Nebulas
and comets streaked by the Wilkerson’s bulky Sports Utility Craft as it clumsily
lurched towards the Pizza Galaxy, but these wonders of the galaxy were entirely
lost on the ship’s occupants. Their
attention was entirely focused on their pilot: Carl Wilkerson, normally an
entirely ordinary, un-notable teenager.
Ten minutes into being the center of attention, Carl was of the firm
belief that being notable was grossly overrated.
“Sweetie,
don’t listen to your father,” Carmen Wilkerson said, patting her son on the
shoulder. “Yes, we’ll eventually have to signal that we’re
queuing into the vortex, but there’s absolutely no rush. It’s in a
ways.” Carmen had a talent for saying
one thing with her words and another thing entirely with her voice. Her husband, Kirk, was more straightforward.
“Carl,
you have to enter the queue now. Now now now.
We’ll get to go faster—“
“There’s
nobody else around, dear, they don’t send out priority unless there are other
ships—“
“We’ll get to go faster when we arrive. If we don’t get in now we might get stuck
behind a space-convoy, and we’ll have to wait seconds before we can go!” Kirk looked at his son as though he was
hanging off of a cliff, in desperate need of someone to pull him up. “We have to go now or we’ll have to wait two
seconds.”
“Or,
you can wait until the last second.
Don’t worry, I’ll warn you beforehand.”
Carmen gave Kirk a look that said I
will, I know what I’m doing before she activated her brain computer and her
eyes rolled up inside her head, doubtless working on her score in 20482048. Carl took one hand off of the sticks to turn
on some music, vainly hoping that mindless beats and auto-tuned robots could
interrupt the bickering.
“What
are you DOING!?” Kirk grabbed Carl’s hand from his adjacent seat and forced it
back to the sticks. “You can’t do that. We could all die.”
“You
do that all the time when you drive me to school, Dad,” George said from the
back. George only had one of his eyes
rolled up in the back of his head; he was aware of what was going on around
him. “You always complain about mom’s
dumb country-X:56 Y:-9,872 Z:.0000007 music.
Too many space banjos.”
“It’s
all about space harmonicas,” Kirk grumbled.
Carl
personally favored space accordions, but his attempt to let any kind of space music was again
thwarted by Kirk’s dire warnings.
As
if timed exactly for maximum stress, Carmen’s eyes rolled back into view. Brief reflections of the
∞ 256
score she had reached faded as she realized Carl had about fifteen seconds
until he had to queue into the wormhole.
“Carl!” she yelled, almost as frantic as Kirk, “you have to queue!”
It was too late. Carl sent out the signal and moved into
queue, but a mile-long freighter that had just blinked out of the cosmos had
the next position in the queue. “Look at
how much time we wasted,” Kirk groaned, as the freighter moved thousands of
times faster than the speed of light through the wormhole. “Now we’ll be two seconds behind for the rest of our lives.”
For once, Carmen nodded in agreement. “How did you miss that?” she asked, as Carl
moved through the wormhole and instantly arrived in the parking sector of the
Pizza Galaxy “I gave you such clear
signals, Carl. Now, you didn’t have to
move into position a million years in advance like your father, but—“
“Oh, come one!” George moaned as
nanobots built spacesuits around the family just as the cabin began to
decompress. “You were getting along so
well when you agreed that Carl sucked! Can’t you go back to that?”
Throughout, Carl had remained
silent. Piloting was an important skill,
even a necessity, in a universe where your house was as far from the grocery
store as it was from the nearest star.
But learning how was difficult.
This—gently drifting through space, waiting for one of the restaurant
worlds all around you to detect the credits in your account and tractor-beam
you into low orbit, watching the twinkling lights in the void—this was
nice. This was how things should
be. Going out for a drift didn’t even
require four-dimensional parallel parking.
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