by M. E. Castle
What do you mean you’re not sure?? I thought you’d learned not to run and hide from human contact by now! Come on, Fisher. You know what to do.
Fisher started to lean toward Veronica. A little wisp of a smile flickered across her face.
He was going to do it.… He was going to kiss her.…
“WAHHHH!” Alex shouted at the top of his lungs, rattling them both out of the moment. Alex was pointing up at the sky. A massive fiery object was plunging directly toward them.
Amanda screamed, “GO!”
Then the top of the Mega Mars Madness coaster exploded. Fisher’s hearing was instantly blown out. A dull ringing echoed in his ears as he scrambled out of the car and away from the coaster. He escaped not a moment too soon—his hand tight around Veronica’s as he pulled her away from the fiery mass barreling toward their heads. Alex, Amanda, and the others ran alongside them. The Earth shook like a struck bell, and Fisher was thrown from his feet and swallowed by a cloud of dust.
Everything went black.
For a moment, Fisher thought he must be dead. Then he realized if he were dead he wouldn’t have the capacity to reflect on it. He sat up, groaning a little, trying to blink the grit from his eyes. His hearing was just starting to come back and he heard an alarm begin to blare.
They had been encircled by a wall of tangled, shredded steel and tortured, burning plastic. Half the remains of the M3 formed a barrier encircling the coaster park. The other half had been reduced to a heap the size of an office building that the kids had barely avoided being buried under. Trevor and Erin were lying on the ground, petrified but miraculously uninjured. Alex was helping Amanda to her feet. She winced as though she’d sprained her ankle. From the sound of commotion outside the wall of debris, a crowd was running in their direction, hopefully with plenty of emergency equipment.
Only then did Fisher realize that Veronica’s hand was no longer in his.
“Alex!” he shouted. Panic burned through his veins like fire. “Veronica!” It was the only thing he could say. Luckily, Alex understood.
Fisher dashed back into the debris in a panic, hurling everything he could lift out of the way. Amanda nodded to Alex that she was okay, and he ran to help, along with Erin. The guards were setting up barriers, forming a perimeter around the wreck and talking hurriedly into their radios.
“Did you see what happened to her?” yelled Alex. To Fisher, whose hearing was still scrambled, it sounded as if Alex was whispering through four layers of Styrofoam.
“No,” Fisher said desperately. “I had her hand as we were running away, but I lost her when we got knocked over.”
“We can’t find Warren, either,” Alex said as he started hefting and heaving through the rubble alongside Fisher.
With every lifted-away piece that didn’t reveal Veronica, Fisher’s frantic pace increased. He almost tossed a piece of scrapped plastic right into Alex’s head, forcing his clone to duck. Fisher yelled an apology and kept digging.
He turned at the muffled sound of a familiar squeal-snort.
FP bounded out of the wreckage, looking heroic—winged hooves prancing. He darted past Fisher and Alex and hopped from one piece of debris to another, putting his snout to each. Then he stopped and let out a piercing squeal, shaking his curly tail like a maraca.
“Veronica!?” Fisher’s heart was in his chest. If anything had happened to her, he would never forgive himself.
Fisher and Alex shoved until Fisher’s arms burned with overstrain, and they just managed to shift a massive support strut out of the way. Underneath it was Veronica. The huge C-shaped beam that landed over her had actually shielded her from other debris. She squirmed free, her hair and clothing matted in dust. She wrapped her arms around Fisher until his lungs barely worked, ashes from the explosion puffing off of her like a coating of flour.
“Oof … youf ofkay?” Fisher’s voice was muffled by her shoulder.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay. Is everyone else all right?”
“FP found Warren!” Alex shouted. “He’s fine! Asleep, actually.”
Fisher kicked something with his heel as he stepped back from Veronica. He looked down to see a twisted, bent steel tube. It took a moment for him to realize it was a safety harness. He felt nauseous. They could have died. They almost had died.
