by Rob Rosen
There was that word again, fate, following me around like a shadow.
Craig chuckled. “Or maybe all just dumb luck.” He pointed my way. “Emphasis on the dumb.”
“So,” I said, sneering at my brother, “you created me, in a way, but the experiment, ultimately, was a failure. I won’t procreate.” I glanced at Milo, popping a semi as I did so. “At least not successfully. So, now what?”
“Invasion,” said Tag. “It is the only way.”
J.T. once again nodded. “The bridge will forever sever, and soon. The savior is no longer. Our world will die. We must, as you put it, invade, mate with your people, eventually populate your world instead, rule your universe, forget about our own.”
Tag again interjected. “Subjugate the humans.”
Justin Timberlake shrugged and pointed at us humans. “Yeah, well.” To which he promptly added, “Plus, you have better food alternatives.”
It was now my turn to nod. “Amen to that.” To which I promptly added, “But you saved Milo’s parents, you saved mine. Why? Why would it matter now if any of us lived or died?”
“No one knew that your parents had made the jump,” he replied. “You, of course, they now know about. You’ve made yourself known, after all.”
I grinned. “Oops. My bad.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t much matter now; the invasion will start soon enough, before the portal forever closes.” He looked at Milo, at Milo’s parents. “As for what I did, why I made that transmission, I thought that by saving them, they would alert you.” He pointed at Milo.
Milo pointed at Milo. “Me? Why me?”
He smiled, very fatherly looking, yet again. Hot fatherly, but still. I wondered if an ugly Curean would be considered sexy, purely as a novelty. Then again, I doubted there was an ugly Curean to be found. “By alerting you, you would alert Randy here.”
The light bulb above my head suddenly pulsed. “You came with my parents here today. I assume there was some risk involved with that.” He nodded. “In other words, you don’t want the invasion to occur.” And still he nodded. “You also have no love for the government, like, it seems, so many of your people.” His nodding went into overdrive. “But your people will die.”
He sighed. “Perhaps. They are dying now, no doubt about it, but science generally prevails in the end. We were close to a solution when it came to you. Hope, therefore, is not lost, Randy.” He stood, readying himself to leave. “I enjoyed my time on your planet. Your people remind me of what ours once had been.” The smile rose on his face. “Scrappy, I believe you’d call it. A bit lost, sure, but eager to do better. Mine, sadly, have given up, lack desire of any kind. And so, given a choice, I’m rooting for the Earthlings.” His final point was at me. “I’m rooting for you, Randy. That’s why I left that picture of myself at your house, so that one day we’d hopefully meet again, so that you’d know me when you saw me, when and if that time came.”
I grinned. “So that you could help us.”
He shrugged. He moved to the door. “For all intents and purposes, I’m already dead. I have no ties to the outside world anymore. I have my research lab, but that’s all. They have intentionally cut me off, in case I should ever rebel. In other words, I’m merely a tiny cog in an enormous wheel. Still, if possible, I’ll help, where I can.”
“How?” I asked. “They must be watching you, right?”
His nod returned. “Your machine can help.” He pointed at Tag.
I frowned. “Please don’t call him that, sir; he’s our friend.”
He chuckled. “Humans,” he muttered with a shake of his head, and then lifted his wrist, a watch similar to ours hooked onto it. “Connect,” he said.
Tag glowed for the briefest of seconds. “Connected,” Tag said, then looked at me. “We can communicate now. I’ve ensured, as best I could, that the connection will be undetectable.”
“Thanks, Tag.” I turned back to J.T. “When will the invasion occur, sir?”
“No clue.”
“Where will it occur?” I added.
“No clue.”
“How many of them?”
He shrugged. “Nope, still no clue. All I know is that the plans are underway. The last known portal is in the government building, what’s left of it. You must destroy the portal.”
The frown that had been on my face sagged farther south. “Then I’ll be trapped here, my parents as well.”
“Oh,” said Mom, suddenly looking startled.
Dad walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Do what you have to do, Randy. It’s for the greater good.”
“Humans,” J.T. again muttered. “God love ’em.” He turned to leave. “When you contact me, speak in some sort of code. Don’t show your faces. Odds are good, they’re now tracing all forms of electronic contact.”
Staring out the window, I prayed it was only the electronic form they were tracing.
§ § § §
“Family meeting,” said Dad as soon as Justin Timberlake hotly departed, taking sexy with him.
I pointed to the others, to Milo, to his parents, to Britney, to Tag. “Them included?” Dad squinted their way. “For all intents and purposes, we’re all family now; we all have the exact same thing to lose.”
Dad nodded, Mom, too. “Yeah, I suppose they do.” He sat on the couch. The couch expanded to seat us all. Nifty technology. This world of theirs met everyone’s needs. Funny that when you get everything you want, you’re still unhappy with what you have. I’d say it was the human condition, but…
“So,” I said, “if we destroy the portal, we’re trapped on this side of things.” I turned to my parents, to Craig. “We’ll never see our home again, our friends. They’ll think we disappeared. Our house will sit there, full of our stuff, empty of us.”
