"Just press the fucking gas button!" John exclaimed as the space cruiser was hit by a meteor. He knew that with this crew the Hyperion was never going to make it to her destination. Commissioned by the Queen of New Spain, the Hyperion was a vessel on a very clear-cut and far-from-secret mission. Ship manifests documented their journey from the start and this is in part the reason the writing-robot was out of ink. It really didn't have to log every single interaction of the crew, especially the last ditch effort of team building/bonding - the talent show. John knew that there would be no record of his words, hence the swearing in his commands. Percy Bysshe Shelley, John's crewman and contemporary, pressed the button and the Hyperion jetted away from the meteors and resumed a course toward their destination. There it was, glowing red in front of them, the Moorgate. 85 Moorgate to be exact.
"This is where I'm born," John said aloud to himself as if he couldn't control his voice from making those sounds. Percy Bysshe Shelley respectfully withheld any question about what this outburst meant. John steered the Hyperion directly to the center of the Moorgate and they were blasted at warp speed toward the nearest dying star. Percy Bysshe Shelly sat back with a confident comfort.
"It's time for the payload."
"Yes," John said, in both affirmation and command.
With a pull of a lever, the Fanny Brawne was released from the Hyperion's sub-torpedo chamber. It launched directly into the near-dead star and reignited the thing.
The writing-robot's sensors fried in the outburst of sunlight. Its head fell to the side and said only one thing:
" Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death"
It was something difficult to ignore but the crew did their best.
"Should we procede... Captain Keats, should we go home?" asked Percy Bysshe Shelly.
"Yes," was John's response, "And let us not talk of this again."
They jettisoned the writing-robot and headed back to New Spain where aged wine and cheese would greet their new sun.
