Silicon Dreaming

Day 01. The Junk Freighter

Just a minute ago I heard a rather loud crash outside the window, that familiar sound of something solid striking the ship’s thick, rusty hull, usually some kind of debris, space junk or a small meteor or asteroid chunk. It can give you a bit of a scare sometimes, always a laugh when you’re having a drink in the lounge with the boys and someone spills their Tyrellian Ale all over themselves. This one sounded a little strange though for some reason. I couldn’t get to sleep anyway, so I decided I’d go look out the window to check it out. So getting up and approaching the stars shining in from the small glass pane separating the junk in here from the junk out there. The window was pretty dirty from years of built up settlements of dust, dirt and grease. I wiped it a bit just with my hands, as they were already dirty and stained with all kinds of things anyway.

Pressing my face up against the glass and peering sideways, I could only just see down the rough metallic side of the ship. I looked here and there around the area that I imagined the impact had occurred, but saw nothing, nothing but a few small clusters of space barnacles, which had probably been accumulating there slowly over the past few decades. I started to forget all about the impact and began to just watch the stars, the little white specks in a sea of black, ever so slowly moving as we travelled along our path to wherever it was that we were going. I kind of lost myself for a moment, thinking about all the different systems and their inhabitants, all going about their cutthroat business of existence. But then I heard, very faintly, a low kind of scraping sound or perhaps more like drilling.

I looked to the hull again and between the barnacles I thought I saw a few little green sparks, shooting off out from the side of the junk freighter, just for a second. The sound continued and I became a little worried. There is a comm. link on the wall in my room, but it’s broken, so I had to go to the one in the hallway to notify the captain, who told me that it was nothing to worry about, that there’s all kinds of stuff that hits the ship all time and it never does any damage at all to the seven inch thick hardened hull and that I should probably just try to get to sleep like he was trying to do. I guess it doesn’t really take much to captain a freighter like this out here in the middle of nowhere. I went back in and checked the window again. The sparks were no longer there, so I crawled back into bed to continue writing in here.

posted by Joshua @ 23:45