In Case of Emergency - A Serendipity Oh Story by M. K. Dreysen

For the last bit before the end of August, this week's free story tells us a bit about Yoa Benevolent, Serendipity Oh, and one stretch of the road the two friends traveled along the way to where we met them last.

In Case of Emergency - A Serendipity Oh Story by M. K. Dreysen

The start of a good beer run should be more epic.

But, everything being the way it was, Serendipity Oh was just glad the run got started. "Whose idea was this trip, anyway?" she asked.

"Yours," came the chorus from the back.

"If that's the way you're going to be..."

"It is. Now shut up and drive." Yoa was, if her tone was any indication, all full up on reasons to not give Sere an inch. Much less a mile.

"Then I guess I'll just turn up the tunes." Sere cranked up the volume, loud enough to drown out the groans.

It wasn't her fault Yoa and Graham were too caught up in the neo-punk scene to appreciate the latest ultrapop stylings. At least she hadn't played Granddad's music; not this time, anyway.

The trip was spring break. The bait she'd offered had been simple: "My grandparents have a place on the water. Sun and sand and beautiful people to drool over."

Which was all true, enough. Sure, there were a couple miles between Granny's place and the Gulf. But compared to the distance between Luna and the Gulf waters, hey, it was practically on the beach. And all you had to do to make the rest of the distance was be willing to put butt in seat and make a little drive every morning.

The beautiful people were, Sere admitted, all sunburnt college students, just like themselves. Hung over from the priors and most of them already paired off for the week. The graveyard tan of the lunatics, and their extended bout of seasickness from Earth's tender embrace weren't conducive, so far, to attracting much attention from the fair ones.

Thus, the beer. Good.

Fifteen miles down the sand, in Granddad's ancient beach mobile? Less good. Or, good in the quiet and the bonfire and the stars above sense of the word. They'd trekked down the beach a ways to make free of the crowds and the noise.

Bad, in the sense of having to bounce back up those miles to get to the store. The one where they kept all the beer.

Sere glanced at the clock, somehow still keeping time despite all the years on Granddad's Toyota. Five past ten in the a.m..

How was she going to kill time until noon? It was Sunday, and it was Texas. Sere would either have to buy breakfast, or she'd be forced to listen to her passengers complain about the barbarian ways of these strange groundhog creatures. Most of all that they wouldn't sell beer until noon on Sunday.

Serendipity had to admit she was out of practice. She'd cleared dirt five days before her eighteenth. Been back, what, half a dozen times or so, since? The ways and means of the world she'd, almost completely, left behind her were almost alien.

Almost. At least she'd remembered before they got to the register at the Kroger.

Her phone saved her, in that moment. Well, really it was Granny on the other end of the phone, but since Sere had dreamt a time or two of a miracle button... "Hey, Granny."

"Love, do you and your heathen fellow travelers think I could interest you in something resembling real food this fine March morning?"

"Granny, if you're up for company, we'll be there with bells on."

The tune sung from the back changed then, from Woe Is Us... to Where's The Food? in record time.

Sere didn't inform her passengers of the fact that, if they wanted hot breakfast served with motherly love, they'd have to put up with a drive. Granny and Granddad's beach house was only a couple more miles up the blacktop.

But that was the one they rented to the tourists. And the occasional granddaughter. Their permanent home was forty-five minutes farther on up the road. Fortunately, the tank was full, and Graham and Yoa weren't fighting the bit all that much. They made it quietly, two drowsing in the back and Serendipity Oh minding the store in the front.

'Singing' at the top of her lungs only occasionally.

"Where's Granddad?" Sere asked, as she started laying out the plates for the troops. "Did you finally hang him up by his toes?"

A threat of longstanding, Sere remembered her grandmother reserving it for when the old man had managed to pull off one of his blunders. Like the time he'd gone out and mowed the yard in shorts.

In the middle of the worst outbreak of fire ants in the past twenty years. In July. In Houston.

She'd nursed him back to health, Granny had. Only occasionally torturing the old man with the tube of ant grease just out of reach. "You old fool. I'd stake you out with a For Sale sign, but no one would pay the shipping on your worthless hide. I ought to let you scratch the skin from your bones."

