OtherEarth

by Jason Segel

  The Company’s stock price took a hit following the news. Shares fell by almost thirty percent yesterday, and the plunge is expected to continue when trading opens today. Meanwhile, the rumor mill has been working overtime as investors speculate about the reason for Yolkin’s sudden sabbatical. Theories range from standard burnout to life-threatening illness. Many in the tech community are beginning to wonder what the future of the Company might look like without its boy genius.

  It takes a minute for it all to sink in. The Company is lying about Milo Yolkin. They’re hiding the fact that the boy genius’s “sabbatical” is going to be permanent.

  “You’re sure Milo was dead the last time you saw him?” Busara asks.

  I’ll never forget the sight of Milo’s emaciated body lying motionless on a sliding steel tray. It was hard to believe that it had functioned as long as it had. The most brilliant man in America looked like a junkie who’d wasted away. I suppose in the end that’s exactly what he was. But it wasn’t drugs that did Milo in. It was his own game that killed him. He got addicted. Then he played until he died.

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “I’m sure.”

  “The Company’s already suffering. If news got out that Milo was dead, their stock price would totally crash,” Kat says. “We know something that the Company doesn’t want the world to know. That means we’ve got leverage.”

  “It also means the Company has another reason to kill us,” I point out.

  Everyone in the car goes quiet. There’s nothing left to say.

  * * *

  —

  The GPS screen says we’re making progress, but it’s hard to believe we’ll ever get anywhere. I’ve been driving all day across the desert, and I doubt the speedometer has ever passed thirty miles per hour. Turns out you need a road to drive fast. Since night fell, twenty has been my maximum speed. The darkness out here is so dense that the Land Rover’s headlights barely cut through it. There’s no moon out, but I can see the Milky Way, a purple streak of stars like a scar across the heavens. It reminds me that my own little world is just one of billions.

  The girls are sleeping in the back. Kat suggested we stop and make camp in the desert, but I didn’t think that was wise. I’ll keep driving as long as I can. If we’re still alive in the morning, I’ll let Busara take over.

  “I knew a guy once who fell asleep behind the wheel on I-95,” says someone to my right. I’d recognize the voice anywhere. I look over to find my grandfather sitting in the passenger’s seat, one wing tip–clad foot propped up on the dashboard. I can’t see much of his face in the darkness, but I can make out the silhouette of his giant schnoz. He looks just as real as Marlow Holm, but he’s not the product of any projector. He’s coming straight from my addled mind. “Cop told me they had to use a spatula to get his guts off the road.”

  “This isn’t I-95,” I say. “Not much to hit around here.”

  “Still,” says the Kishka. “You shouldn’t be taking risks you don’t need to take.”

  I suppose that’s true, but there’s no point in pulling over. I’d never be able to fall asleep.

  “I met your friend Lenny,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, I know. How about that?” says the Kishka. “Guess I can’t hate the bastard for stealing my girl anymore, seeing as how he just rescued the sole heir to my DNA.”

  “Mom arranged the whole thing.”

  The Kishka laughs. “You sound shocked.”

  “I am,” I admit. “I wasn’t aware that she gave a shit. Plus, it doesn’t make sense. Why would she risk her law practice? She could be disbarred if they find out she helped me.”

  “You think that makes a difference to her?” the Kishka asks.

  “I have eighteen years’ worth of evidence that suggests I’m not exactly at the top of her priorities list.”

  “You’re working with a limited set of data,” says the Kishka. I almost ask what he knows about data when I remember that I’m talking to myself. “And even if you had it all, you’d never be able to predict what Irene’s gonna do next.”

  “You’re saying my mom is a wild card?” I ask with a laugh. My grandfather obviously never witnessed what happens when his fancy-pants daughter discovers the maid left a speck of dust in her house. “I think maybe you’ve been gone too long.”

  “Yeah well, whatever she’s like now, I think it’s safe to say she’s still human,” the Kishka tells me. “And if there’s one thing I know about humans, it’s this—they don’t make any sense. And the minute you start expecting them to, you end up at the bottom of a canal.”

