The next week was a continuation. I stuck to the routine and the days blurred together. Wake up. Health Check. Fitness. Fun. Fly. Sleep. Repeat.

  But within that routine, things shifted, small events happened.

  The morning check up was uneventful but uplifting. A steady progress all across the board. I was getting back in shape. I even started to see muscle definition when looking at myself in the mirror. Despite that, training was still a chore and, on some days, I was only able to go through it by viewing it as a set of daily quests to grind. Gamer mindset for the win! Flying, on the other hand, was always welcomed. It was my passion, my goal. But even there, I was starting to get antsy. The Mahkkra’s simulator came with a training program that was helping. I was seeing progress but the exercises were boring. It did not feel like flying. I was used to grinding and boring repetitive exercise. Heck, there was the infamous week-long space bug during the beta. Any ship getting too far away from a space port or space station would immediately crash against an invisible wall. While others did not bother logging in, I spent my evenings doing take offs and landings. But the simulator’s careful approach was getting on my nerves. I wanted to feel something, to fly with a purpose. Cap 6-2 in 2 seconds on a completely empty map, what a pain…

  Mid-week was a low point. I was more tired, the fitness training was a drag, the flight simulator was getting boring. I was in a bad mood. At night, in bed, staring at the ceiling, I decided some things needed to change. I instructed my personal trainers to add variety to my fitness and, thankfully, it complied. And I stopped eating in the foyer. The room was too big, too silent. Eating alone there was depressing. I started testing every room that had a seat and a table, or something close to a table. I also stopped grinding the high scores on the arcades. I focused on shooting. But I did not want static shooting anymore. One day, I was eating in the operations room, looking at the various systems, searching for an idea to get moving targets when genius struck. I reprogrammed a repair drone. Well, I did not reprogram it as much as I fried some systems. The poor little machine was supposed to dig the regolith, compact it into bricks and send them to a collecting unit. But with its targeting system out of order, it was now shooting bricks in random directions. I laughed for a full hour, it was like a mad clay pigeon launcher. My aim was terrible, but I really enjoyed myself on that day.

  As for flying, I got into a huge argument with the simulator. I managed to advance to the point of flying near objects. It was still boring. So when asteroids appeared in the simulation, I tried to race around and between them and the simulator kept failing me and resetting the exercises mid-flight. Oh you don’t want me to race an asteroid field? Watch me. I’m going to stop doing simulations and race for real!

  Thankfully, self-preservation gave me enough wisdom to not do it. I did fly for real, yes. For the first time since that first flight and my near death accident, I took the Mahkkra out. But I did not race in the asteroid belt. Instead, I slowly and carefully maneuvered around the closest asteroids. The simulator is extremely realistic, but there’s something in real flight that always makes me feel more alive. I used everything I could really feel the difference in how much more precise my control of the ship was.

  After that, I mixed simulators and real flight. And then, I tried the weapons systems.

  I had been so shocked by my injuries in the first flight that I had completely ignored this aspect of space flight and focused only on controlling the ship. But with maneuvers becoming easier and easier, I decided it was time to check if the Mahkkra was still the predator I was used to from the game.

  First, I used the two heavy phased lasers mounted on each side.

  I found a lone, small asteroid, aimed and shot. The two beams of purple light instantly hit it and completely vaporized it. Giddy, I adjusted another and shot. Then another. Then another. Then a bigger one. This one did not disappear, but it exploded in several fragments.

  I then proceeded to test the range of the laser and was, again, pleasantly surprised. The range was far superior than what I had expected. The laser beams started to lose coherence and effectiveness with distance but I could still hit and damage the asteroid from quite far away. This was exciting, but I had to remind myself that against ships with shields, the actual effective range would be a lot shorter.

  I did not have torpedoes loaded at the moment, and the ones I had in the station’s storage were, in my memory from Life Among the Stars, very expensive, so I did not want to waste them.