Granddad had taken the rebuke.

Not quietly. But he'd taken it.

"He's off at some conference. Claims he's keeping up to date for the handful of clients who still return his phone calls." Granny snorted. "It doesn't hurt that the conference is in Denver. And Snowmass has a record base this year."

Which would have been Sere's other option, if she'd thought to ask her grandfather what he had in mind for his spring break. Damnit. Just the thought of Graham and Yoa on skis...

Breakfast was well received. Enough so that cleaning up after themselves didn't rouse any complaints from the help. "Ok, are you two ready to run back down to the beach?"

"Yes indeedy," Graham answered from behind his dishtowel. "Unless your grandmother's making something for lunch?"

"She's off to play cards with some friends. And before you ask, Yoa, no. Those little old ladies make sharks look like kittens. We've got enough trouble saving up tuition money. I'm not putting either one of us in the position of losing it to ladies who play poker twice a week." And enjoy taking each other's pin money.

No, the run was the thing, and the store was, blessedly, finally, selling beer when they made the doors.

Beer, meat, the real on-the-hoof kind, not the tube and vat-grown kind. Chips and cheese and a cart full of other delicacies unimagined in the minds of lunatics far and wide.

Or, at least, unattainable on a college student's budget. "You know you're both paying for this fabulous wealth, right?" A lab assistant's pay being enough to foot the tuition, and the trip down the gravity well.

"We've got it. We might be on peanut butter rations the rest of the semester, but this night we feast!"

Yoa being the optimistic one. "Where's Graham, anyway?"

Their worry-wort accounting major had disappeared. To the bathroom, as it turned out. And people watching. "There's something strange going on at the front, Sere."

"Uh-huh. These strange groundhog ways, Graham?"

"I'm not that much of a tourist, Serendipity. I think I can tell when a place is being robbed."

Robbed. Right. In a place where guns weren't an imaginary threat to all and sundry. "Umm, why don't we just head to the back. Someplace with plenty of bullet catching shelves between us and the party goers?"

"It's not like that, Sere. Come on, I'll show you."

So the three of them, Yoa as convinced of her immortality as the others, slid along a careful path to a safe viewing distance. "There are three of them, I think. The two on either side of the counter, and the one making the demand."

Sere stood at one side of the aisle, Graham easily looking over her head. Yoa took up viewing from the opposite side.

So far as Serendipity could tell, Graham had the right of it. Two and one; the two directing traffic, warning off those who wanted the money orders, the lottery tickets, their bills paid. While the one made his demands.

"They don't look much like..."

And they didn't. Not unless surfers had moved into much more creative financing territory since Sere last checked in with them. Surfer dudes for sure, Sere could almost smell the salt and the sunscreen from across the store. Only, in addition to the board shorts and flip-flops, these dudes had thrown together head-gear.

Big sunglasses hats and bandannas across the lower half of their faces. All three wore their facial recognition gear carefully deployed. "Does that even work anymore?" Sere asked.

Graham snorted. "Maybe. If they've never appeared in a mugshot, they might get away with it. Long enough to disappear somewhere."

"If the lifestyle they're sporting is real, in other words?" Sand gets in everything, Sere reminded herself. There'd be a limit to how long she could go without a real shower.

Serendipity started backing away; Graham went with her, so all she had to do to keep the party together was reach out and grab Yoa's arm. "There's nothing here for us. Give them a few minutes and it'll all be part of the evening news."

Only, the world decided differently. Two wild cards made their play. First, a woman pushing a kid-friendly cart, her toddler yammering about "Chips, Momma" providing commentary, pushed her way through the defending surfer dudes. "I don't care, you're not in line and I am."

The second wild card was the Hero. The one Sere had been worrying would make an appearance. Not that she had an idea what the Hero would look like.

Sere just knew, remembered too well, that there was one in almost every crowd. The red-headed lady would have gone on her way, her week's worth of supplies tucked away in the cart, together with a riot of handmade grocery bags in colors no rainbow would have admitted to.

Relatively tall, gray-streaked hair that testified to the ever present Gulf wind, the Hero would have followed the lead of the checkout clerk and the sacker, nervous quiet and doing nothing more or less important than Ignoring What Was Happening Behind Them.

