The Nerdy Dozen #2

by Jeff Miller

  “No, it’s just a cool name,” Lars explained. “Or I guess it is. All the adults here named it and stamped it all over the place.”

  “Cool. I’m Biggs, it’s nice to meet you.”

  The two shook hands, and Biggs made a sign with both hands, like he was holding a fishing rod that was on fire. Lars looked puzzled and turned to Neil for an explanation.

  “Oh, he’s been creating his own sign language,” Neil explained. “I think that means it’s good to meet you?”

  “It means ‘Thanks for the hospitality, moon child.’ But close,” said Biggs. “Also, might I suggest a new abbreviation for this whole colony? You’re gonna attract a lot of space riffraff. Unless that’s the type of thing you’re going for.”

  Lars nodded his head slightly, as if that wasn’t the first time he’d heard the suggestion.

  “So what do you guys like doing? Puzzles? I’ve got some of those around here somewhere,” he said. He seemed frantic. “Video games? I have lots of those.”

  “You may just be talking to the twelve best video gamers alive,” Neil said. “Well, our friend Yuri is at home puking. So just know there could be thirteen of the best living gamers here.”

  “Oh, you don’t say?” Lars said as he reached into a slim freezer and pulled out a bag of dehydrated French fries. He emptied its contents into a machine that looked like a platinum-blue microwave and sounded like a tiny leaf blower. He punched a few buttons and began pulling cups from the cupboard above.

  Lars held up the glasses to the track lighting overhead, squinting to determine if they were clean before lining them up. He wiped some stray cheese balls from his counter with his forearm.

  “Check it out, ultimate cheese ball toss,” Lars said, flipping a yellow fake-cheese puff in the air. It floated in a gentle arc, barely creeping through the air as it rotated. With a spring from his feet, Lars bounced up to bite the neon snack from the air. Neil wondered what kind of distance he could get tossing a doughnut hole.

  Lars seemed not to eat in front of others very often. He took huge bites of caramel corn with an open mouth and wiped the mess from the corners of his mouth onto his shirtsleeve. His shirt was a gray skintight turtleneck that had THE NEW DIST COLONY plastered to it in black lettering.

  Neil knew he was getting a lucky glimpse into the lifestyle constant video gaming without parental supervision provided. He wondered how one might go about getting accepted into the New Dist Colony.

  As Lars scrambled in the kitchen’s cupboards, Sam and the rest of the group had begun slyly snooping around Lars’s house. After all, the radar for the missing ship did lead them here. Something was going on with this bubble boy.

  They poked through a counter of snacks and riffled through a small stack of video games near the entertainment system.

  “You guys should see downstairs,” Lars said, his arms full of snacks for the crew. “I’ve got low-gravity Ping-Pong, and I just got a new space dartboard. There’s an even bigger TV and a stock of space junk food. We can see who wants to play me in my favorite game.”

  “Shuttle Fury?” asked Neil, shakily clutching a tray holding twelve cups of a purplish space juice poured by Lars.

  “Wow, yeah! I didn’t think anybody else played it.”

  “I don’t, really,” Neil admitted.

  “Oh, Lars, our friend Neil here loves to play that game,” said Sam, her voice caked with sarcasm. Neil clenched his teeth and gave his friend a glare, but she only responded with a pleasant smile.

  Does nobody even care anymore that Finch put me in charge?

  “We can all go downstairs, and you two can play a nice long game up here. Sound good, Neil?” said Sam. He knew she was probably buying time for them to figure out what was going on with the radar, but Neil didn’t enjoy being kept upstairs with their bizarre new friend.

  “Awesome,” Lars said, pointing to a silver door in the corner of the room. “You guys go make yourselves at home downstairs. We can play all night! And on the moon it’s sort of always night, so we can just play forever!”

  Only a fraction of his normal weight, Waffles was the first to run toward the basement door, slamming into it.

  “Still gettin’ the hang of jumping,” Waffles said as he rubbed his forehead. The others followed him as he opened the door to the basement, flipping on the light switch.

