How to Ruin Your Life in a Few Hours

This New Year’s Eve, I crashed my ship into the sun.

I was drifting around the system, trying for nothing. I wasn’t supposed to be out on Blazegaze, I was supposed to be on Earth with my moms and my girl. I was supposed to be where there is such a thing as time and holidays and New Year’s Eve. But I’d felt like escaping all of that, just for an hour.

An hour turned into two hours, two into four. Just like how one beer turned into two and three. My allapp kept prompting me with reminders, about the party, refueling the tank, and my current alcohol levels, as if it knew I was on the path to self-destruction. But like a gizmo, I just ignored the warnings.

I know this will sound fail, but I wasn’t even doing anything. At all. Just walking around in circles on the bridge, blasting classical dubstep and nursing my drink. I could have done zillions of things in that time—planned my route for when I left on January 13^th, fixed the auto-clean bot, written an article for VersePress. But I did nothing. Just ran circles around the sun and watched other ships float by. This is why my moms call me “such an achiever.”

In a way, I was suffering from shock, which makes nonsense. The most I’ve wanted in life was to get out of the Milky Way, and soon I would get exactly that. Life should’ve been feeling swert. Instead, even now, I feel numb and out of place, like I don’t really exist or matter. It was more than my last ride through the system for the year, it was my last ride before my new life. I should have been excited, but instead, I was further down than I’d ever been.

Tell me I’m not the only one who wrecked his life for no reason. Well, I guess there was a reason. It’s not as if I can apathetic myself into the sun. I’m not that epic of a fail.

I was taking one last speed-orbit round the sun, (though it was one of many last speed-orbits, to be honest) when a ship nearby just exploded. We think it might’ve been shield malfunctions and it overheated. Don’t have much to go on, since most of the wreckage burned. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Anyway, explosion. Ship bits wound up flying everywhere, so much at once that the shields couldn’t take it all and it hit Blazegaze. I fell down the bridge stairs and hit my cheek so hard it also exploded, splattering hot red all over my face. Ouch much? I got over to the controls, but Blazegaze could barely fly when she wasn’t badly beaten by debris.

The ship I’d been flying by was a human ship called Cleo something. I only saw half the name, and half the ship. That sight was even less pretty. I could show it to you (I took a snap with my eyecam) but I don’t think you’d really want to see it. Maybe I’ll post it when the image doesn’t make me feel like a dweek anymore. That’s really all I felt then, small and useless. And mildly drunk. That never helps.

I sobered up once I got OSSed by someone on the ship. She said her friends and her were trapped against an airlock on the good half of Cleo, and asked (well, begged) that I swoop by and grab them before they drifted into the sun. I spent thirty secs looking for my allapp, but by the time I saw my wrist and replied to her over it, I was sober enough for a funeral. I told her I was on my way, that she’d be fine, and please, stop crying.

The sick part is, when I glided my ship over to Cleo, I finally felt like I was alive. I can’t remember the last time I felt like that, and all I was doing was docking against their airlock. When the handful of survivors arrived on my ship, laughing with relief, I felt amazing.

Then the engine died, and I felt numb.

Blazegaze was notorious for shutting off when I needed her. I hit the flight panel in a burst of anger, and kept trying to start Blazegaze with my allapp, my wrist sore by the time I was done. The sun’s gravity kicked in, and soon we were drifting towards it, my allapp too busy warning me of raising heat levels to start the ignition.

Only one of the handful was an alien—he looked like a centaur with spider legs—and oddly enough, he was the one familiar with my ship model. He activated the escape pods and helped people into them, then threatened to leave me behind when I didn’t run over. I couldn’t stop staring at the bridge, couldn’t compute that this would be the last time I saw it, that I’d finally managed my epic fail in life. Dragging myself out of there was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

I sat in an escape pod with the alien, and he found some first aid for the cut on my cheek. Then I watched Blazegaze find an end that matched her name. Just as the sun ate up the last of my ride, my allapp announced that in San Fran, Cali, America, United Earth, it was officially the year 3012. Congratulations.

I’m such an achiever.