A new life awaits you

So here I am. 15.45 Thursday afternoon Eastern Standard Time, sitting in my new house in the Leafy Suburbs of the off world colonies. Books and equipment sit strewn around me, empty boxes and new ones still wanting my attention. A room full of junk to be sorted. My connection to the mothership is restored, for the time being, thanks to the wonders of radio-broadband, having been offline all week during transit time.

Here, on the planet Auchenflower, in the Brisbane system of Galaxy Queensland, time appears to run slowly, much more slowly than back on the HomeWorld. Space has been stretched to breaking, a cosmologist's dream come true; the open Universe's last moments on a locally observable scale. Everything is enlarged, lumbering, as if spacetime has been engorging itself on the souls of the strip-mall inhabitants, driving perplexed in circles around the oversize roundabouts. The city has a familiar look, but a slighty disembodied sheen - no a glare - appears to cover everything.