I've got my eye on you
14 Apr 2017swaghat
It's probably only been a few times in the last 7 years that I've been asked about my eye; the thing is roughly the same color as my real one and, hell, I don't usually get close enough (physically or otherwise) for someone to notice and ask. The seldom times when I am asked I usually just make something up about being born with it or some bad fight I got into (complete with, "you should have seen the other guy", but the truth is a lot more embarrassing than that and whoever is lucky enough to be reading this gets to know the REAL story about this little piece of machinery I've got in my head.It was 3296 and I had just loaded out an Adder with some mining equipment, eager to go on my first mining run. Now, this being my first mining outing, I had virtually no clue what I was doing. After selecting a system (one of those oddly uninhabited ones in the bubble), I dropped into a patch of asteroids in the belt around the system star, popped open my cargo hatch, and started with my mining laser on the nearest hunk of rock. It was a surprisingly calming experience, honestly, shards of rock gently plinking off my hull as my collector limpet grabbed and deposited them one by one. It was mesmerizing, really, plink, grab, deposit, plink, grab, deposit. I went on like this for about 20 minutes or so, lost in the work and in my thoughts. Smash! My ship lurched forward, snapping me out of the trance and sending me careening towards the hulking mass that I was just farming.
“Thrusters offline.” Now, I forgot to mention that, in my zeal to get out there and start mining, I opted to replace the basic shield generator I had with another cargo rack. What harm could it do? I'm going to an uninhabited system and space dust isn't going to rob me at gunpoint. It happened so fast, though; I blinked twice and my canopy smashed right into the rock; If I hadn't been mag-locked to my seat I would have gone crashing into the canopy, too.
“Canopy integrity compromised.” You don't say. I watched as the cracks in my windshield slowly began to spiderweb as the glass struggled to keep the cabin pressurized and I struggled to reboot the little Adder in an attempt to regain control of the spiraling ship. The lights flickered off and back on and my engines came to life, stabilizing the spin with my nose pointed right at the system's star. It was then that the canopy gave up. All at once the glass blew outwards with a sickening crunch, my atmosphere rocketing out into empty space. Luckily, the first thing any pilot learns when picking up the trade is that a remlock is the most important thing you can have with you (next to an actual ship, I suppose), and I had paid attention to that lesson. Not so luckily, I had purchased my remlock at, shall we say, a discounted price. I had been flying for almost a year and a half and had never lost cabin pressure before, so I figured I would skimp on the remlock I purchased to save a few credits.
It did deploy, however (though a little more slowly than I would have liked), and I found myself with breathable air. Here's the issue that later got the company, RemLlokk LTD, in pretty big legal trouble and of which I was also a victim: in their application of the light dampening compound to the faceplate of the helmet, special care was not always taken to evenly distributing the substance. This means that when my canopy went flying out into space and my remlock deployed with me facing the system star head on, my right eye got one hell of a light show because that particular part of the remlock wasn't covered properly. All it took was a moment taking in the full glory of a class F star to finish off that eye for good. From there I managed to limp home, flying into the station with a minute of oxygen to spare, blind in one eye (docking was a bit of a slapstick routine, or so the flight control's laughter indicated) and embarrassed as all hell. I got the eye replaced, though, having saved up just enough money to be able to afford it... after selling off my ship refinery (I wasn't going back to mining anytime soon). I was out of the cockpit for three months and my body almost rejected the prosthetic, but it took and here I am. It's not all bad, either, since the eye can be paired with my ship computer to provide overlay, zoom, and even picture taking! Still, the truth of the matter is that I lost my eye because I was too dumb to keep a shield generator and too cheap to buy a decent remlock. Lesson learned, now, I suppose.
So there you have it, I hope you've had a good laugh at my expense because, looking back now (with one real eye and one robo-peeper) I know I sure have. The Galactic Watcher has a hell of a sense of humor.
o7