You are listening to a Clarks World magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarks's World Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you well. It is

December 14th, 2011, approximately one and a half weeks till the holidays, and I hope that you are preparing

and you are prepared and you're not ripping your hair out like I am. I want to thank the listeners of the last

podcast who gave me some great pointers on the voices that I was doing.

Ultimately, what I strive for is to make something believable.

And with so many characters in the last piece,

I wanted to give a little bit more definition to each of them so you knew who was speaking.

So on to our second piece of fiction for the month of December 2011.

Our second piece is called In Which Faster Than Light Travel solves all of our problems.

The fiction is by Chris Stabick. The author in question was a member of the ill-fated Clarion

class of 2011.

Nobody was ever the same.

Chris writes words, plays music, and lives in a hovel in Sydney where the rusted roof turns rainwater into steam in the sun. You can find Chris's website

located at Chris Stabic, that's CHR-I-S-T-A-B-A-C-K.com. So without further ado, a, s, a, s,

So without further ado, let me tell you a story. A Story.

I live in my cockpit. I piss in a bottle and I cross the vastest vastness in my shining tin can. I've seen more of nothing than just about anyone,

but if I'm telling you about it, then you aren't really here, because it's just me out here. Every month or so I jerk off to pictures of

shape so airbrushed they aren't human and I drop my tissues on the floor and leave

them there. Every seven months or so I leave my ship for repairs and spend a few nights getting drunk

and listening to old travellers who have either forgotten how to be human or are pretending they aren't so that they can fit in.

And then if I'm flushed, spend the night with someone who is pretending that they aren't because I've

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