There was some confusion at the hospital in response to our arrival. Some nurses thought that Warbell had injured the kid (his name was Murdock Gargle), and they started calling the police. But as the nurses were in mid-call, the police arrived, having been alerted to shenanigans due to a dinosaur chaotically dashing through the streets. After some chaos in which I found myself defending the dinosaur for once, the police let us off with a warning… not least of all because Warbell had managed to keep Murdock stable and safe in his mouth, his tongue acting as a stabilizing instrument protecting Murdock from injuring himself as the dinosaur bounded through the city.
Warbell couldn’t come into the hospital, and definitely couldn’t hang out in the waiting room, so the old lizard was once again left to stand in the parking lot twiddling his nonexistent thumbs. After some discussion with the doctors and police inside (I got to whip out my official dinosaur ambassador card a few times, which I’ll admit is a bit of a thrill), I walked outside to check on Warb.
“The kid is stable so far,” I said. “Looks like he will be hunky-dory.”
“I don’t know that expression,” Warb said. “So he will be okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You really acted fast back there. I barely knew what was happening and I was suddenly in the air, carried away by dinosaur claws.”
“What happened?” Warbell asked, that same intense look in his eyes that I saw in the Six Degrees of Bacon parking lot. “How did the kid get hurt?”
I sighed and scratched an itch on my nonexistent leg, then took a deep breath.
“Well, they can’t really tell me about the details, can they?” I said. “I am not related to the kid.”
Suddenly we heard an ambulance siren blurt to life and keen down the road. We watched it go in silence.
“Looks like today is a bad day,” I said. “Several emergencies.”
“Was he shot?” asked Warb. “By one of your people’s guns?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Did you hear a gunshot? I didn’t. Even a silencer makes a sound. I heard nothing. And no sniper is going to shoot a fast-food worker. The stuff he cooks would probably kill him anyway, so there’s not much reason to accelerate the process I suppose.”
Warbell turned his head towards the hospital, that fiery stare burning at the concrete walls as if by squinting hard enough he might be able to see inside.
“Why do you care so much anyway?” I asked. “It’s not like you even know the kid, right?”
Warbell didn’t look at me. I shifted my feet uneasily. A nurse walked by, coming off her smoke break (gosh, why do so many nurses smoke?), and suddenly Warbell stepped in her way, eyes flashing.
“You will tell me what happened to the boy!” Warbell commanded, voice thundering loud enough to set off a car alarm. “You will let me know every detail, for I am your king and you must do what I tell you!”
Before I could even react, without a word Warbell lunged forward and scooped the kid into his mouth. Inn the delirium of the moment I yelled at the old lizard and pounded on his leg, all a panic that he was trying to eat the boy, but Warb gave me a look that stopped me in my tracks. In that one glance there was something that shocked me to silence, a fierceness and earnestness that nearly stopped my heart. Warbell held the boy tenderly with his head out so that the kid could breathe, then grabbed me with his two-fingered hands, and in the next moment we were running full speed down the street.
Final Pumpkin is not a very large city, and the traffic is usually not very busy, though many people were on the commute to their work at that time, and none of them were expecting to see a rampaging dinosaur during their morning routine. Warbell’s incredibly long legs pounded and cracked the pavement as he picked up speed and dodged cars. Most of the drivers didn’t even have the presence of mind to hit their horns. I had the presence of mind to yell and scream, though, as my feet bounced and grazed the blacktop at upwards of twenty miles an hour.
“What are you doing?” I bellowed. “Where are we going?”
And despite the very logical nature of my questions, of course Warbell did not answer. Probably because he had a dying kid in his mouth. Instead, he picked up speed, hurdling a sedan, sideswiping an SUV, then crouching into the next turn, my footwear burning against the concrete.
“Yeow!” I said with some emotion, using a few other additional choice words which I won’t repeat here.
We shot through a red light, and I wondered if it really counted as a traffic violation since Warbell isn’t really an automobile. The police seemed to think so as a patrol car pulled out behind us and started flashing and howling. By this time I realized where we were going, though, and a thrill shot up my (already much too-thrilled) spine.
“It’s pedestrian right of way, coppers!” I shouted.
In any case, Warbell didn’t stop. Instead, he took a detour through an alleyway, startling some workers on their way to the dumpster and stumbling over a garbage bin. Several stray cats shrieked and scampered away, fur flared, tails pointing skyward accusingly. Warbell just continued to barrel forward, but the police car had to detour around as the bin had blocked the alley.