  The last remaining weapon was the riftlance. It was in a hidden compartment below the cockpit and when deployed, gave the Mahkkra an even more aggressive look. The weapon’s real name was “Trans-Dimentional Rift Beam Emitter”. In the game, it had been an experimental weapon developed by a predatory race of aliens that appeared in a server-wide event. I did not really understand the physics behind it, but it was supposed to open a rift between dimensions and shape it as a short range beam. After testing it, the range was very very short. Less than one kilometer. Practically knife fighting distance for space combat. But the visual effect was stunning. It resembled a lightning pushing forward in a jagged line of pure darkness. So dark it was almost shining. Just looking at it gave me the chills. There was an indescriptible feeling of wrongness about it. Plus, the actual damage seemed incredibly high. It sheared through any asteroid, even the hard metallic ones. Oh, I am definitely going to do regular weapons training.

  I had another weapon system in storage that I could swap the riftlance with, but that was for later.

  So yeah, I stuck to my routine, made small progresses and kept me entertained while not putting myself into dangerous situations. Overall, a great second week… Until it was almost over.

  I decided that, from now on, every seventh day of a week would be a rest day. I was afraid of a burnout if I continued to have days so full of training that I literally fell asleep of exhaustion every day.

  So I spent my morning lounging in various rooms, sipping various fancy teas. I was more a coffee guy than a tea guy, but wanted a change. The smoked tea was interesting. The ginger and lemon tea, on the other hand, I did not finish. It was too aggressive for me.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  And then, came the curry incident.

  For lunch I decided to go out of my comfort zone and try something other than the french dishes I had tried until now. I ordered chicken tikka masala.

  I should have been suspicious when the ProChef required new spice cartridges. I brought the steaming bowl of curry and its side of jasmine rice to the entertainment section, planning on eating while enjoying a nice view of the planet above.

  The first spoonful was creamy, with a wonderful piece of chicken and a warm, complex and exotic mix of spices. The second was also warm. I mixed some rice in and found the combination delicious. I noticed that every bite made my mouth a little hotter. Halfway through, my eyes were overflowing with tears and my mouth was a burning inferno. The worst thing? The feel of burning would not stop. I tried rice to calm it down. No effect. I tried drinking water. It was worse. Even without eating, I felt the heat continue to rise.

  I ran to the kitchen, brought the ProChef’s interface and searched for milk. There wasn’t a simple bowl of cold or warm milk. It only had hot chocolate with milk, which I ordered by default. It helped, but the taste clashed so much with the overflowing taste of curry in my mouth that I had to stop. Plus, after two mouthfuls, I did not feel any more effect. And the heat was still rising in my mouth.

  Abandoning the milk idea, I went to the medical pod and asked for help for my mouth. The response was; “minor inflammation of mucus caused by culinary spices. Natural effect of spicy food detected, no medical treatment required”

  I screamed in frustration, then proceeded to curse the pod in several languages.

  I had plain vegetable soup for dinner. I felt temporary relief, but for two whole days, I felt the tingling of the curry in my mouth. Unbelievable.

  Then came the third week. I maintained my routine with ease. The check ups kept showing improvements. Bone density, muscle mass, neural conductivity, all reached above 90% of optimum. Additionally the physical exercises became easier. I started to actually enjoy some of them and look forward to them. Not the whole ordeal. I still needed external motivation but It was easier and I started to understand how people could come to like it. I started to look forward to the day where I would end up all sweaty and tired, but not sore and aching.

  After the curry incident, I became more conservative in my meal choices. I still tried non french food, of course, but I spent time reading the description of each dish and specifically configured the food synthesizer to warn me when the food would end up spicy hot.

  I continued flying. I did less and less simulations and started to mix maneuvering with shooting. I realized I had to be careful. If I used every asteroid around Hyperion Deep for target practice, any ship scanning the asteroid belt would detect an anomaly in the asteroid distribution. So I went farther and planned in advance where I would perform acts of mass rock and ice destruction.

