Chapter Text
ROSE: Something’s coming.
A lesser man would jump, perhaps shriek in some grossly shrill manner only audible to small dogs. Entirely useless as, if one was in a situation where the fear factor warranted such an exclamation, calling upon only a legion of yorkshire terriers would be the last thing you fucking needed. However, regardless of the monotonous candor of her grating robo-voice, I do not jump as I’m far too fucking cool. And even if I did happen to have moved inches out of my seat in some involuntary movement, it would have been only due to how Rose’s vocalisations have begun to rail on me over the last year.
Since her ascension, I’ve preferred to communicate with her via text and passive aggressive post-its on the fridge. Her voice wasn’t exactly top of my to-do list when sorting out her chassis and it now feels as unpleasant to the ears as it would have if I had I given her the voice of a Good Morning America hostess. As someone who had some semblance of inherited understanding of such topics in her now not-genes, however, Rose would never drone on about an inconsequential roadkill haircut.
On that note, I invite us to a brief intermission. I know, I know, we’re pretty early on in the narrative. A mere two paragraphs and one quip from a minor character in and I’m already making my hands into a mock T and calling for a timeout. It’s high time we discuss something that’s been pissing me off for years. Since the very beginning of my long-standing career as a junior Old Earth archivist, carefully combing through relics of early-2000s pop culture. They were so naive, blissfully unaware of their incoming underwater demise. For someone like me, it was like thumbing over the crude indents of a cave drawing depicting a soon-to-be extinct mammalian foe. And speaking of extinct mammals, what the fuck died on the heads of those bitches hosting that 2010s drivel?
It’s like if Caillou decided, fuck this bald noise- side note for my side note, maybe he should consider investment in some cueball treatment. I’ve been told under reliable authority that people tend to stop being whiny bitches when they get more ass. But that’s nothing to do with me. Digressing back to my original digression, hypothetically speaking he says, fuck this bald noise. But instead of seeking out an investment piece, a decent plastic surgeon, or even a cheap anime wig off ebay, he decided to lay in the road until a poor unsuspecting possum, hit by a caffeine strung trucker on his way home to explain away the distinct odour of truck-stop pussy from his passenger seat to his wife, crawled up on to Caillou’s shiny chrome dome, took its last shaky breath, and then keeled over in a greasy heap, fur highlighted with a blood colour that was positively vogue in 2012. That poor possum. Never will it manage to crawl its way home, overly caffeinated from its trash can exploits, to similarly explain away the smell of truck-stop possum pussy off its fur to its wife and thirty something rabid babies. Now it suffers a fate far more cruel than death for its disloyalty; listening to a never ending cycle of dumb bitches compliment the exemplary blowout of its carcass. It may resemble a work of middle-aged couture from the front, but it’s still a dead ass possum at the back.
I have all fucking day to keep this metaphor going, but let’s wrap it up and say I was right, there are some hairstyles you just can’t restrain under even the most kickin’ of hats. And sometimes that’s a fucking tragedy.
ROSE: If you’re quite done monologuing, there is something you need to address here.
DIRK: Can’t you see I’m busy?
Obviously. I’m always busy. I have so many fucking irons in the fire that I’ve a whole ass barbeque going here, just from various clothes flattening devices. If I was inclined to spend the night with my head in the porcelain version of my throne I could even cook a few jumbo sausages on this fucker. I pass up the opportunity to mull over an innuendo because once again, for some reason, Rose is speaking.
ROSE: Oh, I’m sorry. I was under the impression that you were simply fucking around. Have you started using post-it notes for your important business as well then?
I brush the post-it note aside. Perhaps speculative drawings of two men, who don’t resemble me or the former owner of this ship, are not the best examples of “srs bsns” that I have. But really, it’s not up to Rose to decide that for me. That’s why I’m the captain of this ship.
DIRK: The post-it notes are always important business. Do you not even check the fridge any more?
DIRK: Whatever.
DIRK: Something’s coming, so a meteor or something? Debris? Just steer out of the way.
ROSE: That would be what I would typically do, yes.
ROSE: Someone has to.
