by M. E. Castle
Because nobody had been hurt, the fire department had simply confiscated the sleeves, but the fire chief had sternly said that Fisher and Alex could expect to hear from the police soon. Meanwhile, Principal Teed had gotten word and was deliberating on their suspension.
Alex’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He put it to his ear, listened, and groaned.
“Voice mail from Mom,” he said, slipping it back into his pocket. “She and Dad went to a research lab at Stanford this afternoon to do more work on the Gemini. She said that we shouldn’t expect them back tonight. I don’t think the principal got hold of them before they left. Supposedly, the Gemini will be confined to their bus until they get back.” Alex made it clear that he thought the possibility unlikely.
But Fisher felt a flare-up of hope. “That gives us time to plan,” Fisher said as the cluster of antennae on top of their house appeared over the rooftops. “I think we need to change our approach.”
“What we need is to give the Gemini an actual education,” Alex said. “We need to teach them what things are like on Earth and why you can’t just blow up when you get annoyed.”
In the house, Fisher and Alex kicked off their shoes like they were stinging insects. Fisher felt like he’d lived two whole lifetimes since the morning. FP romped down the hall from the kitchen, trailing the remains of a torn-apart cereal box from his tail, and started nuzzling Fisher’s ankles with happy snorts.
Paul ambled on his tentacles down the stairs and gave Alex a few friendly pats. Alex looked at Fisher.
“All right,” said Fisher. “Time for some serious planning. We need mind fuel.”
“Guacamole?” said Alex.
“You know it,” said Fisher.
They trekked into the kitchen. Fisher grabbed a big bag of tortilla chips from the pantry and Alex walked up to the fridge.
“Hey, fridge,” Alex said.
“Greetings, Alexander,” said the fridge in a pleasant, mellow, female voice. It had made a point to be especially courteous since its brief rebellion caused by Three’s chaos signal.
“Is there any guacamole left from last night?” Alex asked.
“Yes,” said the fridge. “You can find it next to the milk on the lowest shelf. I have kept it at optimal temperature. Your mother also requests that you take care not to jostle the middle shelf. She is incubating a semi-intelligent micro-arboreal fungivore.”
“Oh yeah,” Alex said. “The scum-eating fridge tree. She really hates scrubbing you.” He opened the door and swiped a little Tupperware container from inside.
“Most cheerful greetings to you both, my dear boys!” the toaster piped up in his posh English accent. “I trust your day was a success in every regard?”
Lord Burnside sat happily on the countertop, like any other toaster but with much greater poise and refinement. He was capable of very sophisticated conversation but his dreams remained the same: achieving the ideal crunchiness on the topmost layer of a slice of bread.
“Not so much in the lack-of-explosions regard, Lord Burnside,” said Alex, sitting down next to Fisher at the kitchen table and popping the lid off the guacamole as Fisher opened the chips.
“Oh dear,” Lord Burnside said, the glowing spots that served as his eyes dipped in sympathy. After a moment they took a quizzical bend. “Perhaps it is merely my lack of expertise in any other realm than the crisping of whole wheat slices, but it seems that large explosions occur with unusual frequency in your lives. Is this typical?”
“Not quite,” said Fisher, scooping up a healthy amount of the dip with his first chip.
“So what do we do?” Alex asked, the question muffled by a full mouth of chips. “How can we establish a diplomatic relationship with the Gemini when we never know what might literally set them off?”
“Knowledge is always the key,” Fisher said, leaning back in his chair. “We need to understand them in order to make this arrangement work. And they need to understand us. As much as they’ve studied us from up in space, they’re clearly missing some important points about human interaction.” He sighed. “We need to clear up some things with them before they come back to Wompalog. I mean, it’s obvious they mean well—”
They heard the front door open.
“Huh,” Fisher said. “I guess Mom and Dad came back early.”
Alex’s eyes widened. “Not unless Mom and Dad sound like half the kids at Wompalog,” Alex leapt to his feet and dashed out of the kitchen. Fisher heard the growing babble of voices and raced to the front hallway.
