Get a Job, Todd! Chapter 3 and 4

 WOAH! Whopsie Daisy, looks like I've once again let my procrastination get the better of me. So much for deadlines. I think these posts get about Zero engagement per week on average though, so I highly doubt even a solitary soul was upset with the lapse in posts the past few weeks. For those going through this archive, be grateful you can read this all at once without paying a dollar to Jeffy boy Bezos and his stupid shit eating grin (which is likely occupied at the moment by the president's tiny cock). Think I'll get a secret service visit for that one some day? That would mean that someone'd have to read it first, which I already find highly unlikely. Whatever the case, if you came here at all you didn't come here for me rambling on about why I didn't post something, so, here you are. Fresh and steaming:

3 The Functions of a SpaceShip

Metal clanged under the feet of Todd Jacobson,  friend of crows; a spaceman far from home.

Bathed in green light, he carted along stiff, screaming muscles, each step engulfing his legs anew in a white hot flame engraving his bones. Like a stalking bobcat, the pain yowled at him, never far behind his every step.

The pain told him to lean against the left wall and hobble along, so he did. It told him to stare straight at the floor, letting his right arm droop down and follow along with his eyes, so he did. He traveled through the hallway slowly, his left hand scraping along the wall to hold up most of his weight. Along he went, a shuffle, a stomp, a shuffle, a stomp… 

He wandered in this dull pain, not sure how many steps he had taken or how long had been out of his safe room. Everything was so miserable out here. He had been glad to leave the cold, uninviting, metal room at first, but at least he could lay down in there. It was easier to think when he didn’t have to move, even if he was shackled down.

Todd tried all he could to wrench his mind away from the aching in his legs and their best friend, the pain gnawing on his right arm.

Breathing hurt too, gentle strings of heat deep in his chest, but not nearly as bad as his arm and legs. This light tingling pain in his chest became a target for his mind. Something to look at while the light of the fire in his legs seemed to drown out anything else.

Focusing on his breathing made the shambling easier. While it was still tempting to find a nice place to curl up into a ball on the cold ground, the breathing gave him a new objective in the short term that he found quite easy and rewarding. This was a technique he perfected back on Earth.

Sure, the pain in his body was greater than any he had ever known, but nothing he couldn’t handle. Some days in the 115 degree Idaho summer heat came to mind. 

Summer ‘59 was the Earth’s thirty-eighth consecutive hottest summer on record, and Berry T Dornwood, CEO of T Landscaping International had just signed the deal of a lifetime with the United States Government.

Berry’s company was contracted to dig trenches for in-home gas pumps, paid for with the discretionary fund for the Chevron-ExonMobile Protection Act of 2054. This bill included a tax hike for the lowest 20% of earners, who, according to its authors, would receive the greatest benefits from the new stipulations - largely from trickle down effects from the wealthy not needing to use public gas stations.

Todd worked tirelessly that summer on dozens of different million acre properties. Just him, his shovel, and the sun. The crows were there as well, of course, using their little black bodies to block out the heat every so often; bringing enough momentary relief to deter the stalking specter of sun stroke. His breath had been a focus for him during those days, breathing, and the little couple in his mind at the edge of their field. They’d been quite hot that day too.

 Stumbling through the rusty corridor, Todd found them again up in his mind. His little two person family in their grass hut. They weren’t at the edge of a field now, but instead somewhere along the very same hallway Todd found himself wandering. Shrouded in some dark corner of the ship, they held each other and shuttered, cursing at Todd for getting them into this mess.

Though he never heard them speak, he knew the words well, “Useless, useless boy.”

Alerted by his dragging hand who found something new, Todd forced his eyes open. With great effort, rippling fire engulfing the muscles in his neck, he lifted his head to look. Realizing first just how heavy his skull really was, his vision finally focused on the disturbance.

A door.

Flush against the wall, this new door looked almost identical to the one he had exited. His poor, half functioning brain sent shocks of horror into his already tattered body, convinced that he had somehow walked in a circle. Todd slammed his face against the tiny window in disbelief, desperate to find any information to disprove his horrible theory. Lucky for him, he did.

The room was small and circular. Yellow wallpaper dominated a space which was only filled by two large green couches separated by two large brown chairs. 

Deja-vu, Todd thought.

Only beginning to make the connection that he had in fact seen this room before, Todd reached for the handle. The door swung open with the same silence as the exit of the metal room, and he realized in horror what he had found.

Snaking its way out of the depths of his head, the fuzzy connection between screaming, sitting up, and looking around a yellow room began to form. As he let the door close behind him, he found himself turning red with embarrassment. 

These doctors… or crew? or whatever… must think I’m some crazy person, he thought as he wandered the small half-dome space, trying to convince his head to stay upright. 

They must all be hiding from me and watching the cameras to make sure I don’t do anything… crazy, he brushed the arm of one of the green couches. 

Suede… nice...

One door graced the walls of the room. Todd looked around, bit his cheek, and continued onward through the bowels of this strange place.

As the windowless door cracked then widened, a hulking mass of a man was revealed to be standing in the middle of the new room. 

This man, perhaps better described as an Ox, stood slightly hunched with his back turned, nearly seven feet tall by Todd’s snap estimation.

Shoulders protruded from his body like baseballs, and each subsequent muscle group rippled down his arms like frozen waves on a sea of flesh. They looked stuck together like the parts of a snowman, each muscle larger than Todd’s head. This hulk dominated the space. He wore a black jumpsuit which clung tightly to his chiseled body. Very revealing, unfortunately.

Well, Todd thought, Can’t be huge everywhere I guess… He couldn't help but turn his focus between the huge man’s legs as he slowly turned to face him. There was nothing there. It was smooth, like a doll.

Mid-way through shoveling a strange brown brick into the mouth of his absolutely beautiful and perfectly proportioned face, the huge man completed his lazy turn and made eye contact with Todd. 

Auburn crumbs fell to the floor, scattering among the huge feet of the black-suited mass. Todd’s memory once flashed again, making him sick with the same feeling he had in the yellow room. Face flushing in the familiar red heat of shame, he realized that he had met this man before, not too long ago. Though it had not been under normal circumstances - and he must have changed his hair from black to blonde.

Todd, eyes locked with his one time caretaker, cleared his throat and spoke, “Ahh, hey there… Markus…?” His voice trailed off, only half sure of the name.

“What?” The figure’s booming voice shook the room despite being muffled by the remains of the brown brick. 

Todd stood frozen in the room, a school picture day smile plastered on his face.

The picturesque face of the large man distorted in a grimace. He swallowed and clarified his question with an empty mouth, “What?”

“Urr,” Todd stumbled, feeling the red heat of shame pulse in him with each heartbeat, outcompeting the pain in his legs. “I… uhh…” He forced himself to look at the ground in order to find the right words to say to fix this horrible situation. “We actually, er… You were the one who helped that doctor put me in the pod… that was you right?”

Todd knew it had to be Markus, there was no mistaking the hulking body and supermodel face.  He supposed it made sense that the huge man wouldn’t recognize him. There were probably thousands after all, too many to remember all the faces - not that Todd’s was particularly noteworthy anyway.

“The name is Todd,” he quickly clarified, clearing his throat and lifting his gaze back up from the ground. “And I’m here to be your new Janitor!”

Wide green eyes beamed down at him from the giant man’s towering head. Suddenly feeling quite insecure, Todd stared back. It was difficult, but he felt looking at the floor would have definitely made the encounter much more awkward. Sweat wormed its way onto his forehead. The pair remained like this, saucer eyes locked onto one another for a moment.

 Todd lit up, “It’s so nice to see you again Markus, say, that same doctor wouldn’t be up here… would she?”

A booming chortle bounced out into the stale air from deep within the giant’s chest. 

“Look buddy, heh,” His voice shook Todd’s bones. “I don’t know how you got that name. But first things first: My name is Taz.”

The cheesy smile plastered on Todd’s face slipped to the floor. 

“Huh?” he squeaked.

Bass deep tones once again rumbled the room as Taz continued with hardly a pause, “And secondly little fella, Markus is my older brother… much older, ‘kay? He doesn’t look a bit like me, and he never did.”

Taz huffed a contented smile before locking eyes again with the small man before him, “But you should thank Markus once you see him from freeing you from that black bean you were trapped in.”

Though he didn’t think it possible, Todd found his eyes widening further still. It seemed like it was his turn to be confused again, “What?” This time was even quieter. 

 “And another thing,” Taz rambled on, paying no attention to the color draining from the skinny man’s face. “I’m all fine and dandy if you wanna clean up around here and all, and I’m sure Tristen wouldn’t mind helping make this place all neat and tidy, but I honestly don’t know any reason whatsoever that we would need a janitor.”

Todd found himself completely speechless at the disregard and irreverence with which Taz referred to  the professional janitorial field.  So flippant.

Sure, it may not be the most glamorous job in the world, and sure, Todd didn't, “know the first thing about it,” but by God he would not stand for that one bit. In the days between joining the program and meeting the pretty doctor lady and the giant Markus-not-Taz, he had made sure to convince himself that janitorial work was as noble a profession as any. Something even he could specialize in.

Everyone needs a good cleaning from time to time after all, unlike landscaping. Only the wealthy need landscaping.

Not to mention that the actual work of cleaning did sound very rewarding, and perhaps that could be enough! He hoped it would be half as fun as landscaping was, frequently imagining his grassfield lovers swapping their wide expanse of green to maze-like hallways of a laboratory. They could learn to love it up on Mars, just like him. Who needs nature anyway? 

Todd sighed wistfully at the thought, found a grimace on his face, remembered why he started thinking in the first place, and snapped forward at the intense glare coming from Taz. 

Stumbling for a moment to realign his brain with current affairs, Todd eventually found the right words, “Well then… What is my job here?”’

“J-,” Taz looked even more puzzled than before, “Job? The hell do you mean ‘job’? Why would you need a job?”

Todd fell back onto his heels, twisting his head back in absolute confusion. In many ways it began to feel like a game of ‘what is the most ridiculous thing another human being could say to me right now?’ Which was not a game he wanted to play right now. 

 “Like… so… I can live here on Mars… for free?” Todd asked. A real Hail Mary - fat chance he’d really be allowed to do so much as live anywhere for free - but if any question would clear up the confusion from the note that was it. A bead of sweat developed on his forehead.

The giant man standing in front of Todd shut his mouth and cocked an eyebrow at him, hard. Green eyes dug into the blue of Todd’s as a silence grew between them. 

“Mars?” Taz managed.

For a moment Todd thought he was about to cry. Instead, Taz broke eye contact and slapped his huge right hand to his forehead, cracking open a wide smile on his face. Chuckles pulsed from his belly, low, deep, and measured.

His gentle laugh continued for a bit before he mumbled something in the back of his throat to himself. Todd’s head spun too quickly to even attempt to hear what was said. 

“HUH?!” He screamed, fueled by all the confusion in his belly that momentarily overtook his decision making.

Taz shook his head, “You’re a long way from Mars, Mr. Spaceman…”

Todd’s heart dropped to his feet, taking the color of his skin with it. With the entirety of his flesh tingling with cold pinpricks of fear, naturally, he burst out laughing. 

 The two figures in the room laughed for a bit, hooting like old friends. Taz chuckled idly, head still in one hand, while his small companion’s light laughter quickly grew hysterical. 

Although it had begun as a coping mechanism to help him process what the large man had said, Todd’s chuckle quickly devolved into a panicked, forceful realignment of his entire world through forced pushes of his sore diaphragm. Hardly even a laugh anymore, much more like extended wild screams. 

Thoughts whipped past his brain faster than he could configure them into concepts, let alone questions. As it turned out, the note plastered on his face back in the orange room was an amazing setup for this gut busting punchline. After all this time, his life really had been just some dumb joke. God help him if he knew what it was about, but it sure was funny. At least his body seemed to think so.

Standing doubled over, he was vaguely aware that somehow the cosmic comedy had dislodged a million separate questions. His lungs roared with fire.

Soon, the laughter subsided enough for him to begin catching his breath. Swinging his head back up from the floor, he saw that Taz had long since stopped and had taken up what looked to be a defensive stance about three feet further back on the floor. Straightening up, Todd began to purposely take long, labored breaths and collected himself.

“You okay?” The large man asked.

“Yes… I’m… super good… just confused…” Todd managed a reply between involuntary chuckles.

Looking up into Taz’s eyes made the laughter threaten to come back, so with his eyes forced down to the floor, Todd pushed out his first question.

Choosing each word carefully, he squeaked “So… If I’m not… on Mars… Where am I?”

“The Spaceship Unity,” Taz responded with the same answer the note had given him.

“Spaceship…” the uncomfortable word danced along his tongue and slipped right off.

“Eyyup,” a booming reply came. 

Another manic seagull squawk fell out of Todd’s mouth.

“So, we’re still up in space somewhere? Is that what you’re telling me?” Todd’s feverish voice clamored out.

