by Marc Landau
“Calm down? I’m standing on an alien planet with my dead ex-alien-girlfriend, an alien-infused robot, and a clone dog.”
“It’s a lot to take in.”
“You think?”
“Also. I’m not dead,” she said.
“I know. I’m sorry for not being perfectly exact in my language.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I think the alien inside me is doing it. It wants very accurate details.”
“Ha. Blame the alien.”
She took my hand. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
“That’s not exactly reassuring.”
“Wil, come on. Think about it. I was going to die on that planet, then this thing saved me and somehow you found it, and now we’re here together. It can’t just be for nothing.”
She was right. It was all too crazy to be a coincidence. It didn’t make sense that the universe would put us both through all of this for nothing. Still, I was terrified that the purpose behind all the coincidences was nefarious.
Usually at this point in the vid, either the hero marries the princess, or Pandora’s box pops open and starts Armageddon. And the way the alien-robot was acting, I wasn’t feeling too good about the prospect of marrying the princess.
All I knew was that they really really wanted the Ultra and were more than happy to set us up in a gilded cage until we died and then they could extract it. What they’d do with the Ultra once they ripped it from Kat’s flesh, I had no clue.
Why did they want it so badly? What exactly was the Ultra? It was their leader, but was that good or bad? Did I bring back Gandhi or Satan? At first, I thought it was more Gandhi, because the rock had been protecting us, but that could easily just have been Kat’s influence. For all I knew, once they were separated the Ultra might go ultra-evil and decimate the universe.
You should’ve let it die in space, the little voice whispered.
“You’re probably right.”
“What?” Kat asked.
Chapter Five
I should’ve let the Ultra die in space. Except it probably couldn’t die so what was the point? Still, I should’ve tried. Aren’t you supposed to keep trying even when all hope is lost? The whole “living with the love of your life in a paradise” fantasy had lost its luster. I think it had something to do with the alien-robot hybrid shooting pulsar beams and making clone dogs.
Poka’s alone on the ship, the little voice reminded me.
The bot-alien beeped interrupting my internal conversation. “You agree to remain in the utopia that has been created especially for your primitive biology until you expire and we extract the Ultra from the female organism.”
“First things first. I want Poka down here. The real one,” I replied.
“Beep. Bip! That is not the agreement.”
I could swear I saw steam coming out of its ear holes. I didn’t care. If these things were going to manipulate me, I was going to do the same and use whatever leverage I had. The bot was inside there and it must have some influence on the alien just like Kat had influence on the Ultra. And I knew how to push the bot’s buttons. Even though it would argue that it didn’t have buttons to push.
“Oh, sorry, am I pissing you off? I don’t mean to. Now, if you want us to even consider staying here, you’d better go get my damn dog.”
“Beep!” The bot fumed. It turned to Kat and gave her an expression that spoke volumes. It clearly said, “Can you believe this guy?”
She just shrugged.
“Beep! Fine. Agreement amended.”
Moments later, Kat pointed to the sky again, and I saw Poka in all her kooky glory floating inside one of the translucent spheres. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, it looked like she was having a blast in the bubble. She was running back and forth bouncing off the walls like a pinball. Leaping and scratching at the walls, snapping, trying to eat the clouds as the sphere drifted to the surface.
The ball came to another slow, rolling, soft landing, and she stampeded through the jello wall before the sphere even came to a full stop. She went airborne for about two feet before hitting the grass. And that’s when it got really intense.
She’d been bouncing back and forth inside the sphere like a ping-pong ball. Or more aptly, a bingo ball. Or popcorn popping. But now that she was free, all bets were off. Once her paws touched actual real-life grass, it turned into all-out doggie pandemonium.
As furious as I was with the robot, and the situation, and basically everything in the world, I couldn’t help but smile. Sometimes it’s the little things. A small respite of watching my dog have fun was like being handed a cup of water after a month stuck in the desert. I was going to drink it in while I could. I was sure everything would go haywire again, but for now, I was going to enjoy every second of it.
She was in full-on explosive fun-time mode. Her ears and tail and butt all wagging and flapping faster than I’d seen in a really long time. Too long. She hadn’t had fun like this in too long. Her nose sniffed at a million RPMs taking in all the new sights and smells. Grass, flowers, trees, rocks, sticks.
OMG sticks!
Poka snapped up a small branch and bounded about, gnawing and tearing at it. I tried to grab it from her to throw it, but every time I reached it, she ran away. So annoying. She does that every time. But I didn’t care. She was loving it.
She chewed the stick, biting it in half, then quarters, then bits and pieces, and then she was done with it and bolting over to a rock to investigate some crazy-looking straw-looking flowers.
“Beep, bleep. The creature is destroying the planet. May I cease its existence, Ultra?”
“No. You cannot cease her existence. Relax. She’s just having fun.”
Then Poka squatted and took her first outdoor biohazard in over a year.
The bot-alien muttered frustrated beep curses under its breath, but didn’t repeat its request to the Ultra.
“Good girl!” I yelled, rubbing some salt on the bot’s wounded ego.
