by Matthew Atanian
©1999 by Matthew Atanian
©1999 by Matthew Atanian
10 January 1998... Matthew Atanian was vaguely aware of the date. He’d gotten a PlayStation for Christmas, the first console gaming system he’d owned since the old original Nintendo Entertainment System, and that had died long ago. He did have fond memories of one game from that old system, and the fact that one of its sequels was available on the new Sony system was certainly a deciding factor on which of the “New Generation” systems he wanted.
He actually had two games – one was a sports game that Matt Swett had given him at the troop’s Christmas party. Swett had insisted he take it, even though not only did Matt not care for sports games, but at the time he didn’t even know he owned a PlayStation yet.
The other game was…well…
He’d been engrossed in the game for some time now, eating little, sleeping little, and reluctantly stopping only when he had to go to work. After all, if he didn’t keep playing, who else would save the world from the evil ShinRa Corporation? He laughed slightly. ShinRa was only a minor problem at this point, of course. The big problem was Sephiroth. Well, that and which of the two lovely girls vying for his affections would eventually win. Little did Matt know as he headed north in search of one of those girls that their contest for him would soon have a tragic shift in one girl’s favour...
“Matt,” his mother called out from the kitchen, “you’ve got mail!”
Matt hit the pause button and cursed softly. He rose from his bed where he’d been sitting and carefully made his way from there to his door. (His room wasn’t the most tidy in the world. He did mean to some day get around to doing something about it. Really, he did...)
On the kitchen counter, Matt saw a plain white envelope with his name and address on it, written in the most impressive calligraphy. He picked up the envelope and turned it over. On neither side was written a return address.
He returned to his room and sat back on his bed. He regarded the frozen image on the television screen with interest. His hand reached for the controller, but paused just short of picking it up. Instead, his hand returned to the envelope as curiosity got the better of him.
He carefully tore open the envelope and extracted from it a small handwritten card, covered with more finely detailed calligraphy. It was an invitation, complete with time, date, and directions. The date was tomorrow, Sunday. It was an invitation to...
Matt stared at it in wonder. Finely, after a significant pause, he put it down and picked up the controller again. After all, as odd as the invitation was, it wasn’t until tomorrow.
Matt pulled his bike to a halt in front of a completely average house on a completely average street in a completely average section of Springfield. Already there was Bill Hughes and Mike Quadrozzi, both having been dropped off by their parents a short time ago.
“You got an invite too, huh?” Mike asked.
Matt nodded. “Where are Aaron and Billy?” he asked. “Since you two are here, I’d have thought they’d be here, too.”
“Bill had a hockey game today,” Hughes said. “You know he wouldn’t miss one of those for his own funeral.”
“Aaron called me last night,” Mike said, “as there was no number on the invite. Said he couldn’t make it. Didn’t say why.” He paused briefly, noticing something in the distance, before adding, “Although if he knew who else was going to be here, I’m sure he’d have made more of an effort.”
Matt and Hughes looked in the direction Mike was looking and saw Kirstin Porter approaching on her bicycle. She pulled to a stop next to Matt’s bike. “Hi, guys,” she said.“Where’s Aaron? I thought he’d be here, too.”
“Couldn’t make it,”Hughes told her.
“Oh,” Kirstin said, a bit of disappointment apparent in her voice despite her best efforts to mask it. “In any case,” she added, “I can’t help but wonder why we’re all here. It just seems so sudden, and not like him. He’s a nice kid, but not very social.”
Matt nodded his agreement, as did the others. Just then, the front door opened and out stepped the person who had invited them all together. Kenneth E. Pendrell.
After showing Matt and Kirstin someplace to put their bikes, Kenny invited them all inside. The interior of the house was much like the outside: average. Nice furnishings in all the rooms they’d seen, but something didn’t seem quite right. There were no pictures on the walls. No magazines or books upon the coffee table. In fact, the whole place was quite stark, Matt realized. Nothing extra at all. Just tables, chairs, a few appliances here and there... All of it looked brand new. There wasn’t a scratch on a single thing. It wasn’t the kind of brand new that you get with people who were obsessive about keeping their things nice, either. It was just as if... as if the house had an “un-lived-in” feel to it. Matt shivered slightly.
Kenny had asked them to all wait in the living room and had disappeared into the kitchen. Now he reappeared carrying a trey with drinks on it. He handed one to each of his guests before disappearing again, muttering an apology as he did so.
Matt sipped his drink and was surprised. It was Iced Tea. 4C Iced Tea, perfectly stirred and chilled. He hadn’t asked for anything specific, and yet Kenny had brought him his favourite drink. He turned to the others.
“What did you all get to drink?” he asked.
“Schweppes ginger ale,” Mike said, also surprised. “Hey, did you know that John Cleese used to be a spokesman for this stuff?” He took another sip.
Hughes looked up from his drink, having taken only one sip. “Hard orange juice. Must be 500 proof.”He put the cup down. “As much as I like this, I better not drink any more.” He picked it up again and took another sip before putting it down once more.“Well, another sip couldn’t hurt.”
Kirstin looked up from her traditional Japanese teacup, a pleasant look of surprise on her face.“Oolong tea,” she said as she brought the cup to her mouth once more.
All of them had been given their favourite beverages, each without having asked for anything specific. A sudden chill went down their spines.
Just then, Kenny reappeared. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said, timidly. “I was hoping that you’d all be able to come, but I understand that Mr. Aaron and Mr. Billy can’t make it.”
The others nodded.
Kenny continued.“Well, everything’s ready, so I can tell you all why I’ve invited you here.”
Kenny looked unsure as if how to continue, unused as he was to dealing with others.
“What is it, Kenny?”Kirstin said in encouragement. “What did you want to tell us?”
“Thank you,” Kenny replied. This was not directed at Kirstin, but rather at all of them. It was an answer to Kirstin’s question. “Thank you for making me feel like I belong, and not like an outsider.”
“No thanks are necessary,” Mike replied. “We like having you around.”
Kenny looked down for a moment, embarrassed. “No, really,” he said. “It means a lot to me. I want... I want to show you something.”
Hughes took a sip of his drink.
“What is it?” Matt asked.
“Please follow me,”Kenny merely replied.
The others rose and followed. Kenny led them to a door in the hallway. The door was covered by locks. Regular locks, deadbolts, padlocks, combination locks, even a key-card lock and another that required a thumbprint. Slowly, methodically, Kenny undid each of them.
He opened the door and the smell of stale air came from the other side. They peered inside the doorway and saw a stone staircase descending, spiraling down, lit by naked light bulbs that seemed to stretch into infinity. Even with the light bulbs, the stairs eventually disappeared into distant darkness.
They turned to regard Kenny, the prickly feeling that they all felt on the back of their necks erupting into new heights of prickliness.
“I’m sorry,” he said.“There is a faster way down, but it only has room for one.” He backed slowly towards a door across the hall, which he opened. As he disappeared into the room, he said, “I’ll meet you down there.”
The door closed. Matt, Mike, Hughes, and Kirstin turned back to regard the still open door, with it’s foreboding staircase.
“This is too weird even for me,” Hughes said, taking a sip. He turned back towards the room that Kenny had disappeared into and thrust open the door, followed closely by the others. “Hey, Kenny,” he began, but he stopped speaking as he looked around the room before him.
A shaft of sunlight was broken up as it passed through the blinds on the window. The sunlight illuminated an average bedroom. Average at first glance. It had a bed, a bureau, a bookcase, a closet, and a tidy desk. The desk summed up the room perfectly: it was tidy. Almost too so.
There were two things odd about the room, other then it’s excessive tidiness.
One was the metal panel that was flush with the wooden floor in one corner of the room. It was cool to the touch, and there seemed to be a thin line across the middle of it. It was so tight together and so perfectly flush that it took them a few minutes to realize that the line was actually a separation where the panel could slide apart rather then just a decorative line lightly etched into it.
The second was Kenny, or rather the lack of him. Seconds prior to their own entry, they had seen Kenny disappear into this very room, but now he was gone. An examination of the window discounted that as a possibility: there were no footprints in the snow outside. That left the panel.
“Where do you think it leads?” Kirstin asked.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “But where ever it is, Kenny must have gone there, and he wants us to follow him.”
Hughes took a sip.
Matt turned and looked out of the room, towards the hall and the still open doorway on the other side. “Shall we?” he asked.
“So how many stairs do you reckon it’s been so far?” Matt asked.
“Oh, I shtopped counting after a quabillion or sho,” Hughes responded with an absent grin on his face. He hiccupped.
“Is he okay?” Kirstin whispered to Mike, referring to Hughes. Mike merely shrugged in response.
Matt turned and looked in the direction they had come. They’d been descending for at least an hour.