Except the Hero Noticed. Clued In.

The kid behind the counter, Ryan Teatro, only just promoted from checkout to the front line the week before, he'd opened the front of the store that morning. His manager had stepped out for a smoke. Ryan knew the drill, he'd had a gun pulled on him but at the checkout line, not here. Just keep things calm, empty the drawer right? Get the guy out of the store and safely away from hurting anybody, that's what Ryan's world boiled down to right this minute.

He emptied his cash drawer into the guy's bag. He put the thumbdrive, the one the guy had said to plug into the store's computer system, he put that in the bag. Then the guy pointed at the safe, the one that nobody was supposed to know was there.

The one that was open, because Sally had left it that way when she left for her cigarette. "Three checkers coming in in the next half hour, Ryan. You remember, just pass them their drawers when they clock in." The big door stayed open 'til closing time; the big money drops were behind a smaller door, in the back of the safe.

The guy wasn't worried about the big money drops. He wanted the cash drawers. A couple hundred dollars at a time, it ain't much but it's a living. "Just dump it in, Ryan, and we'll be on our way."

Which, Ryan was more than happy to do. Keep the guy talking, the threat out of sight out of mind rather than ugly in his hand, he'd flashed his shirt to show the gun in his waistband and that had been plenty.

Ryan was thinking about the gun, and not the cash drawer, number two of fifteen; so he dropped the drawer. Which made him jump, made the guy jump, made his traffic control buddies jump.

All of which Clued In the Hero that Something Was Amiss. So the Hero went for her own gun.

And everything went very quickly Straight To Hell.

Sheriff's Deputy Rudy Moreno summed it up that evening; Granny replayed it for Graham and Sere later, once all the dust had settled. "Let me stress this, first," Deputy Moreno started. "Please, no matter how well trained you think you are, please please please let the police handle these things. Protect yourselves, certainly, but don't try and be a hero."

If she'd ever paid attention to that sort of warning, it might have stopped Willa Chapman, Our Hero of the Day. Instead, she pulled her pistol, and then the trigger.

And then she started yelling. "Get your hands up! Get down on the ground! You heard me!"

They did. So one of the crowd-surfers put his face on the tile floor. The other put his hands up. Chapman didn't remember what she'd ordered anybody to do, so she pulled the gun down, from where she'd put the first bullet in the ceiling tiles, and aimed it at the surfer with his hands up. "I said get your hands up!"

The kid blanched, then started blathering. Because a gun in his face wasn't part of the gig, man, this wasn't what he'd set out to get himself into, all they'd signed up for was making sure Mark had time to get the bag filled, and then they'd be running for the water. "I don't... I've already got my hands up, lady..."

Chapman wasn't ready for conversation; confusion wasn't part of whatever script ran through her head that morning. So she pulled the trigger again.

The kid got lucky. Gene Blake dodged the bullet.

Ryan Teatro wasn't so lucky. He caught it. In the shoulder, and his pitching career, such as it was, came to an end that morning. "Kid had a scholarship to UH," Deputy Moreno helpfully told the public. "He's gonna be ok, but the surgeons tell me they're not sure how well he'll recover the arm motion. I'm told his family's setting up a GoFundMe for surgery."

And in the confusion, the whirl of activity that had suddenly become the center of the universe, surrounding one Gene Blake, one Willa Chapman, and one Tommy Murphy, currently pissing himself on the floor while he waited for a bullet to find the top of his head, Mark Hooks, the kid with all the plans and goals that had set all of this in motion, took himself out of the play zone.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, especially for Bea Travers, the mom who'd pushed her cart into line and catalyzed the circus, Mark took Bea Travers's daughter, Grace Travers, with him. "So that bitch with the gun knows not to follow me, lady," Mark told Bea as he hugged Grace, three and one gasp shy of letting her screams fly, to his chest.

Chapman, Our Hero, was too deaf from the gunshots, too focused on the target she'd already missed twice that morning to notice the bigger story.

