You haven't lived until you've flown a jetpack through the plume of an active volcano. That's what they told me as they were strapping the rocket onto my back, at any rate. I maintained that I wouldn't live long enough to appreciate my conquest, and also that this wasn't a jetpack and was more of a discount Lithuanian firework, but they predictably silenced those objections.
As they lit the fuse, I pondered the choices which had led me to this. Should I have joined the space agency of a country which no longer appears on any maps? Possibly not. Should I have believed them when they said that Dorgistan had once been a country but had been cruelly disenfranchised by the Treaty of Klimpt? Well, I certainly could have made a few checks in history books.
Should I have allowed them to give me aptitude tests for space travel which mostly consisted of pouring warm beer over my head and then pushing me down a flight of stairs? No, that was pretty stupid. Once I recovered from my injuries in the testing program, should I have insisted on being given flight status? I had felt I'd earned it at the time, but in hindsight, perhaps the patch on my shoulder wasn't worth it.
Should I have examined the so-called "flight status patch" for signs that it had been impregnated with dangerous levels of horse tranquilizers and black-market hallucinogens? That, with the benefit of knowledge gained, seems likely, but I hadn't known their predilections at the time. Should I have placed the patch on my bare skin? Even they told me that was a bad idea, so while I'm not sure I could have trusted anything they'd ever said, if I were going to have trusted one thing, that might have been it.
Should I have asked to be paid in advance? Yes. I did, in fact. Should I have checked to make sure they'd deposited the pay? Also yes, and also did. Should I have insisted on being paid in Dorgistani currency? No. That was a misstep. Should I have conducted salary negotiations while wearing my flight status patch? That might explain a lot. No, that was also a miscalculation on my part, though in fairness to me, I was extremely convincing to myself in the mirror even though my face was melting and winged demons were eating my skull. It was a power move to wear my patch, I told myself in a beautiful language of my own devising.
But the biggest mistake of all, if I'm being honest, was asking for a longer fuse, because it gave the drugs time to wear off and allowed me to have this lengthy internal monologue. Fear crept in, my rational brain was screaming, and when the rocket blew up as I had been reasonably sure it would, my last thought before the blackness was that I hoped the black box would survive so the noble Dorgistani people would learn something from my sacrifice and perhaps one day find a homeland among the stars, free from the tyranny of the tsar.
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