Orlo's Orbits

By R. N. Wright

Episodes One through Six of Space Dick, Space Ranger, Space Outlaw, and Space Avenger all in one boxed set. After a near death experience "sometimes licensed" P. I. Orlo Suggs finds himself in a new century with a new job. Follow the mistake-prone Orlo and his not always reliable team on their adventures throughout the cosmos. Futurism jostles with tongue-in-cheek in this serial.

Some adult content and language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. N. Wright
• Release date: Jan 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386554165

Book preview

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Other works by R. N. Wright:

Orlo Suggs, Space Dick (3 episodes)

Orlo Suggs, Space Ranger

Orlo Suggs, Space Outlaw

Orlo Suggs, Space Avenger

American Triptych

Flash Fic Five

Quick Six

Copyright 2017

All Rights Reserved

Cover image courtesy of NASA/JPL

Table of Contents

Orlo Suggs, Space Dick

Episode One Ch. 1

Episode Two Ch. 18

Episode Three Ch. 30

Orlo Suggs, Space Ranger Ch. 38

Orlo Suggs, Space Outlaw Ch. 53

Orlo Suggs, Space Avenger Ch. 66

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ORLO SUGGS, SPACE DICK

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Episode One: The Vanishing Odds

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Or, I Am Man, I Am Lunch

1.

I was having one of those days like the camel driver who accidentally ran over and killed the Emir's third favorite concubine and had to come up with half a dozen goats, pronto. It started with my court appearance, as a witness in the divorce case of Hardcastle v. Hardcastle. I had been hired by Mrs. Hardcastle to take pictures of Mr. Hardcastle slippin' the salami to the housekeeper. Photography, that's my specialty. Catching people in flagrant delictio, as the Romanians say.

Well, the judge was looking over the pictures and this little scowl starts creeping over his face. I knew something was not going over so hot.

Mr. Suggs, he says, how many of these pictures are there here?

About eighty, your honor.

EIGHTY!

Well, they were the best ones.

You took over eighty pictures of two people copulating?

I am nothing if not thorough, your honor.

Well, that wasn't the last surprise for the court. Turns out since I had pretty much the run of the house working for Mrs. Hardcastle I figured I might drum up some business working the other side of the connubial conniption by taking pictures of the Mrs. getting a riding lesson from who she called her Gentleman of Horse – and there were no horses in the house. You can imagine the expressions on the faces of the folks at her table when his lawyers presented their set of pictures.

So the judge is looking at these pictures getting madder and madder and the Mrs. is burning a hole through my forehead with her eyes and the Mr. and his table are laughing their asses off and I'm getting the idea that something bad was about to happen.

It finally came down like this: the judge disallowed the divorce on the grounds that those two deserved each other. And he sentenced me to ten days in the county lockup for some vague contempt of court.

If you can imagine getting handcuffed while a whole room full of people are looking at you like they're one popped balloon away from going lynch mob on you, that's the vibe I was getting. Jail was starting to look like a refuge.

Long story short, I spent the next ten days dodging halitosis and hepatitis C and when they let me out who should be there to pick me up but Mrs. Hardcastle which I thought was mighty big of her until she shot me in the chest.

Lucky thing we were close to a place where they have a medical facility and they kept me from bleeding to death right away. But I was pretty much doomed to waltz with the bony guy in the black one-piece unless there was an escape hatch, and turned out there was.

Couple of years before I was in a poker game with a big-deal lawyer and I could tell he was real happy with his hand. Pair of aces, I figured, and I had a couple of threes. Well, the flop turned up an ace, two kings and a three and I had to go with the possibility that he had three kings or aces and I had a full house. So I stayed in and he threw everything he had in the pot including a contract with this outfit that freezes you after you kick.

The last card was a three. And he had two aces in his hand. And at the hospital my SOS monitor fired off at the right time.

Next thing I knew I was waking up in an unfamiliar place in a strange kind of bed. It was almost like lying on air. I tried to roll over on my right side but something held my left ankle.

It was a shackle.

2.

Well, I lay there for a good while and since I wasn't going anywhere I inspected my surroundings. The light was dim but I could make out what looked like long reddish curtains hanging from the high ceiling on the three sides in front of me. Several dark masses were close by the bed and one of them came to life with a piercing blue light. Some kind of monitor, I thought.

