Deep in a residential tower for the MUU (Ministry of Universe Upkeep), and deep in a broom closet, sat a small man. He was small in stature, he was small in mind. His moral compass had been stomped on by all those bigger than he, and his neck was sore from looking over his shoulder.

Not that anyone was actually out to get him, but his self-importance was out of whack and he believed himself to be a much more feared and wanted man than he was. No one on Lyme Node was after him in fact. No one on Towerscape (his missing home planet) was after him either. But he fancied that everyone wanted a piece of the infamous criminal mastermind Aye-Aye.

There was one being after him, but that being was somewhere in the vastness of space, and Aye hadn't heard any news about him in many many years. Perhaps referring to him as a "being" was a bit generous. It was his father, or rather a thing that once was his father.

To keep down the population on Towerscape, and to rid themselves of the weak and lame, it was a father's right to challenge his son to fight to the death as "rites-of-manhood". Aye's father was the famous robotics expert Mel-Aye, and Aye-Aye had been born into a no-win existence.

His father was not only a diabolical genius, but he had an army of nasty robots at his disposal. He was also revered by their society and was once seen as a hero of sorts. If Aye had survived the fight with his father and his insane murder robots, he would have definitely been killed by the people of his planet as some form of nationalistic revenge.

So before his rites-of-manhood amounted to certain death, he ran away.

In a way Aye-Aye had won. His father was shamed for allowing him to run away and he died off-planet, shunned, disgraced and alone.

Before he died though, he vowed he would find his son, painfully kill him and restore his honour and place in Towerscapian history. Death would not stop him.

So, he invented the perfect robotic killing machine and uploaded his consciousness into it before he passed away. As this new version of himself, "Mel Million Max" would hunt down Aye and kill him. Not so much of a being, as an electric ghost. An animated image of his own scowling, wrinkled head hovered above the body of the machine as a translucent bluish hologram. His own grumpy old voice was always on the ready to insult or say something old-man-racist. So much for nurture.

Aye had spent the years between Towerscape and this broom closet smuggling kitchenware, scamming the comatose, and drinking until he was almost blind. It was the drinking that landed him here on Lyme Node, working as a back-up assistant Flood Water Absorber.

Due to the planet's never-ending light drizzle of rain, mild flooding was an issue on Lyme Node and someone needed to back up the assistant to the person that cleaned it up when he, she or they got sick, vacationed or died of goddam boredom.

He literally woke up after a bender and had this job. He wasn't sure how or what he had slept with to get it. He considered himself lucky. A legitimate job for a Towerscapian, off of Towerscape, was hard to come by. Tophers (which is what they called themselves) had a reputation for being assholes and scoundrels. Their appearance, with long dark hair and small curled forehead horns often put people off. It was said that many millennia ago they crash landed on a pre-technology/mall earth and gave Earthlings all their silly devil myths.

His reasons for hiding in a broom closet had everything to do with a Squambogian Mantis Widow. After a vigorous, confusing and surprising night of drunken love making, he had sneaked out before she could bite off his head and lay eggs in his corpse. He had a feeling she'd be looking for him. She was not. Again, he really wasn't that important.

He'd come out when he got hungry.

When he eventually did get hungry, he poked his head out and looked down the long hallway that lead to his quarters. The door was open. He wasn't sure whether he could see Mantis movement from beyond the door.

He crept out and stepped over the body of the headless man who the Mantis had obviously used in his place. The body of the man rippled from within, filled with pulsating eggs. He stole the uniform and dragged the body to the trash shaft to fall to the incinerator. He wasn't ready to be a papa to insectoids. Not yet anyway.

The man's uniform was miraculously intact, and a Lyme Node militia uniform was a rare thing to come across. Dressed in that he would be a sex magnet on his next night at Ginny's Drunk Emporium.

His ex-lover was nowhere to be found.

Looking at himself in this stolen uniform in his mirror actually turned him on. He splashed his neck with mouthwash and grabbed the few tokens he had left and headed out. He was ready again, and not picky.

He got on the lift. What he referred to as "his building" was actually part of a network of towers. They were all connected as it wasn't a great idea to go outside on Lyme Node. Too much murder and damp.

