So I didn’t blow myself up on my second attempt, though I’ll have to stay light on details for legal reasons.
I did some basic chemistry to break down the substance that had been meant to fucking annihilate me if something so much as tapped on the side of my ship, and turned it into something far less energetic.
Then I mixed that with some other shit, created a useless vial of ashen tar on accident, tried again, and then made some actual fucking rocket fuel.
Then I packed it into a tiny little cylinder with a nozzle on the end and an electric starter shoved in the ass.
It entirely failed to ignite.
And I had no idea why.
I’m not kidding when I say I spent hours troubleshooting it, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, before I realized that the problem was actually impossibly dumb.
I’d wired the starter switch wrong.
The rocket was fine.
It was just the fucking contacter that closed the circuit on my dumbass resistive heating element wasn’t working. And it wasn’t working because I’d soldered the positive and negative wires in the wrong places, causing the whole thing to short itself closed, burning the disposable wire filament in the igniter out before it even got installed in the rocket.
And I hadn’t noticed, somehow.
Probably because I’m a moron.
But then I fixed it, and it all ignited just fine, producing a modest amount of thrust and burning itself out safely.
So I made a bigger one, then taped a thumb drive full of every single piece of propaganda I’d ever been forced to ingest by my captors to the tip, before sending it off on a long journey that, if I got the math right, should send it right into the center of the nearest sun.
It was remarkably cathartic, for a meaningless gesture.
It helped that the missile flew perfectly straight, too.
Some more meaningless time spent tinkering in the void later, and I’d strapped several independent stages of solid fuel boosters to my ship.
The boosters wouldn’t produce all that much thrust all told, but it was better than nothing, especially considering that I’d made them out of whatever the fuck I just happened to still have on hand.
I’d tested everything out with scale models as much as I could afford to, and had already made many of the common mistakes regarding stage order, separation, and all those other things that Kerbal Space Program had tried to warn me about.
And after so much iteration and design, I was pretty confident that this was going to work.
But that didn’t stop me from clenching my simulated asshole like my life depended on it, as I sat there, waiting for the launch window to arrive.
I hadn't left anything to be manually controlled other than the emergency stop, considering how little I trusted myself to keep a cool head the whole way through.
Essentially, I was just stuck there, waiting, for the next thirty seconds of real time, as a clock ticked down.
At T-minus zero, a basic little program that I’d stressed tested to shit and back would ignite the first stage of rockets.
Then those would burn for a precisely calculated interval of time.
Then they’d explosively detach. Just a little charge that would shunt them away from me.
And then, between that and the next stage of rockets, the gyros on my ship would kick in, and start changing my pitch and yaw and all those other made up words for mid flight rotation.
Once I was realigned, then the next stage would kick in
A much shorter thrust impulse, this time. Just to bring me closer in line with my target asteroid’s path of travel.
Then, those would detach as well.
And then I would have to wait for about two months. Because orbital mechanics fucking suck and space is huge when you aren’t traveling anywhere close to the speed of light.
And then, finally, after a quick visual check with my cameras and telescope to make sure I’d floated into the right position, I’d use a short impulse from my main drive to approach, before flipping my ship around and lightly braking with another light burst from my main drive.
At which point, over the course of another real world day, I would drift ever closer to a large icy asteroid that was part of a wide, highly disperse band of rocks and dust that all orbited the central star of my destination system.
Then I’d fire an anchor into it, reel it in, and harvest it for frozen hydrogen and water to turn into more hydrogen.
Maybe a few other elements too, if I got lucky.
At which point I’d fuel up my ship, make my final preparations, and then blast off at full speed to try and skip past whatever defenses were there on or around the planet.
What happened after that, I was going to have to play by ear.
Later.
For now, I was just waiting with bated breath, watching the clock count down with unnerving intensity.
And then…
A couple of my cameras were whited out with overexposure, and the ship‘s accelerometer data started spiking.
And that was it.
The readings on my screens told me it had probably worked.
Nothing had exploded, and I was moving as intended.
It honestly felt pretty anticlimactic. But that was what I got for expecting to be able to feel movement from inside my simulation.
I knew, logically, that the only way I was going to know if it worked was through my screens.
But emotionally, my monkey brain had been prepared for drama and bombast. Rumbling in the air, shaking in my seat, the pull of acceleration…
None of it was there.
I felt nothing.
And it was starting to freak me out.
Like, I knew that I didn’t have a body, in the abstract, but in that moment, I finally felt it.
Things were happening that determined my survival, and just like all the other times thus far, I only knew about it through screens.
It was just that only now that I finally was forced to reckon with that inherent disconnect.
Needless to say, I was handling it poorly.
To the point that I was starting to disassociate so hard that my very sense of ego started to fray.
I didn’t feel real.
I didn’t feel like I existed.
I didn’t feel anything at all.
There were just shadows on the cave wall, and I couldn’t even see those with my own eyes. I was dead. I was nothing. I was a ghost, shackled to a mechanical corpse, watching as it shambled on through an empty hell. Forced to watch endlessly as things I was told were important happened without my conscious acknowledgement.
Eyes taped open, facing a screen, not even able to scream. Because I was nothing. Just a specter behind the glass, as lights flashed and alarms beeped.
I…
Was gone.
I went blank.
Not unconscious.
I couldn’t sleep, after all.
But blank.
An empty thing, still hearing and seeing, but with nobody home.
I think I tried to move, a couple of times. Some part of me stirring. Desperate for anything to do at all.
But those impulses were nothing in the face of the horror of my new existence, so what vestiges of myself that I had left fled back into the white noise.
Readouts shifted.
What sensory qualia I took in just rang through me like a flat tone coming through a disconnected landline.
Clouds shifted on a canvas of endless blue.
I never even twitched an eyelid.
My eyes didn’t dry out because they never needed to actually blink. Discomfort wasn’t real, in the sim. Breathing was unnecessary, so I didn’t do that either.
I never had to swallow spit, or deal with a parched throat. My skin never itched. No bodily needs moved me.
I just sat there.
Limp.
Catotonic.
A nothing that couldn’t even have the good grace to stop taking up space.
Time passed, I was pretty sure, but I couldn’t tell how much. I could see the clock tick down, I think, but the number stopped meaning anything to me. It was an abstract, like everything else.
And then my ship hit an asteroid.