Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth

by Ned Rust

There was definitely some resemblance between the four-year-old Griffin twins, Cassie and Paul—the thin-lipped mouths, the sharp points of their noses, the spacing of their fierce brown eyes—but that was about it. Cassie was black-haired, slight, and olive-skinned like their mom. Paul, meantime, was beefy, blond, and as pale as milk.

  But where they differed in appearance, they were purely identical in their interests and activities. Everything they did—and thought and tried and said—they did together. They ate together, slept together, bathed together, played together, wandered off together, and had playdates together.

  Today’s playdate was with the only other twins they knew, Phoebe and Chloe Tondorf-Schnittman. Every other Saturday the Griffins dropped Paul and Cassie at the Tondorf-Schnittmans’ at nine a.m., and then picked them up at one thirty p.m. And on the alternate weeks, the Tondorf-Schnittmans dropped their twins with the Griffins.

  The Saturday of Patrick’s disappearance, the Twinfest—as Mr. and Mrs. Griffin called it—was being held at the Tondorf-Schnittman residence.

  The four children had so far spent the entire morning down in the playroom in front of the sixty-four-inch HDTV engaged in a game that entailed emptying three chests and two closets of the Duplo blocks, baby dolls, plastic cars, VTech appliances, dollhouses, baby strollers, folding tunnels, and all other toys and pieces of play furniture, and then stacking it all into a series of unstable towers, which they hoped might reach the eight-foot-high sound-proofed ceiling. The room basically looked as if a giant had up-ended a toy store.

  Mrs. Tondorf-Schnittman had so far failed to notice the project, partly because she had become preoccupied with a slew of urgent telephone, Facebook, and text-message communications. For starters, Jenna Michaels had put out a request for daycare help in coming weeks because she was separating from her husband. No great surprise there, but still a hot item. And then she saw Gail Munson’s message about Mary Griffin’s son going missing.

  Everybody knew what an organized, competent mother Mary was, and the majority of the back-and-forth messages either posited or affirmed that it was all some innocent misunderstanding. But, still, this was a very serious matter, and one that called for immediate response.

  She was unable to get Mary on her phone, but she e-mailed, texted, and posted that she was happy to watch Paul and Cassie for the entire day if it was any help, and “not to worry about picking them up at 1:30!!!!”

  And then, she called Rachel MacDonald, texted Georgia Dolan, and Skyped Helen Heinz about the situation. It was important to let people know that she was going to be watching Mary’s kids during this crisis. Which—as the activities taking place outside her house would soon prove—she obviously wasn’t.

  PART II: INTERLOPERS

  Earth? No, I have no idea why it’s spelled that way.

  —IVAN DUNN,

  bcp §70¶1290

  CHAPTER 17

  Maps & Ants

  The school receptionist—a nervous, khaki- uniformed woman, hair hard and shiny as a mahogany sideboard—seated Patrick and Kempton on a cushioned, lumbar-contoured bench in the Reception Rotunda, a bubble-shaped structure attached to the front end of the sprawling, semicircular Educational Complex. The building basically reminded Patrick of a modern airport terminal, although one with no windows and a lot more hand-sanitizing stations.

  “Is there anything you, umm, require?” she asked.

  “Not that we know of,” said Kempton, somewhat rudely thought Patrick.

  “Okay then, umm, your sixth-echelon magister will retrieve you shortly.”

  “What’s a magister?” Patrick asked Kempton as he watched the woman’s uniformed figure recede down the hall.

  Patrick knew that echelons were what they called grades, thanks to a conversation the family had had yesterday when deciding whether he should go to school with Oma or Kempton. Oma was thirteen years (or yies as they called them here) old, Patrick was twelve, and Kempton eleven. So it had been decided—so that nothing was too academically challenging for Patrick—that he should go with Kempton. Who was in the sixth echelon.

  “A magister is an academic instructor,” said Kempton.

  “We call them teachers, I think,” replied Patrick.

  Kempton forced a smile. “That’s interesting,” he said. “Now, I’ve got to finish a level.” He’d been playing some game on his binky all morning. “I’ll be right back.” He again pulled the retractable strap from the backside of his binky and put it over his eyes in the same configuration that his mother had used last night for her show.

