by Rob Rosen
“What?” said Milo. “You know this man?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Confused,” said Tag. “Your reaction would make me believe otherwise.” He looked to the other non-humans. “Correct?” They all nodded. “Confused.”
Welcome to the club. “We never met that man,” I said, then turned to Milo, “but he designed the steel house we live in.”
Milo coughed. “Huh?”
Craig stood up and squinted at the wall. “That’s him, alright. But is he a human who now lives on Planet Six or a Curean who once lived on Planet Earth?” He turned and looked at us, then pointed at the two sets of parents. “Either way, he saved your lives.”
“Wall,” said Milo. “Bio.”
“Justin Timberlake,” said the wall. Well, okay, not really, but Justin Timberlake was far easier to pronounce. Besides, the younger version of the dude sort of resembled Justin, which was why none of us were ever willing to take the photo down. Some people put paintings of Jesus on their walls; we opted for a different kind of savior, one who brought sexy back. “Scientist. Genetic engineer. Author of paper on Y chromosome. Frequent lecturer on the subject. Deceased.”
I gasped. “When?!”
The wall stated a date. I looked at Milo. Milo looked at me. “He died approximately ten years ago.”
“Well then, he seems to have made a remarkable comeback,” I said, then remembered where the transmission he sent had come from. “Or simply a prisoner.”
“No,” said Britney. “Not a prisoner. All prisoners escaped. He was not one of us.” She turned. She looked at me. “Has to be government employee. If not prisoner in that building, only other option is government employee.”
I nodded. Made sense. I mean, as much as anything did. Plus, how would a prisoner have sent the warning to vacate the soon-to-be-blown-up house? “Okay,” I said. “So, if he’s not a prisoner, he must be free to come and go. And since we can’t easily enter that building again, perhaps we can tail someone as they exit.”
Tag, of course, had a comment for that one. “Cureans have no tails.”
“Follow,” I reiterated with a sigh. “Follow him as he exits. Find out who he is, what he knows, and why he saved our parents.”
Not to mention, why he built a steel house on a high hill on my home planet.
Chapter 11
“We should be the ones to do this,” said my mom and dad.
“You should?” I said. “And why is that?”
“You’re wanted men,” said Mom, pointing at me and Milo. “Everyone else is in this room is in their databases, perhaps also wanted now. Us, us they probably don’t know about. We can still walk around freely. Plus, we met that guy once.”
“You did?” Craig asked with a surprised look on his face. “How come we didn’t know about that?”
She shrugged. “He knocked on the front door years ago, just before Randy was born. Said he wanted to see how the house was holding up. It was a five-minute conversation. After all, what could happen to a steel house, especially one that had only recently been built?”
“Maybe he’ll be willing to talk with us,” said my dad, “seeing as he knows us. Somewhat.”
I didn’t want to send them out there alone on a strange planet, but she was right: it would be the safest option. I looked at Tag. “You go with them.”
He nodded. “Delighted.”
Craig had been “wearing” him at the time. He handed the watch over to Dad, who held it as if it was a nuclear bomb with a ten-second countdown that was already beeping at six. I grinned. “He doesn’t bite.”
“No teeth,” said Tag. He pointed at his mouth, then chuckled. “All bark…”
I snapped my fingers. “Yay, he finally got one!”
In any case, Dad slipped the watch on and we made plans for them to begin Operation Justin Timberlake at the time that most Cureans left work, which was around two in the afternoon. FYI, they started at eleven in the morning. Also FYI, they didn’t have any coffee shops on Planet Six, so what they did with all their free time was a mystery. Though, looking at Milo, I bet they pretty much fucked like eight-legged rabbits the rest of the day.
§ § § §
Mom and Dad left on their mission. I was scared. I was nervous. I was horny, seeing as I was soon once again alone with Milo in our apartment.
“One thing I don’t get,” he said.
I smiled. I hugged him. I didn’t un-hug him. “Gee, only one?”
He kissed my nose before aiming lower down. “Okay, one right now then.” The kiss repeated before he continued. “Craig looks like your Mom and Dad.”
