Everyone calls me Bones. Not because I have an emaciated body and look like a skeleton. It isn’t even an ironic name for someone with a muscle-packed body. It was all because of a stupid comment I made to my friend Jim in high school. He did something foolish, and I blurted out, ‘dammit, Jim!’ and I became a Star Trek joke I didn’t even understand.

For the record, I’m not skinny. My body is an athletic build that is more on the lean side. I have dark brown hair that is kept short and golden brown eyes. I’m average looking but confident enough to approach most girls and usually succeed in dating them.

Intelligence is where I succeeded in life, but becoming a space pirate might be the ultimate stain that contends against that thought. Now that’s an odd twist in life. My nickname became my pirate name, and it worked. The ship I stole to start my career, the one currently sinking into the depths of this hellhole of an aquatic planet, was Uncharted Waters. Its name was on the hull and the last part of the ship to drop below the water. I had the pleasure of watching my home and all my possessions sink into oblivion.

That’s irony for you. I’m floating adrift on an uncharted aquatic planet, in uncharted waters, while my ship of the same name slips away. Not even I could have seen that twist coming, but with my luck, I should have guessed. The name wasn’t sentimental or poetic, but fucking destiny.

The only life-saving grace was that the old escape pod still worked. Oddly, it was still stocked with enough food to last me a week if I stretched it out. It had a water purifier, so I didn’t have to worry about dying of thirst anytime soon—unless the solar panels were ruined. The door to the pod can be closed during bad weather, so it protects me from the elements. But there was one rub, the pod had the most uncomfortable reclining chair permanently anchored to the floor and barely enough room to move around it.

To make matters worse, I salvaged many parts to keep Uncharted Waters running. The only other device was a 3D printer that was barely large enough to print a coin. It was older than my ship—hell, it was older than my grandpa.

“Still alive, Bonesy?” A crackling voice came through a radio I didn’t even know worked. Calling it working might be a stretch because it could receive, but I’d salvaged the rest of it. There was no way to reply to that bastard.

“So it was Blackeye that did me in. If I get out of here, I’ll shove your ass into the backend of fucking star and watch you burn. See how you survive that, bitch!”

“He can’t hear you,” a mechanical voice came from a metallic device into my right shoulder. I bought a cybernetic implant with a companion AI to help me hack and break into secure places. Oh, the AI is a defective asshole, and I already beat the shit out of the man who installed it. Twice.

“I’m aware of that, Jim.” Yeah, I named the AI after my high school friend because I was drunk and thought I was funny. I’m not.

“Then please shut up. I’m sleeping.”

“Fuck you, computers don’t sleep.”

“Computer? How fucking old are you, grandpa?”

“Don’t think I won’t rip you out of my body. Try subsisting on the shit in this endless fucking ocean.”

“There is a lot of pollution. Where did all the floating debris come from?” Jim asked. I perked up for the first time and found it odd. “Guess this is where all the trash in the universe ends up.”

“You fucking with me?” I snarled and reached out to grab the stupid device from my shoulder. All I wanted to do was rip out its ocular device, an orb at the end of a flexible cord that could extend or retract to look around. I’m not claiming it was the best choice of cybernetic implants, but it was all I could afford.

Ripping out the orb would blind the fucking bastard, and I’d like to see how it talked shit then.

“W-wait!” Jim shouted. “What’s that?”

The orb bobbed in a particular direction, and I turned my head to look. During my lapse of attention, Jim retracted itself to safety. “Hehe, dummy.”

“Whose the dummy? There really is something there.” I pointed at a floating platform that might have been wood, but I wasn’t sure. Ducking inside, I grabbed a rope from the supplies I felt were too useless to salvage. One end I tied to a welded pad-eye hook on the outside of the rescue pod. The other was tied around my waist before I dove into the water. Swimming was a luxury for most space pirates, but I was on the swim team during high school. Something Jim likes to ridicule me endlessly, but now who’s laughing?

It only took a few minutes to reach the platform, and it surprised me how high out of the water it floated. Swimming around it, I tried to ascertain what it was but couldn’t figure it out. It reminded me of those floating docks in the middle of a lake used as swimming platforms by kids. It had enough space on it that five people could lie on it side by side without touching elbows.

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“Two-by-three-meter platform, if you wanted dimensions. Half a meter from the surface to the waterline,” Jim told me.

“Guess you aren’t useless after all,” I muttered back. All four sides had slats with a five-centimeter (2-inch) gap. It made it easy for me to climb aboard. “Do you know what’s keeping it afloat?”

“A type of foam. I’m unfamiliar with the chemical composition, and nothing like it exists in my database. If you can take a sample of it—oh, right, your ship sank.”

“Fuck you, Jim. That’s way too soon.”

“Fine. Anyway, the slats are made of polymer resin, which is highly water resistant. Not a bad find because you don’t have to mope around inside your smelly pod.”

