Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

about 100 yards in length and had an AI mechanism system that accounted for drag, speed changes and directional navigation. That too had been designed by my uncle. On most wrecker ships, they just used the cables and a standard tow hitch that was maybe 50 feet long. It wasn’t uncommon to go through multiple hitches on a single tow job. It also wasn’t uncommon for the trailing ship to smash into the back of the wrecker ship, causing all sorts of damage. Sometimes total, if you weren’t careful.

“That jib is my pride and joy,” Uncle E cooed. “I spent a year on the main bearing alone. That’s what makes it swivel so smoothly.”

It was impressive, I had to give him that. He had spared no expense or brain power on the Stang.

“Wanna talk about it?” he asked.

“About what.”

“The Sheffield.”

“No.”

“Okay then,” he said, dropping the subject. I relaxed and took a sip of the coffee I’d just made in the galley. That was one thing I’d have to change: my uncle may have had prime taste in beer, but his coffee selection was nothing to beam home about.

“Gary, take over and keep the speed reasonable. Denver and I are gonna binge The Sopranos.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Uncle E whistled and shook his head. “Oh to be just like you, watching it again for the first time. It’s only the best TV show that Earth ever produced, in my humble opinion.”

* * *

The trip to Mars was going to take roughly two months. We could have done it much quicker if we hadn’t been towing that giant water hauler. Because my Uncle Erwin always kept the Stang in top shape, there was rarely anything engine-related for me to do aside from running diagnostics and checking the systems each day.

Then running diagnostics and checking the systems the next day.

It was monotonous work, but there was a method to my uncle’s madness. After only a week aboard the Stang, I was so familiar with the engine and electrical systems that I could tell if something was wrong just from the pitch of the engine hum or a flicker of a fuse light. I began to take more interest in the daily ritual, looking at particular parts or designs and asking my uncle why he built them that way. Soon, my uncle and I were spending most of our time together. I’d always had an innate sense of how things worked, but it was cool to learn from him why things worked, and how you could reconfigure a system to get more efficiency or better performance. I began to realize that the maintenance of a ship could be thought of as one long, unending tune-up. Each day we tried to squeeze even more out of the Stang. When I wasn’t learning the ins and outs of electrical engineering or nuclear fission, I was cleaning the ship. Somebody had to do it, my uncle enjoyed telling me.

“And I don’t think it should be the captain,” he would joke.

Trash was easy enough – it would either go into the incinerator or the recycler. If it went into the incinerator, it was later expelled into space in a biodegradable form that would degrade down to nothing in 200 years. Not perfect, but not terrible. The recycler was one part of the ship my uncle didn’t build. The technology had been developed about 50 years earlier, and it was pretty simple. It took all recyclable items, broke them down into their component parts and then created new items with the press of a button. Cups. Plates. Even shirts, if you had the right recycler model.

After I’d put in my working hours, I usually hung out with Uncle Erwin and watched some classic entertainment. It boggled my mind that people stopped creating movies and TV. They were such escapist fun. According to my uncle, the advent of space travel was one of the main reasons entertainment dwindled, as people started to embark on their own real-life adventures. Space travel was commonplace and even boring to us, he argued, but when the first independent spacecraft started crisscrossing the verse, people became obsessed with exploration and settlement. Who wanted to make a TV show when you could learn about the latest discovery on Mars or see the progress being made on Titan Station?

Personally, I preferred comedies. Movies. TV shows. Cartoons. It didn’t matter. If something could make me laugh, I was into it. I was quickly hooked on shows like Arrested Development and The Simpsons. I was particularly intrigued by The Simpsons, an animated TV series, as the idea that a single show could go on for over a thousand episodes was a testament to the medium. My uncle showed me historical articles and excerpts that demonstrated the impact long-running programs like The Simpsons had on popular culture of the day. They were quoted by everyday people and celebrities alike, and episodes were even cut into short, bite-sized pieces and shared digitally as standalone jokes. It was fascinating; none of that existed anymore.

The sheer amount of entertainment being churned out on Earth resulted in a slew of famous people. It seemed to me like you wouldn’t be able to walk down the street in the 21st century without bumping into someone who had been in a movie or TV show. My uncle chuckled at that notion, as he agreed it probably wasn’t very far off from the truth.

One day when we were deep into a viewing session, on our fourth episode of Cheers, a show that was literally just about a bunch of people hanging out in a bar, we got into a heated argument about whether life was better before humans left Earth. Uncle E thought people were more imaginative about the universe, and just life in general, before we started to actually know what was out there in the great beyond.

“Think about it, Denver,” he said. “I used to do this thing called reading…”

He always teased me about that. He