by Jeff Norton
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s finish this.”
With my crew back in the cabin, I lifted off. I gave it everything I could. I lifted us out of the canyon and across the flat, sunset-bathed red desert sands.
“Thanks, Houston.”
“Sherman, the suit is modulating the ship’s power but the—”
“There’s Irwoot,” I shouted, seeing blue bolts dancing on the downed saucer. “Graz must’ve hit him too.”
Now we just had to catch up to Graz. I could see the Yazzerbeast’s racer in the distance. I looked at Carol’s read-out – miraculously, it calculated that I could catch them with the fusion boosters at full power.
“Graz’s fireworks must’ve drained his ship’s power,” I called to my team. “He’s slowing down.”
“Sherman—” started Houston.
“I know, I know, stay clear of his blades.”
We soon caught up with Graz. I gave him a wide berth and blew past him, feeling triumphant.
“No, I—”
“Woohoo!” I shouted.
As we whooshed over the Arizona desert, racing back towards Area 51, I suddenly felt woozy, a bit like my first day at Groom Lake. My vision started to go spotty and I felt like all of my body hairs were being plucked out at once.
“I don’t feel so well,” I said, finding it hard to catch my breath. I tried to focus, and keep the racer straight and steady, but couldn’t see straight. I was going to faint.
“That’s the consequence,” said Houston. “It’s a side effect.”
“Of what?” I asked, trying not to puke in the helmet.
“Digitization.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Houston?” chirped Sonya. “What’s happening to our pilot?”
“I had to reboot the ecto-suit to power the ship’s start-up,” explained Houston, as if it should mean something to me. “It automatically initiated the digitization process.”
Digitization.
“You mean I’m being turned into a robot?!”
“Technically, your brain is being scanned right now, but once that’s complete, yes, the suit will automatically cut and copy your gray matter onto the hard drive.”
“And then what happens to my brain?” I yelled.
“It would be discarded, obviously, along with your redundant body. Just like me.”
If the Aldrin suit got its way, I was soon to become a walking piece of hardware.
“No offence, Houston,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t take any, “but I really want to keep my brain and my body.”
“Actually, buckaroo, metallic is a good look for you,” Octo said.
“Swig some water, squidy,” snapped Sonya.
“Houston, please,” I begged. “Can you stop it?”
“Only by removing the suit, but then we’d lose power.”
“And speed,” I realized, as we hurled across the desert with Graz now in close pursuit. It looked like I might win the alien race, but lose my Earthly body. I’d be a computer in a robot’s shell.
“How long do I have?” I asked. “Before I …”
“Not long,” Houston said over the intercom. “Once the initial scan is complete, the digitization process cannot be reversed.”
“How long?!” I screamed.
“About a minute,” Houston said solemnly.
One minute. I had to cross the finish line in one minute. I had nothing against computers or robots per se, but I did not want to be one. My physical, organic body may have been smaller than average and still recovering from puberty, but at least it was mine, and I wanted to keep it. I also had a hunch that robots weren’t Juliet’s type.
“Guys, channel all available energy into the boosters,” I ordered. “I’m going to make one final burst.”
I tried to focus, but my vision was blurring.
“You’re good to go, dude,” Octo confirmed. “Punch it!”
“Come on, Carol,” I whispered, before slamming down on the accelerator, kicking the ship into its highest gear. “Help me out.”
We soared back to base and sailed over the finish line.
Victorious, but was it too late?
“It’s started,” I heard Houston sigh. “Hold on, Sherman!”
My brain felt like it was being suctioned out as the suit ripped at my consciousness. Everything went black, and in the darkness I saw a swirl of a million stars. I tried to hold onto reality, but as I passed out on the dashboard, I slipped into a vast nothingness.
I had won the race, but had I lost my body?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Unmasked
In the darkness, I could hear the crowd cheering and applauding. The noise was faint at first, but slowly swelled like someone was turning up the volume dial. I opened my eyes, unsure if they were new robotic sensors or factory-issue hazel peepers, and saw Octo, Houston and Sonya standing over me. And then Juliet came into view.
