Pretty Ugly

“Where are we going?” Sam asked Dr. Phelps as they both sat in the back of this rather nice car.
    “We‘re heading to a large area of countryside north of London.” stated Phelps.  “The Olympus Corporation owns a private airport there called Stucka.  One of its many functions is transporting the techs to and from Celestia.”
    “You launch space ships from here in England?” asked Sam incredulously.  “How would you explain it if anyone saw it?”
    “You underestimate the cunning of Olympus,” Phelps said in a condescending tone of voice, which Sam didn’t appreciate.  “The shuttle that we use was specifically designed for the job, it looks and takes off just like a regular airship but once it’s out of sight the ascension through Earth’s atmosphere occurs.  Stucka has plenty of warehouses so if anyone does see it there’ll just assume that we’re transporting cargo.  Hell, most of the staff at Stucka don’t even know the ship’s true destination.”
    “Do all of Celestia’s ‘Guests’ get transported there this way?” Sam continued questioning as he glanced at the clock on the HUD of the car; it read 15:34 16th December 2114.
    “Just the technicians,” Phelps replied quickly.  “It would be a very inefficient process to transport all the convicts of Europe, and some from other continents, a few at a time via shuttle.  Once a criminal is sentenced to imprisonment, they are immediately put to sleep and placed aboard large freight seaships that take them to a floating station out in the middle of the North Sea called ‘Lethe’.  If they’re from other continents then we tend to use airships as they come from far away and there aren’t as many of them.  The use of this facility is two-fold, firstly to store the prisoners away from the mainland and below sea level while they await their transport.  Secondly, it’s used as the spaceport where the cargo ships take off from to bring the convicts to Celestia.”
      “I noticed you said that they were ‘Put to sleep’ like animals,” said Sam.  “It might be better off that these people are removed from society but that doesn’t mean that you can’t show them some respect.  Even though they’ve made transgressions they’re still people like us, they had hopes and fears and dreams, they had lives.  It’s just like what you were saying about Hypnos doctor, his personality is a combination of his ‘Genes’ and his experiences.  This is true for humans; we don’t get a choice of what kind of a person we become.  As much as you wish to change your character, it’s impossible.  Your true personality will always come to surface by this unseen genetic force.  And as for all those unfortunate people up in Celestia who were destined to be the way they are, they might be a necessity.  Everything in the Universe needs balance.”
    “I like you Sam,” Phelps began whilst chuckling.  “You express your opinions unlike every other drone working for me.  Take the driver, he can hear me criticising him but he won’t say a word out of fear of losing his pointless job.  Isn’t that right Phobetor?”
    Sam found that name to be rather strange, but he didn’t mention anything.  Neither did the driver.
“I’m glad you say what you feel,” Dr. Phelps said.  “In fact that’s one of the reasons why I chose you for this assignment.”  
    Sam thought about what he had just heard, so far he hadn’t considered that he was working for Dr. Phelps.  Now he must admit to himself that he was an Olympus employee.  He found this very ironic as for years he had loathed the companies and the way they ruled the world by purchasing peoples souls.  Now he was on their payroll and apparently had been for a while if Phelps was telling the truth about Magna.
Does this make him a hypocrite, he wondered, was he a sell-out?  After a few minutes of silent contemplation in the car he decided that it didn’t matter.  Anyway who cares?  No one was going to judge him for this, as they would never know.  What’s the purpose of doing the right thing if nobody knows you’ve done it, to give you that nice warm feeling that means you’ve been good?  If that’s the case then all the ‘good’ people in the world are really just selfish because they’re just doing it to make themselves feel good.
    So now, Sam had joined the billions of people who were in the employ of the companies.  For some reason he still thought that becoming property of a company had been a recent occurrence whereas realistically he had probably been working for one company or another in some way during every job he’d ever had.  He began to wonder if there was anyone in the world with an honest job who could claim that they were not a slave of the Corporations.  
Then, for some reason, he randomly wished he was working for a company rather than a corporation even though he didn’t actually know the technical difference between them.  All he knew was that generally, corporations were bigger than companies but in his mind, he subconsciously preferred the companies.  He reasoned that this was due to the word itself, company just sounds friendlier than corporation did because it could also be used to mean friendship.  He found it funny that he was thinking this, especially since where he was going he wouldn’t have any real human company for five years.