As we came out the other side, Warbell crossed the street in one long stretching stride, then half-hopped over a row of shrubs into the Final Pumpkin General Hospital parking lot, where he then made a beeline (or perhaps a “t-line”?) for the emergency room entrance, the hoot of the sirens like exclamation points as we reached out destination.
I sat on a bench in front of Six Degrees of Bacon next to a statue of a wild boar wearing a cheap plastic graduation gown. I took a sip of my hickory-smoked bacon flavored coffee and adjusted my new hat. The hat grunted and squealed whenever I touched it, but I was too tired to throw it to the ground of the parking lot and stomp the electronics to bits. And anyway, bizarrely, some part of me found the entire situation really funny.
It was a pretty small part of me, though. A big part of me resented this whole ridiculous outing. Also, I didn’t know what to make of this bizarre talking prehistoric monster in jeans. I just kept wondering if I could trust this old lizard, why he was here, if he was really going to eat all of humanity. But it seemed like a good thing that someone careful and reasonably intelligent like me was keeping a watch on him.
“You don’t have to wear the hat,” said the dinosaur after swallowing down the Heaven Bacon in two huge chomps. “It does look good on you, though.
“Thanks,” I said. “By the way, as long as we are doing this whole ambassador thing, well… what should I call you? Do you have an actual name? I don’t want to call you King T-Rex—it sounds ridiculous.”
The old lizard popped a trotter in his mouth, crunched it noisily.
“You can call me ‘your majesty’ if you like,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
The dinosaur grinned.
“I do have a name, but it’s not really an English name,” he said. “Not like Mike or Billy or Sue or something like that.”
“Well?” I said. “What is it?”
The old lizard snuffled and kind of made a deep belching wheeze, then slurped his Bacon Pho Sure. I waited.
“Are you going to tell me?” I asked again.
“I just did,” said the dinosaur. “But it changes depending on whether the name is in the subject position, or if it is in the object position in the sentence. And it changes depending on who is speaking.”
“Wait, wait, that gaseous explosion is your name?” I said.
The dinosaur speared a bacon-wrapped dumpling on one claw, then flicked it expertly into his maw.
“Only in the subject position,” he said. “In the object position in the sentence, you add this warble, and the tone of the growl is different. It kind of has a rising tone.”
And the dinosaur let out a shimmering belch-wheeze-whoop that about broke my eardrums.
“I’ll just call you Warbell, okay?” I said.
“And your name is Walter Finneson,” said Warbell. “That is the full name on all of your mail. I will call you Wal as I did before.”
“Not Wally?” I said. “Not even Walt?”
“I think ‘Wal’ suits you better.”
A number of unflattering explanations for why “wall” might ‘suit me better’ in the eyes of this ridiculous reptile bubbled up in my mind, but I brushed them aside with a long sip of bacony coffee and then stood up.
“Well, ‘Wal’ needs to get to work,” I said. “Because ‘Wal’ has better things to do than sit and make up terrible nicknames all day.”
I turned and tossed my empty cup into a pig-shaped trash can and saw the kid from the drive-through coming out the front of the restaurant with an anxious expression.
“How is the food tasting?” he asked. “I hope the Heaven Bacon doesn’t taste like asphalt. It’s supposed to be served over a fire in the main building, but—”
And here the kid choked, his hand grasping at his chest. A blotch of red appeared on his shirt, spreading rapidly, and he fell flat on the ground, twitching and screaming in pain.
We decided on Six Degrees of Bacon, a restaurant specializing in innovative bacon-related dishes, and I biked on down with the lizard jogging at my side. The name of the restaurant comes from its six signature dishes from six “schools” of cooking. So, for example, they have Best Wurst Bacon, which is a German dish, as well as Bacon Pho Sure, a Vietnamese bacon breakfast soup. If you try all six of the signature dishes on your scratch-and-sniff Bacon Report Card (each item has a corresponding pig sticker that goes on the card), you get a special graduation hat. It’s pink, of course, with a pig-tail instead of the usual string tassel.
“I want to get the hat,” said the tyrannosaurus as we walked up to the drive-in window. “Get me all six signature dishes.”
“One of the six dishes is an entire pig cooked on a skewer,” I said. “Wrapped in three flavors of bacon. It’s called the Heaven Bacon.”
