“Hey, Diana Base is looking for a fast-food delivery person. Why would a high-tech place like that want a delivery girl?”
Jer glanced up from his chair. It was as close to my bed as Dad’s latest algorithm would allow. “Someone’s got to keep an eye on those dumb robots they got up there.”
“And some dumb barney they pay minimum wage is going to be smarter?” I shot back.
“They aren’t going to hire any stups, Nikki Ann.” He was talking at me like he had the time I couldn’t get the concept of the number eight. I’d bopped him over the head then with my reader, but I wasn’t three years old anymore. I had new ways to take him down a notch.
I stretched out on my bed, hands reaching for the headboard, back arching. His IQ plummeted as he tried to ignore my silhouette, nicely augmented by the two new friends I’d developed straining against my tank top. Who said it wasn’t nice being a girl? “So, what are these non-stups going to do for their minimum paycheck?”
“Uh… take care of the bots,” Jer stammered.
“Not maintenance!”
“No,” he blinked, gave up, starred, then came back to the word fight with a vengeance. “Weight is gold on the Moon, lunkhead. They don’t want to warehouse a lot of spare parts and maintenance people, so they ship up the toughest, dumbest machines they can get with the longest mean-time-between-failure, and let some earthbound bunny do the thinking for it.”
“I could do that.” I said, and highlighted the number in the ad, pulled up the resumé they’d had us do in school, appended that I had over 350 hours in a Lunar Rover, which was a lie, and sent it. “Wonder when I’ll hear from them?”
“Shouldn’t take too long,” Jer said. “A routine ought to be able to check out your resume in no time. Too bad you couldn’t put down all your Rover hours.” The three hundred and fifty hours were only the ones I’d signed and paid for. Jer had almost as many hours, as did several kids at school.
But one of Jer’s first big hacking credits was breaking the lock on the rover. Now, when one of us rented time, all of us got to ride along. Jer had also figured out how to store the file so we could ride it again as many times as we wanted. Going backseat on someone else’s ride, or an old ride wasn’t as much fun as realtime, but it was still time on the Moon as far as I was concerned.
Of course, storing all those vector images was almost a stumper. You couldn’t tell your folks you needed a couple-of-thousand-terabyte array for your birthday to store pirated images. So we went totally creative.
There was lots of spare disk space around the house. Nearly half of the house management system’s drive was empty. Mom never used all the cooking options in the microwave; we dumped over half of them and she didn’t miss one. We’ll never own a Cashmere sweater, so I got rid of a lot of the washer/dryer settings, too, and loaded up images. Jer and I couldn’t walk around either of our houses without bumping into image data, but grownups didn’t notice a thing. Duh. I think everyone over twenty-one is blind.
It took over a week for the Artemis people to get back to me. The woman who called wasn’t too old; she couldn’t be thirty. She liked my resume. My moon buggy hours seemed to impress her. “Do your friends ride a lot?”
I rattled off four who did, “But I have the most hours.”
She smiled at that and asked about my access to a computer. I sent her a download of the Vehicle Remote Control system Jer had built for me with its latest updates and additions. That earned a raised eyebrow.
“Quite a rig you have.”
“We built it ourselves. Well, actually, Jer, my boy…ah, the guy next door, built most of it. He’ll fix anything that breaks.”
She looked at me, big smile on her face. “I bet he will. Here’s a number. Dial it tomorrow at 1:30 a.m. GMT,” she glanced offscreen, “that will be 5:30 p.m. your time, and you start work.” I didn’t tell her I knew darn well what GMT time it was here. Rovers ran on GMT. I was too happy at the moment to take the time to straighten out a grownup who thought I was dumb.
I called Jer on our network. “I got the job! I start working on the Moon tomorrow after school!”
Next afternoon, on the walk home from school, I wanted to celebrate. Jer suggested a milkshake. “Naw. That’s here and gone. I want something I can keep.” I headed across the street, dodging traffic, Jer dodging right behind me. Some old timers in a fifth wheel rig were laboring up the hill, we squeaked across just ahead of them. The gray-haired lady driving just shook her head as she went by. I laughed.
“Where are we going?”
“The Teddy Bear Factory!”
“Not again.”
“And what’s wrong with a cute, cuddly little teddy bear?” We’d had this conversation before. Many times before.
“Nothing, if you’re a girl.”
“And what’s wrong with a girl?”
There, I had him. Didn’t used to. But the last couple of years, that was the winning line. Well, not always. Sometimes he’d won with “You’re not going to waste money on fluff that would buy rover time.” He was quiet today as I eyed the different furry options. They were so cute. I’d just die if I ever found a bear in a spacesuit–on a rover.
“You know, maybe you could buy one today. You know, to celebrate.”
I grabbed his hand, felt for a pulse, then brushed my hand over his forehead. He didn’t pull away like he used to. “Help, police! Some aliens have stolen my friend. Jer would never say something like that.”
He ignored my carrying on, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and explained himself. “Well, you know, if you’re working for Artemis, you’re jacked directly into their system. If the locks aren’t too tight, maybe I could get a hold of the downlink from the rovers. Go direct to the source.”
“You mean we could have it all!” I screamed, pulling him into a hug.
“I think so.” Jer actually turned red. I gave him a kiss and he got redder.
“Let’s get home. Make sure everything is ready. Race you.” I won. He’s the brains of the act; I’m the muscle. My system came up without a hitch. I was ready fifteen minutes early, so I ran an old rover drive while I waited. At 5:29 sharp, I dialed in, ready for anything.
I got a flat video. All kinds of dumb stuff on how I’d get paid, (slow and not much), what my benefits were, (none), how I’d have to have my school report card copied to them. They had a reward program, extra money for good grades, a bonus on top of that for honor classes. What do you know, Jer’s pushing might actually make me a few extra bucks. Only after I passed a test on that junk was I allowed into the interesting stuff. And that was a disappointment again.
They were starting me out as a cook!
They had a cook-bot that made the pizza and stuff from scratch. Most of the ingredients were still lifted from Earth, but the flour was moon-grown. My job was to take the orders and see that the bot didn’t waste anything making them.
Somebody else got to oversee the delivery-bot.
“I think you have to get promoted up to delivery,” Jer said. “Didn’t you see that part in the employee briefing?”
I’d missed that.
Bummed, I spent four hours in my bedroom making sandwiches, pizza and whatever else was ordered by the crew that really worked on the Moon. I didn’t see anything I couldn’t have seen standing at the counter of the local Pizza Heaven. Big bummer.
Still, I didn’t let that bother me. Jer was at my elbow, his reader plugged into my station, tapping away at any outlets the program gave him. He didn’t hit pay dirt that first night, but he was pretty sure he would. “Your Dad’s using tougher lock-outs than they do.” Probably because they trusted their employees more than Dad did me.