Oliop continued to take cover behind the small control console. He leaned forward. “Me?” he said with a squeak.
“Yes, you,” Akimbo said. “Stand forward and be recognized by Lord Akimbo. You have skills that we may find useful. And you will be rightly rewarded for your labors in your lord’s service.”
Jeff waved a hand back at Oliop. Oliop stayed put.
“Don’t worry,” Akimbo said. “You will come to no harm. Don’t you want to be at the forefront of restoring this city to new heights of grandeur? A place where you’ll be recognized for your talents, not shunted to the rear once your hard work is complete?”
Oliop considered this.
“Step forward so we may speak,” Akimbo said.
Oliop came forward. Jeff placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Don’t get close to that thing,” Jeff said in a whisper.
Stress played out across Oliop’s face. His ears were bent back. He wrung his hands together. He hesitated.
“Human, you try my patience,” Akimbo said. “Step aside.”
Oliop gently pushed Jeff’s hand back and approached the portal. The roiling bed of worms became excited, their whispers escalating to a rumble of low voices until Akimbo snapped his fingers. The thunderous click shut the worms up instantly. He ambled forward until he stood in front of Oliop. Akimbo’s sapphire eyes sparkled as he gave the technician a once-over.
“This city needs to appreciate its artisans,” Akimbo said. “You almost single-handedly fixed that which couldn’t be repaired, and you were willing to risk trouble with the law to procure the material to finish your work. Lord Akimbo admires that.”
Oliop offered a sheepish nod. He kicked at the floor and rocked back and forth, uncomfortable with the attention.
“So what do you need me to do?” Oliop asked.
One of Oliop’s feet bent back, nimble toes handing something off to his tail. The tail snaked back towards Jeff. It held a worm. Jeff didn’t want to touch the thing. Oliop’s tail made an emphatic jerk. Jeff looked up, but couldn’t tell if either Akimbo or the Grey were watching or would notice. Jeff grabbed the worm. It felt hot and surprisingly slick, not unlike a muscular earthworm, even though he figured this thing was some sort of mechanism. But the worm was a pilot? And what did Oliop want him to do with it? The worm immediately started to squirm out of Jeff’s hand. Jeff had to fight to keep the thing from crawling up his arm.
Akimbo offered Oliop a hand. Oliop looked back at Jeff, mouthed something. The translator wasn’t helping. Jeff shook his head slightly and mouthed back, “What?” The Grey’s brow furrowed.
“Lord Akimbo,” Irving the Grey said, “grab the technician. Quickly!”
Irving the Grey stepped forward with the blaster raised.
If Akimbo had acted right then, he might have yanked Oliop out of the elevator. Instead, Akimbo turned to glower at the Grey. “You will not dictate to me or order me!” Akimbo said with a huff. “And I do not grab!”
Oliop slipped back from the portal. He pushed Jeff ahead of him and got them both behind the console. The Grey sidestepped around the three-legged lord and snapped off a shot. The bolt of energy impacted on the back of the elevator, leaving an angry, melted pucker mark.
“Don’t shoot the technician!” Akimbo said.
The Grey snarled at him and stepped into the elevator. It would take the Grey only a few steps before the console would provide zero cover.
“Install the worm,” Oliop said. “Install it!” Meanwhile Oliop began to tear at a set of bright red envelopes he had produced from one of his pouches. Jeff recognized the packets from the surveillance footage from the Jinong shop. The stolen AI. Oliop mashed his hands together as if rolling a ball of clay, but Jeff didn’t see anything in his hands.
Jeff juggled the worm, considering it and the console before him. If there was a slot or a hole for the worm or pilot or messiah nut or whatever the wriggling thing’s proper designation was, it eluded him. Maybe there was an app for this, too. The moment of confusion felt like minutes, but in the half second of real time that actually passed, Oliop grabbed Jeff’s hand with the worm in it. Oliop’s touch gave off an electric tickle. Oliop snatched up the worm and placed it on the surface of the console. The worm, without missing a beat, stuck one of its pin-like ends into the console and burrowed in. The elevator sprang to life. Jeff had seen Oliop engage an elevator before, had actually read the “Please Read” document provided him during his orientation at the Commons post-invasion, as well as the FAQ and the glossary of terms for the city. Basic elevator operation was simple once a destination was programmed. Jeff stabbed the door button and the door snapped closed.
