An Eye for an Eye
By Oliver
Against the boundless celestial tapestry, depicting a jillion years of dejection
with humbling minimalism, Fry’s face pressed against the porthole plexiglas.
He felt the empty coldness of the vacuum beyond, the droning vibration of the
dark matter engines on his skin, and he thought of love.
Love, Fry mused, is a rabid gopher trapped in your gut. Love is leaving your pizza
in the oven for five minutes too long, blackening it enough as to mar the taste
but not enough to justify throwing it away. Love is beating on the front door
of a remote run-down cottage during a lightning storm after getting lost in the
countryside, in the laughable hope that someone still lives there and will be
dumb enough to let in a total stranger raving on their doorstep who must even
dumber still for getting lost in the first place. Or something.
Fry focused on the reflection of his eyes; dull, flat, pointless circles compared
to the dazzling unblinking stars, stars that had once conveyed his passion perfectly
before fate had plucked them out. Love, concluded Fry, blows. He felt a hard,
austere pressure passing along the edge of his chest. His intestines twisted and
he wondered if the abyss outside the ship could possibly be greater than the one
within him. How can something so pure be considered so worthless? Fry almost wished
he still had tears left to cry. He felt the motion continue to slide across his
sternum in a joyless embrace. How can love be so… bad, so negative? The heaviness
reached his heart and he let out the longest, weariest sigh in the whole bottomless
history of broken hearts. Then Fry felt his jacket flutter. He looked down to
see that the heavy sensation had in fact been a grey metal arm, reaching around
from behind and into his inside pocket, a three-fingered hand clamped onto his
meagre wallet.
Fry spun about and found his face an inch from a robot’s.
“Hey buddy,” it said.
Fry snatched back his property, batted away the arm and stomped away from
the window. “For crying out loud, Bender, can’t you go ten seconds without
exploiting human misery?”
Bender followed his flatmate out of the cargo bay. “Fry! How can you say
that? My existence is littered with good works. You were there when I took that
poor refugee girl from Arcturus 2 in off the streets? She was human, and I gave
her a chemical delousing, a potato sack to sleep on and all the hamster food she
could cram into her cheeks, all out the kindness of my primary fuel pump!”
Fry headed up into the Planet Express Ship’s loose approximation of a
galley. “You also took her picture in the shower, airbrushed it, printed
in onto cards with our address and stuck them in every phone booth in the village.”
Bender held up his arms defensively. “Hey, I just wanted to get her some
company, you know, stop her weeping onto her ankle chain day and night. Anyway,
some of those callers looked quite respectable, could have been a whole new life
for her.”
Fry began rummaging through the cupboards, looking for comfort food. “Yeah,
but after she escaped you crept up to my bed while I was asleep, stuck a wig on
me and directed the next caller into my room! Then you even welded the door shut!”
Bender burst into laughter, walloping Fry on the back and nearly cracking his
spine. “Hey, don’t mention it pal, I know you’ve gotta get it where
you can.”
Fry mumbled something as he slapped together a sandwich from the tattered remnants
of various life forms. He looked around for the salt, which wasn’t in the
usual spot.
“Oh,” said Bender, “if you’re looking for the salt, I hawked
it.”
“All 2000 kilos of it?”
“You bet. Sold it to the Neptunian Air Force, they’re at war with
those Buddhist slugs on Molluscia. How else did you think I paid for all that
platypus egg yoke you guys ate last night?”
Fry was suddenly locked in a battle of wills with his bowels. “What? You
said it duck soup!”
“Well it had duck bills floating in it, what more do you want? You know,
I’m starting to get a little sick of your obtuse attitude Fry,” Bender
turned dramatically and headed back out the door. “When you’re ready
to apologise, you’ll find me pilfering Leela’s underwear to sell to
you tonight after you break down, yet another selfless act that will doubtless
be unappreciated”. He stormed out in a righteous flurry.
Fry tossed his bastardised sandwich into the trashcan, having lost an appetite
he never really had. He stood there for a moment, gazing at the deck, listening
to the ship’s monotone hum and the faint crash of Leela’s cabin door
being forced open. Leela; the name rolled off the tongue like drool. Fry was so
awfully in love that he didn’t even find her arousing; he found her moving
instead. He fell asleep and woke up thinking of her. He saw her face in wallpaper
patterns. He wanted to hold her hand until they became fossilised together. Fry
knew it wouldn’t be happening but despite how many times he tried to urinate
on his own fire of love, he just could not force it out of him, no matter how
painfully he strained.
Fry stared at the deck for a few moments more, thinking nothing, and then walked
out of the room toward the bridge.
****
Leela was leaning back in her pilot’s chair, long legs resting on the
command consol as she flicked idly through this month’s issue of Kung-Fu
Cupcake, the autopilot light shining happily. Suddenly she heard the bridge door
mechanism start to whirl and in an instant crammed the magazine down the side
of her chair, grabbed the steering wheel and punched on manual control. She just
managed to put a diligent expression onto her face when the door slid up and Fry
slouched in.
