Arthur Fidge felt a faint buzz radiating from his left wrist. His first instinct was to sleep through it, but the longer he ignored it, the more intense the buzz became until it felt as if someone was shaking him by the wrist. Finally, the intensity was enough to wake him, and Arthur lifted his left wrist towards his face and slide his right thumb down the middle of the haptic comband wrapped around his wrist to deactivate the alarm. He then reached his left arm up and across the bed, expecting it to bump into Ada, his wife, but he felt only flat, empty blankets. Startled, Arthur opened his eyes and he was suddenly aware he was back in his spartanly decorated studio on Koss, alone.
By degrees, Arthur hoisted himself off his bed and moved across the room to a set of floor-to-ceiling windows, which were electronically tinted, giving the impression it was dark outside. Although Koss was quite far from the star, Arcturus, – hence the solar light reaching the surface was somewhat muted even during daylight hours – the atmosphere of Koss was composed of a dense layer of mixed gases that, due varying pressure from strong lunar tidal forces, emitted a constant phosphorescent glow.
Koss City, the primary commercial and residential hub on the planet, was composed of a cluster of platforms that hovered at a geostationary point on the very outer the edge of the planet’s atmosphere. Arthur’s studio was on 6th floor of an apartment complex in a resi district at the edge of Koss City, giving him a great view overlooking the vast radiant atmosphere.
Arthur used a panel to the left of the windows to deactivate the tint, revealing a vibrant swirl of intermixing shades of rich blues, pierced by a luminous white streak. From space Koss looked like a brilliant blue star sapphire floating in the abyss. From Arthur’s atmospheric perspective, the dominating blue and white was occasionally disrupted by eruptions of purple and green gases, highlighted by streaks of brilliant yellow and orange, which gave away the presence of the planet’s high energy and rich diversity of elements hidden in its depths. Arthur gazed out over the technicolor sea and began to mentally compose himself for the day.
It was his first day back from a 2-week vacation with his wife and twelve and eight-year old children, Clark and Astrid, on Honos.
Honos had been a wonderful trip. He and his family had stayed at one of Honos’s premier luxury beach resorts. He spent days with his children on the beach or swimming in the warm calm ocean, and he spent evenings sampling the extraordinary offering of restaurants and bars throughout the city, or gambling in one of the iconic casinos. The trip had been divine.
Well, mostly divine. The only black mark had been at the very end, when Ada, perhaps bored by leisure that that point, had decided to rehash an old painful fight about Arthur’s commitment to his work.
How dare she? Arthur thought to himself. She doesn’t complain when she’s spending our money. Spending MY money, really, and faster than I can earn it. Has she become so disconnected with reality that she thinks I could provide this lifestyle for her without having worked like a dog to become a titan of industry? And at only 39! How dare she, that ungrateful…
Arthur suddenly felt a wave of guilt radiating from his gut. He knew was being too hard on Ada, his loving wife and most trusted companion for 14 years. More, she had given him two beautiful children, the absolute joys of his life. Sure, she gave him a hard time for working too much and not spending enough time with Clark and Astrid, but could he really blame her?
When they got married, Arthur had been a freshly minted junior director at his father’s mining services and maintenance business, Fidge & Co. In this role, Arthur worked reasonable hours and being principally responsible for client relationship management, was able to work out of Fidge & Co.’s New Victoiria office on the fringe of the Koss moon’s bustling capitol city, Arma. Arthur had not been rich, by any stretch, but his income combined with Ada’s income as a civil engineer in the Office of New Victoria’s Municipal Governor, provided the young couple a lifestyle with which they were both content.
Arthur’s father, Jost Fidge, was a humble and honorable man who believed there were no shortcuts in life. He built Fidge & Co. over 30 years from nothing into a thriving business with 33 employees primarily providing maintenance work to the three large mining corporations on Koss. Jost was only modestly ambitious, and to him, strong relationships with his family, employees and clients were more important than material wealth.
When Arthur was only 28, his father died unexpectedly while servicing a harvesting rig. Strauss Dampeners, which protected the rig’s crew and equipment from the extreme pressure and temperature fluctuations in Koss’s lower atmosphere, failed. The dampeners were weakened only for a moment before the back up systems turned on, but a moment in the hostile lower stratos is all it took to extinguish his father’s existence.
Until that point, Arthur had not expected or endeavored to be at the helm of Fidge & Co., but his father’s untimely death had awakened something in Arthur. His desire to honor his father’s legacy made Arthur dive headfirst into the role of President of Fidge & Co.
Later in his life, Arthur would look back to the events of the harvesting rig accident and think about how much pain that one fatal moment had caused. Not just for himself, but for his family and the family of the men and women he would come to kill.