Business As Usual at Olicratic Galactic Convention
Chase MacTavish reporting, 3rd Krams, Risork
I don’t want to be here, but I don’t have any choice. Two hundred years ago, a bunch of drugged up apes living on a mud ball fired a missile into the cosmos and accidentally encountered talking slugs. They spent two decades fighting a war over a different space rock until they were both conquered and enslaved by a walking corpse and an army of asthmatic cyborgs. The ancestors of those cyborgs thought it would be a good idea to stick some random DNA in an incubator and assign the results the job of reporting on the current affairs of the universe.
It wasn’t a wise decision, but they put a computer chip in my brain and it will kill me if I don’t comply, so I do what my editor tells me.
He told me to get my off my rocrack and report on the Olicratic Galactic Convention.
For the fifty or sixty trillion of you too engrossed in your day-to-day lives toiling in spice mines or building newer and fancier penises for our benevolent robot overlords to pay attention to galactic politics, the Olicratic Galactic Convention is when extremely wealthy brown-nosers from every corner of the Galactic Empire come together to choose their nominee for the seat of High Poobah and determine the important issues of their party.
This cycle’s presumptive Olicratic nominee is Gorthrock Goldenbags, a fish woman from the ironically named, aquatic planet, Dryscalon. Madame Goldenbags, of course, won all of the planetary primaries in the only way that matters to the Olicrats, by purchasing the vote from every member of the voting public.
Madame Goldenbags is having trouble solidifying the Olicratic party under her as her vote payment is only a few GEC more than her most powerful primary opponent, Gyarb Flycart. The voting elite of the Olicratic party has not been sold.
Remember, although the bribes of 20 GEC is enough to feed a freemen family of five for an entire standard year, it is considered an insult by most of the Olicrats who expect their candidate to pay them at least three times that amount.
Galactic economics aside, I arrived at Mar Salion Resort and Casino early this morning and I have to say, this is a party worthy of the Olicrat name!
The moment I stepped foot on the space station, my bank accounts were scanned and I was almost tossed into the fighting pens for the disastrous crime of being poor. Fortunately for me, someone realized I was the property of the Cyborg Empire and decided it wasn’t worth having this entire solar system purged for damaging me. Instead, the offered to let me live in a small box above the press chamber.
I accepted. The box is much larger than my apartment in Nuyak City and the rent is much cheaper.
First roll call came a few hours after I got settled in and I wondered down to the main floor to see if I could find anything worth keeping my editor from activating the chip in my brain.
The massive convention hall was decorated to the nines with the Olicratic party colors of blue and sloryack, a color barely visible to the human eye as it falls somewhere between a diseased poop smear and the blood of a unicorn on the light spectrum. Still, I have to admit, the decorations really made me feel like I was one of the galaxy’s wealthy elite, ready to take a stance against the evil Maritocks and their “hard work gets ahead” agenda.
Foolish Maritocks.
And the clothes! The delegates were decorated to the elevens in the latest fashions from every corner of the galaxy. I saw one Zarbag wearing a sextet of clartack boots worth more than the transport freighter that carried the crate I wash shipped here in.
Unfortunately, they cyborg accountants that say the cost of keeping me alive is greater than the income I earn and thus I will never be free of indentured servitude did not see it worthy to approve appropriate garments for this intrepid reporter and I was banished from the convention hall before I was able to sample any of the luxurious buffets of exotic and endangered foods.
My misfortune reversed when I found my way into the black room. The black room is more-or-less exactly what its name implies. The walls are black. The carpets are black. The furniture is black.
You get the idea.
There is no light in the black room, just dozens of undulating bodies grinding together blindly in the dark.
It is the perfect environment for the mega wealthy introverts of the galaxy to breath heavily on each other and recharge.
There in the dark, I was safe from the judging eyes of the literal fashion police. I could be myself, as long as I was quiet enough to not draw attention.
So, basically, I couldn’t be myself.
But, I could snort my body weight in a strange powder with the consistency of a powdered soft drink and smelled like the flavor of the number eight. I know the smell pretty well because I smelled a lot of it.
I would have kept on smelling it and watching the inside of my brain fire lasers at the long forgotten memories of trans-dimensional beings for an eternity if some bogruck didn’t come in to confiscate the source of the powder.
Turns out, I’d been snorting the crystalline sweat of the Olicratic Poobarean Nominee, Gorthrock Goldenbags herself. She even offered to let me join the swarm of thralls trailing behind her massive fins, but one of her aides reminded her I was already the property of the Cyborg Empire and kicked me to the curb.
Snorted hallucinogens off a naked poobarean candidate marked off the bucket list. Now I just need to assassinate a religious leader and I’ve won Galactic Empire Political Bingo!
I only wonder if I didn’t miss my chance.
After being evicted from the black room, I wondered the servant tubes of the Mar Salion Resort and Casino for several hours. I had almost remembered where I left my sanity when I accidentally stumbled into a group of three men wearing robes standing in a circle around one of the party delegates.
They were arguing over the delegate’s vote. Apparently, the robed guys wanted the delegate to change his vote from Madame Goldenbags to some guy named Fiscre Saildarter. I’d never heard of this guy before, but I’m guessing he’s important. If there is one fact you can take away from the OGC, it’s this: the more ridiculous a name, the more important the person.
When the delegate refused, one of the robed men waved his hand dramatically and emphasized he would change his vote like he was some kind of dirty space wizard. Since we all know the dirty space wizards are actually a conspiracy invented by the Illuminati to control the galactic masses, it didn’t work.
In the end, I watched him hand the guy a bag of golden disks and that did work.
As for me? The three robed guys told me if I ever said anything about what I saw, they’d murder my entire family.
Joke’s on them, though. One, they didn’t say anything about writing it in a galactically distributed newsfeed and two, my family is basically a vat of goo. Good luck with the goo murder, robed dudes.
Once they let me go and my fish-sweat-high was starting to die, I stumbled back up here to the newsroom to submit my report for the first day. According to the monitor in the corner, Madame Goldenbags is still winning by a huge margin, but the votes are just getting started and who knows what can happen now.
If robed men are busy buying up delegates in the background, we might have a convention revolution on our hands. An upset like that could have massive ramifications for the Maritocks at their own convention next week.
My stomach just reminded me I actually do need to consume nutrients to maintain life, so I’m going to try to get back to the convention hall floor for a chance at the buffet.
I’ll check back in after this round of voting… If I haven’t been thrown from an airlock for daring to consume the discarded table scraps of my superiors.
Live from the Olicratic Galactic Convention, this has been Chase MacTavish reporting for the pleasure and benefit of the Imperial Hivemind and only the pleasure and benefit of the Imperial Hivemind.
Author’s Note
I hope you laughed at this. If you didn’t, I’m worried about you. Not because it means you have no sense of humor, but because it means dirty space wizards are going to come to your home and force you to laugh…
with baseball bats.
This came about because I saw a writing prompt telling me to mix “gonzo journalism” and “space opera.”
Of course, the first thought I came up with was, “What if Hunter S Thompson attended the Galactic Senate Meeting from Phantom Menace?”
Then I realized I wasn’t talented enough to do that any kind of justice and I really didn’t want the ghost of George Lucas’s talent to come after me with the ghastly cries for litigation.
So I wrote this instead.