Leviathan.

That was a good word to describe how he imagined the ship to be –a one big huge-ass giant leviathan. He was lying on his bunk in that twilight between wakefulness and sleep and for some reason he was dreaming that he was floating outside the big, hulking beast of a ship and watching her drift along to God-knows-where in all the vast, deep dark emptiness.

Emptiness. Vast and deep and dark.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! His alarm sounded. He sighed deeply and muttered an old expression his father used to rouse him with from his navy days. Drop your cocks and pick up your socks!

Heh, another day –whatever “a day” was here- another dollar.

Before breakfast, as was the protocol, he went below and checked on the tanks first. “Hmmm….” He murmured while looking at the gauges. All appeared okay, but…

Hmmm…

Again, in his minds eye, he could imagine the strange creatures within the huge tanks swimming around in the hyper-pressurized and soaring, unbelievably hot tanks of thick gel. How did they live in there? He wondered for the umpteenth time. And, what kind of existence could living in such an environment be like? He shook his head as if to physically rid the thought from his brain because, Hell’s bells, he thought -they were probably wondering the same thing about him.

Since all was apparently okay, it was time to go back above and eat.

As he ate his breakfast, he logged onto his laptop and studied the charts as if he was actually going to get off the ship in this lifetime. Wow, he thought to himself. He hadn’t checked the charts in well over six months and, by reckoning from the charts on where he now was compared to where he had been, he hadn’t budged a billion billionth of a fraction of a nanometer.

He sighed deeply and logged off. What difference did it make anyway?

He watched an old rerun of Hogan’s Heroes, of all things, as he did his morning jog on the treadmill. He liked watching the old silly sitcom out of the thousands that were archived just for his use to keep him from going insane on the endless, forever journey. It was his one of his favorites because…well, because although not a hero, he certainly felt a lot like a prisoner too.