Space Junk

by Andrew Bixler

  “No offense,” she says. “But I couldn’t handle living on that ship of yours. It’s a dump. Plus, I like to set my feet on solid ground every once in a while.”

  “Oh yeah, I get it.”

  “I mean, thanks,” she says. “It’s really nice of you.”

  For a long while, they stare at each other awkwardly through their video feeds, the sky exploding behind them, until the silence begins to feel as inhospitable as the space between them.

  “So, this is it, I guess,” Adam says.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Turning away from the screen, Adam tells her, “I just want you to know, it wasn’t so bad hanging out with you, even if I made it seem that way. I had a lot of fun, actually.”

  “I had fun too,” she says. “I’m sorry I lied to you and gave away the black gold. I know how much it meant to you.”

  “Nah, it’s okay. You did the right thing. If it was up to me, I’d be dead right now. So thanks for saving my life, again.”

  “No problem.” Her cheeks turn pink, and he can hear a soft purring coming through her feed. “I’d save you anytime.”

  Adam tries to think of something else to say, to keep her from going, but nothing comes to mind.

  “Well,” Daizy finally says. “Maybe our paths will cross again someday. Until then, goodbye, Adam Jones.”

  “Goodbye, Daizy… Hey, you never told me your last name.”

  “Oh, it’s Jones.”

  Adam’s mouth drops. “Your name is Daizy Jones?”

  “It’s a pretty common name. We’re not related or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’re not even the same species.”

  “Hmph, that’s weird,” he says.

  “Eh, not really.” She smiles and winks. “Anyway, see you space pirate…” Her feed cuts out, and with a flash from her ship’s exhaust, she’s gone.

  “See you…”

  Adam pulls the Asteroid Jones II into Grandpa’s battered bubble and lands on the edge of the brown lawn. Most of the yard is hidden underneath a lifetime’s worth of overgrown, decaying scrap. A nose and part of a side panel, all that’s left of the original Asteroid Jones, rest against the crumbling house.

  “Someday it’ll all be yours,” Grandpa says, dramatically waving his arm over the window.

  “That’s… something to think about,” Adam says. “Listen, I’m sorry for getting you involved in all of this. And for, you know, almost getting you killed.”

  Grandpa smiles, his eyes tearing. “You have nothing to apologize for. You took me on one last great adventure. I had the time of my life.”

  “Well, that’s good.” Adam sighs.

  “I know you’re upset that you lost the black gold, and you think you didn’t get much in return,” Grandpa says. “But you’ll have plenty of chances to find what you’re looking for. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably change your mind about what that is a few hundred more times before you do.”

  Adam scowls and turns toward the window. “Wow, I’ve really got a lot to look forward to – a lifetime of frustration and uncertainty.”

  Grandpa laughs. “That’s what life is. Look at me – I’m older than I ever thought I’d be. Every day might be my last. But at some point I realized that that’s always been true. None of this stuff really means anything. The important thing is to live now, because yesterday is gone and tomorrow never comes.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s been real nice spending time with you, Grandpa,” Adam says. “But I want to get to the bar while ‘The Tale of the Black Gold’ is still fresh in my mind. Maybe I can get a couple free beers out of it.”

  “It’s on me.” Grandpa takes out his phone and transfers a few credits to Adam’s account. “Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got. But try to remember that life is about more than beer, scrap, and videotapes. Just make sure that whatever you’re after is what you’re really after. It’s easy to get lost in all the junk.

  “A lot of people think that’s what happened to Ponce Raleigh, but he knew what he wanted from the start. As he was nearing the end of his adventure, not long before he disappeared out in deep space, he wrote, ‘If I never find the object of my pursuit, many will say I wasted my life. What they fail to understand is that I succeeded the moment I set sail, for I had already reached my destination.’”

  Adam nods, impatiently tapping the dashboard.

  “Chit, there were times I lost a dream or two,” Grandpa says. “The night is long, Adam, but you might awaken to a brand new life.”

  Adam looks up, uncertainly. “Brand new life?”