“Ehhhyup,” Taz responded - slower this time to make sure he had heard the confirmation. “Don’t know where else we would be…”

“Okay, okay,” Todd began to slowly pace as he had in the metal room, hoping that making small tight circles might just force this whole situation to make sense. He spoke out loud, but more hushed and quick, “So, okay… That’s okay, that actually makes sense.”

“Ehhhh…yup…” Taz added, worried the stray they picked up had irrevocable brain damage.

“They put me up in that pod,” Todd continued, half to himself, “then they put me on this ship and you all woke me up because we’re you're taking me to Mars!”

Proud of himself for making the situation make logical sense, Todd looked up to catch Taz’s approving gaze. It wasn’t there.

“Uhh, you’re gonna have to guess again buddy,” Taz’s deep voice rang in Todd’s poor confused ears, “Mars is on the opposite side of the Galaxy, probably a little under one hundred thousand light years away. Besides, not sure why you’d wanna go to Mars, that place has been a trash heap since the War. There couldn’t be much there for ya anyway.”

In a swift movement, the poor, lost man crumbled to the ground, knees slamming on ringing metal. Heat overtook him and tears welled in his eyes.

“But… but,” he mewled, rolling around on the ground in a fetal position, “I don’t have any money…  How am I supposed to get money? I don't have a place to live… Oh shit. I don't have any savings in my bank accounts…” 

The metal floor rang out as he slapped it with an open palm, “oh GOD what happened?! What happened to going to Mars? What happened to being a janitor? I’m supposed to have a JOB! I was gonna have a REASON TO LIVE! I was gonna have a PURPOSE!”  His hands slapped his bald head, “Fuck, fuck, fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!”

Salty pools grew on the floor beside Todd’s pathetic red face. Taz had never seen someone have a complete mental breakdown before, and he’d be happy if he never had to see it again. The poor thing shook violently all over, either pitifully entering flight or fight or being caught somewhere between. Sad, sad, meatsack.

“Ahh, buddy,” Taz slowly shuffled up to the ball of a man on the ground and bent over. 

Todd felt a large hand on the top of his head as a deep voice penetrated his bones, “You can live here spaceman… I mean I don't know what you mean by having a job or whatever, but…” his voice trailed off as he realized he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to say to make him feel better, or why he had to be the one to console this slobbering, weeping sack of flesh about his past, present, or future situations. He fell silent. He was not designed for this.

So, the two sat there on the floor for a moment in still, relative calm. Todd shaking and weeping, a poor ball on the floor, and Taz bent over awkwardly patting his head in reassurance. 

When it was quite obvious that the trying theatrics would not end until Taz found the right combination of words, he tried again, “I don’t know what a bank account is… but, I mean… we could give you some stuff to do up here…”

Todd’s eyes snapped up to meet his large savior. With eyes wet with tears and a nose filled with clear liquid snot, the poor sad man asked, “Really?”

“Uhh…” Taz looked around the room. “Sure man… I’ll have to talk to the rest of the crew, but uhh…”

Electricity jolted through Todd’s lungs as Taz spoke about the prospect of a new job. He felt himself leap to his feet, ignoring the fire engulfing his legs. Scouring the room with his eyes, he noticed nothing but metal counters. Caught up in the same electricity that had shot his legs awake and metamorphosed his body from a pathetic puddle on the floor to one of an energized worker, his brain began analyzing what purpose he could now serve. 

If I can’t be a janitor, he thought in a flash, I’ll be whatever they need me to be.

“whatsthisroom?” the question fell out of his mouth all at once.

“Huh?” Taz replied, seeing this Spaceman as a wild animal more and more by the second.

“What’s this room, this place, this room here, what is it, what is it for?” Words bounded from his mouth faster than one another, creating a strange traffic jam on his tongue. His arms flapped along with his lips.

“Uhh…” Taz’s eyes shifted from side to side, “Well, this is the cold storage where we keep the nutrients… Most of us call it the Kitchen, but it’s not rea-”

 “Do you have a cook?” The question shot through Taz’s explanation.

“What?”

Disregarding the obvious bewilderment on the giant’s face, Todd fired the question again, “Like a chef? Do you have a Cook?”

The two stared at each other for a moment in silence as Taz tried to find a way to answer the question. 

“No? But we don’t ne-”

“Great!” The interruption bounced around the kitchen and slammed into the giant’s ears causing him to recoil, not that Todd noticed. He was too busy thinking of his next course of action. “Who can I talk to that can hire me on?”

The question broke Taz. He said all he could in response, “What?”

Todd’s mind finally began to slow down enough to realize the confusion on his potential co-worker’s face. It dawned on him that he must be stepping over a huge boundary. How could he be so obtuse? Every other job he had gotten - save for the volunteer opportunity to work and live on Mars, (but how great did that turn out?) -  Todd had to go through a vigorous application and interview process. 

Even his landscaping job had been in very high demand, and his employers had taken their time scraping him off the top of the huge barrel of potential candidates. There might not be any swaths of candidates for a cook position here on this ship, Todd thought, but there surely was still some application and onboarding process. Or perhaps the onboarding process is something he had missed by being asleep. He supposed that he was already on board whether he liked it or not. 

There was still not enough time to think about exactly what had happened with the Mars deal, but first thing’s first. He still had a job to secure. 

With renewed humility, he repeated his question, “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, I’m sure there’s some kind of formal process here. Who can I speak to in order to apply for this position?”

“Apply?” Taz said as he tried to make sense of what this man was saying. “You can have it as far as anyone here’s concerned. Are you a cook?”

“I can do anything you want me to within all reasonable and unreasonable limits. I am yours to work!” Todd dutifully responded, just as he had practiced in school.

Taz snorted. “Okay… Well sure then, buddy. You’re the cook. Congrats.” Having had enough of the strange man and his strange questions, the giant slowly turned, exited the room, and took a left down the hallway, chuckling all the while. 

Todd was left alone before he could ask any more questions about his new job. 

  ***

Todd left the ‘kitchen’ and wandered the ship for a time with a new-found optimism and energy. Although Taz-not-Markus had only made this whole thing a million times more confusing, he had given him the prospect of a job; and that was more than enough to keep him going. 

Though roaring fire in his legs forced him to continue leaning heavily on the left side of the ship, slowing his pace, his mind was now fueled with the energy of a plan: 

One: Find the captain’s quarters - he was pretty sure that is what the proper name was. Two: Talk to the Pilot - or captain, or whatever the right thing to call him is - and tell him - or her - that Taz promised him a job and he would love to have the privilege to be able to interview for the position. Three: Find a place to sleep that won’t lock his arms, legs, and neck down every time he closes his eyes.

Each step in the plan became a mantra: captain’s quarters, pilot, interview, sleep, captain’s quarters, pilot, interview, sleep, captain’s quarters, pilot, interview, sleep… 

Todd felt his stomach rumble at the thought. Just imagining the microwaveable meals that he so often found himself eating (Amazon Essentials Beef Stroganoff heated in seconds and seasoned with salty tears of existential despair) made his stomach roar with angry desire.

He craned his neck to look over his left shoulder at the kitchen that he had left behind minutes ago. It had felt wrong to take food from any of the metal boxes until he had officially been hired on, but as he wandered through the metal hallway which seemed to shrink around him with every step, he desperately wished he would have a snack at the very least. 

Someone would have to tell him how the boxes worked first, as he didn’t remember seeing a door on a single one.

Refocusing, he found his plan-mantra flying through his head, allowing it to guide him through the tunnel which he walked. Focused on the floor, Todd began to feel each step grow heavier, as if he was walking up a mountain. Getting steeper and steeper. Rivulets of sweat began to grow on his brow. Shaking his head to focus, Todd looked up and squinted. The end of the hallway seemed to be above him, the hallway somehow increasing its steepness sometime during the trudge. He was no longer walking down a hallway, but up a tight chute.

This new perspective made his stomach triple backflip, ejecting any notion of food from his mind.

 He closed his eyes to avoid the vertigo, and saw his little family at the other end of this long, long metal corridor. All the way behind him somewhere. Sat huddled together, the pair whispered to each other in concern. Would Todd’s body come careening down to smash them? What would happen if he fell? Would he fall to the opposite end or land in front of the kitchen where the floor seemed flat? The couple composed their theories.

Struggling all the way to the top, he found himself confronted with a circular hatch. Its brown handle called out to him.

Holding his breath, a mostly random precaution, Todd cautiously opened the round door. It swung upwards to a room which bathed blue light onto his upturned face. Acting on his suspicion, Todd placed his hands on either side of the opening, and not to his surprise at all, he found himself needing to pull himself up and into the blue room using his upper body.

Hoisting himself up into the wide space, Todd marveled at the technology of this ship. It had felt as though he was walking up a wall, and as he glanced back down the hallway it was very clear that he was looking down a long, metal pipe which widened out in the middle before shrinking down to another identical hatch at the other end. He reached to close the hatch, not wondering briefly if it would be a hike to the other end as well.

To a man who had only ever seen stars from the vantage point of a deeply light polluted, smog filled deep suburban apartment complex that sported only one internal window, the sight that greeted him beyond the hatch was pure and utter magic. An enormous dome of twinkling lights stretched out around him, a purple sky saturated with thick shimmering milky blots. The field sparkled in his eyes, and for the first time in his life he finally saw the universe. 

Stars in the sky had been solitary creatures for Todd. One or two would poke their heads out a few hours after sundown when the thick pollution around the city finally let go of its wealth of orange light. A few more might wander onto the scene later in the evening, but they never coalesced into large groups. No, for Todd, the stars were dim, distant specks tinged with a hint of brown. Holdovers from the days when humans needed them to travel across the seas. In his day, stars were just another distant reminder of old necessities. Traveling with the help of stars is typically much less accurate than a good old GPS. So out of style anyway.

Nothing like here. Here there were countless brilliantly shining holes of light, clustered together so tightly that they flowed across the sky. A magnificent torrent of light cavalcading through the crowded universe. Most definitely ‘in-style.’ Todd never thought the night sky could look so hectic and entrancing, in fact he’d never really given the sky a second thought. 

Standing with his head aimed directly up, Todd made the decision to never stop thinking about the sky again. 

After a few minutes of star gazing - jaw slack in awe - Todd slowly collected himself, picked his jaw from the floor, and looked around the room. That brilliance from the field of stars lingered in his eyes, slowly dissipating to reveal a circular blue bathed in a dim blue. At the far end, silhouetted by the patinage of light that encompassed the space, was a wide control panel with many silently blinking blue and green lights and two staring figures.

A small man with enormous glasses sat on a chair before the panel, dwarfed by a large red headed woman who stood near. They stared at Todd.

“Uhh,” Todd said as his face began to grow red with embarrassment. He quickly dusted himself off, trying to pretend like he hadn’t just been standing silently in the room for god knows how long drooling at the stars above. “Hello! My name is Todd H. Jacobson, and I would like to apply for your Cook position?”

The two turned their heads to look at one another, stared a beat, and burst out laughing. Todd stared in confusion as they doubled over, heads by their knees, heaving in waves.

They laughed between themselves for what seemed like minutes, backlit all the while by distant suns. By the end, the lady was on the ground, nearly in tears, and the small man curled in his sleek chair, nothing more than a shaking ball of residual giggles, glasses askew on his face. Whatever joke Todd said must have been hilarious, but he couldn’t for the life of him understand what it may have been.

 This must be how Taz felt back in the Kitchen, he thought. “Umm…” Todd finally offered the group. 

This smallest of provocations set up a secondary eruption of laughter from the two crewmates. The secondary aftershock of laughter caused the small man to jettison off of the large sleek black chair that enveloped him. He landed with a thump on the metal ground, glasses clattering beside him. 

Todd watched his prospective employers laugh and laugh and laugh, and decided he would just go ahead and wait until they were finished before saying anything else.

This hilarity’s aftershock died down faster than the first wave, soon enough the large woman and small man were slowly picking themselves off of the ground - glasses readjusting and shoulders brushed as they released the last bits of electric hysterics out of their systems.

Finally, the large woman’s eyes, still teary with laughter, met Todd’s.

“Well… Todd…” her red hair flung widely as she shot another glance at the small man who snapped his hand to his mouth to suppress another giggle. “That was the most confusing sentence I’ve ever heard! You’ve already been voted aboard… so welcome to the Unity!”

“Yeah…” Todd said slowly, eyes locked onto the two figures in the room. “So… I’m still a little bit lost I think.”

“I’d bet! That seems to be something we have in common!” the tiny frail man burst out with a giggle, his voice sounded exactly like he looked, “What were you doing in that little pod by the way? I was so sure you were gonna be a monster, or some crazy thing…” he chortled again, little eyes magnified by the concave glass. 

“Huh?” Todd’s brain slammed itself on a brick wall in his head, spun around, and did the same thing over and over again. 

Who ARE these people? It asked him between bashes. How are they just as confused as me? How does NOBODY know what’s going on?

 “Yeah,” The large woman interjected, “We found a black cryo-pod on Destination 4, and when we opened it up you came screaming out, crazy, flailing...”

