Algid Nascency from Being Absentminded
30 Apr 2018Kitaen Silva
Several days have already gone by since, but I figure that if I'm going to pick up the habit of writing my experiences, better to start later than never, right?"Since"? Since what?
Well, that, I'm not entirely sure about. Since the earliest thing I can remember, I suppose. Cliche', isn't it? A journal from an amnesiac, to help them keep track of their experiences in case something else happens to them or their memory... it seems like the sort of thing you'd expect from a schoolgirl.
Yet, here I am, doing exactly that, because it's the best idea I could come up with at the time, and if I just sit here to keep overthinking it, I'll never write anything at all - it's not like there's anyone to criticize my writing out here in the dark, after all. The only comments I'll get out here on the trip to Faraday Orbital are silence and the occasional twinkling of stars and such.
Guess I better explain the earliest thing I remember, then - if I lose my memory again somewhere along the way, there's no telling what little detail will help me to get it back, y'know?
I'm actually not sure what I remembered first, the bone-chilling freeze and the rime of frost on my helmet, or the squawking of the comms. Some woman whose name I've already forgotten was hailing me, and I felt both a massive headache and no small amount of frustration from what I'd assumed at the time as being awoken from a nap. It certainly didn't help that she was criticizing my ship, but only for the briefest of moments, because I distinctly remember questioning how I was in a ship, how I knew it was a ship, let alone mine. I vaguely responded to her hail just as I realized that my ship was pretty much non-functional, just as she'd been saying, and before I could object or say anything at all, she'd sent out a drone to repair my ship a bit.
After it had been repaired enough to move anywhere, I went through a few very simple diagnostic manoeuvres at her instruction, then she directed me to a nearby station and suggested I get proper repairs there. I heard the sound of her engines as she zipped away after a few moments, but I simply waited for warmth and feeling to seep back into my limbs so I could scrape the layer of frost off my helmet - good thing I did, too, because I didn't need to see very much to realize that I was adrift amongst huge chunks of ice and rock.
I slowly and carefully weaved my way through the gaps to find the outpost ahead, trying to ignore the warning lights and sounds reverberating through my pounding skull with the force of a thousand foghorns.
I don't remember tremendously much after that - I got close and hailed the station, but I don't remember docking, or anything. I woke up in a completely different system, in fact - I was in the infirmary at Sylvester City, in Eravate. My ship - a Sidewinder Mk. I, at the time, as I found out from the mechanic - was a complete wreck and I'd been out cold long enough for them to have completely repaired it. Can't remember his name either, but he pointed me to the Station Manager and said he had work for me if I wanted to pay off the bill and earn a few credits on top.
This sounded like a reasonable thing to do, so I took his suggestion and looked into this "work" - the Station Manager was extremely busy and hardly spared me half a moment to formalize the job, send the details to my HUD, and shoo me back to the docks where my banged-up ship sat. By the time I arrived at Hangar 3 and was climbing back into my ship, I somehow had three other jobs, but fortunately all of them seemed simple enough. I plopped into my seat and checked over the details of the jobs to decide how I would go about tackling them - interacting with my HUD was apparently muscle-memory, because even though I had no recollection of learning how to use it - or my ship, for that matter - I didn't seem to struggle too much with it. Plugging in the nearest locations to my navigation and plotting a route, I settled my posture and ran a pre-flight diagnostic.
"Ducat...?" I muttered aloud as I thumbed through menus and screens, absorbing information. Apparently it was the name of my cramped little Sidewinder. Stumbling into my registration info, I also learned - rather, re-learned - some of the basic information about myself. Name, age, birth date, all that jazz - but nothing to spark my memory of anything prior. With a sigh, I did a final once-over of my diagnostics and gave the all-green to queue for launch.
