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CHAPTER 1 2030
“Pilot body scan.”
Gloria’s voice followed the scanner, mounted on the chair and headset which monitored his blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen level and body temperature. A slight deviation from normal would delay a flight, or cause an aborted mission. Rigo let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in.
“All clear. System check complete.”
He spoke into the microphone on the panel, pulling on the fireproof headgear with provisional oxygen, and hose connected to a water reservoir should it be needed. He’d long ago grown immune to the obvious foreboding nature of these precautions.
“Preparing trajectory lock-in.”
“Trajectory mount cleared.”
The screen ahead showed the two massive ski like structures upon which the catapulting rocket would be hurled into space. The new design with its combined power of centrifugal force and horizontal movement had saved barrels of rocket fuel over the past decade, causing billions of funding to be diverted from operating costs to research and exploration. It all translated to less time in the cockpit, and a significant pay cut, now that the trip could be made in one tenth the time it used to take.
He carefully lowered the craft into place and the ‘claw’ which suspended him released its grip. He felt the clamping motion as the four ton machine was locked onto its launch mount.
The strains of Handel’s water music filled the cabin. The powers that be had decided that classical music rather than a digital signal would create a more positive, human environment as a pilot took off. Rigo would have preferred Bob Dylan, or even Aerosmith, but he didn’t make those kinds of decisions. Each month the piece was changed out, only occasionally reverting to a composer from a recent century. There had been some objections to this at first, but George Frederic Handel was reportedly Mr. Futere’s personal favorite, and you didn’t tell the third most important man in the world ‘No’ without repercussions.
10:07 pm, and still waiting. He shifted in his seat, anxious to be moving.
Rigo was known for being on time.
Things had really started to change when the new CEO came in. The morale meltdown was palpable, and the paper jam at the top was an unprecedented mess. Rigo had simply worked harder than ever to protect his reputation. He had never been written up for even the slightest violation, even though some of the changes brought almost unreasonable demands on the employee’s privacy. ‘You didn’t let other people define you’, he always said, ‘otherwise you yourself were irrelevant’.
But lately things had been so different…he was behind again. The new required paperwork (all done on voice screen, but still archaically referred to as paperwork) added a full forty minutes to every shift, and without its completion, an employee could be terminated. He’d seen it happen at least once in the last month. The turn-around time had been so unpredictable that the whole schedule could be thrown off for hours, even days. It wasn’t the first time, he thought with an uncharacteristically resigned sigh. They were starting to get to him.
He checked, rechecked his gages one more time out of habit. Everything was in order.
He decided to call Central Dispatch one more time. Finally, he received the final all clear signal, spoke the response code, and the big engines revved like kittens under his skillful hand. The craft boosted and accelerating to nearly 700 mph reached escape velocity in a scant 30 seconds. This was his favorite part.
Only when he reached the edge of the earth’s atmosphere a few minutes later did he begin to relax. The robotic co-pilot droned off the systems status in the electronically reproduced voice of Gloria Estefan that he had programmed in. In 2030, hardly anyone knew the name anymore, but he had fallen in love with her as a kid, with a touch of Spanish accent in her buttery-smooth voice, listening to her albums on his old ipod. Futere hadn’t controlled that aspect of the flight, at least.
Rigo Sanchez had been with the company since its beginning eight years ago. Ever since he was young he’d dreamed about having a job like this. The training for Transport Engineer had taken nine months, but it was worth every minute. Something about being seven miles up in space above earth all by himself, with Gloria, of course, gave him a rush like nothing else ever had.
