The Elephant Found Me

I’d fled from Arkania to the jungles of Plespot to escape that nasty, vile, husband of mine. I didn’t care about the triple-dense tritanium jewellery he gave me or the Yardosh clothes or the enormous mansion designed by none other than Abawa with its too many rooms, nor did I care that he owned almost the entire planet and portions of other systems. I just wanted to escape the stinky smelly stenchuous odoriferous elephant dung that was his entire personality. But would he let me go? If you think he would, you don’t know Chester very well.

You’ve heard of Chester Brigham Turrington Churling the Fourth of the Arkanian Churlings, the sole descendant and heir to the Churling empire? He was the moving force behind, among many other things, the Maidstone project that’s been in all the news lately. You know, the prison ships that mine the asteroids in the Jersey Asteroid Belt around the Yorkoi system. He was adamant about making sure those prison ships were foolproof - once a prisoner arrived, he could never leave. No way to escape, no appeals, no hearings. Make the rest of the 50 Galaxies safe for the rest of us, he’d say.

Not safe from the likes of him, I say.

I had taken his fastest interplanetary speeder, also his most expensive and newest, and that had to hurt his ego. I mean, how many people could hack their way into the computer’s nav systems past his 200-character password and fake his voiceprint and credentials? Given how much he’d paid for his security systems, probably less than a handful of people in the entire 50 Galaxies. What Chester hadn’t realized was that, during those times that he locked me up in the mansion for supposed bad behavior, I’d studied and sweated and learned as much as I could. Enough to… Wait! Did you hear that?

Hang on, I think someone’s coming.

It was just another large animal. A big one. How freaking huge do they get here?

Anyway, I did what I had to, and now I was almost out of his reach. Almost. But he’ll follow me and he’ll find me. He always does. He’s just that stubborn and pigheaded. Wait, there’s another noise.

The elephant found me! My heart is beating so fast it feels like it’s going to explode.

“Thought you’d escape that easily, did you, Marina?” He barely fit through the hatch.

“Have you gained weight again, Chester?” He turned beet red and I swear I could almost see smoke erupting from his ears. I slowly inched towards the wall behind me.

“It’s not my fault I was cursed with a slow metabolism. And you aren’t such a catch yourself, Marina.”

“You could go under treatment, Chester. It’s only your stubbornness that prevents you from losing all that weight. Bacterial treatment is foolproof. You know it - your company spearheaded the research. And if I’m not such a catch, then why not let me go?”

“I’m not letting anyone inject random bacteria into my body, and you know it. You know how I feel about bacteria. How dare you bring that up, again and again? No cure is worth that treatment. And I’m not done with you yet, Marina.”

“And that explains why you’re the only obese person left in the 50 Galaxies. And why you’re as a big as an elephant. I’m surprised you can still walk.” I reached behind myself and activated the portable transporter door, another prototype I’d copied from Chester’s R&D department. I’d made a few enhancements to the original. I’m sure he’d love to get his hands on it. So would I, but for different reasons.

I felt behind me for the controls and turned it on. The bulkhead behind me transformed into a doorway to another world. “You’ll have to find me first, Chester.”

He laughed a deep, throaty growl. “You obviously don’t know about the failsafe I built into the prototype, Marina, but go ahead, give it a try.” He smirked in the most unbecoming way. He was in full gloat mode.

I stepped through the doorway behind me and transported away from him. “Transporter, code Alpha Pi Pluto. Execute!” he bellowed. Three chirps, and he went through the transporter after me. “Marina! What have you done?”

I walked out of the hold onto the bridge where I’d left the portable transporter device on the bulkhead wall. “I tweaked it. A little.” I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I was free of him, permanently. I’d executed the perfect solution.

“You… You… What did you… How did you… Marina!” I could hear the panic in his voice, the panic of being out of control for the first time in his life.

“I sent you a Maidstone ship. You’re now a prisoner.”

“That’s impossible! I designed the transporter interface myself.” Through the transporter’s visual display - another enhancement of mine that I set to automatically activate after he used it - we could see each other and converse. Quite clever, I thought. I could see him looking around, examining his environment in a blind panic. “Get me out of here!”

I smiled. “You know that’s impossible, Chester. And besides, why would I want to? By the laws you pushed through as part of your Maidstone project, I’ve just inherited your entire empire as your next of kin. Why would I want to?” I waved goodbye as two prisoners came up behind him and grabbed him by his shoulders and pulled him into the darkness.

Poor Chester. He had no idea what he’d created.

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