Ever since I was a young boy, way back in the late Twenty-first Century, I have dreamt of going somewhere important.
When I was very young, I took an interest in history. At first, I think I just liked the way the name "Magellan" came out of my mouth. I was fascinated. It wasn’t the politics that got me, it was the explorers. Politics are for people who don’t know what else to do but put their thumbs on the throats of other people to make them do all the work. I never liked any of that; I wanted true glory, I wanted to travel with Marco Polo, I wanted to help Ponce de Leon find the fountain of youth. I wanted to BE Magellan.
I used to pretend, when I was six, that I was the captain of a ship sailing around the world. It didn’t matter where I went, I just wanted to see everything. More than that, I wanted to see places that no one else had. Not places like America… the Original Americans had seen it long before white people had, and so had the Vikings. That’s another thing: MY voyage was going to be different from all the rest, because on my trips, no one would ever die. Not from battle, and not from disease or starvation. I would make sure of that. When I was six, that’s exactly what happened, in my little make-believe world. The only time anyone ever got killed on my adventures was when we were attacked without warning on an uncharted island off the coast of India. That was a grave day for a six year old. I had to make the decision to take another human life. I never forgot that. I went inside and cried to my mother for a solid hour.
But I soon got bored, because I found that all I was doing was running around. I had everything I wanted in my daydream paradises. Everything except for one thing: a destination. Somewhere no one else knew about. Somewhere fresh, and definite. I wanted to know where I was going before anyone else ever thought of it, and get there first.
In grade school, I decided where it was I wanted to travel to: space. I remember it now: sitting in the middle row of Mrs. Cuomo’s third grade science class. She had just given a lecture on astronomy and was preparing for a guest speaker. This speaker was one Jack Justice, fabled astronaut from the early Mars missions! He explained to us, then, all about the launch sequence, the lonely five-week flight, the orbiting maneuvers, landing on the surface, and even the terraforming process, something he didn’t actually have much to do with, being chiefly a navigator and all, but all the while keeping the interest of those of us in the class who were destined to become astronauts ourselves later that night, in our dreams. Of course, the closest any of us came to a career in the field in adulthood was crazy old Harry Young, the back-of-class prankster, who somehow managed to graduate suma cum laude in Chemistry from Ohio State University. He never actually did his masters, however, and was eventually spotted working in a laboratory in Cleveland where they restored old analogue film of the sort they used to use in cameras, before digital memory cards came about. Believe it or not, he actually made a killing in this line of work, as many people in big cities were into what was then known as "retro technique."
Perhaps I listened most intently, however. In those days, my young scrappy head was filled with ideas, and most of these were inky black silent crystalline visions of diamonds on the black velvet of space. I used to have a running make-believe sort of daydream where I was a pilot on the Jovian shots. I’d deftly maneuver the craft through the thickest parts of the asteroid belt (just for kicks, you see), and gun it straight for Jupiter, shooting through the rings a dozen times before finally settling in on Europa. There, I’d of course somehow manage to do battle with the most hideous and vicious beasts. It would amaze you to know that creatures who lived on a rock so tiny had been planning for years to dominate the universe, but they were, in my head at least, and I was the one who prevented it from happening! Just think of how different life would be now…
But my own life took a turn, when, out of the blue one April morning in the year 2084, I got a phone call from home in the middle of second period Calculus. It was from my little brother Edward.
"Mom and Dad are dead, Jim!"
"What are you talking about?" I exclaimed. I wasn’t so much shocked as I was angry at him. I thought he was pulling another one of his impractical jokes.
He wasn’t. "They were hit by a car going over the old expressway by the city center! The car came at them sideways, Jimmy… they must have had some kind of problem with their foil or something… Jimmy, it’s all shrapnel… it’s all… gone, they’re gone… torn to shreds…." There he broke down and started sobbing violently over the phone. I knew it was the truth at that exact point.