“You did it, Sherman,” she said softly.
They sat me up in the dust beside Carol, just over the finish line. The Aldrin suit was disassembled around me. In a daze, I moved my legs and arms, and rubbed my chest. Everything hurt, but it all felt organic, one hundred per cent … me.
“Am I … normal?”
“That’s a loaded question, buckaroo,” said Octo.
“We got the suit off just in time,” said Houston. “Juliet helped.”
I glanced up and spotted my face on the drive-in screen.
My face.
My exposed face.
Of course. The AJABots who’d been filming the race were covering this post-race drama, which meant my secret identity was a secret no more. The crowd chanted, “SHER-MAN, SHER-MAN!”
I hid my head in my hands, but I was much too late. I’d been outed as the victorious rocket racer. I wondered how long I had until NATO arrived to haul me away.
“Sherman?” asked Juliet, crouching down beside me. “You really risked the gulags – just to impress me?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, my head still pounding from the brain scan.
“Well, I’m definitely impressed,” she said. “And I’m definitely your Prom date.”
“Really? But what about the Mentor, and your rules, and NED?”
“I think I needed to learn from you how to break the rules,” she said. “Thank you.”
I was still dizzy from the aborted digitization, which meant I had no filter between brain and mouth. I just blurted out the truth.
“I was so worried, Juliet, that you’d leave before Prom, before the NEDs attacked, but you’re here and you can bodyguard the Earth tonight—”
“Bodyguard?”
Juliet’s eyes widened with rage and disappointment. And then I realized what I’d said, how it must’ve sounded to her.
“Is that why you asked me to Prom?” she asked. “So I’d bodyguard the planet?”
“No!” I said. “Well, yes, but—”
And then, she exploded.
Literally.
A globe of dazzling blue light burst from her and flashed across the drive-in, so bright it nearly blinded me. I looked away, shielding my eyes. When I finally looked back, she was just as luminescent as the first time I saw her materialize in Ms Teg’s drama class. She was ethereal again, a bright blue light floating in the dusk and looking down at me with disdain and disgust.
“I thought you were different, Sherman Capote,” she raged. “I thought – I hoped – that just maybe you liked me for who I am. Not for what I am.”
She jumped into the air and hovered over me the way hawks circle over mice.
“Hey, douse the fireworks, bluebird,” Octo called, “this guy really digs you.”
“No, he doesn’t!” Juliet cried. “He’s as bad the rest! He’s just using me because I’m an Icon. He’s as bad as NED, worse even! At least NED doesn’t try to hide it. I might as well go along with the Pairing if this is the way—”
“What Pairing?” I asked.
But before Juliet even beg
an to explain, the pieces fell together. NED’s text from his dad (“YOU’VE EARNED YOURSELF A PAIRING”), the Mentor’s comments about the NEDs, Graz’s comment in the cafeteria.
NED and Juliet. Paired.
“Our ceremony is tonight – on their planet,” Juliet sobbed. “I was going to refuse, go to Prom with you, run away. But now …”
POOF, she disappeared.
Just like that, into thin air. She vanished from my life, and from Planet Earth.
And for a few moments, Octo, Houston and I just stared at each other, not knowing what to say, the AJABots capturing the entire episode on the big screen.
The silence was broken by Sonya, on the phone. Sobbing.
“Oh, hey,” I said to her, “I’ll be okay. But maybe don’t go telling everyone I just got dumped.”
“THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU!” she yelled. “NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SHERMAN CAPOTE!”
“What’s with her?” I asked the guys.
She put away her phone and said, “I’ve been Called. My whole family has. We’ve been Called to perform our Balleropera at NED’s Pairing. Tonight.”
Not only was NED stealing my would-be girlfriend, he was summoning my best girl friend.
