Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Life in the imperial insect zone for transients

The rent is cheap in Happy Paradise Vehicle Park, because the location is less than ideal.  Park Management claims that "residents enjoy the benefits of the latest semi-permeable bubble field technology."  Well, what that means is that the field leaks....you get a lot of noise and fumes from the spaceport on the other side of the chain link fence.  So the thing to do is to get your own secondary bubble unit, to give your rented space a little more privacy and liveability.  After a couple of weeks just living in the saucer at night and selling churros in the daytime, I traded a lunch bag full of food stamps for a used patio bubble, and set it up outside my entry hatch.  It came with a tall table, and four of the tall stools the insects are comfortable with.  Works for me.  Flaco, one of the security dudes at the Free Market, lives two spaces down from me, in an old construction shack he got surplus from some jobsite over the fence.  He got somebody he knew with a reaction jet lifter to move it up over here, for cheap housing.  Flaco comes over some times after work, and we have some churros and rum-and-cola, watch the news or whatever.  Since he has four arms, he carries two billy clubs on his service belt, at work.  Not that he needs to use them much....there isn't much trouble to deal with, just sometimes punk insects run through the rows grabbing stuff off vendor tables....or sometimes the migrant worker lizard people will get their paychecks from the mine, and decide to get all smashed at the beer garden that caters to their kind, and security might have to break up a fight over there, or something.  The different species like the transient zone shops and stalls, because they can get their various ethnic cuisine prepared in an authentic manner, and they can find all the specialty items that the big stores in the city don't stock.  I'm still waiting for the cable company guy to show up, so I can configure a connection and try to see if I can access the human space net.  Maybe then I can get some help getting back to civilization.

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