kerflooey
[ker-floo-ee]
1. Informal. to cease functioning, especially suddenly and completely; fall apart; fail:
As soon as the storm hit, every light in town went kerflooey.
**************************************
Alarms filled the cold metal corridors with ear splitting
noise, and the strips of normally white light turned red. People started moving quickly, each one
trying to find the source of the alarms.
Connor, for his part, was mostly panicking.
“Oh
god, oh god, we’re all gonna die.” He
said, looking around with wide, terrified eyes.
“Only
if you don’t start trying to find out what the problem is!” One of the people nearby said. Connor wasn’t sure what was more
embarrassing; that he had said it out loud, or that he had been overheard. What made it worse was who had heard it. Connor recognized his commanding officer, Leon
Nire, immediately.
“S-sorry,
sir. I-I just…”
“Stow
it. We’ve got more important things to
worry about than your panic attack.” Leon
said. The officer looked at the computer
terminal on his wrist. He swore louder
than what was probably intended.
“What
is it, sir?”
“Everything. Every single system on the damn ship is going
down.” Connor felt all the blood in his face drain away.
“Wh-what? B-but isn’t that impossible? I-I mean, don’t we have backup systems?”
“We
do. That’s what’s going down.”
“Well
don’t we have, I don’t know, backups for the backups?”
“Yeah,
they’re called the main systems. Those
are all being fixed.”
“We’re
all gonna die, aren’t we?” Connor said,
this time addressing Leon.
“Don’t
think like that. We’ll get this thing
back up and be on our merry way. Now get
to work and make it happen.”
Connor
was about to ask what he should start fixing, when the ship answered his
question for him. A small spout of white
gas erupted from a panel near the two men.
Connor recognized the location as one of the CO2 filtering pipes, which
meant that pure carbon dioxide was now entering the atmosphere they were all
breathing. Connor wished he had a suit
handy at that moment more than he was willing to admit out loud.
“Uh,
should I start with that?” Connor asked,
already knowing the answer, and dreading it every second.
“That’d
be nice, yes!” Leon shouted. Connor took a deep breath and started pulling
the panel off in an attempt to get at the leak.
The hissing gas made it difficult, and it only got worse when the panel
was actually off.
“And
here I thought this ship was state-of-the-art.”
Connor said as he quickly patched the leaking pipe.
“It was
when it was new. Now, not so much.” Leon said even as he found a problem that
needed his attention.
“You
know what we should do? You know, when
we aren’t in danger of being sucked out into space or something?” Connor said when he finally stopped the leak.
“No,
what?” Leon replied.
“We
should invent a time machine. That way
we can go back in time, find the guy who thought space travel was a good idea,
and shoot him.”
“We’ll
talk about that later. In the mean time,
go that way and find something that needs fixing. It won’t be all that difficult, trust me.”
“Uh,
y-yeah, right, of course, sir. I’m on
it.”
*********************************************
Space travel is cool in concept, but I really wouldn't want to be a part of it. The part about space being a big void of death and emptiness is kind of glossed over in most sci-fi stories, isn't it? Yeah, I don't think I'll be trying out of astronaut school any time soon. Not that they'd want me to begin with, but still.
As a side note, is it just me, or is this word something one would see in a Calvin and Hobbes comic?
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