Liner Notes for The Proper Disposal Of Waste Materials
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I wanted the ship stuck in port for this story. Obviously some sort of maintenance or repair was called for. Rather than a simple part replacement or inspection, what if the engines filled up with green goo that had to be removed. Where does it come from? What’s it made of? Why can’t it be drained away? How do the engines function anyway?
Yeah, I don’t have answers for that, sorry.
The floating spacer labour pool is analogous to sailors in the 17th and 18th century. Some would be on regular routes, regular ships. But in many cases sailors would join for a voyage, get paid off at the end and then seek new work in the port they found themselves in. The space work here in the 22nd century is more specialised. But not that much more! This is an explicitly human future, avoiding the pitfalls of automation breakdown.
So Gunn, the navigator, spends time moving cargo by hand, or next best thing to. It’s a conceit of the setting.
With spacers hanging around a station, someone will find use for them before they sign on to a new ship. Hence this story. And being strangers, they get taken advantage of. Use for various scams and shenanigans. Gunn’s one step ahead though, with both anti-theft measures and a basic understanding of the legal system. You take advantage of random strangers, one day you’re going to run into one who’s more dangerous than you think.
A shipping agent can be many things. A post office, for both regular and discreet messages for example. A source of information. An introduction into various groups in the port they work. Sometimes they even ship goods! I hid the message to Gunn in a spam advert. I have a joke that spam was invented by the CIA to send covert messages to assets, but unfortunately the business model was too good and it got out of control. And there’s now an agent in Vladivostok waiting for orders, not realising they’re in their spam folder…
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