The Rock Rats

DOSSIER: JOYCE TAKAMINE

You had to have an education to be considered for a job at Selene. The lunar nation was hiring engineers and technicians, not fruit pickers. Joyce’s passport to the Moon was a battered old palmcomp that her father had given her. Through it she could access virtually any class in any university on the net. She studied every night; even when she was so tired from picking that she could barely find the strength to open the palmcomp’s scuffed plastic lid.

The other pickers complained that the flickering light kept them from sleeping, so Joyce moved outside the barracks and kept doggedly at her studies out in the open, under the stars. When she looked up at the Moon and saw Selene’s beacon light, it seemed to her as if that laser’s bright beam was calling to her.

Once a guy she briefly slept with stole her palmcomp; just walked off with it, as if he owned it. In a panicked fury, Joyce tracked him down at the next camp and nearly took his head off with a two-by-four. The owner’s guards let her go, once she told them the whole story. They had no use for thieves; especially stupid ones who let a scrawny oriental girl cold cock them.

In three years, Joyce got her degree in computer systems analysis from California Coast University. She applied for an advertised job at Selene. She didn’t get it. Four hundred and twenty-seven other people, most of them just as desperate and needy as Joyce, had applied for the same position.

The same day that she was turned down by Selene she got the message that both her parents had died in a freeway pileup during the earthquake that destroyed the shantytowns up in the hills above the drowned ruins of San Francisco.