“I wonder how much farther it is?” Kirstin asked, reading Matt’s mind.
“Much farther and we’d be surrounded by liquid hot magma,” Mike commented.
“That’d be, like, really, really... what’s the word?” Hughes asked. He took a sip.
They continued walking, spiralling slowly down the cold, damp passageway. “I do hope it’s not much further,” Kirstin said.
“I wonder where we’re going?” Matt asked.
“I don’t know, but this is just really, really weird,” Mike added.
“Hot!” Hughes suddenly shouted, startling everyone. “That’sh the word I wash looking for. Magma ish really, really hot.”
“Note to self,” Mike said aloud. “When Hughes turns 21, move to another country.”
Hughes took a sip and regarded Mike quizzically. “Wash it shomthing I shaid?”
A half hour later they were still descending. Granted their progress was hampered somewhat by Hughes. He had begun walking the entire length of each stair, from the left side to the right side, before he’d walk down to the next stair. That one he’d walk from the right side to the left before descending one stair again. Then, he’d repeat the process, all the while whistling some merry tune he seemed to have made up on the spot. It is also worth note that these were rather wide stairs, so all of this took quite some time.
Still, even with Hughes slowing them down, they had been descending for over an hour and a half now. The air, which had seemed stale to begin with, had gradually gotten more so, approaching something which one might imagine archaeologists in Egypt might have encountered when first setting foot in a newly discovered tomb.
It would be a half hour more until finely, much to everyone’s relief, they reached a door.
At least, they assumed it to be a door. The stone passageway they had been descending in came to an abrupt halt and there was a metal panel in the wall in front of them. There was no obvious way apparent to open the panel. Like the one that had been on the floor in Kenny’s room, it was cool to the touch.
Mike went forward and lightly knocked his knuckles on the door. The knocking produced no sound at all. Mike frowned, made a fist, and pounded harder. Still no sound. Not even the faint sound you might produce from knocking on a huge solid boulder. It was as if the door absorbed the sound.
“Can one of you say something?” Mike asked.
“Like what?” Kirstin responded.
“Oh good, I didn’t go deaf,” Mike said.
“I was beginning to wonder the same thing,” Matt remarked.
“What a pretty door,”Hughes beamed.
Suddenly, with no warning, the panel slid aside. A burst of fresh, cool air came from within, coming upon them with a slight wooshing sound. Light poured from within, making it difficult for them to see what was on the
other side.
And then came a voice. It was Kenny’s to be sure, but it was different. Gone was the usual timidity. Gone was the quietness. Instead, there was confidence. It was a commanding, authoritative voice. Yet one thing that seemed constant was the voice’s usual courteousness.
This is what the voice said: “Welcome, my friends. I have been expecting you. Please, come in.”
The four of them trepidaciously stepped into the light. Rather, three of them stepped into the light and one stumbled. They were surprised to find the floor beneath themselves moving, and as their eyes adjusted to the bright light they discovered they were on a moving walkway, similar to those found in some of the larger airports.
This discovery didn’t keep their attention long. All of them except Hughes stared in shock at their surroundings. Hughes just kept himself amused by grinning at the walkway.
The room was so big you couldn't even call it a room. It was immense, gigantic, and cavernous. The far wall was indistinct, the ceiling faded away in a cloudy haze. Machines and instruments crowded every open space atop shiny aluminium counters and cabinets filled with scientific journals and essays of all sorts. There were scores of bookshelves, hundreds of test tubes and thousands of multicoloured beakers and flasks. Giant pipettes stood next to voltronic pacificators and double glass refibulators and dozens of other devices that would tongue-tie Dr. Seuss, himself.
The walkway eventually slowed down and came to a halt before one large bookcase. Kenny looked up from a book he was reading and smiled. He put the book, The Not At All Brief History of Time for the Non-Layman, Complete and Unabridged Vol. 42 by Prof. Stephen Hawking, back on the bookcase with the other 149 volumes in the series.
“It’s a good book,”he told them. “A bit incorrect in a few areas, but they’re common misconceptions.” Again, his tone of voice was unlike any they’d ever heard from him before. It was normal.
Matt raised his hand, like a child in grade school. “May I ask a question?”
“Sure, Mr. Atanian,”Kenny replied.
“What is all of this?”
“This,” Kenny said with a proud look on his face, “is my Laboratory!”
Kenny gave them a brief tour of his Laboratory. When he spoke the word, he added extreme emphasis to the “bor” part, dragging out the vowel and rolling the r in a very profound manor.
He showed them spatial metaphasic vertion shells, ambient cosmic plasma bursts, duodynetic anaphasic streams, and osmotic energy cores. They were all in awe, even Hughes.
It was all overwhelming. There was so much technology they couldn’t even begin to grasp, and the room was so immense that it felt not like being normal sized people in a huge space, but rather like they themselves had been shrunk. The vast poster on one wall of the Periodic Table of Elements did nothing to help correct the misconception. It occurred to Matt that the feeling he was having couldn’t have been too dissimilar to how Tick and Arthur felt when they had accompanied Sewer Urchin into the world beneath the city streets.
A few hours later, their brief tour was winding down.
“Why show us all this?” Mike asked.
“This is my life,”Kenny responded. “Rather, this was my life. Now, it is simply a part of my life. Thanks to you, I now have another part: friends.”
Hughes smiled as he hiccuped.
“What’s this?”Kirstin asked, looking at a small beaker filled with a clear, thick liquid.
“That’s a special polish,” Kenny responded. “Ever see the film, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?”
The others nodded.
“Remember that bit where Chevy Chase was on that sled? Well, this is like that lubricant that he had used on it, only this stuff is stronger. It’s still in the testing stages. I shall probably have to dilute it if it were ever to be actually used.”
“You know,” Mike pondered, “that could come in handy at the Klondike Derby.”
Kenny smiled. “I’ll see if I can have it ready by then.”
“What’s that over there?” Kirstin asked, pointing.
“My God!” Matt exclaimed as he looked where Kirstin had indicated. “It’s a Stargate!”
Indeed, the large circular construct looked very much like the device from the science fiction film. Kenny smiled once again. “Well, not quite. I styled it’s exterior after the Stargate, however. And the field it creates is similar in appearance. I’ve even styled the user interface to be somewhat like that in the film.”
“So what is it?” Mike asked.
“It’s a trans-interphasic particle conduit,” Kenny proclaimed.
The others just stared at him.
“It creates a wormhole through not only space and time, but reality as well, making it possible to travel to any place or time as long as it is outside our normal plane of existence.”
The others just stared at him.
“It’s a magic doorway to alternate dimensions.”
“Oh!” Mike said.“Kind of like Sliders.”
“Sort of,” Kenny said as he, Matt, Mike, and Kirstin move towards it for a closer look. ”More like Sliders meets Doctor Who.”
Matt, the resident Whovian, made the connection. “Ah! So it takes us not only to alternate present day Earths, but alternate any-time any-places!”
“Exactly!”
“Oh, my,” Kirstin simply said.
“Can we try it?” Mike asked.
“I’m afraid not,”Kenny told him. “It’s not ready yet. I haven’t perfected the returning mechanism.”
He held up one of those multi-use remote controls you get at Radio Shack that can control your TV, VCR, cable, stereo system, garage door, and toaster oven all in one handy unit.
“That’s just a regular remote control,” Matt noted.
“Hey, it works on Sliders.Besides, I’ve made one or two minor modifications.”
“That’sh kinda neat, you know?” Hughes slurred.
The others turned to look at Hughes. He was standing near the control panel. He held up his orange juice and poured the last of it down his throat. He then keeled over unconscious, falling on the control panel and hitting exactly seven of the symbols on it as he did so. Now, as anyone who has seen Stargate knows, seven symbols activate the gate. The seven that Hughes had landed on happened to be the exact seven that were already in position on the gate, and thus it opened immediately.
“No!” was all Kenny had time to exclaim as the gate opened up with that really neat watery-like explosion effect. As he, Kirstin, Mike, and Matt had been standing right in front of the gate, they were immediately sucked in.
Meanwhile, Hughes remained blissfully unaware, slumped against the control mechanism and enjoying his nap.
The four of them landed with a thud and were surrounded by darkness. It took them a moment to realize that this was because they had landed in a small shed. Matt pulled open the door, flooding the shed with sunlight. The air smelled heavily of the sea.
They stepped out into a city with an air of celebration over it. People were moving briskly to and fro as if getting ready for a great event.
Kenny was pushing a few buttons on his remote control. He frowned and gave it a whack.
“When can we go back home?” Mike asked.
“Well,” Kenny replied, “the remote needs a little while to warm up, and then I can open the gate again. Only trouble is that I’m not sure if I’ll get us home or not.
