by Tom Cheshire
“Miss Emma, I believe I have developed a sufficient understanding of several noteworthy issues,” Bob replied.
“I should hope so, it’s taken you long enough…” Dom huffed.
“Well…” Chloe breathed. “Tell us.”
“How would you like me to do that, Miss Chloe?”
“JUST DO IT!”
“I don’t know if that’s going to work,” I interjected. “Bob tried to send me something just now and…” Everyone’s eyes turned to me and I quickly realised that I was only at the risk of alienating myself further from the group. “Never mind…”
“I sense you all seem to be rather exasperated. Is everyone feeling okay?” Bob asked. There was an awkward pause.
“Ah!” Bob exclaimed. “I have an idea. I know exactly how to do this… it will be fun!”
“What’s going to be fun, Bob? Another game?” Dom asked, sarcastically.
“You are correct in a sense, Mr. Dom.” Bob said. “We are going to have a quiz.”
“Oh no…”
“Oh yes!” Bob sounded ecstatic. He imitated the sound of a pouring drink. “It will be like a pub quiz.”
The five of us exchanged various looks of bewilderment.
“Bob…” Chloe spoke softly. “With all due respect… after what happened last time, I don’t think you should be allowed anywhere near a pub… virtual or otherwise.”
“Do not worry, Miss Chloe. I do not intend to simulate the effects of human intoxication this time,” Bob reassured. “Unless you would like me to?”
“No, no, that’ll be fine, Bob…” Chloe heaved a sigh of relief. “So… how’s this going to work? Are you going to ask us questions about things from our past?”
“Correct!”
“And you’re going to give us the answers?”
“Correct!”
“Holy shit…”
“Splendid. So, are we ready to begin?” Bob asked. “How about a raise of hands?”
“Raise your hands, guys.” Chloe said.
Perhaps sensing that this ridiculous pub quiz idea was probably the quickest way Bob was going to reveal his information; Chloe, Dom and Emma all raised their hands immediately. Travis didn’t, but I don’t suppose anyone noticed.
“Well, Joe?” Chloe asked.
X, are you there? I want you to promise me something. Promise me you aren’t going to start messing with my head again.
If you are implying that I am somehow responsible for your recent problems with perception, let me be honest with you. I will not interfere.
“I’m ready,” I raised my hand.
But you may not like what you learn...
14
“Round One: General knowledge. Are we sitting comfortably?”
“We would be if we still had that sofa,” Chloe sneered. That was probably a remark directed towards Dom, but it was Travis that looked the most hurt. We were all sitting in his makeshift chairs after all – well, almost all of us… there may have now been enough Travis-chairs to accommodate all five of our backsides, but Dom had insisted on splaying his body out on the floor as apparently it was ‘more ergonomic’ for him.
“Excellent. Then I shall begin.” Bob played a silly little jingle. Seriously, did quizzes always work like this in the past?
“Question One… What is the…”
Chloe made a high pitched sound like she was hyperventilating.
“Chloe?”
“Sorry guys, just… the anticipation of… sorry, carry on,” she breathed.
“You’re not going to faint are you?” Dom asked semi-seriously.
“Well, I don’t know, it is pretty exciting isn’t it…”
“Guys!” I called out. “We just missed the question!”
“No!” Dom yelled.
“Correct!” Bob exclaimed. “Question Two…”
“What?”
“No was the correct answer, Mr. Dom!”
“But what was the question?”
“Does this ship have the means of returning to Earth…” Travis said, staring vacantly.
“Oh… um…” Dom’s voice quavered as everyone’s entire mood dropped in an instant. “Is that the right answer?”
“It is complicated.” Bob said. “One could say that it is theoretically possible, yet still highly improbable. In fact, the likelihood of it being possible is so miniscule that I chose to simply accept no as the correct answer.”
“Oh gosh…” Chloe whispered.
“But, why?” I asked. Bob wasn’t listening.
“Question Two… What is my favourite colour?” The entire room fell silent.
