A roach eyes the half-raised gangway. Its home is gone, destroyed by the shuttle's landing. In his grip is a piece of thatch which made his home's roof. The roach is not a roach, but the system calls him such, and the protocol of the stewards is to call him such; in the trillions of lines scrawled across the vessel's bloating codebase, this man is considered a variable—the variable's name is roach_1.

A new home can be made for roach_1, and new is okay; new is common to a critter. It skitters up the paneling, finding purchase in grooves the size of a hand. Even with the thermal-protective padding wrapped around his palms, the neon logo is hot to the touch, but it doesn't blister.

He keeps his face pulled back. When he comes close, the stubble on his jaw stinks as the ends begin to smoke. Roach_1, like the others, such as DeadRoach_24 and DeadRoach_25, were warned of the vessel's arrival. Like DeadRoach_3, it wasn't feebleness of mind or body which kept him in that dug-a-hole—it was grit and intention.

He pulls himself up the neon logo of a spacecraft. Below the logo, the company's slogan, in humming red, reads, "providing homes on the frontier of brighter tomorrows."

To a roach, each letter is the distance of a tennis court, and the courts are smoldering. But if one reaches the 'O' in the word providing, and if one can pull themselves up and stand on the platforms within, one may leap and just about grab the ramp's edge. This would let a roach get inside the home, inside the vessel.

The marketers did not consider the bugs at any point, nor did they consider the journey a bug must take across this mouthful made tangible. However, it would be a lie to state that no one in the employment of Ulysses Corp thinks of these buggish stowaways; there are systems, hidden, that the programmers take pride in developing, though many of their minds may be wiped. One such is an extension of the extermination-system: a network of heat-rays takes great interest in the little intruder.

The device rises from the metal plating like a head from a foxhole and scans the enemy. It spins at a speed the critter can't quite comprehend. The critter cracks. Roach_1 blackens. He pops and falls back to Earth from which it came, insides roasted and whining.

If it had had a choice, it never would've been forced to climb such perilous walls. If it had had a second choice, it would be one of the chosen humans inside, facing the warm consequences of 'good health' and learning exactly what 'good health' means for an employee of Ulysses Corp and Ownings.

But it has no choice; the Earthling falls into a pile with others of its likeness.

The camera doesn't tilt. The drone rises from the pile and up the slogan, putting the logo in a perfected frame. It rises until it goes through a little hole in the gangway, until it lands on the face of Alice Majordomo, Chief Steward. She backs up until her body to her boots can be seen.

"That's the last roach," Alice says. "Everyone, clap for Dead-Roach-Underscore-Sixty-Three's attempt."

Inside the chatroom, clapping emoticons blaze the chat-box. She does a faux-clap, more in the air of politeness than enthusiasm, and she eyes the documents on her cart. When it leans, it catches the wind, making many of the documents scatter.

Her lips press into a pinkened line. She takes a breath. "And as we reach the end of today's program, I have prepared you all a poem."

She puts her hands on the drone's sides. When she tries to move the sphere at first, the drone doesn't move. It looks at her with its single eye, and she looks back with a grimace—the drone lets it move her.

She sets the drone over her cart and backs away a distance. "Woe for the old plane—" She grunts, then leans backward until her back cracks. The microphone catches the sound; vomit emoticons fill the chat-box.

"Woe for the old plane."

"So forgotten and irrelevant that only section thirty-three made a bid."

"Picked clean, even of Human resources."

She waits. Her viewership decreases. No one gifts her a merit, nor a donation or a redeemed reward. The chat slows or they discuss matters irrelevant to the stream.

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"And that's all for this broadcast," she says. She speed-walks to the drone and mashes the button on its spine, where a Human would have an optic-nerve. "I hope everyone enjoyed. Have a nice dinner."

When a drone's recorder is turned off, the system takes three seconds to cease the recording.

In those three seconds, she removes her helmet. She puts the helm on the ground and backs away. The last image the stream sees, which becomes the thumbnail of the stream, is of her: mid-sprint, foot raised, face becoming a monstrosity.

The stream doesn't see her miss the kick, nor do they see her land on her back. The crick she popped minutes prior finds a place back home. She strains on the floor, but it doesn't pop again. She groans and moans and when she rolls over, she sees the conductor on her screen.

She sits upright and puts the helmet back on, seeing that trucker-hat swivel within the square. The helmet tilts and she adjusts the angle, then steadies the frame with both hands.

"Ma'am?" She puts a thumb beneath her shoulder-blade, trying to both hold herself up and pop the tension in her muscles with what little subtleness she can. "It's a little hard to see and hear out here with the big doors open and the air, sorry. Can you repeat what you said?"

The conductor grunts. She says with all the huskiness of the liquored conductors, "I didn't say anything, Majordomo."

"Right." Alice is silent. The conductor says nothing. Alice puts one hand on the ground behind her. "I ended the broadcast, so I'm just doing last checks on the entrance is all."

"We discussed you doing last checks in front of the camera. To raise merits."

"Ah." She takes a second. "Everything was running a little long and we couldn't scan the new recruits as they boarded, so I wanted to get to the sanitation bays to do some quick group-scans."

The conductor nods. "There are thirty-six stowaways aboard."

"Oh? Were you all able to scan them?"

"We were."

Alice smiles, but the smile falls. "What do you want for their identities?"

An eye fills the portrait, then the conductor rolls her chair back. There's a young man in her lap. She tightens the mask covering his face and zips the hole over his mouth. She throws him to the ground.

Alice takes a breath. "Then what's the directive?"

"Find all thirty-six," she says. "Tell your people to record your interrogations. Send us those when you find them. When we dock, we'll report the full list to the registrars."

Alice bites the inside of her cheek. "You could also tell me their identities now. We'll still conduct the full interrogations."

"Ain't up to me," the conductor says. "Union rules—"

Alice taps a button and ends the call. "Got our station drifting around like some tour guide for history buffs—there's more to the Milky Way—we need an onboarding program, but all of our tips get split with the conductors—"

She slaps the drone, and the drone twirls and bobs in the air before entering the same position as if nothing ever touched it.

"Alicent!"

"Ma'am?" Hands to sides, back straight, chest out, chin up. Her uniform is weighted with grime. She wears it as if it is laundered upon hearing her full name. The conductor is back on screen.

The tip of the trucker-hat leans, revealing sweat and a forehead. "Hm. You're griping. Are you recording?"

"No, ma'am! I accidentally ended the call, ma'am!"

The conductor takes a breath. "Liar, but carry on, steward."

The portrait of the fat woman disappears. Alice returns to her griping. She complains of the quality of her new recruits to the stewardship. She drags the cart, chassis scraping the floor. She loads it onto the conveyor, where it falls to the side, then she sends it away, cursing it all the way down the belt.

"Even some viable trades," she says. And she speaks on how she can't even get some half-decent tint modules, and of how many recruits and stewards she would have to trade for one. "But maybe we'll become the talk of the Milky Way," she says. "We got the last Earthlings. Everyone in the solar system still remembers Earth. Everyone thinks about Earth."

The big, red button by the entrance gives way to her palm. Minutes pass; she says, "who gives a fuck about Earth"; the request to close the vessel is validated.

The gangway rises with a groan. The doors puff and slam and clang. Locks click, click, and click. In the metal, she faces her reflection. She puts on her helmet of chrome, rust, and wire. Her merit-counter counts a two-hundred, and she curses some more. She sees her reflection through the lowered visor, and she is covered in letters and numbers and signs and symbols.

She swaps to the music module, but a notification splashes the screen: there's an issue in the sanitation bay.