Moving Day for Mom and Dad, Space Traders

            Mom and Dad moved into a new house that was then condemned in order to make a road up to the water tower on the hill overlooking their property. Fortunately the recent sale of the home allowed us to go to the city and get not only the fair market value of the home, but all moving and other expenses. We were sitting in the back yard with my old telescope looking at the road work going on up the hill. Then we left for their new home.

            Once we arrived the movers helped us set everything up. Mom and Dad seemed to like the new house even better than the previous one, and since it was at the edge of a forested area, Dad really liked it. We got the telescope out and started looking around the hills for signs of deer and other critters. There were lots of indications of trails in the nearby hills.

            Mom was happy to find there was a store a few blocks away, and a level walk. "Not that I'll probably ever walk there, but the grand kids can walk to the store." I couldn't really imagine any of my nieces or nephews walking that far to get to a store, except one, and I knew that one wouldn't likely be visiting.

 

            I was involved with a trading operation that included a three way swap between worlds in a single solar system.

            The three-way transfer was starting to look like it was coming unglued. I finally had to contact all of the participants and get them to meet in deep space, we moved the cargo containers out of our hold then picked up the second player's containers. I unloaded them into space near our first batch. We then moved the third party's goods into our hold and transferred them to the holding area. Both parties then inspected the piles, everyone was happy, but decide to pay us to load their ships. So I had my crew loading both ships simultaneously. I flew our ship right over the pile of goods we were getting out of the deal and closed the hold doors over them. With some grumbling (I think one or both of them were thinking of cheating us out of our cargo) the two headed back to their worlds. We had another trade to make with our cargo.

            One of the neat features of this dream was that there was no such thing as artificial gravity. We only had "gravity" while under acceleration; the entire transfer was done in zero G, lots of cool swooping and floating around. The other neat thing, the cargo loaders were all robotic exoskeletons. I was sad a bit that I didn't get to operate one, the crew looked like they were having fun. A couple of the crew were actually not human, they were AI enhanced Chimpanzees. One of the ships in the trade would only let my human operators load and unload cargo.

            One of the first things I'd done when I'd purchased these ape haulers was to emancipate them. I think that was the real issue, I wasn't their controller. Even though the apes were as intelligent as some of my human crewmembers some cultures were against them being treated as equals. I knew that ape intelligence relied on a man made device, but it was surgically installed as part of them, so to my way of thinking it was a part of them.

            The "Crate Apes" agreed to stay on with me, mostly because they didn't have any other real working opportunities other than to go to the ape retirement world and provide services for the older apes. That didn't really appeal to them.

            There was a third event that included much loud noise, music and running around. I can't remember the details at this point. The Blogger email address was part of it, though. I was glad to be waking up because our bedroom was peaceful.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF