Is This Heaven?

edited August, 2011

An early morning rain was tapping at my bedroom windows where I lay in my bed alone, with only the sounds of well remembered music playing in my ears to keep me company. Attached to my chest was a single sensor, a heart monitor. I am dying of course, of simple old age. At the ripe old age of ninety-two years my life has finally come to its end while outside my locked bedroom door, kept away by my request and their own grief were my children, grand children and even more than a few great grandchildren. I was alone mainly because my husband had passed on some thirty-nine years ago and I had found that I wanted my last hours to be my own, not those of someone else. Genetics had taken my husband, some of us live long lives, some short. No, I had never remarried, never had any flings afterwards. I had instead turned my energies towards an education that had stopped at the age of nineteen when my first son began to grow. That had been my abrupt introduction to the fact of nature that yes, you could become pregnant the first time you had sex, even if you were only experimenting to see if you liked it.

Still I loved all my family, even though there had seemed to be a hollowness within me all my life. I hadn’t really loved my husband at the beginning after all, in truth, hardly at the end either though we had always been great friends. Once he had passed I had then happily carried on the traditional mother and grandmother role. All those holidays, birthdays and surprise visits. Some were welcome visits but honestly, most were not. Now my time on this Earth was done, born in the Winter of 1946 I would leave this world in the Spring of 2038. Leave it as I had come, alone as I now preferred to be. Alone, listening to music over seventy years old and all of my childhood that I still had. As Puff the Magic Dragon began to play I felt myself slipping away, slipping away into that long darkness. Would it be to paradise or hell, or worse was it true that we are all only organic computers? That when we die there is nothing after, that we simply become background radiation. That once worried me greatly, I think because even the most self destructive of us really wants to continue on. Now though I no longer cared, I just wanted to sleep. From far away I heard the squeal of an alarm, my heart had finally stopped its struggle to keep my frail ancient body alive. It had done an excellent job over the years, now it was time for it to rest as well. Feeling myself go a last thought came to me, I had been listening to this song when my father came in to tell me his father had passed on. How interesting.

A sound of knuckles banging on wood woke me. “Darlene, may I come in?”

It was my fathers voice. Oh how well I remembered my father, how much I had loved him. Was he here? On the other side? I opened my eyes to discover that I was in that same little room I had grown up in. Was this then Heaven, or Hell. “Sure” I answered, uncertain as to the afterlife’s protocols.

My father opened the door and entered the room slowly. He was exactly as I remembered him, strong and handsome in a way only a daughter could see. He closed my door and an uneasy feeling came over me. Without thinking I reached to my record player, lifting its arm from the forty-five it had been playing, had been playing Puff the Magic Dragon. ‘Its Hell’ I decided, knowing exactly what day this was and how it would end. ‘I’m going to live this day over and over for eternity.’

“We just got a call from your Uncle” my father continued.

“Grandaddy died” I answered. Originally I had tried to hide from the truth. Maybe by coming out and accepting it this time Hell wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe the day wouldn’t end with my father crushed between the steering wheel and his seat, as it had so long ago.

“Yes pumpkin. I’m sorry. His cancer just. It just.”

Dad looked away, exactly like he had that day. Leukemia had killed my grandaddy. A disease that when I died had been curable. But in 1963 it had been a ‘Go home and die’ disease. “So, we do what” I asked. “Drive down to Texas and attend the burial?”

“Your taking this awfully calmly pumpkin” My father answered as he turned his face back towards me. I could see worry in his eyes. ‘Oh dad. If you only knew’ I thought. Instead I answered him with a lie, at my advanced age they came easily.

“Grandaddy’s been ill a long time dad” I told him. “I’ve had a long time to get ready.” Long I thought, seventy-five years had passed since my Granddaddy had died. Seventy five years since that accident in Kansas that left me without a father. Left me with a gold digging mother who within four months would take every penny she could grab, leaving my brothers and I homeless. Being abandoned children and homeless in 1963 was not a good thing. Reliving that crash, so this was to be my hell. Waking up to see my father dead, blood dripping from his mouth, his face as white as a sheet. What great sin had I done to deserve this I wondered, it had to have been a good one. “When do we leave?”

“I’ve already called my job, I’ve got three weeks vacation saved. The Carters will watch our animals for us so I thought we’d leave today.” Same old words, same expression.

“What about the brakes” I asked, remembering him pumping that pedal just before a horrible sound I had never forgotten. A sound of tires screaming, of metal crumpling against metal along with my father cursing.

