ten year sentence part 5

ten year sentence part 5

fiction
edward w pritchard

I have been having lucid reoccurring dreams about Pompeii back on earth and how Mount Vesuvius destroyed the towns around the volcano in 79AD. I think the dreams our prophetic. They had aqueducts back in Roman Italy that supported life in waterless places and allowed Pompeii and the other towns around the bay of Neapolis to grow to large populations. The dreams started after Poj introduced me to speculating on the water futures here. There is an incredible amount of money to be made and information about water prospects here is very valuable. Of course its illegal for us workers to trade on inside information, but many do including Poj. The dreams i am having are, I think, my internal conflict caused by the money to be made versus following the rules.

There are lots and lots of new people coming to Io. Prices are skyrocketing and my salary is not keeping up with price increases here. The other crew members have been subsidizing me. They buy lots of the food we eat which is very expensive because they try to have non processed items, extremely difficult in space, even just back on the earth's moon. I haven't been saving money having forgotten about Sharon more or less. I had a date of sorts with Lalie. She read to me from the Upandishads in ancient hindu and then translated into English, and I wrote a blues song about it. She says that intelligence of the type she has is common but I have a talent for originality which is uncoventional. She wore blue jeans and a sweat shirt on our date and I think I like her better in that than in her colorful clothes, but thats too close to call.

Work here is awful. It's cut throat and the regulations cannot be met collectively but individually now and then someone has to take a fall to maintain the illusion of order and stability. The water project is generating an incredible amount of speculative interest back on earth. There are lots of Wall Street business types looking around while we work in the field. Some guys from the commodity exchanges in Chicago gave me some pizza from home when they learned I was from Chicago. Man that was good. I was offered $250 for a slice at the poker game but I shared it with our crew instead and ate the other whole piece myself.

These dreams about Roman Pompeii are interesting. I think I am intuiting things I have never heard of or read. Pompeii according to my dreams was a hot bed of business speculation and corruption just before the erruption in 79AD. I see in my dreams things in Pompeii that are similar to here. The water project and the aqueducts are parellels and the erruption of the volcano and the suffering it caused might have a prophetic interpetation here.

Poj has been smuggling information back to earth in the programming about the water projects that he compiles for the company. Apparently the water project is so valuable because we are the prototype for all future space stations and some intangible value from each future project throughout the solar system must be factored into our possible outcomes. I have a lot to learn and I have been skipping sleep and reading and studying to educate myself. Skipping sleep also cuts down on the dreams which are quite disturbing.

end part 5