WIP: Psychedelic Sam's Boogy Across the Cosmos

 Psychedelic Sam’s Boogie Across the Cosmos

I
Captains Log: Stardate 804-2

Shit, here we go again

No matter how many times I sit in front of these controls, going over every single decision that led me back in front of this console, I never feel any better about it. Always the same mix of disbelief that Im about to go back up past the heavens, nervous about the possibility that it will be my last trip, and dread at the feeling that it probably won’t be. With an exhale which might have achieved lift if I was facing the right way, I cross my arms and fall back into the pilots seat as I take in again the cockpit which has served as my cocoon every day of my working life.

I can see on the display built into the glass canopy that my preflight checks are being conducted once again. As usual there’s a few warning messages about parts being out of service and needing to be replaced but I quickly clear those out of the way.

If I had the money to fix all these things I wouldn’t have to work so much.

A thousand years ago, all these pre flight checks would have taken a team of hundreds of people considered advanced and intelligent for their time, but now its nothing more than time for an academy dropout can sit and drink their morning coffee.

The screen on the canopy tells me most of what I need to know to do my job, but the rest of the cockpit isn’t without its uses. There’s a cup holder in the center console capable of keeping a cup of galactic coffee warmed to the perfect temperature for a voyage of up to 600 miles. There’s also quite a few indicator lights which are supposed to report different conditions of parts on the ship but most of them had been broken since the day I bought this piece of junk.

What a day that was. When I first laid eyes on this hunk of scrap metal I saw a ticket off of this rock. A vessel which could propel me away from the failure and judgment of my upbringing and into the heavenly world of cosmic possibilities.

Sitting here now, looking at the walls of the ship, its clear that this has always been a prison for me. Now that I have this ship, I have a function. And in our society, anything with a fuction serves its function until it can’t serve its function anymore. The distance between the people doing the work and the people making the money means that the the kings of galactic capitalism are seen as the philanthropists of our time, providing work which “allows” others to live.

To “earn” my dinner tonight I’m heading out to …… Mercury I guess, to try and finish a survey of an abandoned mine shaft. Those off world fuck sticks who hired me would seriously rather pay someone to go into each and every single one of these mine shafts and make sure there’s no more money to be made rather than lie awake in their levitating beds of platinum and pearl sweating over those terrible words “lost profit.”

Finally it seems as though everything is in place. There’s the waiver again,

“Congratulations on earning this Blue Dream surveying contract!
 We are counting on you to make sure that all previously opened
 Plutonium mines are now safe for wayward explorers
 Please note that launching this vehicle constitutes an
 Understanding and compliance with the Blue Dream Pipe Dream tm
 Surveying contract which places no liability to Blue Dream, its employees
 owners, or investors for actions which take place outside of our atmosphere
 Thank you for being part of the solution! “

Fine yes accept whatever lets get going,

Thrusting the throttle forward into launch, I could hear the personal nuclear reactor pulsating away. Apart from the exposure risk of going into the mines themselves, I know I’m too close to that reactor while flying to pass a radiation proximity test established in this century. But it was either keep exposing myself to this junk and die of radiation poisoning before I reached 100, or not work and die by the time I reached Sunday. I complain all the time that there should be more ways to make money on earth but the political and social eye of care left this planet long ago. And besides im just one man amongst a galaxy of indifference.

So thanks grandfather clause, guess I can fly under the radar long enough to work today.

Suddenly a ding from the back of the ship signified that my potentiometer was full and I was ready for take off. Suddenly I found myself gazing past the canopy display and up into the clouds. People in the second millennium literally killed and threw their entire civilization in jeopardy to achieve space flight, and now that triumph has been reduced to a mundane chore. The consuming nature of time.

My mind’s eye snapped back from the land of depression behind my eyelids to the console as I saw that the ignition button was glowing. Even the unnamed ship itself was yelling at me to get going.

I suppose most ships have names, but honestly nothing memorable enough has happened here to deserve a name.

