Based on the final transmission of Captain Randy “Straightline” McManus, 27th Terran Mowing Division
"They said the stars were too far to mow.
I said, get me a mower with a rocket strapped to it."
They never built it for space.
The John Deere Model 5090R "Constellation" was a special commission — built in Randy’s garage over the course of seventeen years with stolen parts, prayers, and three separate attempts to break HOA code 9.4c (“No fusion cores in residential areas”). It had twin rail boosters, a cryo-cooler for beer, and a speaker system loud enough to make the vacuum of space flinch.
Randy was 63 years old. Bald as a cue ball. Skin like old leather. Hands stained with gasoline and betrayal. The Verdancy had taken his garden, his wife, and his bowling league. All he had left was vengeance — and his mower.
And on the 3rd of July, 2559 CE — just after breakfast — he launched.
The Verdancy thought it was a joke. A lone Terran screaming out of a garage in South Carolina on a barely-stable homemade space mower, blaring Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” on loop.
But Randy had the one thing they could never comprehend: Spite-powered trajectory.
He left Earth's gravity with a single middle finger raised to the sky and a message broadcast on all frequencies:
“Coming to trim your hedges, treeboys.”
His first kill was a scout vessel over Titan — mowed clean in two with a tungsten-plated mulching deck and a bottle of moonshine he used as afterburner fuel.
By the time he reached Pluto Orbit, he’d liberated five moons, rerouted three terraforming stations, and planted a flaming HOA flag into the side of a satellite broadcasting Verdancy pacification pulses.
“Weed This.”
The Verdancy retaliated — not with weapons, but with biology. They released spores engineered to hijack dopamine pathways, broadcast subsonic rhythms tuned to neural surrender, and let their vines carry psychoactive sap through the air. Their goal wasn’t conquest — it was compliance. Permanent. Chemical. Green.
Randy mowed through it all.
Because Randy wasn’t most men. He was the kind of bastard who rewired the air filtration system to smell like two-stroke exhaust just to stay angry.
A seed-ship, three kilometers wide, hurtling toward Earth. Inside: forty thousand Harvest Cradles — biomechanical mind-pods grown to saturate the brain with controlled stimuli, regulate dopamine output, and drown entire populations in a soft, perpetual compliance loop. It didn’t carry troops — it carried sedation.
The kind of ship that tucks entire planets in for the last time.
Randy didn’t hesitate. He cut the thrusters. Aimed straight for the cargo bay.
“Mow fast, die loud,” he whispered.
“For Steve.”
Impact velocity: terminal.
Final transmission: “YEEEEEEEEEEE—”
They never recovered his body.
But a week later, every broadcast tower across Earth picked up one ghost signal — faint, warbling through static and cosmic dust.
It was a low hum. Mechanical. Rhythmic.
The sound of a mower.
"He mowed the stars so others could sleep under them free."
— Randy “Straightline” McManus, Terran Patriot, HOA Gold Lifetime Member