  “A brand new life,” Grandpa says, “around the bend.”

  Stepping into the cargo bay, Adam lowers Grandpa to the surface of the ancient space rock, and they wave to each other as the Asteroid Jones II lifts off and leaves the fabricated environment of the dome.

  Adam engages his ship’s autopilot, starts a movie – some stylized, incomprehensible space trip about ESP and black rainbows – and passes out in his seat. He wakes to a blank screen, his ship drifting outside its desolate destination. With some effort, he rouses himself and groggily navigates the airlock to enter the empty lot outside The Tannhäuser Gate. The worn building silently beckons, glowing copper under the soft sheen of the lifeless planet below as Adam disembarks, stretching his tired limbs.

  When he steps inside, he discovers that with the exceptions of himself and the bartender, there isn’t another soul in the place. “It’s kind of slow today,” he observes.

  “Yep,” the muscly, mutton-chopped man behind the bar grumbles. “There’s some big war going on. S’got everybody excited. They’re all out scrapping. Meanwhile, I got an empty bar. Are you gonna order something?”

  “Give me an Ol’ Guard,” Adam says.

  He sits at the window and watches the surface of the neighboring planet storm beneath sheets of swirling brown and orange. Grimy fans spin on the ceiling but do little to cut the stifling air; their chains rattle rhythmically, marking the seconds as they tick past. He loses track of time, but he has no place to be, and for a while he sits in front of an empty can, swirling the few drops at the bottom that he can never quite manage to suck out.

  Instead of ordering another beer, he heads back to his ship and opens a list of destinations on the window. None of the options are particularly appealing, but he selects one anyway. Conscious of the trip for only brief moments between starry-eyed stupors, he eventually wakes to find himself hovering outside Space Den.

  “Ooh, Mr. Jones,” Ms. Chibois greets him as he steps into the lobby. “Where have you been? I was starting to get worried.”

  “Oh, I’ve been around,” Adam says.

  She stands under him and frowns. “You look down. What is wrong?”

  “I’m just feeling a little worn out, that’s all,” he tells her.

  “Well, don’t worry.” She grins. “I will lift your spirits.”

  She takes his arm and guides him toward the curtain behind the counter, but he stops her before they reach it.

  “Unfortunately,” he says, “I don’t have the crits.”

  “Oh…” Her smile fades, and her voice drops. “The special, then?”

  She turns him around and leads him into the tiny room off the lobby. His stomach knots the moment the sour smell hits his nostrils. Guiding him past squirming, half-conscious spaceheads, she sits him down in an open spot against the wall.

  “I’ll give you a little extra,” she whispers, as she takes the dirty pipe from her pocket and presses a block of red putty into the bowl.

  Adam places the pipe to his lips, and Ms. Chibois holds a flame to it. But before he sucks the hot smoke into his lungs, he hesitates, glancing at the sweaty, mumbling bodies crammed in all around him. They shake convulsively or lie motionless on the stained tile floor. Their skin and clothes are even filthier than his own. On the other side of the room, a humanoid not unlike Adam wakes and, upon realizing where he is, slumps back against the wa
ll and stares into space with his mouth hanging open, exposing half a dozen crooked brown teeth poking from enflamed, tar-stained gums.

  Adam suddenly jumps to his feet, shoving the pipe back into Ms. Chibois’s hand. “I’m sorry, I changed my mind. I have to go.”

  “Hey, you didn’t pay!” she shouts after him as he darts across the room and out the front door.

  Clambering aboard the Asteroid Jones II, he sets his destination to the starline, and a few starry-eyed hours later, he arrives outside the giant glowing tunnel. He pulls his ship to the back of the shortest line and impatiently taps his finger on the dash, mumbling, “Come on, come on, come on…”

  At the window, a techno-geek with modded video irises and a bunch of face piercings expressionlessly droans, “Please, like, state your destination.”

  “I don’t need a ticket,” Adam says. “I’m just trying to find a friend of mine who’s already inside.”

