I don’t know, man. My pressure suit is a little frayed around the elbows. I don’t even know where I left my magnetic boots. We’re probably not ready for that, but … if you insist. Jesus.
Ah, hello. Band meeting. Joe’s here, that’s all I can confirm. No one else wants to go on the record, including Marvin (my personal robot assistant), though he has appeared on at least one of our records, truth be told. (Forgive the double-entendre.) We’ve been tossing around ideas for generating a little cash, as the Big Green collective has been struggling a bit of late. The obvious remedy would be another tour, probably of the interstellar variety, but as I was saying earlier, our gear is threadbare as hell and we don’t even have a line on a spaceship rental. God knows what we would cross that trackless void in this time around.
Well, to be sure, the lure of money drives humankind to desperate means. We could probably wrangle a string of marginal gigs between Neptune and Aldebaran, though I’m not clear on how lucrative the exercise would turn out to be. The exchange rate on Quatloos is in the toilet these days. And between the two of us, I’m getting a little long in the tooth for space travel – not sure I could hold my breath long enough to get to Neptune, to say nothing of destinations beyond the Kuiper Belt. Also … we’re short a guitar player. Just saying.
Not that playing gigs is the only way to shake the money tree. Every musician runs into this situation at various points in her/his career. What’s it going to be? Washing dishes? Done it. Carrying boxes and stocking shelves? Done that, too. Driving a cab? Well … I haven’t done that, but I came close once or twice. Then there’s Mitch’s idea. You might recall how he’s been experimenting with gravity. Well, he was musing on how to monetize his new technology, and it struck him that people pay for water, they pay for electricity, they pay for heating fuel … maybe he could get them to pay for gravity. He’s thinking about doing a market test – namely, sending gravity bills to our neighbors. If they don’t pay, he would train his anti-grav ray on their houses and claim that their service had been discontinued. That’s when the simoleons start rolling in.
Okay, well … there may be nicer ways to make a living. Like … I don’t know … playing music, perhaps.
Well, Mitch Macaphee is nothing like that. His sanest moment was when he invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and Marvin is bat-shit crazy. Now Mitch is going around the mill, modifying appliances so that they have rudimentary intelligence and the ability to surf the internet. He has basically turned every machine in the joint against me. My practice amp won’t power up. Our fridge has gone completely rogue, ringing up large grocer bills and denying us access to snacks. And now the clothes washer has taken it into its head (if it even has one) to commandeer the mill and start some kind of appliance commune. It even took one of my black tee-shirts, tore it into strips, and made a headband out of it. Looks quite smart … for a washing machine.
Right, so … Mitch spent a few weeks YouTubing, and the next thing we knew he was tinkering with our aging refrigerator. The following day, Matt opened the fridge door and the little light went on. Hey … he’s finally making himself useful, we all thought. But then the thing started talking to me. One afternoon I reached in for a cold drink and I heard a mechanical voice say, “Are you going to have another one of those?” Then it locked the door on me. That was bad enough, but just this past week we started getting random shipments from the neighborhood grocer – eggs, milk, cottage cheese, lettuce. I thought it was Anti Lincoln planning one of his famous cotillions, but no … Mitch had hooked the fridge up to the internet, and the bloody thing has been shopping online and spending a freaking fortune.
I guess it’s the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system … preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!
Now, it’s no secret that we’re not super fond of live performances. Our battles are fought in the laboratory, not the prize ring! I mean … we make music in the studio, for the most part. Hell, it’s easier, and you get do-overs. So the notion of traveling billions of miles in some dodgy rent-a-spacecraft with a mad man at the helm is not particularly appealing. At the very least, we would need to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do the advance work, which on a gig like Ultima Thule would involve checking the gravitation (too strong, too weak) and doing an atmospheric analysis. I’m guessing the lab work could be finished maybe nine months after his return, which given current technology, might take 40 years.
Fast forward to the 2000s. As many will remember, we were living in a five room lean-to in Sri Lanka back in those days. We had scratched together enough filthy lucre to buy some recording equipment, which we used to record our first album, 
So we’re walking into the twentieth year of this phase of Big Green’s existence, and really … not much has changed since 1999 except that our releases aren’t typically on CD anymore and we’re driving smarter cars. Other than that, everything’s about the same around the Hammer Mill. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) still has a lot of his original vacuum tubes, and his various grease fittings haven’t been lubricated since those early days. The mansized tuber is still man-sized …. he hasn’t grown into some kind of gnarly behemoth. And our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is still off his meds … at least the ones his doctor advised him to take so many years ago.