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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ws_18 on 2025-07-06 03:34:40+00:00.

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Six hours and thirty-seven minutes, Jason was discovering, was an awkward length for a shift. Long enough that the lack of a lunch break was a bit annoying, but short enough that it didn’t really feel like he was done working by the time he clocked out and went back up towards the cafeteria. A lifetime of living on Earth had trained him to expect a few more hours of work after lunch before he was done for the day. He supposed the not-quite-twenty-hour day would be a bit of a problem too when it came to sleeping, but that was something to worry about later.

After grabbing some lunch from the cafeteria, Jason met up with Farranax, Hjelin, and their friends in lounge seven. The other abductees introduced him first to Elkam, the lone cat-alien of the group. The orange-furred feline was the ship’s botanist, in charge of the hydroponics lab that provided the crew with fresh fruits and vegetables throughout their long journey through space. Next was Yronien, a six-and-a-half foot tall, very thin, green-scaled lizard-like being who strongly reminded Jason of a certain car insurance company’s mascot. He worked in the ship’s IT department. The final member of the group was Aeru. She was just slightly taller than Jason and was shaped more like a Human than any of the aliens he’d seen so far. She had reddish-pink skin as if she’d been spending way too much time out in the sun recently, and was covered in a fine layer of something too sparse to be called ‘fur’ but far denser than any Human body hair he’d ever seen before. Ignoring that and the fact that she only had four fingers on each hand, though, she probably could have passed for Human. She was officially a heavy equipment operator, using the power suits to load and unload cargo, but while they were in flight she covered a variety of jobs across the ship whenever someone needed a day off.

The lounge itself was almost like an oversized living room. The wall to the right of the door appeared to be just a plain wall at first, but on the press of a button it became a screen that spanned nearly the entire length of the room. An L-shaped couch large enough to fit the entire group with plenty of room to spare took up most of the far wall and the entirety of the wall opposite the screen, and a couple of armchairs and a minifridge stocked with a variety of alien junk food sat along the wall next to the door.

“Oh, cool, a movie theater?” Jason asked when the wall-mounted screen turned on.

“I guess you could call it that,” Yronien said. “Communications don’t work while we’re in hyperspace. So we download whatever movies or stuff we want to watch when we stop at a planet, and hope it lasts the whole trip. I don’t remember exactly what the data limit is off the top of my head, but it’s actually pretty big for a ship of this size. You’d have to try to max out your allowance, even on one of the longer trips out in the fringe.”

“He doesn’t seem as impressed as you two did,” Elkam mused to the other two abductees in the room.

“Yeah, well, he’s from a stage five world,” Hjelin explained. “Our worlds are both stage three. This is probably just a better version of something he already had back home, not something completely new.”

“Stage five, really?” Elkam asked. “That’s what, computers, isn’t it? Usually those scientists like to go after less developed worlds. Less chance of people remembering when they join the rest of galactic civilization.”

Jason shrugged. “No idea what the stages are, but we do have computers back home. Had ‘em for a while, too.”

“So you must be getting close to space travel,” Aeru mused.

“We put a man on the moon when my parents were little kids,” Jason confirmed. “Haven’t gone any farther than that yet, but for as long as I can remember we’ve always been ten years away from having a colony on Mars.” As he said it, he realized that the others would probably have no idea what Mars was. “The next planet in the solar system,” he clarified.

“I’m not the best at reading mammalian features, but you’re still fairly young, right, Jason?” Yronien asked.

“Yeah,” Jason nodded.

“Then I wouldn’t be surprised if Humans make it out here during your lifetime. You guys might only be a few decades away with a bit of luck.”

“Great,” Jason replied sarcastically. “Only a few decades. I can wait.” Then he changed the subject. “So, what do you guys do for fun out here?”

“Not much while we’re on the ship,” Hjelin admitted. “There’s a gym upstairs by the crew quarters, there’s the lounges, and that’s about it.”

