L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35

by L. Ron Hubbard

  He had been using a small rented rowboat that day and found the cave in the rocks late in the afternoon, hidden from view of the main traffic on the lake. The robot had been underwater and when he rowed into the cave, it appeared.

  Turns out it was lonely. After the shock at being able to understand what a giant robot was saying, Carl said he had relaxed and it seemed the two of them had similar issues. Carl felt lost and the robot was lost, separated from the other robots in his group.

  The robot had been hiding there since right after the dam had filled.

  Over the next few weeks, Carl went back every day and, by talking to the robot, Carl came to realize he needed to face his future and not hide from it. So he told the robot he hoped to survive the war and return. He said that knowing that robot was there kept him alive in Vietnam more than anything.

  But when he got back, the robot was gone. Once or twice a year, Carl went back to the same area, searching for it, but could not find any sign of it.

  “My only hope,” Carl said finally, “was that the robot found his own kind.”

  I nodded.

  It had been clear from Carl’s thoughts that the existence of that robot had got him through the war and kept him going through hard times in his life.

  “Can you show me on a map exactly where this cave is?”

  He frowned, clearly feeling slightly shocked that someone was giving his story complete credence, and then stood and headed off down the hallway to a back room.

  Jean reached over and touched my arm, a smile on her face and tears in her eyes. “Thank you.”

  I flat loved her touch, but strangely enough, at the moment, my entire interest had turned to finding that robot. I really believed that it had existed, as Carl said, and the superhero detective in me really wanted to find it.

  Carl came back with a map and easily showed me exactly the rock wall where the cave was. I asked if I could take the map and he agreed.

  “I got some friends who might be able to help me with this,” I said, standing and refolding the map. “We will see what we can find.”

  He shook my hand again and I could read how pleased he was that I was taking him seriously. He had no expectations, but clearly I had done what Jean wanted me to do in his last days.

  Jean walked me out to my car and once again shook my hand. I could feel her interest in getting to know me more and how thankful she felt. I didn’t mind, but at the moment I had a lost robot to find, or at least prove it had existed at one point in time. No small case. But I loved the challenge.

  And I didn’t get that many really challenging cases after two hundred years on the job.

  THREE

  Every aspect of life has gods and superheroes attached. I am a superhero in the detective area. We live a long time, possibly forever, and we have special powers that help us in our profession. There are food gods, sports gods of every type, and even poker gods and superheroes. One of the most famous is Poker Boy. His girlfriend is a superhero in the hotel hospitality area and Poker Boy calls her Front Desk Girl, but not to her face.

  What I needed for help was a superhero in the area of lost-and-found items. And in the Las Vegas area, I only knew of one.

  Plane.

  I mean, I at least had a second name that went with Sky, but Plane, as far as I knew, only went by one. Just Plane, the kind that flies, not the boring kind. That was his standard line.

  Plane topped the scales at well over four hundred pounds and lived in a giant home just outside of Vegas that had to be the size of a major grocery store, filled to the ceiling in most places with stuff.

  He always wore silk suits and bright ties that he never tied completely. He wore standard, white tennis shoes with his silk suits and kept a baseball cap on his head at all times.

  On top of that, Plane was a hoarder. He would be a cliché if he wasn’t older than I was and as rich as most countries from buying and selling stuff.

  He was one of those hoarders who knew exactly where everything was in every pile and the current value of it on the open market. I had only been in his home once, about five years before, but he took a liking to my beak of a nose. Not sure why, maybe it was so strange it was collectible.

  So I parked my caddy in my spot in the Ogden parking garage, and teleported out to his place. I had warned him I had something really special that needed finding and he had just grunted and said, “Get here before dinner.”

  Since it was only just before noon, I figured I had some time.

  I teleported there and found him sitting in his big office chair surrounded by at least a dozen computer screens, all showing auctions going around the world.

  He put his finger up for me to be silent and wait and less than one minute later he sighed and turned to face me. From what I could tell he had lost all the auctions he had been bidding on. I said nothing. Last thing I wanted was to get a collector going on the unfairness of the new world of computers and eBay and the internet.

  “So what are you looking for?”

  “A giant robot. Real, telepathic, about sixty feet or so tall, vanished in the Lake Mead area in the 1960s.”

  He stared at me for a moment with tiny, dark eyes that I wasn’t certain could see out of the rolls of fat on his forehead and cheeks, then said, “You aren’t kidding, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Client’s father made friends with it back in the 1960s before he shipped off to Vietnam. The robot was gone when he got back and now the guy is dying of cancer and wanted to tell his story.”

  Plane knew my powers, knew I had read the guy’s mind to see if he was telling the truth. So he just nodded.

  I pulled out the folded map and put it on a pile of papers near Plane so he could see it, then pointed at the spot. “A cave that was at the water line back then. He says he goes back out there twice a year to see if the robot has returned.”