  “Simon, who are you talking to?” It’s Busara in the backseat. I had no idea I was actually speaking out loud.

  “My dead grandfather,” I say. I told her all about the Kishka earlier. I neglected to mention that he and I have been chatting on a regular basis.

  She’s quiet for a moment. I think I may have just outed myself as a raving nutcase.

  “Does it help?” she asks quietly.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “Sometimes it does.”

  But this time I don’t feel any better.

  “Hey, Simon, wake up.” Kat is gently shaking me. I sit up with a jolt when I realize the car has stopped.

  “What’s going on?” My eyes are having trouble adjusting to the daylight. For all I know, we’re surrounded by Company men.

  “The GPS says we’re here,” Busara tells me. As she comes into focus, I see her leaning forward for a closer look at the screen, as if there’s been some mistake.

  “This is where your friend lives?” Kat asks me. “This isn’t even a town.”

  I look out the window, blinking furiously until I can see clearly. Dark Skies, New Mexico, consists of a filling station and a Mexican grocery store that looks to be permanently shut. The carcass of a deer lies by the side of the road. Most of the skeleton has been picked perfectly clean. The horns that jut out of its skull are curved like a pair of parentheses. They don’t look like they belong to any North American beast. Whatever it is, the animal has obviously been dead for quite some time. The roadkill crews must not make it to this part of the state very often.

  I’m pretty sure we’re exactly where we need to be.

  “Do you think we should stop at the gas station?” Kat wants to know. “Maybe they know Elvis. There can’t be more than a handful of people who live in the area.”

  “No need for that,” I say with an exaggerated yawn. “I’ve already found him. He lives up there.”

  Ahead of us are bald brown hills. Several domed white structures are perched on top of the tallest. From here they look like a Star Wars set. I’ve never seen anything like them, but l know they’re what I’ve been searching for—what I knew we wouldn’t be able to miss. I point up at them through the glass.

  “Simon, that’s not a house. I’m pretty sure it’s an astronomical observatory.” Busara was cool with me talking to my long-dead grandfather, but she’s clearly questioning my sanity right now. “Nobody lives there.”

  “Oh, really? You don’t say,” I respond, closing my eyes and resting my head against the seat. I’m a wee bit tired of her know-it-all attitude. “Why don’t we drive up and see if anyone’s home? Lemme know when we’re getting close.”

  “Kat?” I hear Busara appeal to my lovely girlfriend in the backseat. The two of them have been known to gang up on me, but this time Kat’s on my side.

  “I think we should humor him,” she says. Not exactly the most passionate support, but it does the trick.

  “Thanks,” I say, smiling as I savor my victory. Busara sighs and shifts the Land Rover into drive.

  Fifteen minutes pass before we reach the road that leads up to the observatory. It looks like something that was built for mountain bikes rather than cars. It takes over half an hour to scale the side of what most people would consider a rather insignifi
cant mountain. We’re almost to the top when we come to a halt in front of a tall metal gate. A fence festooned with razor wire circles the perimeter of the property. To the left of our car is an intercom with a speaker and a single button.

  “Okay, what now?” Busara asks. I can hear the annoyance in her voice. She thinks this is all just a waste of her time.

  “Roll down your window,” I say as if instructing a kindergartener. She gives me the stink-eye but complies. “Now press the button on the intercom.”

  “Simon, be nice!” Kat scolds me from the backseat.

  Scowling, Busara presses the button and we hear ringing. It goes on for so long that even I am starting to lose hope when the ringing suddenly stops.

  “Yeah?” The person speaking has his mouth full of something, and he’s clearly perturbed that he’s had to stop chewing.

  I’m grinning as I lean over Busara in the driver’s seat. “Vidkryty zhopu!” I shout into the microphone.

  The person on the other side is silent. Then he bursts out laughing, which is quickly followed by the sound of choking. The intercom cuts off, and I’m pretty sure I just killed my friend. Then I hear a buzzer, and I’m relieved to see the gate in front of us begin to open.

  “What the hell did you just say?” Kat asks.

