5 The Very Kind and Friendly Nurses
Her eyes were blue, like his mothers. Blonde hair fell in a bob around her shoulders, reminding him of the way she had worn it in his earliest childhood memories. The wide smile painted wide across her face made him feel safe, despite the unnerving feeling that it seemed somewhat strained. There was comfort in that still, she was definitely human.
As far as Todd could tell, whatever had transpired in the Six Million years to the rest of humanity must have spared her.
In fact, he was quite positive they had met before.
Rather than the wild monsters mutated by time that Todd’s feverish imagination had conjured in the dark parts of his subconscious, before him was - in his estimation - the perfect specimen of a human female.
He fell into her gravity with reckless abandon, all thoughts of Space and Mars becoming irrelevant, slightly frustrating background chatter. Attempting to trace the curves of the outline of her body shape, he absorbed her image, assailed by the familiar sense of hunger and frenetic curiosity that plagued his logical mind every time he saw a female member of his species. Her skin was smooth and seemed so soft, not a hair on her head was out of place. A loose fitting white cloak draped over her shoulders, betraying nothing about her figure but two arms, two legs, a neck and head. Todd didn't care, he had his imagination, and she awoke a part of him that had been asleep since he was frozen.
Ironically, she looked to be the exact same doctor that put him to sleep in the first place all those millions of years ago. How this was possible he couldn’t begin to wager a guess, and frankly - as his body froze and he lost his mind to her beauty - he didn’t care. Forgetting exactly where he was, his face melted into a dumb, boyish smile.
“Aren’t you the little specimen?” Her voice saturated his mind immediately with pure bliss, “What kind of creature would you say you are, little guy?” She leaned over and placed her hands on her knees, speaking to him as if he were a little boy.
Todd could feel his face burning with a thick red mask of shame and embarrassment. No woman had ever spoken to him like this, the way he always wished they would. And it was Her! That beautiful doctor who has been plaguing his dreams for, apparently, six million years.
…pretty… Was the only word his mind could muster. He kept the word in his mouth with a herculean effort.
“Uhh…” he stumbled, mind a wash in the image of red lips, smooth skin, and blue eyes. “Todd,” he finally managed. “We’ve met befo-”
The nurse shot up from her slightly hunched posture, lifting her hands from her knees and tilting her head to the side.
“You’re a… Todd?” She interrupted him. Shooting a glance at Markus, the ugly giant who silently stood in the hatchway of the airlock next to the petrified manlet. She continued. “I’ve never heard of a thing called a Todd.”
“No…uhh…” Todd floundered, a pebble stuck somewhere deep in his esophagus. “I…uh, aren’t you the… well, wait- uhh…”
First impressions were key, especially when talking to women; this was another lesson that good ol’ Donny Jacobson made sure to beat into his son.
“Women are easy Toddy Boy,” so he would say time and time and time again - typically over his fourth or fifth beer. “You just gotta show them that you can take care of them. It’s all the female mind wants.”
Donn’s lessons about women would continue anywhere from five minutes to multiple hours, sometimes concluding in a quick speech about the moral failings of the lonely and single folk in the world. Oftentimes, it circled around itself over and over again, reiterating the same point just to add another drunken hiccup between the misogynist rambling. These lessons almost always consisted of at least one beating - typically spurred by Todd’s curious questions.
“Listen to me boy, stop talking,” he would say after giving his son a brand new shiner to go show off in school. “Listen, Women see the first person who looks like can be their caretaker and they get interested," *hic* “you better make sure you keep taking care of ‘em so they never ever leave.”
Unfortunately for Todd, he was too young - or perhaps just too short sighted - to see the true irony in his father’s situation: Darla made $0.50 more on the dollar than her husband and was the main breadwinner in the household, the only real privilege her degree ever actually awarded her.
No, the world for Todd’s parents gifted him was one of strict rules and roles that men and women must play, and to break those rules meant great moral failing on the part of the actors. A good amount of double speak and internalized shame was required to keep this mindset alive. Since he was a child, learning the bases of the rules and roles he was condemned to play from his father, he found them confusing and altogether hard to define. The whole ordeal seemed to just make his life a landmine of guilt, never quite being able to live up to the constantly moving goalpost of performative masculinity that altogether did not align with the truth of reality as far as he could tell.
Nevertheless, even Six Million Years in the future, Todd felt the constraints of his father’s lessons wrap tightly around his neck. Another generational leash.
She’s going to think I’m an idiot. His mind screamed at him, cracking the ice that had formed around his muscles. She probably already thinks I’m helpless…
“Human,” his mouth blurted, “I am a human. Human being. Homo sapio? …or something?” He flashed his best impression of a charismatic grin - a wild toothy thing that turned out to be the most unnatural action any of the people in that room could have possibly made in that moment. That was, until the very next thing the nurse did.
Her face sprung into a serious mask in an instant, snapping together like rubber. Blue eyes drifted into the middle distance, growing blank and focused on something deep and internal.
Stupid, stupid Todd, He chastised himself in his mind, Not Homo Sapio! What were you thinking? You stupid, dumb, pathetic idiot. It's… Homum Sapium? Homis Sapio?
“Rogue human located,” came the sweet voice of the nurse to dilute the critical levels of self loathing going on between Todd’s ears. Dulcet tones slowly melted away in the heat of logic as she added, “Commencing re-synchronization.”
Self loathing recoiled and reformed into confusion - a feeling that he was beginning to tire of at this point. Something was deeply wrong.
“Re-syncowhatnow?” He echoed.
Just as fast as it had solidified, the nurse’s face dropped its dire visage and regained its kind eyes and gentle smile. “Won’t you come with me sweetie?”
She outstretched a hand, reminding Todd of when this doctor - or at least one who looked exactly identical - loomed over him on that metal table… six million years ago. The hand was completely smooth, lacking any great rifts and valleys of wrinkles or fingerprints.
He flinched. Only once before had a woman offered her hand to him.
Mary Brookman was the smartest girl in fourth period social studies with AI instructor Mr. Harborough, seventh grade. Deep set brown eyes came back to him in a flash, perfect windows into a soul that somehow stored every historical fun fact and clever comment imaginable. From her first ‘present’ he was in love - or at least felt something that a twelve year old boy might presume love feels like. It didn’t take much in those days.
School Dances were a battlefield if ever there was one, and finding a date was a matter of dire social importance. As life and death as the question, “What job are you gonna have after you graduate?”
He’d built up the confidence over weeks, scraping together any spare ego he could find from Mr. Harborough’s compliments - equitably spaced out for each student three times a day. Movies on Disney Amazon Prime Plus guided him to craft his perfect proposal, and as soon as the final bell rang on the day before the Spring Dance, he set out on his noble quest.
Bolting up to her as she waited for the bus, young Todd blundered out his speech. Remembering a solid thirty percent and stuttering through another five. After its stuttering conclusion, he stood with his legs glued together, anxiously awaiting for an answer. His still heart caught and beat out of his chest when he heard a giggle.
‘Yes,’ came a simple affirmative response that was enough to send him running away without another word, body filled with more energy than he’d ever known. Success.
Sprinting through the city, heart pounding, fresh spring wind in his lungs, Todd was eager to get home and tell Mom and Dad. He was sure they were to be so proud. Finally, he could start a romance, the second most important thing a person can have behind a job. Just like Donny always said, “If nobody loves you, that's okay, you can still work. Love just makes it a bit easier sometimes - not to mention the tax credits. Besides, love makes babies, and babies make new workers.”
Mom would be happy for him, sure, but Dad would beam. Finally, finally, he had something to prove his worth. Finally something to confirm he was doing his part as a boy, as a man. A girl said yes to a dance.
See Dad, he thought as his feet pounded the road to his family’s apartment complex, I’m worth something!
