At the bottom of a well

I landed here seventeen years ago, a blue and brown dot at the bottom of a gravity well.

I have a malformation in a portion of my brain that causes me some trouble outside of normal space. Not common but not fun. I spent four months in a hospital getting my thoughts unscrambled before I could function again, and the bottomline is, I won't be doing any squirting anytime soon. I can survive it, and the recovery process has become faster so people with my condition (Hopkin F-dysplasia) can even travel after some prep and caution, but I won't be doing it again. Six hours at a time for four months on a table with the top of my head unscrewed was enough to convince me.

I came here on my way to the academy. This was a short hop before the long trip, i was going to be a squirt booster pilot, and I had ranked top in my class back at home. I had promise. And then I discovered I had HFD.


So here I sit, in the butthole of the universe. It's not so bad, actually, and i like it here fine. Warm summers. Not so cool winters. Sandy beaches and clean water. Decent folks who work hard, government which is so unintrusive as to barely exist.

It's a factory planet. I discovered that the same attention to detail i enjoy when I was studying for my pilot's exams lend themselves to my skills as an induistrial engineer, which I matriculated at in record time, and now I work for Redd-Shyft.

I still have a little hollow in my soul for the deepness of space, and the fact that I won't be out there folding space annoys me a little. On the other hand, the things i do, the parts my customers make, the whole of the universe needs. Right here, I have control over the manufacture of every klystron, every squirt booster tube, every piece of hardware that is used in the entire industry- not to say just about every flatscreen, happy meal, and can opener in use. More later.