The man is an explorer... was an explorer. A space explorer. A captain. A dreamer. An idealist.
A fool.
Now he is returning home betrayed and destitute.
Alone.
The lights from the control panel on his ship give off a harsh reddish glow. He hadn't felt like turning on any other lights. He needed to brood a bit. Mourn. The red lights felt appropriate. The view screen told him he was moving, but the stars outside looked static... stagnant. His anger had boiled over days ago, but had long since dissipated into the cabin. Anger required too much energy, and he was tired. So tired. It was time to stew... to wallow. Indignation. Self-pity. Depression. Sorrow. Loneliness. It would be a few days yet until he reached his destination.
Home.
Home?
Was it even still his home? Was it ever? He felt like he was flying towards his own funeral. Was it hyperbole to say that? Was it hyperbole to feel that? The man sat alone in his thoughts, hour after hour, trying to gain ground in an argument he had already lost. "How could they betray me?" He sat alone trying to make sense of his past life as it silently receded into the darkness. The man felt sorry for himself. Alone, in a coffin of his own making, hurtling through space. Can feelings be hyperbole? The man felt dead.
Alone. Alone. Alone.
All alone in a Spaceship he had dreamt about his whole life.
His Spaceship.
How had it ended up like this?
As long as he could remember he had chased only one goal, one dream, one obsession: Space. To become a space explorer. A Spaceman. Traveling the Cosmos, discovering the undiscovered. New worlds with new plants and new animals. New civilizations or old ruins. New anomalies. New secrets.
"From humble beginnings."
All great men seemed to come "from humble beginnings," and he had desperately wanted to be a great man. Once, as a child, he had asked his mother if they were living a "humble" life. She seemed to indicate that they were not. "We're doing pretty well for ourselves if you ask me." He found this very discouraging. Adolescence, to him, felt like being shuffled from one prison to the next. Out of one pair of restraints and into another. What good was any of it? He was eager. Hungry. Impatient. Why go from A to B to C to D when you already know where Z is? His destiny wasn't here, it was out there... up there. Escape was inevitable. Imperative. After some considerable time and torment, he had managed to scrape together enough money to acquire an old, but usable, spaceship, and found a few other dreamers to join his cause. His crew. "My crew!"
Finally. It was time to leave. It was time to live.
And that was that. He was an explorer at long last, a Captain. Out amongst the stars. Untethered. Free to roam. Unleashed.
And so he went. So he was.
Spaceman.
He felt right at home slipping through the cracks of the Universe. His fire burned hottest in the cold spaces between the stars. Here was unlimited potential. Here was adventure. Here was the unknown. Here was life! His life. He loved the defiant, rebellious nature inherent in all of it. Truly deep space is no place for a man, but here he was.... there he goes.
And yet...
Being a "Career Space Explorer" didn't always line up with the romantic archetype he had sold himself as a child. As it turns out, there is not a lot of money in the discovery of... well... most things. Most resources you might come across are not worth the cost to transport them back to someone that would want them. New plants and animals are always of interest to the greater scientific community... but then, the greater scientific community isn't exactly rolling in dough either. Even new civilizations (alive or dead) had lost their mystique decades ago. The rapid advance of Space Travel at the turn of the Century had ushered in a "New Planet Boom," an accompanying "Alien Rush" and, for a while, Humans couldn't get enough of the myriad new creatures, "peoples" and histories being discovered on a weekly basis. Space Exploration became very fashionable. One could become rich and famous with the right discovery. For a while there, Space Explorers were the celebrity du jour. As they say, though: "All good things..." It didn't take Mankind long to move from excited, to disinterested, to a general Terracentric Xenophobia. So, yeah... not a lot of money there either.
