How I Got Here: "The Gimini"
25 Aug 2022Columbuss
Commander Justin Estok. Stardate 23-AUG-3308."Subtle..."
You can always hear off-worlders before you can see them. Anywhere in The Bubble, whether it's a surface installation on a dead moon, mining platform or a fully terraformed planet, off-worlders, they stick out like a sore thumb. Every where you go you can hear them. Suctioning their way down the street. Get too many in one place and it sounds like you're in a palladium mine. The sounds they make, it's the boots. The suction cup sound is magnets in the sole's pulling the feet down onto the steel walk way. The metallic hammer sound you hear when the boot strikes the floor, that's the magnets too. This is life on a low-G world. There's no "official rules" about it, but it's generally viewed throughout The Bubble as "rude" for off-worlders to make a habit of walking around residential areas at night. Too often, it can't be avoided. It's near impossible at the ports. The ports never sleep and neither do the people who live near them.
The local news stories are always full of off-worlder, gravity related accidents. Some minor. Some major. Like an off-worlder’s gravity boots will fail and rather than stopping for passing traffic, they might step too hard and end up hurling themselves in front of it. Sometimes passing transports will swerve to miss them. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes off-worlders will try to get around without boots at all. Either out of arrogance or in an attempt to blend in with the locals. Those accidents rarely garner much public sympathy.
The Gimini Club was on the bottom floor of the second sub section of the metropolitan platform in Ellicott City, which was a sprawling metropolis with skyscrapers reaching toward the clouds and varying levels of platform built between them. Between each platform, entire communities were built, the doorways of which will never see the suns. Each platform is connected by hundreds of stairways, elevators and escalator systems to make travel as easy as possible. Still, it can feel like a labyrinth if you don't know where you're going.
This was where I found myself, watching the coordinates on my data pad and suctioning my way down multiple flights of steel stairs and walkways. Down to the place where skyscrapers start to look like walls and not buildings. The kind of place where a window would be a waste of time. All that natural light you enjoyed further up, it's been replaced with lamps. Down here the streets are made of pavement. Cement laid down hundreds of years ago when the suns used to beat on it and the rain didn't have to trickle down a mile and a half before reaching the street. Down here, the ground is full of drains.
When I reach the surface, I stay on the steel grates lining the sidewalk. The smell of the sewers beneath permeates the air as the loud rush of a hyperloop car goes by somewhere, levels above. Turning the next corner, the coordinates John gave me begin to shorten. Gazing down the dark, lamp lit street, only two words can be read in neon lights at the end of the block: Gimini Club.
"Subtle..." I say, turning off my gravity boots and, carefully, walking toward the lights.