Punches rained down upon the hapless man as Kevin stared on with eyes so tired they could barely focus.  Fights were not uncommon outside Orbit but this one undoubtedly held an element of novelty that warranted the baying of the blood thirsty crowd.  There was no doubt that the heavily intoxicated human would be lucky to crawl away from the conflict, never mind walk, but this was Kevin’s one and only break in a ten hour shift at the galaxy’s biggest club and he would be damned if he spent it being used as a punching bag.  Where were the bouncers?!

A sickening thud rang out as the man hit the floor, his limp arms and loose neck doing nothing to cushion his fall.  The fact that the impact had been perfectly in time with the pounding of the music from within the depths of the venue added to the absurdity of the situation.  Only a true earthling would be foolish enough to pick a fight with a Centibrach.  The insect-like beings stood at over seven feet tall and boasted no less than twelve limbs that could double as either arms or legs; as the hapless human had so recently learnt.  Unfortunately Kevin doubted that this vital piece of knowledge would remain inside the man’s brain as the grey matter itself was currently fighting a losing battle to remain within his skull.

The Centibrach clicked its formidable mandibles and began to rub its hind legs together like a violin player stroking the most beautiful concerto from his instrument’s strings.  Blowing a thin stream of smoke into the cold night air Kevin looked on as the soothing sound of a cricket’s call wavered over the dispersing crowd.  The haunting vibrato of the Centibrach’s song hung in the night air for a moment as the insect promptly turned and began to lay eggs in the prostrate man’s open mouth.  “Come on mate, you’ve had your fun!”  Oh, here came the bouncer’s to save the day.  The lumbering forms of three Martians came into view down the strip. 

Anyone who had never encountered a Martian before would be forgiven for thinking their species was not created with door control in mind.  They simply looked like British holiday makers that had been in the sun for a few centuries too long.  Their deep red complexion was not born of UV abuse but the fact that they were built almost entirely of the bright red rock of their homeland.  To attack a Martian was to simply set about breaking yourself against their solid bodies.  Kevin had seen many a high street warrior shatter hands and feet against the face of the immovable door men, and in one instance wrap a leg around the forearm of the head bouncer, Dusty, by means of a broken shin.  Even the Centibrach left his “one night stand” to scuttle further down the street to avoid their special brand of law enforcement.

Stubbing out his cigarette and inhaling deeply on the cold night air Kevin stepped back towards the club.  As the double doors of Orbit swung open the bass of the music slapped Kevin in the face.  The air itself moved with the vibrations and created the feeling of being inside a beating heart.  The murmur of conversation, punctuated by the screams and laughter of a thousand different races and species, rippled under the throbbing beat. 

Due to this volatile cocktail of beings no one night was ever the same in Orbit.  Kevin looked out over the dance floor at the mass of flailing arms, tentacles, claws and talons and sniffed.  There was no smell that could compare to the sickly sweet stench of spilt drinks, vomit, blood and perfume.  It seemed scent was a crucial element in self-presentation no matter which corner of the universe you had crawled from.  Unfortunately when a race fed on rotten meat or sulphur the word perfume seemed rather unfitting to the various stenches that the clientele seemed to bath in.

With a capacity of over 50,000 on any given night you could guarantee that the marbled floors of the club would display a relative smorgasbord of creatures that boggled the mind.  Kevin himself had stood wide eyed and even wider mouthed at the interracial orgy of enjoyment that had greeted him on his first shift.  That fateful night was over five years ago now and in all honesty he doubted that the universe could cough forth a being that would shock him.  He had seen it all, smelt it all and ,in some rare cases, been inhabited by more twisted creations from the depths of the universe than he cared to think about.

“Hey!” A voice cried out from beneath Kevin’s shoe.  “Some of us are trying to work here!”  Lifting his black leather winkle picker from the floor he realised that in his reflective daze he had stepped on one of the parasitic beings that made a living relentlessly cleaning the club by means of digestion.  Their hard exoskeleton and lobster-like appearance made them perfect for the job as they were near impossible to kill underfoot and were happy to work simply for the opportunity to consume the disgusting delicacies that the surfaces of Orbit had to offer.  “Sorry” muttered Kevin as the creature snarled at him with a downward facing mouth and scuttled away towards the bar.

The lobsters, although lowly creatures, were essential for the running of the club.  Due to the rapid orbit and rotation of Titan around Saturn the days and nights were so short it would be impossible to run a club around the cycle.  For this reason, or so the owner’s said, Orbit never closed.  It needed constant cleaning and maintaining to achieve a feeling of a perpetual Saturday night.  There were no clocks inside the club and it was impossible to get signal on any type of communications device once you had stepped through the front door.  The music was a constant mix played in shifts by countless DJs so any sense of time was lost.  You could be lost for weeks within the sticky dark recesses of the club and not even know it.

