The Science Fiction Short Story Contest

I was reading this and thinking about stress when I remembered a few lines in one of my sci-fi stories.

Twenty-four turns on a decaying orbit an engineer, a few with lesser gifts, and all the on-deck officers rebuilt an xY-12 Boxer drive. The crew thought they wanted to die faster and attempted an insurrection.

The story is actually about true engineers who hear the Song of void ships, sort of the whole as well as the pieces. In my experience, extreme stress is getting trapped in all the broken pieces, and missing the song. Hence the story reference.

Armchair nothing, of course.

We survive this stuff by suffering for a while. At one job I got these skull splitting headaches, medication, the whole bit. Quit the job and I get a migraine once every ten years now which are always triggered by stress. The moral of the story: even flatworms learn things -- mine just involved hammers from hell.