Help! I'm trapped on a space-ship with a grouchy old man!

A Chapter by James

Narrator's POV

Max had barely slept for the last few weeks. After applying for the subnautica program, she'd been too excited to sleep, other than passing out from exhaustion. And even then, it was rare if she got more than an hour or two a night. When the day finally came that she was notified of her acceptance, well, lets just say she lost her voice for a few days. About three or four weeks after that, she was picked up for the trip, the only fourteen year-old out of three thousand people.

Now aboard the Aurora, Max lay on her bunk in the tiny room she was supposed to stay in until the arrival to the new planet. It was a three day journey travelling at light speed, and they should be able to see the planet by tomorrow morning. The empty bunk above Max held no roommate, just an empty mattress and blanket. The ship had been filled to minimum capacity, the maximum being seven thousand. Max was doing the math in her head of how many people and rooms, etcetera.

Max's POV

Ok, seven thousand people, two per room, about three thousand five hundred rooms? And with just over three thousand that meant everybody got one to themselves. Sweet. Works perfectly for antisocial people like me. I wonder what the planet is like? It would need to have quite a lot of things for it to be considered inhabitable. Fresh water, breathable air, food sources, suitable land for farming, and of course space. In other words, finding something like that was pretty darn rare.

Narrator's POV

Max was attempting to sleep when somebody began pounding on her door. Max bolted upwards, banging her head on the top of her bunk, making her yelp. Max stumbled to the door, rubbing her now sore head, and opened the door to find a man, about in his forties with grey, black, and white hair, holding a holographic clipboard, tapping his foot impatiently. He was wearing the strangest wetsuit Max had ever seen, it was black, silver, blue, purple, and green.

"Excuse me Miss, I was sent to give you an orientation?", the man stated, inspecting Max as if he'd expected something else. Max stared at him blankly, her head throbbing in pain, annoyance, and confusion.

"You are Maxine Lewis, are you not?", the man asked again, annoyance creeping into his voice.

"I go by Max, what did you say about an orientation?", Max replied, still rubbing her bruised forehead. The man made a "tch" kind of noise and motioned for Max to follow him. He didn't seem to like Max, as if her very existence ticked him off. Max didn't argue, she just wanted to go back to sleep. He continued walking at a quick pace until they reached the storage room. He typed a command into the door, and two strange dog-like robots opened the door. Max's eyes widened, she'd never seen robots like that before, well, at least not in real life. She'd dreamed of building things like that more times than not.

The nameless man typed another command into a console inside the room, and the robo-dogs bounded off through the maze of boxes that lined the walls of the enormous room. countless stacks of countless boxes filled the room, definitely more than three thousand.

"What are they looking for?", Max asked, admiring the boxes, each one about the size of a very small suitcase or a box for snow boots. Each one had a label with a name and a number.

"Your box, what else?", the man shot at her, challenging her to continue asking questions. Max rolled her eyes.

"How about you drop the pronoun game and run that by me again?", she said in an annoyed and sarcastic tone in a successful attempt to annoy and imitate the man.

The man sighed, "Each colonist has a box with their supplies in it, the robots are getting yours." Ok, Max officially did not like this guy. Not long after that, the mechanical canines returned, holding a box on their backs, perfectly balanced. The box had Max's name printed on the label, but didn't have a number strangely. Max decided to continue bugging this uptight grouch.

"Hey, is my box supposed to have a number", she asked, the man seeming to age twenty years as she spoke those words.

"Yours wasn't working properly by the time we left.", he groaned in response. Max rolled her eyes again.

"How about again without the pronoun game?"

"Every colonist is assigned an AI companion and helper," the man huffed, "Well, almost every colonist. Since you joined so late, the guys in the lab didn't have time to finish yours. Give it the proper programming, they cost a lot of money to delete, so we moved it to storage. It's supposed to stay out of trouble, and we're going to try and fix or finish it when the labs are set up. After we get everybody settled in, build the houses and such, you know what I mean, you took seventh grade science didn't you?"

Yeah, of course she did, or else she wouldn't be here. She popped the box open to find a wetsuit in her size, flippers, goggles, water shoes, and a phone like device. Max noticed the man had one just like it.

"If my AI isn't working, how come I have a device for it?", Max challenged, eyeing the device intently. Another exasperated sigh escaped the man's mouth.

"Your AI isn't currently working, I never said that was permanent. You'll probably get it within a few weeks after we land.", he answered, handing Max her box and shooing her away like a child. Max rolled her eyes once again, but hurriedly walked back to her room.

Once Max was inside again, she pulled the wetsuit from the box, might as well try it on. She pulled her current clothing off, replacing it with the suit. Hmm, it was surprisingly comfortable. Max kicked her shoes off and tried the new ones on. Oh yeah, memory foam soles! Yeah, these weren't coming off for a few days at the least. Max collapsed on her bed, smiling like a madman.

Jeez, all this stuff must have cost a crap-ton of money. I mean, come on! The MOTOR would have cost about one point five MILLION dollars itself! And it was the size of a house! The ship would cost more than five TRILLION dollars, and that's without the equipment and supplies on board! Or the fuel!

Max felt really lucky right now, she was the only kid in the world that was going to live on another planet, out of several billion others. Max drifted off to sleep smiling at that fact.

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