The dog seemed less intelligent than Mrs Pegpig, at least, but a lot of that was just my opinion on its stupid pug face. It didn't need a leash to go on walks, so it was probably smarter than the average dog. David was the one that was mostly taking care of her, but she liked sitting on my lap or coming in with me into my lab, although I often didn't let her in if I was going to be working for a long period, just in case she pooped inside. It cost five hundred eurodollars a month for the fee for a pet permit in Los Angeles, and that was less than the charge for Night City.
I frowned at it. A few simple modifications would help it breathe better, at least. Maybe some respirocyte-building cybernetics, too, so it could rely on stored oxygen and didn't have to breathe the crappy Los Angeles air when it went outside to pee. I frowned. That would be a good modification for most people, too. Were there any commercially available respirocytes, I wondered, or would I have to invent one?
"C'mere," I said to the pug, who suddenly looked at me warily, still panting while my hands were outstretched and grasping for the animal.
The flight on the spaceplane was intense. Apparently, anti-gravity technology only worked when it was very close to a gravity well in the first place. So you could use it on the planetary surface but not in space. Not for propulsion and not for simulating gravity, either. That was a bit of a let-down, as that was real science fiction stuff. So instead, I gripped the handrest of my economy-class seat tightly as the variable-geometry motors of the spaceplane shifted from scramjet mode to pure rocket. The acceleration forces pushed me into my padded seat while on the wall in front of us was an accelerometer that displayed our current "g-forces" and had pegged out at three gs briefly before slowly falling.
The Crystal Palace was very interesting, but I wouldn't have permission to explore it freely. In addition to the huge recreational and business areas that it was famous for, it acted as a vast transhipment hub, and this part of the station was where I was limited to. There would be no gilded oak panelled walls in this area, and no scantily clad hostesses, merely bare metal and shift workers, but everything was still very interesting. My first experience in microgravity was amazing, and I spent the entire spaceplane flight up looking out of the window at the Earth below. I noticed a few frequent fliers snort at me, at me acting like a tourist, but I didn't care at all.
The colour of the Earth below was different from what I was expecting, different from the NASA images I had seen in Brockton Bay. The blue was mostly the same, but there were a lot fewer green areas than I expected. Most places appeared browner than I recalled, with even the areas that were obviously cultivated appearing darker yellow.
Microgravity was a hoot, and there was time enough on the flight up to the Crystal Palace to experience it thoroughly. I was very fortunate I was not one of the approximately one-third of people who got violently ill in space, too. I had been watched most of the flight by the stewardesses, as were all of the few "new flyers", just in case this happened. One person did throw up, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be from what I knew about "space adaptation syndrome." Watching him heave into a small bag and then a stewardess rush to use a small vacuum to suck up the free-floating remnants was gross, but it also gave me ideas for a pharmaceutical that could prevent the reaction from taking place. Something for Dr Hasumi or maybe even Taylor Hebert to look into later.
As I got off the spaceplane, I saw a clear demarcation. If you went to the right, you would enter the resort and residential area of the Crystal Palace; it was fancy. To the left, you enter the industrial and service areas. There was security at the fork in the path that was there specifically so that people like me did not try to go to the right side in the fork in the road, too. And probably also to ensure that the high-rollers did not go to the plebian areas by mistake.
The industrial areas of the Crystal Palace were spun at half-gravity or were in zero-g, depending on their purpose. There was a surprising amount of freight traffic at the station, as I could see from legitimate spaceships anchored off on booms attached to the station. I spent a few minutes just looking out the windows, zooming in on each surprisingly large vehicle, and wondering which one I was going to be riding in shortly.
The reason for so much traffic was that there were a number of products that were constructed in space that there was just no replacement for on Earth, as a number of industrial processes in a variety of industries ranging from electronics, nanite production, and pharmaceuticals required both vacuum and microgravity.