“You seemed to wake up a few times once we got you restrained, but each time you deciphered out the passphrase for the cuffs… so your mental faculties seemed to be alright.” The small man spoke as his feet dangled from the edge of the chair. His smile made Todd feel warm. 

“My name is Eddard, I’m the one who wrote you that little note,” He giggled.

Small man… the remainder of Todd’s brain sang as pushed a smile on his lips. Small like Moose.

Todd’s mantra had made him out to be a big brawny pilot, colored by the image of the large Taz. Far from it, the pilot couldn’t be more than four feet tall, smaller than anybody he had ever seen.

“You must be tired,” Eddard continued, “I hope that IV did some good, it seems like you made it out of the room just fine. How are you feeling?”

“Uh… Good…” Todd felt the words slip from his lips, his brain collecting the little man’s words piecemeal. Now that they were all neatly assembled in his head and he was able to give it the proper consideration, he did feel much better than when he had awoken with the note over his eyes. His legs still ached, but he found himself able to stand upright with no issue despite the hike through the hall. No wonder all those property owners had IVs in their homes.

“Better…” He added, wondering what part of the interview process this was.

The large red-headed woman spoke, her voice commanding the room, “You said you want to be a cook?” 

Her eyes, once lost in jovial glee, adopted the distrusting malcontent of a petulant teenager as they met him.

“Y-yes,” Todd’s voice-cracking fifteen-year-old self spoke through him from somewhere deep down in response. He coughed and regained his composure laboriously reminding himself that this was in fact a job interview.

His explanation flew out at a feverish pace, mumbling through his life story and his volunteer janitorial position with USSP-INC, and concluding with a confused ramble about Taz-not-Markus and his non-involvement with the whole ordeal and the Cook job prospect. To wrap it all up, he gave his usual ‘job application’ spiel, only stuttering once.

Good Job Toddy Boy, they’ve GOT to hire you now… He added in his head.

Silence met his excited ears, and his smile drifted away again. The two crewmates had once again swiveled their heads at each other and widened their eyes. 

Eddard spoke first, “Taz offered you… a job? As a cook?”

Red hot embarrassment filled Todd’s empty head, transforming his pale face into the color of the Sunrise on a smokey morning. Of course he had overstepped. Stupid, stupid, stupid, the refrain began in his brain.

“Well… no, I-,” he stuttered, “he said that I could ‘have the job if I wanted it.’” Throwing up air quotes at the end to punctuate his meaning.

“Sounds like Taz…” the red headed woman chuckled, nudging Eddard to go along with her. He did.

“So…” Todd said after an excruciating moment. Flustered at the strange behavior of his interviewers, he added, “Can I have the job or not?”

“Eh? Oh! Yeah! Yeah, sure,” said the large woman, a wicked smile on her face.

“Well that wouldn’t be much of a job,” Eddard butt in, “All yo-”

“Shut up Eddard,” snapping at the small man, the large redhead turned fully to Todd, “The job is all yours Mr. Space- I mean, Mr. Todd.”

A rush of relief washed over him, bringing along with it the realization of just how cold the room was, almost like the inside of a refrigerator. His stomach turned with discontentment and the pale hair on his arms stood at attention.

“But you’ve just gotta tell me more about this whole U-S-S Inc… something… something?” The large woman stalked closer to Todd, redirecting the room’s chill down his spine. “What is that all about?”

“Uhh…” Todd had trouble finding an explanation with all of his own questions bubbling up behind his eyes, “you know…the United States Space Program Incorporated? Sponsored by Pepsi… an Amazon Family Company?”

He was met with blank stares.

Todd continued, “you know, like… sending people to work on Mars to pay off debts and stuff?”

“Debt?” peeped Eddard, “What do you mean debt?”

Todd stood in the room with his head cocked for a while, staring at the pair in front of him. They stared back with their own heads askew, mirroring his confusion. 

Eventually, he found the words, “I don’t even know how to answer that question…” 

“Well, whatever it was for, must have been good,” The large woman interjected, now vigorously entertained by the stranger, “I mean, if they were sending you to that shithole battlefield graveyard for it, this stuff that put you in this debt must have been worth it. What did you do?”

Before he could ask what she meant by ‘battlefield,’ Eddard had already fired off another question, “How much debt did you have to this company that you had to go to Mars of all places to get rid of it?”

“Well I…” Todd thought back to his life. It never really occurred to him to wonder why he had so much debt, after all it was the thing to push him off his home planet. Debt was something everyone had, a natural part of life. Keeping track was for accountants.

“I guess… I was born with some debt because my parents had me at a hospital, and every person has to pay off their own birthing bill. Umm… then College, that was a lot of money and I had to take out a loan for that, uh… Then I was issued a credit card at eighteen and had to use that for all my groceries before I could get a job, so that racked it up a bunch… Then my rent payments dug into some more credit as well… Some from my parents, after they…” He cleared his throat and shot his eyes to the floor, “I dunno, I dunno, I guess I got most of my debt from just living?” 

“What ship did you say you were born on?” Eddard probed.

Todd cocked an eyebrow back at the tiny man. “Ship? I don’t know…”

Four eyes stared back at him, trying - and failing - to find some sort of footing in his queer response.

“I was born on Earth…? The planet with the Sun and the Moon and the… Oceans and stuff…?” he reiterated, hoping his clarification was helpful.

Somehow, though he would have thought it entirely impossible, the two sets of investigating eyes grew even wider. Ghastly expressions met him, as if they had just seen a ghost.

“Holy moly…” Eddard adjusted his glasses and convinced his throat to eke out, “Earth… really? You were born on Earth?”

“Uhh… yes?” Wasn’t everyone? He thought, though the look of shock splattered across the faces of the small man and big woman seemed to tell him otherwise. Their shared stare continued, saucer eyes reflecting the fields of stars beyond the dome.

“...weren’t you?” Todd finally added after the still silence in the room began to leak into his skin.

“NO! Oh, no!” Eddard replied as his crewmate roared back in laughter. “No, no, none of us here came from Earth! Save for Markus I guess, but-”

“A real human from Earth, huh?” Red hair obscured the little man as the woman took another step closer to Todd - who was shaking like a scared dog. She stood before him, dwarfing him with her height. Waterfalls of fire flowed down her shoulders onto her back. 

“You’ve come a long way, you know… We couldn’t get further away.” As she spoke down into his face, the large woman poked and prodded Todd’s numb body with a sharp finger, squinting and giggling at his doughy body.

“Huh?” Was all Todd could think of saying while he felt the rigid finger of the woman scraped the inside of his belly button through his shirt. He didn’t notice.

“Oh yeah buddy,” she gave Todd a break from the prodding and turned back to the pilot. “That United Space States In…cor…therated… or whatever, must have overshot their target and sent you right into a HyperSpace Lane!”  

Jackal-like manic laughter escaped her throat, momentarily jolting Todd out of his existential stupor. She continued talking just to Eddard, “I wonder if they even knew about them back then?”

“Doubt it, humans on Earth were pretty primitive… You’d have to ask Markus tho, he’d know,” His beady black eyes never left Todd.

“Sure sure, that old fart. Whatever.” She spun on her heels once again and leaned down to Todd’s level. “You, my dear Space-ferring friend, are a fun little anomaly. Look at you! I, for one, am happy to have you aboard - at least as an excuse to go back through the lanes.” 

A devious grin grew on her face.

“Ughhhh” Eddard groaned, swiveling around in his chair, “No, Evangeline, come on! You know how hard it is to get in and out of those now-a-days! Besides, they always hurt my head.” 

“Eddard, no you come on,” she mocked, “It would be Todd’s first time going through a Lane! Poor Spaceman! Everyone’s gotta go, at least once! It’s so beautiful sitting up here!”

Eddard groaned again and gazed at the blinking lights of his wide control panel. 

“What’s a HyperSpace Lane?” Todd meekly asked, he’d felt like this often during classes at school. Completely lost was an understatement.

“See!” Said the red haired giantess, apparently named Evangeline,  "Definitely sent out before they even knew about HyperSpace Lanes! This dude is a relic!”

Something about the way she said the last word stung. Had he really been out that long? That whole issue of overshooting Mars which would have definitely added time… The journey to the Red Planet wasn't supposed to take more than a few months, and that giant called Taz-not-Markus told him they were one hundred light years away from Mars - or was it a hundred hundred, thousand hundred?… - how long would it have taken him to cross that distance? 

Digging deep into his memories, Todd desperately searched for any sort of language he could understand. Lightyear… That was familiar. Some dank and cramped room long ago, smells of sweat and chemicals in the air. Todd could recall the window, offering some spare sunlight to grace the sullen space.

 On and on the AI instructor droned, “blah, blah, blah, light year is the distance… blah, blah, blah, long time, something something…” The memory was so faded now. At the time he had been watching a crow tap on the window, pointing at his teacher between pecks. It was so funny. Little crow, what are you trying to tell me?

If only I hadn’t been busy trying to figure out what that crow wanted, I could have paid attention to whatever a light year is.

Still the word relic bounced through his mind, nagging at him. How old were relics? A century old? Ten centuries old? Where are relics even supposed to go when people forget their importance? Where are they supposed to go if they were never important in the first place? What kind of dusty antique shop in space was he destined for?

“Wha?” Puffs of air coughed out of Todd’s windpipe, “How long? How long?” No other words found him.

The two raised their shoulders in sync in response to his question and Evangeline spoke, “Dunno, probably a better question for Markus. But the last time we were over in that part of the galaxy, humans hadn’t lived on Earth for… what, four-thousand years? I’d have to guess it would be longer than that since you were shot out into nothingness.” 

She turned to look at Eddard, who shrugged and frowned. 

A slick black eel slithered down Todd’s spine.

“Yeah,” the pilot said, a curious grimace adorned his face as he sought solace in his large companion, “Beats me… pretty long, but I’d guess it’s been much, much longer than that, just based on the HyperSpace Lane travel alone. It depends on who you ask I’d guess.”

Oh God.

Ice bounded through his veins. Somehow he seemed assailed by a frosty chill and a scorching heat at the same time, both rippling out in waves across his skin. Goosebumps alerting every hair on his body along with them.

He knew that he was giving up life on Earth when he got in that black container, but he didn’t know that meant he would be giving up on Earth… entirely. 

The Earth, abandoned for… four thousand years…? Who was going to keep track of how much debt he owed? Mars destroyed too… who was around to keep track of his unemployment status? Was there anyone left to recall his payscale? Who would even care about all of his necessary job skills? What about all his work records, had they all been destroyed too? 

Todd’s empty stomach tried to leave his body, even more unwilling to accept this new information than his poor swirling brain. The organ only managed to claw itself halfway up his throat before it lost its grip and fell back down, landing on his diaphragm like a hammer on an anvil. An angry, gurgling, swirling churn erupted from his acid torn throat in response. 

“Woah,” Evangeline yelped in response to Todd’s dry-heave. “I didn’t know they did that… Yuck…”

“It’s a human thing,” came Eddard’s matter-of-fact response.

Todd missed the exchange - which was likely a good thing as the implications very well could have radicalized his stomach all over again. Instead, his mind was full of panic.

Four thousand years… or more? 

Everything, gone.

There were years in his life that felt like they were worth a thousand, but nothing like this.

In an instant, he had gone from a silly, lovestruck, debtor getting a lift to a new job, to a refugee from the ancient past. Four thousand years would be enough to wipe away the stain that his apartment building made on the suburban landscape. Four thousand years would be enough to do away with his poor puppy Mouse and any lingering veterinary bills he may have accrued in his lifetime alone on Earth. Hell, maybe Four thousand years would be enough time to wipe out the idea of money altogether. 

Todd shook the idea away, something so important would surely last any test of time. If old Toddy Boy was still around, there's no way that money wasn’t.

What else would be gone then? Surely not all bad.

Four thousand years would surely be enough to erase the graves of his parents. Good. All they added to his life was another $10,000 in debt, and that was likely gone in the wind. Just fine. Hard memories to keep. 

Despite his best efforts, the image of those two gray slabs burned in his head - reminding him of the couple who bore him. 

It had been a real hassle when they died. His father had one too many long weekend drinking binges after being laid off and denied severance. Todd had left about two months earlier, off to get an advertising degree at CIBU, and without the child-in-home tax credits, the Jacobson’s could no longer afford their bi-weekly water payment. Beer from the fridge - purchased with maxed out credit cards - was the only thing left for them to consume. Unfortunately Donny’s liver was already on its last legs.

Mom went next, couldn’t stand to live in a dirty house with a dead bloating body, Todd supposed. Fair enough. She was found in the bathtub, all lights in the house shut off and the toilets clogged due to the one-day late electricity and sewer subscription payments. No note, no last message, only her College Diploma to keep her company in the overflowing tub.

