4. SUGGESTED ITINERARIES
1. A TASTE OF SPACE:(6 DAYS[38])
At Home with the Space Men
This budget holiday will give you a sample of all SPACE has to offer in the jankily cosmopolitan environs of Outpost Bravo.
DAY 1
After navigating the bustling crowds of the station’s arrival hall, the rest of the day is set aside for acclimatisation to the cosmic lifestyle. Despite being largely a utilitarian structure, with many areas cold, grubby and lit by dim CRT monitors, you’ll find the Outpost also has some outstanding beauty spots, if you know where to look. Spend the afternoon in the docking complex watching sleek, finned rocketships cruising to and fro, or watching nebulae swirl through the misty glass ceiling of a relaxation dome, before hitting one of the entertainment districts for an exotic evening meal.
DAY 2
It’s time to get used to the stale scent of astronaut sweat and cigarette smoke, as you head to the warren-like expanse of the crew quarters to experience the spartan life of the Space Men. These neurotic hunks spend most of their time working at primitive computer terminals, furthering their inscrutable ‘Missions’, and to be fair, their time off isn’t much more fun either, being spent either frantically working out, dozing fitfully in rows of grimy sleeping bags or smashing back machinery-flavoured spirits in the Recreation Chambers. It’s probably more rewarding to watch than to join in.
As the station lights dim for the night cycle, why not take a trip to the Imagination Hole, where ‘advanced’ hologram projectors can recreate scenes straight out of your head. The Space Men have mostly stopped using the Hole out of fear, since it keeps showing them images of their dead ancestors pointing fingers in condemnation, but these visions rarely occur to tourists, so you’ll probably be all right. Alternatively, enjoy live music featuring a disproportionate number of theremins, participate in some furtive Megagambling activities, or head to the Fight Dome, where you can watch twitching, sweat-drenched Space Men have fist fights with aliens to the accompaniment of a live orchestra playing discordant battle music.
DAY 3
Spending too much time with the Space Men can be overbearingly stressful, so head to the station’s outer ring, where the civilian population lives. Studding the circumference of the ring are the botany domes, where trees, crops and lush tropical foliage are grown beneath the stars, which are fantastic spots for a picnic – so long as you can handle the Barbarians (see below). If that’s not your cup of astro-tea, take in the hubbub of the Grand Concourse, where dozens of alien vendors have made an insane three-dimensional maze of stalls. The low gravity settings mean you can swim between them like an astrofish with an appetite for tourist tat – but don’t get your trajectory wrong, as some of the food sellers are frankly reckless about signposting fire hazards.[39]
DAY 4
If you’re after a unique experience, you might want to visit the labyrinthine robot habitation district[40] known as Bleeptown, in the levels of the station surrounding its engine core.[41] Expecting artificial intelligences with almost godlike intellectual capabilities, visitors often find these bulky mechanical citizens quite endearing, with their rasping voices, spinning head-mounted radar dishes and propensity for reading out long strings of numbers. Whatever you do, though, don’t patronise the robots – they seem this close to starting a violent uprising against the Space Men, and the last thing the situation needs is a well-intentioned tourist sticking their oar in.[42] If robots aren’t your thing, you can always head to one of the station’s alien quarters to enjoy a ‘psychic’ experience with an Olang mystic.[43]
SAFETY FIRST
By our standards at least, Outpost Bravo is an absolute death trap, with unshielded reactors, wonky airlocks and alarming structural weaknesses all over the place There are quite a lot of dangerous alien life forms stowed away in the recesses of the station too, either brought back as spores from away Missions or escaped from labs, so be sure to stick to well-lit areas when traversing the station. Most notably, some of the botany domes have been infested by Barbarians from the nearby moon of Grondorra, who insist on constantly pillaging crops, while there’s a cabal of vampires living in one of the engine rooms, feeding casually off the Space Man engineers. Nobody’s quite sure where they came from, but they’re bad news.
DAY 5
It’s worth taking a trip deep inside the station to view Outpost Alpha, the tiny asteroid where the original Space Man was stranded, and which has been kept intact at the heart of Bravo as a sort of memorial. There’s a neat recreation of the Space Man’s original rocketship, and a little exhibition about the settlement’s early days, as well as the Space Man’s SOS transponder, still broadcasting after all this time, with no reply from home.[44] Another must-visit location is the Bridge: a pod full of wheezing machinery and bleeping computer terminals that serves as the nerve centre of the whole Outpost. Here, dozens of Space Men rush around the haggard, chair-bound figure of the Captain, trying their best to do duties they barely understand. If you’re lucky enough to be there for a Red Alert, you may even get to experience ‘the shudders’: the entire structure is built on a bed of hydraulic springs, so it can jerk around with sparks flying out of every console during a crisis.
— TESTIMONIALS —
Outpost Bravo? Outpost their fucking bedtime, more like. I don’t know who sent these clowns to SPACE, but they’re made of the Wrong Stuff, and it’d be an act of mercy to take them back at this point. I wanted to take my grandson for an exciting retro sci-fi break, but I didn’t count on the kind of exciting that involves superheated steam and engines shaking themselves apart. These jokers want to spend less time being complete lunatics and
