Tales Between the Lines

VI.9 - The Happily Ever After

The Titanians will shrug, knowing very well that their crash-landed craft will be far from flight-worthy.

Yet Arch Twisty will still be the Arch-Archaeologist and, as such, the most powerful entity on earth. It will take no more than a few calls on its cell phone to arrange everything.

Only minutes later, a convoy of black limousines will arrive at the site and pick up Arch Twisty and its friends from Titan. The convoy will hurry towards the spaceport and transfer them to Spaceship Mesmerize, the most advanced piece of space faring tech squatting earth.

Spaceship Mesmerize, run by an AI with an oversized ego, will rev its engines, then it will take off, in a flash of blinding light. It will cut into the heavens, soar across the void, and head towards the place Arch Twisty will have selected for their destination.
Arch Twisty will have given that some thought.

Anything outwards from earth's orbit will be cold, dark, and inhospitable. And the Titanians will deserve something better.

Earth itself will be a mess.

Venus will be known for its poor weather and its depressing atmosphere
So, it will be Mercure. The vast resorts that will recently have been built there—glittering, air-conditioned domes under an always serene sky with a fat sun smiling down at them—will be the perfect place for the men from Titan. They will deserve some light in their lives.

And so will Arch Twisty.

So Spaceship Mesmerize will thunder* through the black expanse, seek out Sol's closest companion, and alight lightly on the demarcation line between day and night, right at the airdock of Eternal Sunset Resort.

At that point in time, Eternal Sunset Resort will just be finished, its mostly female staff eagerly awaiting guests, and the Arch-Archaeologist's authority will have booked it exclusively for years ahead.

As Mesmerize's passengers will set foot into the resort, they'll be welcomed by their singing and smiling hosts. Leis will be bestowed upon our friends, and Happiness** will rule.

———
* Yes, we know, you don't hear spaceships in space, and any movie that shows you otherwise (ships thrumming and droning and swishing past the camera) is cr@p. But Mesmerize will broadcast its thundering via bluetooth audio.

** As everyone knows, Happiness is a fickle creature, but she loves good sunsets, and Eternal Sunset Resort is the best place for them.

And thus, another absolutely mind boggling and incredibly improbable story will end in utter bliss.

Though, as with many stories, deep in the heart of this one will lie the roots of several offspring.

In the case of our Titanian friends, this can be taken quite literally and straightforward. No longer in need of their cumbersome winter clothes and enjoying the agreeable climate with six packed torsos in plain view, they will easily establish contact with the Mercurian female staff.*

The long term consequence of this come-together will be a fast growth of a happy indigenous Mercurian population and culture.

Happiness, quite satisfied with the development, will decide to settle down in the panorama suite of the Eternal Sunset Resort and the offspring of the Mercury-Titanians will be happy and—surprisingly—wise enough to always deliver her meals in time and keep her refrigerator full with her favourite brand of Saturnian beer.**

In reciprocation, Happiness will guarantee an eternal happy hour for the Eternal Sunset Resort.

Arch Twisty, on the other hand, will soon tire of the limited range of activities the resort will offer. Him/herself deprived of the type of activity the staff and Titanians will soon excel in, it will board the starship Mesmerize and return to his/her deeply ingrained original purpose—striving for dominion of something.

Mesmerize's AI, confronted with the ultimate goal of its new captain and only passenger, will find an obscure library reference mentioning a precedent case of a notorious, two-headed, galactic president.

So, after a prolonged study of the evidence, Arch Twisty and Mesmerize will set course to conquer the universe on the tracks of the mythical Zaphod Beeblebrox.
The rest will be history.

———
* In the as yet far removed future, etymologists will hypothesise that the adjective "mercurial" will have been a simple derivation of "mercurian", based in the coincidental rise of activity of the Eternal Sunset Resort's staff at the arrival of the Titanians.

** How Happiness will have acquired a taste for Saturnian beer is an entirely different story. So is the one of the smuggler who will be running the exquisite stuff through the infamous Martian beer blockade.

And, with that, the camera will zoom out from the barren orb of Mercure. Sol will enter the field of view, just to shrink as the camera's hungry eye will take in more and more of our solar system. The Kuiper belt will enter the scene, and it too, in all its sickly brown splendor, will grow smaller. More suns will become visible, clusters of stars, starfields, and starscapes, until our whole galaxy shines in its unmistakable brilliance. But it, too, will grow smaller and be joined by its neigbours. Shoals of milky ways will be there, then hordes of them, and later herds. Finally, all known and unknown matter will coalesce and take shape, forming a letter E beside an N beside a D.

END