“You wouldn’t dare,” the Grey said. “You don’t know where it will take us.”
Jeff looked at the Grey, its gun, and the powered-up console before him with its spare control scheme, lime-green door button, and illuminated red button that would send the elevator to whatever destination the programming dictated.
He dared. He hit the red one.
CHAPTER 10
In Toggs’ opinion, being stuck on Earth had its plus side. He hadn’t had a vacation from his studies of Galactic Commons acoustics in years, and this gave him the perfect opportunity to open his ear holes to new sounds. He only wished he had known he was leaving the city so he could pack a lunch.
At the start of what would become known as the Bunnie Invasion, Toggs, along with thousands of other Galactic Commons citizens, thought they needed to evacuate the city and head home. Instead, the elevators dropped off a large number of fleeing citizens on Earth, where the waiting Bunnie got in for the return trip.
The Bunnie proved such a ghastly surprise that little needed to be done with the evacuees but to get them out the elevator. Terror at the sight of seeing the sixteen-legged horrors made for tacit compliance. Only a few of the Bunnie needed to use a stunner on anyone, and most of those instances were due to the Bunnie’s ramped-up levels of excitement. After all, wouldn’t you be keyed up after waiting generations for the opportunity to invade a city that had rejected your entire species because of a niggling habit of eating its ambassadors? Besides, the Bunnie diet had turned away from meat. But their excitement levels when the elevators appeared with the inconvenient evacuees reminded Toggs of watching the scavenger lizards of his home planet getting wired after eating too many ripe stim berries. The dumb lizards would be so jacked up they would race up rocks and off cliffs at blinding speeds and generally would not survive the experience.
Toggs rested comfortably on the opposite end of the spectrum of the Bunnie’s overstimulated nervous system. He himself hadn’t intended to leave the Galactic Commons that day in spite of the emergency, had been performing audio samples in the transportation terminal for an art presentation for his homeworld. The cacophony of alert signals would be a perfect contrast to the bookending sequences that featured sounds of Toggs’ quiet canyon-strewn province on his homeworld, an aural mise-en-scène to highlight the madness of the city in contrast with the bucolic peace of his place of origin.
Moving with the tide of the crowd and squeezing into a cramped elevator had been the course of least resistance that day. He told his fellow evacuees his world code. Maybe one of them would enter it in before they all left. The door snapped shut. The lights flashed. The journey was over.
When the elevator shushed open, Toggs didn’t smell the dry air of his homeworld or see the curved, carved rocks of the park from where the elevators were programmed to arrive and depart. Neither did he see his two brothers or two sisters or any of his cousins, all of whom would have surely come to greet his sudden homecoming in typical Kloman fashion with song, bitter greens, and dirt cheese. By the look on his fellow evacuees’ faces, none of them recognized this world either.
Toggs instead was welcomed to someplace he didn’t know by a creature out of Galactic Commons history, a jewel-eyed thing with salivating mandibles and more arms and legs than could be instantly counted. The Bunnie occupied a s
pecial place in Galactic Commons lore, relegated to the role of boogeyman and serial villain trope. Yet here was one with a number of weapons pointing at Toggs’ face.
Toggs stood tall compared to the average citizen, a hunchbacked bipedal herbivore with a knobbed horn at the end of his short snout. The Bunnie stood taller, and used said snout as its aiming point.
“It’s time,” the Bunnie said. It pulled Toggs from the elevator.
Toggs emerged out onto a broken asphalt runway overgrown with weeds. Clumps of pampas grass grew along the edges, with tall, wispy panicles sprouting from their center. Beyond this were low, large trees with droopy, leafed vines. Arranged in a grid along the runway were many other elevators around which swarmed hundreds of the giant Bunnie with their bobbing spinnerets, frantic in their attending to the evacuees. A handful of less cooperative passengers were unceremoniously yanked, goaded, or dragged screaming from the boxes. These cried and pleaded and trumpeted in panic, while most in the crowd were still too shocked to do more than whimper. A few crackling reports broke the air as several of the Bunnie fired their weapons into the ground to further harry their captives.
