24141226 SecSpec Duty Log

Posted on Fri Dec 26th, 2014 @ 11:45pm by Ensign Sizb
Edited on on Sun Dec 28th, 2014 @ 4:06am

951 words; about a 5 minute read

"Final boarding call..."

The advent of dirt-cheap energy, superfast replication technology and ultrahigh-bandwidth communication had done what ten thousand different religions, philosophies and political movements on a thousand different worlds had all uniformly failed to do--made the concept of "personal ownership" virtually obsolete. When the basic necessities of life had literally no value and could be had by virtually anyone under normal circumstances, when you could walk away from every last thing you owned and cross a thousand lightyears of space to find everything you owned waiting on you when you arrived, up to and including a four-bedroom, self-powered house with attached solarium and greenhouse, a high-performance groundskimmer (basic templates were free, though the "brand name" stuff generally had a premium price) and a climate-controlled garage to put it in, for little-to-no cost, the whole idea of attaching a tremendous amount of important to "stuff" had all but vanished. As long as a replicator template existed, anything you'd ever owned was literally one single voice-activated command away.

Of course, there were always items that couldn't be replicated--after all, your first baby blanket, your holovids of Mom and Dad, your aunt T'vin's heirloom bronzewood lyrette , or your first hatchling leather teething-stick were all things that had a value that couldn't be calculated strictly in terms of the joules needed to create them from nothing, or the credits needed to purchase them. The sentiments of sentients, thankfully, weren't something that could be calculated, quantified, or even easily explained. Ditto with things like archaeological finds, which were usually fairly useless when replicated, for obvious reasons...and then there were the things that, because of one civilization-wide collapse, war or other Outside Context event or another, simply never got added to anyone's database for safekeeping, study, or replication.

Such as the contents of Sizb's largest carryall bag. Earth's Twenty First Century hadn't just been the beginning of the Modern Era...it had also been the end result of over two thousand years' worth of that world's tumultuous religious, economic and political problems, all come home to roost and wrapped in a bow made of overpopulation, fossil fuel depletion and one of the largest, quickest artificial mass-extinction events ever seen on any known planet that HADN'T rendered itself completely lifeless as a result. All at once, in fact, in a mid-century event variously named by rueful historians "The Late Great Unpleasantness," "The Apocalypse," "The Seven Minute War," and "The War to End Everything." Books and video disks tended not to hold up well in the long term; books and video that were backed up only to a primitive datacenter that would crap the bed in the first really good EMP that came along doubly so. So much culture had been lost, so much history, so much art and literature and history that even now, historians could make a comfortable living and reputation digging up and tracing the myriad tiny bits of that world's lost heritage. Only Vulcan rivaled Earth in sheer mass of lost cultural legacy, and the Vulcans very rarely welcomed outsiders digging up lost bits of their own ancient literature and mythology.

Sizb's largest carryon carried a couple of spare uniforms, a comfortable pair of shorts and a hunting robe (might as well be comfortable in your own quarters), some basic toiletries (in the unlikely event you found yourself away from a replicator and a good bathroom for an extended period of time, it was nice to be able to keep your fangs clean). It ALSO contained his marked card deck, several truly ancient video disks, and a several old-time paper books, one of which--the crumbling-but-mostly-intact Forrest J. Ackerman's "A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films" he had found last month in a centuries-abandoned house sitting in the middle of a trackless forest on the northern hemiphere of Centaurus. That one represented a real coup--there were videos listed in that one that literally no one had seen since in three hundred years; he planned to go back when he could, and see if there was anything else he'd overlooked. He looked forward to scanning it in later, and uploading it when he could to the UFP Extranet. The SFRetroRecovery Community would have a collective stroke...

He growled to himself at the crowd on the concourse. He carefully walked around a hulking Lemnorian tourist, skirted around a chattering group of Hemanite religious pilgrims, and made his way carefully for the Endeavor's boarding lock..and bounced off of a young human female.

"Whuff," she said intelligently, as they both hit the deck. His carryon hit the floor, came open and his stuff went everywhere. "I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed, as she scrambled around, trying to pick up things. "I'm so sorry, let me help you--let me help get it--"

He hissed a bit in consternation. "No--I'm the one who--wait, don't--" she was scrambling around on the floor, trying to pick up the pieces of the damaged book. Several people walked past, stepping on pages. He found himself separated from the carryon by a bunch of people, and when he got a clear view, the carryon was gone...the pages were gone...and he had a clear view of the young female in the distance quickly walking away with it just before she was hidden by the crowd.

Sizb snarled.

A...pickpocket. Of all things, on DS5, a farging, Kolk'r-damned THIEF. He let out a roar of frustration that cleared the deck for meters around him. He realized he had only a few minutes to get to the lock, warred with himself about whether to go after her, and finally turned around and hurried for the Endeavor's lock, fuming.

Crewman R Sizb
Security Specialist
USS Endeavour

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