A teaser: Closet a.01

I've been working on some original science fiction lately, and I want to offer it up at a teaser for your all today.
------
Textbooks, internet videos, and just plain normal stargazing had a way of making space seem cool. It was this vast, grandiose place; full of wondrous sights and unimaginable possibilities. 'The final frontier', 'going where no man has ever gone before', all that jazz. Such as it is, space occupied a considerable percentage of the collective human noosphere.

"Fucking, son of a, fuck."

But once you were actually out there, you kinda realized it was a whole lot of fucking nothing. In every single direction, for parsecs, for thousands of lightyears. ‘Oh, but there's dust particles, and the elementary particles popping in and out of reality!’ someone might point out, but they would miss the forest for the trees; space was, ultimately, a long, long stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere. It was flyover country, it wasn’t even a one horse fucking town.

"Maybe if I reroute past the flight computer… It would be messy, but I’ve flown blind in worse conditions…"

All facts that become especially evident when you're stranded in a shitty space-jalopy, lightyears from anything relevant at all to your life. You might think 'Well, maybe you got lucky and have a nice gas cloud or, or, black hole or something to look at?' You'd be wrong. Dead wrong. The chances of that happening are infinitesimal when you’re operating on the intergalactic scale.

Nothing. Not a blip. Nothing. Just a big fucking stretch of black, surrounded by an expanse of pinprick stars, each too far to resolve in any detail. Maybe some of them were galaxies, I was entirely too far away to tell.

"Hey, dumbass, why don't you help," says the woman currently shoved under what amounted to the dash of our spaceship, "Or do you prefer staring woefully out into space."

"I thought you were the smartest woman in space," I groaned at her, spinning in my chair. At least it was something to do. I couldn't even dick around on my phone; if it died, I was shit out of fucking luck. 

"Never claimed that," she grunted, something under there requiring a little more force than usual. "And it's our car."

"It's your car," I responded. "You treat this thing like its your fucking baby, you fix it. And it’s not even a car, the damn thing is the size of a locomotive."

"It's ours, dumbass. Like I keep telling you," she grumbled over a loud banging sound. What went where and how in this damn thing made little to no sense to me, because it didn’t belong to me at all.

"Just because you say it doesn't mean it's true," I muttered, before voicing aloud. "So are we going to suffocate or something if you don't fix it?"

A sudden rumble, the scattering of metal on metal, and my traveling companion wormed her way out from under the console with a string of curses and bangs. "Fuck, ow," she groaned, pressing a greasy hand to her forehead.

Annoyingly enough, she looks like she could be my mother. Or my weirdly older sister, maybe. We shared nearly all of our features, save for a few small differences: Her blonde hair was long and going an early gray, her skin was clear but touched by the beginnings of wrinkles at the eyes and lips, her blue eyes were ringed by just a touch of green, and of course she was womanly. She insisted on her clothes emphasizing her curves, even the grease monkey overalls she was currently wearing.

"Well, Reese," she emphasized my name nastily, "If you'd at all paid attention instead of panicking like a little bitch—"

"Not fucking cool," I interjected. "Or very feminist."

"'Or very feminist' shut the fuck up egg," she groans, waving her hand vaguely. "Like I fucking said, the reactor is fine: no fluctuations in the annihilation chamber, no issues with the antimatter pumps, nothing. No, theres just no power going to the engines. Atmosphere production is still online, so you can go fucking, I-D-K, jerk off or whatever. I'll do all the fixing. As usual."

"You know what, fuck you Maya," I get up from my spinning chair, only stumbling just a little bit. "I'm a nineteen year old man, I don't know why I take this shit from you! All this because you wanted to go to some cheesy arcade?”

“Cheesy? Plutonia is the hottest destination in the entire local galactic cluster,” Maya hissed, pointing her spanner at me threateningly. “Literally life changing. As in you can change into a different life for a bit, if you have enough tickets.”

“How cool could it be, it’s named after the shittiest planet in our solar system!”

“Pluto is a dwarf planet, dumbass, and did you consider that Pluto wishes it could host a Plutonia?” She shook her head sadly at me. “You know what, as soon as I have this fixed we’ll double time it there. You are way too high strung for an art student of all things.”

“You have some fucked up priorities, Maya. We could die out here, you know?”

"Yeah, man, yeah, sure, like you aren't the first one of us I've heard that from," Maya said, sliding back under the console. It was a simple dismissal, one that damn near invited another shout from me. Instead I stood, kicked my chair hard enough that my foot ached through my genuine Sakaraan leather boots, and turned to storm off the bridge.

