Space Rocks!

Space Rocks!

A Story By Peter Wade

Chap 1. Life at the Outpost

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion!

For a start, It’s loud as fuck inside my helmet. Hang on, lets try it again.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRG

Yep, loud as fuck!

Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no other bastard here. If there was someone else here, I could ask them, but I’m not taking their word for it! I’d get them to scream, and see if I could hear it. But then it could just be the fact that the sound has to get through 2 helmets. And at what range?

WHO THE FUCK CARES?

Oh man. I’ve been alone at this outpost for too long. I’m losing my fucking mind. Can you hear a scream in space? For fuck’s sake, there needs to be someone else to hear the scream or it’s pointless, and my closest neighbor is about 30-odd thousand K’s away.

I’d been sent to this outpost on some shithole rock orbiting Saturn to provide a communications relay station as “mankind stretches ever further into the unknowns of space”. Sounds pretty grandiose, doesn’t it. I have no idea where they are at this stage, all I know is that I’m one of a dozen or so comms stations which provide a communications path to wherever the fuck they are, and that I’m about the 3rd or 4th station away from Earth, so they could be anyfuckingwhere. The rocket scientists (and I say that in its most ironic fashion) are looking for Earth 2. At least somewhere they’ve got half a chance of geoforming into something that’s not guaranteed instant death. They reckon they can deal with the extreme heat or extreme cold, and can somehow find somewhere with an atmosphere that can be turned into a self sustaining wet-tropical system. Yeah, and I shit M&M’s.

This all came about because of a global pandemic. Fucking President Bieber completely ignored the severity of it, and now Earth is fucked! President fucking Bieber! I think he had a great grandfather who was some genius rock god back in the 2010’s, some 130 odd years ago, But how the fuck does that qualify this idiot to become the most powerful leader on the planet? Hot Tip, IT DOESN’T! There had apparently been a pretty bad pandemic back in 2020ish, but all the scholars say this one was much worse. The Yank president at the time was someone called McConnell, and he apparently handled it fairly well, despite strenuous opposition from someone who played the President on TV, and who was deluded into thinking he’d actually won. We get taught in history that over time all sorts of people can get elected as the US President. One was a Movie Cowboy, Another was a Reality TV guy. Shit, One was a Saxophone player (I’m calling bullshit on that one!). The unanimous opinion is that the greatest President in US History was Jeb Bartlett in the 1990’s. Apparently at one stage they even had a cyborg as the Governor of California! Even though I come from the Benevolent Dictatorship of AusZealand, What the Yank President does still has ramifications for the whole world, so when they elect the distant relative of some celebrity IT EFFECTS THE ENTIRE PLANET! You’d have thought they would have learned their lesson through the entire “Empress Ivanka” debacle of 2026ish, short lived as it was. Thank Fuck the majority of yanks saw the problems early and decided to go back to Democratic Socialism!

(Now, now, for those looking at a map and saying Australia and New Zealand still exist as separate countries, that’s true. But in around 2028, after Australia had elected one fucking moron after another, and New Zealand’s President-For-Life Ardern became more and more beloved, Australia decided it was time to stop fucking around, and almost unanimously begged New Zealand to adopt us! There were some concessions given, of course. Firstly The Wallabies were allowed to continue as Australia’s Rugby Union team, but they were banned from playing the All-Blacks, and whenever there was a scheduled Aust – NZ game, it would be called a 1-Nil victory for the All-Blacks, and they’d convene at the pub. Funnily enough The Wallabies agreed to this without much fuss! We also had to teach the Kiwi’s Cricket, and although Australia was allowed to remain as World Champions in perpetuity, They had to team up with NZ anytime they played England. There were some other concessions regarding swimming in the Olympics and banning sheep jokes, but no-one really cared about those.).

You may be wondering why I’m here by myself. Trust me, You’re not David Caruso there, I wonder the same thing every day. It’s because when the extent of the pandemic was becoming apparent, a large defence contractor promised the world that they had a solution, and in very short time, They were able to launch a mission to try and turn one of a number of options into a semi-inhabitable environment. I say semi-inhabitable, because that’s all Earth has been for the past few decades. They’d developed super-fast space travel, got some geo-scientists on board and launched. It took a couple of days before they realized that super-fast travel means super-quickly they were out of communications range. They developed and deployed some Communications relay stations, and were in the process of developing robots who would act as maintenance workers for these stations. I was working with a team involved in developing the algorithims that would allow the robots to effectively maintain the stations when some senior politician got impatient and said “well if these guys know how to maintain the stations, let’s just send them”! That fucker got a Presidential citation, complimentary pardon pack, and control over Puerto Rico, and I got sent to This Fucking Rock! (If you’re wondering why I capitalized those last three words, it’s because that’s now its official name. I was going to name it something lame like “Dougsville” or “Drakeistan”, but within a few hours of landing here, it pretty much named itself.

