I know.
But nobody cares.
Galactically speaking, there are quadrillions of stories every day. Let’s be real: quadrillions of those quadrillions don’t matter. Yours doesn’t matter. Your dog’s doesn’t, and we all wish you’d learn that. Your fifth grade teacher’s doesn’t, and you knew that, inherently, from the minute you met her. In fact the infinite majority of them have no import whatsoever on events on even a personal level within their own framework. That’s important because, galactically speaking, a vanishingly small minority do happen to matter, even as the diffuse nature of the aforementioned galaxy makes it hard to capture them. Sometimes, however, a story comes along of such import to the rest of it all that it’s captured in so many ways it becomes and creates a subset of stories all its own. That, and not some fanciful retelling of the time you sliced an orange, is the kind of thing we’ll be dealing with today.
James Morris hated spaceships. There are many other important things to know about James in those days- the beginning of it all, or of the end- but we can leave those to the historians for the moment. The single most important thing to know for the purposes of history was that he was reflexively liable to hate any sealed tin can for no other reason than that it left an atmosphere. Given that he lived in one of the more quickly growing spaceports on Malyria it might have been a surprise to those who didn’t already know but nonetheless it was true. In fact he spent a considerable amount of time each week trying to think of new ways to destroy them. It may not have mattered much in the end but, and this is the crucial pivot, he spent almost as considerable an amount of time each week actively trying to put those plans in motion. He hated spaceships with a passion one wouldn’t have guessed was possible. The rest of his time was spent lazing about, eating, and hanging around one of the many coffee shops that lined the street he lived on. He enjoyed coffee, almost as much as he hated spaceships.
Almost.
Malyria is an excessively large planet, as you’re no doubt aware. It was, in fact, almost a gas giant, but there was something about the place even in its earliest days that was just generally dead. The gases cooled and kept condensing and condensing and condensing until the surface became solid. It orbits slowly and is very far away from its star, so that days are cold and years are long. It is little more than a gargantuan lump of solidified gas floating insolently through the space provided it…and this is precisely why it has come to be one of the most heavily populated planets in the known galaxy. There is nothing there to take from or release into the atmosphere, no way to make the planet worse or less habitable. It began its life as useless whirling detritus from the formation of a star, in the midst of an otherwise useful and bountiful solar system, and as such it offered a perfect habitat for any scouring and destructive species to use as a home base. Hence humans.
They built upon the faceless, featureless plains, and doing so did not make the planet worse. They continued to build and, in spite of all historical precedent, the more they added the more the place improved. Meanwhile, to enhance the lives of those who chose this hideous spartan wasteland, more and more things and plants and comforts were imported in.
Then, in true human fashion and after years of ignoring the ground beneath their feet, a committee was organized to find out just what exactly they were all walking on, resurfacing, drilling into, building on top of, and breathing in. After a few centuries of meetings, a report was finally sought and, as it happened, revealed the top layer of the planet was essentially solid argon. This, as the report made clear, explained all the deaths during the centennial heat waves. But during its fourth review someone read the fifth page of the report and was astonished to learn that just below that crust of lethality there was a shocking follow-on: from about one galactic standard mile all the way down to the core, the planet was a solid sphere of spaceship fuel. It was hard to get to, and dangerous to extract. It put every life on the entire planet at risk to so much as scrape the top layer with the cover of a notebook. Drilling down to it caused fuel and argon to sublimate into the air. It was the source of death and disease and long, slow descents into the expansive madness of aged-dementia. Mining and export operations were set up overnight.
It was into this environment that James Morris was born: a cold world, entirely dependent on the greater galaxy for everything except possibly the most plentiful and otherwise useless resource, which after centuries of unwitting co-existence it was now exporting, sustaining a galaxy of expansion and spaceship-related hijinkery. James Morris had no intention of being exported, nor of exporting himself, nor of being hijinked, or- certainly in his own mind- hijinking. He hated spaceships.
One particularly cold day, as James sucked down a coffee from his third-favorite coffee house, one of the more brilliant ideas for ship destruction he had ever conceived popped, like a cocainated lightning bug traversing the multiverse, into his buzzing and jittery brain. He threw down a few coins by way of tip, pulled on the light jacket his mother had purchased for him from one of the fancier shops at the pole the previous month, and sprinted off through an alley towards the spaceport three streets over. Minutes later, a server came to collect his dirty dishes. Finding the coins, which even on Malyria were not a sufficient tip, the server stormed into the manager’s office, quit very loudly, and started a street revolution. He was eventually sentenced to execution by the state, on the grounds that losing a revolution pretty much triggers a free-for-all in terms of punishment, and killed himself amid a haze of self-actualization when he realized what his life had become. Everything was very clear-cut to anyone who paid attention. Not that many people got upset about it.
