by Mo O’Hara
Dustin was still shaking. “There was something in the helmet! Something was in there!!!” he shouted.
Trevor looked inside. It was empty. “There is nothing there. You vere experiencing space claustrophobia from being inside the helmet.”
Then I saw a bit of Dustin’s hair move. Fang? Was she hiding in the hugeness of Dustin’s hair?
6
I ran up to Dustin, taking off one of my big space-suit gloves as I did. “Hey, bad luck, Dustin,” I said as I patted his hair, scooping Fang into the big glove at the same time.
“Watch the hair, man.” Dustin twitched away. “There was something in that helmet. Something humming, purring. A little voice.”
Trevor led him away down one of the tunnels. “This means you vill join the others who didn’t pass the challenges so far.” On the way out, though, Dustin stopped for a second to say something to Sanj. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Dustin leaned in and whispered to Sanj. Then they did one of those handshakes that I’ve seen my dad do in restaurants. You know, where he slips the waiter five bucks in the handshake. Well, I don’t think Dustin was giving Sanj five bucks, but I’m sure he passed him something. I thought about investigating, but I was too far away to see what it was, and anyway, I didn’t have time to think about little stuff like that. I had a contest to win.
“Right,” Kirsty said, handing me the helmet from the floor. “Your challenge starts in ten seconds. Move those blocks to the other side of the room. Easy, right?”
There was no time to ditch Fang. I quickly dumped her from the glove into the helmet as I swung it up to put it on my head. I could hear her well-known I’m-so-mad-at-you hiss as I clicked it into place and put down the visor. Kirsty helped me with my gloves and then tapped my helmet.
“Starting … now!” she shouted.
Fang was trying to balance herself inside my helmet as I moved forward in the space suit. Moving was weird. It was like when the gravity in the dome was turned down and we were weightless, but I was in this heavy spacesuit and helmet. It felt hard even controlling my arms and legs now that I was strapped in. I took a step and bounced in the wrong direction. Fang dug her claws into my head to steady herself.
“Owwwwwh! Kitten!” I shouted inside the helmet.
“You OK? You’re not making sense again.” Kirsty Katastrophe’s voice came through my earphone in the helmet. I forgot that this helmet had a mic! “Are you having delayed reaction to that head slam with the girl’s boot?”
“No, I mean, you must be kidding? Starting already?” I said, trying to shake my head to make Fang undig her claws from my scalp. “I’m OK. I got this.”
“You better. You only have three minutes to complete the task—or you fail,” Kirsty said.
“I can’t fail. I will do this,” I said to myself and to Fang and Kirsty.
“Yeah, whatever,” she answered. “Two minutes, fifty seconds.”
I blinked my eyes and got my bearings. I picked up the first box and started moving, but I was bouncing around again. Then I could feel Fang relax her claws and curl up inside the helmet. She started to purr. Guess she found a comfy spot.
“What’s that sound?” Kirsty asked.
“Ummmmm, it’s a ummmm … meditation technique,” I said. “Yeah, it helps me concentrate.”
Weirdly, Fang’s purring did calm me down. I can do this, I repeated to myself, but in my own head this time, not through the microphone.
I got the first box to its place and headed back for the second. With each step, I felt more in control.
I picked up the second box and took bigger jumps to get back down to the other end of the room. I did it in half the time.
“See,” I said, “I got this moon-walking thing. No problem.”
I had thirty seconds on the clock and one more box to move. I bent down to pick up the final box when it happened. A sleeping kitten slipped off the top of my head and slid right down the visor to block my view. All I could see was gray fur. Suddenly the purring was not so relaxing.
I grabbed the box and started to move, but I had no idea where I was. I could be heading the wrong way! I tried wiggling my nose and even poking Fang with my tongue to get her to wake up, but nothing worked. I just got a very furry tongue!
“Bleh!!!” I spat out cat fur.
“You’ve got ten seconds. What’s the problem?” Kirsty said.
I had to get Fang out of my face so I could see, but I couldn’t just knock her out of the way. Or could I? I jumped up into the air as hard as I could, and then rolled forward in a tuck, holding the box. As I came out of the turn in the air, Fang slid back off my face and I could see where I was. I hit the ground again and bounced hard toward the end of the room. My boots touched the ground, and I put the box on the pile as the clocked ticked to zero.
I could see Igor through my fur-covered visor. He was mouthing “Urgh! Urgh! Urgh!” and was clapping.
Kirsty’s voice came over the helmet speaker. “OK, that’s a pass. You can head over to the next station for the flight-simulation test.”
I kept my helmet on while they unstrapped me from the harness. Geeky Girl was up next.
I gave her a thumbs-up as she got clipped in. She smiled through the visor of her helmet, and then pointed to mine. A tip of gray tail was just sticking out of the corner.
I quickly tucked it back in, turned and headed off to the changing rooms.
When I got inside, I took off the helmet and out rolled Fang onto the bench. She was still snoozing!
“Fang! Time to wake up,” I said, wiping all the fur out of the inside of the helmet with some paper towels. “We have one more contest to get through for this phase. It’s the flight simulator, and I can’t take a chance on you messing this up.”
