For security reasons, the following segment and all other italicized passages in the transcript of this holog were excised for security reasons by the crew of the Veritas from their original holocoms in 2078. They were restored some 25 years later when the voyages of the Veritas no longer needed to be kept secret due to the significant changes that took place in world government in 2102.
It's still me, Uncas,
Now let’s see how my boss, Joe Tanaka, reacts to my resigning. As you can see, there’s very little visible above ground here in the ice factory. All the ice is kept in huge underground, super-insulated storage areas. Here’s the door to the main shed. I’m going to just slip on these insulated freezer duds. Now, we go through a series of halls and stairways, each guarded by small, insulated enclosures that minimize heat loss as people walk through. See, after we open and close the heavy insulated sliding door into this compartment, we have to wait a few minutes to let the solar-powered heat pump/humidifier replace any water vapor we may have let out and extract any heat we may have let in.
O.K. Now we can open this next sliding door and move into this hallway. Jeeze, I hope Joe isn’t too far down. I’ve lost some of my cold-resistance the two weeks I’ve been gone and I don’t have my usual layers on, so I’m feeling the cold.
Great! I see a light on in the next hallway. Joe must be in there. None too soon. I’m freezing. Let’s look through this peephole. Sure enough, there’s Joe and he’s got a peephole open to one of the storage bins, checking the height of the ice in it to see how much is left and how much has been lost to melting and evaporation. O.K. Here goes.
“Hey, Joe. What’s happenin,’ man?
“Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here today? You’re not supposed to be back until Tuesday.”
“Always glad to see me, aren’t you, Joe?”
“Aww, it’s not that… I’m in a pretty foul mood, I guess. The inventory’s got me pretty worried. I don’t think we’re gonna’ make it this year. Hate to do it, but we may have to import.”
“Gee, that’s a shame, Joe. Where you gonna’ import from?”
“Not sure. Gotta’ get on the holosphere and find out where there might be excess inventory. I hope it doesn’t have to be from too far away. The further it has to go, the more it’ll cost and the more we’ll lose in transit. I heard they had a pretty long winter and relatively cool summer up in New Foundland. Maybe I can get some from there. They can probably use the money.”
“Well, good luck, Joe. Uhm…what I mean is… uhm… the reason I came in today was to tell you I’m quitting... I’m not coming back next week.”
“Well, I’ll be… what’s the story? You getting’ married and heading back to the valley or something?”
When Joe said this, I wished Grey-Gramma and I had thought of that as a reason. It seemed so simple! But, as she pointed out to me later, it was too simple and could too easily fall apart. What if Joe or any of my friends wanted to come to my wedding or happened to come down to the valley to visit me and my wife…well, luckily I had decided to stick with our original story even though it was more complicated.
“Naw, Joe. I still haven’t found me a wife, But, maybe I've got something even better: a job down in New York City, a real good job.”
“You mean, you’re going to live in the lower 10? That’ll be quite a change! How’d you swing it? I didn’t think the new US of A was letting foreigners take jobs.”
“Well, my grandfather actually arranged it. He’s still got contacts down there from when he went to Medical School in Massachusetts before the Great Change. Anyway, he was able to convince them that, as a country boy, I’ve got some special skills they need in the Big City. Seems like they’ve been having a peck of trouble with country kids running away to the City and then getting into all kinds of trouble. So, they’re trying to put together a team of kind of undercover agents who’ll infiltrate and maybe turn these kids’ heads around, get them to go home. Well, they’re reluctant to use country people from the region— Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey— because they might be known by the kids to be straight arrows who can’t be trusted. So, anyway, it seems like I’ll be going underground for the next few years.”
“Wow, sounds like it could be dangerous. Pay good?”
“Yeah, pay’s great! And, as for danger, you know I kinda’ crave it… always have. Besides, maybe I’ll meet one of them hot country babes from down country and I’ll finally get me a wife. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you it’s Sayonara, Baby.”
“O.K., thanks for letting me know. Some of them up there would just disappear and leave me to figure out they’d quit. But, I always knew I could count on you being straight with me. Good luck in your new career, Mr. 007.”
“Thanks, but I’m not going to be a spy, just an undercover psych agent.”
“Whatever. See ya, bud!”
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