Shock the Monkey, page 18
Andi would know. But Andi wasn’t talking—and only now did Noah suspect that she wasn’t just pouting. She had said she had an idea before she went silent—but she never told them what that idea was.…
The cocoon suddenly tightened around him, and for a moment Noah thought that maybe he was being digested after all—but then came the rattle of the engine, making it clear that Kyle was just giving Noah a protective embrace to smooth out the turbulence and g-forces of launch. It was much more pleasant than being held down by furniture.
Not a minute later, they were free from the planet’s gravity. Noah floated in freefall, which was oddly soothing within a travel cocoon. With no sense of up or down, it felt like being in a womb. A comforting sense of peace came over him as he floated in his own private void. In no time at all he was asleep. And he remained asleep until the ship was attacked.
Noah was awakened by a violent blast followed by the blaring of an alarm. For a moment he panicked, having no idea where he was. All he saw were green veins and a pair of terrified eyes.
“Ooh, this is bad!” said a frightened voice. “This is really, really bad!”
Noah found himself growing wolverine claws, and feline fangs. He tried to speak, but it came out as a lion’s roar.
“Ooh, that’s bad, too!” warbled the voice.
Noah remembered where he was, just as another blast rocked the ship. His claws were already beginning to shred his artificial skin. If he lost that, it would make everything a whole lot worse. He swallowed and pushed his various animal traits as far down as they could go—and although it felt like trying to get toothpaste back into the tube, he managed to get the claws to retract, and the fangs to recede. His voice, however, still sounded rather lion-like, which wasn’t helpful at all.
“What’s going on?” he roared.
“I don’t know!” said Kyle the cocoon. “And why do you sound like that? Stop sounding like that! It’s freaking me out!”
Noah cleared his throat, and his voice normalized. “Just calm down. Whatever’s wrong, it’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that!” wailed the terrified cocoon.
Noah tried to find the seam and peel himself out, but Kyle was clinging to him like someone who was drowning. Then the flight attendant’s voices came over the loudspeaker.
“Attention passengers! It is our duty to inform you that we are under attack. Please exit your cocoons and proceed in an orderly fashion to the escape pods.”
Escape pods, thought Noah. Why is my life now plagued with escape pods?
“Wait, did they say ‘exit your cocoons’?” wailed Kyle. “Are we being left behind?”
Then another cocoon responded. “Don’t worry—whoever’s attacking us, they probably just want to eat the passengers. We’ll be fine.”
Noah finally found the seam and shimmied out of the cocoon, even more disoriented now by the weightlessness. Jad was already floating there, eye wide and bloodshot. “We have to move before the escape pods launch.”
They started to propel themselves through the throng of panicking passengers and cocoons, but then Noah remembered—“Andi!” He doubled back and grabbed Andi from the under-foot storage compartment… and realized that he had grabbed her with his actual hand, not a root tendril. He had managed to tear a hole in his skin, and his arm was now fully exposed. Anyone who saw that arm would know he was an impostor!
“Wait! Take me with you!” yelled Kyle.
“Noah, we have to go!” called Jad, nervously clicking a dozen crabby legs.
“Pleeeeeeease,” begged Kyle.
And then Noah realized something. “Maybe we can help each other.…”
Noah grew a single claw on his index finger, then reached up and cut the cocoon from the roof.
“Ow! That hurt!”
“Do you want to get out of here or not?”
“Just try to be more careful!”
Then Noah wrapped the cocoon over his exposed human shoulder, hiding it from view.
“Wait!” yelled another cocoon. “Take me, too!”
“And me!”
“And me!”
“And me!”
They all began to undulate, trying to reach for him, but Noah forced his way past them, until he reached Jad.
“About time!” Jad said. “Why’d you bring a cocoon?”
But another blast rocked the ship before Noah could answer. The lights flashed off and on. There were still dozens of Fauxlites floating around the cabin, glowing a panicked purple, trying to propel themselves toward the escape pods—but without gravity, it wasn’t an easy task. Or at least for beings that couldn’t grow octopus suction cups. Even so, it wasn’t easy for Noah to cling to the bulkhead and hold Andi and help Jad toward the pod while a cocoon wrapped around him like a big, ugly Christmas scarf.
Right by the entrance of a pod, they encountered the flight attendant. One of her heads had passed out, so the other one had to pull double duty.
“This pod is still available,” she said. “Thank you for flying Virgo Galactic! I hope this won’t prevent you from giving us five stars on our app!”
Noah and Jad jumped into the escape pod, which was already occupied by one other individual. A panicked family of Fauxlites tried to pile in behind them, but the other occupant sealed the door before they could get in.
“What did you do that for?” yelled Noah. “There’s still room for more!”
“Their problem, not mine!” said the passenger. Only then did Noah realize that this was the annoying disgruntled traveler, the last person they wanted to share an escape pod with. He hit the launch button before anyone could even find, much less buckle, their safety harnesses—and the ejecting pod tumbled them all like a clothes dryer.
“Quick, get inside me!” said Kyle. “I can protect you.”
So Noah and Jad squeezed inside the cocoon, which buffered them from the worst of the tumbling.
