Cyborgia

by D. M. Darroch

  “Did you do it yet?” asked Mrs. Calloway through a rolled-down window. Ivy ran to the window, spoke with her mother, and walked back to Angus as the car drove away again. Ivy held up a small metal cylinder and grinned at Angus.

  “What?” asked Angus. Ivy pulled the piston out of the nozzle of the Dye-Blaster and began coating it with bright red lipstick.

  “Greasy. Waterproof,” said Ivy. She pushed the piston in and out of the nozzle. It slid smoothly. “And pretty.”

  “Good work,” said Angus. “Give it here.” He held out his hand.

  Ivy shook her head. “No way. My turn to shoot.”

  “You’ve never shot a Dye-Blaster before. You’ve never even shot a Splerf gun. You’ll mess it up.”

  “Angus, you would have broken the Dye-Blaster if I hadn’t saved it from your foot. This is my world, not yours. These are my classmates. It was my potion that got them into this mess. I should fix it.”

  Angus nodded. “Okay. But we’ve only got one jar of dye left. Let me show you how to do it first.”

  Angus showed her two methods: holding the Dye-Blaster against the chest as he’d done and pressing the Dye-Blaster into the ground. Ivy practiced both ways and decided the ground would give her a better range if not an improved aim. When she was satisfied that she knew how to aim and shoot the Dye-Blaster, Angus helped her fill the chamber with blue dye.

  “Well, at least we know it works,” said Angus. He pointed at the ground where the dye had landed. The polymer had melted away in a splash pattern revealing the earth beneath. “Maybe something other than mosquito larvae will have a chance to grow here now.”

  “And I always knew you’d look good with blue hair,” said Ivy.

  “What do you mean?” asked Angus.

  Ivy grinned. “The dye spilled on more than the ground, you know.” She pointed at his now blue biohazard suit. “Your head, too.”

  Angus touched his head. “Really? It looks good?”

  “Terrific. Now, let’s do this.”

  Ivy carried the Dye-Blaster to the spot they’d chosen. She propped it against the ground, aimed, and pulled back the nozzle as fast as she could. A jet of blue liquid squirted fifty feet into the air and splattered against the hospital wall. Within seconds, the air filled with the sound of one hundred active popcorn machines as a gap thirty feet wide sizzled open in the side of the building.

  Ivy dropped Angus’s invention and ran to the mosquito jar. “It’s time, guys! Go find your bodies!”

  The swarm floated out of the jar and sailed upward and through the opening.

  Ivy looked at Angus. His wet, blue, messy head was tipped backward looking up at the building. “The dye really decimates that polymer, doesn’t it?”

  “Yup,” said Ivy. She waved her hand wearily in her mother’s direction. “Do you think they’ll make it? Do you think they’ll get their bodies back?”

  Through the opening in the wall three stories up, alarms began to wail. Angus grabbed Ivy’s hand and tugged.

  “Time to go!”

  The two ran to Mrs. Calloway’s car.

  23

  Home

  AC warmed his hands on the metal camp mug and inhaled the aroma of the hot chocolate. The fleece pajamas felt warm, dry, and soft against his skin. He wrapped the army blanket tighter around his shoulders and squished himself into the camp chair. Mr. Clark tossed another log on to the fire; the wind was whipping up the embers and causing the fire to burn the wood quickly. The Clarks were careful to sit upwind of the smoke.

  “Well, Angus,” said Mr. Clark. “Finish up that hot chocolate, and then it’s time for bed.”

  Mrs. Clark snored in her camp chair.

  AC sipped at the hot chocolate and considered the small tent sitting at the edge of the campsite.

  “Simply to clarify, your expectation is that I should sleep in that fabric hut? It will provide little in the way of shelter.”

  “You will be fine,” said Mr. Clark. “Now, go to bed.”

  AC finished the warm beverage and handed the mug to the father figure. He shrugged off the scratchy wool blanket and trudged to the tent. He walked the perimeter of the tent but was unable to find its entrance.

  “Door,” he said. Nothing happened.

  Perhaps he hadn’t said it loudly enough. This was a primitive world, after all. Perhaps the audio drivers in this tent weren’t as sensitive as those in his world.

  “DOOR.” Still nothing.

  “Angus, what are you doing?” called Mr. Clark from his camping chair.

  “Obviously, I’m trying to open the door of this tent.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to do more than yell at it. For starters, you’re standing on the wrong side. And if you bend down, you’ll see the zipper.”

  “A zipper?” asked AC.

  He moved to another side of the tent, and then touched the metal pull and tugged. The teeth of the zipper separated revealing the entrance to the tent. AC wrinkled his nose in disgust and crawled into the tent. An inflated mattress lay on the canvas floor of the tent.

  “And where am I to sleep? Do you expect me to burrow into this tube of nylon?”

  “That is called a sleeping bag, as you well know. And yes, you are to sleep in it.” Mr. Clark’s voice penetrated the fabric tent walls.

