the big hop

The story you are about to read is not scientifically correct, nor does it intend to be. To perceive it as anything other than the curious thoughts of two twenty-something-year-olds after lunch on a Friday afternoon would be dangerous. Such a thing as The Big Hop, I truly believe, could never come to be.

“All this happened, more or less.”

-          KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

one

The problem was, my calculations were incorrect.

The problem was, my calculations were rarely incorrect, and so while I knew how to solve problems I did not know how to problem solve.

This, as one might guess, often created more problems, and I blame all of the mistakes that led me to The Milky Way on a case of Stardust Fever I had contracted passing through the nebulous smear that was Triangulum. Triangulum is a spiraling galaxy with the luminous arms of a toddler, determined to tug at every passerby, and gaseous clouds that even my shuttle’s filtration system couldn’t make healthy and thus:

Runny nose. Sore throat. Jumbled thoughts in my throbbing head that my microscopic brain-servants needed to work faster on wrangling.

I am the type of Floop who does not punch in numbers wrong. I am also the type of Floop that does not handle sickness, infections, diseases or defections well. I hope you understand how this would lead to a miserable turn of events where I, (A) make mistakes and (B) do not know how to respond to them adequately and (C) find myself trapped in the most desolate galaxy in a universe spanning infinite lightyears.

A Floop (flew-oop) is someone from Planet Floop (plan-it flew-oop). Other species twiddle their tentacles and kill their planets but we Floops are explorers. We travel space far and wide, discovering and charting the unknown and odd. That trip, I sought Andromeda, a galaxy scarcely studied and never-yet-visited, and so imagine my boredom as I passed Uranus’ big bottoms and found myself in the gravitational pull of a puny plot of ice that my scanners detected as “Earth.”

Earth, as the Furthest Farthest Inhabited Rock, was the laughingstock of the universe. It has been featured on numerous Worst Places to Live, Best Places to Die lists and though my ancestors had visited it once, all they had recorded about it was: ‘although there exist more lifeforms here than on any other planet encountered thus far, none of them seem intelligent.’ I scrubbed my nose, spit up cosmic stones, and began punching in coordinates for Anywhere-But-There, Hopefully-Andromeda.

I did not see the asteroid before it hit me. Don’t you think if I did, I would have gotten out of the way? Well, it wasn’t really an asteroid, either. More of a glacier. A wad of space-debris frozen into an awkward chunk that hit the rump of my ship milliseconds before I hit the last key needed to get out of The Milky Way’s way. Its seismic force rumbled my entire ship, sending all my jars of Floop-Soup (my breakfast, brunch, lunch, linner, dinner, and dinfast) shattering across the floor and jerking me around.

I frantically pressed every button, flicked every knob, and turned every dial on the console, most of which I didn’t understand, all which I prayed would save me, none of which did. Before I knew it, I was cascading down toward an icy planet I knew little about, wished to know nothing about, fully-certain I was doomed to die.

I didn’t die, though you already know that. Ghosts don’t talk, or exist, not really anyway. As thoughts, sure. But if they were real, you would have spoken to one, and no, you’re not speaking to one now.

I lived, though at the time, I wasn’t sure that was something to be proud of. Ship-wrecked on the Furthest Farthest Inhabited Rock, I wasn’t the Floop who had explored Andromeda, I was the Floop who had become trapped on Earth. I considered staying under the rubble, letting myself freeze onto the planet and become a monument to my own failure.

But despite the fact that my bones felt like Jim-Jam left in a can to boil over a campfire, I was all-together. If I was going to become a monument, I had no excuse to be a lousy one squished under a heap of metal and forgotten. I heaved myself out, determined to forge an eye-catching gravestone that could be seen all the way from the Orion Nebula. It, I decided, would say: “Here lies the Furthest Floop Flown!” Or, well, one-of.

That followed Floop code. To be a good Floop, you have to find achievements in your failures, because the average Floop fails a lot more than they succeed.

I’d crashed, or ‘rum-paged’, if I’m to use the Floop term for it, into a cavern of polluted black ice clotted with chunks of asphalt and concrete. It was not a place for walking—just slipping and sliding, bonking one’s head. It only took me hitting the ground, ice, whatever, twice to realize if I were a monument here, I would become a ghost just to get myself off this frigid rock.

I gave the remnants of my ship a strong kick. It wasn’t to blame for the rough landing but it was easier to blame it than myself, even if that day was, as they say, ‘one of those days.’ Sometimes, you wake up with your head screwed on backwards, so everything you do is backwards. You stay in bed past sunrise, drop your food on the floor before you get to eat it, and sometimes find yourself stranded on a remote alien planet doomed to die.

There was no hope in trying to traverse the cavern. Not in those conditions. Now, if I was a Boop? Maybe. Boops are the rivals of Floops. They are little sticky balls that climb up walls and clutter pipes. Us Floops eat them because they hate us. They hate us because we eat them. What can you do?

But I am not a Boop, I am a Floop, four-armed and double-brained. They roll because they do not have opposable thumbs, I retrieve my flamethrower from the undercarriage of my sundered ship because I do. All it takes is one simple turn of the crank and boom! Flames spew, reducing the glacial walls into steaming waterfalls. I melted a ramp which spiraled upward, carrying me to the surface.

Where, to my surprise, I found the remnants of an earthling city. In my travels I had discovered countless cities and they are always the same—full of rotten eggs who decided they stunk strongest when together. This place was different, though. Still. There wasn’t a person in sight. Just concrete towers that toppled into one another, standing only because the ice stitching the broken pieces together. It, if I’m being frank, gave even a less-then-cautious fellow like me the supreme heebie-jeebies. It was quiet. Eerily quiet.

I did not explore this city. Exploring is attempting to unravel the mysteries of a place unknown. Exploring is what I shall to do Andromeda when I reach it. Instead I navigated, traversing the wastes and making a double-checked list of everything that could be used to repair my ship. There were plenty of automobiles here with chunky engines and spaghetti wiring, but also heaping helpings of scrap. And toasters, which was important, because you couldn’t have Floop Soup without toasted bread.

I was in denial about being out of Floop Soup. One should never run out.

I was also overzealous in my estimations of how much I could haul. Even with four-arms, these earthlings built everything to be brutishly heavy. This was a job for my Anti-Matter De-Weighter! The Anti-Matter De-Weighter was invented by Floon Floop and had the power to enhance the capacity of your cargo by stealing the poundage from it.

As it goes, it was back on the ship. If the flamethrower survived and the De-Weighter didn’t, I would return to Plan A—freeze into a monument.

I retraced my steps, which wasn’t difficult considering they were the only wet ones on the planet and returned to my home-away-from-home, which I had barged into, declared mine, and decided not to pay any rent on, just to find something fleshy was doing the same.

Actually, this fleshy thing was being nosy, poking around my ship with the curiosity of a rodent. He lifted metal sheets, gazed at the innards, and nodded his head like he understood them. I watched the creature a few moments. My ancestors were right—the absence of intelligence was astonishing!

I nudged my Hairbrained Goggles up and down. Hairbrained Goggles were a must of any explorer! Each lens had a scanner built into them. One surveyed the environment. It was broken and flickering through slides of fuzzy, Galaxy-TV, giving me glimpses of bare-chested Floops. The other surveyed lifeforms. It rewarded me with knowledge. The fleshy one was actually a ‘human’ and a ‘male’ that was over one hundred years old and only six pounds heavier.

Humans came from monkeys, or so my goggles said. I didn’t know what a monkey was, but it told me most humans actually believed they came from a book. A book they thought ‘started the universe’, though some thought was ‘hogwash.’ I wondered, how would they react if they knew they were the youngest species on the Furthest Farthest Inhabited Rock? They’d probably throw a fit—maybe write another book about it.

