License to Thrill

by Dan Gutman

  At that moment the light flashed on again, and this time it stayed on.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Coke and Pep shrieked simultaneously. Instinctively, they clung to each other for dear life. They were shaking, shivering. Their hearts were beating rapidly.

  The alien didn’t move, or make a sound, or react in any way.

  “D-do you believe me now?” Pep asked, staring at the thing. “You’re crushing my neck!”

  Still terrified, Coke relaxed his grip on his sister, never taking his eyes off the creature on the other side of the bars.

  “Did you ever hear of the Fermi Paradox?” he whispered.

  “Of course not,” Pep whispered back. “Only nerds like you know stuff like that.”

  Coke ignored that remark. The alien hadn’t moved.

  “Our galaxy has been around for billions of years,” Coke whispered. “And there are billions of stars like our sun in the galaxy. And a lot of those stars must have Earth-like planets circling around them. So the Fermi Paradox asks, ‘Where is everybody?’ With all those billions of planets out there capable of supporting life, humans have never seen evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

  “Until now,” Pep whispered, staring at the alien.

  “I always said I wouldn’t believe in anything that I couldn’t see with my own eyes,” Coke whispered. “But now I see it.”

  The creature had yet to make a move. It almost seemed like a statue. The twins’ heartbeats slowed down just a little. The longer the creature sat there without doing anything, the less threatening it seemed.

  “Do you think it’s alive?” Pep whispered. “Maybe it’s dead.”

  “Or maybe it’s just watching us, and listening to us,” Coke said softly. “Examining us.”

  “I doubt it can comprehend our language,” Pep said, giving a little wave with her hand before speaking directly to the alien. “My name is Pep. This is my brother. His name is Coke. This is my head. This is called a nose. These are my ears.”

  She was speaking very clearly and slowly as she pointed to each body part, as if she was trying to communicate with someone from a foreign country. The alien had no reaction. Its eyes did not move.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Coke told her. “He doesn’t understand English. Who even knows if he perceives sound waves the way we do?”

  “How do you even know it’s a he?” Pep asked. “Maybe she’s a girl.”

  “No woman could be that ugly,” Coke replied. “Anyway, maybe he has some other way of communicating. Or maybe he doesn’t communicate at all.”

  “All living creatures communicate,” Pep said. “At least the living creatures on Earth do.”

  “Hey, stupid!” Coke suddenly shouted at the alien. “Do you understand me now? You’re a moron, you know that? An idiot! You don’t have any brains!”

  “Stop it!” Pep warned her brother. “If he does understand anything, you’re going to make him mad.”

  “So what?” Coke said. “Let him get mad! At least then he’ll react. This guy is boring. Talking to this guy is like talking to a brick wall. Why don’t you say something, you jerk! You’re a dope! Do something! See, he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.”

  At that moment, the creature’s lipless, sunken mouth opened ever so slightly. A sound came out.

  “Flog slab,” it said.

  Chapter 4

  FLOG SLAB

  “Did you hear that?” Pep said excitedly. “He spoke!”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Coke said. “What did he say?”

  “It sounded like frog slab,” Pep said, “or something like that.”

  “Flog slab,” repeated the alien.

  “He said it again!” Pep shouted.

  “It’s not frog slab,” said her brother. There was an L sound in there. Like, flog slllllab.”

  The twins tried to figure out what flog slab could possibly mean.

  “Maybe flog slab is his name,” Pep guessed. “Flog Slab. It’s kinda cute, actually.”

  “That’s a pretty weird name,” Coke said.

  “Well, what do you expect an alien from another planet to be named?” asked his sister. “Bob?”

  “We haven’t established with certainty that he’s from another planet,” Coke told her. “He could be in disguise. This could all be a hoax. Maybe we’re in the middle of some reality TV show. They just want to freak us out to get a reaction.”

  “So as I was saying,” Pep said to the alien. “My name is Pep. Pepsi McDonald, to be specific. We’re twins. We’re thirteen years old. We live in California. We’re on a cross-country trip.”

