3. Plastic diagnostic

Your laolao is sick today. Pain and fever, a bad flu quickly building-up. Seems I’m under a full-scale invasion. Shock-waves creating craters in my brain. And I’m bleeding a bit: The hysterical side-effect of a flaw in my shields.

I’ve often battled solar storms in my youth, they’ve left me tired and unprotected. My lungs, from smoking too much, are like a deep lethal plasma sea. Powerful mass ejections endangering the fusion core. Hellish conflagrations breaking all data streams.

The air recycling system is off line. Turbulence is giving rise to flares, tons of blinking warnings have set up base on my global positioning system. The menu window no longer offers an off-world refuge option.

On the very edges of my awareness, exactly where my spacesuit soon intends to call its bluff, I feel like I’ve become an endangered specie, dispatched to an unsecured location, beyond the reach of reasonable senses.

I feel I’m almost ready for one of those out-of-body experiences. I better take an aspirin.

And keep radio silence.

Muffled voices in the distance have left heat signatures on my mainframe. It’s an ambush. I can’t reach the decontamination area. Let’s hope there’s a fail-safe feature, some sort of covert operation unit, antifreeze in the engine, anything to help me bypass this plague.

It’s just the flu, little baby, hurting my morale, which happens today to have forgotten to pack its biohazard gear.

While I look for rescue equipment, and count the impact points given by positive thinking, I’ll keep a self-adhesive target in mind: I want gigantic auroras to lay in your future.

And I’ll take exquisite care of myself. No human waste is impregnable. These hostile parasitic colonies, which have landed in force in my inner sanctum, at my command will storm out and I’ll obliterate them with the oblique, but enduring patterns of my optimism.

Your resilient Laolao