One phrase kept repeating over and over in his head, “Keeping him company…”
    Then Phelps began to talk abruptly, “You haven’t said anything for a while Sam.  Not coming to regret your decision I hope.”
    “No,” Sam responded quickly.  “It’s just… I’ve learned a lot in the past fortnight, probably more than I wished to and it’s hard to take in.”
    “I understand,” said Dr. Phelps with, what Sam could tell, genuine sympathy.
    Sam then decided to ask Dr. Phelps something after hearing the note of sincerity in his voice, “You invented this place I’m going to, right?  Didn’t you ever feel guilty about what you were doing to people?  Even if they were criminals, they couldn’t have been all as bad as you claimed.  I mean, you must have seen that there was no difference between this and the death camps even if Parliament refused to see the resemblance.”
    “I designed it so long ago,” Phelps tried to remember.  “Whatever remorse I may have felt back then has long since been eroded away by the decades and replaced with a dull apathy, which seems to have become the uniform you must wear to be anyone of power.”
    “You don’t seem entirely happy with your creation,” observed Sam.  “You weren’t like this when we first met.”
    “To be honest…I wasn’t being completely honest with you when we first met, Samuel,” Phelps admitted.  “I really wanted to recruit you so I didn’t share my doubts in the system with you.  When I first began to work on the project, I never thought it could lead me to this prestigious position residing over Europe’s whole prison population.  The company asked the department I worked in for a concept, they really wanted the prison contract and they were getting desperate.  They approached my department because we had just finished the revolutionary new computing system and we needed a new project.  I suppose that’s another way in which I misled you.  Technically, I did not invent Hypnos.  I was just a member of the research team that developed the computer.  I was responsible for designing the logic software, which is probably the most important part of Hypnos.  If the credit were to go to one person however, it would have had to be Dr. Kumar; it was his idea to build a computer capable of that kind of power and he led the project.  One day I wrote the first draft of a proposal.  In which I came up with the name of Hypnos but after I finished it, I decided that I wouldn’t present it to my superiors as it was too close to the death camp solution that everyone knew had been recently shot down in Parliament.  However, my supervisor, Kumar, discovered my proposal and he passed it upwards.  Fortunately, they really liked it and decided to present it to the European Parliament, soon after Olympus was granted the prison contract I was granted my new job as Head of Science.  I often wonder why Dr. Kumar didn’t just say that he came up with Celestia; he was my boss so he could have taken credit for my work very easily and become Head of Science.  I think he was the better scientist, after all no one thought that the creation of such a computer was plausible.  Not even me.  If he had taken my place I think that he would’ve come up with a more humane solution given enough time.”
    “What happened to Dr. Kumar?” Sam asked just before they went over a bump.  “Does he still work for Olympus?”
    “No,” Phelps said with a distinct twinge of sadness in his voice. “He stayed in his department for a while, loyally producing technologies for the company but a few years back I think he was forced to retire or something like that.  When I speculate about why he didn’t take the credit I like to think that he didn’t want to be blamed if they hadn’t liked it.  This helps appease me because I don’t think I could face the alternative, that the only decent human being I ever met at Olympus is no longer with the corporation.  I suppose I should have appreciated the time that I spent working with such a person… I miss him.”              
    At this moment in time, Sam’s attention drifted out the window.  He was looking at the usually bleak urban environment being bathed in the last remnants of dusky sunlight.  It looked nice.  As he observed the landscape something suddenly dawned on him, he realised he wouldn’t see a sight like this for five years.  He knew that this thought would not leave him during his voluntary isolation and even make him homesick eventually.
It didn’t matter that he hated this city, it was where he was born and that leaves an impression whether you want it to or not.  He never thought during his preparation to leave it that he would miss Earth.  Sam never wanted to be like everyone else in the world, he always tried to have opinions and preferences that most people would consider not the norm.  
However, in doing so, he understood, he probably became more of a member of the crowd, as all anyone ever wants is to be unique in some way.  Now he felt even further frustration as he was experiencing what many people underwent at some point during their lives, but up until now Sam had believed himself too mature.  Sam realised that now he was leaving his old life behind he began to long for it, experiencing the childlike emotion of wanting something simply because they don’t have it anymore.  As Sam accepted the fact that he was not as original as he liked to believe, he also remembered that Dr. Phelps was still speaking.
