Three days prior to events on Earth, Fry was having an out-of-body experience of his own. He was learning - to his surprise - that it was possible to be hit by a speeding Slurm van so fast you left the pain on the kerb behind you.

The fender slammed right into him, but it didn't hurt when it happened. It knocked all the air out of him, but it didn't hurt. It didn't even hurt when he was thrown through the windshield. That just stung.

He thudded face-down into the shotgun seat and shut his eyes instinctively as shattered glass rained down around him. The hovervan lurched violently to the left, and someone swore.

The voice was gruff and male, but beyond that all Fry could see was a pair of heavy black boots, like army boots, or the kind Leela wore. The wailing siren got louder behind them, and voices crackled out over a bullhorn.

"RELEASE THE HOSTAGE AND PULL OVER. I REPEAT, RELEASE THE HOSTAGE!"

"Hostage?" the driver growled. He sounded insulted. A heavy, dirt-encrusted boot swung over to the passenger side and nudged Fry in the cheek. "Hey. Kid. You alive? Feel much like a hostage?"

"Nnnngh."

It was all Fry could manage. He felt like a toy figure that had been stomped on and rammed into a remote-controlled car the wrong way up. All the blood was rushing to his head and . . . oh, yeah. Now came the pain. It started off as a dull ache deep in his abdomen, but then he noticed his head was woozy and there was blood trickling into his tattered clothes, where a thousand tiny shards of glass had tried to tear him to shreds. He struggled into a semi-vertical position, hugging the car seat for support, and cringed as far back out of the range of flying glass as he could.

He sneaked a look at the driver of the hovervan.

His unwilling abductor was in his fifties. He was bulky, with buzz cut hair fading to gray, and frown lines cut deep into his forehead. The stubble on his cheeks was flecked a salt-and-pepper mix of black and gray, and looked like it hadn't seen a shave in a while. He carried himself with a ramrod straight, controlled posture that reminded Fry of his dad. He was also wearing faded DOOP fatigues, but that couldn't be right. DOOP officers didn't hijack Slurm vans and drive them one-handed while firing their weapon out the window. And they probably didn't run into civilians. At least, not intentionally. And they probably didn't try and evade the law, because in most places, they were the law.

Something about this situation was not right.

"Did you rob a casino?" Fry wheezed. "Am I a hostage?"

His captor didn't answer. Instead he hit the gas, barreled into a blind alley and pulled a sharp U-turn. The rear of the hovervan hit a dumpster and the doors flew open, unleashing a hundred cans of Slurm at an unholy velocity. As the hovervan lost weight it rolled helplessly off-course. Fry felt blood, or vomit, or something surge up his throat as they flipped over and over, but he still felt a whole lot luckier than their pursuers. The Slurm cans had ripped through their vehicle like machine-gun fire.

Fry screwed his eyes shut again. I'm gonna die, he thought. I'm gonna die in a crazy shoot-out on Mars.

Bender, I hope this was the death you always imagined for me.

Leela, I love you. I'm sorry I'm such a screw-up . . .

This thought hung unhappily in his head until Fry frowned. Shouldn't his impending death have interrupted him by now?

He risked opening one eye. He was upright, and a long way up. A really long way up. It was getting cold, and cloud condensation was beading on his skin like sweat.

"Oh no," he moaned. "I'm dead!"

"You're not dead," someone said gruffly, but Fry didn't notice. He was getting light-headed from lack of oxygen.

The Professor floated up on a cloud beside him.

"You're not dead, you nincompoop!" he said irritably.

Fry stared. "I'm not?"

"No! Now hwake up before I fire you again! Hmph."

"But I'm not as . . . ass . . . sleep . . ." Fry slurred. The words dragged on his tongue.

Next he heard Amy's cheerful voice.

"Professor!" she corrected. "He's not asleep. He's hallucinating!"

Help me, Amy, he tried to say, but the words wouldn't come out.

Someone was speaking to him from a distance, but he didn't know the voice. It kept calling him 'kid'.

"What's wrong, kid? Hey. Hey!"

Fry clutched hopelessly at his chest. His ribs had taken a pounding when the hovercar hit him, and in this thin air he couldn't breathe.

