Waste of Space

  Kira was crouched by the veeyar controls, about to jack her portable computer into the interface. Violet was beside her, watching gleefully.

  “What are you—” I began, but Kira quickly hushed me.

  Roddy froze in the midst of his game, as though he’d heard me, which was a surprise. The hologoggles had speakers built into them, and Roddy liked to play with the sound cranked to eleven. “Hello?” he asked. “Is anyone there?”

  We all kept our mouths shut.

  “Hello?” Roddy asked again. When there wasn’t an answer, he resumed playing the game.

  Kira hurried over to me with Violet and led us out of the rec room, into the hall where Roddy wouldn’t hear us.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting Roddy off the veeyar system for once,” Kira replied.

  “Because he never shares it with anyone,” Violet said angrily. “Especially me. Remember what he did the other day?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember.” Everyone at MBA knew what had happened. Kira called it the Rainbow Unicorn Incident. Violet and Inez Marquez had been dying to play Unicorn Fantasy, a new game that was a huge fad back on earth. (I wasn’t very clear on the rules of the game, as I had never played it, but from what I could understand, you played a unicorn who could fix environmental disasters with the power of music and rainbows.) Roddy had staunchly refused to get off the system, though. For five hours. Finally, Violet and Inez had rebelled by tying his shoelaces together and then kicking him in the butt. Roddy had tried to chase them, tripped over his shoelaces, and face-planted on the floor. The problem was, he hadn’t fully removed the hologoggles yet, so he ended up with two enormous welts around his eyes that made him look like an angry raccoon. The hologoggles had also been fractured. Luckily, Chang knew how to fix them, but he’d had to use duct tape, which meant they were now unwieldy and uncomfortable. There were only three other pairs of hologoggles on the base and it was unlikely that we’d get a replacement anytime soon. Even though Roddy had been the instigator, Violet and Inez had still gotten in trouble. (Most of the Moonies secretly sided with them, though. We had all had issues with Roddy hogging the veeyar system.)

  It was possible to play veeyar games in our rooms, but those interfaces weren’t nearly as good as the one in the main rec room. The games tended to glitch and stutter. So everyone wanted to use the main one—if we could ever get Roddy off it.

  “So,” Kira went on. “I’ve worked out a way to hack the system. I think I know how to get Roddy to stop playing.”

  “How?” I asked.

  Kira smiled deviously. “Jack in and see.”

  “All right.” I quickly returned to the rec room with the girls, grabbed some hologoggles and sensogloves and pulled them on. “Hey, Roddy,” I announced loudly, so he’d hear me over whatever he was playing. “I’m joining the game.”

  “I hope you do a better job than usual,” Roddy replied churlishly. “This game’s not easy. If you’re gonna suck, you’ll take me down with you.”

  Despite his attitude, Roddy was probably right. I wasn’t very adept at first-person shooter games. But I jacked in anyhow.

  There was a flash of light, and then I found myself standing on a strange planet, under attack by a horde of aliens. Often the extraterrestrial worlds Roddy chose were gorgeous, reminiscent of the most beautiful places on earth. This one wasn’t. We were in the armpit of the universe, a planet that had apparently been used as a garbage dump by every other alien culture. Trash ranging from crashed spaceships to piles of smoldering metal scarred the entire landscape. I was up to my knees in some sort of foul, viscous sewage.

  The aliens we were fighting weren’t much more attractive. They seemed to be mostly composed of armor plating, spikes, and teeth. Instead of having weapons, they fired bolts of acid from various orifices on their body. I wasn’t sure what the orifices were supposed to be. (To be honest, I didn’t really want to think about it.)

  Roddy’s avatar was right beside me, a towering mountain of muscle who looked nothing like Roddy at all. He was blasting aliens with machine guns the size of cannons.

  I had never updated my avatar. It was simply me, and I was dwarfed by Roddy and the aliens. My gun looked like a peashooter.

  “Get down!” Roddy yelled.

