Destiny, Time, Schroedinger's Cat and Butterfly are on the loose! As the Four Metaphors of the Apocalypse, they are ready to take revenge on their captor, Universe himself.
***
Respectable stories are born in a writer's cunning mind. Their less...
The vortex flushed. And flushed some more. Cap felt the air rushing into the room. After an agonising moment, the desired effect set in.
Out of the tiniest cracks in the wall panelling and pink-framed rivet holes, strands of yellow mist curled, drawn to the room's centre. They swirled fast and faster, sucked into the central glass cylinder in a breathtaking display of pure yellowness.
In rapt fascination, Cap saw the misty strands intertwine, consolidate, and blend together into one solid mass. The disintegrator hung forgotten in his hand, and his jaw dropped.
For a moment, he got distracted by First entering the control room, a beatific smile on his unshaven face. Eve's wobbly hologram followed closely behind. When Cap gazed back at the vortex, the metamorphosis was complete.
In the centre of the chamber sat the cutest, brightest yellow rubber duck Cap had ever met.
Slowly, he lifted his heavy disintegrator, mumbling the relevant rules from the eighty-seventh edition of the illustrated First Contact Rules Booklet.
1 - If alien is hostile, shoot. 2 - If alien is non-aggressive but looks like something out of a nightmare, shoot. 3 - If alien declares its intention to enslave humanity, shoot. 4 - If alien fails to declare its intentions, shoot. 5 - If alien sues you for speeding, shoot. 6 - If alien smells like burnt marshmallows, shoot. 7 - If alien wears white tennis socks, shoot. 8 - If alien doesn't look like an alien, shoot. 9 - If alien looks too cute, shoot. 10 - If in doubt of any of the above, shoot.
Not for the first time, Cap wondered if the author of these rules had ever met a hostile alien. Maybe he, she, or it was a hostile alien—or worse. However, rules were rules were rules. And captains of scout-ships were paid to follow the rules.
He pulled the trigger, only to realise that while reciting, his tired right hand had let the muzzle of the weapon drop. A sizzling black hole in the carpet was the result of his inattention.
A disintegrator's destructive power was founded on the acetons* it generated. Acetons were the elementary particles of the universe's most dangerous form of matter.** Acetons were anti-gluons, and thus they destroyed the innate coherence of any matter they traversed.
So, when Cap pulled the trigger, the acetons first dissolved the disintegrator's innards.*** Then they burnt a hole in the priceless Persian carpet as well as in the floor supporting it. Most of them continued their passage through the spaceship's larder on the next floor down, rudely traversing an Emmental cheese they found in their path. They continued through another floor to lay havoc to the ship's spa, permanently perforating a jacuzzi and devastating the plumbing used for feeding mint-scented steam to the hammam. Next, they swooshed through a forgotten storeroom, where they annihilated the world's last existing 1D CD.**** Finally, they penetrated the ship's outer wall, leaving a breach in their wake.
(As luck—or misfortune—would have it, the beam of acetons was directed at the planet of Toblerone, known for its triangular mountains and obese but happy inhabitants. Fortunately, when it reached it, a couple of years later, it had spread so wide that it merely manifested itself as a gentle aurora borealis when it disintegrated some molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, chocogen, and itself, in the upper reaches of the planet's chocosphere.)
Back on the ship, the result of the disintegrator's action was—apart from various perforated hardware and cheeseware—a howl. It was the sound feared by all spacemen across the multiverse. It was the sound that sweet, breathable air made when leaving a ship in a hurry.
Cap looked at Eve and First. Eve and First looked at the rubber duck in forgetful bliss. Again, and as usual, Cap was in this alone.
–––– * Acetons are not to be mistaken for acetone, even though they share part of acetone's dissolving qualities.
** Unless you count in marmite. But modern canonical law had banished marmite, and even the thought of marmite. Its banishment was a consequence of the incident on G'hr'haio seven, where desperate human settlers decimated the peaceful, lemur-like natives in the so-called marmite swamp battles to the brim of extinction. We won't elaborate further—the ugly details would force us to switch this book to mature.
*** Yes, disintegrators were one-shot affairs.
**** Don't ask—that's another (long) story.
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The infamous planet Toblerone, illustrated by the excellent
