Cow Chronicles Part 9: Squids. In. Space

(Note: This story might not be as good as you think. It had a very troubled production, with me having a ton of work to do outside of my blog, along with rampant computer trouble.

Farmer Bob’s voice came from behind a stacked pile of tables. Farmer Joe watched in shock as Farmer Joe emerged. His face was twisted into a maniacal grin. The only times a person would make that face were if they were about to destroy their opponent in a game, or if they were a mad scientist bent on destroying the world.

“I’ve done my end of the bargain. Now you fulfill yours”, Bob Jenkins told Farmer Bob.

“What was it?”, Farmer Bob asked, producing a handgun from under his hat.

“You agreed that in turn for me bringing Farmer Joe here, you would have to eat nothing but Bob’s Pizza for the rest of your life”, Bob Jenkins told Farmer Joe.

“What?! Absolutely not!”, Farmer Bob shouted. “I hate pizza! Gimme something else to do!”

Bob Jenkin’s screen switched over to a loading bar. After several minutes of the same noises the computer had made when it had been turned on, the screen displayed a crude, pixelated bar graph.

“Sales have been in decline lately”, Bob Jenkins explained. “We tried to force our employees to eat nothing but Bob’s Pizza, but they went on strike”

“Can we go now?”, Inspector Zachary asked Farmer Bob, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “If you and that computer can’t agree on anything, I’m flying back to-”

Zach was interrupted by a gunshot slicing through the air. Everyone turned to Farmer Bob, calmly putting the handgun under his hat. On the ground next to him, Bob Jenkins’ monitor lay, a heap of wires, plastic, and glass.

The butler was horrified. “You killed our leader!”, he shouted at Farmer Bob. “I shall inform the police of this, and you will be put to death!”

“I killed his monitor”, Farmer Bob told the butler. “You can just hook up another one”

“No we can’t!”, the butler told Farmer Bob. “The computer he’s in only works with that particular type of monitor. And it was the last of it’s model, so we can’t just buy a new computer”, he said as he pressed a button on the computer. A floppy disk slid out of a slot, labeled “B.J.” He slid the disk into his pocket.

Zach pulled a combat knife from one of the pockets in his trench coat, and held it to Farmer Joe’s neck. “I saw a pizza delivery ship parked in one of the rooms here. Let’s just go”

Zach and Farmer Joe walked through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was a large garage, holding three small space capsules bedecked in neon-orange paint. BOB’S PIZZA: DELIVERY FROM SPACE was stenciled on the sides of each capsule.

“I found a ring of keys on Jenkins’ desk”, Zach explained. “That computer’s not right in the CPU, or whatever, and I wanted a way to escape”, he said as he unlocked the capsule and helped Farmer Joe into it.

The capsule was small and cramped, with a single seat taking up two-thirds of the tiny cockpit. The other third was taken up by a fold-out table, covered with old newspapers and magazines. Zach brushed these off, and folded away the table.

“You’ll have to sit in there”, Zach said, pointing to the space behind the pilot’s seat.

Farmer Joe begrudgingly took a seat in that tiny crevasse. The space was so small that he had to rest his legs on the wall. It was going to be a long trip.

“Would you like to hear about the workings of this capsule?”, Zach asked Farmer Joe.

“No”, Farmer Joe grumbled as he tried to find the most comfortable space to sit.

“Well, too bad”, Zach said. “You’re my prisoner, and you have the right to remain silent while I tell my story. You see, this capsule was originally developed by NASA in 1996. The Poseidon-2 Space Capsule was designed for short travels between low Earth orbit, and the planet itself. You put in coordinates, and the Poseidon-2 uses its thrusters to put itself into an orbit that will eventually bring it over your desired location, and send you down. The genius behind such a marvelous innovation was-”

Whenever Farmer Joe was bored of hearing a person talk, he imagined himself tuning a dial, as if his mind was an old TV, and simply sifted through his thoughts.
He did this now, as Zach worked the capsule, while going into excruciating detail about how NASA had been divided over how many cupholders the Poseidon-2 should have.

“WHAT THE @*#$?!”, Zach suddenly exclaimed. Farmer Joe, who had been trying to get to sleep on a makeshift bed of newspapers and magazines, jumped awake.

Farmer Joe looked out of the canopy. What he saw made his blood run cold.

The spaceship had positioned itself over the International Space Station, dwarfing it like a condor next to a fly. The ship was a deep, gunmetal shade of orange, with ports glowing a brilliant white. At the end of the streamlined body were eight monstrous, mechanical tentacles, each of them flailing through space, making the squid-shaped spaceship look like it was swimming through the cosmos.

