Day 8 of ? – This is Getting Even More Serious

I don’t know how to tell you guys this so I’m just going to have to say it blunt: this Australia to New Zealand passage has just gotten a whole lot more dangerous.

There was always the threat from the sharks, the weather, pirates, food poisoning, falling overboard, boat fire, sunstroke, motion sickness, under-ocean earthquakes, Pacific-Rim-style sea monsters, disgarded shipping containers, mutiny, reverse mutiny, war with North Korea, and (of course) Billy Zane.

But now there’s a new threat – one that could put the entire operation at even more risk.

I am of course referring to the lethally toxic and radioactive Chinese space station that is going to crash into the exact ocean at the exact time and in the exact path of our crossing to New Zealand. What are the chances? I finally get to come down to Australia to live my lifelong dream of the past few months just to have it ripped away from me.

Well, where some people see crisis, I see crisis-tunity. As One White Tree’s unofficial project manager and fifth in command (if anything happens to Ross and Diana their corpses still outrank me), I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure that we do the exact *opposite* of what the Chinese government is telling everyone to do.

They want people to stay away from their space station – we’re going to steal it.

It all makes perfect sense. They cooked up this “radiation” story to scare off scavenger hunters and foreign operatives to keep safe the one true prize: their valuable space seeds (grown from their space experiments to make powerful genetic modifications to the Chinese super plant Siraitia grosvenorii). They one hundred percent do *not* want this to fall out of Chinese hands.

High risk and low probability-of-success never stopped me before so why should it this time? I imagine that my crewmates will be reluctant to go on the mission, but when I tell them of the fortune and glory that awaits us at the end of the rainbow, they’ll be one hundred percent on board. (see what I did there?)

Fortune and glory.

Image unrelated (I just like this photo – it contains many of my favourite things and I needed a picture for the post)

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