Dandelion Studios

Rick Silva’s short story, “Mass” appears in the Space Tramps anthology, part of the Full Throttle Space Tales series from Flying Pen Press.

Here’s an excerpt:

Daimyo reached for the handle over his slab, but it was gone. The handles and handrails had been scaved years ago. The bolts were filed down to a mirror shine, little dots in the gray composite that reflected Daimyo’s dark eyes as he hauled himself up to look at the spots like they were some mystery.
He needed to piss.

“Oh hey. You’re not dead.” The kid was skinny and pimply and bored. He sat on a thick composite pipe that ran along the hall outside of Daimyo’s bedslab and when Daimyo managed a few muttered curses in reply, the kid just went back to playing with his phone.

Daimyo found the piss-hole, slapped the ID panel and opened the floodgates. Even with the stim slowing his metabolics to damn-near-dead, six weeks of piss was a decent amount of mass.

Not decent enough. Daimyo caught a glimpse of his mass debt status when it flashed on the screen. Less than a day to report in. He thought back, trying to find the exact sequence of events he’d planned out. A week or two in dreamstim, then get his affairs in order. That might be a day or two. Then go out quiet and dignified.

Affairs in order. That was a good one. Daimyo didn’t exactly have a lot of affairs, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. He had friends he wanted to say goodbye to, and scavs could be hard to locate lately. Daimyo had been there when they’d cleared the last cargo bay for mass and after that everyone started getting territorial and wandering further out into the empty halls. He didn’t even know where to find half of his friends, and nobody was public with their locations anymore.

Daimyo looked up. The kid was still there.

“Here.” The kid held out a food block. His eyes never left his touchscreen.

Daimyo took it and turned it over slowly. He thought about just forcing it down his throat unflavored. It was nice of the kid to share and Daimyo didn’t want to ask something more of him. But an unflavored food block was a bit too real following the best dreamstim ever, even if Daimyo could barely remember it.

There was a girl. He was pretty sure there was a girl. There usually was.