“And we’re not ready,” she said, solemnly. “I’ve been spending more time on the rocket than rehearsing. And if we make even one mistake in the recital …”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. We all knew the punishment for imperfection.
And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I heard the sirens.
Four Military Police Jeeps revved into the finish area and surrounded us, blinding me with their spotlights.
“That’s Sherman Capote,” snarled an unwelcome, snobbish voice. “The rocket racer.”
NED.
He’d led the cops straight to me.
The Military Police jumped from their Jeeps and rushed me. As Octo, Sonya and Houston protested, they forced me onto my knees, pulled my hands behind my back and tightened plastic handcuffs around my wrists.
NED stood over me and boasted, “Tonight I’ll be Paired with Juliet, restoring order to the universe, and tomorrow I’ll be sipping on the delicious remnants of your puny planet.”
“You’re a monster,” I spat.
“I am a god,” he snarled. “And the god always gets the girl.”
His cape billowed in the non-existent wind as he strolled off into the darkness, leaving the police to hoist me into a waiting Jeep.
“By Article Five of the Geilenkirchen settlement,” the officer monotoned, “you are hereby to be remanded to the Russian Federation.”
NED got the girl, and I got the gulag.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Groom Lake Redemption
I saw this prison movie once where the prisoner escaped by digging a tunnel behind a poster he’d put up in the cell. The poster was of Rita Hayworth, a beautiful movie star from the 1940s. She had wavy hair and was kneeling on a bed, smiling an old-fashioned Hollywood smile. It took the man nineteen years, scraping away with a little chisel, to dig his way to freedom. I’d been thinking about him for hours, because that exact poster was on the wall of my own cell.
I couldn’t resist taking a peek underneath, but there was no tunnel. Instead, NO REDEMPTION! was scrawled in thick red marker pen on the cream-colored concrete.
Prison guards, I decided, had a warped sense of humor. I noticed a tiny spy-camera, filming me from the corner of the ceiling. I imagined a patrol of pot-bellied uniformed guards, clutching mugs of instant coffee and inhaling doughnuts, watching their screens and chuckling at the incarcerated rocket racer.
“Heads up, kid,” a voice said.
I looked up to see a guard who looked about sixty, dressed in a green uniform so crisp it could give you a papercut, with muscles Graz would maim for. He swiped a keycard in the corridor and a loud BUZZZZ startled me. The metal bars slid open and I made the mistake of getting my hopes up.
“Am I getting out?” I asked.
“I don’t think you’re ever getting out, kid.”
“Oh,” I sighed, thinking I’d better start digging behind Rita.
“But you do have a visitor.”
He motioned to someone I couldn’t see, and I heard footsteps echo on the concrete. Then, my heart sinking faster than a Xentaurian mothership, I saw Dad. Standing there in rolled-up shirt sleeves, red-eyed and bristly-chinned. He held two ice-cream tubs in his hand.
“Ten minutes, Mr Capote,” the guard said and strode off, fingers stuck in his belt like a sheriff.
Dad sat down next to me on the bed and handed me a tub.
“Don’t get too excited, Sherman,” he said. “It’s just ice cream. There’s no key hidden in there or anything.”
And you know what he did?
He actually smiled.
Instead of scolding me, lecturing me, or displaying his deep disappointment in me, he actually gave me a break. I peeled off the lid and gazed at the green and brown swirl. It was mint chocolate. My favorite.
“How did you know?”
“You think I don’t know my boy’s favorite ice cream?”
Honestly, I didn’t.
I dug in with my little plastic spoon. It tasted of comfort. The flavor was an Air Force staple, available on bases around the world, and as a kid, it was always the one thing that comforted me after disappointing Dad on whatever sports field was popular in our host country. I’d slurped the swirl after rugby in England, baseball in Korea, tennis in France and soccer in Germany.
And yet today, not even the perfect blend of artificial mint and chocolate could comfort me.
“Dad,” I said. “They’re gonna send me to the gulag, aren’t they?”
“I just don’t know yet,” he said. “This is all way, way above my pay grade.”
