Space, 2349. Because we’re being hopelessly hopeful that something hasn’t killed off the human race by then.
The advancement of intergalactic travel has led to a burst of human pioneers all across the known universe. Their target: censorium, a classified material sought by Earth to power vast, mysterious and vaguely threatening machinery known as the Network which supports mankind’s comfortable, and therefore pretty boring, lives. Beyond the relative utopias of each solar system’s hub worlds, corporations reign supreme on the barren and desolate outer planets, their only goal to make as much profit from censorium as possible and therefore providing a nice, uncomplicated antagonist for this story. On top of that, they have enslaved many unfortunate species along the way to power their endless mining operations, and we all know how that’s going to turn out for them. Maybe there’ll be a vast rebel alliance rising up in a third part of a trilogy.
But now, we drift away from all the twittering politics of the hubs. A planet in Galaxy 00192, barren, dusty and desolate. As promised.
It’s supposed to be show, not tell, but telling worked for Star Wars.
On this unnamed planet, there is an alcoholic writer, because that works for Stephen King. He’s known only by the name of Jones, to make him slightly mysterious. Jones wakes up as one of the six suns flares through his window. There’s six suns to prove we’re in space. He rolls over and pours himself a cup of cheap vodka for breakfast, to prove he’s an alcoholic. You probably think he’s going to crumple up an almost-complete manuscript and throw it onto a mountainous pile of ideas past, but I’ve got to subvert a trope somewhere along the line. You see, Jones is a world-famous author (remembering that ‘world’ is a really small place these days, relatively speaking) and his stories do just fine.
He’s not doing very well otherwise, unfortunately. That’s because he’s an alcoholic. Haven’t you been paying attention? As he groans and struggles out of his sheets, we see that his human habitation pod (language seems to have let itself go in the future) is a total mess. Protein takeaway capsules all over the place. Dusty tops of door frames. Amazing super-powered sentient robotic vacuum cleaner hasn’t been charged up in weeks. If you look on the table by the front door you’ll notice a big stack of unpaid bills next to a display case of first edition novels and all the crude, alien-looking trophies they have won. There is a juxtaposition of fame and wealth here, to be sure, and as Jones pulls on some clothes and slumps towards this door to grab some beers from the beverage dispensary, he sees the top bill and it all catches up with him. He groans again.
Now, we’re going to stop this awful exposition and do something sensible.
----------------------------------------
Moving to this forsaken colony had turned out to be a lot more expensive than they’d said on the TV. Jones could only wait to see if they lied about their compassion too.
His oxygen bill was three months overdue today.
It would have been bad enough back on Earth, but that three month period was two hundred and twenty eight Standard Days out here.
He knew he should have plenty of credits for all his bills. But a beer was literally a tenth of the price of one on a hub world, and perversely, that had drawn ever more of his resources into his crippling obsession. He was having to intersperse his real passion with that even cheaper paint-stripper vodka these days. In Jones’ eyes, there was only one thing worse than a potato, and that was a fermented potato. He would have to get out another bestseller super quick or lose all his taste buds.
He sat at his writing module, dismissing the mouldy cups that brooded there with a sweep of his arm. He switched the machine on, and while he waited for it to boot up, he wrote the entire thing in his mind. The shorter, the better. Luckily for him, his audience had a rather limited memory.
He was making more in royalties from the very first instalment of Big Brave Miner even now than he did from any of his more recent standalones. But even so, he couldn’t bring himself to work on story 89. There were only so many shovelfuls of dirt in a dark tunnel you could describe without repeating yourself, and Jones still held himself to some personal standards. This month’s tale was to be a new property, with an idea he had been mulling over for many seconds.
Big Brave Plumber
Young Vrook needed some money, so he became a plumber. He was good at getting things out of pipes when they stopped working. He was famous. One day, the governor sent a message to Vrook saying that he had had a party in his big party pod and someone had had too much to eat. Only Vrook could save the day. It was Vrook’s biggest challenge yet...