All of a sudden my eyeballs were bleached by a blinding white light.

PROCESS COMPLETE! It was the kind of voice you didn't want to hear waking up to a hangover. Recovering, I could see I was in some kind of amphitheater with a couple dozen heads poking over the railings like a bunch of meerkats out of a burrow.

And how do I know about meerkats? I'll tell you later.

Welcome to the Twenty-Second Century, Mr. Suggs! said this tenorish voice somewhere up behind me.

Thanks, I said, not quite believing him. Do you welcome everyone with leg irons?

Just a precaution. You have a criminal record you know.

Too many pictures, I guess. Where are you?

A dark-haired, slightly-built young man in his late twenties stepped out in front of me. He had the air of a guy with a lot of diplomas on his wall and not too much trouble getting them. I'm Doctor Devine. I'll be helping you get adjusted to your new life in a different world.

How much different could it possibly be, I thought. What's today?

It is Thursday, October Second, in the year Twenty-One Twenty-One.

Well, why wouldn't it be?

I must say, I never imagined I'd be talking to the famous Man In The Display.

What?

You're famous as the – well, let me back up and explain. A few decades after you were frozen the populace rebelled against their plutocratic overlords. Mansions were rocketed. The rich were pulled from their dwellings, abused, and in some cases, eaten.

Didn't the military put it down?

The military joined it. Somewhere in the reign  of strong men a very self-assured young fellow decided that the Republic did not need the presence of people who did not have the grace to die normally and get themselves out of the way. So he ordered the unplugging of the cryogenic chambers, the tipping over, and abusing of the 'popsicle people.' About midway through he changed his mind and ordered a goodly number to be displayed in the Museum of Vile Corruption, dedicated to the folly of those who would waste scarce resources on a self-indulgent attempt at immortality.

And I was one?

Oh, you had the most prominent spot, right there in the great hall. I first saw you there as a young elementary school student. Yes, generations of young people came through that hall to make sketches, to point and laugh –

Point and laugh? At what?

"Well, you were naked."

3.

NAKED? How long was I on display? I began to mentally measure the possibilities of a nice, juicy lawsuit.

From the time you 'died' until the principles of death suppression and indefinite life extension made it possible for you to go into the queue – oh, close to a century.

So what kind of payment am I looking at for this, uh, desecration of my personhood?

Payment? Oh, you mean reparation. I was beginning to think that if he was the great light around here I'd be in charge within a week.

There's no money.

Say what?

"Since we now have the ability to create what we need or want on an individual basis there's no need to trade and thus no need for a token system of barter. We don't require people to drive nails with their heads to justify an animal existence. Your needs are guaranteed at birth. And we go forward from there.

"You'll have to content yourself with the satisfaction of going from being seen as a selfish ass to a visionary – all due to a mature nanotechnology that's available to anyone. Plus, you inspired a lot of great art like Krakenbusch's Pathetic Man and Hogswallop's Ding-Dong in Four-Color."

How did I get here? I still wasn't sure this whole thing wasn't a big joke.

As I said, you were put into a queue for revival once the methods were perfected. So here you are, your wounds fixed, yourself revived and ready for a celebratory picture.

A what?

Right then a number of nice-looking people came in behind me and huddled in close looking forward. Smile, said my chatty host. The light brightened for a sec and everyone wanted to shake my hand afterward. Doctor Devine shooed them out and continued:

You will notice that your memory has improved. This is due to the chip which has been implanted in your brain. I did remember the name 'Hogswallop' for some reason. It will not function fully until you've had some training and seasoning in its use. For that you will go on to your next appointment. Behold!

The dark red curtains directly in front of me parted and I found myself staring at a curious object in the night sky. It looked like a silvery soup can and was larger than anything I'd ever seen beyond the earth.

What is that thing?

The Moon, he said. The NEW one.

4.

OK, I'll have to defer (is that a real word?) to the chip as much as I can control it to explain about the Moon. According to the Compiler of Histories, Dr. Professor O. M. Godwin, the history of New Moon began with the maturing of nanotechnology.

It was never believed that the reconstruction  of other worlds would be conducted by men in clumsy space suits with shovels. The tiny programmable machines would be put to an audacious plan: to make the Moon habitable to an overpopulated Earth's living things.

