Vanguard || (On Hiatus)

Chapter One

I walk into the canteen, tired from my three hours of sleep the previous night. I look for a free table as I walk to get myself some food, my stomach aching from my lack of nutrition. 

"What's the time," I ask my virtual assistant, Hal, as I am clearly unable to see the digital clock overhead. 

"6:45 AM," replies Hal in a monotonic and synthetic voice. Oh, I think, that's why I'm tired. I slowly walk to one of the many empty tables to eat my cornflakes and am confronted by one of my best friends, Luis. Luis, unlike me, actually has parents. However, they work and live on a planet halfway across the universe, so Luis only gets to see them every fifth Christmas. 

"Hey, Luis," I say sluggishly, "what's up?"

"Not much," he replies, "just getting food."

He then walks past me, presumably to get his food. I sit down on the nearest table and begin to wolf down my cornflakes so that, by the time Luis sits down opposite to me, I have already finished. I go back to my room using one of the many teleporters and sit down at my desk chair. Ever since I graduated from Vanguard Academy - the closest thing Vanguard has to a school - about a month ago, life has been pretty boring. The most exciting thing that has happened to me this month was moving into a different cubicle after one of the CryoGas miners got crushed to death on Kepler 22b. 

I turn on my computer and try to finish the essay I promised Roxanne I would do. I open a new Word Document and begin brainstorming ideas around the topic of genetic engineering. I still laugh at the debate about genetic engineering. It's been thousands of years since we first began to use it and people still don't see the benefits it has. But hey, I'll do anything for Chronocredits. 

Unfortunately, I'm unable to write more than an introductory paragraph in the hour of time I have before I'm scheduled to start my intern as a data analyst for CryoGas. Because of the dwindling gas supplies on Kepler combined with the onslaught of new mining companies who have migrated to Kepler, CryoGas has begun to scout out people onboard Vanguard who would be able to find helium, hydrogen and methane reserves using a combination of their intelligence and other abilities. 

I leave my room and go to the spaceport, where a large CryoGas vessel should be taking me down to one of the more prominent mines. Personally, I don't see the need to go down to Kepler 22b just to number crunch, but I want to get off Vanguard. I go into the changing room by the port and get into a spacesuit, then join all the other interns who are hanging nervously around the ship. 

"Ah," says a booming voice to my left, "you must be the chap whose caused a thirty-minute delay."

I turn to see a large man equipped in a spacesuit looking at me malevolently. I ignore him and just get onto the ship, a fifty-metre-long vessel that looks like it's from the Space Age of two millennia ago. Once everyone is on board, the ship unhinges from its position and begins the descent down to Kepler. 

A/N yay! this is technically the first actual chapter in this book. i put more planning into this than I did takeover, so hopefully you enjoyed it. if you did, please consider voting on the chapter.