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Fifteen days. It doesn't seem like that much time. It really isn't

compared to this trip. We've been underway now for 86,721 days

objective time, 33,203 subjective. That's a long time, but nothing

compared to fifteeen days with a malfunctioning food replicator.

Fifteen days ago, I came out of stasis to find that the food

replicator would only produce tapioca pudding. It doesn't matter

what meal entry you input, tapioca pudding is what you get.

Fifteen days is 45 meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner...

tapioca pudding.

I've been told that the last twelve shifts have been unable to

find the fault in the food replicator. The technicians think it

may be a software fault, but none of our software specialists are

due to be woken from stasis until we arive at Iota Persei.

Operations.prime has deemed this to be a low level priority and so

no software specialists will be taken out of stasis to repair the

food replicator. I still have eight, twenty-five day shifts left!

I pass my other shift members in the passageways without comment,

without eye contact. We move more as if we are animated corpses,

pretending to be the living as we carry out our day to day work

routines. The miasma of dispair is palpable in the recirculated

air currents of the ship.

I've been dreaming about it lately. I find myself half submerged

in an ocean of tapioca pudding. I'm slowly sinking in the sticky

sickly sweet pale maggot colored morass. It slowly oozes in to

my ears, my nose, my mouth, smothering me. It fills me with its

cloying saccharine gooey decay, slowly devouring my very soul.

There is no escape.

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