I considered marching down there and ruining The Fleshy One’s day with such knowledge. Instead I observed him until he started to make a great mess of things, tearing the wiring like a little “Hnarf”! A Hnarf (heh-nar-ph) is a pesky rodent that dwells in the bowels of all spaceships, and there were likely a few in mine. He might have even been trying to join them! They gobble up electronic zap-zaps like us Floop’s eat cake—extensively and sloppily with little care for the pleasure of those around us.

So I slid down the path I melted hours ago and swung between him and my galley. He was, expectedly, surprised. I wouldn’t doubt he had lived a droll existence populated with only glimpses of his own kind, because who would want to visit this frigid rock? I bellowed in Floopish to him.

The Fleshy One looked at me like I had four heads, not four arms. He pointed at me and rudely shouted: “Alien!”

So I shouted: “Idiot!” (Floopish: Aya-waka-waka!)

Then, I slapped my hands against my tentacle-covered chest. It made a squelch sound which to us Floops was beautiful. The Fleshy One was not pleased with it. “Floop!”

He did not understand my words. That was clear. I didn’t blame him. Floopish was a complex language created by multi-minded organisms. Still, he knew them in essence and mimicked me, smacking a flabby hand against his own chest. “Human,” he said, sounding it out slowly like I didn’t already know. It was cute, like watching an amoeba mingle among other cells for the first time.

I turned a nozzle on the side of my Hairbrained Goggles and, as he spoke, it scanned his tongue and deciphered every possible movement and sound it could make. Soon, I knew every language possible to the species, and when I spoke to him, his eyes widened.

What I actually said to The Fleshy One was: “Guh-flo-urp, illy-chirp, wimi-bup-bun-da-dun.”

What The Fleshy One heard was: “I come in peace, I fear you are foolish and do not, so please step away from my ship.”

He threw his hands up and jumped away from the ship like I might vaporize him. Then, he was distracted by another curiousity—my flamethrower, which I had dropped at the base of my melted exit. He inspected it; I inspected my ship. Thankfully the little wannabee Hnarf hadn’t done any permanent damage to it, just tugged a few cords that upchucked sparks because they weren’t meant to be, and a few others were rattle-snaking around, wishing to meet their friends again.

The Anti-Matter De-Weighter was in the cockpit, hidden in a trapdoor underneath my seat. In times of emergency, if I press a certain combination of buttons, my seat will be ejected through that trapdoor, and so I kept the Anti-Matter De-Weighter there so I never got stranded without it, because I only have four arms, and carrying things is a pain. I was young then, and I felt strongly about that. I am old now, so I feel stronger and weaker all-the-same.

It was perfectly usable, just a little dinged-up. I flicked it on and, in one swoop, all the debris that had fallen off my ship magnetized to it and my ship, which was a bit too heavy for its powers, rattled against the ice. Behind me, The Fleshy One clapped. I hoped he didn’t expect me to be his savior—my ship had rules and I would rue the day I didn’t follow them.

RULE #1: Nobody on the ship but me.

Call me callous! I do not care. I did not accept tagalong visitors. I had, once, and guess what? It ended in explosive failure and frequent bowel movements. Turns out the cargo critter (Sylvia the Snizzard, if you’re out there, you’d better not be) I’d let slither along with me was a parasite who thought my belly was a snazzy shindig. Well, I showed her, let me tell you what!

I surveyed the damage to my ship and crafted a comprehensive list of all that needed doing. I did not talk to, look at, or think about The Fleshy One. Us Floops are notorious for keeping to ourselves. My ancestors worked dutifully to evolve past the need for dependency, and that is a trend I plan wholeheartedly to continue. The Fleshy One perceived my lack of communication as foreign and ogled me like I was some sort of…alien!

I went through all the Flooperisms of frustration, flicking my forked-tongue against my upper-lip and patting my four hands against my shoulders and tugging my chest-tentacles. To my displeasure, this only made him draw closer, which of course made me draw further away.

“You seem lost, dear child,” he said.

“I am no child!” I could not believe myself. Arguing with a human on Earth when I should be soaring through Andromeda. But the mention of my infantility upset me greatly. “Ten decades I have lived!”

“HA!” The Fleshy One’s eyes went wide. He had little brown specks on his bald head like bugs and teeth with holes big enough I could fit my fingers through them. “So you are but a youngling. You see, I am one hundred and one! A true dinosaur!” Now he was inspecting my ship again as if it were his own ship. I wished he were a Hnarf. You see, we have a special method for dealing with those buggers—“Tell me, are you from outer-space?”

“Yes, and I’m here to blow your planet to smithereens, but considering my ship is in smithereens, that doesn’t seem too worth doing at this juncture.”

I started to walk away, but I am cursed. You see, against my better judgements, I often let my curiosities lead me, and typically they send me plummeting straight into a ditch—or a frozen planet that eighty years ago wasn’t frozen, deserted or, most alarmingly, this far traveled from the sun. But, at the end of the day, was this not my life’s calling? To explore? To seek mysteries in the nothing? So, before I could get far enough away to ignore the urge, I stopped. “Tell me,” I said. “What happened to this planet?”

“It is a long story,” The Fleshy One said, settling onto a slab of ice. “A story that spans nearly my entire lifetime. A story of mankind—oh, how beautiful and wicked we are in the same breath.”

“You sure enjoy talking,” I said.

“Incorrect.” The Fleshy One picked wax out of his ear, inspected it, then flicked it into the still-burning remnants of my ship. “I enjoy educating.”

“You believe that you can teach me something? Haha!” (Floopish: Buh-la-la!)

“Teaching is not always learning something new. Sometimes it is merely changing the way you think. I feel that, if you listen to my words, you may once again find your way.”

“I know exactly my way, Floop-you-very-much!” I hurried off, holding the Anti-Matter De-Weighter close to my chest, refusing to be compelled by a siren. “I will gather my things and leave your planet with great haste.”

two

Night had struck the Neptunian New York by the time I returned “Home”, AKA where-my-ship-plunged-through-the-ice, and to my dismay, The Fleshy One was still there.

What was worse:

1.      That while I had spent my day looting automobiles for everything glueing them together—springs and sprockets and screws—he had spent the day polluting my space, folding his shoal into a cot and piling chunks of ice into a chair.

Or

2.      That while I was trying to lay all these supplies down, he was snatching them up and scraping them together, trying to ignite a fire to cook a can labeled “Pork n’ Beans!”

There is only correct answer—both are equally repulsive.

I told him such, but he feigned deafness, simply whistling to himself as he whittled the rungs of a bolt against a lugnut. Soon, he achieved the feat of convection (woohoo) and clapped his hands together like an overzealous puppet. I watched him place the Pork n’ Beans! atop a piled of wires he (amateur Hnarf) had ripped from my ship, and the syrupy sugary glaze within began to bubble. I mimicked him, la-la-laing over my grumbling stomach as I got to work.

I told myself: once you discover Andromeda and win the Floop of the Year award, the most prestigious title any Floop can secure, this will but a blip in your dual-brained memory.

But first I needed to focus on getting there, and to do that, I needed to repair my ship, and to do that, I needed the talents of my Floobot.

What was a Floobot? Well, many things. Too many things, if you asked some people. At its most basic, it was a relatively simple machine invented for one reason—to teach Floops to do the things they didn’t have time to learn. At its most complex, it was a strand of processors which compiled every genius thought a Floop has ever had. We had evolved past the need for study. Whenever we encountered something we did not understand, we just asked the Floobot.

It scanned the ramshackle selection of supplies I had secured, then told me to listen carefully and spoke too quickly for me to do so. See, my Floobot was insane. It had short-circuited when I passed the Sculptor Galaxy and now rapid-fired jumbled, static-soaked words I could barely string together. The gist of it, though, was that if I worked through the night, my ship would be up-and-flying by morning, and that got me snatching up tools, ready to get my four hands dirty.

Unfortunately, those Pork n’ Beans! The Fleshy One was preparing wafted a superb aroma through the cavern and my traitorous nostrils couldn’t help but guide me over to him. Just one bowl, I told myself. Then I’ll get to work, then I’ll get going, then I’ll win Floop of the Year!

