Vernice Amelia Earhart Johnson did not react. After all, the ear-splitting noise was just a
false alarm. She saw no reason to stop
blathering into the microphone just because nobody could hear what she was
saying. The passengers weren’t looking
out the port side windows, observing the star cluster that Verna was describing
in lengthy detail, because, like all space tourists, they were futzing around
watching their ball-point pens revolve about in zero gravity. In Verna’s experience, trying to get the average
space tourist to take note of a unique and otherwise unobservable star
formation, when they could watch their pocket change floating around, was like
asking her dog to appreciate opera, which it wouldn’t – even after the genetic
enhancements.
It was, in fact, a genetic enhancement that put Verna in this particular pilot’s chair in the first place. Not the genetic alteration that she installed in her dog – that just made the dog taste like a freshwater fish, making him unpalatable to fleas. Unfortunately, like most dabbles in DNA, the fix had a downside and the poor dog died of gill rot.
No, Verna had received a genetic enhancement all her own, paid for by the kind folks at Space Traffic Control Inc., the same year that STC put the misguided high-speed Tilt-A-Whirl into space. The STC medical team injected a virus into Verna’s optic nerve that released strands of DNA into the cells of her eyes. This new genetic re-coding was supposed to generate new tissue that would give her such astounding distance vision that she would become “the human-Hubble” – able to see into the dim, deep depths of distant space while travelling in the first commercial mission to Mars.
Instead, the virus gave Verna the most astounding near-vision. She could see so well, so closely, that she could accurately count the angels on the head of pin – as long as they sat still. Unfortunately, what this meant to Verna was that she tended to flinch and duck as she walked into rooms in which the air contained specks of dust. Her flight controls were impeccably clean because she couldn’t stand seeing all the minute particulates, dead or alive, crawling about on the dials.
Unfortunately, the genetic enhancement so badly wiped out her distance vision that, just to drive a car, she had to wear goggles with bayonet-mounted lenses made by Nikon.
Her vision problem made her utterly unfit for duty as Captain of the
proposed Mars mission and inevitably Verna was laid off. She received a severance package that took
into account the legal costs associated with fending off the law suit that
would surely occur if STC did not get her to sign a “hold harmless”
agreement. With the money, Verna had
purchased a nice big house, a nice big car and nice big furniture; this was
somewhat out of character in as much as Verna was neither nice nor big. When the money started to run out, she got a
job piloting guided tours to the upper stratosphere.
“This is your captain
speaking,” said Verna. “The alarm you
are hearing indicates that, despite our entreaties to the contrary; despite the
fact that it is written on your ticket and on the back of the seat in front of
you, and despite the fact that by law we have been required to tell you at the
ticket counter, the check-in counter, the entrance to the shuttle and every 5
minutes over the P.A. system, a large number of you have allowed your personal
belongings to begin floating about the cabin!”
Finally one of the flight attendants entered the cockpit and disabled
the alarm. He looked at Verna with contempt and stomped off.
“What?” said Verna. “You let
these people float a beach ball around my ship and then you expect me to get up
out of my chair, endangering the lives of everyone aboard this shuttle, just to
disable that silly alarm!”
Of course, the steward heard nothing of this. If he had, and if he had spoken passable
English, he would have reminded Verna that the shuttle flew itself between
destinations and required little if any help from her during landing and takeoff. Verna knew this to be true but she could not
reconcile herself with the reality of her lack of purpose. Surely there was some function she performed
beyond display console monitoring, which was actually a form of triple checking
since the computer monitored the controls and then monitored itself doing the
monitoring. The one thing you could say
for the controls on her ship, though.
They were so clean, you could eat off them, which Verna managed to do
during most of the trip. When she was
bored, Verna would assuage her anxiety by eating potato chips. For example, during this little excursion
Verna was drinking diet soda and munching bacon yogurt flavored chips, the only
bacon that was still legal.
When the long winged, kite-like tourist shuttle sidled up to Kennedy
Shuttle Terminal, all the passengers strolled off the flight with huge smiles
on their faces, excited memories of their wallets floating in mid air dancing
in their heads. Verna, on the other
hand, shivered with distaste, not just for her passengers, but because she kept
belching up bacon-flavored bubbles.
Verna craved adventure and glory, but since she tended to stumble on
the arrivals ramp because it had a bit of an incline and her goggles didn’t
help her compensate, she probably wasn’t going to be climbing Mount Everest
anytime soon.
In the tunnel leading from the cockpit to the Arrivals Floor of the
Shuttle Terminal, Portia caught Verna’s arm as Verna was about to trip
again.
Next: Portia's Sales Pitch
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