My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord

by David Solomons

“Morning, son. And how are you this fine—oh, hang on.” He broke off to repeatedly stab the FIRE button on the game controller. On-screen, a familiar building exploded in a cloud of radioactive dust.

  “Isn’t that the Walgreens on Main Street?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Dad nodded, concentrating furiously on the game.

  A video game set in our town? Strange, I thought. Then again, no stranger than a superhero living here. The empty box lay discarded on the floor. LAB RAT GAMES, read the logo on the side. I’d never heard of them. Rising out of the cover art—a colorful illustration of the suburbs in flames—was the title in big letters: Puny Earthlings! Dad must have bought it in town—the same town he was now gleefully turning to rubble. This was great. But then I remembered that Mom had imposed a thirty-foot exclusion zone around my Xbox. I took a step back.

  “Where’re you going?” asked Dad. “We can play together.” He tossed me the second controller.

  Well, OK then. If it was fine with Dad, then it was fine with me too. I slid onto the sofa beside him and jumped right into the game.

  From what I could pick up playing through the Main Street level, it was a twist on the alien invasion story. Instead of fighting off hordes of attackers from outer space, you were the aliens. You could jump from the cockpit of a fighter-bomber to the bridge of the mile-long mother ship to the strategic brain of the Alien Overlord itself. Lab Rat Games had gone to town on the design. The graphics gleamed. Our town had never looked better—apart from the craters and mass devastation, obviously.

  The designers had not only lovingly re-created the town; they’d also reproduced its inhabitants. Individual faces were recognizable. There was the mayor, there the lady from the post office, over there the man who drove the ice-cream truck that was always parked outside our school in the afternoon.

  “Don’t you think this is all a bit . . . odd?” I said.

  Dad didn’t look up from the screen. “Attention to detail, son—that’s what it is. Y’know, the thing almost entirely absent from your homework.”

  I ignored the insult. “Is that Mitali from down the block?” I leaned in. A small human figure zigzagged her way through the park, trying to shake off a squad of alien shock troops. “They’ve even got her Avengers backpack.” If Mitali is in this game, I wondered, could I be in it too? Immediately I flew my assault craft down Moore Street and parked outside our house. I guided my alien warrior from the cockpit and lumbered up our driveway, disintegrated the front door, and barged inside.

  My mom and dad stood in the hallway.

  I burst out laughing. They looked just like the real thing, right down to the frowny expression Dad gets when he’s reading an instruction manual.

  “I don’t remember giving permission for this,” said Dad, on seeing his virtual self.

  “No,” I said, “but you have to admire the attention to detail.”

  He shot me a sideways look, and then his expression returned to one of puzzlement. “How did they get our images?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe they took it from your library card?” I didn’t care. It was so cool. I searched the house, but there was no sign of a virtual me. Zack, however, was in his bedroom reading a book. Typical. Dad stopped me from blasting him to ashes.

  I brought up an on-screen menu and, with a couple of button pushes, jumped out of the soldier and into the Alien Overlord’s character in the command ship. I returned to the important business of invading the planet.

  The earthlings sent in their military. Battle tanks, attack helicopters, and strike fighters all fell before our superior alien weaponry. But just when I thought we couldn’t lose came the next twist in the game.

  Earth’s greatest defenders showed up.

  Star Guy and Dark Flutter swooped in, and before I knew it, they had kicked our alien bottoms back to Centaurus A.

  The defeat triggered the final cut-scene animation showing what was left of the invasion fleet turning their green tails and fleeing the earth.

  Dad turned to me, arched one eyebrow, and gurgled, “So, Admiral Flibol, Terror of the Ninth Quadrant, Vanquisher of the Lorbofloz Horde, Holder of the Order of the Shining Custard for Valor, shall we play again?”

  We did. We played through the morning, four bowls of Cocoa Puffs, most of two large pizzas, a liter of Coke, a carton of Extremely Chocolaty Temptation ice cream, the entire box of Girl Scout cookies at the back of the cupboard that Mom thought we didn’t know about (they were Tagalongs), a box of after-dinner mints individually wrapped in green foil that were a present, a can and a half of Pringles, and an apple (for nutritional balance).

