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Welcome to the 21st Century.

Text Message Publicizing A.D. 2060

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                                   A.D. 2060


                               Original Fiction
                               By Curtis C. Chen

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It's the mid-twenty-first century.  Fusion power is cheap, every computer
is connected to the Internet, and humans have tamed the Earth and settled
the Moon, Mars, and most of Jupiter's satellites.  The frontier of the day
is the Torus, a region of asteroids and planetoids spanning the void
between Mars and Jupiter.  Interstellar corporations have sprung up amidst
this burgeoning expansion, as have a new breed of humans: "Tories," who
have the skills and the desire to face the harsh magnificence of life in
the wide open vacuum of the Torus.

But there is tension.  Tories and Earthers live in different worlds, and
the differences are starting to show.  The United Nations and NASA are
silently brooding over losing the space race to Ariane Odyssey and the
Quintex Corporation, the two commercial giants who have explored a good
quarter of the Torus.  Now strange things are happening.  Robot supply
stations are raided by pirates, company shuttles are disappearing, and a
new space station has been sabotaged... and no one knows by whom, or why.

Soon enough, the cause of these mysterious events will become clear.  But
not everybody will want to believe it.

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			Available for public consumption
                             on the World Wide Web:
        http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~sparckl/_freefall/freefall.html
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      "Why assign an  Earther  to pilot  a loneboat?  Right  now  the trip
takes about a  week, at one  gee, to get  from  Mars to Jupiter.  A  dozen
things might   go wrong  in that  time.   Ariane's  got plenty of  trained
astros; why not send one of them?

      "I'll tell  you  why," he continued  before   McBride could respond.
"Either they wanted  someone trained in espionage,  or they wanted someone
who  would have  trouble fixing    a  dead loneboat.   Someone who   would
guarantee that the cargo was jettisoned into space."

      "What's the advantage of dumping your cargo several hundred thousand
kilometers from your destination?" wondered McBride.

      "Maybe you don't really want the cargo to reach Jupiter." A slightly
wicked twinkle had come into  Jemison's preternaturally hazel eyes. "Maybe
what's on the manifest isn't really what's in  the crates, and you want to
lose it for someone else to pick up."

      "So you're  suggesting  that Ariane   is now into  smuggling."   The
company   had endured its   share of  scandals,  but  they had never  done
anything illegal.

      Jemison shrugged, unconvinced.  "The only  things  I know  of  which
would need to exist in  a controlled environment are controlled substances
and biological samples."

     "C'mon,  Kyle," McBride sighed  theatrically,  "it was probably  just
breeder-grade plutonium.  Calm down."

                              -- from FREEFALL, Part 1: "Rescued"
      
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		      Read FREEFALL.  Write to the author.
	(But be kind, this is his first effort at book-length writing.)
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