Spaced Out

by Stuart Gibbs

  “Because when they realized I was spying on them, they came after me.”

  I slipped between two oxcarts as they rumbled through the main square. “How’d they realize you were spying on them?”

  “I don’t know. I was being as quiet as a ninja. They just sensed my presence somehow. Maybe they’re psychic.”

  I was sure that wasn’t the case. Roddy wasn’t exactly a master of stealth. He had probably sneezed or knocked something over and given himself away.

  Roddy’s avatar stopped in front of me so suddenly that I almost slammed into his broad backside. He was looking up above the market plaza. I followed his gaze to an enormous mansion, obviously the home of somebody wealthy and powerful. A teenage girl stood on a second-floor balcony, staring off into the distance.

  “There she is!” Roddy sighed. “Juliet!”

  Since the girl had been designed by a team of programmers who were most likely male, she looked less like a teenager in medieval Verona than a modern-day swimsuit model. She was actually wearing a bikini, even though they wouldn’t be invented for another five hundred years.

  “Oh, Romeo, Romeo,” she trilled. “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

  “I’m right down here!” Roddy yelled, unaware this was the beginning of her famous speech.

  Juliet didn’t notice him. She continued speaking to herself, as in the play. “Deny thy father, and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”

  Roddy groaned. “Something must be wrong with the language settings on this game. She’s not speaking English.”

  “That is English,” I pointed out. “But it’s from a long time ago. She wants you to give up your family to marry her.”

  Roddy looked at me curiously. “I thought you’d never played this game.”

  “It’s based on a play!” I repeated. “Like, the most famous play ever.”

  “ ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet continued. “Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. . . .”

  “Ugh,” Roddy muttered. “I have no idea what she’s talking about. C’mon. Let’s see if we can find the door to that mansion.” He started shoving his way through the crowded marketplace again.

  I followed him. “What happened after the Sjobergs saw you outside the office?”

  “I took off and hid in the greenhouse. They came looking for me but, luckily, they didn’t find me.”

  “No,” I said. “They found me. And they thought you and I were working together.”

  “I know.” Roddy laughed. It was a weird, high-pitched laugh that sounded bizarre coming from his muscle-bound avatar. “I heard the whole thing.”

  “And you didn’t do anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Get an adult and tell them what was going on.”

  “If I’d done that, they might have seen me.”

  “So you just sat there and let them threaten me instead? Even though I was innocent? I almost got my face pounded in because of you.”

  “But you didn’t. Instead you nearly sucked Patton’s tonsils out with the Urinator! That was awesome!” Roddy laughed again.

  “It’s not funny!” I told him.

  “Incoming!” Roddy shouted. He suddenly wasn’t laughing anymore.

  An entire horde of angry Italians was charging across the plaza at us. Unlike the relatively normal men who had attacked us before, these guys were all as enormous and muscular as Roddy’s avatar. Instead of mere swords, they carried scimitars as big as I was.

  Even though the entire assault wasn’t really happening, it was still scary. I felt real sweat bead on my forehead and prepared to be filleted.

  “Time to upgrade my weaponry,” Roddy announced. He opened a leather bag clipped to his belt, revealing several pieces of gold. They vanished as the game accepted the payment, and a suit of futuristic armor instantly appeared on Roddy’s body. In addition, his thin sword suddenly became some sort of bizarre space-age gun.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Photon blaster,” Roddy replied, then fired several bolts of green light from it. A dozen Capulets were instantly vaporized, leaving nothing behind but smoking piles of ash.

  I didn’t have any gold, nor did I have any idea how to cash it in and obtain a photon blaster. I could only shake my sword threateningly and hope Roddy wiped out all of our enemies before they reached me.

  “What are you doing?” Roddy screamed at me. “I need help here! Don’t you know how to upgrade?”

  “There’s no upgrading in Shakespeare!” I shouted back. “There were no photon blasters in Romeo and Juliet!”

  “Dash! Troll on your right!” Roddy yelled.

