“Should we head back the way we came in?” John Luke asks.
“No. Let’s see what’s going on here.”
Despite these workers’ colorful suits, they all seem to be running a typical assembly line operation. You walk around and soon discover what they’re packaging.
It’s the same thing you saw pictured in the large bay area you just left behind.
Froot Loops.
This makes no sense. . . .
That’s right. The secret to the universe is Froot Loops, folks, and little did you know they were made in outer space.
You see the boxes and everything.
“I don’t get it,” John Luke says.
“Oh, we’re gonna get it.”
Some of the workers on the line are individually sorting the Froot Loops. They seem to be examining every one of them.
No, not examining them, but putting something on them.
These inspectors hold tiny tubes in their hands and appear to be attaching something to the individual red Froot Loops.
You think about asking someone what’s up with the red ones. Why not orange? But abrupt shouting across the room sorta makes you forget the question.
Especially because the voice is yelling, “Intruders! Stop them!”
“Is he talking about us?” John Luke asks.
“Yeah. Run!”
You spot the nearest exit, which is different from the door you came in. You tear through it, making sure John Luke is following you. But he passes you by, and then he seems to realize he can’t follow you and run in front of you at the same time. So he slows down, and you plow right into him.
When you get up, you turn and see a group of men approaching you. You start to laugh because they’re dressed like pirates. Maybe not the “yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum” sort of pirates since this isn’t the seven seas nor is it a Disney ride, but still. Pirates.
“Come on, Uncle Si!” John Luke says.
There’s a blinking red sign on the doorway you’re now approaching. A sign that says Do Not Go In.
“Come on, Uncle Si!”
“You just said that!” You’re wondering if John Luke is feeling okay. Can he not see the sign?
“Hey, John Luke, I don’t think—”
But John Luke opens the door anyway. The door with the sign that says Do Not Go In. Then he enters and disappears with a loud squeal.
Did he just fall?
You stop for a minute and contemplate whether you should follow. Until you see a six-inch dagger soar by your ear and stick in the wall next to you.
Okay, I’m going in.
When you walk through the doorway, two things happen simultaneously.
You feel yourself falling.
And you smell something really, truly dreadful.
Then you land in a pile of mushy mush.
And for a moment you black out. But not because you’re sixty-six years old and fleeing for your life through space.
It might be because you just flung yourself into some kind of Dumpster on a spaceship and you landed on a giant metal something-or-other.
At some point you wake up again.
“Uncle Si?”
It’s John Luke, standing over you.
“Where are we?” you mutter.
“I shut the door. The problem is . . . I shut all of them.”
You have the worst headache ever.
“Were those pirates following us?” you ask.
John Luke nods.
“Are we currently in a smelly trash heap?”
He nods again.
“Well, it could be worse.”
Then you hear something awful. Something unspeakable. Something dreadful.
And it’s right beneath you!
“Something seems to be alive in here,” John Luke says.
Hmmmmmm.
Do you get your pocketknife out and try to deal with the thing underneath you? Go here.
Do you try to open the doors to the room you’re in? Go here.
LIVE AND LET DIE
AS THE NIGHTMARE SHOCK WAVES of the alien duck call continue to go off, with all of your comrades now on the ground writhing in pain, you decide to do something.
The only thing you can do.
You switch your radio to the broadcast setting, and you start to sing.
“‘Who let the dogs out—woof, woof, woof, woof,’” you belt out.
Hey, it’s not much. But it’s the only thing you can think of.
“‘Who let the dogs out,’” you keep singing.
Suddenly the shrieking duck call stops. It actually stops, Jack!
Everybody stands up again, breathless and dazed and trying to recover.
John Luke speaks first. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” you say.
“Why’d it just stop?” Commander Noble asks.
“I was just—I started to sing, but—”
The shrilling duck call sounds again in all its awful terror. So you quickly resume singing.
“‘Live and let die . . . ,’” you sing, then realize you don’t know the lyrics. So you just start humming and making sounds to the music.
The duck call stops.
“Keep singing,” John Luke says. “Go, Uncle Si!”
“Give me a song,” you say. “Fast! Anybody.”
“‘Happy,’” John Luke suggests.
“‘Jump’ by Van Halen,” Commander Noble says.
“‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,’” Ashley Jones adds.
Everyone looks at her with glances that say, Really?
You decide to go ahead and pick your own song.
“‘You should be dancing, yeah; you should be dancing!’”
The giant floating duck call does the unexpected. It blasts out into space and begins to move erratically through the sky.
“It’s doing it! It’s dancing,” John Luke says. “Kinda like WALL-E.”
“Keep singing, Silas!” the commander says.
You start singing whole songs or only their choruses. The problem is, you don’t always remember even the whole chorus. Or any of the lyrics. In which case you just make something up.
