Take a Letter 01

Yo Zeke, will you take a letter?

No, leave that part in. She’ll wanna know why there’s so much punctuation compared to usual.

Dear Penny,

I have an important question about finding planets.

Because I can do astrometry in my brain-meats-calculator, I’ve always found it pretty interesting to land on planets and objects that nobody’s been on before. Sometimes I have to wear a spacesuit that covers my legs, because it’s space and you need a suit, but that’s a small price to pay.

Of course, there are a lot of planets far from space-lanes that super rudely seem like they haven’t been explored before, but they totally have! And I’m not talking about in a cool way, where there’s the ruins of some evil super-city that’s been abandoned for a million years. I mean like, somebody already planted a flag or set up a buoy or a research station or whatever, and did the fun part of naming it. But there’s no way for me to know that.

Buoys stop transmitting or have their orbits decay after a kerjillion years. And a lot of explorers are (or were) not consistent about where their markers go. I was trying to put flags with my own inimitable doodlations on planets’ north poles, but then I found out that the magnetic fields of planets flippyflop all the time. So for all I know the next person who comes along will stick a flag on the whole other side of the planet and not even know mine’s there!

Just recently I decided I would switch to tagging the highest elevation on a world, which is a cinch to determine from spacy heights. But N̶i̶z̶k̶a̶, n̶o̶ w̶a̶i̶t̶ j̶u̶s̶t̶ s̶a̶y̶ an expert pointed out how that didn’t work, either. Because then you have to hope the next folks to bumble along check what might be a really inconvenient location to reach! I have lost credit for charting at least one planet this way, although I’m pretty sure L̶e̶f̶y̶n̶e̶ the person who did get the credit cheated anyway.

O̶h̶ w̶a̶i̶t̶, d̶o̶n̶’t̶ w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ t̶h̶a̶t̶ i̶t̶ w̶a̶s̶ j̶e̶r̶k̶b̶u̶t̶t̶ L̶e̶f̶y̶n̶e̶, Z̶e̶k̶e̶y̶. I̶ d̶o̶n̶’t̶ w̶a̶n̶t̶ h̶e̶r̶ k̶n̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ h̶e̶’s̶ m̶o̶r̶e̶ f̶a̶m̶o̶u̶s̶ t̶h̶a̶n̶ m̶e̶ a̶t̶ a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶!̶

Please consider using your logical, sciencey mind to concoct a really clever solution, unless you are busy sciencing something else, which is okay too. But please write back, because I like getting mail.

Yoursfully,

Cassiopeia Quinn