Up Against It - M. J. Locke [46]
Joey Spud’s luck had turned when—as he put it—they had brought those damn nanites Up to hollow out 25 Phocaea and build the city. It was that Funaki woman, he had said. Chikuma Funaki was a famous First Waver, like Joey. Geoff had actually met her once, at a party Commissioner Jane had thrown. She had been so tiny, so mild-mannered and polite. Even at thirteen he had stood head and shoulders above her. He remembered feeling he might accidentally harm her if he spoke too loudly; it was hard for him to credit what Joey Spud told him about her.
Joey said she had come Upside as a miner’s mail-order bride in her late teens. After her husband died in a mining accident, Funaki had gotten big ideas. She got together with the banks and made a deal, and to hear Joey tell it, ruined the place. Funaki and the local banks had gotten Downside investors involved and worked out a deal with the Space Meanies, the biggest miners’ co-op. Soon the other co-ops wanted in on the action. Nanite mining came to the Phocaean cluster.
Not to Joey Spud, though. He had continued to operate his own retro-tech business as the decades ticked past: working his claims, prospecting among the stroids on the far side of the sun, blasting and digging, hauling house-sized nuggets to Phocaea occasionally to exchange for cash.
For a while he had held his own. But once the bugs got going, he had told Geoff, they were so much quicker at tapping out the nodes that the precious metals markets were glutted. The price of uranium and platinum and gold had all plummeted. By the time Geoff met him, he was old, sick, and poor, missing a foot and an eye—barely surviving, living mostly off his savings. But Joey Spud was stubborn, and he had worked his last and best claim till the day he died, the year before.
Before he died, Joey Spud had taught Geoff a lot: how to repair and drive the big machines, stabilize a mineshaft, calculate an orbit, test a stroid for precious metals; survival tricks if you ever got stranded out in the Big Empty. And he had listened when Geoff was mad at his dad and mom, or had a fight with his friends, or was glum about something that had happened at school. Geoff would rant or mope or vent, and Joey Spud would just sit there, propped up against one of his machines, whittling weird little gnomish creatures out of a potato, or scratching his balls, and grunt sympathetically. Geoff would head out to visit him every so often—maybe once a month or so. It was a weird friendship and his biking friends ribbed him, but Geoff liked the old guy. And Joey Spud always seemed glad to see him. And even though he seemed worn out and irritable, he still seemed content in some way, like he had done OK by his own lights. And he told great stories.
Geoff remembered one conversation in particular. It had been shortly before Joey Spud had died. It was one of his usual rants against the changes that had happened in recent decades, only for a change he did not seem irritated. Just thoughtful.
“They brought in the bugs,” Joey Spud told him, “and that meant they needed methanol to feed them. They started bringing the big ice Down from the Kuiper Belt. That was when the worm turned. The townies, they’re so dependent on the nanites now, the whole lot of them’d die in a heartbeat if anything was to happen to their bug juice, or that ice that feeds ’em. They’re no more than a bunch of bug-junkies.”
And damned if the old man had not been right.
Less than a month after that conversation, an acquaintance of Joey Spud’s had notified Geoff of his death. Geoff had attended the service (over the objections of his parents; the old miner was a well-known crank, and not well liked among Zekies, and maybe his parents thought Joey Spud was a pervert or something). But