Captain Lawg stared down a milar pouch of food rations as if someone was going to blink first and lose a bet. He slowly moved it towards his mouth as the crew leaned in close to see if he would die. He bit into the soft, almost tender rubbery substance that its packagers had molded into a moist bar before pressure sealing it. He took a bite as Duffy gasped slightly.

  "Sorry." she whispered. Lawg took the bite, chewed twice, paused, chewed again as he made a face of utter confusion.

  "Any good?" asked Marley.

  "kinda tastes like tuna fish, but…more of a dessert fish?" he said suppressing his gag reflex and refusing to swallow.

  "Oh god, that's horrible." gasped Duffy.

  "I can't decide where this was intended to be food. It does have food in it, of some merit. The combination suggests human minds were not the ones designing this." Lawg said as he decided weather starvation or desert-fish was preferable and he didn’t seem set on either.

  "I'll try mine." Duffy said opening her can and dipping the fork in. "Oh yea, that is cat food…super sure that's cat food." she said tasting it. "You wanna trade?" she asked Lawg, who mulled it over for a few seconds and wasn’t really sure.

  "What kind of cat-food?" he asked. Marley opened his rations with a vacuum-sealed hiss.

  "Gross, I got beef-" he said barely getting the F sound out before Lawg and Duffy tackled him, hollering out various forms of threats and choice words. They crawled frantically away with their halves as Marley peeled himself off the floor. "Yea thanks, didn’t want that anyway, so I'll take the dessert fish I guess. That's the closest to not-meat so far. So Menace…what did you get?" he asked. He looked over and she was roughly chewing the milar pouch to bits, spitting out the crinkled parts as she horked down the edible contents.

  "They world may never know." Lawg nodded. "How's your nuts?" he asked Vee, who was sitting calmly.

  "Inefficient, but tolerable." she replied, spitting out a shiny steel nut and popping a rusty one in her mouth.

  "So you only eat rust. Bet that get's boring." Marley said striking up conversation.

  "I think technically she just eats the iron, the bugs breathe by chewing rust and separating the oxygen from the iron." Duffy informed. Everyone looked surprised. "What?" I read!" she objected.

  "Too bad we have taste buds." sighed Lawg. "Welp…that's the food rations from that haul. Did we get anything of usefulness?" he added as Marley flipped through the inventory sheet.

  "2 EVA suits, pretty basic fit's anyone type. Couple of crates of Brandy, 4 bottles of something called Soy Milk, and a left tennis shoe."

  "Well at least you all will live on in my memory." Lawg said solemnly as he grabbed a bottle and shuffled to the cargo bay.

  "Lucky." chuckled Marley.

  "Shoe." nodded Menace.

  Marley finished dragging out the last crate as Duffy welded up the damaged bulkhead.

  "Well, we don’t have Light-speed, but we have thrusters, and with any luck someone will pick up the SOS transponder.

  "Guess we just wait…conserve resources." He sighed. Duffy finished her arc and smacked the pipe to make sure it was solid.

  "Hand me another rod." she asked.

  "You ever notice how every planet and species has alcohol?" Marley noted.

  "Because there is a demand for it." Duffy snickered.

  "No, not recently, like imported goods, culturally…originally."

  "Not following." Duffy said finishing her weld.

  "Like you discover a totally new world with aliens on it…always some kind of alcohol and usually just slightly different than Earth-booze. Go to Pandora…Pandoran Ale, Pandoran whiskey. Go to Rigel, Rigellian wine and Rigellian brandy. It's never like battery acid or bio-sludge either, it's always totally drinkable and harmless. Same with coffee. Go halfway across the universe to Blargsnort 33, pretty good chance they have Blargsnortian Cappuccino. Makes no sense." he noted.

  "Gotta drink something." Duffy said looking for cracks in the pipes.