This meant that some things were ridiculously cheap at the station, whereas other things were ridiculously expensive. I could get the systems-on-a-chip that I used for my first-generation sleep inducers at a tenth of the price up here, and that was because they were made in orbit, in large industrial space stations, and then shipped down the gravity well. At the same time, a thin scop hamburger with no cheese, no fries and no drink costs forty Eurodollars, which was more than eight times as expensive as LA. And that was at the "working people" restaurant in the industrial area of the Crystal Palace. It was true that modern spaceplanes reduced the cost of shipping things to orbit massively, but you couldn't overcome the tyranny of gravity so easily.
It wasn't that it was impossible to build complex transistors and processors down on Earth, but without microgravity, it required the traditional photolithographic process, which used tons and tons of incredibly pure water in the cleaning stages. "Pure water" for industrial processes was priced by the grade, and the "ultrapure water" necessary in chip fabs costs more than fifty eurodollars per litre these days. It was much cheaper to use the different production processes in space than build these large traditional chip fabs on the ground, even if you had to build a huge space station.
Ironically, purifying water in space through vacuum distillation was much cheaper, but nobody would ship water up to orbit and then ship it back down again. While there was some deep space mining activity of small comets or snowballs in popular parlance, the production was nowhere near high enough to ship any water back down the gravity well. As with most things, it was worth so much because it was already in space. A kilo of Chinese steel for sintering stock was worth three Eurodollars, but the same kilo of steel in low-earth orbit was worth forty.
All of this combined to make space a rather weird economy. It was the opposite of what was expected when you thought of "Colonies." The opposite of the "normal" colony model. Colonies were established in space, but instead of raw materials being sent back to Earth like the colonies in the past, it was mostly finished products that went down the gravity well and raw materials and food that got shipped up to orbit. The O'Neill Colony that I was headed to was theoretically self-sufficient with a population of over forty thousand but, in reality, relied on a lot of trade with Earth and other stations.
I finished my burger, fries and lemonade. I was avoiding any carbonated beverages as the flight to the Lagrange point was both long and with minimal amounts of gravity. The freighters used high-efficiency continuous thrust engines-many low-thrust plasma engines powered by fission reactors. The result was that they took quite a while to get going, and the entire flight was probably going to be in microgravity.
Not only were the bubbles of carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages not buoyant in microgravity, but the same applied after you drank them, so burping was impossible. It was best to avoid such beverages unless you were on a station with simulated gravity. If I was staying here in the Crystal Palance, or when I got to the colony, it would be fine... but not for the flight over!
I frowned. There was a digital map app on the Crystal Palace site, but it was rather confusing. I decided to ask the man who ran this burger joint in space, as he seemed pretty pleasant when I ordered my meal. "Can you help me out? I'm trying to find the freight terminals," I told him.
He nodded while flipping patties in unusual ways in the half-gravity, "Leave here, and turn anti-spinward and you're going to need to walk about a third of the ring; I think it is about twenty cors down. Turn spinward and exit into the zero-g area; there will be red lines bordering the door to tell you its in zero-g. Grab the handrail and throw yourself through the door. Then follow the brown line on the deck."
I blinked several times at that unusual vocabulary, but I was not stupid. I was smarter than ever, and I lived a life about four times as fast as the average person, too. I parsed that carefully, following along on the confusing three-dimensional map. "Anti-spinward... that would be to the left, aye?"
He looked up at me and grinned, "Yeah, that's right. Nice. Maybe you'll fit in after all. Ibrahim Olayiwola." He reached out with an offer to shake my hand but then corrected me when I tried to grasp it, saying, "No, no... spacers don't shake that way. Too easy to impart too much momentum in zero-g. It can be a disaster in a p-suit. Just slap or, better yet, lightly tap the palm of my hand with your fingers, like this..." He demonstrated by tapping his fingers on my palm several times.
I reciprocated the gesture and nodded at him, "Hana Rahim. 'Preciate it." I said, trying to mimic Hana's normal, slightly clipped way of speaking. I had hours of her talking, telling me her life story, so it wasn't too difficult to emulate.
