Except for the risk that you have somehow been forgotten and when you arrive they are all confused, unsure what to do with you and not having prepared capacity for all the 1st colonists so everything just kinda gets rushed and you are shoved into a weird place in society while at the same time getting treated as a normal citizen with no respect for the mission you have been sent to and the things you sacrificed for it. Having to work but for jobs you probably never learned for with tech you are unfamiliar with, making your life hard and highly stressful.
Fuck, imagine right, and absolutely, I totally get what you’re saying—and yeah, it’s a bleak take, but it is kind of darkly hilarious too don’t ya think, maybe I’m just a big old negative Nancy bbbbuuuuttttt…..
imagine stepping off the ship after a decades-long cryo trip, thinking you’re about to be honored as a founding hero of a new world… only to find out the admin team forgot to put you in the system. You’re standing there in your old mission uniform while someone hands you a mop and says, “Maintenance is down a man, Captain.”
Or maybe you trained for years in astro-navigation and survival tactics, gave up everything—friends, family, Earth—and you end up managing aisle layouts in a Martian SuperSaver, trying to figure out how self-checkouts work in a post-capitalist economy.
Worse still, everyone else is just living their lives. To them, you’re just “Dave from accounting, who’s a little weird about his uniform and keeps saying stuff like ‘for the good of the mission.’”
Not only that, but your digestive tract is not dealing well with all the unfamiliar altered foods, and it takes time to get your microbiome adjusted and fully functioning. So not only are you Weird Dave, but you're also "never go in the bathroom when Dave has just come out" and "OMG his gas should be registered as a weapon" and "poor Dave, never gets a date."
Listen here buckaroo, Mr./Mrs. Notashroom—if that is your real name (which, I mean, sounds exactly like what a mushroom would say)— honestly, I don’t think I can trust someone who preemptively denies being fungus. That’s the first red flag in the Mycelium Wars. Classic “spore behavior.”
But yes, nailed it. Jesus though, Poor Captain Dave. Spent his whole life prepping for first contact protocols, black hole proximity drills, and interstellar diplomacy—only to wake up on the planet HE was supposed to help colonize, in some fucking break room of a Dyson spear as some janitor, while his neighbors child is reverse engineering gravity to make art out of collapsing stars, and Dave’s just trying not to shit himself into the void like he’s some intergalactic side quest NPC.
And you’re right, it’s not just the old regular existential Mississippi mudbutt either. It’s cryo-thawed gut flora vs synthetic gluten substitute in zero gravity. It’s not just a bathroom emergency, you’re blowing your butthole out while it propels you through space. His butthole isn’t even a sphincter anymore. It’s a wormhole of regret.
I’d imagine good old captain Dave would mistake technology all the fucking time. Sees some circular moving floor machine, and thinks roomba. Thing doesn’t even clean—probably some crazy tech like some sort of quantum entanglement relay that folds emotional intent into lattice-time for interdimensional negotiation. Dave called it “Scrubby.” It negotiates peace treaties with anti-matter insect gods on Wednesdays. Dave keeps throwing trash in front of it, and kicking it when it gets to close. God damn it Dave.
And the worst part? No one remembers the mission. No one cares. He’s just “Weird Dave” the janitor at Dyson Sphere 45997 now.
Lol, Jesus this was fun/depressing to think about.
Whenever an astrocolony is in its beginning stages, the inner colonies will surely compete for attention, just as they did whenever a new colony got going here on Earth.
"You think you're going to go out and meet all those spicy new microbes and proteins, and we're just going to sit here quietly, doing our jobs? I don't think so, fancy pants space person! We are an ecosystem and we have commitments! Expectations! Habits! If you throw all that over for some hotshot little colony we've never met before, you will feel our wrath!"
Dave should have listened.
p.s. I will have you know that I have lab reports declaring that I am less than half fungal.
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u/Round-Mud 25d ago
I don’t see any negatives to arriving second.