Into the yellow sun ninety-two million miles away a pair of pink pajamas spiraled out of control and vanished in a vaporized trail of multi-spectral auroras. Tim, known as the 'Earththing', observed the disastrous micro-spectacle through his peppered quark-dipped scope-monocles. “A terrible, pointless catastrophe,” he muttered, as he pictured all the work and time that the puppy laborers from Planet Spiraticus put into those pink pajamas. Such puppies lived out their miserable lives deep within the industrial caverns carved out of jagged volcanic magma by greedy space industrialists...
It was a cold day in the Triangulum, winds twisting through the desolate avenues and ringing on the stark metal plates that were fused in the blast pits of laser fields millennia ago. The galaxy was rift with such lost arts, a recent rediscovery was the gaussian beam technology that this surface city was built on…
Tim the Earththing was well known in this corner of the parsec. Tim was a door-to-door salesman. He sold items from the endless inventories of bad ideas that Capitalism produces. Tim was currently selling off subsectored-bandwidths of string frequencies harvested from a small nuclear bulge in the outer rim of the elliptical galaxy M31CF2 to customers who neither needed them nor wanted them. "That is the mark of a salesman", Tim would say. Sales, initially hot, went ice cold after the super-cooled sonic nodal-magneto machination minibots hit the market, miniaturized enough to become a common household appliance.
Tim was a happy and content earththing. He spent most of his social life with his two friends- a brainy irregular membrane from the Sea of Tranquility, who enjoyed reading detective novels
and a loquacious spider-scorpion mollusk from his own home planet. He had developed unexpected feelings for his malacolic friend. She was also among the last of her species...
This brings us back to the beginning of this story. One night a fleet of roaming sustenance-bots almost bore Mala away. Tim had to think fast on his foot to save her. He grabbed her pink jammies and shot them toward the sun, using the pseudo-gravity generated by the meridian drives on his U-pod accelerator. The fierce and determined bots followed. Both the bots and Mala's jammies plummeted toward the corona of the sun and vaporized. Tim watched with satisfaction and then with a sudden horror of realization. The sudden horror hit Tim like a lead vest. Tim realized that Mala was still in the jammies when he slung them off on their fateful trajectory...
Tim could see that the pink pair of nighties had no Mala in them as they burst into flames. He immediately initiated a search for elliptical heat trails in the nearby 3-point Cartesian vicinity. It was the first time he used his parabolic chromospheric transparent low-density cloud of plasmatic x-ray-tempered 3-D telescopic particle balloons with the cushioned grips. He quickly zeroed in on the most likely trail based on the Gregg-Xzathoid model of mutually diverging paths. Then he desperately lifted off in that direction with his Saturn Explorer GT planet hopper he salvaged from the junkfield near the orbiting space station Ux...
Mala by this time was feeling lonely and rejected. "Here I am," she sadly cooed to herself, feeling more depressed with every solar second. "Spinning out of control, 13 million miles from the sun, and without my pink jammies." Where was Tim? With the stress of the vacuum, her mental faculty began to deteriorate. She fought back, her thoughts foggily returning to Tim each time with less focus. She just managed to reach the sugar-suppressed anti-vacuum pills lodged between her respiratory pores and her ocular tentacles as her consciousness began to irreversibly leave her…
Tim guided his craft near a free-floating form, and conducted a vital signs scan. Mala was unconscious, but still alive. Using the craft's hyper-alloy extension arms Tim delicately retrieved her and pulled her into the cargo bay. His eyes lingered for a fleeting moment on her soft, muscular tissue that facilitated her motor movement. Her exquisite multicolored radula glistened in the solar wind…
After this near-death experience, Tim resolved to move to a new cosmic location- one beyond modern physics, far, far out into the void where he could start anew. He wished to live beyond the reach of any astrocartograph, a place where there were no sustenance bots and no Cosmic Club restaurants; and most of all, Tim now realized, he wished to live with Mala. Together they set a course for the outer banks of Oblivion. They could not leave Membrane behind. He had plans to start an inter-galactic detective agency. His new name would be Savage, Nick Savage, gumshoe extraordinaire...
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