Fang didn’t even blink. She was out for the count.
“So, I’m going to just leave you here for a bit. You’ll be OK, right?” I said, piling towels around her to hide her. “Don’t move and don’t leave the changing room, all right?”
Fang made a sleepy purr and rolled over.
I tiptoed out of the changing room so I wouldn’t wake her and then bolted to the next station. As I got to the flight simulator, though, I heard ooohs and wows coming from a small group of kids that had formed around the simulator pod. Whoever was in there was acing this flight. The stats on the screen were incredible. Speed, agility, precision. Those were all the rankings, and whoever it was was getting top marks in everything. Then I saw the name on the board: Sanj!!!
This was impossible. Sanj sucked at video games. He always lost in the battlefield games, and in space games, he usually got a little dizzy from spinning at warp speed and crashed a couple minutes into the game.
But the stats on the screen told a different story. Sanj didn’t make one wrong turn. He steered perfectly and docked at the virtual space station in record time. Sanj was king of the flight simulator. He was a racing demon. A speed-flying legend. He might even be good enough to be Evil Emperor of the Week or, worse, to get Neil to take him into space!
7
This was not real. I must have accidentally transported to some bizarro world where Sanj was good at video games! Where was I? He had to have rigged it somehow. I’d played games with him for years and he’d never not crashed out in a burning fireball. Something was not right.
“That vas excellent,” Trevor the Tech-in-ator said as Sanj got out of the pod.
“Yes, I did think it would be more challenging, but you know.” Then he paused and touched his ear. “Thank you,” he added, and did one of his trademark mwhaa-haa-haa wheezes.
Diablo was just finishing on the other machine. “You need more speed on that thing, man,” he said, tossing his helmet to Bob as he jumped out of the pod. “And blasters. You need more blasters!”
“You are just flying up to and docking vith the space station. You are not supposed to blast it,” Trevor said.
“Oh, my bad,” Diablo said.
“You passed anyvay,” T
revor added. “You docked the ship perfectly before you blasted it, so technically you passed.”
OK, note to self. Don’t blast the space station until after you dock.
“Result!” Diablo high-fived with Bob as they crossed over to look at the results on the screen. They were both through, and now Sanj was through as well. I thought more of the competition would drop away with each test. Never mind, I still had this. The flying simulator was my ace in the hole. I was great at this kind of thing, and if Sanj could do it, then they were right, this would be easy.
I strapped in and closed the hatch on my simulator pod.
“Right, the vheezing kid had a good point. Too many people are passing this test, so it must be too easy. This time ve’ll reset so the simulation pods are racing each other.”
“Wait, so only one of us gets to go through?” I said.
“That’s vhat I said,” Trevor spoke down the mic. “Are you strapped in and ready?”
“All ready to win this race and head to space,” I said, smirking.
Then I heard the other voice on the headset. The voice from the other pod.
“I’m ready,” Geeky Girl said. “No hard feelings, Mark, but I am going to win.”
“It’s you? I’m racing you?” I started to say, but Trevor spoke over us.
“Whoever gets to the space station first and docks vins, and that person, and that person only, vill go through from this round. Ready and go.” As Trevor stopped talking, a buzzer sounded and then the pod started shaking like it was simulating a takeoff.
I was racing Geeky Girl to get to the virtual space station and only one of us could win.
I pushed on the thrusters and engaged the turbo-drive engines. I maneuvered in front of Geeky Girl right away and held my position, blocking every time she tried to pass. All those months of Battle Planets X that Mom said were a waste of time were now saving my chances of actually going into space. I had this.
I could see the space station on my trajectory. I would definitely get there first. Geeky Girl would have to walk down that inflatable corridor with the other losers. I felt kinda bad for her. She would make a good astronaut, but that was the problem. She would make a “good” astronaut, and what Neil Strongarm needed were “evil” astronauts. She just didn’t have it in her. She couldn’t survive in the cutthroat competition of space.
I was the best evil astronaut, and now Neil Strongarm would see that. I would be one step closer to being crowned Evil Emperor of the Week and, most important, being picked by Neil and going into space. I was just picturing how I could get a crown welded onto a space helmet when it happened.
Geeky Girl blasted me. The pod shook as my left engine light flickered. She shot me in my left booster!! But this was a race, not a battle.
I engaged the communications link between the pods. “What are you doing, Geeky Girl?”
“Winning” was the reply that came back. “It’s every person for themselves. Sorry, Mark, I have to do this. I have to get into space.”
My virtual ship spluttered and slowed, and Geeky Girl pulled into the lead. I looked out my hatch window from the pod and saw that the whole group of campers had stopped to watch Geeky Girl and me race. We were not just doing this in a virtual world on-screen, we were doing this in front of the whole camp.
OK, if this is how she was going to play this, then I had step up my plan. But first I had to stop the power drain. It was time for my secret weapon. I took my flash drive with the virtual program for the Evil Super Space-Expanding Foam out of my sock and plugged it into the simulator control panel. OK, now to deploy the expanding space-foam hole plugger to stop up the blast hole in the left booster. Done.