  I had no choice but to dive into the sewage as an alien bombarded us with toxic bodily fluids. True, both the sewage and the alien were completely imaginary, but in the veeyar system, they were both revoltingly realistic.

  While I was submerged, Roddy shredded the alien with a burst of bullets, then took out the rest of the brigade as well. I resurfaced, dripping ooze, to find that the attack was over for the moment. We shifted into exploratory mode, slogging through the muck.

  Roddy glared at the gun in my hand. “That piece of garbage won’t do you any good against the Bosnakkian Blastbeetles. Why haven’t you ever upgraded your weaponry?”

  “Because I don’t like playing this game.”

  “Then why are you even here?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” I said. I wasn’t merely stalling for Kira’s sake; this was the truth. “About Lars Sjoberg.”

  “Why? Are you trying to figure out who poisoned him?”

  “He wasn’t poisoned,” I lied. “His food got contaminated.”

  “Don’t tell me you bought that load of crap from Nina.”

  “You don’t think she’s being honest with us?”

  “Of course not. Someone’s definitely trying to bump off Lars. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long.” It’s hard to get a perfect read of someone’s emotions by looking at their avatar, but I was pretty sure that Roddy was shifting into his smug know-it-all mode. After veeyar games, there was nothing Roddy liked better than sharing his opinions with you—whether you wanted him to or not.

  Today, however, I wanted him to. “How do you think they did it?”

  “They slipped cyanide into his food. Duh.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” I tensed as several eyeballs bobbed up from the goop around us. They weren’t very large, but for all I knew, they were attached to something enormous and bloodthirsty beneath the surface.

  “Relax,” Roddy told me. “They’re just Murkmoids. They can’t do us any harm.”

  “You sure?”

  Roddy blasted one of them out of the water. The others all shrieked and sank below the surface again. “Don’t look harmful to me,” he said, then continued onward.

  I followed him, resuming my questioning. “As far as I know, there isn’t any cyanide here at the base.”

  “Well, obviously there is, because someone poisoned Lars with it.”

  “I mean, there isn’t supposed to be any. Because it’s dangerous. So how did the killer get it?”

  “Maybe they brought it up here without permission.”

  “You mean they snuck a poison into their personal supplies eight months ago just in case they wanted to kill someone while they were here?”

  “Okay, maybe they made it up here. It’s not too hard to make cyanide.”

  “It isn’t?” I asked.

  Roddy’s avatar looked at me disdainfully. “Don’t you know anything? Cyanide occurs naturally in . . .” He trailed off suddenly.

  “In what?”

  “Shhh!” Roddy warily cased the sewage around us.

  The surface started to tremble.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Roddy said.

  Two more eyes emerged from the muck. They looked like the ones we had seen before, only these were the size of basketballs. Then the head emerged. And the rest of the body. The creature was the size of a ten-story building, and it was a hideous combination of tentacles and suckers, all of which had teeth on the edges.

  “What is that?” I gasped.

  “A Murkmoid.”

  “I thought you said they weren’t dangerous.”

  “I didn’t know they got so big!”

  “And now you made it angry!” Even though I wa
s only playing a game, it was realistic enough to frighten me.

  Roddy blasted the Murkmoid with his gun. The alien didn’t seem affected at all. Instead it seemed to merely absorb the bullets.

  “Oh, crud,” Roddy said. “It has projectile osmosis.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We should run.” Roddy’s avatar turned and fled.

  I didn’t bother. There was no way we could outrun the giant beast. Each of its steps would have been equal to a hundred of ours. The Murkmoid roared angrily, revealing a mouth full of serrated teeth tucked away beneath all the tentacles, then squelched toward me menacingly.

  I cringed, ready to have my avatar flattened.

  There was a sudden burst of upbeat, synthetic pop music, and a rainbow arced across the sky, turning the dull landscape into a kaleidoscope of color. The Murkmoid froze in midattack, understandably confused.