  "Yea but we're talking about aliens with biology so different they may not even have skin or bones, let alone a liver and biology that can consume alcohol…hell even some Earth animals find coffee or alcohol toxic. It's never pulpified spine paste or something you snort or suck up with your tentacle pores…its always just beverages. Look at Venox. Venoxians don’t even have faces, or mouths, or stomachs…but they got Venoxian Ale and Vexoxian Spice Lattes. Kinda convenient if you think about it… unrealistically so. Basically anything alien should be lethally toxic at best and yet here we are. And what's with the names? Why Delmarian soda? We grew up with it, so why wouldn’t it just be "soda" for us?" he asked. She lifted her welding helmet and stared blankly.

  "That's a very good point. If some uncharted world had something close enough to coffee to be coffee…they'd just call it coffee, but nobody does that, nobody calls their coffee Bon-Smurge or something totally alien. And they never call human coffee "Earth-Bon-Smurge". It's like the humans just claimed everything and got a monopoly on names and everyone just went with it. How is nobody suing us?" She asked.

  "I dunno. Space is weird. Look at the gravity plating."

  "You cant, it's under the plywood flooring." she joked.

  "I mean think about it, not literally… shut up. But every space station and habitable world is like exactly 1G of gravity, plus or minus 6 percent. You never step onto a space station and get mashed flat because the aliens who built it live on a huge-ass planet with 5 G's. Again…it's like humans designed everything." Marley complained.

  "Maybe they did. Maybe God is human." she said looking ominous.

  "Don’t do that to me, you know I get freaked out when you do the crazy eyes and make disturbing observations." he warned, puffing his ears out.

  "It's aaaaall just cardboard and plaster, noooothing is real. We're all floating in a giant stage as entertainment for some enooooormous alien species." she said sounding spooky and waving her hands.

  "Not looking at you with those crazy eyes, Duff." he said turning as she tried to circle him. Lawg walked into the cargo bay.

  "Knock off the grab-ass, we got a mission to do." he said with a stern adventurousness.

  A ship, rescue or food supplies?" asked Marley perking up.

  "Even better." Lawg smiled. Duffy cut in.

  "Oh, no. I hate it when you get that look. It's something stupid that isn't remotely better than food or a rescue ship, is it?"

  Duffy shook her head.

  "We're gonna die." she muttered.

  "It’s a DUUNE Buggy!" Lawg hollered with excitement.

  "Good thing space is mostly sand." Marley said dryly.

  "You know what this thing does?" he asked cheerfully.

  "Buggies across dunes?" Marley asked.

  "No!" he scoffed…"Yes, yes it does." he corrected. "Lucky guess. These are the best desert speed vehicles that ever existed. Nothing get's around sandy terrain like these bad boys."

  "What about anything with hover pads, or a helicopter, or a giant saddle on a sand-worm?" Marley asked.

  "Naw, this is way better. It's got a tape-deck." he bragged.

  "We have a tape-deck."

  "Not a deck held together with tape, Mar. A tape-player."

  "Wouldn’t a tape player be ruined within minutes of a dusty environment? I mean, tape decks don’t even last very long in space, they break, there's no way to repair them, they get stretched and then everyone sounds like a Roman god. Tapes are a terrible form of media, especially in space." Marley noted.

  "They're popular among bounty hunters, I hear." Lawg defended.

  "Just that one that crappy one that got turned into sand. Pretty ironic. Besides, we have space-technology. It's so easy to just extract the data to a computer and then play the computer files. They don’t degrade, there's no physical tape to wind, and you can make copies as backups. Any idiot could at least copy the tape in case the old tape broke, so you don’t have the only version in existence of that entire collection. Even you could copy that off with the computer." Marley boasted.

  "It's not that simple, we don't have the recording deck!" Lawg barked.

  "Computer…" Marley said. "Scan this cassette and copy media to the ship's music folder." he said holding it out. A laser beam slowly panned over the tape and the coms beeped pleasantly.

  "Medium scanned." the computer noted. Lawg looked shocked.

  "Wow…when did the ship get voice control?" he asked to himself.

