1

Earth had finally done it, had finally neared an Earthlike world positioned in the Goldilocks Zone of a nearby star system. The Vita Nova, the ship travelling to such a place, would reach GM-2871 within four hours. Surface gravity had been determined to be slightly less than that on Earth, and GM-2871 was roughly the same size but comprised of far more continents. The planet was surrounded by a thin ring of rocky debris surely suitable for mining, and even the orbiting moon looked like a rather promising venture. Time would tell whether such a journey would prove to be a fruitful capstone on an age of humanity, whether it would usher Earth into a new era of extraterrestrial life.

The crew of the Vita Nova was a mixed bag of thoughts and emotions. Some were cynical about the voyage, while others waxed philosophical on the potential consequences.

But don't take my word for it—see for yourself.

2

i

"Does this pose make my ass look fat?" Betty asked Veronica as she bent over in a way that was certain to offend those flat-chested, board-assed women who couldn't tolerate a well-endowed girl comfortable with her own rockin' body. Her suit lay in a heap below her toned, gap-free thighs, and she only wore a sports bra and an uncomfortable pair of skin-tight, crotch-riding undies. At the same time, she texted her boyfriend Rodney, who was trapped on Earth with a lifetime supply of tissues and a shipping container of industrial-grade lubricant, counting down the days until he would bang her.

Slurping vodka through a straw as she stepped into her spacesuit (adorned with a Canadian flag on the shoulder), Veronica took a good long look at Betty's booty and felt the nipples of her enormous sports-bra-smothered breasts harden. "Girl, your ass makes your ass look fat." She gave it a good spank and watched it ripple. "Damn!"

"Could you be serious for a sec?" Betty asked, still bent over for some reason. "That's all I'm asking. Jesus, Veron! You're always cracking jokes and making crude comments about me, and I'm asking you for some serious advice. I don't want a spanking—not right now. I want your opinion as a strong, independent woman." Her thumbs moved nearly at the speed of light as she finished off the text to Rodney. She wanted to know his opinion on her latest four-hundred-page thesis about the possibility that extraterrestrials built the Giza pyramids. Thanks to the phenomenal advances in interstellar WiFi, they could communicate anywhere, anytime.

"What's the problem, girl?" Veronica zipped her suit to her chin and examined herself. Unsatisfied, she unzipped the suit to her bellybutton and spread the material so her enormous breasts were hanging out, barely contained by their sports-bra prison of the patriarchy. She nodded and tried on her helmet, making sure the seal was tight.

"I've been sexting Rodney lately, and I've been feeling... I dunno, self-conscious about my ass. He says he loves it, but, y'know how guys are. Does he really love it? Or is he just lying to make me feel better..."

"Girl, if Jughead don't like that booty"—she snapped her fingers—"bitch, I'll gladly take it. Mhm. That's for damn sure."

"Don't call him Jughead... You know I hate it. You don't see me calling Archie 'Spotted Dick.'"

"Feel free to call him 'Freckle-Cock' for all I care," Veronica told her, removing the helmet and peeling off the suit. "Ain't nothin' wrong with the truth, girl, and the truth is: Dat ass be a round mound. Fo' damn sho'."

Betty's tablet let out a ding! and she read Rodney's reply.

Rodney: Looks like another riveting thesis, babe! Maybe fix the punctuation and the spelling.

She raised one eyebrow and sent him back a reply.

Betty: wut nerds phicksing,,,,???$

Rodney: lol. I'll correct it after I wipe my ass. One sec.

The window beside Veronica wasn't actually a window, though it certainly looked like one, staring out at Earth with the Sun's gentle (but increasingly overbearing) kiss behind it. In all actuality, the window was a screen, and the Earth being shown was actually advanced CGI. Sometimes, if you watched long enough, you could see little "Easter eggs," courtesy of the dope-smoking programmers, appear for a moment—like just now, while you were reading this, a pterodactyl soared past, smoking a cigar and holding shopping bags from Abercrombie & Fitch.

Another ding!

Rodney: E-mailed you a list of changes I think will help drive your points home. Now how about snapping me some of those butt shots that get me so hard? Here's one of me...

"See this?" Betty said, showing Veronica the tablet as another message came through. "Is he being honest, or fibbing?"

"Is that boy naked with a box of pizza on his lap and a giant stuffed bear hugging him from behind?"

"Isn't it cute? He does that for me. And sometimes he'll make a hole through the centre and put his dick—"

Veronica covered her ears. "LA-LA-LA! Girl, you know I don't need to hear that kinda garbage. Now, you send that boy some butts and then meet the team in the war room. We got a planet to explore."