Ginny's was on the two hundred and sixty-fourth floor, and only a short hour and forty-five-minute walk from his quarters. It was only four floors beneath a ship pad on the roof that used its loud music to cover up the sound of landing thrusters.

It was on the two hundred and sixty-third floor that the lift doors opened on a ship pilot and four guards walking a well-cuffed prisoner with a sack over his head. One of the guards entered a code into the elevator keypad cancelling out Aye's request to stop one floor up at Ginny's.

"There you are! You were supposed to report to Detention Holding, get the briefing and accompany us all the way up!" the pilot barked at Aye, or rather to Aye's uniform. Aye was instantly enamoured with her. Aye was instantly enamoured with everyone. "What happened to you? You look like you were beaten up by a Squambogian Mantis Widow," she inquired with a raised eyebrow.

"That is very specific," he slurred, not having completely sobered up in weeks.

"The claw marks on your face give it away. You need some bandage spray. Get some on the Shiv." she answered with her other eyebrow raised.

"The Shiv?"

"Yes. That's the ship we're using. I'm Stig, head pilot. Captain. Your boss. You were Captain Franchiser's co-pilot, weren't you? He spoke very highly of you."

"I-- Oh yes. That's me. He spoke very highly of you, too," he lied.

"Yes, well he was a good man. He will be missed."

"I miss him like crazy. Can't even sleep. He visits me in dreams. We have pastries."

The lift doors opened on the roof. There was a light drizzle because there was always a light drizzle. Aye was knee-deep in this now and if found out would be joining the prisoner, who was no doubt being dropped on the prison/P.O.W. moon of Tractos. Plus, perhaps this Captain Stig could be easily seduced and their trip back would be a memorably sexy experience.

Across the ship pad Aye was reminded again of why he hated the outdoors. Lyme Node was very much like Towerscape and Earth in this regard; there was very little outdoors left and that outdoors was very hostile and moist and filled with the smaller unsexy kind of insects.

He also noticed that the Shiv, a small craft he had never seen before, was oddly shaped and reminded him of a giant light bulb.