[Fast forwarding]

"After the deep shafts were sunk the enterprise was put to literally pulling the Moon inside out. A similar method was used earlier in converting asteroids to space ships.

CHUKACHUKACHUKACHUKA! –

[WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? NO, YOU MAY NOT HAVE ACCESS TO MY AMYGDALA. I'M IN CHARGE HERE. NOW TAKE ME BACK TO DR. GODWIN]

Damn chip.

The repurposed rubble was installed on tracks and slid into position in a long spiral, imparting the beginnings of rotation to the new heavenly body.

[Skipping]

Iron from asteroids was used to band the new Moon and also to create longitudinal striations to generate the powerful magnetic field that protects the residents of New Moon from the Sun.

[Blahblahblah]

The rotation of New Moon provides artificial gravity to its interior surface and also imparts motion to its great body of water, the continuous Serpentine Sea.

I was still a bit woozy from all the new bodily changes and the transport with Dr. Devine seemed to take place in a series of short jumps. No waiting, in one vehicle, zip, out of that vehicle and into another, zip, and so on, all the way up the forever promised, and finally constructed Stationary Space Platform. Rising out of the Pacific ocean and stretching up 22,000 miles the platform was our jumping off point to the Moon (or New Moon, I'm still getting used to it).

There was no strapping in like the old days but the Flight Attendant (seriously, they still call them that?) helped lock down  my leg iron – news travels fast – and in what seemed like minutes we were docked at one of the exterior ports of the Moon.

Actually, it was only minutes. Due to a discovery only about three decades old.

5.

Meerkats. I promised to tell how I knew about Meerkats. The whole time I was being prepared at the Institute I was in a kind of half-dream world.  People were peeking over the observation deck at me and the chip I didn't know at the time was in my brain interpreted that as time to instruct me on the subject of the furry African rodents (are they rodents?) So it's running video of these things running together in a pack, swirling and undulating, and stopping all of a sudden like a single animal and looking back. They made me think of corporation lawyers for some reason.

So, Meerkats.

We were about to get off the shuttle and start down the fifty-mile tube to the interior when Dr. Devine grabbed my arm and said:

I know you were some kind of detective at one time –

A PI, actually. Sometimes licensed.

PI, right. Well, you know investigating, finding people?

More like taking their pictures, but yeah. Why?

I have a cousin who has disappeared. His name is Arthur Odds and we have reason to believe something terrible has happened to him.

Actually, I should have said we were about to start UP the tube since the centrifugal force tried to push you out into space. There were hundreds of these ports on the outer surface of the Moon and, turns out, quite a large number on the inside as well.

As we filed into the bus tube I noticed there were no ugly women. In fact, most of them looked like models. Particular models. Two Cindys in our group alone, looking at each other like they showed up at a party wearing the same dress.

How come everybody's so good-looking, Doc?

Dr. Devine looked for a moment like somebody broke into some secret room in his head.

Looks? Oh, you can choose your looks now. No surgery needed. Choose your skin color, black, white, yellow, plaid. Choose your height. Penis size: six, thirteen, nineteen. Pretty boy, bruiser. Curvy, skinny, bombshell, butch. Choose what you want on any given day. Most people settle on one look for most of the time.

Kinda hard to ID folks who can change their looks at the drop of a hat, ain't it? He looked puzzled for a half-second.

Oh, 'drop of a hat,' one of those quaint expressions. Yes, we ID, as you put it, using DNA, and things are about to get complicated in that department as well.

We were a little crowded in the tube bus which was little bigger than a hotel room bedroom and the thought of traveling fifty miles cramped as we were was not something I looked forward to. But right away the lights outside the window became a blurry set of lines and within several minutes some voice announced Enright City Station!

The doors opened onto a stunning sight.

6.

Enright City was named for the author who first wrote about turning the moon into a kind of can with both ends knocked out and people living on the inside surface. He described faster-than-light travel without using the usual warp and wormhole concepts. The coworker who bought and read the first copy of his first book was so traumatized by it he never left a review. He never made enough from his writings to make a living on, and eventually disappeared to get away from, depending on who told the story, either creditors or being bossed around by a woman. Anyway, his works are on everybody's sophomore lit reading list nowadays.

[How do I know this?]

