Shock the Monkey, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2024932037
ISBNs: 978-0-7595-5527-3 (hardcover), 978-0-7595-5529-7 (ebook)
E3-20240327-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1: A Sky Full of Stars 1: With Claws Like That…
2: The Tyranny of Memory
3: A Twinkling Ball of Burning Gas
4: Everything Goes Terribly, Horribly Wrong
5: A Miserable Murder of Crows
6: Rip, Tear, Rupture
Part 2: Brick House 7: Kratz Actual
8: I Know a Thing Who Knows a Thing
9: My Thoughts Exactly
10: You’re Sitting in It
11: To Serve Claire
Part 3: Planet Claire 12: Bad Kitty
13: Carnivorous or Noncarnivorous?
14: “⊕ςΦ↓δψ§!”
15: The World of Last Life
16: “You’re Ugly and Your Parental Units Clothe You Strangely.”
17: The Jadoon Cipher
18: I’ll Be Your Cocoon Today
19: Worldless
Part 4: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again 20: Murdrum, Birdrib, and Molévelom
21: Full Bowling Ball
22: The Mobius Suite
23: A Cold Passing of Wind
24: Time Loops Are Funny That Way
25: A Very Dirty Iceberg
Part 5: Mountains Come Out of the Sky and They Stand There 26: Coronation Crashers
27: It’s My Party, and I’ll Die If I Want To
28: Judgment Day
29: Of Birds and Blobs
30: Take Us to Your Leader
31: All Kinds of Guilty
32: Siblings of the Stars
33: On the Outskirts of D’Light…
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
FOR THE INGHAMS AND THE KIRTONS.
FAMILY I NEVER KNEW I HAD!
—NS
FOR ALL MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS, FOR THEIR SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT OVER THE YEARS, AND ESPECIALLY THIS PAST MONTH.
—EE
PART 1
A SKY FULL OF STARS
1
With Claws Like That…
THE CREATURE WAS CLEARLY NOT OF EARTH. IT DID NOT EVEN bear the slightest resemblance to anything that had ever legally been on this planet.
Wherever it was from, it was obviously an apex predator. Even its teeth had teeth.
“Can’t you go any faster?” asked Andi, clinging to Noah’s back as he raced through the Latvian forest to escape the hellish creature.
“Maybe if you weren’t so heavy.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault?”
Noah was pushing himself as hard as he could. He had employed cheetah-speed and tried to use horseshoe bat echolocation to anticipate trees, boulders, and other obstacles in their path—but using two complex animal traits simultaneously? Impossible! It was like trying to do math while someone was shouting random numbers at you. He could do them one after the other, but not simultaneously—so they ended up bouncing off a tree, taking critical seconds away. The neon-blue monstrosity was almost on them now.
“Slime trail!” shouted Andi.
“I tried that already!” Noah shouted back. “Twice! I slopped our trail with hagfish slime, then snail slime, and it didn’t even stumble!”
The creature’s scales, each with its own miniature mouth, screeched as the creature galloped toward them. Although “galloped” wasn’t quite the right word for a thing with five legs. “Gallolloped” was more like it. The rhythm of its hooves cut a five-beat cadence that just felt wrong on so many levels.
“You’re the brainiac!” Noah yelled to his sister. “Think of something!”
“I’m not a miracle worker!” shouted Andi. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a product of science, not a magical being.”
Andi was, as her name suggested, an android. Not the phone, but an actual android, although she was also a phone, but that was a very small part of her functionality. Most of the time she was in humanoid form, indistinguishable from an actual human. But once in a while, she was a suitcase.
She had already tried all her countermeasures against the monstrosity closing in on them, from dark-energy quantum lasers to self-doubt torpedoes. But nothing had worked.
“Fractillian Abysmal Beasts are extremely difficult to discourage once they get their mind set on something.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Duh—isn’t it obvious?”
Noah leaped into a tree with gibbon agility to clear an unexpected bog—but the Fractillian Abysmal Beast stomped right through the bog as if it weren’t there.
“Maybe,” said Andi, “we should find out what it wants.”
“It wants to eat us!”
“Not us,” reminded Andi. “You. My metallic alloys are not digestible to it. But that aside, we’re not certain it does want to eat you.”
“Are you kidding me? Look at it!”
“All that drool discharging from its primary mouth does not necessarily indicate hunger. Fractillian Abysmal Beasts tend to have issues with saliva overproduction.”