When Big Brave Plumber was complete, he forwarded it to the translator at the publishing press, groaned, and rose to grab a beer. He saw the top bill on the table again. He groaned. His life was becoming an awful repetition of groans and forgetfulness in equal measure, but this time, he’d sort it. Even to a famous alcoholic writer, breathing was kind of a priority.
----------------------------------------
As has been established, Jones didn’t have many credits lying around, so he risked his sandskater in place of taking the public hovercraft. It would have been a very handsome vessel, if one of its skates hadn’t snapped in an incident that wasn’t entirely Jones’ fault, and if its plush seats hadn’t been ripped part in a rage little remembered, and if had but a moment of love and care since it skidded out of the hangar last month. It wasn’t just a sandskater, but an amphibious spacecraft, the only one of its kind on this whole nameless planet. Maybe if his talk went sour he’d just get in and fly off to somewhere pleasant with oxygen in its atmosphere. There had to be somewhere like that. Somewhere.
For now, he wavered his way down the dune, out through the gate, and out into the masses in the main town. One of the mines had collapsed last week, killing two hundred myrings and stubbing the human foreman’s toe, and the streets were thronged with bored and starving workers. It took him more than an hour to reach the governor’s palace, in which time Big Brave Plumber had been fully translated, uploaded to Myr Gold Central with an epic spanner-festooned cover of the publisher’s choosing, and reached number one in the weekly story chart within forty-two minutes.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
He got across the plaza and past the oxygen screen unmolested. Then the myring doorman was gobbling and cooing in his ear, and the crowds descended like mosquitoes. With the recent disaster, there was an approximately one in two chance that he was about to be mugged and trampled by the little men, so he was rather relieved when he made out the gleaming panels at the ends of the tangle of snake-like arms twisting all about him. He signed as many signatures as he dared, and then he fled into the bigger danger of the palace. The doorman accompanied him all the way to the office door. He had two mouths, four nostrils and four eyes, unless Jones had been seeing double these past six years, and all subtlety of expression was lost on him. But one tentacle jabbed ceaselessly at the little screen by his midriff. Vrook’s spanner glowed and winked from the surface. “Thanks,” said Jones into the incomprehensible face. “I hope you enjoyed it.” And he really did.
----------------------------------------
The meeting was ruined by a monumental coincidence. It was bad enough that Mrs. Raleigh, the old ruler, had been rotated out by the anti-corruption policymakers of Excavero. He’d seen the branded cruiser lying just beyond the palace all the way from his hill, and chose to forget it in favour of an hour of blissful ignorance. Mrs. Raleigh was a speciesist old hag, and so sympathetic to Jones merely for being human. He could have used a little discrimination right now. But he knew the sharp-edged form folded into position over her desk today would judge him more on his merit. He had before.
“Mr. White,” Jones stammered. “We meet again.”
“Mr. Jones,” said the critic. He looked his guest up and down appraisingly, as he had once done his manuscripts. “We do, as you say, meet again.”
Jones sat down heavily in the chair opposite. He needed a drink. He wasn’t going to get one.
Instead of a manuscript, Mr. White had Jones’ appointment file on the desk in front of him. He leered over it for a long moment. “You come here seeking an extension of the deadline on your O2 supply. If you were still on Earth, squandering your time on those abysmal facsimiles of literature, all your debts could be consolidated into one easy loan. Or that’s what the adverts said.” He glanced meaningfully across the room and then back at the sorry figures that had been presented to him. “Here, however, Excavero policy is clear. Special consideration may be given to debtors of ‘significance to the censorium extraction, purification and/or exportation processes’.” The glance became a glare. “Here is my understanding of the facts. A failed author, who has persistently proven himself quite incapable of publication on his home planet, flings himself as far aware from his shameful efforts as he can, to prey on poor lifeforms equally incapable of identifying his work as utter drivel.”
Jones reclined, a fraction of a sneer on his lips. “So why are you here?”
