text: “John! John, please, wake up. JOHN! WE NEED YOU NOW!” “hu..? Janice? What the hell are you doing? Ger’off me!” “Oh thank the gods. John, we need to go. NOW!” “What? Why? I can barely see. Why are the lights out, Janice what is going on?” “John, the ship lost power. We’re floating and they’re coming. We need to get to a pod now.” The ship was designed to withstand anything. We could fly right through a star and barely have the internal temperature rise five degrees. So how did the ship lose power? Janice wasn’t telling me something but I had to follower her, if nothing else I could go back to sleep in ten, fifteen minutes max. It wasn’t a very big ship only a one million ton freighter whole thing only needed four crew members during transit and even then only for the first and last three months of the flight. “While I adore your ninja character cosplay can you please take a minute and tell me exactly why you woke me up, why the lights are out, and didn’t you say ‘they’re coming’ who is they?” “Shut up! They’ll hear you.” She hissed at me. She actually hissed. Like a gods damned snake! “You know what? No! What in the blazes is going on, on my ship!?” So much for anger management classes, oh well. “I don’t know why, but the ship lost power in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere. But we aren’t alone. There’s... things, now that... I can’t. I just... can’t” “Well thanks for clearing that up. C’mon let’s get to the bridge and try to at least get the damn lights back on.” On the bridge there is a switch for the emergency backup nuclear reactors but it was already flipped. The power breaker box was no use either it was completely destroyed; even the mechanical ship controls were toast. “What are you doing?” “If you listen to the vibrations of the ship sometimes you can hear if the life support system is still up and running. Now shut up for a second.” “How could it be? The lights are off, the food dispensers are off and our sleeping pods ejected us.” “And yet you talk. Anyways speaking of a good night’s sleep, where are Kristoff and Julia? Protocol clearly states that in the event of premature wake up, or total power loss, you go to the bridge.” “It got them.” “Please describe ‘it’ again? And last time you said ‘they’ in reference to this terror inducing fiend.” “Fiend is a good word for it. I don’t know how it got on bored but Kris woke up before me and it... it ripped his head apart. Jules, never woke up. It killed her while she was asleep in her pod. Now will you tell me how the life support system would still be on?” “Fan-fuckin-tastic. So what? You decide to wake me up so that I get the chance to shit my pants before I die? Next time, let me die in my sleep. As for life support, it has about ten billion redundant power supplies for obvious reasons and the only thing it powers is the air filters and internal temperature regulators. This is good for us because I just so happen to know how to rewire some of those redundancies to the engines and main power to get us somewhere safe, or at the very least to send a distress beacon. Now c’mon, life support is in the cargo bay.” I never liked going into the cargo bay, the great omniscient engineers thought that it would put too much unnecessary strain on the life support to pump air into it. Makes sense though, air in this volume starts getting heavy believe it or not and the crew doesn’t generally need to come in here so why make the ship heavier than it absolutely needs to be? “Here’s the life support console. Janice, come here and watch my back, while I reroute the power.” Time to just type in my password... presto! I’m in now to make the batteries think they need to power the whole ship instead of just life support and the backup power generators will start freaking out and turn on by themselves once the batteries drop to 45%. It’s actually all quite easy. Now it’s time to check on where we are and why I woke up early. Huh. That’s weird. The computer is showing Kristoff and Julia as asleep and normal, and Janice as... dead? But that can’t be right she’s standing... Click “Why did you have to go snooping?” “Janice, or who, er, whatever you are what do you think you’re doing?” “Ten thousand planets and no other forms of intelligent life anywhere so your kind stopped sending probes to check the soil. But planet ten thousand and one the miners dug a little too deep, and little greedily because they allowed me to hitch a ride on one of these here rocks on this here ship. And now I’m going to replicate myself ten million, million times and I’m going to destroy your entire species just because I can, just because I want to. Now it’s time for you and the others to die. Good bye John, thanks for the piggy back ride back.