Fuzzy Nation Read Online Free

cockpit.
    Holloway clicked his infopanel back into its cradle and looked down at his skimmer instrument panel. The skimmer was moving along at a leisurely eighty kilometers an hour, a safe speed in the jungle, in which birds were liable to burst out of the trees and smash themselves into the vehicle. Home was another twenty klicks out; Holloway knew that without checking the GPS data because he could see Mount Isabel off to his right. The hill’s eastern face was chewed away and the four square klicks in front of it fenced off and stripped bare of vegetation where ZaraCorp was doing what it euphemistically called “Smart Mining”—strip-mining but with an ostensible commitment to minimizing toxic impact and to restoring the area to its pristine state when the mining operations ceased.
    At the time ZaraCorp started mining Mount Isabel, Holloway had idly wondered how an area could be restored to a pristine state once ZaraCorp had mined everything of value out of it, but this was not the same thing as him exhibiting actual concern. He’d been the one who did the original survey of Mount Isabel; the small sunstone patch that first drew his attention was exhausted in a matter of weeks, but the mount was a good source of anthracite coal, and the relatively rare rockwood tree grew on the mount and down its sides toward the river. He’d gotten his quarter of a percent out of the find—a decent-enough sum—and had moved on.
    Holloway’s critical eye guessed that Mount Isabel had another year or two left in her before she was mined down to a molehill, at which time ZaraCorp would airlift out its equipment and drop in a clutch of terrified summer interns, who would hurriedly strew bags of rockwood seeds on the ground—this counted as “restoring the area to a pristine state”—and who would also pray that the fence winding around the perimeter of the mining area held up while they did it.
    The fences usually held. It was rare these days to lose an intern to a zararaptor. But fear was a fine motivator.
    A loud crash came out of the infopanel. Whoever was in Holloway’s house just dropped something breakable. Holloway swore and pressed the button that would enclose the skimmer cockpit, and then opened the throttle. They’d be home in five minutes; the birds in the treetops would just have to take their chances.
    *   *   *
    As the skimmer approached his home, Holloway dropped it into CONSERVE mode, which dropped its speed significantly but also made the skimmer almost silent. He stop-hovered the craft a klick out and reached for his binoculars.
    Holloway’s house was a tree house—or more accurately, a platform anchored across several very tall spikewoods, on the edges of which stood the modest prefabricated cabin that was his living quarters, and the two sheds in which Holloway kept his surveying and prospecting supplies. Power was supplied by solar panels held aloft by a turbine kite, connected to the compound’s power plant, on which was also attached Holloway’s moisture collector and waste incinerator. In the center of the platform was a parking space, with enough room for Holloway’s skimmer and one other craft, provided it was small.
    It was that space Holloway was looking at. It was empty.
    Holloway relaxed a little. The only easy way into Holloway’s compound was by skimmer. It was possible that someone could have approached by foot and then climbed up, but that person would’ve had to be either very lucky or very confident. The jungle floor belonged to zararaptors and the local versions of pythons and alligators, any of which looked at the soft and slow human animal as an easy-to-catch, easy-to-eat snack. Holloway lived in the trees because all the big predators were on the ground, save the pythons, and they didn’t like spikewoods for reasons the name of the tree made obvious. The spikewoods also made climbing them a challenge if one were taller than half a meter, which any human would