01/09/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

Getting along!

I hear that on Earth they have lots of trouble with air traffic control. All those shuttles, all those Great Power borders, and all those places on the way that don’t take lightly to constant sonic booms. It sounded horribly complicated to me, back when I was just a local girl from Jefferson — but after six months here on 118-G-002, it feels like it’d be barely worse than driving a spaceport shuttle bus around.

Look, you all know the situation — humanity’s alone, all the Great Galactics who were supposed to mentor us were murdered four hundred years ago, nobody knows why, blah blah blah. Sure, that’s all really scary, too. But it’s the second-order stuff that’s alarming. Like flying an alien cargo shuttle, using the remains of an alien planetary transport system. It’s a lot harder to ignore how scary the universe is when you’re staring a corpse in the face.
You see, the good people (aliens are people, I figure) of 118-G-002 had one hell of a good network. In the safe zones where the system’s working right, it’s a dream to fly, with predictive telemetry so good you barely have to move the flight stick; and it can handle just about any problem the planet throws at you. Unfortunately, where the system is down or damaged it defaults to assuming you’re committing traffic violations just by breathing too hard.