Author’s Note: I’m continuing to have internet issues, so this week enjoy a silly science fiction story I wrote for r/WritingPrompts. Hopefully will have my connectivity issues finally resolves this upcoming week and get back to a more structured posting schedule.

“Hey Jim,” the timeless spark that could be called Janette approached the eldritch spark that was Jim.

“Janette,” Jim responded with the tired resignation of an accountant faced with a career of counting that was neither so wrong as to be concerning nor so good as to be inspiring.

“I was going over the sentient numerals for System Zimmer-Powell-Williams,” Janette blinked in rapid excitement.

“Yeah” Jim responded with boredom that would drown in suns.

“Well,” Janette’s signaling faltered as she rearrange the quarks to display her point.  “So, it says that there have been 10e10 sentients born in that system.”

“More than their starter could support, so they successfully found they’re way to other systems,” Jim answered, barely turning his neutrino beams to look at the quarks.  “That’s good for them…”

“No but that’s the thing.  It shows that they’re all still on their starter.  Thing is, that starter is like 70% dihydrongen-oxide.  I had the gravitrons check and there’s no way they could support those numbers.”

“That,” Jim paused as his neutron stars adjusted to take in the factors Janette had laid out.  “That can’t be right,” there was just a hint of a quaver, no more than an electron orbital.  His response jumped to dumping ultraviolet as he looked further at the figures and quarks.  “No no no, that can’t be right.  This shows there’s not even 10e9 active…”

“What does that mean?” Janette’s voice was a whisper that the remnants of the Big Bang could shout over.

“It,” Jim pivoted as it brought up sparks and quarks, taking a sip from a red supergiant to feed his search.  When the answer finally revealed itself, Jim dropped to 10e-23 of absolute zero.  “We introduced death and suffering in their base formulation.”

“But they should’ve been able to adjust that themselves when they got their service rep visit,” answered Janette.

“Yes but,” the red supergiant burst as Jim ran through more base particles, “it appears they killed their service rep.  We had to retrieve the rep.  It caused such a stir.”  The giant’s particle cloud rapidly chilled and began to coalesce into new celestial objects as Jim worked.  “The rep was suppose to visit again once things had calmed down but it got lost in the shuffle…”

“So, all this time they’ve been what?  Ceasing to be?”

“No, no…” Jim thrummed, “Oh it is so much worst than that…someone is so fired.”