As Veronica strutted off with maximum bounce, Betty—bent over, of course—took a series of increasingly explicit pictures for her Earthbound boyfriend.

"Lookin' good, Betty!" a generic-looking guy said as he walked past.

"Thanks, Dave!"

ii

Two extraterrestrial-intelligence experts—Rank and Brad—loitered in another part of the Vita Nova.

Rank smacked out a cigarette from his carton of Ecrivain's Specials, only the finest in government-approved blends.

"Better not, mate," Brad told him. "You'll get superpowers, and that's the wrong genre."

"Genre? What the hell are you talking about, Brad? Shut up!"

A silver wad of flavour-protective foil hit Brad in the forehead. "Ow." He rubbed the bruise.

Lighting up, Rank savoured a hit of the good shit and blew the smoke into Brad's eyes. The sawdust they used as filler came from the cheapest evergreens, and it showed. He coughed a mucous-enveloped pube into his palm—a sign of quality control doing their job—and wiped it on his pants. "So what kinda alien life you think we're gonna find, Brad?" Rank smirked as a droplet of blood rolled down from his right nostril. "Yours?"

"No, since I'm a human being from Earth—like you, Rank," Brad said, too intelligent to get that he was being insulted. "I'm not so sure we'll find intelligent beings, or even complex life-forms at all. We may very well find that GM-2871 is in the earliest stages of life, with only microscopic unicellular organisms frolicking in its primordial seas."

Rank's eyelid and mouth twitched involuntarily. He'd only understood two words that had come from Brad's stupid smart mouth. "Shut up!"

"Okay."

A generic-looking guy walked past and said, "Yo, B-Rad. We on for extreme drunken mini-putt this weekend, bro? I programmed the VR with some sssssmokin'-hot, green-skinned, possibly alien babes. I had a go with one, and—you best believe it, pardner—she does anal!"

Brad raised two finger guns and clicked his thumbs. "Booyah! Righteous conquest, mate! You best believe I am I-to-the-N—that's IN, bitch!"

Feeling alienated, Rank watched them both laugh until the other guy disappeared around the corner. "Who the fuck was that guy? Never seen him before."

With one elevated eyebrow, Brad said, "That was Dave. You don't know Dave?"

"Should I know Dave?"

"Of course. The three of us regularly go drinking together. Oh, and then there was the Christmas party last year. Dave was hysterical." A fit of laughter overtook Brad as he remembered the night's outrageous events. He doubled over and laughed until tears came out of his eyes, which he took the time to wipe before speaking again. "Remember when Dave showed up in a clown costume, totally wasted on starter fluid and amyl nitrites, and he harassed President Ivanka Trump and set both of her brothers on fire? God, that was great!"

Rank scratched the pimples under his thin, patchy facial hair. "No... And I'm pretty fuckin' sure I'd remember something like that."

"Oh, quit joking, mate! C'mon, we've got a meeting to attend."

3

The war room, also known as the peaceful-plotting-regarding-first-contact-with-alien-life room, was a hustle and bustle of activity. Well, maybe not a hustle, or even a bustle. There were five people, four of whom were sitting at their desks and facing the fifth, Captain Dingus, who was smacking a screen with a horsewhip.

"Y'all see this noise!?" Dingus screamed for no reason, rattling the room's rafters.

A brick of cocaine dropped from the ceiling and landed next to Rank, who stealthily shot out a foot from under his desk and pulled the brick closer.

"BLURRY IMAGES!" Grinning like a psychotic, Dingus whipped the screen multiple times, cracking through the tough extra-protective layer the engineering division had added because Captain Dingus' screen-abuse was burning through the ship's budget. As he always did, Dingus brightened when he'd penetrated the strong plastic barrier and managed to kill a whole pixel. "But blurry images with the possibility of life! Now, I don't need to tell all y'all that what we're doin' here might change lives. Hell, what we're doin' might even save humanity! And, goddamnit, what we're doin' will more than likely bring about a lasting peace on planet Earth! BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN Y'ALL SHOULD SLACK ON YOUR GODDAMN CHORES! I HAD RANDY IN COMPUTER DIVISION BLOW UP THIS IMAGE AND POLISH IT UP A LITTLE—"

"Sir," Brad interrupted with his hand held high.

"WHAT!?"

"You're getting angry again."