The difference in a handshake made absolute sense when I considered it. You could just grab someone and shake them around bodily in microgravity or go flying off as you each imparted forces to each other if you weren't firmly on the deck yourself. But it hadn't been something I had thought of.
He nodded and had a thoughtful expression on his face, "How much time do you have before your ship leaves?"
"Quite a while, about a hundred and fifty mikes," I said, curious as to why he was asking. Perhaps he had some sights I could see; I didn't mind acting the obvious tourist. Although we were in the industrial area, I saw that there was one casino, but I was definitely going to skip that. Gambling was a tax on people who didn't understand probabilities.
He nodded, "Good. You must be headed out to the O'Neil Colony, the only freighter that's scheduled for a departure in the next three hours. Usually, there would be a couple of dozen or more ships coming in and out every shift, but you caught a lull, so it's easy to guess where you headed." He nodded, "On your way to the freight docks, stop in the ship's chandlery, it'll be before the zero-g section, and ditch those boondockers." He then stepped around the counter and held a foot up, showing me some unusual footwear. They looked like heavy-duty socks to me or something akin to light-duty toe shoes, with each individual toe able to move around. This was way different from the steel-toed combat boots I had picked for Hana's "outfit." He continued, "After that, maybe consider a haircut."
I frowned, holding my hand up to my hair. It was barely to my shoulders. I tried to think of what Hana would say, coming up with, "It's within regs."
That got him to laugh, slapping his thigh and saying a few words in a language I couldn't decipher. My OS called it Yoruba, whatever that was, but it didn't have the translation pack downloaded. Then he grinned and continued back in English, "Ya, no doubt, sister. But spacers favour a much shorter cut these days. Maybe no longer than abouuut here..." he made a pixie-style or even boy-cut with his hands around his head, "Gets in the way if you have to wear a p-suit, yanno? Will help you fit in, make you not an obvious immigrant from the dirtball, iffen you want. If you are stuck on longer hair, then get some techhair that lets you change length."
He paused there for a moment and then continued, explaining, "But, to avoid misunderstandings, it is a faux pas to keep it a natural hair colour. Colourise it in very non-natural colours, and it'll show you're not a gonk." Ah. That explained the stewardess who had neon pink hair down to her ass. Maybe.
I took the word dirtball as an obvious pejorative about Earth, which I found interesting. It would make sense that people who lived and worked up here might tend to develop a unique culture and a distaste for the culture and people on Earth, so I thought he was giving me some good advice. I nodded, "If I can find a barber, I'll take your advice."
He snorted and nodded, "Download the unofficial map app, girly. The standard one sucks balls. It's basically designed to get groundsiders lost intentionally. If you was in the main one-gee levels, you'd always tend to get lost and find yourself in the most expensive places, too, ya? Funny how that works out, ya? The one you want should be on the regular app store under the name CrysKharita. Just change the default language to English or whatever, and you're good to go."
I nodded slowly. I'd run that in a virtual machine, just in case-just like I did the official map app. "You're doing me a solid. I guess the least I can do is buy another burger to go. Or maybe two. With cheese this time." Plus, they were kind of small, and this body had a lot bigger appetite than I had been expecting.
He chortled and got back behind the grill.
Ibrahim Olayiwola was a second-generation spacer, or Highrider, as people from the dirtball would call him. An entrepreneur, too. His parents were, too, telling him the story about how they had run their own business in Lagos until they spent everything on a chance to immigrate away from the dirtball. Personally, he'd never been on the planet himself and had no desire to ever do so.
People would be amazed at how much money a slightly reasonably priced greasy burger place could make if it was situated right between the spaceplane docks and the freighter anchorages.
Today was a slow day, as usually, he would have had to call in an hourly worker to take over the grill so he could make an excuse to talk to the new faces. He hadn't even needed to approach this new woman; she started asking him for directions.
This, too, was a source of income. As the only reasonably priced provider of food in between where everyone who was immigrating would have to walk, he was a valued intelligence asset of not only the O'Neill Republics but also the two other O'Neil Colonies that were still corporate-controlled. He didn't discriminate on who he sold intelligence to, after all.
