Whoops! Only a day late, don't even worry about it. Without further interruption is Part One of the Second Chapter of my book 'Get a Job, Todd!'
2 Good Morning Spaceman
Todd’s eyes snapped open. In the confined darkness, his chest suddenly compressed as the air he had so lackadaisically sucked into his lungs moments ago now forcefully fled, leaving him empty. He was paper thin, and his ass was stuck to the cushion beneath him.
Ears ringing with a fever pitch, the man’s eyes desperately searched for any sort of discernible shape in front of him, finding nothing but darkness.
His mind was a soup of panic, far too heterogenous to come up with an independent thought. Attempting to forge a singular idea felt like running a garbage disposal with a fork stuck in the drain.
His tight skin rippled with bumps so rigid he expected them to jump right off his flesh. They carried a cold yet fiery ich that colonized his entire skin.
With a concerted effort, Todd breathed in. Ragged, desperate lungs filled themselves with thin, stale air - grasping for any semblance of oxygen. Succeeding in retaining a modicum of unsteady warmth, breathing through the straw of his throat coated his tongue in tastes of metal and thick mucus.
In and out came his breath now, as ragged as the first. Intakes were shallow and shaky, underconfident and weak, but they left his lungs with the same frequency and ferocity as waves smalling against the sides of deep ocean ships. Heaving and forceful.
His frantic eyes finally found something: A line of light ran parallel all the way around him, horizontal to his body. A warm draft drifted in through the line and danced along his bump-ridden skin, calming it like a soothing balm. Tracing the bright white line far to his right, then down to his feet, and up to his left, Todd strained his eyes to see it disappear behind his head.
He had his first dull thought then. It came slowly, and was cobbled together piece by piece with a will to live so ferocious it surely would have inspired generations of elementary school girl’s hamsters to resist the seductive call of a spontaneous death for just one more day. It was a hopeful dream, one which may have been ridiculously morosely optimistic but was understandable considering the circumstances. The thought made his eyes pop and a vein in his forehead pulse. He looked very much like an elementary school girls’ hamster resisting its sweet tantalizing fate.
Todd finally constructed the question in his rebooting brain: Heaven?
With a woosh, his notions of heaven were momentarily approved, as the thin line of bright white light all at once consumed his entire vision. Stale air, unconsciously cultivated for millenia, was finally freed and bolted into the air vents of a spaceship miles away from home.
Todd’s poor eyes stung, light like daggers piercing the baby blue. He reflexively slammed his eyelids shut. This stinging pain, he soon found with chagrin, did not end with the thorns in his eyes. His stomach seemed knotted like a monkey fist, and slammed against his ribcage looking for something to rip apart and digest. In fact, his whole body seemed to be attacking itself.
Todd found his aching bones signing a petition to become free from his burning skin, and a class action lawsuit from his liver, pancreas, and gallbladder that his brain had just begun filing a countersuit against. This could not be heaven. Heaven could not hurt this bad.
Suddenly, his throat began to roar with pain and he found himself sitting fully upwards. The action was crowdsourced by his muscles and tendons with no input from his conscious mind. Chill air teased the back of his neck as sweat glands reawoke after a long slumber. With the top half of his body now standing perpendicular to his pod, the light of this not-heaven had dully faded, revealing several indistinct blobs splayed out before him.
Movement.
Some of the blobs were solid and still, and it wasn’t entirely difficult to deduce they were separate from the multicolored blobs that wiggled atop them.
It took Todd a while to make this distinction.
These multicolored blobs of various sizes and shapes recoiled away from him for some reason and he strained his eyes to discern exactly what he was looking at.
He couldn’t say what was going on, he couldn't say anything. His brain was simply unable to come up with any semblance of concrete words. Concepts swirled around in his consciousness, but all were too abstract to grasp onto. He swam in a sea of gray mist, lost to all but one key identifier of being alive: Pain.
