by Chris Winder
Space Trash
By
Chris Winder
Copyright ©2017 by Chris Winder
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are use fictitiously. Any resemblance of either to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
1
Milo Dezelbup pouted even though he knew it wasn’t adult-like behavior, especially for a Phase-certified quantum-drive engineer. He crossed his long, skinny arms in front of his narrow body and frowned with his wide mouth, which was probably the way most things with mouths frowned. Milo wasn't skinny for his kind, though. All other Parlactians looked pretty much the same but all other Parlactians were also builders, which is why Milo pouted. Milo wasn’t building anything, except a very long, very hard to explain gap in his resume .
Milo was tired of “working his way to the top” as his college guidance counselor had suggested. True, he wasn’t the best quantum-drive engineer, but he hadn’t even had a chance to get some experience by actually getting his hands on one, outside of the classroom.
As he sat there watching the trash fall, he tried to scratch his skinny nose, which is something he did often when he was thinking. He did it s o often, that he had worn the end of his nose down to a nub, which was something that usually only happened to old Parlactians. It would grow back, he knew, but right now he didn’t even care if it made him look old. In fact, he thought looking old might actually get him a little respect.
His nose, however, was not immediately accessible for his fingers to scratch. His polysteel, tran sparent-visored helmet blocked access, as did his polysteel gloves, body armor and encapsulated gas and hydration packs he had to wear while performing his job. His j-o-b, as he referred to it, was not something friends ever brought-up in conversation, because doing so would often put him in a very foul mood.
Milo’s j-o-b consisted of watching and pressing buttons. More pressing buttons than watching, but there could be a good deal of watching involved before buttons could be pressed. H is job was to watch trash fall from a dozen or so chutes in the ceiling of his workroom and press buttons when it stopped. Simple as that, and utterly boring as that. Had Milo been aware of the existence of the thing called a ‘monkey’, it’s likely he would have said that such a creature could be trained to perform the task. The assumption wouldn’t have been be wrong.
Milo’s workroom was exactly ten meters tall, precisely cylindrical and slightly more narrow than it was tall. The walls, floor and ceiling were shiny silver metal and were polished to a mirror finish. Beneath the trash chutes were several shiny silver funnels, arranged so that all of the trash would fall from one to another into a single disposal pod large enough to fit a hundred Milos in. When the disposal pod was full, it would automatically close.
Then it was Milo’s job to find the next target on the list, enter the coordinates into the control panel’s buttons in front of him, and then press the big red button. Th en the pod would drop into the disposal cannon’s barrel. The cannon would aim at the coordinates Milo designated and whoosh, it would be gone.
The trash would be fired at a convenient star, especially if it was in the process of dying into a large red giant anyway. Enough trash could actually poison a star to death. If no such stars were convenient, and the ship’s captain was afraid he, she or it might get caught, a fee had to be paid to fire the pod at a trash planet. There were many throughout the galaxy, so the prices were low enough to make using the service justifiable.
Milo bemoaned his work. He’d studied for six years in order to achieve his certification as a quantum-drive engineer, a very prestigious position, yet he was working in trash disposal. The thought made him sink lower in his seat. The iris hatches of the trash chutes pinched shut and the top of the egg-shaped pod closed like a flower un-blossoming.
Just like he’d done thousands of times before, Milo read the coordinates from his digital clipboard and punched in the next ones on the list. This time the target was a star . It wasn’t a dying s tar but it might be soon, he thought. Sometimes pilots were responsible citizens of the galax y and sometimes, well, sometimes they poisoned stars.
After the coordinates were entered, he pressed the big, red button and whoosh !, the trash was gone. A side hatch opened and another trash pod was rolled into place by a mechanical arm purpose-built for the job. The irises above the pod opened and more trash began to fall.
To his amazement, Milo recognized several items that fell from the disposal chutes this time. The General Engineering and Systems Acquisition Department had obviously received a new order and were throwing out all of their old equipment. To his shock, Milo recognized that some of the equipment was stuff that he had trained on!
A groan, which to the ears of many other species resembled the sound of screeching tires, escaped his throat. Milo leaned heavily into his chair and allowed his large head, which seemed even larger encapsulated by a helmet, flop behind the seat on his long neck. Not only was he not getting any experience doing the job he was trained for, what he spent four years in college learning, but now he was behind the technology. He wasn’t even sure that he would know how to use any of the new equipment. Milo grunted a surly curse word in his language and allowed his digital clipboard to fall from his grasp while his other hand unsuccessfully tried to scratch his nose.
He wondered if he should just throw himself into a trash pod and get himself loaded into the cannon. The polysteel suit should protect him from the trash, which would be dumped upon him from the trash chutes, and the sudden acceleration of being fired out of the massive trash-cannon. Maybe, he thought, he could leave his mark on something, whether it be a passing freighter, a capitol building of some nearby planet or just the crater he would leave on a somewhere else .
