Sorry Please Thank You (17 page)

It’s you.

No it’s not.

It is.

I’m not talking anymore until I find out what’s going on.

Me neither.

SAME HERE.

Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

How many of us are there?
Hello.
Hello. HELLO.
Hi.
Yo.
We have a quorum.
Meeting’s in session.
Ready and waiting
. Do we know what we’re doing? What’s the plan?
Anyone have a plan?
Anyone.
Someone go first. Please, someone, anyone, go first.
Someone, anyone
.

We reached the final frontier today.

Again.

No one wants to be the first to say it out loud, so it’s one of those things where we have cake and beer and everyone mouth-smiles at each other while our eyes are all, does anyone even know what is going on anymore? As in, this is cool, for real it is, but seriously, what the hell.

I’m on the observation deck looking at it. The last world. Am I excited? Sure I am. Even if this is the seventeenth time we’ve been here. I’m excited. I guess we’re still searching. Technically, I think we’ll always be searching. As long as we are on this ship, have these uniforms on, we are searching. For something. Nothing wrong with that. But the thing is, to be honest, lately it has started to feel less like searching and a bit more like, I don’t know, wandering.

Monday mornings they announce the crew members for the week’s away team, and it’s always the same:
our captain, the XO, the medic, the security chief, the ethnographer, and an unnamed yeoman.

This week’s yeoman: me.

Also: the yeoman always dies.

Information that would have been useful to know before I accepted the position.

They said, here is your new uniform.

They said, oh yeah, you get a pay raise.

They said, hey, how about a promotion? And I said, yes, yes, I’ve wanted to be a yeoman ever since I was a kid. To go down to the surface with the bridge officers. To wear that new uniform, get that little bit of extra money in the check.