"How's the kids?" As years ticked by, the star pilot watched an ever-changing roster of bean counters at Mission. "Reassigned," the predecessors always said. The more things change... he thought. Then a pixelated image materialized from Monitor One of a computer generated operative named Story with a vacant, thousand-yard stare. The brain trust at Home Office had concluded that the digital embodied agent would be an appropriate space station interlocutor for the captain since both were ageless.

"See you in six months." More decades, test tubes, formulas, experiments on the space oddment ensued in hope the erstwhile astronaut could be the key to unlocking the genetic alteration secret of living forever as a brain in a jar walking on robotic arachnid legs.

One day while engaged in a video call Story provided a situation report with a familiar cold gaze and low monotone that Big Bad John's trajectory brought it within range of observation again. The chatbot continued to say that Ground had initiated final countdown sequence to launch a missile at the astral phenomena to study the miraculous fragments of its heart, and that the Op-Center identified a power signature on the comet emitted from the ISV Boone. A shimmering blue holographic projection displayed a terrain map of the grail; or, the whale with copious streams of data on the exploratory starship.

"What is wrong with these flesh-and-bloods?" Captain Landrover shifted his sleepless eyes telling Story that the resident geniuses at Guidance must send a team to reboot Haviland's positronic neuro clusters and bring the bird of the galaxy back to Earth.

Never one to mince words, the closed circuit operator replied, "That would be one-term presidential decision making. The space corvette has been declared obsolete by the Department of Space and Futuristic Technology and would be deep-sixed."

"Well, when you put it like that..."

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