“Well,” Kirstin said,“we may as well look around a bit while we wait.”
“Where are we?” Matt asked.
Kenny hit a few more buttons on the remote and it spat out a small slip of paper.
“Alternate Earth,” he read, “an island in the South Pacific, sometime around the year 2010, plus or minus a year or so.”
Mike breathed in a bit of the heady sea air. “South Pacific, eh?” He began to turn around. “Seems like a nice place. I wonder what island this... holy shit!!”
The others turned to see what had startled Mike.
“Well,” Matt said, “I think I know what island this is. It’s called Macross Island.”
“Oh, my,” Kirstin said.
“And that,” Matt said, pointing to the colossal spacecraft sitting in the middle of the city,“is the Super Dimensional Fortress.”
“I want one,” Kenny said with a slight smile on his face.
“Well they only have the one, and I think they’d notice if it went missing,” Matt responded.
“Isn’t this an anime series?” Mike asked.
Matt nodded. “I wonder if this is Macross or Robotech?” he asked rhetorically. He then began to take notice of the crowd of people. Most of them were moving towards a podium upon which stood a tall man in a gray flight suit with longish blond hair.
“Come on,” Matt said.“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Today, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll see how we’ve applied human know-how to understanding and harnessing a complex alien technology,” the man in the flight suit said to the audience.
Matt looked up, as did the others. A half a dozen large fighter planes pealed away from each other to begin their performance.
“Keep your eyes on planes two and four,” the man continued. “Flying at speeds of five hundred miles per hour, only fifty feet above the ground, they will pass within just a few yards of one another. Robotechnology makes such precision flying possible.”
Planes two and four rapidly approached one another, but just as they were about to begin their pass they were forced to peal off as another plane of a different design, clearly a civilian plane, came out of nowhere to pass lazily between the two fighters.
The crowd loved it. They began laughing.
The man on stage was clearly not as amused. Matt was amused, but at the same time he was concerned.
“How long until that thing is warmed up?”
Kenny didn’t reply. He was still watching the planes, and listening to the conversation between the man on stage and the interloper pilot that was accidentally being broadcast over the PA system. Normally Matt would let the kid enjoy the show, but...
“Kenny?”
“Hmm? What, Mr. Atanian?”
“How long until that thing is warmed up?”
Kenny looked at the remote. “Not long now,” he said.
“What is it?” Kirstin asked.
“Well, we probably shouldn’t stay here long if we’d like to increase our chances of staying alive.”
“Why’s that?” Kirstin asked.
It was Mike who responded with a sudden realization. “Isn’t this place about to be attacked by aliens or something?”
Matt nodded.
Kenny spoke. “Well, we should be safe if the attack isn’t going to begin for at least five minutes. In the meantime, we should go somewhere where we won’t attract attention when we leave.”
They had made their way to a far section of the exhibition grounds where a few of the new fighter craft were on display. The area was deserted at the moment as most everyone was still watching the air show.
Kenny was examining one of the planes closely. “Very interesting,” he was muttering to himself.“Seems like airtight construction. I would imagine that they are spaceworthy. I wonder what these joints under the cockpit are for? Hmm...”
Matt walked over with a smile on his face. “That’s where the fuselage swings down to form the legs.”
“Legs?” Kenny asked.
“Well, this whole plane transforms into a robot.”
“I want one!” Kenny proclaimed.
“Well, they do have more then one of these, but you’d probably have a hard time getting it through the gate, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ve got a solution for that,” Kenny smiled. He pulled out the remote again and pointed it at the aircraft.
“Kenny, wait, no!” Matt exclaimed.
The others looked at Matt.
“Not this one,” Matt said. He pointed to the plane’s call number. “This is VT-102. Someone else has to use this one.” He pointed to another right next to it. “How about that one?”
Kenny shrugged and pointed the remote at the other plane. He hit the mute button, and a beam shot from the remote and surrounded the plane with blue boxes of light. Then the beam from the remote started moving rapidly from left to right, starting at the top and working its way down, causing the plane to disappear as it moved across it.
“I think Kenny’s seen the movie Tron,” Mike commented.
“Do you get all of your ideas from movies?” Kirstin asked.
Kenny smiled in reply.
A few minutes later, the remote had finished its task.
“Someone’s coming,”Kirstin said.
They looked, and saw the blond pilot approaching, accompanied by a shorter, dark haired man in a civilian flight suit.
“Let’s go,” Mike advised.
They had found a secluded area in an alley, and Kenny began pushing buttons on the remote again.
“This’ll get us home, right?” Mike asked.
“I hope so,” Kenny replied.
“Oh, my,” Kirstin said.
“How much longer?”
Kenny’s reply was drowned out when a sudden ear-splitting noise filled the air. The ground shook, there was a bright flash, and the air seemed suddenly hotter.
“What was that?” Mike asked, his hands still over his ears.
“The SDF-1’s main gun! We haven’t got much time!” Matt responded.
“I’m ready,” Kenny said. He pushed the play button on the remote, and there was the watery-explosion effect again as the gate opened before them.
“Where’s John Rhys-Davies when you need him?” Matt asked. He jumped through.
“My, this is exciting,” Kirstin added as she followed.
“Here we go again!” Mike hollered as he, too jumped through.
Kenny was silent as he leaped in.
The gate closed.
They appeared in some kind of command complex. All around was chaos. Everyone seemed to be in some kind of mass hysteria.
“Sempai!” a woman called out. They turned. An attractive Asian woman with short hair was on the ground reaching out towards something they couldn’t see. “Sempai!” she called out again.
Suddenly the woman turned into some kind of orangey-yellow liquid and just popped and sloshed onto the floor.
Without even waiting for anyone to shout an obligatory, “Let’s get out of here!” Kenny opened the gate again and they leapt through.
This time they appeared in a metallic corridor. The walls were a dull gray in colour, and large bolts held sections of the corridor together.
“Where are we now?”Kirstin asked.
Mike and Matt found their surroundings to be very familiar. “Some kind of ship I think,” Mike said.
“I think a space ship. I know this place,” Matt said. It was just out of reach in his brain. He grasped at it but it continued to elude him.
“Someone’s coming,”Kenny said.
They ducked down an adjoining corridor just as two people came from around a corner, the shorter of them pushing a blue metal cart. “It’s true you know, though, Rimmer,” the one pushing the cart said. “You rank below all four of those service robots.” He tapped his temple repeatedly. “Even the one that’s gone absolutely mad.”
“Not for long, maitie,” the other replied. “Up, up, up. That’s where I’m going.”
Both spoke with British accents.
“Not until you pass your Engineer’s exam. And you won’t do that because you’ll just go in there and flunk again.” He took out a cigarette.
“Lister, last time I only failed by the narrowest of narrow margins.”
“You what? You walked in there, wrote ‘I am a fish,’ four hundred times, did a funny little dance and fainted.” He went to light the cigarette but paused as his companion replied.
“That’s a total lie,”the one called Rimmer lied.
“No it’s not, Peterson told me,” the one called Lister said as he lit up.
“‘No it’s not, Peterson told me,’” Rimmer repeated mockingly.
“Lister, if you must know, what I did was I wrote a discourse on porous circuits which was simply too... radical, too... unconventional, too mold-breaking for the examiners to accept.”
“Yeah, you said you were a fish.” He took a puff from his cigarette.
“Is that a cigarette you’re smoking, Lister?”
Lister regarded the cigarette in his hand. “No, it’s a chicken.”
“Right. You’re on report.” Rimmer firmly gripped his clipboard, ready to write up the other man’s offence. “Two times in as many minutes, Lister, I don’t know.”
Lister took another puff, unconcerned. As another man approached, Lister inserted the cigarette in his ear to free up his hands for a moment.
“Rimmer, Lister,” the new arrival said in greeting.
“Yessir!” Rimmer responded, immediately dropping his clipboard to the ground and beginning an overly intricate salute.
“Yo, Toddhunter, get down!” Lister exclaimed, grabbing the cart with both hands and stomping his feat a couple of times.
The new arrival gave them both a curious look and said, “Indeed.”
Mike, Matt, Kenny, and Kirstin took this opportunity to quietly slip away.
Mike and Matt looked at each other with a silly grin on their faces.
“Red Dwarf,” they both said.
Kirstin looked at Mike and Matt. Kenny was busy examining his remote.
“Red Dwarf?” Kirstin asked.
“It’s a British sci-fi sitcom. We’ve landed in the beginning of the pilot episode,” Mike responded.
“Well, at least we have a little time here,” Matt responded. “Rimmer’s exam isn’t until tomorrow, and the crew isn’t wiped out until probably a day or so after the exam.”