Bender appeared, lounging on a cloud shaped like a giant cigar. When Fry reached out for help the robot just laughed and blew smoke in his face. It was cold and clammy, like mist.

"Chump," he said derisively.

Fry moaned. "He-hel . . . ep . . . lep . . ." Why couldn't he say it?

"Help," Leela whispered in his head.

" . . . 'elp . . ." he croaked, though whether he was asking the stranger or the hallucinated Leela, he couldn't say.

"Tell him you can't breathe."

Fry just stared blankly. Black spots swelled and burst in his field of vision. Leela's voice in his head was fading. He was floating, he noticed. No wonder he'd thought he was dead. It was kind of nice though.

Wheeee, he thought . . .

And then Leela was back, her voice fierce in his head.

"I love you," she said. "Don't die, you idiot!"

She kissed him and his lungs were burning, because he couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe . . .

He could feel her fingers faintly on his wrists. They were pulling his arms up, making him tear at his shirt.

He blinked and Leela was gone, leaving him staring, dumbfounded, at his tattered shirt and the mass of bruises underneath. Someone shouted and then his stomach swooped. They were going down, fast. There was a clank and a hissing sound -

Fry struggled as something was pushed over his nose and mouth. He tried to bat it off but Leela – or the memory of Leela - kissed him on the forehead with ghostly lips.

"Shh," she whispered, her voice intermingling with the hissing sound as sweet, cold air filled his lungs. He breathed in deep. Each breath was agony, but if he could feel it he must be alive. So he left the mask alone and slumped in his seat.

He awoke some time later.

"Leela?" he mumbled, but she wasn't real – she'd only ever been a hallucination - so he didn't expect much of an answer.

He was sitting upright in the passenger seat of the Slurm van, and someone had bound his ribs up with cardboard and plastic crate ties. It was tight and uncomfortable, and underneath it his chest still hurt like hell. The oxygen mask helped, some, but the elastic was annoying and he couldn't talk with it covering his mouth. He debated it for a second, then pulled the mask off.

"Easy," a gruff voice said.

His abductor moved into view, backlit by the harsh Martian sun. They were parked in the middle of nowhere, and the sun was going down.

"I'm making a fire," the man said. He kicked the side of the Slurm van. "There should be food for two, if you like beans."

"Not really." Fry gasped and clutched at his ribs. "This hurts," he complained. "Can't I go to a hospital? I won't rat you out, I swear."

The man considered him.

"No," he said at last. "Look, I don't like doing this, but I need your help. I'll send you home after, you have my word." He sighed. "Just hear me out. If I don't make it out of this, or if Nixon's goons catch up with me . . . well, someone else needs to know. Someone needs to tell the folks back home."

Fry frowned. "Tell them what?"

"It's a long story."

"Can you tell it over beans?"

The man laughed. "Sure."

He reached under his collar and pulled out a chain, from which two metal tags hung. He handed it to Fry.

Captain E.P.I Glottus, Fry read. More details, carved into the metal, jumped out at him. Recruit no. :1726347. Birthplace : Santa Fe, Earth Continent of America. Enlisted : 03 / 02 / 2984.

It was an ID tag, he realized. A DOOP captain's ID tag. It looked like he'd been right about that after all.

"My name is Captain Eric Glottus," the man said quietly. "I gave almost thirty years of my life to the DOOP, and two years ago I deserted." His mouth twisted as it said it, like the word left a bad taste on his tongue. He laughed bitterly. "I deserted, I hacked into the DOOP database, and if I have my way, I'll become the biggest whistle-blower those bastards have ever seen."

Fry blinked. "Why?"

The captain stirred his can of beans, staring into its gloopy depths.

"Half my life," he said at last. "That's what I gave them. I won't say I was a great captain – hell, I'm not even sure I was a good one – but I cared about my men. And then they started disappearing."

"What?"

Glottus nodded. "It started off small. I'd send a cadet on a fuel run and he wouldn't come back. We'd stop off at an outpost to pick up new recruits, and the place would be a ghost town. I reported it, but all the response I got was some bureaucrat who'd write me back and say 'the appropriate action' was being taken."

"What does that mean?"

"Damned if I know. Superior-speak for shut up and stop asking questions, I reckon."