Sure, the job had its risks, but in eight years he was proud to declare only one vehicle had ever been lost, and that one accident, from which he escaped in a personal space vehicle designed for emergency ejection, had been attributed to a computer failure. If it had been any farther from earth than it was, he would have been in orbit, a floating symbol of disaster. There had been far too many of those before REORB, a snappy acronym for Relocation Overage Routing Base, began backing up all their hard drives. Since the back-up systems were installed five years ago, there had been nary a glitch. All the other competitors had fallen away in the face of George Futere’s entrepreneurial largesse, combined with his powerful position as head of the Global Environmental Safety Commission. A sort of Guru where secular space exploration was concerned, Mr. Futere’s portfolio included the founding of the first Leisure Space Station enterprise known as Sky Meadows. A record thirty thousand customers had signed up for retirement villas in Sky Meadows, half of them were living there now, and the refuse from that space station was serviced by none other than REORB as well. It was a good gig and just ahead of it’s time, as no other entity had been able to refine its space program to the level of the Continental Americas. Germany was next in line, and the announcement of a premiere sky leisure resort of the caliber that the world expected from Germany was imminent.
When the last legal earth landfill closed its gates in 2020, Mr. Futere and his associates were johnny-on-the-spot and operations began in a record ten days. Rigo had been fresh out of aviation school, after his mandatory 18 months service to his country which had paid for his education. He hadn’t been raised with the curious sense of entitlement that most Continental Americans had. Born in southern California, and raised by his adopted aunt in a section of LA that gobbled up more government aid than any other county, he had come up the hard way.
With the consolidation of Canada, the former US and Mexico into the new ConAm, patrolling the borders had been easier, at least in theory. The points of entry were reduced to the air and sea ports, and rather than promote peace, the feeling of national fear was palpable. It may have been the government mandated insurance, or the tighter restrictions on plastic usage due to the landfill disasters, which drove the cost of nearly everything up, including crude oil and food. To be sure, the news stations, now all government owned and operated (they insisted it was for more consistent coverage) told the story that the new Continental Czars wanted to get across. Environmental safety and fiscal equality were the new trends. The idea of three equal leaders running the continent was a brainchild of Morgan Hastings, a patriot of the old order, the first and last female American president, (they’d lost the outdated name ‘American’ with the merger) whose forward thinking views had launched unprecedented political change and with the accompanying plummeting prices of real estate, Futere’s varied companies had lapped up acreage like a cat laps milk.
Rigo had heard about REORB from a fellow aeronautics student. He guessed that a consumer-driven society promised good job security for waste management transport, even though consumer restrictions had greatly reduced the choices that he remembered while growing up. Gone were the days of choosing your own shampoo brand, or any other toiletries as the government-issue Cleanline had been mandatory in all private homes, and institutions. Running alongside the water pipes, they delivered a carefully guarded choice of eco-friendly products, billed with the monthly water statement. Inevitably, a few black market products leaked through the system, but reduction in the amount of plastic products used by the average consumer was considerable.
When the aircraft was released from earth’s atmosphere, he put the settings on auto-pilot and chose a movie, titled Dice Toss. He had at least an hour and a half till he reached the target drop-off site. The movies provided in the data storage were government issue, and although no expense was spared in their production, watching them was lot like eating the MRE’s he and the guys had choked down when he was in the service, nutritious but lacking in variety and creativity. You had your choice of plots, yellow, orange or red, with each increase in hue matching the intensity in the film’s theme. Hollywood’s marriage with the government left a lot of people feeling nostalgic for the old movies for pure art’s sake. Dice Toss’s plot was the orange level, lots of violence, with an infusion of romance. It was a throwback to the old days of the casinos when wealth was something you could gamble for. He wondered what it would really be like, to actually have a chance at becoming rich. Nowadays everyone talked about ‘regulating wealth’. No one was rich anymore, but the government made sure everyone had everything they needed, or at least they talked as if they did.
The bulky “New Rights Document” added into the constitution just after the turn of the century was a mixed blessing. Even the heads of big corporations had their balance sheet gone over periodically by the IRS (newly renamed as the Internal Regulating Service) and ‘Rich’ was no longer a politically correct word, but a certain wistful longing filled Rigo’s mind at the thought of it. The thing was so impossible, he started to feel depressed. Sleepiness crept over him, and he splashed his face with water from the automatic spout, forcing himself to pay attention to the movie. The man was showing off for his girlfriend, and placing all his chips on the table. He would eventually lose it all. The moral was nauseatingly obvious: trying to appear rich makes you look dumb! The woman actress was attractive; it was the only thing that kept him from dozing off. Not that Gloria wouldn’t have sensed his regular breathing and sounded her alarm, a shrill buzz that no one could ever sleep through, an unpleasant form of life-saving. Futere hadn’t been willing to take the risk of sending up a ship that would be completely autonomous, so for now the necessity of a human operator was without question.