Craig rolled his eyes. “Drama queen much?” he said with a sigh. “Still, he’s right.”
I grinned. “What with me being the savior and all, dare I say, duh.”
“Oh brother,” said Craig.
Tag pulsed. “He is your brother.”
We all turned to Tag, a line of us now shaking our heads. Milo spoke up next. “If we don’t destroy the portal, your world will be invaded, besieged. Your people can’t defeat mine.”
“And,” said Cher, “if we destroy the portal, our race is doomed.” She looked sad—beautiful, but sad. Like the real Cher in Moonstruck. Sonny, of course, didn’t look at all like the real Sonny, what with the real Sonny being far out of the real Cher’s league. Still, if we had a Cher, we had to have a Sonny, right?
In any case, Sonny looked around, his eyes landing on all the sterile beauty. He said a phrase, something in his own language. “What does that mean?” I asked, to which he replied, “Hippo is already outside the farm.”
I cocked my head. I thought about it for a moment. “Horse is already out of the barn?” He nodded. I, too, stared at the room, then outside the window, at the vast dead city below. “Yep, it is at that: doomed.” I rubbed my eyes. My head hurt. “Still, if your people invade, maybe some of us will rub off on some of you. Maybe a merger of the two worlds will make both races a bit better.”
Sonny seemed to think it over before replying. “Our people evolved as your people have, Randy. Faster, sure, but the same. We are from the same stuff.” He grabbed at the air and held an invisible bit of said stuff in front of his face. “This is where we strived to be. This is where you will end up. Fate, I believe you call it.”
I stared at Milo as a jolt of something electric shot up my spine. Clearly, I knew of fate. Fate and me, we were on a first-name basis. “A vote then. On my world, that is generally how we decide on things.”
Britney sighed. “Not on ours. On ours, we are told, not asked.”
“Still,” I said, my hand high over my head. “Hands up if you want to destroy the portal.” Around the room, the hands went up, one by one, until all that was left was Tag. We stared at him. He stared at us. He was being given a choice. I v
entured to guess that this was a first on Planet Six. I smiled at the novelty of it. Fate, it seemed, stretched as wide as the universe itself, even touching down on the likes of our glowing friend. Tag smiled and proudly lifted his hand.
Mom smiled. “Then it’s settled. Boom,” she said, her hands making the universal sign for an explosion, fingers in two facing letter Cs before flinging outward.
“Boom,” said Dad.
“Boom,” said Craig and me.
“Boom,” said Sonny and Cher.
“Boom,” said Britney and Milo.
“Um,” said Tag. “Sounds good in theory, but…how?”
Yeah, figures that the watch would be the lone voice of reason.
Chapter 12
Milo and I were alone again. We’d switched buildings, figuring it was safer not to stay in the same spot for too long. Tag put security measures in place, but we knew he was no match for the government, not in the long run. I mean, he was bought over the counter, after all. Sure, the counter appeared from within a wall, but still.
“How?” I asked Milo, his head on my chest, my hand stroking his mane of blond hair. It was a question with multiple directions, though clearly one main one I was going for, namely: how were we going to blow up the portal?
Milo sighed, the vibration rumbling through me before settling in around my prick. “Our weapons won’t work on that building, Randy. There are already safeguards in place. My people are rarely fooled; they learn from their mistakes.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, mine not so much.” My hand stopped stroking, though remained enmeshed within the silk of him. “So, you’re saying we can’t use force to break in, to create that aforementioned boom.”
“Not a chance.” He lifted his head, our eyes locking. A man could easily drown in all that stunning blue—and be more than happy to do so. “And again, how then?”
He shrugged. We had the question; the answer was far more difficult to come by. Which is why I changed the subject for now. Seemed easier. “Funny how we’re so alike and so different. Our worlds, I mean. Still, I love you. You love me. Our hearts don’t know that we’re different species.” Which felt both weird and mushy to say. Somewhere, Craig was rolling his eyes.
Milo smiled and kissed me. “Maybe that’s what that stuff Sonny mentioned is: love.”
I nodded. “If fate really did bring us together, I wonder what it has in store for us now.”
He sighed, his cheek again on my chest. “And is it going to help with that boom of ours?”
My hand went back to its stroking. We lay there in silence, in a new room that looked nearly identical to the old one, to the one before that. There was no art on Planet Six, as I’d already said; there was simply uniformity. It was all, I’d come to realize, peacefully unsettling.
“I’ll miss my world, Milo,” I admitted, sadness suddenly flowing over me, seeping into my pores.
“You’ll save your world, Randy.”
I nodded. “A savior then, either way.” It was very unselfish of me, which was very unlike me. I was either growing up or having a temporary lapse of character. I was betting on the latter. “I’d miss you more, though.” The sadness quickly ebbed.
He nodded into my chest. “Same here.”
I smiled. I was trapped. I was desperate. I was scared. I was happy. I was thrilled. “Hormones,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
My smile widened, as did my prick, throbbing against his belly. “Never mind.” I flipped him off me. I flipped onto his belly. I slid my cock inside of him. Round peg. Round hole. Love. Fate. Everything swirled inside my head as my come soon swirled inside of him.