  His disinterest in talking today, Patrick reflected, was a big turnaround from last night when he’d been unable to get Kempton to stop talking. All the excitement Kempton had shown yesterday about being his host seemed to have disappeared. Maybe he just wasn’t a morning person, but Patrick also had the sense that Kempton had been hoping he would get more special attention than he had been for being Patrick’s chaperone. He’d kept talking about how he was going to “mega-index” and “go viral” online, and how the kids at school were going to freak out. But so far, other than for having been kept home yesterday, and for having been sent here to reception rather than straight to class today, there didn’t seem to be any special attention coming Kempton’s—much less Patrick’s—way.

  Patrick was feeling a little disappointed this morning himself, but for another reason. He’d been hoping that by falling asleep when you were already asleep, maybe you would fall awake. Obviously this was not the case.

  The dream appeared to be very much the same as it had the night before. He’d woken up in the guest bed in Kempton’s room and eaten a rather unappetizing breakfast of oats, some unidentifiable (and very hard) nuts, and chalky yogurt. Patrick didn’t pry, but he gathered from this—and from last night’s dinner of eggplant mash, kale salad, and seed-filled pita bread—that the Pubers were vegetarian, like his parents’ friends the Nagars.

  Not that it really mattered. So far, at least, he hadn’t felt hungry in the slightest.

  The only discomfort he was experiencing—despite the overall strangeness of this dream—was a certain sensation of confinement, like he was being expected to sit still through an epically boring church service. Though it wasn’t that interesting stuff wasn’t going on; it’s just that he felt like he didn’t really have any control over any of it. Which, since it was his dream, he guessed meant there was nobody to blame but himself.

  Patrick glanced at Kempton. The light from the boy’s game was playing out on his cheeks.

  He hadn’t gotten a very good look at it but, from when they’d been walking and Kempton hadn’t had it strapped to his face, he’d seen that it involved spheres, cubes, and gelatinous blobs that grew, shrank, pulsed, and zipped around.

  He had a couple questions he’d have liked to ask—about what they’d be studying at school today, about what this “Lasters” thing was that he’d heard Kempton’s parents mention, about where Oma’s classroom was relative to Kempton’s—but he figured it would be rude, or at least pointless, to interrupt and instead turned his attention to the room’s central exhibit: a hovering, slowly rotating globe of the world. It was really big—you could have fit a small car inside it—and its textured surface was animated with swirling cloud masses and blinking temperature and weather conditions.

  Other than being unable to determine how they got it to hover and spin as it did—maybe there was an elaborate system of magnets under the floor?—he was most intrigued by how it was labeled. Iraq was Irak. England was ingLƏnd. The Pacific was pƏsifik o∫un. France was frans. Luxembourg was LuxƏmbōrg. Australia was ostrALEƏ.

  Kempton moaned and unstrapped his device from his face.

  “Hard level?” Patrick asked.

  Kempton nodded glumly.

  “So that’s the storm you mentioned?” asked Patrick, gesturing at the churning red-and-yellow squiggle moving east across the North American continent.

  “Yeah,” said Kempton. “It’s meeting all the mode
ls so far, should be a real record-setter. Lucky thing we live in AR 50 or it might really knock things for a loop.”

  “What’s AR 50, this area?”

  “No,” said Kempton. “AR 50 is the yie. I was talking about our state of technological development.”

  “Oh,” said Patrick. He regarded the big three-dimensional icon, ið, hovering above the North Pole. “And what’s that?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s that?’”

  Patrick pointed. “The thing that looks like a backward six with a line through it.”

  “The ‘eth’ in Ith, you mean?” asked Kempton incredulously.

  “I guess so. That’s a letter? What’d you call it? Eth?”

  “Uh, hello? How else would you write Ith?”

  “I don’t know, I mean, we spell Earth E-A-R-T-H,” said Patrick.

  “What?”

  “E-A-R-T-H.”

  “O-kay,” said Kempton, widening his eyes and turning back to his binky.