Usually, the ship drives itself. However, out of all of us who got our honorary, god-given driver’s licence through nothing but the sheer awe of Carapace Kingdom without so much as a test, Rose is the one for whom driving came naturally. Not to say that it wouldn’t have come naturally to me had I tried, or needed to try. You see, there are finite items in this world and, contrary to scientific belief but in exact conjunction with any popular one, shits are one of them. And frankly, I just don’t give a shit about being a good driver. Besides, define “good” driving. Does anyone who drives as their profession qualify under the category of good? Is good synonymous with safe, or at least not a mortal concern to the roads? Are school bus drivers, formula one race car heads, and some senile old coot who drives at a constant thirty all equally good drivers? Each would appear to self-define as such.
Good is, actually, a rather baseless adjective when it comes to ideals that society holds. Allegory of the cave and all that. It entirely depends on your perspective of what you believe the purpose of “driving” as a philosophical concept is. As Plato would say, hand up Socrates’ anal canal like a venereal ventriloquist’s dummy, driving is only a conceptual reality to those under the subjugation of its existence as a concept, and if freed from the perception of the reality in which it exists one could easily see past the illusion of it being a necessary one. It’s only in my suspicion about this and subsequent release from Earth C’s metaphorical cave, that I can really see the light about the necessity of this so-called life skill. After all, by sheer definition, I’m a live for now and I’m doing quite fucking well without this apparent necessary boon in my strife specibus. TLDR, driving as a concept is the clever psyop of an insular society that relies on the concept of transportation from point a to b to feel secure in their belief they’ve any control over their place in life. It’s pathetic.
ROSE: Dirk.
DIRK: What? Were you still talking? I thought I told you to go steer.
ROSE: If you were listening, perhaps you would have understood better. Patience and attentiveness are also virtues.
ROSE: Ones perhaps Plato would be familiar with.
Scratch all of the above.
DIRK: Plato is a bitch anyway.
DIRK: And on that topic, what are you talking about?
ROSE: Charming. Perhaps I’ll let you see to our incoming companion alone.
DIRK: What.
Fine, that has my attention. I put my sick, not frivolous, gear down and stalk over to the ship’s main console. The screen is flashing amber, a yet moderate warning of an incoming projectile. Without her needing to repeat herself, I can see that the object is, frankly, fucking massive. At least the size of The Theseus itself. There’s no steering our way out of its path at this rate, and besides.
It’s emitting radar.
A lesser man would apologise for brushing her off, but Rose doesn’t expect anything like that of me.
ROSE: Expect, no. Not from you.
ROSE: A lesser woman, however, might be prone to saying, hm. What is it now?
ROSE: I told you so?
ROSE: I can’t quite recall the hoi polloi terminology.
I ignore her. I’ve bigger fish to fry. Perhaps even to toast over the raging fire of all my burning irons. Very busy, reiterated. I study the screen a moment longer, before looking out the front window above. If I squint deeply, I can just make out a dot between the stars, heading straight for us. I look back to the screen.
I’m not going to say it out loud despite our simultaneous narrative involvement rendering it a moot fucking point anyway, but I’m fucking stumped. By all intents and purposes, this doesn’t make fucking sense. I had this math on fucking lock. We’re supposed to have at least a year before crossing any other lifeforms, and another year on top of that before the band of merrymen come to make a tudor wife out of me. I took the fastest ship English had to hand me on a silver platter, none of the ones he gave them could have not only caught up with us, but overtook us and cut us off. Unless English held back on me. Unlikely, seeing as last time I saw him he was basically on his knees to give me anything my heart desired. Which, quite frankly, was to be as far a-fucking-way from him as astronomically possible, and as quickly too. Hence, ship. Case closed.
ROSE: Dirk.
DIRK: Not now.
I inspect the screen once more. It’s definitely detecting a ship-sized vehicle, emitting radar at us. Which, as I’ve established, makes no fucking sense. I expand the screen with my fingers. It looks smaller. It can’t be Skaianet’s next fastest ship, which was a horrendous overclocked monstrosity, kitted out with multiple rooms, flamethrower rivets, bells, and even whistles. This would be too small to even fit the team pursuing me, unless Karkat’s got over his fear of living in the vents.