I plopped myself down in front of him, sitting on the cot he had fashioned. It was far less comfortable than it looked and it didn’t look comfortable at all. Without asking, I was presented with a bowl of dense syrup with mushy brown pellets and hunks of indistinguishable meat simmering in it, and while he used a metal utensil, I raised the bowl to my face and drank.

“Dinner is always more pleasant with a buddy.” The Fleshy One grinned. “Yet, a lack of talk keeps the air just as lonely. If you do not wish to hear about my world, may I at least hear a little about yours?”

I said nothing. I was busy slurping, burping, and shaking my bowl for seconds.

He obliged me, slopping more beans into the bowl, but hesitated before returning it.

“Most meals, I feel, taste sour when eaten in silence. Conversation does something magical to it, especially good conversation about something you truly care about. And I truly care about you—I’ve never met an alien before.”

“I’ve met plenty, and they’re all like you. Nosy.”

I took the bowl from him and sighed.

“What is it that you want to know?”

“Well, who are you, and where are you from, and why are you—”

I interrupted him, raising, and flattening, my four hands.

“Okay, so you want to know everything!” I set the bowl in my lap and crossed all my arms. “I am a Floop from Planet Floop, a world many lightyears away from here. On Planet Floop, we take pride in silence, because silence means everything is working so efficiently that there is no need for wasted breath, and everything should always be working efficiently, because we have done everything there is to do.”

“Done everything there is to do?” The Fleshy One couldn’t believe it. “My, that sounds rather boring!”

“It would be if we were confined to a rock such as this. But no. Once we completed everything there was to be done on Planet Floop, we became Rak’ataths—‘explorers’—and began a new mission, traveling the universe, making maps detailing all that we see, and selling them for lucrative tender.”

“Money,” The Fleshy One said. “Makes every world go ‘round. Our species are connected by a mutual love of currency. Us humans? We went rabid over it.”

He banged a chunk of ice against a second can and popped its top open. This one had no label, and that had me hoping an equivalent to Floop Soup would spill out. Instead it was full of lumpy green twigs in murk-water juice. I scarfed down my beans and hoped they’d bloat my belly before I made a mistake—us Floops cannot consume anything green, it gets us drunk.

“Is that why you came here, to Earth? Are you hoping to explore it, draw up a map, and pile up some delicious dough?”

I didn’t need my translator to decipher my chortle—laughter is universal. “Never,” I said. “I’m going to go further than any Floop has gone before. To Andromeda!”

“And tell me, what is the purpose of that?”

“The purpose?”

“The reason.”

“The mystery!”

“How unfortunate, you truly are lost.” I threw my hands up, and The Fleshy One matched me. “Before you object, listen. I do not mean physically, but mentally. You are lost because you have a grand mystery right here, yet you are choosing to ignore it. Is that not peculiar to you?”

“Earth, my entire life, has been nothing more than a joke. A whimsy of unfortunate astronomical fate. The Furthest Farthest Inhabited Rock. All that is known about you humans is that there isn’t much worth knowing.”

“Ah, but what you speak of was Earth before The Big Hop.”

“The Big Hop?”

“The Big Hop.” The Fleshy One leaned forward and whispered like he was telling me a grave secret. “Not too long ago, the mere act of mentioning it would have been dangerous. Once, it was the most pleasant thing in the world, but then it became divisive, and, finally, ruinous. I mean, look at all it caused.”

“All of this…from one hop?”

“A big hop. The Big Hop.”

“That is curious.” I stewed over it a minute. That defective part of my brains were working overtime again, wondering. “You’re claiming it singularly responsible for this ice?”

“You misunderstand—I’m saying The Big Hop brought the end of civilization.”

“The end of civilization!”

“Not just the arrival of the ice, but the absence, and change, of everything, can be traced back to when I was just twenty-five years old. That was when the first Big Hop happened. Back then, this world was rife with war. The Hop was supposed to bring an end to it all.”

What I wanted to say: How silly you all were to think such a thing.

What I actually said, in the interest of being polite (really in the interest of suppressing my tarnished brain): “Hm. How peculiar. I’m guessing it didn’t?”

“Actually, it did. But only for a short while.” The Fleshy One sighed. “Us humans, I suppose, were cursed from the start, destined to always find something to battle over.”

I figured The Fleshy One was saying something poignant about his society. I let him have his moment of silence, which wasn’t tough, considering the wind was the only one whispering in the distance, and gave me time to scrub off the Pork n’ Beans! glazing my chest tentacles. Evidently, he was entertained by the thrum of his own tongue—he just continued on rambling!

“You, Floop, seek something great. And while I don’t know if the story of Earth is great, I am certain it is one-of-a-kind and that I am the only one who can tell it to you, as I am the only one who lived through it all.” The Fleshy One cleared his throat with such chutzpah I thought he was gonna hack up a Hnarf. “The only one still living.”

“Are you claiming you’re the last human?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him the rest of the universe would be relieved, entirely uncaring, or confused as to what a ‘human’ even was. “And you’re ancient!”

The Fleshy One smirked. “Kissing death.”

“Disgusting.”

I set my bowl down. This trip, from when I first turned the hyperspace dial, had been one of misfortune. I had left my favorite hat, a Floopball cap for my favorite Floopball team, back home. Then, I’d been robbed by space pirates. After that, I’d made three wrong turns, the first at Maffei 1, the second at Antlia, and the third at Tucana. Not to mention the first planet I’d landed on rained glass sideways. And my ship, poor thing, was expelling sparks out her backside, which was causing ice to melt and water to spill onto her, and her to spew out more sparks.

The average Floop would succumb to the negativity.

They would turn themselves into a monument.

I should be doing that, that would be Very Good Floop Behavior.

Instead, I’m letting my defect win. Again.

“I suppose, if I am to work through the night, a little bit of company wouldn’t be bad. But! I ask that you tell me something truly interesting. If you bore me, I will ask you to be silent. If you are not, I will vaporize you.”

I returned to my ship and began fiddling with a nuisance of nonsensical electronics. The Fleshy One, meanwhile, scooted uncomfortably close to me and, with a heavy heave of rot-rocked breath, asked: “Where should I begin?”

To which I said: “Tell me about The Big Hop.”

To which he said: “Ah, but to get there, we must go back a ways. To learn about The Big Hop, you must learn about its grandpappy—The First Hop.”

The Fleshy One:

Listen: The Big Hop began with a little hop.

Yes, that is right. Silly as it might seem, one singular hop changed the fate of humanity forever. We survived asteroids, and atomic bombs, and aliens invasions we weren’t aware of, I’m sure, yet a singular hop did us in. That singular hop took place in the garage of a man who would eventually become known to humans far and wide. Regardless of whether they sneered or cheered when it was spoken, they all knew his name as Mr. Hop.

But in that moment where humanity permanently altered course, he wasn’t known to anyone, not even his neighbors. Mr. Hop was a milkman—someone who delivered milk from cows to the doors of stay-at-home mothers—and in 1963, there were thousands of milkmen, all nameless.

That day had been particularly grueling. Mr. Hop lived in a place called “New York” and it was going through a “heat-wave.” A heat-wave was when the sun got so angry it made everything got so hot you could cook an egg on asphalt. And he, like every other ‘-man’—mailman, milkman, weatherman—was struggling to fight the urge to rip off his sweat-drenched clothes.

That day he had contended with: chatty-cathy housewives what wanted to blab their problems to him or have an affair with him to make their husbands jealous, drunken blowhards who were desperate for a fight after a bender, and dogs. Plenty of dogs. The nasty kind that fences don’t keep in.

 What’s worse? He returned home to find his power out, his home ransacked, and a note from his wife telling him that she was taking the kids and leaving.

