Cosmic Miasma

Do you want to know why the largest bank in the galaxy stores cheese instead of rare and expensive metals? I’ll tell you.

You probably know that Teta-Zeta has the stinkiest and most awarded cheese in the galaxy. Cheeses even more famous than those from Earth back when Earth was crowded with sheep and goats and cows and all those dirty smelly four legged creatures.

What you might not know is that a slice of TZ cheese has qualities hard to come by any other food in any of the colonies. Qualities of most interest to data junkies.

Cheese is the most perfect form of data storage. Data is the most valuable thing, and the Central Info Bank of Teta-Zeta, the largest bank in the galaxy, stores above all data.

Though a few civilizations still rely on magnetic, optic or quantum disks, those deteriorate rather quickly and are extremely expensive to maintain.

Most data-banks have long ago move to DNA-based data storage. You can store about a zettabyte per square inch of regular organic matter. The most concentrated the matter, the more data you can store in it. And it so happens that TZ cheese is the thickets, richest most dense cheese you can find in the gallaxy.

My squad and I were after a ten thousand year old cheeses stored in the Central Bank. Resale value would be astronomical. Any pirate crew would kill for this information.

Breaking into the bank wasn’t a problem. Security didn’t seem to be that great.

We found that the older more valuable data was stored in cheese that had been sitting in the bank the longest. The deeper the vault we penetrated, the older the cheese and the stronger the smell we found.

The holy grail, the oldest cheese with the ancient star map from the early pioneers, was particularly foul. How could I accurately describe it? It was a deep, nauseating, musty, sloppy, salty, moist, rotten smell. It penetrated our space suits, our clothes, our respirators…

By the time we got the cheese aboard the ship, four members of the crew had fainted overcame by the smell. The rest of us had puked inside our suits at least once.

We seriously considered how much traveling we could do in our ship this stench all around us impregnating every corner. We knew we were not prepared for this.

That day we found out why cheese in particular was used in data banks.

As you can guess we took off leaving the cheese behind. I guess we also found why security at the Central Bank was so lousy