“I think I can eat an entire pig,” he said.
“Ah, yeah, I suppose you can,” I said, and I took out my dinosaur ambassador card. “King T-Rex” gets special discounts after all.
The kid at the drive-through window in his pig-ear hat didn’t look too surprised to see a man in his pajamas on a bike in the street, but then he noticed Rexy and his jaw dropped.
“Can we get an order of all six degrees?” I asked. “He wants the hat.”
The old lizard smiled down at the kid.
“You want a Heaven Bacon for breakfast?” asked the kid. “I can’t sell that through the drive-up window.”
“I can walk inside,” I said. “I understand an enterprising individual can get a “wee wee wee wee all the way home” box even for the full Heaven Bacon, right?”
“It’s more like a crate,” said the kid.
“Just skip the crate,” I said. “Roll the pig out on the sidewalk. It would be easier for the dinosaur here to eat it that way.”
The old lizard nodded, and the kid nodded back blankly.
“I need to check with my manager quick,” he burbled.
“Alright,” I said. “Go for it.”
“What are you ordering?” the dinosaur asked me as the kid babbled excitedly with a baffled-looking Hispanic dude wearing the manager badge.
“Nothing,” I said. “Lost my appetite when I nearly got ate myself.”
“Yeah, I almost lost my appetite, too,” said the dinosaur. “But we all need to eat, you know.”
I was thinking darkly that I should get a bonus for enduring insults to my tastiness when the kid came back.
“Alright, we can wheel out the Heaven Bacon for you,” he said. “Do you want footloose trotters on the side?”
I looked at the dinosaur expectantly and raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know what those are,” he said.
“Pig trotters,” said the kid. “Uh, that means pig feet. You can get them in six different flavors—salt, BBQ, Szechuan spicy, teriyaki, blue cheese, or cracked pepper. Small, medium, large. The art on the box is really cute. It’s dancing pigs dressed up in funny costumes.”
“I want a large of each flavor,” said the dinosaur.
“Wow,” said the kid.
I wondered just how far the royal food budget was going to take us.
We then had a brief conversation about drinks, but I convinced the old lizard and the kid that even the super jumbo Whole Hog size drink would only just dampen the tip of the dinosaur’s tongue. When the rex asked me if I wanted something to drink myself, I finally relented and got myself a hickory smoked bacon flavored coffee.
“About the hat,” said the kid. “Uh, we definitely don’t carry your size, I’m afraid, Mr. Dinosaur, sir.”
“Oh,” said the tyrannosaurus. “It’s not for me. I want my ambassador to wear it as part of his official uniform.”
I made a note to demand that insult bonus system from Mayor Pilky next I saw her. Maybe the price of a full Six Degrees.
I glanced at the dinosaur and his irritating smile.
Now on the one hand, I didn’t really have much of an appetite for breakfast after having just been eaten myself by the tyrannosaurus who was staying in my garage. But on the other hand, it is also very difficult to say “no” to a tyrannosaurus after he has just demonstrated that he is fully capable of swallowing you whole.
“Don’t ever do that again,” I said, starting to put on my pants. “You asked to eat a breakfast WITH me, not eat a breakfast OF me.”
“I wasn’t asking,” said the tyrannosaurus. “I was commanding. Also, your right leg. It’s fake. Why?”
Charlie was peering out the window of his house at me with a horrified expression. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have wanted to see him on the lawn in his underwear, either. I hastily buttoned my trousers.
“I lost my right leg,” I said. “And I never found it again.”
“What do you mean?” said the tyrannosaurus.
“Maybe I cut it off myself,” I said. “Maybe a dinosaur ate it with a side of BBQ sauce. Maybe Charlie borrowed my leg and never gave it back. Who knows? Let’s get breakfast.”
“I command that you tell me what happened to your leg,” the tyrannosaurus said.
That was enough for one morning. Sometimes a time comes in life when you have to stand up for yourself, or else the next time you get bullied you won’t have one leg left to stand on. This was one of those times, almost literally.
“It is none of your business!” I exclaimed. “You may be the king of the dinosaurs and you may be living in my garage and I may be your official ambassador, but we aren’t close buddies and I don’t owe you an explanation of every private story from my life! So zip it and go eat a drumstick at the local Chicken Chunks Restaurant if you are that interested in legs all of a sudden!”