To the milkman, this was too much to bear in one day. He said: “the stress of my own world, and the world around me, was all-consuming. I laid there, on the floor, slick with sweat, imagining how easily all these problems would flow away if I removed myself from the world causing them. So I strung up a rope, climbed on the coffee-table my mama passed down to me, pulled it around my neck, and was about to step off when, all-the-sudden, something happened.

“What happened was divine, but I won’t ascribe it to any one faith. It wasn’t God or Buddha or anything other than a plain miracle. Just before my feet left the table, my television, which had been turned off, turned itself on, and after a few seconds of static ash, a figure appeared. One of strange, outlandish features. And when it spoke? It wasn’t talking to an audience, I tell you. It was talking to me.

“It spoke about an idyllic society—one of peace, prosperity, and endless optimism. A true utopia where everyone had found happiness. When I asked how such a thing was achieved, he told me they were once like us humans, bound to material possessions. But they gave them all up and returned to the world’s simplest pleasure—The Hop.

“I thought it foolish as you probably do and almost shut the tube off. ‘Tied the noose too tight,’ I told myself. ‘Choking every bit of common sense out of me before I even get started.’ But the vision begged, dare I say pleaded, that I give it a chance. That I go into my garage, hop, and then return. It insisted that the simple act of jumping would put a smile on my face and that, when it did, I would know what meant to be truly happy, unshackled from the burdens of a sad society and truly free.

“When you accept death in such a way that I had, so desperate to find the light at the end of the tunnel, things stop making sense. That was why I humored the voice. That was why I went and into my garage, the same garage where I had hidden from my crumbling marriage, burying my sorrows into a bottle. Being in there took me right back into Hell—suddenly I was four beers deep, wife yelling at me for doing something I didn’t remember, wishing I still had the rope tight around my neck.

“That was when I took my first Hop.

“It was a little one. Nothing more than a lazy jump into the air. And if I’m being frank, it wasn’t transcendent. Matter of fact, it was no different than something a child would do simply to expend energy. Yet, that was what made me do it again. And again. And again, again, again. Each Hop was small in its own scope, but took me back to my youth, when things were simpler. When I didn’t have to think about the rest of the world, but instead what made me happy right then. At first I giggled at the absurdity of it all—me, a grown-man whose life had fallen to pieces, was stood in his garage alone, just hopping. Then, I just smiled. It, whether I understood it or not, was fun. I was having fun. I continued to hop because in that moment it seemed that it was all there was worth doing, and it wasn’t until the sunlight drifted through the underside of my garage’s metal door that I realized how long I had been at it.

“When I returned to my living room, regularly-scheduled programming had not returned. The strange figure was waiting for me, coated in static, and before I could even say anything, it simply smiled and said: ‘Do you want to learn what it means to be a Hoppite?’

The Fleshy One tried to continue on, but I help up all four of my webbed-hands to silence him. I had been working to repair my ship’s crunched wing, soldering metal plates over ripped wiring and shooing off Hnarfs. Unfortunately, he spoke like a defunct hyperdrive—far too fast with no ability to break. He rambled on. “Am I boring you? Oh, please, do not vaporize me. I assure you, we are getting close to The Big Hop!”

“Settle down, Impki!” My translator did not change that phrase because, apparently, there was no Earthling equivalent. The closest match is: ‘dunder-brains.’ “You are not boring me—not yet, at least. I’m just wondering, how does hopping amuse a man so?”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“Tried what?”

“Hopping.”

“I’ve hopped between planets before—”

“No, not that. I mean Hopping. Like this!” The Fleshy One clambered to his feet, all his bones cracking at once, and gave a light hop that, for him, looked the labor to end all labors. “See? A simple hop, nothing more.”

The thought actually repelled me. “Uhm…no.”

“Maybe you should. You never know, it could be quite good for you. It was good for Mr. Hop. Here, listen to what he learned that night—the core tenants of being a Hoppite.”

The Fleshy One:

Hoppite – one who studies the art of Hoppism.

Hoppism – one who believes in the beauty of the Hop.

The Hop – the most sacred pleasure mankind has ever forgotten to cherish.

Hoppism is not a religion. It is not a means to bow before, or worship, an unknown entity who would claim lordship over your life. Hoppism is simply a belief that the key to true happiness is connected to something most forget—the carefree Hops of youth. During childhood, many Hop for the sake of putting a smile on their face, uninhibited by a cruel world determined to mock them for such an expression of joy. Hoppites believe that regaining that joy is the key to solving all the world’s problems. That if everyone just Hopped, life wouldn’t be so serious.

There are five core tenants a Hoppite must follow:

1.      They must fully believe in the Hop.

2.      They must encourage others to Hop.

3.      They must never let negativity overpower the Hop.

4.      They must cling to their First Hop.

5.      T H E Y M U S T H O P.

A Hop a day keeps life’s problems away!

“And you’re telling me that this ‘Mr. Hop’ actually believed this rubbish?”

“Not only did he believe it, he began to cherish it. One might even say that he worshipped it!”

I set down the bits and bobs I was holding and gave the wing a quadruple-knock. Not more than one screw fell out, which was good enough in my book. Next, I heaved up one of the burnt, spring-leaking cushions and stuffed them back into the cockpit. I made a show of the fact I only had one seat—I didn’t want The Fleshy One getting any ideas. “So what, he just began to Hop around like some sort of handpuppet?”

“Well, yes. But also no. He began to Hop, but only when life’s problems shifted to make him do so. More importantly, he began to tell others about the Hop.”

I was digging a sharp icicle into the jet-exhausts of my ship, now, scraping out heaping helpings of charcoal-rock flaked with clumps of stardust. “People didn’t truly believe him, did they?”

“Of course they did. Hoppism, introduced by the mysterious Mr. Hop, spread across the planet like wildfire.”

I looked around at the towering walls of ice encasing us. “How ironic.”

three

The Fleshy One:

The first ‘Group Hop’ occurred three years after Mr. Hop’s attempted suicide.

Since that fateful night, the former milkman had made it his mission to follow the tenants of Hoppism. He had abandoned all his earthly possessions, selling his home, his car, and everything but the clothes on his back, and traveled the streets of New York City, giving sermons to anyone who would listen. Often, these were those like him, lost—the addicted, the vagrants, the used and abused.

 He believed if he could get someone to Hop just once, he could change their lives.

At first, the sensible thought him loony. During those days there was a great more loony folk than sensible folk and all of them seemed to congregate to New York. The bankers hurried past him, too caught up in a whirlwind of their own thoughts to even hear his words and the church-goers proclaimed them heretical and didn’t wanna know what they meant. Soon he had a reputation, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. The papers plastered his picture in the Freaks of the City section and dubbed him: “The Ghoul of Night-Time New York—The Man Who Lives By the Hop.”

But Mr. Hop wasn’t discouraged. Maybe he would have been if he had not seen the power of the Hop firsthand or, more importantly, had the other “Loonies”—The Lost, he insisted they be called—not listened. But they did. His first sermons took place underneath bridges among those whose only comfort were the fires they had stoked and the meals they had cobbled together out of dumpsters. Unlike the others, they believed him, because they understood where he was coming from. They were, in a way, like he had been. The seriousness of life had taken away the joy of being alive.

Soon they were a traveling troupe, another attraction parading through New York, spouting their wisdom to anyone and everyone. This time the reception was more curious than anything else—people who had previously lambasted the man they deemed insane were now intrigued by the Hop and the Hoppites. It spiraled into a sensation. Why? Not because of the message. No, us Earthlings rarely cared about the message. It just broke the monotony of the world we had spent thousands of years crafting.

Imagine this: lights, cameras, and money led to the first Group Hop, not the Hop itself. People had to be sold on the idea, and they were—the spectacle of it all entranced them. When the Hoppites gathered in Central Park on August 5th, 1966, gawkers, listeners, and the like did too. They bought ice cream cones, and smoothies, and Coca Colas, and Fritos, and witnessed history.

