them ribs

, originally uploaded by preppiecurler.

perfect ribs through space and time

I had a long conversation in the wee small hours with a fellow from Mars who represented the Perfect Rib franchise.....he told me he was going to leave the ship at the planet humans called Coyote....because the natives looked like coyotes pretty much....well, sort of like Wily Coyote....they walked on two legs and had hands, and could talk.

"Of course you might guess" he explained to me..."These folk like tasty meaty things to eat, with bones...."

"I can see that, I reckon..." I replied.

"So what we are doing is going out there with our genetic templates for Perfect Rib production, and we are going to go into some mall food courts. We already have a contract with a major player in that market." he informed me.

"Ribs?" I wondered...."Like baby back ribs, pork ribs?"

"Precisely!" he said...."You know what they are like, you even have them on your menu here at your grill."

And so we did....both as a bar item and as a dinner item with two sides .....

"You see" the rib-agent explained to me..."The Coyote market is huge....if we can get only 10% of the lunch traffic in the food courts we already have contracts with, we're talking about megabucks.....roughly ....the GNP of Bolivia, somewhere in that ball-park."

"Huh?" I flabbergasted.....

"Yeh!" he enthused ....."with the currency rates and all, it's a sure fire thing!"

The clock on the wall said it was three in the morning, human-deck time.....I sipped at my watered whiskey, and considered the implications of the interstellar perfect rib business.....and decided that it's all a matter of scale.....with us, humanity, being very small scale....compared to them, the alien cultures.....could we live long and prosper like fleas on big dogs?

midnight in the starship lounge

, originally uploaded by tinguru.

my life monitor bracelet

still had about fours hours left on it when I at last went through an environment force field out of alien slug jurisdiction and into the human-support deck of a galactic liner, signed on as a third-class utility hand in the hospitality service branch of TransTimeTransport and Shipping. Good old TTT&S, where would we be without them.....still stuck out in the sticks, I guess.....no other human enterprise had ever managed to wrangle a contract with a starship cartel, thus gaining access to a market beyond imagination .....Hell, you didn't even need much decent product to ship....Humanity was a novelty much in vogue down towards the busy cosmopolitan center of the galaxy....you could sell just about anything "Human" to the alien consumer masses eager for the new and exotic. The general wisdom was that we had better get what we could while the getting was good....while we were still a nine-day wonder, before some other strange little species turned up to catch the public fancy....So I found myself pulling duty as the grave-yard shift host in a 24 hour grill bar, riding herd on the robots, and presenting the traditional human face to the customers.....a delightful crowd of hucksters and shucksters who were intent upon riding out to the stars to diddle the natives, and make a fast buck by presenting to our new-found neighbors a quick song-and-dance and medicine show, before they found out what a useless pack of yahoos we really were, compared to the ancient sophisticate societies that had been stirring Galactic Culture for ages beyond reckoning.....those were heady days.....

cartoon clouds

Cranes, originally uploaded by sinford.sailor.

sort of skating and slip-sliding

down the alleys of the space-station, I made progress over the slug-slimed deck towards the transportation concourse, where I should be able to find whatever human-oriented services were to be accessed in this situation....and....glory-and-behold....I did slide into a little portion of the concourse with a holographic blue sky with puffy cartoon clouds and some perverted alien impression of birds flitting and singing, etc.....and there I did in fact find the usual Atomic Taco franchise, and the Sushi-mama-rama, and a Waffle House....and my longed-for McD with a Value Menu.....I tossed some coin at the serving function thingy, and was rewarded with what resembled to some degree coffee and a Sausage Egg McMuffin....after swallowing this stuff, I began to feel better....I accessed the free wifi, and searched for a labor-jobber.....I needed to get a berth on some ship out of here post haste, was the way I scanned it.....

slug-like aliens

Lachydoi, originally uploaded by Zorgzzzzz.

arrange payment?

I was dreaming about something I can't remember now when the room service voice woke me up, to remind me that I had only one hour left on my room rent.....I would have to arrange payment for another standard rent duration before the current arrangement ran out, or vacate the premises forthwith. I got up and made my way slowly to the sanitary function area, feeling about like the proverbial forty miles of bad road without a shovel or a spoon....or whatever....not thinking clearly, after the excesses of blowing most of my pay from the voyage on a week of bar-crawling and other even less savory things.....punching the code that gave the cleansing facility a more or less functional configuration for one of the so-called human species, I let water and soap substitutes wash over me for the alloted period, and then looked in the mirror. Mirrors are pretty much the same everywhere, if you can get them to compensate for wavelength....what I was looking at didn't look good....it looked downright nasty. I found myself wondering if more drugs would help, and decided that was a stupid way to think....I didn't have anymore money for drugs....a three day beard, shaggy hair, dark circles under the eyes of the damned which were staring back at me......oh well.....I gathered up my meager belongings and tossed them into my duffle, and made it out the door before my last hour expired.

Which put me in a grim grey-green alley sort of thing outside the cheap lodging that I couldn't remember renting in the first place.....I did remember that I was on an alien space station, and that nano-treatment was keeping me alive in a biological situation that was lethal to humans normally.....the color-coded bracelet around my left wrist indicated that I had about another human day left to live, unless I could come up with the bucks for another survival dose....damn....the slug-like natives who had built this place slid slickly down the alley, ignoring me.....I wondered if I could find a McDonald's.....