My hangar platform gave a lurch and raised up a short distance with a hiss as the docking mechanisms went about their business - the lights and klaxons went off and the last of the maintenance crew quickly filtered into a little door in the wall nearby, then hangar bay quickly depressurized. At the entrance of the dock, a spare platform sunk into some unseen socket above my ship, then the elevator mechanism descended in front of me. With a jerk, the platform upon which my ship currently rested was shoved forward onto the elevator mechanism. The stars sliding into view above caught my attention just as the elevator shoved my ship to the exterior of the station and released my landing gear, bouncing my ship around just slightly and bringing my attention back to my HUD. I nudged a bit of throttle into my ventral thrusters and slowly drifted away from the surface of the landing pad, then once I had enough clearance, I dropped my throttle and directed the nose of my ship up and away from the station before putting power into my main thrusters and pulling away from the station in earnest. Looking around, I became suddenly aware of the fact that a planet was dominating a significant portion of my canopy viewport and that my current trajectory would result in an unwanted descent, so I shifted my vector with a spike of anxiety... and immediately realized that I didn't know what to do next.
Contemplating whether to go back to the station and get help, as I probably should have done by informing the doctor that I seemed to have misplaced my memory, it occurred to me that my ship probably had some form of operator's manual, so I stabilized my flight vector and busied myself with flipping through menus and text. Before long, I found my first bit of relevant information, which suggested that my HUD would provide clear indication of my target destination after plotting my route in the navigation panel. Well, I'd already done at least that much out of intuition, so I looked around for some sort of 'clear indication' as implied. Above and behind me there was some sort of broken circle with the name of my first destination, so I grabbed my control column and pointed my nose toward it. Conveniently, my HUD showed an unobstructive little square that I could reasonably assume was an indicator of my facing, so I centered that in the middle of the broken circle. My attention was grabbed by a tiny glint out the top of my window, and squinting to look closer revealed that it was the station I'd just left, quite a handful of kilometers away because I was distracted with reading. I directed my attention back to my target - there didn't appear to be anything of note, but there was a little dot of light - presumably a star - suspiciously in the very centre of the broken circle. A wad of numbers sprang up next to the circle, showing my distance and estimated time of arrival.
"YEARS??" I shouted at the targeting circle, as if it cared. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YEARS??"
A nervous sweat threatening to surface uncomfortably between my skin and my Remlok suit, I quickly busied myself again with the documentation I'd found, because despite my personal objections and denial of that distance and time, I was gripped by the inexplicable sensation that I was forgetting something stupidly simple and that I'd done this hundreds of times already. I wasn't a dusty bag of bones aged in the hundreds, so there had to be some way to get from here to there without losing my mind in this tin can.
Hours later and with tons of bored scrabbling through technical workings and jargon I wasn't exactly interested in right this second, I finally found something that had started to let me relax. Ducat apparently came standard with a device called a Frame Shift Drive, which enabled several modes of travel that were considerably faster than my current rate - supposedly, it could even venture into many multiples the speed of light, which my rational mind doubted, but my intuition shouted in annoyance that it already knew this was the answer to my current predicament. Given the lack of memory to compare against, my intuition was all I had to go on at the moment, so I was inclined to take it in stride for the moment.
Bringing my attention back to the reality of stars and whatnot outside my window, I checked to make sure that I was still headed in the right direction, looked around to make sure there wouldn't be anything to crash into, and then followed the instructions to enable my 'FSD'.
Just as I pushed the button, a bunch of lights flashed in my cockpit and an alarm went off as a huge prompt filled my line of sight.
"FRAME SHIFT CANCELLED. LANDING GEAR DEPLOYED."
With a loud sigh, I palmed my helmet in annoyance. Amnesia aside, I was overcome by the sensation that this was the most basic of basics and that I should have known to do this before even leaving the station. Muscle memory kicked in, and my arm almost automatically located and flipped the switch for the landing gear, then I tried again. A much smaller visual surfaced in my line of sight.
"Frame Shift Drive charging."