Dingus closed his eyes and counted back from one hundred. "Thank you, Brad. As I was saying"—he whipped the screen a few times, trying to make it transition to the next slide; then remembered he had to push a button on the remote—"THIS IS CLEARLY RANK TAKING A DUMP ON THE BATHROOM FLOOR, RIGHT BESIDE THE GODDAMN TOILET!"

As stated, what was previously a blur was now quite obviously Rank crapping on the bathroom floor and even giving the finger to the camera.

"MY GOD, MAN! DO YOU WANT THE ALIENS TO THINK WE'RE UNCIVILIZED DEGENERATES!?"

Rank removed his head from his desk, a dusting of white powder on his bloody nose. "Huh?"

"HUH!? WHY CAN'T YOU BE MORE LIKE DAVE!?" The captain indicated to a generic-looking guy who hadn't been there at the beginning of the scene.

Of course when Rank looked, nobody was there. "Who's Dave...?" he muttered under his breath, trying hard to remember.

As a way of response, Dingus whipped Rank's desk over and over, splinters flying left and right.

"Ow," Brad said, removing one from his forehead. He pressed a hand over the wound to stop the bleeding.

Betty and Veronica giggled to each other from the corner.

"WHAT'RE Y'ALL—"

The janitor walked in. He was a very old man with only one eye and one arm. A cybernetic eye had been installed in his empty socket, but he'd forgotten to recharge it last night and thus its battery was dead. Where his other arm used to be was a stump, covered with a robotics-enabled pad which he could connect to various objects. Presently, he attached a broom and dustpan to his stump and proceeded to sweep the floors. The janitor looked up when he realized everyone was staring at him, including a purple-faced Captain Dingus, who had a grapefruit-sized vein protruding from his forehead. "Don't mind me," the janitor grunted.

A silence passed over the room, which Brad used to redirect the meeting: "Um, Captain Dingus, you were about to discuss the mission."

"That's right." Next slide, showing a planet of land and water. It might've been confused for Earth itself, if not for the totally different-looking continents. "GM-2871 looks like a hell of a world, people! We'll be landin' right here." Dingus whipped the screen on an area of flattened green plains, just below a pair of tall snow-capped mountains. "Ample room to maneuver. Ocean to the left, lake to the right. We can take more samples than we'll know what to do with! Ya'll ready for this?"

"OOORAH!!!!!!" the others shouted—except for Rank, who instead shouted: "I LIKE SKITTLES!"

"Grease the rover and get it prepped for insertion! We're goin' in hard and fast, people! And someone check our emergency Twinkie supplies!"

"On it, Cap'n!" Brad said, saluting with one blood-stained hand.

4

With the Vita Nova in the Clarke Belt, locked in a stationary orbit above GM-2871, the lubricated, gold-foil-wrapped Ragtag Rover slid out of the ship's rear end and penetrated the planet's atmosphere.

Sitting buckled-up within the rover were Betty and Veronica, with the former wanting to talk about suspected extraterrestrial-built structures on Earth and the latter trying to ease the conversation back to a subject more her speed: breasts and butts; a scowling Captain Dingus, gripping his horsewhip and thinking he was too old for this shit; a queasy Brad, hoping the turbulence wouldn't throw him around like a ragdoll; and Rank, who was attempting to roll a joint while the rover was buffetted this way and that.

"I'm damn nervous, girl," Veronica said above the din, just before a huge bump sent them all flying upwards. She hit her head on the ceiling and her pain-filled shrieks were lost amidst the fire and thunder.

"At least we've got Dave here," Betty told her when things calmed. "He'll protect us."

"True dat. Thanks, Dave, you beast. For errythang."

Rank looked around but didn't see Dave anywhere.

"CAN THE CHATTER, SOLDIERS!" Dingus roared. "Rover! Extend wings and release the parachute on my command. Ready... Go!"

As commanded, the Ragtag's useless wings shot out the sides, breaking off as they were meant to do. The Chinese-made plastic wings did thirty rolls a second as they dropped to the raging seas below. The parachute emerged from the top of the rover, slowing it considerably and bringing it more level to the ground.

The on-board computer was perfectly capable of calculating the right moment to do these things, and in fact required no command from Captain Dingus at all. Nobody had the heart to tell him, however. It was better for the man's ego and delusions if he thought he were in control.

The descent was easy-breezy now that the upper atmospheric layers had been successfully negotiated.

Ragtag neared the flattened plains. Insects watching from the surrounding high grass were ahum. Snakes slithered. Lizards lounged.

Fifty metres until touchdown. Forty. Thirty.

