The Daily Doodles

“The Fading Signal”

It’s been roughly three hundred and ten standard days since the crash.

While Caleb Adams was initially happy to have wrecked his supply ship on this un-named fossilized moon instead of being sucked into the nearby giant gas planet, the elation quickly wore off as the reality of trying to find rescue seeps in.

Since atomic disturbance from the gas planet will screw up any signal he tries to broadcast from the surface with his weak portable transponder, he is forced to climb one of the 5 mile high fossilized trees scattered around the dead, small moon and wait for the two hour window where the gas giant is obscured by this solar system’s sun, in an attempt to bounce a signal off of the local star that can somehow be received by one of the Company’s scanners.

Each arduous climb takes over 20 hours of continuous climbing, and the two hour window to broadcast his signal only happens once every three standard days. 

And there’s certainly no guarantee that a scanner will be in a position to capture his signal during that window, or that the Company is even still looking for the wreckage of his supply ship since the safe bet (and the financially sensible bet) is that he was dissolved in the acid atmosphere of the gas giant, and therefore classified as “Recovery Not Feasible”.

In fact, he knows he has no reason to believe he will make it out alive.  Not at this date.

But if he’s not going to try, he might as well just shoot himself in the face right here and now.  He has to at least give himself a chance.

So, for the three hundred and eleventh day in a row, he climbs.

Posted 1/3/2012

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