I was in Ninth grade that year. The next year, I was going to graduate. Then it would be off to some prestigious science college. I had the grades. But I didn’t graduate. Mom and Dad didn’t have any brothers, and their own parents had been lost at sea during one of those Caribbean Cruises that the parents of newlyweds used to traditionally take back then to get to know each other better. I was now the sole breadwinner. And we didn’t have any bread.
So, I dropped out. Eh, no shame there. Sometimes, as the saying goes, you gotta do what you gotta do. I took a series of odd jobs until I found one that I liked, worked there for a while, then moved on to another after a year or so. Edward was about 13 when this all happened to us, so he wasn’t going to be much help for a few years. That’s what I thought then, anyway. He ended up dropping out his sophomore year at Bradford High. But he didn’t get a job – he got a life.
Edward was never the brightest kid, but he had some brains and a lot of talent. People used to say he was going to be a great artist, or a playwright, or a world-class musician of some sort. Funny thing is, everyone knows this, but nobody ever hardly acknowledges it: creative types aren’t real dependable, and they’re also pretty likely to go over the edge. Edward did just that, and I had to support him for the next I don’t know how many years. In some ways, I still support him even now, but that’s going to have to change tomorrow. I mean literally tomorrow… but I’ll get to that later. I have to finish explaining things before I hit the sack tonight, because if something go wrong, I want somebody to know that I tried.
In the summer of ’88 I was working at this place down on Harvey Street called Finfrock’s. Classy type of joint; I was the head waiter there. Nervous old rich people kind of place, lots of strange décor and food whose names you needed a manual to pronounce… even the ceiling was made of that translucent luminous material like the kind they dug up on Ananke. Hell, for all I know that was the real deal, but I’d bet it was really some knock-off dreamed up in a lab somewhere in Singapore. Anyways, this one night when we were really slammed, I think it was a Thursday or a Friday, the police show up. Eddie was in an accident, nothing serious, but would I please come down to the station to answer some questions? Well, turns out that I had no answers for the kind of questions they were asking me! Things like:
- "Have you ever, Mister Carpenter, known Edward to use illegal stimulants?"
- "Has Eddie ever mentioned having rich friends before? Soccer players, actors, or the like?"
- "Has he ever taken any of those black-market courses on how to drive an AT-230?"
Of course, Edward wasn’t quite eighteen yet, and he’d never driven so much as the old gyro our father used to fiddle around with in the back shed, let alone the aircar or anything more powerful than a lawnmower, or a gas-kart. And an AT-230 was a military vehicle; outside of a tank, you wouldn’t find anything a person could drive by themselves that was more powerful than one of those heavy monsters. It was the kind of god-awful death-machine you’d sure as hell never ever want to face down, not a thing like that, regardless of whether you were on the winning side or not. A walking building, and a real menace; sometimes even to their own battalions.
So the officers explained to me that Eddie wasn’t injured seriously, and had almost freakishly managed to avoid injuring others, but that he was in serious trouble all right. He’d single-handedly collapsed two warehouses in the 5th district with that behemoth killer robot he’d bought.
Yes, bought.
While I slaved away painting garages during the day and waiting tables at night to make sure the two of us had enough food in us and money to pay down Dad’s old gambling debts (not to mention the high property taxes), Edward had been running experimental drugs and weapons between various crime lords all over the state of Ohio; he had forged documents on him that said he was one Nigel Jerrimander of Indianapolis, age 28; he had been found with enough explosives to destroy an entire city block; he was making, according to his own confession to the police, about $28 million a month from the local syndicates in all the territory he ran, because he apparently was the best and only game in town and therefore controlled more of the action than even his bosses did. And he was worth more than 4.3 billion dollars, at the age of 17. That may not be worth all that much now, but back then, you could easily buy an AT-230, and still have enough left over to own a couple of local hockey teams besides. Which he also did.
A hundred years before Edward B. Carpenter went to jail for damn near wiping out a quarter of East Dayton, Ohio in a military warmech, that kind of money was only ever seen by the governments of very prosperous nations. Imagine that.