Once on the Shiv the guards dropped the prisoner off in a very heavily reinforced holding cell and one of them, with a wink, spritzed bandage spray on Aye's face, stopping any additional blood or bits of flesh from soiling his stolen uniform. Aye was enamoured with the guard.

~~~

If you have ever been in a spaceship, simply puttering around in space, you may have noticed that the windows don't open. If you feel a tad stuffy, you can't roll one down to simply "air out the place". If you wanted to climb out a window, onto a ledge to, say, escape the heavy burden of being a petite and very feminine woman trapped inside the body of a genetically-altered-huge male brute, well, you couldn't.

You wouldn't be able to fling yourself over a ledge to stop the loneliness, confusion and frustration. There is no "over" in space either. Just out. Sucked out. Horrible business.

Not being able to open the window (and being surrounded by a vast ocean of dark matter) would also suggest that the probability of a long-extinct bird from an entirely different galaxy flying in and fluttering about is nil.

But there Frappe stood in an airlock, because he couldn't roll down the window and there was no down. Tears streaming from his large sad eyes. He felt wrong inside his skin. The skin of a seven-foot-tall, boyishly handsome man rippling with muscles from his laborious job and genetic modification. Although he had a young face and adorable blonde curls atop his chiselled head, he scared people with his size, and he hated that. 

He knew there was nothing wrong with the way he felt. It was everybody else in this wretched business he was in. They made him feel so lost and lonely. Too lost and lonely. The bird was a welcome sight.

It was a sparrow that flew into the airlock. An Earth bird long gone from the wildlife-free mall planet. It landed on his shoulder. He smiled at the bird from another time and galaxy and cried harder. The bird pulled a few strands of his hair out with its wee beak and flew off, out of the lock and down a long corridor lit with the kind of lights that make clear skin look pockmarked and veiny. 

He had hidden his lyric journal where it could easily be found, and his diary which clearly outlined, with drawings and graphs, his frustration with his own sex. He hoped it would be accidentally found and his secret wouldn't be a secret anymore and perhaps the hurting would turn into healing.

Moments before he hit the airlock release and became one with the universe, both physically and metaphysically, an alarm went off, and the panicked voice of his only other shipmate, Stane, rang through the entire ship: "Frrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaappe!!!!!!!!"

Frappe sighed, wiped away his tears and started to put his ugly charcoal uniform back on. Perhaps tomorrow he would try again.

Lyme Node's second moon Roobos, was a false moon. It was artificially manufactured to store all of the massively populated planet's garbage. This moon, as large as it was, still filled up quickly, and needed to be destroyed and rebuilt every fifty years. Mountains of appliances, holiday decorations, deceased pets and relatives, spaceship wrecks and nom-nom wrappers accumulated quickly and it was easier to implode the whole damn thing and start over from time to time.

Stane sat in the driver's seat of the garbage collection vessel Velveteen Rabbit, his eyes wide, his face pale, and only a few potato chips on his shirt. This meant that he had actually sat up, which he didn't enjoy or do that often. As Frappe moped in, eyes still red, he stopped dead in his tracks.

The light was flashing. Not just any light, but THE light...and it was bright puce.

"What have you done, Sa-Sa?" Frappe said in a deep booming voice that still somehow managed to be meek.

"I...I...I dunno...we were given orders...Roobos was full. Ready to be destroyed and replaced. I started the sequence..."

"Irreversible sequence..." Frappe added to Stane's annoyance.

"...Yeah...to send down the Imploder...easy-peasy...we just suck up the debris after, crush it into space dust...but then the bright puce light went off!" Stane was sweating more than normal, and he normally had enough sweat to salt a buffet.

"But the light goes blue first to warn you..."

"I know...but..."

"And then yellow."

"Well, y'see..."

"And then green, brown, violet, indigo, crimson and salmon..."

"Yeah! I got it, fuckwit!" Stane's jowls shook with anger and frustration. He calmed slightly. "There was a wrapper on the console...I didn't see the light. If YOU had've cleaned this place up..."

"They're your candy wrappers, Sa-Sa. I don't like candy. Candy makes it so you can't see your feet."

"Yeah, but it's your console, too!  You should keep it clean, you meat-head." Stane replied, looking down, not seeing his feet.

This was a typical conversation between the two. The unhappy sensitive giant, and the mean and selfish little asshole. Stane was only five-foot-one, and round like a beach ball. The odd thing about seeing these two humans together was that they looked anything but human, and definitely not of the same species.

"What are y'gonna do??" Stane demanded.

"ME?" Now Frappe was sweating. "What did you just schedule to implode?" 

"The other one."

"The other one?"

"Lyme Node's other moon."

"But Tractos has people on it!" Frappe felt woozy.

"Prisoners? They all probably died off years ago!" Stane had turned a shade that not even Frappe had seen before, and Frappe had seen him have several heart attacks, one stroke, and hundreds of choking fits.

"It's a prison moon...they drilled a Life Core into it...those prisoners can't die!"

"Well then the Life Core will be destroyed along with the moon! I'm doing them a favour!" 

They both stayed quiet for what seemed an eternity. Stane's mind worked slowly at best, and the time they needed to process everything and still ruggedly not show each other how absolutely terrified they each were, slowed things down further.

Finally Frappe spoke in almost a whisper "...but even that would only bring the light up to blue..."

Stane's heart sank deeper into his full gross bowels.

"Great. Really fuckin' presto! They said the odds of the light going bright puce are, like, a billion-kajillion-to-one...and it goes off on our ship!" Stane said, sweeping candy wrappers off the console with one angry swoop, exposing all sorts of lights that probably should have been addressed for one reason or another.

"Every Node Soldier in the galaxy is gonna be here soon. Think! Is there any way of shutting off the schedule sequence?"

"No...it's locked on. We'd need some kinda computer genius to turn off a scheduled sequence!"

"Damn. We gotta think of something else then." 

This was precisely why The Node Guard had genetically altered them and assigned them to sanitation. All one had to do was implode a moon or small planet from time to time, then vacuum up any debris with one's ship. It was the perfect (and safest) place to put these two...almost impossible to mess up. Frappe did all the manual labour, his mind always troubled, and Stane worked the controls, his mind murky with sugar and trans fats.

They also looked, in size, much like every sanitation ship crew: one big, muscle bound ogre, and one little, unnaturally round, greasy guy.

Stane pretended to faint while Frappe stared ahead unable to move, unaware of the sparrow on his shoulder.