There Is Judith

This an alternate history piece where the point of departure is the appearance of a starship from the future. The accidental time travelers have no way to return home and thus must make do in the time they are in.

The basis of this piece was a dream I had featuring a the girl and in some industrial site.

There is Judith.

Judith is young woman with short blonde hair who’s in charge of the power plant at Port Stanley.  The plant has a thorium pebble core reactor and provides steam for running the generators and in turn for heating the town.  And we need the generators on the ground.  Even though we do test runs on the fusion power plant on the Endeavor and even take her up for a flight on occasion, we are dependent on ground power most of the time.

Judith was a girl we found in an American orphanage when we arrived on Earth about fourteen years ago.  She quickly  apprenticed with our engineering crew as they were building the power station for Port Stanley.  There were some idiots who objected to her being on the crew.  They were very quickly placed on the next boat back to London.  Port Stanley is our home now and we do everything our way.

Of course when the American authorities found out about how we did things our way they stopped allowing us to recruit people from their orphanages.  Any American who wants to join us has to go to our London office as an adult and sign up there.  And we found that adults are not as able to adapt to our way of life as orphan children are.  The British authorities do object to our ways but still allow us to recruit from their orphanages.  A deal is a deal. 

There are gentlemen who come to Port Stanley to learn about our technology -- or at least the tech that we allow the downtime people to learn.  Judith is now one of the instructors on nuclear fission technology.  But on occasion there is a moron who objects to receiving instruction from a woman.  We usually put his ass back on the boat to London.

By present Terrestrial standards Judith is considered to be a loose woman.  She begins by keeping her hair is a comfortable short style.  On duty at the power station she wears working men’s clothes with a white lab coat.  Off duty she dresses as a normal young Freyan woman.  Apart from her clearly American accent she is effectively indistinguishable from the rest of us.

Her attitude towards sexuality is effectively indistinguishable too.

We were both in attendance at an anniversary party for our landfall and I  was clearly stunned when she came onto me.

“Are you clean?”  She asked me.

I was initially dumbfounded.

“What?”  I replied.

She repeated the question with an explanation.

“Are you clean?  Do you have one of those awful sexually transmitted diseases the ship’s medics are always concerned about?”

Yes, of course I’m clean.”  I said.  “I came to Earth on the Endeavor, remember?”

Yes,” she said, “I just wanted to be sure.”

I nodded.

“I don’t blame you.”  I said.  “Are you coming on to me?”

“Yes, you don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all.”  I replied.

Yes, we got it on that night.  And we’ve been in a standing relationship since.

Live with it.