#51: Track Chair

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“Sam?” Shelby asked his foreman a week or so later during the lunch break.

“Yeah boy?” Sam replied then turned to look at Shelby. “ Oh...that’s NICE !”

Sam stepped back and cast an appreciative gaze at Shelby’s wheel chair. “I particularly like the tracks. That looks gnarly. What yah need?”

Shelby grinned. He was a bit proud of the design himself. The added tracks were the result of a lot of thought and surprisingly little actual effort or additional material. He DID have certain advantages though. Diamond sharp fingernails when needed and those very versatile blood-nanites for example. That helped. It made construction easy and tools unnecessary.

Shelby had constructed and attached a modern rubber band track from a snowmobile around each of the rear wheels of the antique wheelchair and added smaller boogie wheels that he had affixed to swing frames. Naturally the boogies were compressed to keep the track tensioned. Currently the frames, and thus the tracks, were vertical. Only the larger round portion of the tracks were touching the ground. His wheelchair had a shorter footprint that way, the same wheelbase as standard. In this configuration the bogies were about shoulder height. The frames were raised and lowered by a lever. When the frame was lowered and the boogies were in the trailing configuration they would act as wheelie bars, keeping him from flipping over backwards, as well as providing traction. He’d also made a set of roll bars that went over his head, just in case.

When deployed the longer track footprint provided a lot of traction and bridged gaps with ease. The front swivel wheels had also been reconfigured with a track/boogie arrangement such that when they encountered an obstacle they tended to go up and over rather than ‘bump’ to a stop. They would crawl right over a curb or stair-step with very little extra effort from Shelby. With the main track horizontal to the ground Shelby could propel himself up a flight of stairs without flipping over backwards.

Perhaps only Shelby was strong enough to use the track function manually. When Shelby had almost been crushed to death at the bottom of a temple basement in Cu Chi the voice had boosted his strength to an amazing degree. Shelby felt no need to tell anyone about that minor detail. Everyone knew he was strong, no one needed to know just how strong or why.

He might consider adding a motor, maybe. SoulStone tech could make some marvelous batteries and electric power units. Perhaps one day. For now this was sufficient.

“Who owns this place.” Elvira asked. She was sitting in her own little compartment centerline on the roll cage directly over Shelby’s head.

Shelby thought it spoke volumes that Sam didn’t even bat an eye at the dragon yet he was excited by the tank-chair. By now Sam was used to the little animatronic dragon that supplemented Shelby’s talking. He thought it was cute. He thought Shelby was throwing his voice and that the dragon was a puppet, like Charlie McCarthy, Miss Piggy, LambChops, or Ahmed the Dead Terrorist.

He also thought Shelby was nukin FUTZ... a genius, harmless and very skilled.

“I don’t rightly know boy.” he said after thinking about it for a few minutes. “I don’t know if anyone claims it. It might have just been abandoned a few years back when the big corporations started leaving the country.

“I hear the company that had owned it moved to South East Asia.” He muttered.

Shelby thought about that for a minute. He’d fought in Cambodia,... and Laos... and almost died in Vietnam. That was in South East Asia. Ironic wasn’t it?

Sam looked up from eating his sandwich and gazed at Shelby. Sam was pretty sure he knew what Shelby was thinking. Sam had thought the same thing a lot of times himself over the years. It all ended up in one word.

That word was ‘Why?’

He went back to eating.

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The Next Episode is
#51: Track Chair
The Previous Episode was
#50: Another Day at the Salt Mine.
the First episode was
#1 : Prologue

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@everittdmickey
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