  “I can’t let you in without a ticket.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” Adam insists. “I’ll come right back out.”

  “That’s exactly what someone trying to scam a free ride would say,” the kid squawks, his corneas flickering from whatever he’s watching. “Do you see how many ships are in there? You could disappear in a space second. Why would I risk my job for you?”

  Adam throws his hands up and glances around his cabin for moral support, but he doesn’t find any. “Just give me a ticket to Earth,” he grumbles, and a contract appears on the window. He jams his thumb to it, agreeing to an obscene interest rate on the new debt he’s incurring, and watches his bank account plummet back into the red. “Are you happy? I just had that paid off.”

  The kid stares, blank-faced, and instructs, “Please pull forward.”

  Ships zip in and out of virtual cubicles stacked from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, all across the planet-sized station. Gazing out at the sweeping rush of speeding spacecraft, Adam quickly realizes it would take him a lifetime to search every spot, and by then she’d probably be gone.

  “Does everything have to be a fishing pain in the ack?!” He switches to the public channel and, over countless chatting voices, shouts, “EXCUSE THE INTERRUPTION! I’M LOOKING FOR DAIZY JONES. CAN SOMEBODY HELP ME FIND DAIZY JONES?”

  “Brule it with the caps,” somebody says, and the voices resume chattering.

  Just as Adam begins to come to terms with the fact that he’s never going to see her again, somebody announces, “I found her. She’s parked in space 1ACV01.”

  Before he has time to think, he pulls his ship around and flies up along the edge of the grid, plunging into a tangle of traffic. Glancing at the glowing map on his window, he realizes he’s headed in the wrong direction, and without bothering to check his mirror, he swerves back around, cutting off a speeding attack ball and nearly crashing into a bulk prawn freighter. When he finally finds the space he’s looking for, he’s relieved to see the dinky one-seater parked inside.

  He hails the ship, and she appears on his window, smiling and shaking her head. “Adam Jones… what the fish are you doing here?”

  “Are you really going to make me say it?” Adam asks.

  “Yes, I think I’d enjoy seeing you grovel,” Daizy says.

  “I came to find you, to take you up on your offer from before.”

  She stops smiling, and her triangle ears stick up. “Oh, I thought you were going to ask for your clothes back.”

  “The past few days have been the best of my life,” he says. “I was in a space rut. I thought it was the black gold that got me excited about scrapping again. But losing it made me realize that it was never really the black gold I was after. It was you.”

  She glances away from the camera, shaking her head, and says, “Chut up, you chidiot, and kiss me.”

  As Adam awkwardly presses his lips to the camera, cheers and sappy well-wishes resound through his ship’s cockpit. “Chit, I thought I switched to a private channel.”

  “There’s just one problem,” Daizy says. “I already paid for my ticket, and it was made painfully clear that all sales are final. They wouldn’t have let you in here without one, so where are you headed?”

  “Earth.”

  “Oh no…” she moans.

  “What?” Adam sighs, slumping against the dash. “Are we about to end up on opposite ends of the universe?”

  “Actually, I’m on my way to Earth, too. Figured I’d try to get that Todd guy to help me upgrade my ship. I was just hoping to get a break from saving your life for a while. But if I don’t do it, who will?”

  Adam laughs and juts his thumb out at her as the crowd claps and hollers.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” she asks, glaring. “We’ve given these people enough entertainment. Let’s get the fish out of here already, Asteroid Jones.”

  “I can’t believe we missed the whole thing,” Pants moans as she guides her ship through the debris.

  “If we hadn’t skipped school yesterday we would’ve been here on time,” Beer complains from the corner of the window. “I blame The One.”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault,” The One says, knocking his hand into the camera. “Thank Pants and her fans.”

  “The fans saved our lives,” Pants argues. “Look at this place.”

  Burnt metal and broken bits of electronics lightly clink against her ship’s hard, protective fur as it wades through the wreckage. Not long before they arrived, videos from their fans had started pouring in from the front line of the biggest war in the history of the universe. But now it’s over, and all that’s left is a big pile of scrap.