“We seem to be landing in places where there is a lot of ‘wiping out,’” Kirstin noted.
“Odd, that, innit?”Matt responded. He turned to the young genius. “Well, Kenny, we have a little more time to hang around here, but how long until we can leave?”
Kenny frowned. “We can’t.”
“What?” Kirstin, Mike, and Matt chorused.
“We’re stuck here. Since we didn’t wait for the remote to warm up after our last landing, I killed the battery when I opened the gate.”
“So what does this mean?” Kirstin asked.
“So this is it, we’re going to die,” Mike deadpanned.
“There’s no way to recharge the battery?” Kirstin asked.
“Well, we could expose the remote to a blast of Cadmium 2 radiation, but unfortunately you don’t come across such things very often.”
“That’s what wipes out the crew,” Matt said.
“Then we can recharge the remote!” Kirstin exclaimed.
“Well, the remote will be recharged, but we’ll be piles of little white dust on the floor,” Mike said.
“And the remote will be too radioactive to safely handle for about three million years,” Kenny added.
“Could we go into stasis like Lister?” Mike asked.
“No, only one spare booth,” Matt responded. “And it must still be empty, because in Stasis Leak Lister and Rimmer are arguing about who they’re going to put into it.”
“Stasis Leak?” Kirstin asked.
“It’s this episode where they find a stasis leak they can walk through to travel back in time to before the accident,” Matt responded.
“Then why can’t we use that to travel to the future?” Mike asked.
“That’s a good idea!” Matt responded.
“Um… are you sure it’s okay to go in here?” Kirstin asked.
“We have to,” Matt responded. “That’s where the leak is.”
Kirstin looked up at the sign that said, “Men’s Showers.”
“Um… well, okay,” she said.
Fortunately the room was unoccupied at the present.
Matt led the way to the appropriate stall and threw open the curtain. “Over here!” he said. He walked in and pushed his hand towards the wall expecting to pass his hand right through it. “Ouch,” he said, as his hand whacked against the wall.
“I think we have a bit of a problem,” Mike quipped.
Kenny stepped forward and removed from his pocket what looked like it had once been a toy Star Trek Tricorder. The others guessed, correctly, that he had modified it so that it was no longer a toy.
“There is some kind of leak here,” he said, “but it is inaccessible from this side unless you came from the other side in the first place. Good thing, too. If we went through we’d probably be aged three million years.”
“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that last part,” Matt said. The others gave him a look.
“Is there anything you can do?” Mike asked Kenny.
Kenny removed from his other pocket a small metal object. Matt
looked at it closely. “Isn’t that the oscillation overthruster from Buckaroo
Banzai?” he asked.
“Huh?” Mike asked.
“Nothing,” Matt said.“Just another thing Kenny designed to look like something from a movie.”
Kenny pondered the device momentarily and pocketed it again. “I need to make a few alterations that’ll take a few days, but when I’m done we’ll be able to safely pass through.”
Examination of the Engine Room revealed the best place to put the remote where it could remain undetected was behind one of the drive plates. Unfortunately, the area behind the drive plates was inaccessible to people of normal size. However…
Matt finished tying a string around the remote and handed the string to Mike. Mike took the string in his clawed, furry little hand and chittered as he ran off.
Frank Toddhunter thought he was seeing things. Had he just seen a squirrel come out from behind one of the drive plates and scurry off?
He bent down and took a close look at the drive plate, still not believing what he had seen. He soon found a new thing to not believe had seen however.
“Mr. Rimmer!” he called out.
“Yessir?” came the quick response from Rimmer, standing off to one side of the room trying to figure out how to repair the squeaky noise the door was making. He immediately went into his overly intricate salute again.
“Weren’t you supposed to repair this drive plate yesterday?”
“Yessir! I did sir. Good job, isn’t it? Best I’ve ever done.”
“You call this repaired? My gran could do a better job without her glasses.”
Rimmer frowned. “With respect sir, your grandmother…”
“Rimmer, spare me the smartarsed reply. Report to the Captain, immediately.”
“Yessir.” After Toddhunter had turned away, Rimmer made a rather rude gesture before departing as ordered.
Mike ran back in, frantically.
“Did you get it planted, Mike?” Matt asked.
Mike chittered at them excitedly.
“Mike,” Matt said, “I can’t speak squirrel.”
Mike pulled out a small dry-erase sign and a marker. He wrote on the sign, “Big Trouble!”
“What is it, Mike?”Kirstin asked.
Mike began to write something else, but Matt stopped him by pouring hot water over him. They all turned away from Mike as he rapidly got dressed and explained the trouble.
“Rimmer just got told to report to the captain for poorly repairing a drive plate.”
“Damn! We’ve got to go, now!” Matt exclaimed.
They ran from their hiding place and high tailed it to the men’s shower. Unfortunately, the shower they needed was occupied. However, they had no time to wait and little time for apologies as they threw open the shower curtain.
“Oh, my,” Kirstin said.
The man looked familiar to Matt. The last time Matt had seen the man had been on TV, but he had been standing in the same shower at the time. Without looking down, Matt smiled and said, “Don’t worry, it’s personality that counts.”
The man wandered away worried about all of the strange encounters he seemed to have in showers. He wouldn’t have long to worry about such things, unfortunately. In a few moments he would be hit in the face by a nuclear wind, and that would give him something a bit more important to worry about.
The four of them ran into the shower, and two of them were shocked to find that the man had been taking a cold shower. Matty and Squirrel-Mike didn’t worry about this long, however.
There was a distant thunderous noise as the floor beneath them shook. “Hurry up, Kenny!” Matty exclaimed as Kirstin hastily picked up Mike’s clothes.
Kenny pulled out the overthruster and pushed a button on it. The wall before them began glowing pink. They jumped through.
The next instant, the now empty shower was blasted by radiation.
They stepped out into a dimly lit corridor deep in the bowels of the ship. “Look for something that says ‘Xpress Lift,’” Matty said.
“Is that it over there?” Kirstin asked?”
Matt nodded. They got in the lift, and some hours later they arrived in the area of the ship they needed to be in.
They began to make their way to the Engine Room. Half way there, they heard a noise behind them. It was a sort of howly-screachy noise from someone fast approaching.
Alarmed, they turned to see an immaculately dressed black man behind them.
“Hey, who are you monkeys!” he asked them. When he spoke, they noticed his pointed teeth.
“Hi, Cat,” Matty responded.
“How do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Well, you are the best looking thing in the Universe,” Matty responded, figuring that the quickest way out of this would be to play up to Cat’s ego.
“Well you got me there,” Cat responded. He pointed. “What’s that?!”
Kirstin looked where Cat had pointed. “That’s a squirrel,” she said.
“Why do I get the urge to chase it?” Cat asked, smiling.
“I wouldn’t. Squirrels are ferocious creatures that could tare you in half in a heartbeat.”
Mike chittered angrily and waved one clawed paw around for effect.
“Hey, thanks, bud. I owe you one!” Cat looked at them suspiciously. “Wait a minute…”
Mike stopped waving the paw, worried that Cat had seen through their ruse.
“You two wouldn’t be women, would you?” Cat asked.
“Um… yes…” Kirstin responded.
Cat made that howly-screachy noise again. “Don’t move!” he exclaimed. “I’ll be back!” He ran off down the corridor.
“I think we should leave,” Matty said after Cat was gone.
“What was that?”Kirstin asked.
Kenny looked up from his Tricorder, which he had been using all this time. “It appears that that is what evolution has done to the common cat in three million years time.”
“Where did he go?”Kirstin asked.
“Probably to take a couple of baths and to change from his third-best suit to his best-best suit, or something,” Matty said, and then she repeated, “I think we should leave.”
“Why?” Kirstin asked.
“Well… let’s just say that I for one don’t want to have kittens,” Matty responded.
Kirstin blushed and said, “I think we should leave.”
Mike found the remote where he had left it, and Kenny announced that it was functioning normally.
“I wonder where we’ll end up now?” Kirstin asked.
“I’m betting anywhere but home,” Matty responded.
Mike chittered his agreement.
Kenny activated the gate and they all leapt through, and a moment later they reappeared in Kenny’s Laboratory.
“We did it!” Kirstin exclaimed, excited. “We’re home!”
Hughes stirred and slowly rose from where he had been slumped unconscious for the past few days. He rubbed his head gingerly. “I miss anything exciting?” he asked.
He actually had two games – one was a sports game that Matt Swett had given him at the troop’s Christmas party. Swett had insisted he take it, even though not only did Matt not care for sports games, but at the time he didn’t even know he owned a PlayStation yet.
