Geralt had a machine. It was twice the size of the sun and operated on particles. It did the following with its two arms: First, it plucked a loose element from the black void of space, then, with a hand on either side, it squeezed tight until that element was half its size. Sometimes it did this over and over to the same element. Geralt called his machine, The Clicket Clunker, but the locals called it, The Marzipan Muncher.

When objects become large, they began to bend the space around them. Space, for this reason, is a like a teenager: blotched and blemished with spots. Geralt had attracted many objects to it in its lifetime. Most of this run-offs of nebulas, or elements that missed the grip of Geralt’s two arms. One day, Geralt attracted an entire colony of Truggles, which are small, hairless, spheres that locomote by pushing air in the opposite direction they wish to move.

Here’s the thing: The Clicket Clunker was a machine.

Machines don’t have air to push around.

The Truggles called The Clicket Clunker, The Marzipan Muncher. Marzipan is a delicious, sweet treat made of one part crushed almonds and two parts sugar. Anything else is just decoration. The Truggles loved Marzipan. They adorned their food with characters – little Truggles – made of marzipan. In battle, enemies came face-to-face with armoured Truggles, the armour made completely of marzipan. Their weapons too.

Geralt realized, one morning, that the Truggles had started using his machine for crushing their almonds, which was one of the essential ingredients to produce marzipan. His blood was so boiled, that he didn’t think to wonder where the Truggles had got their almonds. This was far more important than being angry about the Truggles using his Clicket Clunker as a pastry chef. But Geralt didn’t know that.

“The Clicket Clunker is not a pastry chef,” said Geralt. He had attached a gramophone to his spaceship and flew close to the machine so that he could talk to all the Truggles at once. To describe Geralt’s frustration is to describe Geralt’s brow, which was an assemblage of two horizontal bushes that, with time, had grown to one. When surprised, it curved like a rainbow – quizzical, it rolled like a wave. Right now it was bent right down the middle, almost to a snapping point.

“We cannot survive,” said all the Truggles at once, “without Marzipan.” They then described how they had made marzipan on their home world, but then a great force had lifted them all up and flew them through space, and when they opened their eyes they were stuck to The Marzipan Muncher, or The Clicket Clunker.

Geralt corrected them: “There is no Marzipan Muncher here, only The Clicket Clunker, oh, in all its magnanimous spherical assemblage.” All the Truggles at once didn’t here this because they’d put a handful of fresh almonds into the machine’s hands not a moment ago – it crunched and cracked loud enough to vibrate Geralt’s ship. Why did the Truggles need marzipan on The Clicket Clunker? Here’s why: they used it to make strong shoes which, without them, they couldn’t move around. Machines don’t have air to push around.

Geralt did not want to violate the Intergalactic Protection of the Planetless Treaty. Rather than remove the Truggles by force, he offered to employ them. The terms? They would do the work to maintain the machinery of The Clicket Clunker and, in return, could use it to make up to a thousand tons of marzipan a day. The Truggles agreed, but requested a maximum of two-thousand tons. “Fifteen-hundred,” said Geralt. “Seventeen-fifty,” said all the Truggles at once. And so on, until they converged at sixteen-thousand.

A space journalist from afar arrived on The Clicket Cruncher, or The Marzipan Muncher, one morning. Already the Truggles had made eight-hundred tons of marzipan and they made it in tubes, setting it in a criss-crossed pattern that stacked high. The space journalist mistook this for a landing pad. All the marzipan was melted by the flames of the engines. There was now an eight-hundred ton lake of marzipan, which the space journalist swam out of to get to shore. There to greet him was a Truggle. First the Truggle stomped, then into stamped, and it finished this dance by screaming loudly and in the face of the space journalist who had to cover their ears and fell to his knees. This was an upset Truggle, indeed.

The space journalist was taken to a tall building made of glass. It was where the Truggles convened to deal with political matters. It was called, The Gurdy. Inside The Gurdy, the space traveller met many Truggles, who now knew him well because he was famous for having made a new landmark. This is what the landmark was: eight-hundred tons of liquid marzipan.

The space journalist wondered a few things:

Where am I?

Who am I?

Who are the Truggles?

Where are the almonds coming from?

He chose the last one to ask the Truggles. At first, they struggled to answer, not for not knowing, but because all the Truggles all at once tried to speak and it came out as a flute army without a conductor. Finally, they synchronized and spoke thus:

We are the Truggles. We have come from a planet that is gas through-and-through, and with these mouths on our back would we blow and move forward. For twenty-thousand years we lived like this and then whisked away by gravity that came from all sides all at once and it lifted us through space with rough hands. We struggled – for we are the Truggles – but just as it is impossible to remove one’s skin yet keep your insides in, so too can you not avoid the pulling force of a large celestial object.

Then the space journalist did this: nothing. And so the Truggles continued.

We are the Truggles. When we all opened our eyes we found that our floor was now ferrous and the sky black. With our mouths we heaved but our lungs only collapsed. And so we held our breath for a day and tried to dig but our fingers were too soft to dig through steel. We built instead, and with glass we made spires and trapped steam, which sometimes came from this machine. But beyond these glass walls, we couldn’t go, because in black void gas quickly spreads out and a breath requires a minimum of a few particles.

The space journalist made the motion for the Truggles to stop, for he now understood where the almonds came from, and didn’t need the rest of the story. He promised that he would put this across the front page. His paper, he explained, was galactically renowned. On the front page, many would read of the Truggles and their almonds and come to sympathise with their plight. Help would come soon. The space journalists left and took with him a gram of marzipan as a parting gift. This what the space journalist did when he returned to his home planet: nothing.