The crew gathered in their Sunday finest, peering sadly over a casket with a dead crewman in it. So shortly into the story of their life, like maybe a hundred pages or so, their life was tragically cut short by the fact that space is actually dangerous as all get-out and inevitably people are gonna die in it, especially with no medic onboard and most of the hull made from garbage and tape. Marley cleared his throat and took a deep breath.
"We are gathered here in this airlock, with sad hearts, to give our fellow crewman a final farewell. She was a good friend, someone we counted on and someone with a strong drive for adventure. As we give this body to the void of space, we know she will always be with us in spirit and in our memory. With that said, we send of Tashi Yokomato, our navigation engineer." he said closing the airlock with a slow press of the big red button.
"That was beautiful, Mar." Lawg nodded, getting out his speech from his pocket. "When you are on a starship, even with a small handful of crewmen, well under 7, it's often easy to miss the extras in the background flipping switches and turning knobs, some can remain invisible for several adventures, but when you lose someone…suddenly we all remember their place and how much they mean to us. Weather or not they have any dialogue or they get cut out of the ship reports entirely…sometimes space claims a life and since it would be super difficult to lose a main crewman like Uka, or even the robot…Ray, I think is his name…it seems cruel that fate always takes the nameless workers that are so easily missed by everyone. We will never forget the Asian chick that has been with this ship the entire time, and until now, not tied in with events important enough to mention. It's too bad her first major role was death." he said folding the paper back up. Roy stepped forward.
"I’m Roy…the robot: spelled R-O-Y. I remember so much about her, so many memories that I could talk for 10 pages of ship log entries worth of filler about her backstory, but we all know it well enough, so I will just say this…you were special, and the crew won't be the same without you, Tashi." he said.
Uka looked back and forth at everyone as they solemnly shuffled off in different directions. Her eyes showed her overwhelming urge to speak but she hesitated, heavy with a feeling of confusion.
"Hey?! Seriously!" she barked "What the ass? When did we get an Asian chick on this ship?" she asked. Lawg looked mortified, silently shunning her as the others shook their heads in poor taste. Lawg wiped a tear.
"Geese Uka, have some respect…someone died." he said as they all shook their heads in disbelief at her insensitive attitude.
Marley sat in the Captain's chair with his furry feet up and silently squinted as he appeared to be in deep thought.
“Hey Roy…” Marley said, chewing on some red rope candy. “Member when we Stole Hitler’s pants and left him on Delmar 9?” he yawned, exhaling smoke.
“Dude…that was like 7 days ago.” Roy noted.
“Whacky fun…good times.” Marley wheezed.
“Yea it was pretty fun after the…oh shit, change subjects Lawg is comin.” He whispered as he entered the Den, Roy awkwardly changed subjects. “So yea, can’t believe we found that guy in the escape pod who was wanted for space-piracy and got to keep all his shit.” Roy diverted. “How you doin Twiggy?” he asked Lawg.
“Mild headache, I still feel like hell from a week ago, I must have taken a pretty bad fall.” He groaned.
“Yea you were crazy-sober when we made that haul. I told you and Duffy not to spend every bit of your cut on those fancy alien drinks, but I’m not your pappa." Roy coughed, waving the smoke discreetly.
“And that was before I fell down the stairs?” Lawg asked rubbing his head.
“Yes, that is correct.” awkwardly muttered Marley. Candy-ass.” He muttered under his breath?”
“What?” asked Lawg.
“Candy…You want a red-rope?” he corrected.
“Sugar? Hell no. I’m still pissed that I got nothing from the haul. I need to keep my sugar down and make better decisions. I cant be diving into a sugar-high every few days and ruining my reputation, or wasting my money.” He said sitting down.
“Yea, silly Captain. To be fair, we did still make serious bank. The music box fetched a good price and the old gun got our fuel tank to the brim. Who knew you could get 1200 credits for a pair of Nazi-uh, space…pilot, uniform stuff.” He shifted subtly as Lawg stared at him blankly, fading to suspicion.
“I know you two were up to something.” Lawg said squinting. “I don’t know what you guys had going on with that mustache-pilot…and I don’t wanna know. You guys are just nasty.” He said storming off for some migraine pills and water, but mostly vodka.
"We still not telling him or Duffy the time travel thing and just sticking with that weak-ass space pirate blackout deal?" Roy asked.