Milo leaned forward and failed to place his face in both of his hands, or even one of his hands, much to his dismay , his big, helmeted head would have made a loud thunk on the his desk, had there been atmosphere For several minutes he sat there and thought. If he climbed into the next pod, would someone notice that the trash wasn’t being disposed of and fire it, and him, off? He wasn’t sure if it would even work. W hen he looked up again, he noticed the chute irises were closed.
Now is just as good as any other time, and probably better than later, which would just be a waste of the now, he thought. Maybe he could hop into the next trash pod and finally be rid of the job he despised. “No”, he said to nobody in particular, “you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, now snap out of it!”
Milo picked his digital clipboard off the floor with a slightly renewed sense of determination, sat upright, and scooted his chair closer to the control panel. However, when he turned his head to find the next coordinates, he realized that his eyes weren’t working as well as they had before his temper tantrum.
Milo didn’t shake his head to try to clear his vision, because Parlactians wouldn't do such a thing. Their heads were big and their necks were long, so shaking their heads vigorously could pull a hundred muscles, which didn’t feel good at all. Instead, he instinctively stuck out his very long, very flat and very wide tongue and wiped his corneas of whatever debris might be making them show his large brain a distorted image on the digital clipboard. It didn’t help. Milo licked again and brought the clipboard closer, but the result was the same and he realized why. When he had allowed his digital clipboard to drop, it landed screen-first on the only sharp object on the floor in the entire room, his lunch canister. The only sharp point on the lunch canister was one corner of a small plaque that proudly announced in debossed letters: This quality XR-221 Lunch Canister was proudly produced at plant 332.8b on the planet of Ga
ra-7. Thank you for your purchase .
So it’s decided then, thought Milo as he heaved a deep, depre ssed sigh . The next trash pod would contain trash and Milo Dezelbup, which meant the entire contents would be trash. First, he had to get rid of this trash pod, as it had already sealed and there wasn’t enough room for him anyway. He pushed the buttons on the control panel randomly, entering coordinates that pointed to no particular destination and pressed the big red button. Whoosh !
After the trash pod was fired out of the trash collection bay, Milo gently set his digital clipboard into the socket on the side of the control panel, specifically designed to store digital clipboards. Then he stood, walked up to a wall from which would eject the next pod, and waited.
Milo had three successes that day. First, he successfully got himself launched at a trash planet, which resulted in a fine crater. Second, he was no longer employed in a job that embarrassed him. Third, he successfully launched the previous pod, the one he couldn’t climb into, at an inconsequential, primitive planet that nobody really cared about anyway.
The planet the trash landed on didn’t have useful resources, so far as anyone knew . W hen an exploration team visited the planet many years ago, the savages who infested it promptly shot them out of the sky.
Earth wasn’t a place anyone wanted to visit. Who would want to with such mean, nasty savages crawling all over it? There was no threat from the inhabitants, because although they had the means to destroy things that entered their rather boring atmosphere, they were so primitive, they barely had the means to escape their planet’s surface. They were, in no way, a threat to anyone who remained out of shooting-out-of-the-air distance.
2
Edith couldn’t help but look smug and she didn’t even try to hide it. It wasn’t that her victory was an amazing victory by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a victory nonetheless.
Edith had been an educator for nearly thirty years. Twenty-eight years, nine months and sixteen days, to be precise. As an English teacher, precision of speech had always been important to her, as had proper grammar and the correct pronunciation of words.
Perhaps, she thought to herself, the little hussie at A-1 Electronics would think twice before trying to tell her that she didn’t know what she was talking about. The little brat wasn’t any older than twenty, but with her bright-pink clown-hair she looked more like she was seven.
Bad parenting , Edith thought to herself. That had to be the answer for why anyone outside of the circus would choose to dye their hair such a ridiculous color.
Circuses , she thought as she pulled up to a red light. They were also to blame for at least some of the troubles she’d experienced in her nearly thirty years as an educator. If experience taught her anything it was the circus and cartoons that had ruined so many generations of kids, producing ruined adults who spawned more disgusting, ignorant, entitled, stupid, spoiled children.
Circuses taught children that everything, even innocent, precious animals existed only for their own personal entertainment. From that grew the idea that people were for their entertainment, including their teachers. That’s why there were so many disrespectful brats in the world.
Edith, of course, never had such a problem in her own classroom after her first year. Her students showed her respect. Where a student sat in her classroom counted for thirty percent of their overall class grade. Slackers, she knew, sat in the back so they could get away with things that only slackers were interested in getting away with. Those who sat in the front actually cared about their education and therefore were rewarded for their efforts.
Cartoons taught children to believe that inanimate objects could think, feel and actively work against you, and Edith scoffed at the thought as she pulled-up to yet another red light. The fastest way to an ‘F’ in Edith Gentry’s class was to say that a chair didn’t like something, a car was trying to start or something similarly ridiculous. Edith saw her light change from red to green and made the turn onto the highway, or at least what this little town called a highway. Modern fiction, she thought to herself. That needed to be on the list as well. With all of these stories about vampires, werewolves and other nonsense, it only served to reenforce personification in the minds of the children, which turned them into stupid adults.
