Diary Log #001 - 330606271241
27 Jun 2020Alan Daniels
<//START LOG//>I visited Sol six days ago. After ten years with the Navy and four as a free pilot, I went home.
Still as beautiful as the day I left.
It's funny, now that I think about it; I never really kept a logbook outside of standard mission reports and maintenance reviews. Not too sure why I've started now, but I've got a feeling that somebody might be interested in my story, someday. Probably not going to happen, since I've been flying for almost fifteen years now, and only just decided it would be a good idea to put pen to paper, as the old saying goes. Maybe that's just what a week of introspection after returning to the system of your birth to put things into perspective.
I was born September 19, 3277 on Earth. Never knew my father, and my mother abandoned me, boohoo. I've done my time thinking about all the "what-ifs," and I couldn't care less about repeating it to who cares how many people read this. Anyway, grew up in an orphanage, had my family there with all the other orphans and unwanted. It was nice, all things considered - we had power, food, water, and regular medical checkups that those fortunate enough to be in a privately sponsored orphanage got to enjoy. Except it wasn't privately run, and the kids that were never adopted out or ran away got conscripted by the government as soon as they got their diploma. Some of them went to the marines, others were PDF, and most of the smart ones did smart stuff and were good at it. Those checkups were what got the suits to look at and choose what kids went where, and it's been that way for at least a century or two. I was both strong and smart with good reflexes, so you know they sent me to the flight academy on Titan. I didn't mind, I got to go do what I always wanted to do: see the galaxy.
The thing about space is that it's really frakking huge, and there's not a whole lot of us pilots in comparison to the rest of humanity. For almost seven trillion humans, less than a billion of us actually go to space. That's a hundredth of a percent. And out of that number, there's maybe twelve million of us who basically live on our ships.
It's times like this that I'm really grateful for things like Galnet and the Inara Foundation. They really bring us together from tens of thousands of lightyears apart, help us stay attached to the worlds below. Our actions affect the lives of so many people, and they barely even know we exist.
...
I guess the galaxy just keeps getting bigger the more we see of it, eh?
<//END LOG//>