Several of the Bunnie appeared to be in charge. These directed underlings, perhaps the sergeants or centurions of the spidery hoard, who in turn kept the rank-and-file humongous spider creatures in line. The weapon fire ceased. Soon the runway looked like a common marketplace on any planet with uniform booths and milling, confused customers representing hundreds of alien races, a flea market that only lacked wares, either legal or illicit.
Toggs couldn’t tell whether he was under guard or under arrest. The Bunnie that had accosted him now ignored him, intent on getting inside the elevator along with as many of its fellows as possible. These squashed in one after another, a well-drilled organization that must have made sense to the Bunnie but looked like nothing less than cramming a yard’s worth of fallen twigs into a junk drawer. Spider legs poked out through the portal and would have to be forced in somehow or the door wouldn’t close.
Toggs began to push on a Bunnie leg to get the hairy limb inside. A Bunnie began to scream in pain. Another of the soon-to-be invaders pushed Toggs aside and got to work cramming his mate’s limb into the confines of the elevator.
“There’s a maximum load warning,” Toggs said, but the Bunnie ignored him.
With nothing else to do, Toggs started recording. His audio pickups were attached to his shoulders and head. His eye implant recorded visuals. With the touch of a finger on his wrist device, the AV system calibrated, white balanced, and began to document how two thousand aliens found themselves stranded in what he would later learn to be central California on the human home planet Earth.
The Bunnie finally got into the elevators. The last of their NCOs performed feats of Bunnie origami on their men and officers. Once that was finished, the sergeants managed to flatten themselves into any remaining space within an elevator. A chime sounded on all of the elevators. The doors closed. The elevators vanished, leaving little to no signal that they had even been there but for a swirl of dust above the runway.
The crowd of Commons citizens just stood there. A yellow sun beat down through white haze. The silence of the human world around them caused some to question whether they had gone deaf, as some had been completely overwhelmed by the incessant alarm signals back in the Commons. Soon, though, Earth-normal noises crept through the air, as if the planet itself were reestablishing dominance over the odd events of the past several minutes. Grasshoppers buzzed and clicked as the air temperature increased. Blackbirds chatted it up in the fields beyond the runway. A low buzz of an airplane somewhere out of sight caused many to look up, shielding visual receptors with claw, tentacle, and hand to catch a glimpse of the flying machine.
Toggs continued recording. He walked among the milling group, looking at the many expressions and reactions. Most remained where they had been dumped, numb, many having been knocked down to the dirt and asphalt. Some hadn’t bothered to get back up.
He panned about the edges of the airfield. His app filled in some details of the flora and fauna, labeling some of what he saw but leaving quite a few things unlabeled and unexplained. His own homeworld was about the furthest thing from a terraformed, immaculately groomed planet, the designer worlds that had become all the rage once impressionable species were introduced to the Galactic Commons and the new technologies available. So the world Toggs saw didn’t frighten him. Several of the refugees around him cringed when a red-shouldered hawk (Identified! Smiley face. Eats small mammals. Not a threat) flew to the outskirts of the airfield before circling back over the low trees (Unidentified. Frowny face. Diet unknown. Exercise caution).
If Toggs were back in the Galactic Commons, he would consider upgrading to a more deliberate, detailed, and scientific app. His stomach grumbled. He was used to eating every couple of hours, leafy greens being the norm. He would have to go foraging, as he doubted any here had food with them.
Someone grabbed his elbow. A rearing millipede almost as tall as Toggs and with two prominent eyestalks said, “I perceive that, unlike the rest of these dullards, you possess enough wits about you to not be stunned into inaction.”
Toggs’ app recognized the species, a heritage race that had belonged to the Commons almost as long as the mysterious Greys. Toggs closed his apps, stopped recording, and considered the creature before him.
“Stunned?” Toggs said. “Not so much. I don’t know what the Bunnie are up to. I’m certain the security back in the city will take care of them.”