  “I said ‘Open up, asshole’ in Ukrainian.” Back at school, those were the passwords to enter our dorm room.

  “You know Ukrainian?” Busara asks.

  “Just the two most important words,” I tell her.

  Busara shakes her head and pulls past the gates. She drives the rest of the way to the top of the hill and parks in the shadow of the giant domed observatory that I spotted from the town below. I slip out of the passenger’s seat as Elvis comes bounding down the stairs of a nearby building. It takes me a second to recognize him. He’s put on fifteen pounds that he badly needed and his skin is no longer the color of glue.

  “Whoa. That’s Elvis?” I hear Kat whisper.

  “Yeah. Not what I was expecting at all,” Busara agrees, sounding far less robotic than usual. The car door closes behind me. I don’t need to hear what they’re saying. I know exactly what they’re thinking. Girls have such filthy minds. Maybe I should have given the ladies a heads-up that he’s handsome, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s been a while, and Elvis wasn’t looking so hot the last time I saw him. I doubt the girls would have been so impressed back then, unless they like their men scrawny and scared shitless.

  “Hello, Simon!” Elvis calls as I get out of the car to greet him. “I was so choked up to hear your voice that I had to perform the Heimlich on myself! How did you find me?” His accent seems to have thickened a lot in the last six months. Hot and foreign. I’m sure the ladies in the car are practically swooning.

  “Remember the last time I saw you?” I ask. “When you told me you were leaving school too? I asked you where you were going, and all you’d say was ‘where the skies are dark and the land is enchanted.’ New Mexico is the Land of Enchantment, and I knew your parents are both astrophysicists. I just put two and two together.”

  I’ve been keeping that little tidbit to myself for the past few days. Kat and Busara would have murdered me if they’d found out we were traveling across the country on a hunch. But my answer satisfies Elvis. “You are genius, my friend!” He wraps me up in a giant bear hug and then kisses me repeatedly on both cheeks. Perhaps I have my cold, clinical upbringing to thank, but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being mauled by an overly affectionate Ukrainian.

  “Damn, Elvis,” I say, finally shoving him away. “Give it a rest. You’re gonna make my girlfriend jealous.”

  Elvis’s eyes widen. The irises are the icy blue of Magna’s Otherworld cave. I swear, I never would have expected Elvis to morph into a teenage dreamboat. I’m starting to question the wisdom of introducing him to Kat. “She’s here?” he asks.

  I gesture to the car, from which the two girls are now emerging.

  “Whoa.” Elvis’s tongue is practically hanging out of his mouth. I’m getting the sense that he hasn’t seen a female in a while. “Which one is she?”

  “Kat’s the one with all the hair,” I tell him.

  “Good,” he says.

  When I realize what he means, I laugh. “The other girl is Busara. Go ahead and give it your best shot,” I tell him. “But I just spent the last forty-eight hours with her, and I’m still not convinced she’s human. And I know how you feel about robots.”

  “If that girl is a robot, I will reconsider my feelings,” Elvis says.

  In the year I lived with him, I never knew Elvis to be anything other than angry, sarcastic and excessively paranoid. But then again, I suppose there wasn’t much point in turning on the charm in an all-male environment. Elvis didn’t see any reason to shower regularly back then either, which was fine by me. The smell kept unwanted guests away. Everything about the kid was a little bit off, including the fact that his parents had sent him to a prestigious East Coast boarding school without a computer. That particular mystery was solved when Elvis borrowed my laptop. He used it to hack into a toy manufacturer and program millions of toy robots to announce to the world’s children that “The robot revolution is nigh.”

  It’s hard to believe that that antisocial anarchist is this Casanova rushing to greet Kat and Busara. Maybe all the time he spent in our dorm left him with a debilitating vitamin D deficiency. Or perhaps he was suffering from a rare intestinal disorder brought on by eating nothing but ranch flavor Doritos and Slim Jims. Elvis is still not exactly what I’d call normal. But now I know he’s got at least one thing in common with other eighteen-year-old males.

  “Greetings, ladies. Welcome to the Dark Skies Observatory!” The Ukrainian accent is now thick enough to slice.