"Yep."
“Cool with me. So what did you get with your Nazi-pawn money?” asked Roy.
“Buncha snacks, totally bitchin shades and a new scanner. The rest I’m savin. You?” Marley asked.
“Savin mine too, mostly., I got this medieval head-bashin cane from the armory at the pawn store. I think he called it a Shalaeli, reminds me of something Uka would use to beat someone. I call it a Ukulele.” He grinned proudly.
“Nice.” He said bumping fists. Duffy stomped into the room with her arms crossed.
“You two shits got into my stash didn’t you?” she asked, picking up an empty ziplock bag off the floor. "Just cuz someone died doesn’t mean you get to grief-smoke my stash." she said angrily.
“Does a little bit.” Marley smiled, donning his shades.
“Come on guys, you know how hard it is to get this now that Captain pissed off the Nug-heads?” she asked with a huff of disappointment “Roy…you’re a robot, you don’t even have lungs, how are you even high?” she asked.
“Science.” He said, blowing out a smoke-ring and busting out laughing.
“You guys are both wasteful.” She shook her head.
“You had sex with Hitler.” Marley snickered as Roy busted out hysterically.
“What?” she asked looking confused.
“Nothing.” He said, capping the subject. "Sorry."
“Well, while you two nim-tards get your giggles on, I’ll be integrating the alien shielding we recently found so we don’t have another rogue accident and get someone else killed. Someone has to do it." she shuffled. Marley sighed.
“Good thing the first alien device we integrated into the ship was a universal integrator. That was like…super convenient.” coughed Marley as she shuffled off.
“You know what would be awesome?” asked Roy, waiting for Marley to turn his head. “Zero-gravity cotton candy machine.”
“I like your style brother.” He said extending a furry fist to bump.
Uka stared at her GPS. Getting mad.
“Damnit, HOPE, turn on. Stupid GPS.” She said tapping it. Lawg entered the bridge with a very-vodka tonic.
“Hope still shutting down randomly? Are we Hopeless in space again?” he grinned.
“There is always Hope, she just doesn’t seem to understand distance. She is telling me that Planet over there is only 14 kilometers away.” She said flinging her hand at the view screen. Lawg jumped and spilled his drink a little.
“Holy crap…when did that get there?” he asked.
“Nothing on sensors, nothing on the screen one minute and then BAM, ringed gas giant right in front of us. Sensors aren’t even reading it right now.” she barked.
“Solid surface 14.2 Kilometers off the Left side of the ship…wouldn’t we be IN the actual atmosphere at that distance?” he asked.
“I am amazed you grasp that, but yes.” She said rebooting the scanner. Duffy strolled into the room and looked at the screen.
“Oh cool. A Voyager Planet.” She smiled.
“A what?” asked Uka.
“Voyager Planet. Named after the ship that discovered one first…well, not really a ship, unmanned probe. You could barely call it a spacecraft. Voyager 1 was a device launched in 1977, lost power in 2125, like a century after it was supposed to break down. Anyway it got caught in the gravity of a tiny impossible planet that was drifting without a sun and someone picked up the blip. Voyager Planets are gas balls between 2 and 20 kilometers in diameter, usually with rings and moons for some reason.” She said sitting down and munching popcorn.” Uka grabbed a handful.
“Got the popcorn machine working I guess…hey, wait…how does a rock under 20 kilometers have an atmosphere or rings? It shouldn’t even have enough mass to be spherical, let alone have rings and moons, how small are the damn moons?”
“Like straight-up space-potatoes. It’s totally against the laws of physics and shit. Some sci-fi writer proposed that it was possible and they laughed him out of the room.” she said mysteriously.
“Who is laughing now?” said Lawg, pretending to be philosophical. Uka checked her scans again with the same results. “Can we land?” asked Lawg.
“It’s 12 kilometers across, we wouldn’t be so much “landing” as “docking”. Hell we could throw off its gravity axis just by bumping it. Uka protested. Duffy shrugged.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea either, but we could send someone in an EVA suit and tether. I’ve always wondered what was inside a Voyager Planet.” she grinned.
“Like the proverbial wonder-ball." said Lawg "And we shall be the first to see how many licks it takes to get to the chewy chocolate center.” He said with a look of determination as he placed one foot on the console and took a captain-pose. Duffy turned slowly.
