Something, as they often said, didn’t sit right about all of this. Then again the question of who ‘they’ were and why they felt the need to say anything about anything was still under heavy debate in all corners of the galaxy. It was one of the last indicators that the Galaxy was still functioning, in fact, and the frequency of those debates had been monitored by economists for centuries. Before that these social economists had measured the price of bread. Before that they had rated the second-most-recently invented wonder product on a number of worlds and packaged this into a statistical indicator called the B.S. Index. Before that they studied the frequency with which people were shot onto the natural satellites of previously terrestrial societies. Regardless of your choice of social-indexing tool, there was something fundamentally flawed in the galaxy- change was coming, and several people with their ears to the proverbial ground predicted it. Others, with their heads up in the proverbial clouds, lucked into profiting from the new order. The point here is: they can land a man on the moon, but they can’t tell you what the price of bread will be tomorrow. And it didn’t sit right with many that, even if this news was the best thing since color videophones, it didn’t change how mustard tasted.

The Captain of the Albright was most decidedly not a member of they, and to him all of this was fleshy, marvelous glory. He fizzled at the things that could be done, he’d have paid any price for bread, there were no good new inventions, and to him mustard was an eternal kaleidoscope of dazzling, never-before-seen flavors. Plus, going to the moon was easy. Unfortunately for him, they were essentially a shotgun of ideas, the bulk bad but some prone to correctness by sheer volume of attempted thought. And the remote for the speaker was pointed squarely at his pudgy, happy, oblivious face.