My father sat on my bed. “Haven’t the money Pumpkin, three’s just enough in our savings for this trip. They’ll be fine though, I just need to pump them a bit every time.”

I got up off my bed. If this really was my past, then... Moving a panel my father had turned into a secret space for me when I was seven I took out a blue tin box. Closing the panel, I was certain mother didn’t know about it or the money would be long gone, it was gone by the time I got home from the hospital after all. Knowing the past can be so predictable, I opened it. Inside was nearly a thousand dollars. Seven long years of baby sitting, yard work with my two brothers and a paper route I’d given up just a month ago. All meant to buy me my own car so I could go to college. Picking up my purse from my desk I pushed the money into it, “If we are driving all the way to San Antonio I want to get there alive. I do not trust Carl’s brakes.” Carl was the name we’d given our battered old rambler when dad came home with it several years ago.

“But that’s your money” my father sputtered.

“It sure is Dad. But Carl hasn’t gone more than twenty miles in one run for years. Just..” I stopped, thinking. “Dad. I want to see Grandaddy one last time. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I want my own car, but we both know what Carl is like. Just ask Paul, he works on him almost every weekend just so you can get to work. Please Daddy? If you want you can pay me back later, I don’t mind waiting for my first car. Not really, just... Oh just let me make our trip a little safer. Please?”

“All right hon. But we don’t tell anyone else okay? And I will pay you back. Somehow.”

I gave him my best sunshine smile then closed my purse, knowing that had my father the money Carl would have been gone a long time ago. But things were hard for us and not getting any easier. What my father didn’t know was mother was stealing money from him and his children, squirreling it away in a safe deposit box for her future escape. “Lets tell mom your getting Carl checked for the trip” I decided. Seventy five years of experience inside of a seventeen year olds body made for a much different teenager. “You can tell her that I’m going with you to keep you company and your taking me to keep me out of her hair. We can leave tomorrow morning, after all it will give everyone time rest and to get ready. That will make things easier on her I’m sure. Paul and Thomas can help her, their more the domestic type anyway. And you will be rested too.”

Dad was so in shock from losing his father that he was easy to lead, as long as I made things sound reasonable. Certainly he didn’t expect such maturity from his young daughter, who just last weekend had been sent home from school for breaking one of the football players arms. As long as I followed a logical tract it should be easy to keep dad off balance. I hoped. I found myself programming my responses in my head as if I were working on a computer again.

So we ended up at Sears Robucks where Dad was sitting filling out the paperwork when the Chief serviceman I was talking with asked what he wanted. “Oil job, tuneup, alignment, heavy duty shocks, lube, four new tires, new spare too, break overhaul, wipers, new hoses and belts, complete inspecting for a trip to Texas and back with the whole family” I answered.

“That will take days” the serviceman laughed. “Going to leave that old Rambler that long?”

“No, it will take you” I looked at the clock. This time of year Sears closed at nine and math had been one of the few subjects that I had excelled in. “Eleven hours. Plus or minus zero, unless you don’t like cash that is. This is a Wednesday, three quarters of your bays are sitting empty meaning those men are sitting around getting paid to do nothing until the evening rush. If there is an evening rush today since its supposed to snow, which knowing people there will not be. Put them all to work and you’ll get the job done in record time.” Seventy-five years, fifty three of them living alone had hardened me in the ways of doing business.

“Cash? For cash yeah I can put more guys on it. But does you father have that much?”

“We’re going to lunch, then a movie and he’s taking me shopping. We’ll stop at the bank before they close. How much?” He named a price, I looked up at the board behind him, doing a quick calculation, added tax and shook my head no. “You just added four hundred dollars for nothing” I whispered. “Why?”

“You want it today? Or maybe a long bathroom break if its better for you” he answered, leering at me. I was no raving beauty but I wasn’t plain either and I well knew exactly what he wanted.

“I see.” Turning around I walked over to my father, taking the forms from his hands. He was so startled that I managed to rip them in half twice before he could say anything. “Thieves” I told him in a voice loud enough to carry far. “Predators, especially that one. Lets go Daddy, Hermans will get the job done just as fast and cheaper.”

We were backing out of our parking space when a man not much older than my father ran out yelling. Stopping the car my father waited, confusion evident on his face. I think he was still thinking of his father, not what was going on around him. “Your daughter” the man gasped as he reached fathers window. “She called my service manager a thief and a predator. Why?”

