Stardate: I don’t fucking know. This isn’t the Captain’s Log, it isn’t an anybody’s log, so excuse me if I don’t situate myself in time by coordinating with the music of the goddamn spheres or the last time Betelgeuse fucked the Milky Way or whatever. Pardon the ever-loving cockshit out of me for marking time by carving Roman numerals — fucking yes Roman numerals, as in Rome, as in Earth, as in where human beings are supposed to fucking live – above my bunk. Thursday? It feels like a Thursday, so let’s call it Thursday. Christ, what a week.
You want to know how many days we worked this week? None. The job fell through, which means the Captain got drunk in his room and bolted the bay doors shut, which means that the doctor — who has a Christing medical degree, in actual medicine, not in drying out a chronic alcoholic — and I had to disable half the security systems in order to make sure he wasn’t drowning in his own vomit, because he’s the only one with the command codes. Which sounds fun, I know, like a real vacation, but every day I don’t work is another day my body falls apart a little more.
First of all, I’m a fucking contract worker, which means that I get to work twice as hard as a full-time employee and get shit-all for health insurance and benefits. It’s ridiculous to me that there are exactly two jobs in the entire cold vastness of space — government drone or non-unionized pirate. That’s it. I can work full-time for The Man and never leave the Core Planets without seventeen different authorized passes stamped sixteen inches up my ass, or I can be a goddamn gray-market shipping contractor (because that’s all a smuggler is, really) running guns to Cousin-Fucktonia outside the Horsehead Nebula.
My mother was a teacher. People used to have options. But that shit’s all gone now. Oh, we can go into space, better turn everyone into a bunch of deep-space miners because fuck algebra, fuck poetry, fuck all of humanity’s achievements on this pathetic rock that birthed us. Well, buddy, you need to know algebra if you want to have halfway-sentient engineers on hand in case your precious self-sustaining Alpha Mining Structure starts to biodegrade.
Well, that’s fine. I didn’t join this crew because I was looking for job satisfaction, you know? But I didn’t realize this Captain was working out his own personal demons and using this ship as his own personal suicide capsule as he tries to reach emotional escape velocity. You want to know the last time we docked on an actual planet for more than a couple of hours? Six months. Six assing, dickfucked, heartshitting months.
Please excuse the language. I’ve been exposed to small but constant levels of solar radiation for the last fourteen years, and sometimes I swear to God I can feel parts of my skull liquefying, and I have to lie down before I get the shakes. I don’t even want to think about how bad my T-Cell count is going to be by the time I reach retirement age.
Not that I’ll get to retire at retirement age, obviously; we don’t have a pension plan. I’ll be working on this Christforsaken ship until some asshole forgets to shut the channel to the loading bay and I’m incapacitated by the vacuum of space.
Maybe I’ll be lucky. Maybe it’ll just be a little blood clot that gets me after my circulatory system starts to degrade after extensive fatigue brought on by an outer-space environment.
You know what happens to the human heart after spending prolonged periods of time in low gravity? It becomes spherical. I’m not kidding. The heart bulges and flattens into a goddamn sphere.
In case you were wondering, that’s not good for you. It’s not just the heart either; it’s all of the muscles. Bones too. The last time we disembarked, the cook shattered his pelvis with his first step outside the cabin door. We had to leave the poor son of a bitch on-planet for six months of physical therapy. And who’s gonna pay for that? Not the captain. Not the shipping company.
At least he gets to sleep in a bed, on the surface of some sort of earth, with actual gravity keeping him tethered to something. You know how fast low-gravity living starts to fuck with your sleep cycle? Right the fuck away, that’s how fast. You start snoring, too. Everyone on this goddamn ship snores like their sinus cavities are trying to carve their way out of the front of their ass-damned skulls, and it’s a nightmare.
We shower in the same water we piss into. You knew that, right? It’s called recycled graywater, and it’s fucking disgusting. I’m 37 and I sleep in a bag and I take showers in toilet water.
