King's County by James Carrick Page A

intruded my mind; I getting claustrophobic.
    "Alright, I see your point. No sense
delaying it if we don't have to." I said closing the
HUD.
    Ed looked straight ahead. He was
unresponsive. I checked his vital stats.
    "You’re an asshole, you know that?" I
said putting one of the purple pills in my mouth to dissolve under
my tongue.
    "Hooolllyyy ssshhhiiiit!" Hektor hurled
into view as Jupiter swelled to the size of a pizza. 3731127MP hit
Hektor like a bullet - dead center causing a flash of yellow light.
This all happened in what to us seemed like only a couple of
seconds.
    One lobe of Hektor was supposed to be
pulverized by the impact while the other was knocked into Jupiter
but that's not what happened. The asteroid split cleanly into two
pieces. One tumbled toward Jupiter. The other passed close to our
craft, close enough to see the detail in its pockmarked brown
surface.
    Jupiter loomed, getting larger in the
window. We followed one half of Hektor and watched it get swallowed
up into the dense atmosphere. A aura of white light enveloped the
asteroid. Its last moment ended with the whole mass glowing as it
disintegrated and was absorbed.
    "Oh, man, look at that. Goddamn, son."
Southern Ed said. The creamy red and orange surface took up the
entire display. It churned in a thousand eddies and pools of
swirling, melting and freezing ammonia and simple hydrocarbons,
vortexes forming and dissolving below us at 80x normal
speed.
    "Nauseating. I mean, almost." I said.
We sank inward, downward into the churning.
    *
    WA 2092
    He called himself Clarke. We stayed out
late that night after the play drinking and telling stories. He
told me about the colony. How he was a freelance writer originally
from London. And how after living in Seattle for years, not selling
much, and having taken part in all the earlier projects, he was
eventually installed here as dean of the department of the spoken
and written word. There were 5 other deans in this department. Two
dimensional visual arts, or paintings, had 21 deans.
    Tonight, Clarke was supposed to
introduce me to Braulio, the head of the whole colony. He said
Braulio was one of the few people around here worth
knowing.
    In the meantime, I lounged by myself in
the square, enjoying a brief moment of sunshine. Everyone else at
the colony was either still asleep or still going from the night
before and in too bad of shape to be out in the
daylight.
    I'd gotten up at eleven after only a
few hours sleep. Maybe it was an after effect of the semi
hibernation in space, but I found I didn't need as much sleep as
before. More likely it was the AMP.
    Since the nightclub in Ruth, I had
developed a taste for drinking the wine and beer with the red tag
on the side. AMP was in them, an option added to all of the normal
brands. It was a mild but long lasting stimulant. Among the colony
people, I got the impression drinking AMP was looked down upon
though everyone here was on at least one thing or
another.
    The colony building was not a normal
high rise though it would appear to be one from a distance. The
interior plan was not organized in a normal layout of separate
floors, hallways and rooms. I didn't notice this at first as my
room on K was on what looked to be approximately 11th floor and it
was near the elevator.
    K was sort of a region in the building,
not a true floor level. After leaving the cafe that morning, I went
upstairs and noticed that the hallway connecting my room with the
elevator only connected to one other room.
    There was a plain redwood door, like
mine, with a nameplate on the side: Middlesex.
    I knocked and waited, then tried the
knob. It turned easily. The lights inside came on automatically.
The room was bare with polished blonde wood floors and similarly
paneled walls. There was a door at the opposite end.
    The door opened to another short
hallway. The ceiling was low and arched, seamless with the walls
which were coated with a textured, gray, fake concrete paint. The
place smelled