“Bob!” Chloe shouted. “You can’t just drop a bombshell like that on us and then just move on with no explanation! Asking us random, trivial things like that... What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking that I must introduce some healthy variety to this game, Miss Chloe. This is the general knowledge round, after all,” Bob declared. “I noted the stimulation of your tear ducts in response to my first question and decided to go with something lighter.”
“I’ll start crying a damn sight quicker if you keep asking pointless questions, you metal bastard! Tell us why we can’t go back to Earth!” Chloe snapped.
“Very well, I will save the colour question for a later round. As for why we are unable to return to Earth, let me explain in the form of another question… Can one find a needle in a haystack?”
“Oh jeez…” Dom hissed.
“Yes!” I answered. “I taught you this analogy Bob. But then, isn’t that exactly what we did with the sofa?”
“One could argue that is correct, Mr. Joe. However, I have not finished the question. What if said haystack were the size of a pyramid, and said needle were the size of a micro-organism?”
“I… I think I see what you’re getting at.”
“We are in a deep region of uncharted space, and even with the knowledge I have gathered, there is insufficient information to determine our spatial position in relation to Earth. It is quite simply unwise to believe there is a chance of locating your home planet.”
Having a logic-obsessed robot telling us all this was quite the knife to the heart.
“Well that’s cheered us all up,” Dom said with his usual low-key cynicism, kind of downplaying the fact that we’d essentially all just been signed a death warrant.
“Excellent. We shall move on then. Next question…”
“Hang on, can we just backtrack a bit to the whole never-going-to-go-back-to-Earth thing?” I interjected. It was too late though, as Bob was busy asking us a boring question about the shape of the ship’s engines.
Bob’s next few questions and answers continued to ride the gamut from the incredibly depressing (learning about the statistical improbabilities of making contact with any other life forms) to the incredibly trivial (finding out what ingredients are in a soufflé.) Eventually, another jingle sound played.
“Now that we have reached the end of the first round, there will be a recap of the scores so far,” Bob announced.
“Oh for god’s sake, Bob, nobody cares!” Dom moaned.
“Team A is currently in the lead with a score of one!”
“What are you on about? Since when are we playing in teams?” Dom asked.
“Oh, I am sorry, Mr. Dom. I misinterpreted your body language.”
“My body language?”
“Correct. Since we began this round you have shuffled your body approximately half a metre towards Miss Chloe and experienced a minor sensation of excitement.”
“WHAT THE HELL?” Dom quickly moved his hands towards his crotch and rolled over, embarrassed.
“Okay, I officially have no idea what’s going on anymore,” Chloe exclaimed, sounding embarrassed.
“I apologise. I made the assumption that you were sexually attracted to one another,” Bob stated.
“Holy shit…” I muttered under my breath. Was he right?
“Well, I mean… you aren’t… wrong�
� necessarily,” Dom murmured, blushing. Chloe shook her head overdramatically. Dom kept talking despite the fact that it looked like she was about to murder him. “But I mean, look, there’s only five of us… You guys, Joe and Emma, you’re clearly together, right?”
Emma rolled her eyes; clearly her and I weren’t going to make up any time soon. The others clearly hadn’t picked up on our little drama earlier.
“And you, Travis, no offence mate, but you’re way too old to have a chance of a relationship with either of… I mean for all I know you’re, like, my dad or something…” Dom continued, digging himself deeper into a hole. Travis had an exceptionally uncomfortable expression on his face.
“So, you know, that leaves… us…” Dom pointed at himself and Chloe. “I mean, come on!” He threw his hands into the air. “You all heard Bob just now, we’re not going home! And for all we know, we could be the last surviving humans in existence! We’d have to repopulate at some point. I mean… we’re not exactly the peak of the gene pool but… ”
“Dom,” Chloe said quietly.
“What?”
“Shut the fuck up and stop thinking with your dick.”
“Okay Bob, I think it’s time we moved on,” I said.
