Charlie's

5

I had lied when I said I couldn't handle visitors. The standard Survey Office drop-in outpost has accommodations for five people. This includes five privacy cabins (which might qualify as walk-in closets elsewhere), each with a private toilet, desk, shower tube and bed. The bed rests on top of the sim bed capsule and can be folded up into the wall. Not luxurious by any standards, except perhaps when compared to being on a remote planet without one.

I cleared out some of the junk I'd accumulated in one of the cabins and made it available to my new guest. "So...what's your name?"

"Fuck off."

"Nice. Did your mother give you that?"

"Leave me the fuck alone!"

I sighed. "I can't do that. There isn't room. You can go in there and close the door if you want, but you'll have to come out to use the fabber. Now that they've dumped you here, you're stuck here until the next transport comes. That could be a couple months. You gonna be like this that whole time?"

She still hadn't looked at me, but now she let her eyes roam around the not-palatial estate. She was quiet, but I could see her begin to sag a little. Finally she murmured, "Sarah."

"Sarah. Okay. I'm Joe. This is your room. You wanna wash up, relax a bit, go ahead. You want clothes or anything else, I can walk you through using the fabber. Try not to make too much stuff you don't need."

Her eyes wandered again, taking in some of my debris...books, papers, bottles, samples, equipment, art posters, a t-shirt on a worktable...With a smirk her eyes finally rolled up to me.

"I said 'too much'", I muttered. I started to tidy up the common space as she went into her cabin and closed the door.

By the time she came out again I had gotten the work materials under control and recycled a lot of everything else. I was at a console setting up a guest ID for her. "Okay...this ID should get you everything you need, and if it doesn't you can let me know. The console in your room works off it too. Here's the menu for the media center...books, audio, video, news, games and all. This one's the fabricator...things you can produce are listed by category. That includes food...you can make ready-to-eat food, or get things you can cook with."

Sarah came over and peered at the screen. "Like meat and vegetables and stuff? How's it make that?"

"Not my field, couldn't tell you. It's not much of a kitchen, but if you really want to heat something on a stove it can be done."

"You said something about clothes?"

"Yeah, there's a standard catalog, plus what comes in on the media packs. You might want to stick with durable if you're going outside. The fabber can't produce everything in the pack, but it's all available in the sim."

"Sim?"

"The outpost comes with a Far Horizon sim system for when you get tired of the walls. Your ID's set up for that too."

"I didn't see a headset..."

"There isn't one. It's a full sim bed." I led her back to her room, folded up the mattress and opened the lid. "You get in, close the lid, go to sleep and wake up in the sim."

I watched her face as she stared at the bed. Her eyes were locked on it, wide, unblinking. I couldn't tell if it was fascination or horror. "What if I gotta leak?" she asked.

"The bed takes care of it. There's hookups that connect automatically."

"How's that work through my..." She blinked at last and looked up at me. "So I gotta strip to get in?"

"Well...yeah."

Her eyes narrowed. "So I'm in here naked with tubes running into me while you're wandering around outside?"

"Uh...the door has a lock. So does the lid."

She slowly looked back at the bed. "So I'm in there, naked, tubes running into me...and the lid is shut and locked?"

"Yeah. It's perfectly safe. In fact, we're supposed to use them for emergency life support if we're sick or injured, or if there's an environmental hazard we can't contain."

"That can happen?"

"Well, it hasn't in the three years I've been here."

Eyes back to me. "You've been here three years? By yourself? Am I the first woman you've seen in all that time?"

"Well, uh..."

She studied me a moment longer. "I think I'd like to be alone some more."

I stepped back out and she closed the door in my face.