The millipede drummed three twig-like feet on his chin. “Don’t be so certain.” He looked about at the crowd of beings. “We will need to deal with the situation at hand, and you seem like a strong fellow to help me do just that.”
He extended a longer arm. Toggs thought the millipede wanted to shake. He offered his own hand. Instead, the millipede gave Toggs’ bicep a squeeze.
“Yes, you’ll do quite nicely,” the millipede said. “Come!”
With that, the millipede crawled toward a light pole with its top missing. Loose wire stuck up like weeds. The fixture had once been painted a dark green, but now a rusty grey covered most of its surface. Toggs followed the millipede and stood beneath it as it crawled halfway up the pole.
“Attention Commons citizens!” the millipede called. “Attention! May I have your attention?”
A handful of faces in the crowd looked his way. Most did not.
“Good fellow, what is your name?” the millipede asked, looking down at Toggs.
“Toggs. Look, I’m not sure what you have in mind here –”
With the wave of three fingers, the millipede shushed him. “Time for you to get their attention. You can do that, can’t you? With your most commanding voice, of course.”
Toggs sighed, cleared his throat. “Hello?” he shouted. “Hey, folks! This guy wants to talk to you.”
“‘This guy?’” the millipede said. “A proper introduction would have been more appropriate. Oh, look. Here they come.”
Indeed they did. At least a hundred refugees began to move closer, at first at a cautious distance, but soon they crowded in. Toggs noted the narrow range of expressions held in common, from exhaustion to fear. Only a few appeared at all hopeful that the millipede would have anything constructive to say.
“Fellow citizens, I am Kwed,” the millipede said. After a moment of apathetic silence from the crowd, he continued. “We have suffered a setback. We are all victims here of some crime. We have been assaulted and are now trapped on a mysterious world.”
Toggs started to shake his head, looked up at Kwed. “Maybe you shouldn’t…” he began to say.
Kwed ignored him and said, “We have no weapons, don’t know the environment, and may never be able to leave. What we need to do is get organized.”
That got the reaction Toggs feared. The audience began to murmur. “Trapped.” “Stuck.” “Doomed.” “Will I ever see my ______ again?” Finally one said, “The B
unnie and the humans are going to kill us.”
Kwed made a multi-limbed gesture of patting down the air around him. “We have no evidence that the humans would eat any of us.”
“The humans are going to eat us,” cried one refugee, followed by several more echoing the sentiment. This carried from the audience listening to Kwed to others on the airfield. Soon, many were no longer sitting and waiting but standing and howling that the sky was about to fall upon them, an impending hailing barrage of gnashing humans that would spin through the crowd like piranha swept up in a tornado.
(And in case you were wondering, Piranha: Identified! Smiley face. Hostile. Diet includes anything with meat. Exercise caution.)
“Just great,” Toggs said. He glared up at Kwed.
“Why did we get brought here instead of being sent home?” asked one beefy purple fireplug of a creature.
This question and the prospective answer got the attention of many. They looked up at the millipede atop the light pole. Here Kwed demonstrated a reaction typical of his species’ weakness to external extreme light stimuli. Orthokinesis would send his body into a syrupy slow motion for several seconds until the higher regions of the brain took over again. Kwed sputtered, unable to form an answer.
Someone else asked, “What are the Bunnie going to do with us?”
“I…I don’t know!” Kwed said. “I’m sorry.”
“He said he’s sorry,” the fireplug said. “What did you do? Did you bring us here?”
“Is this all your fault?” another asked.
“It’s his fault!” came the cry.
This was by no means a unanimous refrain, but enough in the immediate crowd began to shout at each other, their fellow refugees, and up at Kwed that Toggs could see that the millipede was in trouble.
“Everybody settle down!” Toggs shouted. Here Toggs benefited from a wide pharynx, long mouth, and narrow epilarynx, as well as years on his homeworld yalping to his buddies from canyon floor to canyon top. Toggs’ bellow would have given any human opera singer a serious case of envy. The effect on the boisterous crowd was immediate. They piped down.
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