A dick pic started circulating around mission control and, after some investigation, Dr. Laura Bybis discovered that it had been leaked from Commander Niezosi’s confidential medical file. Niezosi complained of tinea cruris and had sent a photo of his groin area to the ground-based medical team. Unknown to everyone involved, the default email settings automatically copied communications from the crew to a minor administrator who didn’t realize the sensitive nature of Niezosi’s complaint and laughed when she saw the poor man’s penis floating weightless between two patches of flaming skin. She’d been sleeping with a kid on the engineering team and forwarded the pic with a note: “If you ever let it get to this, don’t even think of crawling into my bed.” Once in the engineer’s hands, the image went viral.
Bybis called a team meeting and addressed everyone about the indiscretion and what it meant for crew morale. The crew, of course, was not present at the meeting because, at twelve million kilometres from Earth, a signal took forty seconds to travel in one direction. Forty seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but it’s enough to make live meetings unworkable. Instead, Bybis played a pre-recorded address from Niezosi to his colleagues on the ground. Bybis hadn’t screened the video before she pressed play, a decision that struck her in retrospect as regrettable.
Niezosi appeared on the main screen in mission control and addressed the team while framed on either side by screens that displayed diagrams of the mission’s trajectory to Mars. He was unshaven, haggard, dark circles under his eyes. But there was no hesitation. As you’d expect of a mission commander, he got right to it: “I want to thank all you assholes, all you dim witted engineers and shit-for-brains medical people for failing to anticipate the obvious. If you add up all the time we were confined to our space suits during the initial phase of the mission—prep in our cockpit twiddling our thumbs, then blast off, then the initial burn—you get nearly three days confined to our suits. Plenty of time for the rot to take hold.
“Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent nearly nine days in their suits and neither of them complained about jock itch. But look what you give us to wear for the rest of the mission. For more than three fucking years we’ve gotta prance around in these skin-tight get-ups. No natural fibres. No breathable cloth. It’s as if you’ve vacuum sealed my dick in a Petri dish. What the hell were you thinking?
“And then there’s the medical team. I’ve searched our module from top to bottom and I can’t find a fucking thing. No anti-bacterial creams. No anti-fungals. I’ve searched the pantry for ingredients I could throw together. Make some kind of powder or balm. But the rest of the crew is worried I’ll compromise our food supply. I’ve taken to floating around au natural. At first, the rest of the crew thought it was funny, but between my feelings of humiliation and their feelings of embarrassment, it’s starting to take its toll on morale. Never mind morale, I’m so fucking itchy I’m going out of my gourd.”
The ground crew at mission control was an international team, and Dr. Bybis worried that many of the people wouldn’t understand the phrase “out of my gourd” but, as she later discovered, it’s an expression transferable to many cultures. Everyone on the ground knew exactly what Niezosi meant. And although a few of them suffered the same malady, they at least had the reassurance that, whenever they liked, they could drive to the corner Walgreens and pick up some ointment.