If you believe that the behaviour of humans when they are out enjoying themselves was depraved then the antics that had become the norm in Orbit would be enough to rob a man of his faith in life itself.  Due to the sheer size of the venue it was policed by hundreds of Martians that worked as if the club was a martial state.  The sprawling club consisted of a single building covering almost a quarter of Titan’s surface.  It was split into twenty cavernous halls each connected by numerous walkways and tunnels that allowed the clientele to move freely from space to space like ants within a nest.  Each area was lit differently and, due to the varying types of music and themes, pandered to every taste and form of hedonism that the big bag, with the help of the twisted urges that came with conscious existence, could compose.

Common features ran throughout the universe’s most notorious club and had no doubt contributed to its reputation; dim lighting, pulsing music and very few clothes.  In the first few months of Kevin’s employment he had been shocked, appalled and often confused by the exposed flesh that was flaunted within Orbit.  He had been left in no doubt that regardless of race, colour or species all genitalia should be covered unless requested to be otherwise.  It is not that he was a prude and had not had his share of sexual experiences but the dark corners and booths of the club often contained scenes that turned heads and shortly after stomachs.  Orbit was where the whores, gold diggers, exhibitionists and perverts from the heat of every son would come to ply their trade.  It had been but a few hours before he found the best technique was to simply not look or come within the vicinity of anywhere but the most central walkways of the club.  Either that or wear clothes that were easily washable or you did not mind burning at the end of the night.  If only he could trade his eyes for a clean pair.

Following the path of his crustacean-like colleague he made it back to the bar and resumed his place behind his till.  Customers clamoured around the service area like piglets fighting to suck at a mother’s teat.  There was no queuing system in Orbit and in the mad scrum that was often more than ten bodies deep, had been known to claim lives.  It saddened Kevin’s heart that so many had been crushed under the inpatient rabble with their last words being, “double vodka, lemonade and lime”.  The best survival technique while receiving service was to hang onto the bar like a sinking ship and pray that you had not inadvertently pushed in front of a larger and all the more carnivorous being than yourself.  It was not unknown for the smaller races to be consumed by the ruder club goers simply to decrease competition for the bar staff’s attention.

Needless to say speed of service was paramount to Orbit’s success.  The likelihood of ever serving, or even seeing, the same person twice in the cavernous venue was miniscule and so a polite but dismissive approach to customer service was adopted by the more seasoned staff.  While it may only take a second to say please and thank you in this business manners cost money.  When a bar man was expected to take over $1000 an hour and serve over 300 drinks a simple nicety spread across the space of a year could result in an unthinkable loss of profit.  In Orbit it seemed the customers themselves had also adopted this policy as a kind word was very rarely spoken to an employee.  They were treated like machines that simply took orders and churned out beverages without a second thought.  Kevin could not count the amount of times he had been tempted to lean across the bar and plant a frustration fuelled punch squarely in the centre of, what he assumed was, the customer’s face.

This was why he valued his breaks so highly.  Throughout the course of a night the small slights and lack of patience displayed by almost every being that approached his service area would feed a rage within that burnt with a licking flame of distain that made his blood boil.  How can you stand there with six mouths, four eyes, vomit in your hair and not two brain cells to rub together and act like I owe you something?  To step outside and see the unbalanced confused and cognitively impaired creatures he had created wage urban guerrilla warfare on each other gave him a sick pleasure that made him feel dirty all over.  You look down on me?  You are nothing but the leader of a barbarian tribe.  Master of the high street.  Lord of the kebab shop.  Great ruler of the alley that everyone uses as a toilet.  How the mighty have fallen! Often literally.

It was obvious that the bouncers felt the same.  The Martians had a knack of only a appearing when the carnage got so out of hand property was in risk of sustaining irreparable damage or there was simply no one left in any state to continue said carnage.  Their behaviour was understandable, as they were simply employed to protect the club and its employees.  As long as the patrons limited violence to one another and kept it outside the shadowy dominion of Orbit itself they were free to do as they pleased.  Death was no stranger to the neon glow of the club’s entrance and he never needed to queue. Often it would simply be a case of scraping the remains of the losers off the pavement and washing the smaller chunks and blood into the gutter with a hose.  Even the lobsters that devoured every bit of filth that fell to the floor only sampled leftover customer once.  They were disgusting. 

As the minutes flashed by in a blur of spirits, change and the occasional smashed glass Kevin disappeared further and further inside his own head.  The autopilot kicked in and every time he looked at the clock on his till larger chunks of time had slipped away from him.  God knows what he had said, who he had served or what he had been doing.  This was his coping mechanism, if you used your head in this job you would lose it.  The best barmen in the world were tried and tested and often broke down as their sanity lapped like waves against the black marble surface of the bar; until the tide went out and they were sent gibbering back to the job centre.