“A what?!” she puzzled.
“Don’t worry about it. Bring me the EVA boots.” He said with a grin.
"Those dangerous things? After what Happened with Tashi, you are seriously gonna put them on? Those are death-boots." Duffy informed him. He scoffed.
"Of course not, what do I look like…a complete idiot?" he chuckled.
“I really hate you guys!” yelled Marley, waddling around in the EVA boots, covered in a faint yellow glow.
“Come on, buddy. You’re making history.” Lawg said to his tablet, as he chewed on a red-rope and adjusted to his favorite hot-tub jet.
“You always make me use these death-boots and check out the dangerous space-thingy.” he grumbled.
“Voyager Planet…you need to learn your space grammar more better. Anyway you can’t expect the Captain to risk his life exploring a new space-thingy.” He scoffed. Marley clung to the ship as they slowly backed up to the tiny Planet. He flattened out like he was going to be mashed between them.
“Lawg…this is weird…” he nervously said as he closed the last few feet from the ship and the puffy atmosphere coating. He winced and flattened out further in protest.
“Just scoop up some of the gas in the mason jar, and drop the scanner into the atmosphere, see how far down it goes.” He suggested. Marley turned on the scanner and reached out, watching it drift and suddenly stop, just before the antenna could disappear into the clouds. He stared at the little antenna just poking out, perfectly still.
“Um…I think I know how thick the atmosphere is.” Marley said.
“Already?” asked Uka.
“Bout 6 inches or so.” He said poking something solid with his trusty space-poker stick.
“What? That makes no sense.” Uka said skeptically.
“Yep…solid as rock for the most part, like 6 inches of fog, some spots are squishy, but It could probably support weight.” He chuckled.
“Try it. Hop over there.” Lawg suggested. Marley turned to the ship and gave a middle finger and a cold look of irritation.
“I’m not gonna just hop to the impossible planet and assume nothing bad is crawling around in the 6 inches of purple fog. What if it's worms? What if there is a hole and I fall into some sort of opening. That's a terrible idea; you guys are dumb as a bag of hammers.” He barked back. “Oh shit…no, no, nonoonono….” He muttered, and then there was com silence.
“Um…Marley… you good?” asked Lawg. The others looked at each other waiting for a response. Tension increases as they heard no response.
"Death boots." whispered Duffy with a sad look.
“Very funny furball, we got the point. Stop playing.” Lawg said nervously.
“Maybe the worms got him.” Duffy suggested.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“There’s no worms! That was just figurative, paranoid banter.” Uka huffed.
“Well, now there is no communication, and maybe no Marley, how bad are you gonna feel if the worms really did get him…how bad Uka?” she asked irritated and crossing her arms. Suddenly there was a loud pop and the Airlock squeaked. They waited for a second, hoping the worms didn’t just breech the ship. The airlock creaked again and then opened…safely, like it normally did. Roy walked in, carrying a frost-covered Marley.
“Is he dead?” asked a frantic Duffy.
“No, just unconscious. Boots ran out of battery power and he just…decompressed right into space. Y'all really don’t understand how dangerous half the crap on this ship really is, do you? We ARE in space. Space is a heartless bitch, you know?” he said plopping him on the couch.
“You sure he isn’t dead?” asked Uka.
“He’s a Delmarian, they can survive in a frozen vacuum for like…ten, fifteen minutes and be fine. 45 with any luck. Why do I feel like none of you know that, and nobody told Marley?” he asked looking irked.
“Seriously?” asked Lawg.
“Man, it's Xenobiology 101…anything orange with chin-tentacles is resistant to decompression. Something about their blood, I don’t remember. He’s gonna feel like crap though, too bad we ran out of Duffy's weed.” He said shuffling to the scanner and placing the sample jar in the mass spectrominator. "He got a good sample though. Hydrogen, Nitrogen, salt, water.” He muttered. “Frozen water planet I’d say. Looks like there are microbes living in it too.” Roy noted.
“Crazy.” muttered Lawg. “Salty like seamonkeys? You know you can drink seamonkeys in a pinch.” Lawg noted. Everyone stared at him for a second. Duffy blinked a little, slapping him out of nowhere.
“Why do you always jump right to drinking something we found in space? Do you know what kinda alien germs or parasites it could have in it? And what the hell is a seamonkey?” she asked.