Spaceports on Malyria- and on a great many other worlds, in fact- generally consist of two portions: the orbiting dock and the land-based hangars. The orbiting dock is where the larger ships remain moored, while a variety of services are carried out at the hangar: gravity-based repair, landing guidance for ships rated for atmosphere, small scale smuggling operations, breakfast sandwich sales, et cetera. Shuttles constantly scurry back and forth. Supplies are often loaded onto these shuttles, along with new crew, travelers, and occasionally con artists who look to make a little money off of travelers and new crew. The standard satellite array at any given port will include at least one large satellite whose entire job is keeping the orbiting station aligned with the hangar, so that travel and communication can be continued with the least interruption. At the hangar James Morris was currently headed for the satellite array attendant on duty was Melora Morris, and her son was well known to security as a lazy piece of good-for-nothing wet-alley trash.
James’s reputation was a source of concern for his mother. It was also contrived. He discovered early on that the more lazy he pretended to be, the less people expected of him and in turn that lack of expectation affected their levels of suspicion. How could he ever commit a crime, his critics often asked, when he won’t even make himself breakfast? This myopic observance allowed him to continue to destroy, with a clockwork regularity, the hated spaceships infesting his town, without so much as a hint of suspicion even while on numerous occasions he had clearly been present and alone at the scene. Since- the thinking went- he never did anything, he must not have done this, and a great many very expensive ships were destroyed which might not otherwise have been, accompanied by an official report listing faulty wiring or tethering as the cause of loss. He made great use of his community’s refusal to alter their perception of him. He slowed his stride as he approached his destination, putting on a lopsided smile for the guard at the gate who waved and let him in the array’s main office block. Melora hadn’t said anything, but James was a good boy. Besides, it wasn’t like him to cause trouble.
Once through and out of eyeshot, James resumed his purpose-driven gait down the spaceport’s cavernous hallway. Humongous windows on either side showed beautiful panoramas of the surrounding environment. Flat, featureless, and dull, but with just a splash of orange from the atmosphere to let you know you were on solid ground. Just as nature intended, James thought. He loved those windows. If he hadn’t been so focused he might have stopped and stared out of them for hours, watching the nothing that they revealed with the most rapt attention he could summon. It had been one of his favorite pastimes as a child. The other two- to fill out the top 3- being lighting candles and pulling the legs off of self-captured specimens of a specific species of small, naturalized lizard. The Malyrian Lion was not a lion, and not Malyrian, and not up to battling a human, but was for centuries the largest hunter the planet could sustain and had been traced back to a single pregnant ancestor riding a crate of pineapples in from some distant world that had too many of all three things.
Hermaphroditic and now entirely inbred, they were not considered a shining beacon of survival so much as a pest of epic proportions which could be wiped out in the hundreds by putting out a small portion of cheese, waiting a bit, and then dropping a steel plate on it, but from an early age James had hated them, he had hated pineapples, and he had hated crates from distant worlds. But he loved the smell of candles.
His mother’s office was on the far end of the building, and there were numerous off-ramps into the bowels of the port available to him between his current location and that most false of destinations. The trick, and it truly was a trick, was to take one when no one was looking: between the off-worlders and the natives, every section of the gigantic way-station was almost always crowded. He passed two men in coveralls arguing about when the offload date for their fruit shuttle was. James paused and perked up, deciding to loiter strategically. Information was golden on a mission like this.
“1400.”
“1250.”
“1400.” James began to wonder whether this was a waste of time.
“1250.”
“You’re not even close.”
“You’re not even close!” James became certain this had been a waste of time, but as the men continued he stayed and listened. Incomplete eavesdropping was rude and he’d subverted his upbringing better than that. The first man went on.
“Think of it this way…”
“All right.”
“Who schedules an offload for ten minutes before an hour ends?” An excellent point, James conceded.
“Apparently the people here.” Truly possible, James agreed. Unlikely, but a creative gambit nonetheless and James became excited for what might be thrown to top it.
“We could just go look at the board.” Disgusted, James started down the hallway again, though he could hear the two men for a few more steps, growing dimmer and dimmer in an audible approximation of their respective intelligence.
“What kind of a solution would that be?”
“1400.”
“1250!”
James sighed. People just didn’t have the capacity for debate anymore. Primarily, it seemed to him that it was because they argued over facts. A foundational mistake but one which wasn’t insurmountable, provided they had the creativity to do something about that status. Unfortunately most did not, and so by his estimation the failure rate for good arguments was up something like a thousand percent in his lifetime. It was disappointing. He thrived on the conflict of others. As he continued walking- passing a giant digital offload schedule with clear, unambiguous offload times in unsettling neon blue that forced an involuntary laugh- he glanced around the hall. It was suddenly empty. A very convenient turn of events. He ducked left into a branching hallway, while none of the abruptly nonexistent people were looking, and reveled in his free and unfettered infiltration.
