Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu

planning. I want to say all of it, but for some reason, I can’t. So instead, I tell him he has a little piece of ham on his shirt.
    “Score,” he says, and pops it into his mouth.

    Over dinner that night, I try to figure out how to explain it to my wife.
    “They posted the list this morning.”
    “And?”
    “You’re looking at the newest member of the away team,” I say.
    “Yeah?” she says, reaching to take my hand.
    “Yeah,” I say, pulling my hand away.
    “Wait, I thought this is what you wanted?”
    “I’m the yeoman.”
    “Oh,” she says. “Wait, what does that mean?”
    “I’m probably going to die later this week.”
    “So, no movie night?”
    “I am serious.”
    “So am I. I love movie night.”
    “I’m the yeoman,” I say, raising my voice. “Do you know what that means?”
    She shakes her head.
    “The yeoman always dies.”
    She puts her fork down and doesn’t say anything for a while, just sits there running her hand over the horizon of her pregnant belly.
    “There’s a small insurance policy,” I say. “I got a packet from Human Resources, let me go get it.”
    When I come back into the room with the folder, she’s putting on her coat.
    “Um?” I say.
    “This is bullshit. We are not living off a death benefit.” This isn’t how she talks usually, but then again, she’s twenty-eight weeks pregnant. She is not messing around. “I’m going to see the captain.”
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I say. “You can’t do that. You’re not even wearing pants.”
    “You are not dying for this new job,” she says, and she’s right. It hurts to admit it. “I love you, but yeah, I said it. Your new job sucks. This sucks. Living in a converted closet sucks. You even kind of suck. The only thing that doesn’t suck is this baby that we are going to have.”
    “You know, some people would be happy about this. It’s a promotion.”
    She just looks at me like, who do you think you are talking to.
    “Okay,” I say. “I’ll talk to him.”
    That night I lie awake, staring out into the cosmic background radiation, trying to figure out what I could possibly say to the captain that would make him think I’m worth saving.
Tuesday:
    We’re in the transporter bay. We beam down. Such a weird feeling. I wonder if anyone else is as excited as I am, but then I realize how dumb that is. Of course they aren’t. They do this three times a week, and they’re all bored of it. They’re management. Comfortable. Lazy, really. Ever since they instituted free soft serve in the officers’ dining quarters, the captain’s Lycra has been looking a bit tight around the middle. It’s hard not to notice.
    As we’re dematerializing, the captain starts in with the monologue.
    You can tell when he’s going to start with thisnonsense, because he sucks in his stomach a little. He always does this in the transporter because we’re not allowed to move during molecular calibration.
    And then he gets that off-into-infinity look.
It’s the Age of Science Fiction,
he says. Everyone stares straight ahead.
    We have reached the point where our knowledge of the world now exceeds our ability to believe it, to believe what we are seeing, to believe what we are able to do
.
    He has a way of speaking in italics.
    What we are capable of has caught up to, and even surpassed, our intuition about what should be possible. We have surpassed ourselves
. And even though I’ve heard this monologue five thousand times over the ship’s speakers, and even though I know it was written by the ship’s speechwriter, I can’t help but feel just a little inspired, to remember just a little bit of what I felt, looking at the poster in the recruiting office that day, when I signed up for duty, imagining what it would be like to explore the universe.
    And then we rematerialize on yet another world populated by sentient goo, and there’s green glop everywhere, and it’s oozing, which is how the glop procreates, and in the process of