Fisher led Veronica back to the group. The others were still picking themselves up and brushing themselves off. Erin, who always kept a small first-aid kit on her, had just finished taping up Amanda’s ankle. Amanda tested it and grimaced, but nodded.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “I can walk okay.”
It wasn’t until that moment that Fisher remembered Brody, Willard, and Leroy.
“Hang on,” he said with what little breath he could draw. “What about the Vikings? They were near the coaster when it started. Are we sure they got away in time?”
“I saw them walking away as we got going,” Erin said. “Unless they doubled back they are probably fine.”
Fisher could hear dozens of voices outside the barrier of wreckage the explosion had ringed them with. Underneath them was a grumbling engine and heavy metallic clangs. It sounded like a bulldozer or a backhoe was clearing a path.
“Sounds like we’ll be out of here soon,” Alex said, putting his arm around Amanda’s shoulders.
“So … Did all of you see that?” Veronica said, tilting her head upward.
“Of course we saw it,” grumbled Amanda. “How do you not see a fifty-foot meteor pointed right at your head?”
“It wasn’t a meteor,” Veronica said. “It was a ship.”
Everyone stared at her like she’d sprouted a parrot beak.
“Veronica,” Amanda said, moving toward her and speaking very slowly, “are you sure you weren’t hurt? Did you bump your head? Maybe someone should take a look.” She lifted a hand toward her head. Veronica brushed it away.
“I’m not hallucinating,” she said impatiently. “I’m fine. I know what I saw.” She turned to Fisher. “You believe me, don’t you?”
Fisher opened his mouth and closed it again, feeling a little bit like a fish trying to swallow an apple.
Alex yanked Fisher aside and spoke quietly. “Fisher, an object that size falling from space should’ve turned this whole park into talcum powder. You know that.”
“Yeah,” Fisher muttered back, pretending he hadn’t noticed that Veronica was now glaring at him. “It would have to have been moving pretty slowly to just wreck the coaster. But a ship?”
“Uh, everybody?” said Erin, pointing to the wreckage. “What is that?”
Seeping from between the shattered remains of the M3 coaster was a viscous green fluid that glowed faintly. It flowed over obstacles and even up them, defying gravity—almost as if it were alive. More and more of it pooled in the grass as Fisher and the others backed away.
Soon, it had formed a circular pool the size of the Wompalog basketball court. The faint green glow seemed to pulse calmly, like a very slow heartbeat. Then it started to move again.
Nobody could speak. Not even Alex could think of anything clever to say.
A narrow tendril rose out of the pool and slowly extended toward the kids, who were rooted to the spot like a row of flowers. Very confused, scared flowers. The tendril paused when it reached Amanda and Veronica, and its end widened into something like a satellite dish. It stayed in place for a few seconds before the whole extrusion zipped back into the puddle.
The fluid then divided into thirteen forms that rose and stretched upward. As the forms solidified, they took on oddly familiar shapes; torsos, arms, legs, then heads. Colors and textures appeared next, becoming skin, hair, even clothing. Fisher was too flabbergasted to even have a sense of how long the whole process took, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
Where there had once been a small pond of luminescent green gloop, there were now thirteen very attractive and fashionable-looking teenage girls.
Veronica crossed her
arms and shot Fisher a dirty look.
“See? I told you it was a ship.”
First Contact with aliens is a delicate process. You want to present humanity as a gentle, kind, and enlightened people. You can always tell them the truth later.
—Vic Daring, Issue #23
Here it was. Extraterrestrial life. Aliens. Fisher had spent every single day of his life trying to imagine what this exact moment might be like for humanity.
He hadn’t, however, imagined that he, Fisher Bas, would be the first human to meet the alien race—especially not at twelve years old.
Nor had he anticipated their appearance. These beings were obviously not human. Or even carbon-based. But they looked exactly like teenage girls. Gorgeous ones. Veronica was still the most beautiful girl Fisher had ever seen, but staring at a thirteen-way tie for second place was dizzying. The aliens looked like a team of superheroines selected from all over the planet. They were all ethnicities, different heights and appearances, but all looked the same age, and all radiated beauty.
