John Glenn was the first American not to die in space. Yuri Gagarin was the first person not to die in space. And I'm happy to be joining you all here on the internship program on Planet IX! This is gonna be a hoot.

Everything worked fine in the Translation. In the Translation Chambers, that is. You go in naked as a jaybird and come out the other side all transubstantiated. Never really clear what they do with the old body. You're allowed to bring one official-sized piece of luggage full of stuff, and you get a copy of that too. I think they put the originals into an incinerator.

So here I am on the observation deck in the artificial gravity wondering where all my schoolmates are! C'mon guys, let's party! The sun is sooooo tiny from out here.

You know the kind of friend that you love but always gets you into trouble? KidGoat is that kind of friend.

He doesn't even go to Psyhigh but got accepted on this same internship on the Planet IX project. (He's from Mystical high, and there's kids here too from Satanic, 'Pataphysics, Mummy High, Hitman Academy, Sumerian Immersion School, and a bunch of others too.)

At first I was stoked to see him, and for the first couple of days it was TOTALLY a blast, exploring the station, going to orientation, learning how to operate the zero-G forklifts, hanging out in the mess hall.

But before I knew it he was mouthing off to the instructors and getting us both in trouble. I mean, it WAS funny but now we're both in detention, and it's a two-strike kind of place. Next time something happens we're both booted from the station, and I absolutely don't want that. What am I gonna do???

I've been able to keep KidGoat from getting into trouble. Part of it's cuz we've been kept so busy movin stuff around the space station with the zero-G forklifts. I thought internships were supposed to be "educational" and not just forced slave labor?

"Yeah, educating us to goof off without getting in trouble! Na-a-a-a-a-a! NA-a-a-a-a-a-a!" KidGoat bleats.

He's referring to when we take our little side trips around the station when we're moving stuff around. Like the other day when we found this big storage bay with giant floor-2-ceiling windows. It's like you can see all of space out there. And the Sun isn't much bigger than any other star - just brighter. We must be so far out.

Anyway that's when we found @Gentle Porpoise, who was in his own zero-G motorized tank. KidGoat used his so called "language skills" and we made friends. @Gentle Porpoise was kickin' it just like us, and he asked us not to tell anybody we saw him there. He was cool. But we didn't want to get busted so we finished up our delivery and got back to forklift central before anybody was the wiser.

"Привет товарищи!"

The lost cosmonauts were really friendly. @Gentle Porpoise introduced us, and KidGoat seems to be able to translate anything. Though I don't know how the cosmonauts can understand his bleats. They speak porpoise, so maybe @Gentle Porpoise translates for him.

Anyway, the lost cosmonauts are part of a whole bunch of stowaways that @Gentle Porpoise hangs with. We've been having more goof off time and kickin' it with the Porpoise in the storage areas of the space station, and she's been introducing us to her crew.

There's the cosmonauts, who all have CCCP printed in red on their space suits, and there's also Patience and Harmony, in their long dresses and bonnets, and Sir Greybald who we can kind of understand when he talks (he's a knight). And then there's the cavemen. Neanderthals specifically. They don't talk much at all.

"вы будете хотеть, чтобы увидеть машину времени, друзей."

The cosmonauts say they want to show us the time machine.

"They've got a time machine? I want to go back to last night and sleep again! Na-a-a-a-a-a! NA-a-a-a-a-a-a!"

KidGoat thinks everything he says is funny.

So there's like a whole stowaway community of lost time travelers here. They live in the oldest parts of the space station, where nobody ever goes. There's an old rickety time machine there in a forgotten lab. Sometimes it just starts up for no reason and people fall through.

That's how Leonid and Oleg got here, plucked out of their capsule orbiting the earth. Patience and Harmony were sisters on their parent's sharecropper farm. There are about 20 of them all together. There were others, but they were picked up by station security and taken away. After they were beaten. Which is why they all stay to the shadows. The Neanderthals are especially stealthy, and keep tabs on what's going on around the station and communicate it to the rest through an elaborate sign language.

If this is the "old" time machine on the station, what is their new one like?

The Neanderthals discovered something big. There's a super high security part of the station that they hadn't been able to penetrate, but now there's a ton of activity and they slipped in to take a look.

It's the station's real, industrial strength time machine. It's big enough to drive an aircraft carrier through, and it looks like they're getting ready to do just that. There's also massive storage rooms full of kidnapped time-victims, set up like soundstages. There's a whole brigade of union soldiers, armed and cooking stew and playing harmonicas; hangars full of WWI-era biplanes and triplanes, their pilots in an uneasy truce; a troop of African warriors from some forgotten period in history, wearing platinum armor and wielding uranium tipped spears; a massive U.S. Navy ship with USS Eldridge printed on the side.

Technicians are warming up the big machine, which explains the brown-outs in our part of the station. The flurry of activity has @Gentle Porpoise especially agitated, and she's been chirping at the lost cosmonauts non-stop since the Neanderthals submitted their report. Could be we're getting ready for a riot... Does this mean extra credit? KidGoat thinks so.

Well it's been a relaxing few weeks here on the Planet IX Orbital Station. After the time-riot, all the bad guys departed or surrendered. The ones that surrendered turned out not to be the bad guys really, they were just guys with sucky jobs. But they know their way around the station, and have been a big help getting things back in ship shape.

Thankfully things didn't get too out of hand at the riot. There was a little bit of structural damage in the labs, where @Binary Clam Jr. caused a ruckus in his escape. At that very moment, the time stowaways were advancing through the halls, and he was scooped up by a phalanx of Egyptian warriors as they charged by. We'd opened the cells and let everybody out--armies from a hundred different eras, on horseback, tank tread, flying carpet, and saber-toothed cat.

All of that commotion was enough to send the bigwigs flying for the escape hatches. Luckily they were mostly scientists and office workers, and weren't carrying weapons. We did have to laser torch our way through a few blast doors. And use the elephants once or twice.

Since then, KidGoat and I have been taking it easy. We were made assistant managers, in charge of coordinating with the stowaways. Which means mostly we goof off. A lot of the stowaways left as soon as they could, back through the time machines run by the turncoat techs. But @Gentle Porpoise and the lost cosmonauts are in no hurry to go anywhere, and are willing to see what the future holds for them on Planet IX.

Me, I've been half expecting @Junior Agent LuLu to suddenly show up and interrogate everyone, or at least @Nova Toaster and her Time Team to come and witness this massive time-knot. But things are getting back to normal here quickly, and there's not much more to do than day-to-day space station stuff. Like moving big grey boxes and barrels around. Or having anti-grav forklift races with KidGoat when nobody's looking.

Of everything I've learned on this internship, I think that's been the very best part.