Not like there were many options for her. Donny’s bloated, yellow passing meant death fees, alcohol poisoning fees, body removal fees, cremation/burial fees, end-of-life paperwork fees, not to mention the load of his personal debt she would be saddled with. An official death slip would have to be signed with his old employer and the Amazon Office of Employment, each passing day left undone racking up more and more tardy fees. She didn’t even have enough for the bus, and the closest office was a five day walk.

Her debts were passed to Todd after she was found, including her suicide fee.

No, those cheap polythene fake-stone graves only dug a pit further into his debt. Not hard to forget.

Here lies Donald and Darla Jacobson, Nobody Remembers them but their Son. Those were the words he had picked out, but the engraving was far too expensive.

Just as easy to forget, he found to his surprise, was Moose. Although he continued to pop into his head, he was finding it easy to say goodbye. Very sad what happened to be sure, but Todd knew the poor animal's fate as soon as he signed the paperwork to leave Earth. 

Looking out past the dome and into the vast, impossibly large expanses of space, Todd figured the little brown dog’s life hadn’t really changed all that much. He probably got along just well, might have even made some new friends.

What about friends? Todd tried to stir up any emotions by thinking about the Earth and its inhabitants gone to time, surely there was one person he would miss. Friends had never come easily. Whether it was elementary, middle, high school, or even the brief months he attempted a university education, people never seemed to enjoy his company enough to forge something past a passing familiarity.

Some paltry acquaintances would arise here and there. Poor kids in some homeroom class or another who would find themselves at Jacobson’s for a playdate, but none of them ever seemed to want to stay the night. In fact, none of them seemed to want to stay for longer than a few hours. Something about Donny’s drunk ramblings and Darla’s wailing screeches didn’t invite comfortability to prospective ‘besties’. Not that Todd knew how to really use the word, or if anyone even used it anymore.

There were those co-workers at his landscaping job who he came to trust and he felt he could talk to. Good for a chat about the hot sun about privileged - if deserving - clientele. Todd frowned. They were the ones who told his employers about the ‘puppy comment’ which led to his termination and a $100 managerial notice bonus split between the four of them. No, he didn’t much care what happened to them.

The only thing that struck any sort of nerve in Todd’s heart were the Crows. His only friends back on Earth really. Even if Crows still lived on Earth after all this time, they must have completely forgotten about him now. Generations must have passed, father and son crows and on and on… That was if they hadn’t gone with the humans… His heart sank at the thought of the black feathers in his pocket. Feeling it sitting flush with the metal piece, he sighed.

Giving it the thought it deserved, Todd imagined that it had been a parting gift in some way. Almost as though the crows knew he was going to leave and never return. 

A chuckle turned into a glower. How was it that they always seemed to know just what he needed anyway? They had always brought him the exact thing he required, and never anything superfluous or unnecessary until the last time he would be on Earth. Why? Did they really know, or was this supposed to be a small part of a larger gift? 

He supposed it didn't matter now, crows surely forget a human after four thousand years - especially if all the humans are gone. For now it could be a parting gift, whatever it was for originally didn’t matter much.

Man those stars are so pretty… They twinkled across his vision.

“Lost in thought there, ey Spaceman?” Todd’s stupor was shattered by the commanding voice of Evangeline. 

“Please call me Todd, I’ve never been in space before,” He said, shoving the piece deep into his pocket and pulling his hand back out. 

“Okay, Todd, that’s a fair point I guess, but if you did go out into space, you would die, so you being in a Spaceship is the closest thing you’ll ever get,” She teased. 

“Don’t you have space suits or something?” Todd challenged.

She chortled. “Like those would do you any good,” The large woman turned around and lumbered over a section of the wide control panel of flashing colors which stretched across the front of the room in a wide semi circle. Tones and beeps of different pitches began to ring out in the room as she began to push down on different lights and buttons.

“Really Evangeline?” Eddard spun around to face her as she imputed her instructions. “We’re going now?” 

“Look Eddard, this guy has never seen what it looks like to travel through a HyperSpace lane. We’ll go through a slow lane, it’s prettier that way.” She turned back to look at Todd, gave him a wink as if she was doing him a favor, and turned back to the panel. 

“See, look!” She said, pointing out into the vastness of space. Todd followed her finger and saw nothing but more void and stars. “The planet we found this dude on is right at the other end of the main lane!” 

Eddard groaned loudly, “Okay okay, if you say so.” He too began pressing buttons on the panel. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to get to that side of the Galaxy anyway. Besides, Tristen is gonna be happy that we're making our way to Torthal 9 to offload those subsonic alternators, and I’m sure Illana will want us to unload cargo here soon. Plus it's probably a good idea to get in contact with the cruisers over there.” Evangeline nodded along with him excitedly. 

“Cruisers?” Todd asked, picking up on what he could from the conversation. “Like, Cruise Ships?”

Evangeline laughed condescendingly, and spoke slowly as if he were five, “Yeah buddy, Cruise ships, big spaceships! Good job.” 

Todd frowned and thought about the great big oceanic barges that once hosted his landscaping clientele. He guessed she may be talking about a space faring vessel like this one but only larger, however he couldn't help but think about all the janitorial work that must need to be done on a big ocean cruise ship plowing through the stars. 

Words flew out of his mouth, “I mean, do you think they would have a job for me on one of those? Like, instead of being a Janitor on Mars.”

Eddard quickly spun around in his chair, “I seriously don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with having a job. You are on The Unity, just relax.”

“Just… relax?” Todd said as he began to panic. The two continued inputting instructions on their wide panel as his breathing became sharper and sharper. 

“You want a job?” Evangeline finally said, throwing her head over her shoulder, “Illana really likes traveling through the Lanes.” She snorted, stifling a laugh. “So go down to the Engine room, straight down the hallway, can't miss it, and tell her to get up here. Tell her we will be at the Lane entrance in twenty minutes.”

Todd was already back down the hatch as soon as the words left her mouth. 

    ***

After finding that he could slide his way down to the kitchen on his butt, Todd hiked the rest of the way to the opposite side of the long corridor of a ship. A similar hatch faced him and he pulled himself through.

He had never seen a room so large.

A long metal walkway lacking any sort of guard rail stretched out before him, leading down a room glowing with golden light. Flanked by hundreds of feet of empty air in every direction, the walkway pulled his eyesight to its final end, a hatch which seemed to be covering a brightly lit room within.

Branching out from the walkway were similar, though much more terrifyingly skinny, catwalks. Each led to a silver ring which loomed overhead and slowly spun around the central walk, purposefully humming a deep, resonant tune. Five of these large rings dominated the space, each evenly spaced down the long tunnel.

Gold beams connected these rings to the ceiling, large all encompassing bronze walls. Todd stared at the rivets which held them together, seeing the rust and repair jobs that had been done on them, noticeable even from so far away.

As a landscaper, he had seen quite a few repair jobs in his day. Though he was no welder himself, Todd fancied himself something adjacent to a handyman. Nothing that he would ever dare to admit to anyone else - or god forbid an actual mechanic - but deep down in his heart, he knew that if he just got the right person to show him how to fix a machine, he could. At least after a few times of seeing how it’s done that is… or a few dozen times.

Todd gained his familiarity from his father. Donny was always the one to fix things up around the house when the maintenance subscription fees were too high to afford. They worked well enough until they broke again, needing another tune up in weeks or months.

“Trick is Toddy Boy,” he’d say, “Learn how to fix sum’n up well enough, it’ll last until you need to do it again. That’s why they call it ‘maintain-ance’, cause you gotta maintain it over and over and over…”

Darla had only seen machines as a means to an end, and she very much preferred the management of those means to be someone else’s responsibility. A woman with a deep detest for her society’s dependence on machines - or so she would say over and over during her own drunken rants after Donny collapsed on the couch - his mother’s real hatred of machines stemmed from her deep ignorance of them. 

“Machines should just WORK!,” She would scream. “JUST WORK! DAMMIT YOU’RE BUILT TO WORK, SO WORK DAMMIT!”

Darla had said the same thing to Donny night after night as well. Most times, Todd assumed she was talking to him too. 

Todd worried that his mother’s disdain for technology stunted his own natural curiosity towards mechanical things. He could feel his Darla’s desire to give him the mind of a great artist silently poisoning Donny’s business-everymanman-son dream that sat constantly coiled in his heart. The two waged war in him, forging a mind not very naturally attuned to machines in the slightest, but desperately interested nonetheless.

It was too bad nothing ended up sticking. Maybe if he had found something he was an expert in he could have lived a Specialist’s life, a good life, maybe even be a CEO’a life. It was too bad he didn’t have what it took… but that was okay, Todd knew not everyone could be a CEO. Only those who really deserved it.

The bronze walls far in the distance seemed to spin around him. Slowly, surely…

Todd frowned, he really did try his best to be enterprising. Even after dropping out of college he dabbled at seeing every moment as a learning opportunity. For a time, every time his mowers were in need of a check-up from the company mechanic, he made sure to ask the workers in the shop exactly what went wrong with it, what could have been done to prevent it, and what else might he need to know just in case this sort of thing might happen again. 

At first, the shop mechanics seemed eager to answer his many, many questions, but after some time things changed. After a while, though he couldn’t be sure when, the mechanics grew cold and distant, giving him short and curt responses to his genuine questions. 

Once he put together that “go fuck yourself buddy,” and “I swear to god if you ask me that question again I’ll knock you lights out you little freak,” were not things wrong with his mower but rather insults, he elected to keep his mouth shut while on the job site entirely. 

What did I say wrong to them to make them hate me? Todd wondered as he watched a rivet on the far wall slowly rotate around, following its movement with his whole upper body. What’s wrong with me? Everyone in my life ends up treating me like some weirdo freak… but, I’m just here, man… I do my best… What’s wrong with me?

With hundreds of possibilities racing through his mind, Todd completely missed the idea that the mechanics were simply tired of responding: “There’s nothing wrong with this mower but a bit of wear and tear, you took it in at the perfect time. Thank you, honestly! Great intuition, usually the mow team brings their machines to us when they’re trashed. I am just going to replace this one belt/spark plug/etc… Here, I’ll show you so you can just go ahead and do it for yourself next time so you won’t have to come in. It will take five seconds…”

As the thoughts raced through his head, Todd barely noticed his body weight pull him off balance to the left. His feet lost the ground and he began falling, leaving his hands to grasp at the holes in the grated metal floor, just as quickly stopping his descent.

Todd yelped, fingers wrapped tightly in the little amount of grip they could manage. Pulling his body up as much as he could, he could still feel his feet below him, dangling down over the same rivet which he once had followed overhead. 

With a chest half heaved onto the metal, Todd called for help and heard it pathetically come back to him as a sad distressed echo three times before going on its merry way of not dangling over a fifty foot drop.

“HELP!?” Todd cried out again, purposefully ignoring the echo that mocked him in threes. “Illana please?! Are you in here?!”

Feet dangled and dangled, his upper body strength still too weak to pull his lower torso and legs from the drop below. With a deep breath in - one that had been intended to encourage some sort of burst of helpful energy - Todd felt his arms weakening. Whimpering, his chest slipped, and his entire body dangled in a thin line above his feet. Fingers wrapped in the grate were his only saving grace.

Todd screamed something like, “AHHHHGHHHHGHGGHHHAHHAHHAHHHH!!” for quite some time. Skinny twig fingers turned red with the strain of holding up his weight. 

Just as he felt the pull of his body rip loose the grip his fingers had in the walkway, a hand grasped his right wrist. 

Todd sailed in the air for a moment, then found his feet slamming on something solid. The walkway rang out. Just as he lost his balance again, two strong, yellow gloved hands grabbed Todd’s elbows and pinned them to his side, steading him in the process. 

Though his knees shook, he kept them steady - feeling very proud of himself deep down.

Mouth agape in a silent scream, Todd stared down at his savior with wild eyes. Pounds of dark bushy hair were tied back tight in a high bun, dominating the top quarter of this short figure, which was otherwise coated in a thick crust of grease and oil stains. Her mountain of hair and shrewd, dark face however, seemed inextricably and immaculately clean. 

Floundering with his tongue for a moment, Todd bumbled, “You must be the Mechanic! My name is Todd H. Jacobson, and I’m the new cook! It's great to meet y-”

She brushed past him without a word and bent over to open the hatch behind him. Before she hopped in, she made one final turn to look at Todd and said, “Whatever you say buddy. Welcome aboard The Unity.”

The hatch closed, and Todd was alone.

Standing upright and panting heavily, he closed his eyes and listened to the hum of the ship. It rang from those huge silver rings with a very pleasing sound.

As his heartbeat slowed, in tune with the tone all around, Todd calmed down from his very near death drop. Opening his eyes, he noticed what it was that nearly signed his death warrant. The huge bronze wall encompassing the entire space didn’t just seem like it was spinning, but in fact the entire outside shell of this place was slowly but surely rotating around the walkway counterclockwise.

There was something hauntingly beautiful about all this technology. Surely something about the rings and the spinning made the ship go, but to what end each part served - and why exactly the pillars connecting the walls and the steel rings had to be gold - were things that he wouldn’t have the first clue in answering even if he wanted to.