You might be the first one in the history of man to go from “Ticket to Ride” to “Low Rider” to “Friends in Low Places.” Hey, Jack—you can’t explain how your mind works.
“‘Beat it, beat it,’” you call out while the black thing in the sky swirls and streams back and forth. “‘Don’t have a heartbeat, so beat it. Tell ’em you’re funky; tell ’em you’re right. If they don’t get you, know you’re gonna bite—so beat it.’”
“Uh, Uncle Si,” John Luke says over the radio.
“Don’t mess with the magic.”
You’re searching your thoughts for more songs so you can continue as the human jukebox when you see the gliding duck call fly directly into your ship. There’s a massive explosion in the sky.
Uhhhhhhhhh . . . “Did that just happen?”
No one answers.
But now the hurtling mass of a machine is coming down from the skies. It’s the DC Enterprise.
Something pops up and out—it’s an escape pod.
Well, at least the other crew members are probably safe.
You stop singing.
The commander is screaming and yelling.
You pull John Luke to the side. “You all right?”
“Yeah. I’m just hoping Ben and Jada are okay.”
Lots of voices are crackling over the radio. It sounds like total chaos.
“We have to go to the escape pod for Ben and Jada,” Commander Noble says.
Do you join the group heading for the escape pod to check on Ben and Jada? Go here.
Do you decide to start singing again because you really and truly can’t believe what you just saw? Go here.
THROW IN THE TOWEL
SOME MIGHT SAY THIS IS GIVING UP. Or giving in. But you’d call it both and then say see ya later and sayonara.
Hey, Jac
k, sometimes you gotta throw in the towel. Unless you just got out of the shower—’cause in that case, keep the towel till you get some clothes on!
You decide it’ll be best to go home now, even if you have to be tucked into some more cybersleep. The crew members keep making arguments like “Someone might be alive on the planet!” and “We owe it to them to examine the distress signal!” and “There’s danger in being put back to sleep too soon!”
But you care about priorities, not exclamation points. You know Willie and the boys cannot manage things on their own. Your family needs you. The whole world needs Uncle Si.
Yeah. It’s snoozy time for you.
So a few hours later you’re all back in your space suits. And Commander Noble puts in the commands and gets everybody to fall unconscious one by one. This is like Thanksgiving after Miss Kay’s cooking when everybody is sprawled around and knocked out cold with bellies full.
You feel good about the decision you made. Your eyes begin shutting, and you assume when you open them again, you’ll be able to spot Earth outside the window. . . .
THE END
Start over.
Read “Look at the Stars: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”
DON’T STOP
IT’S A GOOD PLAN, taking out the ships. You figure all those vessels you spotted in the hangar must be the ones that are going to attack Earth.
“Mission Control said they couldn’t detect the ship we’re on,” you tell John Luke. “Obviously they have some way of shielding themselves. Like a cloak thing. So you know what we do?”
“What?”
“Make them permanently invisible. And blow them up.”
You find what appear to be timer-controlled bombs in the weapons stash. And the strangest thing is that they look like six-packs of Diet Coke.
“I think I understand what they’re trying to do,” John Luke says. “Everything they’re doing—the people, these weapons—they’re hiding the truth. Nothing is what it appears to be. A teenager really isn’t a teenager. A cowbell—”
“Really isn’t a cowbell,” you finish for him. “John Luke, you went out in space and got smarter.”
“Must be something in the air.”
“Let’s each take a pack of Diet Coke,” you say. “We got some blowing up to do.”
Before you’re able to get out of the armory, a woman in a pirate outfit walks into the room. You can’t help but start to laugh, but then you control it.
“What are you two doing here?” she demands.
Oh, man. You know you can say only a few things. But you’re betting only one response will be the right one. Isn’t that how it usually goes?
Do you tell her you need these weapons for the mission? Go here.
Do you tell her you’ve heard reports that some of these weapons aren’t working—and that you’re trying to fix them? Go here.
COME TOGETHER
FIRST THINGS FIRST: FIND JOHN LUKE.
The astronauts are already captured, and you know they’re alive. Right now you need to get John Luke so the two of you can figure out a plan. Hey, two are better than one.
The room you left John Luke in is empty. The teenage boys’ briefing must be over too. They will know their assignments and how to infiltrate high schools on Earth. World domination. They might even plant brain-zapping software in smartphones that will make everyone dumb so the aliens can be in complete control!
Wait, maybe they’ve already done that!
You start to head down the hallway when you hear someone call your name. It’s John Luke.
“Over here,” he says, waving from a doorway.
For a second you give him a strange look as you enter the passageway he’s standing in.
“John Luke—why are you dressed as a pirate?”
