No one said anything about how BORING being a giant mass of mysterious goo in the underbelly of a half-failed Kerbal colony would be.
Kerbals are such fascinating and intriguing creatures, always finding something to bolt together haphazardly, only to reveal at the last minute that they were explosive bolts, or that they had used fireworks as structural beams (accidentally on purpose, no doubt!). That's why you wanted to go on that exploration ship full of them. Well, them and the other colorful little aliens they had invited along.
But Kerbals have a problem with safety culture, and no matter how competently engineered their component design is, they always seem to muck something up, eventually, and so at the tail end of the five year exploration mission, of course they ended up crashed on a barely habitable hell world.
They call it Armstrong. A reference to an early aeronautical explorer who discovered that below a certain atmospheric pressure, Kerbal blood at body temperature actually boils. It just so happens that your body also boils at that point. And you'll just never believe what the atmospheric pressure of Armstrong is.
(These days, the astronomers make reports of other planets in the system with thicker atmospheres, maybe even ones that could natively allow for respiration, and you wish you had a head to slam into a wall.)
All the other Kerbaloid aliens had found their niches within the society that eventually cropped up, but you were just. Lonely. You had gotten big and strong. You had decided to be your own Great Goo Mass. You would surpass even the goo world you originated on. You would become the Greater Goo Mass.
But you realized, after a millenia, that just growing bigger wasn't enough. The diversity of thought and opinion that flowed throughout you when you were in the Great Goo Mass was astounding, completing, magnificent, and you were just a stagnant puddle by comparison.
The Kerbals (and Parbles and Klingbals and Kerbolians and Marbals and Eurydites and Mesbinites and--) of Armstrong would come to you for advice and wisdom and truth. You are effortlessly intelligent of course and, having been around now for longer than any Kerbal alive on Armstrong, you were able to settle a fair few disputes. You began anticipating when the Kerbals would visit you. You're not proud to say you may have even caused some minor emergencies just so that they would come back asking for help.
(not that Kerbals need help creating minor emergencies. It's just that they usually have a pretty good idea of how to fix things for themselves by iteration)
You couldn't keep going on like this. So you thought, if the Kerbaloid form--a large rounded cylindrical head with a small bean-bag belly and short, stumpy legs--worked for so many aliens... maybe it would work for you.
You reached a tendril of mysterious goo out of the goo mass. When it was, oh, perhaps 0.045t mass, you pinched the tendril off. You stared at it, until, at last, it took the shape you had intended for it.
"Who am I?" You--that is, the other you--said.
"You're a Goobal. Go up to the surface settlements. Learn from them. When you are ready, return to me."
You were impatient. This was to be a trial run. But when the Goobal did not come back, you got worried. That was a part of you. And you just... threw it out into the danger of a Kerbal colony on a hellworld where it could boil alive?
You made three more goobals, and told them that they should find the other one.
They nodded, and you hoped they understood, and then with a pang of guilt you added, "but don't forget to enjoy life!"
The first goobal came back. There were three others with them. Finally, your pieces had returned. But in the dim light of your network, you hadn't parsed at first what you were really looking at. The goobal was with two Kerbals and a Parbal, not in fact the other three goobals.
"See?" You said--the other you--the... It. It said.
"This is where you came from?" said a Kerbal.
"It's the greater goo mass. This all makes sense now," the Parbal said, gravely.
"I didn't mean you harm, I swear it!" the other you said.
"We know sweetheart, we know. And now we can tell everyone!" said the first Kerbal.
"Hey do you think your mom or whatever would let us like. Take a swim?" the second Kerbal said.
"Billbobfred!" scolded the first Kerbal, "don't be rude!"
"Don't let's play pretend at being a boat. We're trying to start a space program! It would be improper!" said the Parbal.
Your mind conjured up images of starships powered by fusion bombs, solid rocket boosters falling apart in a massive explosion, precision-engineered spaceplanes gracefully entering the atmosphere, convoluted grand tour missions bolted together with struts, space stations, planetary colonies, and entire spacecraft/launch vehicles massing only a couple of tonnes taking long winding gravity-assisted paths to get to their destination.
Kerbal engineering at by far and away its most distilled form. Terrible, awesome, excellent, and haphazard.
After all this time, would Armstrong's peoples finally reach towards space again?
Well. They'll need your help to get off the ground.
You had been to space many times by now. You had made little automata from your mass, knowing full well they'd never come back and rejoin you. But those automata had already returned the first up close pictures of the moons Buzz and Desmet, of gas giant planet Zhandar, and of some of the Arriprit Belt's minor planets. Your automata needed no electricity, just sunlight--which Armstrong's three suns provided in excess--and were far more compact than electronic computers.
Even when they had invented compact electronic computers that could control space probes, you went to space for science, testing the habitability of far off places. It's harder to kill you than a Kerbal, after all. These sentient but not sapient offshoots of your mass were designed--by you--to help Kerbals best understand the habitability of the worlds they would intend to visit. But of course, these probes were one-way tickets, even though recovering them and allowing you to interpret their experiences would have been vastly more scientifically useful.
And of course you were many, working with the Kerbals as engineers and scientists and administrators, because the United Armstrong Space Probe Administration couldn't get enough of you!
But now you were going to space for the first time in a millennia, and you were going to really feel it. Because this time you would be sapient, and you would get to come back.
Your Kerbaloid form fit perfectly in the space suit, one that had been slightly modified to account for your different respiratory system. You watched on the television as you... as it... as she boarded the spacecraft. It was a great big winged spacecraft, taking advantage of what little air Armstrong had to help slow it down, mounted atop a tall, broad booster rocket with many engines, necessary to fight Armstrong's punishing gravity. It had already flown once, and sure, it had fallen apart a little when it landed, but the engineers assured you that it was well within tolerances for crew survivability.
Not that, at this point, you could have convinced your other self that she should not go, not after all the work she put in. She didn't just look like a Kerbal, at this point.
You watched, fear pulsing through you like tidal waves, as one, then two, then four of the rocket motors failed. But there were so many that the rocket just kept rising. At stage separation, the lower stage disintegrated altogether. The upper stage had many engines as well. The television feed cut out as the rocket went over the horizon, but the telemetry would keep coming at least until after they went over the scorched Pyri-facing side.
It was a harrowing few days. Your other selves would visit you sometimes and tell you the news, the mission milestones, etc. You hadn't been this terrified in a millennia.
One morning, the dim light of the Ilio suns poured into your realm. It was you! Her. Sorry. Her. It was her.
She was grinning madly, and she jumped into you, shouting "cannonball!"
As she dissolved into you and you took in her thoughts and experiences, you realized how different you and her really were. You couldn't imagine wanting to go back into space after a harrowing experience like that.
You were not you anymore.
You glowed, shining in pink and yellow and green tones, and your other self giggled.
You both laughed. You were not alone anymore.
The other goobal pulled herself out of you and went to catch the train back to the space center.
She was one hell of a good trial run.
Eventually you lost yourself. You split yourself thin, becoming so many different kinds of people. But you wouldn't have had it any other way.
Eventually that first goobal didn't come back. It was tragic, but such is the plight of Kerbal Spaceflight.
But you--all of you--will remember her.
(KSP planet mod, Planet Jam 2)
