Illegally, and yet somehow- as it had been explained to him- contractually, bonded to Gasocorp, James Morris sat on his new bunk. Well, ‘new’. New to him, although truthfully he’d never had a bunk before so it wasn’t necessarily new. It was more his…first bunk. Gasocorp discouraged using numerical descriptors in their welcoming material however, as it often implied the presence of career opportunities, and after decades of somewhat disgruntled employees almost causing a minor fuss at several town hall style meetings they decided enough was enough when it came to ambition: ‘New’ it was to be and they had it pressed into the metal from which each bunk was made. So although it was probably twenty years old and had been slept in by at least a thousand other people, James was still instructed by his welcome packet and the helpful man who handed it to him to call his new bunk his “New Bunk”.
“I hate my New Bunk,” James announced, trying it out. It sounded right, even if it was clearly wrong. Gareth looked up from his New Bunk, in which he was reading a dog-eared and filthy comic book.
“I had a New Bunk that I liked once. Yeh get used to New Bunks after a bit.”
“What if I don’t want to get used to them. Or my New Clothes.”
“New Clothes are a different story. Never get used ta them. Can’t help wonderin’ who died in mine. See the hole in the chest? Gotta think about that kinda stuff, seein’ as I’ve had these for three years and they jist started givin’ us the second pair. New Bunks though yeh get used to.”
James sighed loudly and threw himself back onto his New Pillow. It was lumpy and it smelled like man. He didn’t appreciate it. He did, however, appreciate finally being dry- no matter what Gareth said about the New Clothes, they were clean on the inside and he wasn’t freezing in them. He took out his I.D. card. Well. An I.D. card. It had his picture on it but the man had simply taken a quick scan of his face and left thumbprint before pouring acid on an old, blood-stained piece of plastic and superimposing the new images on one side. He read the printed words on it: his date of entry… his sponsor/emergency contact/next of kin (he’d tried to explain that Gareth wasn’t kin, but was politely informed by the issuing man that it didn’t matter since they wouldn’t be notifying anyone anyway)… his name. He stopped when he came to his name. It was the wrong one. Of course the stupid thing had the wrong name on it. He had very carefully spelled his name out to the man, and he had seen the man typing as he spelled. It should have been impossible to misspell it, or so James thought given the effort that went into getting correct what he would have considered the only important piece of information on it, but no. It was misprinted, a complete and utter disaster. James loved his name. It was the one thing no one else could have, though of course in a galaxy of a trillion people it was unlikely to be uniquely his. This piece of logic, which he was well aware of, he circumvented by rationally considering his violent and passionate hatred of spaceships. He never planned to deal with the galaxy of trillions. And on his home planet any outsider coming in would have been seen to have stolen his name, not the other way around. His name was undeniably his sole property, denoted by a well-developed circle of impenetrable logic. Yet here he was, three days into space, and all of a sudden he had a different name. He was a different person.
“He misspelled my name.”
“Eh, I’m not surprised, blind old bugger. Lit’rally can’t see who he’s talking to. He just types in letters, I think…see mine?” Gareth lifted his gargantuan hand over the side of the New Bunk to display the contents of the card. James read the name aloud.
“Gggracken Mklar?”
“Gracken Mklar. Call me Grack, will yeh?” And Gareth collapsed back into his New Bedsheets in a fit of laughter. “What’s yers say?”
“”Jason Morris.’ How ridiculous.”