Todd felt like he was covered in two layers, one of cold sweat that soaked the peach fuzz covering his nude body, and the other of white hot pain. Particularly consolidated in his right arm which flopped impotently by his side, the pain seemed to scratch at his bones with steel claws, trying to tear him apart from the inside.
Pain continued to bubble through his throat as he found his breath coming in quick shallow bursts before leaving uncontrollably in long, drawn out phrases.
When the figures still did not allow their resolution to increase, Todd made the purposeful action to look around. His head responded in kind by throwing itself left to right, up and down, and in any direction it could, whipping around with each twitch. Throat still burning, his blurry vision revealed nothing more to him than the color yellow.
Hell? His brain constructed its second full thought with the cobbled leftovers of the first.
If his ears would have been working, Todd would realize he was screaming. Or perhaps what he was doing would be better described as screeching, wailing, or otherwise absolutely freaking the fuck out.
Not only was the wailing noise he made the worst the crew had ever heard - a sound which was not dissimilar to the occasional screeching of metal in the docking bay when cargo was left unsecured during a HyperSpace Lane entry - but his left arm also widely flung itself into the air all around his half upright figure. It frequently slapped onto the cold, black glass haphazardly, added a fascinating, percussive polyrhythm background to his scream-song.
Music majors would surely have found it interesting, anyway.
The crew, most of whom found themselves recoiling as far back in the couches or chairs as they possibly could, would be forgiven for thinking this thing they released was some ancient alien lifeform destined to colonize the ship and strip it for parts. They could be forgiven for that, but only for an instant, as it wasn't long before the fear created by this thing melted into a strange pity.
What could be first interpreted as the pale gangling tentacle of some eldritch horror, questing through the empty air around the black sarcophagus soon revealed itself to be the pale gangling arm of a human. Just one arm - the right must have not gotten the percussion memo and flumped lazily in the pod by his side.
Any hypothetical music majors would have huffed in disappointment at that.
Just as suddenly as the unknowable thing erupted from the black pill, the mysticism dropped, revealing a sad, balding man. His pale blue eyes whipped around each corner of the room, never staying in one place for long. It was clearly having some great existential crisis about being in heaven or hell, very understandable given his circumstances.
Markus slowly backed away and slunk to his chair while the ancient pod creature was still too busy letting out his feeble, throat shredding, millennia pent up scream to notice. Slumped in his brown seat, the grisled space pirate glanced at each member of his crew, meeting their confused gazes with a performative shrug of his shoulders.
This human was visibly in a bad way. His eyes bulged from his skull and whipped around the room ferociously, his left arm flailed weaker and weaker, his neck craned, and his voice became more and more thin with each exhale. Though he did seem to be losing steam, the skinny fleshy man would reawaken with a renewed fervor at odd intervals. Each of these episodes would bring along with it a louder screech, and a more frantic clapping of hand to glass.
Words were exchanged between the crew, inaudible to Todd’s ringing ears.
Seemingly to counteract his ears inability to get their act together, his vision finally decided to slowly clear, revealing the multicolored blobs to be individuals. Six of them to be exact, two pairs of two on the green couches flanking two more who sat on their own large brown chairs. He watched them as they looked at each other, obviously either surprised, frightened, or happy - it was hard to read their faces exactly, but it was very clearly one of the three.
He could only really tell that they were talking to each other, and he wondered if they were talking about him. Though they had clarified much for him, his eyes elected to keep some blur for dramatic effect.
Those spherical cinimatographers lodged in the front of Todd’s pimple scarred face, which seemed to be much more in his control now, studied each figure one by one. It was hard to grasp exactly what his eyes were seeing. The strange existence he found himself in - throat sharp and painful, body achy and hot, skin unbearably cold, ears ringing, eyes blurry - made it incredibly hard to say exactly what these things were at all. For all he knew, these could be monsters, trying to decide how to split up his flesh after they carve it from his bones.
