Bowmen's Fillip: A Quandary

Chapter One

There's no place in the system o' stars like the spaceport. A veritable hub of bustle and concern, grinders and dreamers, losers and winners and all sorts of other hubbub. And out there suspended among the stars in the seventh divide of the Chromium sector is a spaceport most unremarkable: Graysen Spaceport of the IIIrd Illogium. It's unremarkable in that it is the setting of a most precedented level of constant activity: imports and exports, trading and dealing, and meetings and beatings. Some twenty trillion transactions are afoot during any given moment at Graysen, and an observer at any time would be privy to beings of all races and persuasions and known systems congregating and mitigating - just as they do at any of the infinite number of spaceports anywhere.

But there's a story to tell at Graysen that's unlike any other that could be told at any of these other number of hundreds upon billions of other unremarkable spaceports. Bowmen's Inn is a meeting place for all where a drink can be drunk, a smoke can be toked, and a myriad of characters mostly just come and go. If they have such a want, they can get both night cap and night capsule and then be on their way. And here it was at Bowmen's where a young lad worked most diligently as he did his best to keep the premises clean and serve his customers, ensuring that cups were filled, bills were paid, and netspeeds were at a constantly high rate of transfer. While data is always everything everywhere, the simple pleasures of conversation and chemicals have never lost their appeal. And of course the immunity and perpetual brightly-lit night-time of spaceports have always ensured a lawless abandon that means even the most humble stopover such as the Bowmen's Inn had a most lucrative potential.

So this young lad, we'll call him Mikey David, just a few Earth years into his teens he was, had never been the most ambitious of individuals and had never found any such subject or pursuit that led him to shine. Certainly not in the disciplines of academia or the entrepreneurial persuasion, and alas, neither so the tradition of self commodification by means of selling his being through persona on the Net & Web. All such was elusive to Him due to He having but want of a personality of any interest. Not to mention too that he was painfully shy. His parents had left him to tend the Bowmen's in what could only be described by charitable effort as quiet disappointment. Hoping not so much that he might find himself or any other, but rather that he might be kept occupied and out of sight so that they were free of their memories. These memories were of long gone hopes of He having satisfaction of something which could be recognisable as either achievement or success. Long and gone aspirations that a sired child may grow and thus generate some shred of pride for a parent at some or any time.

A tragic tale in the telling already, for poor Mikey David was just a lad and inside at times he felt but younger than that. In the eye of the storm of a rough and tumble spaceport Inn, far from the panopticonic existence of being a son in his parents' realm, albeit watched and judged and forever amounting to not a thing. Here now at Bowmen's he rushed to keep his patrons in drink and comfort, facilitating all and sundry and quite often directing his faithful cleaning droid to tend to spilled drinks and blood as well as broken cups and teeth. For there was no two ways about it - archaic cliché of expression be forgiven - the Bowmen's attracted a rough sort because, despite the pinnacles of technological advance and once-alien technology, progress always means new incarnations of the same problems. The civil trading of the sort Mikey David's folks talked about looked antiquated and weak to probably the majority of space races and beings of the multiple dimensions and persuasions that passed through Graysen and subsequently the Bowmen's inn.

At this time, Graysen was in the midst of some sort of trade supermergers, the results of which were that intergalactic mining operatives were almost literally swallowing conglomerates from some far-off system or other. There was much turmoil as markets peaked and troughed and many were leaving their postings to seek pastures new. Also, in what is recalled like some space-based pathetic fallacy, there was a great firestorm raging outside the confines of the spaceport entry gates on the night of our tale, and tensions were high. Mikey David had his mind on recreational pursuits as that he ever did in those days, some sort of shooting and hooting Net game interconnected nonsense that only simulated what a young lad like He could never even dream of doing. The point being that his mind wasn't quite rightly on the tasks in hand as unbeknownst to his distracted attentions a wizened old being shuffled into his establishment.