I just realized, I haven’t introduced myself (“How Woooed” What movie was that from?). Doug Drake here, my mates call me Double D (And that’s not a reference to my man-boobs). I’m a Defence Comms tech, originally from the Political wastelands of Canberra in AusZealand (After NZ President-For-Life Ardern adopted us, Many Australian politicians were forced to face their own uselessness, and most were unable to deal with the shame of actually working, so most topped themselves. The ones who didn’t were forced into humiliating, disgusting positions such as parking meter attendants, shoe salesmen, or a member of the Greens party. To be fair, most of the Greens fared OK during this time, because they’d been irrelevant for years and just hadn’t noticed). I defected to the US as a conscientious objector during the AFL Religious wars (NZ just wasn’t prepared for that part of Australian culture) and took a position as a maintenance technician in a sex-toy factory. After the US DoD was found guilty of poaching vibrator designs for their missile guidance systems, they offered all of us at PinkBitz Industries big bonuses to come and work for them, and replace the grad weenies whos substandard knowledge was the reason the robots were delayed in the first place. Apparently some high ranking General had a complete meltdown when they rolled out one of the earlier versions, and he saw the control panel consisted of 4 buttons marked with a triangle, a square, a circle and an X. So I went to work for the big bad US Government.

Life here on This Fucking Rock (Hereafter known as TFR™) is pretty boring, but I can’t really say I’m doing it tough. My compound consists of several pods, each with a distinct purpose. The main pod includes my living quarters, a Control/Communications room, a workshop which is basically useless, because everything is “repair-by-replace”, i.e swap out a module and send off the broken one, and some storage areas. There's the Communications Relay Station which is separate from the main pod, because it was the first module sent, before they realised that something ( or someone as it became) would be required to keep the bloody thing running. There’s bulk storage in a separate pod for spares and food, another pod is a water generator, another generates power, etc. Initially all the pods were dropped in their locations, and were entirely stand-alone, but over time they were able to send up materials to link some of the pods with tunnels, so there’s no need to put on the full space-suit to travel between them. The pods and the subsequent linking tunnels are made out of some sort of recycled polycarbonate material. Some genius (and I mean that sincerely) figured out that making stuff out of polycarbonates was a bad thing on Earth, because it never broke down so it stayed in rubbish pits forever, but if your intent is to send it to some other shithole, then it’s not a problem. Some of the pods, you don’t want connected into the network of linked pods, for a variety of reasons, but the main reason is because they stink. One of the standalone pods grows some basic vegetables. Apparently there was a movie a long time back where a guy was stranded on Mars for a long time, and he figured out how to grow potatoes in dirt fertilized by his own shit. It was a fictional movie, but some fucking grad weenie saw it as a concept demonstrator. So the rudimentary septic system feeds into that pod, and it actually works pretty good, but although the atmosphere is apparently livable inside the pod, I lifted my visor in there once for about 2 seconds and decided that I’d never do it again.

In the living quarters, Life is reasonably comfortable. Communications back to Earth is pretty limited because the purpose of this station is as a relay station, so available bandwidth is reserved for the geoscientists at the end of the comms chain. As a result, the only time I communicate to Earth is via a chat function once a week. I get a resupply drone every 2 weeks with meat, spares and some other luxuries. At the Station there’s a library of movies and TV shows, they’re mainly from the 1980’s and ‘90’s, Maybe a couple of dozen from the next 3 decades, but Hollywood pretty much stopped making movies in 2025. The Hollywood writers would come up with some totally unbelievable premise, make it into a movie, and some fuckwit politician would take it as a challenge to do it in real life. So they stopped making outlandish fiction and started making films promoting normality, in the hope that the politicians would start behaving like normal human beings. Of course this was doomed to failure, and of course the movies were all flops, so Hollywood basically gave up. Not completely so there’s maybe 1 or 2 movies released every 5 years, but it’s a huge financial gamble every time they do it. Funnily enough the Porn industry went a similar way, for exactly the same reason.

The movies are all on removable media, like USB sticks. That was one technology that has never gone away. Every time there’s a resup drone, they send me a new USB stick with about 3 movies, or an old TV series. Once they sent me a stick with 5 episodes of a show called “Beverly Hills 90210” The drone had left by the time I’d found this out, so I sent it back on the very next drone. Sure enough, on the next drone, they sent back that stick again! Arseholes!. This happened 2 more times. Eventually I was bored enough that I gave it a watch, and now I spend an inordinate amount of time in my day wondering how Dylan and Brandon are going.

