HUMBLE SPACER 05 OCT 3306 (bazaar)
06 Oct 2020Igli
Cosmos is astoundingly vast and profoundly empty. One may travel for days or even weeks without encountering another spacer to chat with. Such rare strangers are usually quite busy and after a brief greeting quickly vanish into the void. Therefore it is rather enigmatic how galactic gossip spreads so fast given a low saturation of the universe with carriers of news.Once a word reached my ears of a big sale in a distant system and I decided to check it out. I made a final hyper jump and immediately had to frenzically manoeuvre and drastically decelerate. Then I spasmatically swallowed what was left in the bottle. Oh my! What a fantastic crowd: a not quite disciplined queue of irritated customers lined up to the docking port of a staion. Ether was erupting with angry radio chatter as commanders were arguing about whose turn it was to dive next into the "mail slot".
I humbly placed my ship in the end of the line and sat to wait patiently. Immediately somebody dropped out of hyper space behind me and called on the comms: "Yo! Yes, I mean YOU, cheap loser! I was here sooner, so move aside!" I pretended that my radio was broken and didn't reply. The newcomer kept cursing for some time but eventually exhausted and chose to shut up.
The queue was moving slowly. Almost to the docking port. What a mess! Some CMDRs were rushing inside, others out - all at once. Slamming into each other: bump, bump, bump... One ace sqweezed through the mail slot port side forward - burning lateral boosters - an exquisite manoeuvre. The attending crowd roared with admiration. Or anger - I didn't get it. My turn to enter the station, I pushed accelarator forward and swung through.
No-o-o! Some Beluga just decided to leave at the same time! It occupied all the cubature of the docking port with its huge and nonsensical rear spoiler. No matter how I tried to give way, I was literally dragged out, spun around and shoved aside. Darn liner, no - a road grader, no less. Praise those energy shields, otherwise we would have to pull over and wait for traffic inspectors and insurance agents to assess damages.
In the end I managed to park my spacecraft and went to see what the bazaar had to offer on a sale day. Nothing... How come?! Nothing was sold at all! Angry customers were milling about a closed market. Administration announced that an "infrastructure failure" had occurred due to insane traffic jams in the system. A jammed star system! Some stellar phenomenon. Evidently humans overpopulated this world too much. Clearly some galactic plague or a war was needed to cull the herd a bit. Or even better - a wicked social engineering experiment.
Generally I like people but some days like that I want to wield a multicannon.