Anyway, in compliance with the nameless hunk, I dragged my finger from my coffee cup over top the launch button and let it hover there for a moment. On a technical level this is a choice, really though I can’t avoid doing this anymore than the earth can avoid being crushed under the weight of first wave industrialization. Nonetheless, I repressed the button into the worn out chunk of a console and blasted off.

The air outside the ship cracked in two as the reactor finally released all of its potential energy to rocket me into space. Even the take off from a pedestrian ship like this smashed the sound barrier clear in half and sent a shockwave of wind and baren dust which rippled outward for miles. No wonder earth children don’t like to play outside anymore. Play died out with the green dream of earth.

II

The heavens rush past my canopy in a blue blur before suddenly faded into nothing; a blue swash of paint quickly drowned out in the ocean of black that is open space.

Plunging into the blackness of space always takes my breath away. Not in the way you hope a beautiful person will one day, more in the way a bad exam grade robs you of air. The way the sudden shift in reality makes you question where you ever truly belonged in the universe. I suppose my answer is that I never did, so I got used to getting bad grades pretty quickly.

However, after the initial shock does its dance of anxiety and excitement inside my head, the the black expanse dulls into a meaningless endless stretch of distance to cover. Once im actually moving it takes on all the luster of the poisons black ribbons which are draped wholly over the blue marble to this day. What is it called again? I remember the day I got this question wrong on an academy exam but not what the answer is (so typical).
 
Aerosol? No

ASPHALT

Yeah asphalt. In itself a marvelous canvas for travel and adventure, now a mundane blob waiting to be trodden over to get people and things where someone convinced them they needed to be. Space is no different now, a simple empty black void which serves as the negative space between the enthralling world of the outer colonies. Hope you’re not picking up this log to learn about the expeditions on Titan because my test scores were not nearly high enough to qualify for that stuff. Much to my parents’ chagrin.

As I round the top of earth to get a better shot at Mercury, I had to put down the visor on the ship to stop the glare from the suns rays from blinding me. The glass on the canopy was supposed to refract the light enough to stop it from causing blindness all on its own but I’m not sure if I trust it with my eyes, satan knows I don’t have enough for implants.

Flying with the visor down also has the bonus effect of disguising the moving lights of the insects of space traffic lurking our there amongst the stars. I don’t know what makes it so difficult for me sympathize with these people who are likely my peers, all I know is that I hate each and every single fucking one of them.  

With another huge sigh (I really should put a potentiometer in front of my face) I lull my eyes over to the all knowing console to see if the all knowing console needs anything.

Wait

What

I shoot forward in my chair, the laziness of my previous movements a distance memory

One of the retro thrusters which helped fight against the pull of the sun wasn’t firing. I expand the warning section on the console and observe with horror a series of warnings indicating that not all power couplings had successfully connected. I normally see this error once or twice a flight when power won’t come to my coffee maker or something but inscribed in front of me now is a giant list of them, somehow the abundance of the warnings themselves didn’t seem to warrant a full blown error message to the computer.

The computer may not be freaking out but I sure as hell am.

SHIT

Without those retro thrusters Mercury is gonna shoot right past me, Im going way too fast to be catch its orbit.

FUCK

There’s literally nothing I can do. My retro thrusters are shot and there’s no other force which can keep me from sailing past Mercury and into.

Intoooo.

Oh no

Into the white hot ball of life and death that’s been keeping our weekly solar system trudging along these last few millennium!

Fantastic

I wonder if the rest of the galaxy will weep when our system implodes in on itself. I know some systems are morned by the Milky Way at large but Im not sure if noble Solarus home of earth is going to make that cut.

Fuck I wonder if anyone’s going to notice that I’m gone. I suppose there won’t be anyone to feed Lucy. Hopefully one of the neighbors pops over to borrow something in the next month and they find her before she starves. That dog deserves a better fate than death. Truth be told she deserves a better owner than me, but it doesn’t look like either of them are going to happen.