On the deck of the U.S.S. Squid, Squid Guy Bob gazed out over the murky, blue sphere that he had been told by Farmer Bob was Farmer Joe’s home planet.

“Such pathetic defenses”, he murmured as his crew members typed away at a large computer bank on a deck below him. The Squid was armed with a massive laser cannon, which could shoot to any interstellar coordinate in a 100 light-year radius. It was the first and only of its kind, and Squid Guy Bob’s prize possession. As of now, it was being used to destroy the tiny, bird-like spaceship below them. Squid Guy Bob ran to an orange, tram-like vehicle that he used to travel back and forth between the sections of the ship.

The tram quietly hummed along down the length of the ship. Inside the gunmetal orange hull was a seemingly endless row of massive grey domes. Inside each dome was a particular squad of employees, each squad with a purpose to keep the ship running. For example, the dome Squid Guy Bob’s tram was just passing was Molecular Formation, who was assigned with converting the ship’s hydrogen and oxygen reserves into the water and air needed to survive, and the one ahead was DNA Manipulation, where people who had a natural tendency towards dissent and rebellion had their DNA modified to remove those traits.
Squid Guy Bob kept all squads completely separate from each other, as he felt it improved worker morale. If the charts coming out of Statistics were correct, it did.

The tram slowed to a stop outside Dome 46: Camera Surveillance. Squid Guy Bob walked up to a metal door barring people from the domes contents. He rummaged through a satchel, and pulled out a disembodied squid tentacle. He pressed it into a scanner, which scanned every last atom of the tentacle, checking if it was indeed, a squid tentacle. It was.

The Camera Surveillance area was one of the strangest sights on the Squid. The members of the staff stood on platforms, surrounded by a rotating globe of screens suspended off the ground by antigrav projectors, each displaying a view from one of the hundreds of cameras placed throughout the ship. Observing it all was one of the most revolting creatures in the universe.

The mottled squid-skin was sloppily stretched across the humanoid figure, being stretched so thin in some areas that it was almost transparent, while in some areas there was so much of it that it hung limp in baggy folds. Where the arms should have been, long, slimy tentacle-arms hung to the floor, covering the floor in pools of slimy goop that smelled like a mixture of Sharpie and roadkill. The thing had no real legs, only shriveled stumps that ended in skeletal, titanium legs that looked like they had been taken from a metal dinosaur skeleton. Strapped to a lump on the top of the creature’s torso which appeared to be a head was a pair of binoculars, behind which were two camera lenses, which penetrated Squid Guy Bob with their soulless, unblinking stare.

A chill ran down Squid Guy Bob’s spine. The real reason he kept the teams of his crewmembers separate was that looking at just one of them made him scared.

“So. . .”, he stuttered, trying to find something to look at other than the monstrous squid-thing who seemed to fill his field of vision wherever he looked. “. . .would you mind if. . .uh, you could switch on that. . .that...thing that, uh, can make you see stuff that isn’t there. . .a camera! Yeah, could you switch on the camera that shows the laser?”

The squid-thing lurched over to a terminal, which had a screensaver that showed live feeds of the squid-things who watched the cameras. As horrendous as the squid-things looked alone, their scariness was increased tenfold when they moved. Their choppy, stuttery stumble, during which their tentacles flopped around, dribbling slime everywhere, made bile rise in Squid Guy Bob’s throat. He looked over at a beautifully painted picture of abstract art. He kept paintings in every room of the ship, as to give his eyes a rest from looking at his henchsquids.
The tentacle skittered around the keyboard, somehow inputting the correct serial number of the camera. A monitor floated out of a slot in the ceiling, descending down to Squid Guy Bob’s eye level. The monitor jumped to life, showing a view of the Earth space station that Squid Guy Bob guessed was the command center of the planets space army, as it was the largest object they had seen orbiting the planet.

“What are you waiting for?!”, he suddenly barked into his clip-on microphone. “Fire the thing already!” He couldn’t wait to step onto Earth. After ages spent with nobody but his henchsquids, a tax had been placed on Squid Guy Bob’s sanity.

So great was the power of the Squids laser, and so puny and pathetic was the space station, that not even any wreckage was seen. Squid Guy Bob thumbed away on a terminal below the screen. The terminals tiny screen showed a tracker of metals orbiting the planet. As he fine-tuned the lense, he saw a stream of titanium and steel particles slowly forming an all-but invisible ring around the planet.

“There. They’re dead. Can we go get the cows now?”, he mumbled into his mike.

A few miles away, a seventeen-year old pizza delivery spaceship was having its course changed.