Space Opera
by Doug Hawley
Space Opera
Logdate LSMFT. This is Captain James T. Pickard
of the Starboat Entropy. I’m
teaching starboat operations and culture to
Ensign and captain in training Horace Green.
Green: I have so many
questions. I don’t understand why
we are not crushed into atoms when we accelerate
at gorp or insane speed?
Captain: See that red
doohickey on the wall behind you?
Green: Yes. The
blinking one?
Captain: It adjusts
gravity.
Green: How does it
work?
Captain: No idea, but
you could ask Drinky, our chief engineer. The
one whose accent keeps shifting. Some
days he’s Welsh, sometimes he’s
Bostonian. He’s a little crazy,
but good with widgets.
Green: What’s
the difference between gorp and insane speed and
how do we go faster than light?
Captain: Long
laughing fit. The difference
between gorp and insane is just the special
effects. Gorp is kaleidoscope with
wahoo sounds and insane is purple with banshee
screams. When we found that all the
physics books claimed faster than light speed was
impossible, we threw out the books. Easy
fix.
Green: How do you
decide which planets to visit where no man or
woman has gone before who wasn’t wearing
cheap alien makeovers?
Captain: I must admit
that I had a lot to do with that. It
is not a coincidence that they usually have semi-human
dynamite women who usually fall for the captain
– me. I did make a couple of
mistakes. Planet Sappho showed no
interest in me, but Yeoman Sally Twist had a
great time there. We had to stop for
triberyllium crystals there after only getting a
trillion kilometers on our last 100 gram fill up. Depending
on which way you swing, you might want to take a
pass on planets Bear and Twink.
Green: It seems that
you see a lot of action in combat and romance.
Captain: Rank has its
privileges. I have had some dalliances
with the crew as well. You might say
unprofessional, but I say hubba hubba. My
great regret is the princess that we picked up
who was escaping the Abominable Asteroid and its
leader Dark Rader. I was ready to
marry her until I found out that she was my
sister. Major bummer.
Excuse me, for a moment. Our Diversity
Officer Ababao wants my attention. What
is it?
Ababao: Captain, I’m
from Detroit. I just can’t get
the Nigerian accent right. What should
I do?
Captain: Let me check. Google
says that we have only 3,234 Nigerians watching
the show. You do you, no problem.
Ababao: Another thing. We
don’t have any nonbinary, Bulgarian or short
crew members and we can’t afford three more
personnel.
Captain: We can
afford one more. Get a short nonbinary,
Bulgarian, three for the price of one.
Ababao: Genius. I’m
on it.
Captain: Back to you,
trainee Green.
Green: I’m
puzzled. According to the manifest,
there are only ten crew members, but I’ve
seen 112 since we took off.
Captain: We get a lot
of turnover, particularly for the ones with plaid
shirts, and others who tell their agents that
they want off. They only last about a
week, so we stream crew on and off as needed.
Green: One more thing
and I’ll go back to cleaning toilets. When
I got onboard, it was 2021, but now it’s
2567. How did that happen.”
Captain: It’s
because of a Newtonian-Einsteinian quantum time
shift relative to the expanding universe and
relativity. Whispers – We
didn’t want to make the same mistake that
Space 1999 and Space Odyssey did and pass the
dates the movies represented without anything
like anything in those movies happening.
Loud noises interrupt the conversation.
Captain: That’s
enough training for one day, and I can’t
hear anything anyway. The crew is
still working on replacing doorknobs with whoosh
machines. Three years now and nowhere
near complete. We can put a man in
orbit around the Big Dipper, but we can’t
finish a simple maintenance job.
Appears
in Medium
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