Mr. Hop explained, with national television crews capturing every word on black-and-white microfilm, what Hoppism was. And then, fifty Hoppites, all lined up in a row, Hopped simultaneously.

And the world watched.

Then, the city joined in.

One by one, the onlookers found themselves drawn into the crowd, Hopping and smiling, and by the end of the day, the Hoppites in the park numbered five hundred. Not all of them knew they were united behind Mr. Hop’s singular belief, the one true core tenant of Hoppism, but they were—“Humanity has strayed too far from the Hop, that first little leap of joy.”

The next day, when Mr. Hop preached, people didn’t gather to laugh and giggle to their friends about the freak, they gathered to listen to his words. This speech, remembered colloquially by it’s opening line, “what does happiness take?” was where Mr. Hop dug deeper into the purpose of the Hop. He spoke of the absence of joy in the productivity rat-race humans had created for themselves and preached that life had one true end-goal: to be happy.

It wasn’t long before it seemed everyone was working a Hop or Two into their daily routine. All across the planet, people were Hopping just to get by, Hopping to stop arguments, Hopping just…to Hop.

Soon, everyone was a Hoppite.

“This is why us Floop’s don’t talk to each other. All your problems seem to come from other people! If you just ignored each other like a bunch of Floops, you would be happy like them, too!”

“But can you ever truly be happy if you are alone?”

“Yes! Us Floops give out a whole award for those best at it. Floop of the Year! The only way to win it is to be crowned best explorer, and what is exploring about?”

“Searching for other cultures and trying to understand them?”

“No! Being alone in space for lightyears on end!”

The Fleshy One looked at me like I had disappointed him.

I looked at him like I had oil all over my chest tentacles because I did. Cleaning the exhaust pipes was unpleasant business. This was often the only good use a Hnarf had. Cosmic oil, sucked from asteroids, was a delicacy to the little buggers. It also made them explode, which was nice.

“I’ve got two brains, not two heads, so please stop ogling me like that and get on with the story.”

The Fleshy One looked confused. “The story?”

“What you’ve been telling me about!”

“You mean history.” The Fleshy One scratched his beard. “And what came next was the most important day in it, December 3rd, 1968. Otherwise known as The Big Hop.”

“Gah!” (Floopish: Raghahast!) “That’s the problem with you humans. You think every day you experience is the most important in the universe. Know what I was doing on that day?”

“What?”

“Eating Floop Soup.”

The Fleshy One:

Murmurs about a supposed ‘Big Hop’ first began in the mid-1960s, a time of great turmoil here on Planet Earth. Just forty years prior, the entire world had been at war, and not twenty years after that, the entire world was at war again. Now, twenty years after that, the entire world was on edge, afraid it was going to happen again. Us humans loved to kill each other.

You won’t know what I’m talking about, but the Second World War, which had no unique name because they had called the First World War things such as “The Great War” and “The War to End All Wars” (which it didn’t), ended with the deployment of a weapon of mass destruction known as the atomic bomb. It contained the power to decimate entire cities in an instant, and it did, and like war, everyone was awfully afraid it was going to happen again, but this time all over the world, all at once.

Though it would have been very Floopish of me to remain quiet and listen to the withered one’s story, I couldn’t stop interjecting. “It could only blow up cities? Why, most species I’ve met have the technology to blow up planets!”

“Oh my! Don’t you find think that so utterly terrible?”

“No, not really, not at all. I don’t particularly think about it at all.”

“And why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I don’t know them.”

“Hm.”

The Fleshy One:

This fear was shared by Mr. Hop, who by now was no ordinary man. He had, in the year following his first demonstration in Central Park, become somewhat of a world leader. He commanded no country, he owned land—but when he spoke, people listened. They listened well-enough that before long his words carried more directive weight than even the most powerful prime ministers and presidents. To many, he quickly shifted into something more. Messiah is a heavy term, but some truly believed him a gift from God.

Mr. Hop never called himself such. In fact, he hated any attempt to celebrate he, the person, because he thought it more pertinent to celebrate the Hop, the idea. He preached Hoppism with an underlying message of world peace but quickly became disillusioned with the idea that words alone could save mankind. Global turmoil, spurned on by sprawling countries who couldn’t stop bickering over who had the best plan for how the world should work, was not at an all-time high. But the playing field had changed. Now all it took was one bad day and a button-press to end everything.

He believed that us humans were, by birth, good-natured. He said it was the world that molded us into monsters. “No generation has escaped the fate of suffering,” he said. “Babies are born into a world that just keeps on burning. Are we really okay with that?”

The word spoken back to him was: NO.

But their action, or rather inaction, screamed: YES.

That was when Mr. Hop introduced the world to the idea of ‘The Big Hop.’

“The Big Hop,” he said, speaking through a microphone that beamed his staticky voice all over the world in a split-second. “Will be the great reset.”

Across the globe, people listened.

They stopped cooking dinner. They parked their cars. They pulled their lips away from their cigarettes. This speech, which would later become known as the ‘it’s time to change’ speech, was important, and even then, at the time, everyone knew it.

“Society, as I see it, has grown too divisive. Every day there is something new to bicker and argue about. But I believe that, if we Hop together and experience that momentary joy in one full, communal burst, it will clear our heads of all manner of sin. It will take a feat of planning, cooperation, and synchronization, the combined effort of all mankind, to achieve the greatest dream imaginable—world peace.

“I propose that on December 3rd, 1968, we all take a chance. We do the toughest thing imaginable, and, for at least an hour, we forgive and forget. We shed our past grievances and everyone regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or national allegiances, Hop into a better future, one where we don’t even remember these terrible times existed.”

This speech took place on January 1st, almost one year prior to the Big Hop, and the fallout from it was immense—for the next dozen months, it became all we humans gabbed about. World leaders bickered over it. Couples whispered about it in bed, children giggled about it on playgrounds, scholars pondered what it could mean, coworkers and neighbors alike ruminated on it and Mr. Hop, all the while, continued to promote it. He, every day, expounded on his reasons for why it was necessary, and people listened.

And when the clock struck noon on December 3rd, 1968, the world Hopped.

“And?” I said. “What happened next?”

“What do you imagine happened?”

 “Nothing at all,” I said. “Everyone was so upset that they began killing each other.”

“No,” he rebutted. “World Peace.”

The Fleshy One:

The Big Hop was a big success—so big that, the next day, another one was organized.

And the day after that, and after that, and after that.

Every day, at noon, as if they were robots following a string of commands beamed straight into their brains, everyone Hopped.

Soon, it became known by a different name entirely. They called it: The Daily Hop.

Feuds fell apart. Wars were a forgotten art. The Big Hop had done exactly what Mr. Hop had planned for, merging the world’s collective conscious into one being, evolving humanity past a need for problems. How? Well, whenever one arose, they just Hopped until it went away. Sparring, with feelings, words, or weapons, was a waste when you could just Hop.

What human-beings used to occupy themselves with: arguing, mating, competing, eating, and lazing.

What human-beings began to occupy themselves with after The Big Hop: Hopping, Hopping, Hopping, Hopping, and Hopping.

Hoppism grew. No, exploded. Without anyone even noticing, the Daily Hop became the Hourly Hop. Nobody said anything to each other about it. The Hop had seemingly connected them, strung their cortexes together in a way that encouraged them to Hop when another did so. Every hour, without rhyme or reason, everyone stopped what they were doing and Hopped until their feet were sore.

Soon the clip-clap of soles slapping wooden floors, cracked asphalt, building-floor-concrete, or God’s-Earth-grass washed out any other sound in the world. It had become an unshakable part of society, ingrained deeply into the world’s routine. People Hopped to work and, once they were there, they took Hop-breaks after lunch and Hopped during their meetings. After their jobs were done, they Hopped to their cars, they Hopped on the buses, they Hopped at the groceries stores, while cooking dinner, and even before bed.

People Hopped, and that was all they did.

