Hyper
Chapter 3 – World’s Best Girl Friend

[Location: Decontamination Depot t3rm1nu5 - Charlie and Linda’s Quarters, Earth Year 2061]

“Charlie? Boss, you awake?”

Charlie opened his tired eyes and shot a blank stare through the darkness at the ceiling above him. He rubbed some crust from the corners of his eyes as he lazily meandered back and forth in the zone between being asleep and awake. He forced himself to listen because he could have sworn he had just heard his name being called. A few seconds passed…nothing. He allowed his eyes to close and began to relax as sleep flooded back into his consciousness.

“Boss, wake up.”

Charlie’s eyes popped open and he was fully awake. Without sitting up, he reached for his handheld resting on the night stand and keyed the mic.

He pressed his mouth close to the electronic device and whispered, “Yeah. I’m awake. What’s going on?” Charlie adjusted the volume knob on the top of the handheld and turned toward the wall, trying not to disturb his wife.

The voice replied through the small speaker, “Central just messaged us. There’s a refugee transport scheduled to dock in about an hour.”

Charlie blinked a few times to try and clear the remnants of sleep from his head. “Kay… I’ll be there.”

He quietly laid the handheld on the nightstand, rolled onto his back, and closed his eyes. Thoughts ran through his mind about the transport and the tasks he would have to complete for it to safely dock, but he still had a few minutes to enjoy his bed and his wife before he had to get up, so he turned onto his side and pressed his face into the cool pillow beneath his head. He exhaled and let the rest of his body relax into the soft mattress.

He reached back with his left hand and felt Linda, who was buried beneath a mountain of blankets, cuddle up behind him and spoon her body next to his. A sense of peace filled his heart as did loving memories of how he and his wife had crossed paths. He thought about how many years had gone by and felt that the love between the two was still as deep as the day they met.

Then he thought about how their lives had come together. They had grown up in the same small town on Earth and even went to the same high school. Charlie came from a good solid family, as his father was a brick layer and his mother was a waitress at the Big-E restaurant in downtown Cottondale, Alabama. Being that Charlie was an only child, they always tried to speak words of confidence to him whenever they could.

When Charlie was ten years old, he played on a little league baseball team. At first, his fielding abilities were excellent, but his batting skills fell well below average. Charlie’s father realized he needed more practice and came home from work early to pitch ten minutes of batting practice before each game. As time went on, Charlie’s batting skills improved and years later he ended up hitting three-twenty during his varsity year in high school while playing second base.

When Charlie was a senior, Linda had just started high school as a lowly freshman. Cottondale High School had more than eight hundred students, so the two never met.

As he neared graduation, Charlie wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life, so he turned to his father for advice. Charlie’s dad was an Army veteran and had been stationed in the Solomon Islands from 2018 until 2022. The islands were the site of the historic battle of Guadalcanal, that had taken place during World War II. He tossed out the idea of Charlie joining the armed forces because he felt the structure and discipline of the military would keep his son on the straight and narrow. After a long discussion, Charlie decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and enroll in the United States Army.

The day after graduation, Charlie drove to the recruiting office in town and signed the papers to enroll. A few weeks later, he was shipped to the Great Lakes Military Training Center and after basic training pursued a position in the military police force. After four successful years in the Army as an M.P., he returned home to Cottondale, Alabama older and wiser and looking for a job. An old high school buddy put in a good word for him at the Tuscaloosa State Penitentiary and he was hired as a prison guard a few days later.

It wasn’t until he worked at the penitentiary that Charlie met Linda. Linda had graduated from high school and had also gotten a job at the penitentiary—not as a guard but as a kitchen worker. She had watched Charlie eat lunch in the prison cafeteria a number of times until one day she brought him a cup of green Jell-O and the two struck up a conversation. From then on, they ate lunch together every day and enjoyed a respite from the craziness of the prison.

On their first official date, Charlie took Linda to see a movie. Afterwards they drove to Frosty-Tip for a soft-serve cone and sat on a picnic table and talked until the place closed down. At the end of the date, Charlie presented Linda with a gift. It was a teddy bear that had on a pointed birthday hat that said World’s Best Girl Friend. Linda loved the gift and still treasures it to this day.

After their first date the two were inseparable. They married nine months later and had been together for a little more than ten years. And even after years of marriage, Linda and Charlie were still as deeply in love as the day they said I Do.

Realizing it was time for him to get up, Charlie slowly slid the blankets off of his body and tucked them lovingly around Linda. She rustled beneath the warm covers, made a few incoherent sounds, and fell back into a deep sleep. He gently kissed the blonde hair on top of her head.

He grabbed his handheld from the nightstand, took a few steps forward through the darkness, and whispered, “Kitchen light.”

A small hanging L.E.D. lamp illuminated and washed the area near the kitchen table with a bright white light. It was enough to allow him to dig through his closet and pull out a fresh pair of coveralls. He leaned over and stepped each foot into a leg of the orange cotton suit. He straightened himself, slipped on the upper portion of the suit, and pulled up the zipper. The red, white, and blue embroidered patch on the right shoulder of the coveralls had the words Decontamination Depot t3rm1nu5 arched across the top. The words Chief Facility Operator were in an inverted arch across the bottom.

