by Nick Cole
“Captain,” said Tempturia. “My sensors indicate they’re heading into the…” She had to wait for the phonetic pronunciation prompt in her iLens to appear. She was an actor, not an actual science officer. It’s not like she’d ever taken any of the very few soft science courses mandatory free college education still offered. Most people just took sex ed and that fulfilled their entire science requirement. Physics, chemistry, meteorology—meaningless. Nothing was as important as learning to affirm everyone else’s sexual weirdness and being able to repeat the mandatory “nothing is wrong with anything” series of mantras that sex ed had devolved into.
“They’re entering the… Vir-idian Nebula,” said Tempturia, barely. “Captain, this is a cat five nebula!” She was reading the smartlink. JasonDare could tell by the pauses. But even she knew the cat five notation was seriously bad news for any in-game starship. “Warning, this space hazard contains an extensive asteroid field!” she shrieked on a badly timed dramatic note. Realizing she’d been caught out reading, she found drone camera three on set and gave her best pouty lip, green Orion slave girl fantasy eyelash flutter. When in doubt, put it out, she recalled from a master class with Dame Gwyneth Paltrow.
Inside his iLens HUD, the director was warning Jason against entering the nebula. A message popped up. JasonDare studied the forward display, or seemed to, as he casually read the message. He made sure to keep his brow furrowed.
“Listen, Jason,” began the director’s note. “You wipe out this ship on my show and I can cut to edit. We’ve got way too many viewers right now. You’ll kill the show and that’s not happening on my watch, buddy.”
She was seemingly incapable of being anything but threatening.
Captain JasonDare had had three full-time directors. The current one, Candy Hopp-Lipschultz, didn’t want to be the one to end the show because the ship smacked into the side of an asteroid.
And yet, thought Jason, it would make for some really good viewing.
“She’s entering the nebula now, Captain,” announced Wong. What light through yonder window breaks.
And if we do crack up, thought Jason, then make it look good and you might just get that Thundaar role yet.
“Take us in, MrWong. One-quarter impulse speed. Stand by torpedoes, we just need a clear shot. Targeting and shields will be useless in there… so look sharp everybody.”
Ahead of them, a curving vivid purple strand of gaseous nebula swallowed the warbird as it dove into the storm, disappearing into the billowing supercontinents of pinkish cluster that towered out and away in every direction.
“I don’t see any asteroids,” gushed Tempturia cautiously.
JasonDare dramatically ignored her.
A moment later, they followed the warbird straight into the swirling storm. Bridge lighting flickered. Someone gasped.
Acting.
Good, thought Jason, as he swam in the dramatic intensity of the moment like a shark in dark waters. A machine that lives solely to move water over its gills and do shark stuff, as someone once wrote. Or so a failed thespian had told Jason in an acting class, once.
A moment later, emergency lighting came back on. The bridge was bathed in an eerie red wash. Again, more drama. On screen, through a sudden break in the static distortion, they saw the warbird banking toward starboard.
“Fire phasers!” ordered Jason, his delivery determined. Sure, the battle would be tough, he emoted, but they would win nevertheless. They had to.
Two multi-hued bursts of bright energy lanced out from phaser arrays at the bottom of the saucer section. High-pitched-shrieks-of-focused-energy-in-agony sound effects resonated across the set and out to the world via livestream. Both shots missed and disappeared into the swirling void beyond the warbird.
“COLLISION ALERT!” flooded the main viewscreen, as the ship’s computer announced the same in an urgent monotone. Repeating it over and over.
“Incoming, asteroid!” delivered Wong. Et tu, Brute? Then he lost his line read and blurted out, “She’s gonna hit us!” like no Shakespearean player ever.
JasonDare saved it with a stoic “Brace for impact” that was real because the set was about to actually jump from the simulated direct hit. Violently so. Actors had been hurt in the past when this had happened. Like the true captain he pretended to be for a living, Jason cared more about others in this dangerous moment of acting, if just so the medics wouldn’t suddenly be called to the set.
A moment later, the bridge physically dropped and several people went sprawling.
Klaxons went off.
“Damage report!” ordered Jason as he grabbed the command chair.