There was a huge investigation, of course, and my name became practically synonymous with him, and I went through about four more jobs in the next year and a half. By the time the investigators had pieced everything together properly, eleven people were caught up in the affair at the highest criminal level, and well over 7.7 billion dollars in assets and bank accounts had been seized. Edward went to prison shortly thereafter to serve his sentence, and for the next six years, I was without the added burden of having to support my brother. Unfortunately, he hadn’t any money left after the feds came and took everything away, so I was left with incredible legal fees to pay off. It took me the next twenty-two years to do just that.
By this time, I was in my mid-forties, working as a buyer for a large retail chain. I had been married twice and divorced as many times. They were not altogether happy years, but things went a lot more smoothly with him out of trouble. In fact, when he got out of prison he got a good job hauling freight for a company out of Cincinnati, and even paid back nearly a quarter of his debt to me! So I couldn’t really complain too much.
At night, I went to a small college nearby, taking classes in vacuum aviation technology. I was learning how to design spacecraft properly; rudimentary craft, for it was as I said a tiny little local school, but nonetheless I was doing what I had wanted to do for the last two dozen years. It felt good. This late education continued for the next few years, and I kept my grades up in the top ten percent. Of course, I was only part time, and there was no way I could have been able to give up my job. I was on a ten year timeline with my degree. I quit sometime shortly after my sixth year, out of frustration. It wasn’t fast enough, and I was getting all too burnt out by the process of work, school, sleep, repeat. I’ve regretted that move for years and years afterward. Because it meant so much to me to do something important, to make my mark, to leave behind me a world better than the one I found because of something I did. I wanted nothing less in my life than to find myself a planet and explore it, map it out, name it after something. Maybe even myself, I don’t know. And what did I do? I went and dashed all my dreams away, into the mud.
Edward was doing alright flying trucks, getting by perhaps better than I was in fact, but the lure of easy money never went away. Over the next twelve years he was in and out of jail for petty theft and robbery more times than he could count. Finally a hard-assed judge on load from a circuit court in Detroit put him in prison again. He did another three years there before getting out and moving to Seattle. I now wish I had seen him before he left, because he died about two years later. Moonrag. Some things never change.
In case this journal doesn’t get found for a thousand years or something, I had better explain about the moonrag. Moonrag is a plant indigenous to Tethys, hence the name. Its effects vary widely among users, but chief among these are delirium, paranoia, and in the worst cases, schizophrenia. Once you’ve smoked it for the first time in your life, you’re hooked for good. The International Centers for Addiction Control estimate that fewer than one in ten thousand users ever kick, and most of these are back "in the swirl" within two years. It’s sort of like the ancient Terrestrial opiate-derived drugs, such as heroin. What’s more, nine times out of ten, a user dies after several years of using, ending their terrible lives in a shambles. First comes the delusions, then something akin to hebephrenia, and finally, a catatonic state that could really be more accurately described as a sort of conscious, permanent coma. So that’s how he went, I guess. All I know is what I’ve read, in a letter from his probation officer out of Seattle.
In the meantime, my dream of exploring new worlds has all but vanished. I’m too old for the space program, and they’ve charted nearly every single one of the habitable planets within practical distance. Not just charted, but actually mapped out and everything. You’d be amazed how many Lewises and Clarks there are in the Global Department of Extraterrestrial Cartographic Sciences. And I could have been one of them, if things had been different somehow.
So these last few decades have been trying at times. I tried to go back to school once, but flunked out because I was going through a bad relationship and didn’t have my head together. Drinking, all that. I retired, like most people, at 75. I’m 86 now. According to my genetic profile, I’ll die somewhere between 96 and 102, with the most likely target at 100. Eh, that’s what happens when you’re born to two people who both carry a few bad genes, I guess. So now I’m working again, and going to school, only this time it’s MY work, and MY school.
I’m building a tweenboat and setting off for space.
* * * * *
[editor’s note: the point of NaNoWriMo is not to write GOOD, but to write FAST. the objective here is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.]