Precious, her sixteen-year-old Shih Tzu, made a feeble attempt at a bark, as if she could read Edith’s mind and not only agreed, but was intelligent enough to say so. Edith reached out and patted her dog, noting the lumps, squishy bumps and not-so-squishy bumps on Precious’s pretty, little head. The growths, the veterinarian said, weren’t malignant, but she could pay just over four thousand dollars to have them removed if she preferred. She did not prefer. They didn’t seem to bother Precious, so they wouldn’t bother her.
Edith wouldn’t call her retirement a joke, because jokes were supposed to be funny. Oh, she was sure that someone thought it was a joke and was laughing all the way to the bank, but she wasn’t laughing. The money she received was a pittance compared to the powerful work she’d done in the world, and the good she continued to do.
That’s why she was so angry with the service she’d received at A-1 Electronics. That little pink-haired floozy actually had the nerve to tell her that she couldn’t return a defective computer, that it was her fault that the computer was malfunctioning when she’d only had it three days. Even after showing the brat her receipt, she wasn’t willing to return it. So what if Edith had cracked the screen? There was still enough of that infernal, glowing real estate to see that the issue hadn’t been her. The thing was practically broken when she’d purchased it. It wasn’t her fault that A-1 Electronics tricked her into purchasing a substandard computer.
The ‘technician’ as she’d called herself, actually had the gall to tell her that it was her fault that the computer, the brand-new computer, was misbehaving. All Edith had done was simply download the games that she played on her tablet. They weren’t named the same, but it was the same game. She wanted a decent computer so that Solitaire, Munchy Crunch and the Facepage, whatever that was, could run without delay. She was getting old, and delay wasn’t a thing she was willing to deal with. It’s not like she bought the thing with the intention of doing anything bad to it. She’d earned the money she’d spent on it over nearly thirty years of educating the next leaders of her nation.
When Edith had informed the clown-headed little girl that she was incorrect in her assumption that she, the innocent customer, was responsible for the shoddy construction of the computer, something she obviously had nothing to do with, the clown got on her little radio and called for a manager.
Then the child actually developed the nerve to say, “Well, the computer didn’t do this to itself.” As if Edith was too ignorant of the fact that computers were inanimate objects. As if this little clown was going to give her a lesson on anything besides looking like an idiot.
When Edith informed the cockroach that she was, in fact, not an idiot, the child actually looked shocked. Edith reinforced the fact that she was not an idiot by calmly explaining that she had been an educator for thirty years, that she might have educated her parents, and depending on how young the inbreeding started, possibly her grandparents. To Edith’s sad surprise, the child didn’t seem to understand most of the words she’d said. So, she decided to do the humane thing and use smaller words. Effective communication and exactness of speech were, after all, very important to her.
“I bought this computer here”, she said very slowly to the dunce she was addressing. When her words were acknowledged with a roll of the girl’s slightly bloodshot eyes, probably due to some kind of illegal drug, Edith continued.
“This computer comes with a warranty, correct?”
“Yes but...”, the little girl started, as if Edith was going to actually listen to her argument or give her thoughts about the matter any attention at all.
“And because I have my receipt, I can not only prove when i purchased this defective device…”, Edith
had stated before the insolent child actually tried to speak over her saying something about the computer not being defective. Oh dearie , she thought to herself. You are far too inexperienced in dealing with me to try that . I’ve seen thousands of your kind, but there’s only one of me . You think you can get loud ? Just watch , and learn .
Edith had many years of practice — nearly thirty years, to be more precise — of projecting her voice when the need arose. Sometimes children could be unruly, especially on the first day of school, the first day back from Christmas vacation and the entire last week of school. Those were other educators, naturally, as she knew that it was important to establish positive social norms very early. The children might be loud on the first day of class, and a few hard-headed ones might try again on the second day, but after that, they were silent unless there was an absolute need to speak.
Edith sighed a deep, satisfied breath. Her classes were works of art. The children came in silently. They set their backpacks and books down gently. They put their butts in their chairs, didn’t whisper, didn’t joke and didn’t touch one another. They dropped their homework in the ‘IN’ box she had sitting on her desk, returned to their seats and waited.
Precious barked again, and Edith smiled at her… not that Precious would notice, because not only was she riddled with small, benign fatty growths, she was also, as near as Edith could tell, completely blind. This is why Precious had to go into the stores with her. She had to be looked-after, no matter how many people complained. Precious was more intelligent than the general population of the little town she’d somehow settled in. One more left turn, down a long windy road through a golf course, and she’d be home with her new computer.
Then Edith smelled it. She didn’t even have to look and she knew what it was. Luckily, she thought, she’d taken the precaution of covering the passenger seat, Precious’s seat, with a large black trash bag, an old towel she didn’t mind parting with and a blanket which used to be jet black, but had been bleached so many times recently it was now a very light bluish-gray. Precious had pooped on herself and the seat again.