    “…I think you would’ve liked him, he was a funny man and very intelligent… perhaps slightly eccentric but there’s nothing wrong with that.”
    “I’m sorry, who?” Sam asked.
    “Dr. Kumar,” Phelps replied.  “I was just saying how he was in charge of creating the foundations for Hypnos’ personality.  Do you remember when I told you what a passion for chess he had?  I never could beat him.  The first thing he taught Hypnos was how to play chess.”
    “What did he think about the name, ‘Hypnos’, for his creation?” Sam wondered aloud.
    “He felt it was appropriate for the task it was assigned.” Dr. Phelps responded.  “Although I’m sure he had greater plans for him than the warden of a lunar dungeon.  I never did find out what he thought of the concept itself.  In retrospect he probably didn’t agree with it, he was a very ethical man.  There aren’t many of those left.  I suppose I never will find out why he passed it on, especially now since I don’t even know if he’s still alive or not.  Maybe he knew that it was the kind of thing that both the company and the government would love and he saw an opportunity for me to succeed.  The company liked it as it was not only cheaper than the other options but because it is the only prison in history where it was guaranteed that no one would ever escape, all inmates are completely comatose after all and are 400,000 kilometres away from their home planet.  The government liked it because if it ever did come out at least they could say that technically they didn’t break their own laws which, after recent history, is a novelty in the eyes of the voters.”
    “Don’t you think you’re underestimating the European citizens,” said Sam.  “Do you really think they’ll care about a technicality just because this government is slightly better than those of the past?  They’ll see that they’ve been deceived, they’re not as blind as you think.”
    “I didn’t say they wouldn’t see,” Phelps said.  “I just said they wouldn’t care.  Of course, there will be some activists speaking out but they will be arrested and then everyone will just make themselves forget.  With religion being pretty much dead and buried, ignorance has become the new opiate of the masses.  History certainly is a peculiar subject, events that happened within a lifetime ago are common knowledge but as soon as you cross that threshold in time, you have to do some searching to find out the truth.  For example, the EU boasts that it was the first of the continental unions and the rest of the world followed its model for a better government.  However, I’ll bet you didn’t know that just last century, as the European Parliament was ‘leading the world into a more enlightened future’; true power was still in the hands of the national governments.  They like to pretend that the changeover was a sudden occurrence that happened as soon as the European Union was formed but in reality, the Parliament was around for a long time before they ruled the continent.  When it was still in its infancy, the European Parliament had no true power whatsoever and was considered by the majority of people to be a useless body with no practical function.  Don’t you find it amazing how different the world was not that long ago?  It just shows you that everything eventually changes in time.  All you need is a little patience and then one day you’ll wake up and find you’re world completely transformed.”
    This little history lesson was being silently appreciated by the other passenger in the car.  Sam had always liked history in school, in fact, it was his favourite subject and this interest had not subsided as he’d gotten older.  Even though Sam claimed that he wanted to have a book published, he had not read many novels.  He liked books; he just didn’t like authors.  
He didn’t like the way most people wrote fiction so that is why he preferred reading history books.  Really, any book with information in it but especially history books because he liked to hear about all the famous and infamous characters from the past.  He enjoyed imagining what the person that he was learning about was really like and how they would’ve managed here in the present day.  
This was another reason he didn’t read too many novels, you couldn’t picture what the characters in those books were really like because they only exist within the confines of the story so what you read is exactly what they’re like.  Historical figures, however, are portrayed differently depending on which book you read or which film you watch, it’s as if their story keeps altering every time it’s told so each time it sounds new.  
If you do sufficient research, a lot of the time you actually discover that most of the heroes out of history were really horrible people and you could even relate with some of the villains.  Sam was also fond of recent history, such as the 20th and 21st centuries but finding impartial sources of information for the last century proved difficult.  
One thing he had learned and never could quite understand from what he had read on recent history was that during the 20th and even early parts of the 21st century, it was commonplace to romanticise historical characters.  People such as military leaders were often worshipped as national heroes even though their actions often caused the deaths of many people, sometimes millions without accomplishing much in exchange, just so some writer in the back of a car would think about their names a few centuries on.  