  "Standard from the manufacturer, bout 64 years ago." Duffy noted.

  "Why didn’t I know this?" he asked.

  "We assumed you knew." Marley shrugged. Vee suddenly switched her vocal implants to the com systems.

  "Attention Crew, We have detected a habitable planet within fuel-range. I suggest we make a landing."

  "For a bug, she does have a very sexy voice. Any life signs?" Lawg asked.

  "Scanners cannot penetrate the dense cloud cover. There are EM waves that suggest at least radio-type basic technology actively in use.

  "What if someone just left the radio on?" Lawg suggested.

  "Pretty sure if there is a radio left on that someone is still alive on the planet. Those things generally burn out after a week or so or continuous use." said Mar.

  "Could be a trap." He muttered to himself.

  "Why? Why lure people to the middle of nowhere with a discreet radio signal? That's just paranoia. Its far more likely there is an isolated civilization down there with radio technology." Duffy suggested.

  "Then we shall be the first to welcome them to…ourselves." Lawg said taking the helm. "Hey look…a greeting satellite." he smiled. "It looks friendly." He added.

  The SS-Taste-E-Sneaky-Chilly-Bastard rolled left after a single hit from the friendly defense satellite. The hovering death-satellite gave them another shot from the energy weapons to send them down into the atmosphere, dead-stick. The thick atmosphere glowed with the strange kind of fire that burns in a zero-G vacuum for mysterious sciency reasons. Vee took the help and calmly scanned the ships sensors with her bio-mech implants.

  "Cardboard fires on B-deck, engines out, structural integrity tape, flexing."

  "Thank fart it's felxi-tape." Mar sighed.

  "Fuel leaks in primary pipes." Vee finished.

  "Pull out." Lawg ordered with a snicker. "And also…that's what she said." he added.

  "Really?" asked a rhetorically disappointed Duffy.

  "Unable to pull up trajectory, glide-landing suggested.

  "Do that thing!" Lawg pointed as the ship shuttered.

  "Glide-landing the ship. Maneuvering ship into atmosph-" Vee started as a laser blast shook the ship. "Correction, recalculating: Crashing ship into atmosphere"

  "Thank you for that specification, Vee, I was concerned for a moment that we might actually have steering." Lawg scolded.

  "Your concern should be elevated." she said, pessimistically optimistic.

  "…Alleviated because we can land or alleviated sarcastically because we have no steering?" Lawg asked in a confused tone.

  "You should refrain from circular discussions. We have no steering. We are gliding without the ability to correct, we have no way of reducing to landing speed before reaching the ground." She specified.

  "Sir?" asked Duffy.

  "Yes Duffy." he nodded.

  "I want you to know before we die that this ship and most of the crew are like my family and those implied mean a lot to me. I love the majority of you. I won't say which ones." she said

  "Very touching, but this is no time to be touched. I vowed to never let this ship be destroyed as long as I am captain. Having said that…Vee…I hereby make you acting Captain of the Taste-E-Bastard or whatever it's called, under the assumption we survive, I relieve you of command…unless I die and you don’t, in which case it's your ship." he said proudly.

  "Understood, Acting Captain Vee assuming responsibility."

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "Hey!" hollered Marley, offended that she gets to be captain. "Lawg…not cool. We're gonna die, so why can't I be Captain for like 30 seconds?"

  "Legal issues, and I don’t want everyone for the remaining 30 seconds of life to be arguing about fairness. She's practically a robot so everyone gets equally gypped, and she doesn’t feel rewarded." he shrugged.

  "That's actually fair…and I hate you." Marley nodded.

  "Wow…" Duffy sighed. "This is taking a really long time to crash. Must be a super thick atmosphere."

  "Oh yea, it’s a biggun." Lawg assured. "We have like…1 and a half monologues before hitting ground."

  "At least we get to have 1.5 last pointless conversations." Marley said positively.

