Chapter 99: Second Home

Chapter 99: Second Home

The steady sound of several beeping alerts came to Milo's ears as he stepped out of the pod. None were urgent so he took some time to stretch, check the attachments to his prosthetics and get a small snack. The colorful red and yellow wax on his tasty collection of cheese made him smile as he forced himself to have a few crackers with fruit and nut pastes before he treated himself to a piece of cheddar. Some of the flavors were interesting and he did some quick research on the different berries used, and found out that the nuts were grown in the ground, not from a tree. Odd stuff.

But he also saw that it was possible to grow all of them with the correct hydroponics equipment. He filed away the option. Multiple small orders of foodstuffs might eventually be traced to him, where one large order of equipment for section E wouldn't, but it would also be a serious amount of work to set up the system for growing plants, and more work to keep it going.

He estimated that he would have to put in several hundred hours of work to start producing berries, and then weeks of waiting for the plants to grow. Maybe he just needed a better way to order things and bring down the risk of the shipments being traced back to him?

He mentally shelved the ideas as unworkable and got to work finding out the problems that the denizens of Section E were dealing with. Electrical was actually steady for once, and for a surprising reason. The solar and wind that Section H had added were over-producing. The excess energy was being shunted into the surrounding sections. This actually made sense to Milo. If they kept the adjacent systems running smooth, the automatic systems wouldn't try to steal from section H. They couldn't store energy past the capacity of their battery system, so using the excess to stabilize the energy distribution of nearby sections was logical. Very few 'solutions' he'd seen done in the habitat over the years had been this good. Usually, it was the opposite.

Food synthesizers were on the blink. There were complaints from all over that the food from some recipes, especially foodcubes, were showing up as charred pellets. It was wide spread, but only affecting 17% of homes. He suspected he knew what the problem was, but he needed to actually look at a food synthesizer and its current programming. He suspected a programming update was the problem, but his own wasn’t connected to the data-net and didn’t get the updates. That meant going to 'his other house'.

Two years prior, Milo had needed a way of attending the swap meets that were sometimes held in the large open areas of the hab. People brought nearly anything to try and trade for other goods. Old video games were popular as were broken or working computers, and video or music recordings of all types. Milo had some equipment he needed to fix, and needed circuits that were common in older equipment.

To get into the swap meet, he needed an ID card. ID cards showed where you lived. He had been tempted to print one out that said ‘Big water tank, mechanical level’, just to see if they even checked. But as amusing as that scenario might be, he rejected it. If they were asking for cards, they might also be checking addresses. The solution had been to get his own apartment and address, one where he supposedly lived with a parent. There were tons of empty spots in the Hab, he'd assumed no one would notice if he claimed one. He’d just be another person whose only option was the nearly free housing offered by a slightly benevolent government.

Getting into the system was child's play. He created records that his 'family' had lived there for two years after his father lost his job and they had been forced to move down to cheaper accommodations. He created names and backgrounds, spent time filling in all the data in every place it needed to be. Now if someone checked on 'Milo Babbage', he actually existed in the system. He picked an empty apartment at the end of an alley in a nearly abandoned part of section G. This particular spot had been selected because it was directly under a large service duct that he could easily move through.

Each alley had ten apartments on each side, and one slightly larger one at the end. Six alleys terminated in a common area for the neighborhood. In theory this was a meeting place for the community and a play area for children. In reality, most were just dirty, empty rooms.

His second home was just a looted shell when he first got there, unused for a decade. He fixed the locks, added much better security to the door, and moved in enough junk to make it look like the home of a father and son who rarely left the small room. Not that he expected to have any visitors.

His first attempt to go to a swap meet had yielded mixed results. Milo knew about people, but he avoided them. He hid in the ductwork, moved through the ceilings support structure of buildings, and never had contact with them. Just walking along a halfway and passing by people was difficult at first. Luckily, most people paid no attention to anyone else and kept their hands in their pockets and eyes on the floor. He would do the same.