“Captain Tanari doesn’t even let us bring any real intoxicants on board,” Aeru said. “Just a bit of really mild alcohol. So if you’re into that stuff, you’ll have to wait for shore leave.”

“Shore leave?” Jason asked.

“Whenever we stop planetside, we get between three and ten days off, depending on how long our last flight was,” she clarified.

“What did you do for fun back home?” Elkam asked. “Maybe we can find something similar at one of our next few stops.”

Back on Earth, Jason and his friends had maintained what felt like a small fleet of questionably roadworthy shitboxes. Together, they’d pull old cars out of a junkyard or a barn somewhere, get them running well enough to do some donuts - always on private property, of course - and then flip them, sometimes even for profit, as soon as they got bored and went looking for something else. And, of course, there was the off-roading, drag racing, and autocross too, although they usually preferred to do that in cars that were in slightly less terrible condition. Name anything fun that could be done with a cheap used car, and they’d probably done it before. They’d even entertained the idea of doing Lemons together, although so far their schedules hadn’t quite lined up well enough to make the commitment.

“I’m pretty into cars,” he replied. He doubted they’d have time to partially restore old alien cars during their three-to-ten-day breaks, or that he’d have the proper paperwork to be allowed to race, so he settled on what seemed like a more reasonable answer. “But if you meant something that we’ll actually be able to do on shore leave, then camping,” he added. “The further from civilization, the better.” The best campsites, in his opinion, were always the ones that could only be reached with a bit of off-roading. “I would say baseball too, but I’d be surprised if you have that out here.”

“Camping … I don’t think we can do that at our next stop on Harlaan. Lots of city, lots of ocean, and not much of anything else. Shouldn’t be too hard to find at the next few stops afterwards, though,” Elkam replied. “And the odds of us having an exact match for a sport for your homeworld are pretty much zero, but we do have plenty of other sports for you to check out if you’re interested.”

“We usually do movie nights while we’re in flight,” Aeru added, grabbing the remote and pressing a few buttons before passing it over to the lizard-like Yronien. “We all pick out a few that seem interesting while we’re planetside, then we take turns watching them through hyperspace. It’s Yronien’s turn to pick tonight.”

The conversation died down as the movie started. It was a bit slower paced than Jason would have liked, and the story was straightforward and predictable, but it wasn’t bad for the only entertainment option available.

When the movie ended, the group split up and went their separate ways. Jason chose to stay behind in the lounge, pulling up the alien equivalent of Wikipedia on the screen in the hopes of learning a bit more about the people he would be living with for what he still hoped would only be the next few weeks. He suspected that it might be a bit rude to refer to the aliens in terms of the Earth animals they most resembled, but for lack of a proper name he’d been mentally doing exactly that the whole time he’d been in space. So now that he had some free time and some access to a computer, he figured it was probably worth learning the proper names for the alien species that were on board.

It was a lot of information to take in. The Galactic Alliance was made up of nearly three hundred member species, and just scrolling through the profile pictures for each one Jason was sure he’d seen a couple dozen of them already. The three oldest, most populous, and most influential species were the Tyon - the cat-aliens who seemed to make up the majority on this ship, the Vollan - very tall, skinny lizard-beings like Yronien, and the Brivvin, an aquatic race that didn’t appear to be represented on board the Spirit of Fortune. Once Jason realized it would take a non-trivial amount of effort to learn them all, his mind inevitably began to wander back towards Earth.

The first star map Jason found demonstrated a problem with his plan to find his way home. There were over a hundred billion star systems on record, each one a possibility in his search for Earth, and he had exactly zero idea what astronomical terms to use to filter that down to anything resembling a manageable amount. He tried the ‘you are here’ button and zoomed in on the section of the galaxy surrounding the point where they’d last entered hyperspace - and therefore temporarily lost contact with the rest of the universe. Picking one system at random, he zoomed in further and was horrified to find that he could not find a single satell…

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