There are moments that define you. Brief snatches of time that remain frozen in your memory forever. Regret. Slivers of hope. That mishmash of pride and mortification when you conjured the courage to ask the prom queen to dance and then she, not her date, punched your lights out. This is what you remember when other people ask when did it start? or what led you to greatness? or at what point did you stop looking where you put your feet, and decide to step off a cliff?

Here. It’s right here.

***

I’d like to meet the asshole who decided it’s okay to call somebody while they’re hibernating. That’s the whole point of hibernating, isn’t it? To not talk to anybody? I mean, why the hell did I drop 50k to take an eight-month nap if I wanted to get interrupted?

“Answer,” I snarl at the blinking yellow light that appears in the middle of my dream. It obscures the strippers and the cotton candy. The call connects with no video. This is okay, because the strippers are likely sexier than whoever is sticking their nose into my subconscious. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Rick Stern?”

Male, human, polite. “Yeah, who’re you?”

“This is Paul Chippers.”

I’m confused. Quintillionaire media moguls don’t call washups like me. They have people to do that. Hell, their people have people, and those people have people. There’s supposed to be a whole army of people’s people between me and this guy. It’s for my protection, and not the other way around. Economic titans like Paul Chippers play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. He’s in a realm where us mere mortals get trampled as a reward for standing around and looking dumb.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” he says.

I open my eyes and find the ceiling of my sleeping tube a few inches away. Yep, I’m in the same place as when I fell asleep. Hotel rooms have been getting smaller for centuries – hard to believe people used to get their own bed, bathroom, and a bureau for their shit. Nowadays, you get a sleeping tube and, if you’re in a real posh joint, a complimentary breath mint. I look down and see the tops of the transparent air bladders buffeting my torso. I’d lift my head to get a better look, but there’s another one covering my scalp like a full helmet. It feels like my face is stuffed in a nylon balloon that has helpfully moved clear of my mouth and nose and jaw, so I can communicate with the outside world. Completely unnecessary, what with cranial implants allowing two-way communication without speaking, but over the centuries of providing hibernation services, the SleepPlex discovered a sharp increase in customer satisfaction when people didn’t awaken to the sensation of being smothered.

I’m on a short hop. Eight months. I think sleep data and a whole slew of it slides in from the left-hand side of my vision. Transmitted directly into my visual cortex, the images and charts display in such a way that my brain thinks it’s floating about six inches in front of my face. This is a little disconcerting considering the wall of the tube is closer than that. Years of use has acclimated me to the weird sensation of seeing things beyond the edges of physical spaces. I glance at the charts that depict various bits of trivia about my sleep experience and focus in on the timer that shows when I’m supposed to wake up. I’ve been asleep six months. A lot can happen in six months.

I can hear Chippers breathing on the other end of the line. Which means he’s not using a cranial implant like I am. I wonder if he’s using an ear bud or he’s got a special person standing next to him who does nothing but hold one of those phone things I’ve seen in historical vids “What’s this proposition?” I ask him.

“I want you to put together a team for me. I need a coach.”

“Are you talking spaceball?” I ask.

“That’s right. The Cup. The Andosians are in a building year.”

“So are we. ‘Cept we’re building up a general population instead of a team. Have you been watching the news? There’s a war going on.” Not that I really know anything on the subject. If I were the kind of person who trolled the public news streams, I’d know all about it. I’d be sick with information. The kind of helplessness you get from data overload. When you glut yourself with all the news reports, all the firsthand accounts, even the rumored technical specifications of the Edochian mothership that popped into Sol earlier this year– oh, it’s 2857, in case you’re wondering – and blew up Earth, and then laid waste to the completely surprised human Fleet assembled around the planet. So here I am on Pronos, as far away from all that bullshit as I can get, sitting in near-suspended animation and waiting for the universe to calm down.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Truce, my friend,” Chippers says. “There’s a truce. In most places, anyway. Somebody’s decided that the Spaceball Cup would be a great effort towards normalizing relations with the other races.”

“And I see that somebody has no idea what spaceball is,” I observe. Are we talking about the same sport?”

“Yes.”

“Spaceball.”

“Yes.”

“Where the object is to maul the other team.”

“Isn’t it to score points?” Chippers asked.

I snort. “Yeah, but only after the mauling. Scoring points is like cuddling after you’re done fucking somebody. I don’t do it because I like cuddling, but because if I do it convincingly enough, I get to have sex again. Same thing with spaceball. If I score enough points, people think I’m great. Then I get to beat the shit outta somebody else.”

“I’ve never heard anybody explain it that way before.”

“I’m pretty good with the metaphors.”

“That’s great! Get our spirits up in a time of darkness, let everybody know that humans don’t quit, ever!”

For fuck’s sake, somebody save me from this guy. “Find someone else.”