  Coke looked around to see if there might be a camera crew hiding behind him. As he did, two more aliens came out of the shadows and positioned themselves on either side of the first alien. One was slightly bigger than the first one, and one was slightly smaller. Other than that, they looked similar.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Pep shrieked. “There are three of them!”

  She leaped into her brother’s arms and hid her face so she wouldn’t have to look at them.

  “Flog slab,” said all three aliens. They stared at the twins with piercing red eyes.

  “I don’t like this!” Pep moaned, tears running down her cheeks. “They’ve got us outnumbered now. I want to get out of here.”

  “Flog slab,” said the first alien.

  “Flog slab,” said the second alien.

  “Flog slab,” said the third alien.

  “Maybe they’re a family,” Coke said, trying to look on the bright side.

  “And maybe the family is going to kill us!” Pep shouted. “Maybe they’re going to do bizarre medical experiments on us first, and then kill us.”

  “You watch too many science fiction movies,” Coke said. “Maybe they’re friendly.”

  “Let us go!” Pep shouted at the aliens. “Let us out of this place!”

  “We mean no harm,” Coke said, holding his hands up and making a V sign with his fingers. “Let us live in peace.”

  “Flog slab flog slab flog slab,” chanted the aliens.

  The aliens droned on and on. Coke closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears in a desperate attempt to block out the sound.

  “Stop saying that!” he hollered. “They’re driving me crazy! It’s some form of mind control! Make it stop!”

  “Flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab.”

  The aliens appeared to be excited now, as if they had made some connection with the two Earth children behind the bars. Their chanting picked up a little speed. There was urgency in it. It continued droning on in the background as Coke and Pep tried to figure out what they should do.

  “Flog slab probably doesn’t mean anything,” Coke guessed. “Maybe it’s just a random noise they make. Like cows moo, cats meow, ducks quack, and these guys flog slab.”

  “Flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab flog slab.”

  The chanting was getting louder and more insistent. Each of the three aliens was saying “flog slab” in a slightly different tone, creating a haunting, harmonic effect that served to calm the twins’ nerves and put them into an almost hypnotic state.

  It had been a long day, and now it was getting late. Coke and Pep were exhausted from their experience, and the droning sound of “flog slab” was like a mantra. A spell. After a short period of time, both of them lay their heads on the floor, closed their eyes, and fell into a deep slumber.

  As soon as the twins were asleep, the three aliens stopped chanting and scurried around on their little feet. One of them opened the bars that had separated them from Coke and Pep. The others wheeled in two long, metal tables. Seemingly with no effort, they lifted Coke and Pep onto the tables and rolled them into the next room.

  It was an amazing place—there was a wall made from hundreds of video screens of every size, from postage stamp to big-screen TV. Th
ere were no knobs, dials, or switches anywhere, like you would expect in a high-tech hospital or airplane cockpit. Every screen was controlled by touching it, which the aliens did with amazing dexterity and speed.

  In the middle of the room was a large, white machine that resembled the devices hospitals use to shoot magnetic resonance images of patients. It was, in fact, very much like an MRI machine, but much, much more powerful. While the twins slept, the tables they lay on were wheeled into this machine. One of the aliens touched a screen on the wall, and a purplish band of light shone on Coke, then Pep. The light, accompanied by an otherworldly humming sound, traveled up and down their bodies like a scanner or photocopy machine. Then it stopped and repeated the procedure a second time, in the opposite direction.

  For centuries, scientists have been trying to unlock the mysteries of the human brain. Why are some people “smarter” than others? What causes autism, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities? They want to find out what makes us “tick.” It’s as if our brains were the innards of an old grandfather clock, and we could watch and see how the gears, wheels, and complicated mechanisms ultimately make the clock’s hands go around.

