by Marc Landau
Yeah, lots of character. Women love it when you tell them the scar on your face is because you couldn’t wait to eat fake bacon. And yes, I’d lied a few times and told stories that I’d gotten the scar from fights I’d had protecting damsels or puppies.
The electrified sphere broke apart into a trillion little sparkles. The sparks formed a cloud like a swarm of white fireflies and slowly moved toward Kat. She was drawing them in. The red egg became a vacuum, sucking up every last one of the trillions of light particles. Again I was reminded of a vid of whales opening their mouths and sucking up millions of tiny plankton.
She always was unique, the little voice said.
“Unique. That’s an understatement.”
I still couldn’t be a hundred percent that once the last fleck of electricity was gone, she wouldn’t turn on us, but I wasn’t really worried about it. Maybe I was too caught up in the amazing-ness of the situation. I watched the final flicker of light dim as the red ball swallowed the last of the sparks. When it was over, a small plume of purple plasma smoke blew out of a hole in the red ball. Was that a burp?
I stared at the screen, transfixed like a prey animal stunned at how it was being eaten.
“Don’t worry I’m not going to eat you.” I heard Kat say inside my head.
“Oh shat! She’s telepathing me again. Or I’m going crazy again. Or both. Probably both."
“You're not going crazy,” she said.
“Who’s that?”
“Me.”
“Me who?”
I heard a low giggle inside my skull. “Don’t be silly, Wil. It’s me, Kat.”
“I’m the one being silly? And don't laugh. Nothing about this is funny!”
“Really, Wil? Isn't it all kind of ridiculously funny?”
As usual she was right.
“You’re right. You're a giant red egg who’s telepathically talking to me. Hard to imagine anything more ridiculous."
“I’m a what?” she replied.
“A big red egg looking thing.”
“Stop joking around.”
“I’m not.”
“Seriously, Wil, what are you talking about?”
“I’m looking at you right now on the screens. You’re floating outside the ship. You just destroyed a big mirrored sphere thingy. It might have been one of your people.”
“One of my people?”
“Yeah. If this is your home planet then that might have been a ship or something from down below.”
“…I just destroyed a ship?”
“Maybe.”
“And ate my own people?”
“Maybe.”
“And I'm a big red ball, floating in space?”
“Yup.”
“Shat.”
Shat was too basic a word for it. Mega-stupid shat. Talk about ridiculous. Kat hadn’t just turned into a giant red egg who’d destroyed another giant egg. She was now telepathically communicating with me and didn’t even know she was doing it.
The good news was whatever the hellvian Kat was, she was protecting us. Or herself. Who knows? But at least me, Poka, the bot and the ship weren’t on her dining menu.
Chapter Twelve
More good news: Now that the purple sphere was gone, everything was going back to normal.
I checked the bot and saw its molecules reconstituting. It was morphing from a ball of space dust back into a solid metal robot. I exhaled a sigh of relief. Poka, luckily, never experienced any negative effects. Probably because she was in close contact with Kat pretty much the whole time, so she was protected. The worst I spotted were a bunch of her hairs floating around the ship. It wasn’t even as bad as when the bot sent the scooper-drone with the hairbrush extension on it to brush her fur. I’m sure that wouldn’t stop the bot from complaining about it.
Best of all, the ship was coming back together. We weren’t all going to be sucked out into space. Thank you alien-vampire-succubus-telepath Kat.
You're welcome, a new voice said in my head. It was deep and powerful. Its timbre resonated in my head and vibrated within my chest. I thought of the Old Testament.
The voice of God.
Which, by the way, turns out to be a work of nonfiction. It was proven that all the events in the Bible actually did happen. The Earth was created in six days. With alien aid. Which aliens actually helped is still disputed to this day. Also, science determined that a day in the Bible was equal to something like fifty million years.
“Who’s this?” I asked
But it didn’t reply.
“Who’s talking in my head?"
Still nothing.
“Who the frak are you?”
The voice had gone silent. It said whatever it had wanted to and wasn’t going to speak again. No pesky human could force it to spill its secrets. Or maybe it just couldn’t figure out how to say more in English.
Saying “you’re welcome” is pretty basic. Almost everyone can say ”hello,” “thank you,” and “you're welcome” in like seven hundred languages, both human and alien. Maybe that’s all it knew. It was obviously intelligent. I wouldn’t be surprised if it could figure out how to speak every language in the universe.
I wished it tried to say more. Even if it only spoke its own language but more loudly the way people do when they think anyone will be able to understand them if they speak slow and loud.
But now everything was silent. It was so quiet, I swore I could literally hear each of the bot’s individual particles sticking back to one another like a weird, goopy Lego-slime game.
Lego-slime. It had been around for hundreds of years. Slinkies, too. They still hung around, both had been found on ancient dig sites dating back hundreds of years. What can you say? No matter how far we evolve and grow, every kid still loves Legos, Slime, and Slinkies.
“Man. I wish I had some Lego-slime to play with right now.”
Stay focused, the little man in my head replied.
“Right. Sorry. Back to business.”
