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Intergalac

Captain's Log

Stardate…Thursday, if memory serves. If you’re reading this, you should know that the following transcription will not be for the faint of heart. Death off the port bow! Regret off the aft! This will be…my final captain’s log.

Long and battle-hardened though my log has become, it shall soon be freed from the cramped synthetic confines of the SOS Starhawk Flamepanther mainframe and, from there, explode into the same illustrious renown as its author.

But who is this author? you’re surely asking yourself. Why does his voice sound so sensual as I imagine it ringing within my skull? Could I— a lowly ensign or simplistic terrestrial citizen— manage to arouse myself as quickly and eff ortlessly as he has just done?

The answers to which, in reverse order, are: probably not; merely one of the Universe’s great mysteries; and Dirk Parsec, the Universe’s finest captain, smuggler, lover, shot, pilot, diplomat, hero, and, if you believe the rumors, singer- songwriter. Leader of brave men, women, robots, and aliens alike. Or at least I was a leader of brave men, women, and robots. They’re all evacuated now. Back to the stars.

As I am also a gifted xenolinguist, let me paint for you a word picture: the retinasearing beauty of a cerulean star overwhelming the faint ruby emergency lights of the Flamepanther, pride of Sector 18. In a matter of hours, the ship and I will hurtle into the bright blue star out our view port, though I’ll be dead long before. Suffocated, most likely, by lack of oxygen. Or perhaps incinerated from unfathomable heat, the Flamepanther my makeshift urn.

Yes, this is the end. The last hurrah. The final engagement. The sign-off shindig. The quintessential quietus. The red- carpet stroll into Satan’s foyer. Even as I speak, the Flamepanther and I are being pulled into the star’s gravity, well past the event horizon.

So before I die, I thought it prudent to write down by way of automated dictation all that I know about Space and Space Heroism. To pass along my seemingly impossible wealth of knowledge, in hopes that some youngster out there in the cosmos might one day take up the mantle of Greatest Spacefaring Captain in the ’Verse. Someone with the wherewithal and proverbial gonads to reach out into the ether and pull back that which is necessary to forge the next generation’s great Space Hero.

The odds that this means you, specifi cally, are astronomically low— even without taking into account the statistical improbability of 1) finishing the book before I perish; 2) this book finding its way to intelligent life; or 3) this book being published and 4) it becoming an intergalactic bestseller, thereby adding trillions to my estate posthumously.

But my time has come. And so has yours! We do not choose our deaths in the black vastness of infinity. We can only aim to dodge our demise for as long as possible before we gaze upon the Grim Reaper’s Space scythe at last. Nor do we choose our lives, tugged along as we are by the inertia of infinity…But we can choose to shape them!

Let’s hear it, then. Do you want to be you, entropy taking hold of your pathetic appendages as you waste away in your relaxed position of choice? Or do you want to be a Conqueror of Space! A Smuggler of Fine Wares! A Pleasurer of Alien Babes! A Champion of the People! A Space Hero!

Set your phaser to stunning. Space needs you.

Captain Dirk Parsec