M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

mundane

Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

I was balancing a cup of tea in one hand, while hanging on to the side of the companionway hatch with the other. I climbed into the cockpit sideways, compensating for the roll of the boat. I was only four days out of port and still getting used to the syncopated back and forth as Lucky Lady took the waves abeam.

I got myself safely to my seat by the helm and took a sip of tea. I sighed, hooked my tether to the harness I always wore above decks, and leaned back over the rail. The sky was clear and full of stars in that complete way that only happens on a moonless night hundreds of miles from shore. I hadn’t seen another vessel in days and that was just fine. Nothing to run into, nothing to worry about. Just me, my boat, the big blue below and the big black above.

I did a 360° scan of the horizon, just in case, and seeing nothing, set the timer for twenty minutes. I lay down on the soft cockpit cushions and closed my eyes. I had a rig that would steer the boat to the wind for me, and I knew that nothing should be able to make it from beyond the horizon to my position in less than twenty minutes. Even so, I had the radar set to sound an alarm if anything showed up within ten miles. I dropped off to sleep in the rocking of the waves.

The timer went off, and I drowsily opened my eyes. I sat up, and looked around. Still nothing. I smiled to myself and took a sip of tea, still warm in its thermal cup. I checked the instruments — with twelve knots of wind on the beam, we were rocketing along at six knots; pretty good for my heavy old thirty-four footer. I leaned back out to look at the stars again, and squinted. I’m no celestial nav expert, but I’ve spent enough time looking up to notice when there’s something new. Occasionally, I’ll notice a new satellite or something up there. But I’d never seen anything new that was this bright before. Or moving so fast.

#

The radar told me that the thing landed about eight miles away, and I thought I could even hear the splash. I certainly saw the flash of light falling from the sky into the sea. Was it a meteorite? I guess that must happen sometimes, and the odds were that at least some of those times someone would be out and about and be able to see it. Still, I didn’t think there were any meteor showers predicted for this area, and I hadn’t seen any other shooting stars all night. And it really didn’t look like any meteor I’d ever seen before. I was sure I’d seen lights on the thing.

You don’t keep much of a tight schedule travelling on a sailboat, so a detour wasn’t going to hurt me any. I disconnected the self steering, and swung the wheel to starboard. I eased the sheets, and soon was surfing the little waves bearing straight toward the radar target that still glowed bright green on my screen.

An hour and half later the predawn light was starting to peek up over the horizon and I was close enough to see the debris. There were a couple of still-blinking white lights among the wreckage, and I thought I could see a glint of metal in the early morning light. I got out my binoculars, and braced myself to try and get a clear view of it while Lucky Lady pitched and rolled beneath me. It was hard to get a good view, but I thought I could make out some kind of yellow lettering on the largest piece floating on the waves. I put the binocs down, and paid close attention to my course. I didn’t want to drive right through the stuff, but I wanted to be able to get close enough to see it better.

I tried to steer myself slightly upwind of the debris, and when I was already too close for comfort, I threw the wheel hard over to port. I hauled on the mainsheet, then cranked in the jib. As the main came around, the Lady bobbed up like a cork and slowed. I tied off the wheel once I was sure we were well hove to and then clipped my leash to the jacklines running fore and aft on the topsides. The sun was rising in earnest now, and I could see the debris pretty clearly, floating about a football field away downwind.

There were three or four distinct parts floating on the surface, and I suspected a fair amount of the thing had sunk already. I could read some of the lettering on the largest piece now: MA R M. This was no meteor.

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Fame

“Pupusas?” The woman’s nasal voice reached Randall at the back of the bus before he saw her pushing her way down the aisle. He could smell the warm, raw meat smell of his own sweaty body, and his stomached wriggled. He was hungry, but he couldn’t face mysterious little bits of meat.

“Quiere pupusas?” the voice called again, and Randall saw the plump figure with her plastic tub approach his seat.

“Frijol?” he asked, his high school Spanish failing him for a full sentence.

“Sí,” the woman answered. “Frijol y queso.”

“Dos, por favor,” Randall said, and fished in his pocket for a crumpled bill. The woman passed him a paper envelope of warm dough that smelled pleasantly of mild spice and cheese, and he gave her the money. She dug into the frilly, ribboned apron she wore over her cheap nylon shorts and gave him a handful of change.

“Pupusas?” she continued to hector the remaining passengers on the bus, before exiting from the back doors just as the bus lurched away.

Randall ate his warm snack carefully, grateful that they were not so hot as to leak runny beans and cheese all over himself. The corn flour dough was barely warm to the touch, but the filling was good and his stomach momentarily stopped its gurgling. Randall had been riding the garishly painted repurposed school bus for about an hour, heading south, heading away from what anywhere he thought of as civilization. His pupusas gone, Randall leaned his head against the metal side of the bus, and tried to relax.

#

Brian Randall was a name that wasn’t famous in the way a screen actor’s name might be famous, but he had several thousand online followers, and he couldn’t go to a conference or industry party without a dozen or more fans tagging along after him. He was the first to admit that he loved the attention. He’d enjoyed a good success with several of his online ventures, and the following was one of the perks of this success. Of course, the money was a strong motivator, too. But Randall would have developed cute little gadgets and toys for the online market even if people hadn’t been willing to pay his way. Indeed, he spent the first several years of his career working out of a dumpy apartment in the Bay area, with a pair of equally bookish roommates, coding day and night for the sheer thrill of it. Brian Randall was a natural.

He first struck it big with a tool he called the “all in one reader”. Once he sold it to Google, their marketing people rebranded it Google Summary. It really was ingenious: you could feed the service any kind of file, and it would output a shockingly sensible summary of it. It was not terribly revolutionary for text files, but it worked just as well on audio or video. And much more interesting for the development set, you could upload a piece of code in any of the popular languages, and it would give a text description of what the code would do. What it did with images was much less useful, but absolutely fascinating. Randall had made certain that the output on image files was always exactly one thousand words.

Randall could have lived easily on the sum he earned from the sale of the product, but he still had more ideas. He moved out of the cramped apartment, got a fancy set of digs of his own, and started noodling. After the Summary sale, he was asked to speak at one of the major tech conferences in the Bay Area, and there he got his first taste of fame. He had only just arrived at the exposition hall, and was picking up his conference package, when a tall, attractive young man approached him.

“Are you Brian Randall,” the man asked, a shy smile on his face.

“Yes,” Randall said, wondering if there had been a problem with his registration or something.

“The Brian Randall,” the man continued, “of the all in one reader?”

Randall smiled to hear his own name for the technology. “That’s me,” he said. “You can just call me Randall.”

“Wow,” the other man gushed. “I’m such a fan of your work. My name is Chick Hernandez.” He stuck out his hand, and Randall shook it. “Can I interview you for my blog?”

Randall laughed, and said, “Sure, why not?” They exchanged email addresses and IM handles, and met that night for a beer after dinner. Chick blogged between rounds. After Randall’s talk the next day, Chick Hernandez was the envy of all the major tech bloggers for the scoop. Randall left the conference with at least fifty more entries in his contact list.

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