Space Junk

by Andrew Bixler

  Trembling and whipping her tail, she gingerly carries the cube back up to the cockpit to await the debt collectors’ arrival. She gazes at the strange object in a half-hearted attempt to decipher its secrets, but to her it just looks like another piece of space junk.

  To calm her nerves, she reaches underneath the dash and grabs an Ol’ Guard from the fridge. “This I understand.” With a few big gulps, she downs half of it and belches, “BUAAA.” When she’s finished, she grabs another one, and by the time the debt collectors show up, she’s polishing off her fourth beer.

  Her phone rings, and she clumsily answers, slurring her words, “Who is-s, hic, this?”

  “It’s Steve. We’re outside.”

  She squints at the nondescript, yet kind of familiar-looking man, and says, “What are you doing, hic, outside? You can’t, hic, breathe out there.”

  “We came for the black gold,” Steve says.

  “Black gold?” Daizy recognizes the words but can’t quite make sense of them. “Ohhh, this, hic, thing.” She reaches for the cube, and it slips off the dash and crashes to the floor.

  “Ahh!” Steve wails.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry, hic. Please, stop worrying. It’s all going to be, hic, fine.” She picks up the cube and wipes it on her undersuit. “Aww, hic, man! I got dirt on my new suit.”

  “So are you going to give us the black gold, or what?” Steve asks.

  “Am I going to, hic, give you the black gold?” Daizy repeats. “Why should I do, hic, that?”

  Steve groans and wipes his hand down his face. “Because we’re going to erase Adam Jones’s debt – like in the deal!”

  “Oh right, right, hic, right,” Daizy says. “But I have to know it’s done before I, hic, hand it over.”

  “How do we know you’ll hold up your end?” Steve asks.

  “That’s a fair, hic, point,” Daizy says. “I’ll let you on board so you can, hic, see it.”

  “All right,” Steve says, hesitating. “Dave will be right over.”

  “What? Why me?” Dave whines, from somewhere off-screen.

  “Because one of us has to watch the ship, and I made the deal,” Steve argues.

  “Meet me at the back, hic, door,” Daizy instructs.

  She creeps past Adam and his grandpa with the slow, unsteady gait that results from being ‘Ol Guard drunk and into the cargo bay. Her legs wobble as she navigates the back steps, but she manages to conquer them.

  She lets Dave in through the airlock, and he tugs his helmet off, revealing himself to be just as dopey looking as his partner. With some hesitance, she hands him the black gold, and he turns it over in his hands.

  “Hmph…” He wrestles his phone, an embarrassingly outdated glass brick, from his pocket and faces it toward the cube. “What do you think?”

  Steve virtually scrutinizes the object for a moment and finally says, “I’m still not convinced.”

  “What do you, hic, mean?” Daizy demands.

  “Well, we’ve never seen it before,” Steve says. “How do we know this isn’t another trick, like at The Foreman’s?”

  “I don’t even know what, hic, you’re talking about.” Her head starts to spin, and she pauses for a moment to regain her balance. “That was Adam, not me, hic. That is, hic, the real black gold. You know it’s on this, hic, ship, and neither of you has ever seen anything, hic, like it.”

  “What does it do?” Dave asks.

  “Yeah, can you give us a demonstration?” Steve says.

  “I, hic, have no idea what it does,” Daizy moans. “For all I know, it doesn’t do, hic, anything.”

  “If it really is so valuable, then why are you giving it up so easy?” Steve asks.

  “Give me a, hic, break,” Daizy complains. “You know, hic, what? Forget it. I’m sure I can find somebody, hic, else who wants it.” She snatches the cube out of Dave’s hand.

  “Hold on a second,” Steve says. “You got a deal. Go ahead, Dave.”

  “Are you sure?” Dave asks.

  “What other option do we have?” Steve says. “The odds of us having jobs after this are slim to nil anyway. We might as well take the one chance we’ve got.”

  Dave shrugs, taps his phone, and holds it up so Daizy can see the screen. It shows Adam’s name next to a number so high she does a double and, just to be absolutely sure she isn’t hallucinating, triple take.