  Just one little problem: The human brain is made of eighty-five to a hundred billion neurons and neural pathways. They’re constantly growing, changing, and dying off. It would take three petabytes of storage to capture the amount of information generated by just one million neurons in a year. The brain generates 300,000 petabytes of data each year.

  Even with the powerful computers we have, our best neuroscientists haven’t come close to figuring out exactly how the human brain functions. It’s far more complicated than sequencing the human genome.

  Someday, perhaps in your lifetime, it will be possible to record every single neuron in the brain and create a comprehensive BAM—brain activity map. Scientists will be able to peer inside a person’s head and see exactly what he or she is thinking, feeling, and planning at any moment in time. It might be as easy as taking an X-ray, or glancing at your smartphone.

  The aliens, possessing a far more sophisticated intelligence than our own, had figured out a way to reverse-engineer the human brain. They knew how to use powerful lasers and nano-robots to measure the activity of neurons in a brain’s cortex. They learned how to create and connect billions of virtual neurons together in a network of simulated waves that worked just like a real brain. And once they had mastered that, they sent these three ambassadors to Earth to see if it worked on humans.

  Using a technology we can’t even begin to understand, the three hideous-looking creatures installed a virtual “sensor mesh” of 364 electrodes on the surface of Coke’s and Pep’s brain. Upon the touch of a screen, the information was extracted, copied, and analyzed. Coke and Pep didn’t feel a thing. Their skin was never broken.

  While the twins slept, a complete map of their brains was downloaded into the alien computer system.

  It took about thirty seconds.

  Chapter 5

  COKE’S NIGHTMARE

  At this point, you’re probably wondering when Coke is going to get thrown into a volcano. Be patient, dear reader. Good things come to those who wait. We’re only in chapter 5.

  While Coke slept, the neurons in his brain kept firing. The result was a dream that was almost like a movie in his head. It looked like this . . .

  Beautiful summer day. Coke and Pep were floating on inflatable pool rafts in the middle of a lake. There were no boats in sight. They didn’t have a care in the world.

  Then, suddenly, the peace was disturbed by a faraway noise—the sound of a motor, possibly a small boat. Coke looked up. In the distance, he could see two tiny dots.

  “What’s going on?” Pep asked.

  “Sounds like motorboats.”

  But the dots were not motorboats. They were Jet Skis. And they were heading directly toward the twins.

  Pep waved her arms to signal the drivers. But they didn’t seem to notice.

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Pep said.

  As the Jet Skis drew closer, the twins could see that two men were driving them. Two men wearing bowler hats.

  “Bowler dudes at twelve o’clock!” Coke shouted.

  “They’re gonna run us down!” Pep screamed.

  “Jump!” Coke shouted.

  He could see the bowler dudes’ faces, snickering and giggling like idiots. He took a deep gulp of air and dove off his raft at the last possible instant before the Jet Ski would have rammed him. It passed right over, ripping the raft to shreds. Coke struggled to swim back to the surface.

  “Oooh, missed him by that much!” cackled the mustachioed bowler dude.

  “This is fun!” shouted his clean-shaven brother. “We should do water sports more often!”

  As Coke’s head bobbed above the surface, he saw Pep, treading water and gasping for breath. Her raft had also been destroyed.

  “They’re trying to kill us!” she shouted.

  The Jet-Skiing bowler dudes were circling around, gunning their engines for another attack.

  “They’re coming back!” Pep screamed.

  “Get underwater!” Coke shouted, before filling his lungs with air.

  The bowler dudes came roaring back, aiming their Jet Skis for the two heads bobbing in the water. Once again, the twins dove below the surface at the last second, avoiding certain death.

  “It’s like Whac-A-Mole, but with people!” shouted the clean-shaven bowler dude as he passed by the spot where Pep’s head had been a moment earlier.

  Coke and Pep stayed underwater as long as they could hold their breath. When they surfaced, a large yacht was approaching from the west. It cruised to a stop. There was a woman standing at the rail.

  “Mrs. Higgins!” Coke shouted.

