Target: Earth

by Johnny Marciano

  Here was yet another bizarre Human quirk. Certainly no feline kept boxes of stuffed ogres around.Then again, I could understand why Humans would want to possess models of their superiors.

  “These animals—do they have a high value?”

  “They do,” the boy-ogre said. “Sentimental value.”

  “This ‘sentimental’ value—it means we will acquire additional dollars?”

  “No,” the boy-ogre said, staring into the plastic eyes of his bear. “It means it is worth more to me than to anyone else. Isn’t that right, Brownie?”

  I slashed the bear out of his hands. “Sell it!”

  The sooner I accumulated this Human money, the sooner I could purchase the technology I needed to repurpose my Zom-Beam into a weapon of awesome power—and commence my conquest of this sorry excuse for a planet.

  CHAPTER 7

  All the other stuffed animals were tagged and set out, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put a price on Brownie. What kind of person sells their teddy bear?

  “What’s that you got there, Raj?”

  It was Lindy, walking over from across the street.

  “Aww, look at this guy!” she said, pulling the bear out of my hands. “He’s a little dirty and—sniff sniff—kinda smelly, but he’d scrub up nice. He looks like a Cuddles! Do you like that name, little bear?”

  “His name is Brownie,” I said under my breath.

  The front door banged open, and Dad came out of the house carrying a mug of coffee and a folding chair.

  “You coming to help, Dad?” I called.

  He laughed. “Ho no! Just watching, son. You’re doing a great job.” He took a slurp of his coffee as he settled into his seat. “It’s a wonderful day for a yard sale, isn’t it!”

  “Hey Raj, what’s this?” Lindy asked.

  My dad looked up, saw what she was pointing at, and immediately shot out of his chair.

  “Whoa whoa whoa, Raj—what do you think you’re doing putting that out for sale?”

  “The broken lava lamp?”

  “Yes, the lava lamp! You can’t sell that.” He snatched it off the table and cradled it in his arms like a baby. “Sorry, Lindy,” he said. “I had this in my college dorm room, and it’s like it’s a part of me.”

  Then Dad started pulling other things off the table. “My magnetic paper clips! And my molar bear mug!”

  “Dad,” I said, “can you just go back to your chair, please?”

  In the end, Lindy decided to buy my old Monopoly game. I told her it was missing half of the money, but she didn’t care. She handed me two dollars.

  “I’m your first sale!”

  I took her money and opened my laptop. Mom wanted me to enter every purchase into a spreadsheet—“It will be a good lesson if you ever start your own business!”—but my stupid computer was acting up again.

  “My mom can totally fix that. She, like, does computer stuff for a living,” Lindy said. “I can take it to my house right now!”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

  After Lindy, we had no customers for a while, and I was starting to worry that the yard sale would be a disaster. But suddenly a whole bunch of people showed up, and all of them bought something. Well, all of them except Mr. Wallace from down the street.

  “FIVE dollars for this? You want FIVE dollars?” he asked, holding up an unopened box of headphones. “Why not just go rob a bank?”

  Grumpy neighbors aside, I was feeling pretty good about how things were going—until I heard the scrape of skateboards on the sidewalk. I knew who it was before I even looked up.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a yard sale, not a junk sale,” Scorpion said. “What’s the matter? The garbage company wouldn’t take any of this garbage?”

  Scorpion laughed way too loudly at his dumb joke and tried to high-five Newt, who clearly didn’t find it funny.

  “We sold all the good stuff already,” I mumbled.

  “Awwww, look at this!” Scorpion said, pointing to my animals. “Are these the baby’s stuffies?”

  “This one’s kind of cute,” Newt said, picking up Brownie. I was surprised. But then again, every once in a while Newt did say something nice.

  “Whatever,” Scorpion said.

  “How much do you want for him?” Newt said.

  She seemed to really like the teddy bear. And what was I hanging on to Brownie for, anyway? He lived in a box in our garage.

  “Aw, just take him,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Newt stepped off the curb and laid Brownie facedown in the middle of the street. Then she ran over him with her skateboard.

  Scorpion laughed. “Sweet!” he said. “Let ME try!”

  Klawde leaned in to my ear. “I have skinned enemies alive for lesser transgressions.”

  For once, I didn’t think he was being unreasonable.

  CHAPTER 8

  The “yard sale” was long and tedious, but by the end of the day, my Human and I had a large stack of green paper rectangles, plus many silver coins.

  The boy-Human shuffled through the dollars, counting them.

  “We must be extremely wealthy!” I exclaimed, purring.

  “We made fifty-seven dollars,” he said. “Probably sixty with the quarters and dimes.”

  “Excellent! What can that buy us?” Surely at least one weapons-building drone.

  “Maybe dinner,” the boy-ogre said, shrugging. “At Bob’s Pizza Palace.”

  I spat in contempt. “What a waste of naptimes! We must sell things of greater value. What of the motorized vehicles? Can we sell the fortress? Certainly that would be worth many hundreds of dollars.”

  “We can’t sell our house, Klawde. We live in it.”