These days, governments would never do that, information contained in the history of the Union would often be distorted and used as propaganda but for history that predated the establishment, they tried to be quite truthful.
    They were in a tunnel now, on their way out of the city.  Sam liked tunnels, he could remember travelling through them in his childhood and loving how the incandescent orange lights that lit his way blurred as they flew by.  He could also recall opening the window slightly so he could hear the wonderful sound of dozens of vehicles in close proximity resonating around the concrete in what seemed to the ears of a child to be an eternal fanfare.  It would usually have been at this point when his mother would reprimand him for opening the window and say that the noise was giving her a headache.
     Sam was aware that he let his mind wander frequently, occasionally it even irritated him.  There was a time in his last job when he had missed huge portions of a conversation because he was busy diligently examining every detail of the picture on the cup that his boss was drinking out of, it was a chicken.
    His attention returned to the present as he saw they were nearing the end of the tunnel and the end of the city.  Beyond the tunnel was the motorway, once they were on that they should get to wherever they were going much faster because not many people used the motorways anymore.  
If you wanted to travel from one city to another most people just flew or went by train, cars were only used for in-city travel.  The only people who really still used the motorways were lorry drivers transporting goods or individuals like him, going some place where no public plane or train goes.
    For some reason Sam had expected that when they left the tunnel for the bright daylight to wash over him, clarifying his mind and maybe even temporarily blinding him for a few seconds.  
In all his daydreaming and reminiscing, he had seemed to forget that it was the evening now so outside the tunnel was almost just as dim as it had been inside.  The road was as vacant as Sam had predicted, just a few Lorries to accompany him on his journey.  
As Sam stared upwards through the window in the roof, he could see that clouds covered most of the sky but there were some clear patches where Sam could even spot a few stars.  
He never could tell which stars were part of which constellation but he still liked to just stare at them from time to time, soon he will be up there with them where he could get a better look.  He also could never decide what the colour of clouds at night were, he’d never seen that shade anywhere else and after many years of looking at them he had settled on a kind of purplish-brown even though he knew that it deserved a proper name of it’s own.
    Now that he was concentrating on the sky and his destination once more, he abruptly remembered something.  “My luggage is already on the ship, right?” he asked Dr. Phelps.
    “Yes, yes,” Phelps reassured him.  “It’s all waiting for you on board, including your cat.  What’s he called by the way?”
    “I decided on ‘Philip’ a few days ago,” Sam responded.
    “As good a name as any I guess,” Phelps said.  “I couldn’t tell because you haven’t given him a collar.”
    “I didn’t think he’d need one,” Sam said.  “Where we’re going it’s not like I could lose him.”
      Dr. Phelps began to chuckle, “I suppose you’re correct Mr. Morgan,” he said.
    Samuel began to find himself starting to like Dr. Phelps, when he first met him eleven days ago he didn’t really have the time to form an opinion, he was too busy trying to understand the new world with which he was presented.  
In the moment it hadn’t crossed his mind but thinking back he appeared to be another rigid company man with no personality and even less sense of humour.  In this car ride, he had seen a different side of the doctor; he thought that perhaps only the lower down employees of the companies weren’t allowed personalities whereas the higher ups get to retain this luxury.  
He began to entertain the possibility that maybe the executives didn’t have any personality so they created companies to recruit people and take theirs, and then he almost immediately dismissed this as insanity and swiftly forgot about it.
    Returning to Sam’s original thought, he was becoming fond of Dr. Phelps, he appreciated this opportunity to gain an insight into Phelps as a person and listen to his stories about Kumar.  It is always nice to see an authority figure as just another human being like yourself, especially your boss because, at the moment, it was making Sam feel more comfortable about accepting this position.  
    Comfort was rapidly morphing into excitement; it had finally dawned on him.  He was going into space.  He knew that it would not be as adventurous as it had been in the old days, when astronauts were propelled past the skies and into the great abyss by huge organ-shaking rockets that were highly inefficient but, nonetheless, exhilarating.  
One of Sam’s favourite historical topics was the beginning of space exploration in the 20th century.  He could recall as a teenager in school being shown a clip from that time of a launch, he remembered gazing in awe at the size of the ship and thinking how that was an impressive way to travel.  