  “Troll?” I repeated, then spun around to find that there was, in fact, a troll bearing down on me. I was quite sure there weren’t any trolls in Romeo and Juliet, but obviously the game’s designers didn’t really care about staying true to the story. This one appeared to have wandered in from The Hobbit; it was the size of a garbage truck, it was vomit green, and unfortunately, it was extremely angry. It galumphed across the plaza, wielding a club that looked like an uprooted tree with spikes jutting out of it.

  Roddy fired a few photon blasts, but they glanced off the troll harmlessly. It roared loud enough to rattle my brain, then leaped high in the air, club raised, ready to flatten us.

  “We’re gonna die!” Roddy cried, and curled into the fetal position.

  Something tapped my shoulder.

  The troll suddenly froze in midair.

  All around us, the Capulet assault team froze as well.

  Someone had paused the game.

  Whoever had been tapping my shoulder was now shaking me.

  I pried the hologoggles off and blinked in the fluorescent lights of the common room. To my right, real Roddy was curled in the fetal position, just like his avatar. He was slowly coming to the realization that the game had been paused as well.

  My father was standing next to me. Despite the fact that it had only been fifteen minutes since I’d last seen him, he’d changed dramatically. He was now extremely nervous and worried, so much that it seemed as though he’d aged five years.

  “Sorry to interrupt your game,” he said, “but it’s important. Do you have any idea what Nina did after you saw her last night?”

  “No,” I said, feeling a little bewildered. It was always hard to adjust back to reality after a veeyar session. Even though my near death-by-troll had been fake, it still felt disturbingly real. “Why?”

  “We can’t find her,” Dad told me. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

  I stared at him blankly, trying to make sense of this. “You mean, she’s not at Moon Base Alpha?”

  “No. She’s completely vanished.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged helplessly. “To be honest,” he admitted sadly, “no one has the slightest idea.”

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  THE LUNAR SURFACE

  While MBA is an extremely safe habitat, the lunar world outside the air locks is not. In fact, the lunar surface is exceptionally hostile to human life. Temperatures can fluctuate from -387 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 degrees Celsius) at night to 253 degrees Fahrenheit (123 degrees Celsius) in direct sunlight. In addition, there is no oxygen. For these reasons, visits to the lunar surface should be limited only to cases of extreme necessity, and no children under the age of eighteen are allowed on the surface except for 1) transits to and from the rockets on arrival and departure, and 2) emergencies in which the base must be evacuated. Should you need to exit the base for any reason, never go outside without a partner. In addition, take extreme caution when putting on your space suits, as any mistake or oversight could cause you severe injury—if not cost you your life.

  FRUITLESS SEARCHING

  Lunar day 217


  Midmorning

  On a normal day at MBA, most of the adults worked from breakfast to dinner, and sometimes after that as well. There wasn’t much else for them to do. Weekends didn’t really exist in space. The scientists would have been at their stations in the science pod, while Nina and Daphne Merritt would have been in their offices. Dr. Marquez conducted his surveys of our mental states—or at least tried to—in the medical bay. Since our doctor was dead and our maintenance man was on trial, we were short both positions. Reinforcements were scheduled to arrive on the next rocket in a month. In the meantime, Chang “Hi-Tech” Kowalski, our chief geochemist and resident genius, was doing everything he could to keep us healthy and the base functioning. The only adults who didn’t work were the Sjobergs, who usually hung out in their suite, doing their best to avoid everyone else. It had been three days since anyone had seen them. We had no idea what they were doing, but we didn’t really care; we were happy to not have to deal with them.

  During the time that I’d been battling Capulets with Roddy, however, things had changed. Instead of working, everyone was now frantically combing Moon Base Alpha for Nina. The place was a hive of activity. Since MBA was only the size of a soccer field, there weren’t many places Nina could have been, but they were being searched over and over again anyhow. It was ridiculous, but then, so was the idea that Nina wasn’t in the base anymore.

  “You’ve checked her quarters?” I asked, as Dad and I walked out of the rec room.

  “A dozen times and counting.” Dad pointed up to Nina’s residence. The door was open and Moonies were shuttling in and out.

