Tunnel Rat

A half-hour later, Milo had to admit to himself that the party wasn't some nefarious scheme by an evil corporation. It was a media event designed to gain free advertising for the Manpower Corporation and to help launch their new streaming channel, Great Gaming. But for people from the hab attending the event, it was just entertainment and free food. And a type that most young hab dwellers had never seen. Someone had the good idea to fill a room with people playing games to advertise a channel where all they did was talk about games. Milo approved of this. But he wondered, was there a cheese channel?

A minute later, he answered the question: There was a cheese channel! Or close to it. It was a cooking and dining channel from France, and all of its programs included cheese as part of each episode. No dinner ended without showing the proper cheese that went with each meal. He dedicated one of his viewscreens only to show that channel and, in a moment of daring, subscribed to a weekly meal shipment. Once a week, he'd get a ready-to-heat meal featured on the show and fruit and cheese that went with the cheese. He was a little nervous trying food that way, but he could always just eat the Meal. Thinking about crab-stuffed chicken in hollandaise sauce, he realized he'd lost an hour of work. He needed to remember his lessons! Cheese was dangerous!

An entire floor of section H was being turned into one big media staging room. Presentations would run non-stop for new games coming out and new gaming products. An entire hour was dedicated to showing off the M-1000 gloves and other gaming apparel from Ubergear. Milo didn't think much about the name of their channel. 'Great Gaming' was too generic, and why would you play a game that wasn't great? Across the huge auditorium, hundreds of arcade-style games were set up in clusters representing the decades they had come out. There was a display with a little round screen where two people could play a simple tennis game with a bouncing ball. 'Tennis for Two' was invented in 1958 as part of a presentation at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. An area nearby had an ancient system that could play a different game by inserting a cartridge. The Fairchild Channel F system had been quickly forgotten after Atari brought out their system, but during the party, gamers could sit down and experience what it was like to play one of the first video game systems.

Row on row of arcade games were hooked up. Stand-up arcade games like Defender, Asteroids, and Centipede were arranged in a circle. As games were played, the screen was duplicated on larger screens hanging from the ceiling. There were two-player tabletop games featuring all the versions of Pacman and Space Invaders and even the six-person version of Starship Commander. SC6, as it was nicknamed, was infamous as both the best and worst game of its era. The concept was ambitious. Several races were at war in the Andromeda system, fighting over ten worlds and numerous moons and asteroids. The game was notoriously difficult to play. The game was huge, with room for six people to sit in separate areas around the center console. One person had the role of captain and could allocate energy between shields, weapons, and repair teams. He also got to fire the Photonic Blaster Cannon once an hour. Two other players controlled the right and left side weapons, which could be a mix of lasers, missiles, and gravity lances. Missiles were limited in quantity, and the other weapons took energy allocated by the captain. Arguments between the captain and his gunners were common. The most preferred jobs were the fighter pilots, who each had a light attack craft that could dogfight with other LAC or attack ships directly.

The final crew member was the navigator, responsible for maneuvering the ship in space, giving the gunners their arcs of fire, all while avoiding enemy fire, asteroids, space pirates, and other navigational hazards. Failure inevitably meant a damaged ship or a complete loss when a fusion reactor exploded. If the team lost, it was common to blame the navigator. Moving the ship was made even harder because the game was in three dimensions. The navigator had to manage pitch, roll, and yaw using thrusters with the aid of six screens. Many professional teams broke up when their navigator checked into a hospital with PTSD.

When a team logged into the internet to play, they were competing with other ships worldwide. The game became an immediate hit with gaming groups who formed teams to compete from their local gaming centers. Corporations bought the game and had logos displayed on their spaceships. The rich bought their games and hired people to play as their dedicated crew. At the peak of the popularity of the game, there were 83,000 games available for use worldwide, but after two years, the war had grown stale, corporate teams dominated the game, and so few non-corporate teams logged in that the servers were shut down. SC6 faded into history. Manpower had found a dozen working copies of the machines, and they would be set up for the party with their own dedicated server. The war for Andromeda would continue.

Milo was impressed. Someone had gone to great lengths to create the event. He already had anxiety about the number of people it would attract, but he desperately wanted to play some of those games. If only the food were better. The menu didn't look that appealing to him. Most of it was the same things you could get from a food processor. Milo saw each ad they had placed on the data net included an address to send suggestions and ideas. He found the folder and inserted his suggestions, putting his message near the top of the queue.

Party research done, he turned his attention to figuring out what anime was all about.