“Wondered that myself. I followed the box exactly and just got murky water, smelled like shrimp. I hate shrimp.” He puzzled.
“And you drank it?” Duffy asked.
“Ugh, of course not…what am I…insane?” I just flushed it. Who drinks that crap?” he asked, making everyone completely confused and lost. It was odd banter even for him, and he looked more dazed than he regularly was, like he was getting quite sober out of the blue.
“I’m alive by the way.” hollered Marley.
“Hey!!” cheered Duffy, giving him a hug.
“Not sure how, but I probably have someone other than Lawg to thank for saving me from the dumb shit Lawg probably did…am I close?” he said abruptly punching him in the leg.
“I made a decision for science, you always complain about everything…there’s no coffee, someone took my shoes, someone ran the battery down and forgot to charge the EVA boots…broken record, man.” said Lawg, rubbing his sore leg.
“So what did the sample look like? Was it worms?” asked Marley. Uka threw her hands up.
“Why is everyone so obsessed with worms?” she asked.
“Something was moving down there.” Marley noted. “I guess I just assumed since it's only 6 inches thick in the fog, that it wasn’t a heard of cattle. Worms seemed like as good a guess as anything.” He said irritated.
“Nothing could exist on a frozen rock 12 miles across, even microbes should be there.” objected Uka “It’s just lazy writing!!” she snipped.
“Well…that whole planet is one big scale problem, like some CG guy didn’t bother checking his math…so why not worms? A tiny impossible planet exists and you're telling me the far-fetched part is the possibility of worms?” asked Marley. “And why the hell am I perfectly fine after my boots crapped out? I was decompressed in the frozen vacuum of space for 2 minutes.” he asked Roy.
“Chin tentacles. Anything with Chintacles is resistant to vacuum.” Roy nodded.
“Neat...” he smiled. “I’m kinda fascinating aren't I?” He said grabbing some popcorn and a blanket from the glovebox.
"The point is, it's not worms." said Roy "But it is living tissue. We scraped something living…holy crap, look at this." he smiled. Duffy looked fascinated.
"That’s not ice in the rings, its skin cells…the rings aren't rings at all, it's just orbiting psoriasis. This tiny planet is alive…and in bad need of moisture. Do we have any Hohoba left?" she asked Uka.
"For a 12 kilometer diameter scalp? I'm not answering that question. It's just too stupid." she said, pouting.
"Well, at least I'm safe from its flakey appetite." Lawg sighed.
"Why?" Uka asked.
"Alcohol dries the skin Uka…I'm not a mathematic or anything but I'm probably 20 percent alcohol by weight, so that would make me toxic to something with dry scalp, and the worms wouldn’t want me either because I'm salty. Worms melt if you salt them, so I'm safe either way" he reasoned.
"What worms? There are no worms, there is no evidence of worms ever being here and how the shit did I not notice an entire Asian person on this ship? Not one damn time? You can't completely not notice someone in a crew of 4 or 5 for several weeks in a ship a hundred and ten frigging feet long with ONE SHOWER!" she shouted.
"Damn Uka…chill out." Marley said looking concerned. "You aren't very social, or observant sometimes. I mean, you are totally ignoring the 12 kilometer creature with scalp-rings right outside the ship. That's a big deal Uka. People notice that hostility and avoid you, except the captain, because tits." he explained.
"Maybe there is a way to kill it.." suggested Roy, maniacally rubbing his chin.
"Dude…we can't do that." Marley said, quite offended.
"I mean in self-defense, only if it attacks us or something. We got 1 rocket tube."
"No, because that rocket tube was damaged. That rocket tube is right next to the main hall and the hall hull is pretty thin. If the rocket goes off in the breech tube we could trigger a hull-breech, we'd have a serious breech-breech and compromise the hall-hull. Marley noted.
"I say we try and communicate with it." Lawg noted. "I mean you already poked it with a stick. The least we can do is do apologies and try to make friends." he said pressing the com button. Uka growled.
"You can't hail it, it's not a ship or a person with communication devices, it’s a living planet or a frozen ice-ball covered in microbes." Uka sighed.
"Or worms." muttered Marley under his breath. Uka abruptly shuffled off and headed to the airlock to take samples and prove there were no worms. She donned her space suit and grabbed the sample-stick. As Marley and Lawg argued the finer points of communications and the definition of life, Uka floated in the background just outside the ship, taking a sample and setting a probe for the surface.