  “Her door wasn’t locked?” Roddy asked, tailing behind us.

  “Er . . . it was,” Dad said. “But Chang kicked it in.”

  Now that he mentioned this, I could see that the doorjamb was splintered where the lock had torn out of it.

  “We were worried,” Dad explained. “She wasn’t anywhere else on the base or answering her phone. We thought maybe she’d had a stroke or something and collapsed in her room.”

  We entered the staging area and nearly slammed into Daphne Merritt and Jennifer Kim.

  Besides Violet, Daphne was the most chipper and effusive person at MBA. Even now, in the midst of crisis, she was upbeat and smiling. Dr. Kim, a seismic geologist, was almost the opposite: reserved and extremely quiet. She actually spoke a normal amount, but always did so in a very meek way, as though she were slightly embarrassed about what she had to say.

  “We checked the women’s room,” Daphne reported to Dad.

  “And?” Dad asked.

  “She’s not in there,” Dr. Kim said apologetically, as if this were somehow her fault.

  “You’re sure?” Roddy pressed.

  “We both have PhDs,” Daphne teased. “We know how to check a bathroom. We’re going to give the gym another look.” With that, she led Dr. Kim around the corner.

  Dad sighed, looking even more worried than before. “This just doesn’t make sense,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  “If Nina isn’t here, could she have left the base?” I asked.

  “She didn’t,” Dad told me. “Her space suit is still here.” He pointed to the space suit storage area. The door to Nina’s locker hung open, revealing her suit, helmet, boots, and gloves, right where they should have been. Given that there was no oxygen on the surface of the moon, she wouldn’t have gotten very far outside without them—only a few feet at most.

  “Maybe she went out anyhow,” Roddy said. “You know, like she got space madness and lost her mind and left in her regular clothes and croaked.”

  “I don’t think that happened,” Dad said, but then told me, “Although your mother and Chang went out to make sure.”

  I glanced toward the air lock. Through the windows, I could see my mother and Chang in their space suits, returning to base. I couldn’t tell who was who, because they had the reflective visors down in their helmets to protect them against the sun’s heat. I asked, “If Nina went out the air lock, there’d be a record of it, wouldn’t there? There’s some sort of electronic log, right?”

  “Right,” Dad agreed. “And there wasn’t any record of the air lock opening last night. But Chang thought maybe Nina had the ability to override it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Roddy laughed knowingly. “Don’t be such a dork, Dash. NASA has a buttload of secrets, and Nina’s their main gatekeeper.”

  Dad narrowed his eyes at Roddy. He looked like he wanted to smack the smile right off Roddy’s face for insulting me.

  I saw Mom and Chang enter the air lock’s pressurization chamber and shut the outer door behind them. There was a loud whoosh as the air inside the chamber repressurized from the moon’s atmosphere to MBA’s. Mom and Chang popped their helmets off, but didn’t open the inner air-lock door right away. Before coming into the base, they needed to remove the moon dust from their suits. Moon dust is very different from earth dust. Earth dust is mostly decaying matter. Moon dust is mostly very tiny shards of glass created in the heat of meteorite impacts—and it sticks to everything. If any got inside the base, it would be extremely difficult to get back out again. Cleaning it off the suits involved two hoses: one that fired air at high pressure to knock the dust off, and a high-powered vacuum to suck it up.

  It was obvious that Mom and Chang hadn’t found Nina: They weren’t carrying a dead body and they looked concerned, rather than saddened. But the rest of us gathered around the air lock anyhow.

  There was an intercom built into the door that we could talk through. Mom flipped it on and reported, “There’s no sign of her out there.”

  “Any luck in here?” Chang asked. Normally, he sported a spiky Mohawk, but it had been squashed flat by his space helmet, making it look like a small mammal that had died on his head.

  “None,” Dad replied.

  Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez came through the staging area. Somehow, she’d ended up chaperoning all three of the youngest children at MBA. Violet, Inez, and Kamoze were skipping along after her, apparently thinking of Nina’s disappearance as a game. “Nina!” they called, as though she were merely hiding. “We give up! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Everyone else at MBA, having run out of places to look for Nina, was pouring into the staging area expectantly. Dr. Janke and Dr. Alvarez emerged from Nina’s quarters onto the catwalk. Kira and her father exited the medical bay. Dr. Marquez and Dr. Iwanyi rounded the corner from the mess hall, while Dr. Balnikov and Dr. Goldstein came from the science pod.

  The Sjobergs were still nowhere to be seen. Either they didn’t care about where Nina was or they hadn’t been notified she was missing.

  “Isn’t there some way to track Nina’s location?” I asked my father. “Like with a GPS chip or something?”

  “In theory,” Dad told me. “There’s a chip in her space suit for exactly this sort of scenario—but it doesn’t do any good if the space suit is here. And her smartwatch is traceable as well. Only she’s not wearing it.”

  “Where is it?” Roddy asked.

  “Up in her quarters,” Dad replied. “She left it on her desk.”

  “That’s weird,” I said. “I mean, she usually wore it, didn’t she?” As far as I knew, most people wore theirs all the time, except maybe at night or when showering.

  “I never take my watch off,” Roddy volunteered.

  “That doesn’t mean Nina never did,” Kira told him.

  “But it’d be weird for her to go somewhere without it, wouldn’t it?” Roddy pointed out.

  “Maybe,” Kira said. “I don’t really know Nina all that well.”

  “Does anyone?” Dr. Goldstein asked.

  Everyone within earshot looked at one another awkwardly, aware of the truth. No one at MBA was friends with Nina.

  Mom and Chang emerged from the air lock, having finally cleaned the moon dust off their suits. Or at least, they’d done the best they could.

  Dr. Balnikov approached Chang as he lugg
ed his space suit to the storage area. Balnikov was a Russian astrophysicist, a big, hulking man who was surprisingly gentle. “I think we should dig up the blueprints for this base,” he suggested. “Maybe there are ducts or crawl spaces Nina could be inside.”

  “Why would Nina be inside a duct or a crawl space?” Dr. Alvarez asked. He was a water-extraction specialist who’d seemed very straitlaced at first—and then turned out to have a love of practical jokes. In his allotment of personal stuff from earth, he’d brought a dozen whoopee cushions. (They’d turned out to be pointless, though, as the squeaky InflatiCubes acted like whoopee cushions anyhow.)

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Balnikov admitted. “But she’s obviously not anywhere else inside MBA.”

  “I don’t think the ducts are big enough to let a human inside,” Chang told them. “And I doubt there are any crawl spaces in this structure. It’d be a big waste of space.”

  “It still couldn’t hurt to check, though,” Dr. Iwanyi said. He was an astronomer from Tanzania who had been raised as a Masai warrior. After Nina, he was probably the biggest stickler for the rules on the base. “We have searched all the rooms here many times over. Where else could Nina be?”

  Chang considered this, then shrugged. “Good point. Let’s see if we can find some blueprints.” He placed his space suit in his storage locker.

  “What about the Sjobergs’ room?” Roddy asked loudly. “Has anyone checked in there yet?”

  Kira shot him a disdainful look. “What are you saying? That the Sjobergs have kidnapped Nina or something?”

  “Maybe,” Roddy said. “The Sjobergs are jerks. They could be holding her hostage until we give them a spaceship back to earth or something.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kira argued. “If the Sjobergs were holding Nina hostage, wouldn’t they let us know? That’s the whole point of hostages, isn’t it? You don’t keep them a secret.”

  “Maybe they’re still working on the note,” Roddy suggested.

  Kira looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  All around us, the staging area was now a babble of conversation. Everyone was comparing notes about where they’d searched for Nina. Dr. Marquez was admitting that he was completely stymied, which wasn’t that surprising, as he was often completely stymied, even by things he was supposed to be an expert on, like psychiatry. Dr. Goldstein, who had finally recovered from the loss of her squash plant, looked like she was about to burst into tears again. Meanwhile, Violet and the other little kids were still chanting for Nina to come out from hiding.