And a Bottle of Rum

Looking back on it now, this may have been a major mistake, but when my craft sent me the first emergency alert, I dismissed it without reading it. I also dismissed the next three. It could have been five. Alright, it was seven.

I was doing the daily crossword. What was I supposed to do, stop?

My ship is old, and it’s constantly sending me ping after ping after ping. Oh, the structural supports are slowly degrading. Please pay attention, the filtration system’s functionality is down an additional 5%. In need of your assistance, the exo-outside is growing increasingly fragile. Whatever. Who needs a structural system, anyway? It’s become routine to just press dismiss and go on with my life.

Eventually, though, the pings become so overwhelming that I can’t even come up with a nine-letter word for ‘lacking a vital organ’ that starts with an H. I ask the ship’s computer what’s going on and it sends back every kind of emergency alert it has, flooding my senses.

Jeez, alright, you don’t have to shout at me!

Craft failure is imminent.

A brief overview reveals that I am in a real pickle.

I didn’t get much mechanic training before I defected from the Army. I was supposed to be trained on everything, at least a little, but I bounced pretty early. There are a lot of weird gaps in my knowledge. How to “fix” a “ship” is one of them.

I do at least know that there is only one scenario in which I am completely boned: damage to the ship’s central core. Today is my very unlucky day! The central pump has stalled out.

I internally wince when I take stock of the pump’s functionality. The circulation system was already faulty when I commandeered the craft. If one were to be ungenerous, this could be considered my fault. I was the one who illegally escaped from the military in a stolen vessel and missed mechanics training.

They call me a traitor. I prefer to think of myself as the only pirate who’s ever stolen themselves. Yo ho, and et cetera.

This craft failure could easily put an end to my piratical career, as well as my life. Even though there’s no direct damage to the cockpit, the ship’s computer is failing fast. If I hack the motor systems I can force an additional thirty units of manual movement. I hurriedly plunge into the computer’s mainframe, no doubt destroying countless memory banks–not like it matters, all of the data will go dead with the ship–and plug directly into the motor system.

Who even let it get this bad? Not me, surely.

My jerky driving job is not pretty, but it gets me from A to B. Still, I do feel some distant shame. If my piloting officer could see me now... alas.

Thank goodness that this ship came equipped with a separate mini-craft. It’s close enough that I can make the physical hop and abandon ship. Leaving the support systems to brave the frightening outside world makes me want to poop my proverbial pants. Pretty much only total ship failure would compel me to face the cold expanse. I am always so aware of the delicacy of my slender limbs, how little it would take for the harsh outside to crush and destroy my fragile insides. I am dwarfed and vulnerable and afraid. I know, deep within me, that I am not meant to be here. This is not a place for me. The urge to get to safety as soon as possible leaves me nearly insensate; it’s counterproductive, that the overwhelming fear of staying outside interferes with my ability to get inside.

I wish that the Army had driven the fear out of me, the way it had with the rest of my unit. If they had, I wouldn’t have run. I was the single failure of the super-soldier bunch; you’d think they’d have written off the problem child by now. I don’t know why they keep chasing me. They spent too much money and time to allow their investment to go to waste, I suppose.

I make the transfer successfully, though it’s certainly a mess. The mini-craft sends out panicked alerts as I breach, engaging its self-defense systems to shake me off as I worm my way into its airlock. Other crafts might pick up on the SOS signals it’s sending out, so my first order of business once I’ve made it to the cockpit is to shut this thing the hell up. I mash buttons until the distress signal quiets.

Jeez Louise.

I carefully take stock once I’m settled in. I’ve never driven this model of craft before. The ship’s systems are, overall, very similar to my previous ship’s, but a lot less complex. The computer is actually laughably simple. That would be enough to convince me that I need to find another full-sized ship STAT, but to add insult to injury, I am so cramped in the cockpit I can barely move. I am not staying in this thing any longer than I need to.

This particular mini-craft was associated with the ship when I first stole it, and I found no reason to abandon the little thing. Plus, mini-crafts are built to be extremely cute. What was I supposed to do? Kick it to the curb?

Using my new craft’s sensors, I hesitantly peer at my old ship, nudging it with the nose of my craft. Yup, dead in the water. Like I said, it was as old as heck when I got it. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been completely marooned and left for dead. It’s too bad. I was fond of that ship, which was probably why I stayed in it for, frankly, too long. I should have traded up for a new model once the pump system really started fritzing.