Todd tried to stop the memory there, but the wave of shame and pain was too strong to be denied, and it boiled over.
There he was, rushing back into the house after his exhilarating victory of his dance proposal only to find a warzone. Evidently, a feverish argument had broken out sometime earlier during the day between his loving parents, leading to a cavalcade of broken plates and shattered glasses to decorate the floor. Harsh words still crashed and echoed in his mind, just as loud and as clear as the day it happened.
Escaping to his room, Todd waited out the storm - a fairly typical affair. This hadn't even been the first fight this week. Kicking his feet while he listened to his parents bout, the dance began to seem less and less appealing.
Donn Jacobson decided to punctuate his final point in his argument with a very conclusive slam of the front door; the shockwaves sent his mother’s footsteps bounding up the stairs. She landed directly in front of Todd’s room, transferring the energy of the fight into loud knocks on his door.
Drunk - both on the victory of the successful emasculation of her husband and more than a few glasses of red wine - Mrs. Jacobson used her motherly nature to gain entrance into her only child’s sanctuary, determined on using the privilege to begin a new front of her war against men there. One down, one to go.
At first, Todd recalled that she had asked about his day. Beginning sweetly after seeing the wide smile on her son’s face - eager to care for her baby after having driven away the dangerous, drunk bad-man - her love turned to ice when the prospect of a girl, the dance, and perhaps even love was discovered to be the impetus of his joy. She was just as quick to turn on him as she had with his father.
“Love is a farce,” she told him blankly, something deep and wild behind the blue eyes. “Love will promise you a life of happiness forever and ever and ever… But you know what Todd?” She spoke slowly to ensure her rampant drunk slurring wouldn't get in the way of her message, it made him feel two years old again. “I’ll tell you a secret… hmm.
“Love, Todd, is a Drug. Love is the worst drug of them all. It’s… so… pungent, that you’ll think you’re the only one in the world who’s ever felt it… but… just as quickly…” She attempted to snap a finger but merely scraped them together weakly, “The feelings are gone… like that.”
Darla took a drink from her empty wine glass and threw it to the floor. He recalled the sound of bouncing plastic as the Amazon essential cup tumbled its way back down the stairs into the kitchen. It would be refilled later that night from the bag in the fridge.
A barking laugh came from her then before she continued, “You just start giving and giving, because of this love, this drug… it… consumes you. Love will beg you to give away all that you have, Todd, more than beg. Love will convince you that you need to give everything away…”
She swayed, collecting what valuable eye contact she could to punctuate her key points, “but eventually Todd you’ll realize that the love has just gone and you’re left with nothing. Nothing Todd. Nothing, nothing because you’ve given all you have to a useless man who works and works and works and still comes back with no money! Not enough to pay for bills! Not enough to pay for groceries! Not enough to pay for new clothes! Not enough to pay for a smartphone!”
At some point - Todd’s memory was not sure when - she had fallen to the floor in a pool of tears in his room. Hysterical, she had continued, “And I have to beg HIM to go back to WORK! It’s not like I’m not working all day. It’s not like I don’t have a full time job! It’s not like I want him to be gone all the time! It’s not like I want us to be miserable!”
She continued, eyes staring wild daggers at her child from her pool on the floor, “But SOMEBODY has to come to take care of the baby. And, Todd, I once Loved a man who ‘doesn’t know’ how to take care of the baby,” she issued air quotes out at random. “And now I’m stuck with him. And I’m stuck with YOU!”
After a brief pause, she stood up, summating in a low sinister tone, “So No,” drunken slurring, seeming to take over her vernacular more and more as the energy left her body. “No Todd, no love for you. No girls for you please. Ever. Don’t you ever ruin a poor girl like your father ruined me.”
Even now, so far removed from the memory, the words drained him.
Darla made one last twist to look at her son as her hand grasped the door handle to finish the job, “Have fun at your dance or whatever, but… Just remember, there’s no place left in this world for Love. It was a drug for a different century. Just find a good job and hope to find some love on your little Disney Amazon Prime Plus shows. They’ve got a lot about love there anyway. Too many if you ask me.”
She slammed the door, throwing Todd’s mind into the memory of the dance.
Mary stood as an gracefully awaiting angel before the writhing crowd of pre-pubescent angst haphazardly jolting to AI generated Pop Hits!™ in the lazily emptied school gym. Mary, alight in a halo of blonde hair, blushed as she grinned. Her eyes shone in the lights of the dance, green and red playing in pools of brown, inviting Todd onward.
She reached out her hand.
For one brief moment everything melted away. Her hand beckoned, and he reached forward to take it. Nothing matted now. Momentum carried him for two steps before his mother’s words seized him.
Don’t you ever ruin a poor girl like your father ruined me.
He turned away, burst into a bathroom stall, and found tears on his shoes. For a while he weeped openly, buzzing of white fluorescents punctuating his misery, but before long her sweet voice came drifting in from the hallway. Muffling his cries with a shirt, he could hear her apologize to him. She had done nothing wrong, but grasped at ideas nonetheless.
He couldn't find words to reply, tears flowed down his face.
She called out for a long time, each second only cutting him deeper. Still, no words came.
“What did I do wrong Todd? Why won’t you come back out and dance? What did I do?” She cried, further proof that he would only hurt her if he was in her life.
Eventually, long after her voice fell silent, her footsteps carried her away. No words ever graced his lips to call her back or change her mind. Todd was alone.
He decided he would be alone forever, then and there.
The memory faded and the nurse’s smooth outstretched hand still reached out for him.
This was not a dance.
This was not romance.
This was not love.
Really, Todd had no idea exactly what this was all about, but it surely had something twisted to do with his own humanity, and nothing about feelings or human connection.
And yet, he wished it was.
Todd shook his head and glanced one final time at Markus. The giant looked straight ahead, betraying nothing.
“Well,” Todd said, rocking back and forth on his heels, “I guess this is it…”
The two remained silent, the nurse’s hand outstretched, the giant looked grimly ahead.
Todd turned to face his whole body at Markus and furrowed his brow, “Okay, seriously. This is the last time I'll ever see you… Please… just…”
He took a sharp breath, it didn't make sense, none of this made sense, but…
“Did you know? When you put me in my pod… Did you somehow know that we would meet again here and now? Did… did you know that you would wake me up?”
Finally, Markus’ large head slowly pivoted to look down at his dwarfed companion, his damsel, his purpose.
He said plainly, “Yes. I will see you later Todd, don’t worry about anything.”
“Let’s go honey!” The nurse said as she grasped his right hand and yanked him through the threshold that connected the two ships.
Just as her free hand came to close the hatch, she issued one last message to the giant on the other side, “Thank you Markus! We can always count on you!”
***
The Ship, which the nurse dutifully told him was deemed ‘The Independence,’ was significantly more pristine than the Unity. Replacing the long metal corridors that clanged with every step, harmoning with the hum of the engine, were empty, quiet eggshell white hallways. Sterile white tunnels ran for what seemed like miles in every direction, branching off into thinner paths every few feet. Everywhere here was a complex ant’s nest of wayward paths. A nightmare place.
Todd, yanked through the maze by his right wrist, tried in vain to take in the impossibly enigmatic internal layout and odd - and rather uninspired - interior design of this strange liminal place. He gazed at the small circular lights embedded in the walls each spaced out to equal intervals. The orbs leaked a ghastly pale yellow shine into the space, and placed as they were, they acted in a way as to destroy every shadow that should have been following along the pair as they stumbled along. While uncanny and deeply horrifying, Todd couldn’t help but be impressed with an incredible sense of sameness in these shadow-less hallways.