We moaned in sync as he came with me.
“I love you, Milo.”
“I love you, too, Randy,” he said. “I love you so much it makes my heart pound, like it’s gonna pop out of my chest at any moment. And that answers the why, the why we’re doing what we’re doing; sadly, it doesn’t help one bit with the how, as in how we’re going to do it.”
I nodded as I slid out of him. “Well, at least we got the why out of the way.”
Seconds later, his scruffy cheek was once again on my smooth chest. “We need to get Tag in there, inside the government building.”
I nodded, yet again. “Good idea, but we can’t even get us in there.”
He paused, seemingly thinking of a plan. Better him than me, I figured. Eventually, he pointed at the wall. “Paste,” he said.
“Blech,” I said. “Time to eat, already?”
He pushed himself off me and over to my side. “Wall, paste.”
The wall split. A tray came out, a plate resting atop it, the paste proffered. To repeat: blech. “Talk about ruining a perfectly good moment.”
He chuckled. “Missing the point.”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
He was now sitting on the bed, his legs dangling over as he twirled my balls between his dexterous fingers. “The paste,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common, government employees included.”
It took a moment before the light bulb glimmered above my head. “The paste has a supplier, you mean?” He nodded. “The paste somehow gets inside that government building; we just need to piggyback inside with it.”
“No pigs on Planet Six, Randy.”
I shook my head. “No, I meant, the paste goes in, Tag goes in with it.”
He nodded. “Exactly. Why didn’t you just say that?”
“I did.” I stood. I walked to the tray and stared down at the nasty goop. “Where’s it made, Milo? How does it get distributed?”
He scratched his head. “Not a clue. The government feeds us. We feed. We don’t ask questions because we don’t get answers. Besides, I didn’t really care. Before, I mean.”
I sighed. My head was pounding. The big one. The one up top. The littler one down below had at last settled down, for the time being. “Okay, we’ll come back to that one. Now, onto the next question.”
He knew what I was getting at; I could see it in his eyes. We were in sync in so many ways. Scary that our minds were thinking alike. I mean, scary because my mind was generally a mess. Hoarders had less of a mess. “You’ve been wondering about that, too?”
I sat back down, as did he. We were side by side, naked, feet dangling, thighs touching. “Justin Timberlake somehow injected me with a Z chromosome.”
“In five minutes. On your doorstep. With a handshake.”
Not the most romantic vision of my stupendous creation. I pictured Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, with angels flying in, a giant floating clam shell beneath me. Instead, I was more like the morning paper, tossed on the porch. Thud. Welcome the savior. Talk about anticlimactic.
“How did he do it without my mom knowing? They talked for five minutes, she said. He didn’t even come inside, no pun intended.” Okay, maybe a little pun, just a wee one. Or maybe make that a weewee one. “Is that even possible?”
He shrugged. “For a Curean, all is possible.” He turned, those eyes again locking with mine. I melted each time it happened, very Wicked Witch of the West like. “Still, at least we know that you and I aren’t related, and why we look so similar.” He grinned. “And why I fell in love with you at first sight.”
I touched my face. “Pretty.”
He touched my chest. “Everywhere.”
I touched his chest. “Two hearts that beat as one.” I cringed just a bit. Even for me, that was corny to the nth degree. Still, it’s what I felt. I was unique in all the known worlds. Out of the seven and a half billion humans, he’d found me, which made him equally unique—or, you know, damn lucky. Either way you looked at it, we were meant to be together, the deal sealed with a handshake.
§ § § §
We ate dinner in my parent’s apartment. That is to say, we at our paste with no delight, but at least the company was, uh, delightful.
We told everyone our idea.
“We can’t get inside there,” I said, “but Tag can, alo
ng with the paste. Once inside, he can hopefully find the portal, see if there’s a way to destroy it.”
Tag nodded. “One problem.”
Craig sighed. “One? Just one?”
Tag shook his head. “No, Craig. Hundreds, I would say. Though one major one, at least in regards to me.” He turned to look at us. “If I get in, how do I then get back out?” He looked at his legs, or at least through them. “I don’t walk; I follow the device. I can only project a hundred feet from it. If the device stays inside the building, I stay inside the building.” He blinked. I wondered if he did so randomly or on a timer or simply for effect. “I’d prefer not to be trapped inside a building that we hope to soon destroy.”
“He makes a good point,” said Sonny.
Tag nodded. “I generally do.”
“And we need him,” said Cher.
Tag nodded. “You generally do.”
“And he’s our friend,” I added.
Tag stopped nodding. He didn’t even blink. He seemed to be at a loss for words. First time for everything, I figured. “I am a machine, Randy.”
I squinted his way. “You sure about that, Tag?”
He started to reply. He stopped. Eventually, he replied, “I am glad you think of me that way. And a friend would not simply desert another friend in a building they hope to destroy, correct?”
I nodded and smiled. “Never.”
Then he nodded and smiled. “Okay. Then I will think this over.” The hologram promptly shimmered and vanished.
