The Last Invention Page 10
The teenagers on Asekz 13 are obsessed with human behavior—they are fascinated by the idea of two different genders that can share such intimate love with each other. So they follow the sci-fi romance from their distant planet as it unfolds on Earth, occasionally influencing the path of the story. At the same time, the story is being novelized in book form by Ricky, who sits in his rocking chair and writes. The current story is about a boy named Adrian who falls in love with a girl named Melanie. He uses techno-gadgets produced by The Last Invention to try to get closer to her, but this has led to many twists and turns in his life.
My face felt warm. I had suspected all along that those two were using me as their slave, but the truth glowed before me on the screen. A sickening anger bubbled up inside of me. I was supposed to be a slave to Melanie, not some old crusty guy and a green pig. Being a slave was no good if it wasn’t part of some cool fantasy. Now my whole life was ruined because some aliens needed a new business! More questions swam around in my head.
How many science fiction books have Ricky and Oinkleberry created with humans as the characters?
During their visits to Earth, they have collaborated on six complete young adult books, and the seventh is currently in progress. All are sci-fi romances with teenage protagonists from Earth who acquire high-tech gadgets.
Why do the kids on Asekz 13 want to read about humans so much?
The residents of Asekz 13 can never experience the privacy of an intimate love between a boy and girl—there are no such genders on that planet. Creatures there reproduce by pollinating the fresh green meadow with their advanced DNA, creating a pod cell beneath the surface that grows larger in the warmth of the green sun. Love is foreign to them, except for their love of their mother planet. So teenagers there want to witness this special Earthly bond between a boy and girl that is alien and curious to them. As well, since science fiction was once the most popular genre on Asekz 13, before the last scientific discovery was made, these new sci-fi teen romances created by Ricky and Oinkleberry satisfy two different needs and are wildly popular among the youth of Asekz 13.
Why do Oinkleberry and Ricky even need money? Couldn’t they just create it with some gadget?
The unit of currency on Asekz 13 is not a physical medium. It is reputation. The more that creatures desire your goods and services, the higher your reputation climbs. With higher reputation comes greater privileges, such as owning a plot of colonized land on one of the outer asteroids, or even becoming one of the Master Guardians of the planet.
Can’t the people on Asekz 13 just use the Body Builder to make themselves human?
Use of devices for alien-to-human transformation usually ends in death. Whenever a human mind is created artificially, it is generally abnormal and evil, trying to achieve its goals in a cold, heartless, computational fashion. This is due to the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics, which states that the smallest particles in the universe are in multiple places at once and can never be accurately reproduced. When a device tries to re-create an exceedingly complex structure such as a mind, which relies on billions of accurately placed quarks, errors will inevitably occur. As a result of the butterfly effect, which places great importance on this sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the final result is a tragically flawed product. This problem cannot be overcome even at the end of technological evolution, as it is an inherent impossibility in our universe. More simple structures such as body parts can be recreated accurately, but without an accompanying mind, they are usually just curiosities.
I turned off the Interrogatrix and closed my eyes. My head was swimming. Everything I knew about the universe seemed to be turned upside-down. Was anything as it seemed? Alone, in my dark cell, I thought of the billions of people out in the world who weren’t in prison, but who had no idea what was really going on in the universe. They were traveling at 514 miles per second, their bones were created inside ancient stars, the particles in their brains were actually in thousands of places at once, their goose bumps once existed to lift up ancient fur.
These new ideas made me feel so dumb for being human. I was just some toy to be played with by an advanced race that never had to worry about boy/girl stuff and first kisses. No wonder they reached the end of technology way before us.
Over the next few weeks I typed in every possible question that popped into my head. Sometimes they were dumb things, like “Where are the nearest buried treasures to my house?” or “Which came first, boys or girls?” The answers to those questions were over 50 pages long. Here are some other questions I asked:
Are superheroes real?
Are there any dinosaurs still alive on Earth?
What is the grossest thing I ever ate without knowing it?
What is the secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken?