  As I launched yet another fiery invasion upon the panicking humans, I took a moment to admire another aspect of the game: the R & D laboratory (which Dad explained stood for “research and development” and not “railguns and Death Stars,” though he did agree that in this case it could just as easily mean that). Here, deep in the heart of the Alien Overlord’s mother ship, you used nanomachine replicators to design and build all kinds of weapons—from the obvious, like sonic blasters and thermal detonators, to the unusual, like a tank that you grew in a tank, and genetically mutated attack penguins. You could create almost anything you could imagine. It was like evil Minecraft.

  Remembering how Zack had been weakened when he was cut off from starlight, I cobbled together a weather weapon with the capability to turn the skies cloudy. But the game versions of Star Guy and Dark Flutter simply flew up through the clouds to recharge. (In real life, after what had happened with Christopher Talbot, Zack never went out unless he was at least half-charged, and always filled up at the end of each day. He was as careful about recharging as he was about handing in his homework on time.)

  When Dad and I finally lowered our game controllers and lifted our bloodshot eyes from the screen, we saw that the devastation we’d brought to our virtual town was mirrored in our living room. A landfill’s worth of cardboard packaging and scraps of food littered the carpet. On the wall, where the painting that Mom did at art school had hung, was a dusty outline and a nail. I vaguely remembered a crash behind me during the final ground assault on the mall, but had assumed it was due to the excellent surround sound.

  Dad retrieved the painting from behind the sofa.

  “Why didn’t Mom do art instead of getting a job in insurance?”

  Dad thought for a moment. “It’s good to follow your dreams, but it doesn’t always work out, and then you have to know when to stop. And that’s tough.” He traced a finger lightly over the painting before hanging it once again in its place on the wall.

  “Dad, did you stop dreaming?”

  He nodded slowly. “But it was much easier for me.”

  “Why? What did you want to be?”

  He straightened the painting. “A Jedi knight.”

  That figured. Dad surveyed the wreckage of the living room. “We should probably get out the vacuum cleaner.”

  “Yeah, we probably should,” I said.

  “Or . . .” Dad’s eyes swiveled to the TV. The game menu filled the screen, the START button pulsing like a neutron star. “Puny earthlings!” boomed a synthesized alien voice through the speakers.

  “No. We can’t,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Ready, player one?” said Dad.

  Amazingly, by the time Mom came home from work, there was no sign of our marathon gaming session. The carpet, which at one point had disappeared beneath a mountain of debris, was now entirely visible, and the bottle of I Can’t Believe It Was Butter stain remover had proved remarkably effective with the Extremely Chocolaty Temptation spills. I caught her briefly inspecting her painting on the wall, but if she had any suspicions, they didn’t last long. Dad had prepared dinner as a distraction. When I’d asked him earlier what he was making, he replied, “Tactical shepherd’s pie.”

  Zack called to say we shou
ldn’t wait for him, because he was—and I quote—“staying late at the library.” Your guess is as good as mine.

  I’d enjoyed playing Puny Earthlings! with Dad. There was just one problem. Despite spending the whole day devising more and more outrageous strategies, we had failed to overcome the combined forces of Star Guy and Dark Flutter. The game was simple. You couldn’t win until you’d neutralized Earth’s superheroes.

  All through dinner I could think of nothing else. I knew it wasn’t merely the challenge of the game that made me burn to brush Star Guy and Dark Flutter aside. Defeated by them in the virtual world, I had also been rejected by them in the real world. And it stung worse than my unfortunate wasp presentation. As I brushed my teeth, I made a decision. While I couldn’t get one over on them in real life, I resolved to crush them in the game.

