Starting working your shift

“How did we get here?” Gogo asked numbly as she stared out of the shuttle at the mountains of trash that spread off into the horizon.

“We went through the interstellar gate and then continued flying,” you explained as you made some adjustments to the controls. It’s been awhile since you needed to use your piloting skills. “Are you okay? We’ve been here for an hour.”

“No,” Gogo says as she rubs her eyes, she looked dazed and confused. “We were just at that party and the guy was handing out buckets.”

“That’s a Bucket Party hosted by a Pinkie Pie for ya; you don’t remember what happened until the video is on the internet,” you say, as you reached over and took off the bucket Gogo still had on her head. You set it on the floor behind you as you make sure the seal keeping goodies inside was intact. As you looked back, you saw that Diana clean up some ice cream she had spilled on herself. The three of you were in a shuttle craft similar to the ones StarFleet from Star Trek would have used by their ships. This one had four seats, a replicator for cheap snacks, in the back was the character storage tank.

“Since you probably don’t remember my explanation, let me go through it again,” you say, turning back to the controls. “Prime Earth and all its colonies and vassals tend to have a trash problem and since no one wants to have trash laying around and local landfills stink the land around it, the solution was to set up thousands of trash worlds to dump the trash at.”

“Rein Corp assigns 10 offices to one Trash World to patrol for characters, splitting the world up into quadrants that are in turn split into a hundred sectors though we mainly patrol the areas where new trash is dumped.”

“What if there are characters that got missed in the non patrolled areas?” Diana asked with concern.

“Not likely but I think they would get found when the dumping portals move back over to their area,” you respond, trying to recall all the procedures. When you had woken up in the shuttle, you had reviewed the assignment and found that you were going to be patrolling sectors 23-25 in the Beta Quadrant of Trash World 2338. It was a lower priority sector to patrol and likely empty of characters but if they were going to pay you to do nothing, might as well.

“And how are we going to fit them all in here, this thing is on the small side,” Gogo asked as looked at the available space in the shuttle and saw only enough seats for four people and maybe space for ten people if they stood. She then thought of something more important. “How are we going to get them in here? Are we going to land and pick them up? And what about bodies? Because I’m not sure about being in here with a corpse or skeletons!” You shake your head quickly.

“No, we won’t be landing at all. The shuttle has ray that can function as either a storage ray or a transporter. See the massive blue device behind us? That is a data storage bank, when the ray is used on a character, it will convert them to data and stores them there. Even any remains since it’s relatively easy to bring them back depending on a few things. The scanner on my left, picks up any character chip or any registered DNA and lets us know where to point the ray.” As if on queue, the scanner pings indicating a couple of stasis pods were buried deep in a mound. You checked the scanner and maneuvered to get the right angle with the least amount of resistance in the way.

“Press the blue button on your top left,” you asked Gogo who took a second to look. Activating the ray emitter, blue ring shaped pulses went deep into the trash pile. Soon a chime sounded and you turned on the autopilot. “Let’s see who we picked up.”

Walking over to the data bank’s terminal, you used it to project the inventory holographically.

“Looks like a Gimli from Lord of the Rings and a four digit iteration of a Ron Stoppable from Kim Possible,” you say looking over the stats of the two characters you found. Both of them were in stasis for over a decade and from the same store. “Looks like they didn’t sell and got tossed by their store; the Ron should fetch me a good commission.”

“So this is the whole job? Detect something, press a button, and done?” Gogo said with a deadpan voice. “This couldn’t be automated somehow?”

“Automation was tried and the original attempt missed 4 times out of 7,” you answer as you walked back to your seat and pull out a manual from under Gogo’s seat. “This is the employee Trash World shuttle manual. It will have the history and the shuttle specs. If something happens you should probably be familiar.”

“It’s not like I have much else to do, our phones don’t get signal out here,” Gogo replied, giving you pause. You forgot that the character grade phones you got your harem only connect to their local network while your phone connects to the multiversal network. Something to change when visiting other worlds when on vacation. You shrug as you set the shuttle to continue on its path.