She didn’t even turn to look at me. She was too busy playing with the alien flowers. She’d bitten off a bit of a leaf from a yellow stalk with round, purple flowers. A bit of goo oozed from the place she’d torn the leaf from. More goop. Forget Planet Wil and Poka. I was going to name it Slime World.
“Poka, drop it!” I screamed, and she dropped the leaf instantaneously. Thank the universe she knew when I yelled “drop it,” it was serious business and always dropped it immediately. Unless it was a faux chicken wing. She never let go of those. I’d have to stick my hand into her gross mouth, reach around and fish it out, while she gagged and stared at me like, “This is so gross with your fingers down my throat.”
“I know it's gross. What do you want me to do?”
“Let me eat the chicken!”
“It could be crawling with Gorvellian parasites.”
“Who cares? Those are delicious too.”
I don’t know why she’d drop anything else, even Plel sirloin chops, but couldn’t let go of those damn wings. I guess we all have our weaknesses. For Kat it was Romlovian dark chocolate. For me it was pretty much anything with sugar.
“Hey, is that thing poisonous?” I asked the bot.
It beeped a sneer. “We have designed all the fauna to be harmless to your primitive biology.”
“Can you please stop commenting on how primitive we are?”
“Confirmed.”
That word let me know the bot was pulling some strings inside there. Or at least trying to. I bet it was fighting hard to regain control of its programming. It had to hate having an alien pulling its strings and controlling it. But at the same time I was sure it was getting a full-on robo-rod at all the new data it was collecting by having an advanced alien entity possessing it. It must have been at odds with itself. Half wanting control of its systems back, half in awe at the advanced tech and data heroin being injected into its main frame.
As much as I hated the
walrus sometimes, I wanted it to get control back. At least it was on my side. Most of the time.
The good news was, they’d child-proofed it for us primitives so there wasn’t anything dangerous on the planet. Other than the aliens.
Poka was still exploring the landscape, fraking out at all the alien sights and smells. It was good to see her get out and stretch her legs. Finally she’d calmed a bit and was in more of an investigative mood versus the earlier frak-out mode.
That was until she spotted…herself. Or to be more exact, her alien-clone.
She raced over to it, then slammed on the brakes about ten feet away. She always did that. Started with a full on “I’m gonna kill that thing!” Then when she got close, she’d slam on the brakes. “Wait. I better keep a perimeter. That thing might kill me!”
Her ears shot straight up like antennae. She hesitantly sniffed, jumped back, barked, and then repeated the process. Standard canine “What the hellvian are you?” maneuvers.
The Poka-clone still wasn’t doing much of anything. It was just standing like a statue. Weird it was taking so long for it to come alive. Is that what was happening? Was it coming to life?
I had no clue what I was going to do with two Pokas. Well, not two. There’s only one Poka. No matter how much the clone was a perfect reproduction, it would never be the one and only Poka.
People have identical twins all the time, and the parents know the difference. Sure, the kids can trick random people and pretend to be one another, but it’s hard to trick the family. It’s the same thing with the Hilpans who have litters of up to forty identical babies. All clones of one another, for all intents and purposes. But their mother NEVER has trouble distinguishing one from another.
Distinguishing the Poka clone from the original Poka was yet another thing to worry about later. Right now, we were all here. Our whole weird little family. Me and Kat and Poka.
And a bot-alien.
And a dog-clone.
Okay, it wasn’t the normal family structure. It wasn’t even even the normal multi-species-alien family structure. But what could I do? You get what the universe gives you. Like an ancient philosopher once said, “It’s not about having what you want. It’s about wanting what you have.” Whatever that means.
Chapter Six
I could get onboard with the idea of spending the rest of my life here. The planet was beyond beautiful and I was with the people (and dog, and a clone-dog) I cared about. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It might be a prison of sorts, but any criminal on Prime would kill to get transferred here. The biggest downside? The warden’s a snotty alien-robot hybrid waiting for Kat to die.
There were mountains to climb and ski on. I was sure they could whip up a lake or sandy beach with no problem if asked, and they could put it right next to a snowdrift. It was all of Prime’s best vacation spots laid out right next to one another. I bet they could even add the Horkan sand dunes or the cliffs of Bona if asked. I’d always wanted to dirt race the dunes and bungie-loop from the Bona cliffs. Who wouldn’t want to live here?
Even Poka was having the time of her life (except for the clone thing). No constrained parks with invisi-fencing or leashes. Nothing could hurt her here. Except herself. If we stayed, I’d have to make sure there were no big holes around, because she was obsessed with those. And if big enough she’d definitely fall in. Or more likely she’d jump in. I had to be sure to tell the bot-alien no wells or ditches, and definitely no volcanoes. I didn’t want molten Poka.
The other thing I was going to miss was Mom. Don’t tell her I said that. But I wasn’t sure I could go the rest of my life without seeing or talking to her. Maybe a couple of weeks, but not forever. As much as she drove me bonkers, I didn’t want to never speak to her again.
I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that if I didn’t go home after the duty shift ended, Mom would start a manhunt for me. I was expected back on a specific date, and if I wasn’t there, she’d take action and hire a ship and search the galaxy. No way she was going to let another holiday go by without her family together.
