Entry 1-To you, From me

“Mum, I AM going. I’m heading to outer space... No, Mum, we’re a team of five… Yes, we have enough food on the craft… Yes, enough for four years, Mum..., Mum. Calm down.”

She’ll always worry about me. And why wouldn’t she? It’s not every day your daughter joins a space research program for four years. My planet was one of the first in the galaxy to send a mothership beyond habitable space. I’ve heard the Frohks* did it before us. In school, we learned about different planets and their ways of life. Ever since contact with the Jykurs* was established 63 years ago, planets have been getting closer. We share knowledge, and even social networking sites, but only a few planets have figured out how to safely venture to another and return. We heard of an Otr* ship approaching us a few months ago, but no contact was established, and the ship was lost in the void. But now it’s our turn.

Our planet has always been a bit different. At least, I like to think so. We’re labeled as the “Tentacle Beings” across the galaxy. We all have tentacles for legs, and our color depends on our birth givers. My dad was hot red, and my mom sky blue, so I’m purple. I have a slight tinge of pink between my purple tentacles, but no one ever notices it. I was part of the Slide and Kick** team in school. Later, I went to military school and joined the air force. Good thing tentacles grow back—I’ve lost my fair share during my service. After losing my father in an intergalactic war, I couldn’t return to the battlefield, so I joined the research team for extra-terrestrials. Graduating as a data scientist and analyst, I joined the space research program, and now I’m on my way to the first-ever cross-planetary voyage of the Halmm*.

Launching this expedition wasn’t easy. Our center star, Dahln, is comparatively smaller than most you might know, so solar power isn’t as efficient. We’re mostly generating energy from body excreta and tentacle fluids.

We set off today. Our ship has four floors, but only one is partially residential. I’m in charge of engine mechanics and driven consoles. We don’t need to be on duty 24/7—only potential asteroid collisions or abnormal gravitational pulls will make us run amok. Roger and I have been researching how to normalize mid-space living and make travel to other planets faster. This is our first step towards exploring the universe. Daniella manages the vegetation room on the third floor, which provides oxygen for the entire ship. She occasionally complains about being a one-person department, but the rest of us are engineers, and she’s the only botanist. Goliath and Franco track fuel and energy consumption, trying to minimize it for future motherships. We all have our roles, and it’s like paradise.

Six months in, everything’s running smoothly, except for Goliath and Franco’s argument last week—they’ve stopped talking to each other. It’s a problem since Goliath only speaks Mathelian, and Franco is the only one who can translate between Mathelian and English. English isn’t native to our planet; we primarily spoke Mathelian, Domelar, and Stanic in different regions. But after our treaty with Earth to expand and enrich our relationship, English became a common language, as Earth is far bigger than our planet.

We have a lot of free time, and I love to read. I’ve read classics like Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby, often quoting them to Roger while we work. At first, he was annoyed, but now he quotes them back at me. Am I making progress with friendships? Forced friendships, I guess. You don’t realize how important social life is until you have none. We’ve been communicating with the same four people every day, our coordinator once a week, and our families twice a week. With not much to do and no one new to talk to, we’ve started taking individual shifts on craft duties and only see each other on weekends. We even turn off our wrist devices’ map grids, making the weekends feel like a treasure hunt. We look forward to our interactions. Time is flying by on this spacecraft—one year down, and we made it, alive.

We were celebrating our anniversary in space when a gift basket arrived from the ground. We thought it was an approaching asteroid and didn’t anticipate a surprise. We blew it up with a grenade, thinking it was a threat. So, we spent the whole day decorating the meeting room with dried leaves and candy wrappers for our party. Come on, it’s not a party bus, after all. I was in the canteen collecting food for our dinner party when the ship went into red alert lockdown. Just 24 hours ago, there was nothing on our radar to signal an emergency. Now, all the rooms are on auto-lock, and I’m stuck in the canteen. I’m needed in the cockpit to divert the ship and avert the danger, but I’m stuck here. Even if we hit something, I’m nowhere near the escape pods. I don’t even know where everyone else is. The manual override won’t function, the door is jammed shut, and the red alert light and high-pitched beeping aren’t helping. And I’m stuck here.

The ship shook. I shook. Tables in the café toppled, drinks spilled in all colors, and food scattered on the ground. I fell unconscious among the chaos. Dropped to the floor, flat, no vision and a screw beating heart. 

If someone were to take a picture, it’d look like a scene where the character experiences ecstasy and sees colors, but for me, it was literal.

I don’t know how long it took me to wake up and make sense of my surroundings, but when I did, I was no longer on the mothership. I was in a wasteland. I ran to the control room. There were leaking pipes, damaged lights, hanging wires, and destroyed pathways. When I got there, I searched for my crewmates and sent them a signal to meet me. But their receptors were void. Are they hiding? Did they die? Or worse, did they escape and leave me in this hellhole? I ran to the basement to check for escape pods, but the basement didn’t exist anymore. It was ripped off by the asteroid hit. Not just that—the last floor was also gone, ripped off with its ceiling. To re-describe the mothership: it’s now two floors tall, with the residential quarters, storage, and escape pod floors torn down and destroyed. One lady, two floors. Lucky for me, the vegetation floor is still intact. But besides oxygen, these trees are no use to me. They can’t produce liquid for me to consume. I had to check the footage to see what had happened—what monstrosity hit us.