Mr. White waved a hand between them. “I am not the one requiring scrutiny. I’m going to be honest with you, Mr. Jones. I was quite hoping to never again cross paths with a money-grubbing parasite of your ilk, especially out here. I only hope you’ve moved on. Please, tell me you’ve progressed at least a few steps. Nothing else about that hero electrician who’s summoned by the president because he’s the only one that can fix the world-saving computer?”
Jones’ silence was answer enough. The governor leant forward, fingers pressed white together, eager to pounce.
“Tell me one more thing. The myring lap up those words you excrete because they’ve got nothing in their intellectual history to compare it to. But you do. All the greats - Hemingway, Tolstoy, Shakespeare... how can you read their works of unbridled beauty and spout out those incredible scribblings?”
And, as White spoke, Jones found his answer. He was barely listening, his mind wandering off to the garblings of the doorman, and the crowds outside. He didn’t understand much about the people he shared his home with, but there was something in their interaction that he did.
“Because I can move them,” he replied.
----------------------------------------
Unfortunately for Jones, the governor was less moved. He had generously provided seven days in which to pay up. His next royalties came in ten.
The situation called for a good drink.
He laughed as he slapped the demand down onto the table. The paper pyre tilted, toppled to the crumby carpet in all directions. The awards stood resolute in their cabinet.
He’d never wrote, or moved, for the money. Not even the fame. He’d convinced himself of that by the fifth can. He chuckled as he looked up at the little vents in the corners of his pod which would soon run dry. He could wander the streets for a while, have a long, good nosey in the previously uninteresting administrative buildings by the palace. That would give him another good twelve hours, before his public respiration permit expired. It was supposed to be a painless way to go.
Blissfully, he drank some more. The mess didn’t matter when it blurred away to nothing. It did a bit more when he rose and nearly broke his neck on a plastic bag halfway to the writing module. But not a lot. He’d been thinking of his final retort to that jagged man who’d orchestrated his slow demise across twenty years and two planets.
He found the button, eventually. The module whirred into life. It was time for his magnum opus.
There once was a nasty group of people who ruled over everyone in the world. They left big brave miners alone, but sent the tall thin man to punish those who made them no money. Laughter and inspiration meant nothing to them. One day, Moork fell on hard times. The man came to claim him...
----------------------------------------
Even the softest of scrabblings at his door made Jones’ head roar. He groaned and turned to pour his breakfast. It wasn’t there. Neither was he.
He picked himself up from the floor and crossed to the door, which was now shaking violently against its seal. It was only when he noticed the smoke obscuring the afternoon suns above his excited fans that he remembered The Tall Thin Man.
The company buildings were in ruins. The police were gone. Their sandskaters were black outlines upon the hard-packed earth.
The palace was deserted. They led him through the labs and prisons, the office where he had received his sentence only yesterday. The copies of his bills fuelled raging bonfires at the centre of the devastation. His own writings flashed triumphantly on all sides as they watched him search through the rubble.
He found the tall thin man in the hangar at the rear of the building. He had been running for his cruiser when they got him. Jones couldn’t believe what those rubbery little limbs could do to a human skull.
The cruiser’s hatch hung open on one hinge. He left the myrings by their prize and followed the fuzzy voices to the cockpit.
Jones listened to the panicked questions on the intercom for some time. Instinctively, his eyes wandered the hazy sky, but the promised fleet would take several days to arrive. The dispatcher said so; he was instructed to hold on until then.
He would. He asked what to look for, how many, and what they would do when they got there. The commander on the other end was happy to help. Jones was clearly human.
Back in the hangar, he pushed through the throngs towards his vehicle. Then, the gravity of the day took hold and he doubled back to pick whatever skater he damn well wanted. The myring clung to him like he was a king. Perhaps he was. But there were things to do first.
He picked the fastest craft left standing and sped off for home. He’d have a glass of water first. A gulp of free air. Then, there was a sequel to write.