Okay so we got back to the ship, right, and there weren’t any supplies left. There was a jam of branches in the doorway. The hatch wouldn’t close. We cleared it all out and closed the hatch. Miraculously, the lights and dials on the consoles in the control room still blinked and glowed. Harmony. The control room was cramped, the old style, the way a spaceship should be. Nothing like these tulip-white and blue jobs they have now, for the rich kids to dance around in, like, *Oh, there’s so much rooooom in this control rooooooom!* This was a vintage model, I guess you could say. But to us it was just what we were used to. Floor all welded together from mismatched, patchwork panels. Bumpy. Kind of a funky smell. Beautiful. I said this time let’s name it Interloper, after the days when we were brave and went places, and they smiled (as one) and said okay. It knocked me out when they all smiled as one. Never happened, almost. Only in my dreams. I said let’s not waste any more time, right, but what I meant was let’s hurry up because this moment is already slipping, I can feel the reality of this place slipping and we need to get out of here before we get trapped here. Who wants to be stuck in an unreal zone? Not me. Everybody went to their stations. I took the command chair because it made me feel like a big fucker. Nobody seemed to object. Sal, my science officer girlfriend, went to the lab. I heard her say, “There’s not much left in the computer. Something’s been eating away at the data fields.” Must have been data bugs. Burns, my engineer girlfriend, went down the hatch. I could see the glow of the pershidium converter (very illegal) glowing on her cheeks as she went down. Then she slammed the hatch behind her. Gloria, my boyfriend girlfriend, sat on the floor at my feet, and started caressing my fur boots. Sometimes everyone hates her because she is my favorite. Sometimes not. It depends on what we’re smoking. The others went to their places. Butch, my kickass gunner girlfriend, took the ladder up to the turrets. Phred took the chair next to mine. Her knees interfered with my knees, the seats were so close together, and the consoles crowded us in. That’s what’s so beautiful about these old control rooms. Really, “room” is a misnomer. It’s more like a control hole. We started pushing buttons. Gloria looked on, wide-eyed and wonderful. The whole metal carcass started to rumble around us. The leaves on the aspen trees outside the selenite window trembled with more than fear. I said to Phred, “You ready, pilot girlfriend?” and she said “Yeah.” She pushed the final button in the arcane sequence, and gripped the leather steering wheel with her leather gloves on. I hear the newest models don’t even have steering wheels. You don’t need them. Just a mouse and a graphical user interface. Who could stand it? We blasted off, and immediately the world beneath us lost reality. I knew it was happening. It shimmied and shivered. Really, it’s a stunning thing to see, a world losing its reality. I just pray I’m never stuck on one when it happens. Sometimes I have dreams about that. That’s when I wake up to find Gloria there, mopping my forehead with a cool damp rag, making me happy. Ah, I love her sometimes. I reached down and unmade her hair. Sometimes she gets a little nervous during the takeoffs. No sooner had we become completely alone in the black light of space than the intercom bleeped, and the old games began. “Captain,” said Fish, shrilly, from the hydroponix garden, “There’s something alive in here, and I don’t mean the plants or the beneficial bacteria!” Then the screen in front of my nose started to blink with a million little red dots: an Imperial fleet, most likely. And the hatch to the engine room popped open, and Burns’s ruddy face poked out, covered with soot. The pershidium’s on the clink,” she announced. “Too much disuse.” She looked happily disgusted, in her overalls. Then she popped downstairs again. She didn’t need me to say go to work on it. She was going to work on it. Gloria was definitely nervous now. I could tell because her stroking got more intense, and she was reaching up my pants leg, towards my dick, which was getting hard. How can I explain this to anyone who doesn’t have as many girlfriends as I do? It was titillating and annoying at the same time. She looked up at me with her greasily madeup red mouth and smiled with her white, wet teeth. Ah! Harder and harder.... Then the fucking auto-chef, which had appeared to have no supplies left in it, suddenly began whipping out pancakes. What the fuck! There were flapjacks flying all over the tiny control room, smacking Phred and me in the face, everywhere! For a second, I almost froze. I had gotten so used to living on a world that was almost but not quite unreal that I had all but forgotten how to do anything but freeze. It was chilling to