The landscape I looked down on was something. We were on some kind of overlook and down below was a brilliant blue river or lake – it turned out to be an arm of the Serpentine Sea – with a thin strip of dark green forest between us and the water.  The low sun caused everything to be bathed in a bright orange light and the air was just a little bit chilly. The far shore, wherever it was, was hidden by distant clouds.  The sky overhead was pale blue.

We're about to go into our New Moon version of night, Dr. Devine explained. Our work starts tomorrow, but tonight is for relaxation.

I'm especially interested in your women, I said. Lemme guess: fucking with no consequences but they still don't wanna do it.

Dr. Devine laughed. Well, there's more to it than that. Why don't we visit one of my favorite places and see what happens. What's your taste in the ladies?

Curvy and easy.

I think your prospects are bright.

Sounds good, and Doc?

Yes?

Thanks for getting rid of those damned leg irons.

We took the tube to someplace out in the dark which was really more of a twilight, to a kind of resort and casino but with no money changing hands. The one-armed bandits hadn't changed much except for the 3-D displays and they took no tokens. The Doc took off somewhere and left me to myself, like a pup in a strange new house. Before I could get to the Poker and Blackjack areas some spiffy gent shoved a pair of dice in my hand and I was the next lucky shooter up.

Eleven! yelled the croupier on my first roll. Oh, this fella's gonna be lucky tonight! It was not clear what I was risking or winning since I had no tokens, but my next roll was a four.

While I was wondering what the point of this betless dice rolling might be a striking redhead slid next to me facing away from the table, stuck her five-inch heel into one of the grooves, and pushed a creamy-colored thigh up out of her little red dress. It was the sweetest laig I'd seen since I last melted.

Make your point and you can make me! she said in a husky voice and stared at me with hazel eyes you could fall into.

I desperately tried to recall my old craps tricks. Lessee, if I hook one of the dice into my forefinger with the One pointed up, rattled the other freely in my hand, and then snapped the roll so the One just spun, and hoped nobody noticed it didn't bounce off the back – JUST HOLD THE DICE TIGHTLY FOR FIVE SECONDS. So said a voice inside my head.

I did so, rattled, and rolled.

Two Twos showed up and the table went nuts. And as the voluptuous babe took my arm I thought I imagined seeing two dice with nothing but Twos on every face. Come on, she said. You're covered in every way.

We went to her room or what I thought was her room. None of these places seemed to have locks. She closed the door, hit a button, and said Occupied! in that voice and with a look that made you wonder if she meant the room or her.

I followed her to the bed. She turned around, crossed her arms, and grabbed the hem of her skirt, ready to start pulling it up. Let me know if you see anything you like, she said.

Right there, I said. Take it slow. She pulled the skirt up slowly, and pretty soon some frilly black fabric showed up looking more like a tattoo on her smooth perfect skin. Then a belly button surrounded by round softness. She stretched up and two fabric-covered mounds popped below the hem of the skirt. I took her small waist in my hands and started to perform my patented one-handed bra unhitch but she beat me to it. I figured it was time to kiss her. Maybe tease her a little with the tip of my tongue on her teeth but she was already there whole hog.

I looked down and everything was porn-movie perfection. She started undoing my shirt and I hooked my thumbs into the waist of her panties to

[PERFORM THE GESTURE OF MAXIMUM TRANSGRESSION]

Now look, you keep quiet until I'm done here.

So OK, I slid her panties down below her sweet round bottom revealing a neatly groomed Promised Land. She sat on the bed and I slipped them off and in what YOU call a gesture put them in my pocket. Of course if she asked, I'd give them back. I know the rules of the game. I unbuckled my belt and as the zipper took off on its way south I thought, damn, I shoulda got together with Doc on an upgrade to one of those thirteens.

7.

We walked arm-in-arm to a little café next to the casino for breakfast. And who should be sitting there out front, watching us do what the kids used to call the Walk of Shame, orange juice in hand, with a big grin on his face, but Dr. Devine. I started to introduce her but suddenly realized I didn't know her name.

Vonda, she said.

I believe we've met before, he said. I'm Dr. Devine.

Doctor. Sorry I can't stay. Perhaps we'll get together again soon. Nice meeting you –

Orlo.

Orlo. I'll be around.

And just that quick she turned and walked toward an awesome white beach with her rounded hips swaying and pushing out against that little red dress, taking turns with one another.

Did you enjoy your time with Vonda?

