Destiny's Hand

7 Memorable Mentor

Year 2791, Ceathee 1st Gaoday, afternoon:

"It's five tokens for a personalized tour, but gawking is free."

The almost officially nineteen-year-old Artim steps back from the historic display. He turns to a shorter older man wearing the most worn out and patched onesuit he's ever seen. His face is a disconcerting mix of smooth and wrinkled skin. Scar lines make a row of Xs across a bare chin too neat to be an accident. Thin brown hair peeks out from the back of knees, showing the longest style Artim's seen inreal for a man.

The eccentric is unfamiliar but not unknown to Artim. Professor Veliot Smartswan has been reclusive for most of his life. The time alone seems to have intensified the man's quirks and added an unidentifiable oily smell.

Artim gulps and says, "Um, was just looking. I don't have a lot saved up at the moment. So…." He glances back at the display and points at a helmet. "Can you just say if that really could connect invirtu?"

Smartswan grips air below his chin. After a jerk of surprise he says, "Used to have a beard." Flexing his fingers he gestures towards the encased device with tubes and lines hanging from it. "That, yes it could."

Artim taps the clear barrier. It doesn't activate and he realizes it's dumb, inactive. He's pretty sure it is still nuglass, and therefore nearly unbreakable by anything short of an x-tech tool. A handspan beyond, the dark visor of the helmet shows a reflection of himself stretched and twisted by a pair of mounds positioned where eyes would look out. "What's with the face breasts?"

"Designed that way for good reason. You want specifics? Ask a wizard."

Artim shakes his head and glances around the large room of Yellow Hall in South Central Commons. They are alone in a corner with the professor's presentation. Eleven other display areas are scattered around, most with at least a handful of people perusing.

The walls are active nuglass set transparent and allow a nice view of the Hab down the length and up the curves. Artim looks almost straight out from the corner at the South Hospital. Built around a spoke several hundred mrets away, it is a tall block at the bottom of a pole.

He was born at the north one, but the hospitals are mirror images of each other so it is easy to imagine himself as a baby there. Two weeks and nineteen years ago he was held up to hospital nuglass for his first dawn, although he officially doesn't celebrate until his assigned dawnday in a month and a half. Never seriously hurt, he's only gone back for routine checkups and never to this south one. He doesn't expect his life would be any more interesting if he'd been born there instead.

More than a dozen mrets down, grass and flowers color the ground. He pictures the soon to be born nextbatch taking their first look at their tube of a world and crying. If the nuglass would part for him, he feels like he could just lean forward and dive into the greenery. If that helmet worked he could actually do that invirtu, and his tube world would explode into a symphony of experience.

He sighs, feeling his free time slipping away. Every year the Hab feels smaller. He's tried to follow his batchmates' interests, but nothing they do has caught his fancy like what he's heard Hab life used to be, before superman took over so many decades ago.

A twisted piece of metal catches his eye. It's an ugly shape, not the least bit artistic that he can tell. It's also one of the only tagged pieces of the reclusive man's collection. Artim steps close enough to read, Light Drone CT33N2655G4 "Ga" and then asks, "What happened to the rest of it?"

Smartswan raises his arms slowly and then starts flapping and cooing like a bird. As Artim gawks, the old man hisses and makes an explosion sound, and then he smiles and says, "That's what you get for free. You want to know what happened to the smartest drone the military ever had, you'll have to pay me."