“Uh …” Fisher said. He realized Alex was making the same sound. It was the same noise that rattles out of an old laptop when it’s trying to analyze particle accelerator data. Fisher’s brain was in overdrive.
The “girls” turned to look at the humans. Their eyes clicked to Fisher’s, and then to Alex’s, and then back. Then, with a signal that was invisible to Fisher, the girls began to glow. Each one became … blurry. Almost as if they were vibrating at extremely high frequency. The blurriness increased, making them look like doubles.
After a moment it became clear that doubling was exactly what they were doing. Twin forms grew farther apart until, with a final snap into clarity, each girl became a pair of identical twins, right down to their clothing and the way their hair fell.
The identical two girls closest to Fisher and Alex stepped forward. They were pale, with ice-blonde hair. Electric green eyes held Fisher’s attention in a vise grip.
“Hello,” one said in a voice that was like soft violin music played in front of a gentle waterfall. “We’ve been studying your species from space for many years. We were only waiting for a signal from you to make contact.”
“Signal?” Fisher squeaked out.
“We’re so happy to meet the official Earth representatives!” the other said with a glowing smile that made Fisher feel like stammering even though he wasn’t talking. “We hope that our arrival wasn’t inconvenient.”
“No, no, no, not at all,” Fisher said, marveling at how easy it was to serve as the ambassador for Earth’s first encounter with an alien species. He could feel the Nobel Prize slipping into his hands already. He blinked to clear his mind. The fact that the aliens looked like pretty girls was distracting him from the fact that they were aliens. Nobody in recorded history had ever even found proof of extraterrestrial beings, let alone spoken to one face-to-face. Out of nowhere, Fisher and his friends were standing directly in the middle of one of the biggest moments in history.
“We’re fine,” Amanda said, hopping on her stronger ankle to get a better look at the girls. “No thanks to you.”
“Where did you come from?” Trevor asked in an awed whisper.
“We’re from a star system approximately five hundred Earth light-years from yours,” said the first twin. “We are called …” The two girls made a series of sounds that fell somewhere between whale song and a jackhammer hitting a submarine, accompanied by flashes of light from their eyes.
“Um …” Fisher and Alex said, exchanging a look. Fisher cleared his throat. “Can you repeat that?”
“We’re aware that your physiology is incapable of reproducing our name,” said the second girl, “even though humans can make lots of wonderful sounds.” She flashed Fisher another warm grin. Even Veronica didn’t smile at him this much. “Because of that, you may decide upon a human name for our species that you are more comfortable saying.”
“What about the Landing Impaired?” Amanda said.
“Or the Altitude Recalibration?” Veronica added.
“Veronica,” Fisher whispered. “Don’t be—” But when she turned to glare at him, he swallowed back the word rude.
“Well, they’re all twins,” said Erin after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Twins from space. That reminds me of the astronomy unit in my science class. We could call them the Gemini.”
“Yes, yes,” Fisher said quickly before Amanda and Veronica could say anything more. “The Gemini. Perfect.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Perfect …”
Amanda cleared her throat. Actually it sounded more like she was clearing her entire thoracic cavity.
“We, uh,” Alex said, glancing nervously at Amanda, “should give you Earth names individually, too.”
“Fine,” said Amanda, stepping up to Alex, putting her arm through his with pointed force, and giving the two Gemini who’d been speaking an iron-tipped glare. “It’ll be tough to remember a lot of complicated names. There are twenty-six of you. So we’ll name you alphabetically. Anna and Bee,” she said, pointing to the speakers.
She proceeded with the rest of them, pointing and naming, and if any of the other kids disagreed with her they definitely knew better than to go up against the wrestling captain. Fisher tapped a button in his sleeve, switching on a hidden digital recorder to get the names down, hoping it hadn’t been damaged during the crash.
“Yang and Zoe,” Amanda finished.
The second Gemini, Bee, nodded in approval. “That’s perfect.”