The mini-craft doesn’t have clearance to leave my previous ship’s associated sector per se, but I’m smarter than the autopilot was. It’s no trouble to escape. I keep to the edges of the sectors I navigate through, skirting around other crafts. It’s not just because they’re so much bigger than me and my weapons systems are not... great, but also because if someone looked too long they might wonder where my main craft was, and if a lone mini-craft had permission to be here. Given that I don’t, it’s in my best interest to escape attention. This entire mini-craft class has really stupendous stealth systems, and the exo-outside is a slick all-black sheen. That nearly makes up for its small size and unbuffed offense. Sure, I might be tiny and stupid, but at least I look cool.

It’s always difficult to find a new craft to commandeer, but especially so when you’re magnitudes smaller than everyone around you. This sector is busy, and it takes all of my significant piloting skills to avoid being bashed simply by accident. I can’t take another ship by force, not with my limited weapons. I’ll need to find one that I can sneak onto.

Behind a popular refill station, I find a full-sized craft that looks like it’s been abandoned. It’s sitting in stand-by mode up against the wall. I don’t know if the pilot is asleep or compromised, but their loss is my gain. It makes easy prey, and easy prey is my favorite kind. In piracy, it pays to be a coward. It also pays to be an opportunist, as well as to have a make-do attitude. I am a fairly successful pirate. I’ve made it this far, haven’t I?

I transfer into the full-size craft, blinding myself with terror for the second time today. Two transfers in a row not only puts me at significant risk, but also severely exhausts me. Physically, I’m completely spent, but mentally, I’m so hyped up from fear that I could practically vibrate myself to the moon. My body is begging me to lie down and never get up; my mind is screaming to start running and never stop.

I am straight up not having a good time.

The autopilot for the mini-craft kicks back in once I leave. It wanders off to return itself to its sector. It makes me a little bit sad to think about it hovering around its associated full-size, its computers not advanced enough to realize that its friend wouldn’t be coming back online. It can’t manage fuel access on its own, so hopefully someone will hear its eventual distress call and come adopt it. Chances aren’t great for a mini-craft on its own in the great big universe. I don’t want it to run out of fuel. It’s really a sweet little craft.

As I plug into the new ship’s systems, I understand why it’s sitting behind a refill station unattended. This thing is extremely compromised. It took in too much bad fuel, and that affected the original pilot. I can feel them, their consciousness linked to the ship’s mainframe. Right now, they’re dormant, probably a reaction to the faulty intake.

This is, actually, a pretty ideal situation. Not for the original pilot, but certainly for me. How often is it that you get to force-board a craft with absolutely zero defensive maneuvering on the opposing pilot’s part? Even the mini-craft’s auto-pilot tried to fight me a little bit. On proverbial tip-toe, I inch my way onto the main deck. The pilot doesn’t stir, and I remove them easy-peasy. I settle into the seat and immediately build a firewall around the pilot’s consciousness, then write a program to keep them trapped inside.

Golly, it’s not murder. They’re still technically alive. They’re just never going to escape as long as I’m in the pilot’s chair, and I don’t plan on abandoning ship. Still, there could be scenarios in which they would be given back control! None I can think of now, but it’s possible!

The first thing that I do, once that crucial task is completed, is purge the intake system. There’s still some of that bad fuel left in the tank, and it splatters as it’s ejected violently from my ship’s premises. I’ve never seen the appeal of bad fuel, though some members of my unit used to consume it for fun. It slows down all of your systems and severely compromises your ship’s computer. Plus, once it hits, there’s nothing to do but wait for your filtering system to work it out and purge it through the output systems. They thought it was a challenge, but I’ve never liked making things harder for myself.

I stumble my way through engaging my new motor systems. This new craft is nearly as jerky as my previous craft was when it was actively dying. My optic channels are wobbly and my balance systems are way off base, which makes it impossible to comport myself with my usual effortless grace.

I swear, I’m an excellent pilot. All my instructors said so. Most pilots wouldn’t even be able to turn on a craft this compromised, let alone drive it.

I should probably try to wait this out wherever this craft’s docking station is, rather than behind a random fuel station. Accessing a craft’s entire memory bank at once is a great way to go catatonic, so I open the slightest channel to gain basic information and try to figure out where I dock.