I heard the bot’s soft beeps and hums getting louder by the millisecond. It wouldn’t be much longer before it no longer sounded like a bound and gagged ransom victim. And I was pretty sure of the first thing it was going to do was when it was free. Chastise me.
“Your poor decision skills almost destroyed the ship and all of its occupants.”
There it was. The first thing the walrus said now that it was free, and it was an insult. No “thank you,” no relief, just cold, calculating robot facts and judginess.
“You’re welcome,” I replied.
“You literally did not do anything.”
“Literally? Really?”
“Correct. My processing functions were online during the entire sequence of events, and I saw that you stood and didn’t act or move more than two inches during the entire emergency.”
“Two inches, huh?”
“One inch and three quarters to be exact.”
The ship had now pretty much reconstituted itself. The same was true for the bot. The command center’s systems rebooted and came back online. The ship was now beeping, humming and buzzing with life. I’d never noticed how loud everything was before. It all blended into the background noise. Now every beep was screaming in my eardrums. I liked it. It felt like life had come back.
The bot turned to me and blinked its judgy blue glowing eye slits. “You should be relieved of command. And the dog should be quarantined and shipped back to Prime.”
I was relieved to have it arguing and trying to strip me of command again. Sad that it was so power hungry that it wanted to run this measly ship. If you're going to mutiny, take over a war-destroyer, or at least a decent transport ship. I was in command of a one-man flotilla. I wasn’t sure if the bot was actually power-hungry enough to want to command the dinky vessel, or just needed to be right about everything. The answer, of course, was both.
“You don’t really want command of this hunk of junk, do you?”
The bot did its usual processing hum. It w
as thinking it over. Maybe it would realize being the captain of a glorified rowboat wasn’t really worth the effort.
“And you keep forgetting that you can’t send Poka back. You don’t even know where we are.”
The bot hummed on that thought.
“You actually seem a bit confused. Maybe you should clean whatever nuts and bolts are in your brain.”
Its hum turned into an angry buzz. “I am not capable of being confused. Additionally, there are no nuts and bolts in my system. And I don’t have a brain.”
“That’s definitely true. No brains.”
“Correct. There is no brain.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Glad you finally admit it.”
It blinked its eyeholes in confusion even though it couldn’t be confused. It was trying mega-hard to figure out my insult. Finally, it beeped. It knew. Like a toaster dinging when the toast is ready. The lightbulb went off in its head appendage.
“I do not need a brain to be smarter than a human. My processing power is more advanced than three human brains. A brain is a weak vessel.”
“A brain created you.”
The bot beeped and hummed in frustration. I’d made a damn good point. I smiled. I was happier than I should’ve been to be arguing with the bot again. It was a waste, but it felt like things were getting back to their usual, annoying normal. And I was desperate for good ol’ annoying, boring arguing with the bot and chasing Poka around. There’d been way too much excitement the last couple of days for my processing systems, as the bot would say.
Of course, the normal didn’t last long. Now that the mirrored sphere was gone and the ship and the bot were back to their solid forms, there was still the issue with Alien-Kat.
Chapter Thirteen
When I checked the screens again, she was gone. More specifically, the giant red, angry succubus egg had disappeared. Did she return home to the planet? Was she sitting at the dinner table with her sphere family, telling them about the crazy humans she’d encountered? Had she “phoned home” and left us stranded, orbiting the planet with no way to ever get back to Prime?
If so, that was a pretty crappy thing to do. Just leave us hanging out here to die. What happened to her-it protecting us? I thought about how long the supplies would last, but must have spoken out loud because the bot interrupted with its accurate and depressing data, as usual.
“Eighty-two percent of the supplies are undamaged. Enough for one year of survival.”
That was a relief. Kind of. I guess all the shooting and teleporting hadn’t…
The bot beeped. “Correction. A year of biological survival. You and Poka will cease to exist in three hundred sixty-seven days. I have reserve power for the next nine hundred twenty-two years.”
“Great. You'll live a millennia. Me and Poka will be dead in a year if no one finds us.”
“No one will find you,” the bot replied.
“Thanks, Mr. Optimism.”
“It is not a matter of optimism. It is factual data compilation. The odds of being discovered in the uncharted region of the galaxy is zero point…”
“We talked about all the percentages.”
“Correction. The odds are slimmer than a Telivian tail.”
“Thanks for the colorful simile. You’re getting better at it.”
“There is no need to thank me. Of course I am progressing. My ability to learn is programmed to increase by a factor of tenfold every seven hours.”
“Nice way to take the fun out of it, bot.”
“It is not a matter of fun. It is a matter of function.”
“Good pun. Function. Pretty funny.”
“I was not attempting to create humor.”
“Don’t worry. No one will ever accuse you of being a stand-up comedian,” I said.
“Why would anyone accuse me of that?”
“Dude. Keep working on your human language conversational programming. You need to understand sarcasm better.”
The bot buzzed. “Sarcasm language program. Confirmed.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. The bot was tough enough to deal with as is. I feared I was going to turn him into an insult comedian.
