Yes, yes, blahdebloo, it's been fifty thousand years since anything has been posted. I've been listening to Great science fiction audiobooks lately (yes, Great with a capital G), and worrying over whether I am a truly creative soul or not. Tonight, on impulse, I opened up Word and discovered that, instead of too little to say, I really have waaay too much. To the point where I am lousy with details and drown people in them. It's interesting, to be sure. Here's my dribble for the day.
---
Alex had
always drawn comfort from things; the cocoon-like glow one gets from being in a
room of your own devising, with all your treasures around you, and it was this
that sustained her through the voyage to the academy. She had no schematics of
her new room, no idea of the size except that it was at least half that of her
bedroom back home, and no concept of how many others she was expected to share
quarters with. Nevertheless, she spent most of the three months it took to go
from the Dagobar system to Alpha Draconis rearranging holos in different
configurations near her future bed (the actual photos of her parents and Holly
would go nearest her head, of course) and placing her tiny treasures in nooks,
crannies, or on chests of drawers, depending on the imagining she had that week
of her impending home. It was tedium by the second week, practically arranged
by the fourth, but it was all she had. Aside from her required workouts every
night in the gym, she was confined to her tiny cabin for the entirety of the
trip, with nothing but her course materials to read, and no electronics
allowed.
The trouble
that had gotten her practically imprisoned had begun the day she arrived. She
had stood on the gangplank with her family, her luggage beside her, as it swarmed
with stewards and bots coming to and fro with necessary supplies.
“You’ll
send a message as soon as you get in,” her mother said for the hundredth time.
“Yes,
mother, I shall not waste the card on food or comfort or alcohol on the ship,
and upon arrival I will march straight to my bunk, ignoring all orders or
potential friends, and report to you the fact of my un-death.”
“Just be
careful and send the message,” her mother had repeated. Her father pulled her
into a last embrace and dropped a whiskery kiss on the top of her head before
stepping back, squaring her shoulders, and saying gruffly, “You make us proud.”
“I will.”
His hand fluttered softly on her shoulder as he scanned her face,
---
We'll see if I come back to it. It screams Hyperion and Ender's Game and Starship Troopers to me. But then again, if I ever reach the level that people can accuse my work of being like any of those, I will be proud.