  Dave taps the screen, “There.”

  “Uh.” Daizy points at a message asking him to confirm.

  “Ack,” Dave complains, tapping it again. “Okay, there.”

  And like that, the long red number next to Adam’s name becomes a neutral black zero.

  “You’re not going to, hic, reverse it as soon as you leave, right?” she asks.

  “Nah,” Dave says. “That would be a bigger job than you could possibly imagine. I’d quit way before I’d put myself through that.”

  Daizy hands him the cube and drunkenly laughs. “Then it’s all, hic, yours.”

  “Our new friend Adam Jones is in big trouble, you guys!” Pants announces. “The Foreman is going to hurt his grandpa unless he brings her the black gold, but we can’t let it fall into her hands. We need your help on this one. The fate of the universe depends on it. Meet us at Ferd’s after school. We know the starline is expensive but we got a great group rate. Just tell them Pants sent you! We’ll fuel up—”

  “And eat up.” The One sticks his head into the frame, and Pants shoves him away.

  “Remember, we can’t do this without you. Tomorrow, you’ll all become official members of Pants Team Pink!” She holds her fingers out in a ‘V,’ and the video ends.

  Todd glances at the time and taps his phone to start the message over. The hour of departure is fast approaching, and he’s getting anxious. He would have closed up a while ago if it wasn’t for the little old lady leisurely perusing the bargain box.

  “Can I help you find anything?” Todd yells, craning his neck to see her.

  “No thank you, just browsing,” a wizened voice calls from behind the shelves.

  He slumps onto the counter and stuffs a Moon Pie in his mouth as he watches the second hand tick on a dusty antique Munsters clock hanging on the wall. If he doesn’t close soon, he might miss the whole thing.

  “Excuse me,” the lady calls. “Son?”

  Todd lifts his head to find her standing in front of the counter. “Whoa, you sort of snuck up on me.”

  “I’m looking for a gift for an old friend of mine,” she says. “What do you have that would be good for a hundred and forty-three-year-old woman with two cats and a bad hip?”

  “Uh, she likes cats?” Todd asks.

  The woman snorts and frowns. “I said she has cats. I didn’t say she likes them. She likes the same things everybody likes.”

  Although years of experience have taught him better, he tries to come up with something that might make her happy. “I’ve got VR goggles. It’s great for older folks who can’t get around so easy.”

  “Smut,” she spits the word and scowls. “People get addicted to that stuff. I would never get her something like that.”

  “Listen, I don’t know what to tell you, lady,” Todd says. “I mostly carry ship parts and old videotapes.”

  “That’s it, huh?” She stares up at him through thick lenses and twists her lips. “Let me see the tapes.”

  “Does your friend have a player?” he asks.

  “Come on, come on,” she says, ignoring him. “Just bring ‘em out.”

  Todd sighs inwardly and patiently explains, “If she doesn’t have a player, she won’t be able to watch them.”

  The lady waves her hand at him in a get-moving gesture. “I know, I know.”

  Todd sighs, audibly this time, as he bends down and starts lifting boxes onto the counter. The woman plucks out one of the tapes, stares at it for a long moment, and sets it on the glass.

  “If you tell me what she likes, maybe I could help you pick one out,” Todd sa
ys.

  “I don’t need any help,” the lady grumbles.

  She takes another tape from the box, inspects it thoroughly from every angle, and sets it down. One by one, she repeats this act until the box is empty and the counter is a disorganized jumble. Todd glances between her and the clock, impatiently gesturing and clearing his throat, but she doesn’t pay any attention.

  She finally pushes the empty box aside. “No, she won’t like any of these. What else do you have?”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry but I’m getting ready to close up,” Todd says. “Maybe you could come back tomorrow.”

  “That’s just fine,” she says. “I wasn’t going to buy anything from this dumpy little store anyway.” She snatches her bag off the counter, pulling a pile tapes onto the floor, and stomps out.