Then I looked at the control panel in my pod and imagined I was playing Battle Planets X. What would Captain Titan do in the game? He would probably sacrifice himself to save his shipmates and the mission. No way was I going to do that. First, I had no shipmates in this simulation, and second, there was no way I was giving up on this that easily. Then I thought, What would Neil Strongarm do?
I smiled as I diverted power from the landing gear, the communications systems, the navigation systems and the life-support systems. The left booster surged back into action with the diverted power.
Trevor’s voice came over the speaker in my helmet. “You are not allowed to override the simulation like that.”
I ignored him. I had to catch up to Geeky Girl. I was flying by sight without the tracking systems and speeding along as fast as the rockets would take me. She was seconds away from docking, but I was gaining on her.
I started to feel light-headed. Oh yeah, the oxygen level was dropping in the pod.
“If the oxygen level falls below the next level, I’m stopping the simulation,” Trevor said.
Then I heard another voice—one that I recognized. “No, let him do it.” It was Neil Strongarm.
I was right on Geeky Girl’s tail now. I was about to pass her when she jettisoned her back rockets into my path. I had to swerve hard right to avoid them.
Geeky Girl had lined up her ship perfectly with the docking station. Even without her rockets, the momentum pushed her into position.
“Noooo!” I shouted as I was spinning off to the right, still reeling from my quick swerve.
Geeky Girl was seconds away from docking. She was going to win this.
Then I heard the voice again. “Shame, I thought that kid had something.” It was Neil Strongarm again.
I hated the sound of disappointment in his voice. I would not lose this. Not even now. What would Neil Strongarm do?
Then it occurred to me—if the docking port at the space station was blocked then I would have to make a new one … by blasting a new hole in the space station and docking there.
I fired up the blasters and shot. The laser cut through the walls of the virtual space station, making a hole just big enough to land. I spun the ship around and reverse-parked into the hole in the station. I could see Geeky Girl complete her docking as I deployed the expanding space-foam hole plugger to seal the hole up behind me. I popped the hatch to my pod just before I passed out from low oxygen. I remember Trevor and Igor lifting me out of the simulation pod and leaning me against the base as I took deep breaths. The next thing I knew Neil Strongarm was standing over me.
“I like the way you think, kid. If you don’t like the rules, then change the rules.” He smiled. “Sometimes that works.”
“Both of these kids pass,” he said to Trevor.
“Right. All of you who have gotten this far vill be put into teams for the next assessment. The rest of you”—Trevor pointed down the long inflatable corridor—“that is the vay out!”
8
Most of the other campers walked down that corridor. Some of them had to be carried by Phillipe because they wouldn’t accept that they had lost.
There were only a dozen of us left now, and Kirsty stood in front of us all with a clipboard, pacing back and forth.
“You kids have made the first cut.” She smiled, but then she scowled. “But ONLY the first cut. The next assessment is to test how well you work in teams and how fast you can think.”
“There’s no time in space for dillydallying,” Neil interrupted. “You have to think and then act.”
Then Kirsty read out the teams.
The trumpet kid, the drum kid and a scary Goth girl were on one team.
Three really scared-looking nerdy kids were on another team.
Sanj, Bob and Diablo were on another.
And then she read out my team.
“Mark, Igor and Geeky Girl.”
“Great, so I have to work with the girl who literally just shot me in the back?” I said.
“Or you could give up now?” Kirsty said.
“Fine,” I said.
Igor patted me on the back. We would have to make this work. At least we had a team that had Igor’s strength and Geeky Girl’s techy knowledge and my general evil greatness. We could ace this challenge. If Geeky G
irl didn’t double-cross us to win.
“Go into your allocated rooms, and you can start your test,” Kirsty said.
I high-fived Igor as we headed to the room. Geeky Girl followed. She had taken off her helmet and was holding it by her side. Under the visor, I spotted a wing flutter slightly. She lowered the visor gently to cover up the budgie inside. So that’s where Boris has been this whole time. Then I remembered. Fang! She was still in the changing room!
“Ummm, I have to go to the bathroom,” I blurted out. “All that lack-of-oxygen thing really made me … ya know … need to go,” I lied.
Kirsty rolled her eyes. “You have two minutes to get to your rooms. Once the door is closed, the clock starts and the door won’t reopen until the assessment is over. If you’re out when the door closes, you fail.” She paused. “And your team fails.”
Geeky Girl and Igor gave me a look that said, “You better make it back.” I ran to the changing room and rifled through the towels, looking for Fang. The clock was ticking. Where was she?
Then I heard her. “Meeeeooowww!”
Fang was balancing on the door top, ready to pounce. “Good attack cat,” I said, “but we have to go.”
Fang jumped down. “So how am I going to sneak you into the room without anyone seeing?”
Fang curled up on the floor like she didn’t care.
“You can’t sleep more. Come on, we have to leg it,” I said.
“That’s it. Leg it.” I pulled up my flight suit pants leg and she climbed up and clung to my sock. Then I ran.
I made it to the door just as it started to beep and close. I dove through and skidded across the floor as it clicked shut. Phew.
“Cutting it close,” Geeky Girl said.
“So? What are you gonna do about it?” I said back. “Blast me?” I paused. “Oh yeah. You did.”