  “You’ve got to do more of a skipping motion, like an injured pony,” Lars explained, hopping toward the small dirty kitchen. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Neil stayed put as he watched his friends moon-leap toward the basement. Harris and Sam walked together, and Harris said something only Sam could hear. Neil could see her giggle, and some kind of emotion caused Neil’s stomach to drop.

  “WHERE ARE THE ADULTS?” NEIL SAID, SLURPING ON A PURPLISH space beverage. Looking around the messy space bubble, Neil had the impression an adult hadn’t been present for months. “And who are these adults? My mom would lose it if my room looked like this. Well done.”

  Neil walked over and plopped down on the chair, an action that took a bit longer than it usually did on Earth. Each time he easily lifted off the ground, Neil felt like a wrestler leaping off a top rope for a high-flying elbow drop.

  “My pleasure,” Lars said with a laugh, his voice nasal and slow. “The adults are all scientists. I’m the only one here under the age of fifty.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “A long weekend trip to the other side of the moon. Another country sent a rover up here to explore, so they’re off to go mess with it,” Lars said. He started Shuttle Fury, selecting a head-to-head battle round. “They have big Sasquatch costumes and everything. Scientists on vacation are weird.”

  You’re telling me.

  Neil’s father was a scientist as well, although his specialty was archaeology and things that happened millions of years ago. He also was horrible on vacations, constantly keeping to a strict schedule and dressing in all tan like a sunburned zookeeper.

  “You ready?” said Lars, his green eyes opened wide. Neil responded with a nod, and the game erupted with lights and sounds of space shuttles. The level featured a race to random coordinates about halfway from the moon and Mars. Lars jumped out to an early start, but Neil was able to keep pace.

  As they played the game, successfully rolling their ships through an asteroid belt, Neil soon realized Lars was good—like, really good. He rarely encountered players that could flat-out outplay him. Lars would soon notch his tenth victory in a row.

  “Wow, Lars. You’re really great.”

  Maybe Lars was just a totally normal guy, simply stuck here with his dad.

  “Yeah, I’ve had a lot of time to just practice,” Lars said, before tapping a series of buttons on his controller. His shuttle discarded extra weight from the payload air lock underneath, increasing the shuttle’s speed.

  “Whoa, cool!” Neil said.

  “And do you know the trick to warp speed?”

  I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Nobody is going to let that go.

  “Yeah, I think,” Neil said as he activated the warp speed shown to him by his friends. His ship barreled ahead of Lars’s, leaving a glittering blue trail of space dust in its wake.

  “Oh, that’s just regular warp speed,” Lars said, a bit unimpressed. “But this is even cooler.”

  Flipping a couple buttons on the control panel, Lars throttled forward. His ship jumped into what looked like a double-warp drive, going even faster than the trick Trevor annoyingly demonstrated before.

  Lars’s craft shot into the distance, slowly corkscrewing as it left an even broader blue trail behind it.

  “Man, I played this game for hours and never even saw this!” Neil exclaimed. “Or, at least, I know people who have played this game for hours, and they’ve never seen this!”

  “Oh yeah. Some Whiptails don’t have it, but you can use all your reserve fuel to kinda do the same thing,” Lars said, snorting. “You can’t unlock this until the last le
vel. That and the Whiptail’s last line of defense. Supposedly it’s how you destroy the asteroid in the game, when you’re out of pulse cannon energy and you’ve discharged your missiles.”

  Wait, asteroid?

  “I’ve tried it, but my ship always explodes,” Lars said. “There’s some trick with it I’m not seeing. I’ll figure it out. Like I said, I have a lot of time up here.”

  “I’d imagine,” said Neil, his tongue curling out of the corner of his mouth. His mouth stretched into a smile as he successfully pulled off the same double-warp maneuver.

  “Although things have gotten a bit better lately.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Totally. I learned a new trick on the Whiptail shuttle. You can jump-start it from outside of the ship,” Lars said as he landed his virtual spaceship.

