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BETWEEN ZION & HELL
* 3 *
"There you go," whispered the thirty-something Hitchhiker as he crouched his tall muscular dark-skinned frame
beside the clunky-looking processing unit and clicked a memory chip back into place.
With a groan, he stretched back to his full height of six-foot-plus and readjusted his old oil-smeared orange cap on his bald head.
For a slow moment, he gazed at his neverending personal project.
/The "virtuality chair."/
Carved into the lowest, darkest, and grungiest levels of the City, "Hitchhiker's Shop" was one of the few things that reminded him of his humble
free-born beginnings... his neighborhood... his childhood... his life before... before his training as a hovercraft Operator, his fast days as a
Junior Operator, and his long years as a Senior Operator onboard the noble 'Nosferatu'...
With the too-soon passing of his mother... and then his father... ten years ago... Hitchhiker, barely in his twenties, relocated to a living unit
beside an old abandoned mechanic's shop, where he could shield and distract himself and try to forget... where he could grieve and heal...
alone with his operator and mechanical skills... fixing or building things... and where he eventually uncovered a new passion... a new struggle...
to learn and relearn everything he could about his pod-born parents... including their previous lives in the unreachable untouchable Matrix...
But how could he reach the Matrix... touch the Matrix?
How about something close to it?
/And the "virtuality chair" was born./
Within weeks, Hitchhiker had returned to the old 'Nosferatu' as Senior Operator... to rejoin the cause... a good cause that kept him working, busy...
and distracted from his own issues... So, on and off, every other month or so, whenever his ship and crew came home to recharge, he would
spent hours sometimes days at a time, tinkering on his personal project... every other month... over the last ten years...
With designing, programming, and testing assistance from Miriam -- a pod-born he helped to rescue from the
Matrix before his father passed, his close long-time friend, and the sister he never had -- Hitchhiker had finally completed a working version...
a crude and choppy audiovisual contraption based on the technology of the Construct...
/Definitely crude and choppy./
But it was nonetheless the talk of the Lower Levels... the talk of the young socketless free-borns... who lined up outside his cluttered little shop...
day after day... for just a few more minutes in the cable-covered helmet and chair...
As he stretched his legs towards the doorway, Hitchhiker could already hear the chatter and babble of young voices beyond the front area...
beyond the front door...
He smiled to himself.
/What did I get myself into?/
Next>>
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