Wrenn Journal Entry - "Ticket to Ride"

To pursue the quest for justice that now weighs upon me, I have needed to become daring and brave. As evidence of this, I present the identification ticket from my first-ever space liner cruise.

(Note: I didn’t sneeze when they were taking the picture. My face just does that sometimes when I try to smile.)

In theory, a commercial space cruise is only as adventurous as checking into a hotel that’s somewhere else by the time you check out. It’s meant to be kind of boring. That’s also why, for certain destinations, it can make sense on a budget like mine.

But there were a surprising number of old-fashioned touches I didn’t expect, like a printed boarding pass I actually had to bring with me, and a cabin with a physical viewport. Plus, there were these crisply-uniformed staff members who took ship protocol stuff really seriously.

That was how I got into my frightening test of courage. Since I didn’t want to deal with the crew and their attentive brand of hospitality, I asked not to be disturbed. Then I spent most of the trip asleep, to minimize my schedule shock on the destination world (this is not weird, and everybody should do it). Between telling the people running the show I didn’t want to be bothered, and also sleeping through the only mandatory safety announcement, I didn’t realize that I would miss some important details.

That’s why when the turbulence hit, I had no idea what was happening. I started awake and had to just guess the reason why my viewport was full of fire and a spinning view of the rapidly-approaching surface of a planet. What I figured was that the liner was about to crash.

That idea would have panicked me even if I hadn’t also found that my cabin door refused to open for me. I was trapped!

Thinking quickly, I deduced that by prying the locked maintenance control panel open, I would be able to trigger a manual override and get out. Just another handy application for a high-quality replica ancient knife. My plan worked, too. First try!

That was how I found myself standing in the pleasantly-decorated hallway of this classic cruise ship, holding a weapon and yelling my worried demands for answers at a couple of very confused staff.

One of the crew members (I remember he had a really businesslike brushy mustache) stepped forward and somehow managed to stay very polite. He explained that most passengers enjoyed watching the lightshow of an old-fashioned, slow atmospheric entry process. Those passengers also understood, through listening to audio memoranda, that no doors were open to them during the somewhat involved operation. He also told me it would be wonderful if I’d return to my cabin until we had finished landing, for safety’s sake.

Evidently a little rumbling and the rest of it is part of every large space liner cruise that ends at a planetary spaceport. It’s something I was completely ignorant of because I’d never taken one before. Someday, I hope to stop being mortified when I think about that misunderstanding.

Still, through feeling sure I was in mortal danger and then overcoming an obstacle instead of feeling paralyzed by it, I was able to obtain the kind of personal victory that I find it really uplifting to remember in times of need. This ticket, as my souvenir, helps with that.

I also left a few really positive guest surveys, because the people who worked there were nice enough not to yell at me or charge me extra for messing with their door.

(Watching the rest of the landing also went fine. Once the terror subsided.)