  “Hey,” said Patrick, leaning forward as he noticed other strangenesses: “And does that say Antarctica there?” The tribble-shaped island in the North Atlantic was labeled antarktikƏ. “Isn’t that Iceland?”

  “What are you talking about? Antarctica is Antarctica and Iceland is Iceland.”

  “But, on Earth,” said Patrick, bending down and observing the continent at the bottom of the globe was labeled ISLƏnd, “it’s the other way ’round.”

  “Huh,” said Kempton, clearly wanting to get back to his game.

  Patrick glanced up at a large, black-tinted camera bubble in the ceiling. He thought he could make out something moving inside, presumably the camera itself, but just then a strange, stiff-backed man in a bright blue uniform came stumbling down the hallway, leaning forward almost as if walking into a gale.

  “Hello, Kempton!” hailed the man.

  “Good morning, Magister Dorkenlaffer!” said Kempton, standing and tugging on Patrick’s T-shirt.

  “And you must be, umm, Patrick Cudahy Griffin of Earth!” said the man.

  Patrick stood and tried not to gawk at the ribbons and ornaments up and down the man’s chest and arms. Some were traditional medals—gold stars, eagle wings, lightning bolts, and things like that—and some sparkled and even contained blinking lights. A particularly eye-catching one on his shoulder resembled a spider carrying a stop sign:

  The letters on it refracted the hallway lights like the surface of a DVD.

  “Just Patrick’s fine,” said Patrick, steering his eyes to the official’s homely, wide-jowled, heavily made-up face. The man, pleased by this reply, had broken into a fit of laughter that made Patrick think of a drowning person gasping for air.

  “Shall we go to class now, Magister Dorkenlaffer?” asked Kempton.

  “Of course, of course!” He regained his breath and gestured for the boys to follow. Patrick noticed that in addition to the man’s peculiar habit of leaning forward, when he turned, his shoulders and head all moved together—like he had a board strapped to his back.

  “What’s wrong with him?” whispered Patrick as the teacher lurched sideways, pushing open a door that creaked as if its hinges hadn’t been oiled in twenty years.

  “What?” asked Kempton.

  “What’s wrong with him?” repeated Patrick. “He, um, walks a little funny.”

  “Freak triking accident,” replied Kempton a little too loudly for Patrick’s comfort. “Broke his back. He’s still partially paralyzed from the waist up.”

  Patrick followed Kempton and the teacher into a dimly lit classroom. He was pretty certain you couldn’t be paralyzed from the waist up and made a mental note to raise the issue when there was a better opportunity to talk. Now clearly wasn’t the time—far too many people were staring.

  CHAPTER 18

  Adept Intercept

  Novitiate Frank Kyle, one of the 120 remaining candidates for Earth’s coming Deaconry, slowed his Mercedes to observe the activity at 96 and 102 Morningside Drive.

  His dash-mounted BNK-E continued to scroll texts and to squawk calls from emergency responders regarding the missing child at the first house and the old man with the heart attack (exactly three hundred cubits away) at the next.

  “Microparticle detection app, tau setting,” he said to the air.

  “Transcense levels approaching three parts per million,” replied a female-inflected voice.

  He smiled and pounded his fist on the goat-leather steering wheel: he was first-to-scene, which meant the mission was his. All he had to do now was execute the operational orders to eliminate the visitor, and do so discreetly. And that shouldn’t be a problem. A single enemy combatant operating here without any support network didn’t stand much of a chance.

  He punched the accelerator pedal and—without breaking the speed limit—drove off. All he had to do was spiral outward from this location. Now that he’d found the insertion point, the trailhead, he had just to keep an eye on his chemical detectors and he’d find the creature’s path. The residue from the transcense—the unique, unstable substance that had fueled the enemy combatant’s journey here—would leave a faint but detectable trail for the next two dunts (about five “hours” as the locals would say).

  He would find it and kill it and, in so doing, achieve a significant piece of mission experience to separate himself from the other 119 novitiates and boost his chances of becoming one of the final twelve, the new leaders of Earth. None of his peers would be able to deny that—however easy this mission proved to be—he’d have been the one who had put an end to the enemy’s first known attempt to disrupt Earth’s coming Purge, and the glorious Reboot to come.