After only a few steps into the hallways of horror, another bolt of fear leaped up Todd’s spine. Each footfall gave into his weight. His feet sunk ever so slightly into the ground and were then pushed up, the material feeling much more like a pulsating mattress under his feet than the white linoleum it resembled.
Pressing his free hand to the wall gave similar results. His fingers sunk almost a half inch into the surface, gripped by the fleshy pale substance for a moment in return, before being spat back out. He felt as though he somehow just shook someone’s massive hand.
Without a word, the Nurse led him through these confounding, flesh-like eggshell colored hallways, turning him seemingly random directions when the path came to a fork or turn. Dragged along with eyes wide and pupils small, Todd marveled at the strange skin-walls as they passed. It didn’t take long before he was convinced that the entire ship was somehow made of the same, living material. It felt wrong in a way his mind couldn’t wrap around. Flesh, living flesh.
Skin…walls… I’m in a… skin… ship?
Stomach churning, he felt as though he had been swallowed by some great beast. Somehow - Todd was sure of it - this ship knew he was in here. Not the captain up in his chair, not the crew going about their tasks (wherever they were), but the ship itself seemed to have an awareness of each and every footstep. More intense than simply the feeling of being watched, Todd felt as though he was being eaten. Every move along the floor or touch of the walls reacted to his presence - ushering him further along down the hallway.
Perhaps as an act of self preservation, a new, morosely cheerful thought appeared in Todd’s mind:
Oh! I’m dead! This is all just a sick nightmare! The bunk serum killed me, or I smashed up on some space rock… and I’m dead. I’m dead and this is just the nightmare-hell bit, great good great.
Todd saw the thought enter his head and stopped for a moment, but was immediately pushed along by the floor, which seemed to have a vested interest in him getting to wherever the nurse was trying to lead him. This was even more concerning.
Okay. Cool. Dead and nightmare-hell. I can do that. That sounds good.
Although, his heart thumping loudly in his chest argued otherwise.
Todd pretended to not hear it.
Eventually, after the sixth or seventh random turn down increasingly thinner white hallways, his distracted mind formulated a question that he thought might give him some bearings on the current situation. Even if this is a nightmare, knowledge is always power, right behind money that is.
“Where are we going?” was his brilliant query.
“The Processor!” she responded simply.
“...what?”
“The Processor!” she dutifully repeated.
With his line of questioning completely exhausted, Todd found himself only able to say, “w-...why?”
“They do all the calculations for the ship! Like a main computer hard drive!” She looked back at him, her hand still intertwined with his like a school girl leading her crush through the halls after school. He’d always wanted to run down the halls like this with Mary - this was beginning to feel like a punishment. One more point for ‘nightmare-hell’ theory.
“Aren’t you excited?” She asked.
A deep rumble shook the ship, Todd knew it was anticipation.
“A-are there any other humans in here?” Despite the leading evidence that this was all some retribution for his failures in life, his stomach was on his heart’s side in the whole ‘nightmare-hell’ situation, and was currently threatening to leap out of his mouth and make a break for the airlock - much more willing to take its chances in deep space than this deathtrap. That would surely make for a more palatable nightmare-hell than whatever this is.
“Approximately thirty seven point four percent of the remaining Human species lives right here in the SpaceCruiser Independence!” His female captor’s response came through with an almost absurd excitability, ever so slightly strained. Blonde hair bobbing, she led Todd forward at a faster and faster pace.
Todd frowned, “Where are they?” She had been leading him through the ship for almost fifteen minutes, which had seemed like hours to the poor Earthling.
A cheery giggle found his ears in response, “Everywhere around you silly! All kinds of us!” She brushed her free hand against the wall of the ship and did a little skip.
Todd shuddered and continued being dragged along in silence.
Okay body, his mind reasoned with itself, let’s do it your way… if we're not dead already, we might as well be. Look around, we're in a damn…
He had a hard time finding the word for where he was - what this was. A monster? A ship of monsters? A ship that itself was a monster that is also inhabited by beautiful women - who look exactly like the doctor who put him into the pod in the first place - who are also monsters?
What are they gonna do to me? A sharp twinge of pain grew in his heart, a thorn of tightness that began to slowly burrow inside his left breast. Cosmic confusion and existential dread got tiring on an organ after a while.
NO! His mind leaped around in his skull, racing back to the face of the disfigured giant spaceman who shuttled him to his strange place. Markus. He said I’d see him ‘later’… When the hell is later? Can it please be later NOW?
Yanked into a wider hallway, Todd cleared his throat and found the courage to speak up again, “Uhh…”
No Markus to save him… yet. But it was enough of a solid fact to stabilize him, for now.
“Be honest with me, please…” Todd took a shaky breath, “Are you going to kill me?”
Her signature giggle responded again, though this time with a harder edge that made it seem more sinister. “You’re dead right now silly! We’re gonna make sure that you stop being dead!”
Sweat dripped down Todd’s forearm and slipped into the increasing gap in the nurse’s grip on his hand. In a lightning response, she whipped her hand up and snatched his wrist, nearly pulling him off of his feet. The flesh ground steadied him on his next step, saving him from another potential fall.
“What do you mean?” He asked, shuddering at the ship’s helpful rebalancing.
Her long finger pointed down the wide hallway, leading to a dead end, “Just down there!” Todd had never seen a wider smile on a human being, he could see its corners despite being completely behind her.
I’m never going to love again, this ruined it for me… not that there’s anyone left anyway…
“What do you mean I’m already dead?” the other part of his brain was too busy asking aloud.
The nurse huffed, “You’re not part of anything.” She yanked him even harder, footsteps hurrying along the gripping corridor. “You’re just ‘A Todd,’ alone in the Galaxy. Useless. Purposeless.”
The word shot through Todd’s chest like a frozen arrow.
“Hey!” He began to protest, but the sinking feeling of agreement in his own now icy heart stopped him. She was right, he was just ‘A Todd, alone in the Galaxy.’ He always had been purposeless on Earth, and it only made sense that he would be purposeless out here as well. No special skills to speak of, no family, no friends. Just Todd.
Useless Todd…
With the dead end fast approaching, the nurse pulled him faster and faster. Todd found time to ask one final question, “So, I won’t die?”
“No,” came the firm response.
That would have to be enough for the time being. Whatever happened next, at least death was off the table. He had to at least believe that. Todd nodded his head, agreeing with his heart and stomach on this new truth as she led him the final few feet through the hall - white walls mocking him all the while.
Okay… Not dead… not gonna die… not dead… not gonna die… He repeated in his mind over and over. As before, a mantra became the only thing keeping him afloat in a turbulent storm. Whatever the case may be, wherever these winds thrashed him, at least he had his life. There was still a chance, whatever that was good for.
Not dead… Hey, maybe she’s taking me to a new job… Not gonna die… that’s one way I know how to not be useless… Not dead…
At the end of the hallway, the two stopped dead in their tracks.
“No Todd, you won’t die,” the blonde woman said, her attention turned fully to the wall, “You’ll finally be alive.”
Still grasping his right wrist with her left hand, she placed her right onto the wall. Immediately with her touch, the white substance began to writhe and shift, like hundreds of snakes underneath the white surface suddenly jolting awake. Todd was reminded of the way his muscles would cramp and spasm after a long day’s work, twitching and contracting. Slithering internal contortions grew more violent, vertically splitting the surface with a thin black crack dead center. Increasing tremors widened the crack, opening the facade into a hungry maw. By the end of the process, the entire wall had retracted - unobstructing the chamber beyond.
Todd looked out into what looked like some sort of great big concert hall. From an elevated platform where the wall once stood, he stared straight ahead at a very wide room filled with large black boxes hanging in the air, each suspended on slithering wires connecting to a high domed ceiling and propped up by two pink stalks. Disappearing out into the distance, rows and rows of these three feet wide, three feet tall, slightly reflective black boxes orderly crowded the space, each one around six feet away from another.
