[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult by Gideon Defoe

his brain’s attempt to try to insulate itself from the full horror of what was unfolding. He’d stood powerlessly by as he heard his mouth spend ten minutes explaining how prone he was to nosebleeds when adjusting to the space station’s centrifugal gravity. Then he heard it move from that topic onto a graphic description of his childhood bowel problems. Now, in some inexplicably inept attempt to change the conversational course it appeared to have resorted to regaling Phoebe with anecdotes lifted directly from Cliff Ganymede’s autobiography
The Moon’s A Balloon (Watch Out, Fake Moon! It’s A Thargoid Trap!).
    ‘… so that’s when the Pilots’ Federation made me the youngest pilot in the entire star system to be awarded the rank of Deadly. Which was a real honour. And did I mention that I fly a top-of-the-range Anaconda? Because that is also a thing I do.’
    He wondered if she’d noticed the horseshoes of sweat on his shirt. He was wearing the latest gland-freeze spray, but there was only so much you could ask of it.
There is a chance she hasn’t noticed
, Misha thought,
so long as her eyeballs are just painted marbles, like on a taxidermied crow, and she’s faking being able to see
.
    He tried not to think about the fact that once out of his sight it would take her five seconds to call up every detail about his employment history, income, mental health, and – given another half a minute or so – probably an entire run-down of all his recessive genes. Though it might take her a little while to work her way through the list, because he had many.
    ‘But, goodness, I seem to have talked quite a lot. What about you? Do you enjoy police work?’
    ‘Good grief. Is it that obvious?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That I’m a cop?’ Phoebe wrinkled her nose. ‘Can you tell by my feet or something?’
    ‘No, I, uh, think I must have seen you doing a docking bay inspection. I notice that sort of thing because of the importing and exporting. For which, noticing skills are important. It must be exciting. Catching criminals, busting smuggling operations?’
    ‘It’s quieter than you might expect.’ Phoebe shrugged. ‘There’s been a bit of low-level smuggling since Placet B passed that Madeleine law.’
    ‘Madeleine law?’
    ‘Like the cakes.’
    ‘They banned cakes?’ Misha said, lost.
    ‘Not literally. It’s a nickname. Because of Proust.’
    Misha tried to nod his head in the way he imagined a man who had read Proust might do.
    ‘Apparently, hundreds of years ago,’ Phoebe started to explain, ‘when they didn’t have so much in the way of instant reproduction tech, you’d have to just … remember stuff. People didn’t have recordings of everything they ever did. Product packaging would change, and everyone would get wistful for it. If you go back far enough there were actual entire shows and movies that had been lost. Obviously that’s before we sent out ships to pick up all the old radio waves. Anyhow, people would forget that stuff was rubbish; they’d sort of imagine everything with this kind of rosy glow they called “nostalgia”. And they felt happy thinking about how good things were, and they felt happy bitching about how terrible things were today by comparison. So to get the sense of nostalgia back, on Placet B they’ve tried to ban any technology or recorded material designated a non-vital cultural artefact that’s more than thirty years old.’
    ‘Wow, that seems extreme. Does it work?’
    ‘Not really. It’s a pretty ridiculous and unworkable law. But at least it means that every so often I get to find a hidden database of old movies and slap them with a fine. It’s not, to be honest, what I saw myself doing at this stage in life.’
    She knocked back another drink, and continued glumly, ‘Do you ever think that there’s like a hyper-loop shuttle, and that all your peers got on the shuttle at the point they were meant to, but somehow you didn’t, you missed it, and now you’re