Do my parents still love me?
What are the deepest, darkest secrets of the kids in my grade? (800 pages, once I got the Interrogatrix to understand what I was asking)
Where do babies come from? (Just for fun, but the answer was 1000 pages long, and it had pictures!)
Sometimes I would stay up all night under the covers, with my nose pressed up against the warm, glowing screen. I uncovered the deepest mysteries of the universe—how many other planets have intelligent life, how many other universes there are besides ours, what came before the Big Bang, and something called the Grand Unified Theory. I didn’t really understand any of it. My mind kept coming back to Melanie, so most of the time I asked the Interrogratrix questions about her. I learned everything—all 32,897 ingredients that make up her perfect smell, the number of tiny hairs on her body, the thickness of her toenails (.17 millimeters), her favorite thing to do (Read, yuck), the funniest moment of her life (When her mom walked into the men’s room in the airport), her saddest moment (When her dad left and never came back, but I already knew that from using the Roleplaying Ring), the type of music she listens to (hard rock, cool), and every last thought that she ever had about me (some of it was not as bad as I thought).
Then one day I asked a simple question:
What is Melanie doing right now?
Melanie has left Earth and is ascending toward heaven.
Something burst inside my brain. I saw flash of light behind my eye. A long, prehistoric scream came out of my mouth and echoed down some distant hallway. More screams came out, as my arms and legs punched and kicked the bed. My hands were shaking so hard that I couldn’t even type in another question. My stomach turned inside out, and I threw up over the side of my bed.
It just couldn’t be true.
I threw the Interrogatrix across the room. It bounced off the wall and landed near the bed. I cried for a long time, until my pillow and blankets were covered in tears, and my throat felt dry. My body bounced up and down until the whole bed was shaking. My head slammed against the pillow over and over again until my cheek pulsated. I reached out and tried to pick up the Interrogatrix, but it was too far away. My body fell out of bed. I crashed next to it, but I didn’t type any more questions for a long time.
I stared without blinking or thinking for hours, maybe days, who knows. Warm pee came out of me and soaked the blankets, and it mixed with the drying puke that oozed out of my mouth. The horrible smells didn’t bother me because I didn’t care about anything anymore. Nothing would ever be good again. I looked around for something sharp, and when I couldn’t find anything I just scraped my fingernails against my wrist, leaving long white lines that eventually turned red. Tears came out of my nose and went between my lips, making my tongue taste salty.
I stared and slept and stared and slept. No screams were left inside of me, but for some reason I heard nothing but screaming in the distance. Eventually, I opened the Interrogatrix with one hand and slowly typed in another question.
Why did she do it?
She wants you to join her on the floating tower.
I imagined Ricky in his rocking chair, his colorful veins popping out of his skin, cackling in
the green sunlight and writing down each new horror in my life with glee. I wanted to throw up some more, but my desire to kill him and that disgusting, smelly pig made me swallow it back down.
That’s when I came up with a plan to be with Melanie forever.
Something the readers would never forget.
A story with a terrible ending.
Mom and Dad would forgive me. I was just a burden to them, anyway.
I crawled over to the wall, tore away a chunk of the cheap padding, and slammed my head against the concrete. I didn’t feel a thing.
I smiled.
In the back of my mind thousands of voices screamed for me to stop. They felt guilty, apologizing, pleading with me—give Melanie a little more time, she’s coming for me. I knew Ricky had stopped rocking in his chair. Oinkleberry had stopped digging in the dirt. They hadn’t expected this twist in their story. My whole room shook, as if the faraway voices were using their mind powers to jolt me back to reality.
I slammed my head against the concrete wall again, only harder this time. I saw a flash in front of my eyes. I could almost feel my actions being recorded on that Dark Matter Matrix, an uncaring and invisible force that has witnessed all of history dating back to the beginning of the universe. There were so many more questions to ask, secrets to find out about the world. But I didn’t care anymore. The screams got louder. Dust fell from the ceiling and sprinkled onto my hair. The floor vibrated.
