Time to get to work,” the tiny fish (who we’ll name Maybe-One) shared with the really large fish (who we’ll name Maybe-Naught). These were not fish in the usual Earthbound definition of fish but, if pressed, calling them fish would do. Maybe-One was red but sometimes yellow. Maybe-Naught was blue but sometimes green. Their fins billowed so wispily that you might think them imagined. Their eyes were shaped like teardrops, their pupils like black holes drawing on the gravity of their white backdrops.

Neither Maybe-One nor Maybe-Naught knew who employed them. To their understanding, they had always just been here, in this pink, gelatinous ocean of goo through which they swam effortlessly. Not so for many of the critters that were trapped here, suspended by the goo. Maybe-One and Maybe-Naught never knew why, but these forms couldn’t move about as they themselves could, even though some of the critters seemed to have propulsion systems of their own. Instead, for all their efforts at flailing and rocking, these critters stayed in place, not going anywhere. Being able to swim through the goo, where nothing else could, made Maybe-One and Maybe-Naught feel useful.

And so, they went about their job.

Swim swim swim.

The next object they stopped in front of was rectangular and featureless, except for the angry bird face on its front. You would recognize this object as a mailbox belonging to the United States Postal Service, but Maybe-One and Maybe-Naught had no knowledge of the United States or its postal service. Neither, really, did they know about angry birds, but this narrative is for you, not them. To Maybe-One and Maybe-Naught, the mailbox was next in a long line of objects to be dealt with. This one was assigned Object Number 0110-11110100001001000000.

Thwak!

A thin, pink tentacle exploded from Maybe-One’s mouth and attached itself to the surface of the mailbox. The tentacle slowly contemplated the smooth metal and then, with a decisiveness bigger than the fish itself, violently jabbed through the metal to the innards of the mailbox where, we are guessing, there was little to be found. Further probing ensued during which Maybe-One’s tiny face looked like it was reacting to eating a box of strontium ions – that is to say, its tiny face was all screwed-up. After a moment – pop! – a set of glowing bars flickered into the space above the mailbox, like a neon sign coming to life over a dark karaoke bar. The tiny fish, its job now done, retracted its tentacle and darted out of the way with something resembling relief on its face.

All the while, the larger Maybe-Naught had kept back a distance, rocking in place, as though waiting its turn to join the rope skip. Now, Maybe-Naught swam up to the newly crowned mailbox and examined the glowing barcode, tilting its fish head back and forth several times. Satisfied, Maybe-Naught backed up a few lengths, then hurled itself with surprising speed, nose-first, at the side of the mailbox wherein the mailbox lurched backwards through the goo until it collided with an unseen membrane that one would be left to assume was the outer limit of the pink universe, stretching it out… out… out… until – boom! –  the mailbox and barcode completely disappeared from existence. Gone, as though they never were.

Maybe-Naught admired its handiwork for a moment, then swam over to join Maybe-One at Object Number 0110-11110100001001000001. Maybe-One was just finishing with this new Object such that the barcode had flickered into existence above the Object’s head. Object Number 0110-11110100001001000001 had a head and, by Earth standards, would be recognized as a housecat. While you may think that Maybe-Naught would have been tempted to head-butt the cat into the next universe due to the longstanding grievances between the species (as Saturday morning cartoons have long verified), Maybe-Naught did not. Maybe-Naught tilted its head back and forth, inspecting the luminous barcode, and then swam away, leaving the slightly perforated and very terrified cat running on the spot in the pink goo.

Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002 was particularly uninteresting. Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002 was long and limby, possessing trim, brown hair, standard brown eyes, comparatively pale skin, a nondescript nose, fullish lips, but not overly so, and was still wearing round, wire-framed spectacles. Maybe-One had seen several of these critters recently, and knew in advance what the outcome would be. Nonetheless, Maybe-One wound up and plunged its tentacle into the insides of Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002 and rooted around a while. Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002 yelped even louder than the cat, but there was little Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002, or any of the objects, could ever do. A few strontium ion-inspired faces later, Maybe-One produced the expected barcode for its friend, the big fish, to peruse.

Then something unusual happened, quite unknown in the known history of the pink goo universe.

Maybe-One swam away, and Maybe-Naught swam up to scan the newly produced barcode. But, instead of leaving Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002 to float in the pink goo for further processing, Maybe-Naught head-butted Object Number 0110-11110100001001000002 out of the pink goo universe with a boom! The small fish hesitated on its way to the next object, looking back at the empty space that Object Number 0110- 11110100001001000002 and its barcode had occupied. Something was wrong. That shouldn’t have happened. Maybe-One could see, as Maybe-Naught approached, that Maybe-Naught knew it too. For the first time ever, both paused their work, pondering the logic of the universe and their purpose within it.

Trusty Boylan was falling through space.

Space, in this case, was humid and dark, with hints of pink fluorescence in the air. It was also, Trusty realized, rushing by rather quickly.

And then it wasn’t.

With a dull plop, Trusty’s trip ended as a warm, soft, textured surface – tongue-like flashed through his mind – broke his fall and absorbed any deflection that physics had scheduled. He lay there for a moment, cell phone still in his hand, abdomen still smarting, slightly fogged spectacles still in place, looking up at the sky-spanning, translucent, pink intestine from which he had just been ejected.

His brain replayed his gambit of quickly tapping together a barcode using his phone app, and then holding it up over his head. It had worked! He had confused the sorting fish. They had kicked him out of what was, he was almost certain, some kind of meal preparation. But if that was the frying pan, where was he now?