Kids were pouring in the front door. A high percentage of the seventh grade, plus some sixth and eighth graders. Before Fisher or Alex could react, the house was full.
“How’d they get through the gate?” Fisher shouted.
At the center of the throng were the Gemini.
“Fisher,” Alex said, tapping the screen near the door to bring up the front gate camera.
“What the …” Fisher said, staring at the image of Zoe standing in the Liquid Door to keep it open and waving in a few stragglers from school.
“How is it opening for her?” Fisher said, then noticed a small object in Zoe’s hand. “Is that … is that a comb?”
Alex patted his back pocket.
“Yes,” he said. “My comb. Mental note, the genetic scanner of the Liquid Door is hypersensitive and needs serious adjustments.”
“We’ll have to get on that if our house is still standing tomorrow,” Fisher groaned.
“What’s going on?” shouted Alex above the clamor, stepping forward to confront the Gemini.
“What’s it look like?” asked Bee. “Everyone at Wompalog’s got so much work to do. Stress is a killer, am I right?”
Bee and Anna executed a perfect fist bump. A fist bump? Fisher thought.
“We decided to invite them over for a little fun!” Bee went on.
“I thought—” Alex’s eyes were ticking back and forth frantically, like a metronome gone wild. He gulped. “But what about staying on the bus?”
Anna rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. “We traveled two thousand light-years in a ship to get here! We’re tired of sitting still. Besides—” she sniffed disdainfully. “The bus doesn’t even have Wi-Fi!”
“Wait!” Fisher said, snatching a vase out of George Katz’s hand, which he’d been about to use as a football to hurl across the living room. “We can’t throw parties here! This house is full of experimental technology and potentially dangerous lab equipment!”
Anna and Bee merely shrugged and pushed past them.
“Wait!” Fisher called again. But they were already gone.
He followed four of the Gemini from somewhere in the middle of the alphabet into the kitchen and found the fridge flung wide open.
“Stop!” he said. “That’s our food!”
It was too late. They’d cleaned out the fridge in a matter of seconds. Fisher spotted the fridge tree crawling away by its little branches and managed to grab it before it became Gemini salad.
“Enough,” he said. “If you’re that hungry, you should … what are you still eating, anyway?” The food was gone, but the Gemini still had their mouths full. “Never mind,” Fisher said. “Just … don’t move. I’ll be back.”
Fisher deposited the fridge tree in a small cupboard in the hallway and tried to put together a plan to round everyone up and get them out the door.
The party was already in full swing. Fisher’s barely renewed hope was plunged back into arctic waters. The Gemini didn’t want to talk. They didn’t seem to want a cultural exchange at all. They just wanted to dress up and treat the human world like a dollhouse. An easily explodable, flammable dollhouse. Alex had his hands clasped behind his head in frustration.
“Fisher, even I don’t know a bunch of these kids,” Alex said, turning in slow circles and taking in the crowd.
Fisher’s mind was racing. “A head-on confrontation is a bad idea,” he said, miming an explosion with his hands.
“No kidding,”
Alex answered. “Let’s work on the kids first and get to the Gemini when everyone else is out the door.”
Fisher nodded. “You take the upstairs. I’ll stay down here.”
Alex gave him the thumbs-up and bolted up the stairs.
In the kitchen, the Gemini were setting out trays full of snacks. Fisher had no idea where they’d gotten more food, but if there was anything strange or untrustworthy about the choice of edibles, it was too late to warn the students, or FP, who was going through the party mix faster than fire through gasoline-soaked matchbooks.
Three eighth graders were marveling over the automatic self-setting dining table, whose instantly extracting arms could move with great speed and handle a variety of utensils. One of them had discovered the automated features by accident when he’d dropped his glass and the table shot out an arm to catch it. Now all three students were tossing plates and glasses in the air to watch the table grab at them.