The parachute on top was released, floating for a second before its lack of an anchor caused it to tangle and blow away. A new parachute blew out the back of the rover. Its wheels emerged from the bottom and the rover bounced as it hit the flat earth, rolling along, slowing with every metre travelled.

Coming to a stop, the crew let out the collective breaths they'd been holding. Rank blew out smoke.

"NICE WORK, MARINES!" Dingus shouted, experiencing a flashback to an ancient battlefield. "NOW STORM THE BEACH! GO, GO, GO! SHOW THOSE KRAUTS WHAT WE'RE MADE OF!"

5

While Betty and Veronica collected flora and water samples and gossiped about who was the ship's biggest dick, Brad canvassed the area for higher forms of life. GM-2871 was remarkably well-off in terms of ecological development, and with the buzzing of what sounded like crickets, he had a feeling mammals would also be discovered.

Meanwhile, Rank—forever on a quest to lower the galactic value of humanity—was blowing smoke into the ears of a Sun-bathing two-headed lizard, trying to get it high.

Captain Dingus ran in place, pretended to shoot people, threw make-believe grenades into not-real bunkers, and relived the horrors of his past. In the conflict of his mind, wars were never truly won.

Suddenly Brad yelled for the others to come quick, which helped to finally bring Dingus out of his PTSD-like state of high-alert confusion. Like a dutiful soldier back on the frontlines—okay, maybe he was still suffering—Captain Dingus raced over to Brad, where he stood peering into a mess of brush.

"What is it, Sarge? Are those fuckin' Russians settin' up a flankin' maneuver!? We're pinned down, Sarge! WE CAN'T HOLD THEM BACK MUCH LONGER!"

"No, sir," Brad said, massaging his superior's shoulders until the vacant look left the man's eyes. "Easy, easy. The war's over. Deep breaths, sir. Now come see this."

"AWWWW!" The women both pointed, then rushed the creature. "IT'S SOOOO CUUUUUTE!"

"Is that... a monkey?" Dingus asked, hands on his hips, tapping the horsewhip against his bottom. "In the same orange uniforms we're wearin'?"

Brad helped the creature up, which seemed very curious of the two bangin'-bodied women. "Actually it's a chimpanzee. Its name tag says 'Chimcham.' And I haven't the faintest idea why it would be wearing our uniform. Maybe that's just how things work on this planet? Though it does seem rather unlikely."

Holding Brad's hand, Chimcham tilted its head up at him. "Ooo-hoo-ah-ha-ha!" it said, baring some very sharp teeth. (Because you horrible monsters left me here! I'll kill you! I'll kill you all!)

"Aw, girl, he's trying to talk," Veronica said in a baby-like voice, jamming her enormous breasts against Chimcham's face, nearly suffocating it in breast. "Sooo cuuute!"

"Oo-ooooooh!" (I'll show you something cute!)

"Guys, I think I killed a lizard," Rank said from behind. He held a limp two-headed lizard by its tail.

"Quiet, Rank!" Dingus was back in action, his head cleared of the fog of war. "Ladies and gents, we have discovered new life on this planet! Get your samples ready to conduct further studies! Dave! Warm up the rover's engines! WE'RE FLYIN' THIS GODDAMN THING BACK TO THE SHIP! Brad! Send word to the Vita Nova that we need a probe ready! Make it a footlong! I want to know more about this monkey's insides than we know about our own ship!"

Chimcham's eyes went wide with horror.

6

"Entering wormhole," Brad told the others in the war room, as they stared through the Vita Nova's windshield. Visible to everyone was a kind of psychedelic, sci-fi swirl of colour: blues blending with browns, oranges becoming yellows; where one colour ended and another began was hard to describe when one was faced with a limited word count.

"Bullshit! Where's the fuckin' sesame seeds and bits of corn?" Rank asked, cigarette in mouth, appearing very confused, with his wrinkled forehead and blood leaking from every orifice.

"That's a butthole, Rank."

In truth, the windshield was really a screen, and the "wormhole" was actually just a pre-recorded video of an oil painting being made by a highly intelligent dog with an owner who'd spotted the signs of a genius when it was still a puppy.

But if it were a wormhole, it would look exactly the same.

Dingus whipped various desks as he made his way to the front of the room. "As y'all already know, we've placed a satellite into orbit 'round GM-2871, we've sent a colony in the rover back down to the surface, and we've got robots buildin' another base for the next ship! We're headin' back to Earth now! The chimp is goin' through the gamut of tests! And we still got more Twinkies than we know what to do with! NICE WORK, Y'ALL!"

"I'm just glad we had Dave there to ensure things went smoothly," Brad said.