Noah dropped back down to the forest floor and called up cheetah-speed again. While he had still not mastered all the defense mechanisms of the million-plus species held within his DNA, there were several hundred he could summon at a moment’s notice—if not simultaneously, then at least one after another. For instance, he could go all poison dart frog on the monster, forcing his skin to secrete a deadly neurotoxin—but there was no guarantee it would work. And even if it did, the thing wouldn’t die until after it had eaten Noah, so that was a nonstarter.
Had Noah been able to effectively echolocate while also running like a cheetah, he would have known about the granite face of a mountain in front of them before it could be seen. And although Andi’s radar did catch it, she couldn’t communicate the threat in time.
Noah hit the mountain face at nearly sixty miles an hour. That would have killed a normal human, but his body responded like a tardigrade—a microscopic creature that could survive bullet-speed impact. Of course, that didn’t stop it from hurting.
But he didn’t have time to yowl. He swallowed the pain of his near splat and, realizing he had to climb the sheer cliff, called up some gecko. Gecko was easy—it was, in fact, one of his favorite traits. His fingers spatulated, and he began to scale the rock wall, but just a few feet off the ground, he realized his critical error.
Shoes.
To successfully gecko, he needed all ten fingers and all ten toes to climb. Quickly, he kicked his shoes off and tried again, but to no avail.
Because he was also wearing socks.
How pathetic to have survived an entire alien conspiracy trying to kill him, only to be defeated by a stupid pair of socks. The irony that they were from “Target” was not lost on him.
Noah Prime never expected he’d be spending his time running from aliens. To be honest, he had never believed in aliens, until a team of them blew up his house and his parents informed him that they were not, in fact, human, but were emissaries of an advanced species trying to protect him and save his life. Of course, what they failed to tell him was they also wanted to destroy all life on Earth.
Turned out that the aliens trying to kill him were the good guys, and his parents were forces of evil. Even the name of their species—Fauxlites—screamed that they were not what they appeared to be. That sort of thing messes with your head, sending your moral compass spinning into strange, dizzying places.
All the more reason to make everyone think you’re dead and then disappear.
But being devoured by a Fractillian Abysmal Beast was not the kind of disappearing Noah had in mind.
The painf
If Noah offered up an arm or a leg, that might buy him and Andi the time they needed to escape—and he could use his axolotl salamander regenerative ability to grow new limbs. He’d used it before, but it was as painful as… well, getting your limbs chewed off. So he was not too keen on that plan.
Andi hopped off his back and turned to the creature. “Okay, you caught us,” she said. “Are you just going to stand there drooling, or are you going to tell us what you want?”
And to Noah’s surprise, the creature said, “I’m not entirely sure yet.”
“So,” said Andi, “you just randomly chase people through the woods without even having a clear endgame?”
“I’m trying to decide whether to turn you over to the Anusians or to the Fauxlites.”
Which meant there was nothing random about this encounter. “Then… you know who I am,” said Noah.
“And I know that there’ll be quite a reward for alerting either side to the fact that you’re still alive.”
Well, the good news was that Noah was now off the day’s menu, but the alternatives to being eaten weren’t much better. If the Anusians knew Noah was alive, they would kill him, while the Fauxlites would keep him alive, put him on some interplanetary wildlife preserve, and destroy all life on Earth.
“One might assume there’d be a reward,” Andi said, “but think about it… the Fauxlites hate Fractillians. They’ll probably send you on your way without even a thank-you. And the Anusians? Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you a prisoner of the Anusians who escaped in the Volcanic Portal Disaster a few months ago? If you go to them, their mission leader will probably oysterize you again and put you back on her pearl necklace.”
The creature’s mouth seemed to drool just a little less fervently. “Nascent Organic Aggregate Hybrids are valuable. Maybe giving them this N.O.A.H. will buy my freedom.”
“Yes,” said Noah, “but you seem pretty free to me already.”
“Ha!” scoffed its many scaled mouths, then its primary mouth said, “Free? How can I be free when most of the time I have to squeeze myself into a human skin just to fit in?”
Noah shrugged. “But not when you’re rampaging.”
Its scale mouths sighed. “True,” it said. “But there’s more to life than rampaging. And like your android said, I’m still a fugitive, and I’m tired of hiding. But if I bring the Anusians your limp, lifeless body—I’m sure they’ll let me off for good behavior.”
“Killing me is NOT good behavior!” Noah insisted.
“Depends on who you ask.”
“And besides—I’m the one who broke Vecca’s necklace and threw you into the pond to rehydrate!” said Noah. “If it wasn’t for me, you and all the other prisoners would still be pearls around her neck! And this is the thanks I get?”
