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.
So what happened? Well, I think that’s something a lot of us are still trying to figure out, but there’s also a lot who don’t really care, just trying to get through the rest of their lives the best they can, going from planet to planet in search of work or a decent place to settle down with a nice girl or something. I remember when all our dreams were set so high. We’d build castles in the sky, literally, the giant space docks, and there’d be whole communities living and dreaming, millions of people coming and going, the whole place like one giant cluster of activity, working together like one enormous organism.
Of course now there is the very real threat of actual giant space organisms, the starwhales, as they have come to be known rather than their proportionally long and difficult to pronounce scientific name, certainly the largest organic creatures they’ve ever shown in any of those space wildlife documentaries. But then again, you never can tell exactly whether what they tell you on the reality screens reflect the actual truth of reality. Almost everyone has their own agenda. I can’t help but think sometimes that the starwhales are only now exacting their revenge on us after centuries of hunting and slaughter for their valuable oils, their massive bones for construction and their tender flesh that many considered the greatest delicacy in the galaxy, if not the universe. I don’t really care for it too much though, but it does go well with carrots I must say.
Well there’s really not too much of a market for immortality these days. Besides the fact that it is illegal in many parts of the galaxy owned and operated by the people’s combine, for one thing there are very few actual people who could afford the basic upload package, and that’s without the extra additional add-ons. Secondly, even if anyone could afford it, they probably wouldn’t want to have it done anyway. Not in these terrible times. Actually I’m pretty sure the whole notion of achievable immortality has pretty much fallen off the galactic social conscious radar. Nothing about it is ever shown on the reality screens, almost like Immotec itself and the whole concept never even existed.
Well, today was just an ordinary day really, a routine I’ve become accustomed to following over the past few months. The alarm droid slapped me in the face a few times before I got up, stumbled over to the shower, which I still can’t believe has no hot water. What kind of age are we living in? Got out, ate some disgustingly plain synthetic breakfast, went for a walk, did some exercise, read a bit, watched some realityvision for a while and decided to write in here for a bit.
So anyway, what I really want to tell you is a story, they say everyone has at least one good story in them. Well I’m not sure how good they are, but I sure do have plenty of stories. Perhaps all my mediocre tales combined, with their joint forces, create the equivalent of one good story. I guess it’s all a matter of that you consider a good story as well. One man’s junk and all that. Speaking of which: I wonder sometimes about all the junk on this freighter, where it came from, its story of existence and where it’s going. The junk disposal business is huge these days, so competitive too, when there are laws against just dumping it into outer space. They say it’s to reduce hyperspace particle collision damage, but sometimes I think it’s just so the junk companies can stay in business.
But speaking of big business, before the great collapse, ours was virtually the biggest. The company I worked for, Immotec Inc. had – when times were good and the economy was at its peak – one of the highest share prices in the galaxy. I had only been there for a few years, but already was beginning to climb the ladder. What I did there was pretty simple, the product sold itself, back in the day when things were booming and there were plenty of people rolling in enough cash who could afford the luxury. Even some of the workers were able to afford the procedure after their working days had finished; they simply forfeited their superannuation to us, plus maybe a few surcharges, depending on the package, and their future existence in this sorry universe was assured. Of course, times were good back then; everyone was looking to the future, what new things it would bring. No one thought it would become what it is today. Perhaps if they had known, the idea of living forever wouldn’t have been so profitable.
Starting this new journal, mainly because I’ve been really quite bored lately. Life for a former, deep space, travelling Immotec Inc. salesman and technician, who’s now in somewhat of a transitional period piloting cargo freighters, trying to get some writing done, and the like, is just not that exciting most of the time, especially not these days. So not content with simply boring myself, I felt the need to set it all down on paper, as they say, simply to pass the time away. Of course, the occasional interesting thing does happen every so often, and I admit I have seen more than a few things in my day, but lately things have been very uneventful. Do you ever get that feeling where you just wish that something exciting would happen just out of the clear black sky, like a giant asteroid coming out of nowhere and colliding with us, if only to liven up the day a little bit? I usually try to live the simple life as much as I can. You always hear all the great space bohemia stories that are passed around from planet to planet.
It always amazes me how many cockroaches there are here in the far reaches of outer space; resilient little critters they are. Another brand new spray is being advertised on the reality screen again. I guess if there weren’t any cockroaches out here and everywhere, all those companies would go out of business or something. I doubt that will ever happen. The reception is terrible though at the moment; won’t be decent again until we get a little closer to the system we’re headed for, which is still quite a way away I think. I don’t even know why I bother to watch it. There’s nothing ever good on anyway, six hundred million channels and not a single decent program to speak of. Well I guess there’s not really all that much else you can do on a giant, floating, tin can filled with junk.
So I guess I should tell you all about how we got here, kind of stranded on this junk ship. Oh and I’ll introduce you to that crazy Mervyn Malone and maybe even tell you stories about all the antics he and I had been up to in our time on the ship. These days he seems to have lost his adventurous spirit somewhat. I’m not sure where he is now; wandering around the ship somewhere no doubt, thinking about something or other. There aren’t too many other people on board here, not like some of the other ships I’ve been on, but then again, I haven’t ever been on a junk ship before and I guess they don’t really need too many people on deck. Along with my usual piloting shift, I’ve managed to help out and keep myself useful, but in actual fact, there’s really not too much to do and I find myself often just walking around, thinking about this and that, humming a tune or something.