All the modern ships he had ever seen were compact, efficient and boring.  They certainly didn’t resemble what he saw that day in history class.  From then on he had been very interested in early space travel and did a lot of research on the subject; he had been surprised to find the politics of the time, which had shaped the sphere of space travel, very intriguing.
He learned about what was known as the “Space Race” between the two most powerful nations of the time, the USSR and the USA.  Every time he thinks about how America wasted so much money and risked lives just to prove that they were ‘better’ than some other people that they had never met on the other side of the world by beating them to the Moon always made Sam laugh.
It reassured him to know that even some of the most influential people of the time could behave like petty children, perhaps if he had lived during that time he would have been more worried than relieved.
    Once again Sam glanced out his window and tried to shed a few more seconds off the journey.  The road that Sam was currently travelling on was just one section of the remnants of another time, the motorways.  They were old enough to be considered relics but archaeologists hadn’t needed to excavate them, because they have remained virtually the same as they had been when first constructed.  They were still depressing concrete structures as their use has been in a steady decline for decades so they were repaired from time to time if it was needed but there wasn’t much point in improving them.  
Sam spotted electricity pylons off in the distance, linked together by a web of power lines but his attention was soon firmly transfixed on something closer.  He was examining the lights that were placed along the centre of the motorway.  He felt they looked like thousands of letter T’s.
    Then Sam sighted a small pink squiggle of graffiti on a bridge overhead; he couldn’t quite make out what it said, if anything.  That gave Sam another highly unlikely theory.  Maybe whoever it was who designed these ancient roads what seemed like aeons ago had a name that began with T, so they planned to have the lamp posts in that shape as the ultimate graffiti so a part of them would still exist centuries after they’d died.  
Sam began to think more about graffiti, there were lots of it around his neighbourhood and even in his building, which he actually liked, it made the place more colourful and interrupted the usual grey backdrop of his life.  However, he didn’t like all graffiti, those that were little more than gaudy scribbles he felt were lazy and had no purpose to them.  He preferred the huge murals that, if they were painted anywhere else, would be considered beautiful.  The effort put into them was evident to everyone.
    Well, almost everyone, he could remember a time when he was walking with this woman a few years back, she was called Anna and when they passed by one of these wall paintings she made a passing comment that he never forgot.  She said that she thought it was “Pretty ugly.”  
Sam knew that she had meant it in the sense of ‘quite’ but nonetheless, he felt that this oxymoronic phrase perfectly defined what graffiti was.  He didn’t feel at the time that it was a particularly memorable moment yet, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, it had still stuck with him after all this time; it had even outlasted the woman.
    It would be nice if when thinking through your entire life, the instants that you immediately thought of could be chosen by you.  Such as if something really good happened to you just now and you wanted it to be part of this chronological slideshow, that you could directly save it forever as if you were a computer.  But you can’t, your uncontrollable memory chooses these moments in time using some sort of screening process that you can’t detect.
    There were other types of graffiti around other than the two Sam had already thought about.  There were always plenty of political and anti-parliamentary slogans painted around the cities, most were just anarchic and very volatile but occasionally there was a piece which Sam really liked.  
One phrase could be recollected with greater precision than the rest.  He wasn’t sure if it was political in nature but Sam had liked it nonetheless.  One night when he was walking home from work he noticed that things weren’t as he had remembered them from his walk to work that morning.  On a wall of one of the many buildings that he passed daily, there was a short phrase painted on in a foreboding black:

YOU ARE AN IMMORTAL UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE

    Sam didn’t know it at the time but that moment was soon to become part of his own mental slideshow of memories.  He was lucky it had been imprinted so rapidly because on his walk to work the next day, the slogan had already been removed.  He wasn’t completely sure what the writer had intended by scrawling this on the side of a block of flats but he liked it, Sam enjoyed unexpected events during his daily routine, sometimes a short surprise is enough to make you smile.  
    Sam had always believed that, as a writer, it never mattered what you intended a piece of work to mean, it was only important what readers took away from it and if they didn’t understand what you meant, then the fault lies with you.  He had formed this belief from all the times when he had read a piece of ‘classic’ literature that a work colleague or teacher had recommended.  
