It’s not a matter of whether you will fit inside the hole. To travel from Sector-D3 – familiar to the inhabitants of Earth – off to Gliese 581C holes are the only option. We offer a variety of holes for customers with geometric specifications. Some come with five travel bags, others turn up with a huddle of hundreds of micro-chihuahuas, still some offer the ring on their finger to be shot to a loved one. Our hole targeting machine spat that ring right on her dear beloved, just as they sat down to eat a healthy portion of mash.

The largest hole we’ve had the privilege of constructing was for a customer that wished to remain inconspicuous. Of course the object being stuffed hole-to-hole, so the saying goes, was far less so. You see, the customer, who we will refer to as OG-4, was interested in moving a certain sun which had been inconveniencing him for the last month. There it sat, say forty degrees north of the horizon, never budging, never asking to be budged.

OG-4 wasn’t having it.

Economostrology is the study of astrology and its application to economics. Astrology is the study of finding correlations between white humming dots and the nearest object of interest to the astrologist at the time. Economics is the word used to attempt to justify the tendency for humans to steal from each other and feel good about it. OG-4 wanted to steal a sun.

I’ll let you in on a secret. A sun is a bubbling mess of lots of hydrogen that got all stuck together when the universe was more crowded and there was less room to move. Think, if you put four-billion hens in a field, you’d certainly find yourself with a hot hen sphere by next morning. OG-4 had made a bet, not on a hot hen sphere, no, but on a hot hydrogen sphere. They’d gestured that if a certain white dot in the sky had moved elsewhere by a week on Tuesday, the share price of Outer Oats would find itself at a dizzy height. Outer Oats made dried oats for space travellers. No one travelled in space any more.

Everyone used holes instead.

But the rigour of economostrology is not to be taken lightly and OG-4 was adamant if the sun wouldn’t move, he’d have to take it upon himself. We charged him eighteen quadrillion credits. Most of it was to expense the rehabilitation of twenty civilizations that had lived off OG-4’s sun’s rays. Holes, surprisingly, cost the same whether you choose to make them large or small. A few atoms of iodine once requested transportation to the Rings of Yutixillion and got themselves all oxidized up when they heard our prices. Smaller holes don’t cost less.

The first hole we placed just shy of a new solar flare that had peacocked off OG-4’s sun. A second hole accompanied Jargis-11, a red dwarf that another customer had requested to have binarized for his friend’s surprise birthday celebration. When we really let our egos loose in our forebrains, we call such feats ‘operations’. OG-4’s request was a guileless matter transaction.

When OG-4 woke up on Tuesday morning, strolled into their backyard still dressed in a bathrobe, what we would have paid to photograph that face of satisfaction. What we would have paid to photograph that face when they checked the early stock market roils of Outer Oats.

The first hole we placed just shy of OG-4’s nose that morning. It was pinhole of a hole, a flea might mistake it for a bagel. A second hole accompanied an empty spot in the Gallery of Customer Satisfaction, for all to admire and indulge in for as long as it can fill their will.

Such is the multifarious way of holes.