  At the front of the rainbow, zooming toward us, was a flying unicorn. There did not appear to be any means of propulsion that allowed it to fly. But it was still flying, in violation of every known law of physics. As it got closer, I could see that Violet was riding on its back. Or, rather, it was Violet’s avatar from Unicorn Fantasy, a warrior princess who was also a veterinarian. “Hi, guys!” Violet yelled.

  “Hey!” Roddy yelled. “There’s no unicorns allowed in this game!” He was so angry, he’d forgotten all about fleeing for his life.

  Not that the giant Murkmoid was a danger any longer. It appeared completely incapacitated by the very presence of the unicorn. Violet circled it a few times on her flying unicorn, wrapping it in a rainbow, then cried, “Sparkle power!” A bolt of pink light shot from the unicorn’s horn, zapping the tentacled beast, which promptly exploded into a cascade of flowers. Daisies and roses rained down around me.

  “Kira!” Roddy roared. “I know you’re behind this! What have you done to my game?”

  There was another flash of light, and Kira appeared beside Violet, bobbing in the air astride her own flying unicorn. “I altered the source code to make a mash-up of our games,” she said proudly. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “No, it’s not cool!” Roddy yelled. “You’ve totally messed everything up!”

  “I think it’s fun!” Violet announced. She zipped around the landscape on her flying unicorn, turning our vile surroundings into beautiful things like fields of poppies and meadows full of rabbits.

  “Fun?” Roddy spluttered. “What’s fun about a bunch of stupid flying unicorns? That doesn’t even make any sense!”

  “Oh, and a mutant squid the size of a skyscraper is totally logical,” Kira countered.

  “Get out of my game,” Roddy said angrily. “And reset it back to the way it was before.”

  “You mean, when you were about to get your butt kicked by the squid thingy?” Kira asked. “If it wasn’t for us, you’d be dead right now.”

  “I was handling everything just fine,” Roddy argued.

  “You were running away like a chicken,” Violet said, then imitated a chicken to get her point across. “Bock-bock-bock!”

  Rather than debate this anymore, Roddy simply blasted Violet’s unicorn. Thankfully, instead of turning into a gory pile of flesh, the unicorn died in an explosion of glitter.

  Still, Violet wasn’t pleased about this. “You jerkasaurus!” she shouted, still floating in the air. “You killed SparkleBright!”

  “Oh, that’s the way you want to play?” Kira asked Roddy. “Fine. Let’s play.” Her unicorn fired a bolt of fuchsia light from its horn, hitting Roddy’s avatar squarely in the chest. There was an explosion, and when the smoke cleared, Roddy’s musclebound he-man had turned into a kitten. A light blue kitten with enormous eyes.

  “Ooh!” Violet squealed. “He’s adorable!”

  “This is so uncool,” the kitten groused. It was bizarre to see something so cute speaking with Roddy’s voice. “I was here first and you ruined my game. I’m telling Nina.”

  “Bye,” Kira taunted, waving from her unicorn.

  “Yeah. Bye!” Violet echoed.

  The kitten suddenly vanished, meaning that Roddy had jacked out. Beyond the cloying synthetic unicorn music, I could heard Roddy in the real world, storming out of the rec room.

  “Wow. That worked out better than I expected.” Kira brought her unicorn in for a landing beside me. A rainbow ripple spread through the swamp, turning it into a gorgeous pond.

  “It worked a little too well,” I said. “Roddy was about to tell me something important.”

  “Like that he’s the one who tried to kill Lars?” Kira asked.

  I glanced at Violet to see if she was listening. Instead she was distracted creating a new unicorn. A pink one. With wings.

  “No one tried to kill Lars,” I said. “He was poisoned by contamination.”

  “Yeah, right,” Kira said dismissively. “So what’s the deal? Are you looking for the killer? Because I’ll help.”

  I thought about saying no, but quickly decided against it. I didn’t like the idea of lying to my friend, and the fact was, I could use some help. Even though I had solved some crimes at MBA before, I had never done it on my own. “Fine,” I agreed. “But you can’t tell Nina what we’re up to.”