We only had each other, but sometimes I wished she’d had another kid, just because I was such a pain and a disappointment. Not to mention that I didn’t talk much. Or at least, that’s what women tended to say. My male friends didn’t seem to care. We were content to sit around playing vert-games and grunting.
I often wished I had a sister so Mom had someone to blab with for hours on end. I think women tend to talk more than men. Sorry if that’s sexist. It’s meant as a compliment. Except when they go off track for twenty minutes and you forget what the hellvian they were talking about.
The thought of Mom searching the universe was a bummer. I didn’t want her spending the rest of her life on a hopeless search. I guess people can do whatever they want. It just seems like a waste to spend your life on a hopeless endeavor. Speaking of hope, it’s always interested me that in the myth of Pandora, the worst thing that was released onto the world was actually…hope.
Maybe the aliens could teleport Mom here. But was that just blind hope too? More importantly, did I want to be trapped on the planet with my mother for the rest of my life?
Then there were my friends. I’d miss them too. Stim. Kari. Nuncho. Especially Nuncho. We’d go on long glider rides, visit places we’d never been to, and try the worst food and drink in each new sector. After eating the most revolting food we could find we’d compete for the worstsmelling and loudest farts. Immature, but fun. I’d usually win in the smell category, but he’d always take the gold for amplitude. Man, that guy could let them rip. He could even toot Mozart’s Moonlight Sonata.
I wasn’t even close to a social butterfly, but I liked the few friends I had, and wanted to spend at least some time with them during the remainder of my short two hundred and fifty year life. Oh, and football. Could I go the rest of my life without watching my team lose every one of its games? As much as I hated them, I wasn’t sure I was ready to give that up.
And what about Kat? Did she really want to spend the rest of her life stuck to an alien?
Not to mention the fact that it wasn't sitting right that they couldn’t separate the two from one another without killing her. It just didn’t make sense. These things could make planets, kill black holes, teleport through galaxies. But they couldn’t remove a primitive human from the Ultra? Come on. Something was Delivan-fishy around here.
“Do you consent?” the bot-alien asked.
“Easy there. What’s the rush?”
It beeped and blipped in frustration. Did I mention the “blipping” was a new sound? The longer these two were together the more they were evolving. I didn’t like it one bit.
“Consent.”
“Don’t rush me.”
The bot turned to Kat and pleaded with her with its wideeye holes.
“He’s got a point. What is the rush? Isn’t time irrelevant to you?”
“Not where the Ultra is concerned.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“It is not your concern.”
“Your being pretty rude for someone who wants my help.”
"Blip! Beep. Blip!”
I could almost see the steam coming out of its ear holes again and I imagined the robot inside saying, “I told you this guy is so annoying, isn’t he?”
The bot-alien forced itself to calm down. “We do not want your help. There is no choice in the matter. It is the Ultra’s desire, not yours, that is of importance.”
“So if it was up to you, you’d just kill me and Poka and Kat? And then take your Ultra?”
“Correct.”
“Good to know.”
“Do you consent?”
“No. No. I don’t consent! I do not consent. Get it through your alien-robot head. Now stop asking, and give us some time to decide!”
The bot turned to Kat again and pleaded with its eye holes.
She shrugged. “You heard what the man said.”
“Please, Ultra. Can we end the e
xistence of that creature?”
“No.”
“Please, Ultra?”
“You know I’m right here, right? I can hear you begging her to let you kill me,” I said.
It ignored me and continued pleading with the Kat-Ultra.
“Sorry. Nope. You’re going to have to wait.”
The bot slumped and made a whimpering noise, like a kid who didn’t get to have ice cream before they ate their veggie-spread. “Okay, Ultra,” it whined.
It struck me that the bot-alien seemed to be developing more of the walrus’s personality the longer they were together. Also, Kat seemed to be integrating more with the alien inside her. She seemed to know what it was thinking and could say it with more ease. She was acting more like the Ultra, but also like Kat.
What do you get when you combine a human female with an all powerful alien being? I don’t know but the world was going to find out. Hopefully it’d be more like a peanut butter cup than oil and water.
You got your Ultra in my human, the little voice joked.
I clapped my hands together. “Okay, now that you’re banned from trying to kill me, let’s discuss the details.”
“Details?” the bot bleeped.
“Yes, details. All the little things that make up our contract so we can consent.”
I was asking mostly to buy time until I could to figure out if there was a way to get any sort of edge on these super-powerful, God-like aliens. It was a lost cause, but hope springs eternal. Stalling seemed like the best thing to do (and the only thing). The longer the bot and Kat had to incorporate their personalities into the aliens, the better all our chances that they could exert some control.
“Beep. Details. Confirmed. We will show you the living habitat,” the bot-alien said.
Right. I’d got so caught up in the beauty of the planet, and Poka and her clone, I’d forgotten we would need an actual place to live. “Good idea. Lead the way.”
Chapter Seven
Kat and I followed the floating robot, but Poka stayed back. She was still too entranced by the facsimile of her. I was hesitant to leave her behind but what harm could she do? She was too chicken to attack the clone, and the planet had been idiot-proofed. But just to be sure I asked the alien if there were any holes around.