If someone could just explain this to me a few times I bet I could get it… I could at least understand why it has to be gold I bet…

This was not at all an unfamiliar feeling. In fact, much of Todd’s life was filled to the brim with the feeling that there was something about the big picture he just couldn't quite grasp. He always seemed to get lost in the particulars and mechanisms that made grander systems go around. Really, Todd had trouble coming to a holistic understanding of just about anything.

He always felt just as smart as the next person - just as capable and adept at learning - but he figured he must have been too busy daydreaming and losing himself somewhere deep inside his own mind to ever really find his ‘thing’, his purpose.

Others didn’t seem to struggle with this - not that Todd interacted with many others.

Individual lessons were fine and easy enough for the young Todd Jacobson. From his earliest classes of first grade up through his final days before dropping out of college, the day by day lesson plans seemed easy enough to pass. He enjoyed the structure - wake up, learn a few new things, go home. But it seemed that on exam day, Todd always had a tough time going about putting the pieces together.

Sure, the pythagorean theorem was easy enough to learn, yeah, he remembered the class period the teacher told him about President Zuckerberg's historic fifth term and how amazingly patriotic the laws he passed were, but for the life of him, he hardly ever saw anything higher than a ‘D’ on every returned math test or history project.

The day to day was easy, but it was excelling that seemed to avail him.

Excelling, in fact, was something he seemed to be unable to do in any field at all - certainly when it came to social settings. When he wasn't too busy avoiding anybody that might perceive him in any way, shape, or form as behaving in a way that wasn't normal, he was too busy worrying that they knew he wasn’t normal no matter what he did. This roadblock stopped him from even trying to secure a casual acquaintance as a serious ‘long-term friend-type relationship.’

Every social group seemed to spit Todd out like a bad piece of gristle. Due in large part to his absolute atrocious abilities in Math, Science, Economics, History, Literature, and every other subject he was offered during his public education. Not a single person seemed to find him of any importance or worth in their lives in or out of the classroom. And, as the saying went, ‘if you’ve got nothing to offer, then why are you even offering?’

For Todd, it felt as though in every class he had ever taken, there was somebody who was succeeding and thriving while he floundered. No matter what the subject was, even if it was one that he didn't feel completely hopeless in to start out, somebody else would come along with a more complete understanding and made him feel as though he had to start from square one. 

College had been an absolute hell for this exact reason, and largely attributed to his dropping-out. By the end of highschool, the writing on the wall was obvious enough even for him: Become a specialist in a field, or perish under debt for the rest of your life.

This was a lesson not only taught to him directly from his school and teachers, but also observed through his parents. Going into his first year, Todd had the horrible awareness that he had to find something that he truly excelled in now, or would forever drift from low-skilled job to low-skilled job until a debt relief labor program came along to save him. Or he died, which did feel like a good option many cold nights after his parents had passed.

Unfortunately for him, no class in college ‘hooked’ him - as so many were fond of saying - and it wasn't long before he was back out on the streets working full time.

Even landscaping was just another area for him to underperform. No matter how many times he asked and how hard he tried, he never could quite fully understand the machines. This, and the disdain the mechanics held for him, disqualified him from any position in the shop. Understanding a minor break, he could do, but if there was more than one broken part Todd was lost. 

If they had just been more patient with me…

He never could - and never tried - to understand the pest and weed spraying division. Walking around, killing plants. Why would he want to do that?

Most of all, Todd could never even begin to understand speaking to the clients about their property and the landscaping itself. They never seemed like very reasonable people, not to mention he could never remember all the services the company offered. Unreasonable people tended to yell at him when he couldn’t remember things.

Another of the reasons his gentle wishes to be a mechanic failed. Unreasonable people and a bad memory disqualify you from being a specialist in so many fields.

This quality rubbed him the wrong way, and it was something the billionaire clientele his company worked for had to spare. More than any other human. While he already felt isolated from any of his classmates and coworkers, these rich folk were a different species entirely. They seemed often to be something far from human, something further removed from than even chimpanzees and gorillas he was pretty sure humans evolved from. 

Billionaires were something… parasitic. Every time he looked in their eyes, he couldn’t help but think that there could be nothing else to better describe evil.

For this reason, and this reason primarily, Todd blamed his ineptitude. For him, the world might as well have been all evil - root, core, and stem. Deep down that is. Everyone he talked to from the beginning of his life on Earth to the start of his exodus in space had nothing but bad things to say about their lives. It didn’t matter if it was the fellow burnouts like him, or the well connected, well educated specialists he always so dreamed of becoming. Just about everyone seemed miserable all the time. 

He tried to avoid it, hold a cherry demeanor, focus on his straight lines at work and his happy grass family, but from the perspective of almost losing his life from a fall in a spaceship thousands of years after everyone else is dead… it was much easier to see.

People would walk around with their heads down from job to job, going through the motions of living. From as early as he could remember, Todd always felt as though none of it made sense. Everybody who pretended like it was making sense might as well be living on an entirely different planet - and, much to his frustration, even this didn’t even seem to be an original thought.

So many of his co-workers seemed to have similar grievances with the world at large, and for the most part Todd nodded and went along with his compatriate’s complaints - but deep down he knew it was really only him.

Everybody else had a purpose. It was so clear. He saw it, the people he worked with at the Landscaping job who bemoaned their own lack of skills were all so talented somehow. Todd saw it in everyone he met: They all had a purpose, big or small. Talents, hobbies, interests. Everybody but him.

Deep cravings gnawed at him, begging him to find just one interest, one hobby, one special talent to satisfy them for good. Despite how he tried, he found none his entire life.

Sure, he could make one hell of a straight line on a mower, but what kind of skill is that?

If, so he often found himself thinking, he was only able to look past the horrible evil of the world long enough to pick a life path just like everybody else, then he could be happy.

Todd Jacobson felt as if he stuck out like the sore thumb of the entire species. Purposefully forgotten and ignored. Being shot out into space and forgotten didn’t help.

As he sat and listened to the dull hum of the engine room, he wondered if he would now finally be able to find purpose, a reason for living. He chuckled at the thought. How ironic would it be to finally become a Specialist now that the Earth itself has apparently been depopulated. What’s the point? What a big joke that would be. What a big joke he was already.

He took a seat on the walkway and watched the wall spin. It was nice in here, someone so useless didn’t even deserve to be in here.

A metal screech scattered Todd’s aimless self-pitying thoughts. Whipping his head around, his eyes locked with those of a man who poked his head through the circular hatch. Only the top of a head and brows eyes peered over the edge, staring daggers through the space between them.

“Uh… hello?” Todd said, scrambling to his feet. He looked down at the top of a head which lay just inches away from his ratty tennis shoes.

The eyes looked him up and down once… twice… and three times before a muffled voice from the other side of the hatch said something Todd couldn’t catch. 

“What was that… sorry?” Todd asked, pasting an apologetic smile on his face. 

The figure lifted his head further into the room to reveal a gaunt face. “So you’re this uhh… Spaceman huh?” He sounded like he was talking out of his nose.

Todd’s teeth gritted as he chuckled, “Like I’ve told everyone else, my name is Todd Jacobson, but you can just call me Todd. Y-”

Seeing the smirk on the skinny man’s face and the stifled laughter echoing from the long walkway below, Todd’s face went red. 

“Sure, sure, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, sure man, sure,” the man nodded back.

“So…” Todd tapped his fingers on the metal walkway where he sat. “What’s your name?”

“Tristen,” the man snapped. 

“Nice to meet you Tristen,” Todd smiled a toothy grin once again, but he didn’t smile back. “What do you do here?”

The gaunt man cocked his head to the side, “Huh?”

“Like… what’s your job?” What kind of ship is this? Does anyone know what their job is? He added in his head.

Tristen’s eyes went comically wide, Todd thought that they may just pop out of his head, “What do you even mean by that question?”

Maybe after all this time, these people were using some new fancy slang word for ‘job.’ Slang words come and go and often make things very confusing, or they had during Todd’s time in school. Four thousand years did seem like a long time for at least a few new slang words to come around.

Todd laughed, “I don’t even know anymore… look, I come from a long time ago.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if talking to a child, “I guess there’s a lot for me to learn about how you guys work. So…” 

Stopping for a moment to meet Tristen’s gaze, Todd found it so twisted with confusion and disgust that he had a hard time reading the emotion on it at all. So expressive…

Electing to continue in a normal tone, Todd carried on, “If there’s anything you need me to do to help out around here, please let me know. I can do just about anything, and I’m a quick learner.”

Speaking with his jaw below the lip of the hatch, Tristen responded with eyes as wide as sauce pans - wider. Todd didn't know exactly what he said, but it was likely, “Really?”

“Yes!” Todd’s heart thumped in his chest as enthusiasm unintentionally dripped into his voice, “I’m already the cook, but however much free time I have from that I’d love to pick up any odd and ends around the ship!” 

Tristen’s raised eyebrow seemed to indicate Todd wasn't quite selling himself enough, he continued, “I took a job on Mars doing Janitorial work before that fell through… but, uh… I can do just about anything anybody could reasonably or unreasonably want, or need me to do, above and beyond any expectations.” He smiled his widest most salesmanly smile. Pulling out the big guns, why not, there's a lot to prove as the new-hire.

“Uhh…” came the response a moment later as Tristen’s face began slowly sinking further and further down. “Sure man… well… hey, Evangeline really wants you up in the cockpit… like, now. She’s getting really mad that you’re not there… so… If you want a job, just… hurry up and do that, I guess?” 

Tristen’s head dropped under the lip and a skinny hand with spindly fingers gripped the  handle to pull the hatch closed. 

Thunk.

Alone again, but at least he had something to do. He always liked having something to do.

4 100,000 Light Years in No Time At All

Todd’s grumbling stomach steered him on his slide back into the kitchen for a quick bite to eat on the way to the cockpit for the eponymous Hyperspace Lane travel that he was hearing so much about. If he was to be the cook - something that grimly seemed like a sick joke among the crew - he might as well start learning this kitchen and its various cooking instruments.

He had never cooked before, not unless you count the ever-so convenient and very handy, all purpose air-fryer and microwave oven. Frozen dinners and fast-cooked single serving meals composed the majority of his diet on Earth, and he had very little experience working much more than an Amazon Essential Air Fryer - which came standard in every apartment along with the mandatory surcharge of $1,000.  

Swinging open the door to the small room, Todd got a better look inside. The circular walls, much like the room with the chairs and couches, were a matte yellow color. Steel counters, which he had originally assumed to be cold storage of some sort, lined the perimeter. Upon further inspection, Todd found his parting assessment to be correct. These metal boxes lacked any sort of handle that could open them.

Smooth on all sides… In fact, the only derivation in the slick gray metal surface was a four inch wide, once inch long slot that sat dead center of each counter top. 

Staring at one such hole quizzically for a moment, Todd listened to his stomach rumble. Taking another cursory glance around to make sure there really were no signs of heating elements, ovens, and definitely no Air Fryers - Amazon essential or otherwise - he focused his attention back on the small square hole on top of the metal counter.

First sliding his fingers inside and investigating the sharp corners of the hole, he found what seemed to be a set of small closed doors inside. He pulled his hand back out of the slot and looked at it closer. 

It was too dark inside the hole to see the small doors within that stopped him from exploring deeper into the metal box. Todd scowled. No he could surely figure this stupid thing out he didn’t need anyone to explain it over and over. Just a cooler of some kind… 

He grumbled, eyes flicking back and forth in a triple check. Revealing nothing, he slammed a fist down onto the flat top in frustration. 

In response, the counter gave off a brief whirring noise and dispensed a brown liquid from the slotted hole on the top. Flopping out, the brown goo abruptly hardened and shrunk into a slab of brownish-red color. It filled the room with the smell of motor oil. 

Todd cautiously picked up the brick and turned it over in his hand. It was slick, and coated his fingers in a clear, lubricating grease. Lifting it to his face, the smell attacked the hairs inside his nose, filling his nostrils with a bitter singe. He recoiled, head jolting back in the opposite direction - almost jumping off his own neck to save himself from the odor. It reminded him of the thick black substance that accumulated at the bottom of the lawn mower engines. 

But his stomach rumbled with hunger, and this was a kitchen.

With one last look around to make sure there was really nothing else to eat, Todd lifted the brown hunk up to his face once more. His nose immediately begged him to drop it, but he used his left hand to silence its cries with a pinch. With his sense of smell momentarily incapacitated, Todd opened his mouth wide and took a small bite from the corner. 

Before he could even chew, his taste buds began setting off the same warning signals that his nose was desperately trying to convey. Not only was the block in equal parts mushy, moist, crumbly, and dry - a terrible, and all together confusing texture combination - the bitter, sour flavor ripped through his mouth like a freight train. Everything his senses warned him about the taste was true, and before he knew it he was scraping his tongue with the collar of his tee-shirt, littering the floor with brown clumps. 

His eyes locked once more on the rest of the brown brick that he held in his right hand. How this could be considered food Todd couldn’t say, but the hunger pains in his stomach were not getting any quieter. With no other option available, Todd took another bite. 