contemplate. Luckily, the adrenaline of the launch, or maybe the sticky warmth of the flapjacks against my kisser, made me not want to sit there and contemplate. So I said in my best leather jacket wearing, cigarette-smoking tone of voice, “Fuck it! Crank up the stereo!” Phred gave me one of her award-winning you’re-a-flake-but-you’re-cool smiles, and reached snappily above her head and hit the VOLUME UP button. Drums, bass and guitar poured into the room. The vibrations made my ass feel good, and Gloria was making my crotch and legs and even my stomach feel good. It was starting to be a good day. Then the Imperial fleet closed in, phallus guns at the ready. Was it a coincidence that Interloper was a pussy ship? Who can say. All I know is, when you’re in an empty region of space, surrounded by a mob of hot, red erections throbbing toward you menacingly, it’s hard not to get a little crazy. Butch called down from above, saying she was ready to start blasting with all the firepower the out-ofshape ship had left, but I thought of something else. “Spread ‘em!” I said. Gloria’s lips went hot against my trousered thigh, she moaned slightly, and then Phred pushed more buttons. An outside view of our ship appeared on the screen—she was in spread-eagle mode, her big ship’s pussy wide and glistening. The Imperials moved in, chuckling. The thing you’ve got to realize about the Imperials is, they’re not *all that* anymore. They think they are. Or maybe everyone else just thinks they think they are. Maybe they never even had that much power to begin with. History is not one of this universe’s strong points, so it’s hard to say. I’d say look it up in the ship’s library, but according to Sal there’s really not much data left in there about anything. Except the recipe files. For some reason the data bugs hadn’t eaten the recipes. I found out later that all the flapjacks had something to do with this. Sal had been trying to get the computer to do something, anything, and all it wanted to do was cook breakfast. Weird. So anyway, my plan was simply to let the Imperials spend themselves in our hole, effectively neutralizing themselves. And it was working. The first few ships swooped up, rammed themselves against our split port, churned and chugged a while, then shrank dismally out and wandered offscreen. Interloper shuddered and moaned who wouldn’t but we never really lost control. The shields seemed to be holding. Then Phred nudged my ribs, and said,iLook closer at the masked one.” Sure enough, one of the enemy ships had a black band across its front windows, just like a badguy mask from a cowboy movie, and it was next in line. I started to say something to Butch in the turret, but it was too late. The maverick ship had already connected. We couldn’t blast it now if we wanted to; we would have been blasting our own ship’s *puni,* for chrissake. This is where phantasy leaves off and reality begins. This is where that line is. Notice: I know where the line is. I am not psychotic. You can be merely neurotic and still know where the line is. Or was. And this is where it was—a minute ago. But now? I am not so sure. When the masked one coupled with our ship, and that star trek-ish shudder made us all grab at whatever console or chair arm or whatever was handy, and we all sucked in our breath as one-as one, I tell you, the way it hardly ever happens-something just shifted, and it has never shifted back. I can’t say Interloper was damaged, exactly. She still responds to the controls, just—differently. She’s catlike, more supple. More sanguine at the same time. Does that make sense? It’s like her sphincter opened up. It’s like she sat in a hot tub all morning and did yoga all afternoon. Like we went to a nice, warm, mellow coffee house with couches on the floor and rugs on all the walls, and little oil lamps-oh hell, I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess the moral of the story is, we were all surprised when teaming up with a radical representative from the defunct Empire proved not to be such a bad idea after all. Now we go around raising hell together, the masked one and the Interloper. And every now and then, whenever the mood hits, which is really pretty often, we park our steely carcasses out behind a convenient asteroid belt or gas giant, and fuck. Just fuck, man. Get freaky. See stars and nebulae. The whole bit. And Fish, formerly the tightest one of the whole lot, the most pinched, you know? comes down from the hydroponix room, and she has this mysterious, mischievous smile on her greasy tight little face and she says, “Captain,” dig this, she says, “Captain. I figured out what it was that was alive in here.” And I say, feeling this upwelling of love that I can’t spell or figure out or even begin to explain, I say, “Well what was it baby?” And she says “It was us.” I guess everybody gets theirs in THE END