You mean the next Mrs. Suggs? She was amazing. A panther in the sack, knew baseball, football, hockey, kinds of beers. Cars. Now the senior Mrs. Suggs did not raise a babe in the woods, at least not after the first couple of years, and I knew the whole thing had to be a setup. And I didn't suppose I was the first or would be the last to be doing the mattress mambo with her. But DAYUM.

I think I'm going to enjoy these women with their chips and whatnot.

She's very good at what she does. They all are. But you haven't met a natural woman yet.

I was half-expecting one of those you-fucked-a-dude moments but he didn't go there.

She's a RoboVixen.

We spent most of the morning doing On-Off exercises – part of what's called Chip Control. I was half in a daze after finding out I'd spent the night with a superdeluxe love doll and still sorting out what it all might mean. Then I remembered what he said the previous day.

Tell me about Arthur Whatshisname.

You can remember his name. Try it.

Oz?

Close. Odds.

So he's missing and you think somebody's put a hammerlock on him or something?

He's turned off all lines of communication. Once you get what you call a handle on chip communication management you notice when people drop out. But his last messages and readings were about C1124IB and S254J3B which are very different places.

Huh?

[FIRST SENTIENT LIFE OUTSIDE THE EARTH DISCOVERED AT C1124IB]

[INITIAL ENCOUNTER UNFORTUNATE]

The Doc must have noticed my dizzy response. You're getting your first information about the case. There will be more later.

So it seemed the ability of people to go places outran anyone's keeping track of them.

You mean you can't just dial up his number and get a read on where he is?

"No. Once you get skilled in counter-measures you can defeat attempts to monitor and control you. Most people trying to hide know the Upgrade Trojan Horse trick so they refuse upgrades to their chip. You'll get to know when familiar folks are in the area. That's why I'm asking you to look for him. He won't recognize you.

So how do you figure I want to go on this wild goose chase?

Wild goose chase, he laughed. Another one of those expressions. Well, Mr. Suggs, he said, leaning in close.

What else do you think you have to do?

8.

It was a fair question. You know, back in the day it was go to school and get a degree or other and then you get a job doing whatever you were trained to do. But here nobody really had to do anything. It was more what do you WANT to do.

And that set loose a whole lot of mainly performing and arguing. Dancing, acting, horn-tooting, guitar-playing, singing. Arguing about the Beatles or Duke Ellington. Whether certain politicians should have gone to prison for a hundred years or life.

And when the Doc asked about what I had to do I think he meant what I really wanted to do was, well, take pictures of people being naughty, sure, but as part of being a detective. And here was a juicy mystery to solve.

He wasn't going to let me loose on the universe without any preparation. And neither was he going to send me out alone.

You need a team of trusted lieutenants. I figured he was going to pack me off with a bunch of those model-perfect specimens we kept running into. But he corrected that right away.

I think I have the right ones. Humans as scarred and twisted as you are. With backgrounds almost as wretched. Throwbacks to earlier times. Refuse thrown on the trash heap of your Twenty-first Century society, frozen and thawed, yearning to be rescued from their folly –

Doc, I get the idea, I said. So when do I get to meet these pearls?

In due time. I'm still getting one out of leg irons. But you and I have work to do.

That got me thinking about escape. I wanted to be like those kick-back pool loungers with their fruity drinks with little umbrellas watching those ungodly gorgeous bikini babes prissin' around them and chattin' 'em up and makin' plans with them and all of it under this unreal pale blue sky with the green land stretching off and up in one direction and the deepest blue sea rolling by us on the other. I wasn't up for a meet-and-greet with a bunch of mooks.

So how did we get from rocket-riding spam in cans taking weeks or months to get anywhere to fucking star children who get miffed at a half-hour jaunt to another planet? I'll turn you over to the Perfesser:

"The great discovery that changed humans from earthbound denizens of an increasingly overcrowded planet to interstellar travelers and outmigrants came about accidentally. Work with powerful magnetic fields revealed that certain objects and small creatures could be suspended within them as though gravity were somehow nullified.

Eventually, researchers realized that these magnetic fields were creating self-contained inertial frames within the larger frame. That is, the mass within them was being masked" from the effects of gravity, which was marvelous enough, but also that the effects of inertia could be muted or even eliminated.

"With the development of shaped, braided, and mutually reinforcing magnetic fields and