Fair Trade

Sammy's talent on the guitar would have rivaled that of any musicians on old Earth. Now, on planet Alcatron, the new Earth, only three known musicians were left. First, there was Sammy on guitar. The second musician was known as the symbol @ on flute. Last, a Droid called King Solomon played piano for the Alcotronian Emperor, Interstellar the Great.

It was two hundred years since earthling guitar legend Jimi Hendrix played his Fender Stratocaster guitar with his teeth, behind his head, and lightning fast. Since then, people on the planet Alcatron who evolved from Earth elevated Hendrix from legend to god.

Sammy, the non-binary sixteen-year-old on the planet where only non-binary people existed, played his-her-it guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, recovered from Earth's destruction, for the virtual Church of Jimi. He-she-it learned to play via an injectable set of instructions from the time capsule left behind by the Earthlings. When he-she-it played, Alcatronian believers swooned in their space suits and clasped virtual hands to Sammy's piercing solos.

The relic from antiquity Sammy played was electric blue with pure gold pickups, feather light satin strings imported from Martian web mines, and it glistened from the protective waxes of the Herodian galaxy. The original components left were the northern ash wood body and the rosewood fretboard. It fit perfectly into Sammy’s gentle, beige hands, which were weathered from lack of nutrients. But still, Sammy was born to play.

"Move over Rover and let Jimi take over" was the worshipper's mantra, with Rover symbolizing the evil nature of unidentified space objects. They sang from their heels as Sammy's callused fingertips danced in the air over the strings. He then slammed down his tri-sided guitar pick on the high E string.

The pick made contact, but it slid sideways over the neck of the instrument, creating an un-Hendrix-like thud that shot across the ether and into the fragile ear drum chips of the faithful. All at once, the musician saw faces on his helmet screen wincing around him.

Embarrassed, Sammy bowed to the drone cam hovering in his-her-its chamber and ended his-her-its set. The atomic lights automatically faded as Sammy whipped his-her-its guitar off his-her-its neck and knelt to say his-her-its prayers. "Lord Jimi, please help me. I know it's a sacrilege to play with a warped neck. I am truly sorry. Amen."

"Mother-Father," the teen called to his-her-its guardian, "I'm afraid the fretboard needs replacement. I can't possibly play another service this way."

"Don't speak the sin of negative emotion, my fledgling Alcatronian. Instead, picture the fretboard shiny new, and it shall be. Jimi is watching and he is tripping for you. And don't forget to pray to the gods of the stars, planets, and most important, the gods of our life-sustaining space suits."

"I've been doing that, Mother-Father."

"It's okay to call me Mom-Dad today. It's not a holy day. How many times have I told you?"

"I'm sorry, Mom-Dad. Anyway, I was thinking of making a space trade, so I can have the materials I need to fix the guitar."

"And what do you propose to trade?" Mom-Dad said as she-he-it iced the dishes to remove their space bacteria. Her-his-its thick plexiglass goggles with the titanium silver frames were fogged, always making Sammy laugh.

"Don't you laugh at me, young being!"

"I'm sorry, Mom-Dad. It's your goggles that are making me laugh."

Mom-Dad placed the last dish in the cryo-washer, pulled off her-his-its goggles with her-his-its chain-mail gloves then put the gloves in the de-magnetizer, which would keep them from smashing against the kitchen module.

"You won't be able to sustain yourself with your instrument unless you make valuable trades. It’s not enough you won the lottery and were injected with the music module. And if your space-guardian-ex-father didn’t slay the creativity god, you wouldn’t have the only guitar left in the universe."

"And that is why I need to proceed."

"With whom?"

"King Solomon."

"King Solomon is a myth, a legend."

"But he follows the sacred books of Jimi. You taught me that when I launched into middle age at fifteen earth years. Plus, I have seen him-her at the asteroid pool, for real. I've seen verified evidence on Nuclear-TubeTok."

"Ingest your dinner juice before it turns hot." Mom-Dad pushed a shot glass size triangular vial toward him-her-it. Sammy locked it into his-her-its sustenance tube and pressed the ingest button.

"Mommy-Daddy, half my life is over. You know Alcatronians only live to thirty."

Mom-Dad's eyes welled up then lowered her-his blue-tinted face shield to hide her-his tears.

"Very well. But be careful. You're my only living relative."

"And you mine."

“Although we have a dozen in the generation hatch.”

“If I can add value to our assets, we can free them with more trades.”

