Re: So Long, and Thanks For All The... Arrest Warrants
Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2017 7:55 am
(Warning: game-spoilers. If you've not yet visited Jameson's ship (and have plans to) do not read this and then complain that it's about Jameson's Ship. Just saying...)
Maybe it was that we first landed on the wrong side of this desolate space-rock, too far from anywhere to even have a name, that caused us to giggle and gently mock each other for a while as we replotted our course and tried again and again that did it. Perhaps we just hadn't properly anticipated how desolate and sad it would be... but for whatever reason, when we finally reach Jameson's ship, we are all humbled into a sad, contemplative silence.
The debris field of the crash site is surprisingly small and we scan it in just a short amount of time, picking up a few datalogs and info-drops. It's almost as if we spin that task out for longer than it needed to take to avoid turning our attention to that which we came here for in the first place: the Cobra mkIII, "JJ-386" half-buried nose-first on a planet too far from home to calculate without a nav panel.
The vessel is surprisingly intact, the parts of it not planted in the ground are neither scratched nor burned nor discoloured. The naked metal fittings still glint proudly in what little sunshine reaches the surface of the empty rock that became the famed commander's resting place. She honestly looks as if, with just a little excavation, she could be fired up and relaunched, her hull is so complete.
Our little SRVs swarm and swirl around the site, photographing and scanning while we (though we don't ever acknowledge it) search for Jameson's body. The ship's beacon is intact and contains the last batch of data he had been intending to send. We download it but do not find a corpse: Jameson, whether he survived the impact or not, is not here.
It is, all in all, a sobering place to be; profoundly sad and an unfitting end to a glorious life of adventure. I feel somehow cheated to realise that I have solved the mystery that plagued all the wanna-be jocks in school: I want a better ending to the story that thrilled and inspired me as a kid than "...and then he crashed into a planet and that was that. The End."
"Well, gents," murmurs Dawg over the coms, "Shall we?"
I assume he means "We're done here, let's head for home," and fire up my SRV's thrusters. But, instead, Dawg and Al scoot their buggies around the hillside and up to where the craft's left wing is almost level with the ground. And then - to my instant disbelief - they tear along the ground, over the shoulders of the Cobra and thrust their buggies - screaming and laughing - into the air, turning somersaults in the low-grav.
I stare in disbelief, unable to process this at all.
"Come on, Socks," urges Dawg, "Show some respect! Come and be alive!" And with that, Dawg is reversing at speed off the wing-tip, his thrusters arching him high, high into the "air" and throwing his SRV into a reverse somersault. Al is laughing as loudly as I've ever heard him as he thrusts up from the ground beneath the wing, carefully aiming his jump so that it collides with Dawg's descending buggy.
"Morning, Al!" calls Dawg.
"Morning, Dawg," replies Al.
I reluctantly snicker at these antics, unable to formulate what is happening here in words in my mind. But I know it's important, and that it has meaning, and that it is somehow honouring Jameson's life (and death), so I turn my buggy and zip round to see what kind of performance I can muster. I line my wheels up carefully with the left wing, press my throttle full-forward and power onto the back of the Cobra. Just before the edge of the wing, I lock my right wheels, pulling my buggy into a spin, and thrust only on the left so that I lift and cartwheel to the side in a high, glorious trajectory.
"Oh, bravo, Socks! Magnificent effort!" muses Dawg as Al shoots forward to try to get beneath my landing spot. Indeed, my buggy comes back to the ground upside-down on top of Al's SRV, and he chuckles and waves as my ride gently rolls forward over his cabin.
We spend some time performing various tricks and antics, zipping about and making our buggies leap and spin and roll. Eventually, though, exhausted by laughter (and feeling quite, quite sick), our SRVs running a little low on integrity, we are forced to return to our vessels which are parked some 2km away. I salute Jameson's little Cobra and turn away from the site, hoping that our brief moment of joy has, somehow, infected the otherwise desolate place.
