Full Put

15 Oct 2026

Tags: #writing #sci-fi #dream fiction

1 Coca-Cola

Rami^[1] was the Safety And Wellbeing Officer on the mission which in retrospect required none, which was a strange thing considering how common workplace accidents were, moreso if your workplace was a spaceship.

To add on to the mystique, no one knows for sure when the "Wellbeing" part was tagged on. Or maybe the "Safety" thing came after, actually. In fact, he's pretty sure this wasn't his original title. He was Officer of something, that's for sure. Everyone he's met so far was an Officer of something or another.

He thinks maybe it was changed to be something more obviously unambiguous. Before that, he had been asked countless times by his crewmates, "What is it you do again?" Between that and the 11-lightyear journey, they couldn't get to their destination any sooner.

The nature of the job was touted to be quite a dangerous mission, to retrieve some thing or another of cosmic importance^[2], not to mention the already-present danger in navigating space itself. He wasn't really sure what it was. That's probably the purview of the Retrieval Officer, the Mission Officer, or the Captain.

And there was another thing he wasn't sure about. The crew members liked to use the phrase "Full Put"^[3] in just about any context he could recall.

He figured the phrase was meant to bring good luck. His peers seemed quite relaxed about the whole affair. Gareth (Procurement) wanted to bring on Coca-Cola as a provision, but apparently they didn't have enough runway to formulate something that could last for the voyage. Miraculously, they did. Well, in Gareth's own words, he told Rami he'd try to Full Put the process. Whatever that meant.

Almost in the same breath, Gareth claimed to have come back from the future, after months of R&D, with the formula for powdered Coke (the other kind). He thought it was a joke at first. Just like that, the RSSS^[4] Maxwell was stocked with Coca-Cola.

2 Safety

The S&W Officer served a very important role, something more important than Coke Procurement. He had a specific seat in the cockpit, which he supposes was meant to give him a view of everyone that had been defrosted from cryosleep and working the active shift.

The warm bodies of the RSSS Maxwell all fit in the cockpit, and anything that didn't immediastely require human attention was in attendance of robots scurrying elsewhere on the ship.

Cherie, the Manifest Officer, was in charge of making sure everything was accounted for. All the moving parts, living or not living, on the ship needed to stay put. Her seat was not too far from Rami, and it was the only one that didn't swivel. He figures it made her job that much easier that way.

Curiously, it was angled such that he'd always be in view. She would sometimes glance at Rami, who would always glance somewhere else whenever she did so. A shiver would course through his body whenever he met her gaze. He felt guilty, for some reason. Maybe she felt that he would stay put less often than the rest of the crew, but there's not really anywhere to go.

The approach to the destination was smooth-sailing. Rami, as the W&S Officer (they'd undergone an organisational restructuring, or maybe this was his original title), was assured by the Navigation Officer that true to popular belief, space is mostly nothingness. Space travel resembled more of coasting through empty, open waters, only many, many, orders of magnitude emptier and opener.

Well, this made his job easier. He never really had any cause for concern, but he'd been told not to be complacent, so he still kept a look out for everyone in the cockpit.

3 Full Put

Ahmed (Steering) narrowly veered the ship away from an asteroid, and then again in the opposite direction from another asteroid. Those at the steering console could not find it in themselves to sit comfortably. Those watching the pilots were at the edge of their seats. Those further back were at least leaning forward to get a better look.

A crack drew itself on the surface of the window, followwed by a deep shudder as the impact of an asteroid shook the ship and permeated its way to the cockpit.

"Cherie, this ain't it. I'm calling it." Ahmed called out to the back.

4 Manifest

The manifest slug made a straight line from Cherie's barrel to Rami's torso. Another clean shot. Its viscous fluid made its slow passage through Rami's veins. Cherie's gun, a modified tranquiliser, seemed to extend at the barrel; in fact, the entire gun seemed to melt out of her arms in an instant.

In those moments, it tried to occupy two places at the same time, oscillating between the two spots so rapidly it seemed to stretch, until one gun settled and stilled clearly, cleanly, like a jigsaw piece.

Every other being, object, body, warped in the same way... as the fluid evaporated in Rami's now-temporarily-unconscious body, space negotiated its place with him as the centre of an incredible whirlpool of liquid flesh, metal, plasma, dust.

The squall settled in almost the same instant. Rami saw nothing, didn't even register that he had been out cold for a microsecond. The machinery seemed to go quiet for a moment before emitting the same loud hum.

The ship was still cruising amid nothingness.

"..ull Put this... " echoed Ahmed's voice from the front of the cockpit before it was drowned out by fans and clicks, then some sighs from the crew around him.

Rami wondered what that phrase could mean, but it seemed to bring good luck to the mission.

Afterword

This story is based on a dream I had on the night of 14 October. Usually if I'm lucky enough to wake up lucid enough to recall my dreams, I try to write them down on my phone.

This is an attempt to turn it into writing, and format them into something that makes sense, adding a bit of information here and there to make it a cohesive story. I'd been reading Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, a book I absolutely adore, so I believe the writing style may have had an infectious influence on this piece as well.

I'm not much of a writer, so I tried to keep the story as short as possible.

I suppose then this afterword serves as a dream diary where I sort out what I experienced and what I'd made up (for the plot).

It's eerie that the way they presented themselves to my dreaming self, they were already rather well-structured, and I hardly had anything to change. I wish I could show you what I saw in my mind's eye, but this is the best I can manage. I tried to keep this story as short as possible.

In my actual dream, it was a lot more dramatic than this. Rami had an emotional breakdown, for some reason. He'd figured out the whole space-time reset mechanism and was upset to the point of throwing up.

They did a stage reproduction/re-telling of the events aboard the spaceship at the crucial moment of the mission, which let Rami (in the audience) realise what had happened. The run time for the reproduction was stated to be about 20 minutes, but Rami felt that he had been in the show for much longer. They started hastily trying to reset things as he stormed the stage, but things got messed up as space-time warped while he's mid-sentence. In fact, one of his crewmates objected to what he was about to say, before he even spoke, which was another clue that this was not the first time he'd gone through all of this.

There was a restaurant selling some fried rice, I think hints of Cyber-Orientalism. Anyway, I couldn't really fit these in the story.

I tried to think of a suitable mechanism for this sort of thing. Why would someone be used as the unwitting "reset point"? So, I used the phrase "Full Put" as a sort of activation phrase, like a way for others to save their point in time and space.

Maybe the chemicals in the manifest slug are able to access the deep subconscious impressions of Rami's (or any subject's) memories, unlocking some potential of the brain that's hard for technology to match. With the context of this being a fiction borne from a dream, I think it's quite apt as an element of the story.

As for why Rami has to be the one, or how reality gets warped in the first place, well, I can't answer that...