Why, it must have been nigh-on 40 yahren ago, me and Boomer flew out to this space joint to try to meet some girls. When you’re that age, you’re interested in mating, you know, although you don’t think of it as mating. Why are we driven to mate?… Propagate the species, I guess. I mean, who knows. Who came up with all this? Anyway, propagate your own species, I presume. But in space, you might have to be more open-minded. Anyhoo, the story…
We sat down and got our bubbly purple space drinks. I lit up a fumerello. Back then you could smoke in bars. There was some kind of techy-sounding groove playing. I had my eye on a mostly humanoid-looking cheerleader type. She had a weird double nose, but I figured I could close one eye or something.
“Dang!” I heard. Boomer was excitedly eyeballing a three-legged chick wearing a lot of spandex. He was squirming in his seat. “Whoa, partner,” I said. “You’re cool and in control. Just like flyin’ a Viper. You don’t let the Viper fly you.”
“Heh. That’s what you think,” he said. “You’re fooling yourself. Nobody’s in control of anything. We’re hurtling through space-time on our way to certain death. Or actually not certain death. Not certain anything! And nobody knows why. I mean, who came up with all this?!”
I stared at him for a few seconds. “That’s heavy, man.” I blew a smoke ring. “Space-time…”
The spandex chick crossed a couple of her legs. “Oooh, I like that.” He downed his purple drink and he was off.
Anyhoo, one thing led to another and so forth and so on. Stuff we couldn’t show in the kid-friendly “Vipers: Behind the Scenes” show we used to do for the fleet.
* * *
The next morning Boomer calls me up and says “Hey, man! That space chick gave me V.D.!”
I said, “Uh oh. Bummer, man. What are you gonna do?”
He said, “Well, I better go see Dr. Huer.”
* * *
It was worse than we thought. Dr. Huer said the only way we could save Boomer was to put him in a protective suit made out of rare space metals. It had to cover him head to toe. They wired him into it electrically, so he was like a mandroid. And something had happened to his brain, I guess. His speech changed. He developed kind of a stutter, so he sounded like this: “Mmmmm… bi-di-bi-di-bi-di-bi-di-bi-di… You get ’em, Starbuck!”
He lived the rest of his life like that. I think he kind of vicariously lived through me and my various adventures. You know, he couldn’t fly anymore on account of that dang suit. I’d let him ride in the back seat of my Viper. I still remember hearin’ him… “Wee! Weeee!” And he’d make these weird little electronical noises. And, “Come on, Starbuck. Let’s pull some G’s! Weeeeee!” I’d figured he’d gotten less philosophical. More live-for-the-moment, you know.
Boomer died one day when the Battlestar had some engine trouble. He went in the engine room, into the sealed-off core, to handle some dilithium crystals that had done gotten radioactive. His suit was supposed to protect him, but he got scared and peed himself and fracked up the electronics and blew a hole in the suit. His last words were, “Bi-di-bi-di-bi-di-bi-di-bi-di… the needs of the many… outweigh… the needs of the homie.”
You know, I never made it past Lieutenant.
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