The dinosaur looked at me with an expression of lizardly contemplation. Well, I don’t know what the emotion was really. I can’t read dinosaur feelings well, and from what I was learning, dinosaurs don’t have much of a variety of facial expressions.
“I respect you,” said the tyrannosaurus. “I expected that you would do everything I said after I almost ate you alive.”
“I am stubborn,” I said. “Also, there has to be a law against trying to eat someone like that.”
“I think you will find that there is no law against a tyrannosaurus chomping on a human being. Especially if that tyrannosaurus happens to be the king of the local lands. Peasant.”
The tyrannosaurus gave me some kind of incredibly patronizing grin, and those enormous ivories glimmered in the morning sunlight. I wondered about the feasibility of locking up a socially inept extinct monster in the local hoosegow.
“Shall we go eat breakfast now?” asked the dinosaur.
I thought about a lot of things inside the mouth of that old lizard as he shook me back and forth. I thought it was really slippery and slimy inside a dinosaur. I thought about the latest TV dramas I would probably miss that night as I was being digested in the stomach of an overgrown reptile. And I thought, yep. The old lizard, “King T-Rex” really is a tyrannosaurus.
You might think I would be screaming my head off, but such was strangely not the case. I was numb and scared and mute instead. Maybe when you are actually eaten by a dinosaur, you figure you really have nothing left to lose and there is just nothing to say. And, I mean, if you have to die anyway, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic way to go than down the gullet of a previously extinct super predator, and you kinda just gotta accept it.
However, it smells very bad inside a dinosaur’s mouth. I don’t recommend the experience.
And the old lizard seemed determined to make the experience as unpleasant as possible, accomplishing said goal by physically turning me over and over with his enormous tongue, or nibbling at my sides with his ghastly blunt chompers. It was kind of freaky to be honest. I think I finally yelled at some point—I can’t remember clearly, but somehow I ended up with rex saliva in my mouth. My head clocked against the beast’s incisors and I blurted out some colorful profanities. At one point I believe that I accidentally belted the dinosaur’s uvula because the big shmuck choked and grunted and jerked in a way that I might have found funny if I hadn’t been inside his mouth. Then by some miracle of maneuvering I felt the beast tickling my armpit with the tip of his tongue, which might be the grossest thing that has ever happened to me.
And it was then, through the fog of fear and the crackling of panic, that I realized the old lizard wasn’t going to eat me.
A few moments later the mouth opened, light streamed in with a flash and a rush of air, a shock of cool assaulted my damp body, and then I was falling and waggling and spitting and gagging all at once before whomping to the sidewalk. The fall was abrupt and short, and I only had time for one burst of expletives before I crumpled in a pile, thankful and slimed, outside the dinosaur again.
“Well,” said the tyrannosaur, staring down at me. “What do you think? Am I really a tyrannosaurus?”
That grin on that lizard’s face was the biggest I had ever seen it. I crawled away from him in as dignified a manner as I could muster.
“Well,” I said, gulping for air. “Well. Well. Uh, well. You have a very convincing tongue. Very realistic. Still not sure what to think of your teeth, though.”
The tyrannosaurus cleared its throat.
“I have a very convincing stomach as well,” he said. “At least it’s been convincing enough for me as long as I have been alive. It reminds me regularly of its existence—but I never want to put YOU inside of it, no matter how hungry I might get.”
“Oh?” I said. “Because you are so fond of me, I suppose?”
The tyrannosaurs somehow raised a scaly eyebrow.
“You look terribly unappetizing now that I have seen you without your pants on,” he said.
I looked down. Sure enough, I had been completely depantsed at some point whilst inside the mouth of the monster. Somehow I had missed that minor detail in the process of savoring the unique experience of being vomited out onto my own lawn. I rather awkwardly flopped my hands about in a vain search for my misplaced trousers.
The tyrannosaurus coughed once, and my trousers came flying out of his open maw directly into my face.
“There you go,” said the tyrannosaurus. “Off to breakfast, then?”
I opened my eyes. The head of a dinosaur was in my window. I leapt a full four feet out of my bed, hitting my head on the ceiling and crying out at the top of my lungs.
“Shh, you will wake the neighbors,” said the tyrannosaur.
“What are you doing?” I said. “What time is it?”
The tyrannosaur smiled his big, toothy smile.
“I don’t know how to read your clocks,” he said. “I just got up with the sun. And I am hungry.”
