Transmissions: Chapter 1
Here is the first chapter from the first draft of a story I wrote for my final university project a few years ago. This feels like an appropriate time to share.
04.28.2033 @ 22:38:46 – Merritt Island, Florida – Captain Roger Fitzpatrick
Twelve years ago, a little man with a bad spray tan, too much power and not enough common sense got impeached and divorced on the same day. That night he went home and drank himself stupid as he went through his social media feeds to complain about his woes. He took advice from people online who insisted he was wronged by women, democrats and anyone else that was old enough to vote. Fueled by vodka, handfuls of horse tranquilizers and Viagra he went to work the next day in a blue suit, a red tie and carried a bucket of lard under his arm. A normal person may have stopped to think that being fired would mean you don’t show up at the office anymore, but not this guy. No, this guy wouldn’t let a little detail like that stop him from doing the good lord’s work. Possibly the dark lord’s work. Who knows? Anyway, he thought it would be a good idea to go to one of those undisclosed locations no one is supposed to know about. His online posts indicate he was going to go there because no one would let him go there unsupervised, even though he was “the man” in charge. He said he was going to livestream it to show the world all the “cool shit” they were hiding and the “EEE-TEES” they had locked up. I want to say it was the horse tranquilizers, maybe it was the vodka, but after reading his autobiography, I think he was just out of his fucking mind. As soon as he walked through the front door he began to strip. Once that blue suit hit the floor, he began rubbing lard all over his body. The security tapes are quite a sight to see, and that image will forever be burned into my mind. Security must have been used to this behaviour, because it wasn’t until he passed through the third security checkpoint that someone noticed the access card he clamped on to his left nipple and asked, “Weren’t you fired yesterday?” I have never seen someone attempt to capture a greased-up pig before, but I imagine this was close. For a heavy guy in his early 80s he could move. Eventually he got into the room that he was never allowed in. Did it have a console under a big map of the world? Yes! Did it have a big red button under glass that this big orange idiot needed to press? Yes! Did he hit random switches targeting our enemies and allies? Yes! Did he take a fire extinguisher off the wall and break the glass? You bet he did! Did he press the button and start an all-out war? Almost. Someone had the foresight to take the nukes offline when the impeachment hearings began, but the countries he targeted were fully aware of what happened because this dumb shit live-streamed himself doing it in all his greasy naked glory. So he personally moved the doomsday clock up from one hundred seconds to midnight to ten seconds to midnight and promptly dropped dead from a Viagra/horse tranquilizer induced heart attack.
The past decade has been tense, and now in an uneasy alliance with these other countries we have pooled our resources into building a new rocket ship we have christened the Arc II. Its purpose is to take the best and brightest minds out past the edges of our solar system and find new worlds for humanity to inhabit. We humans need a little more space between us. When this idea was brought up in a meeting, I may have laughed and called it a waste of money and resources that would have been better spent fixing our problems on this planet. As punishment for speaking out against it, I got promoted to Captain and assigned to the Arc II to ensure nothing goes wrong. It’ll be like Star Trek, only there aren’t any aliens we have to worry about. Just a solid ten years of exploring and then I get to come home and retire. Ten long years away from home. What’s the worst that could happen?
After rereading my final version of the story, I feel like the whole thing could use another rewrite.
Still, today felt like an appropriate time to share this draft that I wrote in 2022, have idea what we would be in for three years later.