  This was infuriating. “If we can’t sell our way to riches, how else can we make money?”

  “Well,” the boy-ogre said, “there’s work.”

  “What do you mean by ‘work’?” I asked. “Is that anything like napping? Scratching? Destroying the fortress of your enemy? Because that would be a most fun way to make dollars.”

  “Work is the exact opposite of fun,” he said. “It’s when you spend a long time doing something you don’t want to do—something that’s really hard or really boring. Usually both.”

  This work was the most horrible Human concept yet.

  “No cat would ever do anything they didn’t want to do,” I said. “Unless their warlord forced them to.”

  “Well, here on Earth, no one can force you to do things for them,” he said. “They have to give you money. Like how Lindy gets paid to walk Mr. Mitchell’s dog.”

  That was an odious task indeed. One could smell the brute from a block away. “So you are saying that all wealthy people became rich by working?”

  “Well, no,” the boy-ogre said. “Really rich people are usually born that way. And other people get rich when their grandparents or whoever die and leave them a fortune.”

  This sounded promising.

  “Perhaps you have a wealthy loved one or ancient relative near death?” I asked.

  Alas, he did not.

  CHAPTER 9

  I’d finally cleaned up the last of the leftover yard-sale junk when Cedar and Steve rode up on their bikes.

  “How’d it go, Raj?” Cedar asked.

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “How much money did you make?”

  “Sixty-one dollars,” I said. “And thirty-five cents.”

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And I have to give half of it to my parents.”

  “But you did all the work yourself,” Cedar said. “They aren’t even here!”

  “My dad was, uh, supervising.”

  Just then Dad came walking out of the house carrying a glass of iced tea and wearin
g an enormous pair of headphones. He settled back into his chair and waved at us.

  “Hey, Dr. Krish,” Cedar and Steve both said.

  “HI, KIDS,” Dad shouted. “MAN, THANK GOODNESS THAT’S OVER! IT’S HARD WORK RUNNING A YARD SALE!”

  He leaned back and crossed his legs.

  “At this rate I’ll have to have forty more garage sales to buy that headset,” I said.

  “Maybe you could get a job,” Steve suggested.

  “Don’t you have to be in high school to do that?” I asked.

  “Hey, I have an idea!” Cedar said. “How about we start a business? It’s fall cleanup time, so we can rake leaves and clear gutters and stuff. There’s a kid on my block who paid for his car that way. We can split the work and the money!”

  “Then you can get that virtual reality headset you’re always talking about,” Steve said.

  “And I can get the telescope I want,” Cedar said. “The Astro 9000!”

  “Well I know I need my lawn raked!”

  I turned and saw Lindy’s mom walking across the street with my laptop. She explained that she had defragged the system, removed some grayware—whatever that meant—and doubled the memory. “It should work a lot better now,” she said, handing it to me.

  “Wow, thanks, Mrs. Langston!”

  She gave me a big smile. “Please, call me Annie.” Then she held out a Ziploc bag. “Anyone want cookies?”

  “They’re still warm,” Steve whispered.

  I was taking a second cookie when Annie cleared her throat. “Um, Raj, I have to say that your search history is rather . . . interesting.” She looked at me sort of sideways. “I’m sorry to have looked, but I wanted to see if you’d visited any suspicious sites. Your computer was so slow that I was worried you’d downloaded some malware by mistake.”

  I stopped chewing. “For real?”

  “I didn’t find any viruses, thankfully,” she said. “But why were you googling things like ‘how to conquer earth’ and ‘weaponized squirrels’?”

  “I didn’t search for any of that,” I said.

  “Really?” She looked skeptical. “Then why would it be on your computer?”

  “I have no idea!” I said.

  Except wait—I did.

  Klawde.

  That cat was going to get me into serious trouble someday.

  “Oh. Huh,” she said. “Well, in the future, you do need to be careful about the sites you visit. You don’t want a cryptoworm.”

  That did sound scary. “Okay. Thanks again for fixing it,” I said.

  As she crossed the street to go home, she turned back. “And I’m serious about the lawn,” she said. “With Oliver away on his foreign exchange program and my husband always traveling for work, it’s more than Lindy and I can handle. I’ll pay twenty dollars an hour for the three of you.”

  Cedar, Steve, and I all high-fived each other.

  “That’s so awesome!” Steve said. “That’s like ten dollars an hour for each of us!”

  “It’s actually not,” I said.

  “We have to make flyers! And a logo!” Cedar said. “It’ll be so fun!”

  “Yeah! Well, except for the yard work part,” I said. “But I’ll do it for the VQ.”

  Cedar turned to Steve. “You never said what you want to buy.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “But if I spent it all on Frogger at Quarterworld, I bet I’d finally get the high score!”

  Cedar patted his arm. “You just keep thinking about it,” she said.

  CHAPTER 10

  My nineteenth nap of the day resulted in a brilliant idea. (The ancients were right: A feline’s best thinking does only happen after the first eighteen.)

