Episode 9 – the flight home.

I was flying back from Luna on my own. KB was spending a few cycles with some Luna estate agents.  Loony estate agents more like. Bright orange from the dome-filtered sun, and bulked up with lurid weighted suits to keep their bones and muscles strong through long periods in the reduced gravity.

They looked like a bunch of gaudy teddy bears – kind of ironic, as they were all depressed. They said it was because of the parlous state of the Lunexpat property market. The downturn followed recent studies (which they refuted) about the negative effects of long-term one sixth G on brain function – apparently it led to depression. 

The shuttle from LunaPort3 up to the relay hub was uneventful.  Just the usual periods of weightlessness when the acceleration came off, before you adjusted to the hub’s rotation. A couple of kids were being sick, but I’d had my EasyG™ pills an hour before, which would also see me through the midway spin about 3 hours into the flight, when we reversed the ship for deceleration into Terra.

I was looking forward to the six hour flight back to Borri Syland Spaceport, to catch up on some recent HoloVids™. I’d acquired a set of the latest neural projectors and a hooky copy of ‘MoleWars’. I didn’t hold with science fiction, which was becoming increasingly popular. Too far fetched for me.

Only a one hour delay leaving the hub, caused by RoboZaps vaporising a path through scattered debris from an inbound Aurelian ore freighter. Coming back through the outer rim it had apparently been holed by a lost hundred year old survey drone and it was travelling with a cloud of spilled payload.

There had been a lot of that lately. The tree-huggers were worried that we kept colliding with nomadic aliens. I’d seen a news report that clearly showed a weird green mess mashed into tangled wreckage on the nose of a docked Sportship.

I was shown to my couch and was pleased to see I’d been put next to the most attractive (albeit slightly orange) woman that I’d seen on this trip.

As I settled in, primed the couch to my shape and adjusted my straps, I put on what I hoped was my ‘interesting, clever and approachable’ face. “Hi there,”

“Hi there,” she said boredly, without raising her eyes from her iPear™. I noticed she had the latest iPearV8 - probably a designer.

“Art,” I held out my hand, “I see you have the new iPear8 - any good?” She looked at me for the first time. She really was very nice, quite sophisticated, if a bit snooty.

“I guess." She smiled and shook my hand. Expensive scent. "Wanda."

“Hi Wanda. I understand the V8 lets you create your own holos on the fly?”

“It might well do, Art. I just use it for reading novels – you a designer?”

“That’s right, I run Artlie-Saturn. It’s a B2B agency, so you might not have heard of us. We concentrate on making things like waste management, high-tech and security systems exciting – takes a different skill to other design. We get deep into the products and turn technical features into business benefits.  You might have seen our HoloAds for Plop Technologies, BlastM2Bits and TimeTravelTech?”

“No, I don’t think so,” She looked sad for me, sad that she hadn't heard of our biggest clients. I was running out of material that would interest a non-designer.

We detached from the hub with a jolt and about 30 seconds weightlessness, until we cleared our bay. The thrust cut in and G was restored. Automatic shutters dimmed the incoming sunlight, the moon shrinking behind us, I continued...

“Yes, it’s not like designing clothes or interiors. We need design skills of course, but we have to go further, including our brains in the process – we need to understand the product and the needs of the audience and address those needs with product benefits, presented in an interesting way. Our message needs to strike against customer indifference and open their minds to a dynamic sales message. That takes technical knowledge and copywriting ability. It's more than just design.”

“Ahh,” - I was losing her.

“Take a look at the inside of this cabin – yes, it’s been designed, but on a very basic level. There’s no real skill. Just bright colours, lots of leaf patterns - presumably in the naïve belief it will help people forget there’s a vacuum out there -  and a bit of steel on the edges to make it durable. To be honest my 8 year old kid could do it in her lunchbreak.”

“I see,”

I realised I had been doing all the talking, “Anyway Wanda, that’s enough about me. What’s your line?”

She gestured around us with her hands “I design spaceship interiors,”

(to be continued)

Hartley-Stone