They didn’t think about that…

Author : Stivi Cooke

They didn’t think about that…

In all the plans, all the awesome designs, the mind blowing concepts, all the calculations, the deals, the engineering and finally the launch… they forgot that part…

As humanity reached out to the planets and the asteroids, landed and started to colonize the Moon (china), Mars (America), Titan and europa (India); we built bigger and better, faster and more powerful spaceships.

But time and distance still play god’s game…

Even at the speed of light and depending on the relative positions of Earth and Mars it would still take between 12 and 21 minutes to get there and Pluto would take about 23 years to reach at that ultimate speed.

Now we were stretching outward, past the solar boundaries, deep space… a emptiness equal only to death perhaps…

Oh, sure we knew people would have a lot of time on their hands, trapped in a steel can with no way to pop outside for a smoke, a fresh pizza or a long stress reliving soak in a bath. Moreover, we had great stores of entertainment – music from forgotten times, books from every genre imaginable – all of mankind’s knowledge and wisdom too.

We choose our crews carefully for compatibility. The accommodations like a five star hotel. Meals that were banquets. And oh! That exquisite music… always that music…

Now we were on the way to Alpha Centauri, the engines silently screaming at full ignition.

They forgot that… people’s favourite stuff… no-one listens to all the music in the world or reads all the books or watches all the movies… sooner or later, we prefer stuff… again… and again… and again…

I couldn’t listen to the captain’s David Bowie music anymore, the flight navigator’s hip-hop was the first to go, then the engineering boy’s reggie and samba collection was discreetly destroyed. The medical doctor and her nurse’s operatic themes were the worst… how many times could I listen to Aida?

And they forgot that as we travelled at the edge of light’s limit’s, any upgrades to our entertainment collections would never catch up until we reached landfall…4.3 light years away… always racing towards us with a gap between us and the music because they didn’t start sending the new stuff until we were clear of Mars…

To save space, the collections were implanted in our mind supplements, constantly linking to the ships computers and of course the sound systems. Well, who wants to wear headphones for four years? The music seeped out in spite of the soundproofing.

I loved it at first but a year later it started to grate on all our nerves… we stopped listening so often… then began to retreat into our private rooms but it was a big ship. You had to go out and do things so you couldn’t not notice the tunes. Unavoidable really, as we started to exhaust each other’s conversations and opinions, which we heard a million times before.

I snapped around October in the third year. Killed them all – had to, didn’t I? The music was in their heads.

Now I’ll arrive in a years time, serene, glowing, happy and comfortable in my work grooving to Grand Master Funk… and it’ll take them another eight years to come for me.