Choose Your Destination

Choose Your Destination

Here’s the list of destinations Tom is picking from so you don’t have to hold your screen up to a mirror.

           destination  subjective time
            Straylight  3s
                 Vesta  14s
       Czarina-Kluster  23s
             Funk Soul  372s
     Shaeffer’s Choice  2942s
                  Höel  70042s
           Strangedown  78309s
          Eros Kluster  82409s
              Pasiphaë  146239s
                Sinope  146935s
              Amalthea  147001s
              Ganymede  147007s
         New Val Halen  147002s
              Callisto  147003s
     Shaeffer’s Choice  147014s
      The Moose Denied  147020s
Europa Nature Preserve  147004s
                Himara  147271s
                    Io  147692s
                 Elara  147848s
                  Leda  148234s
         New Amsterdam  183327s

Apparently Shaeffer chose both ways.

This is a mix of names I made up, orbital/asteroid habs from books that influenced me, and several of Jupiter’s moons – I guess Pallas is hanging out near the Jovian system at the time of this story. Which I suppose could give an enterprising nerd a guess as to the exact date this is happening, if I’d actually done any of those calculations myself. Which I did not.

And I don’t know about you, but I really do not want to visit a place called “Höel”. I think it was colonized by a bunch of Ren & Stimpy revivalists. shudder

7 thoughts on “Choose Your Destination

    • Oh, yeah, there’s that “Room with a Moose” episode, isn’t there? Nah, it’s not, unless it’s cryptomnesia.

  1. Any particular reason the Europa Nature Preserve is out of order?

    My first guess was that the list includes willingness of the destination to receive sudden visitors as part of a complex weighted algorithm rather than naively sorting by transit time. Second guess was typo, which I think means that I respect you quite a bit as an author.

    • Completely intentional as you guessed! A gold star is you.

      No, actually, it just got screwed up when I was rearranging the destinations to put the best ones where they’d be visible; there were about eight more I came up with that were kinda stupid-sounding. WHO WOULD ACTUALLY NAME THEIR COLONY “CHUP SCUGGLE”.

      I think I can get away without editing it in the actual image, too, since those digits are lost in the highlight on Tom’s arm. Score!

  2. Hmmm. The more they jump between realities, the more the Panopticon seems to be manifesting in Rita1’s world. I suspect this is Not A Good Thing. I’m sure we’ll find out, but first I think Rita1 has some havoc to wreak in Green Rita’s world.

  3. I read them before I saw that you kindly listed them in the description (which I greatly appreciate). I did, however, read the “Europa Nature Preserve” as the “Ewoks Nature Preserve…”

    I also found it interesting that past 147000 they all plateaued. Though now that I read your list, I can see that they don’t actually quite plateau. But I guess a lot of them must be all near Jupiter? (I realize you said you didn’t do the calculations. So, I’ll not read too much into it.)

    • Looking at the list and my comments below the page, I think “near Jupiter” is definitely the reason for the clustering of stuff around 147k seconds of travel. I think the idea I was working with was “there are settlements on a lot of the moons, plus some notable space stations”.

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