Scum of the Universe

by Grant Everett

  “Shipwide alert! We have a complete and total core meltdown in...” September paused mid-word and blinked three times. Her voice dropped so low she was almost inaudible. “Uh, actually, no. Cancel that. It's just a floaty on my eyeball.”

  “It's fine, September. Just take a break,” an unfamiliar voice ordered over a wall speaker. “That's not a suggestion, by the way. Take ten minutes, or I'll have you relieved by the secondary team.”

  September sat down in a huff, looking as though she'd just been insulted. As there was nothing beneath her but solid floor, Tuesday darted forwards to stop her from crashing to the tiles. The ship had already predicted what was happening and raised an ergonomic seat to gently catch her. Tuesday was constantly impressed by The Frontier.

  “Maybe...” Tuesday began, hesitating. September looked at him without interest as she sucked on the straw. She hadn't told him to shut up, so he continued. “Now you've got a minute, maybe you can explain the whole dimension thing to me.”

  September gave a dismissive wave.

  “It's above your paygrade, Spasm. I'd be wasting both my time and yours.” She sighed in resignation at the hopeful look on Tuesday's face. “Okay, fine. So, you're aware that there are approximately one million alternate dimensions, right?”

  “Right,” Tuesday lied.

  “Problem is, the vast majority of them are so alien, so different to our own, that sliding into them would be immediately fatal. It might be due to some sort of exotic radiation, or because the dimension is made up entirely of antimatter, or something like that. However, after decades of probes and experiments, The Unison discovered that approximately one-hundred-and-nineteen of them are, to some extent, survivable.” September slurped a mouthful of Red Vee. “We also learned that the angle and the speed you enter and exit these alternate dimensions makes a massive difference as to where you re-enter in our own mundane Universe. We're talking distances that would turn your hair white. As all of our traditional hyperdrives and methods of faster-than-light travel have proven to be completely useless the moment you hop outside of the borders of the Milky Way, dimensional sliding is the only conceivable way that we will reach another galaxy. Even then, it'll require ten solid years...give or take a day.”

  Tuesday had already learned back on Seven Suns that asking what a galaxy was only invited scorn. So he tried a different question.

  “What are these other dimensions like?”

  September smiled vaguely, burrowing deep within some of her most precious memories.

  “Amazing. Beyond incredible. We may not understand our own Universe all that well, but these other dimensions...they're like nothing you've ever conceived. Beyond human imagination. Our language can't even come close to explaining them properly...even I can only understand them to a degree, and I've seen many of them first-hand.” September started to count on her fingers. “Dimension 456C is an endless ocean that stretches beyond measurement, and it's filled with highly intelligent whales the size of planets. 357D contains some sort of mysterious, silent machine the size of a galaxy that some long-dead builders put together a billion years ago for a forgotten purpose. 289A is an empty void that contains nothing but endless screams from an unknown source. 456D is inhabited by a warlike species of intelligent capsicums who, unfortunately, demand heavy tolls whenever we visit their dimension. 123D is filled with boiling human blood that rushes about in powerful tides...”

  September reclined on the chair, enjoying this rare break. After a mere two minutes, a wall speaker made a DING noise.

  “Well, break's over. You can go now, Spasm.”

  Tuesday blinked. “What, that's it? You're back at work now?”

  September shrugged.

  “Yes. I still have ninety-six hours left on my shift.”

  Tuesday recoiled in horror. He couldn’t even stay up late enough to watch the dodgy ads for sex hotlines, let alone several days.

  “You aren't serious,” Tuesday responded.

  September shrugged in dismissal, stepping back towards the sphere.

  “I was awake for a week, once, and I still managed to get my fourth-dan black-belt in psychotic mathematics,” September rubbed her almond-shaped eyes. “Though admittedly, you have to keep in mind that sleep deprivation actually helps with understanding psy-math. After all, sane people literally cannot comprehend it. My instructor said he’d never witnessed anybody who was able to keep writing so legibly after technically falling asleep on their desk. They had to wake me up in case my snoring was some sort of secret code that I was using to help the other students cheat. Long story short, high distinction.”

  “It's not natural, this sort of thing,” Tuesday said, scratching himself in three places at once.

  “No, it's perfectly natural, Spasm. Geniuses must deprive themselves of sleep and other wasteful pastimes or nothing will ever get done. Think of all the time you've spent sleeping, Spasm, and how totally useless it all was. I weep at the magnitude of it.”

  Tuesday shrugged.

  “Sure. But I'm happy.”

  September paused, glaring at Tuesday for a second, and then continued to tap away at the spherical dimensional plotter at full speed.

  “What’s that meant to mean?”

  “Does all this make you happy?” Tuesday wondered.

  “Happiness is an obsolete genetic limitation designed to foster maximum reproductive capacity among unthinking beasts, and has zero relevance in a self-conscious, self-evolving species such as ours.” September blinked. “Or at least mine. Would you like me to write that down for later, Spasm, or do you have something else incorrect to state? I’m sure I can find a moment to fault your very best arguments.”