  "Yea that's cool. Anyone got anything to say be fore we all die to death together as equals and Captain Vee?" Lawg asked.

  "I regret everything." Duffy admitted.

  "Yea I can respect that." Lawg nodded. Marley teared up.

  "I'm super terrified and not in a normal way but a void of masculinity pansy way with no dignity." Marley admitted.

  "Orange!" Announced Menace, hugging Marley and then bracing herself for all the deaths about to get done.

  "Permission to die naked and comfortable?' Asked Duffy.

  "Permission…Denied." Lawg squinted, bravely placing his boot on the dashboard.

  "Permission to shit-pants?" Marley asked as the ground became visible and approaching fastly.

  "Permission…Granted." He squinted further as he stood tall and saluted the windshield.

  Duffy sat in the sand and shook her head as Lawg tried to start the Dune-Buggy's engine.

  "Unbelievable. He's dumb enough to get shot down by a defense satellite, but lucky enough to crash it on a dessert planet after randomly finding a functional Dune Buggy."

  "You people need to remind me that the Sneaky Bastard can't land itself." he hollered, kicking the tires.

  "Lawg, we put a piece of paper on the steering wheel that says "Do not attempt to re-enter atmosphere." in red marker. We have a shuttle craft for a reason, the Taste-E-Chill's engines are not designed to lift-off and only land as a glider in emergency situations. We've been through this like 4 times." Duffy complained.

  "Well…it was an emergency." he defended. "We were on fire."

  "Only because you dove into the atmosphere of a planet after pissing off a defense satellite!" She replied. "And there is no way that old combustion engine is going-" she was interrupted by the gas engine roaring to life and Earth rock-music blaring through the tape deck. She tossed her hands up as the Buggy roared past her and a triumphant dipshit sang out of key to a conveniently functional music player.

  "He really is the luckiest thing in the universe." Marley said casually getting up.

  "TAKIN CARE OF BIIIIIZNESS!!! WHOOOO000ooo!" Lawg wailed as the Buggy whizzed by in a Tokyo-style drift.

  "Maybe if we run him through some form of juicer, the liquids may have extractable luck we can all share." she pondered.

  "I refuse to drink anything squeezed out of another creature, that's just disgusting." he said sipping his milk from a straw as a sudden wind rushed past them and the dune buggy rolled to a stop.

  "What's happening? Sand storm?" Lawg asked.

  "Try looking up." Marley sighed. Lawg looked up at the massive hovering ship that was lowering a large wooden stick with magnets on it.

  "It's like some kind of lifting beam. They're beaming us up!" Lawg yelped.

  They sat sadly in a dark prison cell as Marley stared at Lawg angrily.

  "Told you hovercraft beats dune buggy." Marley scolded as Lawg attempted to break down the door.

  "Robots. Planet of robots. Good luck finding any food here." he said kicking the door just to try it out.

  "Relax Lawg, if they intended to kill us they would have just done it. It's probably a decontamination thing or a holding cell to determine if we are hostile.

  "What if they are going to stick wires in our heads and use us as batteries?" he gasped.

  "First off…we have fusion technology. That's basically infinite free energy for any civilization with advanced AI, secondly, a human would make a terrible battery. All humanoids waste most of their energy and the heat produced is pretty inefficient…Now data storage, that would make sense." he said making Lawg even more freaked out.

  "Imagine the processing power if they could unlock the 90 percent of our brains we never used. We could become gods." he gasped.

  "That's a myth. humanoids don’t just only use 10 percent of their brains. You specifically might, obviously being the exception. They just don’t use the whole thing all at once for everything. That's like saying we only use ten percent of our ship because every room isn't always occupied. People move around and some rooms get left unused for a while. Moreover, if you could use the other 90 percent of your brain you'd just be a regular person."

  "Hey…I assume that's an insult." he snipped. The room scene-changed to a similar empty room with 2 chairs and no windows, this time with Duffy and Menace occupying it.