"Ugh, guys…something isn't right." Uka mentioned as Duffy neared the console.
"Define." she squinted.
"My scans show no solid surface below the fog, the probe sank and I lost communications a few meters down. Something is definitely moving, but I ca-" she said as the communication was severed and Duffy jumped in horror as a massive beak poked out of the clouds and swallowed Uka whole in one bite.
Lawg and Marley turned slowly and stared with disbelief.
"Is she…" Lawg said. "Dead?"
"No life signs, no com signal, no anything. Scanners are just showing nothing, not even the planet or creature, and definitely not Uka." Duffy said hitting buttons frantically.
"Do something! Fire something, ram it!" barked Lawg.
"All we have is stunners and a broken rocket-tube." she said spamming the stun button and watching the beams disappear into the clouds with no effect. Marley noticed a little red indicator next to the air-system controls.
"Something is obstructing the air vents." he said.
"Who cares? Toshi is Dead, Uka is dead and we need to get out of here or stun this thing to death before we all get eaten, we won't suffocate in the next 2 minutes because of a hairball in the vent." Lawg noted.
"We might if we fire up the burners and don’t have ventilation. Do your thing, I'll take care of this." he said grabbing a broom and a pistol. He darted off to the maintenance panel and squeezed inside. He crawled for a good ten feet before feeling extra paranoid. The crew was freaking out and Marley was right behind them on that idea. A faint voice muttered next to him.
"Watcha doing Marley? Your crew needs you." said the eerie voice.
"Not real, not real, freaking out but it's not real. Might be real, but probably isn't, gonna find out, please be not real. Please just be worms." he muttered nervously as he army-crawled to the obstruction. Captain Lawg proceeded to alternate stunners and maneuvering to avoid the giant tentacles of the Kraken-like beast he was locked into mortal combat with. Suddenly one of the console panels blew off and he could hear laser-blasts from inside the vent.
"Die you bastards!" hollered Marley as he emptied the gun into the vent and jabbed the broom around. Something scuttered out of the hole and Duffy stomped it, lifting her foot to see a smush-print of something green and bloody. Lawg looked up to check his progress and he realized there were no tentacles, nothing out there but a silent planet.
"I think I killed it." Marley sighed, climbing out of the vent. "Crisis Averted."
"Killed what?" asked Duffy…there is nothing out there, no bits, no remains, no life-signs…like it was never there at all." she puzzled. Marley shuffled away from the panel and stomped one of the vent-critters to ensure it was dead.
"That's cuz there wasn’t anything ever there." he huffed, wiping his boot.
"Try that again, but with details." ordered Lawg.
"I told you guys it was worms, freaking told you. I just had this feeling when I took the samples and then I remembered the vent parasites I heard my cousin talk about. These little bastards get in your air vents and start leeching out a toxic gas that makes everyone go insane and trip balls. They feed off brainwaves or some shit, it's very sciency. Anyway now they're dead and no more hallucinations or paranoia…headcount!" he hollered. Everyone except Uka spoke up. He checked the ships scanners for her and the signal was outside the ship, no lifesigns.
"Oh no…she really did go out there." He said with his ears drooping.
"If there was no creature…what happened to her?" asked Duffy.
"I think she just panicked and vented her air supply. Claustrophobia is one of the symptoms of the worms' hallucinations. People feel trapped and end up opening their helmet or opening an air-lock without a suit. The newer ships have detectors for them now but the old ones didn’t, and it caused a lot of problems, lotta deaths." he sighed.
"Then she is really gone?" asked Duffy quietly. There was a solemn silence as reality sunk in. The crew stood in silence, trying to gather their reasoning and all hoping she would appear and the scanners were wrong, but they never did.
"We are gathered here once again in this airlock to give respects to another fallen crewman who has passed in the service of this ship. Uka is dead there is no trace of brain activity, no medical procedure or regenerator can bring her back. This crate represents the casket we didn’t have time to make and since her body was mostly shriveled to a husk, it made sense to stuff her in this crate instead. She wouldn’t have wanted a fancy service, I can almost hear her saying it…'You turd-Lawg, just launch me into space and move on, no sense having a big ceremony and wasting resources'…so this brief and minimal service is all she would have accepted." He finished, pulling the lever. The body drifted and they all saluted, except Marley, who looked like he was deep in thought, and suddenly perked up.
