Sixed Up
Lubowa.M.Planet
The novel Sixed Up is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Lubowa.M.Planet
First Printing, 2012
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the authors, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed and Published in The United States Of America.
DEDICATION
This writing is dedicated to my beautiful wife who is always supportive and helpful in my earthly endeavors.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 0
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Acknowledgements
Thanks are conveyed to Pete Hofrath for his thoughts, creativity, ideas and sleepless nights spent for making this writing a reality. He is a great writer and having someone who writes and is straight forward as a sounding board proves to be infinitely valuable.
Grateful acknowledgement is also made to Christine Musonge for her time spent editing and proof reading the manuscript.
Cover design by: Rapantin
Chapter 0
Intro
The whole idea behind this story was borrowed / stolen from one of the great Internet storytellers, a man who went by the name cmsix. He posted countless stories about a man, usually a rugged individualist, who found himself on another planet or in another time period or both, usually at the hands of an extraterrestrial. I’m not the only one to use his idea and I don’t even know if it was his to begin with. I do know that he was the best. He had a lot of physical and financial problems in the years before this was written and to be honest, as I write this at the start of 2012, I don’t know if he’s alive. There hasn’t been anything new posted for a while and he’s got more unfinished stories than completed ones. Anyway, this is dedicated to you, cmsix
******************
Chapter One
It’s a bitch getting old. Here I was, back home from my third heart attack, wondering why the doctors put so damn much effort into keeping me alive.
I’ve been on this planet for 76 years. Been through three wives, a half dozen kids who don’t want to have anything to do with me and have been living off my almost depleted savings since I got the letter that the company I put 37 years of my life into decided to declare bankruptcy and that the pension fund was empty.
I struggled from the bedroom to the toilet, then into the living room where I sat in front of the idiot box. I was reaching for the remote to see what was on at 9:30 in the morning when I felt that sharp pain in my left arm and my chest tightened up again.
I sat back, trying to catch my breath without breathing hard enough to hurt when the air started shimmering a couple of feet in front of me. A man materialized in the disturbed air. Something about him reminded me of a British butler.
I could see his lips move and then he looked at me expectantly. After five seconds or so, a high pitched, nasally voice with a Brooklyn accent started speaking in English. Maybe a doorman instead of a butler, I thought.
“Looks like you’re going to die this time,” he said to me. I could see the hint of a smile on his face.
“Or, if you like, we could take you away from all this,” he said, sweeping his hand around, indicating the dirty living room with its decades old furniture. “Say the word and you’ll be transported to our world and put back into the shape you were in when you were a teenager.”
“What do you get out of it?” I asked.
“We need you for an experiment. We’ve been watching you.”
“Oh? Is there something special about me?”
“Not really. You’re a human and they tend to work out well in our experiments. You’ve done a good job at destroying your body. Our species gets a thrill out of taking someone as close to death as you and revitalizing him. Something like restoring an old automobile.”
“What would I have to do?”
“Just live. We’ll fix you up so you could live at least as long as you’ve already lived, then send you to a planet where the people are just starting to form villages. You’ll have your choice of beautiful women, have plenty of game to eat and probably become the leader of a community that will worship you. But you’d better make up your mind because in five minutes your heart is going to stop.
I looked at my life. Even if I was going to live, my life had long since stopped being enjoyable. I’d never bought into any of that life after death stuff and even if it was true, I didn’t want to sit around for eternity, playing a harp and worshiping some ultimate being. I’d be happy to put off either of those outcomes for another 76 years. The whole deal was a no-brainer.
“OK. I’m in.”
******************
I woke in a dimly lit room. I could tell I was on a table of some kind, though it felt soft and molded to my body. I found that I couldn’t move, almost as if I was glued to the table.
The room gradually got lighter until I could see the ceiling. It was stainless steel and I could see myself. I was definitely on some kind of table and I was naked. The first thing I noticed was my stomach. I had a six pack to end all six packs instead of the over-the-belt gut I’d had for close to three dozen years. I moved my gaze down a bit and saw some equipment that would choke a horse. I’d always been a little shy of the norm in that department and here I was a little bigger in a relaxed state than when my old one had been at full mast.
The rest of my body and face matched what I’d already noted. My skin looked as if it had been tanned. Not the orange of the artificial stuff that was so popular with the younger generation but the real dark tan I used the get as a kid, running around without a shirt all summer long.
I found I was able to rotate my head and I looked to my left. The wall was the same material as the ceiling with a built in screen, maybe 50” wide. It was one large graph and there were several other displays that I took to be different bodily functions. There were two rows of screens above and below the others that showed different views of me and the room I was in.
