Why Didn’t You Think of that Before We Left?

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We had already been in trouble for a couple of weeks before we realized it. We were up to about 90 percent of light-speed by then, coasting along toward Alpha Centauri in our skeletal framework of a starship and feeling pretty smug about life.

Well, OK, not “life,” since all three of us had traded in our bodies to become standing waves in Tilbey’s experimental mass eliminator, but we were feeling pretty smug all the same. We had outsmarted the UNASA bureaucrats who had tried to confiscate our starship once we’d proven the technology, and whether they liked it or not we were going to be humanity’s first emissaries to the stars. We’d worked for it, we’d lived for it, we’d died for it, and by god the honor was going to be ours.

Or so we thought, right up until the moment Tilbey began singing old Necrotic Nuisance songs in squeaky falsetto.

We were in the “day room,” which was really just the payload housing for the original Orion class cargo rocket we’d cannibalized to make our starship, the Spook. Since we were the payload on this flight, we figured using that for our living space would be appropriate. We’d put our book readers and video displays in there, and cut windows in the walls so we could see out, but we hadn’t bothered to glass them in and pressurize the space since we didn’t need to breathe anymore. That meant Tilbey’s song came directly through the mass eliminator interface, straight into our holographically stored minds.

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