In the Beginning there was Trash, as Talked by Nick

Post date: Apr 09, 2008 5:12:48 AM

The Following is just the beginning of a look at the Seedier Underside of the Verse. There is and will be more to follow.

From a story called

"Salvager's Gold"

by Selina Rosen

Clyde shuffled down the dock of the space station with three bags slung over one shoulder, the tools of his trade clutched in his other hand, and no joy in his soul. Another crappy day, another deflated dollar. It was cold this morning. Hell, it was always cold on the docks. After fifteen years he should have been used to it, but he still got chilled sometimes.

Fifteen years! He looked down at his expanded belly and grunted. "I suppose if they counted my age the way they count a tree's, they'd cut me in half and decide I was about 103," he mumbled to himself.

It didn't seem possible. Had he really been digging through the dumpsters and trash cans of this "satellite with an attitude" for that long? Fifteen years ago he'd been a young man with dreams. A salvager on a barge working under the command of Eric Rider, an icon of salvaging in their galaxy. Clyde was going places and doing things. He'd dreamed a young salvager's dream of one day commanding his own space barge and finding The Big Trash.

The Big Trash was the not-so-secret desire of every salvager. Out there in space, lost somewhere off the usual flight paths and away from the hyperspace highways, was a huge space station, the relic of a long-lost civilization. A salvager had seen it once, and had time to send back pictures and samples. But he didn't send back the coordinates, for the obvious reason that some other salvager would steal it from him. Unfortunately, his ship had been destroyed in a meteor shower, leaving no survivors and no hint of where The Big Trash was.

Every salvager worth his salt had been looking for it ever since. It was the stuff of which legends were made, except that The Big Trash was more than just legend — it was very real. Somewhere out there, hanging in space and ripe for the picking, was the biggest find in salvaging history, just waiting for some lucky salvager to find it, strip it, trash it, and ship it off as "pieces parts" to the far reaches of the galaxy.

But Clyde had given up his dreams of conquest, fame and fortune long ago, for the same reason that most young men did; he had fallen in love with a beautiful woman and settled down to have a family and a stable life. He took a stationary job in a stable space station, in his field of expertise. While it wasn't glamorous, and he was never going to get rich, at least it brought in a nice, steady income so that his family could live a nice, lower middle class existence.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now after fifteen years in a dead-end — and mostly disgusting — job, his beautiful love had turned into a screaming, obese, middle-aged harpy. The two children, one male and one female, were ungrateful, money-grubbing little leeches who talked to him as if he were lower than the filth he dug through daily to put food in their thankless mouths.

No matter how many times he tried to explain to the worthless little scumbags how important his job was, they just simply didn't get it. After all, space stations like the one they lived in depended on recycling even more than planet-bound societies. But the kids didn't listen, or they just didn't care.

Scientists and techs had tried for generations to make machines to do Clyde's job, but none had been successful. The first tries at developing mechanized recycling systems had been total disasters. Basically, the very first systems expected people to separate the trash themselves — into paper, plastic, metal and "other" — which, of course, none of them seemed intelligent enough to do. The problem seemed to be in their inability to figure out what went into the "other" slot.

The next attempts were designed to allow machines to separate the garbage, but paper got on plastic, stuck together with the "other," and jammed the machines up time and time again. After years of failure, the scientists and techs finally had to admit defeat. So when all was done and said, sentient beings could create space ships that flew at light speed, terraform planets, and travel in hyperspace, but they couldn't build a machine which could successfully separate the "other" out of the garbage.

Good thing, too, or salvagers like Clyde would be right out of a job. "What a shame that would be," he grunted as he set down his bags and his tools and opened a dumpster. He used the vacuum first, successfully sucking ninety percent of the "other" up and leaving the rest for him to pick through with his double tongs. The chant that played all day every day in his head was playing even now as he rested his rather hefty girth on the edge of the dumpster to reach a can in the very corner. It's a living. It's a living. It's a living, his inner voice chimed, making him want to slap the shit out of himself.

When he left that dumpster to move to the next he noticed that he had a nice stain of "other" across his jump suit just under his belly, and thought how good it was that he had given Ruth yet another thing to bitch about. He could hear her grating voice as if she were standing right there:

Clyde! What was it? Could you just not stand having even one pair of coveralls that weren't stained with some sort of awful gunk from the bowels of the station? I'm not going to be able to get this stain out. You know that, don't you? It's just going to be like this from now until they're ready for the recycle bin. Blah, blah, blah.

