Absolute Zeros by Xander Franklin

Author:Xander Franklin [Franklin, Xander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2019-07-09T22:00:00+00:00

The MMUTCAT rolled along on eight, honeycombed wheels. It bumped and bounced along the tundra waste, wheels lifting in time over rocks and Skitter nests, flaring up on independent, articulated suspensions. Inside the cabin, Private Johnson had come to a startling realization.

“So wait, you’re not Arab? Like Rania?” he asked, cocking his head in surprise.

“Naw man. Spanish and Cherokee,” Almar said with a laugh. “But lots of people get it wrong. I guess the name is Arabian, or was, don’t know.”

“Huh.” Johnson sat back in his seat, puzzling over the vast spread of surnames. “But you do have a bachelor’s?”

“Yep,” said Almar, tapping the blinking icon on the MinMap. “Digital Development, out of Oxford.”

“Huh.”

Johnson looked out the side viewscreen, watching snow dunes drift on by.

“Then how come you’re not an officer?” he asked, still looking out the side.

“Too much hassle,” shrugged Almar. “I figured I’d do my eight, get out and go back to school. Full ride for my P.H.D.”

“Huh.”

The MMUTCAT rolled past an exceptionally large Snow Skitter colony, Almar artfully steered around the porous, cement-like boulder. He’d enjoyed school, especially working in the abstract worlds of digital theory and design. He never felt adrift or lost there, always surrounded by likeminded scholars and stern encouragement from his academic advisors. Before he graduated he’d started research on an ambitious project to code a computer using Cherokee syllabary instead of Latin Script or Binary. He’d hoped to use it as a way to bridge the knowledge of his ancestors with an enduring digital medium. And, it made for a hell of a challenging doctoral research project. But his savings had run out with his senior year of undergraduate studies, and so he’d put those plans on hold to join the ICF, where full-term service guaranteed a trooper funding for up to two degrees. It wasn’t a bad life as an assistant gunner in a security platoon. The job was routine and he always had enough ‘mental bandwidth’ left over at the end of the day to put back into his independent research. At least as long as the Linknet was up and nobody was throttling the connection by downloading tons of vidplay files.

The chirruping icon on the MinMap grew louder as a squat, grey cottage pulled into view ahead of them. It was an older ranch house, formed from overlapping rings of inject-molded alloy. It resembled a large beehive with two chimneys, capped with fresh snow from the night before. A thin stream of steam drifted lazily from one of the stacks for the geothermal generators, the other was empty. Almar eased off the throttle, allowing the MMUTCAT to coast to a stop on regenerative brakes.

“So this is it then?” asked Johnson.

“Yep, Gligman Ranch.”

“So how’s this work?”

“We go up, knock on the door and wait. Hope they’re in a good mood,” said Almar unbuckling the harness of his worn, padded seat. “If they’re home, we chat, help them unload the crates and leave.”

“And if they aren’t in a good mood?”

Almar shrugged. “Then we drop the crates and go.

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