  “Oh, without it moving first? That could’ve been helpful,” said Neil.

  Lars looked at him with a quizzical face but kept playing the shuttle simulator. His character, a boxy pilot, took robotic steps out of the air lock. The avatar shut the round door and slid a secret panel that was just above the doorway. Inside was a red handle. It kind of looked like a fire alarm.

  “Cool,” said Neil, wondering if his ship outside had the same feature. Lars’s character tugged on it and ran backward, watching the rockets on the back of the simulated Whiptail begin to bloom white and blue.

  “I’m excited you guys are here. We can get a big team game when those twins come back, too,” Lars said. “They promised to come back soon.”

  Hold it, Neil thought.

  “Twins?”

  “Yeah, they stopped by within the last twelve hours or so,” Lars replied, now almost a light-year ahead of Neil in the virtual race. “You need to ease off on all the throttling. Flying in space is different.”

  Lars fired a laser at floating space rocks, leaving jagged obstacles for Neil to encounter.

  “Were they alone?” Neil asked.

  “You sure ask a lot of questions. Yeah, they came by themselves,” Lars said. “They knew all the tricks to this game, which was impressive. I actually came close to losing a game. I tried to make them hang out longer, but they were in a rush. Something about . . .”

  “What?”

  “Why are you so interested in this?” asked Lars, looking away from the screen.

  “I’m just a curious guy.”

  “Well, curious guy, they were looking for their parents, or something.”

  Neil’s eyebrows lifted with this new information, and his ship began to float idly.

  It all made sense. The Minor twins stole the rocket because they wanted to look for their long-lost parents.

  They’re the ones I saw in the window of the stolen ship.

  It was definitely time to go. Neil purposefully steered his ship into the path of a behemoth meteoroid, and the craft was quickly smashed apart like a golf cart stuck on railroad tracks.

  “Game over. Darn,” Neil said. “Guys!”

  Neil ran downstairs.

  “We have to go. I think I know where to look for the missing spaceship!”

  “Not so fast,” Lars said, appearing at the basement door. He had a mischievous smile, and he clicked a button on a small handheld remote he had kept in his sweatpants. They heard the sound of a heavy metal bolt locking the front door in place.

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “YOU CAN’T LEAVE,” LARS SHOUTED, HIS VOICE HEATED. “I’M sick of being up here all alone.”

  Neil imagined it could get pretty lonely planted on the moon all alone. It seemed a lot like being stranded in a field in the middle of nowhere, like a cowboy.

  Space cowboys. Oh, now I get it.

  “If you think there’s any chance we’re staying in here, you’re sorely mistaken,” yelled Trevor, trying to stomp angrily toward Lars. In the low gravity, however, it was still a gentle bouncing, and not at all what he was going for. “My dad doesn’t practice space law, but I’m sure he could start.”

  “You think anybody knows what goes on up here? Ha!” Lars said, which made Neil feel nervous. In space nobody could hear you yell for help against a turtlenecked tween, and that went double inside a glass dome. “I’ve known you were after those kids the whole time. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I get that it must be lonely up here, but we need to go,” Neil said. Trevor and Waffles tugged at the door’s metal handle, but it refused to budge.

  “We’ve got some serious stuff to attend to.”

  Lars’s face was covered in shadows, and his features that seemed goofy and friendly before now appeared sinister. His head tilted slightly forward, and the circles under his eyes grew shades darker.

  “Serious stuff?” Lars questioned. “Stuff pertaining to how, exactly, twelve kids just showed up at my invisible moon habitat?”

  “Well, what about you? Why is your little space condo showing up on our radar?” said JP.

  “New Dists welcome everyone. We have a constant radar beacon welcoming any intelligent life-form,” Lars said. “But I’m beginning to wonder more about you all. Especially where you found these very realistic NASA outfits.”

  Neil hesitated, unsure what to admit. Even if he hinted at the truth, where would he begin explaining the situation?