She wouldn't actually say blah, blah, blah — that was just the point at which he would turn his brain off, grab a beer out of the fridge, and launch his ass into his chair.

There had been a time when his life had been filled with adventure and promise. Now adventure was finding a really interesting piece of trash that wasn't too sticky, and the only promise he had was that tomorrow would be exactly the same as today. The docks would be cold, the trash would be sticky, his wife would be bitchy, his kids would be ungrateful, and no matter where he stuck his beer in the fridge it would always be just slightly colder than piss warm.

The hookers were huddled together at mid-dock trying to keep warm. No doubt they were expecting a fairly large ship to dock soon. Most of the hookers hung out in the dockside bars, but the more industrious — and desperate — ones braved the cold in their skimpy attire in the hopes of getting the best johns, or at least the horniest and therefore least particular ones.

"Hey, Clyde!" the hooker named Crystal yelled, waving at him wildly. "Got any good trash?"

Sometimes he did, and it was always a sure bet the hookers would give him more for it than the recycling center. And every once in a while, when a man had an ugly, bitchy wife who only put out once every three years, it was nice to be able to trade.

"Nope, sorry girls," he said.

Crystal winked at him. "Maybe tomorrow, stud."

Clyde grinned widely back. "With any luck," he said, walking past them and heading for the next dumpster. He'd fill his bags the rest of the way in this one and then head back for the recycling center.

He laid his stuff down, slung the bin open and glanced inside. "Aw, damn."

Crystal walked up behind him. "What is it, Clyde?"

"Another damn stiff." He turned to look at the too-thin hooker with the missing front teeth. "You ever get the feeling that you're just living the same day over and over again?"

Cadavers definitely fell into the "other" category in recycling, but you couldn't just suck them up in the vacuum. First, you had to call the station police and stand by the dumpster till they got there. Then you had to waste a bunch more time filling out some stupid screen form.

It happened at least once a week. They very rarely turned out to be station dwellers; mostly they were spacer scum. Maybe he'd been killed on a ship and the murderer had hidden the body, then pulled it out and got rid of it as soon as everyone else took off for the bars — or one of a hundred other decadences they could revel in on the space station.

But it was likely he'd ended up in that dumpster the more popular way. The spacers were always getting stupid drunk and getting into fights over everything from drinks to hookers, and sometimes — lots of times, actually — someone wound up dead. And no matter what sort of "foul play" made a body dead, they always wound up in a dumpster.

There wasn't much else you could do with a dead body on a space station. Open an airlock and you were on line. It wasn't like being planetside where you could take a body out of town, dig a hole and throw it in. In fact, a dumpster on a space station dock was more or less the space equivalent of a shallow grave in a wooded area.

While he was waiting for the cops he decided to go through the guy's pockets. They were empty, so he'd probably been rolled. But if he had, they'd forgotten to take the guy's watch, and it was a beaut. Clyde was sure the stiff would want him to have it. It had one of those spandex bands, and Clyde thought for a minute that he wasn't going to be able to get it over the guy's big-assed thumb since rigor mortis had set in with it sticking out at an odd angle. He got it off the corpse and on his own wrist safe and sound just as two Station Police Officers showed up on their little electric scooters.

Clyde watched the officers get off their scooters with an effort. It was a hell of a job to look rough and ready when you were riding around on something that could maybe hit fifteen miles per hour at top speed and forced you to sit in such a way that if you hit a bump your knees would slam into your chin. The things obviously hadn't been designed for comfort, although it was hard to say just what the idiot who designed them was thinking.

The much shorter of the two officers, a teal-blue alien with suction cups instead of hands, slapped his tentacles against the dirty cold metal of the dumpster and chinned himself to look in.

"Yep, he's dead, all right," he said.

"Any fool can see that, Spritz," his human female partner said with a sigh. Clyde had seen both of them before; the docks must be part of their patrol. No doubt they'd pissed some big shot off. The woman seemed as bored with her job as Clyde was with his. It was harder to tell what aliens were feeling; you had to take some sort of class to learn their different body languages, and he just didn't give a shit about the moods of your average squid-looking alien. He was sick to death of all that touchy-feely crap intellectuals kept spouting about treating everyone equally. The way Clyde figured it, he was at the bottom of the food chain; when and if equality trickled down to him, he'd think about sharing it with guys who sucked their dinner through their asses, noses or ears. Until then, they were all just damned aliens to him.

"You see anything?" the woman officer asked without enthusiasm.