“See,” said Kyle, “aren’t you glad you brought me along?”
The disgruntled traveler, who had not been invited into the cocoon, was now even more disgruntled.
“I saw that!” he yelled. “I saw that appendage! You’re not Fauxlite! What are you?”
Then Andi, who was also tumbling around the escape pod, struck him in the head, knocking him unconscious. And even though Andi was in suitcase form, Noah couldn’t help but wonder if she had done it on purpose.
19
Worldless
SAHARA TOSSED AND TURNED ALL NIGHT. IT WASN’T EASY SLEEPING with goggles clamped on her face. She had tried to remove them—because did these people really expect her and Ogden to sleep with them on? What if she had an itch? Or what if she had contact lenses and had to take them out? This arrangement was clearly not intended for anyone’s convenience.
When she did doze, she had the strangest dreams. Houses falling from the sky. Evil people being crushed beneath them as they came down. Oblivious townsfolk in a bright Technicolor village. Sahara knew what those images were, and where they came from. She’d have to be clueless not to see the connection—and how her current reality resonated with her favorite childhood story. But it was more than that. There was a voice in her head that kept whispering to her that this connection was worth investigating.
Dig deeper, the voice said. But frankly she was too tired to dig at all.
She had no idea how long it had been since she had collapsed exhausted. Dawn was peeking through the windows, but who knew how quickly the planet rotated? It could have been dark for just a few hours, or for days. All she knew was that Ogden was still snoring across the room, and these blasted goggles were making her whole face hurt.
She went to the balcony where the rising red sun painted the beautiful towers in shades of crimson. Everything glistened and glowed. It was beautiful, but something about it was unsettling.
Dig deeper…
She gripped the goggles and tried to pull them off, but that sent a surge of pain through her eye sockets, and veiny squiggles filled her vision. She sighed and began to fiddle with the dangling third lens. Perhaps the key to removing them rested with that third lens.…
Their ornate hotel suite had a kitchen, and although the appliances were odd, they were mostly recognizable. This triangular one was an oven; that cylindrical one was a refrigerator. The drawers held eating utensils for various sizes and shapes of mouths. There were spoons, forks, and even sporks, which Sahara had always suspected had alien origins.
And there were knives—which were the same throughout the universe.
She grabbed the sharpest knife and took it to the band that connected the third lens to the others. And she began to saw.
“Ogden, wake up!”
Ogden heard Sahara’s voice in his sleep, but his subconscious refused to acknowledge it. He was having the most amazing dream and didn’t want to be disturbed. In the dream, he was in a flying kayak preparing to swoop down and rescue Claire from the clutches of a headless T. rex. To his right and left, in their own flying kayaks, were astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and a remarkably buff Albert Einstein. Like most dreams, it made perfect sense to itself, although Ogden was beginning to suspect that its logic might not hold up under scrutiny—which made him want to hold on to it even more.
“Ogden!”
Now Sahara was shaking him, and he felt the dream beginning to evaporate. Neil deGrasse Tyson dissolved into a swirling galaxy of cosmic dust, Einstein went up in a mushroom cloud, and Stephen Hawking, who had only just arrived, collapsed into a singularity, wheelchair and all, before he could utter a single computer-generated word.
As Ogden surfaced from the dream, he swore to himself that he would remember it, but it was entirely forgotten by the time he opened his eyes, leaving him with a vague sense of loss and feeling very, very annoyed.
“What do you want?” he croaked. “Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”
“You need to get up and smell the roses. Because they’re not roses! We’ve been lied to!”
“Lied to? How?”
He looked up to see her eyes, which he shouldn’t have been able to see. “You took your goggles off! You’re not supposed to do that!”
“The question is why, Ogden,” Sahara said. “Why aren’t we supposed to do that?”
“Because the people who live here said so,” Ogden snapped. “And I don’t want to get yelled at again by two officers with half a brain!”
“Forget about them! Ogden, I think L. Frank Baum was an alien.”
“Who?”
“Not just an alien,” continued Sahara, “but I think he must have come from here!”
“Who are you talking about?”
Sahara grit her teeth in exasperation, as if it was obvious. “The guy who wrote the Oz books!”
For a moment Ogden wondered if he had woken up from one bizarre dream into another. “Oz? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, trust me! It has to do with everything!”
Ogden sighed. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he had been struggling with an overwhelming urge to say I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore from the moment their house came crashing down on this planet. But he had flatly refused to say it, because it was too blatantly obvious a thing to say. Well, maybe the time had come to just go with it.
“Okay, I’m listening,” Ogden said, crossing his arms and shaking his head, betraying the fact that he really didn’t want to listen at all.
“Did you ever read the books?” Sahara asked.
“I saw the movie.”
“Forget the movie, I’m talking about the books!”
“Why would I read the books if I can see the movie?”
Sahara just stared at him. “Did you actually just say that?”
He shrugged. “Once in a while, there’s a movie that’s as good as the book.”
“Name one!”
“Well, let’s see… there’s—”
“No!” Sahara said, shutting him down. “You just did what you always do! You’ve derailed the conversation.”