“But?” I said. “Surely there must be a but. This ending is too warm-and-gooey!”

“Unfortunately.” The Fleshy One scratched his beard. “See, you can Hop away the problems of a civilization, but you cannot Hop away the problems of a planet. And just a few years after The Big Hop, a problem from the planet arose.”

“And what was that?”

“Well, it got cold.”

“Cold?”

“Frigid, actually.”

The Fleshy One:

It did not happen all at once. No, chemical changes in the atmosphere to such a degree as what we encountered are rarely spontaneous. Rather, temperatures crept up across the Hopping Seventies so slowly that nobody really noticed when winter slipped back into September, then August and July. Before long, the greedy season began hoarding all the months for itself.

“And everyone didn’t find that odd?”

“No. They were too busy Hopping to find anything odd.” The Fleshy One put his skinny fingers to his chin and let out a hmmm. “Well, I suppose if they did find it odd, they would have just Hopped until they forgot about it.”

Per my translator:

FLABBERGASTED:

/ˈflabərˌɡastəd/

greatly surprised or astonished.

“this news has left me totally flabbergasted”

I was flabbergasted. “If you couldn’t be bothered to notice the weather…” Both my brains worked overtime, thinking about all the things you wouldn’t be able to do. “…how could you do much of anything?”

The Fleshy One leaned toward me with a smirk. He carried a peculiar stink, like different pieces inside him had died long ago and now were rotting. “That’s just it, though. There wasn’t much that needed done! The Hop showed us the truth. Beyond the basic requirements for living—eating, drinking, and sleeping—us humans were duty-bound to nothing except our own ambitions. All these things we had created, these barriers to a success life…they were artificial. Unnecessary. We are only gifted one life. Why waste it doing things we don’t want to?”

“You’re saying you learned all this from a single hop?”

“No. Certainly not. That would be absurd.” The Fleshy One cleared his throat. His breathe smelled of Pork n’ Beans! “I’m saying we began to think this way because of a single Hop. It took years of repetition, of constant and countless Hops, to truly believe it.”

Floobot was no longer helping me. It couldn’t. The drone had, just ten minutes ago, conducted a life-or-death surgical procedure on its own wiring to try and restore its sanity. Unfortunately, it had failed. Unfortunately, instead of dying, it lived by a single thread I didn’t have chutzpah (floopish: Hoopa-Floopa) to snip. When it attempted to speak, sparks fizzed out its mouth like an overzealous Carboffiene Cola machine. So now it just rated my performance by flashing numbers on the electronic screen on its belly. When I finished working on the thrusters, it said:

QUALITY: 8 – there are only three cracks remaining that might explode.

SPEED: 3 – my inventor could’ve repaired that quicker and he’s dead.

HNARF-SNUFFING: 0 – Traitor! You worked with them! Do it again. Let them eat my final wire. Kill me.

That was enough approval for me. If the thrusters exploded, I’d probably be goo on the windshield before I noticed anyway. I moved over to the last obstacle keeping me rooted to this dying planet—the engine. Icicles plugged its grommets, causing it to bloat-up like there was a little man inside of it angrily trying to punch his way out. I realized The Fleshy One was shadowing me, waiting for a response. I sighed. “Sounds like a nightmare.”

“It was heaven.” The Fleshy One wasn’t looking at me, but instead the ice beneath him. His jaunt reflection leered back at him. “For only the briefest chunk of time, we had achieved a global harmony long-thought impossible. Mr. Hop even pushed to rename the planet. He wanted to discard the moniker ‘Earth’ and prestige us with a title that announced to the entire universe what we were.”

“Land of the Gullible,” I said, wiping my hands through the air above my head like I was unsheathing a billboard. “Or, oh, even better—”

“—Paradise,” The Fleshy One said, cutting me off. I was about to crack another joke when a raincloud gloomed his face in despair. “But, soon, it was anything but.”

“Oh, dramatic. Don’t tell me—people finally woke up to the absurdity of the Hop and moved on with their lives?”

“In a way, we were woken up. Not to the absurdity of the Hop, but the price of it.” He ran his fingers down his wrinkles. “Doing anything to excess is worthy of punishment, and all our Hopping, every day, every hour, everywhere, some billion feet strong, had gifted us a terrible surprise—a permanent vacation from the sun.”

“What the Floop does that mean?”

“Unbeknownst to us, with each Big Hop, we were actually pushing our planet. Miniscule amounts at first, barely noticeable. But repeating it…? That caused us to drift through space at an alarming rate. First, the seasons changed. Then, the years grew longer. We passed Mars, and Jupiter, and…”

The Fleshy One was starting to ramble. This entire time, chatting about this nonsense had been thrilling him. But now, it was an ailment. These days, I deduced, must have been dreadful, and that was likely because they didn’t happen. Like my Floobot, something had gotten this human’s wires twisted up.

“That is scientifically preposterous,” I said.

“I don’t blame your disbelief. I mean, it’s an insane concept, isn’t it? Even Mr. Hop didn’t believe it at first. But convincing you should be no challenging task. I mean, look all around us.” The Fleshy One waved his hands weakly. “Earth is far from its home, just like you. Lost.”

I am an arguer. Rarely do I concede my beliefs even if they are certifiably false. But, truthfully, I couldn’t drum up a convincing reason Earth would be where it was. My ancestors charted it next to Venus. Yet here it was, bumping butts with Neptune. I huffed: “Okay, well, after your easily-convinced-kind discovered this, what happened? I’d make a guess, but thus far, all my predictions have been wrong.”

“People disagreed on it.”

“Of course they did—”

“—Not the problem. No, they all agreed that the Earth had moved. What they couldn’t come to terms on is how we solve it. This, you see, is when mankind proved themselves unsavable, when we resorted back to our most innate and common state of being—bickering and bitching.”

The Fleshy One let out a great sigh.

“Then, the Dual Hop emerged.”

four

The Fleshy One:

The Dual Hop is a tale that mirrors every action of mankind. It is a tale of taken something meant to benefit the world, something creative with good intentions, and sullying it, twisting it to spit in face of what it stood for, using it to harm the very world it was meant to help. It was first set in motion when an unnamed man from the midwestern United States ceased Hopping in favor of complaining.

By then, people had started to notice was the world was changing. The snow, which was becoming a near-daily occurrence in parts of the world was arid and soaked in sand, was the key giveaway. And the man, the Complainer, broke one of core tenants of Hoppism—he encouraged people to stop.

He insisted that, if we continued, the weather would continue to shift, and soon the world would be an igloo, and they would be nothing but icicles scattered all over the globe, statues to a race that once was. Other people joined in, forgoing the Hop in favor of proving their own points, and then nobody was Hopping, and nothing was getting done, and the snow continued to fall, daily.

But, while the world was just becoming privy to the situation, Mr. Hop had been aware of it for quite some time. Just over a year after the first Big Hop, a group of scientists who genius far outweighed his own had contacted him with their troublesome findings and ever since then, he and they and the leaders of the largest nations had been working to devise a universal solution. They weren’t ready when the Complainer began to spiral things into fury, but he knew they needed to spring into action, else society would revert.

And if it did, Mr. Hop was afraid they would lose it all. They had achieved world peace easily, but keeping it was an entirely different story.

That was why, hoping to spurn the Complainer’s influence, Mr. Hop proposed what he dubbed ‘The Dual Hop.’ It was a simple plan: to stabilize the Earth and combat it’s eventual detachment of the sun, they would split the Daily Hop into two different Hops. Half of the population would Hop on one side of the Earth, while the rest would Hop on the other side of the Earth, thus creating a perpetual balance that did not bat the planet to one side or the other, but rather kept it locked in place.

The reason Mr. Hop had waited to reveal this plan to the public was not because he did not believe in it. No, he wholeheartedly thought this was the best solution to what he had accidentally created. But he had spent nearly his entire life since discovering the Hop studying humanity and knew how they would react to such an idea—with dismay.