Todd traced the wires sprouting from the top of the strange objects. Up and up they went, meshing with the white of the dome far above. Supporting the boxes from underneath, pink stalks jolted and moved in a sick dance, each at their own pace. From his vantage point on the elevated platform, possibly millions of little black cubes haphazardly jiggled all across this huge room, making waves in a great dark sea.
Every second his eyes took in this uncanny stadium, the more it became uncomfortably clear that there was absolutely nothing that Todd could liken to what he was seeing. Surely these were computers of some kind, or batteries… some kind of machinery, shining in the light with that dull metallic gleam. But the stalks? The jostling? A million possibilities ran through his mind, conjuring up anything that would make sense. Lawnmower batteries had a similar look… but these were ten times the size. All swaying together like a grassy field.
Nothing came. He froze, something here was horribly wrong, and he felt the need to run away- sprint in any possible direction that might offer him a sight that his mind could actually process.
To his absolute horror, the nurse still had his wrist, and began to drag him into the room - now more forceful than ever. For a moment he went limp, commanding his legs and body to be wholly unresponsive, as kissing the floor seemed more favorable to this mess. But the nurse’s strength surprised him, she nearly pulled him off his feet before the fleshy floor reached out, grabbed his ankles, and placed his soles back on the ground to correct his balance.
“Oop!” Said the nurse, face forward, surging ahead, “Don’t fall now, I’ll get you resynchronized somehow!”
Todd obeyed. He didn’t know what else there possibly could be to do at that moment but to obey. Obviously going limp wasn’t an option.
As the two came up to the rows of black batteries, Todd, against his better judgement, was able to get a much better look. Forcing himself to lift his head from the ground to observe these horrible things - whatever they may be - he noticed that the large black box had obscured a significant amount of them from his sight upon entering the room.
Growing from the ground, the two fleshy stalks that held the boxes up actually seemed something more like legs. Rising with shaking joints, the stalks connected to pink flesh that squirmed and squelched out from the back of the black metal. Skin wrapped tight around a hunched backbone and rib cage.
Todd felt air leave his lungs in a gasp of horror and disgust.
This creature - for Todd was now quite sure it was a living being and not just a computer - breathed slightly and writhed slowly. Skinny legs - not stalks - jostled back and forth at their wobbly knees, feet fused with the ground. Short, emaciated arms reached up, hands lost to the box. Blue veins cascaded across paper thin skin. Dragged along through the rows and rows, Todd regretfully craned his neck to get a better look. His eyes bulged in horror, magnetized to these revolting, jittering things. Each of the maybe millions of these figures had a fully formed torso, shoulders, arms, and neck. Skinny, bony creatures embedded into the machines, all shaking according to their own beat.
In a way, they seemed to perform a disgusting dance. Some shook with an enthusiastic - if not manic - two step, attempting to plunge themselves further into the box they held aloft. Others - those with old wrinkled translucent skin - performed a slow samba, pathetically and fruitlessly pulling away.
Looking closer at one of the fleshy orbs protruding from the work of pure, clean technology, Todd watched as the veins desperately pulsed and pumped. All aimed into the box.
Feeding it.
“W-what is t-this?” He dared to ask, unaware of the oceans of sweat on his brow and the tremors running along the length of his body like a wet dog.
“Just a part of humanity! The thinky bits! Well, the power for the thinky bits anyway!” She skipped with a casual, nonchalant glee as they traveled down the rows and rows and rows of horrible writhing, dancing processor people.
“W-wait…” Todd stared at the floor, eyes wide in horror. “You mean… these are humans?”
“Well of course silly,” her voice mocked him, as if it were some playground misunderstanding, “As I said before! We’re all human here, everything here is human.”
Guess Six Million Years really does a number on ya… He thought, losing himself in his footsteps. Now was not a good time to think very deeply about his situation.
***
The very kind and friendly nurse continued to drag Todd through the neatly organized concert hall of swaying, squirming souls long enough for him to lose track of time.
Is this what became of us? Despite his best efforts, critical thoughts caught up with the nurse’s quick pace. No use in ignoring the truth of the situation any longer. Everywhere he looked was humanity. Is this all we become? After everything we did on Earth, and making an… Empire in space… apparently… Now everybody just becomes… these? His face twisted in disgust.
The nurse dragged him ever onward.
His poor stomach - exhausted by his constant war with his mind since he had awoken from that horrible pod - didn’t even have enough energy to protest for food anymore. All it could muster was a singular painful tone of discontent.
No music majors were around to check the pitch.
How the nurse wasn’t getting tired, he did not know, but after more walking - painful aching fire making itself at home in his calves and thigh as well as setting up a nice afternoon garden in his feet - the sound of approaching footsteps plopping along the floor ahead caught his attention. Todd glanced up in a panic to catch whatever this new horror could be.
Walking towards him from the opposite direction was the very kind and friendly nurse. Short blonde hair bobbed up and down as she walked, blue eyes shone in the sterile white room. Todd did a double take, delirium obscuring his mind.
…she was walking the wrong way, somehow letting go of Todd’s hand without noticing at some point. Though that couldn’t be right either as he could still feel her hand around his wrist.
Looking down to his arm, he confirmed the feeling. A white hand still gripped him and led him onward. Following it up to see that the nurse leading him this whole time was, in fact, still leading him and had not released her grip and begun walking the opposite direction for no discernable reason, Todd squinted and leaned back on his heels.
The approaching nurse smiled, the leading nurse smiled back. Two identical women smiled at each other, walking opposite directions. One alone and the other dragging along a very very confused man. Exactly the same. Same blonde hair, same blue eyes, same soft skin. Same height, same kind look to their sharp faces…
This went beyond simple similarities of features, hell, this went beyond twins. These two were identical copies of one another. Two of the same women who helped to shoot him off into space.
Another point for the ‘this is a nightmare-hell’ hypothesis.
Why are they her? The question bored a hole in his brain. Why is the same woman who sent me into this nightmare somehow multiple women, six million years in the future?
They nodded at each other and the copy passed by Todd, the clone politely smiled at his horrified gaze.
“WHAT?!” All of the energy that he had been building up inside his heart since entering this horror-house of a spaceship made his simple query as to the identical look of the two nurses come out with a bit more vigor than intended.
His outburst echoed in the room, though he didn’t stop to count how many times it came back like he usually would, unusual circumstances and all that - it had been a very odd past few hours by anyone's measure.
“Hm?” the leading nurse looked back, unfazed.
Todd cleared his throat, walking on the knife’s edge of a life ending panic attack which besieged him at all times. He elected to keep it short, “Why… She… Look… Like… You?”
“Oh?” The nurse issued out her standard laugh - he heard the same laugh call out in tandem behind him, “All the nurses here are clones, don't you know? Only… we’ve got a special way to keep us all connected to each other and the ship!”
She tapped the top of her head, which clanged with the sound of metal, “With the help of this little itty-bitty implant, we can be the absolute best at our tasks. No AI can learn and adapt to human anatomy problems better than our own kind. And we certainly don’t keep androids around any more.” Her voice dripped with poison.
Todd decided again to stop asking questions.
Stomach boiling and legs on fire, he was dragged ever onward through the technological horrorshow life had become.
With abandoned desperation, he escaped into the depths of his mind, searching for his little family on their field of green. Everywhere he looked all he could see was that same pale flesh floor, stretching out as far as the eye could see. They must be in here somewhere, deep in the bowels of his mind’s approximation of the same monster-ship he himself found himself trapped inside.
There they were, huddling together in the middle of the space. The floor sunk in around them, feebly attempting to eat them where they sat. Shivering in the cold yellow light, they took turns weakly swatting away shivering, jittering computer-headed people. A horde crowded around them pressing up on all sides.
