The Last Invention

by Adrian

  “Should we make another spaceship?” I asked.

  “If we fly down the outside, we won’t squeeze past the narrow part.”

  “Blast it?”

  “Too risky. The tower might fall on us. We’re not going to make a spaceship this time.”

  “Run down?”

  “Too many levels, our legs will give out. I don’t even want to know how you managed to create this huge tower in so little time. You’re not even fifteen yet.”

  “Then what?” I asked, embarrassed.

  Melanie picked up my jar of lip glue where it had fallen out of my bag. Then she whispered something into The Last Invention and made a device called The Jetpack and Hoverpack Creator Elite. She used it to create one small computerized vest for each of us. She put a vest on me, buckled the straps, and pushed a bunch of buttons on the control panel. Just when I thought Melanie was the ultimate genius, she found some new way to impress me. Finally, she strapped herself into a vest.

  The tower accelerated.

  The blazing heat from the approaching sun was causing some of the plastic on our devices to melt. There was hardly any floor space visible on the tower. Our melting junk was strewn around like a lifetime of decaying toys.

  “Pucker your lips, now, and lean over to me,” Melanie said. I followed her orders. She spread some of the glue on my lips. Then she smeared some on her own lips and tossed the tube over the edge of the tower. I had never seen her so frantic. She jammed The Last Invention into her pocket.

  “Now what?”

  “Now kiss me, you fool.” Melanie grabbed my vest and pulled me close to her. Our lips slammed against each other, creating a massive bolt of lightning that demolished the entire top of the tower. Our gadgets flew everywhere, slamming against the side of the invisible barrier and plummeting down the side of the tower. The waterbed exploded, and so did the refrigerator, the boomerang, and the little sink. Our old blanket and pillow burned up. While debris scattered everywhere, a powerful jolt of electricity surged through every organ in my body, and then leaped into Melanie’s body. Jagged, jittery bolts bounced back and forth between us, like we were part of an experiment in Frankenstein’s laboratory.

  Lightning danced around my brain, waking all of it up at once, and allowing me to continue narrating even through the electrical storm, even with my lips locked tight onto Melanie’s. Our jetpacks kicked in, and we floated slowly down, the lightning continuing to spew from our violent kiss. Layer after layer of the tower shattered below us. The green sun beamed on the creepy corners, scuttling bugs, and discarded bones that lay scattered throughout the lonely interior. The stairwell made a metallic groan and imploded upon itself. I put my arms around Melanie’s jetpack, nearly searing off my hand on her rocket engine. I didn’t care. Our kiss was perfect, even though we had to breathe desperately through our nostrils to stay alive. If one of us seemed short on oxygen, we would breathe into each other’s lungs—mouth to mouth at thirty million feet.

  Even as we crept further away from the sun, the electrical power increased, supercharging every bit of metal in the tower and creating fireballs that flew off above and below. When our tongues met, it was like licking one of those gag hand buzzers, that just happened to be powered by a two ton battery. But the lip glue kept us together, even though our bodies sometimes stretched out like two skydivers on a jump. The smell of burnt metal, charred stone, and that disgusting melting mortar made me gag. I tried to focus on Melanie’s smell, jamming my nose against her skin until I was inhaling her pores.

  I could only imagine the surprise on the faces of everybody on the planet. Billions of spores outside the invisible barrier blocked our view, but my enhanced brain was able to sense shock and awe on the planet’s surface. Before long, the aliens were speaking to me again, cheering, wishing us well, even though we were defying them by escaping. They admired our true love, that mysterious energy force that was so fascinating to them. It kept us going through the cold nights on the tower top, and now it fueled our escape. That was only the beginning of what our true love was going to accomplish in our lifetime.

  I thought of The Butterfly Effect Sequence Analyzer, the device that made me think that my actions were meaningless, at the end of a long chain-reaction through history controlled entirely by fate. But my mistake was thinking that the line ended. Instead, it stretched off forever into the future, in an infinite number of branching directions, each one decided by our actions. Melanie and I were making a new path right now, our lips locked tight against each other’s. We would make another path tomorrow, and another one after that. Fate may have brought us together after thirteen billion years, but now we had the control. Each of our actions would be just as important as the previous one. I tried to squirrel away these thoughts in my long term memory while my brain was alive and surging with energy. Maybe I would still be able to think this clearly after our electric kiss ended.

  I didn’t want my brain to ever shut off—I could see the green electricity jumping from neuron to neuron. I didn’t need the Interrogatrix anymore, or the Butterfly Effect Sequence Analyzer, or any of those other devices. My education was complete, and I never would have guessed that I would graduate in mid-air, with a jetpack on my back, lips glued to Miss Infinity, escaping from a tower made by my adolescent fantasies, fleeing from a green pig and a veiny mutant, who brought us to a planet full of obsessed teenagers. I’d like to see public school match that.

  When I opened my eyes, the tower was nowhere to be seen. We were in the middle of open space, and only a small stream of oxygen coming from the jetpack kept us alive. We had escaped through the hole in the bottom of the barrier! The swirling wormhole stood majestically above us, hovering in open space, groaning and beckoning us to come into it. We kicked our jetbacks into overdrive and drove straight for the dark cave mouth. A deep welcoming bellow—like all the monsters in the universe rolled into one—greeted us on the way in. Our kiss continued as we soared into the cave, through clouds of space dust, past twinkling stars and mysterious floating clouds of debris. A boomerang whizzed past us, probably thrown by some kid on some other tower somewhere. I wondered how long it would take to get back to him, so he could escape from his fears.

  Melanie put her arms around me and squeezed me tight. I wondered if she could still hear my narration, the gentle words that made her fall in love with me in the first place. I just wish I had the courage to say nice things to her way back when she was tutoring me in math. That could have saved a whole lot of trouble. I squeezed her back, and as we approached the exit of the wormhole, I became sure that we would remain together even after returning to earth. The only thing that worried me was a long black pipe that stretched through the wormhole from Earth to Asekz 13. Melanie and I would have some work to do once we returned home. The Last Invention would come in handy for that.

  We tumbled out of the wormhole into the bright green meadow with the caretaker’s cottage. The impact against the ground knocked our lips apart, and that was the end of the longest kiss ever—one that spanned two distant corners of the universe. My brain returned to normal, but I could still remember some of the advanced thoughts that I had when electricity had supercharged it—just like when I went from Logan back to my twelve-year-old self. I promised myself that I would write it all down when I got home.

  When Melanie and I stood up, we saw Ricky and the Pig sitting in their usual spot in the ruins of the caretaker’s cottage. Ricky rocked back and forth in his chair, the green sun illuminating bright yellow veins in his skin. Oinkleberry dug in the ground, looking for more discarded inventions. They hadn’t moved after all—nothing had changed, except the dark pipe that curved out of the wormhole, snaked across the huge meadow, and disappeared into the cemetery. The aliens were harvesting Quintessence from recently buried corpses to fuel their hi-tech way of life.

  “Is this the garage sale,” a red-headed boy said, who stood in front of Ricky.

  “Don’t see no garage.”

  “Is it a
tag sale then?”

  “Don’t you think you’re a little old to be playing tag?” Ricky asked.

  “But that sign said to come this way.”

  I ran over to the kid, took him by the hand, and led him back toward the cemetery. Ricky just smiled at us and continued rocking. Oinkleberry looked up and oinked. Melanie took the boy’s other hand, and we followed the pipe, which emitted a glopping sound from inside. I told the kid to go home immediately and read a hardcover or softcover book. Science fiction, fantasy, whatever. Just don’t play with any electronic devices. Not for awhile, anyway.