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They show the astronauts smiling and enjoying their time in space in promotional videos. They show you the dramatic countdown. They show you the rocket launching into the sky while all those cool songs play in the background, like the distance by cake- And everyone else does to... What they dont really show you is a grown man strapped into a metal chair, sweating through his boxers and wondering if the people who designed the spacecraft remembered to tighten all the bolts. Because of his absolute overabundance of paranoia.
In which- thankfully- they did. I"m Mark. I'm a planetary surveyor, its basically a fancy way of saying that they paid me a shit ton of money to go somewhere no man had gone before and take an educated guess to if it was trying to or going to kill us or not.
i was expendable- not expected to return, just get the info, send it to them, and probably die in space from like... Scurvy or Something.
thankfully i came back. But i didnt really come back alone. I suppose I should explain how that happened; and to do that, i think we'd need to go back a little.
Ever since i was young- i was mostly just... Under The Radar, i was really into space, tapestries, drawings, being that underdog "Weird Kid." Yep, its one of those Stupid underdog stories- i didnt really like them as a kid; but irony is truly something. As time went on, i got older. I went to school. I studied. I WANTED to be a Famous Artist, but instead became an engineer at N.A.S.A. Alongside my brother, then a surveyor, then somehow ended up sitting inside the most Gigantic, and most overglorified coffin humanity had ever built.
I didnt want to be an astronaut, with all the accidents, explosions, and the whole dying thing; it wasnt my first plan. but it was the only thing left- and Earth had changed. Everyone knew it. The oceans were rising. Weather patterns were becoming so unpredictable that Weather-People were Useless, Ecosystems were collapsing. Food and water were getting harder to produce or Find due to the amount of resources we were Using.
I studied the pattern Every year, some plave became too hot, or too dry, or too flooded, or too damaged to support the people living there.
So they did something, and sent me out.