Short Story: Do Eros Sevens Dream Of…

Short Story: Do Eros Sevens Dream Of Jupiter And Mars?

The two hundred and fifty kilometres per hour station-to-station no-turbulence pipe came to a stop.

End of the line. Everyone off.

I stepped out the pipe onto a narrow walkway amongst a shoulder-to-shoulder throng six wide whose momentum funnelled me toward a down-ramp and into a square, where a girl with dreadlocks leaning against a 3-D sandwich-board bit through a foil wrapped protein bar - without first removing the foil.

Sodium glare from overhead down-lighters pooled around her bejewelled feet. When she looked up from the three hundred credit a go, all-in-one meal, silvery-white light flashed off her to-die-for self-cleaning teeth in titanium alloy.

No Crumbs. No unsightly residue. No substance too tough.

The Ad men aren't joshing us, I thought; those teeth are the business.

After the girl had swallowed the mint-flavoured bolus I asked about prices.

No off-peak travel permits till Thursday, she told me, at any cost.

I activated my Holo-I-Dent. Not even for Level Five workers, I said?

Nada.

Step lightly girl, I said, touching her forehead. She bowed. I left.

***

Quarantine laws were ultra-draconian this cycle even by Fourth City standards. Of course, no one grumbled. Not when the last epidemic had claimed three million.

I would just have to wait.

I dialled a cab. It dropped me at the Plaza where I paid through the nose for a ready-to-go Eros Seven who I slept with in a ten by six overnight security-pad situated just off the third and top rung of the inter-city sky-way.

Before I turned out the light I accessed my credit balance - twenty-three thousand ordinary creds was not enough money to see me through till Thursday. I had to find boon-work tomorrow or sleep rough.

In the morning I walked to the nearest terminal, rode the open-topped overground tram to the basin, where Boon Agents were already busy signing up Level Fives and Sixes - common-a-garden chip salvage work invariably done by casuals did not pay that well but did help accrue additional travel credits, so... I got myself two days work.

***

That night I bumped into the same Eros Seven who had kept me warm and nourished the night before. Like a fool I agreed to be her official off-terra escort on the next off-peak inter-stellar blimp out of there - in exchange, naturally, for cut-rate services.

Her name was Rishka. Like all other MK. 1 Eros Seven models she was exactly two metres tall. Unlike all the other MK. 1's I had ever known her eyes were the colour of deep-mined Venusian sapphire.

The next night, after I finished work, I bought two permits from the dread-locked tout with precious metal teeth.

The trip lasted almost one complete cycle. The solar storms we ran through bypassing Jupiter's orbit were the worst on record but it was worth the fare just to see Rishka's face.

She never slept the whole journey.

If Rishka had been capable of 'real' sleep, I wondered, dreaming, would she have dreamed of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars?