After two hours in line,
elbowing through long-haul truckers and space cowboys high on caffeine and regret,
they finally reached the drive-thru.
Blindy leaned out of the left side window so far
that a slightly stronger breeze would’ve peeled him off the ship like snot from an air vent.
A holographic squid-cashier boomed—
in that exact dead corporate tone rehearsed by millions of miserable souls before it:
“WELCOME TO MEAT & BONE™—
where everything that ever screamed is now sizzlin’!
Your order?”
Blindy drooled instantly.
“Two triple-fuck burgers…
No, three…
Hold up… FOUR!And a fatty flagnator cut… the one that boils your blood and kicks your skull so hard you start seeing gods…
And a Flamin’ Cola.
No, TWO.
Actually… ah screw it… FOUR.I wanna forget life.”
The hologram froze—
the kind of freeze suggesting it was silently filling out a liability waiver,
calculating the odds of customer death,
and wondering whether this counted as self-harm or just extreme stupidity.
And Blindy, poor fool, possibly didn’t know
— or maybe he DID know, who the hell can tell—
that Flamin’ Cola contains flagnator-spleen extract,
which causes violent hallucinations in humans…
…assuming the poor bastard survives the first tachycardia spike.
Finally the hologram beeped:
“Order received.
Caloric Level: SUICIDE+.
Warning: beverage may dissolve esophagus.
Thank you for choosing Meat & Bone™.”
Zeros stood beside him, motionless—
a monument to disappointment.
“Perfect,” he muttered.
“I was just about to order acetone…
to wipe off all the filth that accumulates from being near you.
Flamin’ Cola, acetone—same shit anyway.”
The bag slid out of the chute—
something inside twitched, hissed, and tried to bite the cashier’s hand,
but the squid calmly severed the tentacle with a barcode scanner.
Blindy was already deep-throating the first burger.
His face flushed, eyes glassy.
“Ohhhh fuuuuuck…
This… this is cosmic MAGIC…
I— I CAN SEE SPACE WAVES!
I UNDERSTAND GRAVITY!!”
Zeros enabled autopilot faster than he could say “idiot.”
He reached forward—CLICK!— flipped up a protective metal cover,
CLICK-CLICK-CLICK—activated three ancient toggles,
spun a brass wheel,
and slammed a button once labeled:
"AUTO-WHOOOOSH."[Blindy's handwriting. Crooked. Sticky. Slightly burnt]The ancient navigation panel flickered to life.
Old aviation-era bulbs glowed a sickly orange.
One bulb flashed like a dying restroom light:
“AUTOPILOT: ON”
Beside it, under a rattling metal lid,
a tiny split-flap display began flipping:
FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP…
And finally revealed:
MÜLLDEPONIE
Zeros nodded with mechanical satisfaction.
“Good. The ship flies itself now.
And you—
don’t touch a SINGLE button.”
Blindy raised both hands, licking the last scraps of alien meat off his lips.
“Aight-aight… I get it…
Still feels like an insult though…
One tiny, nervous moment later,
the Z-P-N-E-S popped out of hyperspace
and aligned itself with Mülldeponie,
fully prepared to perform a normal landing.
Well…
It should have performed a normal landing.
What it actually did was something else entirely.
The moment the ship dipped into the atmosphere,
the entire city of Dumsta howled with alarms
as if a vengeful god of chaos and poor engineering—