I gulped. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “And I look more like you, more like your parents.” He nodded. “I saw pictures of my mom pregnant. I saw pictures of me just after I was born. I am their son.” And still he nodded. “But?”
“I don’t have a but.” Um, yeah, he had one mighty fine one. My frown momentarily turned to a grin at the thought, and then promptly fell back to a scowl. “It’s just weird, is all.”
I shrugged. “It’s all weird, Milo. All of it. Perhaps Justin Timberlake can make it a little less so.”
“You think?”
My shrug rose a bit. “He warned your parents about the explosion. In theory, he’s on our side.”
“Yes,” said Milo, “but, in theory, he’s also been dead for ten years. In other words, not all theories become fact.”
I sighed. “Got it.” I paused, mostly out of fear. Okay, totally out of fear. “And, just to be clear, you don’t think you and I are related, right?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t fuck you if I thought we were related.” Phew!
“I was hoping to fuck you next, actually.”
His head stopped shaking. “To reiterate, I wouldn’t let you fuck me if I thought we were related.” Again, phew!
“Got it,” I said, yet again. “But…”
“Again with the but?”
“But it is still weird. There’s no denying that I look Curean. I mean, on my planet, I’m a ten. Here, I barely register as a seven, eight on a good hair day.”
“Ten? Ten what? Eight what? Sorry, lost me.” He stared down at my already tenting crotch. “Wait, did you have ten inches on your planet and eight on mine? Now that, that is weird. Disconcerting even.”
My sigh made a triumphant reappearance. “Never mind.” I grabbed my crotch. “Let’s just put those aforementioned eight inches to good use.”
“No buts?”
I smacked his. “Oh, there’ll be one of those involved, alright.”
§ § § §
Two o’clock rolled around. Two-thirty. Three.
We were all together again, back in my parent’s apartment—minus said parents. “Where are they?” I groaned, very much now panic-stricken. Guilt washed over me. I’d sent my parents out into the wilderness, so to speak, with nothing but a hologram for protection.
“They’re fine,” Milo said less than convincingly. “They’re just two people out for a walk. Nothing suspicious about that.”
I shook my head. “They’re two aliens looking for a possible government turncoat, standing outside a secret government building that had just recently been half blown-up.”
Milo shrugged. “Yeah, well, when you put it like that.”
I sighed, stood, began to suggest forming a search party, when, suddenly, the wall parted and in they walked.
They weren’t alone, either.
“Mom!” Craig shouted.
“Dad!” I shouted.
“Justin Timberlake!” Britney shouted.
Suffice it to say, all eyes turned to our guest.
I walked over and shook his hand. He shook mine in return. “You speak English, sir?”
He nodded and smiled, very fifty-year-old Justin Timberlake looking. He had to be Curean; humans rarely looked that, well, hot at his age. Distinguished, sure. Handsome, of course. But hot? I mean like scorching? Yeah, not so much. “I s
peak English, Randy.”
I jumped upon hearing my name. “Um, thanks for saving my parent’s lives.”
“Just like you were meant to save all of ours,” he replied.
Again, I jumped, my heart suddenly pounding in my chest. I didn’t know this man, yet I felt like I did. Maybe because we had his picture on our wall, but no, I didn’t think that was it. “You’ll excuse me, sir, but I’m confused.”
“No,” he said. “You’re the savior, my boy.”
I coughed. Craig coughed even louder. “Savior?” I said.
“Him?” said Craig. “He barely makes it out of the house without tripping. What could he possibly save?”
“Curean kind,” came the reply, very matter-of-factly.
“No way,” said Craig.
“Way,” said Justin Timberlake.
Dad nodded. “Yeah, way.”
Mom mirrored the gesture. “Big time way, the way he explained it to us.”
Sonny and Cher spoke up next, “But how can he save us?” she asked. “Are you sure? I mean, he’s a bit, um, young.”
“And dumb as a brick,” added Craig. “And not a very smart brick at that.”
I sighed and turned back to our guest. “In any case, I’m still confused, only more so now. Like Cher said, how can I save…” I pointed beyond the wall. “Everyone?”
“You can’t,” Justin Timberlake replied.