  Tuesday cursed himself for trying to win a debate with the smartest person he’d ever met, and proceeded to immediately do it again.

  “All I mean is you should take it easy occasionally. You're making me tired just looking at you. I'm sure that big round thing will take care of itself. Aren't there others who can help out?”

  September stretched like a cat, thinking on this for a split second, and startled when a siren went off. Rapidly typing a string of perfect engineering jargon into one of the floating segments, she shook her head.

  “I'm needed here. You, however, are not. I honestly feel that I'm being too subtle with you, Spasm. Push off.”

  Tuesday exhaled in frustration and casually put a rollie cigarette in his mouth.

  “Smoke that here and die an immediate and terrible death, Spasm.”

  “Ah,” he put away the fag.

  “Where'd you get that, anyway?” September demanded. “There's a zero tolerance policy on all nicotine products on Unison starships. You do remember what happened to the Marlboro people on Pox?”

  Tuesday nodded. Even he'd heard of them.

  The Marlboro people of Pox were a peace-loving, nascent civilisation of farmers who enjoyed herding large flocks of dopey arachnid cattle. Before first contact, the Marlboro people spent all of their spare time in the worthwhile pursuit of developing more efficient ways to pick their multiple noses. Think shaved Ewoks, but with eighteen permanently snotty nostrils. Introduced to tobacco by an especially soulless human sailor looking for a quick graft, within a matter of months the entire world of Pox was chronically addicted (including the cattle). To make things far worse, if a Marlboronite attempted to give up the addictive poison, they'd turn inside out from shock. Riddled with cancer and lung disease, neither of which had existed on Pox prior to human contact, the Marlboro people launched a military campaign against humanity. The Unison was given no option but to wipe out the entire world of Pox with thermonuclear weapons and mass drivers…or to simply settle out of court, whichever came first. The tobacco companies all blamed The Unison for not providing nicotine patches and gum to the aliens prior to the apocalypse, but a class action lawsuit against big tobacco failed, as all the victims were dead, which tends to be the case when big tobacco was involved.

  “Why are you still here?”
September demanded.

  Tuesday realised he’d been drifting aimlessly on his polluted mental ocean for the better part of a minute. Despite the fact September was still colder than a refrigerated rectal thermometer made from an icicle, Tuesday decided that now was as good a time as ever to make his move. Jumping off this highest of cliffs, hoping he knew how to fly, Tuesday swan-dived for the jagged, distant rocks below...

  “If you’re thirsty at some point, well, maybe…

  “I am fine for now, Spasm. This drink is sufficient.”

  “No, no,” Tuesday cut in. “I mean a drink...a drink in my quarters.”

  September laughed, a musical sound. “Share a few snifters of non-alcoholic caramel schnapps? I'll stick with the energy drinks, thank you.”

  She took a sip from the straw as Tuesday clarified things.

  “I’ve got moonshine, actually.”

  September choked and Red Vee spurted out of her nostrils. Somehow, even this clumsy stumble seemed sexy to Tuesday.

  “You have a still? Are you clinically defective, Spasm?”

  “Well, I was once classed as a hopelessly defective moron by...” Tuesday waved this topic away. It wasn’t helping his cause. “Look, I've got a fresh batch that should be ready in the next couple of days. I'd love for you to try some. As long as you keep in mind that it'll dissolve your cup if you're not quick enough, it should be fine.”

  “What, it dissolves foam?”

  “Ceramics. Stomach lining stops it, though. For a while.”

  September laughed again, though more casually this time. She obviously thought that Tuesday was just being funny about the strength of the booze, but that was only because she hadn’t encountered anything like Jack Spasm's moonshine outside of medical journals. Every page of Spasm's recipe book had been decorated with varying numbers of hand-drawn skulls, and it was yet more proof yet that Spasm was a diabolical psychopath who wanted nothing more than to inflict suffering on other people. An Lithuanian cockroach had unwisely attempted to drink out of a smouldering puddle under the still, and had exploded like a grenade made out of snot. Tuesday was eager to see if this was a good sign.

  Tipping his hat at September, who was so engrossed with her plotting that she didn't bother saying goodbye, the janitor that everybody knew as Spasm left the Department of Dimensional Plotting.

  Replaying the scene, Tuesday tried to figure out if his attempts at picking up September had been a success. After all, while she hadn’t actually said yes, Tuesday decided that September must have forgotten to confirm it out loud. Laughing counted as a yes, right?

  Tuesday kicked his hovering bucket of stinking cleaning fluid down a corridor of glowing incinerator bins, and he tapped each flashing VAPORISE button in turn so that their contents were reduced to ashes in a microsecond. As usual, the walls were all displaying the irradiated desert where Tuesday had been born and spent his formative years in an attempt to make him feel better. He ignored them.

