Pete's Ancient and rarely updated
D-land Journal

Wow. It has been quite some time since I updated the old castaway's log. What has been up, you wonder?

During the last couple of weeks I have been rather busy in the Monkey Abuse Lab, setting up new experiments to run on the monkeys. I was able to cruise a bit earlier in the year since the work involved stimuli that were quick and easy to make. However, now we are working on projects that require a great deal of processing to be done on the stimuli before they are ready and this becomes a tremendous time sink for me during the day.

My work here is a wonderful conglomeration of jobs. I am a monkey resource manager since I have to hire, train, and grade/pay the monkeys who work here in the lab. I am a computer programmer, writing programs that modify sound files in fundamental ways. I am an IT/Network professional, responsible for keeping our local area network of a dozen computers and printers operational as well as upgrading the systems and the network from time to time. I am a research psychologist/physicist since my research involves how visual and auditory stimuli enter and interact with the brain. I won't mention my sideline as a day trader in the stock market or my hobbies of recording vinyl albums to cd or maintaining websites that are seldom visited. But, one can see that, when I need to write new programs, set up new computer systems, train employees on new procedures, and design and write up new experiments, I can get a little swamped.

No complaints, tho, I love this stuff and I still have enough time in my life to do the weekend runs to where my heart dwells. I've spent the last two weekends visiting the love of my life. Obviously, when I'm with her I have far better things to do than update my journal here.

Okay, where was I when I left off? Overviewing my escape from my homeworld and how I finally wound up here.

During my time wandering the Rimward Expanse I saw multitudes of life forms. Most of the life forms I saw were either intelligent life forms, domesticated servant/service life forms, or pets. I rarely got to spend a great deal of time on other worlds' surfaces outside of visiting port cities. Besides, I was always far more interested in the culture of the native intelligent forms than in the flor and fauna of the world they inhabited.

Intelligence is most common in endothermic species, it appears. This may be bias on the part of space-faring races... exotherms do develop more slowly and may simply not be as fully represented as the warm-blooded species. Anyway, I have seen dozens of species from many different worlds and I have only seen a small corner of the Economicium. If I am correct, the Economicium is comprised of at least a thousand different intelligent species and spans about a third of this galaxy. These numbers may have grown or shrunk, I have been away for a long time.

The Earth, by the way, is at the far edge of the Rimward Expanse, in an area of the galaxy where stars are few and far apart. Because of its remoteness, this region has been subject to less exploration and exploitation than more dense regions of the galaxy. Thus it is that the Earth has been rarely visited by outsiders.

This is not to say that it has not been visited, nor that some of its inhabitants have not left for the stars for one reason or another. In point of fact, the Far Expanses have been designated a nature preserve by the Economicium. This means that the Earth and its inhabitants are protected from exploitation and that contact is kept to a minimum. This is to allow the "native species" to grow uninfluenced by the outside galaxy. Occasionaly "sample populations" are collected for purposes of study and evaluation. Some are returned, some are not.

The ones that are not returned are often volunteers, who do not wish to return. Since the initial discovery of the planet some several hundreds of your years ago, I doubt that more than 1000 humans have been contacted and removed from Earth, and I'd guess that 80% of them returned. These are guesses, since I have never been involved in such activities. The mission I was piloting here was strictly observational in nature.

I believe i saw a human once, on Bissel 4. I tried to stop him so that I could speak with him (I was curious about what species he was and where he came from) but his companion was a rather large and mean looking Grell. The Grell was not at all happy that I was interested in speaking with its mate and let me know with a face full of vile smelling mucous. By the time I recovered my vision and had stopped retching, they were gone. I sometimes wonder if the human with the Grell was with it by choice and if he knew that Grell are hermaphroditic. Ah well, not my problem now.

Anyway, since you were wondering why you've had so little contact with outsiders, now you know. Perhaps with another entry I will try to remember an exciting tale of being a Rimward Pilot or of some exploit that I had on a distant world. If i can recall anything through the haze that is my memory.