The Hackjack is hardly fancy enough for things like turbo-lifts or even more than one deck. It was basically a space-born semi-truck after all. So I passed out into a hallway choked with stray bullshit Maya had picked up from one planet or another.

"Why do I follow her around on this bullshit?” I grumbled, picking my way back to the crew quarters. Or, well, crew quarter; Maya has a room. I have one of two bunks set into the wall leading to said room. They both had curtains that could be drawn, and the top one contained my duffel bag. The bottom, a shitty pillow I'd grabbed from my dorm when she’d showed up out of nowhere to drunkenly tell me about her plan.

I threw myself in, after only just barely reminding myself to shuck my boots, and avoided colliding with the steel wall on the other side by the slimmest of margins. "Fuck her, seriously. I'm better than this. Next time she comes asking for my help on some bullshit adventure, I'm gonna tell her to fuck off."

Historically speaking, I probably wouldn’t. But I meant it this time. I did. I had school to focus on, dammit.

How behind was I even on my assignments? Had the siren song of space finally fucked me well and truly over? I bit the bullet and pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket. There was an unsightly jumble of wires and batteries attached to the back and plugged into the charging port. Maya had called it a 'quantum ping transponder' and laughed at me when I asked how badly it bent causality. In what manner that was a stupid question, she’d failed to properly explain.

Whatever it was, or however it worked, it let me actually pull up my university website from however terribly far away we were from good old Planet Earth. With an ungodly ping of, like, a couple seconds, but given the circumstances I could deal.

"Fuck," I muttered, once the landing page buffered. Multiple important notifications, including several professor emails, and a notice my midterm grades had been posted.

"No, Reese, it's fine you can totally handle four classes," I grumbled at myself as I clicked the grades. “It’s not like you’ll constantly be gone, you can do full time college.”

"Are you bitching out there?" Maya yelled from the bridge. "Cause you sure don't have anything to bitch about, Mr, fucking, Sits on his Ass!"

"No!" I yelled back ineffectually. I had more important things to worry about than Maya correctly putting together that I was bitching.

Remedial Algebra 2: D Life Drawing: C- Art History: D Freshman Programming: F

The fact that the mandatory freshman orientation 'class' got graded was galling, but putting that aside I had a huge problem. Several of them, in fact.

"What am I gonna do... They're gonna fucking kick me out," I groaned, letting the phone fall down beside me. "I barely even got in, too. I had to take out loans, what the fuck..."

"It seriously sounds like bitching in there!" Maya yelled over a sound I could best describe as 'what if an arc welder was mad at you'.

"Seriously how can you fucking hear me?" I yelled back. "There's a bulkhead in the way!"

The sound of booted feet slamming into metal, the hiss of said bulkhead opening, and she was leaning over my bunk, forearm bracing against the bottom of the top bunk so she could properly stare down at me.

"Maybe don't bitch so loud."

"Have you considered I have shit to do in my life? I'm failing most of my classes!" I shoved the phone in her face as proof.

"Okay, I didn't need to see that your lock screen was a random drawing of an ass, I believe that you’re failing." I cursed and quickly unlocked the stupid thing, but she was already looking away. "Besides, don't you only give a shit about your art class?"

"Well, yeah, but I have to pass all my other classes if I want to actually get to, like, take those," I said, rolling over to watch as she dug a futuristic backpack out of a compartment on the far wall. "Most institutions tend to want you to get a 'rounded education'."

"Yeah, those places mostly just want your money," Maya said, slapping said pack on her back. Blue lines flashed across the largely black surface, and a tight, form fitting space suit expanded out from it, vacuum sealing to her body. A glass dome, fed by two thin tubes leading back to the pack, closed around her head. "I have to go check the engines. Don't touch my shit."

"Wh—"

"Don't touch my shit," she repeated, before she slapped the door release on the wall behind her. The bulkhead leading outside slammed open, internal atmosphere vented around her, and she stepped out into the void.

The door slammed shut exactly as quickly, and I let go of the bar above my bunk that I'd grabbed instinctively to keep from going shooting out alongside her. "Why can't we install a goddamn airlock," I grumbled uselessly. "She's gonna wear out the oxygen generator doing this shit."

I knew I should be taking the time to actually do something, but I couldn't quite summon the energy needed to climb up to the top bunk and dig my laptop or my sketch pad out of my duffel bag. Instead, I laid there staring at the underside of said bunk tiredly. I'd tucked a few trinkets through the slats: a watercolor I’d painted depicting a brilliant blue sunset over the silver mountains of Argent Prime (Maya’s name, not mine), a purple stone on a chain I'd pulled from the walls of an asteroid mine, and a few scrap sketches of strange alien trees, the native planet of which I struggled to remember.