He lifted his head into the heavy air and sensed new motion.

Huh?

The tongue-like surface was moving with conveyor belt intent. Struggling to his knees, he could see debris covering the surface of the tongue in front of and behind him. Behind, he could make out a few TV remote controls and sets of keys. Maybe some socks. In front was the unmistakable form of an upside-down mailbox, eagle descendant. Further ahead, the organic conveyor belt disappeared into a wall that more resembled strawberry ice cream than wall. On either side of where the tongue met ice cream, the crystalline wall held two window-like openings which looked fluid, as though they were sagging containers of water inspired by that melty Spanish painter. Through each window were more stars than Trusty had ever dared hope to see in person. The stars shimmered as the windows’ currents meandered and eddied along the lines of some unseen gravity. That’s when it occurred to him that he was in space. No, not just in space, in an alien spaceship in space! Trusty smiled a blue ribbon-worthy smile which, to those less familiar with the storied history of blue ribbons, was an excellent smile.

His mood darkened when he noticed the ice cream wall closing in quickly and, more importantly, that loose clouds of objects were floating outside the drippy windows. What was floating out there probably used to be in here. It was time for another venue change.

He peered over the left and right edges of the moving tongue. Below was a darkness that yawned deeply and lazily with only a vague suggestion of bottom.

He spied an escape route!

With only seconds left before he became space junk, Trusty shoved his phone into his back pocket and leapt through the warm air towards some piping that ran down the wall beside the conveyor belt.

He got it!

His body swung around and collided with the soft wall. Squish. It was like hitting a wet sponge and his body settled immediately. Luckily, the pipe was as grippy as a damp football, so he was able to hang on. To the casual observer, it looked like Trusty had been leaping through alien spaceships all his life. The dusky pink piping beneath his fingers was warm and it pulsed, and Trusty began to suspect that it might be alive. With that, his first instinct was to let go, but the darkness below told him not to. He chose to slowly slide down the pipe-that-might-be-entrails, which worked well because the pipe-entrails secreted a slightly oily substance whenever he relaxed his grip. Down, down, down he slid.

Honk. Honnnk.

A strange honking sound drifted up from below, but what Trusty heard wasn’t a honk. What he heard, in the Queen’s own English, was: more glue.

More glue?

Trusty slowed his decent and two shapes down below began to take form in the dim light. They were aliens. Trusty was seeing aliens. Both stood in front of a large fishbowl monitor that was displaying video of a beagle in the process of losing its mind. The beagle was enraged, but its mighty beagle bark was foiled by the seeming absence of audio in this place.

Deciding that the aliens looked sufficiently distracted, Trusty allowed himself to creep down a few more feet. Then he froze. These aliens, standing ten feet tall, had big, round, yellow heads that were encircled by bulbous eyeballs. Twelve eyeballs between the two aliens stared out in every direction, including Trusty’s.

He waited.

If they were aware of him, they weren’t showing it. With five more feet to cover before reaching the ground, Trusty decided that hanging here wasn’t an option and, while there wasn’t much cover below, there was an area to his right that looked fairly drenched in shadow. That’s where he would head.

With agonizing care, he reached the bottom, keeping one of his paltry two eyes on the aliens’ twelve. The action on the fishbowl took on new vigor and Trusty used that moment to steal his way into the shadows. He crouched down low and held his breath. He seemed to have made it! Twenty feet away, the aliens were still attending to their… prey?

From here, Trusty could see that the aliens’ heads each had four or five slender antennae extending straight up from their tops, and several, stringy, green, strands hanging down like a beard from the bottoms. The strands were long enough that they used them like hands to manage the fishbowl controls. Their big, yellow heads sat on narrow necks which looked like the trunks of palm trees, but flexible, and their bodies were a simple cone shape, wide end down, with the texture and coloring of an oak tree. As they moved back and forth in front of the monitor, harassing the beagle, they left a trail of shiny, astral slime on the ground.

But none of that was the best part.

The best part was the lobster claws and the bicycle horns. The aliens each had a pair of arms that were flailing about, with red lobster claws at their ends, snapping at the air in time with the struggles of the dog who they were now wrapping up in green tendrils, the likes of which Trusty remembered all too well.

Each alien also sported a long tail, similar in thickness and texture to their necks, but tapered towards the end where a cluster of three bright, red bicycle horns were set. With no discernable mouth on their yellow, beach ball heads, Trusty figured those honks must have come from those horns. Within seconds, Trusty’s hunch was confirmed.

Honk. Honnnnnk… a little more insistently this time.

But again, Trusty heard: more glue.

His brow puckered. How was he hearing a simultaneous translation of the honk language? Granted, the honk dictionary didn’t appear very deep, but still.

A full screen of the beagle’s eyes registering “uh-oh” regained Trusty’s attention. Somewhere between the “uh” and the “oh,” the dog was sucked-up into the Big Green Eye, like a hairball to a vacuum nozzle. The screen went dark but for a pink dot.

Trusty shivered.

Then…. Something was wrong.

He looked up to his left. Above him towered a brand new, ten-foot alien with three of six eyes trained on his face and four beard tendrils reaching out to wrap him up.

Before he blacked out, Trusty heard, as though from far away:

More glue.

Trusty willed his eyes open, hoping that the pain behind them would release out into the… Pink! He was surrounded by pink goo again. Head aching and eyes grudgingly admitting light, he spied two shifting-color fish, one smaller and one larger, approaching him with very determined looks on their fish-like faces.