Though the disease of conflict which had ailed the human race since its inception had slept dormant for a few years, the Complainer had rudely knocked it awake, and the idea of a Dual Hop had given it a good shake afterward. People began to remember how intoxicating it could be to fight, and they did, because they could. You see, a rift had formed, and the disease of conflict exploited it:

One group thought that, before stabilizing the Earth, they should move it back to where it was. These people liked it hot.

The other group thought that, before stabilizing the Earth, they should move it a little further away. These people liked it cold.

Of course they couldn’t agree.

Without a happy middle, the Hop’s joyous spell wore off and the Dual-Hop took on a different meaning entirely. What had been drummed up as a way to keep humanity glued together only served to widen that growing rift. Families split apart, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters traveling to opposite ends of the globe to fulfill their vision of a perfect planet. When noon struck, it was like the ringing of a war-time bell—The Daily Hop was no longer a momentous triumph of the human spirit. Now, it was a battle.

Mankind had turned the Hop into one of its favorite things—a weapon.

And thus, failed it final test, forever throwing world peace out of its grasp.

“The lunacy of this! Mr. Hop gave them a solution and they squandered it!” I was in such a huff that my elastic cheeks bubbled up like balloons. “And for what? Because they had to be right? Breadcrumbs! They threw away their planet over breadcrumbs!”

The Fleshy One’s wrinkles sucked inward, contorting his face in a maelstrom of pain. With his composure cracking, I realized I was talking to a man who had lost everything. His friends, his family, his home. Only, unlike most people, he couldn’t pack up and leave—there was nowhere to go.

“Humans are selfish,” he said. “All Mr. Hop wanted was a future of world peace, but they didn’t care to look beyond their own lives, and not realizing that was his greatest flaw. To him, there was no joy brighter than the Hop. But to most of mankind? There was no joy brighter than a battle and the stakes of this one, the fate of the entire planet, was too intoxicating for even the most devoted Hoppites to walk away from.”

The Fleshy One scrubbed his whiskers. They were frayed and unkempt, like broomstick bristles left to gather dust. “Well, it’s all in the past, I suppose.”

I opened my mouth, but my chest tentacles, which find the taste of tension repugnant and thus are my best asset for sensing it, whipped my lips shut.

So we sat in silence. I had repaired the engine, stripping itself metal plates off and soldering its innards back into a solid structure, and now I was sitting in the cockpit of my ship, on a chair with springs jabbing my bum, tangling sparking electric worms together as The Fleshy One watched over my shoulder. When I realized he was in a trance, lost in thought and not-quite-paying-attention, I waggled one of those fireworking cords at him.

“If you’re going to talk-up a Floop’s time, you can’t leave the story unfinished.” I shook my head. “Finish telling me this story of you humans which, by the by, I have determined I do not like very much!”

Us Floops, we have two mothers, no fathers. Us men are not involved in the process of baby-making at all. Even I, one hundred years old, do not know how a Floop comes to be. This is one of life’s great mysteries. But what I do know is that if my mother’s were here, they would say: ‘Be a good Floop and help this Amateur-Hnarf, because he has helped you. At worst, vaporize him. At best, take him with you.’

I, being a Floop, was not one for talking. But I was starting to wonder about the idea of having a partner to travel with. He had good stories and that made for a good time. Maybe, if I were lucky, everyone else would think so too, and his stories would help me win Floop of the Year.

Though my anti-social chest-tentacles fought against the very notion, smacking my lips purple, I said: “…but I suppose I like you, because you have kept me good company tonight.”

The Fleshy One weakly smiled. It seemed to crack his dried skin. “That’s pleasant to hear, at least, Mr. Floop. You have kept me good company as well, I think. Truth be told it has been so long since I have had any company that I have forgotten what it is like, good or bad.”

“On Floop, typically good company much quieter. Good company asks for galaxy juice and nothing else. Good company sits and watches the space flow by.”

“Don’t you ever get lonely like that?”

“How would I get lonely? People right there!”

“Because, back in my day, we would do the same thing. Everyone would be in such a rush to do whatever needed doing that they would scarcely ever talk to each other. They would be there, certainly. But being with someone is something different entirely, no?”

“I suppose so.” Strangely enough, I understood what the Fleshy One was getting at. Last year, at the Floop of the Year award ceremony, everyone watched, but nobody talked, and that struck me as strange. Made a victory feel like it would be like walking through a graveyard. “Is that how Mr. Hop felt before his first Hop?”

“The more important question, I think, is this—is that how you feel right now?”

“I…” That gave me tremendous pause. Part of being a Floop was approaching life at a million-lightyear-an-hour pace. We did not stop to consider our feelings usually. “…don’t know.”

Hoping to get back on topic, I said: “So, what happened next?”

To which The Fleshy One responded: “What happened next…?”

The Fleshy One was weary. You could down by the drooping gray bags tugging his wrinkled eyelids down onto his cheeks. The mere act of regaling me with this tale…it was too much for him. He rubbed his head, like he was trying to worm the thoughts out of his skin. At first I thought he was trying to remember, then I realized he was wishing he could forget.

“What happened next is that the Dual Hops ended in Death.” He let out a long sigh. “The death of Hoppism. The death of the Hoppites. Death of society and civilization. Death of the world as we had always known it.”

The Fleshy One:

The Dual Hop continued on for months, an intense battle of attrition where neither side was willing to let the other gain a galactic inch. During this time, the world was often silent save for the shuddering of its skin as billions of feet stamped their rage into it, trying to knock the other billion off, straight into the atmosphere.

This conflict didn’t just birth fresh hatred—it birthed fresh countries. The longstanding borders of old were cast away like snakeskin and now, allegiances lived and died by whether you favored the Summer Hop or the Winter Hop. They even went so far as to rewrite the tenants of Hoppism, purging the old ideals in favor of new ones that existed only to soil the reputation of their newfound enemies. The Hop ceased being anything other than a means for one side to “win” and “get their way.”

The two tribes continued to segregate themselves, eventually growing bored of the bickering and resorting to the childish act of completely ignoring each other. When that got boring, they turned back the clock and, once again, fell into a pattern of violence. Across ten years of constant retaliatory Hops, they hadn’t ever agreed on anything, except that they couldn’t agree, of course. And now they had decided one could not survive, and two could not comingle, which meant the only option remaining was war.

I suppose you could call what followed ‘World War Three.’ By then, we were getting sick of counting, and maybe even a little hopeful, because we didn’t give this a heroic name like the first one or no name like it’s sequel. We simply, with intent finality, called it: The End.

And was it? Well, look around.

After a year of “winning”, The Winter Hop emerged victoriously into a sundered world. Humanity’s creations—its cities, its buildings, its cars, its people—scattered the planet, destroyed, broken, brutalized, dead.

Three billion souls blinked out in three-hundred and sixty-five days, one complete gallop around the sun. If you don’t believe in the ethereal, let’s call them brains. Three billion brains, formed in bellies and made of key components from two other brains, with millions of years lived between them all, tossed away like a coin thrown into a wishing well.

And that wish? Endless winter. A lifetime of snow-cozy days. The survivors chased that dream for a short while, resuming their Daily Hops, keeping themselves indoors so they didn’t have to think about the carcasses rotting in the streets. But not even the Hop could wash away the blood on their hands. For a Hop to be magic, one must cling to the joy of their First Hop, that initial, carefree happiness.

Yet they could not. They had corrupted that memory and lost it for good—they had, in the name of the Hop, killed the very kindness which fueled it.

They could not heal, nor could the world. The damage was done, the world dead.

Soon it began to freeze, and the people did too.

After that came nothing except the silent whisper of the wind as it blew remnants of civilization.

