driftfleet | 1. Say, say, say, ain't it been some kinda day

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1. Say, say, say, ain't it been some kinda day

Who: Simon Tam and you
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Anyone aboard the Marsiva
When: From yesterday until the mighty shuffle!

[A very well-dressed man is seriously studying the communicator. His hair is tousled, and his clothing- fancy as it is- looks disheveled. Like he fell asleep in his clothes or... something else.

Hmmm.

At any rate, the young man looks pretty irate, but when he speaks, his voice is perfectly friendly.]

I've been watching this network for a bit and want to make sure I am understanding things correctly. I am part of a group of people who have been abducted and will be used to entertain a television audience? [He purses his lips.] Is there anything else I should know?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not that I'm aware of. Unless your Alliance is powerful enough to pull in people from different universes and times, I doubt they have much to do with this. Atroma is the one you want to blame here.

[He sucks in a breath. No Alliance. Different times and universes. It could still be a trick, of course, but he would play along for now.]

I... doubt that they are capable of that. They can do a lot of things, but time travel is something we have not figured out yet. So Atroma is the government here? Or are they, as they say, the showrunners?

Showrunners I think would be more appropriate. I haven't seen much evidence of governing from Atroma, but I suppose that doesn't really mean anything. We aren't told a lot about our audience or the show's creators.

That makes a sick sort of sense- I guess to makes it harder for their prisoners to rebel if we can't reach the people who have taken us. Plus, extra entertainment for trying to figure out that mystery. They win either way.

Exactly. They promise that at the end of this show's cycle we'll be sent home. Naturally, I don't trust that promise at all. People have left, including a man from my own universe, but we have no way of knowing if they actually went back to where they came from.

And the word "cycle" could mean any length of time they want it to mean.

[He pauses to digest that.]

So we are at someone's random whims, more or less. We go home if they wish, we stay if they wish, and in the meantime we are nothing more than players before an audience.

Basically. They pay us as well, as an incentive for us to try to get good "ratings" - that is, make ourselves as interesting as possible for the audience.

Well, I am not sure they will get much interest out of me. I tend to keep to myself... my crewmates back home were the interesting ones.

[Okay, that was a lie, but he doesn't exactly blab about the whole "wanted fugitive" thing to anyone.]

If they brought you here, then they wanted you for some reason. I haven't been able to tell why they kidnap who they do, but I doubt it was because they find us uninteresting.

I suppose that makes sense. My work being second nature to me does not necessarily mean an audience will not find it interesting...

[She nods.]

Though I have to wonder... they seem to be bringing a lot of doctors in lately. I hope that's not a bad sign of things to come.

It must say a lot about the kind of worlds we come from that I am agreeing with that thought. We are on a show, after all- need to keep the audience entertained.

... does this sort of thing happen in your world normally?

Not especially, but I mean... I have become cynical enough to fully believe that I could have been abducted for that purpose. It has happened to me once- I was kidnapped by a group of people on a backwater planet who needed a doctor.

You know, I was kidnapped by a group of terrorists for much the same reason, but that made more sense to me than this does.

But you say "planet." I assume this means your society is space-faring as well?

[He nods.]

I cannot imagine a world without space travel, in fact. Where I come from- I cannot assume it is the same for everyone- humanity long ago used up and left Earth, hundreds of years before I was born, and colonized other star systems.

[Beverly looks thoughtful for a moment.]

That easily could have been our Earth, if history had gone a little differently. There was a devastating nuclear war hundreds of years ago, but we survived it and become members of the interstellar community not long after. We've been exploring ever since. Like you, I can't imagine a world without starships... at this point, I've spent most of my life on one.

In my... universe, I suppose I should call it- it was a matter of the planet no longer being able to sustain life rather than war. There were too many people, not enough resources to go around, even with great advancements in clean energy and food production. It happened hundreds of years before I was born, however, so most of what I know about Earth is from history books.

[Beverly looks sad as Simon talks. What a shame, to have never known Earth. And it's hard to imagine everything just being... dead.]

Is there any way to go back? Life has surprising ways of bouncing back when you least expect it.

[He shakes his head.]

It took a whole generation living and dying having never set foot off a ship before we were able to find a habitable solar system and two planets- we called them Sihnon and Londinium- to settle on. From there, we terraformed other worlds and moons and spread out.

What about other species? Was there no one willing to help you?

We have yet to meet any species other than humans, believe it or not. The only "aliens" we have to speak of are mutated animals shown off at cheap sideshow attractions. [And Reavers, but they were still men, in a sense.]

[A galaxy without other sentient beings? That's...]

That's so hard for me to imagine. I live and work with no less than ten other species on my ship, and I'm friends with many of them.

It is hard for me to believe sometimes, when I think about it. Humans that lived on Earth all those years ago probably took for granted that we would have met someone else by now.

I suppose in a way it makes sense... we have no way of knowing how many parallel universes there are, perhaps an infinite amount. Theoretically, anything that could happen, is happening, in some universe. Clearly, both our worlds started off similarly enough, but something changed somewhere along the line to create one Milky Way with billions and billions of inhabitants and another with very few.

Edited 2015-04-22 23:40 (UTC)

1. Say, say, say, ain't it been some kinda day

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