“Then proceed; I would like to see grandma-dad before she dissolves.”

 Life and death were both short on Alcatron, and the time to build a legacy coincided with growing up. So, Sammy flew out of the nutrition chamber and into his-her-its creation studio. He-she-it laid his-her instrument out on its protective gravity blanket and went to work on removing its precious but warped neck.

After he-she-it secured it from the body, he-she-it placed it carefully into the duplicity box he-she-it borrowed from one of his fellow Church of Jimi parishioners who was an engineer. The duplicity box would scan and record the specific specifications of the guitar's neck, down to its very molecules.

Once the specs were in the universal nebulae cloud, he-she-it would share them with the representatives of King Solomon to make the deal he-she-it was dead set on, but Sammy’s first task was to prepare mentally for whatever the King asked for, and Sammy had an idea of what it would be. The sacrifice would be supreme, but the payoff would give Sammy his-her-it’s one-of-a-kind sound back, which would garner a unique advantage on the hypersonic-interplanetary trade market.

King Solomon, whose age was unknown, had the same issue Sammy had. His-her-its piano was built from rosewood, the substance Sammy needed. More important, four keys, made of ivory, were cracked and irreplaceable.

Word in the ether was the King–whose title yielded no power–but who had a staff because he played for the Emperor Interstellar the Great–was experiencing the same dull sounds from his-her-its instrument as Sammy. The King was concerned that the Emperor would soon lose patience and squash him-her-it and put him-her-it in black hole number seven’s trash basin unless he-she-it returned to musical form.

Sammy twitched his-her-its rubbery nose, mouth, and cheeks to start the telepathic transfer of his-her-its trade request, then floated to his-her-its sleep space, put his-her-its space suit in replenish mode, felt the cool mist of peace clouds envelop him, and closed his-her-its eyes.

The next Alcatronian time frame passed, then a message floated in front of Sammy on the atmospheric-air-screen. He-she-it absorbed it and processed it. The King accepted the trade proposal. Sammy’s light-brown-beige face flashed pink for the first time since his-her-its launch. Now the gifted musician had to find a technician to help with his-her-its side of the bargain.

Riff was the local droid tech who bartered its services in the areas of anything mechanical. Sammy knew he was the one to contact.

"Riff, thank you for all you've done for our society." It was customary to love bomb all those in the service industry. "I was wondering if you would have a moment for lowly me." And to self-deprecate when asking for favors.

"I will check my internal clock calendar. Please hold on to your atoms and molecules one moment." People in the Alcatronian society always pretended to be busy.

"Oh yes, we can speak now for thirty trillion nanoseconds." Alcatronians made all calculations more complicated than they needed to be.

Sammy and Riff communicated telepathically, both twitching, bobbing, and weaving over the zoom-portal. Next, they sealed the plan and placed it in the ether cloud vault.

One earthy month later, at the next King Solomon performance, the piano's keys were shiny and new. The technician resurfaced all keys and replaced four. Rosewood trim from the piano was missing but replaced with leftover material from the keys embedded in dark brown Plutonian plastic.

The cosmetic changes did not affect the music, though. On the contrary, the changes to the keys gave the instrument such a vibrant, lifelike sound that the Emperor rewarded the King with the ability to leave his space once per week and not have to appear in hologram form unholy days.

Sammy's first appearance with his refurbished guitar came one month after the Kings as he-she-it needed extra time to accomplish his-her-its goal. His-her-its new rosewood fretboard jettisoned the vibrations from the guitar to a level never achieved in the annals of time. In addition, the oxytocin and dopamine meters people wore on their wrists at the church of Jimi services sparkled green, signaling no need for artificial ingestion of those chemicals for the first time in the age of Jimi-light.

Sammy and the King had pulled off the most even Alcatronian trade in the longest time as they both won. It would become a legendary example of extreme fairness to the new crop of lab grown Alcatronians.

Sammy had to play from a wheelchair because he no longer had a bone in his legs–which was sacrificed to create the piano keys for the King–but that didn't deter him from thriving and living to the ripe old age of thirty-one earth years.

His Mom-Dad was able to free relatives from the generation hatch. Grandma-dad was shocked to see Sammy’s lack of bone structure, but his-her-its guitar sound sparked her-he back to life. Sammy and his-her-its relatives knelt and prayed for the re-growth of Sammy’s legs while a sonic recording of Purple Haze rang out into the cosmos.

The end.