073018 Wake up, wake up, berzerkerz and serpents! We’re about to begin the resurfacing procedure, and I want you all to have your eyes wide open for this. We’ll be on land in a bout oh twenty minutes or so. Local weather is (ha ha) arid and destroyed, wind-swept and acrid as usual. Please make sure you have your fishbowls secured tightly around your necks before we open the doors, and whatever you do, don’t talk to anyone who offers to sell you cash, and please report any suspicious packages to the nearest patrol booth. It’s dusty out there, folks, so watch your step, shield your eyes, and do have a lovely time exploring the surface. Well, OK. I was too giddy to worry about the frozen text of the standard pre-resurfacing warnings. Usually I do actually listen to whatever they say in these boats, because I mean you never know. Would you rather be cool and aloof like everyone else? or would you rather be the guy who actually knows what to do in an emergency, and therefore is able to save a bunch of babies and women, and gets a hypervid made all about how much of a hero you are? So I do pay attention to how to work the emergency release valves and the lifeboats and how to inflate them and all that stuff. I actually listen like a third-grader, you know? It’s not that difficult, we were all supposed to have learned how to follow directions, but almost nobody does. Look around, next time you’re on a big boat, and see if I’m wrong—do people a) know something I don’t know, that gives them this sublimely bored sense of utter confidence that nothing could possibly go wrong; or b) already know the procedures so stone-cold solid that if something does happen they will already know what to do; or c) just really not care because they’re too stupid, slow, and dumb to even be bothered? Too fucking complacent even to spend four or five micro-bits of attention on the fold-out card and the holo speech? It seems unbelievable from a rational point of view, but then, if we were a rational species we wouldn’t be wearing fishbowls on our heads and being tourists in the ruins of our own civilization, now would we? I think too much, according to my “friends.” But I didn’t have time to think about all that today. This trip was going to be a little different, you see. In fact, I hadn’t even been sure which box to tick on the pre-sub form! I finally had to just choose one, and hope that what I’d heard—that no one actually checks to see if you’re telling the truth—was true. My choices were a) conference; b) pleasure tour; c) hyper-filming; d) penal servitude; e) research (but there was a whole separate form to fill out if you ticked that one; not just anyone is allowed to do research, after all!); e) sensual servitude; or f) combat tour. I had tried to think about it without taking so much time that it would arouse suspicion or annoy everyone in the queue behind me. It was pretty obvious that it wasn’t (a) because I didn’t have a suit or a briefcase or a job or anything like that. It obviously wasn’t (b)—do I look that fat to you!? I’m not young and stupid enough for it be (c), and I don’t have enough neck tattoos or repltilian, sinewy muscles for (d). There’s no way I would be able to BS my way through the attendant sub-indices and appendices for (e), and I would have had a special ID (not to mention a gas mask and a bunch of weapons) if it had been (f), so that pretty much left (e). It wasn’t fully 100% accurate, and making my hand move the stylo to tick that box made me feel like I was taking off my clothes and waving my dirty panties around right there in the terminal, but what choice did I have? My cheeks turned into two little radiators and I failed to fully make eye contact as I tried to discern whether the ticket agent was raising an eyebrow at me and smiling. But anyway, it had worked. There were no further questions, and they didn’t even search my bag. I kind of had some reservations about whether the orange handkerchief was going to be the source of any friction, but again—I didn’t really have time to think about that. I was in it now, baby! Decompression was finally over. The stewards were going around making sure no-one had too much nitrogen fizzing through their bloodstream and making sure all the chairs were upright; all the usual stuff, and the rumbly grumbly noises of everybody getting their stuff together was signalling a ritual transition of a sort. Ever notice how just the sound of everyone getting ready to move gives you kind of an infinitesimal panic, like oh shit, I got to get my bag ready and my legs poised to get up and out of this chair— but it’s not like you’re going to get trampled or left behind if you’re not fast enough. They put in procedures to guard against that years ago, after all. I think it’s just a herd-mob-mammalian type of response. We descended from mammals, you know—that’s what they were still teaching back when I was a kid, anyway. It was finally time to get up and file off the boat. My stomach was flipping like a jellied squid. I felt so tingly I almost could have believed myself that I *was* here for sensual servitude. I wondered how I was supposed to go about finding my people. Oh well, I had ad-libbed thus far, I guessed I could keep improvising now, and hope for the best. Everyone ducked their heads as they passed the hanging open doors of the overhead bins. The line shuffled slowly along towards the hatch, and a ring of rusty daylight beckoned.