It was accompanied by a timer and a meter, so I made some final checks and smaller adjustments to my bearing while the ship vibrated and rumbled with increasing intensity - then the timer reached zero. The ship seemed to auto-correct for my slight trajectory errors, while a strange tunnel of light seemed to coalesce in front of my ship - then with a final lurch and a sound like some sort of huge plasma thrower, my ship, with me in it, had been launched through a pants-shittingly brain-melting pipe of cascading stars and nebulae, vehicle and pilot both rattling at the seams for the entire duration. It only lasted a few seconds, and it felt like hours...
...but then I was dumped unceremoniously onto the roaring visage of a fucking sun and I suddenly had a vast and powerful preference for the wild ride immediately prior. Yanking back on both my throttle and my control column as the temperature in my ship immediately began to skyrocket, I desperately attempted to turn and go in any direction that could be remotely called "away", and in a hurry. Canopy finally filled with black, with sparks and smoke starting to roll out of my console, I jammed the throttle forward and hoped with every inch of pressure smashing me into my seat that I was gaining ground on that gigantic funball of nuclear superdeath.
A glance between the churning smoke at my radar showed that not only was I quickly escaping, but I was escaping faster and faster. The percentage at the left started decreasing, alarms and lights stopped flashing and blaring, while the number on the right quickly increased. My gut implied that these were indicators for my temperature and speed, respectively.
My air filters somewhat quickly dealt with the smoke, but I kept going for about another sixty seconds before I relaxed the throttle and turned slightly to try and see how far I'd managed to get away. With immense surprise, it was revealed to me that the murderball which had dominated my entire window a mere moment ago was now seemingly the size of a small candy or coin. I at least knew enough that this much distance in such a short amount of time was absolutely ridiculous, but my side step from panic into confusion was rudely interrupted by an obnoxious bleep and the flash of an icon in the upper left of my viewing angle. Someone had sent me a message. With an aggravated sigh, I opened it for no other reason than it was something to redirect my attention onto. It was a short message - perhaps both fortunately and unfortunately.
"Something has come up and we need that data sooner than planned. If you can deliver it within the next 12 minutes, we can arrange for an additional 10,000 credits to be deposited into your account."
Credits seemed like fair enough motivation to set aside my questions for later. With luck, maybe I could buy better parts. I wagered that having an FSD prone to lobbing me into a gods-be-damned sun every time I needed to go somewhere was probably not a good thing by any stretch. It wouldn't be long before I learned that this was simply how the FSD worked and that you were expected to be on your toes when jumping systems.
Having somewhat of a feel for a few things at this point, I pulled up my navigation panel and looked for the station I was supposed to be delivering to, then plotted a route. The familiar targeting indicator popped into existence in my peripheral view, so I directed my ship toward it and nudged my throttle forward. Once again, a wad of numbers appeared to tell me my distance and how long it'd take for me to arrive - as my speed increased, the time rapidly decreased until planets and such were soaring past, each like little more than some harmless sports ball suspended in the inky black. My ship seemed to somewhat increase and decrease speed on its own depending on my proximity to my target, but I still wasn't confident that I'd be able to stop this bucket of rust.
However, once relatively close to my destination, a prompt appeared and directed me to drop out of "supercruise", to which my body once again exhibited muscle memory and flipped a switch. With a sound somewhat like a laser-powered explosion, my ship made a short leap through some sort of tunnel of blue light, then my impact alarms went off for a split second as a station seemed to erupt out of nowhere and dwarf my ship. A whine somewhere within my ship seemed to wind down - one I'd failed to notice all this time due to rather stressful experiences over the last short while. Then my radio crackled to life and a flight controller in the station dryly repeated a forgettable common-sense formality regarding safe conduct in the vicinity and some such. Just as dryly, I queried docking permissions, and was immediately permitted to land. A ten-minute timer showed up in my view, with a dock number that I was permitted to land at, so I started flying toward the station.