“It didn’t have any rails,” Ogden pointed out. “It was more like a self-driving car.”
“My point,” said Sahara, slamming her hand down on the nightstand, “is that in the Oz books, the Emerald City wasn’t actually emerald. It only looked that way because they made people wear special green glasses to ‘protect them from the glare.’”
She waited for Ogden to put it together.
“Oh… so, you think—”
Then she brought a knife to his face. “Hold still.” And before he could even flinch, she cut the band that dangled between the second and third lenses. The instant the band was broken, the goggles unclamped from his face and fell off, revealing a truth that Sahara already knew.
“Wait… where are we? What is this place?”
The first thing Ogden noticed was the sofa across the room. The one that had appeared so velvety and plush when they had arrived. Now it looked like the kind of sofa people leave by the curb, hoping against hope that the trash collectors will actually take it away. The fabric was rotting, and bare springs poked through the cushions. And that velvety feel? It was moss. Around them the walls of their so-called hotel suite were cracked and peeling—and a glimpse toward the bathroom revealed that the grand golden toilet wasn’t golden at all. It was… it was…
“Ew” was all Ogden could say.
“Exactly!” said Sahara. “Ew.”
He picked the goggles up off the floor. “Augmented reality!” he concluded, intrigued almost as much as he was nauseated. “These are augmented reality glasses! They take what’s actually there and project something else over it! A digital makeover!”
He hurried to the balcony and looked out over the city. Without the goggles on, what had been glorious towers and rolling green hills were now crumbling concrete ruins and piles of garbage.
“This city… it’s a dump!”
“Exactly,” Sahara agreed. Then she grimaced. “Even the butterflies aren’t what they seem.”
And when one of them came fluttering in the open terrace door, Ogden saw what those butterflies really were. They were spiders. Hairy. Flying. Spiders.
There was a knock at the door, and Ogden and Sahara looked at each other.
“So what do we do now?” Ogden asked, still reeling from their revelation. But before Sahara could answer, the door opened—because in this dump, none of the locks actually worked.
Half a dozen people entered. Each appeared to be of a different species. That was something both Ogden and Sahara had noticed—there was an abundance of different sentient species here—but with so much thrown at them so quickly, they hadn’t yet wondered to ask why. Immediately, the group began gasping and whispering to one another, noticing that the two earthlings were not wearing their goggles.
They were all dressed in shredded, stained rags, and while torn jeans might have been fashionable on Earth, these ruined garments were by no means a fashion statement. Ogden held one lens to his face and was not surprised to see that, through the augmented reality lens, they were clothed in glowing garments of light.
“What do you think this is all about?” Sahara whispered. But before Ogden could even guess, a member of the party puffed up (literally) and said, “All rise for the First Citizen of our fair city!”
“We’re already standing,” Ogden pointed out, but Sahara shushed him.
The First Citizen entered—a slim creature with gaunt, sunken cheeks. He was of a species that had little bud-like horns and spots like a leopard, although even his spots seemed faded, as if they had seen better days. The scene reminded Ogden of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” but with aliens. The First Citizen wasn’t naked, of course, but he might as well have been. He carried himself with the pride of a man in a tuxedo, despite wearing rags no better than any of the others.
He stepped forward to greet Ogden and Sahara. “Pleased to meet you, I am Forlo, the First Citizen of—” But he stopped short when he realized their goggles were off. “Oh no!” he gasped. “Quickly! Quickly! Put your goggles back on before you go blind!”
“Actually,” said Ogden, watching a winged spider flutter past, “blindness might be the better option.”
Sahara was neither impressed nor intimidated by Forlo. “We know!” Sahara said simply and plainly. “We know, so you can drop this whole charade.”
Then the herald—or whatever he was—puffed up and announced as pompously as he could, “I’m sure the First Citizen has no idea what aspersions you are casting upon his integrity!”
But First Citizen Forlo waved a hand to silence the herald, and he deflated mournfully. The creature stepped forward, peering through his goggles at them, scrutinizing them. Ogden wondered if they were now to be executed for knowing the truth. Sahara, on the other hand, didn’t sense danger. First Citizen Forlo had an air of wisdom, not malice.
The First Citizen heaved a sigh and dropped his shoulders. They fell halfway to the ground, leaving him with a very long neck. Now, with those spots, he looked more like a giraffe than a leopard.
“How unfortunate,” he said. “It was our hope that you would see our town as we’ve come to see it.”
Sahara looked at the entourage. “So, everyone in the city knows it’s all a lie?”
“Of course everyone knows,” First Citizen Forlo said. “What kind of fools do you take us for?”
“But if you know, then why do you wear those goggles?”
He sighed again. “If you lived in a place like this,” he said, “wouldn’t you?”
Reality is never truly objective. Whether on Earth or on a faraway planet, reality is what everyone agrees it to be. Money is just worthless paper, unless everyone agrees it’s not. Seconds and minutes and hours only exist because we believe they exist. And beauty? Beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder at all; it’s in the mind of the beholder—which is much more easily fooled than the eye. Certainly, some things are constant. Two plus two will always equal four… but four of what will forever be in question.