Scanning the room, his mind duly noticed that one of them looked very much like a monster with a gnarled face and hulking form, leading to one of the many moments that his screeching found a second wind.
Whoever they were - monsters or not - his racing mind tried its best to land on something concrete. Running through hundreds of possibilities aside from heaven or hell, he eventually concluded that this was not a place on Earth.
Still widely uncontrollable, his neck muscles indiscriminate movements allowed him to follow metal pipes that cut vertically across the sheer yellow walls. Dozens crawled up the room’s walls, all equally distant from one another. Todd followed up where they converged, wrapping around themselves in a knot to construct the ceiling. From the floor, where the tubes had fled, the same shiny material stretched out in every direction, smooth and cold.
He hadn’t seen much of the live footage from prototype Martian homes, but one was shown on an advertisement for the USSP-INC’s program that he caught on his final walk home from T-Landscaping. He would have missed it completely if it weren't for a crow tapping on the sidewalk advertisement flatscreen.
A room with a similarly constructed ceiling and floor were shown in the commercial, and though the room was much different, Todd had an eye for details. He liked the way they snaked up the walls, and it seemed like a decent room to live in. All in all it was the first thing to make him feel like signing up.
Why the crow had tapped on the screen who could say. Birds will be Birds.
Slowly, his third and final thought came into agonizing fruition. Arriving with a series of sub-thoughts, the idea clicked his brain into an alignment like a puzzle whose pieces had been found scattered across the kitchen floor after a heavy night of drinking. If he were in a sound frame of mind, he would have been quite proud that he put it together, let alone remembered all the words.
The thought, its sub-thoughts, and their accompanying justifications that were cooked up in Todd’s rebooting brain went as follows:
First: Mars.
Surely this is where he was now. It made sense, the program directors, doctors, and AI videos in a waiting room just a few minutes ago had all told him that’s where he was headed. This elegantly simple thought led to a cascading understanding of the situation.
The figures on the couches and chairs then, must be Doctors.
Only logical, surely the program directors would have sent him right to doctors who would check him out as soon as he landed on his vocational destination.
One issue prevailed with this understanding during its formation in the fuzzy brain of Todd: The huge disfigured monster which occupied the leftmost brown chair. The more it came into focus, the more it became clear that this thing, which may have once been human, had been irrevocably twisted by some series of horrible accidents. Its skin twisted away from itself and cracked with an itchy dryness, while it simultaneously seeped with oil. Its eyes shot away from one another, seeming as if they had once belonged to two different people and were haphazardly stitched onto the face of this malformed beast.
Todd’s throat hurt more and more the longer his eyes lingered on this oppressive disfigured form. After a moment of gazing, dizziness overcrowded his mind and out-competed his logic. Horror and panic began to dissipate, and as his head began to spin softly, Todd began to consider the hulking beast as some strange Martian oddity.
It was very likely, his scrambled egg brain reasoned as he rapidly lost oxygen, that before him was a group of scientists and their very own prized Frankenstein’s Monster. This Martian team of scientists must be good at what they do, as the hulking mass of grisled skin seemed every bit as lively as everyone else.
These doctors might be able to help with the growing pain in his throat that seemed to get worse by the second, with or without the monster's help. They could get him patched up and prepared for his job here.
Finally, as his vision began to fade and the intakes of his breath became more and more ragged, his final sub-thought occurred: Janitor.
Everything was going to be a-okay, Todd Jacobson had a job.
Wispy, thin ribbons of sound crept out of his throat arriving to a wimpy conclusion as the screaming flailing figure at the edge of the galaxy, once trapped in the black container, suddenly collapsed.
Todd heard the whoosh of air as his vision went black, the right side of his head slammed onto something hard.
New pain found its way around his head and blackness encompassed his vision. He drifted into the peace of new realization:
Maybe things would turn out alright for Todd Jacobson, after all. Maybe being a Janitor on Mars is what he was made for. Maybe things really were looking up for Todd out here in the big old expanse of space.
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