Layers and layers and layers
05 Mar 2018Harry The Hatchet
Natural Selection3221-05-01, around noon
Homeworld
Long ago. On a day where we had an especially good crop, my son had a dog.
Well, that's too far. We should go back. Longer ago, I had a son and two daughters. They grew up very quickly. I like them and dislike them in equal measure, as any good dad should. They all, luckily for them, bore the looks of their mother. They moved on in their own respective ways, still on the homeworld. So now that we're all caught up:
Not long after he was born, on a day where we had an especially good crop, my son had a dog.
He came through the door of our house on the range quickly. Chasing a wild puppy until he cornered it somewhere upstairs. He was around eighteen by this point. Old enough to consider buying a dog of his own and still yet young enough to compuslively do it. He carried the little dog down the stairs where I met him with my arms crossed. It was my classic this-is-a-serious-situation pose. It almost never worked. He looked at me with wide, excited eyes. The puppy looked at him with very similar eyes.
"I met a girl!" He said. "And she likes dogs." I said.
Salt and Soul
3304-03-05, 14:51, Today
Ross 1507, Else, Curtis Outpost
This man was showing me a picture of his family as I pushed my way passed him. Another man was showing me a picture of his wife as I shoved further. Some wife was showing my shots of her husband, but I couldn't see. The crowd was intense, crackling with nervous energy. It was always like this around the Search and Rescue Agent. Families wanted to crack open your cargo hold with their bare hands, were there a chance one of their loved ones occupied an escape pod you put there. I hadn't any escape pods, only two black boxes. I tried to tell the weeping crowd but it didn't listen, it never does.
I checked in my two black boxes and collected the meager payment. A black box holds around a tetrabyte of data consisting of flightlogs, jumps, cargo rack inventory, fines, bounties and so on. Black boxes, by and large, pay more than escape pods. At least at Curtis Outpost, a black box trades in for around 4,000 Cr on average. An occupied escape pod lands around 3,100 Cr. A person trapped in statis is worth about 76% of a black box. You are worth around 76% of a black box. More specifically, you are worth 760,000 gigabytes of spaceship logging data.
Arms Length
3221-05-17
Homeworld
My son was stunned. He just walked. I found him several kilometers away from the local surface port, shuffling along. His dog skipped alongside. I pulled up near him, my rickety surface vehicle groaned to a stop and I got out. I walked with him for some minutes in silence. Then when I could coax a word out of him the rest of the story spilled out in reams. He met the girl, who loved his new dog, for their third date and they were 15 days into their happy life-long journey to bliss. Then she said it wouldn't work out. His perfectly laid out future shattered before him. I joked that, you know, 15 days is not a bad record! But the joke didn't go down well and we fell back into silence. The dog, who was far above the need to feel betrayed by love, had slipped from it's collar and ran ahead. He span in the dust on the road, then sprinted towards us, passed us, span again, then ran between us and hit us behind the legs on the way. Then he darted off into the rich crop-land off the right side of the roadway. We were dragging his empty leash behind us.
It took us around half an hour to turn around and get back into the surface vehicle. We had to wait another half hour for the dog find us and get in the back. But that's okay. It gave us some time to sit and watch other vehicles blast passed. Occasionally they would honk at us and flash their lights, as we occupied their roadway. We laughed. With each annoyed horn, we laughed louder. Until, perhaps because of the rediculousness of it all, we were weeping with laughter. Our eyes and noses streaming. Continually weezing at virtually nothing. As we got louder, the dog barked, perhaps to join in.
"15 days wasn't a bad record!?" My son shouted between laughs, scraping tears from his cheeks. The dog seemed to be equally pleased.
Intentions and Miscalculations
3304-05-02, 04:55, Yesterday
Au Draconis, 340,236.6 Ls from the main star
I found a wreckage to salvage. There were two black boxes and one occupied escape pod.