Bypass Gemini

Chapter 1

“What’ll it be today, T?” asked the cook.

He was more or less the stereotypical short order cook: greasy whitish apron, greasy grayish hair, greasy blackish cookie-duster mustache, and a pot belly from too much of his own greasy merchandise. The name on the apron said Mel, though it was anyone’s guess why, since his name was Marv. He’d run “Starvin’ Marvin’s Curb Counter” for about as long as anyone could remember. It was almost literally a hole in the wall, just a couple of stools and a counter carved into the side of a shopping center. It was also the only place anywhere close that took something besides credits as payment. The food wasn’t bad either.

“The usual, Marv. And call me Lex, would you?” said Lex.

Travis Alexander was one of those people who could never get a decent nickname to stick. T, TL, Trav, Alexander, he’d tried them all, but either he didn’t like them or other people didn’t. Unfortunately, a brief and notable flirtation with celebrity a few years back had stuck him with “T-Lex," a name so awful it could only have been conceived by the sports press. After trying and failing to shake it, he’d decided to split the difference and shorten it. Results had been mixed.

“Bowl of chili, no spoon, and a bag of chips, coming up,” Marv said.

“And hack me off a slice of that coffee while you’re at it. It’s been a long night.”

Lex looked in the mirror set into the side of the counter. His short brown hair was a mess, and his eyes, also brown, were bloodshot from too little sleep and too much of Marv’s coffee. He was also still wearing his courier gear: a red T-shirt covered with his corporate logo, a messenger bag plastered with the same, and cargo pants that, while functional, weren’t terribly fashionable. A few hours of sleep and a minute or two with a comb would probably earn him the description “handsome," or at least “rugged," but at the moment he was trending more toward “train wreck." Working three jobs will do that to you. It was also probably why even though he’d been subsisting on a steady diet of foods that congeal if you don’t eat them quickly enough, he still qualified as gangly.

His main job was as a hand courier. He made his way from business to business for same-day deliveries and such. It involved a lot of running around, and the violation of most traffic laws. His second job was as a chauffeur, though there hadn’t been much business on that end lately. Planet Golana was basically nothing but a big shipping hub. There were loads of big businesses, and thus loads and loads of white collars floating around, but most of them had their own private drivers, so that left Lex carting around out-of-towners and the slice of the economic spectrum that was too rich to be seen in a cab, but not rich enough to have their own limo. It wasn’t a big market. As for the third job? Well... the less said about that, the better.

A bowl of chili, a bag of corn chips, and a plastic cup of coffee that may or may not have been in the pot for the past week were set before him. He opened the chips and used them to systematically shovel the contents of the bowl into his mouth. It wasn’t so much eating as refueling, a procedure so practiced and mechanical that he tended to use it as a time to organize his plans for the rest of the day. With his free hand, he fumbled around in his pocket, one by one dropping onto the table the various items one accumulates over the course of the day. Energy bar wrappers, a pack of gum, a lighter, his tool chain. Finally he found what he was looking for.

A thin plastic rectangle, roughly the size of a credit card, clattered down onto the counter top. It was transparent save for a short metallic tab along one of the short edges. It was a slidepad, a device that had become so prevalent you were practically assigned one at birth. The little pad served the purpose of a cell phone, PDA, day planner, key chain, voice recorder, wallet, game system, media player, and virtually anything else one might need in the day. He slid his finger across the screen, causing it to flicker to life. The display area extended beyond the confines of the plastic thanks to “patented HoloEdge technology” according to the ubiquitous commercials. It baffled him that they still advertized the damn thing. It was like advertizing oxygen.