Closet Spaceship Part 2

      Let me tell you a little about my travels into the future. As I mentioned in my first Closet Spaceship post, this was thanks to my trusty ship Macintosh SE, which carried me unimaginable distances in very little time. I can’t explain how it could do that, but I suspect others could find the same capabilities in their own computers, laptops or notepads.

Anyway, the first time we tried anything long-distance, I found myself on a spaceship that was transporting prisoners. One of the quirks of travel with Mac is that sometimes I’m invisible to the characters (so I can watch the action without influencing it in any way) and other times I’m visible to them (so I can interact with them). The majority of my earliest trips were unobserved. I guess that made it easier for the people there, who already had more than enough to keep them occupied.

Take Sean Foster, for example. Here’s a twenty-four-year-old who’s been sentenced to twenty years in prison and has to spend it on a planet outside our galaxy, where he’s pretty sure he’ll be forgotten by everyone on Earth. It’s a bleak future, so he didn’t really need me popping into the picture and trying to explain how I got there. Instead, I was able to observe his third day of captivity aboard the prison spaceship, which turned out to be quite different than he expected. He certainly didn’t think the spaceship would be attacked and he’d end up floating in space as the only survivor. He also didn’t think he’d meet a crew as interesting as the one under Captain Lamont’s command aboard the ship Outsider.

But that’s where he found himself—and so did I.

I only had to spend a few hours there to realize that this was a place I’d want to revisit. Mac accommodated me and we spent many hours aboard Outsider and on the surfaces of other planets as the years went by.

 

     In my next CS post, I’ll tell you a little about what happened when I first appeared aboard Outsider—that is, when the crew first laid eyes on me.