Nodding, I sat at the edge of the platform and used the rope to pull it toward the pod. Honestly, with the way the water moved, I wasn’t sure if the platform moved or the pod did. Either way, they were coming together.

Once the two bumped together, I used a utility knife and cut the rope. The platform had a metal frame where the fake boards were attached, creating the flat surface I was sitting on. The odd thing was on each side of the frame, there were three holes that looked like handholds. Two near the corners and one in the center, and based on eyeballing the size of the slats, I felt those boards would fit into the gap almost perfectly. I wasn’t sure about the design purpose, but I used two corner holes on one side and tied a rope from it to the pad-lock hooks on either side of the pod door. Since the pod was like an upside-down funnel, the bottom part was the widest and had a rubber bumper all around it. This was for both flotation and protection, like that used by boats tied up against a dock. In this case, it’d act like a cushion between his pod and the raft, so they didn’t slam into each other when the water became choppy.

After securing it, I found that the entry to the pod was only slightly higher than the platform. The distance between the two was too much to step across, but jumping wasn’t hard. Worse case, I took the small step down to the rubber bumper and then stepped into the pod. This could work.

“Now what?” Jim asked.

“I’m going to sit down and cultivate. Maybe gain some superpowers and leave this planet.”

“Oh, really? That’s a good idea.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Superpowers don’t exist.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Are you sure you are a fucking AI?” I shouted, but my radio crackled from inside the pod as I was about to go on my rant.

“C’mon, Bones! Stop ignoring me. I only scuttled your ship, and if you give me what you stole, I promise I’ll buy you a new one. That old piece of shit needed to be junked years ago.”

“That’s my home, asshole!”

“He still can’t hear you.”

“Fuck off—wait. Did he say I stole something?”

“He did.”

“When was the last time I pirated anything, and what was it?” I asked Jim. The AI recorded all that and even kept track of all my sales. The problem was, I hadn’t stolen anything in months. “And scuttle? That fucker blasted apart my engine as I was heading toward hyperspace. The fact I survived was pure luck. My ship should have been destroyed.”

“It was…” Jim reminded me, and all I could do was grit my teeth.

“In theory, he would’ve only scuttled you if you weren’t going into hyperspace. Your last pirate mission was Wayward Seven Station, and we couldn’t sell anything. Mostly low-grade resources, which you angrily tossed into the back of your cargo bay.”

“Most?”

“There was a cybernetic eye. You kept it with you and claimed you could sell it to One-Eyed Jack. It might be in the pod because that’s where you hid small valuables. Your rainy day loot.”

“Think that’s what Blackeye wants?”

“I don’t know. My calculations keep flipping.”

“Dammit, Jim! What does that mean?”

“One data set says the chance is 70%. The other says 25.”

“Why twenty-five?”

“Because I found nothing out of the ordinary after I scanned the eye. It’s a normal cybernetic device. Street value is maybe 2,000 creds. That’s not enough for Blackeye to scuttle your ship and offer to buy you a new one. The 70% chance is because, as far as I can tell, after analyzing all your scores, you suck at being a pirate.”

“Dammit! Shut up and get to the point.”

“Okay. Nothing in there is worth anything near the value of your ship. Also, if you remember, you got wasted with Blackeye before your last score. He didn’t exhibit any weirdness or greed during that time, and he’s easier to read than the Uncharted Waters you painted on the side of your ship. Hmm, actually, not so easy to read now that it’s at the bottom of the ocean.”

“I’m really going to fucking kill you,” I told my precious little AI in a soft voice. Jim finally realized I wasn’t mentally stable, and his jokes stopped.

“Maybe there was something else in the resources we thought were garbage, or he wants that eye.”

I listened to Jim’s analysis and frowned. There really wasn’t anything I’d jacked that was worth scuttling my ship over. Even worse, Blackeye didn’t intend to negotiate, which means he was after something and didn’t want me talking about it.

“Did I take anything from him the last time we drank?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t bother watching your debauchery, and you were making out with an old hag that was at least twice your age. It was gross. So I went offline to do an update.”

Fucking die! I growled in my head and barely held back my rage.

“A ‘no’ would suffice.”

“Aww, don’t be mad. What was that Douglas Adams quote you always liked? Something like ‘Far out in the uncharted waters—’”

“Stop. Don’t butcher the quote. And it wasn’t a literal meaning, which is the situation I am in.”

“All I’m saying is you can just put your thumb out and hitchhike your way to another planet.”

“I’m convinced you’re an idiot. A defunct AI. A bane. My punishment for the sins of all my lives combined,” I grumbled. But Jim knew me better than I knew myself. Distracting me with one of my favorite stories, which was one reason I became a pirate. I even wanted to name my ship Uncharted Backwaters. Weirdly, no ship registry would allow it, pirate or otherwise. Sighing, I laid back on the platform and closed my eyes. Before I knew it, I was sleeping soundly under the warm sun.