“Everyone has turned me down.”

My arm itches. I have an overwhelming desire to scratch, amplified by my immobilization. I try to ignore it and ask, “What about Lester Bimms?”

“Dead.”

“Bummer.” It’s not. Lester’s a dickhead. Was. “What happened?”

“He stabbed a referee at an exhibition game before the war. With a straw, of all things. He died in prison, something to do with food poisoning.”

Lester only drank from an iron straw with holes in it. He said if he could suck his fruit juice through that, he’d have lungs powerful enough to scream his players across the goal line. An interesting idea considering the same players operated in the vacuum of space. It didn’t shock me that he’d tried to kill a bee – we called refs that because of the yellow and black blinking stripes on their exosuits. Bee harm was everyone’s wet dream. “What about Plono Reeck? He’s a good coach.”

“The Andosians passed a law prohibiting their citizens from playing or coaching for the opposing races. Plono almost beat them during the last Cup tournament. He scares them a little bit, I think.”

Plono would have won, too, if his quarterback, a wiry young man from the Rim Colonies, hadn’t lost his bearings and dropped out of the pocket into the path of the Andosian linebackers. The largest intact pieces they found after that spectacular collision were his exosuit’s gloves and a thigh plate.

I rattle off five more names. Chippers has answers for all of them. “I’m retired,” I try.

“You’re only forty.”

“I got banned from the League. The bees won’t let me near an arena.”

“But you weren’t arrested. You didn’t do any time for it.”

“Only ‘cuz everyone agreed the guy had it coming. I pleaded temporary insanity and won.”

“That was on primetime. Fifty trillion people saw you shoot him.”

“The fucker was stinging my guys every chance he got,” I say, referring to the real reason we called spaceball referees bees. Penalties involve getting shot with low-yield EMP rifles that temporarily immobilize the offending player. I’d rather be sodomized by a Brakkan tiger than be helpless in a spaceball arena. Brakkan tigers have three dicks. Barbed. “Even the other team thought he was out of control.”

“You did sleep with his wife.”

“I didn’t have a choice. Veeni women are sirens, and I’m not just saying that. They croon at you and it’s all over.”

“What was it like?”

“I still have nightmares about it. Look, I can’t coach.”

“What if I told you I got the Spaceball Referee Association to lift the ban?”

“I’d say you were snorting hooda dust.”

Chippers laughs. It’s fake laughter, the kind when the person is offended but they don’t want to let you think that they’re offended. “Well?” he asks, “What would you say if I got them to lift the ban?”

“The SRA’s letter was pretty explicit. Permanent ban.”

“It’s lifted, if you coach for me.”

I nearly disconnect right then. Some little voice in the back of my head whispers dreams of greatness and glory. You’d think I’d have learned by now to ignore that voice. It’s usually the one that gets me into trouble.

I try to tap a finger, but my hands are engulfed in air bladders that keep my arms stable during slumber. I still dream, and dreaming people tend to thrash around. So, I settle for flicking the inside of my teeth with my tongue. I look back at the sleep data and see today’s date. This cycle’s season starts in two weeks. We must be talking about next cycle. He couldn’t possibly be thinking of this cycle. That’s crazy. “This is for next season, right?”

“Nope. This season.”

“Holy shit, I’m the last person on your list, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“How much am I going to get paid for being at the bottom?”

“Five hundred grand.”

“You’re joking! Spaceball coaches earn at least five million for fielding a team!”

“Most coaches don’t cost four million in bribes to get reinstated.”

“Oh.”

“Your contract includes fifty million if you win the Cup.”

Winning the Cup is a very big ‘if’. I’m sure Chippers wouldn’t be sticking his nose into things – media mogul and all. Still, I don’t need some manager trying to tell me what to do. “I run the team my way.”

“Done. Just win.”

“Support?”

“No expense will be spared.”

“Except my salary, of course.”

“That’s the deal.”

“I’ll need a mobile practice field. Full size, not one of those half-courts.”

“Won’t be an issue. When and where do you need it?”

I think about it. Then I make the first in a long string of shoot-from-the-hip decisions. I tell him where I want the field.

There’s a pause, and then Chippers laughs. Hard. Real this time. “Oho! If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, this will be a Cup Tournament to remember! To be on the safe side, I’ll arrange a security contingent to go with the field.”

Even though I know the season starts in less than two weeks, I smile. Too little time to put together a team, train it, win twelve regular season games and reach, let alone win, the Cup Tournament. I smile all the same. It’s an opportunity I’d be an idiot to pass up. “Okay, Mr. Chippers, you got yourself a coach.”

“Excellent! Welcome to Chipper’s Clippers, Rick.”

“Wait, what? That’s not the name of the team, is it?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Jesus Christ.”