Krueleig arrives each morning in the Remote Guidance Space Propulsion Laboratory shortly before third hour three twelve. He prepares himself for the day’s work by canistering warm liquid stimulant in a thermo-controlled container which he will wheel carefully to his workstation, trying not to tip it over as it is tall and heavy and has small wheels. He will also gather a breakfast container from the employee lounge, and then check for amended work assignments on the board. This is a useless step, as are many of his day to day “tasks,” as the passage of time “on project” are rarely under five generations. Changes are always slow coming and predictable. When he finally completes all the preparatory tasks necessary to begin his day, he plops himself down on the metal post at the center of the circular console that is his workstation. Krueleig is a cephalopod, and the post has a large metal ball at the top to which he is able to both restrict the leakage of black ink from his internal glands, as well as hold himself in place for the 37 and three tenths hour shift that is his normal workday. Some days the RGSPL pitches around quite wildly.

Before impaling himself on his post, Krueleig must first report each day to Silian, the overlord of his department. Silian is a Lizard Man that Krueleig despises with passion on account of the degrading way he continues to suggestively tailgate Krueleig’s wife, Leona Staufferengina. It is particularly annoying to Krueleig that Silian seems so lavishly to enjoy the idea of getting a little too drunk and following her around for the entire evening at the formal social events which the Science Lab throws every light-year tenth dot. Leona has always denied to Krueleig that there has ever been any inappropriate action towards her from Silian. But Krueleig had witnessed firsthand a long trail of black ink oozing from Silian’s pants leg at the seventh equinox party of the lord of Umbra. Krueleig had, sometime later, caught Silian smelling his tail (a disgusting practice) and leering directly at Leona from across the room. Leona, who was dancing with a group of female Rowshe, her best friends in all the galaxy, caught him looking and inadvertently, in her apparent nervousness, sneezed an ink blot all over the dance floor, quite nearly soiling the pants-leg of Major Queequeg Van Shippensburg, as he danced obliviously with a svelte manatee in a tight fitting spandex muumuu. Krueleig grew, predictably, even more suspicious then, but as yet he has not been able to lay down definitive proof of impropriety. In the meanwhile, Krueleig would choose to leverage every scrap of doubt that he could use to console himself. For her part, Leona explained away the splatter of ink on the dance floor by calling attention to a long standing sinus infection in her right third armpit combined with a case of the nerves relating to how important it was to the career of Krueleig that Silian find her, and therefore Krueleig (by association), kindred spirits to his cause of advancing the enlightenment of the Hoard Injustice philosophy throughout the galaxy. This explanation (rattled off in one - lung defying sentence), Krueleig accepted acrimoniously, wanting it to be the truth although quite realistically, the margins were slim.

All the same, Krueleig hates Silian, feels justified in doing so, and retaliates in the only practical way that he knows how. He has denied revealing to Silian the discovery of a new life form in the galaxy, a pitiful race of dry, dusty, small-eyed beings inhabiting the third planet in orbit around a small G2V class Hydrogen star out in the 14th Delphnine sector. Krueleig has not reported his discovery, the discovery of his team leader actually (as Silian will certainly be awarded full credit – as well as the free four parsecs supply of liquid dish detergent and putric cesspool scented fabric softener), a man too self-absorbed to do any more than strut round the remote star vehicle’s command center gazing at himself in the large eye pools of the skein of cephalopods that are the true backbone of the organization. (Of course, the term backbone in this description is somewhat ironic, as there are fewer than seven actual backbones in the entire inter-galaxy department of unassigned life form acquisitions). A move that could potentially result in getting him sentenced to being rolled in abrasive quartz and salt crystals, backed into a tight fitting mason jar and placed on a shelf in the overlord pantry next to similarly packed (but exquisitely colored) sea cucumbers (sad pathetic creatures).

At any rate, Krueleig has come to work every day for the past three weeks and steered his remote drone, the Quepdo, across this tiny solar system as an invisible taunt to the self-centeredness of Silian, not so much as scorching the surface of the tiny planet of humanoids with opium soot or even doing as little as playing them the Bagdasarian national anthem, a tune so erotic that it has been known to triple the population of Black Robe Bi-Pedophiles and Second Mile first-responders on any planet that it is played in the general direction of. No, instead, Krueleig has simply gone about the business of docking with a small ice moon that is circling a drearily colored gas giant. The giant has its own cone-of-shame style rings of ice which give it the general appearance of malaise. It was attractive to Krueleig only because he had decided fill the Quepdo’s storage holds with repugnant and worthless chunks of what really amounts to no more than frost buildup freezer ice. When the expedition finally makes its destination in the Pleistocene quadrant, they will lose a full shift of indentured slave labor hours cleaning out the stinking mess, and Silian will look, for all intents and purposes like a publicly elected, and liberal, socialist senator.