Fry shrugged. He'd never worked at a job fancy enough that the boss used euphemisms. If someone wanted him to shut up and stop asking questions at Planet Express, they just came out and told him so.

"Then what happened?" he asked.

The captain chewed slowly.

"We were cruising round Teddy Bear Junction," he said. "Place is a scumhole, but we were on the trail of interstellar smugglers and I had word there was a hideout in use at the Junction."

"Cool," Fry said thoughtlessly. Fortunately the captain seemed too glum to notice.

"When we got there," he continued, "we were ambushed. Attacked on two fronts. There was a firefight, and the ship sustained some damage."

His voice was level; methodical, even, like he was filing a report.

"I had command of fifteen men," he said. "I sent eight after the enemy and kept the remainder for repairs. It meant overseeing two operations at once, but it seemed a no-brainer. Fix the ship, sweep up the space rabble and head for home." He paused. "I never saw those eight men again. The last I heard from them was some garbled message about an irregularity approaching. A craft, or a creature . . . they weren't sure. So they went out to recon." He shuddered. "Whatever they found out there, it scared them out of their wits. They started babbling like lunatics. The prisoners too. I couldn't get any sense out of them, just a crapload of nonsense – when they remembered they had radios at all. They were . . . laughing. Like they were high on something. Laughing and laughing, and then . . . nothing."

The sun had sunk beneath the horizon, and it was getting cold. Fry shivered.

"What was so funny?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Where did they go?"

"Nowhere. Anywhere. How the hell do I know? I just told you I never saw them again."

"Oh, right. Sorry."

Fry winced. The pain was mounting in his chest again, and the cold didn't help.

"What about your other men?" he asked.

The captain grimaced.

"I was trying to establish radio contact with my missing crew members. At first I didn't notice, but after a while . . . The silence was wrong. I should have heard from my guys working on the engine. It's not a big job, y'know? Engine repair. The ship's a throwback – a Mark II running on converted hydrogen – and she can be a bitch to patch up after a scrape, but my guys knew the drill. They could do it in their sleep." He stared, unseeing, into the distance. "They were gone. Not on the hull, not in their quarters, not on the bridge. Just gone."

"You never saw them again either?"

"Oh, I saw them." The captain's jaw clenched. "They floated past my window."

"Um." Fry swallowed nervously. "They were spacewalking, right? To repair the engines?"

"They were dead."

"Oh." The delivery boy shuddered. "I knew you were gonna say that. I just knew it. Something got them, right? Like a - a monster, or a thing from outer space, or -"

"Nothing got them," Glottus snapped. "They got themselves. Killed themselves, I guess." He scowled. "They went out without spacesuits. Just stepped into space like they were stepping out the front door. No oxygen, no visors, nothing."

"That's stupid," Fry noted. "And if I think it's stupid, it must be really stupid, because I'm the stupidest person I know."

Stupid. The word stuck in his head somehow; sparking some lazy, long-dormant synapse into action.

"It doesn't make any sense," the captain mused, more to himself than to Fry. "These were guys with years of experience in the field. They knew better."

"Maybe they forgot what they knew," Fry suggested helpfully - then stopped.

Why had he said that? Forgetting . . . that stuck in his head too.

People forgetting . . .

Why did that matter? Why was it important? He knuckled his forehead, trying to make the connection.

Glottus didn't seem to have noticed his companion's sudden lapse into silence – probably because he was now in the middle of furious tirade against the DOOP, who had falsified reports of the incident, doubted his version of events, and then tried to buy his silence with a promotion. To hear him tell it, they were as crooked as one of Bender's practice girders.

"You don't believe me," he accused Fry.

"Huh? No, no! I believe you," Fry protested. "My face just looks like this because I'm in horrible pain. I think I broke my ribs."

"You did," Glottus confirmed. "I gave you my last med-shot, but I'm clear out of morphine. Sorry. Bone repair's a bitch."

Fry nodded. He appreciated the medicine, but if he'd known he was getting it, and known it would hurt this much, he would have told the captain to keep it. He couldn't decide what was worse – the dull, cramping ache of soft tissue knitting back together, or the feeling his ribs had been coated in rapidly-shifting thumb tacks. Both were pretty bad.

"Keep talking," he pleaded. "It helps. Tell me what happened next. There's more, right?"