A door swished open and a young woman in white came in. She smiled at me, put an arm on my shoulder and ran a metallic device over my body, like Bones would have done in Star Trek. The thing gave 3 beeps and she looked at it for a moment before pressing a button and putting it away in a pocket. She reached next to my head and pushed something on the side of the table. I immediately felt freer.
“You can sit up but you need to take care. You’ve been unconscious for a long time and you can get dizzy if you try to do too much, too quickly.” She held out a hand and I grabbed onto her forearm for support as I sat up. As I swung my legs around to dangle over the edge of the table, I felt a little woozy. She steadied me until I felt better. I smiled and nodded to her. She did something at the wall near where my head had been and then handed me a glass of cold water.
“Don’t drink it too fast. You’ll be very susceptible to ‘brain freeze’ until you get used to your new body.”
I tried to sip but got carried away. I couldn’t remember water tasting so good and then I started to get the beginnings of a headache. I saw some activity on the displays out of the corner of my eye, one of those things you see but don’t realize till later.
She was back at the wall and came forth with a bowl of liquid. As she got
closer, I could smell chicken soup. My mouth started watering and I’m surprised I didn’t drool on myself.
“There is more if you want it, but I doubt you’ll be able to finish all that is in the bowl.” She did something to the side of the table and a tray appeared over my lap, complete with napkin and a soup spoon. She placed the bowl on the tray and said, “Let me know if it’s too hot for you.”
I dipped my spoon in it and held it up under my nose, sniffing what to me was the finest ambrosia. I opened my mouth, put the end of the spoon in and tilted it, letting the liquid flow onto my tongue.
I must have been Goldilocks because it wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t too cold; it was just right.
I swirled this essence of the gods around my mouth and swallowed. As I put the spoon back into the bowl for a second serving, my body released a sigh of contentment.
“Oh, my,” my female attendant said as she looked at the displays. The large graph was suddenly spiking.
“Damn, what’s wrong?” I asked her. I was really liking this new body and seeing that graph made me start to panic.
“Shh, Shh. Everything’s fine,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “I was just your looking at your ratings.”
“Ratings? You mean, like on TV?”
She looked offended. “I suppose you don’t know any better. It’s like TV the same way your TV is like the old crystal radios.”
“Oh, I remember those,” I said. “Had one when I was a kid. Damn thing was more trouble than it was worth, but I swear, it was damned exciting, coaxing some new sound out of it, hearing things from all over the world. I haven’t felt adventure and excitement like that since I was a youngun.”
I noticed that the big graph had risen to a new level and stayed there the whole time I was thinking about those days. I remembered my best bud Jimmy and how we huddled together in the basement under a hanging light bulb, tuning in the latest radio show, broadcast live more often than not. The graph had recovered and stayed up there while I was recalling the two of us, almost 70 years in the past.
“So, Honey, what’s your name? Or do I just call you Nurse?”
If my TV comment shocked her, this one was a lot worse. “I’m not a nurse,” she told me. “In fact, we don’t have medical personnel and haven’t for centuries. All healing is done with robotics and nanites. No, I’m your producer. And I must tell you, the audience loves you.”
“Audience. The way you say it, it’s like you’ve got a bunch of people watching me wake up and eat my soup.”
“It varies. Earlier, when the feeling indicator shot up so high, when you tried the soup? There were about six and a half billion hits. When you were thinking of your childhood a few minutes ago, it varied from five and a half to five and three quarters. You were averaging one and a half while you were asleep and three to three and a half since you woke up. When you were brought in and the robotics were working on you, it stayed right around four.”
“And those numbers are all billions? What’s with you people? Don’t you have anything to do?”
“Nothing more important than this.”
“That just doesn’t make sense. There’s never been anything special about me, in the slightest.”
“You’re special, now. Your emotions are so unencumbered, so real, so natural. It’s looking like you’ll be one of our most popular ever, maybe even the most.”
“Well, I’ve got to say, that soup was the best thing I’ve tasted in a long time. And it’s been even longer since I thought about the stuff I used to do when I was a kid.”
“Ah. We had a pretty good idea about the soup. A lot of people tuned in just for that. You haven’t had any solid food for two of your weeks and your taste buds have been revitalized. The combination of hunger and the ability to really taste things combined to really bring up that pleasure level. It was almost twice as high on the feeling scale as your water was.”
“So that graph measures feeling, huh?”
“Sometimes. It actually measures intensity of emotions, feelings, desires, that kind of thing; it all boils down to energy. When you got the brain freeze I warned you about, it measured that, too. It was even higher than the pleasure you got from your first drink. You see the small screen on the left, the one with the changing colors?”