“Hey,” he greeted her, as if his heartstrings weren’t in mid-concerto.
“Hey,” she volleyed back. “Cargo all secure?”
In his little corner, Fry thudded himself into his seat and rotated in it like
a child. “As secure as Iron Man’s jockstrap. What are we delivering
in those canisters anyway?”
“You were there at the briefing Fry, don’t you remember?”
Fry attempted a trawl through his memory. “Err, not really, I too preoccupied
wondering who would be the woman if Godzilla and Gamera ever got it on.”
Leela rolled her eye in the headmistress persona she felt forced to adopt.
“Canisters of organophosphates my dear Philip, for the farmers of Sicilius.”
“Err, Sicilius?”
Leela’s voice dropped an octave as she turned to glare at him, “The
planet were delivering them to?”
“Oh, oh right, right, yeah, Sicilius, yeah. What do the farmers use, err,
organifroggythingy for, then?”
Leela turned back to face the windshield. “Hey, I just work here. Ah,
look, we’re nearly there. I’ll plot a course for Odysseya”
“Err…” began Fry
“The capital city, where we’re making the delivery,” Leela pre-empted
tersely, jabbing at a panel to request an orbital approach.
A mossy looking planet expanded on Fry’s view-screen. He thought for a
moment; Odysseya sounded familiar. Amy had talked to him about the place once,
back when they’d been seeing each other. She’d been going on about some
sort of beauty craze there, something to do with genomorphic cosmetics. Fry indulged
himself with the idea of becoming absurdly beautiful, being reborn as a buffed
demigod that even the most adamantly non-shallow woman would submit to in a matter
of seconds, even Leela. He considered having his hair replaced with peacock feathers,
or having a shire-horse appendage grafted onto his person. None of that would
work of course. Fry did not consider himself particularly insightful but even
he knew that one cannot inspire love through aesthetics alone; he had to prove
he was sensitive, thoughtful, understanding, and all that other sickening girly
crap.
The command consol squeaked and bleeped alarmingly like a krautrock disco.
“Oh for the love of Nemo!” Leela exclaimed. “That’s all
we need!”
Fry leapt to his feet, panic flooding him. “What’s wrong? Don’t
we have the right access code? Are they going to shoot us down? Will I never taste
Botox cornflakes again?”
“No, worse. They’re spamming us. Twenty thousand emails and counting
already, and with our access receipt in there somewhere. It’ll take an age
of tedium for some chump to fish it out and delete the rest. Get cracking Fry.”
Fry sat back down and miserably opened up the ship’s mailbox to begin
the long dispiriting descent of scrolling. They needed the receipt for the Professor’s
tax files, especially since he had nearly finished his cat-o-nine-tails-o-matic
prototype. All manner of banal obscenities and offers flickered at Fry as he plunged
down.
The bridge door opened and in tromped Bender. “Hey, Leela, you ever thought
of giving a bit more thought to style and glamour instead of practicality? You’re
giving me nothing to work with honey!”
Leela was too busy looking busy to take her eye off her monitor. “Bender,
whatever you’re talking about, can you just stop talking about it, get down
to the cargo bay and get ready for the delivery. We’re having more viruses
pumped into us than Annabel Chong here, I don’t really want to linger.”
“Yavol mein Kapitan!” Bender barked belligerently and stormed off
again.
Fry suddenly paused in his scanning, something hooking his attention. ‘CHANGE
YOUR EYE COLOUR, CHANGE YOUR SPETRUM OF VISION, CHANGE YOUR OCULAR CAPACITY, TRANSFORM
YOUR FACE FOR AH POOK’S SAKE, CH…’ boomed the subject title. After
making sure Leela was engrossed in her piloting, Fry opened the message. It was
a rather artless advert for an eye clinic in Odysseya. A number of fuzzy photographs
showed various successful operations on various species, the only humans being
some hippy girl who had a third eye inserted into her forehead, and a shaved marine
type who had his eyes grown so they acted like an owl’s and then attached
to prehensile stalks coming out of his sockets. ‘24 HOUR TRAIL PERIOD: You
don’t like what you see, we’ll change you back, FREE OF (extra) CHARGE’
promised the ad along the bottom. A childish map marked the clinic as just down
the street from the spaceport.
The Planet Express ship lurched into orbit and Fry had, by his standards, an epiphany.
He looked at purple-silk-haired Amazon easing the craft toward the surface, a
woman whose every blink was a wink. He knew how he could prove his love; give
her the empathy she so sorely wanted. He knew it would be a bold move but surely
better that a lifetime of feeling like burnt pizza. His mind was already made
up; his impulsive instinct had kicked it and that was no way to counteract it.
He subjected his wallet to an autopsy and discovered he had just enough cash to
do it. He silently rejoiced in triumph.
For 24 hours, Fry would become a Cyclops. What could possibly go wrong with
that? |
