Leon Winkler was beginning to be depressed. Beginning HELL. He’d been depressed, disillusioned, and despondent since high school. It was a cruel world out here and he was unequipped to cope with it. Public School had done him no favors. If it hadn’t been for his video games, that his parents and relatives had given him for various christmas and birthdays he wouldn’t know squat.
Game computers, which is what they’d given him, would have qualified as super-computers a decade back. Surfing the internet with was was no problem. Surfing the internet was how he found his games.
He found them on the darknet using TOR. Some of the games would make a Butcher cringe (they were THAT gory) some would make a lady of the night blush...they were THAT realistic.
He lived in his parents basement.
He didn’t mind it too much. He had the internet after all. It was wearing on him though. He was thirty years old and couldn’t find a job. His future prospects didn’t look good at all good. Automation had taken everything that didn’t require a PhD.
One night, after winning a game of
he happened upon a help wanted ad.
GAMERS!
Huh?
He was an expert at tank games, especially super-tech simulators. He’d been doing nothing else for the last decade or so. When he was awake he was online.
What the hell? He might as well apply. The worst they could do was tell him no.
Well what do you know? He was accepted. Not only that but AlCoLu sent him a new gaming console....er...teleoperation console. He’d just finished setting it up and everything. He was good to go.
His online supervisor had explained to him before he set up the unit that this one was cutting edge. It incorporated a neural lace that was lightyears better than the previous HUDS that he’d been using to game with.

That done. It was time to get to work mining.
Leon had found his niche. He made decent, actually excellent, money with no expenses. After a while he earned enough move out of his parent’s basement and find his on place. Oddly enough he didn’t find a girlfriend. He’d been scared off by the Feminazis so he avoid women like the plauge. He thought they were too dangerous. He might accidently offend one then he’d be in deep doo-doo. The courts and the just-us system favored women he thought. He relieved his sexual tension, how else?
On line is how.
Leon was happy. He worked, he played, he pretty much spent the remainder of his life on line. Unfortunately he eventually got old. He’d worked long enough, and saved enough money that he had an adequate retirement fund. He decided that he’d had enough of earth.
He was going to the moon.
The moon had a number of advantages to earth. For one thing, very important to elderly people, was the low gravity. On the moon, the 240 pound Leon would weigh just 1/6 as much. That would certainly relieve backstrain.
So he booked passage to the moon.
No rockets....that would be MUCH too much strain on his aging body. He’d take the an airship to orbit. He boarded the airship at the launch facility in Texas then floated leisurely to dark-sky station..floating on top of the atmosphere of earth. It was in many ways similar to the floating cities of venus.
When he arrived he took in the sights then went to his room at the ‘Hotel in the Sky’. His connecting skyhook wasn’t until the next day. It brought back fond memories of his gaming days, except that this time it was for real.
That went well. He’d been slung from one orbit to another, increasingly further from the ground until he was released one last time...for the trip to the moon. All without the expenditure of any rocket fuel. Just slingshot to slingshot.
After a few days in space he reached the vicinity of the moon. Then he did it backwards. Skyhook from space to the surface. There WAS no darksky station this time. The moon has no air. Orbit to surface, no intermediaries.
That was fun. But now he was at his destination. Tycho Under would be his new home.
