Eleven days ago, we encountered a Tongu Slaver Ship by the outskirts of the Lambda-Ceti Star System, and pursued them as they fled until they suddenly swung around and fired a strange weapon at us.  It must have been some sort of stink ray, because before we knew it, almost the entire ship was saturated with an overpowering stench.  I was totally dry heaving for like five minutes until Dr. Rena managed to find out that the cargo bay in the lower-most quadrant of the ship’s sphere-hull was unaffected by the ray.  I immediately got onto the ship’s intercom system and, between retches, ordered the entire crew to evacuate to the bay.

The cargo bay’s a big place, but housing the entire ship’s complement in it has proven a logistical nightmare.  Yet despite Dr. Rena’s assurances that the stink ray’s effects ought to wear off in only a few hours, it’s been nearly two days, and the rest of the ship remains uninhabitable.  Engines, weapons and subspace communications are all down, and the only reason we haven’t been sucked into the gravity well of one of the Lambda-Ceti System’s many gas giants and crushed like a rotten egg, is through the constant firing of our maneuvering thrusters, which has been accomplished by INFO, whose robot olfactory sensors are too primitive to be overpowered by the stench, and also by a solitary officer that we send out in the only functional pressurized space suit we have remaining.  There being only one crewman who can maintain the ship at a time, I’ve set up a circulating rotation of my senior officers to keep the minimum ship operations running along with INFO, in 14 hour shifts.

I will update this blog as our situation … hopefully ... improves.

I’ve been approached by the producers of this new holo-web series, or holo-web-isode or whatever, called ‘Celebrity Math Challenge’.  It’s a reality show where a bunch of famous people are forced to take high school algebra tests to find out who’s the smartest celebrity in the galaxy.  But looking at the list of cast members so far, it looks like a bunch of washed-up actors and ex-athletes, all of them just looking for a quick buck.  I don’t understand why they’d want me.  Still, I could sure use the space bucks, and of course, I’d most certainly win the challenge.  Being in command of a Galactic Union starship, we use algebra like crazy every single day.  I mean, not me personally, but Ensign Adams uses lots of math to plot our courses at the navigations console, and Chief Beauregard’s engineering calculations are the only things that keep the ship from shutting off or exploding or something.  INFO always uses the quadratic equation as the punch line to a number of his jokes, and yet, they’re still hilarious!  So, I’m sure I’ve gleamed tons of algebra from my trusty crew over the years, and thus am sure to ace the holo-web show and win the 100,000 space buck prize for a ‘charity of my choice’.  Wink, wink!

UPDATE:  So, I got eliminated during the first episode of ‘Celebrity Math Challenge’.  I think it was just because they were so fixated on the useless, bookwormy algebra on the tests, instead of the real world algebra which I’ve mastered out here in the darkest reaches of outer space.  Also, they caught me trying to cheat (even though I suggested to them that I was merely ‘changing the conditions of the test’).  What’s worse, I just saw the episode I was in on the holo-web, and whenever I appear on screen, the title bar says “Jack Sunstrike – Little Brother of Capt. Reginald Sunstrike.”  Gah!