#witchspace

Pilot’s log: 15 September 3301

I’m starting this log to help cope. There’s a piece of classical Earth literature I love which contains a quote: 

"Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space."

I made the push out to Sagittarius A* all at once. 25.900 light years, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Urania performed beautifully, exceeding all expectations, but her pilot let her down somewhat. I’d just like to make a record of what happened to me on the way.

Flying a ship long-distance for nineteen hours straight is brutal, jump after jump after jump, fuel scooping after each one. After 3.500 light years boredom sets in. Every star looks the same, it’s just M-type after M-type after M-type. Give me a god damn O-type, or even an A-type - hell, I’d even take a methane dwarf at this point to break up the monotony, for fuck’s sake! Every once in a while you’ll run through an H II region and UniCart’s stupid navigation computer will string a bunch of protostars together on your route. They look just like M-type stars, but you can’t scoop them. Often, I was so bored that I was flying essentially on automatic and wouldn’t notice I wasn’t scooping anything until Urania started shouting at me that she was overheating.

After eight hours, I was still less than 10.000 light years towards the core, already exhausted, and was starting to despair of how far I had left to go. Each jump became more difficult than the last. I flew too close while scooping. I made mistakes and was forced out of supercruise more than once. I was on the verge of a mental breakdown each time I ran into a protostar or brown dwarf and had to reroute. And then I started seeing things.

It started, as I imagine it always does, with a vague feeling that I was being watched. I was crossing the void between the Scutum-Centaurus Arm and the Norma Arm when I noticed it. Shortly after, I hit a string of methane dwarfs and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being mocked. As I continued, I noticed how much like an iris the spacial distortion when you’re about to jump into hyperspace looks. This was enough to convince me that something was watching me, mocking me.