  “Like I’d ever tell Nina anything. What was Roddy’s big lead?”

  “He said it wasn’t very hard to make cyanide. But he didn’t get the chance to tell me how.”

  “That shouldn’t be too much of a problem.” Kira waved her hand and the world around us melted away.

  “Hey!” Violet yelped. “I wasn’t finished with my unicorn!”

  “It’s okay,” Kira told her. “I only paused the game. We can get it back.”

  Around us, without the game running, the veeyar system reverted to the default mode, which was the classroom setting. This made sense, as we often used it for school. In the classroom mode we could perform virtual chemistry experiments under the watch of instructors back on earth, or work out virtual math problems in the air, or dissect virtual animals in biology.

  “Computer,” Kira said, “how do you make cyanide?”

  I winced, unhappy that she’d asked this in front of Violet, because I knew what was coming next.

  “What’s cyanide?” Violet asked.

  The computer quickly answered both questions, at once speaking in the standard, soothing female voice and writing the words for us in the air of the virtual classroom. “Cyanide is a poisonous chemical compound primarily used for the mining of gold and silver, although it also has some medical uses and can be used as a pesticide or an insecticide. It can be found naturally in many fruit seeds, such as cherry pits, peach pits and apple seeds.”

  Kira and I looked at one another, surprised. “There’s cyanide in seeds?” I repeated.

  “That’s correct,” the computer replied. “In addition to the ones I mentioned, it can also be found in the seeds of nectarines, plums, and apricots.”

  “But we don’t have any seeds here,” Kira told me. “Or much fruit at all. Not since those tangerines two months ago, when I first got here.”

  “Dr. Goldstein has apple seeds,” Violet said. “Lots of them.”

  “She does?” I asked. “Where?”

  “In the greenhouse,” Violet replied.

  That made sense. Dr. Goldstein was the lunar agriculture specialist. It was her job to maintain the greenhouse. Only . . .

  “Dr. Goldstein isn’t growing apples here,” Kira pointed out.

  “I know,” Violet said, offended. “I’m not stupid. But she has seeds. Lots of them. I’ve seen them.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I just have,” Violet replied. “I pay attention to things.”

  That was true. There had been many times when Violet noticed things that other people hadn’t. In the past, I had made the mistake of discounting what Violet claimed was true, thinking she might be making things up, but now I had learned not to be so quick to do that. So had Kira.

  “I think we ough
t to pay a visit to Dr. Goldstein,” she said.

  Excerpt from The Official NASA Procedures for Contact with Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life © National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, 2029 (Classification Level AAA)

  HOAXES AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS

  In the case of any contact with IEL, you must be alert to the possibility that it is not true contact at all. In the great majority of cases, any reports of IEL will turn out to be false.I Sometimes, those who report IEL will be doing so as a hoax or jest, as they mistakenly believe such behavior is funny—although the far greater likelihood is that the reports will be in earnest, but will be cases of overzealousness. Therefore, it is paramount to respond to all potential cases of IEL with a healthy skepticism.II

  * * *

  I. For reference, as of this writing, 100 percent of all reports of IEL have been false.

  II. The following have all been determined to not be actual manifestations of IEL and can thus be immediately discounted: the northern lights, lightning and other atmospheric phenomena, crop circles, earth mounds, large sinkholes, unusual rock formations, wind shears, icefalls, and Stonehenge.

  7

  SEEDS OF DOOM

  Lunar day 252

  Breakfast time

  The greenhouse was located directly across from the mess hall, which allowed us to grab breakfast while casing the place. Normally, I wasn’t a big fan of breakfast at MBA—or any meal there, really—but since I had already been awake for several hours, save for my brief nap, I was hungry enough to eat . . . well, space food. I made myself some reconstituted banana pancakes and a hot tea. (Since it’s basically dried leaves and water, tea was one of the few things at MBA that didn’t vary much from its earth version.)