  “I found him,” Horton calls out. “He seems okay.”

  After a moment, Todd’s disheveled, greasy image appears on the window. “Where were you guys? You totally missed it!”

  “We were in detention,” Beer grumbles. “So, what happened?”

  “What happened?” Todd leans away from the camera and rummages around off-screen. When he returns, he’s holding a dented can of Ol’ Guard. “Pants Team Pink clobbered the Foremen and the Ears – that’s what happened!”

  “You’re kidding,” The One says.

  “No joke,” Todd says, guzzling his beer and wiping a hand across his mouth. “Every fan with a ship was out here.”

  “Just to confirm, you’re saying that Pants’s fans somehow defeated The Foreman and the entire UE army?” Horton asks, skeptically.

  “Well, yeah…”

  “Yay!” Pants cries. “You did it, you guys! No one can beat Pants Team Pink!”

  “But, how?” Horton demands.

  “Well, BUAAA,” Todd belches. “It wasn’t easy. Without you guys, the team was a mess. But someone had to rally the fans. I just thought about Pants and, inspired by her leadership, decided to take action.”

  “Pants’s leadership?” The One says. “Everybody knows I’m the glue that holds this team together!”

  “So, I got up in the top Ear’s space,” Todd continues. “You know, he was yelling and threatening me, giving me the space business. But I looked him in the eye and told him, I said, ‘I don’t think you know who you’re talking to, pal. We’re Pants Team Pink, defenders of the universe, and we don’t take chit from no one.’ Then he started to whine, you know, and apologize. But I knew it was all just a trick.”

  “No way,” Pants says.

  “Way,” Todd says. “He was trying to get me to let my Ol’ Guard down, but I just squeezed my can tight and sent his ack to space hell.”

  “Whoa,” The One says. “This is crazy. Todd might actually be bruler than I thought.”

  “Todd is totally brule, you guys,” Pants declares.

  “After that,” Todd says, crushing his empty can and tossing it over his shoulder, “it was all over. I heard The Foreman got wrecked before we even got there, and with their leader out of the picture, the Ears were too disoriented to mount an effective counterattack. They never saw us coming.”

  “But what about the Asteroid Jones II,
and the black gold?” Beer asks.

  “I never saw them.” Todd shrugs. “I’d be surprised if either one of them survived.”

  Pants glances out ahead, frowning, as her ship slowly pushes through the rubble. “I hope Daizy and Adam got out okay.”

  “I guess that’s the end of this adventure,” Beer says. “So, what’s next?”

  “We should head home soon,” Horton says. “We have to get back in time for school tomorrow, or today, or whatever.”

  “Ugh,” The One groans. “Can’t we go to virtual school?”

  “You already tried that, remember?” Beer says. “You just went even less.”

  The One squints and stares off into space for a moment. “Oh yeah…”

  As Pants searches the remains, hoping not to find any fragments of the Asteroid Jones II, she spots something peculiar – a small patch of dark space, like a shadow cast on the surrounding night sky. “Hey, hold on a second you guys.”

  “What’s up, Pants?” Horton asks.

  “I want to check something out before we leave.”

  “Come on, Pants,” The One complains. “We’re never gonna find anything in all this scrap.”

  “It’ll only take a space minute,” she says, sending her fans to commercial. “Be right back.”

  Jumping up from her seat, Pants slips into her furry pink spacesuit, gives herself a big hug, and climbs through the airlock. Once she’s outside, she fastens her tether to the hull, tugging on it to make sure it’s secure, and then gently pushes off from the ship princessfluffypants toward the dark glow. Using her suit’s thrusters to adjust her trajectory, she warily makes her approach, swiping away the small hunks of scorched metal that litter her path. When she gets closer, she sees that the darkness is emanating from an object at the end of a short, pale staff. She reaches out and snatches it, but when she realizes what she’s holding, she almost chucks it away. The arm is white and frosted over, its hand frozen in a permanent claw.