Snippet #2470056

Vincent nodded and swiveled his chair again, this time dragging the interface with him. He whistled with appreciation, though this really wasn’t too advanced for the technology at the time, and once again resumed fiddling around with the multiple selections on the database. Dragging back the planet information sheets except for the coordinates of Gondalia, Vincent opened the one for the planet that they were headed to. He had heard of the planet before- he definitely had, the memory still fresh as if it were yesterday- but from what he remembered, it was an extremely brief and basic overview. Nothing had been said about what sort of inhabitants lived there, or the demography of the planet itself. The only two things that Vincent had got out of the lecture was: one, the inhabitants of the planet were savage, crude and dangerous; two, it was most likely that most of the surface of the planet was water.

But after fiddling around with the interface in front of him, working his way through as if he had been working with it for many years, Vincent didn’t learn anything more about Gondalia at all. The glaring words that caught his eyes the most: Unexplored. He paused, pulled off his hood, and glared at the words before pulling his face close up to the floating interface. “Are you kidding me? Vincent shook his head, laughing slightly as if it were a joke before swiping his hands around again, refreshing the page to see the singular word again. Unexplored.

Vincent couldn’t believe his eyes. Are they sending us off…to get us killed?! His palms sweated as he returned to Gondalia’s information page and looked through the rest of the sparse information on there. Grabbing his pack that he had placed earlier on his lap, he opened it and grabbed his pad and a flask which he downed in a second. “God damn it!” Vincent muttered as he made the interface shrink back into the screen in front of him and then made the interface of the pad in his hands emerge from the slab of glass. Amongst the immense amount of folders that appeared in front of Vincent, he chose one that was in the corner of the selections.

“Come on…come on…,” he muttered, as a loading screen showed, anxiety and nervousness biting at him as he waited for the folder to show. Finally, the loading screen faded to show more folders, many of which had ‘Confidential’ in their titles. It wasn’t that Vincent was a rebel- well, he was, to an extent- but he loved hacking into the government information databases. This included ‘pirating’ data on basic things such as where people lived to the experiments done in the underground labs that the government hid from the entire human population on Earth, to information on life-bearing planets. The file that he opened now contained stolen confidential data on an amalgam of planets, including the water-planet called Gondolia.

The file contained the exact same information- word for word- on the interface that was on the StarFire 200IO. Vincent let out a strangled laugh and waved his hand downwards toward the pad, the words in the air immediately vanishing back into the slab of glass on his lap. Zipping is pack up, Vincent unlocked his seatbelt and got up, shaking his head slightly and yelled at Hannah, “I’ll be back. Soon enough.” Leaving the bridge, Vincent chose one of the rooms that was closest and wasn’t occupied and threw his bag in before heading off to the galley. I swear. If they don’t have some alcohol on this death trap…

The trip, in Vincent’s eyes, was starting on the bloody best way ever- and he needed booze to make it even more glorious.