  “On the ground?”

  “On the mattress, which is on the ground. Yes. Now, I don’t want to hear another word out of your mouth until tomorrow morning. Good night.”

  AC zipped the tent flap shut, crawled into the sleeping bag, and after a small amount of bouncing on the air mattress, fell quickly to sleep.

  The doctors couldn’t explain why all the children had woken at once. They couldn’t explain what had brought about the illness or what had cured it, and none of the parents was willing to allow their child to be a medical test subject. Only Angus, Ivy, and Mrs. Calloway fully understood what had happened, and they weren’t talking.

  After they’d left the hospital, Ivy had declared that her world needed to break free from its colorless existence. She had gone on a rampage, using Angus’s Dye-Blaster to blast strategic holes in the gray polymer yards and parks. The dye mixed with the standing water and spread, dissolving the polymer roads and yards and eliminating the mosquito breeding ground within a three mile radius of the Calloway home.

  Billy and Dylan had been the first of the newly awoken children to come to Ivy’s house. Beth and Patricia showed up a little later. Angus and Ivy began teaching them how to make Dye-Blasters while Mrs. Calloway brewed several more batches of dye. By the time the six children had assembled an arsenal of dye blasters, the rest of the science class had arrived.

  “If we spread out and blast all the neighborhoods, within a week, we won’t have to wear suits outside anymore,” said Ivy. “The mosquitoes in this town will all be dead.”

  “Yeah, thanks to Angus for inventing them,” said Billy.

  “And for waking us up,” said Patricia.

  “No,” said Angus. “Ivy figured out that part.”

  Billy hoisted a Dye-Blaster and struck a macho pose.

  “So, now that you’ve fixed us and helped us build these cool blasters to fix our world, are you going home?”

  Angus looked at the children. He’d known most of them since kindergarten. He’d been to many of their birthday parties, was on the swim team with others of them, and there stood his two best friends.

  And then he reminded himself: This wasn’t his world. These weren’t the children he’d grown up with, gone to school with, and shared his secrets with. And this Billy was a nice guy, but he wasn’t Angus’s best buddy, Billy Roberts. There was only one of those, and he was in another world with AC. And his parents weren’t a lady with crazy eyes and a cyborg man with a skin face. He had a real live furry cat, although as he looked at CATT clanking among the children and wagging its stethoscope for attention, he knew he would miss the robot.

  No, the only true friend he had here in this strange cybor
gia was Ivy Calloway. And as much as he would miss her, she was home where she belonged. He needed to go home also.

  “Yeah,” said Angus looking at Ivy. She studiously avoided his eyes. “I’m heading home.”

  He pulled the World Jumper out of the waistband of his jeans and checked the display. All of the codes were listed there: the pirate world, the crystal world, cyborgia, and home.

  “I guess I’m going,” he said.

  Billy grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down, and then thumped him on the shoulder. “Dude, thanks for everything. I mean it.”

  Several of the boys followed Billy’s lead and shook Angus’s hand. Dylan gave him a noogie, stopping only after Angus gave him a good natured punch in the shoulder. Beth shook his hand, Patricia hugged him, and several of the girls ruffled his hair. Mrs. Calloway grasped him in burly blue-stained arms that hoisted him off the floor. Ivy still didn’t look up.

  “Okay, everyone back up. I’m going home now.”

  He selected the home coordinates. Still Ivy didn’t acknowledge him.

  “I’m really leaving,” he said again.

  “Dude, we know. You told us,” said Billy. “Go home already. It’s getting embarrassing.”

  Mrs. Calloway smiled. “Billy, I think he’s waiting for one more person to say goodbye.”

  And then Ivy looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her face was wet. She smiled sadly at Angus. He felt the tickle in his nose that signaled his own tears were about to fall.

  Sensing his distress, she ran across the room to him, grabbed both his hands in hers and said, “I’ll never forget you.”

  “Well, it will be hard to. AC looks exactly like me,” said Angus.

  “Yeah, well. I won’t hold it against you,” smiled Ivy.

  “I’ll miss you,” said Angus.

  “Me, too,” said Ivy. She dropped his hands and wrapped her arms around him. She nestled her head on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. “You’re my best friend, you know.”

  Angus whispered back, “If you ever tell Billy, I’ll deny it, but you’re my best friend, too.”

  And then he did it.

  He kissed her quickly on the cheek. She pulled away and stared at him, shock written large across her face. Her cheeks were pink, but wonder of wonders—his were not.

  “I can always come back to visit,” he said, grinning. “I did invent the World Jumper after all. And I’ve got your address.”

  With a puff of baking soda, he was gone.

  An otherworldly, ghostly howling disturbed AC’s dreams.