He walked a couple steps to the kitchen, tapped the screen on the liquids dispenser, and waited for his coffee. After a few seconds he pulled a stainless steel mug filled with steaming java from the machine and took a seat at the kitchen table. He blew across the top of the warm liquid to try and cool it and took a small sip. It wasn’t real coffee but it was loaded with caffeine and tasted good. Coffee that was ground from real beans wasn’t something available on a decontamination depot millions of miles from Earth, but the synthetic stuff did the job well enough.

Charlie placed the mug on the table, yawned, and rubbed his eyes again to get rid of the crumbs that still hung in his lashes. He took another sip of his coffee then placed the mug back on the table and ran his hand over the coarse stubble on his chin. He had forgotten to shave yesterday and it looked like he wasn’t going to get around to it today either.

Depot regulations did not allow for personnel to have mustaches or beards. Each member of the depot team was fitted with an emergency self-contained breathing apparatus and a sealed face mask. To provide a proper seal, the mask had to be placed firmly against the skin. Facial hair would degrade the seal and allow a chance for gasses from the hydrogen fuel condenser facility to leak inside the user’s mask. In emergency situations, inhaling hydrogen vapors from an over flowing slurry tank, the most toxic portion of the condensing process, could kill a person in as little as thirty seconds. Making sure one had a tight, leak proof seal around his mask was a matter of life and death.

As Chief Facility Operator, Charlie was provided with living quarters that were more comfortable than the rest of the crew. On one side of the room was the sleeping area, with a comfortable queen sized bed with temperature control and real cotton sheets. A bathroom facility was only a few steps away that included a lighted mirror, sink, walk-in bathtub, and a waste evacuation unit. The depot had artificial gravity, so an evacuation unit really wasn’t necessary as long as the gravity generator was working, but it had been installed just in case. Through a small archway was the living room with a soft couch and a few comfy chairs. A complex entertainment system took up the entire wall. Next to that was the dinner table, which had been upgraded to seat six, and then the kitchen. It had been outfitted with a small meal dispenser that had fifteen different entrees on its menu. There was a stainless steel sink in the counter for washing dishes and a digital clock with red numbers high on the wall above it.

In the depths of space, there was no sunrise, sunset, or anything that could be considered a day. A twenty-four hour and forty-minute clock system that was synchronized with Mars’ central time zone had been installed in the decontamination depot to give the inhabitants a sense of time in hours, days, months, and years.

Temperature and light controls for the entire living area as well as the entertainment system were all voice adjustable. The satellite based system allowed you to watch live network programming from Mars as well as more than a billion other video entertainment choices that could be retrieved from a digital archive.

Charlie had always been happy with his living quarters and knew it was a definite upgrade compared to the multi-person bunk room and community eating area that the rest of the crew lived in.

The only thing missing in their happy home was a window. Being that their lodging was buried deep in the bowels of a hydrogen fuel condenser facility inside of a deep space decontamination depot, a window was not a possibility. The hull of the depot was comprised of five-inch-thick, high tensile aluminum. The only part of the vessel’s hull that was open to space was the passage way to the space craft docking doors.

None the less, Linda was able to breathe life into their living quarters by posting an ultra-high definition picture of a dense forest on the screen of the entertainment system. The screen took up the entire wall and showed a forest on Earth during the autumn season with bright orange leaves and deep green ferns in every direction. The image was so life-like one could almost walk into it, stand next to one of the large pine trees, and smell the scent of rich moist soil. Even if it had been possible to have a window, the image of the autumn forest was much better than looking out into the dark, cold vacuum of space.

Linda worked hard to keep their living quarters clean and orderly even though outside their front door was a smelly hydrogen fuel condenser facility with its twisted jungle of steaming hot pipes, covered by a thin film of grimy hydrogen soot. Organization and cleanliness were one of her pet peeves.

The black greasy hydrogen soot was a byproduct of the compression process and had a way of replaceing its way into the smallest spaces on the skin and clothing. Each day when Charlie returned home, Linda would insist he throw his coveralls into the laundry and leave his dirty boots in the hallway outside of their quarters. Her other demand was that he immediately take a bath in an attempt to keep some of the grime from inside their home.

“Boss, we gotta slight problem.” It was the chief mechanic, Roy Thompson calling. Roy had been on the depot since the day it was commissioned. He always thought the name Decontamination Depot t3rm1nu5 was more than a mouthful and had lovingly nicknamed the station D.D.315.

Charlie grabbed his handheld and keyed the mic. “What’s up?”

“Bay door number three won’t open. I’ve tried to override the safeties and still nothing. It’s giving me a C.P.F. fault.”

Charlie replied, “Control processor failure. Did you try changing the control board?”

“I’m on my way to the parts bin right now to grab one. I’ll be back by the dock door in about fifteen minutes.”

Charlie clicked the mic again. “Got it. I’ll meet you over there.”