  Todd follows close behind and hastily locks the door behind her. On his way back to the counter, he picks up the tapes she knocked on the floor and leaves the rest for tomorrow. He flicks off the TV, grabs his 440/A-2 hybrid leather jacket off his stool, and takes one last lingering look around the store, in case he doesn’t make it back.

  A duffle bag full of clothes, one full of snacks, and one full of choice videotapes are waiting for him in the warehouse. Glancing over their contents one last time, he zips the bags and hauls them out into the alley behind the shop.

  Double-checking that the door is locked, he slings the bags over his shoulders, and starts the long trek to the municipal parking lot. The muscles in his arms and legs start burning almost immediately, and the canvas bags quickly become covered in dirt as he drags them through the alleys. By the time he reaches his ship, his clothes are soaked in sweat, and his skin is coated in dust. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on his shirt, but the gunk just streaks.

  “What’s the point of cleaning it?” he mumbles to himself, looking up at his ship’s newly printed G.S.S. Minnow logo, already half obscured by dirt. He fumbles the keys from his pocket, and they slip through his fingers and disappear in a light gray plume by his feet. The lot is a blur as he gets down on his hands and knees and blindly feels along the powdered earth.

  “Looking for these?” a familiar voice asks.

  Todd looks up and can just make out his friend Josh standing over him, dangling a set of keys.

  “It’s about time you showed up,” Josh says, his scruffy hair and beard gray with dust. “We were starting to get worried.”

  Todd stumbles to his feet and snatches the keyring. Pete and Bill are standing back by their ships, with their things piled around them, arguing about which Darrin is better.

  “He might have come later, but Sargent was the original,” Pete says. “He got offered the part first!”

  “Face it,” Bill says. “York is and always will be the OD.”

  “Hey,” Todd interrupts.

  Pete and Bill turn toward him and nod. “Hey.”

  “Let’s get the fish out of here,” Josh says. “We’ll see you out there,” he tells Todd.

  Todd presses a button on his key fob, and the lights on the back of his ship flash blurry red. With some struggle, he manages to lug his bags on board and shut the hatch. When he flips the power on, voices from the Pants Team Pink chat blare from the surround sound, and a text translation begins scrolling down the window:

  fujikoMINE: “—haven’t heard anything since Pants’s announcement.”

  jose_chung: “Well I’m about to take off, Fujicakes. I don’t want to get all the way out there just to find out it was all some big prank.”

  fujikoMINE: “Nah, this is for real. A bunch of us are already on our way.”

  Todd lets the feed play in the background as he undresses and rinses off in his ship’s black marble shower; he’s still patting himself on the back for acquiring the rare stone, and cheap. When he’s done washing, he trades his dirty clothes and work shoes for a fresh pair of antique Chuck’s and a secondhand state-of-the-art adjustable United Empires battlesuit. On his way to the cockpit he grabs a super fancy-style ration from the cupboard, and he plops down into his custom replica of Pants’s pink captain’s chair, which creaks loudly underneath his formidable girth.

  Reaching under the dash, he opens the fridge to reveal half a dozen glowing rows of frosty Ol’ Guard. “The only place I want to be,” he muses, cracking a can and guzzling part of it as he turns his attention back to the chat.

  telescopicnippleantennae: “I wonder what the fish it is. I never heard of it before – black gold?”

  i_still_believe: “I heard it’s some kind of mind control device the UE developed to enslave the universe. But it only works on one person at a time.”

  As Todd watches the comments scroll by, he rips open his dinner and cracks apart the accompanying chopsticks.

  101010: “That’s not it. It was brought here from the future. Whoever touches it can travel back in time half a second.”

  telescopicnippleantennae: “What use would that be?”

  101010: “You could keep compounding half seconds until you reached any point in history. Somebody’s probably changing the past right now and we don’t even know it.”

  RationsOnRations: “Where do you come up with this stuff? You guys don’t have the slightest clue. It’s obviously a marketing stunt perpetrated by Pants Team Pink to gain more fans.”

