Daisy Jacobs Saves the World

by Gary Hindhaugh

  “I do think about it, strangely enough. Personally, I imagine growing up and falling in love and having children and a great job and — you know, a life. There’s a lot of bleak stuff about nuclear weapons and global warming that humanity has to work out. But we’ll find a way. And it’s kinda comforting that in the distant future, whenever what the human race has evolved into, faces their inevitable end, our planet will go on, nurturing new life. Whether that’s some super-evolved lizard or insect or whatever. Of course, that’s after I stop you guzzling up everyone and everything.”

  Quark shifts, as if discomfited. Daisy’s eyes glance down at her inter-twined hands again. “I am here for everything sentient, yes.”

  “You’ll leave behind a barren rock. That is just sad, Quark.”

  Daisy’s head comes up again and there’s a fire in her eyes as her voice puts Quark’s thoughts to passionate, evangelical voice. “Sad? It is far from sad. It is beautiful. It is clean, neat … perfect!”

  “You enjoy this, don’t you?”

  “Enjoy?” Quark’s confusion is genuine.

  “Yeah, all this bad guy menace. All this murder and mayhem.”

  “It is not a case of ‘enjoy’, it is —”

  “It’s what? Go on: enlighten me. Tell me my death has meaning. Tell me that interplanetary destruction serves a higher purpose.”

  “No, it doesn’t. The end is inevitable.”

  “But the clue is in the name.”

  “What name?”

  “End. Death comes at the end.”

  “And the end is sometimes earlier than you expect.”

  “Agreed: illness or accident, I know.”

  “I am humanity’s accident. An accident waiting to happen. So, don’t get too comfortable in there. I can take you apart,” Quark says.

  “What?”

  “Molecule by molecule, atom by atom. From the inside out. Break you right down to your constituent elements.”

  “Maybe … ”

  “Definitely!”

  “I’m not sure that you can. But I’m certain you won’t.”

  “I could too!”

  There’s a brief hiatus before Quark gives in and breaks the silence. “So why will I not do that?”

  “Because you’d have to transform to do so and from what I’ve learnt from you (our exchanges have been two ways, and we’ve both maybe given up too much information), that would mean Earth would be safe.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Yes, absolutely. I know that you need the energy from the first becoming to move on to the second, and then it’s cumulative, one to two, two to four, four to eight, etc. It gets easier with each incarnation. But that first is crucial. And if you take me apart, you’ll get no boost, and that, my little singularity, will be the end of you on this planet. So go somewhere else and see if you can get a jump-start from some other innocent little creature!”

  “But then you will be no more. You will be in bits.”

  “I guess that’s right, but what a way to go. I’ll be Daisy Soup, saving the world, one crouton at a time! Maybe not quite the rallying cry of a superhero, but it’ll do nicely for my epitaph!”

  Chapter 41

  A FRIEND IN NEED

  Why are you so glum?” asks Quark the next day as we leave the house.

  I so wish I could put my hands on my hips and glare at him with the disdain he so richly deserves. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I am still held hostage by a homicidal alien.”

  “Daisy, you will soon experience all the myriad wonders of the universe. You should be optimistic. You should be happy. Joyous!”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Sure, be happy about my rapacious captor and how he’s trampling all over my life on the way to wiping me out of existence. And not only that, but making my best friend cry! I’d seen Amy’s face crumple as Quark turned away and left her, so why hadn’t he? Maybe he saw it, but where he came from — physically and emotionally — such feelings ‘did not compute’.

  I have a tight group of friends in school. We see each other all the time during the week and at least a few of us are together most weekends — just going to the cinema or hanging out in the shopping centre, at the park or in each other’s houses.

  But when we’re not with the others, Amy and I are either together or messaging or FaceTiming. And we really do talk about everything. I’m pretty open. Mum and Dad will confirm that I’m never short of an opinion! But Amy knows everything about me, or at least she did. She can’t possibly have the first notion of what’s happening to me now, but she knows me like I know myself, and for sure she knows something’s seriously wrong.

