Day 121: Snowflake - The True Tale of an Emergency Exit

It would probably be more credible if my scheduled outages weren’t pre-dated.  Maybe I should have a category for likely but unplanned outages?  Maybe I shouldn’t have more categories for not writing than for writing.

The whitepaper called it a snowflake.  Actually the whitepaper called it a Low Orbit Life Raft and henceforth referred to it as a Snowflake–presumably to avoid it being called a LOLR.  Having read the remainder of the Snowflake’s specs in the comfort of my home office in Taos, New Mexico I didn’t quite appreciate what that all meant.  Instead I replaced the real information with conjecture about what it might be like to be miniaturized and ride an actual snowflake.

I know two things.  One for sure and the other as an inevitable possibility.  The one thing I know is that unlike a parachute the snowflake conceals the moment I will strike the ground.  I suspect this has the effect of creating low-level intermittent anxiety about when I will hit rather than an ever increasing anxiety.  The thing I do not know for certain but am likely to find out is if my body being frozen solid will be structurally useful upon impact.  Near as I can tell the plan is for me to freeze solid, hit hard, but not break, then thaw back to life.

I’d expected burning up hitting the atmosphere, but something about the drifting nature of the snowflake greatly reduces the constant friction that would cause that heat.  I can nearly call to mind that box of information being on the upper right-hand corner of the page.  After that there were several pages of spiraling diagrams that didn’t do the true nauseating effect justice.