The vidcall showed me a young-looking elf woman with a pretty extreme morph job, including huge green eyes and incredibly long pointy ears.
“Good day, Mistress Long. This unworthy one calls to confirm Master Ueda’s passage aboard the Square Deal.”
“That would be Goro Ueda, I assume? Yes, we’ve reserved quarters for your party as specified in his request for transport.”
“Ah, about that,” she said hesitantly. “Master Ueda has acquired three additional staff since the request was posted. One neotroll with special dietary requirements, and a pair of twin moon kittens.”
“That’s not a problem… oh, darn it. Help me out here, please? If you were human I’d say ‘ma’am’, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be proper here in Hoshida.”
“This unworthy one would never presume to question a human’s choice of words,” she replied deferentially. “However, some kind masters have been known to refer to the diligent servants of another master as ‘cutie’.”
I couldn’t quite decide whether to face palm, or punch someone.
“I see. Alright, cutie, we’ll go with that. Can you fit the new staff into the barracks in your original request, or do you need more space?”
An alert drew my attention to another incoming call. Ugh. Naoko was still talking, and this elf girl apparently wanted to have a long conversation about the care and feeding of moon kittens. Whatever they were. Yeah, okay, no problem, come on girl, I don’t have all day.
Darn it, she wasn’t going to shut up. Now what? Do I ignore the other call, or tell her I have to go, or… wait a minute.
I opened a second connection to the call manager, and dug into the disguise filter options. Was there a way to just tell it what to display for my movements and facial expressions? There must be, since infomorphs can make vidcalls and they don’t necessarily even have a physical body.
Aha! Yes, there was an input channel for that. All I had to do was clone the disguise filter Naoko had set up for me on the other line, and feed it cues. I could do that! Copy, configure, self-test, try different expressions. Sure, that looked about right.
I accepted the new call through my second connection, telling the app to show an older me smiling pleasantly.
“Hello, this is Alice Long of the Square Deal. How may I be of service?”
This time it was an older-looking elf, with red hair instead of blonde.
“Yes, this unworthy one is calling on behalf of Master Kita. We’ve received your confirmation, but the master wonders if it would be possible to arrange for an industrial power connection? A simple ten-megawatt line would do.”
“I’ll have to check with engineering, but it sounds doable. Only, what in Gaia’s name would you need that kind of power for? I’ll have to make sure it can’t endanger the ship.”
“Of course, Mistress. Master Kita is engaged in perfecting the ecology of his latest virtual world, and the design algorithms are quite processor intensive. The simulation is running on a computing node that requires seven megawatts of power, and there are various items of supporting hardware to consider.”
“Funny, I don’t see a giant computing cluster on your cargo list.”
It was working. I was still talking about moon kittens with the elf on the other line. I had to concentrate a little to keep the two conversations straight, but I could do it. Sweet!
Naoko hung up just in time to take another call. Then the queue backed up again, and I had to open a third connection. But that was as bad as it got.
Some minutes later Naoko logged out of the call manager, leaving me to juggle all of the calls while she went back to working on cabin setup. I kept the manifests up to date as I worked, flagging change requests from the passengers and problems with the bot crews.
A few calls later she showed up at the cabin where my physical body was watching the bots assemble a simulated coral reef. She hugged me, and leaned in to whisper in my ear.
“You’re juggling four calls at once and still watching all the bots? You’re a life saver, Alice! Thank you so much.”
“I’m just trying to help out,” I told her. “But this is pretty tiring, so I hope I don’t have to keep it up much longer.”
“We can hand it off to the facilities AI if you have to take a break,” she said. “I’ve been trying to avoid that because the Hoshidans consider it rude. But I don’t wish to overwork you.”
“I can handle it, Naoko. We’re only in port for a day, right?”
“That’s correct, Alice. Once we’re underway I expect our passengers will all retreat to their VR tanks or private amusements, and things will quiet down. But I shall still speak with the captain about obtaining additional assistance.”
Things finally calmed down for a bit as we came in to dock at Takeo Station. By then we were up to thirty passengers, but we’d gotten a call from each one’s staff confirming their arrangements. So I was able to spare a thread of attention to take a look at our destination.
I’d read that space-based colonies build big stations, but none of the vidshows did justice to the scale of them. Takeo Station was the main habitat in the Hoshida System, perched in high orbit over a hot gas giant orbiting a dim red star. Dozens of smaller stations were scattered around the planet’s moons, and swarms of shuttles filled the space between them. But they were all small fry compared to the main habitat.
Takeo Station was so big it would have easily qualified as another moon if it wasn’t man-made. A flattened sphere twenty kilometers across at the equator, defended by guns that outmassed the Square Deal and armor half a kilometer thick. Or at least, that’s what the guidebook said.
There was a deep chasm around the station’s equator, with a steady flow of shuttles entering and leaving. As the Square Deal maneuvered closer it grew from a small gap in the station’s hull to a vast pit, a kilometer wide and four kilometers deep. We descended half that depth before finding our assigned docking position, nestled flat against the south side of the chasm.
“This place is huge,” I commented to Naoko.
She smiled tolerantly. “Not particularly. Wait until you see Imris, or one of the Bastions.”
“Seriously? Naoko, this one station must outmass all the trees on Felicity.”
“I did tell you that Felicity is a poor world, did I not? But I’m afraid we’ve no time for sightseeing. Here is a link to the station’s navgrid. Can you find your way around?”
Wow, that was a huge map. More than a trillion cubic meters of rooms, hallways, lifts, atriums and gardens, and that was just the parts that had life support. There was a marker showing where I was, but how would I ever find anything?
Oh, there was a search interface. I entered the address of one of our passengers, and the mapping program immediately came back with a suggested route to get there.