  "So…we don’t get to talk much, do we?" asked Duffy. "You are always so quiet on the ship when you're not yelling random words, but you seem pretty happy. I know your species is intelligent but there seems to be a language barrier. If we're gonna die, I'd really like to know you a little better…so what motivates you, what makes you tick?" she asked. Menace smiled and placed a cockroach on the table.

  "These… are… crunchy." she said in a monotone voice.

  "I wonder how the guys are holding out." she sighed.

  "Let me out, please don’t eat my brains!" Lawg wailed pounding on the door.

  "They're not zombies, they're robots and you wouldn’t even make a snack for one anyway."

  "I thought you said they would take our brains."

  "Hypothetically, for computer processors, not food." He scoffed.

  "HEEEELP!!!" Lawg pounded.

  Vee sat alone in a room, hands on her thighs and staring blankly forward like a mannequin. She didn’t even blink for a good 40 seconds. The door opened and a small white robot hovered in, dragging Marley and Duffy. Another came in dragging Lawg and Menace. They were tossed into the holding room as the robots hovered out without an explanation.

  "I wanna speak to a lawyer! I have been violated and my rights abused. I demand a full spread of apology snacks and a masseuse to fix the crick in my neck I got from being tossed in another room." Lawg hollered. There was silence. He shrugged. "Worth a try I guess. So is anyone dead or crippled? They torture or probe ya?" he asked taking a seat on the cold metal bench.

  "No. They just chucked me in some rooms and scanned me with an overhead laser." Marley shrugged. "Bout 3 times."

  "SCREWDRIVER!" smiled Menace like a kid just off a carnival ride, hopping and clapping.

  "Anyone find anything identifiable? Alien writing, number codes on the rooms, specific materials indicative to some specific species?" Duffy asked. Lawg cringed.

  "I don’t know what indicative means but I don’t like it." he squinted.

  "Robots looked like Pineapple brand products." Marley shrugged. "What? They do!" he defended from the odd looks.

  "The company that runs the Pineapple Syndicate?" asked Duffy. "Don’t they just make laptops and overpriced earphones?"

  "Yea but did you see the little floaty-bots? Surgically clean, everything pleasantly rounded and sleak, one button on the back, friendly eyebrows on the face-screens?" he said cluing them in.

  "Oh come on, that has to be coincidence, someone just ripped off a Pineapple brand theme. Why would a computer company pushing environmental friendly hipster products want to abduct a bunch of space-losers?" She scoffed. Lawgs eyes got big.

  "I did use a pirated operating system on the GPS…and we do run a really dirty exhaust filter." he said alarmingly. Duffy punched his arm and rolled her eyes.

  "They don’t have a copyright on sleek, white, surgically clean products. Anyone can design a robot that looks like a floating mouse or Pi-pad."

  Vee waited patiently for her opening before chiming in.

  "She is correct. The hoverbots are Apexian. They have an indium-iridium content in their paint gloss that is only used by the Apexians." she said calmly.

  "It’s the Remnants of the Apex" Marley gasped.

  "What is that supposed to be?" asked Duffy. Lawg eyes got big as Marley explained.

  "The Apex was a giant space cruiser that held an entire civilization after their planet was made uninhabitable by pollution and trash. It was supposed to be fixed by automated drones so they could return again but it took dozens of times longer than planned to render useable soil. They did return, but by then their civilization was a bunch of lard-asses who couldn’t even roll their lard-asses in and out of bed without assistance."

  "If they returned…why is the ship smashed and ripped apart?" asked Duffy.

  "Isn't it obvious?" Marley asked. She didn’t think so. "They could barely even move, let alone farm and hunt. Returning after they all turned to lard-balls was basically suicide." Marley explained.

  "What about the ship's automated stuff? Wouldn’t it be there to help them?" She asked.

  "The Computer AI was damaged and no landing pads were built, so the Apex just kinda dove nose-first into the ground. The Inhabitants probably survived the crash purely from fat-padding. Hey, Vee…what would your expert opinion be for survivability?" he asked. Her eyes flickered as she processed the damage.

