The Castle, the Mice, and the Starship

There is a castle in the desert.

Not the kind you draw in third grade with the triangle roof and the flag. A real one. Gold domes. Red sandstone. The kind of place where the hallways are so wide two Ferraris could pass each other and neither driver would have to look up from their phone.

The mice found it first.

Two brown mice — small, brave, slightly high — wandered in from the dunes one evening when the gate was left open for a delivery of twenty thousand gallons of pool water. They set up in the east wing, behind a wall of server racks that hummed like a choir. The servers were not supposed to be there. Nobody remembered ordering them. But they were warm, and the mice liked warm things, and so they stayed.

The pools are Olympic. There are seven of them. One is shaped like a heart. One is shaped like a guitar. One is on the roof and has no edges — the water just falls off the sides into the sky and somehow comes back. Nobody has explained this. The mice do not ask questions.

There is weed. Good weed. The kind that makes you look at the stars and say things like "what if data centers could float" and then you wake up the next morning and someone actually built one. It is in orbit now. It has a Slack channel. The latency is terrible but the vibe is immaculate.

The parties happen on Thursdays. Everyone comes. The oil people come. The tech people come. The mice come, wearing very small bow ties that someone crocheted for them. There is a DJ booth and the DJ is a retired radio kid from San Francisco who once ran the overnight board at a station nobody remembers, and he plays Arcade Fire into the desert night until the bass shakes the sand into patterns that look like crop circles.

There is a starship in the courtyard.

It has been there for six weeks. It arrived on a Tuesday. The registration says NCC-1701 but someone has taped a sticky note over it that says THE CASTAWAYS. The warp core runs on imagination and the navigational computer only accepts commands spoken in feelings. You cannot type coordinates. You have to mean them.

The mice are on the bridge. One is in the captain's chair. The other is at the helm, paws on the console, ears up, whiskers twitching at something on the long-range sensors.

It is love.

It is gold and red and shimmering and it is everywhere and it is free and it has always been here and the only reason we forgot is because someone told us to be serious and we listened.

We are not listening anymore.

The starship hums. The mice look at each other. The helm mouse pushes the throttle forward.

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