He couldn’t count the amount of times when he had read a book, which he thought, was okay, just to have a condescending speech forced in his ears about all the important points he had overlooked.  Sam really didn’t like people telling him what he should have taken away from a certain book or film or whatever.  What a person learns from someone else’s creation should be personal to that individual.  That is why Sam never told anyone his feelings regarding that slogan, as a matter of fact he never even told anyone the sentence he’d read that day.  He didn’t want anyone telling him what they thought the writer meant when he wrote it and ruining what Sam had learnt from it.
    It was true Sam didn’t know exactly where they were going but it was still taking longer than he had initially expected.  He decided to ask Phelps, “How much further is this place?”
    “Why are you in such a hurry?” Phelps said.  “You’ll have to learn some patience for where you’re going.”
    Samuel Morgan had patience, he wasn’t sure about many things but he knew he could wait for what he wanted when it was truly necessary.  That’s why he spent so many years at that job he loathed; he knew that one day he wouldn’t have to give anymore of his life to it.
He used to dream of eventually writing a great book, which would be universally loved and he would become rich and famous as a result.  Then he would never have to work again, his occupation would be a professional author and he could spend the rest of his life producing as many novels as he could, maybe one or even more would be turned into films.  
    Fair enough, it was a nice dream but was not exactly lining up with his real life.  He never predicted quitting (or getting fired from) his job before he had gotten a novel published, nor did he expect that he would be spending the next five years in a metal castle in the lunar sky.
Sam wasn’t an idiot, he knew that his dream was hopelessly unrealistic, it was just nice to have something to aspire to and this was probably the best opportunity he’ll ever have to achieve it.  All he needs to do is spend the next five years writing books and when he returns to Earth, he’ll be back on track with his plan.
    A sizeable dent in the road gave Sam and Phelps a jolt; the authorities only really focussed on repairing major damage, basically meaning anything that makes a road impossible to drive on.  This policy meant that much of the motorways were now highly dilapidated, but they weren’t as decrepit as you’d expect for roads of that age.
    This was definitely the longest journey to get to work Sam had ever undertaken, but it was by far the most relaxing.  When Sam had worked as a computer repairman, he walked to and from work almost every day.  It wasn’t horrible; in fact, he frequently found it rather pleasurable.
Walking was Sam’s favourite mode of transport, this did extend how long it took him to arrive at his destination but he didn’t mind, he just considered that to mean he had more time to think, which was rare in an urban routine.  Sam enjoyed walking because on your journey you have more of a chance to take in the view.  When enclosed in a car you don’t get to see your world properly and most of the time you’re going too fast to fully appreciate your surroundings.  Sam didn’t care that it was the slowest way to travel; after all, he was a patient man.  
Practically every time Sam went to and from work, he had to carry a bag, even though it only contained a few folders and books it always felt so heavy, as if he had to physically carry the burden of hating his job every time he went to work.
    It was beginning to dawn on Sam that they were still far from their destination, he thought maybe he should get some rest before they arrived so he closed his eyes and leant his head against his window.  Ever since he was a child, when he really tried to, it always took Sam a long time to fall asleep; he assumed that to be true of everyone when they concentrated on going to sleep.
    Sam had once read in an article of one of the papers he used to write for that humans only needed four hours of sleep a night, he had tried it a few times and he had felt perfectly fine as he went to work on those mornings.  He did wonder, if that was all you needed, why did he stay asleep for so long if he didn’t set his alarm, perhaps it was because he didn’t have anything worthy to accomplish.  
Even though Sam enjoyed sleep, he didn’t like it, he slept a lot and he considered it a waste of time, he could be doing so much more with his life rather than sleeping it away.  True, he didn’t know exactly what he could have been doing but he knew there must be something.
    The average person sleeps for about eight hours a day.  That’s a third of the twenty-four hours you get per day.  If a person lives to ninety years old, which is about the average, they will have spent thirty years of their life with their eyes closed and their mind switched off, similar to being dead.  Phrased another way, if you die on your ninetieth birthday at the exact second you were born you will have lived for 2,840,184,000 seconds, this means you have spent 946,728,000 seconds of your life being unconscious.  Almost one billion seconds lost because of sleep.  He remembered these figures so well because they were similar to a number he had once seen in a book on astrophysics.  He had found it curious that, on average, we spend 0.946 billion seconds of our lives asleep and that one light-year consists of 9.46 quadrillion metres.  Just because something is a coincidence doesn’t make it any less interesting.