I looked where she was pointing. The graph I’d been paying attention to was three feet high and maybe five feet from side to side. It looked like a heartbeat in a regular hospital, up and down, some almost constant levels, but this one stayed up when I was happy or content or whatever for an extended period. The one she was indicating was a foot or two to the left of the graph I’d been watching and was a lot smaller. It was maybe eight inches square.
“Yeah,” I said. “I see the colors. I didn’t really notice it before.”
“Well, that display shows what is going on with you.
You could say it classifies the type of energy the big one measures When you were exploring the soup, it was oranges and reds. When you were thinking about your childhood, there were a lot of yellows and then greens and blues. Your brain freeze was dark blue and purple. The colors show what you’re feeling while the graph shows how much. That rising and falling bar on the other side of the large graph is the number of people who are watching at this time. You can see that it’s pretty good as I’m explaining this to you. It makes good vid when a new subject gets familiar for the first time with ideas that are second nature to the youngest child.”
“Vid? What’s that? TV?”
She almost snorted at me. “I wish you wouldn’t call it that. It’s insulting. Learn to call it vid, please.”
I poked her in the side and got a sharp look from her. “I think your audience likes it when I call it TV and you get pissed off. That bar on the right went up and it’s higher now than it was before.”
Before she could answer, I brought the spoon up to my mouth and took another taste of the soup. It was good, really good, but it just wasn’t the same as before. I guess the second drink of water isn’t nearly as good as the first one to the guy who’s been stuck in the desert. The graph went up but not nearly as much as before. It didn’t stay up for long, either.
“This is great soup,” I told her, “but I don’t think it will ever be as good as that first spoonful.”
“We could always give you a forgetter and put you out for another couple of weeks to see if your reaction is any better.”
I didn’t like that comment – at all. The main graph spiked but the colors were dark blue and black.
“So, I know what black means,” I said. “What do all the other colors mean?”
“They’re different with everybody. We’ll figure them out as we observe you. Different species have different color displays. You are one of the most distinct specimens I’ve ever come across. When you have a strong emotion, the colors are really bright. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone’s fear and anger show up as strongly as yours just did.”
I didn’t say anything out loud but my thought was I’d show her anger if she actually tried any of that shit she was talking about.
“See?” she said, pointing at the dark blue splotch next to the graph that was just coming down from another peak.
“So, how does this all work,” I said, changing the subject. “I feel like I should have tubes in me and all kinds of wires attached to my head and my chest. And there should be beeping noises.”
“We don’t have anything as primitive as that. How would we be able to monitor you if you moved?”
“Oh, wireless. We had that. Bluetooth. So what’s the range?”
“Range? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“How far? The stupid things used to bother me. Stopped working a few feet from my car.”
“Feet are a small measurement, based on your body’s feet, correct?”
“A little larger than mine, yes.”
“It’s hard to believe that anything so limited was useful to your people. You can be a lot farth
er than something you can measure in feet. Did you ever look into the sky when it was dark?”
“Occasionally. It’s gotten pretty bad over the years with all the lights and the smog. I used to enjoy lying on the roof and looking at the stars when I was a kid.”
The feelings graph and audience display both rose as I recalled the sky full of lights.
“Get the idea of the farthest star you can see. One that’s almost too dim to see, not dim because it’s a dim star but because it’s so far away.”
“I can picture dim stars but from what I learned over the years, that’s a distance that’s almost impossible for a human to understand. Something like a million men, one after another, one traveling a million years at a million miles an hour, then the next one starts his million year journey.”
“Much farther than that, but you get the idea. We can pick up your signals from a distance longer than it is to that farthest star. And we have subscribers who are farther from us than that.”
“Subscribers. Farther than the end of the universe. How does that work?”
“The transmission or are you asking about what a subscriber is?”
“Both, I guess. I’m gonna guess they don’t put a satellite dish on their roof.”
She laughed. It sounded good, a lot better than the looks and snarls that I’d gotten when I compared her vid to our TV. “No, there are no dishes. It is all done remotely, and I don’t know if you have the understanding to grasp the concepts involved.”
“FM.”
“No, that was a very primitive form of information transmission. I don’t believe it was powerful enough to cover even your home planet.”
“No, FM radio certainly wasn’t. But we had another definition for it. Anything we didn’t understand was FM. Fuckin’ Magic.”
She laughed out loud. “I see. Well, some of the specifics are FM to me, too. But I’ve got a general idea of how things work and I can probably pass most of it to you.”
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