  He opened his eyes and saw the fabric ceiling billowing. Shadowy fingers crisscrossed across the ceiling and the walls. He bolted upright, but his arms and legs seemed to be tangled up in something. And then he remembered. He was in a sleeping bag. He felt for the zipper on the inside of the bag and pulled to open the side. He pushed the bag down off his torso and pulled his legs out. He sat in a crouched position on the side of the air mattress and listened.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  What was that? It sounded like the sound his grandmother had made the first time she tried to knit with her new knuckle implants.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  Or perhaps it was a metal cat-dog that someone had left out in the forest during the rain. It sounded like it needed to be oiled.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  Or it was a disembodied specter, a howling phantom, in other words, a ghost.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  AC reminded himself that he was a scientist, not a mere juvenile. It was statistically improbable that a grandmother was knitting in the dark in the middle of the forest. The existence of ghosts, though entertaining fodder for fairytales, had yet to be proven. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion for this strange nighttime noise was that a robot was loose in the woods.

  AC unzipped the tent and crawled outside. He stood and looked around the campsite. The wind had cleared the clouds, and the moon was round and full. The larger tent was visible in the moonlight; he heard Mr. Clark snoring loudly. He turned his attention to the other noise.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  It was coming from an empty campsite across the roadway. Actually, most of the campsites were empty; apparently, few people shared Mr. Clark’s love of camping in mud and rain. AC walked across the road, careful to avoid puddles in his fleece sleepwear.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  The robot was getting louder. It must be in the bushes somewhere. AC peered into the foliage; the moonlight made it easy to see that there was no robot rusting there.

  Hoo ... hoo ... hoo.

  The noise was directly over his head. AC looked up into the boughs of a cedar tree. Large yellow eyes flashed on him. They blinked shut and opened again. How did a robot get all the way up there? AC stepped back to get a side view of the machine. The yellow eyes followed him. The robot was compact and latched securely on to a limb of the tree. AC watched the head swivel around and back, 180-degree rotation, nice trick. He’d have to modify CATT to do that when he returned.

  The robot shrieked and launched itself from the tree. AC was astonished to find that, in flight, the robot was silent. No clanking, creaking, or whirring. And then it was gone. Perhaps this world wasn’t as primitive as he’d first thought. Whatever scientist had created that robot was far superior to any scientist he’d read about in his world.

  As he walked back across the road toward his tent, he heard some scrabbling around the camp kitchen. He walked closer to investigate. Four black and white striped robots scampered around the table: two small, and two miniature. They had tiny ears even smaller than CATT’s. They ran quickly over the table, noses scanning its surface—probably collecting information, thought AC. The tails were fluffier than CATT’s though: AC wondered what their manufacturer had used to create them.

  Quickly losing interest in the little robots and feeling sleepy, AC walked back to his tent. One of the miniature robots saw him and followed. The second miniature robot followed the first, and soon all the black and white robots were walking in the direction of AC’s tent.

  As he was bending down to unzip the door, he was overcome with dizziness.

  “Nice footie pajamas, AC!” Billy laughed.

  “How did you get here?” he asked. “Did your parents take you camping, too?”

  And then he realized he was not about to climb back into a sleeping bag in his tent. He was no longer in a forest. He was no longer in the primitive world.

  And there was Ivy. He embraced her and cried, “You’ve woken up!”

  And then he realized that Dylan, Patricia, and the rest of his science class were there, too.

  “You’ve all woken up! Am I dreaming?”

  “No, you’re home now, AC,” said a woman with crazy, curly yellow hair. Mrs. Calloway. He was at Ivy’s house.

  “Who did this? Who woke you all up? Who brought me back here?”

  “Angus Clark,” said Ivy.

  “Your alter,” said Billy.

  AC put one arm around Ivy and the other around Billy.

  “I guess he’s smarter than I gave him credit for.”

  Ivy nodded. “He’s my best friend.”

  Angus was still grinning when he arrived, dizzy and with a splitting headache, into the middle of a windstorm in a campground. He knew he was in a campground during a windstorm because some idiot had forgotten to stake down a tent and it was whirling across the campsite. He turned to watch it sail away and realized that it looked strangely like the smaller of the two Clark tents. In other words, his tent.

  “AC!” he yelled. “How many of your messes do I have to clean up?” He set off running after his tent.

  Perhaps it was the frustration of having to catch his tent in a campground at midnight, the confusion associated with his reentry into his home world, the excitement of rescuing an entire science class from the hospital, or the daze of his first kiss—whatever the cause, Angus truly didn’t see the tiny family until he was on top of t
hem.

  The smallest one squealed. The next largest one yelped. And then the family of black and white striped skunks turned their backsides to the inventor-in-training and his World Jumper and sprayed.

  Angus closed his eyes, choked, and envisioned his next invention: an Anti-Skunk Force Field.

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  About the Author

  D.M. DARROCH is a cat lady with a gardening disorder. In between grooming her felines and manicuring her vegetables, she scribbles quirky novels. You may meet her on a trail in the beautiful Pacific Northwest where she shares her life with the most tolerant man on the planet and the boy with one billion ideas.

  Read more at D.M. Darroch’s site.