In this respect Kevin was made of sterner stuff than most.  His ability to distance himself from the realities of the job enabled him to work the 15 hours shifts the club required without so much as a single break down.  The writhing sea of customers that constantly lay before him did not faze him in the slightest.  The knowledge that they would never be satisfied and the flow would never cease gave him a feeling of quiet absolution; it made him feel as if he was moving in a dream.  Minutes slipped into hours, the only communication Kevin had that was not taking an order or asking for more supplies to his area was to return the withering looks of exasperation from his co-workers.  There was a grim determination between the staff to outdo themselves.  No one asked them to work as hard as they did; they were expected to by one another.  It wasn’t a case of making money, it was self preservation.  If the club began to lose money, hours got cut and people lost their jobs.

There was never any shortage of new employees at Orbit.  The taxing and highly stressful nature of the job meant that the turn over of staff was higher than that of a suicide squad.  Despite the less than glamorous reputation of this type of bar work there was nothing more formidable to add to a CV than a stint behind the bar at Orbit.  The stress levels alone meant that doors opened in almost every form of customer service.  Once you had had a screaming match with a centaur being from the moons of Beta Pictoris about whether you served him a single or double you were prepared for almost anything.

Kevin himself had never intended to don the black shirt and trousers of an Orbit bar man.  He had always dreamed of being an intergalactic salesman.  Travelling from world to world selling his wares and meeting all manner of strange and interesting people.  Now, after half a decade staring at what he believed would have been his pleasant and meek customer base across 3 feet of black marble, he could never dream of meeting a pleasant person again.  It was never a smooth romantic path that brought people to the sparkling none-slip floors of Orbit, but Kevin’s sob story was one that could even nurse a tear from the lidless eyes a lizard man.

Five long years ago Kevin had been a regular at Orbit; essentially he got so drunk he could not find the exit and kept finding himself back at the bar.  Even he did not know how long he had spent circling the club, searching for a door or window to release him from the perpetual night that slowly robbed a man of his sanity, dignity and taxi money.  In his desperation he had even tried to tunnel to freedom from the inside of a toilet cubicle but this plan faltered after he hit a pipe and regrettably redirected the flow of sewage directly onto himself.  It seemed the last shred of his mind was washed away on the tide of this fowl smelling viscous fluid.  The dark corners and forgotten chambers of the club became his home.  He darted from shadowy alcove to dimly lit stairwell stealing drinks and feeding upon the forsaken bar snacks that found themselves kicked to the edges of the dance floor. 

He did not know how long he lived like this but he knew it had been too long.  Running his filthy fingers through his hair, feeling the greasy matted locks running over his calloused split knuckles and over his chipped talon like finger nails he knew weeks, possibly months, had passed.  He no longer knew himself.  The sharp charming banker that had entered the club had been reduced to this creature.  It made him sick; not physically of course as when one feeds off dirty peanuts and mangled pork scratchings from the floor you cannot afford to waste a meal, but the hatred he felt for himself was only equalled by the burning abhorrence for this neon prison.

He decided to end it all.  To free himself from the abject misery that was an eternal night out.  He knew just what to do.  In his time lurking in the farthest reaches of the club he had heard a story; a ledged of a drink so strong that it had been banned in almost every club but Orbit.  It was called the Paradox.  By using the principles of interstellar travel ,and the theory that by passing through space at such a speed it would be possible to move through time, a barman had found a way to pass a beverage through a cyclical black hole and thus pass the drink through time itself.  This resulted in an anomaly known as the cosmo-politan principle in which one drink may inhabit the same space as itself at the same time.  Both drinks exist simultaneously causing its alcohol content to double.  This made it possible to turn a drink that was 70% to 140%.  A lethal dose that only one man had technically survived and to this day was still unable to sober up enough to drive.

Kevin spent days searching the floor of the club for spare change and eventually accumulated enough money to purchase the fabled eternal night cap.  He drummed the depths of his courage to emerge into the general populous of the club and queue for the bar but whatever embarrassment he would have to endure it would soon be over.  He could be free from the pounding bass and clink of glasses.  Silence would reign and he would finally be alone.

After queuing for an inordinate length of time Kevin finally approached the bar.  His hands were shaking and he could feel beads of sweat forming on his brow.  Perhaps the barman could sense his nervousness?  Looking searchingly into his eyes the tired looking employee offered him a glass of water before Kevin could even speak.  Muttering something about not being thirsty he pushed the glass away, the cold surface was pleasant on his clammy hands.  “I’ll have...” the worlds stumbled out of his mouth, tripping on his teeth “a Paradox please”.  The barman looked shocked and a little scared.  “Ok, let me get a manager”.