  You see, we’re a group of gamers working for the US military. We did one tour a few months back, and now we’ve flown to space with little training in a spaceship full of space bananas as Earth’s last hope. It was all completely understandable.

  Neil heard clanging at the door, and turned to see Waffles and Dale attempting to wedge dinner knives into every possible crevice.

  “You can mess with that door as much as you like, but every exit is sealed shut with reinforced steel,” Lars said with a snarl. “The New District just doubled its population.”

  Neil’s watch beeped, reading 03:00. It was closing in on a full twenty-four hours since they’d left NASA, and the Newt was probably long gone, its warp drive kicking up stardust throughout the galaxy. Neil and the others took naps, waking up in shifts to do battle with Lars.

  “Forty-seven straight victories!” blared Lars’s froggy voice.

  What initially seemed like a fortress of never-ending joy and gaming was now a prison. A prison with video games, yes, but a prison nonetheless.

  Thus far Lars had gone undefeated on head-to-head matchups in space Ping-Pong, space foosball, and Shuttle Fury, possibly proving he should’ve been selected to pilot the secret mission in the first place.

  “Who’s up next? I’m beginning to think we may not have any more challengers,” Lars said with an arrogant tone. He seemed to lack awareness about the benefits of sharing and playing nice with others. And hygiene, for that matter. But he was a ruthless pilot.

  “You’d think he’d get sick of beating everyone repeatedly on that stupid game,” Harris said to Neil as the two sat down on Lars’s couch on the main floor. After an hour of silently snooping around every exit for a point of weakness, they’d given up hope of an escape. Lars’s lunar home was on lockdown.

  “Looks like we’ll just have to plan to grow old in this place,” Jason 2 said, joining the couch with a joke. Nobody laughed, but Neil could tell Harris’s brain was busy thinking through something.

  “Hey, Harris, you’re next,” said Lars from the bottom of the basement staircase.

  “Dude, you already beat me once,” Harris yelled back. “I get it; you’re very good at games involving the space program. Call me when you play a game with some real action.”

  Neil could hear scuffling from the floor below, followed by Lars reappearing at the top of the stairway.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lars said, looking offended. “Shuttle Fury is hands down the—”

  “Save it, Moonboy,” Harris said, unapologetic for cutting him off. Neil could see flashes of the attitude that made him a formidable villain. He could really get under your skin. “You want to have a video game challenge, let’s up the st
akes.”

  Lars looked shocked and intrigued. His boogery-nose breath subtly whistled in the recycled space air.

  “We play one game of my choice,” Harris explained. “I win, you let us out of this little space shack. You win, we take you to an actual spaceship, like the ones you pilot in the game. The real deal.”

  “What’s the game?” said Lars, looking unimpressed by news of a ship. JP, Riley, and the others filtered into the room, watching as Harris gave away their prized possession.

  “The highly anticipated sequel to Feather Duster, Bird and Beast Magazine’s number three ostrich-themed virtual reality,” Harris said.

  “What?”

  “Feather Duster 2,” Harris said as he reached into a pocket of his suit and brandished a clear case housing a silver disc. With it were two masks that looked a lot like ostrich beaks. “Complete with smells.”

  Lars said nothing and stood in silence, possibly calculating his odds at victory.

  “If I win, each one of you has to play an hour of games with me a day,” Lars added. “I’ll sleep twelve hours and play twelve hours.”

  “When will you eat?” asked Corinne.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” Lars said. “And another thing: I’m not playing you. I’m playing him.”

  Lars pointed a clammy finger directly at Neil.

  “If he’s as good at this Feather Duster game as he is at Shuttle Fury, this will be a piece of cake.”

  “Deal,” said Harris, not giving Neil a chance to respond.

  Neil shot him a look, remembering how when Neil was Harris’s prisoner, Neil played him for his release. It ended with Neil being returned as a prisoner, despite being victorious. Plus he hadn’t had a chance to play the newest version of the long-awaited sequel.

  “Why should Neil get to play? I want to challenge this worm,” said Trevor, attempting to remind everyone he was still in charge.