  A sign that I was in a better shape was that I no longer felt too tired to do anything after dinner.

  So I started to map the surrounding stars. On my first evening, I started compiling stars by luminosity and measuring all angles.The next evening, I came back to the operations center excited to continue. I was in the middle of measuring updated angles and searching for a way to know the distance between the position of the station between now and the day before when I noticed there was a menu for star distance. I opened it and realised the computers had already made the calculations for me.

  I felt like an idiot. I had a pen and papers, parallax equations ready and the computer had already done it all. I decided to take it with humour. At least it will make another great conversation material. A little bit of humorous self deprecation for entertainment. The rest of the week passed without incident. I mapped the nearby stars, finding 12 in a 10 light year radius. I was optimistic I would be able to find something in at least one of those.

  Then the third week blended into the first. I started to feel the isolation. I had a ship and maps to travel. I was just waiting to be in proper shape and ready before leaving. Being so close to leaving and not ready yet made me antsy. I almost collided with an asteroid during one of my flight sessions. The alarms blared and the cockpit was flooded with red flashing lights while I wrestled back control over the ship, nearly avoiding collision. The only good news? By midweek the check up deemed all my physical parameters to be optimal. I did a celebration meal in my office, but my heart was not in it and it ended up being just me sadly eating a wonderful Christmas stuffed turkey while watching the planet and its asteroids slowly dancing in the black sky.

  I changed the weapon loadout of the Mahkkra, replacing the riftlance by a wike. This weapon, also an experimental weapon I gained in a legendary raid with the guild, is an extremely efficient railgun. Its real name is Warp Infused Kinetic Emitter. As the name indicates, it uses warp bubbles to accelerate pellets to near speed of light. Its operating range was from point five to point eight of the speed of light. At that speed, the pellet seemed to instantaneously hit the target. And the kinetic energy was absolutely devastating. When I tested, it vaporized asteroids that were dozens of meters wide. I liked it as a weapon. It consumed a lot of power, but less than the riftlance and had incredible range. But the Mahkkra could only equip a limited amount of ammunition, making it tactically inferior to the riftlance in my opinion. So I switched back.

  On the seventh day, the Mahkkra was ready to depart. Fully fueled, packed with rations, medical equipment, repair parts I thought I could need.

  I was planning on leaving on the first day of the fifth week. The date felt significant. It would mark a full month spent on the station. And it would give me a day of rest before finally going on an adventure.

  I was having lunch in the home theatre. It had occurred to me that I had avoided this room because of the deception brought by having all databases empty, but the seats were comfortable, with a foldable table, like on a plane, which made eating easy. I activated the 3D projector, planning to display a view of the nearby star and visualize my planned trip when I froze.

  The projector’s menu had a list of titles I could watch. Movies, series, documentaries. A huge 3D menu with titles and animated pictures.

  Hands shaking, I selected one. The room became dark, sound arose, of waves. A woman wearing a futuristic summer dress appeared, near a beach.

  My mind went blank. I stood there, immobile. My jaw hit the floor from the shock.

  Stupid stupid stupid, Nico. you did it again. You made assumptions and missed something extremely important. You had a media library, from the start and you did not check it, because it would be too depressing to find another empty database. Bouhou. You should have checked, you idiot.

  I did my breathing exercises and calmed down.

  I leapt from my chair and ran to the operations center, heart beating so hard I thought I was at risk of having a stroke and checked the main database of the station. It was still empty. That confirmed it was only the media library. So I could have accessed it and learned about this world. I wasted weeks.

  I went back to the home theater and carefully pulled the list of available titles.

  Categories. Yes, that would give us a first good impression of what I had. Thriller. Romance. Action. Comedy. Documentary. And more.

  There was still no date, or no indication of where I was in the galaxy, but it would give me context, at least.

  I am going to try to understand the world through a Netflix catalogue. I laughed. What a terrible and wonderful idea. I can’t wait.