Passenger Video Log: B. Crenshaw.
Seventeen hours before the event.
We are finally approaching Cassia, my new home away from home. Updated planetary scans have been pouring in over the past two days as I recovered from hypo-sleep, and seeing the planet so close outside my window is simply marvelous. Browns, greens, and blues that are at once so familiar and yet so foreign. Seeing the it in person is so much different than the computer simulations I’ve been working from.
This will be the first colony construction project I’ve been on-hand for from the beginning; usually I spend months drawing up the plans, sending them out for review, and then some years later receiving pictures from the surface when the project’s complete. I admit I’m a touch nervous—some of the new information coming from the surface requires I tweak my ground plans, but I’m confident there won’t be much in the way of hassle when we actually get building.
No word yet on the factory and production modules that followed us here—our sister ship is still a few days behind but there’s every expectation that they will arrive safe and sound. If they don’t it’s not the end of the world, but I fully expect in that case to have some very angry project foreman and laborers on my hands—I may have envisioned a bit too much marble in the colony’s planning if we aren’t able to automate the collecting and shaping of building materials. Either way, we’ll make due.
Cassia is already inhabited, but it seems that most of the tribal cultures are spread on the eastern side of the continent, far from our community in the area I’ve come to call “Grass Valley” next to the large inland sea. The researchers have scientific names for all of the planetary features, and my plans certainly drill into enough specificity that there’s no confusion among the workers, but it will be nice to have local, familiar names for forests, mountains, and hills.
Most of the colonists are still sleeping; there’s no need to wake them until we’re ready to descend to the planet itself. I’m very glad for the extra time, not just for the opportunity to fine-tune the designs but also because the solitude is nice—once we’re on the surface privacy and isolation will be hard to find, at least until the major construction is finished in two years’ time.
Visiting this new world is going to be so much more rewarding than staying behind a desk for the rest of my life.
Header image created by Oleg Danilenko