On forward view, he could see the warbird slithering away into a glowing green mass of clouds beneath them. Static electricity discharged in a sudden blue wave that raced along the seemingly sculpted surfaces of the nebula.
“Damage to the main array, Captain.” It was the engineer. An actor who’d played Doctor Clown in the two-hour dramedy Doctor Clown two decades ago. It had been a big hit and he’d made a lot of money, which he’d promptly spent on ex-wives and race cars. Now he was Chief Engineer Rogers. The aging actor rolled his r’s, trilling each with copious amounts of brutishness. “We managed to take that one right in the kisser, Captain.”
“Sensors are useless!” shouted Wong, trying to make something of the line. An Out, damn spot, out! out of it, as it were. JasonDare reflected that it didn’t really come off. But nice try anyway, Wong.
“Targeting disabled,” announced Tempturia on point. Stoic. Concerned. Defiant. Nice job, thought Jason, as he helped a background actor playing a random redshirt off the floor of the bridge. Then he lurched into his command chair and pointed at where the warbird had been.
“Don’t let her get away.”
***
Massimo Scarpa works in his uncle’s bakery in Napoli. He has three girlfriends, two hundred pairs of shoes, could model for any fashion house, and rolls dough starting at three a.m. Until noon, he stands in front of a three-hundred-year-old brick oven and bakes loaf after loaf of his uncle’s secret artisan Pugliese recipe.
He’s also the chief engineer on the Romulan warbird Cymbalum inside StarFleet Empires. He joined the Romulans because it sounded like Rome and he has big dreams of going to Rome someday and meeting all the beautiful women there, as he has already met most of the beautiful women in Napoli where he lives.
He’s forward-thinking like that.
Right now it’s three a.m. in Italy. In just under an hour, he needs to start rolling dough. There’s already a fire in the brick oven. He’s made an espresso, in fact three, since he left the greedy embrace of Maricela earlier in the evening, much to her anger, contempt, and crocodile tears. In just under an hour, he’s got to get the cloaking device back online, charged, and the ship underway. And oh yeah, Intrepid’s firing phasers and lobbing untargeted photon torpedoes as it chases Cymbalum through a cat five nebula. And if that’s not enough, in the eye of the nebula is a massive open chasm within the storm, filled with tumbling asteroids swirling in on a central vortex. It’s a navigational maelstrom that’s akin to surfing a debris-laden tornado.
Scarpa studied the screen of his notebook. It was set up on the massive wooden trestle table he’d be rolling dough on soon. The screen showed the cloaking device diagnostic page. The word “OFFLINE” blinked as green waves pulsed away from it.
“Okay, my friend….” He tapped in a few commands. “What’s-a wrong with you today?”
The screen shook.
“Aft shield collapsing,” noted the ship’s computer down in engineering. “Divert emergency power immediately!”
Scarpa emitted a short curse and raised both hands.
“Fugetta ‘bout the computer. He don’t know anything,” he told himself. “Now…”
“Mr. Scarpa.” It was the captain on chat. “I need that cloaking device
in the next few minutes or there isn’t gonna be a ship.”
“I know, mi Cap-i-tan. Si, but-a—”
“Lizard, steer for that big one,” Mara interrupted. “Get behind it now! Decrease bow angle—”
“She’s firing—this one’ll be close!” BattleBabe suddenly shrieked over the captain in chat. Everything sounded like it was going from haywire to hell in handbasket up there on the bridge. The captain cut the link, and a moment later, the entire ship shuddered. On screen, the image of the bridge vibrated and shook for a long, slow second.
Photon torpedo, thought Scarpa. But she missed us, so we still gotta time.
He returned to the diagnostic and rubbed his hands together.
After accessing the control panel to the cloaking device, he ran the system diagnostic once more. “She says-a here,” he said to no one, “the couplers are offline and need to be reset… and then harmonized resonance will be restored. Si! Yes. Cloaking device she’s-a gonna work now. Here we go.”
But it didn’t. Once he recoupled the power couplers with the drag-and-drop menu that allowed him to control the warp engines and all the power systems, he got a system reboot message for the cloaking device firmware.