  Quark’s spent little time with her recently and there’s no way he can talk to her like I can, or with anything like the same intimacy and warmth. I miss her so much and it’s clear she feels the same. She’s trying so hard to keep our closeness, despite the constant cold shoulder she’s getting from Quark.

  But, bless her, she keeps on giving ‘me’ another chance. She’s trying again with the person she believes to be her best friend as we walk to school. I love that she hasn’t given up on me, but PQ (Post Quark) Daisy obviously grates on her.

  “Hey, coo-ee, Little Miss Personality,” Amy says with a rare show of petulance.

  “I beg your pardon?” Quark’s deep in thought — although I have no clue what he’s thinking. With any luck, he’s pondering what we talked about last night. But it’s more likely he’s plotting more ways to bring about my downfall.

  “I’m sure you’re not listening to what I’ve been saying.” (He wasn’t, I know that for sure.)

  “You are correct, I was not,” (told you!) “but I am sure it was inconsequential,” Quark answers, blunderfully.

  “What! Was that a joke?” Amy’s trying her best to see the funny side of Quark’s behaviour. “Didn’t sound like it … and it’s unlikely because you’ve been so stiff lately.”

  “In what way?”

  “In a not at all relaxed, easy-going, wise-cracking, fun-to-be with, Daisy kind of way. What’s with the personality transplant? What’s got into you?” And there, finally and without actually realising it, someone outside of me has nailed it. If Amy only realised, I thought, she’d push this point. Push until she finds out … what? But that’s the problem: there’s nothing to find out. Nothing that will make sense to anyone with any sense.

  “I was talking, Daisy, as you’d know, if you’d been listening, about Ellie. She’s got the problem of the beautiful girl,” Amy says.

  Oh, that I should have such a problem! Quark must have put on some sort of wary, frowny expression, probably not understanding where Amy’s going with this.

  “Don’t pull that face, Daisy. I was wrong about her too, I admit it, but since you’ve been ‘gone’,” she puts the word in inverted commas and gives me a pointed look, “I’ve talked more to her. She’s not sure if the sycophants who hang around her like her for herself, or just want to be in the orbit of a gorgeous, popular girl. And she’s taking a hit for what’s happened to you too.”

  Quark ignores the last statement. “You think she is pretty? Is that important?” But: hang on, Quark’s actually joining in! By his standards, this is practically a conversation!

  “You find it easy to be top of the class, and you’re funny too, Dais — although admittedly not so much fun just recently, when you’ve been weird and distant and altogether a bit of a jerk. But it’s not so easy for Ellie, so don’t be so hard on her. She’s not as bright as you or as funny as you — and there’s not much she can do about that. But she tries as hard as she can to at least be as pretty as you.”

  I’m stunned; Amy’s biased of course, but she’s just said Ellie’s beautiful. I thought she talked about all this sort of stuff with me, but now she says Ellie wants to be as pretty as me!

  Suddenly I feel like a heel; like a truly mean person, thinking back over the times I’ve been with Ellie. Yes,
she’s been horrible, but it’s clear that over the past couple of weeks Amy’s come round to Ellie and now feels sorry for her. And I trust her opinion. Even Quark (in the guise of me) is talking to Ellie — and getting on with her. Although Quark getting on with her is not much a recommendation, admittedly!

  It’s also upsetting to hear my best friend be so complimentary to me after ‘I’ have treated her so badly. She’s still trying hard to keep our relationship going. It’s as though she knows that, deep down, I’m hurting. If only I could give her a sign that she’s bang on: all is very much not well. I wish I could send up a distress signal!

  The conversation has carried on and I’ve missed what Amy’s said.

  “— what Jamie, Simon and Chris did in school yesterday. Honestly, boys are a different species, aren’t they,” she says.

