Chapter 2

Flotsam

Chapter 2: Hank's Hideaway

I am sitting in a bar on an alien planet drinking what can passably be described as beer. 

I take another sip. "Run it all by me again."

Hank The Bartender chuckles. "You are Halley Rochelle Houston. You are not the original Halley Rochelle Houston, but a clone. A new instance of Halley created by an insurance policy that produces a backup if something happens to the previous Halley. You will note that I said ‘previous Halley’, not the original. You are the twenty-third instance of Halley Houston to be decanted in Clementine's trailer since the disappearance of the original Halley. Which makes you Halley-24 in the parlance of Halley clones."

I nod. As bizarre as it sounds, this part mostly makes sense to me. The last normal thing I remember was a midnight argument with Clem in the field outside the trailer park. It was the usual fight about living in a trailer park, squandered potential, all of that; at least until a sudden wind kicked up and a shockingly bright blue light snapped over us. I remember a weird humming noise and feeling incredibly drowsy and just sinking to the ground... and then suddenly I was in a bedroom looking at a nude catgirl named Pussy who looked like me and called a beautiful hermaphrodite her ‘Master’. A beautiful hermaphrodite who was my boyfriend Clem. Clearly I’d missed some important developments. I take a long, hard drink of my not-beer.

Hank takes his cue to continue. “We are on an alien planet. It has an official name, but the human community just calls it Flotsam. There is...” Hank does the swoopy hand thing, “a network of wormholes, we call it the Nexus, that lets spacecraft travel between solar systems really quickly. It’s artificial but no one knows who made it. We call this place Flotsam because all the wreckage, trash, and whatever else that’s lost in the Nexus eventually gets dumped here in this solar system. Most trash just circulates in space as garbage asteroid belts, but a bunch of it ends up falling onto system planets. Flotsam is absolutely littered with mysterious space trash. It’s kind of the galactic dump.”

From the trailer park to the dump. “Sounds nice.”

Hank smirks, “It’s not much, but it’s home." He moues a little when I don't laugh at his joke; I’m kind of a tough audience right now. "Anyway, Halley-Prime and Clem were abducted by aliens, I don’t really know who or why. We can’t be sure because Halley-Prime and Clem were in stasis, but since they ended up on Flotsam it’s safe to assume something went wrong in the Nexus and the abductor ship was marooned here.” The man shrugs. "And then several misadventures later you exist." 

I take another swig of my not-beer. After freaking out and fainting, I woke up to see a concerned and very beautiful Clem and a bored and judgemental looking Pussy. Clem shooed the catgirl away, which was an enormous relief. She told me to relax, to focus on my breathing, and that she would take me to someone who could explain what was going on. I nodded and silently continued panicking a little. But I did let Clem take my hand in her perfectly dainty one and lead me out of her space-trailer, a repurposed derelict spacecraft thing, onto a street straight from a mid-budget science fiction serial. It had all of the tropes of a cowboy western town: red desert dust and shale, narrow packed earth streets lined by makeshift  walkways, and a warren of frontier-style improvised buildings. Except everything was also very future, made of repurposed metal spaceship chunks or brightly coloured plastic, surrounded by a riot of glowing screens and holograms and real live aliens. I was gawking like a tourist who was also a time traveller. Clem kept making apologetic faces as I stared, and more than a few humans and aliens we passed gave me a knowing, pitying look. Apparently recurring Halley's was an open secret in these hurr parts, pardner. 

Clem led me down a few small streets, dragged me onto a larger thoroughfare with bigger screens and louder holograms, and zipped us down a tiny alleyway to "Hank's Hideaway". Which was a bar fashioned from a half dozen shipping-container pod-things welded together to make a small ground floor tavern with a smaller apartment above it. "You brought me to a bar?" I'd asked. "You look like you could really use a drink," she answered, deadpanning in a very my-boyfriend-Clem kind of way, "who better to talk through your worries with than a bartender?" I must have given Clem The Look because she giggled and played with her hair in a not-at-all-my-boyrfriend kind of way. "Hank is a great guy," she said, "and he can explain your situation better than anyone else, except maybe me, and I bet talking to me is super weird right now." I couldn't disagree with that, so me and the gorgeous hermaphrodite woman who was my boyfriend walk into a bar. Where I was bought a reasonable facsimile of beer and put in the care of a handsome man who is still patiently explaining that I’m a brand new clone on an alien world. 

"So I'm Halley-24."

Hank nods, obviously pleased that I'm catching on. 

"I think I can at least try to deal with that..." I smile ruefully and look at my alien brew, "You know you're having a day when learning you are the 23rd clone of yourself is not the weirdest thing to happen to you."

Hank chuckles, "What do you consider the weirdest?"

"Learning my boyfriend looks like a cartoon alien princess has been pretty fucking strange, but I think I'll give the nod to finding out that another version of me is a catgirl sexslave. That's just too fucked for me."

Hank nods sympathetically, "Pussy is hard to reconcile with, isn't she? Although technically she's a petgirl... more like an anthropomorphic pet cat than a person. It's still a strange choice, but not like, unheard of here." He shrugs, "Here is kind of a weird place."

I polish off my drink. Aside from why anyone would want to become someone else’s sexual pet, there was something else that didn't quite add up. "The other thing I still can't figure out is why Clem brought me to see you. You seem like a nice guy, but why are you *the* expert I just have to talk to?"

Hank smiles, "I have all the booze."

I unholster The Look at Hank. "Seriously, why do you know so much about me and my situation?"

"It's simple, I'm Halley-2."

...

"I think I'm going to need another beer."

***

Chapter 3