I look for my class and designation first. I’m big, I realize. Really big. Full-sizes vary, but even taking into consideration natural differentiation, I’m nearly twice the size of my previous full-size craft. Twenty-five times the size of the mini-craft! I’m gigantic!

I wiggle with glee as I access my weapons systems. Beyond my size, I am packing some serious heat. The previous pilot got basically every weapon add-on available. The memory bank finally pulls up my designation: mercenary craft. That makes sense, then. I’m an ambulatory killing machine.

Unfortunately, my other systems have been treated very harshly. My filtering system is the worst off, poisoned from bad fuel. Though this ship is relatively young, it’s in nearly as bad a shape as my last ship: a barely functioning filtration system, damage to the ship’s computer, and, of course, central pump problems. Just my luck.

I stay where I am–sort of upright, generally–as I sort through the foggy data that’s trickling across my psychic processors. I’m in an off-world craft, built on Mars. Neat! I’ve never piloted a ship built off-Earth before. Mars has well-established ship nurseries so it makes sense that I’m capably built. I wonder if my size is because of the lighter gravity from my home planet.

Post-Mars, it seems as though I’ve been working as a free mercenary for a while. I cackle when I discover my craft’s current job. I serve as protection for a pirate crew! We’re in this sector to sell our stolen goods before we jet off again. How absolutely ironic in the best way!

Though we are piratical peers, I’m not interested in sticking around and playing nice with this crew. I work as a lone wolf. I’m going to dock until I filter out this bad fuel, and then I’m going to leave before anyone on the crew realizes I’m not the original pilot. Stealing vessels and putting their original pilots in psychic prison is frowned upon, and it would most likely evoke enemy action if I was discovered. I do wish I could let the mechanic take a look and tell me more about what’s wrong with my systems, maybe fix me up a little bit, but there’s no way I can take that chance. If they do any sort of psychic scan on me they’ll be able to see that the consciousness in the cockpit is not the original. Hell, even my physical form is detectable through the exo-outside on some scanners. I can’t risk it, despite how creaky and sick my functioning feels. I’ll have to work it out on my own.

My systems alert me that I need to purge fuel right-now-immediately.

I purge fuel again. There isn’t actually much left in the tank, but involuntary fuel tank purges tend to operate on a better-safe-than-sorry model, which I approve of.

I set a sub-routine to search through the computer’s storage to find my class and call sign.

My internal navigational systems do not come online in any sort of helpful manner, but I do have an external geo-locator device on board that remembers where my traveling station had parked. The ship’s systems and I agree that we both desperately want to dock and go into standby mode for eight hours, minimum, so I’m going to do my darndest to bear up under adverse circumstances.

The good thing about being so gigantic and heavily armed is that, even with my motor systems screwing up royally, no other craft opens offensive maneuvers when I swerve or cut them off. I even rear-end another ship and the pilot apologizes to me for being in my way!

The bad thing about being so gigantic and heavily armed is that you attract a lot of attention, especially when you’re blatantly driving under the influence of something. A couple of military police give me the hairy eyeball before the fuel station is even out of sight.

Just the sight of their exo-outsides makes me want to turn tail and run. The Army logo is big and gold and threatening. If I get caught, now, I’m really screwed. Back to the military for me; back to the labs and experimentation and engineers who will poke and pry and test and torture in order to produce the optimal weapon. What a happy reunion that will be!

Luckily, they continue on their way without engaging. I breathe an internal sigh of relief. The soldiers around here are not super invested in their jobs, a benefit of sticking to the backwaters.

I slowly drag my stupid craft across the finish line, reaching the entry to my crew’s spaceship. It’s interstellar mobile, capable of moving between planets in a way our personal crafts would be unable to. The door scans one of my optic channels, which luckily has not changed along with the new change in management, and it opens, welcoming me home.

Our spaceship has a long corridor with different fuel, docking, or mechanic stations branching off. My craft has a vague motor-memory of which docking station is mine. It’s the farthest down on the left. I confidently engage my motors forward and immediately bounce into one wall of the corridor, which sends me careening into the other side. I crash to the ground. My craft is big enough that this makes a substantial thumping noise.

Another ship emerges from one of the docking stations. I take one look at its exo-outside, and barely hold in a frightened whimper.

All white armor and a red cross emblem.

Mechanic.

“Jake, come on, man. It’s 0900. You were gone all night, and you came back drunk?”

