[Facebook] More Sci-fi

Oh, hi, have a story. I’ll talk about California when I’m not cramming my head with tutorials, trying to be productive, or being depressed that I’m not productive. Something like that.

—

Status update: I don’t think I can ever get back up..

.. It had just been so *long* ago: it was years ago that she had fallen down this solar system’s gravity well and just happened to run into a hospitable planet instead of the star’s fiery atmosphere. Just the right probabilities had worked out in her favor, and she had survived planet fall.

Then, she had to learn how to live on the planet, full of strange ecosystems and geological formations. She still remembered… the day she was caught in a sand storm, the week she spent sick from the brightly colored fruit, the month she spent nursing her broken leg, the countless battles against the dogs determined to rip the flesh from her bones, the moment of realization that the planet was probably devoid of sentient life…

And those were only the very lowest points of her stay so far.

Well, she survived. She was built to win, and by golly, she had won out over the planet.

However, her past upsets blanched and cringed when set next to her current challenge.

She wasn’t an engineer in her past life, that much was clear. She lost most of her technology in the crash, though, and the world soon reclaimed the scraps that were left. If she were content with living out her life on this planet, then that would have been fine.

She wasn’t content with that.

One night, she couldn’t sleep, and as she looked up-well into the alien constellations, she remembered her life, flitting among the stars.

The next morning, she dismantled her thatched hut, retrieved the small computer that had survived the crash, and began to re-derive astrophysics.

Her first rockets had gone a measly 10 feet; later iterations went farther, and started to light up the sky with their failed excursions. But they were still that: failed, with a tendency to explode in the upper atmosphere.

She fired off 3 rockets of the same design last month: 2 of them failed. It didn’t bode well that she was sitting in a rocket sharing their design, with a few last minute tweaks thrown in.

It’s not like she had the margins of error that space farers of old had, lacking the huge organizations trying to extend human achievement. Chances of 2/3 were enough… for her to dismount her flying death machine, return to her hut, and wait, hoping that some space farer would pick up her distress signal (she had created her own antenna array!) and fly down-well to find her, with a rusted rocket sitting on the launch pad, ready with some tea to regal the traveler about how she had re-derived astrophysics, and look! There’s proof on the wall behind you, where I carved a particularly nasty result into my hut, aren’t you impressed? My, my, am I glad that I’m here to share this achievement with you, rather than blasted to smithereens and floating through

Okay.

Enough of that.

She gripped the flight control, and rested her finger on the ignition.

It was time to fly.