  Yes, it was Mrs. Audrey Higgins, their germaphobic health teacher. She reached a hand down for Coke and Pep to climb aboard the yacht, and gave each of them a towel.

  “You saved our lives!” Pep marveled. “Why? You hate us. You’ve been trying to kill us ever since you locked us in the detention room and burned the school down.”

  “Well, I didn’t want those idiots to kill you,” Mrs. Higgins replied matter-of-factly, “because I wanted to do it myself!”

  It took a moment for Mrs. Higgins’s words to sink in. It also took a moment for the colorless, sweet-smelling liquid she had soaked the towels in to take effect. But very soon, Coke and Pep were feeling lightheaded.

  “What’s that smell?” Coke asked.

  “I think . . . I’m going to . . . pass out,” said Pep.

  “It’s my favorite scent—chloroform,” said Mrs. Higgins. “It increases the movement of potassium ions through the nerve cells, which serves to depress your central nervous system. The result will be cardiac arrhythmia. Don’t worry, in a few minutes you won’t smell a thing. Because you’ll be dead.”

  Clearly, she was insane.

  Unbeknownst to Mrs. Higgins, a helicopter had landed at the other side of her yacht. While she was busy poisoning the twins with chloroform, the helicopter pilot—a red-haired teenager—had come running over.

  “Step aside, you old hag!” he said, shoving Mrs. Higgins overboard.

  “Archie Clone!” Pep yelled.

  Yes, it was Archie Clone, the teenage supervillain who had attempted to drop them onto the tip of the Washington Monument.

  “Come with me!” Archie Clone yelled. “Quickly!”

  “I thought you died in Washington!” Coke yelled as he and Pep ran and climbed into the passenger side of the helicopter. It had no door on it.

  “You thought wrong,” Archie Clone replied. He grabbed the controls and the chopper lifted off the yacht.

  Archie Clone turned the helicopter and pointed it toward the edge of the lake. Soon the twins could see land passing below. Archie Clone slowed the chopper and hovered over what appeared to be a junkyard. He descended to ten feet. The twins couldn’t see what was below.

  “Pep, I’ve had a crush
on you for a long time,” Archie Clone shouted. “Now, finally, I have the opportunity to express my feelings toward you.”

  With that, he stuck his foot out to the side and pushed both twins out of the helicopter.

  “Hellllllllp!” they shouted as they landed in the dirt inside a four-walled enclosure that looked like it was made from iron. When the helicopter flew away and the dust had cleared, they could see a familiar figure standing at the top of one of the iron walls.

  “Evil Elvis!” Coke shouted.

  Yes, it was Evil Elvis, the Presley impersonator also known as their aunt Judy. He—that is, she—had terrorized them all the way from North Carolina to Tennessee.

  “We thought you died in the RV explosion!” Pep said.

  “Elvis never dies,” said Evil Elvis.

  Suddenly, a grinding noise could be heard. The twins could see that the walls of the iron enclosure were moving together. The space was getting smaller.

  “What’s happening?” Coke yelled.

  “Oh, don’t worry your little head about it,” said Evil Elvis. “This is just a machine they use to crush old cars.”

  “So that’s what Archie Clone meant when he said he had a crush on you,” Coke told his sister.

  Coke took a running leap at the iron wall, but it was too high to climb over. He fell to the ground and had to scramble to back away.

  The iron walls continued closing in on all sides. The enclosure had shrunk from the size of a large living room to the size of a bathroom.

  “Ha-ha!” shouted Evil Elvis. “Finally, I’ll be finished with you twerps! When these walls come together, you will be crushed to death. Your bones will break like twigs and your internal organs will burst like water balloons!”

  “Why are you doing this?” Pep screamed frantically. “You’re our mother’s sister!”

  “I’m doing it for Dr. Warsaw,” Aunt Judy/Evil Elvis said solemnly. “The man I love.”

  Speak of the devil! Guess who suddenly appeared standing on the other moving wall?

  “Dr. Warsaw!” shouted Coke.