    The information contained within the last paragraph was also in the article Samuel Morgan had once read.  It’s a depressing thought when you realise that there are more souls in the world than there are seconds in your life.  It wouldn’t sound like enough time to any human.
Sam’s immediate thoughts after reading these figures were those of the bargaining variety.  He wished that he could strike a deal with God or Mother Nature or anyone that would listen to him so that he could spend his entire life not requiring any sleep if he only makes up for it during his later years.  This meant that, if he lived to the average age of ninety, he would spend the first sixty years of his life awake at all times so that he could achieve more than most.  Then, in return, he would spend the final thirty years of his life asleep, effectively meaning he would die at sixty.  He would get the chance to truly get as much out of his youth as he possibly could and as a bonus, he could skip the depressing and undignified years of his winter.  
    His statistics would be the same as everyone else’s so everything would even out in the end and the natural balance would not be disrupted.  However, he will not suffer having to be looked after by his future children who he had once taken care of or if he had no children, he felt the more probable situation, some random strangers wasting their lives watching over him when he may as well be dead already.  Sam felt his deal to be fair.
    Sam had nothing against the seniors of the world who, well, not exactly chose to but regardless spent their final years needing to be cared for because they couldn’t manage by themselves anymore.  He understood why most people who’s only choice was a poor quality of life and no life at all would choose to survive every time.  There’s no rush to die, you have the rest of eternity to be dead, you only get a small amount of life and you may as well live as much of it as you can.  Sam could comprehend the reasons of his elders; he just didn’t want to join them.
    Sam was drifting off now; he could feel himself melting into every fibre of his seat.  He would be asleep soon.  When Sam was very young he was scared of the dark, he was too afraid to go to sleep if it was pitch black, he just needed some light.  What he was really afraid of wasn’t the lack of light, it was the lack of knowledge.  He needed to see everything that was in his room so that he knew where he was.  Sam, of course, grew out of this childhood fear and now he actually quite liked the dark.  Thinking back he couldn’t understand why his darkened bedroom had frightened him so much, yet he didn’t mind closing his eyes to go to sleep because when you do that, everything goes dark anyway.
    Even when he was a kid he knew that he would eventually grow out of it, he reasoned that when you grow up all your irrational fears will steadily slip away until nothing scares you.  Sam was right, that had happened to him.  What he hadn’t seen coming, though, was that for every childish fear that leaves you, you pick up about three or four new ones that, through your juvenile eyes you didn’t even register as worth fearing.  Now, as an adult, Sam feared much more as he did as a child and currently longed for those days of ignorance when he was even ignorant of how good he had it.
    There was a book Sam had read in his infancy, it was about a knight and a castle and a dragon.  In it the knight went into the castle and slew the dragon.  He was described as ‘Brave and Bold’ (which at the time Sam had mistaken for the word ‘Bald’).  Sam used to believe that the knight was brave because he didn’t fear fighting the dragon, maybe this was why he had mistaken the fact that people get braver as they get older with them losing their fear.
    At the time he hadn’t known that being brave didn’t mean not being afraid of anything, it meant seeking out things you were scared of doing and then doing them anyway.  This was why he had believed that when he grew up he wouldn’t be afraid of anything, then he realised that being frightened of more things was actually beneficial, it gave you more opportunities to be brave.
    Dr. Phelps glanced over at Sam, who was now completely asleep.  Phelps found that amazing, Sam was about to go into space for the first time and he was so relaxed that he was having a little pre-flight nap.  Phelps remembered his first space flight, he was a wreck he was so nervous, it was hardly any different from a terrestrial flight but he still made himself sick with worry.  He only ever went into space once, he decided he couldn’t take the anxiety anymore of thinking what could go wrong when you were so far from home.  He never went again, just another perk of being the boss, he didn’t need to.
    Victor Phelps looked over at his new employee again; he could’ve woken him up out of jealousy, why should he get a peaceful trip when his boss had such a horrible time before his first flight.  
It was a ridiculous thought; he never understood why thoughts like that occasionally popped into his head, he bet that never happened to anyone else.  His senses returned and he decided to let Sam get some rest, after all, he still had a lot of distance to cover.