Adelaide had been trying to avoid it, trying to escape the inevitable, but there was no more delaying it. She just had to take a deep breath and come to terms with what she had always known.
She was going to buy something expensive.
It hadn’t even been her idea to return to the Top Drawer. Ray had suggested it, to see if there were supplies that she wanted in light of their first voyage. They didn’t know how much money they had raised exactly, but it should be more than a few Weeks, all told. And while it made sense to save most of it, it wasn’t unreasonable to make a few new purchases.
Adelaide wasn’t sure if he’d anticipated how unable she’d be to restrain herself. The fact that he’d left her alone suggested otherwise. Because now she was seriously looking at a drone. She was comparison shopping between different drone brands. She was thinking up reasons to buy two drones.
She hadn’t come in thinking about drones, even. She had had a plan to move deliberately between specific targeted areas, and then she had been immediately distracted by a display of different binoculars and telescopes. She was realizing that Captain Mattson’s model was actually a few years old and not nearly as fancy as they could get, and she had been looking at which one to buy when she’d seen an adjacent display of desalination tools that promised not only to remove salt but also all other possible contaminants. She didn’t really understand how that was even possible, and maybe it wasn’t — some of these also apparently carbonated and flavored water, so maybe they weren’t targeting the most hardened travelers.
And on and on. It was funny, Adelaide hadn’t thought of herself as especially materialist before. She’d never really gone for expensive brands or dreamed about some sports car. She’d bought nice laptops for class, but never indulged in anything where the keyboard glowed different colors even if she sort of thought that sounded cool. She wasn’t an ascetic or anything, but she’d never been a particularly notable spender, not that she’d had the money to find out.
But this evoked the way she had felt as a kid. Not just in the obvious “kid in a candy store” way, but in the sense that these items all appealed to her because of the possibilities they evoked. She remembered feeling like, if she could just get a certain bicycle, she’d be able to ride into town. Or if she got the ice cream truck playset, her American Girl doll would really be able to take off economically. Or if she got a chemistry set, she’d be able to invent something really brilliant and skip middle school altogether.
Ray snapped her out of her reverie, saying, “I thought we discussed these drones last time.”
Adelaide nearly blushed. “I don’t think it’s crazy! Look, we spent that whole trip going to dangerous places. I don’t know that future Nodes will be in dangerous locations, but there’s every chance they will be. Why should we be doing all of that ourselves when we could use one of these?”
Ray considered that. “Well, you know better than me, Professor. But isn’t there some really fancy thing you use that goes bing when you get to whatever place you’re going?”
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“Yes, that’s exactly how I would have put it.”
“And you’re going to strap your fancy thing to a drone? And then send it somewhere dangerous? Do you have another fancy bing thing if the first one falls in a whole or gets eaten by a lizard or whatever?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, it seemed expensive to me.”
“Ok, that’s fair. But, even if we still have to go ourselves, think about the scouting! I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to know what we’re getting into in advance for once?”
Ray nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good point. And it’s not a bad plan, although there are some other ways to do that that might be less ridiculously expensive. We can do that, if that’s what you want to prioritize.”
Adelaide was glad not to have been shut down entirely before she remembered that she was in charge and could do any dumb thing she wanted, technically. But she felt silly about having forgotten that, so any inflated sense of self worth was short lived.
She decided to take Ray’s hint. “What other priorities are you imagining?”
“I can think of two. First, more advanced survival techniques. We have things for normal voyages, but normal voyages mostly just avoid especially dangerous places, unless it’s a Suicide Cruise or something. But your little science map is going to pull us places I wouldn’t normally expect us to go. So we should think about buying some things that let us travel or camp more safely.”
“You want to go back and buy a katana from the lastplace?”
“Hilarious. No, I am thinking about clothing and tents that can handle more temperatures or conditions, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah, I mean, if you’re saying our lives depend on it…”
“I’m not — we can leave or avoid places that seem too rough. And I’ll use my Prerogative to make sure we do. But that’s less bings for your science machine.”
“What’s the other idea?”
“We can invest in tools that help us make more from the places we visit. We don’t really have mining equipment, for example. We’re never going to be a commercial operation, but we could invest in some way to take advantage if we come across some obvious gold vein or whatever. Or they have these all-terrain luggage train things that let you carry more with you. We could buy one and carry more back with us when we wander off into some jungle.”
“Hmm, I see what you mean.”
“Or we can save it. Have more flexibility the next time we come here.”
Myrna’s voice came from behind a nearby shelf. “Nope, saving it is illegal, you have to buy something.”
Ray banged the shelf she’d been hiding behind. “Buzz off, Myrna. We know you’d sell us some sort of flying spoon for a Month and a half.”
Myrna laughed as she walked towards the door, where a new customer had just entered.
“Look, we can think about it,” Ray said. “No wrong choices, just different approaches.”
Adelaide smiled at that, but she knew the way their next trip could change based on what she chose.