He was dressed similar to a lot of the people he'd seen, in a shapeless set of coveralls and a large hooded jacket. Instead of his normal leg, he was using a simple prosthetic made of ugly pink plastic and metal forearm crutches.

He'd made it all the way to the end of the dead-end hallway where his 'home' was, before he was noticed. Two boys watched him coming towards the common area; one with apathy, and one with amusement. The second stepped in his way.

"What do we have here? A new guy? I didn't know we had people down that way. Pay the tax, runt. I'll take one of those fancy braces unless you can give me something better?"

His second home was as he'd left it. Piles of parts to household goods, games, and electronics were piled in the corners. A small workbench had a small light above it and some simple tools. A hammock with a blanket was in one corner. A large screen for video and gaming on the wall, food synthesizer, and tiny bathroom completed the necessities. A typical hermit dwelling in the habs, like many others. If anyone bothered to check, it was just Milo living here now, his father having left a couple of months after arriving at the hab, location unknown.

Milo created a bowl of foodcubes. It came out fine. His distrust of others included the food synthesizer. He had turned off automatic upgrades. Someone was always changing how the food tasted and he hated it. He turned updates on and loaded the latest. The next batch of chicken flavored cubes showed up looking like charcoal.

He took an old laptop from his backpack and used it to upload the fix he had programmed. The next batch came out fine. He set up an automated update of his own to go out in an hour. It would fix the over-cooking problem and added a new recipe option. He tossed the laptop in his backpack, swapped out his prosthetic leg, and grabbed his braces. Five minutes later he was banging on Butch's door. Luckily, he was home.

"Whoa! The Ghost that Walks! Haven't seen you in ages? What's up?" Butch and the other guys had nicknamed him Ghost because of how he showed up for swap-meets and then disappeared for months at a time.

Milo could smell the telltale odor of charred food. "Is your food machine borked all to hell? I have a fix for it."

Butch's mother had overheard and yelled out. "Bless you son. Come inside and see if you can fix this piece of crap. Butch? Get your friend a fizzy drink and bring him in."

Ten minutes later Butch's siblings were happily eating. Every face was smiling. New Recipe!

Food from the synthesizer didn't change much. Milo had added a recipe he had found to the list of available foods. 'Macaroni and Cheese' seemed to be a big hit. It was now his preferred food as well.

Butch and Milo slumped against a wall out in the hallway. Butch asked him, "You heard the big news yet?"

Milo hadn't. But Butch had figured out early on that Milo always appreciated any news of what was going on in the hab. "Big outfit moved into section H. They look legit. Maybe long-term. My pa and uncle are getting jobs with them. It's all online work playing 'Contract Workers'. They work four weeks straight, then three days off at the end of the month. Ma was upset until she saw the money. I'm going to start training for it in a couple of months. I'm too young now, but as soon as I hit 18, it looks like I might actually have a job and be able to get my own place." Besides Butch, his family consisted of his mother, father, three siblings and a cousin. Butch longed for a spot of his own, maybe with just a little brother or two with him.

Milo was immediately suspicious. "What kind of pods are they making them use? Some of those can really mess you up."

Butch nodded. "Yeah, heard about that. Explains some of the older folks who just wander around, glassy-eyed. But these are the new Mark VII's. They aren’t supposed to have the problems the old ones did. You even get fixed up a little if you use them long enough."

That actually did sound legit to Milo. "Wow. How many people are they hiring?"

Butch wasn't exactly sure about that part. "They have four full floors of them. I think about five thousand, and they say that it's just a start. But the jobs aren't the best part. The company is throwing a big party. There's a massive swap-meet scheduled and anyone 13-17 can go to a special event. Tons of old vintage games there, the big ones like in the old arcades. And you can try out the new online game in a Mark VII pod! It's all free. You should head out with us."

Now Milo was really intrigued. Plus, he loved the old arcade style games. If he could have ordered a dozen of them for his own hidey-hole, he would have. "Sounds awesome. Count me in."The debut release of this chapter happened at Ñøv€l-B1n.