  Scratching at his overalls, which seemed to be indelibly stained with Jack Spasm's old bodily fluids, Tuesday marvelled at how easy it had been to assume his new role. Good-old Spasm mustn’t have made any friends, as even the other Alpha Deck dropkicks didn’t recognise Tuesday to be a liar. He hadn't been glanced at twice this whole time.

  It was almost too easy. Disturbingly easy. Weren’t these people geniuses among geniuses? Surely somebody would eventually notice?

  Little did Tuesday know it, but somebody on-board already knew his secrets. All of them.

  *

  The next ninety-six hours went by quickly. While Tuesday had divided around eighty percent of his time between sleeping or finding new places to sleep, September had barely sat down. If it wasn't for the psychosis cut-out chip installed in her spinal column for her twelfth birthday, September would have been window-licking mad by this point. As it was, she was merely sleepy and grumpy.

  Hitting the dusty REPLACEMENT button on her console, it took less than a minute until five lesser science officers arrived to take September’s place. They all looked surprised, their facial expressions telling September quite clearly that they were wondering why their workaholic superior had stopped slaving away for any reason short of total dismemberment. The small group took up their positions at the dimensional plotter, but could barely keep up with September's workload. Even though there were quintuple as many hands and brains as before, they began to struggle. September gave a loud sigh, and went to say something.

  All five scientists braced themselves.

  While September was more than capable of lighting up a room every time she opened her mouth, she usually only spoke to shred the ego of anybody foolish enough to do something as unthinkable as being imperfect in her presence. While the top geniuses among the crew valued and hung on her every word as professionals, waiting eagerly for the next insight that would shatter everything they knew and understood about the Universe, nobody could bloody stand her. There was a very good reason September worked alone: she was an arrogant, tactless, irritating twonk.

  Her next words were typical.

  “Damn it to a Green Hell! Learn how to operate a dimensional plotter properly, Hemming! An epileptic amputee with nerve damage just randomly slapping their stumps about would have better fine-motor skills. What flunk-out mail-order community college taught you such a rubbish technique?”

  “Yale.” Hemming snarled. “Followed by Harvard and Princeton.”

  “It's not good enough. Not good enough by far!” September announced to the quintet. “You waited too long, Hemming! You missed the boat. My mother, August, plugged an experimental learning adapter into her womb during her second trimester to start me on the early road to success, and I was born with the capacity to type hands-free at one-hundred-and-ninety-seven words a minute. Despite being born sideways, I was the most highly educated foetus Old Suwon ever produced.”

  “Educated at being a bitch.” Hemming muttered. “And technically, weren't you a clone, just like the seven others who came before you?”

  September’s eyes narrowed dangerously at this accusation, and every lesser scientist besides Hemming froze for the briefest of instants. That single microsecond of stasis confirmed that September's dark secret was still circulating despite her best efforts to have it stamped out. Rather than directly refuting the accusation, something September was in no way professionally required to do, she clicked her fingers at one of the other white-wrapped scientists.

  “Sacks, would you care to explain why I’m the highest-ranking scientists on board this ship for the benefit of poor Hemming here? Try to use words with six syllables or less for the sake of the more special people among us.”

  “You’re in charge because you're going to work yourself to death by the time you're thirty, right?” Sacks snickered, feeling emboldened by Hemming's audacity.

  “Exactly!” September yelled dramatically. “Geniuses aren’t meant to throw up a tiny, flickering, useless little spark for a hundred forgettable years: we’re nuclear bombs, burning so brightly that we become permanently seared onto the retinas of history! People like me need to lead the way for all those useless peasants, because we’re more intelligent, more qualified, possessed of a more stable temperament...”

  “A what?” Sacks said in disbelief.

  “Don't interrupt me!” September screeched. “Even combined, I outrank you all by ten decimal places! If you’d care to dispute any of this, how about the smartest person in the room puts their hand up right now? Well?”

  September's hamster, Mister Boodle, casually hopped up onto his hind legs and planted a front paw against the Perspex wall, sipping from his water tube. Funnily enough, it turned out that Mister Boodle was the smartest person in the room. The hamster's mind actually belonged to a sixty-five year old human professor known as Rip Newton, an off-the-scales genius who had unwisely decided to use his extensive resources on board The Frontier to mess around with illegal experiments into digital personality transferral. Rip’s collea
gues noticed some alarming changes in his behaviour around the time of these covert DPT experiments, such as the way he'd begun to sleep in shredded newspaper rather than a bed, and how he now made indecipherable high-pitched squeaks instead of speaking Unglish. After nibbling a chunk out of Eulogy's left hand for no good reason, Rip's former body had to be permanently restrained in a straitjacket within a padded asylum cell in the underbelly of The Frontier, and at that very moment it was happily running on a giant wheel that the psych nurses had been forced to install for the sake of keeping their patient calm. Rip Newton's vacated brain now spent all of its time split between trying to figure out exactly why it would always end up back in the same place on its beloved wheel no matter how long it ran, and fantasising about dried fruit.