“A draft?” Liam exploded. He lowered his voice and said hoarsely, “Thanks to you, half my stuff is on a spaceship millions of miles from here.”
“It wasn’t my fault a wormhole opened in your room.”
“No, but you could have warned me earlier so I could put my things away in drawers and keep them from being sucked up.”
“Yeah, well, sorry,” Madison said, frowning.
“Oh, she’s sorry,” Ant said, looking at Liam while rolling his eyes and jabbing a thumb toward her. “Everything’s okay now. She apologized, so none of your missing stuff matters anymore. Get over it, Liam. No big deal, right?”
“Yeah, right,” Liam growled.
Chapter 6
A silence fell. Liam glowered, Madison sulked, and Ant eagerly looked from one to the other as if he’d placed a wager on who would speak first.
Finally, Madison sighed and looked at Liam. “So what happened, anyway? Where’d you go?”
“The Ark,” Liam mumbled, reaching up to rub his neck. It was a little sore. “Where the wonderstorm and all the monsters came from last weekend. I just met the owner.”
Ant blinked rapidly. “The owner?”
“The ship’s captain, the head honcho, whatever you want to call him. Big tall man, mostly robot. Has a human face stuck on the front of his metal skull.”
Both Ant and Madison stared at him, and he slid down the door and collapsed with his knees bent and legs drawn up. He spent the next ten minutes telling his story, going into every detail he could remember. At some point, Madison pulled out her journal and wrote in it, most likely a few notes of confirmation that her sleep-written message had correctly predicted the event. Liam tried not to get distracted, but as he watched her scribbling, he knew that those very words would remain in her journal for sixty or seventy years, and her future self would dust off this same book and send some of the information back through time, thus forcing herself to sleep-write the very message that was even now stuffed in her pocket . . .
It was horribly confusing.
He continued telling his tale, all the while wanting to ask why the wormhole had needed to appear in his room. The truth was, it hadn’t. The Ark Lord could have opened it anywhere. When the robot had emerged, it had homed in on Liam, playing its red lights across his chest as though it detected some kind of advanced tech . . . which it had, because he had a translator embedded in his chest.
If Liam had remained by the lake, the Ark Lord might have opened a wormhole there instead, and naturally Madison would have entered that location in her journal, and her sleep-written message this morning would have been different. Time was a funny thing; events happened because they had happened already, and they’d happened already because they were going to happen . . . or something like that.
When he finished his tale, they peered at him with concern. “You’re saying the Ark Lord injected you with nanobots?” Ant said.
“That’s what he said.”
Madison looked from Ant to Liam again. “And what, exactly, are nanobots?”
“Miniature robots,” Liam told her.
“Not just miniature,” Ant corrected him, “but microscopic. They’re mostly theoretical, but . . . well, so are wormholes.”
Getting to her feet and approaching Liam to look at his neck, Madison said, “And what’s the point of injecting microscopic robots into your neck?”
He stood still as she pulled back his collar and scrutinized his neck, her breath on his skin. “They, uh . . . they . . . well, I don’t really know. He said not to fight the change.”
“The change,” she said softly. She looked directly into his eyes. “This is bad, Liam. The change? You need to go to the hospital.”
Ant moved closer to peer at his neck too. “She’s right, man. We should go now. Maybe they can dig them out before they spread around your body.”
Liam firmly shook his head. “First of all, how would we explain that one? ‘Excuse me, I have alien nanobots in my neck. Can you take them out before they start transforming me into something else?’ I don’t think that’ll go down too well. Also, whatever is going to happen can’t be too bad. I mean, I saw myself in the future. I know I survive this just fine.”
“You don’t know anything of the sort,” Madison scolded, batting him on the arm. She stood taller than him, and right now she seemed much older than fifteen, more like an adult. “You saw yourself in the future, but what else? You told us you were dead in your bed, so you really don’t know if you’d spent your life with a limp, or an arm missing, or in a wheelchair, or anything! What if you’re horribly deformed by these nanobots? You’ll live until old age, sure—but in what kind of health?”