I looked at the clock.
“It’s barely five o’clock!” I exclaimed. “I can’t get up now! This is my favorite time to sleep!”
“We need to go get breakfast,” said the tyrannosaur. “I assume you are a man of your word. You said you would have breakfast with me.”
“I said, and I quote, ‘I have work tomorrow,’” I retorted.
“Yes,” said the tyrannosaur. “It’s your first official day as my guide. That is what you meant, right?”
“No!” I said. “I am an electrician! You should see the pile of electronics I need to fix scattered all over my house, not to mention the buildings around town with wiring problems! How did you think I could afford this house? And that garage that you slept in last night?”
The tyrannosaur smiled blankly at me.
“So are you ready for breakfast?” he said.
“Let me sleep for another hour!” I yelled.
I pulled the blankets over my head and tried to sleep. However, the image of a tyrannosaur watching me through the window kept barging into my head. That image was not conducive for sleep. Neither was the loud crunching sound coming from outside. I think I may have lain there a full thirty seconds before I threw the blankets off and dashed to the window. I leaned out, and my eyes bulged when I saw him.
The tyrannosaur was still standing next to my house, but now he was eating my bushes very noisily.
“Those are my bushes!” I bleated. “They aren’t food! Are you really a tyrannosaurus? You aren’t, are you?”
Hearing that, the tyrannosaur stood up straighter and taller than I had ever seen him before and he gave me what I think was an indignant scowl.
“I am indeed a tyrannosaurus,” said the old lizard.
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Since when do tyrannosaurs eat bushes? Prove to me that you are a tyrannosaur!”
“You want me to prove it?” said the tyrannosaur, a light in his eye.
“Yes!” I shouted stubbornly.
And with that as his signal, the tyrannosaur pounced forward and snapped me up in his jaws.
Before the old lizard moved into my garage, the city of Final Pumpkin was making all kinds of plans to spruce up the joint with a bed and dinosaur-sized shower and a variety of other accoutrements. Basically they wanted to make my humble two-car garage into a five-star dino hotel. Well, they wanted to until they saw the incredible bill from the architect, designers, and plumbers.
“Don’t worry,” said the old lizard. “I am a dinosaur. I am used to sleeping on hard floors.”
Frankly, I had been looking forward to the dinosaur-sized jacuzzi that Mayor Pilky had proposed. I figured the dinosaur wouldn’t be using it ALL the time, after all, so whenever he was out with his fans… well, who wouldn’t want to take a dunk in a jacuzzi the size of most public pools?
Actually, it seemed like once I agreed to house the old lizard, all the promises from the mayor kind ofdried up. The enormous paycheck lost a few zeroes now that I was the officially sponsored t-rex ambassador. After some meetings and an interview with the local newspaper and a limited amount of celebrity, I ended up a schmuck with a dinosaur holding a pillow on my front lawn.
“You’re the ambassador,” said the old lizard. “Guide me.”
I showed him the remote control for the garage.
“Push this button to open the garage,” I said. “Push this button to close.”
Somehow the tyrannosaur managed to hold the remote control in one claw, the pillow in the other. I turned to go.
“What’s for breakfast in the morning?” the dinosaur asked.
“I’m not your cook,” I said. “I’m not getting paid enough for that. The food bills alone would bankrupt me.”
“But you are my guide, right?” the dinosaur said.
“Yes,” I said. “I can guide you to a tree in the morning, or walk you to a nice restaurant.”
I wasn’t really serious.
“Okay, then let’s have breakfast together tomorrow morning,” said the dinosaur.
The old lizard must have thought I had been serious.
“I have work tomorrow,” I said.
“Yes, your new job as my guide,” the dinosaur said. “I am looking forward to breakfast tomorrow.”
And then the tyrannosaur ducked into my garage. His tail disappeared inside, and I stood there watching as the garage door slowly squealed shut in front of me. I wasn’t too sure about this arrangement, but I was glad I could keep an eye on that suspicious lizard at least.
And I kept thinking about those strange stones I had found under the house. What could they be?
I thought about what to do all week. For me, the old lizard was a really big mystery—a mystery that a lot of people just seemed to accept and celebrate. Of course I didn’t understand how a tyrannosaur could still be alive today. I wondered why he could talk. I wondered why he didn’t have sharp teeth, why he was eating plants, and why he didn’t just eat everything that moved instead. But most of all I wondered why he wanted to live in my garage. Maybe it’s because the question was about my stuff. It’s hard to give up things that you paid good money for. Especially when you can’t even figure out a good reason for the sacrifice.
