Fiction: work. life. space cows.

Now that we’re away from the planet there doesn’t seem to be any real urgency to our flight. Of course, it was touch and go there for the last couple weeks, what with the limited space aboard these haulers and twelve billions people trying anything, literally anything, to get a spot. Important people were left

A cow can get used to zero gravity just like a human. In fact I’d swear they take to it even better than one of their two-legged minders. Maybe it’s because they’re used to a life at the ass end of the pecking order, always being told where to stand, when to eat, and eventually

“Bring the damn hose five steps closer.” Felix barks over the lowing hum of a thousand head of cattle and the ever-resonant thrum of the engines. “Are you fucking dim?” Hari and I are handling it, the carbon steel nozzle gripped firmly in my left hand and a good slug of pressurized water hose tucked

It’s possible by now, this early into my story, an intelligent person might be starting to ask some serious questions about my predicament. Like for a start, what happened to the Earth? Or, what was someone thinking hiring a bunch of ranch hands to tend cattle, living, breathing, eating, shitting cattle no less, aboard a

Hari snores. I would be, could be, content for the rest of my life living in the ass-end of a fleeing starship and shovelling cow shit into the matter recyclers while chomping down rubbery nutrient bars and slugging water that tastes a bit too much like iron, really I would. But sleeping, or trying to