Yet, as I approached the station, it dawned on me that I didn't see any sort of clear indication of where this dock would be. I was apparently designated for dock 34, suggesting that there were at least 33 other docks somewhere on this station, and I couldn't see any visible landing pads. I pushed more out of my throttle and adjusted my bearing to attempt circling the station, but I quickly realized that this station was mind-bogglingly massive. Several blurbs of text started to appear in the upper-right of my view - new contacts, contacts lost, etc., as ships appeared and disappeared from all around the station. Watching the direction that other ships were coming and going, I presumed a guess at where I was meant to land, and angled my ship toward the larger end of the station.
Then I realized, as I reached a point where I could look over and see, that this station had to have been designed by some sort of spectacularly braindead form of life pretending to be an engineer. Despite this, other ships were coming and going from the station as if it were just another Tuesday for them - and maybe that might be exactly the case - but I just could not, for the life of me, simply accept the sheer idiocy of this situation. I pulled my ship to a full stop and turned to get a more proper look and actually process this scene.
Of course, not that I expected a double-take to really show me anything different, what I was witnessing was indeed reality. At the ass-end of this station was a shielded opening - very broad, but remarkably thin - and sure as shit, as evidenced by the colouration around the opening, vessels undeniably had to scrape paint on a daily basis just to get through there. I could see into the station from where I had stopped, and it was a vast, open area on the other side of that shielding.
The docks were on the interior of the station. What a massive waste of interior space that could have been _much_ more effectively utilized. For what? What purpose does this marvel of idiotic architecture serve? It stuck me as risk-by-design, an intentional effort to make the menial task of docking into something as needlessly dangerous as possible. Instead of doing the logical thing and making docks accessible from the exterior, so that all of that interior space can be better utilized, some moron clearly thought it was bloody brilliant to direct all incoming and outgoing traffic through a single, envelope-sized slot. Gotta maximize the risk of accident, injury, and potential death, before you even touch down.
Ironically, the flight controller hailed me again, specifically to warn me about the heavy traffic, and it took every fiber of my being to not shout into the microphone; "Well golly-gee, I wonder FUCKING WHY!?"
For some reason, I was extremely angry because of this. It didn't make any sense. Who came up with this design? Who paid for it? Why, in all of the time it took to plan it, fund it, and build it, did apparently not one single person think to suggest that justmaybe this was an awful idea?
The timer plastered in my view didn't care, it just continued to count down. It only served to make me angrier. But sitting around here, stewing in my internalized screaming and borderline-homicidal urge toward this station and everything involved with it, was not accomplishing anything. And not accomplishing anything was also not getting me paid.
With a bitter grumble, I queued up to enter behind this lumbering freighter.
The timer, still not caring in the slightest, ticked away the seconds. By the time the freighter ahead of me took his sweet-ass time barely squeezing through the entrance, I had two and a half minutes left to locate my dock and land, apparently. Thankfully the Ducat is one of the smallest ships I'd seen all day, and I didn't have much to fuss with when gliding through the shielded entrance, but I still cursed with intense vitriol under my breath as I looked around for any indication of where I was meant to land. Spotting a big glowing 34 above me, I angled toward it with a bit of a pirouette and aggressively approached. I angled my ship for landing, when the flight controller's voice blasted into my cockpit again.
"Uh, warning, pilot - your landing gear is still retracted."
I stopped my ship, several meters above the pad. I was eye-level with the control tower for my designated pad, and while he couldn't see through my cockpit, let alone my helmet, I gave the hapless man a murderous glare. If looks could kill, the blades I was firing into his soul at that very moment would have erased him and everyone related to him, past and future. Even though there was quite a distance between me and the man in the tower, I could see him shift uncomfortably in his seat as he grabbed the mic next to him to hail me once again.
I bashed the switch for my landing gear just as he opened his mouth to speak, causing him to fumble incoherently over his words as my landing gear deployed and drowned him out, and he ended up not saying anything meaningful at all. Slightly satisfied by this, I less-than-gently deposited my Sidewinder onto the surface of the landing pad, and powered down my engines - giving both the throttle and control column an annoyed shove after the engines had turned off.