He closes the door behind you. “That’s what the soldiers are dressed as. Have you seen them?”
“I’ve seen a few, but I just thought—”
“Yeah, it’s kinda crazy. But maybe that’s the fashion.”
“An army of pirates. Really?”
“Space pirates,” John Luke says. “Come on—this is a walkway that leads to an armory. They took us in there after the meeting. It’s where I got the outfit. And . . .”
He holds up a triangular object in one hand and takes a drumstick—not the chicken kind—out of his back pocket. After further examination, you realize what John Luke is holding.
“Is that a cowbell?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“This ain’t no time for playing games. We got a world to save, Jack.”
“I know. Come on.”
John Luke rushes down the dimly lit passageway, which forks three ways. He chooses one of the routes, and it ends at a closed door.
“Stand back, Uncle Si,” he tells you.
Then he bangs a couple times on the cowbell. It doesn’t make any noise.
Instead the door in front of you blasts open. As if two laser beams tore through it.
“Whoa,” you say. “What’d you do?”
“This isn’t an ordinary cowbell. It’s a weapon of some kind.”
“It looks like a cowbell.”
And yeah, you know it, Jack. You can already picture it in your mind. You and John Luke on the battlefield, fighting off aliens, and you’ve run out of ammo. You call to John Luke, telling him you need more cowbell.
Yep. That’s right. A lot of good it will do you then.
John Luke opens the shredded door. He wasn’t kidding about the armory.
“There’s lots of different kinds of weapons in here,” he says. “We were going through the list in our class.”
You pull him to the side.
“Hey, you know what we’re dealin’ with, right?” You decide to speak only in a whisper for the next part. “These people are planning to invade the US.”
“Not if they can’t get off this ship.”
“You have a plan?”
“Yeah. The big question is this: do we take out their ships or their leaders?”
Well, look at John Luke, all grown-up and acting like Alexander the Great. Or General Patton.
You think for a minute.
These are good questions from a man holding a magical cowbell in his hand.
Do you take out their ships? Go here.
Do you take out their leaders? Go here.
BRAIN DAMAGE
YOU CHOOSE CYBERSLEEP. How do you know if you can trust that professor guy anyway? Hopefully everything will be better in the morning, like it usually is.
When you first enter cybersleep, you experience a wonderful, familiar sense of security. But a short time later, it feels like you’re bouncing around, and you wonder if you’re imagining the screams.
Then you wake up and realize you’re not.
As soon as you shake off your post-cybersleep confusion, you notice that John Luke is missing. The ship is violently jerking up and down, and you can hear voices down the hallway. After detaching yourself from your seat, you open the door and get a firsthand glimpse of the chaos that awaits you.
The professor or whoever it was—a TV critic, Jack?—happened to be right.
You see an awful, terrible, unspeakable thing—it’s John Luke. He’s been infected.
Antlers are coming out of his head.
When he sees you, he attacks. And just like that, it’s over.
You should’ve known better.
You should’ve realized that when you’re in space and an alien jackalope gets involved, you don’t go on acting like everything’s fine and dandy.
Before your transformation, you experience your last thought as Silas Robertson: I wonder what antlers will look like on my head.
You bet they’ll look pretty cool.
THE END
Start over.
Read “Look at the Stars: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”
BRASS MONKEY
“WELL, WE’VE HEARD REPORTS that some of these are not working,” you tell the
woman.
“Are you sure?” she asks. “You’ve heard that those bombs in particular don’t work?”
You nod.
“That’s strange.” She touches her wrist, which appears to have some kind of device on it.
Maybe it’s one of those smartwatches. Like having an iPhone as a watch. It’s the latest technology, and you’re really hoping to get one when you’re back on Earth.
“Yeah. Strange, Jack,” you say, letting Jack accidentally slip out of your mouth.
“Want to know the strangest thing about that?” she asks.
You notice her eyes have become dark. Like all black.
That can’t be good.
“Maybe the fact that they look like cans of diet soda but are actually bombs?”
She only shakes her head. “No. It’s strange because we just got those in. They’re brand-new. Never been used. Never been tested out. But I have an idea.”
This definitely can’t be a good idea.
Soon the door opens, and some pirates from the seven spaced-out seas come and put handcuffs on John Luke and you.
“I think it’s finally time to see how these bombs work,” she says. “In person.”
Then she starts to laugh, but the laugh becomes something awful and horrific—a squealing, wailing scream.
She sounds like a monkey.
And she just keeps laughin’ and laughin’.
They take both of you away. You’re not laughin’.
You especially don’t laugh when you end up holding a can of Diet Coke and are told to open it.
This is just not the right way to end the story, Jack.
Hey—you don’t even like diet cola!
THE END
Start over.
Read “Look at the Stars: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
Si in Space Page 6