Quietly I explained, flashing my cash while watching as the mans face got redder and redder as I spoke of the offered ‘long bathroom break.’ I’m over the age of consent, but I still look a lot younger than I really am (and I don’t mean my soul, spirit, mind or whatever.)

“I thought something like that, we’ve had complaints about him but nothing as blatant as this. I’m Oscar Morton, Manager of this store. If you will please come with me back into the store I’ll get this straightened right out.” Fifteen minutes later Sears had a new Service Manager, Carl was being pulled into a service bay and I’d paid the bill in full in advance, subject to Carl being completely ready by nine pm today. Sears likes cash, especially the amount Carl’s work required. Then father and I were off to find a meal all to dads complete amazement. He’d never encountered an empowered woman before, I was certain of that. Not in this town, not in our social group. Then I do have those years of experience on him, didn’t I.

“You certainly have changed” my father observed over his hamburger.

“Dad its my money, its my Grandaddy and its my family. He was going to take four hundred dollars into his own pocket just to ‘expedite’ Carl. That or me and that is extortion. I’m going to college, I’m not going to lift my dress just to get Carl fixed faster.”

“Well yes it is... YOUR WHAT?”

I had to giggle as everyone was suddenly looking at us. “I’m going to collage” I repeated. “I decided this morning, you always wanted me to go so well, I’m going. Subject to my finding the money of course. Maybe I can get loans or find some scholarships. My grades arn’t bad, just my attitude towards jocks who try to push their hands into my blouse.”

So it went, until near nine thirty when we pulled into the drive. Dad had called mom of course, explaining why we would be late. On a pay phone of course. I already really missed even a primitive cell phone. Apparently the manager had decided to make up for his ex-services managers attempted graft because Carl shone with a brand new wax job, was clean as a new whistle inside and he rode and sounded better than he had in years. I was also some seven hundred plus dollars poorer than when we left home. Dad kept the receipt though, my father always paid his debts and he never took gifts from anyone. Not even on his birthday or Christmas.

After supper I went to bed, expecting to wake up with Puff the Magic Dragon in my ears again. Instead it was Paul shaking me awake. “Wake up sleepy head, we’re leaving in two hours. Why sis you haven’t even packed yet.”

Sitting up I waved him away. I needed a shower, coffee and a serious dollop of whisky in that coffee. Wait, this was the next day and I wasn’t in a hospital. Paul wasn’t crippled for life and dad was still alive. This couldn’t be hell, could it? My feet hitting the linoleum floor answered that question. There was no way anyplace in hell was this cold. Paul laughed at my shriek, shutting the door to my room behind him. Coffee and whiskey were some years ahead of me so it had to be a cold shower and just as cold breakfast. Mom never cooked in the morning. Never.

Then there we were, driving down that road I will never forget. I was still kind of tired so I had dozed now and then, but not when we got to that intersection. We were on 335 just north of Emporia where my life had changed, where a patch of black ice had caused my father to slide through an intersection right into a farmers tractor. A tractor complete with full harrowing attachment. Instead we breezed through, the road had warmed enough that the ice was gone and old Farmer Landers, I’ll never forget that name, had already run that stop sign like he did every time he came to it. He was long gone by now.

For the first time I relaxed inside. Everything was different, I was too uncomfortable for this to be Heaven and too cold for it to be Hell. So what was this? Had I somehow gone back in time? Had the original accident somehow created a rift that my dying soul could traverse. My degree was in computer sciences, not physics. I had no idea what the truth was and I certainly wasn’t going to start asking questions because whomever gave me this chance just might take it away if I did. I had my dad back, I had my brothers back and mom hadn’t yet had a chance to fully show her black widow side.

Texas is a big state. I was born and raised near Grand Island Nebraska but Texas was huge, I mean, you just drove and drove and drove. Carl almost ran out of gas once before dad found a gas station. Humble Oil, seventeen nine a gallon, I’d forgotten those old names and prices. Dad finally gave up from exhaustion and pulled into the oddest motel I’d ever seen. You see, every cabin was built to look like an Indian teepee. Hamilton Texas, what an odd little place. Strangely I had never left Nebraska after that wreak, I’d lived, raised a family and died within thirty miles of where I had been born. Other than that one deadly trip I’d never gone anywhere while some head shrinker I was made to go too a year after the accident called it survivors syndrom. Oh I’d surfed the internet when it was created, the cybernet as well, filling my brain with knowledge I’d never need but was my escape from my life. I’d even looked up what had happened to grandaddys land (it wasn’t pretty, all those rich peoples homes built on it) but leave the safety of beautiful Nebraska? Not I, yet now here I was in Texas and it even smelled different.