Back in our ships, we decide between us that we'll hop in the hot tub, crack open some champagne and listen to the vocal datalogs we downloaded from the ship. Al, naturally, ensures that everything is perfect - from the cut-crystal flutes to the perfectly-cooled bubbly. The hot-tub is lightly and pleasantly scented, the wall-to-wall view-screen set to show a sunrise on some unnamed ringed planet, rays glinting between the rings as time passes. We salute each other as we ease our bodies - a bit bruised from our SRV antics - into the soothing water and settle to listen to the last words of Cmdr Jameson.
But the bubbly goes largely undrunk and our collective mood becomes contemplative and quiet as the story of Jameson's last flight - captured in this, his recorded letter to his son for his birthday - unfolds. As Jameson's voice fades away, the enormity of what we have heard slowly dawns on us: Jameson didn't crash after preventing the Thargoid War; he was murdered after potentially (and unwittingly) causing them to regroup and reassess us as enemies. My childhood history books were wrong. We were all wrong.
We stare mutely at each other as Jameson's voice, tearful with love for an already-lost child, fades away. Eventually Al breaks the silence by saying, "Let's take this to Felicity. She'll know what to do with it." Dawg nods.
I don't really know who this is, but I don't presently care, so I nod and stand up, reaching for a bathrobe as I climb out of the hot tub. Al and Dawg follow my lead and, though we all briefly glance around at each other, we still have no real words, so, instead, we nod and separate: me to my room, Dawg and Al to dress and prepare for lift-off.
In my room I lie on my bed without removing the robe and simply stare at the viewer which shows the scene of the planet beneath us. Eventually it slowly recedes as Al lifts off. Inertial dampers prevent the extreme angle required to make escape velocity from sliding me off my bed: it is like watching someone else's life.
Someone else's life. Jameson - cultural icon, childhood hero, eventually done in by the very people who worked so hard to glorify him. In the end, it wasn't the betrayal that broke him, but the thought of never seeing his son again. All that life, all for nothing. It was all just a lie; a big manipulation to get us kids signing up to the Service; to cover up man's role in provoking the Thargoid.
All for nothing.
Maybe it was that we first landed on the wrong side of this desolate space-rock, too far from anywhere to even have a name, that caused us to giggle and gently mock each other for a while as we replotted our course and tried again and again that did it. Perhaps we just hadn't properly anticipated how desolate and sad it would be... but for whatever reason, when we finally reach Jameson's ship, we are all humbled into a sad, contemplative silence.
The debris field of the crash site is surprisingly small and we scan it in just a short amount of time, picking up a few datalogs and info-drops. It's almost as if we spin that task out for longer than it needed to take to avoid turning our attention to that which we came here for in the first place: the Cobra mkIII, "JJ-386" half-buried nose-first on a planet too far from home to calculate without a nav panel.
The vessel is surprisingly intact, the parts of it not planted in the ground are neither scratched nor burned nor discoloured. The naked metal fittings still glint proudly in what little sunshine reaches the surface of the empty rock that became the famed commander's resting place. She honestly looks as if, with just a little excavation, she could be fired up and relaunched, her hull is so complete.
Our little SRVs swarm and swirl around the site, photographing and scanning while we (though we don't ever acknowledge it) search for Jameson's body. The ship's beacon is intact and contains the last batch of data he had been intending to send. We download it but do not find a corpse: Jameson, whether he survived the impact or not, is not here.
It is, all in all, a sobering place to be; profoundly sad and an unfitting end to a glorious life of adventure. I feel somehow cheated to realise that I have solved the mystery that plagued all the wanna-be jocks in school: I want a better ending to the story that thrilled and inspired me as a kid than "...and then he crashed into a planet and that was that. The End."
"Well, gents," murmurs Dawg over the coms, "Shall we?"
I assume he means "We're done here, let's head for home," and fire up my SRV's thrusters. But, instead, Dawg and Al scoot their buggies around the hillside and up to where the craft's left wing is almost level with the ground. And then - to my instant disbelief - they tear along the ground, over the shoulders of the Cobra and thrust their buggies - screaming and laughing - into the air, turning somersaults in the low-grav.
