Distant Words -- Day 80 -- Back in (the) Black
10 Apr 2019Caoimhe O'Shea
Caoimhe switched on the video diary as she chewed one side of her lip. Leaning back, she looked at the camera for a few moments before she began her entry."Uh, yeah, so... I'm a little behind." She made a sheepish grin and then took a deep breath. "After Waypoint Three, I started off for Waypoint Four. But I got a little tired early on in that flight, so I set down on one of these little moons to take a nap." She shifted uncomfortably and the handheld camera's view shifted a bit to reveal she was recording this not from the flight deck, but from her bunk. Empty tissue boxes and food container pouches were piled up in a corner.
"I, um...got addicted to a program on a feed I picked up out here." Some of her embarrassment ebbed as she started to talk about it. "It was an old television transmission from Earth. Imagine! I'm all the way out here and I'm picking up a weekly TV show from 1965!" She pulled her feet under her, sitting cross-legged in her bunk. It was clear that not only was she still in bed, but had been there for some time. "I worked it out, " she continued. I'm, like, ..." She shuffled through some loose sheafs of paper that were scattered around near the foot of the bunk. "I'm at Pru...asses... here it is...Pru Aescs PI-P b33-17. I'm around ten thousa...here, nine thousand, two hundred or so light years from Sol."
She looked intently at the camera and made her point. "How did a programme broadcast by the BBC one thousand three hundred and forty years ago make it all the way out here already? And, I've been watching this show for months now and I still don't know his name? Doctor Who???"