Daniel X: Game Over (13 page)

You could almost hear the sickening realizations dawn around the boardroom table. This was why they hadn’t been able to pause the game. This was why everything had seemed so real. And this was why Number 7’s threat to terminate them should be taken seriously.

I wasn’t sure what kind of a long-term management technique it was, but something told me that Number 7 had just lit quite a motivating little fire under these greedy, selfish aliens, and that this night’s hunt was going to be particularly hard fought.

That poor Pleionid didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, whatever its abilities were. I cleaned my eyes and
flicked my wings, which I guess is the fly equivalent of a discouraged head shake.

“How disgusting!” screeched Number 8. “A fly! There on that hat! Somebody vaporize it!”

Uh-oh.

I ZIGGED, I zagged, I climbed, I dove, and somehow I actually managed to dodge a half dozen swipes from hands, claws, tentacles, and even several blasts from a variety of alien weapons.

Being small, fast, and nimble was a huge advantage. Fortunately, such an accomplished gathering of intergalactic safari hunters was used to going after larger and more interesting prey, and somehow I made it away from the conference table, and then under the door, and then out into the hallway, without any of them in hot pursuit.

Still, next time I tried spying as a fly and found myself in the middle of a table surrounded by alien safari hunters, I resolved to do a better job blending in.

I landed on the ceiling a little way down the hall and tried to recover my fly breath, but a moment later the
conference-room doors burst open and the aliens poured out, readjusting their human costumes and grumbling like a bunch of high-school students who’d just been given five hours of homework.

“I can’t believe this,” whined one of them.

“Should we just take those two out and run the hunt ourselves?” suggested another.

“Yeah, you give that a try. They didn’t get top-ten rankings for nothing.”

“Maybe we should just get the heck out of here.”

“Great idea,” another chimed in. “Let’s all just leave this backwater planet.”

“I mean, if we don’t
try
to hunt the Pleionid, then we can’t
fail,
right? And, if we don’t fail, they won’t terminate us.”

“Yeah, seriously, that’s a great idea! We know it’s not a game now, right? So we just need to get away!”

“Hey, wait a second. What guarantee do any of us have that we’d
all
leave? I mean, how would I know if you decide to stay? This hunt would be pretty easy to win if there was just one guy in it.”

“I’d never go back on my word…”

“You’re so full of it. That’s it; I’m staying right here. You guys couldn’t hunt your way out of a paper bag anyway.”

I guessed Number 7 and Number 8 knew a thing or two about the psychological makeups of these selfish hunters. There was no way they would abandon this opportunity to hunt one of the universe’s most legendary creatures if it meant letting somebody else have the chance.

I dropped back onto my favorite hat and rode it down to the lobby.

The aliens exited the building together, but as soon as they’d stepped out into the bright Tokyo morning, they all took off in different directions. Mine, after checking to make sure nobody was following him, crossed the plaza and loped down the avenue to a noodle shop just a block away from the big Japanese Rail train station.

I’m not usually a soup fanatic, but I guess my fly senses were tuned a little differently than my regular ones. As it was, the place smelled so good I almost drowned in my own fly drool, and it was only through an act of sheer will that I kept my wits about me and resisted the temptation to dive-bomb somebody’s udon noodles.

I kept looking around the narrow restaurant, expecting to pick out another alien in the crowd, but everyone seemed to be distinctly human. Everyone, that is, except for the counter girl who soon came to take my alien’s order.

“Dana!?”
I squeaked.

Fortunately, I was a fly, and nobody could hear me.

“WHAT CAN I get you, sir?” asked Dana, passing my alien a moist washcloth with a pair of tongs. Japanese restaurants—even McDonald’s—almost always pass out moist cloths for washing your hands before you eat.

“Your spiciest soup,” grumbled the alien safari hunter. “And make it a double helping.”

“Big day ahead of you?”

“What business is that of yours?” he snarled.

“My profound apologies, good sir,” she replied, bowing. “I will place your order immediately.”

The alien grunted and brusquely turned his attention to a small black item he’d removed from a jacket pocket. It looked like a BlackBerry or some other smartphone, but I could see with a glance that it hadn’t been manufactured by any Earth-based company.

