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�Editor
April 16, 2021.
I got in my spaceship and blasted off. Now mind you, this was back in the days before the Interstel Hyperway system, long before president Nader and the Solar Conservation Act, long before the establishment of Lunar National Park, long before all that stuff our kids take for granted. You know there is always a party period, when any new technology takes the universe by storm, when no one has yet had a chance to clamp down on it. It�s a wild frontier time, a crazy, anything-goes time�much like, I am told, prevailed among the so-called �computer geeks� when the legendary Internet made its debut. Well, the same atmosphere pervaded when Spomon Steller perfected his HyperSuperCard technology and made it possible for anyone with a relatively rust-free Toyota Celica and a few extra bucks to fly through space with all the abandon of a drunken motorboat enthusiast.
And that brings us to my part in this story. I had just cashed my profit-based bonus check from the bookstore I had been working at for three years. (There had, in the late 20th century, been plenty of visionaries who had proclaimed that within decades the �book� would be a thing of the past, replaced by spiffy CD-ROMs or some such garbage. What in fact happened was the CD-ROMS got relegated to junk shops and spontaneous Frisbee games (sometimes in the �Old & Unusual� section of the store, kids will browse through and find an actual vinyl record album, the kind that actually reproduced sound somehow by being scraped with a needle, and I will hear them exclaim, �What is this, some kind of CD-ROM or something?� and put it back and move on, all the while giggling about how charmingly backward the world was before they were born), while the book enjoyed a popular comeback to rival that of the Green Bay Packers in 1996! There�s just no accounting for taste and history!) I had finally had enough; there was never going to be a big breakthrough. I was not any closer than I had been a decade ago to owning my own business (who the hell could pull that off these days, anyway?). I was still only making $100 an hour�barely enough to fill my own belly with potatoes, let alone find a wife and make some babies with her! Just growing older than 30 was no magic key, either; there still was no secret, just as there had been no secret at 16, 18, or 21�.�.�.�. So I gave my two hours� notice and slapped my final check down on the table at the check cashing joint. They took the usual DNA scraping, a brief but annoying procedure (which phrase, now that I think about it, had pretty well come to define life for me!), and I waited a few seconds and soon I had $4801.52 in my account. Not bad, not bad. That would be enough for a start�and for a finish? What the hell, who knew. I would find something. Be a hobo, sell my body, fly into the sun yelling, �YAWP!!!��anything but pick up another meaningless job lit by the sinister neon of a corporate logo.
Last week I had forgone eating (except for rice and crackers, that sort of thing) and spent my last check from regular wages on making my car spaceworthy. At least, the mechanic said it was spaceworthy. He said I might need a new timing belt soon, and I should really have a tune-up, and oil was leaking past the valve seals, and the exhaust manifold was cracked, and the catalytic converter was about to fall off�but he said heck, go ahead and drive it�the new Steller Kleen-Reactor and Steller Pro-Tec Hull Converter Kit should hold even if the whole earthbound exhaust system fell off in mid-flight. I don�t care; I�m getting out of here! I had yelled, paying the man; That�s the spirit! he had said, pocketing my cash.
And here I was, climbing into the driver�s seat as I oft had before, fastening my seat belt and turning the ignition. But now, oh, now there was a difference. The Steller Console at my right, where the radio used to be (it had been a cheap factory radio anyway), sat blinking�one of its many lights, a green one�blink, blink, blink�.�.�.�and I smiled and pulled away from the curb.
I pulled out of the glove box a celebratory bottle of Chianti. Did I mention how unregulated the spaceways remained?
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