“Oh well” I sighed as I leaned back in my coffin, trying to put even a few more inches between me and the white hot ball of life which I was hurtling towards in a horrible eagles dive of death “She wouldn’t have liked it out in the badlands of earth anyway. Nothing green to graze and even less meat to eat.” Despite all this I can’t help but feel a pang of self loathing dwelling on how she would never know that I had died. For all that poor creature will ever know I might have totally forgotten about her and traveled on to other stars. Maybe my concern sounds crazy but Lucy and I connected on some deep emotional level. Maybe because she was short a leg and I had gone my whole life feeling like I was short a brain. Two broken pieces which fit no puzzle. And now I was breaking off even from her.

I guess I should also feel bad about my own death. If anyone else was listening I guess it might seem weird that I haven’t brought it up yet. Its not that I’m not afraid of death, I had always been scared when my mind turned suicidal in my younger years, but suicide was something I considered for a long time much (once again) to my parents chagrin. Its not that I don’t value my own life (they liked to use the phrase “ungrateful” a lot), but living this constant existence of not being good enough for the things I tried and never feeling like I was putting my efforts into the correct thing has left me feeling far two worn down for someone still in their “prime.”

So I suppose I float towards the sun with a little sympathy for the loving creature I leave behind, a little fear at how much hotter I can possibly feel (holy shit I didn’t even know it was possible to sweat there at all but I am POURING everywhere), and a whole lot of indifference for the “life” of resource mining I’m escaping.

Take me now, Satan

At least someone wants me.

III

Fuck

My feeling of defiant indifference didn’t last long

Never does, not long enough to graduate from the academy and not long enough to burn up. I am seriously sweating out of every single pore on my entire body, this fleshy prison which all my life has felt nothing but cold neglect swims with white hot searing sensory overload. I don’t feel like Im burning I feel like Im boiling from the inside out. I can feel the blood which normally only drips out of me during lonely nights on the bathroom floor suddenly jumping around inside like a feverish surge of excitement at the kind of party I never attended.

Shit fuck okay I need to do something about this

Aaaaaa

….


Aaaaaaaaaaa.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck man WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO

IVE GONE MY WHOLE LIFE STRUGGLING TO EVEN WANT TO MOVE AND NOW IT FEELS LIKE EVRY SINGLE THING IN MY BODY IS ALL TRYING TO MOVE IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

FUCK

AAAAAAA

IM SCANNING THE CONTROLS BUT THERES NO WAY FOR ME TO FIX THE THRUSTER FROM HERE

THAT FUCKING THING IS WAY TOO CLOSE TO ME, EVEN THROUGH THE VISOR I CAN FEEL MYSELF STARTING TO GO BLIND

SHIIIIIIIT

WAIT

WHAT IF I SHOOT MYSELF TO THE SIDE

TRY TO RIDE THE GRAVITATIONAL PULL AROUND THE DAMN THING

FUCK ITS IDEA ONE OF ONE BUT I GUESS IT MIGHT WORK

DIVERT THRUSTERS

FULL POWER, ONLY HAVE ONE SHOT AT THIS

OOF FUCK THAT WAS A BIG LURCH, BUT AM I GONNA AVOID THE BALL OF DEATH

LIFE

WHATEVER

OKAY WAIT IM GOING IN MORE THAN ONE DIRECTION NOW

JUST BARELY SLOWING DOWN MY SUNWARD VELOCITY

NOW MAYBE IF I SHOOT EVERYTHING OUT THE BACK ITLL BE ENOUGH TO PUSH MY STUPID ASS OUT OF THE GRAVITATIONAL PULL AND AROUND THE RING OF INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM

HERE GOES NOTHING

SHIT I THINK THAT WORKED

OH FUCK IM BEING RUBBERBANDED

O O        O                               O                                                    O

N              O                      O                            B                                     R                                          O

T                                                  O                                                      O                                                                  O                                            O

F                                                                                                                                              

A                                                                                                            

S

T

To be continued?