  "Casualties of landing, 5 percent. Resulting injuries from lack of medical robot assistance leading to death: 8 percent. Elemental exposure in the first week would likely claim another 15 percent. Food generators inoperable from damage resulting in vitamin deficiency and medical complications: 33 percent in the first 6 months. Lack of recyclable water would claim 12 percent in the first 2 weeks. Assuming any wildlife survived the uninhabitable land, predators would claim between 28 and 38 percent. That is 111 percent fatality, meaning the planet is 11 percent additionally lethal than what is necessary to fully wipe out the population."

  "Wow, that's dark." Duffy sighed.

  "Oh yea, no way with a busted shelter, damaged systems, no infrastructure and a humanoid population unable to waddle let alone run from predators, is basically a death-sentence the moment they entered the atmosphere."

  "So Who built this whole structure?" Lawg asked.

  "Survival of the fittest…only robots capable of surviving without assistance: Survey drones. They were solar powered, self-repairing armed with enough firepower to level a city block." Marley explained.

  "But WHY?!" asked Duffy "Why would a survey bot even need weapons at all? Mining laser or excavation charges maybe, but not offensive weaponry." she said looking puzzled.

  "Nobody knows why, but they did…half a kiloton yield fusion rifles."

  "That's completely useless except to cause an accident, what if that thing went off inside the ship?" she asked.

  "Oh, they did now and then. HUGE damage. Those Drones were so trigger happy a bumble-bee-fart would cause retaliation protocols. They were pretty much designed for paranoid world-killing missions. Some of them even wound up off-course and selling in the Delmarian black-market. Flying, intelligent tactical drones that can self-repair and probably self-replicate in the event of a major crash like the Apex. Those survey drones just apparently took over the planet after all the humanoid lard-balls were eaten by critters. Nature is scary, so are robots." Marley explained.

  "Why wouldn’t they just stay and protect the people?" asked Lawg.

  "They weren't designed to protect…just survey and kill shit. Survey bots just scan and move-on unless something moves and needs blown up. They likely got the hell out minutes after the SS Cheese-puff popped on landing and all the little cheese puff people were devoured by wolves. Wolves probably loved it. 600 pounds of immobile rolling fat that can't even run away or reach their asses. Fish-in-a-barrel situation." Marley shrugged.

  "FISH!" announced Menace, salivating

  "So the death-bots surveyed the whole planet and took over, killed the wildlife and built more killbots?" asked Duffy.

  "Seems that way." Marley pointed out. "They probably haven't seen organic life in ages, I mean that story was supposed to be hundreds of years ago. It's no wonder they abducted us to study, something still in their program, buried away under generations of updates is the protocol to find signs of life on this planet and preserve it."

  "Awesome!" Lawg whispered as he fist pumped the air

  "No, not awesome, why awesome?" Duffy asked.

  "They haven't seen humanoids in centuries, we're basically gods to them!" he smiled.

  "That's not remotely what that means. We're probably more like valuable resources to store and preserve. They may never let us leave this room, or they may just wait till we die and taxidermy us for display. They may be shipping us back to some mainframe to scan like some plant sample and we could end up in a receptacle or trash bin. None of this ends with us being gods, Lawg." Marley yelled.

  "Oh right, those are all not cool." he said getting up and heading to the door, pounding on it.

  "Can the precious resources get some refreshments? Maybe some string cheese or a spiked Shasta?" He hollered as Marley facepalmed. A solitary robot entered the room and hovered blankly.

  "You are free to go…organic life. Enjoy your new home." it said robotically, displaying a happy face on screen.

  "Oh that's kinda nice." Lawg smiled.

  "We're basically slaves Lawg." Marley reminded.

  "Oh that's bullshit." He corrected. They headed down the hallway and suddenly Marley made a mad dash to the left and everyone followed.

  He dodged a few laser blasts before opening the door panel to the ship hangar.