Gene Blake definitely had other things on his mind than what Mark was up to. Tommy didn't have a view of any of this, he wanted nothing more than to keep, to keep being able to, count the veins in the tiles, just as long as there were veins in tiles to count, and no lead entering body parts that shouldn't have lead in them.

Bea Travers noticed. She started screaming her notice, at about the same time her daughter did. Only, their chorus was a distant harmony; Bea was right in the middle of things, still.

Little Grace, on the other hand, was out the automatic doors and into the parking lot, clutching a bag of Cheetos with one hand and Mark's shoulder with the other.

"Come on," Yoa called, as she ran for the door. Graham took off after her.

"Oh, shit," Serendipity Oh said. And then she started running. "Yoa, hey, this is already off the rails..."

"Worst case," Graham huffed between strides, "We get his car and license plate, and the cops don't have to wait for the cameras."

"Oh," Sere said. And ran harder. That much, she could make sense of.

Yoa with an arm full of little girl, that didn't make sense. "What the hell?"

"Hell," the girl echoed. And then giggled.

"He threw her at me," Yoa supplied. "Which car did he get in?"

Because an armful of wriggling toddler didn't allow much viewing room. Graham and Sere pushed past her, to watch the perpetrator of the whole business squeal out onto the highway in a much newer version of the Toyota beach mobile, an all electric version of the FJ Cruiser Granddad loaned out to Sere and her friends.

"At least it's not yellow," Sere told herself. "What's the plate?"

"TV7 something or other," Graham answered.

They both reached for their phones.

Our Hero added another gunshot. The last one of the day; the one that hit Yoa just north of her tailbone. Yoa fell to the ground, screaming, with Grace adding her own voice to the din. "Y'all just hand over that little girl and get on the ground now, until the police get here. Or do you want another bullet?"

The Hero never did admit what she'd done. She didn't really have to. For all the work Deputy Moreno did, when the news crews showed up, Moreno never came right out and said, "The lady who jumped in to help was the only one who pulled any triggers. The only one who shot anyone."

The forensics ultimately told the story, once the bullets came out of Ryan and Yoa. The sheriff's office published the evidence, under duress because Ryan's parents, and Yoa's, filed a lawsuit against Chapman; Willa avoided the eventual finding of fault via bankruptcy in Texas and re-incorporating in Idaho, where she didn't have to worry about wage garnishment.

Chapman spent the rest of her days as a celebrity at various conventions, selling videos of her "Heroic Self-Defense and The Lonely Sheepdog" speeches. And carefully avoiding reporting any income in forty-eight states.

Ryan recovered use of his arm, if not the pitching talent that would have at least paid for college. Yoa, well. "If the injury had happened here," Doctor Yeun, chief surgeon at Luna's medical school, said, "We would likely have been able to recover most, if not all, of your mobility, Miss Benevolent. As it is, assuming no further damage from lift and setdown here at Luna, I'm afraid the most we'll be able to expect is full control through your abdomen and hips."

"Including organs?" Yoa asked.

"Yes, including bladder, lower GI, and so on. Depending on how the nerve bundles respond, I suspect you'll feel reasonably comfortable as far as somewhere through the lower half of your thighs. But from the knees down will likely be unresponsive."

"I'm alive, and so's Grace Travers, Doctor. There are worse places to be."

Serendipity Oh would always remember that conversation, and the strength on Yoa's face as she accepted the way of it all.

Maybe, Sere thought, maybe she doesn't fully believe it, yet. But Yoa was damned sure going to try and accept it. The determination was there, etched into every new line on Yoa's face.

But that, the conversation where Yoa found out how much of a difference a gravity well and a difference of professional opinion on the methods for treating severe spinal injuries had made to her life, the lawsuits that would consume much of her spiritual energy over the next few years, even the nightly news segments where Deputy Moreno and his fellow officers tried to make sense of a screwed up Sunday morning, all of these things came after Graham and Serendipity settled one more item of business.

"Hooks comes from money," Sere found. "Mom's got the name in Brazoria County, dad's people are from Houston."

"How'd they get him out of reach of the cops?" Graham asked.

Mark Hooks called Mom as soon as the tires hit the road. "I'm in trouble," he said. "The cops are going to be looking for me."

"Drive to Ellington Field," she told him. "We'll have people waiting for you."

