I can’t tell the difference between dream and delusion anymore.
THE museum housed humanity’s greatest traveller: stuffed and displayed in his original navigator chair (which cost us a fortune to buy from a rival collector).
Initially, his mission was to deposit transmitter/ receiver orbiters around Fomalhaut* to accelerate research in deep space communication. Gustav survived in space for fifty years, travelling to and from the Fomalhaut System, entirely alone.
Such a long journey presents many physical and psychological challenges, to which many creative approaches were attempted to keep the pilot attentive and coherent to avoid such malaises as depression, insomnia, schizophrenia etc.
Gustav died ungracefully on his return to Earth. He had become so habituated to his chair and the artificial mental environment, that his body went into shock on disconnection and the med-techs were unable to reverse soon enough to save him.
The logbook for his voyage spans a gallant eighty- two volumes, becoming more and more verbose the further one reads. Most people of course, study only the single abridged volume or the narrative version16. The complete works have not yet been translated from the native low-Ganderan.
It seems that an injury led Gustav to abandon his exercise regime, and thus chair-bound he quickly succumbed to the common ailments of long-term space travel: muscle atrophy, bone-thinning, excessive flatulence etc. Compounded with bed sores and the effects of sustained acceleration in one position, Gustav spent the next fi fteen years rotating through a stim-diet of psychotropic phantasmagoria, simulated life programs and pharmacological comas.
It was during the return leg of the journey that he coined the term ‘ludicroustic.’ The food reserves hadn’t kept as well as hoped so Gustav had to rely more heavily on the protein recycler than is deemed safe. Tubed permanently to his chair, there were few intermissions from the CRF (Computer Reality Feed).
Insanity is where one misperceives the external world but I am not insane yet. It is just that the world presented to me is too strange to bear, and I have become ludicroustic. My senses and foldback are artificially controlled and lack the complexity of what I remember of Earth living. I have been a king, a queen: I have been all things, and suffered all the fates I could desire. Not even the breakfast simulator can save me now.
Obviously these long voyages were not for the human body, or mind, and thus the Human Seed Project was given a further boost.
* It is a class A star approximately 25 light-years (7.688 parsecs) from Earth. Its name is derived from Arabic, meaning “mouth of the whale”. Incidentally Fomalhaut is also listed as a ‘Fallen Angel’ in the Book of Enoch.
** Peter Leonnard, 2187, available public domain.
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