It blinked its eyeholes and grimaced with its mouth appendage, like it was thinking something over. Oh, brother. Was it about to hit me with its first attempt at sarcasm?
“Data clarification,” it said.
“Okay, clarify.”
“I should have specified in our earlier communication about supplies. It is irrelevant if anyone finds you within a year.”
“Why?”
“You will be deceased in less than seventy hours.”
“You said we have supplies for over a year.”
“That is correct.”
“So?”
The bot didn’t respond. Was it trying to be sensitive to my plight? Like a doctor not wanting to give the patient bad news? More likely, it didn’t deem my question specific enough.
“So?” I said again.
“So. A question at the end does not indicate what you are inquiring about,” the bot replied. There it was. Definitely not being sensitive to my feelings about dying.
“So why only three days?”
“Life support systems have been damaged by a plasma strike.”
“Was it the sphere thing?”
The bot paused and hummed.
“No. It was the battle prior to our arrival. The plasma signature is from a class C destroyer from Earth Prime’s defense forces.”
“Great,” I muttered.
“It is not great,” the bot replied.
“I know! I was being sarcastic!”
Stop losing focus! the little voice in my head yelled.
Why was it still there? It must be the remnants of the two battling spheres. Whenever those alien things were close, it scrambled my brains. I was like a fraky antenna. If those things were affecting me, I wondered if all humans would have similar reactions.
If an egg-cocoon-Kat-alien got close to Prime, it could mess with all of humanity's brains and throw the whole planet into chaos. It’s not like it takes much to make humans frak out. Mayhem is coded deep in our DNA.
“Sensors indicate another object orbiting the perimeter of the ship.”
Come on! Enough was enough. If this was another alien, I was gonna get my hand cannon laser and blow this thing to bits. It wouldn’t work, but I’d do it anyway. All the aliens we’d come into contact with so far were impervious to everything. I didn’t care. I was going to shoot the shat out of this thing. Send out the data-drones to laser the thing into oblivion. Which, again, wouldn't work. But I couldn’t take it anymore. These things were making me crazy. I needed to blow off some steam. There’s only so much a person can take. I was getting a serious case of space rage, and I was about to lose it on this new unknown alien.
“What the hellvian is it?” I barked at the bot, knowing it wouldn’t have the answer. The damn walrus didn’t have any specs in its system for any of this stuff. All it kept saying was “unknown origin” or “insufficient data.”
“Insufficient data," the bot replied.
If I couldn’t kill an alien, I could snap at the damn bot. Yes, I was being petty.
“Insufficient data. Insufficient data. That’s all you say! What the hellvian good are you?”
“I am good at nine thousand forty-seven hundred tasks.”
“Well. Right now, they’re all fraking useless! I need to know what the frak is fraking going on. Where are we? How do we get back? Is it safe to go back, or did we just start a war before we teleported here? Can you tell me anything?!”
The bot beeped and buzzed. The usual processing sounds. They wouldn’t come to anything. At worst, I’d stuck it in an ongoing feedback loop. Like the computer from War Games that fraked out when it couldn’t answer the question about war. There were no answers. A bot with no data to analyze was like a philosopher trying to comprehend the existential meaning of life.
&n
bsp; “You’re worthless!” I yelled, then kicked it in its round robot belly. I immediately felt bad about it. I always felt bad when I did stupid shat, but I couldn’t help it. That was an excuse, and I knew it. I’m working on it, but now wasn’t the time for immersive nano-therapy. It also wasn’t the time to randomly kick the bot. It hadn’t done anything wrong. I just couldn't deal with the fraking frustration anymore.
“Sorry about that, bub.”
“Engaging defensive protocols,” it replied.
“Defensive protocols? Wait. What?”
ZAP. A jolt of electricity shot through my bones and I crumpled to my knees, quivering. On the plus side, it wasn’t as bad as being eaten by the purple sphere. Still, it hurt like shat.
“Jezzelusbub, bot! I said I’m sorry.”
The bot buzzed louder and a bright orange thingy started glowing on its hand appendage. It was going to shock me again.
“I’m sorry!”
ZAP!
That one hurt a lot. I almost retched that time. That was another thing I was getting damn sick of. I’d had enough nausea and vomiting in the last day to last a lifetime.
The bot powered up its hand appendage again.
“Wait!”
But it didn’t.
ZAP.
Again, electricity flooded my system. I was grateful that whoever programmed the damn thing they must have put some sort of limiter on its defensive systems. I was shocked (no pun intended) that it allowed a robot to attack a human.
Something had definitely gone haywire with the walrus’s programming. Not surprising, with all the alien craziness going on. Those things had gotten into my head. I wasn’t shocked that they were messing with the bot’s brains, or lack thereof.
Poka seemed completely unaffected by all the alien brain telepathy. My guess was she was so crazy to begin with, the aliens took one look inside her noggin and ran away scared.
The bot’s hand glowed orange. This thing was out to kill me. If it couldn’t override its programming and deliver a kill shot, it was going to try to finish me off with a thousand short bursts.
ZAP.
“Cut it out!”