  It was simple, really. I would just manufacture the money myself. Primitive though the ogre’s scanner and printer were, they could transfer images from one flat sheet of crushed-up trees to another. And since these dollars were nothing more than green rectangles of this paper, I could print as many of them as I wanted! I would use them to buy the VQ Ultra, as well as all the rest of the technology I needed.

  Purr.

  But when I explained my plan to the boy-ogre, he shook his head.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Klawde,” he said. “Only governments can print money. If you copy it, it’s called counterfeiting. And that is totally against the law.”

  Such absurd Human regulations obviously did not apply to me—I was hardly a citizen of this pathetic planet—but the boy-ogre explained that no store would accept homemade dollars.

  Hiss! Of course the petty warlords of Earth kept such a mighty tool to themselves. How frustrating that you must actually have power before you can abuse it.

  “So how do I become a government so that I may print money?”

  “Forget it, Klawde,” the boy-ogre said.

  I did not understand why he was always so negative.

  “By the way,” he added, “do you know that you almost totally blew your cover? When Lindy’s mom was fixing my laptop, she saw my search history—your search history.”

  He opened his computer and turned the screen toward me.

  weapons-building drones

  brainwashing technologies

  are humans edible?

  long-term effects of earth’s toxic atmosphere on the cerebellum

  “Why were you looking up this stuff, anyway?” he demanded.

  I swished my tail. “Because you don’t have any of the answers.”

  The ogre just shook his head and sighed.

  I hated when he did that.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sunday was the first day of the Three Gardeneers Lawn Care Company.

  The name was most definitely not my idea. Or Cedar’s. But The Three Musketeers was Steve’s favorite old movie, and he won rock-paper-scissors on what to call us.

  “The Three Musketeers is about these three really cool friends with swords who, like, do good deeds and stuff,” Steve explained. “And we’re friends, and there are three of us!”

  He held his rake like it was a sword and slashed it through the air.

  “It’s a terrible name, but whatever,” Cedar said as we fanned out across Lindy’s yard.

  We’d barely even gotten started when Steve stopped to take his first water break. Cedar, meanwhile, raced an old-fashioned mower—the kind that doesn’t have a motor—back and forth across the yard. And I was doing my best with the raking, even though I kept sneezing and having to stop to blow my nose.

  “I think Raj is allergic to yard work,” Steve called down from the tree he was sitting in.

  “Actually, it looks like you are,” Cedar said. “How about you get off your butt and start pulling up that crabgrass?”

  By the time we were done with all the mowing, raking, and weeding, it was way past lunchtime. Cedar had blisters, my nose was so stuffed up I could barely breathe, and Steve . . . well, Steve was Steve. He kept trying to get us to play Three Musketeers with rake handles, and when we wouldn’t, he lay down in the grass next to Flabby Tabby. They both had their eyes closed now and were sunning their bellies.

  “Aw, it’s like Steve is a cat, too!” Lindy said, walking out of the house with a tray of lemonade.

  Lindy could be annoying, but right now I was really glad to see her. The lemonade was delicious.

  She smiled at us. “I was the first customer at your yard sale, and now I’m the first customer of your yard business. Or my mom is, anyway. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Totally,” I said, pressing the cold glass to my hot cheek. It felt great.

  CHAPTER 12

  The boy-ogre came in looking tired and extremely dirty.

  “Are you raking in the money, ogre?”

  “Ha ha ha, very funny,” he said, wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve.

>   “What is that leaking out of your nostrils?” I asked. “Are those your brains? Are you going to die? If you do, will I inherit your money?”

  “I have allergies.”

  I did not know what these were, but I assumed they were not worth dollars. “How much money did you earn today, ogre?”

  “Twenty dollars. But I didn’t even get it. When we were done, Lindy’s mom realized she didn’t have any cash in the house. She asked if we took credit cards, which we obviously don’t. Then she offered to pay us in cybermoney.” He sniffled. “I think she was joking.”

  When I asked him what “cybermoney” was, the boy-ogre shrugged. “I think it’s actually called ‘cryptcurrency’ or something.”

  A search on the ogre’s “web browser” revealed to me that cryptocurrency was virtual money, and that it was made up of digital code instead of green paper. And it was not controlled by governments—individual Humans could create these currencies. They simply needed unbreakable encryption and vast computing power.

  Of course, the computing power here on Earth was pitiful compared to that of Lyttyrboks, and the Humans’ encrypted files were kitten’s play to unlock. And so (with minor assistance from Flooffee) I could create a vastly more secure and thus more valuable cryptocurrency than any ogre could.

  In other words, I could make my own money!

  I immediately descended to the bunker to call my minion.

  “Oh, hey there, Supremest Butt-Sniffer!” Flooffee-Fyr answered. “Er, I mean, All Powerfullest Warlord.”

  My plan had lifted my spirits so high that I let the insult pass.

  It took me some time to explain Human paper money, but Flooffee grasped cryptocurrency instantly. “Oh, it’s just encrypted code?”

  “Barely,” I said. “It only runs to one hundred thousand lines.”

  “Is that all?” Flooffee said.