“Parsons! What 5 things would someone put in a spell circle to summon you?”
“Uh… what?”
“It’s a meme, like a, a game. My grandma explained it to me once– I thought you liked all that vintage stuff?”
“I do I just. Witchcraft isn’t really my– I don’t think it works like that, Carter. Bees, does it work like that?”
From the front of the cockpit, Thoroughly called, “Nope,” without looking down into the Endeavor’s recreation area.
“See? Intrepid and Indomitable Pilot Beeson says magic doesn’t work like that.”
“C’mon, it’ll pass the time. We gotta think about something other than the fact that we’re all probably gonna die out here.”
“Well, when you put it like that.” Parsons sucked in a breath, held it, exhaled for an inhumanly long time as he thought.
Carter tsked at him. “Man, you gotta stop showing off your lung capacity that’s just rude.”
Of the six of the Endeavor’s crew, Parsons and Carter had ended up bracketing the lung capacity rankings.
“Listen, I can’t help the fact that I spent my entire childhood practicing breathing.” Choir had done right by him when it’d come time to beg NASA to send him into space along with his doctoral thesis: Project Renaissance’s portable navsat system. The self-sustaining, solar-powered satellite-in-miniature kept a close orbit to the ship, relaying back along a trail of breadcrumbs left by each of its siblings to course correct in real-time en route to the Kepler field.
With the Bishop-Alcubierre drive and the most-advanced space mapping technique ever invented working together Parsons was pretty confident that they had humanity’s salvation on lock. Sure, The Endeavor had lost that relay race already and was dropping breadcrumbs through the Andromeda galaxy because of freak axion interference, but those other crews on those other ships? They were going to be fine. All because of Parsons.
Most of them, anyway.
The ones whose assigned earthlike exoplanets were actually habitable.
And after them, the remaining dregs of humanity would follow, and life as humans defined it would continue on in new and fascinating ways and it would all be fine!
“Probably everything I brought with me on the ship, I guess,” he blurts, refusing to indulge his train of thought further.
“We were only allowed three personal items.”
“Yeah, but like that’s the most important stuff: my grandma’s blanket, ’cause it’s heavy and space is freakin’ cold. My graphing calculator ’cause my ma bought it for me when I was 8 and you hafta have somethin’ sentimental out here. My lab coat. Gotta have the lab coat if you’re gonna summon an aerospace engineer anyway and how’s anyone gonna know what I do without it? It’s essential.”
“Yeah, okay, but two more. If there hadn’t been a weight limit, what else would you’ve brought?”
“My CD and vinyl collection, the whole thing, and the stereo I built for it,” he amends without hesitation.
“Just how many CD’s do you have?”
“All of them.” He grinned like the sun rising. “1,532 the last time I counted the ones that were music but my mom said she was gonna buy me more for my space birthdays even though she can’t send ’em to me. I keep ’em in these binders,” he held his hands up, gesturing the dimensions, “’cause the cases go on shelves. The records, though, I’ve got like 700 of ’em and they’ve got their own like. Rolodex.”
“What’s a Rolodex.”
“It’s this– y’know what, google it– and anyway my stereo’s not so big, though, just big enough to play a 78 but it’s perfect ’cause it’ll play them and read the CD’s in the same drive and the speakers are totally y’know modern so it’s like… a little bigger than a 12-inch square and thin as a tablet. There’s too many adjustable parts for the design to be sold — I mean old music’s a really niche interest y’know?– but I have a patent for it anyway ’cause no one in my family’s ever patented anything in the US before and mom insisted. Man, I really miss that thing. Whenever we get where we’re going I’m gonna build a new one. I don’t care if I hafta do it with twigs.”
“You think we’re gonna land somewhere?”
“There’s planets in this system, right?”
Carter looked out the porthole at the gas giant that dominated the starboard side of the Endeavor’s field of view; its atmosphere was dense with clouds of green but beneath it, sometimes, vast swathes of violet-black and dapplings of reddish-pink were visible. Deeper, denser layers of gas, shifting and uncertain around a core of what had to be ice. Impossibly far beyond it were others that were rocky, but none with atmospheres supporting life. “Uh, yeah, sure looks like it.”
“Well, I mean this is up to all of us but the rules kinda went out the window a while ago, right, so we’re probably gonna try to land on one of that thing’s moons,” he pointed out the window, “And then I’m gonna build a stereo.”
Mack, their captain, drifted up from the sleeping quarters and right into the conversation. “You gonna make your own records for it, too?”
“Out of clay, sure. Thomas Edison did it; it’s not that hard. I mean he used wax but I gotta assume we’re not gonna have much to work with so: clay.”
“Another genius did it, it’s not that hard,” Mack teased. “You’ve gotta helluva optimistic streak, kid.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
The Illyrian Codices 