That gave the Fractillian pause.
“If you let us go,” said Andi, “we’ll give you something more valuable than anything our enemies can give you.”
“And what would that be?”
Then Andi turned to Noah. “Tell him, Noah.”
And the creature looked at him, waiting expectantly.
It was so like Andi to lead him from a cliff wall to a cliff edge. Great. He had nothing.
“Uh… Uh…”
“Well,” said Andi, feigning impatience. “Are you going to illuminate him or not?”
And Noah figured out what Andi was suggesting. It wasn’t going to be easy—he had only managed this particular trait of the broadclub cuttlefish once before. Noah closed his eyes. And when he opened them, they spilled out bright bioluminescence of the exact wavelength needed to hypnotize the Fractillian. Noah didn’t know how long it would last—but it gave him a momentary advantage. Now that it was hypnotized, Noah shifted gears. Turning off the bioluminescence, he dredged up the harpy eagle. His fingernails elongated into the world’s sharpest claws—as did his toenails, completely shredding his socks, as if in karmic punishment for preventing his earlier escape. Just as the trance wore off, Noah leaped at the Fractillian Beast, clawing at it. The creature roared. All its scale-mouths roared, all its terrible teeth in teeth in teeth gnashed in fury. It tried to turn, shake him off, but instead succeeded only in flinging him onto its back, where Noah dug in his claws again, even deeper than the first time.
Then the creature stopped thrashing. And it shivered. And it said:
“Oooh, that feels good.”
This wasn’t what Noah was expecting. He redoubled his efforts, clawing and shredding deeper, sending wailing scales flying—but no sooner had the creature’s flesh shredded than it healed, and new scales came in to replace the old.
“Ooh… Now a little to the left…”
“Andi, it’s not working!”
“Actually, I think it is,” said Andi. “Do as he says.”
So Noah moved a little to the left and dug furiously at the creature’s back with his hands and feet.
The beast rolled its shoulders. The new scales all seemed to be smiling and deeply relaxed.
“Oh my Universal Deity!” said the creature. “That feels amazing. Please don’t stop.”
And since the creature was not eating him or turning him over to his enemies, Noah kept it up for a whole twenty minutes, until the Fractillian Abysmal Beast was as relaxed as a kitten on its favorite rug.
“That,” said the beast, “was the absolute best back massage I’ve ever had. You should go to the Fractal Abyss and start a business. With claws like that, you’d make a fortune!”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Noah.
“Pity you’ll never get a massage like that again,” said Andi.
Now that the creature had been massaged into submission, its primary mouth and all its scale mouths puffed their lips into a profound pout. “Aww, why not?”
“Because,” said Noah, picking up on Andi’s lead, “if you turn me in, I’ll either be killed or put on a protected wildlife preserve. Either way you’ll never see me again. But on the other hand… if you let us go, I’ll be happy to give you free massages for life.”
The creature was silent.
“Well,” asked Andi, “what do you think?”
“Quiet,” said its many thousands of mouths, “I’m thinking.”
In the end, the Fractillian, who formally introduced himself as Murdrum, agreed to the terms. But not without insisting that Noah make himself available for massages whenever Murdrum had a hankering.
“I don’t like it,” Noah told Andi.
“Hey, a Fractillian isn’t the worst friend you could have.”
The mention of friends made Noah’s heart sink a little.
“Of course, I do think it’s time to move again,” said Andi. “Because if one rogue alien was able to find us, others could.”
Move. That was easy for Andi to say. She spoke every earth language that ever existed, as well as a few that had yet to emerge, and her database was well-equipped with the cultural norms of every society, allowing her to adapt in ways that Noah could not. Right now they were in Latvia—and not only didn’t Noah speak the language, he had never even heard of the place before they set up house there. And to make it worse, on the rare occasions they went into the nearby town of Ludza for food and supplies, Andi introduced him as mans brālis idiots, which Noah quickly learned meant “my idiot brother.” And all Noah could do was offer a blank smile and play the part.
“It’s not appropriate to call someone an idiot!” he had reminded her.
To which she had responded, “In your case, it’s the only appropriate word.”
Mr. Ksh, their rich benefactor, assured them that he could move them to a new location every few weeks, since he had an endless supply of real estate holdings, but for Noah, all the moving around was getting old.
“I miss Sahara and Ogden,” he told Andi, as they sat in their secluded cottage, or kotedža, in front of a fire that Andi kept having to relight with her optical lasers, since the wood was so damp.