"A dead guy in a dumpster," Clyde said with a shrug.

"Huh." She looked at the hookers. "Any of you see anything?"

They all just shrugged.

"Figures." She handed Clyde a computer screen and the little plastic doo-wop he could never remember the name of. "Here, fill this out."

Clyde nodded and started scratching the doo-wop against the screen as the officers snapped pictures and took samples. A few minutes later the coroner's little electric wagon pulled up to take the body away. Two guys got out of it, went over to the dumpster and started pulling the dead guy out. He was a big guy, and it took them several tries.

"Hey, don't forget he's my salvage," Clyde said quickly. Cadavers didn't bring in much unless they weren't stiff yet, but he figured he ought to get something for his trouble besides the watch.

Everyone knew no one was going to find the murderer. Hell, in all probability he'd already skipped station and was millions of miles away by now. Why even bother to try? Clyde watched them go through the motions and realized their jobs weren't any worse or better than his. They'd take that body down to the morgue, run an autopsy to determine the cause of death, and then send the guy's clothes to one recycling center and his remains to another. They'd stick his picture down here on the docks and maybe someday someone would identify him. Then someone else could tell his family — if he had any — that he was dead.

In the end, those poor bastards would have nothing to show for a day's work but a healthy bunch of piles from riding around on the moron-designed scooters. At least Clyde had a kick-ass new watch.

Not that Clyde was a creature of habit, but on days when he found bodies in dumpsters he allowed himself an extra stop at Charlie's Bar, Porno Palace, and Corner Market. It was located on the far east side of the docks and on the way back to his living unit.

The bar was almost empty, it being about an hour before the evening crowd would start shuffling in. The bartender, a tall, thin human named Barney, put a shot glass in front of Clyde as soon as he sat down and filled it with a golden liquid.

"Well, it ain't Tuesday or Friday, so I'm guessing you found another body?" he said.

"Yeah, right, big fucker. Had a new watch." Clyde held up his arm with a grin.

Barney laughed. "You crazy sonabitch. Is it legal to strip the dead?"

Clyde shrugged. "I don't know, but he ain't usin' it. There has to be some plus to having the shittiest job on the station." He downed his drink and motioned for Barney to fill his glass again.

"Bad day?"

"Every day's a bad day, Barney. Some are just worse than others. I used to work with Eric Rider, you know. Back when he still used to captain his own ship."

Barney nodded — he'd already heard Clyde's life story a thousand times or so. But it was his job to keep the customers talking long enough to help empty their pockets of all that extra money they were always carrying around. "He's dead now isn't he?" he asked for the thousandth and one time, keeping the tradition going.

"Yeah, old sonabitch got too smart for himself. Last I heard some alien girl had wound up taking over his salvaging empire..."

From here Clyde would go spiraling down into the shithole that was his life. Who he used to be. What dreams he used to have. How his bitch of a wife had destroyed him and left him the husk of a man he was today. What he could have been. All that he wasn't. Blah, blah, blah. At some point Barney just tuned him out, humoring him every once in a while with an, "Oh," or a "Hum," or a, "You don't say?" The names and the places and the jobs changed, but every slob who walked in the bar basically had the same story. They wanted to be someone. They had gotten so close. Now they were nothing, no one loved them, and their lives were monotonous and meaningless.

In other words, their lives were all the same as Barney's. One day ran into another, and another, in a long successive line of nothingness off into oblivion, with him and everyone else wondering if perhaps, just perhaps, there wasn't meant to be more to life than this.

Maybe it was time he found a nice woman and settled down himself, start his own family to bitch about. There was a time when a man felt the need to fill the void in his life with something meaningful and permanent. Maybe someone to spend his life with was just what he needed to add a little stability and meaning to his existence. Then again maybe he'd just buy that new sound system he'd had his eye on.

"Don't you think?" Clyde asked expectantly.

"Ah..." Barney coughed, caught off guard. "What...I missed that last little bit."

"Pseudo-intellectuals. Aren't you sick to death of them? They're always trying to make themselves look smarter by trying to make us look stupid. They've ruined everything, there isn't anything worth watching on TV anymore and books..." He broke off laughing. "Well, I probably would have liked reading if everything weren't so damn highbrow. They write this utter crap with no real plot and all these neurotic characters you couldn't like, and then look at you like you're an idiot when you just don't get it. All the time you just know they don't like it any better than you do. You ever notice that nothing's funny anymore? Even the stuff that's supposed to be isn't. All I want to do is flop in my chair, drink a piss warm beer and watch a little tube, but there's not a damn thing worth watching."