I tilted my head away from the wall and smashed it against the cement a third time. A high-pitched noise started up in my ear. I felt guilty about spoiling millions of years of delicate evolution—killing off all those parts of me that were so ancient, that stars gave up their lives to create. I was destroying a miracle—but not really; I was actually saving humanity from an evil murderer. The Interrogatrix couldn’t answer the question about what my future would be like, but I knew. It was lonely, smelled like pee, and didn’t have Melanie in it.
I crunched my head against the wall and felt a jolt inside my brain. Something was seriously wrong now. The room was spinning. Screams came from every direction—deep down in the prison, above me on the roof, and in the furthest corner of my brain. I heard a high-pitched shrieking noise. Explosions sounded in the distance. Walls crumbled. The building shook like there was an earthquake. It was as if the whole world was melting around me as the life drained from my body. Illusions of chaos and destruction, hallucinations of death and mayhem. It was just a hint of what my life in the fiery afterworld was going to be like—that place where demons go after they die. I wouldn’t even be able to see Melanie way down there, or be with her on our tower.
Yet somehow I was still alive.
I smiled as I prepared for one last mega-crash of my head against the wall. What would my headstone say? Here lies Adrian. He was thick-headed and selfish. It’s not how I imagined it when I used to walk through the cemetery. I wanted to make people smile for eternity.
When my head hit the cement again, the whole wall crumbled and tumbled away. My hallucination was complete when, on the other side, I saw the ruins of a wrecked prison. The entire building beyond my room was gone. If I rolled over one inch more, I would tumble ten stories to the ground. There were piles of stone bricks, windows, doors, steel girders. Mangled bodies. The bright lights and busy streets of New York City. In the center of the wreckage was a dragon with tremendous wings. Its enormous tail snaked across the ruins, up to the frame of my cell wall, the tip of it curling onto the foot of my bed. Blood dripped from the sizzling green scales. The dragon shrieked so loud that glass shattered. Sirens roared in the distance.
I knew that I was already in the afterlife, and this was the monster that had come to take me to eternal damnation. But when the dragon turned its head in my direction, I saw Melanie’s beautiful face—perfect as always—embedded in the beast’s neck, just under the lower jaw. Her entire human body was cocooned in the creature’s belly, ready to burst out like an alien trying to break free. Her arms and legs disappeared inside the monster’s lizard limbs. Her breasts were green and scaly. She wore the dragon’s titanic head as a mutant hat, its glassy eyes staring like a dinosaur looking for prey. But Melanie’s eyes seemed sad and lost, as if she and her dragon shell were controlled by two separate brains.
With one flap of its colossal wings, the beast soared over the rubble and into my room. Melanie’s face leaned down to meet mine, like a guardian angel come to rescue me. Above, the dragon’s main head made snorting noises, and bursts of flame shot off into the distance. The rest of the body broke down the remaining walls and burst pipes as it tried to squeeze into the small room. She lifted me in reptilian, scaly arms, pee-stained blanket and all, until I was resting against her soft, green dragonbreasts. She whispered that she didn’t know where to find me here. She had to destroy everything in her path to reach me.
Maybe the afterlife isn’t gonna be so bad after all.
“Oh Adrian, what did you do to yourself,” the dragon said in a gentle voice. “This is all such a weird dream.”
Just then a S.W.A.T. team stormed onto a section of the building that was still standing near my cell. They pointed big guns with laser sights at the dragon. With one swat of her huge tail, the dragon bowled them over, their bodies scattering across the night sky. A helicopter appeared with a giant searchlight. A red beam came out of the dragon’s eyes and sent it tumbling to the street below in a fiery crash. Fire engines flashed their red lights and gridlocked the street.
I lay limply in the dragon’s arms as she spread her gargantuan wings and took off into the night sky. In seconds we were a mile above the prison, the cold, chilly air making me shiver. A second pair of much tinier wings erupted on either side of the dragonbreasts and covered me in warm flesh. Sleepy towns whizzed by below, a perfect starry sky above. When I had the strength, I hugged the dragon as best as I could. It purred softly as we glided through clouds. Melanie had saved me. I was still alive, and we were ascending toward the heavens together.