After the movie ended, he entered the moon’s atmosphere, turning on the hyper-lighting system that allowed him to see on the dark side of the moon’s surface. He downed the last of his first cup of coffee, now cold, and scanned the instrument panel on the screen in front of him. The course had to be recalculated after every load to evenly distribute the deposits on the moon’s surface. One meter of error was allowed. Rigo had never been off by more than twenty centimeters.
He slipped the control stick into disengage slot and felt the whirr of the compressed cube of garbage ‘falling off.’ Bingo! He gave the drop command and watched the surreal drop of the nearly weightless load and its top dressing, a lead sheeting blanket to keep it in place, and create a less unsightly view from above, if anyone was looking. Although there were plans for a Moon resort, the only humans on this side of the moon were REORB employees like Rigo. The Grails A and B launched in 2011 had given invaluable information about the varying levels of the moon’s gravity, making the garbage dump possible for the first time.
The ship, now released of its load, re-programmed its auto-adjustment for the weight and temperature change and Rigo turned the ship towards home. He sped up, roaring the engines, hoping to gain some lost time. He thought back to his 18th birthday when he took his first vehicle, a used Dodge Ram, out on the open road, away from the city. The feeling of power was like a drug.
In the monitor, he could see the view of the blue orb that was earth, suspended on nothing at all in the blackness nearly 340,000 kilometers away. It was always an eerie sight. He religiously looked at the monitor after releasing the load, and touched it with his forefinger. Like kissing the blarney stone, it was a superstitious tradition from which he had never deviated. So far, he felt it had brought him home safely every time. He calculated that in 4 years with 4 loads a week, accounting for vacations, he’d made nearly 800 safe trips to far side of the moon and back.
Gloria’s voice commanded him to complete his log, which he did promptly, speaking slowly into the screen, with Gloria asking him to clarify what she did not understand. No matter how many times he’d done this, he was still amazed at the power of automatic dictation. The words appeared as he spoke them, properly spelled and punctuated. It was a dream come true for someone who barely passed freshman English!
The craft lurched ever so slightly when exiting the moon’s atmosphere. He commanded the atmospheric adjustment, and through a series of preprogrammed circuits, Gloria magically made it happen. It was smooth sailing once more.
He checked his watch. 2:34 am. Another coffee break. Overdue, in fact. He gave the command to Gloria, and within seconds the bold smell of fresh brewed java reached his nostrils. Until several years ago, and the innovation of gravity calibration, no one in space had been able to drink a normal cup of coffee. He had been lucky being born when he was. Although not perceptible from the inside, the craft was designed on a magnetized socket which caused it to revolve at astronomical speeds, creating the actuality of earth’s gravitational pull. When the gurgling stopped he opened the stainless steel door on the panel to his right.
The first sip was deeply satisfying. He should give this up someday. Addictions are necessary evils, he told himself. After all, that’s what I’m carrying to the dump. He only let himself use this word in his head. The bosses didn’t like to hear the word ‘dump’. The preferred term was Overage Routing Station, or ORS, which was less messy sounding. Everyone’s addictions. The average load contained the equivalent of the refuse of several tons of household throwaways, which now was comprised of less than 2 percent plastic, compressed into one cube measuring 30 meters on each side and 1 meter thick. Plastics, syringes, medical equipment, rubber gloves, medical tests and samples, and other chemical and hazardous waste, revealing a society rife with the trappings of germ paranoia, comprised more than half of the load. It was a nasty stew that no one quite knew what to do with – especially with the plastic eating bacterium disaster that had nearly destroyed modern life--until REORB appeared on the scene. Removing it all to outer space had been the perfect solution. The neon green vehicles with black and white stripes warning of the noxious cargo and labeled PR for Priority Reroute, were only allowed to take off at nightfall and return under cover of darkness. Out of sight, out of mind.