I stare in disbelief, unable to process this at all.
"Come on, Socks," urges Dawg, "Show some respect! Come and be alive!" And with that, Dawg is reversing at speed off the wing-tip, his thrusters arching him high, high into the "air" and throwing his SRV into a reverse somersault. Al is laughing as loudly as I've ever heard him as he thrusts up from the ground beneath the wing, carefully aiming his jump so that it collides with Dawg's descending buggy.
"Morning, Al!" calls Dawg.
"Morning, Dawg," replies Al.
I reluctantly snicker at these antics, unable to formulate what is happening here in words in my mind. But I know it's important, and that it has meaning, and that it is somehow honouring Jameson's life (and death), so I turn my buggy and zip round to see what kind of performance I can muster. I line my wheels up carefully with the left wing, press my throttle full-forward and power onto the back of the Cobra. Just before the edge of the wing, I lock my right wheels, pulling my buggy into a spin, and thrust only on the left so that I lift and cartwheel to the side in a high, glorious trajectory.
"Oh, bravo, Socks! Magnificent effort!" muses Dawg as Al shoots forward to try to get beneath my landing spot. Indeed, my buggy comes back to the ground upside-down on top of Al's SRV, and he chuckles and waves as my ride gently rolls forward over his cabin.
We spend some time performing various tricks and antics, zipping about and making our buggies leap and spin and roll. Eventually, though, exhausted by laughter (and feeling quite, quite sick), our SRVs running a little low on integrity, we are forced to return to our vessels which are parked some 2km away. I salute Jameson's little Cobra and turn away from the site, hoping that our brief moment of joy has, somehow, infected the otherwise desolate place.
Back in our ships, we decide between us that we'll hop in the hot tub, crack open some champagne and listen to the vocal datalogs we downloaded from the ship. Al, naturally, ensures that everything is perfect - from the cut-crystal flutes to the perfectly-cooled bubbly. The hot-tub is lightly and pleasantly scented, the wall-to-wall view-screen set to show a sunrise on some unnamed ringed planet, rays glinting between the rings as time passes. We salute each other as we ease our bodies - a bit bruised from our SRV antics - into the soothing water and settle to listen to the last words of Cmdr Jameson.
But the bubbly goes largely undrunk and our collective mood becomes contemplative and quiet as the story of Jameson's last flight - captured in this, his recorded letter to his son for his birthday - unfolds. As Jameson's voice fades away, the enormity of what we have heard slowly dawns on us: Jameson didn't crash after preventing the Thargoid War; he was murdered after potentially (and unwittingly) causing them to regroup and reassess us as enemies. My childhood history books were wrong. We were all wrong.
We stare mutely at each other as Jameson's voice, tearful with love for an already-lost child, fades away. Eventually Al breaks the silence by saying, "Let's take this to Felicity. She'll know what to do with it." Dawg nods.
I don't really know who this is, but I don't presently care, so I nod and stand up, reaching for a bathrobe as I climb out of the hot tub. Al and Dawg follow my lead and, though we all briefly glance around at each other, we still have no real words, so, instead, we nod and separate: me to my room, Dawg and Al to dress and prepare for lift-off.
In my room I lie on my bed without removing the robe and simply stare at the viewer which shows the scene of the planet beneath us. Eventually it slowly recedes as Al lifts off. Inertial dampers prevent the extreme angle required to make escape velocity from sliding me off my bed: it is like watching someone else's life.
Someone else's life. Jameson - cultural icon, childhood hero, eventually done in by the very people who worked so hard to glorify him. In the end, it wasn't the betrayal that broke him, but the thought of never seeing his son again. All that life, all for nothing. It was all just a lie; a big manipulation to get us kids signing up to the Service; to cover up man's role in provoking the Thargoid.
All for nothing.