I hung there limply as Melanie flew toward home. I passed in and out of consciousness, everything whizzing by in a dreamy blur. I examined her dragon-ness with as much interest as a urine-soaked kid with a major concussion can possibly show. Each claw on her webbed feet was longer than a butcher knife. A ring of horns on the lizard head looked like they could skewer King Kong without any effort at all. Her wings filled the entire sky and were transparent. Tiny backup wings on her tail kept it from dragging her down. She was the coolest dragon ever, and I tried to keep my eyes open as we did a loop in the air and then plunged down toward the cemetery near my house.
We burst through the transparent bubble next to the cemetery and came out in the bright green meadow with the caretaker’s cottage. Ricky and Oinkleberry were nowhere to be seen. The green sunlight beamed down on the dragon’s scales, creating shiny flashes of emerald that hurt my eyes. I closed them for protection just as the dragon veered into that strange cave in the hillside. I couldn’t open my eyes after that no matter how hard I tried. The flapping of giant wings, the lizard shrieks, Melanie’s breathing, and somebody’s screaming—possibly my own—created a chorus of echoes that grew louder and fainter at the same time. I lost consciousness again, and the whole rest of the trip through that strange wormhole was a collection of sounds and images. Parts of words, Melanie’s soft skin, the dragon’s fierce snorting, the heat of dragonflame, bursts of oxygen coming from somewhere, whispers in my ear. Then I saw distant times and places—Dad pushing me really high on the swing, Mom carrying me to bed, Grandma feeding me oatmeal and tickling my chin with the spoon. My giggles seemed to drown out the dragon for awhile, as they repeated endlessly in the distance. Every flying sensation I ever had came out of the deepest parts of my brain—a roller coaster ride, an airplane taking off, tumbling off the slide at recess. When the images stopped, I felt the hard claw of the dragon clutching me against the soft dragonbreasts. I wondered when the ride was going to end.
Finally I was able to
open my eyes again, just as we neared the bright green exit of the strange tunnel. I took a quick glance at the passageway we had flown through. It was filled with colorful dust and gas clouds, and it snaked off into the distance. But even with all the twists and turns, I could somehow see back through the whole tunnel, all the way to the green meadow that we had started in. We had flown to a deep corner of the universe, a very far away place. A place from daydreams and nightmares. We emerged from the cave mouth into a thick, green, sparkling fog. I saw the wall of a stone tower that seemed very familiar.
The dragon circled the stone tower, climbing higher and higher. The dizzy feeling made me shut my eyes again. I rested my head on one of the fleshy wings that kept me warm. We circled the tower, faster and faster, until my brain spit out all the memories of dizziness that I had ever experienced in my life—the metal playground ride that spins so fast, the merry-go-round when I was little, the super-tuck-in Dad used to give me when he spun me around and then slammed me down on my soft pillow. I opened one of my eyes and saw the tower walls whiz by. Countless windows zipped by, peering into the dark interior. The dragon flapped its wings until we were going faster than any ride in the universe. I tilted my head up. The tower stretched to infinity, disappearing into the ceiling of thick green fog. My lungs tickled from breathing that stuff in. I closed my eyes again and fell asleep.
When I woke up, my head was resting on a soft pillow. I opened my eyes and saw Melanie staring down at me. Her dragon body was gone. She rubbed my cheek with her soft hands. We were at the top of the tower, lying on the stone landing surrounded by turrets that I had daydreamed about for so long. Somehow the tower actually existed, and Melanie had taken me there. My fantasy had come true. I was alone with her in a faraway place where nobody could disturb us. I tried to move my neck to see through one of the turrets, but a sharp pain made me stop. But I could already tell that the whole top of the tower was enveloped in that thick green fog. It was impossible to see anything beyond our little platform.