Captain’s Log January 17, 0900 hours: Am I a captain? No, no, I am not. Captain of my own destiny? Sure, let’s go with that.
The news today, got a strong enough internet signal to download an mp3 horse whinny, you know, for my robotic stead. They tried to get horses comfortable in low gravity. But anyone who’s spent even a summer on a farm knows horses are fickle creatures. The experiments failed miserably, enough to stock Ikea with meatballs for a century. Nope, my ride is a thousand-pound behemoth XRe-9 from Shanghai Dynamics (the cheaper knock-off of Boston Dynamics), which I nicknamed Maurice. And, well, he ain’t much to look at. And goodness knows I don’t want a video of me riding him going viral. It’s not the majestic saunter of a thoroughbred against a sunset. No, sir. I’m not Clint Eastwood, and he’s no Silver. I’ll just give you this mental picture. Eight legs. Yep, Maurice’s got eight legs. Imagine trying to tame a ten-ton octopus bucking like a mechanical bull at a honky-tonk during last call. Not a pretty sight.
The shrinks told them to give us horses to create a “sympathetic environment.” Whatever the hell that means. Really, they wanna ensure we don’t go ape shit and slaughter the cows. Oh yeah, you heard me right. Couldn’t get horses, but cows took to space like E. coli to a bowl of potato salad on a warm day. Warm days, where I play my music in the sun. Miss those out here.
Ooh, an update on my resupply.
Damn it. Delayed again.
February 01, 1527 hours: what do you want to be when you grow up? I always responded: space cowboy. Why? It was a smart-ass answer and the coolest imaginary job I could think of. Raised on reruns of Cowboy Bebop and the Mandalorian, I figured it meant bounty hunter extraordinaire. But you know what? If that was their job, they’d be called Space Bounty Hunters. Right? Yes, yes, they would. Not space cowboy. Do you know why? Because some people call me a space cowboy, yeah. I run a herd of cattle on one of Saturn’s moons. And not one of the cool moons either. Titan. Badass. Atlas. World-holding bodybuilder. Fenrir. Sounds like a freaking werewolf ripping out of a heavy metal poster. Nope, I’m on DCR-12, which stands for Doritos Cool Ranch-12. Yep, corporations discovered naming rights in space.
And how do they describe my lovely home? No, go ahead, Google it (everyone’s still using Google, right?). Did you read it? Yep, a potato-shaped, turd-colored moon next to Coke Zero-115. That’s home. Like a midnight toker named the entire cluster on a munchies run.
February 14, 1600 hours: Supposed to get my resupply. Typical Valentine’s Day shit show: package delayed. Been there before. One of the many travesties of life in space. And unlike the movies of sleek ships, sophisticated robots that, yeah, maybe try to kill you, and laser swords, the reality of space, at least the one controlled by billionaires with penis rockets, is that it’s cheap. Cheap AF. Seriously, I rode a ship out here held together with duct tape and zip ties. Why? Because when the corporations got involved, start-ups raked in investor dollars to spend on space sex and Mars weed. And when the time came to pay the bills, stockholders called closing time and cut costs. Hence, why I’m on DCR-12 wrangling a herd of cattle to terraform the moon into something livable. Or mineable. Or growable. All I know is that we’re terraforming. Sounds bitchin, like there should be a bunch of droids and science shit. Nope. It’s me and cows and machines to convert the methane into viable resources. That’s right, the glorious future of your dreams runs on cow farts.
Plus, tons of manure lying around. Sure, I’d love to grow crops, but they refuse to send me seeds. Say it might throw off the delicate ecosystem. What ecosystem? It’s cows and one dude. And I don’t think I need to explain; if you don’t come with it, you ain’t getting it. DCR-12 is a closed economy.
But I have a plan. Just need my freaking resupply.
February 29, 0111 hours: So, what does a space cowboy do? Ride the “prairie” on Maurice, brand cows (not for protection from space marauders, but out of sheer BOREDOM), lasso practice (yep, nine-time DCR-12 roping gold medalist), and cow insemination. So much cow insemination. Why, you ask? Money stupid. Takes a lot of expensive equipment and scientific know-how to clone cows. Thus, they opted to send one minimum wage schmuck with a metric ton of cow semen. Joy.
Also, space cowboys do a lot of milking. Didn’t cover that in science fiction monthly. And because the cow’s only food is algae (grown in tanks and fed by, you guessed it, methane) the milk is green. I see my dairy inspector father shaking his head.
Inspection Grade: F.
March 03 0700 hours: Happy Resupply Day! Didn’t get my ketchup, bummer. Even freeze-dried food tastes better with ketchup. So, I’m stuck with gallons of milk and freeze-dried food. Life of luxury. However, they did include my powdered egg yolks, sugar, imitation vanilla, and freeze-dried bananas. Oh yeah, you see where I’m going with this.
April 15, 1234 hours: why am I not smarter?
April 30, 0655 hours: seriously, couldn’t I have had one engineering class?
May 31, 1515 hours: BANANA SPLIT! Space is cold AF, yet it took a minor miracle to get my rinky-dink churn to function. Yeah, the ice cream is green and lumpy. The vanilla can’t overpower the algae, and the bananas are a decade old. But if I close my eyes, it tastes like home, like the banana split my dad used to make me. And if I focus hard, I can see that kid, eyes full of hope, staring up at the moon, dreaming about being a space cowboy.