Dipshits in Space: Season 8

93: Visions of Marigold

"Unbelievable, this is the opposite of believe!" Lawg barked.

"Hey, it's the law." Marley yawned.

"It's stupid." Lawg protested. "5,000 credit fine for not having a human on the ship. Damn Xenoffirmative action laws."

"Actually the laws exist for a good reason, they just dicked it up. The laws intended to prevent anti-human prejudice on Federation crews, so I support the concept, they just don't take into account how many humans live in each system, so it went from helping to just being preachy. Like, the Mars colony has about 50/50 human to alien population, so it's pretty sketchy if you don't have any humans on a 12 man crew, and the racism is kinda obvious. However, then you get places like Thorp, where humans are 1 in 600, but every crew over 6 has to have a human. So you end up discriminating against everyone else and shipping in humans from outside the system and paying them extra, for under-qualified workers, just to avoid fines. Personally I think it should be illegal as balls to even ask what species you are on the crew application, but whatever. Not my business I guess." Mar shrugged.

"I dunno...I don't really want a Thorp on my crew. Robots, blue people, Jews, all fine, but Thorps eat their young and I draw the line with cannibalism." Lawg shrugged.

"So you seriously still don't count as human, being Half Chaff?" Mar sighed.

"Nope. Gotta be 75 percent to count, otherwise you're de-chaffinated"

"Damn. Weird. You can be like 20 percent Thorp and count as Thorp."

"Only if you really Thorp it up and listen to Thorp-core music."

"You have no idea how politically incorrect that sentence was, dude."

"Politics has nothing to do with it, Marley. This is about fairness and Non-descriminography. Now I gotta find another token human, or a species under a population of 9,000 to finish the damn cargo run."

"Cool. So have you noticed the way we got this new ship for cargo and people-moving , yet we still just dick around and do adventures and never do any cargo or people moving?"

"Sure we do, it's just never eventful enough to type down in the crew logs. There was that one thing...that other thing, the cows, that president that turned out to be parasite in a president's body."

"Oh right, I thought it was less than that. I guess boring cargo runs aren't very memorable. Easy to think they were far fewer than on the records. Kinda makes it hard to grasp the passage of time. Like have we had this ship for 4 weeks or 4 months? Without the calendar app on the phones, you'd never know.

"Alright, well we're losing money sitting here so let's go find another crewman. I almost don't even care who at this point."

"You're hired." Lawg smiled, casually swiping the tablet as Marley played his game-buddy and a short, human man sat eagerly across the table.

"Really? Wow. This is exciting. I've never been on a crew before. I'm so glad to see someone willing to give me a chance."

"Well, Private Dawkins, you'll find on this ship we treat everyone equal...still kinda bad but equally bad." Lawg smiled.

"It's so hard to get a job on a ship when you're like me. We don't have a lot of support in most communities."

"You know..." Lawg sighed. "It's unfair. A man shouldn't be judged based on the way he or she or Zee was born, but by their ability to do the job and pass legality requirements. I think you'll feel right at home here on this crew of goofy misfits. We're just full of funny, interesting quirks that make us unique and beautiful, especially Riea. And you sir have a gleaming Federation record and incredible qualifications. I'm rather shocked that you agreed to work for us." He chuckled as Marley's ears perked up and he began scrolling through the data files.