And so they did. People, the pilot of the family plane first of all. The family lawyer, second of all. The pilot filed the flight plan after they took off.

"You're going to the station at L5, first," the lawyer told Mark. "Then, once we arrange everything, Luna."

"College. Again?" Mark responded.

"No, not college." Katie Leonard managed not to make the face, the disgusted one. She'd already had to clean up his mess at Rice. "The company maintains a handful of subsidiaries off world. You'll be working for the construction division, most likely." Which you'd know if you'd have bothered to pay any damned attention at the board meetings your mother forced you to attend, Katie didn't add. "Keep your head down long enough for us to make this all go away."

"Or what?" Mark demanded. "You can't force me to stay there, Katie."

"No one's forcing you to do anything, Mark." That would take a tranquilizer drip and an asteroid facility. Which the family didn't have available. Yet. "But a little cooperation, for a relatively short time, and you should be able to move freely. Maybe even surf again. Otherwise, you'll spend the next decade or two looking over your shoulder for the Texas Rangers."

The heir apparent turned away from the lawyer, dismissing her in favor of the landscape flying by the jet window.

Katie shrugged. The Hooks kid would be out of her hair for the next year or two, she hoped. She'd have court filings and research and payoffs to manage, but at least she wouldn't have the urge to strangle the little bastard staring her in the face every minute of it.

She never asked why Mark had done it. What could three thousand dollars, less than a week's worth of his allowance, matter? Except for the sheer mad joy of the gun and the scared look on the Teatro kid's face. For Leonard, it was just another one of the Hooks kid's troubles, in line with all the other ways he'd found to shake shit up when it got too quiet for him.

It was the first time the Hooks machinery had dealt with the off-world environment for something like this. Mark had had to cool his heels after the Rice debacle; but Ecuador had been far more accepting of 'financial misbehavior', the least of the accusations the university had leveled.

The only formal one that made it past the review committee. The others Leonard had scrubbed from the records with a judicious application of donation money. She'd let the cost of damages done fly to give the Rice professors a bone to chew on. Either way, Mark Hooks had flown to Ecuador, to a resort H-Adaptive Realty purchased for the occasion.

Katie had arranged a passport for him, an identity that wouldn't matter once Mark came back to the States, but that would keep him off the radar of anybody with kidnapping as part of their business plans.

She did the same thing here. Mark Hooks flew from Midland Spaceport to the L5 habitat. Six weeks later, Matt Honore took the shuttle flight from L5 to the lunar surface, where he'd signed up as an apprentice welder on the next phase of the dark side telescope expansion project. Three years of five twelves a week, night shift local time, overtime to bank, a pretty typical young person's path so far as the H-Regia Construction, Limited, and Katie Leonard, lawyer, viewed things.

That was their regular interaction with the lunar authorities; Leonard went on about her business, the part where she started the defensive court filings and the cash deposits. Especially a significant anonymous deposit covering Yoa Benevolent's medical care.

And a matching amount to the Luna medical school in the name of H-Regia. Leonard figured it would be better safe than sorry; besides, the HRCL team would always need good medical care, with the construction jobs in a rough environment. The company looked after their own, it was one of the benefits they didn't discuss with the new folks until they'd worked at the company more than a few years.

Sere watched the news. The local Houston news. She worked to remember the cadences, the little ways the reporters hinted at the what and who and how moving beneath the surface. "The reporters know more than they're willing to talk about on camera," she told Graham.

"That's normal, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she admitted. "No different than Luna. I'm just out of the habit of translating Houston politesse."

Graham set himself the task of sifting through the various government databases. "After automating it. There's just so damned much of it."

The L5 station had made the choice, years back, to just let most of their databases be open to the public. "They're such a target, there wasn't any damned point. They control write access absolutely."

"That, and the important stuff isn't open to the public."

"Well, sure, hide it in the junk pile where there's so much other juicy goodness to dig through."

Graham's bots sniffed out the Hooks kid. And, that he'd lifted for Luna under a different name.

"That tells me his minders didn't understand how different the off-world is than down-well," Sere said, when Graham showed her the 'Matt Honore' lunar leg of the switch. "I.D.'s matter downwell, but nothing like they do on orbit."