  Plane nodded and stood. “You want to jump us there or you want me to.”

  “Safer if you do it,” I said. I didn’t feel good about trying to land someone of his bulk on a pile of rocks.

  He nodded and a moment later we were standing on rocks about a hundred feet above the waterline of the lake. There was a dry wind blowing and I felt damned happy the temperatures were moderate today. On a hot summer day, this would be an oven.

  Plane was looking behind us and after a moment pointed and said, “There.”

  He jumped us into the mouth of a cave that clearly had been under water at one point.

  “This is the place I saw in his mind,” I said, nodding.

  Plane again jumped us to a spot above the waterline in the back of the cave, then said simply, “Brace yourself, this rewinding time thing can get a little crazy-making.”

  With that, outside the cave the sun started blinking like a strobe light as Carl took us back in time until eventually in front of us the cavern filled with water.

  Then he slowed it down and I caught a glimpse of a young man in a rowboat.

  “Here,” I said.

  Plane had already stopped time.

  “No worry, he can’t see us,” Plane said. “We’re outside the time stream.”

  I nodded, thankful he had answered my unasked question.

  As we watched, a young guy, clearly the Carl I had met before he went off to war, rowed slowly into the cave.

  And as he got to the back edge, just as I’d seen in his mind, a pointed-headed robot came up out of the water slowly. I found it very impressive that Carl didn’t instantly panic and row like hell out into the lake, but eventually it became clear they were talking.

  After Carl left that day, the robot simply sank back into the water.

  Plane sped us forward to the next day and then the next until finally it was clear that Carl was saying goodbye. This time the robot watched him row away before he sank back into the water.

&n
bsp; Illustration by Bob Eggleton

  Three months later, we watched the robot wade out of the now-shallow cave and into deep water.

  “Okay,” Plane said, “I got the robot’s signature. If it is still on the planet, I’ll find it.”

  Plane flashed us back to the present. Then seemed to focus far away.

  I waited as patiently as I could until he returned to his beady eyes. “He’s still here, along with a couple dozen friends.”

  “What?” I asked, stunned.

  Plane pointed to the deepest part of the lake in front of us, “They are living down there. And I got a hunch this is bigger than both of us.”

  I nodded and looked slightly upward. “Laverne. I think Plane and I have found a problem. Would you join us for a moment?”

  In all my years, that was only the third time I had called Laverne, Lady Luck herself. She ran everything and was the most powerful god there was.

  She appeared beside me dressed in a dark silk power suit that fit her thin body perfectly. She had her long dark hair pulled back tight, which gave her thin face a stern look.

  She flat scared the hell out of me. The most powerful being in all the universe would do that to a normal person.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I did a very quick summary of my client, her father, and what Plane and I had just seen in the 1960s.

  “Pointed heads, jet packs on the back, dark eyes?” Lady Luck asked.

  Plane and I both nodded.

  “Maybe thirty of them down there,” Plane said.

  “Well, shit,” Lady Luck said. “That’s where they went.”

  “You knew about them?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

  She nodded, staring down into the lake below us. “Back when we fought the Titans, before Atlantis, we created them to help us and built a world for them to live on. Most were destroyed in the battles, but they helped turn the tide. After the war and then with Atlantis going down, we lost track of the survivors because without our help they couldn’t go home. And honestly I had never thought of them for centuries until now. “We called them Lightning.”

  “That’s why the lightning bolts painted on them?”

  She nodded. “Amazing they are still here and hiding after all these years. We need to get them out of there and get them home. More than likely they have no idea the war is even over.”

  “The war with the Titans?” Plane asked.

  Laverne nodded.

  My knowledge of the history of the gods and superheroes was slim, at best. I just couldn’t imagine how long ago that war was, or how old Lady Luck really was.

  “Where is their home?” I asked.

  “Deep in space,” she said, waving her hand and dismissing my question. “I’m going to need help with this. I want to thank you both for this incredible find. We owe it to the Lightning to get them home.

  “I have one favor to ask,” I said before she could vanish. And I asked and she laughed and said, “Of course.”

  So three days later Jean and I were in a rented speedboat that had towed Carl in a small rowboat out to the area where I knew the robots were. I hadn’t told Jean or her father a thing, just that I had a surprise for them. Both of them thought I was being stupid, but they went along.

  The evening was still warm and thankfully the wind was fairly calm, so the waves on the lake weren’t bad at all. I normally wasn’t a fan of small boats, but for this, I wasn’t going to miss it, even if I had to dogpaddle out here.

  After we unhooked Carl’s rowboat from the speedboat, I turned off the engine and pointed to a spot. We watched him row toward it. For a man near death, he was surprisingly strong.

  As he reached the spot, a metal pointed head slowly eased up out of the water.

  We all just watched as the robot got about halfway out of the water and stopped, facing Carl directly.

