A Year of Stories (Collection Three)

The Rush Job

(Apologies! I forgot to post this last night, so you get two stories today!)

[Receiving...]

[Receiving...]

[Transfer ID: 435XBJ!-LBJ]

[Transfer Alias: "Snake-Eyes Toni"]

[Priority: Economy]

First of all, this is costing me a fortune.

Do you have any idea how expensive it is to send a message half-way across the bloody galaxy? Of course you don't, you work for the Company, might as well be asking you if you know what your own arm tastes like.

Let me put this in perspective for you Anders. That last paragraph, where I strongly considered ending our friendship, that cost me enough Units to buy three months worth of Station Rations, and the services of a highly flexible, and morally ambivalent Carcadian Love-Bot to feed them to me.

So the next time you need a "rush job," how about you ask your employers to spring for a ship, I'd love to visit – actually, no I wouldn't – which brings me to my point.

I looked over all the data you sent, and from what I can tell, you're in a lot of trouble.

I don't know which of your AIs screwed the pooch on this one, or whether it was one of you geniuses that decided to throw a decimal point out the window, but someone got their math wrong.

There isn't enough Hydrogen in the system, and you're not just off by a little, you're off by a factor of a thousand.

How do you even do that?

Didn't someone test the Seed before you poured a medium-sized civilization's total GDP into it? Didn't anyone run a simulation? Geezus Anders, I know ten year olds who wouldn't make this kind of a mistake.

What's the point in trying to, "expand the scope of human civilization," when you people can't even do simple Calculus?

Anyway, like I said, not enough Hydrogen, which is throwing off the whole reaction – it's like you suddenly aged the thing 100 million years.

As you might have noticed, the core is starting to get dangerously hot, and your free Helium is being baked into Carbon faster than your drones can try to correct it.

Faster than anything short of the hand of god Herself could correct it, if my estimates are right, which they are.

The good news is that you probably have a month to get the Colony evacuated before your pet Star goes full Red Giant on you.

The bad news is that every, single thing in that Sector is about to be rendered down to its constituent parts.

The point is that the whole project is a wash Anders, and you'll be lucky to keep your life, let alone your job, once the Company realizes that you just pissed away several hundred trillion Units, because someone on your team forgot how multiplication works.

I would suggest throwing them, whoever they are, under the biggest bus you can find, while you still have the chance.

Yours,

Toni

P.S. If you need a place to crash, my couch back on Terra is always open... assuming you're still alive, that is.