Previously: Part I
8:00 AM October 31, 2052 Ship Time (ST)
It had been eight years since I left Earth. I was not getting nearly the amount of work done that I anticipated up to this point in my travels. Being this deep in space, and the fact that I am was smarter than nearly all other humans, gave me an incredible advantage over any other scientist of my caliber, of which there are few. I assumed I would be disproving modern theories of the universe handily by now, the way string theories and M theories of the past were dismantled. The truth was that I was flying at near light speed, warping the very fabric of time, and as I did years were flying by on Earth. My friends and family were all dead by now and unless humans started to colonize other planets or sent more people out like me, then I was likely the last one of my kind: a lone human, hurtling through an infinite void, alone.The whole mission started to seem pointless to me, I thought about how it would feel before I left on this mission and assumed I could deal with it better. The thoughts were abstract then – this was real. No one would ever feel as alone as I felt. There was no hope that I would ever see another human for the rest of my life. I tried to distract myself by doing the work that I intended to finish. I became overwhelmingly distraught by the fact that no one but myself would ever benefit from the advances I made, and that during the thousands upon thousands of years that passed on earth since I left many people probably discovered far more than I could realistically do in a lifetime. I thought I could deal with these feelings since I had always been a loner.
8:00 PM September1, 2027 ET
I stood at an intersection in Washington D.C. I looked around me and couldn’t help but think that the nation’s capital was not all that I thought it would be. Everyone around me looked so dirty and poor. The fact that I was standing at the intersection attempting to hitchhike in my only suit, a blue suit I bought in 10th grade which was fashionably small at the time, and a bright red computer backpack did nothing to quell my nerves. I did my best to comb my otherwise messy brown hair into a respectable order because I had the biggest interview of my life that day. When I say interview I mean I was just going to show up at the NASA headquarters and start asking people questions. I may have been a genius when it came to math and physics but when it came to people, I had no idea what I was doing.I tried for two days straight without sleep or luck to find someone who would listen to me. Late on that second day I saw a vivacious blond woman in a pantsuit walking by me as I tried to plea my case with an official who was having none of it. She must have pitied me because she came over and asked what I was trying to do. If my social skills left something to be desired for the average person, then they were virtually nonexistent when talking to a beautiful lady like her. I couldn’t look her in the eye and attempted, without success, not to look her in the chest either. The best I could do was go full blown nerd on her and show her what I had been working on at school. She was very impressed by my work and agreed to let me intern at the research and development department at NASA, even with my limited schooling. Ms. Bosomchest changed my life and it would be a long time before I watched WWE again.
These nobodies in all honesty were lucky that I took my talents down to NASA in the first place. During the first two weeks I was there the scientists tried to give me the most tedious jobs that no one else wanted to do. But my genius could not be contained; I had an appetite for answers that could not be satisfied. I would stay at the headquarters day and night working on my own theories by myself, inspired by all that was going on around me. By the time I started showing the others what I was working on, people started to take notice. The fact that I did not have any letters after my name or a degree to fall back on stopped holding me back when people started to listen to what I had to stay. I began to work closely with Ms. Bosomchest on a daily basis. She was one of the smartest women in the whole world but the stuff I was working on was much too difficult for her to grasp. She did the small stuff for me and allowed my mind to concentrate on making real progress.
She became infatuated by me, by my dismissal of her flirtatious attempts, and my sheer intellectual dominance of any room I was in. When I was stumped I used her, she became my WWE. She fancied that we were in a relationship at the time but she was the only one connected. Thinking back about her would be one of the worst things about flying out here in space. I had someone who wanted to be part of my life, who wanted to share what I had to offer and I just used her for my own advancement. I thought no one could ever be enough for me, that my only chance to be happy would come from within my own mind. That is why I was the only one to volunteer for this mission. That is why I knew I could handle it.
I was wrong.
8:00 AM December 25, 2058 ST
Four years ago my “internet” went down. The whole thing was wiped out. The only thing that I had left was 24 hours worth of my most recent activity. This amounted to 24 hours of WWE wrestling videos. I also had a few books on the universe, a dictionary, and my notebooks full of unfinished theories and calculations. I used none of these things anymore. I had been on this ship for fourteen years. I was in another galaxy so far from earth it is impossible to comprehend the distance in your mind and I couldn’t even summon the enthusiasm to walk over to the windshield and look out. I tried to watch WWE sometimes but just seeing other people on TV, people I knew were dead, and a species that died long ago was just too depressing. Mostly I drank and drew pictures. I brought along 70 bottles of whisky, one to celebrate each potential year on the ship on New Year ’s Day. I only had five bottles left.I also brought on this trip a huge stack of notebooks. I preferred to write out my calculations by hand, my mind just worked better that way. I filled those notebooks, mostly, with pictures of penises or peni as I like to pluralize it. If I thought that another human would read my life story I might have left that part out, but since I doubt highly the possibility that anyone will ever know about Terry Cakebread I see no reason not to be honest about the whole thing. At some point during the trip the subject of the penis, particularly my penis, the last, final penis, or the lone penis, as I referred to it, became infuriating to me. It became very symbolic of my life. It, like my life, really had become useless since this whole trip began. It would never get to do what it was designed to do or accomplish its purpose. It was an endless reminder that I was lonely and it fucking mocked me. I would awake each day with acute onset of Bonair’s disease, and find it staring me in the face. Other times it would just hang there depressed, making me depressed. But mostly it was just there, being useless, the way I was just there being useless.
I tried to draw other things. I tried to draw Bob Marley but it just looked like a penis with dreadlocks. Motorcycle perhaps? Penis with wheels. Watergun? I think you see where this is going. This day was just like any other, I was drunk like many of the days before lying in my living room amidst a floor strewn with pencil drawings of peni. The fact that it was December 25, on the ship was just an abstract measurement. It wasn’t Jesus-mas back on earth and it didn’t feel much like Jesus-mas here either.
Just then the ship started to shake.
The artificial gravity of the ship was disabled and I was floating in my ship. I was incredibly drunk at the time and I thought I might be hallucinating. Suddenly I flew up to the front of the ship and was knocked unconscious. When I woke up I was no longer in the only place I knew for the last 14 years. I was in a dark square room that smelled like thai food, by myself. I often had dreams of being outside of that goddamn ship but I could tell that this was no dream, something had me. The only way I could have been taken out of that ship and still be alive would be if aliens abducted me. I wondered what they would look like, what they would do to me. Then the door at the far end of the room opened.
ET
He looked like fucking ET. I thought that I might be killed but at least I would get to see what aliens really looked like. But no, I get abducted by aliens that look like fucking ET. Spielberg , nice fucking guess, thanks for ruining my day.
“Wheres Alf?”
It didn’t answer me. It just walked around me staring silently. I felt my butthole tighten up, everything I’ve ever read about aliens tells me that they are going to stick something up my ass, and Spielberg already guessed right once today. He pulled out a long wand.
He's going to stick that up my ass.
He waved the glowing light over my body like a metal detector. I didn’t move, I’m not sure If I could have moved or not, but I didn’t. Then when he was done ET walked out of the room without making a sound. I sat there dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to think. At least they were probably going to kill me, that would be ok. But what if they just kept me as a test subject? That’s what humans would have done.
Fuck.
To be continued . . .