The other game was…well…
He’d been engrossed in the game for some time now, eating little, sleeping little, and reluctantly stopping only when he had to go to work. After all, if he didn’t keep playing, who else would save the world from the evil ShinRa Corporation? He laughed slightly. ShinRa was only a minor problem at this point, of course. The big problem was Sephiroth. Well, that and which of the two lovely girls vying for his affections would eventually win. Little did Matt know as he headed north in search of one of those girls that their contest for him would soon have a tragic shift in one girl’s favour...
“Matt,” his mother called out from the kitchen, “you’ve got mail!”
Matt hit the pause button and cursed softly. He rose from his bed where he’d been sitting and carefully made his way from there to his door. (His room wasn’t the most tidy in the world. He did mean to some day get around to doing something about it. Really, he did...)
On the kitchen counter, Matt saw a plain white envelope with his name and address on it, written in the most impressive calligraphy. He picked up the envelope and turned it over. On neither side was written a return address.
He returned to his room and sat back on his bed. He regarded the frozen image on the television screen with interest. His hand reached for the controller, but paused just short of picking it up. Instead, his hand returned to the envelope as curiosity got the better of him.
He carefully tore open the envelope and extracted from it a small handwritten card, covered with more finely detailed calligraphy. It was an invitation, complete with time, date, and directions. The date was tomorrow, Sunday. It was an invitation to...
Matt stared at it in wonder. Finely, after a significant pause, he put it down and picked up the controller again. After all, as odd as the invitation was, it wasn’t until tomorrow.
Matt pulled his bike to a halt in front of a completely average house on a completely average street in a completely average section of Springfield. Already there was Bill Hughes and Mike Quadrozzi, both having been dropped off by their parents a short time ago.
“You got an invite too, huh?” Mike asked.
Matt nodded. “Where are Aaron and Billy?” he asked. “Since you two are here, I’d have thought they’d be here, too.”
“Bill had a hockey game today,” Hughes said. “You know he wouldn’t miss one of those for his own funeral.”
“Aaron called me last night,” Mike said, “as there was no number on the invite. Said he couldn’t make it. Didn’t say why.” He paused briefly, noticing something in the distance, before adding, “Although if he knew who else was going to be here, I’m sure he’d have made more of an effort.”
Matt and Hughes looked in the direction Mike was looking and saw Kirstin Porter approaching on her bicycle. She pulled to a stop next to Matt’s bike. “Hi, guys,” she said.“Where’s Aaron? I thought he’d be here, too.”
“Couldn’t make it,”Hughes told her.
“Oh,” Kirstin said, a bit of disappointment apparent in her voice despite her best efforts to mask it. “In any case,” she added, “I can’t help but wonder why we’re all here. It just seems so sudden, and not like him. He’s a nice kid, but not very social.”
Matt nodded his agreement, as did the others. Just then, the front door opened and out stepped the person who had invited them all together. Kenneth E. Pendrell.
After showing Matt and Kirstin someplace to put their bikes, Kenny invited them all inside. The interior of the house was much like the outside: average. Nice furnishings in all the rooms they’d seen, but something didn’t seem quite right. There were no pictures on the walls. No magazines or books upon the coffee table. In fact, the whole place was quite stark, Matt realized. Nothing extra at all. Just tables, chairs, a few appliances here and there... All of it looked brand new. There wasn’t a scratch on a single thing. It wasn’t the kind of brand new that you get with people who were obsessive about keeping their things nice, either. It was just as if... as if the house had an “un-lived-in” feel to it. Matt shivered slightly.
Kenny had asked them to all wait in the living room and had disappeared into the kitchen. Now he reappeared carrying a trey with drinks on it. He handed one to each of his guests before disappearing again, muttering an apology as he did so.
Matt sipped his drink and was surprised. It was Iced Tea. 4C Iced Tea, perfectly stirred and chilled. He hadn’t asked for anything specific, and yet Kenny had brought him his favourite drink. He turned to the others.
“What did you all get to drink?” he asked.
“Schweppes ginger ale,” Mike said, also surprised. “Hey, did you know that John Cleese used to be a spokesman for this stuff?” He took another sip.
Hughes looked up from his drink, having taken only one sip. “Hard orange juice. Must be 500 proof.”He put the cup down. “As much as I like this, I better not drink any more.” He picked it up again and took another sip before putting it down once more.“Well, another sip couldn’t hurt.”
Kirstin looked up from her traditional Japanese teacup, a pleasant look of surprise on her face.“Oolong tea,” she said as she brought the cup to her mouth once more.
All of them had been given their favourite beverages, each without having asked for anything specific. A sudden chill went down their spines.
Just then, Kenny reappeared. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said, timidly. “I was hoping that you’d all be able to come, but I understand that Mr. Aaron and Mr. Billy can’t make it.”
The others nodded.
Kenny continued.“Well, everything’s ready, so I can tell you all why I’ve invited you here.”
Kenny looked unsure as if how to continue, unused as he was to dealing with others.
“What is it, Kenny?”Kirstin said in encouragement. “What did you want to tell us?”
“Thank you,” Kenny replied. This was not directed at Kirstin, but rather at all of them. It was an answer to Kirstin’s question. “Thank you for making me feel like I belong, and not like an outsider.”
“No thanks are necessary,” Mike replied. “We like having you around.”
Kenny looked down for a moment, embarrassed. “No, really,” he said. “It means a lot to me. I want... I want to show you something.”
Hughes took a sip of his drink.
“What is it?” Matt asked.
“Please follow me,”Kenny merely replied.
The others rose and followed. Kenny led them to a door in the hallway. The door was covered by locks. Regular locks, deadbolts, padlocks, combination locks, even a key-card lock and another that required a thumbprint. Slowly, methodically, Kenny undid each of them.
He opened the door and the smell of stale air came from the other side. They peered inside the doorway and saw a stone staircase descending, spiraling down, lit by naked light bulbs that seemed to stretch into infinity. Even with the light bulbs, the stairs eventually disappeared into distant darkness.
They turned to regard Kenny, the prickly feeling that they all felt on the back of their necks erupting into new heights of prickliness.
“I’m sorry,” he said.“There is a faster way down, but it only has room for one.” He backed slowly towards a door across the hall, which he opened. As he disappeared into the room, he said, “I’ll meet you down there.”
The door closed. Matt, Mike, Hughes, and Kirstin turned back to regard the still open door, with it’s foreboding staircase.
“This is too weird even for me,” Hughes said, taking a sip. He turned back towards the room that Kenny had disappeared into and thrust open the door, followed closely by the others. “Hey, Kenny,” he began, but he stopped speaking as he looked around the room before him.
A shaft of sunlight was broken up as it passed through the blinds on the window. The sunlight illuminated an average bedroom. Average at first glance. It had a bed, a bureau, a bookcase, a closet, and a tidy desk. The desk summed up the room perfectly: it was tidy. Almost too so.
There were two things odd about the room, other then it’s excessive tidiness.
One was the metal panel that was flush with the wooden floor in one corner of the room. It was cool to the touch, and there seemed to be a thin line across the middle of it. It was so tight together and so perfectly flush that it took them a few minutes to realize that the line was actually a separation where the panel could slide apart rather then just a decorative line lightly etched into it.
The second was Kenny, or rather the lack of him. Seconds prior to their own entry, they had seen Kenny disappear into this very room, but now he was gone. An examination of the window discounted that as a possibility: there were no footprints in the snow outside. That left the panel.
“Where do you think it leads?” Kirstin asked.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “But where ever it is, Kenny must have gone there, and he wants us to follow him.”
Hughes took a sip.
Matt turned and looked out of the room, towards the hall and the still open doorway on the other side. “Shall we?” he asked.
“So how many stairs do you reckon it’s been so far?” Matt asked.
“Oh, I shtopped counting after a quabillion or sho,” Hughes responded with an absent grin on his face. He hiccupped.
“Is he okay?” Kirstin whispered to Mike, referring to Hughes. Mike merely shrugged in response.
Matt turned and looked in the direction they had come. They’d been descending for at least an hour.
“I wonder how much farther it is?” Kirstin asked, reading Matt’s mind.
“Much farther and we’d be surrounded by liquid hot magma,” Mike commented.
“That’d be, like, really, really... what’s the word?” Hughes asked. He took a sip.
They continued walking, spiralling slowly down the cold, damp passageway. “I do hope it’s not much further,” Kirstin said.
“I wonder where we’re going?” Matt asked.
“I don’t know, but this is just really, really weird,” Mike added.
“Hot!” Hughes suddenly shouted, startling everyone. “That’sh the word I wash looking for. Magma ish really, really hot.”
“Note to self,” Mike said aloud. “When Hughes turns 21, move to another country.”
