Decisions, decisions

Well, this isn’t where I had hoped to be. Its rarely a good thing when you have to make a choice between taking a career ending action which, whilst morally correct, will result in your bankruptcy and potential incarceration or choosing to quietly exit a deeply dodgy situation leaving others to sort out the burning bag of excrement you’ve dumped on them and hoping they can prevent too much destruction.

I’m not a bad person. I’ll keep telling myself that no matter what the outcome here. Its just, sometimes things happen around me which aren’t great. And quite often those things happen because of things I did. Often for money. Ok - that makes me sound pretty bad, but I swear all those crappy things I did, I did for the best of reasons. I have a family to provide for!

Let’s start at the beginning. Not the very beginning, we haven’t got time for that! But at least this beginning, which I am very much hoping is not the beginning of the end. Officially, I am a logistics operator on the space lanes between the asteroid belt and Earth. I run a manned cargo hauler on the quicker routes and I specialise in carrying valuables, live cargo, data storage devices, that kind of thing. Basically anything which requires oversight and management and which you wouldn’t trust to a machine - those automated haulers are so easy to steal from its a wonder anyone uses them! I’ve also been known to transport... other things. Things which my customers would prefer others not know they had, or will have when I get to them. Its a premium service which I offer, but not one which I advertise if you know what I mean. It pays extremely well, at least relative to my more legitimate job, in no small part because I take all of the risk when I agree to ship that kind of cargo - no payments until the items are delivered, no paperwork which could be used to trace back to the customer, nothing. Its all on me and if I get caught then I probably go to jail if I keep quiet and certainly will never work again if don’t!

Sadly, out here away from the blue and green pebble we are supposed to call home, making a living is hard and sometimes people have to make choices they don’t want to make. The super-rich can enjoy planetside life and the aspirational can enjoy Earth-orbit stations and the possibility of making it down there one day, but the rest of us - we have to do whatever we can to scrape by, even if the moral compass suggests true North might be in a different direction. Between the AIs which basically run the whole Earth system and the corporations which essentially own everything else, there isn’t a whole lot of room for the rest of us. You’ve got to love progress... apparently.

Today, I am hauling some completely legitimate cargo for a respected mining company. None of the materials they mine of course, those just go on the autos and often on the slow lanes - so long as there’s a steady stream of supplies they don’t care about the time it takes to get back and they can accept some losses to theft. No, this cargo is low-g machine parts which are too expensive to manufacture near Earth but which are needed there for the enterprise to run. So far, so legal.

I’m also transporting some more interesting cargo in amongst the machine parts where its hard to spot. I don’t ask too many questions but there were certainly some machine parts added to the hold which looked a bit ‘explode-ier’ than the manifest suggest they should be.

It was all going just fine. Right up until it wasn’t. I guess this was my ‘stir the tanks’ moment - I thought I was Tom Hanks but I ended up being Kevin Bacon. I executed a slow roll to even out the heating and something must have shifted. Probably not restrained properly for zero-g manoeuvres. Not my fault. I blame the loaders for not realising I was going to stuff some additional bits in the hold.

Anyway, whatever it was, something went pop. Not a big bang or anything but enough to alert the safety system and ever so slightly change my direction. the safety system wanted to kick me out of the lane and call for help - not a great plan with what I am hauling. So I overrode that plan and stayed in lane without actually checking exactly what the system had decided to do. Turns out, it was trying to avoid a secondary interaction with an auto hauler in the vicinity. It won’t be a big collision or anything but on my current course I am going to gently nudge the hauler enough that it won’t be going where its supposed to be going anymore. And the new place its going will result in the delivery of its cargo being made in a much more direct way than is generally desirable for anyone who doesn’t enjoy tonnes of cargo falling on them.

I could move just enough to get out of the way, but if I do that I will definitely get noticed. I’m already drifting through the lane enough that the system monitors will eventually spot it but if I change course again they’ll know something is up and will want all kinds of explanations about why I am shifting direction on purpose. That will inevitably involve jettisoning those bits of the cargo which are not exactly as listed on the manifest which will not improve my reputation, won’t get me paid and might even land me in jail if someone officious starts sniffing about my manifest. If it were just me, that maybe wouldn’t be so bad but if I don’t bring in the money, who else in my family will? If I’m destitute, they all are as well.

Or, I could lean into this bump right now and there’s a pretty good chance that the system will believe me when I say I was avoiding some miscellaneous space junk and had to shift at short notice. There’s almost no way of proving that’s not true with all the rubbish floating about out here and my safety system can always be convinced it did things it maybe didn’t exactly do.

Doing that keeps to my delivery schedule, means I get paid and, whilst not exactly a glowing addition to my pilots resume, doesn’t affect my reputation too badly, at least not with my more select clientele. It also gives me a good enough reason to have moved that no one will want to look too deeply at me. Especially not as my flight computer is telling me that option somewhat points the autohauler on a collision course with a populated station, which I imagine might be a higher priority than looking at me. Its currently highly unlikely the hauler would actually hit the thing, but the act of moving the auto more will increase the chances to the point that someone will have to take action and the disruption caused to the station whilst they panicked about that risk is going to be painful for someone. On the plus side, that someone won’t be me, and I would much prefer not to be in jail and or destitute! And its highly likely they would notice and that the hauler wouldn’t careen through the station on its way through causing huge damage and a number of deaths. The traffic controllers rarely make that kind of mistake anymore, even with all the additional complexity from the number of stations and captured asteroids there are now in the system.

So, in summary, my choices are to do the right thing, be responsible for a mistake which wasn’t really mine in the first place and take a financial and reputational hit on behalf of corrupt oligarchs and soulless AIs who have repressed me and my family. Or, push that hauler onto a path of potential destruction and almost certainly get away with my pocketbook and reputation intact. In the first instance, I will probably be in jail and penniless and my family will be left with nothing, but I will have a clean conscience. In the second, I’ll be in my own home with a little more cash and the knowledge that my family is safe for at last a little while longer, but I might never be able to sleep again if something goes wrong.

Like I said, I am not a bad person. I want a clean conscience, but I also want the security that comes from having enough in the bank to pay next months rent and put some food on the table.

So that’s where we are. I know what I’ve go to to do. I make a silent wish for forgiveness from those I am about to let down, tell the flight computer the new plan and push the button...