“Drunk” must be its term for taking in bad fuel. Fear screws with my response time as it approaches; fight and flight have left the building, and only freeze remains. The mechanic heaves me up and brings me inside its station despite my prodigious size; it’s pretty big, too, though it doesn’t appear to have any weapons systems. I am unable to resist, paralyzed.

I’m towed into the mechanic’s station. White, white, all white: bright white lights and bright white scanners and shining silver implements reflecting back the endless white. It’s too much like the labs where they made me, the belly of the beast I only barely escaped.

The mechanic gives me basic diagnostic tests to determine functionality. It shines a light into my optical sensors to test pupil dilation, then presses a device to my central core to assess my pump and listen to my respirators. It has me stick out my comms wiggler to look down my comms tube and then clucks at me for being low on lubrication fluid. Like that’s my fault. Hello? Take it up with the original pilot, thanks.

“Did you black out?”

I attempt to access the comms system for the first time. It is extremely complex and difficult to manage even without bad fuel poisoning your ship–it’s never been my forte. My comms wiggler feels heavy and clumsy, and I don’t think it’s just the bad fuel.

“Miaow,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

Gosh darn it, that’s a response for a mini-craft! I expel some mucus from my comms tube and try again: “Nuh-uh.”

I don’t know what “black out” means; we hadn’t covered it in training yet, but it doesn’t sound good. I send a thumbs up reaction, trying to indicate that everything’s chill. That doesn’t seem to assuage the mechanic, so I send a second. I’d send a third, but you can only do two at a time, given that these crafts only have two thumbs. Thumbs are one of the best features of a full-sized craft. If I had designed them, I would have given them at least six, but nobody cares what I think.

“Do you remember what happened last night? Jake?”

“Nerp.”

It looks frustrated. It’s not too old for a ship, exo-outside light brown and still smooth. Full-sized crafts’ exo-outsides have this weird thing where they get wrinkly and fragile as they age. My previous craft had wrinkles galore.

“If you keep showing up to work drunk, I’m going to have to tell the captain. No doctor-patient confidentiality on a pirate vessel.”

If the mechanic tells the captain, they might want to do a more thorough examination. They might put me in scanners. They might find me out.

I’m not getting scanned today. No way, José. This calls for drastic action.

I use my considerable bulk to push the mechanic back. It’s not expecting a full frontal ram, stumbling and trying to catch itself on the rack that holds its devices. The flimsy rack can’t hold up to a full-sized’s weight, the devices scattering across the floor and the mechanic crashing its hull into the wall. Still, the push clears a way to the door.

I run the best I can, which is not very well at all. I fall as I escape back into the corridor. I don’t bother to stand up again, just put all of my processing into my motor systems and drag myself forward on my hands and knees.

“You asshole!” Its cry echoes around the corridor as I escape. “You wait until the captain hears about this!”

I crawl into my personal docking station and close the door behind me, fumble with the lock until it engages. Internal alarms are blaring for the second time today. I can’t wrest control of my respirators, air pumps drawing in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide at a frighteningly heightened rate. The central pump is going haywire. The ship’s computer is firing like nuts. Excess lubrication gathers in my optic sensors. I feel like I’m going to purge fuel again.

Of course, the previous pilot takes this opportunity to wake up. Just what I need right now! I can feel it pounding against the firewall. It’s sending me all these pings: “no, stop” and “please, let me out” and “get out of my head.” Drama queen.

I start the process of wrestling my craft back into obedience. The first thing I do is put the original pilot on mute. That won’t stop it from being able to send pings, but at least it’ll stop me from receiving them. So annoying! I used to take my previous ship’s pilot off mute sometimes to check on it, but it was always screaming. I don’t need that kind of drama in my life. I think I’ll just leave this one on mute permanently.

Heartless. That was the answer to the crossword clue. “Lacking a vital organ.” I just forgot that “heart” is another word for the central pump.

Riding high on my victory, I take manual control of my respiratory system, slowing the intake and outtake. This calms the central pump–the heart, as I now realize, because I am a genius at crosswords–and brings the circulatory system back to baseline. With those two systems settled, the ship’s computer stops going haywire.

I desperately need to rest. My physical form, inside the cockpit of this craft, is exhausted from switching ships twice today. I was designed to sit inside a ship, for Pete’s sake, not skitter around outside of it. Independent movement is a last resort, and it drains my emergency battery. I need the electrical impulses from the ship’s computer to keep my own circuits functioning. Once I put this ship into standby, I can go into sleep mode and recover.