Hughes took a sip and regarded Mike quizzically. “Wash it shomthing I shaid?”
A half hour later they were still descending. Granted their progress was hampered somewhat by Hughes. He had begun walking the entire length of each stair, from the left side to the right side, before he’d walk down to the next stair. That one he’d walk from the right side to the left before descending one stair again. Then, he’d repeat the process, all the while whistling some merry tune he seemed to have made up on the spot. It is also worth note that these were rather wide stairs, so all of this took quite some time.
Still, even with Hughes slowing them down, they had been descending for over an hour and a half now. The air, which had seemed stale to begin with, had gradually gotten more so, approaching something which one might imagine archaeologists in Egypt might have encountered when first setting foot in a newly discovered tomb.
It would be a half hour more until finely, much to everyone’s relief, they reached a door.
At least, they assumed it to be a door. The stone passageway they had been descending in came to an abrupt halt and there was a metal panel in the wall in front of them. There was no obvious way apparent to open the panel. Like the one that had been on the floor in Kenny’s room, it was cool to the touch.
Mike went forward and lightly knocked his knuckles on the door. The knocking produced no sound at all. Mike frowned, made a fist, and pounded harder. Still no sound. Not even the faint sound you might produce from knocking on a huge solid boulder. It was as if the door absorbed the sound.
“Can one of you say something?” Mike asked.
“Like what?” Kirstin responded.
“Oh good, I didn’t go deaf,” Mike said.
“I was beginning to wonder the same thing,” Matt remarked.
“What a pretty door,”Hughes beamed.
Suddenly, with no warning, the panel slid aside. A burst of fresh, cool air came from within, coming upon them with a slight wooshing sound. Light poured from within, making it difficult for them to see what was on the
other side.
And then came a voice. It was Kenny’s to be sure, but it was different. Gone was the usual timidity. Gone was the quietness. Instead, there was confidence. It was a commanding, authoritative voice. Yet one thing that seemed constant was the voice’s usual courteousness.
This is what the voice said: “Welcome, my friends. I have been expecting you. Please, come in.”
The four of them trepidaciously stepped into the light. Rather, three of them stepped into the light and one stumbled. They were surprised to find the floor beneath themselves moving, and as their eyes adjusted to the bright light they discovered they were on a moving walkway, similar to those found in some of the larger airports.
This discovery didn’t keep their attention long. All of them except Hughes stared in shock at their surroundings. Hughes just kept himself amused by grinning at the walkway.
The room was so big you couldn't even call it a room. It was immense, gigantic, and cavernous. The far wall was indistinct, the ceiling faded away in a cloudy haze. Machines and instruments crowded every open space atop shiny aluminium counters and cabinets filled with scientific journals and essays of all sorts. There were scores of bookshelves, hundreds of test tubes and thousands of multicoloured beakers and flasks. Giant pipettes stood next to voltronic pacificators and double glass refibulators and dozens of other devices that would tongue-tie Dr. Seuss, himself.
The walkway eventually slowed down and came to a halt before one large bookcase. Kenny looked up from a book he was reading and smiled. He put the book, The Not At All Brief History of Time for the Non-Layman, Complete and Unabridged Vol. 42 by Prof. Stephen Hawking, back on the bookcase with the other 149 volumes in the series.
“It’s a good book,”he told them. “A bit incorrect in a few areas, but they’re common misconceptions.” Again, his tone of voice was unlike any they’d ever heard from him before. It was normal.
Matt raised his hand, like a child in grade school. “May I ask a question?”
“Sure, Mr. Atanian,”Kenny replied.
“What is all of this?”
“This,” Kenny said with a proud look on his face, “is my Laboratory!”
Kenny gave them a brief tour of his Laboratory. When he spoke the word, he added extreme emphasis to the “bor” part, dragging out the vowel and rolling the r in a very profound manor.
He showed them spatial metaphasic vertion shells, ambient cosmic plasma bursts, duodynetic anaphasic streams, and osmotic energy cores. They were all in awe, even Hughes.
It was all overwhelming. There was so much technology they couldn’t even begin to grasp, and the room was so immense that it felt not like being normal sized people in a huge space, but rather like they themselves had been shrunk. The vast poster on one wall of the Periodic Table of Elements did nothing to help correct the misconception. It occurred to Matt that the feeling he was having couldn’t have been too dissimilar to how Tick and Arthur felt when they had accompanied Sewer Urchin into the world beneath the city streets.
A few hours later, their brief tour was winding down.
“Why show us all this?” Mike asked.
“This is my life,”Kenny responded. “Rather, this was my life. Now, it is simply a part of my life. Thanks to you, I now have another part: friends.”
Hughes smiled as he hiccuped.
“What’s this?”Kirstin asked, looking at a small beaker filled with a clear, thick liquid.
“That’s a special polish,” Kenny responded. “Ever see the film, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?”
The others nodded.
“Remember that bit where Chevy Chase was on that sled? Well, this is like that lubricant that he had used on it, only this stuff is stronger. It’s still in the testing stages. I shall probably have to dilute it if it were ever to be actually used.”
“You know,” Mike pondered, “that could come in handy at the Klondike Derby.”
Kenny smiled. “I’ll see if I can have it ready by then.”
“What’s that over there?” Kirstin asked, pointing.
“My God!” Matt exclaimed as he looked where Kirstin had indicated. “It’s a Stargate!”
Indeed, the large circular construct looked very much like the device from the science fiction film. Kenny smiled once again. “Well, not quite. I styled it’s exterior after the Stargate, however. And the field it creates is similar in appearance. I’ve even styled the user interface to be somewhat like that in the film.”
“So what is it?” Mike asked.
“It’s a trans-interphasic particle conduit,” Kenny proclaimed.
The others just stared at him.
“It creates a wormhole through not only space and time, but reality as well, making it possible to travel to any place or time as long as it is outside our normal plane of existence.”
The others just stared at him.
“It’s a magic doorway to alternate dimensions.”
“Oh!” Mike said.“Kind of like Sliders.”
“Sort of,” Kenny said as he, Matt, Mike, and Kirstin move towards it for a closer look. ”More like Sliders meets Doctor Who.”
Matt, the resident Whovian, made the connection. “Ah! So it takes us not only to alternate present day Earths, but alternate any-time any-places!”
“Exactly!”
“Oh, my,” Kirstin simply said.
“Can we try it?” Mike asked.
“I’m afraid not,”Kenny told him. “It’s not ready yet. I haven’t perfected the returning mechanism.”
He held up one of those multi-use remote controls you get at Radio Shack that can control your TV, VCR, cable, stereo system, garage door, and toaster oven all in one handy unit.
“That’s just a regular remote control,” Matt noted.
“Hey, it works on Sliders.Besides, I’ve made one or two minor modifications.”
“That’sh kinda neat, you know?” Hughes slurred.
The others turned to look at Hughes. He was standing near the control panel. He held up his orange juice and poured the last of it down his throat. He then keeled over unconscious, falling on the control panel and hitting exactly seven of the symbols on it as he did so. Now, as anyone who has seen Stargate knows, seven symbols activate the gate. The seven that Hughes had landed on happened to be the exact seven that were already in position on the gate, and thus it opened immediately.
“No!” was all Kenny had time to exclaim as the gate opened up with that really neat watery-like explosion effect. As he, Kirstin, Mike, and Matt had been standing right in front of the gate, they were immediately sucked in.
Meanwhile, Hughes remained blissfully unaware, slumped against the control mechanism and enjoying his nap.
The four of them landed with a thud and were surrounded by darkness. It took them a moment to realize that this was because they had landed in a small shed. Matt pulled open the door, flooding the shed with sunlight. The air smelled heavily of the sea.
They stepped out into a city with an air of celebration over it. People were moving briskly to and fro as if getting ready for a great event.
Kenny was pushing a few buttons on his remote control. He frowned and gave it a whack.
“When can we go back home?” Mike asked.
“Well,” Kenny replied, “the remote needs a little while to warm up, and then I can open the gate again. Only trouble is that I’m not sure if I’ll get us home or not.
“Well,” Kirstin said,“we may as well look around a bit while we wait.”
“Where are we?” Matt asked.
Kenny hit a few more buttons on the remote and it spat out a small slip of paper.
“Alternate Earth,” he read, “an island in the South Pacific, sometime around the year 2010, plus or minus a year or so.”
Mike breathed in a bit of the heady sea air. “South Pacific, eh?” He began to turn around. “Seems like a nice place. I wonder what island this... holy shit!!”
The others turned to see what had startled Mike.
“Well,” Matt said, “I think I know what island this is. It’s called Macross Island.”
“Oh, my,” Kirstin said.
