There are five big furry white things up there.
Out of the eight trillion, six hundred billion, four hundred and eighty-two million, thirty two thousand, five hundred and forty-six stars that are visible in this part of the galaxy, I can see five furry white snowflakes.
I miss being able to see.
My contacts are in their case… not quite sure where I'll find replacements out here. My glasses are still (I think?) by my bed at home, under my crinkled copies of the Economist and Discover magazine. On the wooden bedside table Dad helped me build when I started high school. With the sticker on the back of the Bionic Man that I haven't quite managed to completely scrape off.
Another world, another time.
My nose is cold.
I guess I can still stare up at the furry little guys… for now. After I lose my contacts or they tear I suppose I'll just… die? Whee. Funny how far I've come and how badly the little things can still screw me over.
Mormon boy is snoring. Very loudly. I'm tempted to do think of something nasty to do with his flashlight and his left nostril, but there's no way I'm leaving this bag. Not even to pee. Our drinking water has been frozen ever since we crashed. I'm guessing it's a good twenty below zero out here. My contact case is tucked in my underwear, but don't tell anyone.
My world consists of what I can see through this little opening of my sleeping bag: i.e. The Fab Five Furries.
Who am I kidding? My 'world' shouldn't have gravity on it. Let alone a breathable atmosphere on it.
I use the world 'gravity' loosely: here gravity is more like weather. It comes and goes, in gusts and bursts and clouds and eddies and will'o the wisps. At first it was kinda cute, but now it's just downright annoying. My sleeping bag is currently anchored with a pylon to sedimentary rock (which implies weathering, water and compaction. Its sedimentary dear Watson)?!?!?
Mind, you if another 'gravity downpour' of nine g's occurs again I fear for the state of my bladder.
Mark wanted to throw that table away for years. I found it stashed in the garage once and another time it got buried in the basement under his fishing gear. Not up to his art deco taste, I suppose. But I still think that he was secretly a Bionic Man fan…
I wish I had gotten a better view of this place before the crash. Not only can I still not read the language but I couldn't even see any data ports, only what I could see out of the viewer window. It helped that it took eight weeks to reach it of course. By that point Jailor Jack here was so bored I thought he was going to break out a future version of Uno and make me play. I got to move about a couple of rooms on ship. It wasn't like I was going anywhere.
This world is so strange. Our pod shouldn't have survived the crash in one piece, yet neither it nor us have a scratch. Which is only mildly impossible. Throw in the breathable atmosphere, the oh-so convenient overhead lighting provided by the electromagnetic gaseous clouds and Freaky-Friday gravity and there's a whole bunch of frozen cookie dough chunks in your ice cream bowl of impossibilities.
I think I lost where I was going with that. I'm a little hungry.
Of course, if the atmosphere turns out to be poisonous... or we're baking in UV radiation...
Either way my boogers are still frozen solid.
Oh hell.
My upper lip is welded to my sleeping bag zipper.
Altar Boy is still snoring.
I guess 'boy' is the wrong word. I'm just throwing nouns around really. Adjectives? Grammar, good at, I'm not. He's the same age as me; the wrong side of twenty-nine. I can tell he's scared out of his mind. I keep expecting him to go 'gibber gibber' a lot. But pretty much after the crash we walked until we could walk no more and then we fell asleep. Standard method of dealing with shock: lose yourself in physical activity till you pass out and hope that when you wake up it was all a bad dream.
I used to do that a lot, now that I think about it.
I think I hate him so much cause I've been trying to hate the guy this entire voyage and I still haven't come up with a decent reason to hate him. Yes, he's my 'guard' and I'm his 'prisoner' but he's just so damn nice. He actually took the cuffs off when I told him they were chafing. Took. Off. The. Cuffs. I almost guilted myself into putting them back on. He's just so damn accommodating that it makes it completely impossible and unreasonable to hate him.
That doesn't stop me trying to hate him, it just irks me to the point of nearly hating him.
And he's more attractive than me, better chest, ass and, although he has got to be the same age as me, he looks five years younger. Clean living, can't beat it. That is not to say, however, that he's the cleverest fox in the hunt. He'd probably try to bake the dogs and horsies some nice muffins if he met them in the woods.
Still, I do appreciate the fact that he pushed me into the escape pod with him. Very sweet, considering he was in full 'gibber' mode at that point. Mind you, he still had enough wits about him to make sure I was not, at any time, physically touching him. He'd been doing that the whole cruise. That look that said he'd rather I was a homicidal maniac than just a… a… deviant? Not sure these people even have word for me. Not any more. Genetic clean up must have taken care of that ages ago. No doubt a Godsend... to play God.
I'd take offense if I wasn't enjoying it so much. It's almost like being back home again.
Mark and I used to make out in on the bus stop in La Jolla to watch people gawk. We'd give each other points if we could cause the breeders to trip as they walked by. We managed to cause an Audi to crash once. We each got fifty points for that one.
We couldn't afford cable.
I wish I had gotten a look at some topos of this place. Or at least a layout of the gravity anomalies of this thing. The only plan I've come up with so far is to hike to where the bits of spaceship are still falling. That's Fab Five Number Three. Or Jai. Very much like the old Christmas story with the three wise men. Except I could never stand Jai.
Maybe someone there is still alive. Maybe that someone has an interstitial transmitter capable of calling for a rescue ship or a passing transport. Maybe we can make it out of here alive. Maybe they have developed the technology to send me back home to sixty-four Evergreen Terrace four hundred years in the past.
And maybe L.A. will be swallowed by lava flows.
The furry guys are gone now. Blue cloudy things are blocking my view. When I had my eyes in I assumed they were probably ionized gaseous gravity-driven dust clouds that constitute the stratospheric equivalent of the 'sky' here. But without my CibaSoft lenses slapped on my cornea, they're just blue cloudy things. Except when the lighting arcs between them. I think it's the only lighting this place has here. When one sparks it changes the color of the cloud and somehow solidifies the particles in it, turning the cloud into one of those glowing waxy blobs in one of those tacky lava lamps my older brother used to think was so cool. Once the charge is gone it reverts to its gaseous phase in a sort of stratocumulus way.
It's like being trapped in the world's largest discotheque.
With a Mormon.
Oh, and aliens.
I forgot about the aliens.