We’re almost there.

I shed my add-ons, including my weapons systems. I log them as I remove them: laser pistol, a heavy slug repeater revolver, brass knuckles, boot knives, a couple of shurikens, a mechano-parasite psychic disruptor (oops, that’ll get mysteriously lost immediately!), a shield generator, a semi-automatic laser assault rifle, a pump-action shotgun, and a garrotte wire. I have to give the previous pilot credit, they really were ready for anything. Beneath the weapons systems are layers of armor. The previous pilot seemed to favor the all-black look, and though I don’t think that my optic channels are a bright orange like the mini-craft’s, I still think I look pretty cool.

I strip everything off in preparation for standby mode and stuff anything that has purged fuel on it into the auto-washer. Finally, I get a ping that my sub-systems have accessed my class and call sign. Took them long enough.

Call sign: Jakob Dobrzinski.

Designation: Mercenary.

Class: Human.

There’s a reflective surface hanging on one of the walls of the docking station. I walk in front of it, looking at myself, turning around, taking it all in.

Although I am not as large as I was with my add-ons and armor equipped, my pure frame is still substantial. My base exo-outside is a dull beige-pink, which is... fine? Not as cool as the mini-craft’s solid black, and I had grown very fond of my previous full-size’s dark brown color, but it will do the job.

Like the previous full-size, the thin, threadlike strands that grow from the exo-outside are not full coverage. They had been on the mini-craft, but most pet designation mini-crafts have those filaments across their entire body. There’s still significantly more strand coverage here than there was on my previous full-size craft’s, especially around the comms system output. Both excretory systems also have more of those strands surrounding them, and it looks like there’s a different configuration on the front liquid-based system than on my previous craft. My previous one didn’t dangle. It pisses me off how they change these things from model to model.

Still: four limbs, one head, two optic channels, one olfactory channel, one comms channel, and two auditory channels. All systems are present and mostly functioning. Everything is about where it should be and nothing is missing. Not bad for a curbside find! There’s that dependence on bad fuel, but once I get somewhere safe, I can detox myself and re-write my programming to get rid of the addiction.

I settle into my docking station and close my eyes. A few hours in standby mode and then I’ll figure out what to do next. I rest my ship’s hand on its central core, feeling it rise and fall with the intake and outtake of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The circulatory pump is beating away, strong and healthy, carrying the oxygen and immunity system drones along the blood ducts.

This time, I tell myself, I’m going to be better about going to the mechanic. I’m not going to ignore duct buildup, like I did with my previous craft, “the Ethel”. Or filtration issues, like I did with the one before that, “the Henry”. Or accidentally pilot my way into a military base, get shot in the cockpit, and barely escape with my own life, like I did with “the Soon-Lee”. That was the past. It’s going to be different this time.

I might be a parasitic brain robot, but I can learn from my mistakes.

Anyway, it’s not like “the Jakob” is brand-new, off the lot, straight out of the womb. He’s a used model. After I get the addiction thing figured out I can probably ride him for a while before I have to steal a new vessel again. I try to remember my training. I can get another... what, four years out of him? That’s about how long humans live, right?

I’m a great pilot. I bet I could stretch it to five.

Mayrav Feynman lives and writes in Boston, MA.

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Editor's Note:

Thank you so much for reading Mayrav Feynman’s “And a Bottle of Rum.” One of the main things that drew us to the story is how it begins in the register of comic misadventure. We read of a failing craft, a negligent pilot, a sequence of bad decisions narrated with cheerful confidence. Its deeper pleasure, however, lies in the instability of that narration. The story keeps revising the reader’s understanding of its own terms—ship, pilot, mechanic, fuel—until what first appeared to be a familiar piece of spacefaring fiction reveals itself as something much more disquieting.

Feynman’s conceit is sustained by an exacting control of language. The body is rendered as machinery in many respects. Where consciousness meets occupancy and survival becomes a matter of maintenance and replacement. Because the narrator experiences these ideas as ordinary, the story’s violence hits harder, likely because of how it's disguised as inconvenience, even charm. The humor remains buoyant, but it acquires a darker attitude as the implications gather. Until it finally resolves into its startling treatise about possession. About the stories we tell ourselves in order to feel less queasy about our own affairs with possession and trespass.—Jon Negroni

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