Then the dreaded mini-game popped up.
“To reactivate the main start sequence for a fully operational cloaking sevice system…” droned the in-game advertising announcer. Mini-games were loathed by players and loved by stream watchers. The epic fails were so legendary that Twitch had a pretty popular daily half-hour recap show called FailWhale Follies. A cartoon whale, voiced by a Jim Gaffigan officially licensed voice impersonator, hosted.
“Are you ready?” asked the game announcer.
“Si,” replied Scarpa and pressed enter.
The mini-game trumpet fanfare sounded as the screen switched over. Alarms rang out within engineering as another phaser shot grazed the shields. Scarpa ignored it and concentrated on the mini-game. There were some games he was good at, some he wasn’t.
“Tonight’s game is brought to you by Nyquil Lager. When was the last time a beer made you sleep so well?”
“I love beer!” shouted Scarpa and thumped his muscled chest.
“And remember folks,” said the announcer as he tacked on the Government Council on Social Behavior lecture that, by law, must accompany every ad. “Don’t tolerate intolerance. Hate hate. Brought to you by Anheuser-Kawasaki. Drink responsibly and don’t be a bully.”
“Don’t bully…” mumbled Scarpa. “Sure, I won’t-a bully.”
On screen, an eight-bit cartoon version of engineering appeared. The warp engines pulsed rhythmically, and with each surge in developed power from the ship’s reactor, two small glowing balls of green energy appeared in the tiny eight-bit warp core reactor. Then they began to pulse and bulge as still more appeared every few seconds.
“Congratulations! This game unlocks a bonus round of power-ups for your ship!” trumpeted the mini-game announcer.
“Uh-oh,” replied Scarpa.
Already, glowing green balls were beginning to fill the cartoon reactor. In time, they would overflow and start an actual warp core breach.
“What’s going on, Mr. Scarpa?” came the captain over the chat. “We’ve got all the power we need, but we’ll take more. What we really need right now is—Lizard! Roll one-eighty on my mark! And reinforce the aft shield! Mark!”
The large lizard monster avatar could be heard roar-hiss-gurgling in the background as the ventral shield array collapsed.
“We must-a scrapped an asteroid,” thought Scarpa aloud. He checked the camera feed to the bridge. The forward viewscreen was a crazy mess of asteroids pitching and rolling at all angles. Then he realized Cymbalum was the one pitching and rolling as the ship careened through the tumbling runaway space rocks.
Again the captain left the chat as matters seemed to be getting out of hand up on the bridge of the old warbird. Scarpa returned to his computer as the warp containment field started to comically bulge with all the excess new energy.
In the corner of the engineering bay, a small device burped. Scarpa moused over it and saw a pop-up.
A Romulan ale still.
A small dialogue bubble appeared. “Feed Me!”
Just then, a tiny eight-bit doll of Scarpa’s avatar entered through the automatic doors leading into engineering with a loud shuushhh.
“So I guess I just take the little energy balls and put them here, right?” He moved his tiny avatar over, took a glowing ball, and dropped it into the Romulan ale still. The machine jiggled and lurched, and out popped a small glass of Romulan ale that began to slide along a conveyor belt. It was luminescent forest green, like Nyquil Lager.
The conveyor belt was long, runnning the entire length of engineering. A moment later, the tiny green glass fell off the end of the conveyor belt and shattered.
A loud booming unseen voice proclaimed a bombastic, “Uh-oh!”
Scarpa stared in bewilderment at the mini-game.
Shield alarms began to bleat as phasers pounded the ship. Scarpa slid out his smartphone, toggled the engineering app, and reinforced the collapsing shields with excess power from the overperforming warp engines.
“Warp core breach imminent!” groaned the ship’s computer. The tiny containment chamber was once again reaching maximum capacity. Scarpa reasoned that if the cartoon mini-game was indeed boosting the actual warp engines of Cymbalum, then the cartoon chamber being breached by too much energy might actually breach the real warp core containment field.
“Which would be very bad, mi Cap-i-tan,” muttered Scarpa.
The next tiny glass of Romulan ale was headed down the conveyor belt. It too was going to crash to the floor.
