At age nine, Eddie Bifteck had no patience for other children. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing; they all wanted to be veterinarians or astronauts or some other nonsense like that.
Eddie knew what he wanted and he knew what he wanted was the only thing that mattered: Eddie Bifteck wanted to be a space marine.
He knew there wasn’t any water in space, so the name confused him a little, but he didn’t let that stop him. Because that was the kind of attitude a space marine needed.
“Space marines aren’t real, honey,” his father kindly told him many times over in an effort to crush his hopes and dreams and undoubtedly lead to doom for all mankind. Eddie forgave his treason against the species, but ignored him all the same.
The dream was bigger than them both.
So he worked on it. He he pumped weights all the way through middle school; he lied on career aspiration surveys all the way through high school; he graduated with barely any time spent on science or math or anything else but he paid a lot of attention to anything with astronomy and spent all his free time at his uncle’s gun range firing things in ways that probably weren’t legal and practicing retrieving ammo under fire which was definitely not legal and sometimes pretending the other patrons at the range were treasonous scum and fantasizing about executing them to the rapturous applause of a planetary tribunal, which wasn’t exactly illegal but was the sort of thing people didn’t like to hear.
That was what Eddie wanted. To do the things people didn’t want to do, for the reasons they didn’t like.
Because that was the kind of thing space marines did.
***
“You’ll have to go to college, sport,” said Eddie’s father warmly.
And Eddie did, but only to enter in debate clubs and argue ferociously for the necessity of exploding rocket bullets as mandatory equipment on all expeditions outside Earth’s atmosphere. He honed his arguments to killing points of lethal sharpness based on an unorthodox technique he called ‘no, that’s treasonous.’
“This sounds a little excessive,” his opponent said.
“No, that’s treasonous,’ said Eddie, shrewdly.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
And that worked very well until the last debate of his first year, when he was arguing against a particularly wily and cold-eyed classmate.
“Your idea is preposterous and useless,” she told him.
“No, that’s treasonous,” said Eddie, advancing confidently.
“Putting the propellant in the gun AND the missile itself is pointless,” she continued.
“No, that’s treasonous,” said Eddie, pressing his advantage.
“One struggles to find the right words to describe the sheer amount of wastage and excess this concept represents,” she said. “What would you call it? ‘Deliberate self-sabotage in a manner best fit to destroy the entity enacting it from within?’”
“No, that’s treasonous,” said Eddie, sensing victory within his grasp, and then he realized what he’d just said and burst into screaming tears with lots of snot.
***
Eddie graduated with a degree in accounting and applied for a job at NASA.
“Can you do math?” they asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Can you fly rockets?”
“No.”
“Can you run software?”
“No.”
“Can you assemble impossibly delicate and complex machines?”
“No.”
“What CAN you do?”
“I can fire a gun and reload it and will never surrender against any threat assailing our species from the stars, fighting to my last breath.”
NASA said they’d call him back and never did.
Eddie applied for a job at a private space launch company instead.
“Can you do math?” their interviewer asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Can you fly rockets?”
“No.”
“Can you run software?”
“No.”
“Can you assemble impossibly delicate and complex machines?”
“No.”
“What CAN you do?”
“Annihilate the aliens that seek to destroy us all,” he said.
“We’ll get back to you,” said the interviewer.
Eddie realized he had to take matters into his own hands and started with the matter of the interviewer.
“Take me to the spaceship,” he told them through a gentle chokehold. “There is empty space to guard.”
***
Liftoff was less tricky than anyone had told Eddie, which made sense to him. You just pressed buttons and hey he was in orbit.
Good, but not good enough.
“The aliens will take over the moon before they assault Earth,” he explained to ground control, “so I need to guard there first. Which is why you need to send me there.”
“The spaceship isn’t designed for that, Eddie,” said ground control. “Eddie, we have your father here. We have your teachers here. We have your uncle here – which took some doing, because he was in a supermax prison. We’d have your childhood friends but we can’t find any. Eddie, won’t you come home?”
“I’m doing this for them, and for home,” said Eddie stoically. He was surrounded by those that lacked vision and courage and spine and honor and some other stuff he couldn’t think of. “If men like me don’t stand guard over the sheep then the sheep don’t have watchdogs and they get eaten by wolfdogs and that’s bad and I’m great and whatever or something. Point me at the moon.”
They pointed him at the touchdown site, which almost worked until he saw through their cunning stratagem.
Fine. He’d do it himself.
***
Any landing you could walk away from was good, Eddie knew. So this was at least 50% good.
“Aaargh,” he gargled heroically to Earth. “I’ve aaargh taken up ooooeeurgh offensive ouch ouch ouch positions in a defensive owwwww emplacement in the rubble of the main cockpit. For the first time in Earth’s jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeSUS history it is secured against threats extraterrestrial and insidious. Anyone that travels dozens of lightyears across the nightmarish emptiness of the void to attack you will have to go through me first. I did this all for you, for all of you, except for those of you that tried to stop me because you’re all traitors seeking to subvert and destroy our species.”
“Eddie, buddy,” sobbed his dad over the radio, “please, special boy, what led you to do this? Why couldn’t you stay here and be happy? What put this idea in your head? Why are you dying on the moon? That last one’s the most relevant right now the rest are rhetorical.”
“Because,” said Eddie, as he prepared to straighten his right leg out, “that’s what space marines do.”
Eddie straightened his right leg out.
“OooooohSHIT,” he confirmed, and passed out for six hours, which is pretty bad when you have two hours of air left in your tanks.
***
When the Betelgeuser archaeologists showed up thirty million years later, he was the only human they met in person. A small shrine was built around him to commemorate the occasion, admiring that the alien who had expired so far from air and warmth had done so with his hand outflung and outstretched towards the stars in the spirit of universal brotherhood, reaching out with an open mind and optimistic soul to the hope of finding aid in a seemingly uncaring and empty universe.
It was all very heartfelt and they never found a history book that could tell them otherwise.