  As I slipped into bed, I suddenly remembered the airplanes and my suspicions about an electromagnetic super-weapon. I turned off the light and watched the tree shadows moving on my ceiling. Maybe Zack was right and there was no weapon. And even if some supervillain was lurking behind the incident, what could I do? Zack and Lara weren’t interested, S.C.A.R.F. hadn’t made it past the logo stage, and even Serge wasn’t talking to me. I was on my own.

  No one else cared, so why should I? I decided to forget all about it. Instead, I planned to enjoy my week off school by taking over the world.

  The Death of Superman

  How do you defeat a superhero?

  I pondered the question as I rode the bus to Main Street. I needed inspiration and decided to look for it in Crystal Comics. I hadn’t been back since the whole Nemesis business during the summer. As I stepped off the 55 and looked over the familiar storefront, I felt a pang of regret. The last time I’d been here was with Serge and Lara. That wasn’t the only difference.

  Christopher Talbot, the owner (and supervillain), hadn’t been seen since he was swatted out of the sky by a giant asteroid going 27,000 miles per hour. Since his disappearance, his business empire had rapidly dwindled. His former villain’s lair and flagship volcano store had lain empty for little more than a month before signs went up announcing it as the future location of a new Macy’s. In the absence of their charismatic owner, the dozen or so stores that made up the Crystal Comics empire were snapped up by a competitor. The original store on Main Street limped on, the last creaking starship of a once mighty fleet.

  I pushed open the door. The moon base–themed interior was looking tired. The Alien Detection scanner at the entrance needed a new bulb, the tentacles poking from air vents lacked their former gooey gleam, and no one had refilled the green Martian gas pumps for weeks. The place smelled stale and was empty save for a couple of customers browsing a dusty display of action figures and someone snoring lightly in a wingback armchair beneath a copy of “The Death of Superman.”

  At least the shelves were still lined with comics. If anyone would know how to bring about the downfall of Star Guy, it would be Lex Luthor, Magneto, Galactus, or any of the hundreds of other villains who stalked the dark places of the comic book universe. Back in the old days there was something called the Comics Code, which required good to triumph over evil in every issue. And while most stories still followed that pattern, there were examples where the bad guys won, even if the writers had to create alternate universes to let them do so. I gathered a bunch of issues and began my search.

  A voice drifted out from behind the cash register propped on the store counter, accompanied by a series of familiar thudding and blasting sound effects. “Ha! Didn’t see that coming, did you? Fear me!” Curious, I peered over the high countertop. A skinny sales assistant with a tangle of dark hair sat cross-legged on the floor, playing Puny Earthlings! The store stocked a handful of video games and a single console on which to try them. The sales assistant must have swiped it off its stand in the middle of the store in order to play without interruption from bothersome customers.

  He studied the screen through a lick of hair that hung down over one eye. “OK, Star Guy,” he said, hunching his shoulders and bearing down on the game controller. “Let’s see you dodge this.” He thumbed a complicated sequence of buttons. “Atomic blast! Plasma cannon! Heat ray!” he shouted in quick succession. “Come on, you annoying masked menace—fall out of the sky!” There was a shriek and the sound of tearing metal. I knew what it meant, having experienced it myself each time I played. Star Guy had brought down the Alien Overlord’s mother ship.

  Game. Over.

  “Oh, come on,” whined the sales assistant, hurling down the controller. “That’s not fair.” Star Guy’s victory theme song played out over the end credits. I’d heard it so often it had become stuck in my head—the most annoying tune in the universe. As the trumpets blared, the sales assistant noticed my head poking above the counter. He blew the stubborn strand of hair out of his eye. “Can I help you?” he asked, in a tone that made it perfectly clear that he really didn’t want to.

  What’s more, I knew that he couldn’t help, based on his total failure to put Star Guy out of action. I wouldn’t learn any secrets from this guy’s feeble game fu. “You’ve got Puny Earthlings! too,” I remarked.

  “Well, duh,” he replied, and grudgingly got to his feet. “Who doesn’t?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you read GameSpot?”

  I hadn’t been able to browse the video game site since Mom banned me from unsupervised use of the computer. I shook my head.

