Typhon's Great Regatta

amart29 (68)in #esteem • 7 years ago

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Typhon's Great Regatta

The inaugural parade brought together more than eight hundred ships, from those in competition, to training ships and exhibition ships. The highlight of this year was the reproduction of the three ships that more than fifteen thousand five hundred years ago led a sailor on Earth to cross the ocean to meet a continent whose existence was largely unknown, Christopher Columbus was his name.

The relationship that the organizers of the Great Typhon Regatta wanted to establish this year was obvious; the ships that led Columbus through an unknown ocean, to find lands unknown to the peoples from which he came and which would later be colonized; with Perseus and its valuable cargo of human embryos and most of the species that still populated the Earth, sent to cross the stellar ocean to colonize a world where humanity could prosper again.

Perhaps the relationship was not entirely valid, for the colonization that took place on Earth at that time led to endless abuses and exploitation. The new settlers had tried to avoid these situations as much as possible, becoming only those worlds that did not have original settlers. But in the minds of many explorers and navigators of the colonies, the image of that sailor had been idealized as that of an explorer in search of a new world.

Leonardo was uncomfortable and impatient, he did not like this kind of pompous events, he would prefer to be in the competition once and for all. He had come a long way to be here from his native Hyperborean, a space station orbiting the outer edge of Dyson's sphere of a red dwarf star at the end of space colonized on Orion's arm.

His ship, a catamaran with which he competed in the category of a single crew member, with a navigation assistant, was now guided by the automated piloting system of the inaugural parade, and being just a passenger on his own vessel, made him too uncomfortable.

Once the parade was over, the competition would begin, calling at the ports of twelve floating cities. For navigators like him, who came from a world where navigation took place in a small inland sea, without a starry sky to be guided by, the category in which he participated had been created this year, whose main difference with the others was to be restricted to only one crew member per boat and the use of satellite positioning systems and route mapping was allowed.

Thirty other pilots participated in his category, who, like him, would venture to spend a little more than nine months in solitude, making only short one-day stops in each city they passed through. He, coming from a space station, was not exactly one of the favorites, but more than winning, his main interest was the experience of piloting his boat in the largest and most prestigious sailing competition of all colonized worlds.
Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, July 2019

Typhon's Great Regatta

Typhon's Great Regatta

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