I forgot which day I posted the last two parts of the Prologue, but Tuesdays feel good, right?
For those unaware, my book released earlier this year on Amazon and the site remains the only place 'Get a Job, Todd,' is still available as a paperback. To prove that I am no Bezos shill, this blog will home episodic weekly posts that will eventually cover the entirety of the novel. Some changes will be made as I see fit, and so this will also act as another edition of the book itself. I reserve all rights to this work and I'll take the time here to reiterate that this is a work of satirical fiction, and all companies or people within have no correlation to any real lief persons or corporations living, deceased, or yet to be born.
Enough of me talking.
Here's me talking:
1 A Rock at the Edge of the Galaxy
On the vast desert surface of a rocky, dead planet, a smooth black sarcophagus sat in a pile of pockmarked and rusted metal debris. The area surrounding was dimly illuminated by a blue light which idly blinked on and off in regular intervals - the only source of light on the entire planet.
The black coffin had sat at the bottom of the crater for an unknowable amount of rotations around the planet’s small distant sun. Here, at the far edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, the piece of human technology had been preserved long after civilization on its planet of production had expired. That dead planet lay over 100,000 Lightyears away, a distant sparkle in the inky black sky.
The poor, five foot nine man with a patchy and pathetic five o’clock shadow inside the black pill had no idea. For countless days and nights, his pod’s solar powered batteries had soaked up just enough sunlight to maintain his vitals while he lay inside. Silent.
He could not see.
He did not dream.
He did not sleep.
He just lay in his sarcophagus, half dead for a millenia.
XPX-4921 B, the planet to which Todd was intended to travel, was a mere 99,995 light years away from his current location. Incidentally, it looked fairly indistinguishable from the one he spent eons on. It would have likely garnered a similar name if the scientists of the Sisyphus Project had been able to see it. Only planets with a probability percentage of higher than 45% were given flashy, fun names. All others were nothing more than contingency as far as they were concerned.
But Todd had overshot that contingency, landing on some far flung rock further out than anyone could have predicted, and his pod never opened.
Not that anyone really cared.
This planet - which could very well have called itself ‘Greg’ or something else exciting if it had a consciousness to do so - spent millennia completely and utterly alone in every sense of the word. Unfortunately, this quite underwhelming hunk of dead rock lacked such complex mental processes - and all mental processes for that matter - so it elected to not name itself anything in the end.
Long before the hairless overindulgent primates who were lucky enough to evolve the great boon of consciousness just to call themselves ‘Humans’ had ever traveled this far into space, they had used their great big brains to calculate this place to have a Zero percent chance of habitability.
This was primarily due to the planet’s odd orbit, which flung it back and forth between two larger gas giants like some great game of backyard bocce ball, all three sailing through the empty space just far enough out of their star’s habitable zone to lack one key ingredient for life.
Liquid water never flowed. No flowing water: no life. Simple as.
Otherwise, this hunk of matter had no reason to be explored. Devoid of any valuable minerals or natural gasses, and so far at the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, only a great cosmic accident would have landed some poor fool onto the surface of the dead rock, and what a Great Cosmic Accident Todd Jacboson was.
Much like him, the planet was a bit small, and not as symmetrical as it ought to have been.
The sad lonely light flickered on aimlessly for millenia, blinking on, then off, then on again - all powered by that distant cold which sat perched on the horizon seemingly about to fall off at any moment. Occasionally the sun’s power would allow for the light to shine for a second longer, but other days the blue glow would only shine for a millisecond, conserving the bulk of its power for the frozen manlet inside.
Desperately, the blue light cried out its simple, dire message: SOS.
This distress signal shot out into the universe for years upon years, never tiring, never changing its mind to say something more interesting, never blinking green for a moment for a joke or going red to try to get more attention. This was, of course, another genius contingency created by the eponymous head scientists of the Sisyphus project.
Unfortunately for the man trapped in the opaque black pod, human contingencies tend to fall apart after a millennia or so - especially if they are half baked as those that were constructed by the eponymous head scientists of the Sisyphus project.
Rather than sending any reserve or backup energy towards long distance radio signaling, all spared solar energy within the pod, after life systems were maintained, was sent to the idly blinking blue light. A silent pathetic whimper for help.
On and off it went, waiting eternally for the one in a million chance that a passerby would happen to see the light and choose to waste the fuel to investigate.
Lucky for Todd, his chances of being found were not rested in the kindness of strangers.
Dust coughed into the air, shimmering blue in odd intervals by the light. The disturbance, a large boot, stopped alongside its pair. They belonged to a hulking dark silhouette of a body, which paused to gaze at the cylindrical object that winked its light out into the universe.
Here was the only thing to have survived what seemed to be some ancient spaceship crash. Just what he was looking for. Most markings on the outside had been long erased by the sun's constant assault of radiation, so there was no way to read the full inscription left by the great contingency apes of Earth.
It had once read: “Sisyphus Project, Subject #13027 - Name: Todd H. Jacobson - Age: 23 Years - Gender: Male - Destination: XPX-4921 B - TO AWAKEN SUBJECT, PLACE HAND ON CENTER OF POD.”
The lumbering thing which loomed over the pod did not read this inscription, because he could not. There was no inscription left to read. The Sun had only left a faded letter “C”.
Nevertheless the words were known.
A huge head, obscured by a smooth orange helmet swung lazily left, then the right, analyzing the landscape for any other sort of valuable detritus. The remainder of the crash, it seemed, was so blackened and aged by time that it was hard to distinguish from the rocks of the planet itself. A piercing blue eye once again fell onto the black pod.
He sighed. Not much longer until it's all over now.
***
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