  Between bites, Todd says, “I’ve actually seen the black gold with my own eyes. I didn’t believe it either at first, but it’s real.”

  telescopicnippleantennae: “Yeah okay, dude. Whatever you say.”

  “No, I really did,” Todd says, wiping sauce from his mouth. “Adam Jones came into my shop, and he had the black gold. Only, I didn’t know who he was at the time.”

  RationsOnRations: “Sure, Adam Jones just happened to wander into some crummy Earth pawn shop. That’s believable.”

  Richie Sakai: “Why would he bring it there?”

  “He wanted me to buy it,” Todd says.

  RationsOnRations: “Then why the fish didn’t you?”

  “I thought he was making it up. How was I supposed to know? I never saw the thing before.”

  The chat erupts with laughter.

  Richie Sakai: “And you just let it walk out the door?”

  telescopicnippleantennae: “Seriously, if that’s true, you’re the biggest chidiot in the universe.”

  princessfluffypants: “Hey, leave Todd alone. He’s not a chidiot. He’s a great merch guy.”

  “Thanks for rescuing me, Pants,” Todd says.

  i_still_believe: “Hey, it’s Pants!”

  Richie Sakai: “Is this thing for real, Pants?”

  princessfluffypants: “Hey guys. We’re still on for Ferd’s, but we got detention for skipping school yesterday. So we’re going to be a little late.”

  telescopicnippleantennae: “I’m so pumped. It’s like a real life adventure or something.”

  iamtetsuo: “It’s really her, you guys!”

  THEolguard: “Pants!”

  Josie87: “THE PRINCESS HAS ENTERED THE BUILDING!”

  double-dollars-to-donuts: “What’s up, Pants?”

  ghoulardilives: “The black gold is just another way for the elite to control our minds, like how they drug the rations to keep us docile – it’s all about control, man.”

  critlife: “I just made a 10,000 credits in week without getting dressed. Particularly follow my secret to enjoy have patient success. soon you could be strike it rich!”

  HFILman: FISH FISH FISH FISH FISH FISH

  princessfluffypants: “The chat is getting crazy, you guys. I have to go. See you in space!”

  Josie87: “That was so brule!”

  RationsOnRations: “I bet that wasn’t even the real Pants.”

  Todd tosses his empty tray into the airlock and straps in. He sets the autopilot to the nearest starline, and his ship takes off into the dingy sky. Unzipping one of his bags, he spends half an hour or so selecting a videotape and stuffs it into the player mounted on the das
h. Tambourine taps jingle from the surround sound, and a goofy ancient-Earth guy with sunglasses appears on the window, twist-turning in his golden throne.

  With his feet on the dash and an Ol’ Guard in hand, Todd gazes at the screen and contentedly sighs. “This is my kind of adventure.”

  “What do we do with it?” Dave wonders aloud between big bites of his dripping Black Hole Burger as he stares at the strange cube in the center of the metal-mesh table. It seems to cause the light around it to dim, even under the harsh fluorescence of the Moon Burger patio.

  “I guess we should take it back to headquarters and turn it over to Mr. Trant,” Steve says, unwrapping his own inky-black burger and stuffing it between his cheeks. “I wonder what kind of meat this is…”

  “It’s not exactly an approved form of payment,” Dave says. “I don’t think he’s going to be happy about it.”

  “Trant doesn’t know what happy is,” Steve mumbles through a mouthful of charred meat. “The black gold is something, and in his case something is as good as anything… or as bad.” An onyx tomato slips off his burger and splats into a dark pool of sludge at the bottom of his wrapper, spattering oil across the table.

  “Hey, you got grease on it,” Dave complains, wiping the cube with his napkin.

  “Gahhh,” Super Dave moans, clinging to Dave’s shoulder.

  “I don’t think that’ll hurt it,” Steve says.

  Cradling the cube, Dave says, “You don’t know that. Burger grease might drain its power. I wonder what it can do, anyway.”

  “Maybe it grants wishes,” Steve suggests, plucking the cube from Dave’s hand. He closes his eyes and says, “I wish Dave would explode in a ball of fire and quit bothering the universe.”