The data systems didn't much care what the paperwork identifications claimed. 'Matt Honore' was just another label in the reference list for the mass and associated life systems associated with the original label of 'Mark Hooks'. Ninety-seven kilos, twenty-three standard years, oxygen-food-water consumption and assorted evacuations as baselined. He could call himself whatever he wanted; for L5 and Luna and the budding Mars-Asteroid and Venus systems he was measured, sorted, evaluated for all travels according to off-world rules alone.

The ISS didn't share that database; neither did any of the groundhog governments. At this particular point in time, these were life-system engineering data shared between research environments.

At this point, though, from Earth's point of view, what the lunatics and the marvins did between themselves was less than interesting.

Six weeks after Matt Honore hit the lunar surface, Sere had him traced.

The question was... "What do we do about it?"

Vacuum exposure, rockfall. An accident on rocket transportation. Graham and Sere debated them all. "Problem being, convenient accidents have been 'addressed'," Graham said. "The board doesn't want the old ways returning."

"Las Vegas Syndrome," Sere replied. "Nobody wants the rumors to turn into fact." And they hadn't, not really. A couple of Jimmy Hoffa's had occur ed, in the first rush, so the board had cracked down.

Like L5, some of the databases were sacrosanct from public knowledge. Security cameras and their equivalents were near ubiquitous, and impossible to evade. Or, near as as to make no practical difference for a couple of college kids with no clearance and access to the real computing iron.

On the other hand, medical procedures were not quite as locked down. "Too bad they'd twig to a kidney replacement," Sere mused.

"Or any other major surgery under anesthesia."

The only access points were routine vaccinations. The mundane public health stuff. "We could make him line up for an MMR shot every six months, plus the various flu vaccines."

"Annoying, but how'd that be any different than normal? He wouldn't even notice." You became inured to it; every six months on your personal timelines, three months if the terrestrial disease vectors overloaded, the off-world rolled sleeves for whatever latest round of needle pushing had been deemed necessary.

All essential, given the way groundhog flu spread.

Sere remembered something else, then. But only because she'd started teaching the occasional lab class. "Hey, one of my students told me she didn't just get her flu shots. They'd piggy-backed something else into it for her, for childhood leukemia or something."

Graham squinted, confused, then went off to do some homework. He came back a few days later with the answer. "Not just cancer." The ever present worry. They lived in a radiation environment, constant exposure in the caverns or the L5 station wasn't all that much more entertaining than living in Denver or Mexico City.

But they were still kids. The folks working the surface of Luna, Mars, the asteroids caught larger daily doses. And the experimental drugs to go along with it. "Ok, so?"

"At least a few of the drugs they're giving out are gene editors."

"Ah. Graham..."

"I know what you're thinking. Here's the twist."

And so they pushed through a little script for Matt Honore; one that would follow his records all the rest of his days in the off worlds.

And then home again, when the DirtWorlders wanted to know what the lunatics and the marvins had done to their precious Mark Hooks.

Not a gene editor injection. The kind that came with warning bells and whistles, telling all and sundry that, while the individual injected would likely have a ten percent overall improved lifetime, the subject should be considered as EXTREMELY HIGH RISK for mutagenic side effects carrying down to any offspring. AS SUCH, this patient should be strongly advised to SEEK GENETIC COUNSELING PRIOR TO ANY POSSIBLE PREGNANCY or CONSIDER STRONGLY LIFETIME NEUTERIZATION OR OTHER PREVENTION METHODS against accidental procreation.

No, Sere and Graham didn't arrange for any permanent genetic-modifying injections for Mark/Matt. Nope.

They just made sure the warning that went along with such injections got inserted into his permanent records.

The long-term birth control, long term but easily reversible for a physician who knew of it, that was administered automatically on his next routine vaccination as triggered by the flag in his records, was just a happy accident. One that was then wiped from Mark's records just as 'accidentally'.

It was really too bad that Mark Hooks never paid attention to his Luna paperwork. He was too busy counting the days 'til he got back to Terra, to money and privilege and the new high-society possible girlfriend his mother had told him so much about.