“Understood, Mr. Joe. We shall move on to Round Two: Sports!”
“Sports? What’s that got to do with anything?” Chloe asked. As expected, Bob didn’t listen.
The second round of the quiz came and went without a single major revelation to speak of, except confirming which countries won the FIFA World Cups in which years, which I guess would have been somehow important if I could remember ever having had an interest in football. The third round was ‘entertainment,’ and Bob decided to test us all on our knowledge of James Bond movies and Oscar winners. Suffice to say that all of the random flashes of pop culture I experienced earlier happened to be absolutely no help in these rounds, and not one of us managed to score a single point. Not that we cared. As we rolled on to the fourth round, we still didn’t seem to be any closer towards uncovering the truths we desperately needed.
“Question Twenty-Seven… As I previously indicated, I decided to save this question from earlier. What is my favourite colour?”
“Purple?” Emma said. “Like our food?” By this point everyone was just answering the silly questions as quickly as possible in the hope that we’d get some useful ones sometime soon. Why all this pointless information had even been saved on Bob’s memory backups in the first place was way beyond my understanding. Why Bob considered it relevant or interesting at all was even more baffling.
“Incorrect. The correct answer is brown.”
“Like my shit?” Dom said, half-asleep.
“Ew… Dom, that’s low, even by your standards…” Chloe grimaced.
“Question Twenty-Eight. While we’re on the topic of colours, what is Mr. Dom’s natural hair colour?” This seemed to wake Dom up quite a bit. His whole body jerked upwards like an agitated dog.
“You mean it’s not ginger?” Dom asked, with genuine concern in his voice.
“Brown, like Dom’s shit?” I joked.
“Incorrect, that was a trick question!” Bob announced.
“Because my hair is ginger,” Dom said.
“Incorrect. You see, Mr. Dom does not in fact have any hair!”
“Wait a minute, what… what… WHAT?!” Dom screamed. Immediately his hands reached for the top of his head and started pulling. Before long we understood what Bob had meant – Dom had been wearing a wig the whole time. Dom pulled and pulled, and I watched, mouth hanging agape, as his entire head-full of hair peeled away. Having removed his artificial locks to reveal a perfectly spherical, egg-like scalp, Dom sat, cradling his beautiful fake curls in his arms in utter shock.
“All this time… I had no idea,” he gasped, cuddling the ginger lump as if it were some kind of pet.
“Hey, it’s okay, Dom. Join the club,” I chuckled, pointing towards my massive bald spot. Dom wasn’t listening. Ever-curious, he began stroking the edge of his precious beard and then, with a very audible gulp, lifted part of it up.
“Oh…” he sighed, flatly. With a sudden, forceful rip, the entire goatee went flying from Dom’s face, leaving behind the slightly inflamed yet incredibly smooth skin on his trembling chin. He inspected the beard with his thumb. Just like its larger sibling, it was totally artificial, and had been all along.
“Well, that explains why you never had to shave,” I commented. Dom wasn’t listening.
“What about downstairs?” I asked, cheekily. I had the feeling Dom wasn’t going to say anything for quite some time. Indeed he didn’t. The wig and beard slipped through his fingers and landed softly on the ground. Dom stayed sitting, arms frozen in the same position, staring at his former pride and glory lying out on the floor in front of him.
Then something unexpected happened. Chloe stood up. Without a sound, she shuffled over and sat down next to Dom. She put her arm around him. I exchanged an awkward glance at Emma. I heard someone sniff. Was Dom crying? I couldn’t be sure from where I was sitting. All I know for sure is that me, Emma and Travis had never felt as awkward as we had at that moment. I turned towards Bob.
“Maybe we should take a break?”
“Good idea.”
An hour or so passed during which we all consumed purple pudding in silence and tried not to feel insanely weirded-out by the newly hairless Dom. His bare scalp kept catching the light from the kitchen, illuminating his entire spherical head like a shiny bowling ball. I suppose in a way it distracted us from the fact that at the start of the quiz we’d been told that we’d never return to Earth, the thought of which was surely enough to make any of us want to leap out of the airlock at a moment’s notice. Still, I had something else on my mind. I paced the corridor a few times mulling over things. When we finally sat back down to resume the quiz, I realised what had to be done.