Barney nodded, glad that Clyde had given him enough information that he could pretend that he'd been listening. "Problem is that even though there are more of us, money talks and bullshit walks and everything is geared towards the upper classes," the bartender added. "Other night some high tech comes down here slummin'. He puts some crap on the TV, has a couple of drinks, and he's watching this shit and laughing his ass off. I swear wasn't nothing funny on. Just some high-tech geek getting bitched at by his boss. Well some of the clientele they start bitchin' about the crap, want to watch a ball game. So I change the channel and this guy's all why'd you do that, and I tell him it's cause the show sucked, and surely to God wasn't worth getting his ass kicked over. Well he gets all puffed up like, guess he was feeling his drinks, and he says we're all too lowbrowed to get the humor. That we probably only really enjoyed toilet jokes and pratfalls. "

"What happened then?"

"A bunch of guys kicked his ass, loaded him into a set of magnetic boots, and hung him from the ceiling at which point we proved him right by laughing our asses off as we watched the scrawny geek try to get free. He was too weak to walk in them, so he wound up undoing the laces, which of course dumped him on his head on the floor. He stumbles to his feet and threatens to call the cops, proving that he ain't so smart after all and forcing those same guys to kick his ass again. Normally I try to stop a fight in the bar because it just makes a huge mess for me to clean up, but I figured this time it was worth it."

"What happened then?"

Barney shrugged. "Don't know. They carried him out of here and I haven't seen him since. Hell, when I saw you walk in I figured you'd found him, but since your stiff was big..."

Clyde laughed. "Thanks, Barney, I needed that. Well, I'd like to stay and get shit-faced drunk, but you better add up my tab so I can go or the old lady's gonna make my life a living hell. Not that she doesn't anyway, just that it'll be even louder." He swayed a little as he got out of his chair. "All I ever wanted was to find The Big Trash, ya know that, Barney?"

"Yeah, that woulda been great," Barney said. If Clyde wasn't bitching about pseudo-intellectuals ruining the entertainment industry, he was talking about The Big Trash. Barney wasn't really sure what The Big Trash was and wasn't sure that Clyde did. He took the guy's money and watched him leave, feeling no more sorry for him than he felt for himself.

This is by no means the end of Barney's story, as you have yet to get to the Heart of the Big Rubble! If there is not a pun in there somewhere, blame it on the Dino, but get ready for the Drive In Theater!

Clyde, the bartender could be just any bartender, or he could be pouring your next cool one, or semi tepid one.

Johnny & Jimmy will probably recall that their oft bespoken fallen comrade Lopez was a big fan of the pursuit of The Big Trash! Perhaps they should credit Lopez for teaching them to Talk Trash so well. Lopez always talked highly of his older brother, Gironimo Lopez affectionately dubbed Hi-Lo. It was always "Once the war is over" and how he "an Hi-Lo was goin ta make a big score." Or that Hi-Lo's "Commander Ryder had an insight that would pan out one day soon and they would find the Big Trash together!" Maybe Hi-Lo an Ryder did, or maybe one of the many other Brown Coats that have gone searching and gone missing have.

Oh where oh where have the Brown Coats gone, with their Coats cut long and their soles cooked lean.

The Big Trash? Yes it did at one time exist. Built and launched long ago it is a relic of what remains of a long lost civilization. The Owners, that shadowy group that last claimed control of The Big Trash, sent it out into the Black, pushing back the edges of unknown space. A mobile self sustaining Space Station/Ore Gathering/ Processing Plant, it was refurbished and designed to go out and get what the Owners wanted, cutting out the middle men.

They were said to have gone to many places here to fore unreachable, and some that were near unspeakable, traversing not only Space, but maybe even Time and Dimensions....

Many singularly valuable profound oddities were procured and sent back from its far travels, that is before such shipments ceased to return.

Many more small oddities of questionable value were also found and introduced into the Verse.

Give me an N? N!

Give me an I? I!

Give me a C? C!

Need I go on?

Yes, Nick was one such small oddity, or so he will claim if pressed, spindled or mutilated, if it is not just another Tall Tale. He does not react well, nor play nicely, when "The Owners" are mentioned in his presence.

Another is Nick's Grandfather, who he knew as "Grampa Reap", who if it can be believed is said to have claimed to have been a Civil War survivor. No, not a survivor of one of the Alliance's Civil Wars. He is referring to Old Earths War of Northern Oppression vs the Southron Environs.