Wow

This has sure been a slow month.

A Mission To Jupiter (Dreams)

Note: Sorry about the first paragraph.

                Far off in the distant reaches of space, I was aboard a spaceship. I had no particular reason to be there, but as usual took no notice of the fact at all. Nevertheless, I was allowed to and perfectly aware of how to pilot the ship. The control room itself was quite dull, walled in with tarnished metal plates arranged in a boring rectangular configuration, which were decorated only with a useless pattern of intersecting raised squares. The floor appeared to be concrete. The front window was entirely uninspired. It took up the greater part of one of the walls and was not even given curved edges or trim on the sides to emphasize its existence. The only other objects in the room were the door, which was inset about a foot into the wall opposite the window and split into two horizontally sliding sections, a railing in front of the window, and a control panel located near the front end of the right wall. The control panel was both incredibly simple and seemingly fake. It was a long, thick, rectangular slab of white plastic, tilted about 22 and a half degrees towards the center of the room, and held up by two metal poles. Its only control was a grey sliding knob. It had to be pulled along its wildly curving path at a specific speed and using a particular state of mind to move the ship. The control room's lack of design sense extended through every single other part of the ship.

                As I stood in the similarly designed hallway behind this control room, a message blared annoyingly over the intercom.

                “All crew members and stowaways of any importance please report to the teleport bay, now! The boss himself is visiting!”

                I walked through the maze of corridors and arrived at the teleport bay just in time to see the boss appear. There were no sparkles or sound effects or anything making the event interesting, the boss just wasn't there one moment and was the next. The teleport bay was slightly smaller than the control room and there was only one teleportation chamber. It was more of a tiny alcove than a chamber, with no discernible controls and only a metal plate on its floor to signify its importance. The boss stepped into the main room and cleared his throat. He glanced at his clipboard.

                “Hi,” he said. “Your next mission is to collect some pressurized liquid hydrogen from Jupiter. Just head into orbit like sooooo...”, he explained, waving around his free hand, which still was holding a pencil,

                “Oh!”, he exclaimed, noticing the pencil and extending the hand holding it towards the captain of the ship, “Take this! I need this hand to wave around!”

The captain took the pencil.

                “... and then send in a pod. You'll need seven grams of it. Keep it pressurized, we can't have any cheating,” concluded the boss, who stepped back into the chamber and vanished.

                All the people in the room except the captain left, eager to return to whatever they normally did. As you can tell, the spaceship didn't have much of a purpose. Being only a construct of a resting imagination, this is understandable.

                “Shame,” said the captain, “I never gave the boss his pencil back. I'll have to keep it safe for him.”

You may correctly surmise that the captain was extremely overestimating the importance of the pencil to the boss. Just how extremely he was doing so will become very clear very soon.

…

                The ship had reached Jupiter, and the planet looked strangely small through the window. Its odd beige and rust-colored stripes curved and faded in exactly the right way to make them look painted on. The time had come to collect the hydrogen, and I was standing in the control room, ready to move the ship closer to the planet. Eight other crew members, all dressed in white jumpsuits, were standing behind me for no obvious reason. I carefully moved the knob along its slider towards the left end of the control panel, which signified small sizes or short distances. Jupiter seemed to grow, but very slowly.

                After a few seconds of movement towards the planet, one of the crew members became impatient.

                “You're doing it all wrong! We've got to go way faster than that!”, he yelled, and then yanked the knob at an alarming speed.

                The ship flew straight towards Jupiter. As the planet as seen in the window grew larger, the ship began trying to rip itself apart. The floor shook with surprising vigor, and the lights went wild from absorbed radiation. By the time I finished my struggle back towards the control panel, all that was visible through the window was a uniform brown haze. The only illumination came from the giant electrical storms occurring below us on Jupiter. One I had a firm hold on the control panel, I slowly and carefully slid the knob back towards the right, inching us back into a sane orbit. At that moment the captain bolted into the room, panting from the exertion of running through every corridor in the ship in search of a pencil.

                “Have any of you seen the pencil? The boss needs it back and I've lost it!”, he half-sobbed.

                “No, captain,” droned the other crew members in unison.

                The captain's face went from an extremely worried, mortified look to one of utter despair and gloominess.

                I pulled open the top drawer of a nearby small, dark-stained, and ornate wooden cabinet which couldn't have possibly been there and pulled out the pencil, which could not have been put there. I showed it to the captain, hoping that it would cheer him up. It did not.

                “It's too late. I lost it, and I can't take it back. I would lose it again. I can't be trusted with anything...”

                The captain fell silent and left the control room. One of the random crew members glanced through the doorway and into the hallway, immediately recognizing the path the captain was taking.

                “The captain is heading into Jupiter's room!”

                'Jupiter's Room' was a room containing a human-sized scale model of Jupiter, accurate except for having a somewhat exaggerated equatorial bulge and a slightly greenish tint. It hovered about two inches above a raised platform and was surrounded by convoluted metal pipes on its left and right sides. By the time the other crew members and I arrived there, the captain had reached the far end of the room and was standing on the platform to the left of Jupiter. Though it was a scale model, its internal pressure was accurate, which meant that the captain's plan of walking straight through it would certainly and intentionally lead to his death. I rushed off to the only place I could think of that could help: The Infinite Couch Cushion Field.

                The Couch Cushion Field, luckily, was located a few feet to the right of Jupiter's Room. Both its ground and sky were white, and no end was visible. The brown, lightly patterned couch cushions stubbornly extended forever in every direction. I leaped out of Jupiter's Room and hit the center of a nearby couch cushion. There was, of course, an invisible button there which instantly rendered the scale model of Jupiter holographic, nothing but a field of harmless light.

                One of the crew members glared at me.

                “What exactly are you doing?”, she asked.

                “I just saved the captain's life, of course,” I boasted. The captain walked through the hologram and out the other end unharmed. “See?”, I said.

                “You're ridiculous,” she responded as the captain rushed towards me, not entirely sure whether he was grateful or furious.

                I woke up.