  “Hi,” Kat says. She always plays it cool. For her a pleasant hi means she’s practically drooling. “I can’t believe we’re finally meeting. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “And I have heard much more about you,” Elvis assures her, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. Now that I think of it, I did have a tendency to go on and on about her back then, though I don’t remember saying anything that would justify an eyebrow wiggle. I spin around to admire the scenery in the opposite direction, just in case I’ve turned beet red.

  “Is this where you live?” I hear Busara ask in her usual clinical fashion.

  “Yes,” Elvis replies. “I chose it for the magnificent views. At night, you can see for millions of miles. If you like, I will give you a personal tour after dark.”

  Kat laughs, but when I turn back around I see Busara hasn’t even cracked a smile at the joke. “May I use your Internet connection?”

  “No,” says Elvis. He’s shaking his handsome head.

  “No?” Busara repeats. She glances over at me, as if hoping I can translate.

  “There is no Internet today,” Elvis says. “My parents traveled to Albuquerque this weekend to purchase home goods and alcoholic beverages. They took my phone and the router. I am sure they put a stop on the Internet service as well.”

  “What? Why?” Busara sounds scandalized. “What if there’s an emergency? There’s no one around for miles. You could die up here on your own. What if you’d really been choking a few minutes ago?”

  “Oh, I was,” Elvis informs her. “But a ham sandwich is not what will kill me. I am not so easy to dispose of.”

  I walk over and join the three of them. “I think Elvis’s parents are more worried about what might happen to the rest of the world if he goes online while they’re away,” I say. “Most of Elvis’s hobbies are classified as felonies.”

  “I have…how do you say…issues with technology,” Elvis admits with a sheepish shrug. “And the law is so little-minded. I almost got into very big trouble a few months ago. Am I right, Simon?”

  “Oh,
yes,” I say. “Almost.” Fortunately for Elvis, it had been convenient for both of us to let me take the fall.

  “I can’t believe the feds still think Simon hacked into that toy company,” Kat says. “He barely knows how to operate a microwave.”

  “Hey!” I object. “You know that’s not true. I practically live on Hot Pockets.” Kat gives me a kiss, but she and Elvis both keep laughing at my expense.

  “Wait—you’re the robot revolution guy?” Busara asks Elvis. He’s finally captured her attention.

  “Yes,” Elvis replies. “That is why I live here now. My mother and father thought it would be smart to leave Massachusetts after the unfortunate incident. And that is also why there is currently no Internet service on this mountain.”

  “Do you have running water?” Kat asks.

  “Of course,” Elvis says. “We are scientists, not barbarians.”

  “Then is it okay if I go in and have a shower?”

  “Please,” Elvis says gallantly. “In the basement. Knock yourself up.”

  Busara merely smirks, while Kat doubles over and nearly drops to her knees.

  “Out,” I say. “The phrase is knock yourself out.”

  Kat wraps an arm around Busara’s shoulder. As she limps toward the bathroom, I can still hear her cackling.

  Elvis watches them, grinning like a village idiot.

  “You’ve been in this country since you were two years old. Your English is better than mine,” I whisper. “You said that on purpose.”

  “My accent is gift that brings joy to the world,” Elvis replies. Then he drops the act altogether. “You won’t stop me from having a little fun, will you?”

  “Knock yourself up,” I tell him.

  “ ’Preciate it, bro,” he says in a comically American accent. Then he punches me in the arm for good measure. “Come on, lemme show you around.”

  * * *

  —

  I can’t stop thinking that this place is right out of Otherworld. I wish I could. The thought is more than a little unnerving. Five buildings form the observatory’s compound. All are painted a blinding white. I feel like I’ve wandered into a futuristic Greek myth. Four of the buildings house telescopes of various sizes, their giant unblinking eyes trained on the sky. The fifth, I’m told, is the residence. From the parking lot it looked like a simple boxlike structure. Seen from the side, however, it’s something else altogether. Only half of it is anchored to the mountain. The rest juts out into the air. It reminds me of a diving board. Or the plank on a pirate ship.