Consider: You’re at a space port.
The bustling kind, of course. Folks buzzing about, people chattering interminably. You hear languages you’ll never be able to comprehend. You just lack the organs. In the distance, the rumble of short range engines coming online. Some cocksure pilot brings their craft real close to the terminal’s glass pane wall. You know the ship would lose in a fight against the station architecture but you’re not really eager to have that knowledge put to the test. Oh, but it’s a long ship.
You glance down at your fob watch. It’s just under a thousand units till boarding, which means time to muck about. Grab hold of your suitcase. Walk down the corridors. On either wall, covering the faux-oxidised faux-copper adornments, advertisements in faux-neon buzz-hummed away. You can’t even read the text on any of them. The borgyloid seems happy, though. Might be a borgiakin, come to think of it. Are those teeth? Maybe they’re mouth claws. Oh, oh! That font’s actually kind of interesting! It’s made up of human arms! How quirky! And that must mean the red accents on the letters are... yes! You look closely and realise that really is blood! Oh, rather makes sense now, does it not? The borgyloids are humanity’s closest extrasolar trading partners. Figuratively closest, of course. But no one wants to linger on those centaurite nerds when there’s borgyloid culture to admire! How exquisite! You will admit, it’s a little unnerving at first how their primary expression of joyful communion translates to something like “let us eat your arms in a non-metaphorical way, may we have your arms to eat.” It’s just something you have to get used to, like the slight lag of a robot arm. Ah, but it’s time to move on.
Your trilby expresses relief. You’re at your platform. When did your hat learn to express emotion? It’s been such a long day, such a long day indeed. You dream of laying down in bed planetside. Here on the station, there’s too many different kinds of humming. The life support systems, your room AI, the handheld generator for your robot arm charger... It’s too much! You want to go back home! Back home, where the only humming you hear are the AC, your PC, and your hand-holding robot arm charger. Besides, it’s much nicer to be kept up by roadworks or your neighbours than sub-audible pressure cavitations. It really is!
Oh. Your ship’s been delayed. Kessler cloud in low orbit over Europe. How silly of them, those pre-commercial space travel humans. People used to be so silly. They shot too many sharp bits and bobs in space. Entirely too much. How silly. Still, it’s generally considered the smarter option to avoid making contact with sharp bits and bobs, especially when they’re travelling at orbital speeds. So, you entirely understand. But your arm charger waits for you at home. It so beckons, waving at you. Oh, if only it could... oh, but that would be naughty. It might not be best practice to have thoughts like that. Not just because you’ll have to go buy a ticket for a capsule bed this evening, it seems, but because people generally do not have thoughts like that about their home appliances. Well, except for the ones that call you husband and or wife, hoh hoh!
There, the capsule kiosk. Its yellow extravagance is a poor match with its plastic construction. Still, what can you do? Well, the bored teenaged girl on the pixellated screen tells you you can pay up or shut up in between her two-frame chewing animation cycles. You do, but you promise to give the girl a bad review. She does not respond. You pick up your suitcase, which the lil kid with the Dickensian accent promises should weigh exactly the same as before you left it out of sight for thirty units of time. What a lovely lad. Lass. One of the two. Or maybe a third thing. Kids these days with their organs.
No one’s called the capsule corrals “hotels” in thirty cycles. The brochures might, but not even the big sign at the entrance does. Some clever clog had gotten to the “t” and the “l”, it seems. Or perhaps it was just the slow decay, the passage of time. Regardless, you clamber to your capsule. Into the compartment your suitcase goes and with a press of a button, your capsule enters bath mode. The pod fills to the brim with water before you can say “claustrophobia” (which is only a good thing since you wouldn’t want to be caught with your mouth open) and flushes itself before you can think the words “fear of drowning”. You swap your now sopping wet clothes with your suitcase. If you cannot have your hand-holder, you would at least be able to enjoy your handheld.
You open your suitcase. A large stone approximately the size of a small handheld robot arm charger falls in your lap. Attached is a note: “Fanks, guv’na!” At least they said fanks.
