“We had planned to start you off on some of the more routine stuff, but we’ve got a bit of an emergency cooking and we’re kinda short-handed—as usual.”
Before I could reply he went on, “Can you handle a VR-17 simulator? Reprogram it?”
I nodded cautiously, wondering if this was a true emergency or some kind of a test.
“OK,” Spence said. “Come on down to the simulations center.” He headed for the opening in the partitions that was the doorway to my cubicle. There was no door to it.
I followed him, stride for stride, as he hurried along the corridor. He was wearing a soft blue open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and denim jeans. I wore a simple blouse of salmon pink and comfortable russet slacks. He glanced at me and grinned. “You play tennis?”
“A little.” I had won every tournament I had ever entered; the daughter of el Presidente had to win, but I thought it would be best to be modest with him.
“Thought so.”
“Oh?”
“You’re not puffing,” he said. “Not many of these desk-jockeys can keep up with me.”
“I am curious,” I said as we entered the simulations center. It was nothing more than a large windowless room, empty except for the big mainframe computer standing in its center and the desks with terminals atop them set up in a ring around the mainframe. The four corners of the room were bare but for a single cheap plastic chair in each corner.
A man was sitting in one of those chairs, with a virtual reality helmet covering his face and data gloves on both his hands, which twitched in the empty air, manipulating controls that existed only in the VR programming.
“Curious about what?” Spence asked as he showed me to one of the computer terminals.
I slid into the little wheeled chair. “You are the president of this company, right?”
“Yep.”
“But I had the impression that the company belonged to someone named Sam Gunn.”
Before Spence could answer, the man in the VR helmet began swearing horribly at the top of his voice. He called down the wrath of God on everyone connected with the machinery he was supposed to be operating, on the person or persons who had programmed the VR simulation, on Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and all the mathematicians in the world. All the while his hands gesticulated wildly, as if he were desperately trying to ward off a host of devils.
Strangely, Spence grinned at the interruption. Then he turned back to me and said, loud enough to be heard over the continuing tirade of abuse, “I’m the president of VCI, but Sam Gunn is the founder and owns more stock than anybody else. He doesn’t like to sell shares to anyone who isn’t an employee.”
“I can become a stockholder?”
“We have a very generous stock option plan,” Spence replied, almost yelling to be heard over the continuous screaming. “Didn’t you watch your employee orientation video?”
In truth, I had not. It had never occurred to me that employees might become partial owners of the company. A very clever Gringo, this Sam Gunn. He undoubtedly keeps the majority of shares in his own hands and doles out a pittance to his employees, thereby gaining their loyalty.
As if he could read my thoughts, Spence said, “Sam’s a minority stockholder now. My wife and I own more shares than anybody else except Sam, but no individual owns more than a few percent.”
Wife? Spence was married. For some reason I felt a pang of disappointment.
“Sam Gunn must be an unusual man,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the rantings from the corner of the room. But the instant I started to speak, the ravings stopped, and my voice shrilled stupidly. I felt my face flame red. Spence’s grin widened but he said nothing.
“I would like to meet him some day,” I said, more softly, as I turned to the computer terminal.
“You can meet him right now,” said Spence. “That’s him in the VR rig.”
My mouth must have dropped open. I spun the little chair around to see Spence looking off toward the corner. The man there was pulling off his VR helmet, still muttering obscenities.
I stared at Sam Gunn as he got up from the chair and tugged the data gloves off. He was short, much shorter than I. His torso was stocky, solid, although I could see that his belly bulged the faded blue coveralls he wore. His face was round, with a little snub of a nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Hair the color of rusted wire, cut very short, and sprinkled with gray—which he insisted (I soon learned) was due to exposure to cosmic radiation in space, not from age. From this distance, halfway across the room, I could not tell the color of his eyes. But I could easily see that he was angry, blazingly furious, in fact.
“Goddammit, Spence,” he said, stamping toward us, “if we don’t get this simulation fixed, and fixed damned soon, somebody’s gonna lose his ass out there.”
Spence put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “Here’s the gal who’s going to fix it. Just started with us this morning.” My shoulder tingled from his touch.
Sam gave me a stern look. “This kid?”
“Juanita O’Rourke,” Spence introduced me. It was my alias, of course.
Sam stared at me. Standing, he was about the same height as I was sitting. I saw that his eyes were a bluish-green hazel color, flecked with golden highlights.
“From Los Angeles,” Spence added. “Computer programming degree from—”
“I don’t care where you’re from or where you went to school,” said Sam Gunn. “I love you.”
I had heard that he was a womanizer of the worst sort. Some of his escapades had been included in the dossier my father’s secret police had given me to study. The dossier hinted at much more. Strangely, my father never mentioned the danger that Sam Gunn might pose to me. Perhaps he did not know of it. After all, his attention was focused on affairs of state, not affairs of the bedroom.
I got to my feet and put on a modest smile. Partly it was because I towered nearly thirty centimeters over Sam Gunn. The feeling gave me joy.
“You give your heart quickly,” I said, adding to myself silently, And very often.
His round, freckled face turned into an elfs delighted countenance. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
I hesitated just long enough to let him think I seriously considered his invitation. “Not tonight,” I said. “I just arrived here and there’s so much to do…”
Spence cleared his throat and said, “You want this simulation checked out, don’t you?”
All Sam’s anger and frustration had disappeared as quickly as a dry leaf is blown away by a gust of wind. “OK, Esmeralda—”
“Juanita,” I corrected.
Sam shook his head. “To me you’re Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl that Quasimodo loves.”
“I am not a gypsy.”
“But you’re beautiful,” he said.
“And you will be Quasimodo?”
Sam dropped into a crouch and twisted his head up at a bizarre angle. “I’ll be whoever you want me to be, Esmeralda.”
He made me laugh.
“The simulation,” Spence reminded him.
“Oh. Yeah. That.”
Fortunately, the problem was simple enough for me to solve, although it took several days’ intense work. VCI’s major business was removing old commsats that had ceased to function from the geosynchronous orbit so that new commsats could be placed there. There were only a finite number of slots available in GEO, and they were strictly allocated by the International Telecommunications Authority. VCI crews flew from space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) to GEO and removed the dead commsats to make room for new ones.
It was a small part of the satellite communications industry, but a key factor. VCI also had contracts to sweep debris out of the lower orbits where the space stations flew. I learned that the company’s name originally stood for Vacuum Cleaners, Incorporated Sam’s company cleaned up the vacuum of orbital space.