"Maybe this is how you die. Starving to death in the middle of nowhere space." I laid an arm across my eyes and sighed. "First human to die outside of low earth orbit I guess. That I know of. Yay."

I rolled over, just enough to hang over the bed upside down. Maybe the blood rushing to my head would give me the juice I needed to do something. The back of my mind was a staticky mess, and the dull clang of Maya clomping around on top of the Hackjack with her mag-boots was a shitty compliment to such. Was she purposefully making a racket, just to fuck with me?

"The engines are aft, dumbass," I groaned, rubbing my temples. She couldn’t hear me, but it made me feel a little bit better.

My eye caught on the bulkhead door, the one that went into Maya's quarters. Technically it led to a service corridor for the reactor, with her quarters just off to the side, but the effect was the same. I never had any cause to go into the reactor room afterall.

"...Fuck it. I'm not getting anything else done." I slid out of my bunk, and didn't even bother to get my boots as I rolled to my feet. The bulkhead opened at my approach, leading into a red-lit hall. I ignored the big sign labeled REACTOR alongside several warning signs about the antimatter contained within. One of them was messily scrawled by Maya, depicting

I remembered the security lecture I'd gotten on proper handling of that stuff. Not a fun time.

But it didn't matter, I was headed for the smaller door set into the wall beside me. There was a code lock, but Maya was beyond predictable for me.

"6... 9.... 4.... 2.... 0..." I said to myself as I typed it in. A green light flashed above and the door clicked open. "She's like a child in the body of a grown woman."

I shouldered inside and very, very carefully closed the door. Not that Maya could hear from where she was in the vacuum of space, but I couldn't risk it. What I found inside was surprisingly mundane. A messy cot shoved against the far wall, another door that lead to the head, and a closet shut firmly. There was a desk, too, strewn with discarded papers and boxed in by all manner of strange pieces of technology, the function of which was largely inscrutable to me. I could pick out fluid chambers, something that vaguely resembled a Tesla coil, and what was clearly a microwave with a distressing amount of doodads bolted to it.

In that regard, at least, I would listen to Maya; I was an art major, and the idea that I might set off some kind of man-portable weapon of mass destruction wasn't an anxiety I was ready to stomach.

I did shuffle through her papers though. Most of them were written in a script that I couldn't read but did recognize; the looping pictograms were Seventhist script. It was a relatively common language in the cosmos, but it was certainly odd that Maya would bother to learn to write it.

"Is she using it as a code?" I muttered, holding up a few of them to the light, like it would reveal something or translate it for me. For not the first time, I regretted telling that weird doctor on Lorpon XI that he couldn't shove a universal translator in my ear.

"Ugh, fuck it," I said, dropping the untranslatable pages down. I went rustling deeper, moving pages aside without a care. There was no way that she would recognize that her mess was different, right?

There were diagrams, blueprints, and the user manual for the Hackjack. That booklet — 'The NX-5 Light Freight Buggy and You!' — I at least recognized, having been there when Maya upgraded from the previous junked out piece of shit she'd been flying. The others? I couldn't make heads nor tails of them either. One depicted a bottle like shape, looping in on itself somehow, alongside densely written English comments that described something called a 'localized false space-time event'.

The other one depicted what might be plans for a handheld, man portable WMD. There was some kind of core depicting, and a diagram for some kind of explosive motion. 

"I really need to stop hanging out with this fucking woman," I said for the fourth time today, gently setting them down for fear that the paper itself might explode into a million pieces.

It was all so pedestrian, really. So expected of that walking tornado I forced myself to deal with. It was a carefully crafted smokescreen, it had to be. Where would she keep the really incriminating stuff, the real skeletons, the smoking guns?

My eyes were drawn to the thin closet door like iron to a magnet. It was too neat, too perfect. Poetic, almost. I had to check. I had to see. I had to find the skeletons in her closet.

At the absolute worst, I saw some embarrassing clothes or a sex toy. Best possible outcome? Something to shove in her face.

I grabbed the unlocked door and yanked it open.

Warm summer air punched me in the face and I stopped dead, confusion driving me into a stupor. 

Rolling green hills, lush with row upon endless row of carefully tended crops. A sun, shining bright as it just crested over a mountain over the horizon. The distant sound of birds, chirping at each other in trees just past the hills. And, like a delicate cake topper, a lavish villa that reminded me of the Italian wineries I’d visited on a senior trip. It was brown brick, marble statues, and water features all wrapped into a acre wide footprint that didn’t include the surrounding farmland.

I stepped inside.