When the barman returned with Stubbs, the manager, in tow they both looked anxious.  No one got into bar work to see if it led to a career in euthanasia.  After a few minutes of heated whispering Stubbs nodded and made a gesture that, to Kevin, meant “fine, kill the idiot”.

The barman began mixing liquids that on their own looked volatile enough but once mixed within what looked to be an upturned vacuum bell began to steam and fizz.  The angry red bubbles rose to the top of the liquid and burst with a sound like a cat hissing.  This was not going to be pretty.  After the glass was almost full and foaming like the mouth of a rabid bull dog the barman took it to the washroom and did not return for some time.  When he finally emerged he was carrying the effervescent mixture on a steel tray and was sporting a striking pair of protective goggles.

Kevin wrapped his weathered fingers around the glass’s handle and felt the warmth of the drink against his knuckles.  Touching his lips to the rim and opening his mouth as wide as it would go he gulped the fiery liquid down.  His eyes instantly began to water as the liquid tasted of iron and sulphur.  Bubbles burst and flecked his face with burning hot droplets as he struggled to consume the tide of hot fluid that was lapping against his lips.

His eyes had become cloudy and unfocused by the time the bottom of the glass came into sight.  The drink was already affecting his fine motor skills and hand –eye coordination; if he removed the glass from his mouth now there would be no way he would successfully return it for another gulp.  He became unsteady on his feet and began to stumble like a newly born horse.  Opening his mouth to say something he found that his voice had become more creature than human and that everyone around his becoming steadily taller.  He felt his head bounce of the soft edge of the marble bar and gently fold his body like bed sheets upon the warm welcoming floor. If this was death, he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. 

“Kevin...Kevin” a hand came down lightly on his shoulder making him jump.  The jolt brought him rushing back to reality at such speed that it felt like he had been awoken from an almost coma like state.  “Kevin, are you listening to me?”  It was Stubbs.  “Your shift ended fifteen minutes ago, what are you still doing here? You a masochist or summit?”  With that Kevin turned wordlessly away, his brain and body not yet in unison.  Stepping away from his till he drifted back along the bar as the abusive cries of the jilted customers bounced off the cotton wool layer around his brain.  He was free.  Another shift complete.

Stepping out into the light Kevin looked up and down the strip in grim wonderment at the debris from the night’s frivolities.  Empty cans and bottles of countless intoxicating liquids or volatile chemicals lay strewn on every flat surface, bent and crushed under foot.  Scattered bodies lay in similar states of disrepair in doorways and gutters.  The revolving doors of Orbit gave the impression that it was an untamed beast, digesting people and spitting them out in such a state that they were often asleep before they hit the floor, if they made it that far.  The dangers of sleeping in the open were not simply the inhospitable climate of Titan but the equally inhospitable behaviour of those that picked their way through the galaxies biggest impromptu sleepover.  Many of the snoozing customers would awake without wallets, shoes, hair or skin and without a doubt, their dignity. Although there was the chance for a lucky few to come away with more than they left with; often a parasitic creature or a clutch of eggs in one of their warmer orifices.

Kevin shuddered to himself as he tiptoed through the minefield of comatose creatures, imagining the hangovers that would wrack their bodies in the morning.  The crippling headaches and weak stomachs of every variety would all be born thanks to the sort of chemical abuse that spanned further than the reaches of the periodic table.  Multiple heads on multiple creatures would be held by multiple arms.  Varying arrays of unsteady legs would b co-ordinated into an interplanetary walk of shame.

The rings of Saturn shimmered overhead.  Their celestial beauty emanated a feeling of peace that cleansed Kevin’s exhausted mind of the night’s chaos.  A feeling of absolution flowed through his muscles as they relaxed, the tension spilling from him and pooling at his feet like a warm ooze.  Looking down at his feet as the stress left him and his shoulders sagged he realised that this warm feeling of comfort was not entirely of his own creation.  A puddle of green slime had begun to form round his feet.  Following the viscous trail along the gutter to its source he realised that he was stood in the extradited stomach contents of an unconscious slug being.  On the tide of vomit a spluttering crustacean trod water in a valiant effort to not be submerged in the viscous slime.

Reaching down Kevin gingerly picked his co-worker from the quickly growing pool and unceremoniously shook the strings of bile from his form.  “I hate my job” muttered the cleaner.  Kevin nodded in silent agreement.  Placing the lobster back on dry land he set off again in search of a steak bake and a warm bed.

The smell of internal slug slime hung in his sinuses as he set off again into the sun rise.  Taking a cigarette from the pocket of a nearby sleeper and dropping his ruined shoes into a waste bin he squelched onwards in sodden socks.  Six hours sleep and he would be back to start it all again.  The cigarette crackled as he licked the flame against its tip.  “God, I hope the garage is open” he thought.