I didn't even bother getting up from my seat - I accessed the station services directly from my HUD, transferred the data I was sent to deliver, collected my payment - I had to sternly remind about the bonus I was promised, and took yet more satisfaction from the obvious inconvenience this brought them, as they clearly hoped that I had failed to pay any mind to the bonus offered in exchange for rush-delivery. As the credits were automatically transferred into my account, I mashed the intangible button to have the maintenance crew top up my fuel and then I took a quick scan through the Pilots' Federation job-listing board to see if there were anything that needed to go back to Eravate. At least Sylvester City had a reasonable goddamn station setup.
And then I stopped tuning out the announcement reel being blared on repeat to the station interior and everyone in it. This place - and many others just like it, I would later discover - are complete madhouses with itchy trigger fingers that fetishize murder over petty and minor inconveniences.
"Remember, loitering is not tolerated, and is punishable by death. Please depart from the station in a safe and timely manner."
Depravity. Complete, utter, depravity.
And this was merely my first mission. I had no idea at the time that I was going to be seeing a lot more of that fucking ridiculous "mailslot" - nor that I would eventually get used to it, even if I'll never quite shake the anger I feel toward whoever coined, implemented, and proliferated this apparently-standard piece of station design. For the life of me, I can't seem to figure out when it became acceptable practice to just casually murder people, even over simple mistakes or accidents. Something was very, very wrong in this day and age, and some part of me hoped to make heads or tails of it eventually, so that maybe I might do something about it.
Nevertheless, I continued on with the courier work for quite a long while. Found myself earning millions of credits at an astonishing rate, and quickly bought an entirely new ship - an Eagle Mk.II, which I dubbed "Melrose" because it seemed fitting for reasons I could only guess at - as well as a variety of parts to make the most out of this new ship. I eventually bought several other ships - a Hauler that I named Sally Dancer; an Adder that I named Thousands Wizard; a Keelback I've dubbed the Merry Scrapper; a Viper Mk. III that I named Rend Gale; a Viper Mk. IV which I named Torrent Hail; a Cobra Mk. III dubbed Distant Fade; and an Imperial Eagle that I elected to call Mysotis Alpestris. But even though my "fleet" keeps growing and gaining new ships, I keep coming back to the Melrose, which I've outfitted to be excellent for courier jobs, as well as dogfighting pirates and criminals alongside system authorities.
Even now, I'm kicked back in the Melrose, relaxing with a freshly-heated pouch of kobe beef stew and writing a long journal entry to recall my earliest bit of functional memory while I wait out this lengthy flight to Faraday Orbital in the GD 215 system. I didn't expect to write this much, exactly, but the fact that I have enough time to write all of this while idling in supercruise is probably a solid indicator of why people don't normally take this courier route despite the massive pay it offers. I've not once encountered pirates on this route, I've not seen any of these rumoured Thargoids, or any Guardian technology, hell, I haven't even had to try and land on a planet yet.
But if I'm honest... I'm kinda itching to get out there and find things. The very idea of Guardians, let alone uncovering their technology, is particularly fascinating to me, but for as fond as I am of Melrose, this ship just isn't quite suited for digging around at that sort of thing, so I'm saving up for something heftier. I'd also like to try and establish my own little "bubble" of sorts, and I've set my eyes on the Lagoon Nebula, so I'd need another ship that'd be excellent for deep-space exploration and research.
I've a lot of work ahead of me, and I'm going to need some deep pockets filled with credits if I'm going to make much of it happen.
. . .
Well, I finally see the sparkle of Faraday Orbital up ahead, so I guess I'll end this entry here. Who knows if I'll bother to keep writing this journal thing or not, but I guess this was fun to do, and was certainly more entertaining than watching an ETA timer slowly tick down.
Remember, fly safe, fly kindly, but carry a big stick and the willingness to use it when necessary.