Scarpa sent his tiny avatar flying toward the tipping glass… and barely caught it. And then Scarpa’s doll went slipping and sliding right on past the previous spill, as the green Romulan ale already on the floor from the first shattered glass seemed to possess some sort of super-viscosity. Now there was a trail of thick green Romulan ale everywhere as Scarpa fought to control his tiny out-of-control avatar.
More glowing balls of green energy were filling up the warp core containment field. Scarpa raced to get them out and then went sliding back to the Romulan ale still. Which produced yet another tiny glass of Nyquil Lager. Or so it seemed to Scarpa, who had a special place in his heart for Nyquil. It reminded him of his childhood and of playing sick so he could stay home and game.
Now he was setting the glowing dark green glasses everywhere in the engineering bay. He thought about throwing them back into the warp engine.
“But I don’t know whatta that’ll do! The ship… she could go boom!”
Barely managing to control his flailing avatar, he deposited more glowing green balls in the still and scooped up yet another glass. Then realized he was out of places to set them down.
“Whatta I do now?”
“Mr. Scarpa, what’s our status on the cloaking device?” The ship shuddered violently as the captain came through on the chat.
“Drink Me!” appeared in a cartoon pop-up bubble.
“Okay, why not,” muttered Scarpa and right-clicked his mouse.
Deep liquid green colors washed over the screen. They dripped and pooled like spilled syrup until it was as though Scarpa were seeing the world from the bottom of a pool filled with Nyquil Lager.
“What the…” he whispered, and muttered as he struck different keys on his keyboard. Distantly he could hear the alarms from other overloaded systems aboard Cymbalum urgently competing for his attention.
“Y’know, ship, we are getting killed here, si?”
And now there were images inside the green world on screen as the first small notes of a Hammond B3 organ trilled and ran up a scale. An electric guitar began to wail on a beat. The song was forlorn and desolate, and then being driven forward into so
mething new. Something darker.
A singer began to croon “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
The world on screen became an alien, green jungle as the words “Kill the Snake Monkey” appeared and then faded.
Now it was third person. Scarpa tapped a few keys and the figure in front of him, a musclebound warrior with a wickedly curving scimitar, moved from side to side through the emerald depths of the alien jungle.
Scarpa left-clicked and the warrior swung his sword back and forth.
As Scarpa panned about the on-screen avatar, he noticed the warrior was like a Romulan from StarFleet Empires, except more like a Frazzetta fantasy version of a Romulan. Muscles and a loincloth. Epic vintage hack-and-slash in bizarre animal-skin boots. But the pointed ears and burning eyes were unmistakably Romulan.
“Kill the monkey snake… I don’t see-a no monkey snake,” murmured Scarpa. He checked his watch. He had forty minutes until dough rolling-thirty.
For the next seventeen minutes, Scarpa fought an unbelievable epic fantasy adventure that was half drug trip, half Tolkien. He heard the captain repeatedly trying to get through to him as he fought belch-groaning alligators that walked like men and carried spears. They came out of dark pools within the iridescent green jungle canopy, slither-waddling through shafts of crimson light that fell through the thick clutch of simulated alien plant life. He followed a narrow silver stone path through the sinister depths of the strange jungle while an ancient acid rock soundtrack wailed on and on. First the singer, as he kept repeating the nonsense chant and occasionally seductively mumbling “Lemme tell you honey…” or “it’s all right!” and then a freestyle jam from the organ, full of arpeggios and diving glissandos.
The jade man-gators, eyes bulging and twirling, roared and lunged at Scarpa’s avatar, intent on violence. Scarpa cut wide and sliced one in half. It wailed and belched its green guts all over the screen. Two more came in, jabbing their spears, and Scarpa leapt his avatar backward, striking out at them. Three more hopped in and tried to pincushion him, but Scarpa struck down at the right moment and hacked all three of their spears in half. His Romulan barbarian roared and so did Scarpa in the pre-dawn darkness of the bakery by the firelight of the wide brick oven. He drove in hard on the surviving man-gators, hacking and slashing as man-gator limbs went flying in every direction and a guitar began to wail forth in electric tenor.
