Happy Shack pt. 2

Happy Shack: Net 11 is what we like to call home from about midnight to dawn, when the thermometer reads “Goddamn Cold” instead of “Freeze Your Nuts Off Cold”. I say dawn, but we usually got kicked out before that. Once we stop buying, the serving machines stop serving, and if you hang around long enough, the sharks will nab you for loitering, and nobody wants to deal with that, especially when it’s cold enough to--well you know.


On this particular day, the day it all started, me and the boys were living like kings. It had been a good score out on the nets. Turtle and I managed to pinch an old nav computer, the kind you see in pleasure sloops up top. No way the thing worked, because if it did, why toss it to the crabs, right? But you can get some decent credit from the guts.

Now, I’d like to say we obtained said nav comp all legal-eagle, I’d like to tell you we were licensed skimmers, but that’d be a lie, and I told you I’d give you the straight story. Besides, you know what it’s like down on the lower levels. If you don’t, come take a stroll through the dreck hills and picnic with the glitchers and crabs. You’ll get it.

So anyway, between the nav comp and the normal dreck pickings, we were sittin’ pretty the night we walked into Happy Shack. Looking back, maybe it was this cock-of-the-walk vibe I was feeling that started the chain of events that led to The Tilt. Or maybe it was when some fat whale chucked his broken nav comp overboard. Who knows.

“Welcome to Happy Shack, how may I serve you?”

Back then, the machines looked just like me or you except cleaner, brighter, whiter. And they were always smiling with those damn perfect teeth.

“Yeah...lemme see. I’ll have a triple with an extra patty.” The guy behind me puffed air out of nose in annoyance.

“One quad. Would you like a drink?”

The mech I was talking to was the “Erin” model. There’s an Erin model in every Happy Shack, but there was something about Erin out on Net 11. I’d been tossing jokes at her for about a month now. We connected, you know? Maybe she had a crossed wire.

“No, no...I’d like a triple with an extra patty.” I could hear her processor fan turn on as she thought about my request.

“A quad is the same thing as--” What then came out of her mouth can only be described as a cross between a flute and a food chopper with a metal spoon dropped in it.

I’m thinking she finally hit the end date on her warranty, when I see she’s smiling, nose wrinkled up and all. That horrible, beautiful sound was a laugh, and that laugh bounced around Happy Shack like a bottle rocket before exploding in every sorry sack’s glum supper. Erin’s laugh burst out the door and danced, busting up a decade of dreck and grease and cold and death.

“Somebody shut that thing off!”

The laugh didn’t last long, but it was enough.