Jurassengers

*"No matter the distance between us, we are never truly apart, because in the end, we are nothing more or less than humble passengers."*
—Narrative(**src**)
Jurassengers was a short story.

## Plot

The opening paragraph of the story describes an aspiring author with low self-esteem who wants to write a story based on the film *Passengers* (which the author has not yet seen). She had hoped that her fanfiction would directly compete with the film and possibly surpass the film, but when the film was released earlier than expected, she decided to just write the story and hope for the best.

The actual plot of the story introduces Claire Dearing, a passenger on the spaceship *Neptune*, awakening from cryonic sleep. She realizes she is the only one to have woken up so far, and tries to go back to sleep. However, her cryonic pod will not put her to sleep again, so she begins to wander around the ship looking for help. Upon entering the pool area, she finds a Stegoceratops sitting alone at the bar. She talks to him, and he says that their pods must have both malfunctioned. He also claims to have been awake much longer than her. Because he is so unhelpful, though, Claire blows him off and walks away. After a time, she comes to realize that she might go crazy without another person to validate her thoughts, and runs into the Stegoceratops again. While at first she doesn't want to talk to him, she decides that he is so pathetic that it wouldn't hurt to give him some time.

She offers to bring him a drink from the poolside bar, even though it's not allowed for dinosaurs to drink. She realizes he must not make much money, as he could never afford alcohol. He reveals that he doesn't make any money; he's a commodity, like livestock. The Stegoceratops talks about his life and how he wants to make a difference for people, while Claire half-listens. He asks her about her life, but she doesn't want to discuss it. In their talks, he says her name, and she doesn't remember telling it to him. She asks his name, and he gives it as Owen.

Claire asks Owen to lock her back into her pod, as it locks from the outside. He claims not to know how. She begins to walk away again, and Owen apologizes for wasting her time. She tries halfheartedly to make him feel better, but ends up dismissing his complaints about his life as insignificant. He encourages her to talk about her problems too. She talks about her experiences in the past, about how she felt as though if she were to fit in, she would hate the person she was acting like, but if she acted the way she really wanted to, she might not fit in. Owen reassures her that she's a nice person, and when he learns that too much alcohol can kill a person, he worries that he wouldn't know what to do if she were in danger. Apparently, dinosaurs do not even have the right to save a person who is in danger.

As she starts to realize that Owen has had the idea of worthlessness drilled into him his whole life, she begins to pity him and talks more about his own life. She learns that he is thirty-one years old, has never done anything that he considers worthwhile, and that there are just a few other dinosaurs on the ship and that they all are in cryosleep. However, he lets slip that they have two hundred and eighty more years until they arrive at the new world. She woke up after only twenty years of their three-hundred year journey.

Claire begins to panic, and asks Owen how he knows it was only twenty years. He says that he checked the security footage. She demands to see this footage too, and has him bring her to it. When she views the footage, she sees Owen enter the cryobay and interfere with the mechanism of her pod, causing her to wake up. Claire's immediate assumption is that he woke her up only for sex, and she accuses him of making her a hostage. She flees the control room.

After wandering for a while, Claire realizes that Owen is not coming after her, and she finds him at the pool surrounded by empty bottles from the bar. He had tried to drink himself to death like she said, but was unable to drink enough to kill himself. When he dies, the implant in his brain will sense it and awaken the next of ten dinosaurs in line. Owen was selected first. He reveals that he turns thirty-one today; the ship launched on his eleventh birthday, and it's been twenty years since. In spite of all this new knowledge, Claire still lashes out at him in anger.

As she walks about the ship, Claire finds the safes that all the passengers' and crewmembers' belongings were stored in when they launched. She finds some safes that are red instead of the normal gray, and realizes that (as there are only ten) that they belong to the dinosaurs. She finds one that is labeled 01, and realizes it must be Owen's, as he adapted "01" into his given name. Claire looks through his belongings to see if there is anything she can use to further emotionally damage him, finding a variety of documents including a news clipping about 01's creation by InGen. She also finds letters that Owen wrote to himself on his birthdays, in the character of his father. Most are apologies for not being there. The most recent one develops into a furious tirade against Owen, repeatedly claiming that no one will ever care about him. She is not certain if she is angry at Owen anymore.

She finds Owen again debating whether to drown himself in the pool. He says that he can put her back to sleep, and then he'll kill himself. Claire reassures Owen that he isn't as bad as he thinks he is, and that she thinks he has worth. Owen offers to sedate her so she can sleep again, but she insists on giving him a birthday party, as he's never had one. Claire offers to teach him how to swim (and wears no clothing while doing so). He tells her about how he came to choose her of all people to wake up, deciding three years ago and debating if it was right, but ultimately deciding she was special. Claire believes that "special" means that she's different from others and considers this a bad thing, but Owen tells her special is good. They continue to talk about their backgrounds for hours.

The two talk, and party, and disco for a long time. When Owen goes to the control room to retrieve more disco music, he realizes it's been three days. She admits that she doesn't care, that she might not go back to sleep, and that she's fallen in love with him. Owen insists that they can't be together and that Claire deserves to see the new world. Owen gives her a drink, and after she takes it, she realizes it was laced with sedatives and that he intends to put her back to sleep anyway. She struggles, but succumbs.

Claire wakes up again two hundred and eighty years later, and goes to the first Stegoceratops she can find. He says that he cleaned out Owen's body three years ago (meaning that he lived to be 308, a little more than three times the maximum lifespan of a Stegoceratops). She searches his locker, finding no possessions, but when she opens her own locker, she finds a single note reading *Thank you.*

When they land on the new world, Claire finds that teleportation was invented during the three hundred years that they were traveling and that spaceships are obsolete. Technology has progressed so far that her old job is now obsolete. Instead, she becomes a social worker, adopts two children, and works closely with the dinosaur community to improve their lives. She never marries. She dies at the age of three hundred on the coastline of the new world, knowing she has improved it and hoping to see Owen in the afterlife.

The story ends with another monologue from the author. It briefly turns into a rant (the author was made by her mother to see *Office Christmas Party* against her will, and her mother used up her Scene points that she wanted to use to see *Passengers*, *A Monster Calls*, and *Beauty and the Beast*, but ended up getting a Cineplex gift package from her mother which makes up for it all), but ends with the author deciding that even if her life doesn't have everything that she wishes it would be, she's going to keep writing anyway and let herself be happy with who she is.

## Trivia

* In the story, lyrics from Baby, It's Cold Outside were used as dialogue for thematic purposes.
* Numerology was used for symbolism.
* Owen's views of himself, and his social status as subhuman, mirrors the Narrator's anxieties over her skill as an author.