Physical Lifestock

1.

The hum of the engine is gone. There are no systems indicators in the pens. I don’t know what’s happened.

The cows are afraid, silent. The look in their eyes… They know. I can see in their idiot eyes that they know something’s wrong.

Now Buttercup’s making noise. Bawling. Getting louder and once the alarm starts blaring that jittery heifer will panic the rest of the herd.

We’ve lost thrust. Weightlessness. I’m not strapped in. Liable to float into the thick of them. I’ve been neglectful. Unchained them for exercise. Figured they’d be comfortable but now they’re starting to bump, to jolt.

One cow collides with another, they take to writhing. Momentum builds. Mass, a grand total that heaves in rhythm with ill physic.

So I come to understand. Given time we’ll grind. Hard bits at ballistic velocity. Soft bits smashing, thunk. Appendages caught on moorings. Slipping, tearing.

2.

Thruster malfunction. Software bug. Radiators were read to underperform. Engines cut before checks were initiated. It took time to sort. Longer than routine, due to weightlessness and rarity of fault. The malfunction itself was serious, as incidents go. But well within margins relative to long-term operation.

Then a name was brought to echo at role call. Farm worker. The pens had to be checked.

An animal assemblage had smeared thick fluids across the walls, floors. Aftermath of nothing cognate. Blind, unknowing violence. Men searched through the substance, found no corpse to identify. But it was known. A man has been crushed in the pens, conjoined with an idiot mass.

3.

“Quite unique!” smirks among officers present,
“But a right is a right. Not to be divvied out in context, nor diluted by weight. Burial rites must be observed for the whole, as they are owed to the part that is man.”

In this spirit, funeral attendance was held. But the mortuary wasn’t fit to host a funeral for twenty cows and a man. Not all at once. Sixteen shifts. The lump was divvied and partitioned into manageable bits. Observance held on repeat for every individual chunk sent to rest in vacuum.