The others voiced their agreement.

Rank plugged one nostril and snorted a line. "Dave wasn't fuckin' there."

"Um." Brad cocked an eyebrow. "He was in the rover... sitting beside me, mate."

"That was me!"

Rolling his eyes, Brad said, "On the other side."

"Betty and I totes had a threesome with Dave once," Veronica added for some reason. "He spanked me the way a dirty young bizznatch requires. Mhm. Fo' shizzle."

"Who's Dave!?"

The janitor appeared out of nowhere. "You don't mean Dave Zapp? A fine soldier. Matter of fact, he was with me back when we first came to this planet. That's right, Captain Dingus, I ain't no janitor—I'm a spy. I used to be the captain of the Rusty Trombone, a stealth vessel sent on a black-ops mission to GM-2871 in search of life. Chimcham was our test monkey. A shame we left him there. I reckon he's dead by now. You happen to find his skeleton?"

The crew all shared knowing glances—except for Rank, who was spaced-out and staring at his hands like he'd never seen them before.

An alert sounded over the speakers: "EMERGENCY ALERT! TWINKIE STORES HAVE BEEN RAIDED! REPEAT: TWINKIE STORES HAVE BEEN RAIDED! OH, AND A CHIMPANZEE HAS ESCAPED AND IS KILLING THE REST OF THE CREW! THAT IS ALL!"

Captain Dingus locked and loaded a laser gun, screaming incoherently. "YA'LL HEARD THE GENERAL! JERRIES ARE STORMIN' THE BASE! HOLD THE LINE, SOLDIERS! HOLD THE GODDAMN LIIIIIIIIIINE!"

7

i

Betty and Veronica got separated while hunting Chimcham, which hadn't ended so great for Veronica. While exploring a part of the ship without power, her energy-inefficient flashlight went dead and she was left in the dark.

That's when Chimcham attacked with Twinkies.

Just before she died, coughing up Twinkies, Veronica struggled to say: "Tell me... my ass... looks... fat... girl..." And then she was gone, departed from this world. Some might say she wasn't right for it, others might say it wasn't right for her. One thing was certain: She always stayed gold, Ponyboy.

ii

Minutes later, Rank heard some banging in the ventilation shafts. He was too busy smoking his Ecrivain's Specials to care.

Bad move—as Chimcham dropped from the ceiling and manhandled Rank, ripping down his drawers in the process.

Rank screamed, and the tasty snack cake went up his poop-chute, making a noise just like when a cork gets fired from a wine bottle.

Chimcham left him to bleed out.

8

The others had backtracked to the war room, intending to form a last stand with only one possible entrance/exit to defend. Guns armed and at the ready, they sat and waited, wetting their pants as the screams of the dying drew ever closer.

Enter: Chimcham!

The chimp thumped his furry, blood-soaked chest, a belt of Twinkies wrapped around his waist. "OOOOH-AH-AH-AH!" (Death will come sweet and painfully!)

Dingus opened fire—or he would have, if the gun hadn't exploded in his hands. "Fuckin' Chinese crap!"

Chimcham advanced.

Then Rank dragged himself into the room, stark-naked below the belt and bleeding profusely. He took a drag off his cigarette and jammed it into Chimcham's hairy foot, setting the creature ablaze.

Amidst the poor animal's dying howls, the others celebrated.

"Thank God Dave was here to save us!" Betty said.

Brad quipped, "I guess you could say it was... all in a Dave's work! Hahahaha!"

"HAHAHAHA!"

Down on the floor, Rank tore the hair from his head and let out a strangled squeal. "WHO THE FUCK IS DAVE!?"

A beautiful, majestic man with long, flowing blond hair appeared on the scene. "I am," he said, and his voice sounded like the trumpets of angels combined with the soft, heavenly singing of a Christian boys' choir. "I am Dave, from the planet Zoltar. I can't take all the credit for saving you people, but I will take some. We have been watching you humans for quite some time. We like you. We think you're cool. So it wouldn't be good if you were made extinct by a psychopathic chimpanzee." Dave pulled off his own arm and waved it around, then reattached it, extending and retracting his fingers for show. "I can put my arm back on, but you can't. So play safe. My people will be in touch..."

Dave stepped backwards, phasing through the wall and disintegrating into a billion trillion mites of extraterrestrial data. He rejoined his parallel universe and reformed within the mother computer his entire species now lived inside.

>DAVE IS BACK.

>HUMANITY SAVED.

>MISSION COMPLETE.

>PRAISE DAVE.

>PRAISE DAVE.