That was it I think, the point I realized that I really wasn’t dead. That somehow my mind had gone back in time or more likely a different reality, for whatever my reality would have been all that changed when we did not leave yesterday. Everything was new, on that old path my old self lay unconscious in a hospital room, my father dead, my brothers injured and my mother. Oh my mother, hardly harmed, she was at home tearing out walls looking for any hidden money, already adding up the money dad’s insurance was worth, planning that one way trip to France, leaving us homeless and in debt to the hospital. Here though there were new chances if I didn’t forget my history, then things might be better for my families future. But first there was grandaddy’s funeral, that was more important to me than anything right now. Mom’s greed, that I knew I couldn’t hope to change. Then it dawned on me just before mother called me back inside, one of my favorite shows started this year. In England the British people had just been introduced to Dr. Who, I would get a chance to watch it from the beginning if I could find an penpal in the BBC before they purged all those tapes.

Grandaddys funeral went like the dozens I remembered from my past life, though I had to remind myself to be ‘awed’ by everything. After all, for me this was supposed to be my first funeral. I said my goodbyes, then sat alone with the casket while everyone went for refreshments. A wake it was called, where the body lay in state at home overnight not in some expensive funeral home, just in case the dead really were alive. It had happened, but not in a long long time. It was something funeral homes pushed out of our lives in the seventies since they made more money that way.

I remembered that one summer Grandaddy had come up to visit. He’d stayed for a month, I remember my father being delighted at getting to spend hours with his father. I remember mother grumbling about the extra cooking and cleaning. Grandaddy though had taught me how to tell one tree from another, how to work with wood, the differences in woods and what tools to use on each. Most importantly he’d taught me that skin color had nothing to do with what was inside a persons body, it was just all how we were brought up. That lesson helped me a lot in later life so even now, after so long I really did miss him.

Why does it always rain at burials? It rained, hard and it was a cold rain because it was forty some odd degrees. Dad told me that it almost never snowed in this city and I liked that. I like snow yes, I love snow but it gets old real fast, especially when your walking to school in it. Afterwards we returned to our hotel where dad took us out for burgers and cola, the best we could afford if we wanted to get home. Tomorrow we were to meet Uncle Robert at grandaddys lawyer. As to why I didn’t know, the only time I’d ever inherited anything was when my husband died. For all my years I had no idea what to expect in this matter, didn’t everything go to the closest relative? That would be Uncle Robert and dad since dad was an only surviving child. Still we had to be there and it did delay our return to freezing Nebraska just one more day so I went to bed cold and alone like always.

“What do you mean he left twenty acres to each of the children” my mother asked the next day. There was stunned shock in her face, Grandaddy had split up his land between his brother, dad and us. Dad got twenty acres, so did my Uncle. My uncles though was an odd parcel that adjoined his existing ranch, in effect straightening a rather crooked property line. My brothers and I pulled slips of paper from a hat for our twenty acres after dad chose his first. Mom got zilch, in fact in the entire will she was never named, not even referred to. That told me grandaddy had known what kind of woman his only son had married.

We were rich, sort of. Rich in the way that people who have almost nothing are when they are given something. All the land was out in the middle of nowhere though on a little farm to market road called 1283. It didn’t even have a name, just a little two lane sorta paved county road. Nowhere now I reminded myself, but the city of San Antonio had an explosive growth in the nineties that lasted almost thirty years, until gasoline hit ten dollars a gallon and kept rising. That revitalized the cities as families had been forced to move closer to work while it left places like my land destitute. But for a while land values had skyrocketed.

“Yes Mrs. Raleigh” the lawyer explained. “As well as ten thousand dollars each for their educations. Two thousand now, the rest subject to them going to college or when they turn thirty. All the rest of his cash goes to his favorite charity, that being the Salvation Army. Now, if you all will each sign here at the red X on your forms I will close out business, though there is an offer for your land.”

“How much” mom snapped. She struck like a cobra when it was money, money I knew she would find a way to steal from us so she could get to her beloved France and away from Nebraska.

“I’m sorry Mrs. Raleigh, but I cannot say until each person has signed their documents.”