At least they have each other. Todd thought. He tried to occupy his mind with anything else.
Finally, after hours of agonizing walking through rows and rows of dancing flesh and machine, the nurse led Todd to one black box hung curiously still in the air.
Swinging slightly, this shadow box lacked its human hermit crab component. Empty. Todd thought it looked a lot bigger than when it was uninhabited. Aloft only by the grace of the snake-like black wires above, it hung untended, pathetic, and dysfunctional, a battery charger with no power source.
“Alrighty!” The nurse said, an expecting tilt in her voice.
Todd raised his eyebrows in confusion, “Huh?”
“Go ahead then!” She said, cheery as ever.
The man from the 21st Century looked at the nurse, then the black box, and back. He did so several times until he finally put together the terrible request she was making. His eyes grew wide.
“Wha…?” He managed only a whisper.
“There you go buddy! You’ll feel much better once you’re in there don’t you know?” She tilted her head. To his dismay, he was comforted.
This face had gotten him to sign away his genetic code way back on Earth, he would have once thought it too strong to ever resist; but some requests were too much.
Todd shook his head violently, sputtering out a refusal strung full of profanities and fear.
“Awee… buddy…” She touched his shoulder, “Now, just cause you look a little different from the rest of the ship’s processors doesn't mean you won’t synchronize to our computer system.” She spoke with real sympathy from her voice, as if to comfort a child. He felt two years old again.
“NO!” He yelled in her face, but she did not react. “I’m not from this time, okay?! I’ve never been a processor battery thing and I never will be!” He stomped his foot in protest.
“Not from this… time?” The nurse shot up as she had when they first met. “Explain your circumstances as to how you arrived with Markus?”
“U-uh…” Todd stuttered as he pieced his life’s story together in the mess of his mind. How had he not thought of this before? Then came the justification, What if she doesn’t believe me? What if she doesn't believe me and that Black Box eats me alive?
He took a deep breath, I’ll have to make this good, real good…
Todd H. Jacobson tried his best to keep it brief. He told her that he was born on Earth 2038, gave a brief summary of his life on Earth, job resume, and detailed the events of his horrific past few hours. After the nurse was caught up on his circumstances, he got a bit off track in confusion about HyperSpace Lanes, Human history, Basic Economics - really getting lost in the weeds there in the middle - and Markus’s role in his odyssey, but all in all that portion was disorienting for both her and for him, and is in many ways untranscribable.
To make the whole speech that much worse, the signs of lack of adequate sleep were beginning to obviously show as nearly his entire speech was completely slurred.
When he was done - left panting like a dog, face beet red and still trailing off random questions about his purpose in the Universe - the nurse was silent. She stared into his eyes.
“One moment please,” she said as she quickly spun, walked a few feet down the row, turned left, and disappeared into the sea of flesh batteries.
Todd was alone in the chamber - save from that of the mass of humanity-machines around him. Mind clearing from his rage-confusion ramblings, he felt what was left of humanity enclose him on all sides.
He watched a younger looking one - skin still tight against its bones - excitedly squirm and squish itself further against the black box. Skin rippled on the sharp edges. Its knees, which seemed to be one evolutionary trait that could not be removed, pumped as if they were running.
In the silence, without the footfalls of himself and the nurse on the semi-hard ground, Todd picked up a strange noise. It came from the young one he looked at, and the one beside it, and the next. A collective groan came from all around him, each of the processor people adding to its dull cacophony ever so quietly. His trapped and tortured species moaned in chorus, exercising their last vestige of communal free will.
His skin crawled as he stood alone in the room beside the dangling, useless black box.
After only a brief moment, the nurse came back, accompanied by an identical clone. The two strode up in front of Todd, and one of them - he wasn't sure if it was his original guide, another clone, or if it even mattered at all - spoke, “You say you are a human from the 21st Century?”
“Yes,” Todd said, finally confident something may go his way.
They shared a glance before the one on the left took two quick steps towards him, and jabbed him in the neck with something sharp before he could say ‘whatthehell’ -which he attempted anyway.
His vision went dark, and he felt his head hit the fleshy ground.
6 Horrible Fate of Humanity At Large
Todd awoke standing upright, staring into the comforting blue eyes of his mother. Unfortunately, just as a warm familiar smile grew on his lips, her face came into form. Not Darla Jacobson at all. Just the face of the doctor who set him off to Mars. Just a very kind and friendly nurse.
Seeing double at first - likely from whatever they had used to put him under - he forced his eyes shut and frantically blinked, trying desperately to shake the drug out of his system. After his eyelid dance concluded, opened them and frowned. Nothing changed.
He had not been seeing double at all, rather, there was simply a second, identical kind and friendly nurse standing behind and slightly offset the first. Just so perfectly offset from one another as to give his mind a twist - not that it needed any more of those.
Only once he accepted this reality did he notice the third identical blonde nurse standing in the far side of the room, just barely visible behind the second. Identicality is perfect camouflage.
All three stared directly at him, the same smile plastered on their faces. It was good that the crush he had on the nurse died hours ago, he would have considered this sight Heaven long ago. Now he knew better, this was the closest to Hell he’d ever really gotten, maybe the closest he’d ever get. Love is poison, just like mama always said.
This new room was small, the same circular lights adorning the wall as the rest of the ship, bathing them all in the sick yellow color Todd began to loathe.
They couldn’t have picked a nicer color? I think some nice green or purple lights would do this place a world of good. Maybe some tasteful orange lights. I’d love to see some good orange lights… Like the sunset…
Looking down, he saw that the ship itself was holding his wrists and ankles tight with white tendrils, cradling him in a divot in the wall that fit him perfectly. A deep hum came from the ship, a sound that throbbed like a heartbeat. Something about it felt wrong and altogether indescribably unwelcoming.
“Boy do we have good news for you!” The closest nurse said, snapping his attention back before he could think further about the horrid grip the ship had him in.
“That’s right Todd H. Jacobson! We tested your blood and other genetic markers just to be sure… but it's true!” The one just behind blurted out, excited.
The trio stood in silence looking at him with anticipation for a moment. Todd guessed they were expecting him to speak, so he started to think of the right thing to say.
Right before he could fire off a quick, ‘what are you talking about, help me, please, help me, get me out of here, oh god help, please, help this is a real nightmare and I wanna go home or to sleep or something, just help me,’ the nurses continued.
“You are the very first ever Class-E Human to ever grace the halls of the SpaceCruiser Independence!” Came the gleeful announcement.
Todd dully stared down at the trio, the drug cocktail working through his system finally letting go of the vice grip on his brain. His skin tingled.
“Huh?” He mumbled, unaware of the line of drool dripping slightly from the left side of his mouth.
“That means that you get a very special tour of the ship and meeting with the President!” The one on the right said.
“Yay!” her identical companion chimed.
“...president?” Todd said.
Of all the leaders that could lead this abomination of a spaceship, he didn’t expect one to have been democratically elected. Todd wondered if the processor people had to fight for their Right to Vote, or if they had it from the outset. Either way, good for them - Todd's own suffrage was temporarily suspended on account of his unemployed status. He found it somehow insulting that these processor people were allowed to when this was denied for him back on Earth.
Voting always sounded so fun.
“The one and only President Jeff!,” they chimed in unison.
Todd pulled at the white fleshy restraints that held him to the wall. At least they’ve got me held restrained upright this time, he thought.
Head still swimming with the last remaining chemicals from the nurse’s sleep-tight serum, Todd revisited the idea that this whole thing was a dream, and found that it didn’t really matter. He might as well be dead anyway. That thought didn’t seem as frightening or hard to grasp anymore for some reason. He was obviously of no use to anyone, his time on the Unity and Earth had proven that.
