Et sic, est finis.
22 Apr 2018Namita Pear
Bibo ergo sum. On our first voyage the Explorer endured the 0.22LY run to Hutton Orbital, on a fluke, and to justify our misappropriated trust in Mother Gaia's errands we filled the pantry with as much gin as could fit. Eden, the body whose orbit Hutton rests upon and likely named with some humor, distills enough per day to happily sell us as much as we can buy; in our case, hardly a tonne as it was meant to sustain only two crewmembers.
This trip was no different than our first, and the road between Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri was paved with our broken-in livery in the pursuit of aesthetic wearing, Centauri Mega Gin, and of course For The Mug.
I mention all of this to explain the state I have spent the time between the last report and now: medicated with gin, sipped from a container with latent frame shift energy. Rosy cheeks, warm and watery eyes, and a distinct sting to the breath was my yoke, as I find myself immune to the haunting energies of deep space exploration that popularly haunts so many others, including my employer, CMDR Pear. Silence was now oppressive and huffed down my neck, and there was no artificial intelligence to soothe my quiet. Why have one? There were two people on board, normally.
Instead, I write. But my existence as Namita Pear, lite, is one I reject, having traveled a full 50,000LY in her stead. The keystrokes of my lonely fingers were rapid in the final stages of our expedition, towards Lakon interpreters, not the word processor of this discount logsite.
It was half past 17 hours on the galactic clock when I stepped out from the cabin to present Namita with my work, tucked under my arm and installed into my personal tablet. She was dead asleep in her bunk, mostly devoured by the heavy blanket. I said, softly, "Namita," as my arm rocked her back and forth in a reverse lullaby. The fog on her clear helmet (worn as a tenant to safety and that I had been neglecting in my restlessness) cleared quickly after her bout of stirring yawns, and she pulled herself free, weightless, and confused as to why I was offering her my dataslate.
"Look, here," I said, and depressed the entry key.
In the command line was already printed 'vgn_dec.com', the program I had worked on, and all of the necessary parameters. The code she agonized over was an ancient Earth cipher, but one of such simplicity as to be an almost uncrackable code if handled correctly. Her messages, the ones she had slaved over, had their flaws but contained a very important twist that kept her interest shackled for so long.
The same twist was used in Altair some 15 years ago, and I recognized it instantly.
CMDR Pear was understandably surprised when she opened the file my few lines of Lakon had produced. The job was imperfect and much of the punctuation was butchered, but it took the garbled messages and spat out readable plaintext. I had solved her week long conundrum in a few kilobytes.
I felt important.
She hung halfway out of the bed, switching her focus between the words on the screen and I. "It's a shopping list," I said, "the same thing we're doing. Our friend, at least, has loftier ambitions and less progress than us. Do you think this was worth all the commotion?"
She did not.
"It's been a week, Namita. My ass is sore and I'm slipping into alcoholism. I think I'll take a long walk out of the short airlock..."
Failing to conceal my smile, I headed towards the rear gangway, and only stopped at the door as Pear scrambled out of bed. "Wait," she says, "don't go," she pleads, "why would you say something like that?"
There was a feint of ignorance from me by the time we got to the airlock threshold. I was standing there, looking confused, in regular clothes: a signature red vest, trousers, shirt. A contrast to her bright orange Remlock, which hesitated by the final bulkhead before the door, her fingers wrapped around a handle. There was nothing to protect me from the harsh, cold vacuum which surely wait on the other side of the door. My hand mimicked my figure in its aloofness, reaching behind me to unseal our atmosphere and open it to the outside.
"Namita, we're at Fortress Cousins." A stevedore below us paused as the airlock opened and the gangway extended, quickly returning to his business when he saw nothing important. "You were going to give our data to the Cooperative, remember? And, speaking of which, you should check the running for distance jumped, this week. Quite a few things to catch up on in the seat, Captain."
For a week I flew, navigated, landed, deciphered, drank, and wrote. No more! Now I sit not in a pilot's chair but a rather nice recliner in the trucker's lounge, drinking whatever I please out of my mug and letting my feet rest up in the comfortable 0.8Gs of rotation. I suppose CMDR Pear is sitting in the docking bay still, perhaps five pages out of twenty submitted to the station. The instructions from Hutton organizers will point her towards several more stations before she is done, and I don't pity her.
With myself on yet another holiday and some more million credits to spend, I look forward to a bit of relaxation. No such luck for Pear, I'm afraid... it appears 50,000LY just isn't enough to be the farthest-going "Trucker" in the galaxy, this week. She has a few notes left by myself on how to get to the Neutron Highway and accelerate her numbers a little bit.
If I'm lucky, she'll be up to 75,000LY by the time she realizes I still have access to her blog, and have 20,000LY to go before she can dock and reset her password. I only hope she doesn't visit Colonia without me.
This has been CMDR Wade Alexander.
Habent sua fata libelli.