I read mine carefully though before I signed it, intrigued my brothers stopped signing half way through to find out what their geeky sister was up to. I’d been burned before by a shady lawyer just after my husband died and had sworn that would never again happen. Eventually I looked up to see the lawyer staring at me. “No. I’m not selling” I said with steel in my voice. “If I sign this I agree to sell to this ranchers group, I bet everyone does.”

The lawyer sputtered. “But Miss Raleigh, its twenty-five dollars an acre. That is a fair price in todays market, why you would be getting five hundred dollars.”

“No. My section has grandaddys house on it. His workshop, barn, every building and that’s worth way more that five hundred dollars. Where is the real deed transfer forms?”

“Shut up and sign the paper” my mother snapped. I felt the world explode when she slapped me, barely rolling into a ball before I hit the floor. Standing up as fast as I could I let my anger flow through me, enjoying its taste. It had been a long time since I’d tasted anger and oh I was mad at that cheap blind side shot. My right cheek felt like it was on fire and I had my grandaddys temper plus nearly twenty years as a fighter in the SCA. That was something else in the future that was good my mind reminded me. As my mother advanced I decked her.

“You ever raise a hand to me again I’ll feed it too you” I growled as she lay on the floor at me feet. I don’t think she even saw the blow coming.

Dad was stunned again, completely flummoxed. I think my brothers couldn’t believe what they were seeing. This was completely out of their world experience and they didn’t know what to do. I could see it in dads face, it wasn’t anything like the subserving little daughter he had learned to expect.

Mom started to stand and I dropped her again. “When I say stand up, not until” I growled again as I stood from the drop strike, feeling my elbow complain about the hardness of her head. Looking at the lawyer, himself shocked, I again demanded the real papers. Oddly I noted that all the other half signed forms had vanished. Paul had an odd expression on his face though, sort of like the cat that ate the canary. “All of them.”

A hand grabbed my ankle, almost without thinking I slammed my other heel against a rather thin wrist and ground hard. Mom grunted and the hand vanished.

“Pumpkin” dad asked, there was fear in his voice but not for mother or himself. I could tell, I guess he thought that I had finally lost it, and he did remember his own fathers temper when someone tried to cheat him.

“Daddy... Moms been squirreling away our lunch money, every penny she could for the last eleven years” I told him, my anger still burning just below the surface. “Going without lunch is bad enough, cold cereal for breakfast and you know what supper is like. We’ve been afraid to tell you because we didn’t want a broken family and we knew that the costs would give us to mom. It’d just end up being worse.” I looked down at mom who was nursing a battered wrist. “I think its broken anyway you bitch, it should be. Mom has a secret lockbox at the bank, I know because I stumbled across her records book while getting dirty laundry from your bedroom. All those times you wondered why you couldn’t make enough to more than pay the bills and put cheap food on the table? That was mom shoveling cash into her secret stash. I think she wants to run away to France and never come back.”

“Listen young lady” dad started, only to shut up when I looked at him. Back in my fighting days more than one squire, and a couple of Knights had backed down when they had accidently angered me. My husband often said that getting me angry woke up a dragon, a really mean, nasty dragon. I’d seen grandaddy get mad once when a city boy had shot one of his cows and claimed it was a two point deer. I suppose I had the same look so dad shut up.

Nearly shaking the lawyer pulled out new forms. These dad carefully read, my dad wasn’t really stupid after all. It was just that having attended his own dearly loved fathers funeral had him off balance. I knew he’d been deeply in love with mom when I was eight, I guess that had faded over the years. Looking at mother and the hate filled look she was giving all of us I knew she certainly felt nothing for dad now. Dad though, he was a romantic. Or was once, I’m pretty certain that had passed away a long time ago just no one had noticed. Things were going to change and I did not want to be home when they did. I had the rest of this school year to finish high school then I was off to college.

“These are legit” Dad told me. He got up, giving my brothers their copies, dropping mine at my place then kneeling by mother. “Let her up” he whispered.

“If you can behave yourself like a good little spoiled brat harlot you can get up” I told mom. Dad helped her up, then to a chair in the corner. Mom was white as a sheet and looked scared to breath. Fine, that was perfect for me, I sat down, flipped through the pages then signed. When the lawyer had our forms he pulled out another sheet of paper.

“You figured out the first offer” he admitted. “Honestly I was certain you would want to sell, there are other offers but honestly, it is the best. After all your going back to Nebraska and taxes alone will eat you up.”

