A space ship tumbled through an asteroid field of New York, its insides reverberating from the loud music the three young people were intent on listening - despite the fact it made a normal conversation nigh impossible.
“Dude, he’s calling, turn the volume down!”
“Co-driver, you’ve heard our passenger, do eet!” bellowed the pilot and himself reached for the volume button.
It was an old ship, still utilising now not so common music storage formats, thus making them fiddle with various storage discs of variably poor quality.
“Yes. We’re going to - I can’t hear you - yes! YES! To Newark Station! NE-WARK! We have one more seat free.”
“No we don’t!”
“Shut it, you’re the fucking co-pilot, you mess around with temperature settings, fucker!”
“Come on guys, I’m trying to fly here, don’t make me kick ya both out. Give me that!”
Outside yet another asteroid bolted past the window, glancing the Starflyers’s rudimentary shielding while the comm device was being passed forward.
“I’m the fucker, don’t sweat it. Yeah, we have TWO seats free but you seemed too busy hitting on… No, he’s just drunk as always and –“
“I’m not drunk, I’m on cardamine man!”
The pilot let out a sigh of intensity only matched by the noise an exhaling whale can produce, before he hurled a heavy space-glove at the unsuspecting passenger’s face.
“Ethanol is not cardamine and your girlfriend is not sitting here. Oh, he just hung up.”
“Yeah, Pelham, you’re just as alone as an asteroid is in Manhattan’s orbit.”
The comm device made another ceremonious journey to the back seat again, now accompanied by the engine’s soft hum. A few seconds later the tiny bubble of air once again played the role of a bridge between some dead musicians’ vision and the brains of the three. Brainwaves to airwaves and back to brainwaves, so went the transfer of things between human beings. Primitive.
Not overly large, but neither overly small, a space rock smashed through the feeble shielding with terrifying ease, utterly obliterating the fragile husk, scattering its content across the vast emptiness of space. A beam of light reflected from the planet below would let the non-existent eyes of an immaterial observer see a pink puff of crystals – all that was left from the three young men - and an imaginary female.
There, on a crowded planet where the party had ended, I stood enshrouded in a mist of alcohol and gloom; sad for they didn't care to fly me home.
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