You know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of happy friggin’ endings! Every story you read, every movie you watch, every T.V. show you TiVo, it’s all the same. It all just works out in the end. The guy gets the girl. The hero defeats the monster. The inspectors find the weapons of mass destruction.
Well, news flash, people: that’s not what real life is like! Real life is full of unhappy endings. The guy doesn’t get the girl; monsters don’t even exist; and Iraq couldn’t build a nuclear weapon if Walmart sold nuclear-weapon-making kits! And Walmart doesn’t sell nuclear weapon kits, people. They just don’t.
I’m tired of art not reflecting life like it’s friggin’ supposed to! And what am I doing about it? I’m making some damn art! Art without happy endings. So, here you go, folks, here’s a great friggin’ story with a really shitty ending:
The Void of Space
By Porter Mason
He looked once more at the navigational monitor and sighed. The trajectory was way off course. It was heading toward a crash with Jupiter’s fiery moon, Io, and there was little Sergeant Walters could do about it.
“I suppose that’s what you get for trying to do too much in one misson,” the cynic inside him thought. “I suppose that’s just what you get.”
There was nothing to do now but wait. He’d prepared a delicately worded statement for NASA, explaining how and why their $2.2 billion ship would soon be little more than a charred hunk of steel and titanium. He’d readied a transmission for his family, his last words to them. Funny to think he had 25 minutes until death, and already he’d said all his last words.
“I suppose that’s what you get for living 600,000,000 kilometers away from those you love. I suppose that’s just what you get.”
The console in front of him beeped once, and onscreen a small green icon began flashing.
“A new radar contact?”
Probably some asteroid that’d been hit slightly off its line. The computer kept track of the orbits of countless asteroids, but reported any that strayed slightly from their appointed rounds.
The computer showed the contact. The shape resembled an asteroid, but it was emitting heat… and light.
“The fuck is that?” mumbled Walters, but he already knew the answer. It was another ship. And not one manned by humans. It was protocol naturally to report back immediately to Earth, but he was too close to Io’s magnetic field to attempt radio contact. And any record of the incident would soon be swallowed into the moon’s magmatic crust.
Sergeant Elijah Jacob Walters was having the most well-documented close encounter of the first kind in human history, but no one would ever know it happened. His mind raced; he looked around the console frantically, hoping to find what he knew wasn’t there. He looked back at the visual of the ship before him. Walters found a sudden calm and leaned back in his chair.
“I suppose that’s what you get for wishing, every night of your life, to witness the existence of another lifeform, even if the circumstances in which you would witness such a thing would prevent you from sharing it with another living person,” thought the sergeant, and he sighed. “I suppose that’s just what you get.”
And… then… suddenly, the left rear rocket righted itself, the ship escaped Io’s orbit, the aliens made contact, boarded Walters’ ship, and gave him a map with the locations of every other known civilization in the Galaxy. Walters returned to Earth in three months, became a national hero, and lived to see his daughter go on to become President of the United States and sign into law the first Earth-wide peace accord, which marked the beginning of the historical period known as Pax Gaia, wherein all the nations and peoples of the planet lived in total and complete harmony for the rest of time.
But then, a day after all that happened, Sergeant Walters stubbed his toe on an ottoman!
THE END
Ha ha! Now there’s a shitty ending! In more ways than one! ZING!
P.S. I just zing-ed myself. (sigh)