Paul looked towards Thomas, somehow they had always communicated without words. All my life I never did figure it out, I doubt I would this run through either. Looking at dad Paul cleared his throat. “We would like to sell” he said. “Five hundred is a lot of money.”

“Not really” I cut in. “You want to sell, how about I buy it from you then because I’m not selling. Dad?”

“I do need the money pumpkin” dad admitted. “It seem’s I’m going to have to get a divorce.”

“Okay then you three sell your shares to me, I pay you out of the cash Granddaddy left me and until I get out of college its my responsibility to pay the taxes. Deal?”

“Pumpkin, its like your someone else” my father asked. “But yes, it is a deal.”

“Its not the money dad its Grandaddys place” I explained. “Maybe some of moms goldigger ways are in me, or maybe I just realized that I want out of Nebraska myself and I think Grandaddys home would be perfect for me.”

So I became the proud owner of eighty acres of land due west of San Antonio Texas in Medina county, with a beautiful view of the man made lake. Mom. Well mom tried one last time to ‘put me in my place,’ this time with a baseball bat. That was the last time and I didn’t even leave a mark on her. Dad never really understood what had gone wrong between him and the woman he had fallen in love with and I lost him anyway when I was in college. Lost him to a heart attack. Mom? Oh mom stayed in San Antonio until she hooked up and ran off with some Air Force guy. We never heard from her again and Dad was heartbroken. I think that’s what really killed him but I had him almost four more years. I even made my brothers attend college, which was a good thing because the draft passed both of them by while they were studying. Then I sorta edged both of them into the Air Force as officers. No Vietnam for my brothers, then I was out on my own, without any debt either. You see, I had an ace.

An ace. Remember all those wildly popular television shows, movies and books between 1965 and 2020? Except for a few, like that magician boy from England, I stole a lot of them. I created Star Travels in the summer of 1964, releasing it as a book. Blatantly I stole it hook line and sinker character for character and the better plot lines before the original creator could write it. The same with a dozen or more stories by others that had become blockbuster movies. I didn’t feel good about it, but when the bills for my dreams started coming in I had to deal with it. Even so all those creators eventually came up with other things, a lot of them better ideas than the original. Financially stable I did move to Grandaddys acres but my nastiest deal was yet to come.

On July first, 1979 IBM brought out the 8088 processor and a year later the 801 and I would be ready. Only a computer geek would remember those dates, and truthfully I still was a computer geek even if I did study another subject for my major this time. Why get the same degree twice I thought. So in the fall of 1980 I was knocking on their door, well sitting in an office talking to a suit. I had spent two years writing programs for that little jewel from memory and now it was available, but I was known as a science fiction and fantasy author. Heck, I had eleven major films out and Star Travels had been running non-stop for almost eleven years but I wasn’t known as a programmer. My doctorate was in Astronomy (boy had I stunned them with my thesis.) Not only that my entire program library was typed on an IBM selectmatic. No one was ever going to listen to me but I had money, and I had the guts to use it. The guts, and a damned good lawyer.

“You want what Mam?”

“I want to build a home computer using your 801 chip” I explained again, noting that my lawyer was playing nice and keeping his mouth shut. He had no idea what I was up to anyway. “It will have a stand alone monitor or be able to use a standard television using a built in adaptor. Video will be sixteen color, I want a ten megabyte MFM hard drive and I want sixteen kilobytes of on board memory. Mass produced the base system should cost no more than one thousand dollars. Can do?”

“I’ll have to talk to the engineers Mam but this project could cost you millions and give you nothing but a toy to play with. No one is going to buy a computer for their home, and not many business’s will be able to afford it.”

I pulled out my red checkbook, not even glancing at the register since I knew how much was in this account to the penny. “How many millions” I asked. I absolutely love the poleaxed look of that full of himself suit faced with the impossible now wore.

Three days of legal wrangling later I had my project on the fast track. I was out almost two million dollars and would own outright whatever machine IBM came up with. Two million, so much more than the five hundred that lawyer had tried to pay me for twenty acres of land. Two million and the one person I hated most in the computer world was going to be slapped down forever.

