Puppet on a string ...
09 Jun 2018Anla'Shok Na
There are those that will tell you there are few things worse than waking up and not knowing where you are. Well, given my present set of circumstances, one thing does spring to mind, and that is waking up not only not knowing where you are, but also not not having the faintest bloody idea how you got there. You see, in the normal scheme of things, the ‘where’ is usually resolved pretty quickly, as the confusion is often the result of whatever you had way too much of the night before refusing to loosen its grip on your perception of the world. Eventually though, like a blazing revelation you would sooner forget, the cold hard reality what you actually got up to, and how those particular shenanigans lead to your present situation rear their ugly head and all is revealed. Okay I hate to admit it, but I’ve been in that headache inducing, stomach churning, ‘gods, what the hell DID I do?’ situation more times than I care to remember, and I’ll let you into a little secret, it gets worse the older you get, trust me.
Now, the ‘how’ on the other hand, whose resolution is often a natural, if somewhat slower, follow-on to the answer of where, can occasionally elude you without the aid of additional information. It is this particular situation that yours truly finds himself at present.
You see, for the past 72 hours or so, I have been aboard a Diamondback Explorer, which is currently on course to the Colonia system. Readouts are all in the green, so the ship appears to be in good shape. There are enough stores for a couple of weeks, a working fuel scoop, life-support seems to be working okay, and the Roxy reserve tanks are full. On the downside, the ship is unarmed, the environmental controls are set way too high, the ship appears to be on a pre-programmed course under the control of an incredibly annoying Covax A.I. called Jazz, who I’m convinced is mildly psychotic and more than a little paranoid, and as if that were not bad enough, I’m sure I can hear a bloody cat hiding in the hold somewhere.
So, on the whole, things would appear to be okay, that is until you realize that this is not MY ship, I have absolutely no memory of how I got aboard, or how, and this is the kicker, yours truly managed to escape from a maximum security Riker class prison ship!