I exhaled sharply. This wasn’t going so well, and my head suddenly hurt. I grabbed a seat. Everyone followed suit. Tag stood. And glowed. “Okay,” I said. “Maybe start at the beginning.”
Justin Timberlake nodded. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form—”
I held up my hand. “Not that far back. Maybe just to the steel house.”
He held up his index finger. Even that was hot. “Ah,” he ahhed. “Yes, a fine achievement that.”
“You built it, right?” Craig said.
J.T. nodded. “Designed, really. Never did that with a building before. Just sort of copied a Victorian blueprint, standard San Francisco stuff, then swapped out wood for steel. With a few minor alterations, it was quite simple.”
Actually, it was considered a modern marvel. Our house has appeared in innumerable magazines and journals over the years. No one knew how he did it. More importantly, no one knew why. Oh, and no one knew who the architect was. His name never showed up anywhere before or since the building of our house. In fact, if it wasn’t for the picture on our wall, we never even would’ve known what he looked like.
“Simple, huh?” I said. “In other words, you’re not human.”
He smiled. He had a fatherly smile. Hot, sure, but fatherly, just the same. Like if the real J.T. were to play Santa Claus in a movie. “Curean,” he said, “right on down to my Z chromosome.”
I gulped. He opened up the bag, the cat jumping right on out. Meaning, since he brought it up, I decided—nay, needed—to ask, “And me, sir? What do I go, um, down to?”
Mom squinted my way. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I pointed to the Cureans. I pointed to the humans. “Who do I look more like?”
Mom and Dad looked around the semicircle of us. Mom started to reply, then stopped. Dad started to reply, then stopped.
“See,” I said.
Justin Timberlake nodded. “Let me tell the entire tale; your question will be answered then.” He looked at all of us. We all nodded eagerly for him to continue. “Right,” he said. “So, as you know, our race is dying; your race is not. Yours is similar to ours, genetically speaking. If we could somehow mesh the two genomes, ours would once again be on the right track.”
“Oversimplification,” said Tag.
Justin Timberlake shrugged and pointed at us humans. “Yeah, well.”
“Anyway,” said I, duly offended, “please, continue.”
Again, our esteemed guest nodded. “We knew of your universe, could see into it through your telecommunication portals. We studied your kind, learned your languages, your culture, figuring that someday, somehow, we could, hopefully—”
“Invade,” interrupted Craig.
“Nasty word,” said J.T.
“Still,” said I.
“Fine,” said J.T., “invade then.” He shifted in his seat before continuing. “Anyway, once our two universes started to approach each other, we found the anomalies, spots where the worlds touched, however temporarily.”
“My house,” I said. “Your secret government building. Milo’s house.”
Craig held up his hand. “The fourth site? Where does the government building connect to?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I know what I’m allowed to know, what I need to know.”
I grinned. “The dead tell no tales.”
He thought about it for a moment before replying. “My death was out of necessity. Yes, as you infer, so I won’t be able to speak publicly about what I do, at least not anymore.” He cleared his throat. “In any case, once the spots were discovered, our world needed a way to create a portal, a way to go from universe to universe. Since the city we are in is built upon a metal similar to your steel, your house needed to be built of the same material, like to like, the portal thus created. So that when the universes touched, as they so often have done these past many years, the bridge is always there.”
“Oversimplification,” said Tag.
Justin Timberlake shrugged and pointed at us humans. “Yeah, well.”
Craig’s eyes rolled like dice on a craps table. “Got it. Next,” he said.
“I was sent to your planet to conduct experiments, to see if the genomic combining was possible.”
“But how?” Craig asked. “Our house wasn’t built yet. How was the bridge created?”
“It wasn’t,” J.T. said. “Once the worlds collide, and you know where the touchpoints are, which are easily enough calculated, one simply has to jump. Still, once that occurs, the connection is lost. The touchpoints shift, ever so slightly. Me being on Earth, I could no longer make the calculation to be able to jump back.”
“You were trapped,” Milo said.
J.T. nodded. “Until the steel house was built, until the bridge became permanent, both at your house and at the fourth site.”
“Oversimplification,” said Tag.