  I knew that was the last of the robots left, the very one that Carl had met. All the others had left last night under cover of darkness. Lady Luck had asked if it wanted to stay behind for just a short time and say goodbye and it had. It really was the last of its kind left.

  Clearly the two of them were having a conversation, but from our distance, we couldn’t hear Carl’s side of it, even though he was speaking aloud.

  Finally Carl nodded and the robot moved a little farther way and then silently its rocket packs fired and it lifted out of the water and into the air, not even causing a slight wave. In a moment it was gone into the late afternoon blue sky.

  I started the speedboat and we went over to where Carl just sat in the rowboat, head down, smiling. We got him back into the speedboat and the rowboat tied to the stern.

  “Are you all right, Dad?” Jean said, putting a jacket over Carl’s shoulder.

  Carl smiled and nodded. “He’s just like me. He’s a survivor, and he finally gets to go home after his war. And now, I feel like I do as well.”

  Then Carl just sat there smiling in the back of the boat and there just wasn’t a thing Jean or I could say.

  Five weeks later I got a call from Jean that her father had passed away in his sleep, peacefully. I attended the funeral two days later.

  Two weeks after that Jean called me to talk. I figured she wanted to know how I had done what I had managed to do for her father. And that was going to be a tough topic to get through.

  But it didn’t turn out that way.

  The two of us sat with glasses of wine and then had a great dinner. And besides getting to know a little more about each other, we talked most about her father and his incredible life, how he had finally gotten to come home from his war.

  And how he had helped his friend do the same.

  Are You the Life of the Party?

  written by

  Mica Scotti Kole

  illustrated by

  JOSH PEMBERTON

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mica is a freelance developmental editor based near Detroit, Michigan. She started writing stories in kindergarten, opening with a colorful series based on her zoo-animal Duplos (involving, at one point, flying go-carts that ran on … coconuts?). She is also the curator of Free Writing Events, a Twitter account and website, which compiles and promotes free-to-enter online writing events and contests to over 20,000 authors (it’s how she discovered Writers of the Future). She writes YA fantasy long-form and adult science fiction short-form, and her current obsessions are home-brewing, Steven Universe, and board games that start with the letter M. She is also the founder and host of the #Write4Life charity event, which aims to help other writers get edited and agented. She quit her day job to pursue the dream of writing in 2016, and this is her third professional publication. She will be querying her third novel next year. You can find her services and Free Writing Events calendar at micascottikole.com or on Twitter at @Writevent.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Josh Pemberton was born in 1987 in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Seattle, Washington.

  From posters of oceans and dinosaurs on his walls as a young child, Josh has held a consistent fascination in the capacity of images to ignite his imagination and has sought to understand and unravel that mystery ever since.

  He went on to graduate with a major in studio art at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Then spent three years studying in the drawing and painting atelier program at Gage Academy of Art, and finally went on to receive his MFA in illustration at the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco, California.

  Primarily working with traditional materials, themes of the mythic, fantastic, and natural world hold his interest. Josh currently is seeking to establish himself within the illustration world while continuing to work with private clients and commission work. www.joshpemberton.com

  Are You the Life of the Party?

  Question Seven: How do you like to be kisse
d?

  Eddie tapped his front teeth with the clickable end of his pen. The waxy pages of the old Teenspeak magazine shone blue in his hands, reflecting the blinking lights of the console as he considered his options. A: soft and sweet. B: deep and dark … He laughed aloud at the absurdity. The Engineers were good about giving him stuff to read, but they missed the mark on his gender and age.

  A speaker on the control panel blared, “Operator, request closure of Gate B-4.”

  Eyeing his quiz choices, Eddie palmed the mic button and said, “You got it.” It was old habit; the Engineers didn’t need confirmation. All they needed was for him to cut the connection and do what he was told, which he did, right after placing the folded magazine on a switch panel and circling A for soft and sweet.

  Trust your old dad on this one, Rissa, he thought. It’s best to keep away from the rough ones.

  Swiveling in his chair, Eddie fiddled with a monitor and cocked his head. He heard a monotone rumble as Gate B-4 closed. Beyond the glittering console and the bulletproof glass of his tower, Eddie could make out the rat’s maze of thirty-foot partitions spreading off into the distance below him. Bleak and dim, the nearest section was empty of subjects, human or non.

  He leaned back in the chair and flipped up the magazine. Question Eight: There’s a house party this weekend. You:

  Eddie crossed off are throwing it and smiled to himself. “I don’t think so, Rissa.” Then he circled C: are getting everyone to go!

  “You’ll get there, sweetie,” he told the empty room. His Rissa had always been introverted—she had a misanthrope for a dad, so it was no surprise—but she was so much better than he was, good-looking, smart, and so nice to everyone.… Before the prank, she’d had more friends at one time than Eddie had ever had in his life.

  He made a fist, gripping the corner of the magazine. “Some friends,” he growled to no one.