I had the bottle of pills in my hand, potent and deadly, I was meticulous in my research and procurement, a brief time of intoxication, then sleep, then death…

The computer interrupted what was my usual morning ritual of looking at the bottle by announcing that an ‘anomaly’ was pulling my spacecraft off course. “crap, I can’t even kill myself properly” I said morbidly and proceeded to cough…

I was 85 Terran years old when i bought this ship, a Japanese Chibi-class interplanetary hopper, designed to take an executive (and probably his mistress judging by the generous sized bed and bathroom) back and forth between the Moon and Mars in as fast as a week.

It was used but space worthy and cost everything I had accumulated over my lifetime. I fully intended to die in that ship, alone, and have it take me far away from where I was born.

I had long since neglected any family, had no heirs and suffered a horrible guilt of having giving up on my dreams long ago to gain material comfort that no longer mattered.

As a young man I had vowed to become an artist, a real one, one who delighted and one who was cherished, yet gave it up for a “steady career”…

I glanced at the computer screen and saw to my puzzlement the anomaly that was making the computer squawk, it was a white dot on the screen where all material things usually showed up blue, suddenly I realized it was a black hole.

I was actually excited about this twist of fate and watched the screen eagerly for new information, got bored, then decided to just fly right into it and get it over with, so I set the ship to full power, and set a course precisely to the center of the black hole.

As my last hour approached I put on the only ‘fancy’ clothes I had brought with me, a pirate costume from a play that had ended it’s short run a long time ago…

The power of the black hole suddenly became frightening as the ship creaked and clunked in new ways, and I thought about praying but something hit me square on the head and so that’s how it ends… …

only it didn’t end.

I woke up, seeing two pretty girls cleaning out rabbit cages and I felt good and alive.

A little groggily I stood up, no arthritis pain, funny…those girls apparently hadn’t seen me as they did their work with the occasional “ewww” and “yukk”, and I took a step forward just to hit an invisible wall… The girls turned around and were babbling “look, the robot found more things with it’s space-junk collector beam! is it one of those syms like we found last month? well at least this one has nice clothes!”  The brunette said. "the last one didn’t have any clothes - or a head come to think of it, not that you were looking at his head!" the blonde one said.

Suddenly a big ugly lazer-blaster was pointed at my head..”up against that wall NOW” she smiles were gone, the laughing had stopped and while these girls didn’t look anything but cute I didn’t doubt for a second that they wouldn’t shoot… “put all of your stuff into the access port on the wall and proceed to the fluoroscope next to the rabbit cages” the blonde one said. Then the one with curly brown hair said, “This spaceship has a nasty habit of picking up bits of junk from space, like you, and you’ll do what we say or we’ll blast your synthetic butt into pieces”

“You mean put my costume in that hole in the wall?” I spluttered. A blinding beam of light burned a hole next to my boot. I took that as an affirmative. I stripped in no time flat, dunked my stuff in the place they were motioning to and stepped under the fluoroscope.. “Hmmm, you’re human” blondie said “but there are abnormal readings, which colony are you from?” I suddenly realized that my body wasn’t the same as last time I had forced myself to look, shamefully, at it’s long neglected state, It WAS me, but, and then it hit me, it was the same as when I was a kid, maybe 20 at the oldest, oh wow, Einstein must have been right on the time theory associated with black holes…

“hey sorry ’bout treating you like that, we thought you were one of those pleasure robots they make for lonely space miners on the asteroid belt!, we found one floating in space before and just assumed..” curly said. “Pleasure robots??” I managed to say, unsure weather to be flattered or insulted. “look I’m not used to being naked like this can i have my clothes back?” I said.

The girls both said “NO” at the same time, smiling at me, suddenly I realized that I didn’t mind after all….. …and so that’s how Daz The Phony Space Pirate came to be aboard the Giant Killer Death Space Robot Spaceship aka Pinky Purple…

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