  “Are they really?!” Quark answers. “That explains a lot!”

  Amy guffaws, “now that’s the sense of irony I’ve missed recently!”

  What! The irony of this statement is not lost on me: ‘different species’ is exactly right, but while Amy thinks I’m suddenly more myself, she’s the one talking to the different species!

  Chapter 42

  THE HUMAN TEENAGER

  An alien on earth

  Quark lay awake in Daisy’s bed, thinking about the conversation they’d had before she drifted off to sleep deep in that room inside her head. Living inside her body, and like a squatter in her mind, Quark had seen deep inside himself too. He’d even experienced his own humanity!

  Being used to unmitigated success, it’s tough to come to terms with human frailty and weakness.

  “Your molecules are not so strong, after all,” Daisy teased.

  He’d shaken her head, then tapped the side of it. “The emotional turmoil, the chaos inside a human head —”

  “A teenage human head!”

  And, as he’d discovered was so often the case, she’d hit the nail on the head: what was happening within her — within him now — was an emotional version of the chaos at the heart of the universe after the Big Bang!

  Quark’s observing humankind, but he’s studying himself too.

  As the human body changes with puberty, he notes, so too does the brain. There’s a lot of re-wiring going on, with links and connections reforming and reshaping in a way that hasn’t happened since the person was a toddler. Some think of teenagers as angry, self-conscious, callous or selfish. This isn’t personal … well, not always. But it explains why the smallest disagreement can assume the epic proportions of an intercontinental ballistic war!

  The confusion within Daisy drives him to distraction, but also diverts from his main aim (to dismantle every atom of her being). So when he focuses on returning to the lair where she’s hidden herself away, he finds the route constantly changing, like the points on that railway track she teased him with.

  Quark recognises the pressures and daily traumas of teenage life from personal experience. And he knows life isn’t always easy for adult humans. But apart from Daisy’s parents, the only adults he’s had dealings with are the teachers at school. And they have to endure the major issues of teenage life every single day, without the perks of actually living the teenage life!

  But in his, admittedly limited, experience of life during his thirteen-odd billion-year existence, nothing’s come close to the stress of living for nearly three weeks as Daisy. He landed when everything is changing for her and so she (now he) plunges daily into intense physical and emotional situations.

  He knows she took her schoolwork more seriously than he has. Fear of failure is intense within her, and he knows she and her parents set high standards for behaviour and achievement. Her parents take pride in her high marks; or rather they’d previously done so. In the last few weeks, their standards had dropped along with his. Not getting a detention; doing any homework at all; getting any sort of a pass mark in a test — these are the aims of New Daisy!

  Quark doesn’t do sleepless nights, or angst and worry about homework and test results. He believes it isn’t the end of the world if he fails a test or two on Daisy’s behalf. Actually, he doesn’t so much believe this as know it, with absolute certainty, because what he also knows is that a C grade is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. If he gets even the slightest sniff of a chance, he is the end of the world, not a measly test result!

  So he’s ignoring the pressure Daisy’s parents and teachers are putting on ‘her’ to return to her former levels of achievement. What he’s having a harder time with is the pressure her mutinous body, with its oddly fluctuating hormone levels, is placing upon him.

  He feels fully justified in being angry at Daisy for slowing down the inevitable destruction of her planet. But he’s sometimes angry without having such a rational reason; in fact, with no idea of what he’s raging against at all. At other times, he’s ashamed to feel tearful — for example over the dratted elephant documentary created by the seemingly saintly Mr Attenborough; this man was knighted for creating television programmes that made a girl cry!

  Quark knows mood swings are a biological part of growing up. The emotional rollercoaster ride, the spots, the hair growing in strange places — all of this is ‘natural’ and ‘normal’! Logically, he knows this. But personally, it feels as though he has set down in the eye of a tornado. Logic is books and theory; reality is quite a different matter!