One interest I have up here is Rock Music from the last century. Again, most of it is from the late 20th century, because some time in the early 21st century, artists stopped writing music and started writing beat poems about how fucking rich they were and how many bitches they had. To be fair that was only the male artists. The female artists wrote beat poems about how they were one of the bitches for some rich guy!

Nobody can hear you scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say

But they can hear you rock! One benefit of life on TFR™ is that I can turn up the music HOWEVER FUCKING LOUD I WANT! Before I left for TFR™, my Grandfather loaded me up with some music from his era. I don’t really relate to much of the songs because they’re about a world I was never part of, but that doesn’t matter. I fucking love the music, and the louder, the better. Bands with names like ADDC, Aerosmiff, Van Hagar, all had brilliant guitar work, heavy drums, driving bass guitar, it’s fucking great. With a number of electronic components at my disposal (don’t tell the DoD) I was able to hook up my small audio system to a fucking great amplifier. Once I walked out onto the rock past the furthest pod and using an RF remote I cranked up the volume to maximum, and I could hear it clearly at about 100 metres. I have to be careful because I once cranked up the music while communications were operating, and I was causing distortion in the comms channel. So now I only rock out when I’m off shift. I decided I wanted to learn how to play guitar, and I asked for one to be sent to me. The Yanks said there was no way they could fit a guitar into a resupply drone, but eventually they offered to break an electric guitar down and send it as a kit. I won them over when I said that if these geoscientists did manage to create a new home, it’d be pretty shit without rock music, and they agreed. They also said they could only fit in a small amplifier, I said that’d be fine! I’m not very good, but I am very loud, and there’s no-one here to complain!

Every Resupply drone brings me something else. BEER! Under my contract with the US DoD, I get a carton of beer every 2 weeks. They were initially dead against it, but I was adamant that if I couldn’t have beer up there, I wasn’t fucking going! Thankfully President-for-Life Probationary Ardern intervened and impressed on the Yanks that beer is an integral part of AusZealand culture, and therefore an important requirement for me to maintain my cultural identity whilst in space. The other comms techs were able to take important cultural items with them. Most of the first Americans sent up took a copy of the constitution and a gun but within a year they had all used the constitution as toilet paper and then turned the gun on themselves, so their replacements had to choose something else. They all chose cheeseburgers! President-For-Life Probationary Ardern is the Great GrandDaughter of the first President-For-Life, Jacinta Adern. As Jacinta neared the end of her life, she had become so beloved, it was unanimously decided by AusZealanders that we didn’t want to risk electing another moron, and that we should always have an Ardern Woman at the helm! Of course there’s always the chance that one of Jacinta’s descendants may not be as good as her, so a probationary period was implemented for 2 years, in which time the President-For-Life could be replaced, but the previous 2 generations have been great, and the current President –For-Life Ardern has my vote (if we still actually voted!).

Resupply Day! A high point in my calendar every 2 weeks. Although I get to send a short text message to say what I’d like in the next delivery, it’s always interesting to see what they sent, because while they try to comply with our requests, it’s not always possible, so they do their best.

FUCKING VB!

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say!

IF YOU DIDN’T WANT ME TO SCREAM, YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE SENT VB!

Victoria Fucking Bitter! One thing that New Zealand and Australia agreed upon when P-F-L Ardern adopted us was that certain Australian beers would be retained as AusZealand beers. Coopers was the main one, there were a few others, and there was a huge craft beer culture that was assimilated, but FUCKING VB wasn’t considered. My grandfather told me a story once about a war hero from the early 21st century. He’d been awarded the VC for his bravery in a Middle-Eastern War, but then he was accused of War Crimes! He was accused of making a local drink VB! Fucking Barbaric if it was true, but my Grandfather never believed the accusations.

The Communication System which my station is part of is a really complex one. Given the differing orbits of each planet, and of course the orbits of the various natural satellites (such as TFR™), The communication paths from Earth to the end-users is extremely dynamic. They’re able to predict which way the path will go in advance, so I’m able to do some checks before I come online, then I’m on standby for the duration that my station is part of the path. That can last from 3 hours to 48 hours, and then it could be days before my next shift. Between shifts I maintain the station, I eat and drink. I watch old movies, the occasional gratuitous porn (My favorite is one called “Game of Thrones”), and I rock out!.

That’s what life at this outpost is like, and it’s not likely to change any time soon! Not unless something unexpected happens

Then something unexpected happened!