Goosebumps rose in Liam’s arms. She’d asked the same questions he’d asked himself earlier. The truth was, he didn’t know the answers. What he did know was that old-age Madison wouldn’t be sending all these messages back in time if she thought he’d suffer terribly. Even with the paradox of time loops and the danger of butterfly ripple effects, and all that other stuff theorized on TV, she just wouldn’t knowingly put him through a lifetime of misery.
“It’ll be fine,” he assured her.
“How do you know?” she demanded.
“I . . . I just do.”
He wished he could tell her. It would be much easier if he could just explain what he knew. But future-Madison had warned him against it. She’d practically begged him not to, saying she wasn’t due to find out the truth about her sleep writing for another seventy years or so. If he told her, the future might end up altered in some way.
It was only natural, therefore, for Ant and Madison to remain unconvinced. “You need to give us more than that,” Ant said. “If you know something, then tell us.”
“I can’t.”
Madison arched an eyebrow. “Can’t—or won’t?”
“Can’t,” Liam insisted. “Look, I’m not messing about. You have to trust me on this. You said yourself you didn’t want to see the future, Maddy, so I’m actually doing what you want here.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“No, you haven’t. Not really. Hey, look, help me pick up my room while we’re arguing about this, okay?”
As he set about collecting stuff off the floor and tidying up, Ant and Madison stood in silence before half heartedly picking up a couple of things. Liam felt he owed them a little more, so he picked his words carefully.
“I think that whatever is going to happen to me must happen. Because if I don’t go along with the Ark Lord, then he’ll dump a load of monsters on this house, and then I really might end up maimed for life.”
“Maybe that happens anyway,” Ant broke in. “You have a choice here. You could stop this now and get those nanobots taken out, and the Ark Lord loses his temper and dumps monsters on the house, and we’re all injured in some way, but we survive. Then there’s the other choice where you go along with the Ark Lord, head into battle with Gorvian time grubs, and die horribly in a pile of ash. Maybe refusing to do as he says is what saves your bacon and lets you live a long life.”
Liam sighed. “I don’t think so.”
He felt a strange sensation in his shoulder just then, a tickling deep inside the flesh. He frowned and stood perfectly still for a moment.
“What’s wrong?” Madison asked, moving closer.
“I . . . I think it might be too late. I can feel the nanobots doing something.”
She looked alarmed. “Doing what?”
“Not sure. Just . . . crawling? Only they’re way too small for me to feel them crawling, so I don’t know. They’re moving down through my body.”
“Does it hurt?” Ant whispered.
“Nah.”
They all watched a while longer as Liam stood there with his t-shirt pulled up. He felt a tingle in his chest, then his belly. Nothing untoward happened though, and he sighed and let his t-shirt drop.
Their discussion seemed to have drawn to a conclusion, perhaps the inevitable one. It was
obviously too late to do anything about the nanobots, and Liam added that if there was any hope of him having the nanobots taken out and their effects reversed, then he needed to do the Ark Lord’s bidding as best he could.
Deflated, Madison puffed out her cheeks and sat on the bed again, leaning forward to put her face in her hands. “I wish I’d never brought you guys into this. Everything was safe until I met you.”
“As far as you know,” Ant told her.
They finished tidying up. Liam was quite proud of their efforts, though he missed some of the books he’d lost. He hadn’t quite figured out what else of value had been sucked up onto the Ark among the piles of stuff he didn’t care so much about. He’d figure that out soon enough. He’d wake one morning and hunt around for something, then pause and realize it was gone forever.
Madison opened up Liam’s laptop without asking, but she didn’t boot it up. Instead she squinted at her reflection in the black screen and started messing with her hair, smoothing it out. “That wormhole did a number on me,” she murmured.
Liam rolled his eyes at Ant. He secretly thought she looked pretty amazing even with bits of hair sticking out at funny angles.