  He looked at me as if I’d missed the biggest news headline in the world—which I had, if your prime source of news is GameSpot or Kotaku or io9.com. He waved the familiar box that the disc came in. “Two days ago one of these appeared on every doorstep in the area. Our town’s been chosen to test the game before it launches worldwide. Are you going to buy those?” He gestured to the comics clutched in my hand.

  “No thanks. They’re not what I’m looking for.”

  “Time-waster,” he muttered, and sank beneath the counter to continue playing Puny Earthlings!

  Why had Lab Rat Games given out free copies to everyone in town? Maybe it was some sort of clever publicity campaign. But what mattered was that everyone I knew would be playing the game. Serge, the kids at school who picked on me—all were trying to defeat Star Guy and Dark Flutter. Someone was bound to come up with a solution. I desperately wanted it to be me. Suddenly, it had become a competition.

  And why shouldn’t I be the one? After all, I had an advantage over the rest of them. Insider knowledge. I knew, for instance, that Zack was mildly allergic to cats, though not enough to knock him out of the sky, not even with some kind of multibarreled, high-velocity, cat-flinging weapon (I’d already built one in the mother ship’s R & D lab). But I knew what made him tick. I felt sure that the answer was somewhere in the soup of my relationship with my big brother. If anyone was going to spoon the crouton of his flaw, it would be me.

  I headed quickly for the door, itching to get back home to my Xbox and another round with the dratted duo. As I passed the sleeping figure in the armchair, he let out a great snore from beneath the comic propped over his face. The comic slid off and fluttered to the floor. I gasped.

  Hidden beneath “The Death of Superman” was a face I never expected to see again.

  Christopher Talbot opened one eye.

  We Meet Again

  My first instinct was to run. The last time Christopher Talbot and I had been in the same room, he’d sicced his attack robots on me and then tried to shake me off his wildly maneuvering rocket-powered super suit while I clung on for my life.

  “You,” he rasped, surprise turning into a cough. He looked worn-out. Eyes that once dazzled like gemstones were now dim. Hair that used to be as bouncy as an overeager Labrador lay limp against his bony skull. Breath rattled through his thin frame. Being struck by a giant asteroid hadn’t done him any favors.

  During our previous showdown I’d
proved that, to his immense annoyance, rather than the hero he believed himself to be, he was in fact a villain. I couldn’t imagine he’d forgiven me for that. I gave the store a quick once-over for killer robots. All clear.

  He gripped the arms of the chair and with a groan hauled himself to his feet. “It’s good to see you again, Luke,” he said, a smile cracking his thin lips. “How have you been?”

  “Fine,” I said with surprise, and then, drilled by years of my parents telling me always to be polite, I couldn’t help adding, “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. After my body was smashed to pieces by the Nemesis asteroid, which I only survived thanks to the protective carapace of my Mark Fourteen Sub-Orbital Super Suit, I woke up in a hospital in South Korea. With amnesia.”

  I wondered. “Does that mean that you . . . ?”

  “’Fraid not. I still remember that your brother is”—he cupped a hand to his mouth and then whispered—“Star Guy.”

  That was a pity.

  He filled me in on the rest of the story. “While I was in the hospital in Seoul, I was put back together by skilled surgeons, but at enormous expense. I had to sell off my business to pay the bills, and then I was shipped home to find, oh great irony, my house a smoking crater, thanks to a stray chunk of asteroid.”

  “But you had insurance, right?”

  “Forgot to renew the policy.” He shrugged. “Ah, well, at least I have my health.” He dissolved again into a coughing fit. “It really is nice to see you, Luke. Takes me back to the good old days. And a few of the bad. But we’ll let that go, shall we?”

  Why was he being so friendly? I was highly suspicious. My actions were largely responsible for turning him into this wreck of a man who now stood before me. If I were in his position, I knew what I’d be thinking.

  “You’re thinking, ‘I bet he wants revenge,’” said Christopher Talbot, raising an eyebrow. “You imagine, because of your role in my downfall, I must be plotting to get back at you. Hmm?”