Let’s say you’re an interstellar explorer – no, a starseeder, you make stars in this scenario. You’re a one-man constellation creator, independently financed and floating in a tiny, one-man spacecraft you designed yourself. A little UFO-looking thing built from scraps and reference photos and a cosmogineering degree you kind of fell into without giving your future too much actual thought.
And, anyway, your rickety little ship, it works, and you’re out there, exploring the galaxy and creating new stars. They’re good stars, maybe even great stars, and, for a while, everyone really likes your stars. You’re one of the first people up there in a homemade spaceship, and your stars are getting a pretty good amount of attention. Not, like, making any newspaper lists or anything, but you were interviewed a couple times, and people seem to like your stars and like having holograms of them spinning and shining on their desks.
But, the thing is, you maybe take too much time making your stars. You’re prone to perfectionism and overfinessing, and, also, you take a lot of naps because your body isn’t in the best shape. For the sake of this story, let’s say it’s because you’re old, or at least old-adjacent. Let’s say you were in an accident when you were young and your consciousness was merged into an eighty-year-old synthetic body that wasn’t built super well and now nothing really works the way it should, especially not for someone your real age. But, well, that’s what you’ve got to work with and so you do.
And so you make stars and people like the stars and, yes, you take too long making new stars, and, suddenly, yours aren’t the only stars in the sky anymore. There’s thousands of them, millions, maybe even billions, and even some right there in your quadrant of space – and, out there in the spiral arms all lit up with neon space-stations and giant letters, there’s even some that look a lot like your stars, too.
Now you’re not saying anyone stole these stars – you’re not that arrogant, or stupid – but, as you look out through the rusting porthole of your artisan UFO, you see these stars that look like your stars are getting a lot of attention. And you hope that maybe someone will see your stars, too, that maybe they’ll want to add another holo-star to their desk. But they don’t, not really. They don’t even know you’re there.
And so you keep trucking along, doing your thing, making your stars, even as the sky gets brighter and brighter and brighter. Even as it becomes harder to see anything besides the neon and the noise. And, suddenly, people you know, people you met on homemade spaceship forums, they’re whizzing past you, in brand-new ships branded with big logos from bigger manufacturers. And as they pass, waving from the window, the wind buffets your little UFO, even though you’re reasonably certain that’s not how space is supposed to work.
And so you start sending out emails, trying to get those corporate backings, trying to find even a modicum of financing to upgrade your spaceship. Once upon a time, you prided yourself on doing it all yourself – that’s how you got up here in the first place, how you got into this mess – but, now, that doesn’t feel like enough.
Those emails, they never get answered. The money and the parts never come.
But you keep trying, you keep waiting, because everyone says you’re supposed to try and wait, that’s how making stars is done, but, now, you’re not even sure if you like making stars anymore. You know you did, once, you made them for you, but then the stars were subsumed by the desk-holos, by the logos and the neon and the pursuit of the same – but you aren’t selling desk-holos, not anymore, not really, and the logos and the neon aren’t getting back to you, not even after you wait more than the appropriate amount of time and send a very polite follow-up email – and it’s been the same story, over and over and over again for years, and now you’ve kind of forgotten why you started making stars in the first place.
But did you? Did you really? Or is it just the isolation of your little one-man UFO talking, the after-effects of sealing shut your ship against a galaxy absolutely teeming with a poison that increasingly affects only you? Or is it just the years in space and all the other ships getting to you, is it something as screamingly pedestrian as jealousy and frustration? Or maybe it’s just the bad brain chemistry that got programmed into your skinsuit by mistake. Maybe it’s all of the above. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Because the great part about having bad brain chemicals is that you might never actually know.
Image from Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson.
You’re old now, older than you ever thought you would be – older than you’d ever, quite literally, dared to imagine – and you’re tired now, and you wonder if you should just pack it all in, stop making stars, turn your ship around, and go home. And you think about it, a lot lately, but, truthfully, you don’t know what you’d do. All you know to do is make stars. And that’s not, like, hyperbole: making stars is what you went to school for, and the only other skills you picked up were how to answer phones and enter orders, and between all the poison in the space-air and your own not-wanting-to-do-that-shit-again-itis, going back to that seems like a terrible idea.
So you start wondering, pondering, because that’s all your bad brains will let you do. Maybe you never should’ve become a starseeder, you think. Maybe you should’ve gone into planetscaping, or hologram programming, or become an accountant. That last one probably never would’ve happened – you’re terrible with numbers, and getting worse – but you get what you mean.
And the thing is, you know you’re not alone. You’ve read stories about other starseeders in this situation. But they’re always talking from the other side, aren’t they, from one of the brand-name spaceships or the big neon space stations, or else they’re shrugged off as some nameless mass of forsaken failures whose stories won’t be told, accessories added to the aura of someone else’s star.
Except you’re here, you’re still here, right now, and you’re telling that story that won’t be told, and so maybe it’s not the telling but the listening, maybe it’s always been the listening, but what the hyper-hell are you supposed to do about that? And, OK, maybe it was a bad idea to climb aboard the U.S.S. Unpronounceable Norse/Polish Gibberish and hurl yourself into the endless void, but, seriously, how were you supposed to know the skies would disappear beneath starlight? How were you supposed to know the universe would become so cluttered everything would end up being run by algorithms that hate the taste of your name?
And you know that last bit sounds a little nuts, like some petty excuse someone makes up to explain their own screw-ups, but you also know it happens, you’ve seen it happen, over and over and over again, you’ve got proof, and you keep coming back to it because it absolutely has something to do with the morass of self-doubt and self-pity you currently find yourself in, but unless you’re going to build a time machine or another kind of machine that irons out everyone’s subconscious xenophobia at words they can’t say out loud good, you’re really not sure what the point of dwelling on it is anymore so maybe you should stop.
And, anyway, you’re losing track of the thread, which, you tell yourself, is not something a good starseeder would do, so maybe you’re not a starseeder, after all, maybe you were but maybe you’re done starseeding – even though if that were true, you probably wouldn’t be here barfing all this out onto an empty screen, so maybe you are starseeder after all. But now you’re right back where you started, alone and trapped and staring after the space-brake lights of everyone zooming ahead of you.
And maybe it’s the space madness talking, but you feel better. You still don’t have any answers (or any emails), you’re still not sure if you even want to be chasing after those ships and space stations anymore, but you feel good about this – this tiny, sputtering star you created. And so you decide to do what you do and leave it, leave this star, with all its imperfections and questionable uses of tenses and metaphors, shining furtively in a dusty and unused corner of the galaxy.
And maybe it’s not what you want, what you really want – and maybe you don’t know what you want – and maybe it’s not a particularly good star, not the star you set out to make – but it’s something. And something counts, something is, for right now, enough. And, honestly, who knows? Maybe someone somewhere out there might see this little sputtering star of yours, maybe someone like you will look up in their own dark moments and know, at least, that they’re not alone.
It’s not much, you know. But it’s something, and that’s enough.