I held up my hand and glared at J.T. “Please, don’t, sir.”
He grinned. Hotly. “Right. In any case, many of us jumped, as it were, before those permanent bridges came into being. Infiltrated, as it were. With our superior intelligence, our knowledge of science, technology, we were able to obtain the appropriate jobs. For me, apart from my experiments, that included architecture.”
“Our house,” Mom said.
“Your house,” J.T. said. “A colleague bought the land, another approved my plans, another obtained the necessary permits.” He looked at my mom. “You were pregnant at the time, ma’am. We accepted your offer for the house. We thought of everything.”
Tag snickered. It was an odd sound. Mechanical. “Not everything.”
J.T. slouched. Yes, hotly. He stared at me. “You were to be the savior, your DNA like ours, but also like your parent’s. Your offspring would be able to procreate with either species. It would take only a few births. We could continue the experiment from there, repopulate our planet.”
I laughed. I got it. I was the savior. Only, I wasn’t. “I’m gay. You had to wait years to find that out.”
Craig laughed as well. “Yep, no procreation possible.”
“Yuck,” I said as I imagined the logistics.
“And the bridge,” Tag said. “It’s closing, isn’t it? The worlds would need to separate at some point, permanently. Your experiment, I take it, must need a human of procreative age. You’ve run out of time.”
“Wait,” I said. “Still lost here. Why couldn’t you just use my DNA, create a new species of your own that way?” I stuck out my tongue, then retracted it. “Take a swab. Be my guest
.”
J.T. sighed. “My early experiments went along those lines. We hoped to be able to achieve this new species, as you put it, in the lab, in vitro.”
“Test-tube babies,” said Craig.
“Close enough,” J.T. agreed. “Sadly, though the resulting embryos were viable, they were also eventually sterile. In other words, you’d get one new generation, then nothing beyond that. There would be a possibility that we could work with that, once back on Planet Six, but that would be far too risky of a plan, in that it might not work, and we wouldn’t have any other options.”
“So,” said Tag, “that must mean you needed a natural childbirth, a baby born outside the lab.”
“Me,” I said. “You needed me.” I scratched my head. “But that must mean I’m human. My parents are human, so I am, too. But then, how could I be your savior, how can I have a Y and a Z chromosome?”
Mom’s eyes suddenly went wide. She looked at J.T. “You visited us,” she said. “You visited us when I was pregnant with Randy. You did something to me, to him.” She was pointing my way as she said this.
He nodded. “Your son, thanks to me, has both a working Y chromosome and a working Z chromosome. He is unique then, unlike any living creature in any of God’s universes.”
I grinned. Craig faux-wretched. Milo gave me a thumbs-up. Tag simply shrugged. I had a feeling he thought the same about himself, that he was unique. In truth, I believed that myself.
“But he’s an idiot,” protested Craig. “Pretty, I suppose, but still brick-dumb. And your kind seems to be anything but that.” He pointed at Britney. “She learned English in only two days!”
Britney smiled widely. “A day and a half, really.”
Craig kept pointing. “See! See!”
J.T. shrugged. “Must be Y interference. The two genes cancel certain qualities out. Either way, Randy is not sterile. Randy could procreate and eventually repopulate our world.”
I grimaced. “Except, like I said, yuck.”
“So, force him to do it,” said Craig. “Or just take his, you now, spunk, and, um, inject it, or something like that.”
J.T. nodded. J.T. frowned. J.T.’s shoulders again slumped. J.T. did all these things—you guessed it—hotly. “The idea was suggested. The idea was rejected.” He looked at me again. “You are the savior. Our people will one day venerate you. God would not have used a slave to populate his worlds; we also will not do that. Human mythos is Adam and Eve. You were to be our next-generation Adam. Adam must be venerable, esteemed. The government was unanimous in its decision, which is a rare thing indeed. Even today, all officials know of you, pray for your help.” He bowed his head in apparent reverence, then added, “All of this, you, your parents, it’s all fated to be. Your house holds the portal, your mom was pregnant with you, the Z chromosome had to be injected into a fetus. This is all fate, God’s will, and all it took was a simple shake of my hand with your mother.”