“And that,” Matt said, pointing to the colossal spacecraft sitting in the middle of the city,“is the Super Dimensional Fortress.”
“I want one,” Kenny said with a slight smile on his face.
“Well they only have the one, and I think they’d notice if it went missing,” Matt responded.
“Isn’t this an anime series?” Mike asked.
Matt nodded. “I wonder if this is Macross or Robotech?” he asked rhetorically. He then began to take notice of the crowd of people. Most of them were moving towards a podium upon which stood a tall man in a gray flight suit with longish blond hair.
“Come on,” Matt said.“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Today, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll see how we’ve applied human know-how to understanding and harnessing a complex alien technology,” the man in the flight suit said to the audience.
Matt looked up, as did the others. A half a dozen large fighter planes pealed away from each other to begin their performance.
“Keep your eyes on planes two and four,” the man continued. “Flying at speeds of five hundred miles per hour, only fifty feet above the ground, they will pass within just a few yards of one another. Robotechnology makes such precision flying possible.”
Planes two and four rapidly approached one another, but just as they were about to begin their pass they were forced to peal off as another plane of a different design, clearly a civilian plane, came out of nowhere to pass lazily between the two fighters.
The crowd loved it. They began laughing.
The man on stage was clearly not as amused. Matt was amused, but at the same time he was concerned.
“How long until that thing is warmed up?”
Kenny didn’t reply. He was still watching the planes, and listening to the conversation between the man on stage and the interloper pilot that was accidentally being broadcast over the PA system. Normally Matt would let the kid enjoy the show, but...
“Kenny?”
“Hmm? What, Mr. Atanian?”
“How long until that thing is warmed up?”
Kenny looked at the remote. “Not long now,” he said.
“What is it?” Kirstin asked.
“Well, we probably shouldn’t stay here long if we’d like to increase our chances of staying alive.”
“Why’s that?” Kirstin asked.
It was Mike who responded with a sudden realization. “Isn’t this place about to be attacked by aliens or something?”
Matt nodded.
Kenny spoke. “Well, we should be safe if the attack isn’t going to begin for at least five minutes. In the meantime, we should go somewhere where we won’t attract attention when we leave.”
They had made their way to a far section of the exhibition grounds where a few of the new fighter craft were on display. The area was deserted at the moment as most everyone was still watching the air show.
Kenny was examining one of the planes closely. “Very interesting,” he was muttering to himself.“Seems like airtight construction. I would imagine that they are spaceworthy. I wonder what these joints under the cockpit are for? Hmm...”
Matt walked over with a smile on his face. “That’s where the fuselage swings down to form the legs.”
“Legs?” Kenny asked.
“Well, this whole plane transforms into a robot.”
“I want one!” Kenny proclaimed.
“Well, they do have more then one of these, but you’d probably have a hard time getting it through the gate, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ve got a solution for that,” Kenny smiled. He pulled out the remote again and pointed it at the aircraft.
“Kenny, wait, no!” Matt exclaimed.
The others looked at Matt.
“Not this one,” Matt said. He pointed to the plane’s call number. “This is VT-102. Someone else has to use this one.” He pointed to another right next to it. “How about that one?”
Kenny shrugged and pointed the remote at the other plane. He hit the mute button, and a beam shot from the remote and surrounded the plane with blue boxes of light. Then the beam from the remote started moving rapidly from left to right, starting at the top and working its way down, causing the plane to disappear as it moved across it.
“I think Kenny’s seen the movie Tron,” Mike commented.
“Do you get all of your ideas from movies?” Kirstin asked.
Kenny smiled in reply.
A few minutes later, the remote had finished its task.
“Someone’s coming,”Kirstin said.
They looked, and saw the blond pilot approaching, accompanied by a shorter, dark haired man in a civilian flight suit.
“Let’s go,” Mike advised.
They had found a secluded area in an alley, and Kenny began pushing buttons on the remote again.
“This’ll get us home, right?” Mike asked.
“I hope so,” Kenny replied.
“Oh, my,” Kirstin said.
“How much longer?”
Kenny’s reply was drowned out when a sudden ear-splitting noise filled the air. The ground shook, there was a bright flash, and the air seemed suddenly hotter.
“What was that?” Mike asked, his hands still over his ears.
“The SDF-1’s main gun! We haven’t got much time!” Matt responded.
“I’m ready,” Kenny said. He pushed the play button on the remote, and there was the watery-explosion effect again as the gate opened before them.
“Where’s John Rhys-Davies when you need him?” Matt asked. He jumped through.
“My, this is exciting,” Kirstin added as she followed.
“Here we go again!” Mike hollered as he, too jumped through.
Kenny was silent as he leaped in.
The gate closed.
They appeared in some kind of command complex. All around was chaos. Everyone seemed to be in some kind of mass hysteria.
“Sempai!” a woman called out. They turned. An attractive Asian woman with short hair was on the ground reaching out towards something they couldn’t see. “Sempai!” she called out again.
Suddenly the woman turned into some kind of orangey-yellow liquid and just popped and sloshed onto the floor.
Without even waiting for anyone to shout an obligatory, “Let’s get out of here!” Kenny opened the gate again and they leapt through.
This time they appeared in a metallic corridor. The walls were a dull gray in colour, and large bolts held sections of the corridor together.
“Where are we now?”Kirstin asked.
Mike and Matt found their surroundings to be very familiar. “Some kind of ship I think,” Mike said.
“I think a space ship. I know this place,” Matt said. It was just out of reach in his brain. He grasped at it but it continued to elude him.
“Someone’s coming,”Kenny said.
They ducked down an adjoining corridor just as two people came from around a corner, the shorter of them pushing a blue metal cart. “It’s true you know, though, Rimmer,” the one pushing the cart said. “You rank below all four of those service robots.” He tapped his temple repeatedly. “Even the one that’s gone absolutely mad.”
“Not for long, maitie,” the other replied. “Up, up, up. That’s where I’m going.”
Both spoke with British accents.
“Not until you pass your Engineer’s exam. And you won’t do that because you’ll just go in there and flunk again.” He took out a cigarette.
“Lister, last time I only failed by the narrowest of narrow margins.”
“You what? You walked in there, wrote ‘I am a fish,’ four hundred times, did a funny little dance and fainted.” He went to light the cigarette but paused as his companion replied.
“That’s a total lie,”the one called Rimmer lied.
“No it’s not, Peterson told me,” the one called Lister said as he lit up.
“‘No it’s not, Peterson told me,’” Rimmer repeated mockingly.
“Lister, if you must know, what I did was I wrote a discourse on porous circuits which was simply too... radical, too... unconventional, too mold-breaking for the examiners to accept.”
“Yeah, you said you were a fish.” He took a puff from his cigarette.
“Is that a cigarette you’re smoking, Lister?”
Lister regarded the cigarette in his hand. “No, it’s a chicken.”
“Right. You’re on report.” Rimmer firmly gripped his clipboard, ready to write up the other man’s offence. “Two times in as many minutes, Lister, I don’t know.”
Lister took another puff, unconcerned. As another man approached, Lister inserted the cigarette in his ear to free up his hands for a moment.
“Rimmer, Lister,” the new arrival said in greeting.
“Yessir!” Rimmer responded, immediately dropping his clipboard to the ground and beginning an overly intricate salute.
“Yo, Toddhunter, get down!” Lister exclaimed, grabbing the cart with both hands and stomping his feat a couple of times.
The new arrival gave them both a curious look and said, “Indeed.”
Mike, Matt, Kenny, and Kirstin took this opportunity to quietly slip away.
Mike and Matt looked at each other with a silly grin on their faces.
“Red Dwarf,” they both said.
Kirstin looked at Mike and Matt. Kenny was busy examining his remote.
“Red Dwarf?” Kirstin asked.
“It’s a British sci-fi sitcom. We’ve landed in the beginning of the pilot episode,” Mike responded.
“Well, at least we have a little time here,” Matt responded. “Rimmer’s exam isn’t until tomorrow, and the crew isn’t wiped out until probably a day or so after the exam.”
“We seem to be landing in places where there is a lot of ‘wiping out,’” Kirstin noted.
“Odd, that, innit?”Matt responded. He turned to the young genius. “Well, Kenny, we have a little more time to hang around here, but how long until we can leave?”
Kenny frowned. “We can’t.”
“What?” Kirstin, Mike, and Matt chorused.
“We’re stuck here. Since we didn’t wait for the remote to warm up after our last landing, I killed the battery when I opened the gate.”
“So what does this mean?” Kirstin asked.
“So this is it, we’re going to die,” Mike deadpanned.
“There’s no way to recharge the battery?” Kirstin asked.
“Well, we could expose the remote to a blast of Cadmium 2 radiation, but unfortunately you don’t come across such things very often.”