Steeling his will in the same way he practiced for yearly performance reviews, Todd chewed as long as he possibly could. Though his mouth, tongue, nose, and brain pleaded with him all the while, his jaw worked on the piece until it was emulsified enough to swallow; then he did so.

Slick brown mucus inched down Todd’s throat. 

No, the whole idea was immediately forfeited  as his esophagus vetoed the project entirely. Gagging added a different, ‘stomach bile’ flavor profile into the cacophony parading around his mouth, and he began to feel his eyes watering. With all of his might, Todd forced himself to swallow the chewed hunk along with the bile that had arrived via his now burning throat all back down into his stomach. A tear fell down his face - one silent protest.

One horrid pile of food brick-and-bile managed to make it to his stomach, slamming down like a rock. Familiar hunger pains were immediately replaced with something new. Something worse. 

Fire shot through him starting in his stomach and spread through the rest of his belly. Doubling over, Todd tried to resist the inevitable feeling of vomit that bubbled up inside of him. Inching fingers of chill cascaded through his intestines. He shook his head and held his stomach tight with both hands while more tears fell to the ground. 

He felt it rise up within him, carrying along with it the burning feeling that besieged his guts. Finally, in one grand heave, the piece of the brick he had chewed along with a significant amount of stomach bile erupted into the floor of the Kitchen. 

Composing himself and wiping the tears from his eyes, Todd gazed at the mess he had made on the floor.

“Hmm…” He hummed aloud. “That’s no good.”

Anxiety replaced the pain that slowly began to subside from his stomach. He had to be up in that cockpit where everyone was waiting for him as soon as possible. Whatever ‘grab a quick bite of space snacks’ plan he had gone into the kitchen with had to be thrown out as quickly as possible to return to his initial job. 

What was I thinking? He asked himself. Nobody told me I could have any food… Taking an unapproved snack break at his old job would definitely have gotten him fired, why would this place be any different? 

If he got fired here, would they just throw him out into the stars?

Todd slowly stepped over his pile of vomit and emulsified food brick, and reached for the handle of the door. 

Taking one last look, Todd promised himself to come back and clean up his mess with whatever janitorial supplies were on this ship just as soon as he saw this ‘HyperSpace Lane’, whatever it is. 

He stepped through the door and walked up the hallway. 

                ***

“OWWW! Fuck! Evangeline! Stop doing that shit!” 

As he pulled himself up into the cockpit, Todd was confronted with the silhouette of a small skinny figure held aloft by its hair. Feet violently swung feet above the ground, his captor had him held up so their eyes were at the same level. 

The stars were so beautiful behind them.

“I thought I told YOU to go FIND HIM and GET HIM here NOW!” Evangaline screamed in Tristen’s face as he helplessly strained against her grip - clearly in pain. She shook him, “WHAT IF HE’S LATE? WHAT IF HE MISSES IT?”

“Hey! Woah! You gotta put him down lady! I’m right here!” Todd called out and waved his arms, letting the shock of the situation guide him. 

The outburst gained the attention of the entire crew, which he now noticed were lazily standing around the perimeter of the room, leading on the encompassing glass dome.

Fire poured out of the red headed woman’s eyes. Tristen was immediately dropped - flopping like a fish on the ground for a brief moment before straggling to his feet and smirking, pretending to have recovered with grace.

In a flash, the looming figure of Evangeline covered Todd in a shadow, blocking him from the light of the stars. 

Looking up, Todd found himself asking in a small, private voice - almost to himself: “You wouldn’t happen to have any cleaning supplies around, would you?”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” her voice boomed in response. 

Todd was at a complete loss on what to say in such a situation, so he giggled. 

“W-WHY ARE YOU L-LAUGHING AT M-M-ME?” She screamed into his face, squeezing out each word with great effort sending hot, dry air up Todd’s nostrils. It smelled like the stale metallic air his apartment's radiator poured into all the rooms with great effort every winter, a desperate machine trying to somehow singularly provide all it could.

“Uhh…” He involuntarily chortled again, never having experienced this level of direct, exaggerated anger pointed squarely at him. Most of the vitriol he had experienced in life was something more like high intensity disappointment, not rage. 

Thoughts in his head were very rapid and hard to make sense of. Coming in about twenty to fifty at a time, none seemed to want to complete a sentence. Half were curious about how she got so tall, around five were angry that so many were curious about such a stupid thing, and the others were upset that the stars were being blocked. One rogue thought attempted to herd the fevered group - rally them to get some cleaning supplies out of this intense exchange - but Todd had never seen a herding dog in action let alone a single sheep, so his thoughts didn’t have a single clue as to how that whole process worked.

“Alright Evangeline, I think that’s enough,” a booming voice came from the shadows - saving Todd from the nightmare loop he was trapped in.

Taz, the beautiful giant he had met in the Kitchen from whom the command came, closed the distance between him and the large woman.

Her face, which was now about the same color as her own long hair, turned to the large man with a vicious rage. “Where even is Markus!” She screamed up into his face, “He’s the o-one who found this little p-pipsqueak anyw-way!”

“Organizing the cargo bay,” Taz replied calmly, his large right hand resting on her shoulder. “You know how many times he’s been back and forth through the lanes? He really doesn’t need to see it again.”

Red hot anger drained slowly from her face as she lost the steam in her argument. Gears inside her head shuddered and caught. Her face found the floor before snapping back up to glare at Todd 

“Well then where was he?” She pointed at him, her finger grasping the tip of his nose.

 “I w-uh…” Todd’s tongue tripped over his teeth. “I was in the kitchen-”

Evangaline whipped over to Taz. With a pinched tone she asked, “What was he doing in there?”

Taz shrugged and let go of her shoulder.

“I’m the new cook… remember?” Todd cautiously reminded her. 

The tall woman’s face dropped, “Oh my god he’s serious.” Her face found her hands as she spun around. 

“I can’t fucking believe this guy.” She found her way over to Eddard at the control panel without another word.

Todd’s attention turned towards Taz who had turned around to walk back to his spot by the wall with the small mechanic. Clearing his throat, he tried to catch either of their attentions, but Taz was focused on the ground, and the small mechanic woman seemed to be avoiding his gaze entirely, turned around to look at the stars. A real shame, he really had meant to say a proper ‘thank you for saving my life and not letting me fall to my death,’ earlier but hadn’t gotten the chance.

Todd looked around the room and eventually met the eyes of the skinny man, who had found himself his own portion of the perimeter stars away from the others. With caution, Todd approached him while he finished wiping the dust from his shoulders. 

“I’m sorry Tristen, I didn’t mean to get you in trouble,” he offered his still mildly aching right hand to shake. It seemed a fitting gesture.

The skinny man looked at him with a cocked eyebrow and did not reciprocate the handshake. 

“What?” he asked plainly. 

Todd put his hand back down to his side, brushed the sweat off his palm, and squinted. 

“Uhh… you know,” he began in a hushed tone, glancing over at the large redheaded woman who had once again begun to concern herself greatly with the control panel. “She just had you by the hair, two feet in the air… What the hell?”

“Hmm?” Tristen glanced over at Evangeline and chuckled, “Oh yeah, I hate when she does that…” He took a deep breath, “But I guess I can’t help it, it's just something she does from time to time.” He faced Todd again, “Besides, I usually bring it on myself.” 

“What do you mean?” Todd was beyond confused. If someone had done that to him - when he still had his hair - he would have kicked, screamed, and bit until they left him alone. Self defense was not his forte, but he had some creative ideas.

“Oh you know,” Tristen continued casually, “I tell her how I think things should go, she disagrees, I explain why she’s being dumb, she picks me up by my hair, I make fun of her stutter, she cries, I cry sometimes too, then we move on. It’s just the way we work.” 

Todd stared at him silently, waiting for an explanation.

“But I do appreciate the help,” he added. “Telling her to stop and all. You know, usually I have to wait for Taz or Markus to step in, but it was nice to be dropped a few seconds early this time. I’ll remember that.” He flashed a reassuring smile at Todd.

Silence fell over the cockpit as Todd found himself at a loss for words. He had never seen such violence done to another person so casually. From the look in Tristen’s eyes, it seemed as though all was already forgiven, as if it really all was a simple routine for them. In fact, something about the crew rubbed him the wrong way entirely. The way they sat or stood, each in their own spot in the cockpit, still as statues… it was as if he had walked into a movie that had played a million times over. Every time is just the same. They were burned into their spots. Todd noticed that even the metal floor sported erosion patterns, marking their routine as much as he was. All of their movements, especially the two still huddled over the control panel, were practiced, measured, and precise. Even Evangaline’s anger, Tristen’s pain, and subsequent forgiveness seemed rehearsed. 

Todd’s brain underwent an interesting interchange of emotions. With his eyes still peeled, a great confusion thundered through him, arresting his heart and flushing his skin. Though interlaced with the flashes of fear, the booms in his mind signaled something almost completely unknown to him. The people in his life never acted this way, intermingled so perfectly in a perfect work-life harmony. People’s bickering never ended so abruptly, and there was always someone who missed a memo or instruction somewhere along the line. Completely unlike here. This kind of unity was so peculiar.

This peculiarity, ordered as it was around the bonds between these crewmates, quickly gave way to a secondary feeling. A great sadness poured down from the rainclouds forewarned by the thunder of wary dismay, drowning his heart in a deluge he could not immediately place. Capturing him so suddenly as it had, Todd’s breath seemed to miss its command in the chaos. His tear ducts, another casualty of this storm, leaked small puddles into the creases of his eyelids.

The stars glittered and flittered their resplendance, eternally communed in an untroubled countless infinity. ​​

Finally, as he wrangled his breath and instructed the tears to recede back into his eyes, the stream of emotion quieted to a trickle and allowed Todd to identify its origin: Jealousy.

Todd knew that this group was the closest thing to a ‘family’ that he had ever seen. How comfortable they seemed around each other… In the still silence of the cockpit, despite the strange anger he had witnessed between them - or perhaps because of it, they all seemed in their right place. This crew, he realized, must be closer to each other than he had been with his own family. Lucky. They looked around at each other silently, not feeling the need to spark a conversation to fill the emptiness. Routines binding them together eternally.

Unlike his own mother and father, and very unlike all of the friends Todd had ever tried to make in his life, here was a group of people who understood each other. Here was a group who didn’t need to drag on an argument until everyone went to bed hungry, talk behind their back about wanting them to change, or fill casual discussions with interesting musings to prove their worth to one another. Here was a group who was comfortable in their collective silence. As he looked in their faces in turn, he noticed nothing but contentment on each and every one.

Furthermore, each of these crewmates seemed to be a specialist - just another reason to be jealous. 

Lucky lucky space… pirates? He thought. Though he was confused at their lack of specified jobs - or in fact, what they were doing up here at all - it was unmistakable that they were each playing a very specific role on the ship.

Eddard seemed easy to figure out: pilot. He’d known it even before they’d met. Todd had yet to see him away from the wide panel, which seemed to control the ship, so pilot he was. Easy. 

This ‘Illana’ was obviously the mechanic, or engine maintenance personnel, or something like that. Seemed fitting, her kurtness and stern look reminded him very much of the mechanics he knew back in his Landscaping job. Good to help you out when something is broken, not so familiar with friendly conversations.

For the other crew personnel, Todd was at a loss. He thought that Evangeline, the angry red-headed giantess, must be the captain of some sort. She barked orders, and others followed, pretty typical captain behavior there. Though she bowed to Taz immediately and her stuttering wasn't very captain-ly. A captain definitely wouldn’t cry. She was the one to gather the whole crew in the cockpit, but from what he saw, it seemed like she had done so under a desire to see the HyperSpace Lanes together as a crew. In fact, as he watched her finish inputting button presses into the large machine in the front of the room, she continually glanced up at the stars ahead, shaking with obvious excitement. Perhaps co-pilot would be a more apt description of her role on the ship, but Todd couldn’t be sure either way. The word navigator ran through his mind but he was too slow to catch it, so co-pilot it was.

As for Taz, the blonde giant who looked exactly like the man named Markus who placed him in the pod - but was not - Todd found no other role fitting other than captain. Definitely… right? Big and loud… but he didn't really give any orders. All he did was yell at Evangeline when she was being openly rude, anyone could have done that. He certainly was large enough to lead, but standing with Illana on the side of the room, slumped against the glass dome of stars, nothing about him shouted ‘in command.’ If anything, he seemed bored.

What about this Markus guy, who had apparently found Todd’s pod on whatever rock it landed on and brought him here? Was he the same Markus as the man who placed him in the pod? That surely wasn't the case, as at least four thousand years had passed between now and then. Somebody couldn't have lived that long. Such a common name, the one that put him in the pod was probably some ancestor of this Taz guy. If it somehow was the same Markus, what the hell was he doing here? Just organizing boxes in the cargo hold? Hardly a job for a man who’s been alive over four thousand years. 