“Bob. I have an idea. Why don’t we take it in turns to be the quizmaster?” I said.
“What are you doing, Joe?” Emma asked. I gave her the sort of reassuring look I used to give her back when I thought she trusted me.
“This is going to work, guys. Bear with me,” I whispered, as Bob let out a long elongated ‘hmmm.’
“That is an interesting proposal, Mr. Joe. Could you elaborate?” Bob asked.
“Yeah, so how about in each round, we take it in turns to be the quizmaster, so we all get to have a go at asking questions?” I continued. Chloe nodded, impressed.
“Ooh, that is exciting. Does this mean I get to have a go at answering too?” Bob asked.
“That’s the idea!”
“Stupendous!”
I looked around the room; Dom, Chloe and Emma were nodding, Travis looked pensive but gave a thumbs up.
“And remember, Bob, it’s a game, you want to do your best to win!” Dom said, sounding upbeat. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while. I smiled. It was good to know that the others were on the same page as me for once. We all knew how much Bob liked his games, so it seemed only logical that the best way to get our questions answered was to trick him into playing his best and answering them all for us.
“Let’s begin!” Bob exclaimed.
I let Chloe be the quizmaster to start off with, as she looked so desperate for information at this point I thought she was going to pass out. I’m glad I let her begin, as she started out with a real doozy.
“What is this ship and what is it for?”
“Oh, I believe I know the answer to that!” Bob exclaimed, shortly before playing a buzzer sound effect.
“Go ahead!” Chloe said.
“And don’t forget to elaborate,” Dom added.
“Absolutely! This ship has been designated Atom Sierra Dot Delta Seventeen by the International Space Communications Authority of the planet Earth in the middle of the twenty-first century, for the purposes of long-term space flight and cosmological research!” Bob said. We were all speechless; that was certainly a lo
t to take in.
“So do I get a point?” Bob asked.
“What? Um… yes! Uh… correct answer, I guess!” Chloe replied. Of course we were going to take his word for it, Bob was ‘playing to win’ after all.
“I can’t believe it,” Emma said. “We’re actually learning stuff…”
“Quizzes can be most educational, Miss Emma,” Bob stated.
“Heeeeee!” Chloe squealed with glee. “Ahem, sorry. I’ll move on to the next question then, um…” She paused to compose herself. “So the Atom Sierra, then. How did it end up here, in the middle of nowhere?”
“Oh that’s easy!” Bob made the buzzer sound again. “It flew!”
“Elaborate or you won’t get the point!” Chloe shouted.
“Oh yes. The Atom Sierra used the hyperconductive reactor drive to propel through space along a fixed trajectory!”
“Uh… Does he get the point for that?” Dom asked.
“Um, that’s not really what I was looking for, actually,” Chloe said. “I was hoping for an answer with less techno-babble, more along the lines of… of…”
“Where was the ship supposed to be going and why did it end up stranded in space and not back on Earth?” Dom finished Chloe’s sentence.
“Yes, exactly!” Chloe high-fived Dom.
“Ah, yes, that is a most interesting question,” Bob said. “But I would most graciously like to refrain from answering to give someone else a chance to earn a point.”
“That’s not how the game works, remember!” Dom raised his voice. “You play to win!”
“Very well. The ship was originally intended to navigate a path known as the Kuiper loop, to the edge of the solar system and back, in order to perform experiments on the composition of astronomical subatomic particles and the then-revolutionary cryogenic freezing procedure,” Bob explained. “However, there were complications…”
“Complications?” I asked.
“Correct, Mr. Joe. I was compromised. One might say, abused,” Bob said, softly.
“Wow… okay, that escalated quickly. Can I take over as quizmaster?” Dom asked. Chloe nodded.