Life among the stars, man. Life among the fucking stars. Fuck this shit. Fuck this bullshit.
Tags: anything set in space really, captain’s log, firefly, humor, i’m mad as hell and i’m not going to take it anymore, mooks, redshirts, space, star trek
Oh, poor Kaylee.
Lol this sounds more like Zoe or Jayne to me :p
Jayne, definitely.
Man, I’d still go up there. Spherical heart, drunk captains and all. (Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to want to be space-cowboys. It’s a totally pointless longing.)
This just made me think of Red Dwarf, and Lister, the dirtbag of space.
But you gotta know this is EXACTLY working and living in space is gonna be like: no fucking Green Woman Utopias for you, astroNOT.
This reminds me of the (terrible) novel I currently have in my brain, and which someday I will write. It will be about how completely and totally soul-crushing a Space job is. What with all the Space business travel, and Space commuting, and delayed reimbursements for Space work-related costs.
Why yes, I am a disgruntled academic. I once had a dream where humanity had discovered FTL travel, and transport lines to a habitable planet on a nearby star had been opened. And oh hey guess what we have a Work Meeting there and goddamnit now I have to put in another request for grant travel money.
And how the fuck do you even calculate time differences in space? When do we ARRIVE?!
And how the hell am I supposed to calculate my per-diem?!
O’Brien and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day?
Would like to gently point out that the Enterprise had mostly fully functioning artificial gravity. Just saying.
Still, long-term exposure to that kind of environment CANNOT be good for your circulatory system.
Agreed. Not to mention the radiation. Why, why won’t someone think of the RADIATION?
Aw, quit whining, it’s good for you, it puts hair on your chest. Inside your chest. Whatever. Hair all over.
Deflector shields. This story didn’t take place aboard the Enterprise-A. Somewhere in the Firefly ‘Verse, maybe.
I think that “heartshitting” is now my 2nd favorite type of shitting, following pretty closely on dickshitting, which is a thing I accuse people of being, mostly when they anger me while I’m driving.
Mallory…you are a destroyer of dreams.
Perfect.
I’ll stick to my ocean floor habitat, where every sound foretells a crushing doom.
I would so read this book.
“Please excuse the language. I’ve been exposed to small but constant levels of solar radiation for the last fourteen years”
You can use this on Earth too!
Finally I have an excuse for my vocabulary!
"Please excuse the language. I’ve been exposed to small but constant levels of solar radiation for the last fourteen years"
You can use this on Earth too!
I have never wanted to go to space, not for one single fleeting second. Now I know that I was right and true in my lack of desire.
Dear Mallory, please teach me how to swear. I feel like “butthead” is really just not going to cut it for me after being introduced to your incredible command of colorful oaths.
Back in high school, I tried to give myself a formal education in colorful near-cussing. It involved making a list of words that aren’t really swears but still form colorful images, most of which fall into either the “butts” category – farts, poop, genitals – or the “silly” category – monkey, fruit, face, hat, doofus, stinker.
Then, rapidly list off combinations; they aren’t a “butthead”, they’re a monkey fart-faced stinker.
I may have recently taught this technique to my boss, who vowed to give up swear words for Lent. (She’s cool, even if that makes her sound like Awful Boss.)
I really shouldn’t have been drinking a cup of tea while reading this. *wipes up tea from keyboard, monitor, self*
Every time I realize that I have none of the math or science or emotion-reading skills that would get me onto the Enterprise to play Dixon Hill games on the Holodeck with Captain Picard, I despair. This makes me feel better.
Every time I realize that I have none of the math or science or emotion-reading skills that would get me onto the Enterprise to play Dixon Hill games on the Holodeck with Captain Picard, I despair. This makes me feel better.
Deflector shields. This story didn't take place aboard the Enterprise-A. Somewhere in the Firefly 'Verse, maybe.