Then there was Tristen. Of all the crewmates on the ship, Tristen’s role seemed the most enigmatic. Though he hadn’t been on the ship for long, Todd thought about the actual tasks that he had seen Tristen doing that might help him come to a determination, and came up with a squat. If pilot, co-pilot, mechanic, captain, and whatever this mysterious Markus did were all taken, what could be left for skinny Tristen? His physique betrayed nothing about his skills. He didn’t seem like a fighter, or a builder, or a leader. What could there be left to do? 

“Allright,” the little voice of Eddard came to shatter Todd’s internal musings. “Seems like we’re just about to the Lane entrance.”

“Yes yes yes!” Evangaline chirped, all traces of anger gone from her tone. Her feet tapped excitedly on the metal floor, clanging with each tap. “Look! Look! It’s right there!” She pointed a long finger into the void of space and began to giggle like a schoolgirl. 

Todd followed her finger like he had before and saw nothing but more void and stars. “Where?” He asked. 

The crew burst out into scattered laughter which slowly subsided. Nobody answered his question. 

This was getting tiring.

“Are you ready, Spaceman?” Evangaline said, turning back to look at Todd.

“Uhh…” Todd managed.

“Get ready for the biggest stomach ache of your life,” Came a high voice from the shadows Todd hadn’t heard yet. Looking over, Illana pointed straight up forward at the expansive star field in front of them.

His legs rumbled, and he began to feel heavier and heavier, as though he was being pulled down more with each passing second. Internally, his organs - who had just forgiven him for the debacle in the Kitchen - were yanked down to the floor as well, no time to protest. Stars began to streak and blur outside of the domed cockpit, blending together in long strands like canned spaghetti. However, just as Todd felt the ship begin to pick up speed and the millions of individual streams outside became a mess of indiscernible streaks, the stars suddenly snapped back to their original places. 

Todd was briefly in the air, before his body smashed onto the ground. This time there was nobody there to catch his wrist and save him, so he went sprawling across the floor - nose becoming acquainted with the same metal floor his head had met back in the orange room.

“Gosh dangit!” came the soft voice of Eddard drifting over the collapsed crew.

Todd flipped to his back, untangling his left arm from around his right knee, and grasped for his nose. Rising to a sitting position while rubbing the bridge of his schnoz, Todd asked, “What was that all about?”

“Freaking traffic!” Eddard said, eyes glued to the starry expanse before him.

“Huh?” Todd huffed, abjectly confused.

“It’s alright…” Evangaline spoke. Sitting cross legged on the ground her head was down and she seemed to shrink further into sadness with each word she spoke. “We can skip the slow lanes and the lights this time I guess… Just hop in the fast lane so he can at least experience it… this traffic is gonna take a century…”

Eddard glanced at his disconsolate companion with pity and patted her on the back before reaching a hand to a small black lever which stuck out from the control panel at a ninety degree angle. With a flick, it shifted it to the left. 

Just as it did so, Todd began to hear a loud clicking, sounding off twice before repeating.

Click, click… click, click… click, click…

“Okay…” Eddard said. “Sorry about that Spaceman.”

The clicking sound continued as the rest of the crew stood up off the floor and dusted themselves off.

“What the hell is happening?” Todd found his shrill voice of his frantic query embarrassing and made a mental note to make sure to calm down whenever he gets the next chance.  If there was ever a time to find a family and learn to become a specialist, this ship was it. He’d just had to calm down first.

“Relax,” Tristen’s voice lazily added from the side, “There was too much traffic in the Sub-Lightspeed HyperSpace Lane, so he’s just merging over to the fast lane. We should be all good to go now.”

Before another word could exit Todd’s jumbled mind, his body, the crew, the ship, space, and time itself instantaneously compressed down into absolutely nothing.  

              ***

Air poured into Todd’s lungs as he lay flat on the floor, vision completely encompassed by an array of bright, twinkling stars. Compared to the last time he woke up, he realized he was screaming much quicker. Coming back to himself and shutting off the siren of his mouth, Todd glanced around the room. His spine ached.

Nothing had changed but the stars.

Each member of the crew sat or stood in the same position they had been before, five pairs of eyes fixated on the poor human rolling around on the ground.

“How was that?” Evangaline said, daredevils’ energy in her lungs.

Todd found himself unable to speak. Glued to the floor, he realized throwing up back in the Kitchen hadn’t been such a bad idea. Otherwise it would have all come out now.

“Yeah, I bet that was wild for you, huh?” She gloated. Oddly, though Todd knew there was no reason for him to feel bad, the comment hurt. Sure, he had a boring life, always too poor to ride a rollercoaster or even go to Amazon Present’s Six Flags Over Amazon Amusement Park - Sponsored by Pepsi, an Amazon Family Company - but that wasn't his fault. At least, it wasn't his fault when he was a kid…

“You know,” she continued, venom dripping from her tongue, “I can’t remember the first time I went through the HyperSpace Lane, but I’m pretty sure I never screamed like that.” She laughed.

“Well I’m pretty sure he’s not like us, Evangeline,” Eddard said. “Besides, I even get a headache every time I go through a Lane. So cut him some slack.”

“Seriously,” Illana spoke from her spot leaning against the dome, “I don’t know why you want us up here to go through the Lane anyway. I hate it. I never get a stomach ache when I’m down in the Engine room when we go through.” She held her stomach in mock pain, “But up here...” She held a finger to her mouth and faked a gag. 

Todd rolled onto his back again as his gut churned. Watching someone recreate his own horrible act only made him want to repeat it to show her how it's really done. He closed his eyes.

“Wha… What the hell was that?” Todd managed to say, focusing on his breathing. 

“Uh… A HyperSpace Lane?” Evangeline snorted as she was asked if ice was frozen water. “Only the thing we’ve been telling you about all this time? Hello, are you there Spaceman?” 

Todd groaned and rolled back to his stomach. 

“Nobody really knows to be honest with you,” Eddard explained, spinning around in his chair to look at the grounded man. “They’ve been around as long as humans have been up here in space, as far as I know. Longer, likely. Way longer.”  

Todd’s head spun.

“But there's a ton of 'em,” Eddard continued, “connecting all parts of the Galaxy together. Criss Crossing is like some giant invisible web. Humans were using them for trade lanes for a while, but when the Empire collapsed… well it's mostly just scavenger ships like us using them nowadays.” 

“Empire?” Todd feebly asked, sound muffled by the metal ground as his lips pressed against the cold metal beneath.

“Yeah, those Cruisers are all that’s left of that. Anyway, we just passed through the longest Lane in the Galaxy. I really can’t blame you for feeling like death, you just went 100,000 light years in zero seconds after all.”  

The phrase ‘100,000 light years’ bounced around in his head for a while. Todd couldn’t even comprehend how far that really was, and he began to feel very small. He let his body go limp on the floor.

“But yeah,” Eddard finished, “Nobody knows who built them, and whoever did was long gone before humans discovered them, so…” he shrugged his shoulders. “They’re pretty convenient though, no?”

“You said we got into the fast lane?” Todd cautiously asked, tipping his head up and supporting its weight with his chin. 

Evangleine let out a loud, long sustained groan before Eddard could swoop in to explain - he spoke over her single crunchy note in a shout, “Yeah, yeah. See, the entrances at each point of the lane condense the ships that pass through into that of a single photon, then shoot them to the other end. Boom, instantaneous arrival for the traveler. However, if you fly your ship on the outer edge of the photon probability field, you can actually experience some time as you go through the lanes.”

He glanced over to the pouting Evanglaine who had ended her groan with a huff at the end of his explanation, “It's her favorite thing. Really pretty and doesn't give you as much of a headache. Plus you can jump out at any point and don't have to be locked into the entirety of the Fast Lane’s Time Dilation.”

“...time dilation?” Todd’s mouth said, grasping on to the last thing he heard in quiet desperation. 

“Yeah yeah, see, while traveling in the HyperSpace Lane’s center seems instantaneous to the traveler, it really just shoots you across the galaxy at the speed of light,” He turned once again to Evangaline, “or very close to the speed of light in the slow lane.”

Todd stared at him with a slack jaw and a cocked eyebrow. He knew he looked a lot like a dead fish at this moment, but couldn't really care less.

Eddard continued, “Basically what that amounts to is that, while we experienced no time at all going through that lane, everyone else across the Galaxy just experienced 100,000 years.”

‘100,000 years,’ echoed in Todd’s mind. “Wait…”

Eddard fully turned back to him with a slight smile on his face, ready to answer more questions. 

“So…” Todd slowly continued, eyes scanning the ground as he chose his next question carefully. Something was horribly wrong here. 

“How many times have you been through these lanes?” He lifted his body off the metal floor and stood to meet Eddard’s reply.

“That makes Sixty-Five!” Came a seemingly reinvigorated reply from Evangeline.

The reply hit Todd in his side and knocked him off guard. Stumbling to the left, he found himself braced against the domed wall off the glass cockpit.

“I really wish you could have seen the slow lane…” her face turned sour, “but you just had to be late didn’t you…” She spun around in her chair to look at the stars. 

Sixty-Five?

Time Dilation?

100,000 Years?

“So…” Todd’s head swiveled to look around the cockpit, eyes meeting those of each of the confused crew members. “When you said that humans haven't been on Earth for four-thousand years…”

“Uh-huh?” Eddard was eager for another question.

“Did you mean four-thousand years total? Or four-thousand years… for you?” 

“Uh…for us.”

Todd felt his fingers turn cold. “So…”

“Uh-huh?”

“How long would you say it’s been since Humans lived on Earth? Like, in total… if you included the time you all spent in the HyperSpace Lanes?” Todd could feel his heart hammering in his chest. The cold from his fingers crept up his arms, slowly numbing his extremities. Suddenly it seemed as though his knees no longer wanted to hold him up.

“Hmm…” Eddard looked at Evangeline who shrugged. “Not too sure… I’d say, close to Six Million Years or so. Maybe longer.”

Before Todd could get his mind to react to what he had just been told, an ear piercing alarm blared, and every light on the long control panel which Eddard and Evangaline sat before began to flash with a bright red light. The small room was immediately filled with light and sound, returning Todd to a fetal position on the ground, hands covering his ears. 

The rest of the crew maintained their casual calm as the alarm blared all around them. He watched from slit eyelids as Eddard and Evangaline spoke to each other seemingly unfazed. Even though he was no further than ten feet away from them, he couldn't understand a single word being spoken underneath the loud alarm. Their hands danced along their control panel until the blaring sound stopped, and only the flashing on the red light remained. 

With the sound gone, Todd slowly stood and took his hands from his ears. There was no blood, which surprised him. He was sure if the sound had gone on any longer there would have been.

“What the fuck was that?” He screamed, wheeling around to look at each of the crew. The alarm lived as a spectral ringing in his ears for a while, making him yell a bit louder than he normally would have under such duress. So much for calming down.

“Oh gosh,” the deep voice of Taz responded, somewhere to his right. “I’ll go get Markus.”

Eddard, still hunched over the control panel, barked a reply, “Yeah Taz, please do. It’s The Independence.” 

“Ugh…Well, at least it's not The Patriot this time,” the giant replied as he cracked open the hatch to the hallway before taking one last look at Todd. “They took us for all we had last time and pretended it was a favor.” The hatch closed.

Todd spun, eyes wide. “WHAT?!” Was all he could manage.

“Calm down buddy,” Evangaline said, disdain dripping from each word. “We’ve been hailed by a Cruiser. But like Eddard said, it's not The Patriot, so we probably have no need to worry.”

Flippantly, she glanced down at the dancing red lights on the control panel, a twisted scrunched expression erupting on her face. “Looks like their sensors picked up a Biorhythm on our ship,” her eyes flicked up at Todd without moving her head from its downward position, “and they require an immediate transfer.”

A chill filled the room. Todd’s heart missed a few beats before ka-thumping back on.

“What does that mean?” Todd rubbed his hands together, feeling pools of moisture building up in the palms of his hands. 

Nobody answered.

He repeated himself, his voice breaking halfway, “What does that mean?!” His heart was beginning to race now, fueled solely on context clues.

“It means they wanna check you out, dumbass,” came a short response from the grease-covered mechanic.

“WHO!?” Todd spun around, face flush in panic.

“Look buddy, you’ve gotta relax,” Tristen’s voice was soothing somehow. Todd’s eyes whipped around and met his, finding comfort in the strange companionship he had found. “They probably just wanna run some experiments on you or something.” 

His words had the opposite effect. Panic in his chest redoubled its effort and shot across his body in a flash. An icy chill thundered through his limbs, jittering across his heart and encouraging the organ to pound and hammer harder his chest with each passing moment.

“Well, well…” he began to pace around the small room, “What are they? Are they human? Are they like me?” His words prowled the room, desperate for relief from the rampaging fear in his body.

The crew glanced at each other before Illana puffed with laughter, no longer able to hold it in. “Human?” she roared with glee. In between bouts of grading, bountiful guffaws, interrupted only by Tristen’s futile chasting, the mechanic managed to continue, “Yes. Like, you? Hell no!” She doubled over in jovial, biting, amusement.  