"Right." Captain Glottus grimaced. This was obviously the part of the story he was least proud of. "I took the promotion," he said. "Headed up to HQ and got a little lost. I mean, I'm just a humble field officer, and those tiny little office cubes all look the same . . ."

Fry sniggered. This excuse sounded hokey even to him.

"The DOOP bought that?"

"Not once they caught me, no. Put it this way : getting out was a lot harder than getting in. But I found what I was looking for."

The captain pulled another small metal shape out from a chain around his neck. This one wasn't an ID tag though. It was a goldish nugget that folded out to resemble a palm pilot. When Glottus touched the button in the center, a holographic projection sprang into the air.

"See for yourself," he said cryptically.

Fry frowned. He wasn't much of a reader at the best of times – too easily distracted – and the pain in his ribs wasn't helping. But this felt important, so he squinted at the reams of data shimmering in front of him.

What was it? Names? A list of names?

"I don't get it," he said.

"A lot of it is DOOP code. It might not make sense to a civilian, I don't know. But I'm guessing you know what MIA means?"

"Missing."

"Yeah. And expired?"

"Uh . . . rotten?" Fry hazarded. "Like bad eggs? Or . . . no, wait. People-expired means dead. Right? Dead?" He paused, staring at the number next to the word 'expired'. "Dead. But -"

His eyes jumped back to the MIA column. The figure there was even bigger.

His lips moved silently as he tried to add up the two.

"But that's hundreds of people," he managed at last.

"Five hundred and fifty seven," Glottus said grimly. He stared at the projection. The light cast ghoulish green shadows on his dark skin. "I must know every name by now. I keep reading it. I keep thinking of those families back home, waiting for someone who's never coming back. And if the DOOP has their way, they won't even know why. They'll just sit and wait and grow old not knowing. Who the hell would sign off on that?"

"I don't get it," Fry said. "How can they cover up that many missing people? It doesn't make any sense. I mean, someone would notice."

Glottus shook his head. "They didn't all disappear at once," he said. "It's been slow. A batch of unexplained deaths here, a platoon gone AWOL in neutral territory . . ." He tapped the first name on the list, zooming in on the fine detail. "It started two years ago. A supply train ran into trouble. From the information they relayed back to base, it sounds like an anomaly opened up in front of them. Some kind of rip in space. That was what they called it – a tear. And something came through it."

"Like Yivo?"

"No, some kind of craft. But when they got close to it the crew stopped making sense. Just like my damned men. All they could do was gibber on about brains and jellyfish, I don't know. There's an audio file attached to the report, but I can't make hide or hair of it."

"Brains?" Fry blurted out. Cold shot through him. No, not cold. Some other feeling, one that felt like cold water trickling down the back of his neck, but had another name. Foreboding. "Play the tape," he said urgently.

"It's not a tape, it's a -"

"Just play it!"

The captain looked like he wanted to argue. He was wearing the same look Fry remembered his father wearing, right before he called his sons insubordinate and ordered them to drop and give him twenty. But there was curiosity mixed in with it. Enough to make him shelve his doubts and play the audio file.

It was eerily familiar.

Sure, the voices were different, and the crackle of DOOP gunfire was unfamiliar, but other than that . . . these guys sounded the way the Planet Express crew had, that time the Brainspawn came to Earth. They had the same way of talking, all slow and heavy, like it was a big effort even remembering what their tongues were for. They thought everything was funny or sad or scary, like little kids. And they were so dumb they made Fry feel like Einstein.

He listened to them bicker, a sick feeling swelling in his stomach.

"Hur hur . . . braiiiiiiiinssss . . ."

"Them not brains – them whales! Space whales. Here, Whalie-Whalie . . ."

"Brains! Brains!"

"No! Fish! Ha ha, they zap you. Like a jellyfish. Jellyfi-iiiiiiish!"

"BRAINS!"

There was another burst of gunfire and the men on the tape screamed and fell silent.

"They shot each other," Fry said.

"No," Glottus argued. "It looks that way, but it just doesn't make sense. There must be something else at play here – even the damn DOOP thought so. Some kind of mind control or -"

"You don't get it," Fry interrupted. "I wasn't asking a question. I think they did shoot each other."

He took a deep breath.

"And I think I know why."