It was only a matter of time before something broke—or worse, someone got clocked in the face by an overenthusiastic table arm. Fisher realized this might be just the time for a field test of his newest device.
During the infiltration of TechX to hunt down the evil Dr. X, Fisher had used his Memory Loop serum to make a guard experience the same six seconds over and over. It was like replacing a live security camera feed with a repeating tape. Recently, Fisher had been experimenting on a new variety of the serum. Its purpose was to distract FP when Fisher had important work to do. Unfortunately, the serum was as of yet untested.
The kids laughed maniacally as they tossed more and more plates, forks, serving platters, and glasses at the table. Fisher knew the table was reaching its capacity. He had no choice. He would have to act fast. Soon, the arms would start missing, and plates—or bones—would start shattering.
Fisher pulled a small plastic pellet out of his pocket and hurled it at the kitchen floor. Its thin plastic shell broke open, releasing a fine powder in a cloud that Fisher was just outside of, as per his exact calculations.
Instantly, the kids stopped what they were doing, smiled, and sat down.
Fisher nearly laughed out loud. It was working! He knew that right now each kid was recalling the experience of eating a favorite food in such exquisite detail that he would stay occupied for at least another half hour … when the serum wore off.
But Fisher couldn’t relax yet. In the living room, Chance Barrows, the multisport star and glowing pinnacle of cool among seventh-grade boys, had just tripped over the release lever for the tank holding Mr. Bas’s collective-mind ants. The entire swarm shared a single mind, and it flowed out of the tank like a wave. Chance dove out of the way as the ants searched for food. The swarm moved in absolute unison, perfect coordination, taking sharp turns and twists as they headed for the kitchen.
Chance crushed a few dozen as he clambered out of the way, but the hive continued on like nothing had happened. Fisher raced for the pantry, holding his breath as he passed through the kitchen, where some of the memory serum powder was no doubt still lingering in the air. Finally, he found the emergency ant containment device: a Dustbuster with “Emergency Ant Containment Device” written on it in black Sharpie.
The ants preferred food but they didn’t mind consuming other things—much like the Gemini, Fisher thought. They’d already begun chewing up the living room carpet, and if left to their own devices would go straight through the hardwood floor. If they reached the outdoors, they could wreck the local environment.
“Sweet party trick!” said a short boy Fisher didn’t know, his eyes following the ant swarm like it was a light show. Chance had hopped up onto the couch.
NOTES ON
MEMORY SERUM PELLETS
PURPOSE: to distract FP
FORMULA: variation on Memory Loop serum
DELIVERY METHOD: PELLET
OBSERVATIONS and SIDE EFFECTS:
• need to program other foods for additional applications—not everyone likes popcorn as much as FP
• blissful state potentially entertaining for bystanders, therein a new distraction?
• too long-lasting, may dilute
“Yeah, thanks!” Fisher squawked out as he desperately grabbed a plate full of donuts off the coffee table and hurled it on the carpet. As the ants swarmed over the food, Fisher hopped back and forth with the E.A.C.D. on full power. Working as fast as he could, he was able to suck up most of insects. He marched back to the tank, made sure the lever was reset to “closed,” opened a small chute at the top, and knocked the ants back into their proper home.
“Master Fisher! Master Fisher!” came Burnside’s high voice from the kitchen, and Fisher ran to the aid of his loyal toaster and friend, once again keeping his hand cupped over his mouth as he passed the kitchen table.
He pushed his way through a throng of students crowded around the counter, where he found Yang and Zoe gnawing on Lord Burnside’s cord like it was a piece of licorice. Around them was a pile of partly eaten plates and mugs with huge bites taken out of them. Clearly, when the Gemini ran out of food in the kitchen they decided to cut out the middle step and just eat the kitchen.
“Hey!” Fisher said, yanking the toaster cord out of their hands. The two Gemini looked at him with mild confusion.
“We were eating that!” Yang said.
“We’re hungry,” Zoe said.
