Nebula

My Unusual Thief

Despite everything I thought of my mystery Martian, he wasn't actually that much of a bad guy. He was just a cop. And cops have to go by the book. It's nothing personal, it's just the way it goes sometimes.

But he made it personal when he interrogated me about my parent's murder. I guessed later that it was all off the record anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered if I told the truth or not. I also wondered why he wanted to know what happened badly enough that he would go so far to blackmail a fifteen year old girl.

He was... I don't know, curious? I guess that's understandable. I mean, it was one of the great mysteries of his career, now solved once and for all. He was a good interrogator/blackmailer to get me to spill everything within an hour. Like I already said, more than enough shrinks couldn't do what he did in the years they had.

To my regret, I never spoke to my mystery Martian again. But I never forgot him. He opened doors that made life on Mars bearable. I didn't feel as if the world was against me anymore, I wasn't hateful of every look, paranoid of every word. I could start to do what I wanted, what I thought mattered most.

So from that night onwards, on the way home from school, I used the allowance I'd saved to work on the Presley. Sometimes it was as simple as bribing the guards with doughnuts and coffee. Other times it was getting special spray paint that could withstand intergalactic travelling. That took weeks of saving - but it was worth it to see the Presley shine again.

Not that I'd planned on going to other galaxies. The Milky Way was large enough as it was, I didn't need any others. That'd make things too complicated. At least it would for me - because I'd need human-sized cryogenic tanks, an incredible amount of fuel and stupidly expensive things that only huge corporations would be able to afford.

That's was why people like me don’t go to other galaxies.

The time I had left allowed me to get that rusted heap of a ship to something of decent standards. Nobody had worked on it for years. The oxygen garden was beyond decayed, so that needed to be replanted despite my lack of green thumb. The titanium alloys were still good enough, though. They were replaced as soon as I could afford better ones, I wasn't taking any chances.

I could go on, but the point is that it wasn't up to scratch. So I brought it up to decent standard while I waited until I was eighteen.

Going to school, having friends and homework - it was all still pretty new. Having a life like this wasn't something I'd had at all while I was in space. I thought it wasn't too bad being alone, how could I miss what I never really had? But as time went by... I thought that I was actually going to miss it. People were around me a lot of the time and it was nice to always have somebody to talk to.

That would quickly change when I would leave. Everything would. I'd be alone on the Presley and my life would become what I always wanted it to be. A transporter. Not a hero or a vigilante. Just a normal transporter of goods from one solar system to the next. A life that anyone could be happy with if they tried.

It would be lonely, but I'd already accepted that. I was used to loneliness.

I guess sometimes life just pushes you around in places where you don't want to be. Opportunities arise whether you want them to or not, it's just what you decide to do with them. That's why I'm writing this, to you, whoever you are. So you know me. Not the symbol, just me. How I began and where life took me in the end. I never pushed it, I just went along for the ride. Some people don't quite get that.

My eighteenth year came before I knew it. I had matured since that night. Still a complete bad-ass rebel who couldn't give a damn about the 'rules', but a little more sensible about how people worked and how to play them without getting shot. How 'society' in all its complexities worked.