"Wait a second…we have a Teleporter." said Marley.
"So? It wouldn’t be beneficial to send her anywhere. You know she wasn’t sentimental like that and nobody anywhere else could bring her back so why send her anywhere? Teleporting a dead body for no reason?" Noted Lawg.
"Don’t you guys ever listen to my tech rants…or any rants for that matter?" Marley asked.
"M-sorry what? I was thinking about hookers and cheese." Lawg muttered.
"Teleporters! It’s a device we have had for like 30 years or something, 20 of that with good reliability, even in the old models that take forever to run. I have told you this before…a teleporter is a clone-murder machine. It grinds you into information and prints you off somewhere else as an exact copy of yourself." Marley yelled.
"What is the point, furrball? Where would we send her that would make any difference?" asked Duffy.
"Here, like, just right here. The teleporter has a buffer that stores and scans DNA so it knows what to send. This thing scans every molecule and atom and subatomic particle that makes us who we are with enough accuracy that after a dozen re-copies we don’t even notice a difference, other then hair loss, but those studies were inconclusive."
"Obviously, I'm not getting in a hair-loss machine." muttered Lawg.
"It's so obvious…if it can send a living, conscious person to another place and re-construct them in a living, conscious form…then theoretically anyone who has ever been scanned and sent through any Teleporter is saved on file and basically immortal. We can just print off another Uka from the last time she was teleported… yesterday." he shrugged, tapping a few keys on his scanner and doing the math. Lawg looked confused.
"Then why hasn’t anyone in the last 30 years made that connection, if we have been carrying around immortality machines on starships as a reliable standard system for over 10 years, how come people still die? Wouldn’t this basically be the biggest technological breakthrough in histo-" he said cutting short as Uka materialized on the pad. She opened her eyes and looked around.
"Hey…why is everyone just standing around looking at me, did something bad happen while I was replacing the gas-cap?" she asked as Duffy's hand let her soda slip and fall straight to her feet without even blinking. Uka looked a bit confused, slowly walking to the cargo bay. "You guys are weird." she huffed.
"I…how, what?" Lawg said as if fighting back a mini-stroke. Marley turned the screen.
"See, I just opened the save files and did a copy-paste. Set the destination to itself. Bam, immortality. Why nobody has figured this out in the history of teleporter use is beyond my grasp. Just like backing up your laptop. System crashes…roll er on back. You lose the memory between your last save and the crash, or I guess in this case between the last teleport and time of death, but otherwise it’s the same basic thing. Brand new Uka. hell, you could use this to restore missing limbs, cure cancer, reverse aging." he listed.
"So we have the technology to just change our own mortality at will, return ourselves to our most healthy and prime form and age, whenever we want?" asked Duffy.
"Basically yea. I guess nobody thought of that usage till just now, or if they did they didn’t make it publicly known. People can be lazy or miss obvious details, especially if something entertaining is happening that they can watch and think about. Like TV"
"Can we bring back Tashi" asked Duffy.
"Nope, she is gone forever. It's an old model teleporter. Pattern drivers only hold enough information for 5 people, and all of us have teleported since she last has, so her information was re-written for space-storage. Harddrive space is weird, sad shit happens in a lack of harddrive space. Tashi is permanently gone and nothing in the universe can bring her back." he shrugged. Lawg sighed philosophically and struck a thinking pose.
"If only she was more important to the mission logs, or we had a slightly better teleporter capable of storing 6 people. Unfortunately she was just not significant enough to this universe to be brought back. What a cruel God that picks favorites and decides based on likeability and importance who is expendable and who can always be brought back somehow, conveniently…Like some power-hungry, twisted alien author with a dark sense of humor, just seeing what he could get away with, pushing limits and toying with our fate for entertainment." he said peering up at the canopy.
"Awe damnit." Marley barked.
"What?" asked Lawg.