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Belinda stretched as best she could in her wheelchair. Every day was a little different as they adjusted her medications, trying to find a correct treatment for what ailed her. She had been able to walk a little this week in physical therapy, but only with braces on her legs and rails next to her. Two therapists stood to either side in case she got off balance. Some days it was easier to stay in the wheelchair. And some weeks, it was impossible to get around without her chair. At its worst, her disease cost her the use of most of her body except her right arm and hand. She constantly worked on keeping control of that one link to a normal life. With an arm and a hand, she could move her chair, play some games, and use the data network. Her therapist said that constant use would keep her nerves and muscles working together. So even when the rest of her body rebelled, her right arm and hand were exercised during all her waking hours.

She wanted to have fun at the party and meet some people. Her therapists and bodyguards weren't friends, and Daddy was...well, Daddy. She thought he meant well, but deep down, John was too competitive. They had played games together when she was small, but she'd seen a growing annoyance as she got older. He didn't like to lose, even to his own daughter. And she wasn't going to lose at one of the few things she was good at. John didn't like to lose at anything, especially business and gaming. He was still upset over missing the World Boss raid she had led.

She was upset that she couldn't play GENESIS for a month. The recent round of medications hadn't worked well, and the doctors had worried about her using a gaming pod. She would have ignored them, except John had taken her pod away. That was when she started calling him John and not Daddy. She knew he hated it. Calling him by his first name was her way of saying, "You aren't my real father." It was cruel, but so was taking away her pod. In GENESIS, she could walk and run. And she had friends. She wondered what Milo was up to. He was probably mad at her for flirting with him and then disappearing. He was so strange and focused. No one believed they weren't together somehow. No one gave away magic items as he had. Rumors were going around before she had to take a break from the game.

She had thrown herself into planning the party with nothing else to do. The event got delayed twice because of engineering problems. The elevator took forever to build; without it, Eric couldn't show off the Manpower facilities. But she used the delays to improve things. She'd spent the budget for games and then browbeat John and Eric into giving her more. With a bigger event, she had been able to bring in better vendors and entice advertisers. She had tentatively had Gearhead showing up and had dropped a hint to Ubergear when they inquired about the event. In the end, Gearhead was out, and Ubergear got a full hour of the event to show off their new products. She'd charged them a quarter million dollars and used the money to buy a dozen refurbished SC6 games. The things were huge when assembled, each one in the shape of a spaceship with six different sections for the crew to sit in. She had all of them linked to a series of screens for the audience to see the battles. Six teams were coming to play, all of them the remains of older teams from the game's heyday. Ubergear would be fielding a team as well, all equipped with their new gear.

It had been tricky getting things done. John had wanted her to be listed as part of the Manpower team putting on the event to capitalize on her popularity after the big raid. She refused. It was hard enough to meet people when she was in a wheelchair and living in a rusting metal mountain. She wanted to enjoy the day, let someone else run it and take credit. She had enjoyed spending the money. It was fun making suggestions that people had to take seriously. That reminded her to look at the email with suggestions from views on the Great Games channel. Most suggestions were dumb or repetitive, but some had been golden. The idea to revive SC6 had come from a suggestion someone had sent in. It was so easy to listen to people. She wished she could convince her step-father to do it more. He listened to himself way too much.

The first suggestion she looked at was interesting. "You need better food. If you live in the hab, it's boring to come to a party and eat the same stuff. And if you aren't used to to hab food, it's horrible. Why not serve things like macaroni and cheese with real cheese? And pancakes! Please set up a big grill with ten people making pancakes and have fruit and cheese and bacon and stuff to go with them. Everyone likes pancakes. And do some retro foods that are served over by the retro arcade games! Hot Dogs, Cheese Fries, and Funnel Cakes! Make it a carnival atmosphere. Did you know they used to make fried cheese? You dipped the battered fried cheese in sauces. It sounds great. We should have that at the party."

This message had to have come from one of the design staff. No one else knew what they were serving for food. She hadn't thought about it, but this person was right. Who had thought using the food processor in the habitat to make the food was a good idea? It was just cheap. She rewrote the suggestion and sent it out to a half dozen people, asking for input and wanting changes made. Then she called Francis. When she needed someone to do something immediately, she called Francis. She had made sure he got promoted and assigned to her staff for the party. He was a little odd, but at least he could think. "I've got a job for you, Francis. I need to find vendors for a food list and I want to sample it all tonight. Set it up, and you and your staff can have dinner with me and decide what we like from this list." John never understood people. She could have just told Francis to do the job, but this way was more fun. He and his team were funny sometimes, and eating alone was boring. She'd been using a carrot-and-stick approach with some of John's staff and slowly building her team. She wondered which person had sent that email. There was no way to trace it, but she wondered what other ideas they had.

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