If you can’t get a date, check your breath, then your armpits, and, as a last resort, check the mirror
Virtual Stud
Star wranglers looking for love
SEVENTEEN MONTHS IN DEEP SPACE, at the outermost rim of Andromeda, rounding up stray asteroids and driving them into the interstellar winds which would sweep them to the mines of the Pegasus cluster where planet-sized processors would milk every valuable mineral before shooting them back into space.
Seventeen months wrangling rocks and another fifty-two years in cryo-freeze for the round trip back to the Rock Ranch in the Milky Way. That’s 647 months without getting laid, and Buckaroo Bill’s pipes were so backed up they could burst.
(Spoiler Alert: If you counted his previous tours, and the fact that he was twenty-two when he signed on, and the only time he had sex with someone other than his hand was when he woke up in bed at nineteen with a woman so drunk she dragged him home thinking he was her boyfriend, it was actually 1959 months, but it felt like forever.)
In the airlock, before Bill and his fellow wranglers stepped into the space station between Jupiter and Mars, Bill spit a wad of Titan Red Leaf into the corner and announced, “I’m headed to the first whorehouse I can find and roping me a fine filly for a week-long ride.” Bill pronounced it “who-er house,” but nobody corrected him because the thought of Buckaroo Bill with a filly, human or horse, kicked the other wranglers’ funny bones into overdrive.
Bill spit a wad of Titan Red Leaf into the corner and announced, “I’m headed to the first whorehouse I can find and roping me a fine filly for a week-long ride.”
The wranglers’ funny bones kicked into overdrive because Buckaroo Bill was the homeliest wrangler in the cluster galaxies. The other wranglers in the bunk cabin posted an ancient cartoon print of Li’l Abner’s Lena the Hyena over Bill’s bunk with the words, “Star Wrangler looking for love.” Evidently the girls in Madame Chu’s Starlight Bordello in orbit around Europa agreed. None of the girls would see him, not even Last Resort Linda, not even when he offered half his tour pay for a half hour and a hand job.
Bill dropped by the Jupiter’s Shadow Lounge, where the bartender suggested a virtual girl. Bill stared in his drink. “You mean a bot?”
The bartender ran a tray of glasses through the laser sterilizer. “Nah, a bot would laugh you out of your own room. I mean a virtual girl, like a hologram with a voice in your head. They’re the latest thing for star jockeys who blew their wages in a bar like mine.”
Bill dropped by the Jupiter’s Shadow Lounge, where the bartender suggested a virtual girl. Bill stared in his drink. “You mean a bot?”
Bill left his drink half-finished at the bar and dashed back to his room at the Spin Down Space Suites and called up the Reel-Gurlz holo-site. He ordered Bargain Betty with the Double D upgrade. She didn’t even knock at his door, but appeared in the middle of the room, took one look at him and vanished.
When he called Reel-Gurlz to complain, the dispatcher informed him, “She recorded her visit, and we’ve reviewed that recording. Face it, bud. Even holograms have standards.”
from a story idea by Lily Tiller
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Wry noir author Phillip T. Stephens wrote Cigerets, Guns & Beer, Raising Hell, the Indie Book Award winning Seeing Jesus, and the children’s book parody Furious George. Follow him at Phillip T Stephens.
