Semester 1 2017 er the engineer in a cocktail of milk, beans and broken wiring. The crew stared. The coffee machine suppressed a giggle.
of nostalgia, he leaned towards the instructions and—ah.
Captain Xennius sank into his chair. This was it. He was going to have to call the whole damn thing off and stage humanity’s leap to the stars in a studio, again. At least it would give the conspiracy theorists something productive to focus on. With a heavy heart, he made his decision. The wonders of the universe, the dreams of his childhood, the expectations of his father— all would have to wait.
He knew what was wrong with the ship. Nostalgia quietly made way for an overwhelming wave of embarrassment. He turned sheepishly to assess the rest of the crew. Josephine was engaged in another futile argument with the navigation system over its demand for pay and voting rights. Adams was standing, hands on hips, at the coffee machine, which was impatiently explaining its wiring system and opinion on his character. The rest of the crew were looking extremely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of equipment that had stopped working entirely and were hurrying to consult the ample holographic replications of the cork board with its crucial information. The captain walked casually towards his chair. They were all worried enough as it was. There was really no point in making everything awkward, especially not with Josephine and Adams. There was a good chance those two would have been just as incompetent if he hadn’t made this tiny mistake. He harshly instructed the guilt that had been steadily gaining popularity with his conscience to go and find someone who would indulge that sort of career ending nonsense.
Oh dear.
“Alright. Turn her around, crew. Josephine, see if that plotter has managed to drag itself away from its newfound obsession with the romantic poets for five minutes. Otherwise we’ll just have to follow our outward path by manual estimate until we get back in range with Earth. Adams, you just sit down – no, sit down, leave the coffee machine for now.” The ship began its slow rotation, lights beaming its presence to the silent, lonely galaxy. Xennius stood alone on the viewing platform, reminiscing. He and his crew had built this ship themselves from condensed matter in jars. In its current state, with its life support systems and supplies designed to last for years, the epic craft would have been too heavy to resist the Earth’s gravity for take-off. So, crew and jars had crammed into a small shuttle, and their wondrous surroundings had been expanded and assembled, each intricate, crucial piece at a time, by their very own space-suited hands. He remembered his optimism back then, shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, on the brink of the ultimate unknown, clutching a sheet of detailed instructions and armed with the reassurance of hundreds of practice sessions. And now, after mere months, their home, their purpose, would be dismantled. All their hard work. The captain sighed and turned away. He couldn’t bear to look outside, to see those distant specks of light and life that might have been their legacy.
An entire section of the steering mechanism gave up and collapsed to the floor. The captain closed his eyes. The ship span on in no particular direction, and the instruction manual on the wall remained, unbeknown to its desperate readers, upside down.
The cork-board mounted on the bridge wall caught his eye. He chuckled, remembering the rousing cheers when he had pinned the first set of assembly instructions to it. The corkboard had been the very first thing to be born of the jars, and was ironically the only damn thing that seemed to be working properly. Full
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