I wandered out back to the hole where the tyrannosaurus had apparently slept for many years. It had already become a tourist spot, and a fence had been erected around the area. There were some tourists taking pictures of just about every dirt clod in sight. I simply stood, staring at the hole, trying to imagine what it would be like to sleep in a dark cave for hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of years.
I thought the old lizard must have had a really bad crick in his neck when he woke up.
I thought about the tyrannosaur footprints we found around this area as well. There were a few in scattered places, and some were not particularly hidden. I wondered how no one had found them before. Maybe there could be more underneath my house or garage, like where I was living literally was his old stomping grounds. There was a crawlspace that led underneath the garage, so it might be worth checking out. I got down in the dirt and crawled inside.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Mostly I just founddirt, spider webs, and a few snakes. The dirt was too loose to have fossilized dinosaur footprints in it—of course. But that didn’t mean that the old lizard didn’t used to walk around right where my garage was now.
I found a few unusual rocks underneath the garage that seemed somehow… organically shaped in some way. I decided to take them out with me. I didn’t want to come away empty-handed from crawling around in the dirt for a good thirty minutes, even if all I came out with were a few ugly rocks.
As I stood up and dusted myself off, I saw Charlie standing a few feet away.
“Oh, there you are,” Charlie said. “I was looking for you. Man, am I glad that dinosaur isn’t here. Anyway, I was just wondering if I could borrow your truck for a week.”
“A week?” I said.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I figure it’s better if I ask you to borrow it for a week rather than come over and ask every evening, haha.”
“Haha,” I said.
I didn’t laugh. I just said, “haha.”
“So what do you say?” asked Charlie.
I don’t know why, but I said, “Okay, Charlie. You can borrow my truck.”
Why on earth did I always let him borrow my stuff?
“Thanks, my man,” said Charlie. “Again, really glad I caught you when that t-rex wasn’t around. That guy scares me to death. If he was here all the time, I don’t think I could ever come over. So, uh, can I have the keys?”
I didn’t reply, but I did smile as I handed over the keychain.
It is Easter. I like writing stories. I wanted to share a story which I wrote for a chapel speech I gave earlier this year. I also drew the illustrations. I have been a Christian all my life, though these days I really have a hard time embracing the teachings and it’s hard for me to say with certainty what is true. However, I keep hoping that there is a loving God out there, and this story is kind of an expression of that hope. I really wanted to write a Christian-inspired science-fiction story, and predictably took some inspiration from from C. S. Lewis’ sci-fi trilogy with the following. The title is a pun playing off of the dual meanings of “body”–and the Japanese title is also a pun, though it works differently… It’s “Hoshi no Karada,” which means “Star Body”–but the word for “desirable” or “to want” is “Hoshii,” and so I was wanting to kind of implicate that meaning in my story, too. A Desired Body. Happy reading–and Happy Easter!
The Japanese version follows the English. Japanese translation provided by Yukakology from Fiverr, with additional edits from my Japanese tutor hero and my coworker Yukiko. All artwork was done by me on paper with pencil, then scanned. Apologies–it’s not great art!
The ATOM pods turned in the gravity pull, detecting the nearby planet and its riches before we could come out of the long sleep. I felt adrenaline as I awoke, knowing that something good had brought me to life. Even just looking out of the sensor window, I could see that the world below us was beautiful, full of treasure we could take for ourselves.
“It’s a good one, I can see even from here,” came Evelyn’s voice over the interphone. “This planet will be our biggest profit yet.”
“Let’s take it, then,” I said. “We’ve been floating for six days. Finally we have something to wake up for, huh?”
We turned our pods toward the planet, and we fell from the sky. Our pods, egg shaped, burned lines of fire through the atmosphere, but the shells protected us as we streaked towards land. We skimmed over the water, the stretching oceans, the shimmering flames of the nearest star glittering above us as we searched for a lifeform we could use to adapt into and begin to take everything for ourselves.
“Remember,” I said. “The lifeform we choose has to be big enough that we can get a good DNA sample. We need to be able to take the organic matter into our biosuits in enough volume or else the mutation will be incomplete. We want to make sure everything goes smoothly so we can really enjoy ourselves.”
