Isyra: The Last Outpost

It took Jeremy a full five minutes to realize that Julian had not simply chosen to ignore his task list in some bizarre display of simian dominance, but there was indeed some elaborate technical problem preventing his little devil horned image from blitzing across the World-Ship, a ball of water seven hundred kilometers in diameter.

He still fumed, puffing out a hundred little children from his birth sac before feasting upon them in a fury. Their crunchy screams, precise genetic clones of his own were soothing. If it wasn't for the fact that he was off schedule it would have been an acceptable breakfast.

His worker cube was still fully operational even though many of the systems around him where not, so he set off down Julian's hideously cold maintenance corridor. The World-Ship decided to sacrifice 50,000 square feet of rich feeder fish farms to accommodate the floundering Julian. It had constructed an elaborate system of corridors, drained them of brine and replaced it with a sharp oxygen-nitrogen gas.

Sometimes Jeremy resented the fact that one of the feeder fish farms that was demolished had produced his favorite variety of cheese flavored snack.

His seamless, transparent cube of water and half eaten young shuddered as a compression wave rocked the tiny corridor.

Julian's face briefly materialized on the back of Jeremy's optic nerve. Crazed, extraordinarily pale and unusually quiet the man was clutching his throat. Snow worked itself up into the corners of the elaborate display before guttering and dying.

It took him another four minutes of travel and detailed genetic blueprint analysis to realize that Julian was indeed not complaining about a lot of food stuffs, but that he was very likely in the final stages of asphyxiating. He considered it and determined that it would be a bad thing to allow his life to end, in accordance with human customs.

It seemed so bizarre and alien to him. He muled it over for another moment, half chewing on the dismembered corpse of Jeremy Junior. What was a Fish to do?

He was the only human for a hundred million light years, they needed him functioning at least within twenty percent of optimal capabilities.

So it was with a little effort that he increased his speed down the narrow, fourteen kilometer long corridor. Concentrating on his breakfast and the puff of flame propelling him to extraordinary speeds, he failed to notice the terrible sight of the ocean boiling away from outside the corridor.

It was only the harsh light of the neutron star in which they were orbiting, and his own disfigured shadow that made him pause a mere fifty meters from the simian living complex.

He involuntarily birthed far more young than he could possibly eat in one sitting. They felt like little bricks.