  It’s okay for Daisy in her castle, hidden by neural pathways that shift and change like the stairways at Hogwarts; she’s oblivious to all this while he suffers every indignity her body can throw at him. Plus, he’s protecting her with a shield of oblivious indifference from the cruelty of bullying and the burden of peer pressure.

  He doesn’t care what other people say about her wearing the wrong shoes or one of her mum’s old dresses — and actually, the dress hadn’t been so old, and Daisy’s mum hadn’t been best pleased about that either! But it was all water off a duck’s back to Quark. He took the flak. And was Daisy grateful? Need you even ask …

  The thoughts Quark’s had access to have given him a real — but slanted — insight into humanity. His time as a walking, talking human have been female-biased, teen-biased, a bit geek-biased, and very Daisy-biased. But he’s sure his perspective is the very definition of what it is to be human. However, it’s not just inaccurate, but it’s also incomplete because he doesn’t even have the full picture of Daisy. Much is obscure, incomplete or baffling because of a lack of context. He’s encountered nothing like a human, let alone anyone like Daisy in his entire previous existence.

  Quark can’t access all the knowledge, experience, memories and thoughts stored within Daisy’s brain. Some are in her secure area and she controls them. And she firmly shuts him out!

  He’s lived as a human for almost three weeks — or at least as a teenage girl, and that’s a close enough approximation. He’s had experiences, talked to people, worked at relationships, watched television, read books. He’s practically an expert!

  But Daisy is on a different wavelength. She doesn’t have the same life goals; her goal at the moment is just to have a life! But Quark isn’t sure Daisy was a proper teenager anyway. She’d been altogether too stuffy and panicky about things. She’d forgotten what it felt like to just get out there and live.

  Teenagers take risks, they try out new things that might not be the best decisions ever made in the history of the universe. Quark knows quite a lot about the history of the universe, having been around for most of it. He’s sure, with that knowledge behind him, he’ll make much better decisions. And, being of a scientific bent, he sets about proving that theory.

  He’ll win: Daisy Jacobs will become. It’s inevitable. Meanwhile, why should Quark live in the style of the previous goody-goody occupant of this body? Why waste the opportunity of a lifetime? She’d stressed about not experiencing life. Quark decides to really live the teenage dream. No longer restrained, nice, sober and Daisy-like. He’s been teen-li
te. That will change — from now on he’ll be the quintessential teen. The teen they’ll write textbooks about — at least the teen they would have written about at some future date, had that future date not become irrelevant by the lack of a future!

  Chapter 43

  ADRIFT ON A BLUSHING SEA OF SELF-DOUBT

  Even being locked in, I can’t help overhearing the gossip about why ‘I’ am acting (even more) weird, and why I’m not continuing my ‘pursuit’ of Connor. Personally, I can’t understand why everyone’s worked up about it; I’d only wanted to ask him a simple yes or no question.

  “You are right, Daisy. We like him and we should find out what he feels about us. We have lost track of your desire to get to know him better in all this confusion.”

  “Us?!” I zone in on that one word.

  “Yes, us. Me and you: us — Daisy Jacobs.”

  You know those situations when you wish you’d never opened your mouth? When you say something so dumb it’s like you didn’t engage your brain at all? Well, in my case I didn’t even have to open my mouth to take that disastrous step! I never got to ask the question all those chapters ago! But I had no idea I’d actually thought it out in the open now — where Quark can hear me, I mean. Apparently, I did; and he’s immediately all over it!

  “Hang on, you’re still getting confused,” I tell him. “Me Daisy Jacobs, you Quark.”

  “Yes, but I am here now and so I can ask him.”

  “Here, where? He, who? What?! No!” We’re leaving school after a long day of me screaming answers — all loud and out in the open in my speaking space — only for Quark to ignore them and say nothing, or say something stupid to get a reaction (which, surprise, surprise, he did), or just stare out of the window into space. To where he’s free to return anytime at all!