“I’m sorry,” Fisher said, trying to sound pleasant and not one second away from a total breakdown. “This is a part of Lord Burnside.” He patted the toaster. “He … helps prepare consumables. It would be a much better use of him to make toast.”
“Toast!” said Yang excitedly.
“What’s that?” said Zoe. The Gemini, Fisher noted, had some very significant gaps in their human knowledge.
“I’ll show you,” Fisher said.
There was a hidden cupboard that even the voracious Gemini hadn’t found. Lord Burnside got very antsy when the bread supply ran out, and so Mr. and Mrs. Bas kept an emergency stash. And this was definitely an emergency. Fisher reached in for the package of bread, put two slices into Lord Burnside, and pulled down his lever. “In a minute or two, those will be crispy.”
“Perfectly,” Burnside added in a slightly quivering voice. Clearly, he’d been traumatized by the fact that he’d very nearly been devoured.
“We shall consume your toast,” said Zoe, sounding less like a teen girl, and much more like Principal Teed trying to get control of the school after Ice Cream Day.
“All of it,” said Yang with an intensity normally reserved for serious medical diagnoses and Hamlet monologues.
Another crisis avoided, Fisher jogged out of the kitchen and upstairs, where Alex was trying to keep everyone away from their parents’ personal labs. Their automatic security systems didn’t ask any questions before releasing a cloud of forty-eight-hour sleeping gas, and some of the kids were getting dangerously close to setting them off.
Something else was bothering him, too—he hadn’t kept an exact count, but he was positive not all of the Gemini were in the house. There were at least three or four pairs unaccounted for. What were the others up to? Was something even bigger coming?
Whatever it was, he’d have to deal with the Gemini one crisis at a time. The party had to be shut down. Alex took a moment to catch his breath when he saw Fisher running up.
“How’s it going up here?” Fisher said, mopping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
“Not great,” Alex said. “I’m shoving people toward the doors as fast as I can, but as soon as I move on to the next group they come right back. We need help.”
“Who’s gonna help us?” Fisher said. “Everyone loves the Gemini!”
Alex let out a long sigh.
“Not everyone,” he said pointedly.
Fisher blinked as Alex’s meaning settled on him like the cold, clammy touch of a wet bathing suit. But he knew he had no choice. He swallowed. “I’ll ask,” he said.
“You’ll plead,” Alex correct
ed.
Fisher closed the upstairs bathroom door behind him and pulled out his phone, dialing Veronica’s number with shaking fingers.
My patience is equal to five hundred straws. And that—that was the last one.
—Prince Xultar of Venus, sworn enemy of Vic Daring, Issue #38
Ten minutes later, Amanda kicked open the front door with such force that it smacked into Jacob Li, making him spill his fruit punch into a luckily placed bowl of corn chips. Amanda and Veronica stepped through the hallway and into the living room simultaneously, smoothly taking off identical pairs of sunglasses.
“All right,” Amanda said, cracking her knuckles. “This party is over.”
Five Gemini pairs turned to look at her with a unified swivel of their necks. Their silky hair fell gracefully across their shoulders.
Everyone else in the room also turned after a split second. All with the same blank, mysterious eyes.
Alien eyes, you could call them.
“Fisher …” Alex muttered.
“Yeah,” Fisher said. “I see it.”
The other kids were Gemini.
Fisher wanted to turn invisible, back out of the room, and seal it shut. He should have seen this coming. The Gemini could take any form they wanted. And it had become very clear that they’d started as beautiful girls because they knew it would make people like them more, trust them more, and pay less attention to all the strange things they’d started to do. But they could look like anything. They could blend in to the human population. They could do anything they wanted and nobody would know it was them.
“We do not wish to end the party,” said one of the Gemini in the corner, who looked sort of like Chance—a big, athletic boy with wavy blond hair.
“Well, this isn’t your house,” said Veronica. “Or, furthermore, your planet. We’ve tolerated your impish antics thus far, but you’re taxing our hospitality to its furthest extremes. Your welcome is wearing tenuously thin.”