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I just barely ascended from lurkerdom, but I'd love to take a whack at it.
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Sep 29, 2021 14:57
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 00:39 |
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Nothing is ever truly lost 1140 words I didn't make it back to the surface vehicle in time. Must have been too busy clawing my way out of the ravine I fell into, dragging along what I could salvage of the sampling kit that took the tumble with me. Before that miserable climb and after, I tried everything I could think of. I sent distress signals to the vehicle, the hab, the shuttle, even in the direction of the orbiter. All long shots at best given the comms troubles that have plagued this mission from the start. Back at the top of the ravine, I sent up one of two operable flares in my suit's inventory, which I could hope some autonomous system would notice and mention to my crewmates. And then I did the only thing left to do, which was to travel as fast as I could back to the vehicle. The fall could have gone worse, I know. I am essentially intact, as is my suit. The climb was strenuous, but doable. Not so utterly draining as I'd feared. But it's true that I am tired as I slog through deep sands and across jagged regolith. And the light of the primary star is fading much faster than I'd like. And it's possible that I might have lost my bearings a little, left to my own pathfinding abilities until my suit's positioning module decides to start working. I'm maybe a little lost, but nothing is ever truly lost. True story: when my parents met, before they'd even gotten onto the train where they'd go on to share a life-changing twenty minutes of conversation, Pop noticed Dad on the platform because of his unusual wristwatch. When they tell the story, there's frankly too much detail about the watch in question. My version's more interested in the concepts, so for our purposes, let's say it wasn't a conspicuously expensive one, more the kind of thing no one except a specific kind of nerd would even know about. And so anyway, Pop uses the watch as an excuse to start talking to Dad once they're seated near each other, they gaze into each others' eyes, the rest is history. I've heard that story so many times since I came into the picture, and so has everyone else those two have ever met more than twice, but the story and its endless retellings are only one small part of the veneration the watch receives in their home. Almost right away, it became a sacred relic of The Fateful Meeting. Dad stopped wearing it casually, kept it in a fancy case he'd had to purchase separately because he'd picked up the watch itself from some foreign flea market on a photography assignment. Then that wasn't enough and they moved it to a glass case in the living room (a younger me was convinced that this was a pretext to get visitors to spring the trap of hearing the whole story), and then it wasn't long before they realized the old thing could really use a professional cleaning. Then the cleaning became an annual ritual of its own, one which Pop always invoked by announcing, "This old watch is looking awfully dusty!" and which ended with the two of them taking a long lunch in between dropping the watch off and picking it up. This went on the whole time I was living with them, until a year or maybe two before I moved out. That was the year when some small-time crook knocked over the watch repair shop and took The Watch along with all the actually valuable pieces in the place. They (or possibly their fence) probably dumped it once they had a chance to look up what people were paying for the model, is what the authorities said. Nothing more they could do for us, hope you had it insured, please go away. Pop took it in stride, which surprised me at the time. Lots of "I'm just glad no one was hurt," and "I loved that watch, but it's much more important I hang onto the man who wore it," and so on. Dad...well, Dad kind of went off the rails in his own quiet way. All I knew at the time was that a couple weeks after the loss of The Watch, Pop and Dad had a fight about something. They failed to hide the fact of the fight, but I didn't learn until a few years later that Dad had been living a secret life as a vigilante in search of his stolen property. Maybe vigilante's not the right word; as far as I know, he never became a costumed crime-fighter. It was more like he was a self-hired PI on the case. But it did involve a lot of lying to Pop, whose disapproval upon discovering the scheme was as predictable as it was dramatic. Dad had no choice but to drop the hunt or escalate hostilities with the very person he was trying to demonstrate his love for. Telling the whole story to me for the first time, they both kept throwing in assurances that this really was the truth. Partly, I guess, because they'd held so much of it back at the time, but they also seemed to expect me to disbelieve. I said something like, Well, Dad, you're good at a lot of things but I have a hard time picturing you singlehandedly taking on the criminal underworld. And I'll always remember what he said back: "I was getting closer to finding it. I think eventually I would have. Nothing is ever truly lost, you know. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to go through to get it back." It's night now, the really dark kind. The last smoldering glow of the dying red star in this binary is long gone behind the horizon, and it'll be at least seven hours before the return of the primary's ultraviolet-heavy rays. My suit can recycle the air for twice that long and keep me hydrated within tolerable limits for a hundred-plus hours beyond that. But out in the open and on foot, the cold is going to be a problem. My chances of finding the hab on foot before hypothermia takes me down are not great. But I should be easy enough to pick out against the landscape until then. It's probably about time to use that last flare, come to think of it. Maybe they've all made it back to the hab and have already noticed I'm missing. Maybe they're looking for me. It's far, and cold, and more than a little dangerous, but still, maybe they're already on their way. I'm a little lost, but nothing is ever truly lost. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to go through to get it back.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:58
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