HELL

All travel in this planet happens with a rover. Yet here I am walking in a red desert of iron oxide to reach the Hub, with the Sun setting on my left. Sunset here is the exact

opposite of Earth’s. The whole sky is pinkish, except for the area around the sun, which is blue. The reduced gravity makes me feel almost like I’m floating. Dangerous as it

is to walk around, I can’t help but feel it is worth it. This is the image I was dreaming of when I decided to move here.

I want to light a smoke and savor this moment. Watch the Sun go down, with a glass of whiskey in my hand and the sea at my feet. Maybe even take some extra pain meds for the

warm pleasant numbness they provide. But the closest sea is 225 million kilometers away. Whiskey and cigarettes are a luxury that I can’t afford, if I want to return home some

day. My suit would prevent me from smoking anyway. Ironically opiates are the easiest thing that I can get my hands on, since I have a prescription and the main doctor is my best friend

I want to come back out tomorrow and admire this alien world but I can’t risk it. Hell, I shouldn’t even be out right now. One unlucky space radiation storm and I would end up

with a ruined brain, needing a brain pacemaker to function. Not that there was anything wrong with the pacemakers. Before the implants, being caught in the open when a storm

hit, was a sentence into a life of severe brain problems. Now people can function normally and I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference if it wasn’t for the implant

showing on the side of their heads. But the sight of them makes me nauseous. Partly because I don’t like the idea of my brain not being able to function on its own, but also

because I don’t like seeing the electrodes disappearing inside the skull.

Then again maybe I would risk going out again if I wasn’t spooked by the storm that hit us a week ago. Stars above, it was the worst storm I have ever experienced. I was in

the lonely outpost, when the storm hit. It came from outside our solar system. Everything was fried. Earth would have to pay handsomely to send spare parts. A few of the

wrecked systems were some of the most expensive equipment ever produced. There is a chance that even the Quantum Computer, one of only three that exist in the world was

destroyed, but it is only a slim chance. There are plenty of safeguards protecting it from stuff like that. Most importantly for me, the life support systems were gone too. I

had to manually open the valves to use my reserved oxygen.

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