“Well, good,” said Fisher. “Great, in fact! As, um, Earth representative, I … uh-oh.”
A mound of rubble and dirt clods was pushed apart from inside, and a trio of familiar faces appeared with perfectly bad timing.
The Vikings. So they’d come back after all, just in time to be caught by the blast.
“Hey!” shouted Brody, looking as angry and stupid as usual. They stormed forward at Fisher.
But they stopped cold when they saw the Gemini. The Vikings looked at each other, unsure of how to act in the presence of so much beauty, their faces flushing.
Brody was the first to snap out of it. “We got business with you,” he said, pointing at Fisher with a broad stub of a finger.
“Y-yeah,” Willard said, taking a step forward. “P-punching b-business.”
Ingrid and Jeanne (Gemini girls nine and ten) neatly intercepted them.
LIST OF GEMINI NAMES
and brief descriptions***
1. Anna
2. Bee
very blonde, green eyes leaders, gorgeous
3. Claire
4. Deb
very tall, wow so pretty
5. Ellie
6. Fae
red hair, flickering a lot might explode? stunning
7. Gloria
8. Helen
intensely beautiful, brunettes
9. Ingrid
10. Jeanne
exquisite, definitley exploded
11. Kat
12. Leah
short hair, breathtaking
13. Mae
14. Nina
curly hair, extremely pretty
15. Ophelia
16. Phoebe
bright blue eyes, stunningly beautiful
17. Quinn
18. Renée
extremely tall, so so pretty
19. Sandy
20. Tina
glasses, devastatingly gorgeous, you get the idea
21. Ulyana
22. Vera
jet black hair, surprise: magnificently stunning
23. Wendy
24. Xena
just wow
25. Yang
26. Zoe
super gorgeous
***none are as pretty as Veronica
“Excuse us,” said Ingrid sweetly. “We’re in conversation with the ambassadors. You’re interrupting us.”
“This isn’t your business,” said Brody. But he sounded nervous. “You tell ’
em, Willard.”
Willard gulped a little and puffed himself up. “Yeah. It isn’t your business. So … just … g-get out of our way. Why don’t you just … go do c-cartwheels??”
“Yeah,” said Leroy. “You look like a bunch of dumb, squawking, uh, pairs o’ cleats.”
“Parakeets,” corrected Brody, smacking his forehead.
Ingrid and Jeanne frowned deeply. Then they started to glow. Fisher heard a faint hissing sound. The hiss grew into a harsh crackle, like a big log in a fireplace or very violent popcorn. BOOM.
Fisher blinked and staggered backward as another blast nearly knocked him off his feet. Had the Gemini shot the Vikings with some kind of high-energy particle beam?
When his vision cleared, he saw the Vikings were flat on the ground, marked with cuts, bruises, and burns. One of Brody’s eyes was swollen shut and Willard was holding one arm like it was broken. On the spot where Ingrid and Jeanne had been standing there was now little more than a scorch mark and a small puddle of green fluid.
Two Gemini had exploded. Oddly, the other twenty-four girls didn’t really seem to care.
Fisher and Alex jumped at a second earsplitting noise.
But it wasn’t the Gemini this time. It was the crash of a bulldozer finally breaking through the debris of the M3. That crash was followed by the sound of heavy boots as the guards raced through the gap the dozer had created.
“Step away from the aliens!” the team leader said, forming a semicircle behind the kids.
Fisher spent a second wondering how the guards knew the Gemini were aliens. Maybe the people farther away had seen the ship coming. But Fisher didn’t have long to wonder. He knew things were about to go from bad to worse. His heart sped back up to panic mode. Everything had been going so well until the Vikings had shown up.
Now they were on the verge of interstellar war.
The human species is its own natural predator, and is quite good at it.
—Early Gemini notes on Earth
The Gemini started glowing. They reminded Fisher of deep-sea bioluminescent fish, sending out an eerie red light from just beneath their skin. The heavy brow of the security team’s leader twitched as he eyed the girls, his weapon hovering at the ready in his thick, blue-veined hands.