"I think we sent Tashi off in my lucky shirt, the red one she was always borrowing. Double-Damnit. Well, since she was wearing it when she died of that random vague accident we keep mentioning, I guess it was really HER red-shirt in the end." he sighed. "Just when you think the loss is bad enough…you lose something a little bit extra: like when Log realizes in a few seconds that the levers he was pulling to fire our imaginary cannons at an inanimate planet, was the power breaker for the Hot-tub and the foot bubbler is totally fried from the surges." he said softly. In the background, Lawg let out a traumatic 'NeOO000ooo!' of loss and fell to his knees, as he often did regarding the Hot-tub. "Aaaaaaand there it is." Marley nodded. "A cruel universe indeed." he finished, shuffling to his bunk. Uka wandered out of the cargo bay, looking irritated and confused.
"Why is it Sunday? When did we have Saturday? Did we get time-travel memory wiped again?" she hollered angrily, stomping around. Duffy sat down Next to Roy and pondered about her life.
"What time travel memory wipe?" Duffy asked.
"Never mind." Uka diverted.
"Should we tell her she was killed and re-printed on a Teleporter?" Duffy asked.
"Tell me what?" asked Uka, walking to them and stopping with her arms crossed.
"Oh, you didn’t actually leave. That's an oversight. Um, so here is the thing…" Duffy nervously said. "You sort of…died."
"I died?" she barked with a look of shock.
"Technically yes, but Marley printed you back from the teleporter." she said pausing for retaliation.
"Hu…seriously?" she asked looking almost whimsical. "That's brilliant; I didn’t know you could do that, just clone someone from a teleporter? Wow, I owe him big time. Why does nobody else ever use it for that?" she sighed as if relieved, turning to go with a slight grin.
"So, aren't you freaked out in the least that you are now basically a clone?" asked Duffy hesitantly.
"You jackasses still don’t what species I am?" she asked. "I'm a Zeroxian. We're all clones, aside from things like hair style and color contacts, we're genetically identical. Besides, you guys go through that teleporter constantly. Every time we get on that thing it essentially kills us and prints a new one so how is this any different? You can either consider this irrelevant and move on, or accept the fact that basically every crewman of every starship in the galaxy is a series of dead and copied clones re-copied from 40th generation data. We all accept that as daily life, right?" Uka asked Duffy.
"Pretty much…" Duffy pondered. "Kinda makes space travel pretty dark when you think about it. All those animals and people just being de-materialized and killed just for the convenience of transportation instead of shuttle pods, dozens or hundreds of times in their lifetime. Makes you wonder if anyone is the same person after being reduced to raw data like that." Duffy said opening a bag of chips. Uka grinned.
"I'm already 30th generation clone, and that was before I ever left my home world. There were only about 6 originals left of us after the war, over 500 years ago and we've been copying for centuries." shrugged Uka as if it was nothing. "This is space. every endangered species does that." she scoffed as Duffy turned to Roy.
"I'm a robot…so raw data is kinda my thing anyway, therefore, I don’t find it that appalling. In addition, I am still kinda high from your stash, so not much bothers me right now." He smirked, kicking up his feet.
"You don’t have lungs." said Uka quietly under her breath.
"Don’t over-think it, Space is weird. Weird shit happens in space." he replied softly. Duffy rubbed her head and sighed.
"So in conclusion…we are all fine, the crisis was avoided and we are ready to go on another adventure and everyone is fine…except the extra crewman, Tashi, who is dead." Duffy re-capped as Uka sighed with frustration.
"There was never any Tashi, it was all a hallucination." she protested. Marley grimaced in offense.
"Tashi was our friend, I know grief takes many forms including denial, but don’t expect us all to just forget her like that. You think she was just a hallucination? You also insisted there were no worms." he said lifting his boot to show the smashed spot. "It was totally worms!" He whispered. Uka gave up trying.
"Well, since we sent all her personal belongings and therefore all evidence in the casket containing her body, I guess we will never really know." she shrugged.
"WE will know Uka…we all know." he said taking a moment of respect and returning to his bunk. Roy looked unconcerned, snacking on a red-rope.
"Well the important thing is despite death and impossible odds everyone important was miraculously saved in a predictably timely manner and all is well, a conclusion so convenient that finishing the recap is entirely optional for the next adventure." he smiled.
The ship panned dramatically into the stars as a possibly empty, possibly full casket tumbled slowly into the night. Some music played…possibly orchestra, something simple yet bold and not remotely similar enough to anything else that could be copyrighted.
-This episode dedicated in loving memory of Tashi Yokomato. The chick we all forgot. You will be fondly remembered. Maybe.