Galactically speaking, most worlds are divided into distinct quadrants on a geographic basis. The proliferation of trading ports, along with the general melting pot character of an entity defined by its literal inclusion of all relevant space, leaves it vulnerable to outbreaks, and as such world quadrants can usually be sealed from each other with relative ease. This precaution, in terms of its ascension to universality, was first taken in the third year of the Universal Empire’s Blue Period when an unchecked strain of the flu got aboard an outbound freighter carrying rats to a rim planet called Felming. This train wreck of a world has since been scorched from its galactic orbit at great expense (along with all three remaining planets of the Universal Empire and all works associated with both the Blue and Jade Periods), but within three days of the freighter’s landing each person on the planet had undergone some form of mutation, most of them singularly horrifying and accompanied by excruciating pain. It was determined that even a single scan on the transported load between the commercial quadrant- where the load had been secured on its home world of Garbuse- and the export quadrant of the same planet would have exposed the pathogen to enough radiation to reduce the threat from the planet-wide scourge of billions it became to a minor local outbreak that might have closed a few schools and led to public debates about the money wasted on the quadrant checkpoints. Fortunately the lack of any further overall zoning strategy means that every imaginable creature comfort is present in each of the quadrants. This system ensures that the unlucky traveler, stranded in one quadrant or another, behind a medical checkpoint, need want for nothing while they wait for their immunodestructive doom. The weakness, of course, lies at the spaceport itself, when a planet is worthless (or efficient) enough to concentrate itself particularly around only one… and when it is also home to certain residents who might not be so concerned with the safety of others. A posit that Malyria was one of said might not go amiss.
James opened a door marked “Service” and slipped through into a room which would have been nicely represented on a game show: circular, monochrome, and marked by a series of identical hatches differentiated only by number. He crossed the floor with breathtaking confidence and opened Hatch 4, revealing, by muscle memory, the largest of seven conveyor belts located in this module of the station. He’d been there before, often as a young boy taking his first, tentative steps into petty terrorism and murder. The belts were so well crafted that they rarely required repair, so the room was empty most of the time and therefore a good place to get away. It had the added aesthetic bonus, where James was concerned, of being the one place in the entire station from which it was impossible to see a spaceship of any kind. A gigantic connecting bridge blocked the sole access skylight in the circular room, meaning that while huge beams of shifting orange light filtered in- often interrupted by massive, unidentifiable shadows- no ships were visible in and of themselves. James hated spaceships, and so by default loved this one redundant little corner of the place he’d hated since his earliest days.
His plan required moving belts. They weren’t. He had time. So with the hatch open and the belt stopped, he leaned back against the wall and lit a cigarette. The paper and leaves came from a farm on the other side of the planet, he’d been told, that had been in production since the first days of colonization. Apparently it covered what was thought to have been a primordial lava ocean. They weren’t expensive, but they weren’t very good, so James tried to smoke as little as possible. He could have gotten the good ones any time he wanted and smoked like an ignored prophetic chimney but that would have required stealing, which he was agnostic about, and stealing from spaceships specifically, which he wanted no part of. Though he had tried it, he found he didn’t like to steal from the ships- it took some small piece of energy away from his focus on destruction.
He stared into the open hatch impatiently, puffing away. The belt was taking forever to kick on. Usually a load on the main belt happened by every few minutes. Just this morning he’d been annoyed to look out his window and see three ships orbiting, large enough to be clearly defined in orbit directly above the station. By now there should have been some cargo ready to load, via the belt, into the shuttles to take back to the big ships for transport. He smiled a little as it occurred to him that someone- some disgusting Space Sailor- must have really screwed something up, when a thrum sounded. The belt snapped to life like a cracking whip.
James stuck his head in the large opening and glared down into the blackness. His hope was that he’d catch a glimpse of light when the main entrance flap lifted- an indication that loading was underway. There was nothing. He needed to see, so he pulled his head out of the square hatchway and looked around. An old flashlight was sitting on top of a junction box across the room, next to the hatch for the smallest conveyor belt. Determinedly devoid of hope he crossed the space, picked up the flashlight, and tried to turn it on. As expected, the battery was dead. They really didn’t have to come down here that often- it could have been a year since the flashlight’s owner had left it- so the ‘dead’ part of the ‘dead flashlight’ situation was unsurprising. He stuck it in his pocket anyway. No one would miss it more than they were already missing it. Then he walked back over to the main hatch, leaned in again to check for a flash of light, and the service room door slammed open, hitting James from behind and knocking him onto the now very active belt. He flew down it, into the dark.