  "Hurry up dumbasses, I have a plan." he yelled as they followed and the door closed behind them. Marley yanked a wire and the robots stopped on the other side of the door, confused and silent as they headed for the ship.

  "The hell was that?" asked Duffy.

  "I ripped out the adapter, they can't open the door."

  "They need an adapter to open a door?" she asked.

  "Yep." he nodded.

  "That makes no sense, why would they need an adapter to access a panel they created, wouldn’t they plug directly into the damn panel?" she asked.

  "You'd think, right? I noticed the plugs they used and realized why they look so much like Pineapple brand computers…they ARE pineapple brand computers. It's obvious, why not make your entire ship's software at the same company that makes all of your daily life products?"

  "Okay…but why develop a door lock that needs an adapter instead of just having a direct jack on the door?"

  "I dunno…why make a new phone without a headphone jack and require an adapter plug to plug the standard headphones into so you have to carry around a little adapter with you? I don’t design this crap, I just exploit the loopholes for personal gain." he said breaking the adapter and throwing half down the hallway, the other half down an air vent as they approached the ship.

  "So how do we get out of the atmosphere without getting shot down?" Lawg asked.

  "I dunno, I've been winging it up to now." Marley admitted.

  "You said you had a plan!"

  "I never said it was a good plan, just slightly better than dying right now…winging it is technically a plan if you think about winging it before you wing it."

  "You suck." Lawg barked.

  Marley lagged behind as they got on the ship and powered systems up.

  "This is dumb, they'll never let us leave the hangar!" Duffy yelled.

  "That's why I got this." he smiled, pulling out a jump-drive.

  "That's my…special mission files." Lawg objected.

  "It's totally porn, Lawg. We know it's porn. Point is, that porn is full of viruses and this entire planet runs on electronic systems. The only thing that can disable Pineapple operating systems is a porn-virus." he said jamming it in the door receptacle. The lights flickered and the system rebooted harshly, doors unlocking.

  "Good lord, Lawg." sighed Duffy. "How corrupt is your porn?" she shamed.

  The ship drifted leisurely through space with the repairs almost finished and the lettering just getting fixed, so it read "TASTE-E-CHeaky Bastard". Duffy took a break to get more spray-paint as Marley chilled out with a Daiquiri and Lawg finished cutting the sandwiches into little triangles.

  "Fun day." Marley yawned.

  "Yea it wasn’t too bad actually. Got beaten up a little but I got to play with a real Dune Buggy and got some cool new tunes on my new tape player. Translator isn't working on this one though, every time I scan it just calls it "Foreigner". Like I don’t already know it's foreign already." Lawg scoffed.

  Yep…good thing Pineapple robots are so rare that nobody makes viruses for them…makes it super easy to hack one when you need to." He said, grabbing a wedge.

  "Luck of the Chaffee, my friend."

  "Either that or the code writer got lazy and ran out of space, just threw in something convenient to move on, thinking nobody would notice."

  "Well you have to have consistent file sizes

  "Yea but that's just lazy. Couldn’t the program writers just go back and change something so it ends in a satisfying way instead of just code filler and then sudden ending? I mean it's that very kind of lazy corner cutting that ended this adventure the way it did." Marley pointed out in an obviously dramatic manor.

  "How so?" asked Lawg, sipping his beverage and watching the stars out the window, admiring the splendor of the universe and contemplating his place in it.

  "If some lazy code writer for the shuttle bay took the time to go back and fix an obvious problem, we'd be stuck in Pineapple headquarters awaiting execution. Instead we got off scott-free purely because someone half-assed their job. That's not so much luck as negligence and lack of caring. Think about how many things would work better if someone didn’t just give up and bury their lazy mistakes, go back and crop things for space instead of rushing an ending just because its 15 minutes after the dinner time and they wanted closure before their burrito." Marley suggested.

  "Oh come on…nobody is that indifferent that they would just cut something off mid thought like that..."