Death didn’t seem too bad now. Better to get it over with now before he got any more front row seats to horror matinees.
“Why not just throw me out into space? I’m surely a bio-contamination or whatever,” Todd replied glibly.
A deep, heavy feeling consumed the space behind his eyelids. Not quite that of fatigue, much more general. Todd felt very much that he wanted to sleep and never wake up. He could just close his eyes and never open them again - who would miss him?
“Special request from the President Himself!” the left nurse said excitedly. Her twin grinned the same plastic grin. “He wants you, our very own friend-out-of-time, to have a tour of the ship so you can see for yourself just how far humanity has progressed.”
Todd felt the bonds slither away from his wrists and ankles, sending his limp body falling stiff to the ground like a felled aspen. Just before his vision was consumed by the eggshell white of the floor, he felt hands grasp his chest - caught at the last moment the arms of the two nurses closest to him. Todd's heart fluttered as they helped him regain his balance, old crushes die hard.
Todd watched with a tomato red face as the furthest nurse pressed her hand on the wall, triggering another writing motion underneath to split open a six foot tall, three foot wide opening to another white room beyond.
Holding him by each shoulder, the two closest nurses carried him through the door, nodding at the third who they left in the room. As the group exited, Todd looked back to see the opening they had walked through close back up, twitching walls reaching for each other to seal the gap.
Is she gonna be okay trapped in there? He wondered to himself.
With one nurse ahead of him and the other behind - making Todd feel incredibly self conscious - he was led through a long corridor that seemed to come up against a huge domed glass window.
Trying to keep his mind off of the slushing, squishing sound that each of their footsteps made on the grasping ground, Todd couldn't stop thinking about the third nurse in the room. He wondered if she ever got to leave, or if being in that room was her job.
These nurses never have to wonder what their purposes are. These nurses never have to feel like they don’t have a job.
“Well Todd,” the nurse leading him said, breaking the monotony of the slushing footsteps. “You’ve missed quite a lot of history, is there anything you would like to know?”
“Uhh…” Todd looked at the white fleshy ground.
There were so many questions, but when he asked the crew of The Unity, they didn't seem to know - or rather they did know, but didn’t care enough to take the time to explain. Maybe these Nurses would be more forthcoming.
“What happened to Mars,” he questioned. “I- I know there was some war? Or something that busted it up, and junk… but, I was supposed to go work there as a janitor… back in my day.” He smiled at his own joke, if you could call it that - he sure did.
“But,” he added, remembering he was supposed to be asking a question, “what exactly happened? I hear it’s a graveyard?”
“Oh yes,” the first nurse giggled, “You wouldn’t want to try to clean that place up.”
A giggle sounded off behind him, making him jump.
“How did a war junk up a whole planet?” Todd pressed after recovering.
“It wasn’t just war,” the one behind him piped up again. Something about the way she spoke reminded him of one of the children’s programs on Disney Amazon Prime Plus. Her voice enfolded him in sweet lilting tones and a general cheerfulness that, despite all its efforts, didn’t do much to undercut the terrifying words that fell from her mouth. “It was also the famines, the climate change, the socio-economic discontentment… not to mention the nuclear holocausts. What happened on Mars is what happened to every other planet humans found ourselves on. I guess we just can’t help it. We’re really no good at terrestrial living long-term, it seems. Mars was just the second one to go, that's all.”
Speaking with the same beguiling infotainment intonation, the one ahead continued their joint explanation, “Well yes, the Empire crumbling did leave the place lacking management, but destroying the surface with enough nuclear warheads to level ten civilizations didn’t help either.”
“What?!” The word popped out of his mouth before he could catch it. Nevertheless he tried, clasping both hands on his gabbing jaw to prevent any further runaway words from running amok.
The leading nurse spoke, “the same thing happened to Mars as all colonies on terrestrial bodies throughout the Galaxy: Humanity. Humanity happened to Mars. Humanity happened to every planet we could terraform. It’s an inevitability of our species it seems. Most of our history we have conceived ourselves as a terrestrial organism, but what you see all around you is proof that humanity can be so much more when we let go of our assumptions about our purpose.”
The exact thing Todd was worried about had just happened: He did not understand half of what she had said. So much was still absolutely unexplained to a quite frustrating degree, but the end of the hallway still stretched on and on, so he felt the freedom to ask clarifying questions. His feet slapped the flesh floor with each footfall.
First thing’s first, he thought before asking. I can ask what the hell ‘terror form’ means later. Sounds scary.
“There were more planets that humans lived on?” He looked back and forth between the nurses, craning his neck backwards to look behind him after finishing his question.
He watched her nod with his head upside down as the one in front answered, “Sixteen thousand four hundred ninety-three! All across the Galaxy, many needed to be terraformed!”
Okay I might need to ask about ‘Terror Forming’ sooner than I thought, Todd squinted.
“How engineering we once were in the distant past, oh!,” she giggled. “I guess the future for you.”
Another sickeningly in tune laugh was shared between the pair - stereo sound.
If any Music Majors had been around to hear, they would have been able to pick up that they laughed in minor thirds.
Todd would have described it as ‘kinda creepy.’
Shaking his head to refocus, Todd marveled at the idea that humans had once lived on many planets. During his lifetime, colonizing Mars had been a brand new prospect, oversaturated with hope and optimism. Newsreels and advertisements came out every day about new technologies that would allow the USSP-INC to start changing the Martian surface to sustain a healthy population for the indefinite future, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember what that technology had been called. Whatever it was, though, must have benefited the shareholders greatly, as the advertisements just kept coming and coming.
Todd didn’t quite understand the mechanisms of it all back then, but all of the AI advertisements had told him that this market speculation and reinvestment was a great boon to everybody, especially the everyday worker. Though he never quite got how that could be possible when his rent kept going up.
From his distance - both literally and metaphorically - from his home and old life, life on Earth suddenly began to seem incredibly ridiculous. Every message from advertisements informed him of the great plenty that businesses acquired in heaps for the betterment of humanity, but none of those resources ever made it down to him, or anyone he knew for that matter. In fact, from this new far-flung perspective, Todd found himself recoiling upon recalling the memory of each and every horrible, monotonous day on Earth.
They all went something like this: Wake up. Watch advertisements. Feel bad about not being a specialist. Go to work. Watch more advertisements. Learn to distrust coworkers and trust employers. Go home. Watch an advertisement about a new thing, and learn about how great The Market is doing. Stare blankly at the drafty, peeling walls of his apartment. Feel bad about being poor. Go to sleep.
Marching through the halls of this nightmare flesh-ship, something suddenly struck him with the velocity of a very confused and absurdly wayward duck mistaking the side of someone’s head for a nice pond to take a calm afternoon swim. Making his eyes bulge with blood and rage, the new thought threatened to shake the entire foundation of his life, but held a truth deeper than any he had known. Despite his best efforts, it pounded through his mind: Advertisements always made him feel horrible. Each one throughout his life left a flavor in his mouth, oversaturated with sweetness to cover something deeply bitter beneath. They had reinforced that being good at something was all that mattered, that luck was paramount and hard work was no sure thing to success unless you really deserved it. Companies and profit were all that mattered. Being a specialist was something to aspire to, an employer was someone to admire. Everyone else should be ignored, or hated. They told him that he should hate himself, and throughout his entire life, he dutifully listened.
Pressure welled behind his eyes and in his sinuses, a single red-hot tear froze a meandering path down his scalding face. If steam could bellow from his ears it would, and he clenched his jaw so hard his poor teeth screeched out in pain.
For the first time in his life, it all felt so wrong.