My calculations are never off. It’s the nature of my existence, after all, to have the maths shit on fucking lock by a variety of apparently nefarious means. If any organic lifeform capable of manning the vessel were near me, I’d know narratively speaking. Therefore, it must be unmanned. A probe, perhaps? We’re lightyears away from the nearest civilisation capable of making one, and they’re historical years away from having those capabilities. And yet, that’s the only explanation. If anything was out there, thinking, I’d see it. I’d be controlling them, after all.
ROSE: I see you’re continuing to ignore me.
ROSE: Regardless, it would be unbecoming of my purpose on this ship not to provide you with some semblance of warning.
ROSE: Therefore, duck.
DIRK: What?
I look up, but it’s already too late. The radar beeps stubbornly in the periphery of my vision, because the fast moving object hurtling towards the windshield is not, in fact, the ship it’s detecting. It’s a person, boot outstretched, cracking through the window and roundhouse kicking me in the jaw. I, for lack of a less humbling alternative, go down like a stack of bricks, showered in a rain of glass.
ROSE: Oh well.
ROSE: I can only try.
I cough, snorting out blood disgustingly over the front of my shirt. The control room’s lighting has gone deep red, a warning siren blaring as paper, plans, and a metric fuck tonne of swords get pulled out through the gravitational force the hole in the window has left. Serendipitously, the hole is blocked by my kotatsu flying through the air and slamming into the windshield, the whole ship shuddering with the force. My assailant is unperturbed, taking advantage of my momentary disbelief to pin my chest down on the floor with one disrespectfully heavy boot. I’d say it’s hot, but there’s no one currently pursuing me that I’d take a gamble on there. I’m, most likely, about to die. I don’t need to get cancelled on top of all that.
I’ve been going in blind momentarily with the narrative. See, this is definitely not what I had planned. I had a lot of plans, most of which are now floating around the abyss of space on a wad of sticky paper. It would have been more helpful for me to stick them to a solid object, I’m realising now, but, as I said, I didn’t predict this. I try to narratively place the person behind the mask, the wizard behind the curtain as it very well may be, the fucking bitch. I come up empty handed. Trying to squint through the throbbing pain in my face to see through the visor also comes up short. I hazard a brief glance to Rose to see if I can read any recognition off, if not her robot chassis, her straight up vibes. She’s ignoring me and my impending death, busying herself by using her foot to expertly sweep up the excess glass on the floor. The utter wench.
I look back at my assailant.
DIRK: What are you waiting for?
They tense and relax their fists, almost rhythmically, like they’re preparing to strike. But no sword is called to hand, or chainsaw, gun, etc either now that the topic is breached. It’s only when I clock the rise and fall of their chest matching in speed that I realise they’re catching their breath, not preparing to deck me in my already bruised face. I consider escaping, then consider that there’s nowhere to escape to. I’m also well and truly trapped underfoot, but I’d rather not admit that too loudly.
DIRK: Dave, right?
DIRK: Always one for theatrics. Though, usually not any that might get you typecast as the protagonist.
DIRK: Planning on doing this anonymously? It doesn’t work that way, bro. You see, narratively speaking you were always going to deliver the–
???: Holy moses snookums its the absolute real mccoy hearing you jibber on for old times sake.
???: And boy do i love hearing your voice. Its just been me myself and i on my lonesome dreaming about it for so long. Really is the cherry on top of this whole adventure.
???: But you dont need to give *me* the spiel!
???: Unless…you want to practice?
My blood runs cold. This time, I do attempt to move backwards, but the imposing foot feels somehow even less sexy now that I know who owns it. Some monkey part of my brain insists that it can still make it work and I ignore it. My assailant reaches up and removes their helmet, tucking it expertly under one arm on his hip while the other hand shakes out a shoddily grown mullet that would make other space cadets proud. When he looks down at me, there’s absolutely nothing going on inside that big head of his and it sends chills down my spine.
JAKE: Hi babycakes!
…
Fuck.
It is at this precise moment, that my brain decides that even the help of a legion of yorkshire terriers would be better than nothing.
To be continued.........?