Nine months later NEMESIS was ready. I’d rewritten the software as I found bugs and I’d approved the design. No massively wide ‘I’ll take all your desk space’ system this, it was a futuristic looking dull black mini-tower. There were spaces for third party boards and empty slots to take up to one megabyte of software supportable memory, if you were rich enough that was. More importantly it ran at a blistering fifteen megacycles a second while a quadruple line of red LED’s on the front flashed gaily telling the user it was running or locked up. I knew that some smart hacker would get those LED’s to make words, but they looked nice and helped the machine feel ultra high tech. Effectively the 8088 was now a dead duck, as well as certain budding software company. Built in Japan NEMESIS would sell for a whopping nine hundred dollars each. An extra two hundred would get you a thirteen inch color monitor made in America by Zenith. It came with a good easy to understand word processor, a data base program, accounting, two games and of all things a mouse. One game was for kids, one was more challenging and for adults. It also came with a very powerful BASIC programming language. One better even than the best available by 2000 in my original timeline.

In the meantime I was busy hitting the Convention circuits. No, not business, Science Fiction. I’d also made a point of being at a certain birthday party in California, one that had birthed a group to be known as the Society for Creative Anachronism where I met people the like I had never suspected in my first life. I made friends, enemies and managed to avoid a God complex only by reminding myself daily I had an edge over everyone else. I even finally stumbled across real love at one Convention.

Within two years NEMESIS was starting to hit the trash heap as DAGGER came out, then ARCTANGENT. Each was a faster system, each had more memory, better graphics and more storage area all for about the same cost. IBM was stunned when they realized what they had freely given away, especially when their engineers and software designers started leaving. For a while I was busy writing programs, raking in money and planning my next attack but I didn’t have the time to waste on that. That was what I needed the programmers for and have you ever seen what happens when you tell an engineer a specific project is all theirs? With no pointy headed suit looking over their shoulders, no cubical, just a budget, deadline and minimal requirements.

Now you see I really was bitten by the space bug in college. Bitten hard, which was why I had changed my Major from Mathematics to Astronomy. When the government finally shut down Apollo I was ready, picking up selected discarded equipment ‘for my personal museum.’ As my wealth reached unbelievable numbers I called in a bunch of newly laid off NASA scientists and engineers and gave them a proposal. Those that signed on were given a budget with all hush-hush need to know and since she isn’t paying your salary you don’t need to know.

By 1995 I discovered that I had to found a second and third company. So I ended up spinning the operating system programmers off to their own company and applications to another, never the twain should meet during business hours. That third company? Games, computer games. Three were a ton of third party games out there now, some darn good but they were still on the learning curve. I gave my new company a list of games and outlines as to how they would work. Stand alone, LAN games and mentioned the possibility of live first person shooter multi-player on-line games, then I let them take off on their own.

I made certain that I owned all three companies fully and none were on the stock market but I had as little to do with them as I could. The absolute only thing I ever laid out on paper, and was then cut in stone on every doorway, even the Janitors closet was this. “We play fair here or your fired.” A lot of people thought those words were for show until they were walked out to their cars carrying that dreaded cardboard box. Too late they learned otherwise because I made certain to employ a certain kind of spy in all my companies, a tad expensive, but in the end well worth it. That new employee? Was he or she really a new employee, or a spy watching to see that company policy was maintained. Those who were paying attention learned fast from the mistakes of others, the others learned what an unemployment office looked like from the inside.

In the popular millennium year of 2000 (it was really 2001 that was the millennium but newspapers will be newspapers) I was ready. Celebrating my fifty-forth birthday I announced Project Stardust. Yeah, I stole that name but what the heck, Project Stardust was nothing less than building both a moon base and a ship to visit every planet in the solar system as fast as could be done, all with off the shelf equipment. Strange, everything was already designed, the mockups built and tested and mass manufacturing was already in progress. In American factories.

You could have heard a mosquito land on a marshmallow when I announced that.

It only took three years to build SOLAR QUEEN in orbit, it was to be my interplanetary spacecraft. Three years and more launches than NASA had ever hoped to make on a government budget. Another year saw SELENE Station fully manned. With my own moon base and my own spaceship people now wondered what this crazy old lady was going to do next. I shocked them again when I stepped aboard my ship as Owner aboard. I’d sold everything I owned on Earth, putting the money into Project Stardust and at fifty eight years of age I was in space. On my birthday we lit the ion engines and left Earth orbit, I knew that I should have about thirty four years left to explore the solar system. Thirty four years with Cindy. When we were out of Earth orbit I had the Captain marry us, after all we’d been a couple since 1978 when I met her at a science fiction convention.

That hollowness? Cindy had filled it fully.

To hell with the Religious Right. I was in Heaven.