And where was Mr. Hop during all this? Gone.

five

“And that brings us to today, where that wind still blows. And yet, for so long, I have been the only one able to hear it.” The Fleshy One sighed with both lungs, matching the pace of those whistling gusts. In Floopish, we have a special word for when someone looks like he does. It is a word that encompasses all the bad stuff in the word: alagash. Translation: shit. Recounting this tale had sucked away what little strength he had left. “Today, which is to tomorrow what tomorrow will be to yesterday—nothing, and a whole lot of it.”

“Are you certain that you are the last of your kind?” I couldn’t fathom such a concept. Us Floops spend so much time traveling the stars that Planet Floop could explode and I doubt even ten percent of us would perish—most of us are too busy to ever go home.

“We can never be certain of anything.” The Fleshy One scrubbed his sweaty cheeks, the placid skin looked like melting clay. “But before you arrived, I hadn’t seen another living soul in over ten years. Maybe more. Nearly impossible to catch hold of time these days. And I believe if you’ve seen an alien before one of your own kind, you’re right and good alone.”

“Alone…”

Now that concept I understood all too well. Us Floops are alone months on end, exploring. We meet plenty of people, sure. Hundreds a week. But we don’t talk to them, not like I’ve talked to The Fleshy One. We do business, and nod heads at each other, and grunt, and exchange currency. But conversation? Conversation like this is pointless when you’ll never see someone again.

Yet, there I was, ruminating over The Fleshy One’s words. I, myself, in a trance.

I shook my head, rattling my two brains together, and turned my attention back to the dashboard. I had solved the mystery of the cables and now only had to flick a switch and see if all my work was worth it or if I was going to have to turn myself into a monument. But if it did work…

…did I really want to keep being alone?

“Human…” I paused, struggling to kick the words off my forked tongue. From birth, us Floops are taught to emphasize efficiency to build a better generation, as that’s what our forefathers did. But here I was, wanting to do something so…unnecessary. “Say I crank this switch to ON and the ship actually does, by some miracle, turn on…what would you say about coming with me? About leaving this desolate place behind and exploring the stars?”

I looked back, over my shoulder, and saw The Fleshy One was no longer behind me. He had retreated to the corner and sunk into his cot and now resembled a moldy sack of fruit flesh. Through short, belabored breaths, he said: “That truly is a beautiful thought. Let’s see if that miracle comes true, first.”

That was all the encouragement I needed. Suddenly, I was getting worked up at the thought of having a partner accompany me. It was something I never even knew I wanted until it was right here, in front of me, on a dying planet. I jammed my chest-tentacles against the switch and snapped it upward and the entire interior of the ship let out a good shudder, wanton bits of loose metal showering me. Then, the engine began to purr as all the Hnarfs still hiding inside it squealed, scurrying out onto the ice below.

The dashboard illuminated slowly, awakening piece by piece. First, the navigation panel bloomed to life, showing me Neptune and Uranus and Saturn, and then the galaxy map flicked on, showing too many numbers for me to digest, coordinates and other nonsense. I didn’t have to wait around to watch the rest of it return. I knew I had done it!

I leaped out of the ship and rushed over to my newfound companion, expecting him to congratulate me and salute my brilliance. Instead, as I stood over him, he just wheezed, and even that looked like more than he was meant to be able to do. I hunched down and inspected him. Even with just a cursory glance I could tell what was going on—he still had all of the parts that made him function, but they were shutting down slowly, one by one.

The Fleshy One was dying.

“No,” I said. “No, no. That isn’t fair, human! You can’t perish, not like this!”

“If the miracle of your ship returning to good health comes at the cost of my life, then so be it,” The Fleshy One said. “As long as the story of Earth, humanity, and the Hop, lives on, that is worthy sacrifice.”

It was like he had continued to exist solely to pass the tragedy of his planet on and, now that he had finished expelling it, he was withering away. I watched as, with each breath, the last vestiges of his being faded from his shell of a body. My chest-tentacles were whipping. “Is this really how your story ends?” I spat. “On such a pathetic note?”

“I thought so. I truly did. That is, until you came along. Now, I see this encounter for what it truly is—the end of my story, but the beginning of yours.”

“What!?”

With every ounce of energy he could muster, The Fleshy One reached out and wrapped his bony hand around my wrist. His grip was weak, fingertips barely able to press into his palm. “Mr. Hop…he spoke of your kind. What he described seeing on TV…it looked just like you…”

My eyes widened. “Wait a second…”

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it.

“…are you Mr. Hop!?”

The Fleshy One somberly smiled. In his glassy eyes I saw the reflection of a life long lived, full of memories he had clung to dearly. “No. No, truth be told, I never even met him. I was just a fella who saw his vision. Who agreed with him. Who understood what the true importance of life was—being happy. Your ancestors, whoever they were, taught him that, and after talking with you, I believe it is because your society is suffering from the same isolationism mine ours was.”

“But…”

The Fleshy One’s hand tensed around my wrist. “They introduced the Hop to us with a purpose. I don’t doubt that. They believed it would help, and when our planet fell into ruin, they abandoned the notion out of fear that, if they pursued it, your kind would suffer the same fate. But please, grant me one favor.”

“A favor…?”

“I need you to Hop.”

“To…Hop?”

“Just as I have described it.” The Fleshy One was struggling to get through even a single word now. “Cling to…that memory…of youth. It will…feel silly. But that silliness…is part…of the joy.”

I gawked at him like he had sixteen heads. Despite listening to his entire tale, the Hop had seemed a legendary pastime, so much so that I couldn’t imagine doing it myself. But, I wasn’t going to reject the wish of a dying man, especially one who had not only helped stave off my boredom, but also taught me a thing or two about life. I had explored much of the universe, yet here, secluded on this one measly planet, was a man who had uncovered mysteries even I could not fathom.

I stood up and took three steps back. I straightened my posture, emptied my lungs, and did my best not to giggle. It was silly, and if another Floop saw me about to do this, they would cackle and point their forty fingers at me. I closed my eyes, recalling a time when I was but a Floopie, just able to walk, barely able to run, stumbling around my mothers as they cheered me on. It was a memory I hadn’t hooked out of the dredges of my mental slop in, well, forever.

Then, I hopped.

And it was like I never landed.

Like I was frozen in time, somehow unstuck from the temporal river that carried us forever forward, exploring the feelings of boyhood I had long since forgotten. It was like I was back then, lurking temporarily in the past, able to reach out and feel my mother’s touch, and see the world from a perspective so small and untainted. During that Hop, I had no notion of death, nor even consequences. I saw nothing but that moment, that peaceful past where seeds of worry and doubt hadn’t yet begun to sprout, weren’t even planted. Where pleasure, and nothing but, abound.

When I opened my eyes, my feet stamped into the ice, and I slipped backward, falling onto my butt. I gasped for air, trying to collect my thoughts, but with each heaving breath I dispelled them into the frozen air. When I looked at The Fleshy One, he merely smiled.

“Don’t…bother…answering,” he said. “You…Hopped…for…an…hour.”

I scrambled across the ice, over to The Fleshy One and he let out a soft giggle, like everything was all right. “Hoppism,” he said. “Is magic.”

I did not move from that spot for some time. I was compelled to stay with The Fleshy One until the bitter end. He wheezed, he coughed, he withered, and when he spoke for the last time, he simply said: “It begins with a single Hop.”

I buried him the Floopish way, which is to place the dead body atop the highest point you can find to announce their passing to the world, and I mourned for several days, scouring the planets for any remaining signs, placards, or statues mentioning his legacy, mentioning the Hop, or Hoppism, or Mr. Hop himself, and gathered them at his final resting place. I did with him what I would want done with me, even if it wasn’t what he would want, because it was what he deserved—I made him into a monument.

To humanity, he was not Mr. Hop. But to me, he was.

When finally I left Earth, once the Farthest, Furthest Inhabited Rock, now just another uninhabited rock, behind, I did not chart a course for Andromeda. Winning Floop of the Year now seemed pointless. Instead, I punched in the coordinates to Planet Floop, home, and returned with a new purpose.

A purpose that began with a single Hop.

THE END