“Switch it on,” he suggested. “Use the webcam like a mirror.”
She shot him a steely glare. “You probably have a way to secretly record me, and then you’ll post a video of me on YouTube. I’m not stupid.”
Ant said, “It doesn’t need to be switched on to record you, Maddy.”
She froze. “Is that true?”
“Sure. The CIA might be watching you right now. Or aliens for that matter.”
Shaking her head, she snapped the lid shut and threw the laptop onto the bed. “That’s a really creepy thought.”
****
The rest of Saturday morning was uneventful. They talked until Liam’s mom chased them out of the house. They continued talking on the front lawn as the roofers finished their work and packed up to leave.
“Looks nice,” Madison said, shielding her eyes to appraise the repairs. “You’d never know a giant bat ripped it to shreds.”
“Did the insurance pay for it?” Ant asked.
He’d actually offered to pay for the work himself, but Liam’s dad had snorted quite loudly at the idea of being dug out of financial trouble by a twelve-year-old with deep pockets.
“Yeah, the insurers agreed,” Liam said. “They argued that there were no reported tornadoes last weekend, but the fire chief’s report swayed them. There was no way such damage could have occurred otherwise.”
Ant nodded. “So what’s next?”
“Liam’s mom is fixing up the kitchen,” Madison answered. “She was fretting over paint colors earlier.”
Their conversation seemed to have moved away from potentially life-threatening nanotechnology and degenerated into small talk. “Let’s watch a movie,” Liam suggested, getting up off the grass.
Madison checked her phone. “It’s not even eleven! I thought we agreed on a movie every Saturday at 4 PM until one of us dies of old age?”
Liam didn’t like being reminded of his future self dead in bed. “Well, we’re all here now. I vote we watch Twister so we can see if the claw marks on our roof could have been caused by thousand-mile-an-hour tornado debris.”
Ant grinned. “If you want to see a tornado and a bunch of weird creatures, how about The Wizard of Oz?”
Chapter 7
Liam woke late that night with his heart thumping as if from a nightmare he couldn’t remember. His pillow was damp. He threw the covers off and lay still, staring into darkness, grateful for the cool air on his skin. His t-shirt was also damp around the collar and armpits. Man, that must have been some dream!
He sat up and swung his legs out of the bed. The crescent moon offered a feeble glow through the window, but apart from that and the 20-watt nightlight by the door, everything was black. His digital clock read 3:14.
When he stood, one of his bare feet clunked slightly on the hardwood floor. He froze, trying to figure out why he’d left one of his shoes on. He stared down into the pools of darkness. His right foot looked normal enough, and he wiggled his toes to prove it. The left foot . . .
He squinted. “What the—?”
Something was wrong. His foot was swollen. No, not swollen exactly, just different. Wider. Squared off at the toes.
Feeling like he was in a dream, he took a couple of steps toward the nightlight and gasped at the monstrosity surrounding his left foot. Someone had placed a metal boot on him during the night. He threw himself down on the hard floor by the door and shifted his foot closer to the nightlight, looking for the clasps that held the boot so tightly around his ankle. It felt restricting, liable to cut off his blood flow if he left it on much longer.
A small, nagging voice at the back of his mind grew louder as he fumbled with the hard casing. It looked a bit like a futuristic sneaker, pale grey with tough, clunky toecaps. He couldn’t find any way to unfasten it, though. It was locked firmly onto his foot, and when he tried to dig his fingers into the top of the shoe behind his heel . . .
He sucked in a breath and let go, flinging his hands wide and uttering “No way!” in a panicked, squeaky voice. The sensible, everyday part of his brain wasn’t ready to comprehend what that little nagging voice had been telling him all along.
It wasn’t a shoe at all.
It was his foot.
Trembling, he reached for his ankle again. As before, his fingers touched something hard and oddly thin, not the ankle he’d grown up with but something else, something unreal, more like a stiff rod than a flesh-and-bone human joint.