“Yeah, I got it,” said Evelyn. “Plenty of life here to choose from, too.”
And there was. Strange bird-like creatures fluttering and singing through the air. Long pin-legged insect-like things dashing across the surface of the lakes. Billions of tendrils poking out of the hills and reaching for the sun. But we needed something big, and these lifeforms—we could take their lives later, but we needed something large for our adaption engines to really work.
“How about that tree?” Evelyn said. “Over there. Biggest tree I ever saw. Lush. Powerful. We can take it, and it will transform us, make us suitable for this world.”
I turned my ATOM pod in the sky, triggered the shade mechanism in my viewing port so that the streaming sunrays wouldn’t dazzle me, and took in the organism before me.
It was like a tree, certainly. Hundreds of feet tall, with gargantuan limbs splayed out, welcoming us in. The outer material—the skin or bark of the thing—was an intricate play of dark and light, whites and blacks, and splotches of gray. Instead of leaves, the thing had bubbly orbs of glittering green that seemed to suck the energy from the atmosphere and beam out heat themselves. But most beautiful of all were the fruit. Massive hanging bulbous fruit, juicy and inviting, thick with organic material that would be perfect for our adaptation engines.
I sucked in air across my newly-grown teeth.
“It’s against the rules to use the trees,” I said, though I liked what I saw. “Sometimes the trees don’t make for good adaptations, you know. It might not…”
“It’s fine,” Evelyn said. “We aren’t going to find anything nicer than this. Those old guidelines about trees are outdated anyway—our new adaptation engines have been updated and can handle the transference even from plant life.”
She didn’t wait for me to respond. Already her ATOM pod was diving. It plunged into one of the enormous red fruit, larger even that her own space-traversing machine. Immediately the pod began to transform, merge with the fruit, and gorge itself on the available organic material.
“It’s amazing, Guy,” Evelyn said. “The fruit, this tree—it will provide everything we need to adapt for this world, so we can take anything we want. The power—it’s astonishing!”
Any time we wanted to use a world and make it ours, we first had to merge with organic material in that world so that our bodies could live there. If we just tried to exit our pods in our newgrown bodies, we would be too vulnerable, weak and fresh in a possibly dangerous environment. The rules, though… they said we should adapt using an animal—flesh and blood, not the tree.
“It’s good, Guy!” Evelyn cried through the interphone. “It’s so good! You need this!”
I couldn’t bear to stay away, hearing Evelyn’s excited voice. My ATOM pod seared down from the sky almost beyond my control, and I bonded with a second fruit, the pod hitting it with a loud, wet pop. Soon the skin of my pod was pulling in organic material—I could hear the juices gurgling around me, assimilating, pulling through the membrane of my cosmic machine.
And I did feel it. The power. The knowledge of this world that would sustain us, the DNA and the pieces of this gorgeous world that were becoming a part of me.
Yes. With this power, we would become the creatures we needed to be to live in this environment, and absorb the truth, the facts of how to adapt through the elegance of the DNA of this amazing lifeform that obviously was thriving here. I felt my body infused with everything we needed to rule and conquer this world.
Within a few hours, our bodies had been converted to something greater than we could ever have imagined, and we emerged from the cosmic membranes of our pods. My body was larger, muscular, my eyes sharper, my mind dancing with the information of a million lives, and I knew how I could make this world my own.
I fell dozens of feet to the floor of the world, and the tendril-like plants whispered away from my gripping feet. I roared and shook my fists at the sky, and I heard Evelyn cry out her own victory not far away. We dashed through the undergrowth to each other, each step cementing the use and the power of our bodies, making us more confident in our new skins.
We crashed into each other, and I lifted her above my head, and our eyes flashed as we looked on each other in naked triumph.
“We are masters of this world,” Evelyn said. “We will take everything we need.”
“Yes, but less us prepare ourselves fully,” I said, and reached to pull off strips of black bark from the tree. “We need to protect our new skin as it hardens for this world.”
The black bark oozed and shifted onto our bodies after we applied the clothing chemicals that shifted the structures of the molecules and created living vestments we could use to cover ourselves. Soon we were running, laughing, taking anything we wanted from our new world.
Nothing could stand against us. The creatures of our new home, for all their variety and beauty, could not overcome our space weaponry, nor our perfect new bodies and the power within us. Again and again, everything we found, anything we wanted, we took, the treasures, the fruits, all things of value bowed before us and went into our collection modules, crunched down to microscopic size via the portable black holes housed inside.
