Re: The Show Must Go Off

[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part five
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MCL-BeltMiner#C485640624
I earned some lowchits on the way to my place carrying trash away. I wasn’t proud. I rooted right through it for anything handy. I collected a dented water bottle, a broken toolclip, twenty-some half-worn-out standard fasteners, twelve nearly empty cans of air freshener, some cleaning chemicals, a tenth of a sewing kit, and a third of an old foam mattress. I dumped the rest at the Waste Station, making a small profit from my clients by throwing away less mass. Then I carried my bundle to my place and went into the hard work.
After the wall console was clean, my bunk unbolted from the floor in nine pieces. It took all four legs and all four braces to build a temporary sawhorse to prop up the spring frame high enough that I could bolt it to the ceiling over the wallscreen. Then the sawhorse came apart, and three braces were needed to brace it in place. The result was a homemade shield for my wallscreen. I mounted the toolclip from my comasuit in the door alcove and replaced it with the broken one. Then I cleaned the rest of the place, secreted the leftover bunk pieces and fasteners and chemicals in the bathroom cabinet, and started sewing while scanning local net activity. When my wrists stopped throbbing, I mounted the remote in the door alcove near the toolclip and dozed off sewing.
When I woke up, I had a breakfast of warm tap water and finished sewing. A professional tailor would have a massive coronary, but I had torn up the third of a mattress and made a foam pad to go around the edges of my homemade wallscreen shield with a removable, washable cover. I programmed a passcoded toggle for public access to my wallscreen complete with variable message forwarding. Then I pushed my bare mattress across the room from the wallscreen, moved the chair under the shield and checked the time. I had most of what I needed to get a leg up. And hacking the local net chatter had given me a good start on the rest. I braided a cord out of mattress scraps, hid remnants and cleaned, and tied the mallet to my broken toolclip. Then I walked out to meet the only bartender on Asteroid V-gamma-7 who’d ever been in the Gladiator Games with not a single complaint on file from anyone.
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