His artificial foot and ankle-rod connected to something equally frightening, a hard structure buried deep beneath his shin and calf, protruding in places as though the robot limb hadn’t fully developed there yet.
“Robot limb,” he said aloud, breathing hard. “No way. No way.”
He said that over and over, but it didn’t help one bit. There was no doubt his left foot, ankle, and lower part of his leg had fundamentally altered as he’d slept, his flesh silently converting to steel and plastic.
When he checked his other foot, he noticed that it, too, had a hard patch underneath the skin near the toes. He prodded and twisted, feeling where changes were occurring within his flesh. Before long, he would have two robot feet.
He remained sitting for a long time, poking at the rest of his body, especially around his neck where the nanobots had been injected. Oddly, nothing untoward was happening there. Any normal virus would likely have attacked the area immediately surrounding the puncture wound, but instead it had headed for his feet. Why?
The enormity of his predicament loomed like a massive tidal wave rolling toward a beach. When it finally crashed down over him, he feared he would run around the house screaming and waking up his parents. Everything—Madison’s sleep-written messages, the wormholes, the Ark and its alien prisoners, everything—would come out, and then the FBI and CIA and Homeland Security and US Army would sweep in from all directions and cocoon the house inside a giant dome while scientists in hazmat suits came at him, snapping on latex gloves and wearing surgical masks beneath their glass faceplates as armed soldiers filed in and—
He shuddered and buried his face in his hands. This was a nightmare. But he couldn’t let his parents find out. Somehow, he had to hide what he was becoming.
He almost laughed out loud. How was he supposed to hide his big, clunky, metal-and-plastic foot? What happened when both feet changed, when his entire legs became robotic? What if the nanobots worked on his hands next? His face?
The only way to hide this bizarre, impossible transformation from his parents was to leave the house.
Run away? he mused. No, I can’t do that. Maybe go on a camping trip? Pretend to stay at Ant’s house?
Frowning, he decided that last idea was a pretty good one. Ant’s parents had a gazillion spare rooms in their ridiculous mansion. The residents of a small village could hide out
in one wing of the building for a whole month before a cleaner ventured down the corridor.
The upcoming kitchen work would facilitate his plan. His parents would understand if he wanted to get away while contractors were stamping about the place. It was Sunday tomorrow—already Sunday, in fact—and other workers would be showing up to work first thing Monday. It would still be noisy even when Liam returned from school. How was he supposed to concentrate on homework with all that ruckus?
It’ll work, he thought. They’ll go for it. I’ll head over to Ant’s tomorrow and spend a few days there. His parents won’t notice anything because we’ll slip in and out of a side door somewhere. Barton can drop us both at school and pick us up afterward.
Except he wouldn’t be going to school. Not with shiny metal feet and hydraulic knees.
He vigorously rubbed his face. How was he being so calm about this? How could he make jokes as alien nanotechnology coursed through his veins and altered his very being on a molecular level?
Because I’m going to survive.
He sat there on the floor by the nightlight for nearly an hour pondering his situation and planning his next move. He could probably get past his dad without any trouble even with clunky metal feet. But his mom? She’d notice immediately. He couldn’t even put shoes on over the robot casing. He had a bathrobe, but it didn’t drape low enough. What if he was up early and at the breakfast table before his parents? He could safely sit there with his feet tucked backward, and then he could slip away while their backs were turned. It was risky, but he had no choice. There was no way he could just leave for Ant’s house without facing them and asking permission.
“Breakfast it is, then,” he said with a sigh. “Let’s hope I haven’t grown huge metal pincers by then.”
He finally crawled into bed at 4 AM. Lying on his back, he could sense tingling sensations below his left knee and in the toes of his right foot. Thankfully, there was no pain. In fact, beyond the tingling, he had no feeling in his extremities at all. He felt nothing.
I have metal toes. A completely metal skeleton surrounded by some sort of hard plastic casing. I’m turning into the Ark Lord!
Impossible Mission Page 4