Old Memories

[DarthBindo]

//WIP.
Ian Holmes smiled, a dreamy look on his face as he studied the holoboard in front of him, the dazzling array of numbers splayed across it almost dancing in their complexity.
He looks happy, content with his life.
The date is January 13th, 817 A.S, almost six years ago.
Dr. Holmes sits in his shared office aboard the Cambridge Research Station, various knickknacks and photos of a smiling family scattered about the bookshelves and desks.
He didn't have to work up here, really, on the space station itself; most of his work as a mathematician come physicist could be done from his home office or the University down on the surface.
Ian actually rather preferred working there, much closer to his family, not a million kilometres up in space in some old tin can.
But occassionally large segments of compiled data from the programs he was working with needed to be transferred, and despite the massive amount of bandwidth available for uplink to the station, the data segments were just as massive, exponential growth in the digital stream due to varying technicological factors and all that jazz.
So every once in a blue moon some poor schmuck had to take the plunge up in a rapid transit shuttle to hand-deliver whatever fresh batch of formulae and output data was needed by the physicists they were supporting to calibrate this, or adjust that, or jigger the thingamajig so it phased the proper space time whatever. Ian didn't really get the physics of whatever fool notion they had in mind, just the math behind it.
Funnily enough, it was somehow always Ian who got the short straw. Dr. Richards got sick outside atmo, Dr. Reed always managed to be on sabbatical when the transfer order came, Dr. Zhivago was his boss.....
So it always fell to Ian. Such is life.
He did love his job though. The work was interesting, he was good at it, and the hours were excellent, with working from home always an option.
It was really quite brilliant, actually, not having to even get dressed to help solve some of the mysteries of the universe; certainly a bit of a change from his youth.
Holmes leaned back in his comfy office chair. It got rather hard to concentrate on numbers, as interesting as he may find them, once his thoughts got off on a tangent.
He'd been a wild boy when he'd blasted off of Trafalgar at seventeen, intent on making something of himself, seeing the universe, experiencing adventure and all that. The first few months

---

gone four years, first day back: Zoners still getting shot in Theta :|