“That’s what wipes out the crew,” Matt said.
“Then we can recharge the remote!” Kirstin exclaimed.
“Well, the remote will be recharged, but we’ll be piles of little white dust on the floor,” Mike said.
“And the remote will be too radioactive to safely handle for about three million years,” Kenny added.
“Could we go into stasis like Lister?” Mike asked.
“No, only one spare booth,” Matt responded. “And it must still be empty, because in Stasis Leak Lister and Rimmer are arguing about who they’re going to put into it.”
“Stasis Leak?” Kirstin asked.
“It’s this episode where they find a stasis leak they can walk through to travel back in time to before the accident,” Matt responded.
“Then why can’t we use that to travel to the future?” Mike asked.
“That’s a good idea!” Matt responded.
“Um… are you sure it’s okay to go in here?” Kirstin asked.
“We have to,” Matt responded. “That’s where the leak is.”
Kirstin looked up at the sign that said, “Men’s Showers.”
“Um… well, okay,” she said.
Fortunately the room was unoccupied at the present.
Matt led the way to the appropriate stall and threw open the curtain. “Over here!” he said. He walked in and pushed his hand towards the wall expecting to pass his hand right through it. “Ouch,” he said, as his hand whacked against the wall.
“I think we have a bit of a problem,” Mike quipped.
Kenny stepped forward and removed from his pocket what looked like it had once been a toy Star Trek Tricorder. The others guessed, correctly, that he had modified it so that it was no longer a toy.
“There is some kind of leak here,” he said, “but it is inaccessible from this side unless you came from the other side in the first place. Good thing, too. If we went through we’d probably be aged three million years.”
“Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that last part,” Matt said. The others gave him a look.
“Is there anything you can do?” Mike asked Kenny.
Kenny removed from his other pocket a small metal object. Matt
looked at it closely. “Isn’t that the oscillation overthruster from Buckaroo
Banzai?” he asked.
“Huh?” Mike asked.
“Nothing,” Matt said.“Just another thing Kenny designed to look like something from a movie.”
Kenny pondered the device momentarily and pocketed it again. “I need to make a few alterations that’ll take a few days, but when I’m done we’ll be able to safely pass through.”
Examination of the Engine Room revealed the best place to put the remote where it could remain undetected was behind one of the drive plates. Unfortunately, the area behind the drive plates was inaccessible to people of normal size. However…
Matt finished tying a string around the remote and handed the string to Mike. Mike took the string in his clawed, furry little hand and chittered as he ran off.
Frank Toddhunter thought he was seeing things. Had he just seen a squirrel come out from behind one of the drive plates and scurry off?
He bent down and took a close look at the drive plate, still not believing what he had seen. He soon found a new thing to not believe had seen however.
“Mr. Rimmer!” he called out.
“Yessir?” came the quick response from Rimmer, standing off to one side of the room trying to figure out how to repair the squeaky noise the door was making. He immediately went into his overly intricate salute again.
“Weren’t you supposed to repair this drive plate yesterday?”
“Yessir! I did sir. Good job, isn’t it? Best I’ve ever done.”
“You call this repaired? My gran could do a better job without her glasses.”
Rimmer frowned. “With respect sir, your grandmother…”
“Rimmer, spare me the smartarsed reply. Report to the Captain, immediately.”
“Yessir.” After Toddhunter had turned away, Rimmer made a rather rude gesture before departing as ordered.
Mike ran back in, frantically.
“Did you get it planted, Mike?” Matt asked.
Mike chittered at them excitedly.
“Mike,” Matt said, “I can’t speak squirrel.”
Mike pulled out a small dry-erase sign and a marker. He wrote on the sign, “Big Trouble!”
“What is it, Mike?”Kirstin asked.
Mike began to write something else, but Matt stopped him by pouring hot water over him. They all turned away from Mike as he rapidly got dressed and explained the trouble.
“Rimmer just got told to report to the captain for poorly repairing a drive plate.”
“Damn! We’ve got to go, now!” Matt exclaimed.
They ran from their hiding place and high tailed it to the men’s shower. Unfortunately, the shower they needed was occupied. However, they had no time to wait and little time for apologies as they threw open the shower curtain.
“Oh, my,” Kirstin said.
The man looked familiar to Matt. The last time Matt had seen the man had been on TV, but he had been standing in the same shower at the time. Without looking down, Matt smiled and said, “Don’t worry, it’s personality that counts.”
The man wandered away worried about all of the strange encounters he seemed to have in showers. He wouldn’t have long to worry about such things, unfortunately. In a few moments he would be hit in the face by a nuclear wind, and that would give him something a bit more important to worry about.
The four of them ran into the shower, and two of them were shocked to find that the man had been taking a cold shower. Matty and Squirrel-Mike didn’t worry about this long, however.
There was a distant thunderous noise as the floor beneath them shook. “Hurry up, Kenny!” Matty exclaimed as Kirstin hastily picked up Mike’s clothes.
Kenny pulled out the overthruster and pushed a button on it. The wall before them began glowing pink. They jumped through.
The next instant, the now empty shower was blasted by radiation.
They stepped out into a dimly lit corridor deep in the bowels of the ship. “Look for something that says ‘Xpress Lift,’” Matty said.
“Is that it over there?” Kirstin asked?”
Matt nodded. They got in the lift, and some hours later they arrived in the area of the ship they needed to be in.
They began to make their way to the Engine Room. Half way there, they heard a noise behind them. It was a sort of howly-screachy noise from someone fast approaching.
Alarmed, they turned to see an immaculately dressed black man behind them.
“Hey, who are you monkeys!” he asked them. When he spoke, they noticed his pointed teeth.
“Hi, Cat,” Matty responded.
“How do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Well, you are the best looking thing in the Universe,” Matty responded, figuring that the quickest way out of this would be to play up to Cat’s ego.
“Well you got me there,” Cat responded. He pointed. “What’s that?!”
Kirstin looked where Cat had pointed. “That’s a squirrel,” she said.
“Why do I get the urge to chase it?” Cat asked, smiling.
“I wouldn’t. Squirrels are ferocious creatures that could tare you in half in a heartbeat.”
Mike chittered angrily and waved one clawed paw around for effect.
“Hey, thanks, bud. I owe you one!” Cat looked at them suspiciously. “Wait a minute…”
Mike stopped waving the paw, worried that Cat had seen through their ruse.
“You two wouldn’t be women, would you?” Cat asked.
“Um… yes…” Kirstin responded.
Cat made that howly-screachy noise again. “Don’t move!” he exclaimed. “I’ll be back!” He ran off down the corridor.
“I think we should leave,” Matty said after Cat was gone.
“What was that?”Kirstin asked.
Kenny looked up from his Tricorder, which he had been using all this time. “It appears that that is what evolution has done to the common cat in three million years time.”
“Where did he go?”Kirstin asked.
“Probably to take a couple of baths and to change from his third-best suit to his best-best suit, or something,” Matty said, and then she repeated, “I think we should leave.”
“Why?” Kirstin asked.
“Well… let’s just say that I for one don’t want to have kittens,” Matty responded.
Kirstin blushed and said, “I think we should leave.”
Mike found the remote where he had left it, and Kenny announced that it was functioning normally.
“I wonder where we’ll end up now?” Kirstin asked.
“I’m betting anywhere but home,” Matty responded.
Mike chittered his agreement.
Kenny activated the gate and they all leapt through, and a moment later they reappeared in Kenny’s Laboratory.
“We did it!” Kirstin exclaimed, excited. “We’re home!”
Hughes stirred and slowly rose from where he had been slumped unconscious for the past few days. He rubbed his head gingerly. “I miss anything exciting?” he asked.
Disclaimer:
Well…let’s see… most of the stuff I “borrowed” this time around was acknowledged within the story itself, such as Stargate, Sliders, Doctor Who, Robotech, Red Dwarf, etc… Dialogue for Roy Fokker was lifted straight from the Robotech novel “Genesis” by Jack McKinney. Dialogue from the scene between Lister and Rimmer was lifted straight from the episode The End by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.
What might not have been as clear to anyone who has not seen the film End of Evangelion was the destination of their second slide. They landed in NERV headquarters right in the middle of Third Impact. Good thing they left so soon…^_^
And of course, as usual, Jusenkyo curses are borrowed without permission from Ranma ½ by Rumiko Takahashi.
What might not have been as clear to anyone who has not seen the film End of Evangelion was the destination of their second slide. They landed in NERV headquarters right in the middle of Third Impact. Good thing they left so soon…^_^
And of course, as usual, Jusenkyo curses are borrowed without permission from Ranma ½ by Rumiko Takahashi.