“You could ask for a raise.”
I turned my spoon upside-down, scraped some ice cream onto my tongue and let it melt in my mouth.
“What were you doing out there, son? You get banned by NATO from ever touching rockets and your response is to race one?”
“Two, technically,” I said. “It was a double-fusion system so—”
“Sometimes I just don’t understand you,” he said. “You and Jessica are the two most important things in the universe to me, and yet sometimes you both seem so, I don’t know, alien to me.”
He still didn’t sound angry, just really confused. So I braced myself, ignored the churning awkwardness in my stomach and told him about Juliet. About trying to impress her so she’d want to go to Prom with me. Then, I was about to try one last time to warn him about the NEDs when, for the second time in five minutes, Dad threw me a total curveball.
He started dishing out dating advice.
“Sherman, if that’s how you feel about her,” he said, “you have to tell her. Now. Before it’s too late. I wish … I wish I’d told your mother one last time before—”
“Time’s up, Mr Capote,” said the guard. “My boss’ll be back in a minute and if I get caught—”
“Thank you, Gord,” said my dad. “I appreciate you letting me see my boy.”
“Don’t mention it,” replied Gord. He opened the bars with a BUZZZ and beckoned my father from the cell. “Seriously, don’t mention it. To anyone. Oh, and by the way, I’m out of printer ink.”
“Copy that,” said Dad, rising and stepping into the corridor of freedom. “Oh, Sherman, I almost forgot.”
He held out his hand and gave me a purple rubber bracelet.
“Your friend Octo gave this to me for you,” Dad said. “Kind of weird present, guy-to-guy, but—”
Gord grabbed the bracelet. “I need to check that item,” he said, rubbing it between fingers and thumb. I held my breath, hoping the guard had never seen a ventitent wormhole conduit before.
“It’s a style statement,” I lied.
“Well I wouldn’t wear that in the big boys’ lockup,” he warned, handing it back to my dad who slipped it
onto my wrist. “But other’n that, it looks harmless enough.”
“I’ll come back for you, son,” said Dad.
“Don’t go anywhere, kid,” quipped Gord, slamming the door behind them, and escorting my dad along the corridor – leaving me to plot my escape.
I tried to open the bracelet. It should have been easy but that was when I realized that ventitents were ridiculously strong. I tugged, yanked and pulled until I was lying back down, trying to expand the rubber with the force of my left foot.
I could just see the YouTube video now that the guards would post: me, squirming beneath a poster of Rita Hayworth, wrestling with a purple bracelet. At least if I failed, there wouldn’t be anyone on Earth left to watch it.
I was still lying on the floor, feeling defeated, when a terrifying picture popped into my brain.
An almost-like-I-was-there, 3D-surround-sound image of Juliet gazing into NED’s eyes, saying, “I do”.
That did the trick. I gave the bracelet one almighty pull with both hands. It made a crackling sound followed by a low hum, and I was finally able to stretch it to the size of a hula-hoop.
I placed the vortex on the floor, blew Rita a kiss, and jumped.
Through the fabric of the universe.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Escape from Planet Earth
I couldn’t tell which way was up.
Just an instant ago my shoes had been squeaking on concrete and now they were sliding around a kind of giant slithery catcher’s mitt made of tentacles.
“I know it’s cheatin’, buddy,” Octo said, “but I had to do somethin’.”
As relieved as I was to be out of the prison, I did feel a little cheated.
“That was …”
“Disappointing?” Octo asked, putting me down on the floor of what appeared to be public toilets. “You were expecting a thrill-powered ride through a swirly- whirly vortex, right?”
I could hear a cheesy love ballad bellowing in the background. I looked around, trying to get my bearings.
“Don’t think I’m not grateful, because I am. But where are we?”
“You shifted about half a mile, dude,” Octo said.
Houston appeared from behind the ventitent, dressed as a merchant seaman and hauling the Aldrin suit’s steel trunk.
