When Pam Rakai convinces her husband Jack to write an article for the ‘My Job’ section of The Modern Earth Woman’s Weekly, he starts to keep a record of their day to day life. A franchise holder from the Inter-Galactic Vending Machine Company, Jack’s daily routine is not usually glamorous or exciting. He and Pam, along with their three children and sundry alien pets, travel to various spaceports and refuelling stations to service and restock the company’s massive vending machines. In the process, they encounter aliens from many of the 739 species of intelligent civilised life who make up the Conglomerate that Earth joined 114 years earlier. Their next call is to the Afgfun Seven spaceport to deliver supplies that the company hope will defuse a miners’ sit-in. It’s a trip Jack is dreading as he’s not confident that he can safely navigate their new spaceship through the asteroid field that surrounds the spaceport. The perilous journey is just the first of the unexpected hazards that lie in store as he and his family get caught up in a dangerously escalating situation. Jack and Pam must protect their family, keep their employer happy, deal with some very unsavoury characters (alien and human alike) — and remember to keep a log for the readers back home. Written as Jack’s personal log of what happened on Afgfun Seven, Franchise is the first in a series of logged events from the crew of the spaceship Cornucopia.