  CHAPTER 19

  Intro to Modern Chemistry

  From behind fifteen neatly arranged desks, fifteen pairs of luminous eyes studied Patrick as if he were some sort of space alien although, of course, it was they who more resembled bug-eyed Martians.

  “Class,” said Magister Dorkenlaffer. “As you know, we have a very special guest today. For only the second instance in Ith’s history, an Earthling is among us, and our class has the profound privilege of hosting him!”

  Fifteen hands shot into the air as Patrick tried to keep his face from going any redder than it already was.

  “I need not remind you to be on your very best behavior and to accord him—Patrick Cudahy Griffin—every courtesy. He is a stranger and deserves your alpha-level interpersonal protocols at all times. Now, questions, and— Nevis! Do you require a time-out? You know there is no personal videography permitted in classrooms! Shocking!”

  A slight, towheaded boy in the third row dropped his binky to the desk and slumped down in his seat, eyes lowered as he received the big-eyed staring treatment from his peers.

  “Yes, Timar?” said Magister Dorkenlaffer, pointing to a copper-skinned boy in the front row.

  “Is he related to Rex?”

  Magister Dorkenlaffer turned to Patrick. “Are you related to Rex?”

  “Who’s Rex?” asked Patrick.

  “He doesn’t know who Rex is!” a girl yelled from the back of the room.

  “Oh, dear,” said Magister Dorkenlaffer, adjusting his brass-buttoned shirt collar. “Umm, Rex was, you know, the first Earthling, umm, emissary … Surely you are familiar with Doctor Rex Abraham?”

  “He arrived here on Ith fifty yies ago,” offered Kempton.

  Patrick shook his head.

  Magister Dorkenlaffer cleared his throat. “Of course there are differences between Patrick’s world and ours. Now, Kempton Puber, would you please show our guest to his seat?”

  Patrick followed Kempton to two vacant desks in the first row.

  “The important thing at this juncture,” said the teacher, reading from his handheld screen, “is that we all recognize the significance of our Earth brother’s arrival and are eager for him to become an integral member of society. To that end,” he said, “Patrick Cudahy Griffin, you will please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help you in an
y way, or—on the other hand—if there is anything we are doing that makes you uncomfortable that we should therefore stop doing.”

  “Does this mean there will be another Pandemic?” blurted a girl with the most elaborately bejeweled cornrows Patrick had ever seen.

  “Bilma!” said Magister Dorkenlaffer. “I don’t believe you were called on to ask a question and of course there is not going to be another Pandemic. You know modern science has made such a thing statistically impossible.”

  The girl seemed somewhat abashed but fired off another question anyhow.

  “And will he die before very long, like Rex did?”

  “Bilma, I still haven’t authorized you to ask a question, much less one even more patently ridiculous than your first! Don’t make me put a note out to the Admins!”

  Bilma promptly sat down and closed her mouth.

  Magister Dorkenlaffer meantime turned back to Patrick and, seeing the confusion on his face, hastened to explain: “Rex died in the Pandemic.”

  “Yeah, when he saved the Seer!” yelled the same boy who’d asked if Patrick was related to Rex.

  “Class!” Magister Dorkenlaffer yelled. “Remember the Twelfth Tenet: Patrick is an emissary; he is not a paid performer here for your amusement!” He coughed into the forest of wiry gray hairs on the back of his hand before adding, “I’m certain the Seer is right now entirely appalled at your behavior.”

  The students did not seem to like this thought and fidgeted uncomfortably.

  “Umm, who’s the Seer?” asked Patrick.

  Everybody gasped except for Magister Dorkenlaffer, who gurgled.

  “She’s, umm,” said Magister Dorkenlaffer, again adjusting his shirt collar, “you know, err, much like your Hearer.”

  “My hearer?” asked Patrick.

  “Yes,” said Dorkenlaffer. “The leader of your sense, the ruler of your world.”

  “You mean the President of the United States?”