Todd could hear blood rushing in his ears, each beat of his heart sending shockwaves of ice down his veins. He had never felt so awake in his life, and yet this all felt so much like a nightmare.

“What can I do? I want to stay here with you!” Todd looked again to Tristen for support. While the Unity didn’t offer much in terms of creature comforts, he knew it better than whatever this ‘human-but-not-human’ ship was all about.

“Uhh…” came his thin friend’s reply. “I mean, we can take a vote.”

Eddard’s voice came next, catching Todd’s panicked attention and making him whip around like a starved baboon, “Sure, I mean we can always just hop in the lane and go back to the other side of the Galaxy.”

“Fuck that!” Illana said, stomping her little foot from her position on the floor. “We’ve got shit to offload, we’re getting too heavy for the engine!” She slowly stood and brushed herself off, her face now a serious mask. “Getting this little freak off of the ship would definitely help.”

She looked over to Tristen, “What about Torthal 9? You’ve been talking about that damn place for weeks! You’re really about to go all the way back to the opposite side of the Galaxy, and for what? Just to keep this little thing along with us? What purpose does he serve here? What does he do?”

…Useless, Useless Todd… Clenching his fingers and toes, poor, useless, pathetic Todd swallowed a lump to push back tears.

“Oh Illana, you’re just mad that he was the one that got you out of the engine room. You’d vote anyone off the ship that dragged you out of there,” Tristen scoffed. 

“Or maybe I want to vote him off because I had to save his dumb ass from falling to his death!” she crossed her arms and sneered. 

Todd, inadvertently reverting back to his six year old self in such a stressful scenario, made a panicked whine, “Well, don’t I get a vote?”

The crew once again glanced around at each other. “I don’t see why not,” said Eddard.

“Yeah, it’s your life after all,” Illana added, Tristen nodding along. “Only fair.”

I don’t understand these people at all. Todd kept the words behind his teeth.

“Okay, so, let’s take a vote,” Todd feverishly said, “Obviously, I want to stay. Tristen and Eddard you guys are with me right?”

 “Well hold on Tod-” Tristen tried to say before he was cut off.

“And it seems like Evangaline and Ilana, you guys want me gone right?” Todd blundered through, seemingly oblivious to the crew's growing discomfort. 

“Uhh…” Came the large woman’s confused reply. “What are yo-”

“So that makes three for me to stay, and two for me to go,” Todd looked down at his hands as if to count a large sum, and snapped his head back up. “So that means that as long as either Taz or this Markus guy wants me to stay, then we’re going back through the lane and I’m NOT getting experimented on!” Todd stood triumphant in the middle of the room panting like a dying dog, he’d always had a small fascination with politics and felt very proud of himself for the intrigue.

“Sure buddy, but uh,” Tristen put a hand on his shoulder. “We usually wait for the whole crew to be here for a vote…” He smiled apologetically. Todd’s face, already red from whipping his votes, turned into a beet - nearly purple in color.

In the same moment, the hatch at the entrance of the cockpit flew open, and the giant Taz came blundering through. Rocketing through the room straight up to Todd, each foot falling like tree trunks on the ground, he raised a meaty finger that stopped just short of his left eye.

“You!” He boomed. 

“Y- Me? Uh… ahh… what?” Todd meekly said, shrinking under the might of the giant.

“What the hell did you do in the Kitchen?” He said, wagging his finger. 

Todd felt a death-like wave of shame drown him, flooding up his face like a malicious rising tide on a hot beach. He was like a buried man, completely incapable of stopping the flood of self-hatred that roared stronger with each glance from the crew.

Still reverted back to a six year old in part of his over-stressed mind, a relevant memory flashed over his eyes of when he had vomited over the clean kitchen floor after hounding down too much birthday cake. His parents had saved up months for the dessert, and its expense was reflected in its flavor. Though his parents had told him to only have one slice, and to save the rest for their emergency dinners throughout the week, he had snuck in during the middle of the night and eaten over half. It was beyond delicious, overloaded with sugar and sweeter than any candy he had ever had. 

Swallowed in singular, unchewed chunks, he was able to wolf down his stolen share in under two minutes. Almost immediately, the delicacy made its way back up and out of his stomach, throat, and mouth, and Todd was crying for his mother to clean it. The rest of the night was spent listening to her yell while she cleaned up his vomit with an Amazon essential floor mop. 

Oh how she screamed. “USELESS, USELESS BOY!” 

They never let him have a cake again, and he never asked. 

“I’m sorry,” he peeped, tears forming in his eyes. 

Tristen’s hand slipped from Todd’s shoulder. As he glanced over at him, Todd saw through his tears that his face had contorted into one of disgust and anger. 

“What did you do?” Tristen commanded an answer, betrayal in his voice.  

“Ah shit…” Todd looked around at all the staring faces. Just like all the other times in his life he tried to make friends, old Toddy Boy somehow managed to mess it up right at the outset. Tears began to pool in his eyes, nothing could stop the deluge now. 

“I- I was hungry a- and,” Todd felt as if he really was a child again. “I- wanted s-some food in the kitchen, s-so I t-tried so- some…” He watched his tears hit the metal floor of the cockpit. He sniffed, “A-and, it really hurt my stomach, a-and… I t-threw up…” 

Tristen immediately began to screech, ‘BIO-CONTAMINANT, BIO-CONTAMINANT, BIO-CONTAMINANT!” And bolted as far away from Todd as he could get. His skinny back slammed against the opposite side of the glass dome of the cockpit, arms outstretched, seeking for further escape routes to flee Todd’s presence.

“Wha-” Todd began to say to explain himself, but was cut off once again by a cacophony of voices from the crew. 

“Are you a fucking idiot? No wonder you threw it up.” Illana goaded.

“What made you think you could eat that?” Giggled Evangaline. 

“BIO-CONTAMINANT, BIO-CONTAMINANT, BIO-CONTAMINANT!” Sounded the alarm that was Tristen.

“Buddy…” Eddard sympathized. 

“Tristen enough!” Commanded Taz.

During the chaos, the hatch of the cockpit once again opened, silencing the room immediately. Todd - who had fallen to a curled fetal position in a pile of his own tears and shame in the interceding chaos - looked up to see the most ugly person he had ever seen in his entire life. With a twisting face, mismatched eyes, and smashed nose, something about this monster did seem oddly familiar.

Markus? Todd thought.

Only once his body was fully inside the cockpit did Tristen finally stop his screeching, replacing it instead with a loud declaration, “Vote on whether we give this Bio-Organism to the SpaceCruiser Independence. All in favor?” 

Six hands shot into the air, each belonging to the individual members of the crew. 

Lake Jacobson, a small salt water sea that contained the body of Todd somewhere in its fathoms, grew a bit larger.

“That’s me, Illana, Evangeline, Eddard, Taz, and Markus in favor of giving him over, and… Todd for staying…” Tristen shot daggers into the pool. 

“Wha? What the hell?” Todd whined quietly. His eyes found Eddard. 

Like a pathetic imitation of once great general on a long gone planet, Todd rose to his knees, dripping like he’d been blasted with a fire hose, and beseeched the man who wrote that fateful note when he awoke, “You too, buddy?”

“Sorry man,” Eddard looked over to Tristen, “Like he’s said a million times, this ship is a delicate ecosystem. It’s better for us that you leave anyway. Nothing personal.” 

Todd jumped at the grip of an oversized hand on his shoulder. Markus loomed over him as he had done so long ago. Even though he could move his body this time around, Todd felt just as hopeless.

The scarred giant only had one thing to say, “Let’s go.”

    ***

Kicking and screaming is an overstatement. Todd was far too tired to scream, and the fire in his legs hadn’t dulled enough to allow for any high velocity flailing; but he did not go quietly nor easily. 

Yanked by the wrist through the cockpit in front of the entire crew - embarrassingly similar to his last day at T Landscaping - Todd managed to screech to a halt in front of the hatch to make one last ditch effort. He was right in the middle of a great, semi-meandering, final speech advocating to find the time for a secondary vote when suddenly, all the wind in his lungs left in one big hurry. 

He lost the train of thought completely as he slid down on his back down the chute-hallway head first, trying in vain to find his breath. Looking down as he gasped for air, Markus stood framed by the hatchway, his large boot still lowering from its lung assaulting kick.

Betrayal did not help him find his breath nor his train of thought, and he continued to gasp until he came to a halt before the door to the ‘Kitchen.’ Markus came into view moments later..

Pulled to his feet in a single motion by his shoulder, Todd found himself confronted with another drop. This time taking the form of a long, metal staircase. Thinking the fall would hurt much more than the lazy backslide down the corridor, he opted to use his legs on his own volition, avoiding another kick in the chest was a good bonus.

Each step reminded him of his destination.

The unknown. 

He walked to his doom.

At the bottom of the ringing metal staircase was a large, open room, the corners and edges of which were cluttered with metal boxes, crates, and pipes of various twisted and contorted metal shapes. Coils wrapped around beams, lights flickered on and off. Despite the visual cacophony, the room was enigmatically clean and organized. Everything with its place along with its similar pieces. Coils over here, big scary metal sharp bits over there. The piles each had similarities to those beside them, though were distinct enough to warrant their own groupings. A lot of thought was put into this, a lot of time and effort. It all fit so perfectly.

Against his will, Todd lit up with odd jealousy.

How much time did this take? I guess they have had Millions of Years… His wandering thoughts caught on one phrase, Millions of Years…

As Markus ushered him through the room, he was reminded of the shop at his old Landscaping job, although that room hadn’t been nearly as organized during his escortment out of the building.

The pair entered a small, sterile, white chamber at the far side of the room and stood before a large circular metal door. 

“So…” Todd said, finally with enough courage to speak. “Are you…” he stopped and thought about how to ask this question. If it had been over Six Million years, then how in the world - or the whole damn universe, I guess - could this be the same man? 

“Have we met before?” He finally said, having found what he thought to be the right words. 

The giant paused for a moment before his simple reply, “Yes.” He looked straight ahead at the closed hatch, grisled face betraying absolutely no emotion. 

“Oh,” Todd looked at the floor. “...back when I was put in the pod, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the one who put me in… right?”

“Yes.”

“Cool…” Todd clapped his hands together and rocked back on his heels. “So… uhh… What a coincidence, huh?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that.” 

Todd swallowed hard and rubbed his sweaty hands together slowly. “So…” he began, feeling much like a trapped wild animal..

Why me? He thought before continuing aloud, “It has been… millions of years… right?”

“Yes. Six million, four-hundred fifty-nine thousand seven hundred eleven and a half Earth solar years to be exact.”

“D-Did you… know?” Todd had his next question ready immediately. Swallowing nothing in anticipation, he leaned back on his heels, side-eying his companion. 

Markus stood silent for a breath, eyes still locked on the hatch before them, then replied, “Know what?”

Todd glued his eyes to the floor and bit his cheek. Feeling another panic attack coming on, he continued in a hushed whisper, as if to hide the words from his own subconscious, “...did you know I… Did you know that we would meet here… in the future.” His eyes involuntarily searched their periphery for the giant. 

Silence filled his ears, so Todd asked again, this time facing the ghastly giant, “Did you know we would meet here?”

Markus said nothing. 

Todd let out one sharp guffaw and looked ahead. Am I dead? What the fuck is going on? I wish I was dead. I thought this whole space thing was supposed to make me not wish I was dead all the time anymore… I wish I was smart enough to understand what the hell is going on here… 

Unable to find another question that might be able to explain how this strange giant was able to put him in the pod, and be here now, six million plus years into the future, Todd’s mind went black. None of it made any sort of sense. 

A human this old? 

Taking care of Todd Jacobson? 

Space? 

On went the fevered train of his mind, finally coming across a different worried thought that might actually be answered by this silent beast. “What am I gonna see on the other side of that door?”

“Humans.” the giant said plainly. 

“But not like me?” Todd studied the lines on his face, they seemed as though they had been etched by time. 

“No.” Markus made little indication that Todd was there at all. 

A silence fell over the two before Todd thought of another vital question, one that he wasn't quite sure he really wanted an answer to. Mind aching with a whirlwind of panic and fear, he asked, “Am I in danger? Am I going to die?” 

Finally, one of the eyes of the giant, the blue one on his right side, met Todd's. He took a breath, “No.” 

“Wha-”

Todd was cut off when a piercing pitched whine filled the air. A circle of light appeared before the two, outlining the metal hatch. Slowly, the light grew like a waxing moon, slowly encompassing Todd’s entire field of vision as the hatch that connected two spaceships opened. He shut his eyes. 

When whine came to a pathetic mewing end, Todd gained the courage to cautiously peel his eyelids back open. Slowly adjusting to a bright white light on the other side of the airlock, Todd saw a black silhouette of a human shape interrupting the bright light. It stood in a halo of light, accompanied by a high and feminine voice, “Well, well, well. What do we have here?”