“This world is the richest one found yet in the history of our race!” cried Evelyn. “Look at the minerals, the rich biodiversity, the metals housed in the hills, the quality of the oceans and all that we can yet learn!”
I laughed, and I leapt dozens of feet in the air, pouncing over the shrubbery, crushing everything underfoot, sucking all that I wanted into my portable black hole.
But as the days passed, I realized something was wrong. I woke up with the knowledge that something had broken inside of myself, and I felt a streak of fear stab through my mind. I stood from the bed of pulverized downy cotton matter that had made my bed, and something gave in my leg.
I looked down, and my skin had cracked. The black leathery bark clothing was starting to split. I desperately tried to run, and found my legs seemed to splinter beneath me.
“Evelyn!” I yelled. “What is happening?”
She emerged from behind the cover of overlapping enormous leaves, but I knew from one glance that the flaw was in her, too. The power that I had seen that first day in her new body had halved and broken. Something creaked in her bones as she turned to look at me.
“Death is in this organic stuff we have taken in,” she said. “Did it not fully adapt us? Did the technology fail?”
I grabbed her arms, feeling the pain jag through my fingers as I held her.
“You did this!” I said. “The guidelines warned against using the trees when making the adaptations! Why wouldn’t you listen to me?”
“If you are so wise, then why did you follow and use the fruit for your own adaptation?” Evelyn retorted. “You are no wiser than I!”
“Do you both find yourselves so full of excuses?” came a voice then. “Listen to yourselves, and see how you have led yourselves to destruction.”
Someone was stepping through the flora nearby. The footsteps were like thunder. Yet there was a gentleness in the voice that reverberated through our hearts.
It was the Man. Larger than either of us. Perfectly adapted for this world. Somehow I knew right away we were supposed to adapt through this organism, and not through just any tree or thing we could find in our rush to take and make everything our own.
The Man stepped closer, taking us by the hand, leading us through the underbrush. We walked with him, tears in our eyes, our bodies failing, cracking, falling apart. Even just a few steps and I could hardly breathe, could not keep up with his quickening steps.
“I will carry you, but you must let go of your burdens,” said the Man. “There isn’t time nor space for you to carry all the things you have stolen. Let go of them, and I will carry you.”
What could we do? I did not want to drop the packages, the fruit of our labors, but my knuckles burned with pain as my body continued to shiver and crack. The black hole module fell from my grasp and into the swirling undergrowth.
“Faster, we need to go faster,” said the Man, and his glistening muscles pulled us along, and we saw the tree again from whence we had come, and He brought us there, and we saw He was crying now, His mouth pulled back in a grimace of sorrow.
“You will need to crawl back into your pods,” He said. “If you will follow me, I can save you, but I cannot force you to take the positions. I need to take my own.”
He put us beside the ATOM pods we had arrived in, and then he was climbing up the tree. I peered across at Evelyn, and she back at me, curled in our painful places. We knew if we climbed into the pods, we would lose everything we had ever known, and all the treasure we had tried to take. But what choice was there?
I coughed and spluttered as I pulled myself into the pod, my black bark clothing curling off of me. I was like a baby, barely able to move, and all I could do was weep, and realize the depth of my selfishness. I saw out of the viewport the Man had taken His position indeed. He was on the tree now, becoming one with it, His arms splayed out across the tree’s limbs, the thorns I had not seen before piercing into him, and His blood was joining the tree. As the pod began to take on His organic matter, I could feel the transformation begin.
I could not see Evelyn. I could only see the Man, and He died, shattering as the tree took Him, and He cried out once in a language that I could not understand, but which my heart took in like sweet words spoken to my soul. The broken body that I had boiled and churned in the pod, and everything purged away, in a riotous wave of stinging, shining new.
When the pod I saw in jettisoned from the tree, and sprung away from that world, I saw, too, that the Man who had climbed the tree was gone, too, and somehow I knew that He somehow was walking again. Somehow it seemed He had escaped the thorns and suffering of the tree which had nearly killed me, and which Had indeed killed him.
I knew He had escaped those thorns because, even as I left the wondrous garden that was the astonishing world I had tried to steal, I knew the Man lived because the blood that burned in my heart was not my own.
I was something new, again. And the treasure I walked away with that day was greater than any I had searched for.