Like a rat dropped into an infinite desert after only having known a tiny, one foot square cage its entire life, Todd felt a mix of relief and fear. The box his mind had been shoved into during his childhood finally burst open, revealing a new world of hurt and neglect that always existed, but was always covered by little more than a thin layer of colorful paint.
Why this was happening now as he was paraded through the wide hallways of a human-ship after every planet his species had ever called home had been nuked to oblivion, who could say. Whatever the case, something about the flood of information seemed to unlock a new type of thinking for Todd.
New ‘what if's' arrived in his mind.
What if he would have tried to befriend a coworker in earnest, just once? What if he hadn’t listened to the advertisements? What if he didn’t have to feel bad about himself and just made one friend?
He wondered what a lot of workers could get done if they didn’t have a boss telling them what to do. What could one leader do against a mob of one hundred followers? What if they stopped calling themselves followers?
Mind stuck on leadership, Todd asked, “What about that Empire? What was that all about?”
“Well that’s a long story, honey,” the one behind him said with a chilling tone.
“When planets began to be inhabited, a structure formed between the majority shareholders of the colonized worlds. This board of investors dubbed all planets under their ownership ‘The United Galactic Colonies of Humanity’,” the one ahead said.
“A pretty name,” the one behind said, cold steel tone juxtaposing against her language.
“Well… these Colonies had some problems with androids and pirates and whatnot, so one day, the head chairman of the board of directors said ‘to hell with this unmanageable, inefficient Democracy’ and took control of everything! He made sure to take care of those dirty androids lickity split!”
Todd felt like he was back in history class. He always hated history class. …and that’s why it is so, so wise that President Trump used an Executive Order to repeal the 22nd Amendment and pass the 28th, which removed the second line from Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, so that President Musk could start his first of his historic four terms… bla bla bla… Always so dry and repetitive. Who cares about the past? That’s why it’s passed, or so thought papa Donny Jacobson at least.
“The President made all sorts of great decisions, though not everyone agreed” Todd could feel the eyes of the trailing nurse burn into the back of his head as she spoke, “See, back then, almost everyone had these handy dandy implants.” The two nurses tapped their heads in sync.
“And Todd let me tell you how nice they are! We really can’t understand what happened back then, implants make you feel all fuzzy inside when you do something right.” The nurse ahead of him sighed intermittently while gushing about her implant.
“See, some silly implanted worker-humans, Jeff knows why, tried to break out of the Empire, and it seemed for a brief moment as though they might just shatter the whole thing!” The one behind continued in a hushed excited tone as if trying to grab him with the story. It was working, but perhaps not in the way she intended.
Seems like my idea about working together has been tried before…
“System after solar system fell to those silly workers, no implants… no control…” the leading nurse giggled, “it got to such a point that the President of the time had to enact final measures. I’m sure it seemed mighty unfortunate at first, but once he was done, no planet in the Galaxy was left habitable. Everyone left got the immense privilege to live on one of these beautiful SpaceCruisers, managed by UGC-INC, an Amazon Family Company!”
Todd regretted waking up from the pod, he had been regretting it since he had woken up, but now he could confidently say staying in that black coffin would be much more preferable to this.
So that’s what happens when workers try to fight back, huh? I should have stayed home and starved to death with that little mangy dog… I hate history…
“We Nurses are all that’s left of the Implant system,” the one in the back said. “The secret was: find the smartest, most empathetic person in the galaxy, make an implant just for her, then clone her over and over! No new ideas, no rebellions, no silly ideas like Liberty, just a workforce dedicated to our task! The task of preserving human life.” She smiled a programmed forced grin at him.
He was done with questions for now.
***
After some slushy minutes of walking on the grippy floor, a great dome at the end of the wide hallway came to encompass Todd's entire vision, bulging out before him like a glass bubble. Beyond its sheen was a wide white room that harbored something completely ineffable upon first glance. A large indistinguishable pink blob about the size of a large lawn mower bag, one of hundreds in the wide room, slowly moved past the large window. Todd squinted as it traversed slowly across his field of view over a flat white track, a strange undulating globule of reddish pink slowly and purposefully spiralling down and down. Something translucent hovered beside it.
“Once the Empire had been done away with and the terrestrial humans were all good and dead,” came the voice of the nurse behind him, “The Executives of the SpaceCruisers choose a different route for our species.”
His skin crawled. What the hell am I looking at? He asked himself, knowing full well that it wouldn’t help him comprehend the situation at hand in the slightest.
The more he looked, the more the room began to resemble the inside of a giant, mile wide gumball machine, slowly and carefully carting enormous pink, already-been-chewed gum-wads around and down. Round blobs flanked by see-through human figures glided down a thin white path descending in a wide spiral. Following the path with his eyes, he watched a new pinkish blob wind downward and downward.
Craning his neck to see the end of the strange contraption, Todd watched the spiral path tighten, finally ending in a small hole far below. He watched one of the pink blobs - now a tiny dot way down at the bottom of the ship - perfectly fit slip the hole and disappear. Gone. The one behind it met the same fate, and the one behind. Every five seconds a new pink blob fell into the perfectly sized hole all the way down the spiral.
They moved slowly, and after he had watched dozens of them get sucked up by the bottom of whatever this enormous round room was, his eyes drifted upward to one of the blobs slowly crossing by the large window. It slowly moved into sight, hovering above the ground. Blue lights on the track and the bottom of the blob shined at each other in opposition. As the bulbous form came into view fully, Todd got a look of one of them in its entirety. His eyes scanned this red thing, and his mind made the horrible connection just as quickly.
Oh. Good, a sarcastic voice rang in his head, more horrible nightmares. Just what I wanted.
Flesh. Human flesh. Human eyes on the top of its head, baby blue, spread much too far apart, looked out with a glazed veneer, lost in ecstasy. Todd thought he could decipher a nose in the mess of the top, and the more he looked, just about every part of this naked pink blob seemed to be marked by vestigial forms of a fully functioning human. An impression of an ear that seemed to lack any sort of actual hole hung onto one fat flap, dangling with every slight wiggle of the body. Chubby fingers with long, yellowed fingernails poked out from various flaps and folds across the form. A moist and dripping tongue lolloped out somewhere near where Todd would have assumed its neck was. A thick layer of moisture coated everything, reflecting the blue light of the track.
Unable to stop his investigation, Todd’s eyes scanned for a mouth, searching the folds and growths on the floating sack of meat as it slid down the clean white track beyond the clean glass. To his horror, the only thing his eyes found was a clear tube that connected to the middle of its body, disappearing under another one of possibly hundreds of pink fleshy flaps. Every few seconds, the tube pumped brown liquid into the blob from its connection on the white track. Every time it happened, the thing wiggled in delight, eyes squinting in what could only be interpreted as joy.
Floating beside the round thing, staring down into its glazed eyes, was a transparent figure of a human. It moved in a reversed manner, mouth opening and closing in a silent emphatic speech to its human sack - making sure to wave its hands appropriately. There was no doubt in his mind what he was seeing.
AI Advertisements… still around after all this time.
It smiled with the same genuine emotion he had always envied from the AI actors used in Advertisements on Earth, and though he couldn't not hear what it was saying, Todd was sure that this was the same programming that used to sell him socks, underwear, apartments, groceries, insurance, Amazon Products, and just about everything else throughout his life on Earth. After all these years, they were still using AI to sell useless stuff to…
If things went differently, would they be showing Jacobson’s Advertisements?
The thought made Todd retreat into his mind momentarily - is this what would have become of his lifelong dream if he never dropped out of college? If he had really been someone, really worked hard, life would have still led him to this spot in some way or another. Becoming part of this grotesque horrorshow was all his life ever was going to be, no matter what path he took.
