Floating To The Bush Garden On Schedule

The zooming silence nestled in the humming engine background, we were powered by oozing energies, slowly cramming up horsepower to nurture velocity, we did not need much, we were frictionless, having a run on the surface of Oane, a moon off the planet Ebron, without a proper atmosphere, we would float against our will, it required minor energy to keep us close to the surface, sands that had not witnessed any passage of time, if I could get out and write my girlfriends name and mine, eternity would always have to read us. The mission was a simple sample and photographic review of the place, we had nine scientists on board and my crew of fourteen. This new spacecrafts were wonderful with speed and range, and overall comfort, but it still required a crew to cargo ratio of disproportionate disadvantage, too many functions had not been automated, much redundancy was human; fourteen people to keep a ship and nine scientists ambling.

Drinking my coffee in the control room, watching Oane go by underneath, we were on routine low level flight, smooth as silk, the darkness of space protruding contrast, Andrea our copilot, setting tomorrows routine on the glittering navigation systems; “how are we looking.” She responds, “All systems within operational parameters, except for one odd thing…” “What?” Andrea searches the soul of the ship with her eyes, and rounds back to me her experience, “There seems to be an anomaly on the back up systems, I checked the architectural layout of the recovery system and there seem to be five polar dynamic definitions; I can’t quite manage a singular polarity?” We both new the implications of this, I was fortunate to have Andrea with us, she was a first rate computing systems analyst, there could only be one conclusion, unlike most spacecraft that had a singular dynamic topology, our spacecraft had five topologies, each designed to operate with the others through a singular topology function, the main system was obviously working correctly, but for some reason the backup system was not recognizing itself as one, but rather was treating each dynamic module as an independent, you get this nasty of this, hard to control a spacecraft with just one idea of its dynamic more difficult to get a system with five polarity ratings, to stay on course, fortunately our operational system, was all straight; but in case of an emergency we were going to have a ship with five centers of gravity and five centers of propulsion. Andrea noted “I will work to see if it is a design flaw of simply a matter of setting the proper operational parameters.” “keep me informed” “yes sir.”

Even with this bit of bad news I could remain calm, back up systems have never been precisely ready during normal operations, but for the most part, when you get an emergency something seems to make them work, I kept the faith, and more than faith, Andrea gave me the confidence to relax and keep my coffee and eyes dreaming the terrain and space.

“Hey mister, are we floating to the bush garden on schedule?” Jeffrey, lead scientist was asking me if we were going to be able to meet the timing to our geological site, the primary for our mission. “Yeah, we are due over the site in 16 hours, barring any unprecedented events.” “Good, very good!” Jeffrey was a nice guy gone bad, he only cared about the test results from bush garden, he was making his name as a first rate geologist, and we were just his working platform, conversation with him was always business, don’t think he thought we pilots could think much. And perhaps he was right, it is sort of strange, but even as I have not discussed it with him, and merely sense his distaste for our profession, I get this feeling that he is sort of right; maybe it takes more incarnations to be a scientists, maybe they are closer to being Buddha’s than pilots. I say this with no small recognition that it implies many terrible things about my life, but there is something very basic about flying a spaceship, its not unproven technology, sure the thing might crash, it might even give everyone onboard a good scare and nothing more, but the general agreement is that the thing will work, and what I do is done by thousands of pilots everyday, every hour, hardly seems complicated, and today, with all the automated functionality brought forth by programmers that must understand a hell of a lot more than a pilot, I guess, being a pilot is really a function of monitoring all these automatic autopilots doing there work, and when they fail, being prepared to take over their task, which, because of the very fact that it can be automated must not be very complicated, fact is it suffers from very known parameters; whereas a scientist has to discover new patterns and new ways of looking at the world, I just pilot this thing, I just do the same thing over and over, been at it for over twenty years, next year I get to retired, and it has been mostly uneventful, the ship takes off, it follows a trajectory, it lands, I monitor all that and make sure that the restrooms get clean and the containers get emptied of their cargo. Yes sir, there won’t be much difference for me come retirement, sitting on a chair sipping coffee through the hours, much the same as I do now. Perhaps I wanted to be something else, but this is really the only thing I was ever good at, I got along with the instruments, the stars are a comfortable sight, I get to maneuver around the rings of planets, I occasionally witness two suns crashing into each other and there have been occasions where comets have streaked by the cockpit adding a bit of fervor to the game of flying this thing. But yeah, mostly it is dull and when something is dull you have to have a great deal of patience, I am a patient man, which is why I can tolerate central command and la–di–da rockologist.
“Captain” “Yes?” “We have arrived at our staging point and will maintain it until further notice.” “Good, advice the science team that we will be launching the probes and science pods, they need to prepare for the landing shuttle no later that 18 hundred hours.” “Yes sir.” The ship goes into a restful mode now, I like this part of the business, just land those guys, sit around wait, write emails home, I wasn’t married, it’s absurd to marry when you are never going to be home to fuck the wife and distort the children, anyways I wasn’t going to pretend to hold a marriage together, unlike some of the other fleet captains. I love the sound of those engines winding down to a cruising speed, calm whispers.

RC