A small white device slid along the track alongside the blobs, both projecting the hologram and the clear tube which injected brown liquid into the blobs. The brown liquid was administered in sync with the hologram’s movements, conducting the pink sack’s jubilation.
Todd took a horrified step back, falling into the Nurse behind him.
He pointed a finger at the passing blob. “W-w-wha-w…” He couldn't make himself talk.
“That’s right my friend!” The nurse who held him said. “See how the other half lives!”
“This is what we call ‘Business Class,’ here on The Independence,” said the other.
Pulling himself away from the arms of the nurse behind him, Todd plastered himself to the window just in time to watch the pink blob that had first hovered across his path slide further down and to the other side of the room - destined for the black pit at the bottom. As it turned the corner just past the field of vision of the window, another nearly identical one with an identical AI hologram began to come into view at the other side. Todd watched them pass.
One of the nurses behind him spoke up, “After the fall of the Empire, the new president of the SpaceCruiser Unity-”
“A man named Jeff!” The other one giggled.
“...yes,” The second one continued as Todd watched four more blobs sucked into the hole at the bottom. “...great and wonderful Jeff realized that humanity had to evolve in order to move past our warring and hateful ways.”
A squirt of brown shot under the flap of a new blob, it squirmed in delight.
“Order online now! For a limited time only, you too can get a DEEP DISCOUNT. If you sign up right here and buy this over here, you can be as happy as anyone else for once…” A clip from an imagined Jacobson’s Advertisements commercial played in his head - giving words to the silent specters on the track.
She continued, “At his disposal, Jeff had a large swath of worker-humans scooped up from the planets before they were bombed who had strong dislike for implants, and a smaller population of business-humans who had a certain standard of living they were used to on the Terrestrial Colonies, but understood the importance of keeping humanity alive in the depths of Space.”
“What would you have done Todd?” the second nurse nearly whispered in his ear.
“I’ll tell you what Jeff did!” They continued onward, not allowing for a response. “Think about how difficult it must have been for Jeff to transition humanity into Space, Todd!”
Striding up beside him so that both of the blonde nurses now flanked him, the first one continued, “Jeff realized that to make the worker-humans want to work, he had to make it fun! So, since human brains make great external processors - especially when they’re in good moods - he made a fun game that the workers could play all day instead of working!”
The one to his right giggled. “How smart! Who needs implants to force you to work if you can just have fun all day instead? They’re so lucky down there…” She sighed.
“With the workers giving their processing energy directly to the ship, they never had to work a day in their lives, and the ship could go on functioning just fine!” The pair giggled in sync.
What kind of life is that? Todd quaked.
“As for the Business-Humans, well…” the one who wandered to his left gestured to the window, just as a new blob-man was passing by.
“It took some doing… boy did it take some doing…” the one on the right paused before continuing, “But eventually, Jeff realized - at the end of the day - every human just wants to be comfortable. And look!” She again gestured, mirroring her companion on his left, “Don’t they look so comfortable!”
A pink blob jostled and wriggled, brown liquid shooting directly into its bulging flabby belly, eyes squinting. Down and down it went… pop, sucked into the hole at the bottom far far below.
“Where do they go?” Todd dryly asked. “When they hit the bottom. That hole. Where does it go?”
“Oh!” Said the one on the left, “We forgot to tell you the best part! The whole reason that Jeff made his patented Spiral System!”
“He’s very proud of that name by the way, just a heads up,” the one in his right ear added.
The left nurse continued, “First you must understand, after some time being up here, the original Business Class had all gone through the system. We had to begin birthing new ones.” She craned her neck and pointed to the top of the spiral which was far out of sight, “They are born way up there,” she said, “from Leftover genetic material purchased from humans back on Earth that Amazon had laying around in the bowels of the ship. Junk from a little thing called the Sisyphus Project.”
Todd saw the black words scrawled onto white paper in his mind’s eye, his name written in the curley-que print of the women - or woman - who were talking to him now.
‘I, Todd H. Jacobson, Hereby grant all rights and privileges of my Genetic Code to the USSP-INC Trust, owned and facilitated by Amazon.com forever and in perpetuity.’
His eyes widened.
She continued, “They’re born from genetic stock and given nothing but essential nutrients through that clear tube there.”
Brown liquid shot into one of the blobs before him.
Genetic Stock? Every single blob had blue eyes.
“Their whole life all they have to do is sit and have fun, and get all filled with essential nutrients to grow big and round and happy.” Todd’s stomach churned as the nurse explained, “They don’t have to move their whole lives. A modified implant gives them pleasure signals straight to the reward centers of their brain based on what they tell their AI Companion to show them. They see anything they want, enjoy anything they want, have anything, or anyone, they want. I assure you Todd they’re really quite happy from birth to the end. The genetic code birthing became so useful that we started using the same stock for the Class-C’s down below! Don’t tell the Class-B’s though, they'd hate that.”
The nurses giggled again.
“See, once Jeff realized that he too had to adapt and evolve to survive without the need of a Planet,” the one on the right said, “there came a need for food.”
“It… eats them?” Todd mumbled, looking down at the hole. “The ship… eats… people?”
“Everyone has their purpose.”
***
Their horrible explanation on the inner workings of the nightmare ship’s cannibalistic internal exosystem concluded, the two nurses led Todd to a thin staircase. Like the rest of the ship - much to Todd’s growing disdain - the stairwell was filled with the same perfectly interspaced circular yellow lights.
He looked up the corridor. A white tunnel to… what’s up there? The thought echoed on his lips, “What’s up there?”
The two nurses who stood behind him glanced at each other before turning back to him. The left one said, nonplussed, “The President. Who else did you think we were taking you to see?”
“What’s he gonna do… to me?” Todd heard his heartbeat pound in his chest. “Will he eat me?”
“Oh!” the two nurses exclaimed in unison before breaking out into a bout of laughter. He would have killed a man to hear this woman - these women? - laugh back on Earth, but now the sound of it only made him want to jump into the vacuum of space and take his chances somewhere far away from the consequences of his last strange day on his homeworld.
Todd was tired of people laughing at him.
“No, no, silly…” The right nurse said, wiping tears from her eyes. “What would make you think such a terrible thing?”
Todd felt his hands shaking, relief filling his unwilling body. Anxiety clashed against passivity, “I, well… J-just the whole, ‘genetic stock’ thing. I-I think I signed off my genetic code back on Earth before I left…so, you know, I think that… well… what if he has the taste for… for me, and- and-”
His weeping speech was cut short as the left nurse ran to him, wrapping him in a tight embrace. Todd’s pounding heart tripled in speed, and he thought he might be having a heart attack. She petted his hair and cooed, “Oh, no, no, no sweetie, no…”
“Those are Class-B Humans, honey bug…” said the other, who was now standing just as close, holding a hand to pat the bald spot on the back of his head. “...bred specifically to get nice and big and happy! Maybe if you were here when the system was set up-”
“Oh but we don’t have to talk about that!” The nurse holding him wrapped a hand around his ears briefly as she chastised her companion.
She looked Todd deep in his eyes, holding him inches from her face, “You were not bred to be eaten Todd Jacobson. You were one of the last humans to not be bred for anything. Nothing at all.”
“But don’t worry buddy,” the other said, matching her tone exactly with the one holding him, “I know that must have been terrifying back then, being born without a purpose. But look around! Things are much better now! Everybody has a purpose, everyone has a place!”
“And you’re gonna go up there, you’re gonna meet the President, and you two are gonna find a plan to get you a purpose!” The close one held his cheeks and shook his head every other word.
Dizzily, Todd replied, “A purpose?” That didn’t sound half bad.
“That’s right!” They said in unison.
“Everybody needs a purpose!” The close one said, letting him go and taking a step back to join her companion.
“Just up those stairs, he’s waiting for you.” They said, together in unison.
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