I climbed to the brim of his hat and looked down, making a thorough study of the device—its shape, its color, and the specifications of the tiny screen, which, at least for the moment, simply read, AWAITING SIGNAL.

I zipped to the men’s room, transformed myself back into human form, and returned to the counter. My plan was simple: I was going to get my hands on his tracking device, and I was going to do it without him knowing I’d done it.

“Can I take your order, young man?” asked Dana, passing me a washcloth.

“Yes, miss, I’d like a steaming hot bowl of
whackami,
please,” I said to her with a wink, using the Alpar Nokian word for “distraction” in place of the Japanese word
wakame,
which means seaweed, and was one of the flavors of soup featured on the menu.

She winked back. “And would you like a large or small serving, sir?”

“Might as well make it a large,” I said. “And if you could,” I whispered, “please time it to arrive exactly when you bring lunch to that gentleman down the counter.”

I pulled out my iPhone and pretended to read some manga while Dana went back to the kitchen. In a moment she returned with a very large—I’m talking bigger than her head—bowl of soup, and carried it down the counter.

I tensed, ready to spring to action.

“Here’s your soup, sir,” she said, placing the bowl of soup on the counter in front of the alien.

“Fine,” he muttered without glancing it up. “Leave it there.”

“Would you like some hot sauce?”

He looked up from the tracking device and glared. “I
said
I wanted it spicy—
of course
I want hot sauce.”

“Very good, sir,” said Dana, reaching under the counter and pulling out a bottle of shishito chili oil. “Will this do?”

He squinted down at the bottle’s label and nodded. But, as he did, Dana squeezed the full bottle ever so slightly, causing a single droplet of the oil to spurt out and into the alien’s left eye.

Shishito chilies are legendary for their potency, and after handling them Japanese cooks know very well not to touch their faces, particularly their eyes. The stinging and burning can be so intense that temporary blindness often results.

With a muffled yelp, the hunter dropped the tracking device onto the counter and jammed his washcloth into his eye, rubbing furiously and shouting all manner of alien curse words. If it hadn’t been a brightly lit, crowded restaurant, I’m sure he would have leaped across the counter and throttled Dana without a moment’s hesitation.

Instead, he snarled at her: “Would you… please… get me… a clean
washcloth!
”

I quickly transformed a stack of napkins into something that looked exactly like his tracking device. And then it was a simple matter of sidling up behind him and making the old switcheroo while Dana hurried to get him a clean cloth so he could dab his eye.

“You are a fool,” he spat out as he ripped the towel from her hands.

“A thousand apologies, good sir,” she said. “May I offer you a free cup of tea?”

“You can offer me nothing, you pathetic lower life-form,” he grumbled. He was about to say something more hostile than that, but he stopped himself. Instead, he grabbed his newly replaced tracking device and stormed out of the restaurant.

“This is some excellent seaweed soup,” I told Dana as she passed me the check.

“I thought you’d like it.” She smiled as I shelled out the appropriate combination of yen notes and coins and scribbled some instructions on the back of the check for her to meet me outside.

TEN MINUTES LATER I’d gotten us a fortieth-floor room in the Park Hyatt—the swankiest high-rise Western-style hotel in the area—and I summoned the rest of the gang.

With Joe’s help, we quickly determined that there was more to the alien’s smartphone than I’d begun to guess. Not only was it tuned to a secure channel that would receive transmissions from Number 7 and Number 8, but it contained a preloaded database about the nearly extinct Pleionid species and its abilities, as well as a smattering of other encrypted information that I hadn’t been able to access from their heavily secured network.

Joe had run a signal from the device straight to the wide-screen unit on the wall, so we could all see the information it contained.

“They spoke in colors!” exclaimed Emma. “How amazing!”

The transponder was now displaying images from the Pleionid’s home world—a cloud land of shifting colors and shapes, mesmerizing in their complexity and beauty. And there, flitting in and out among the semisolid shapes—their towns, their buildings?—were the Pleionids themselves. Sweet, wide-eyed creatures that seemed to be a cross between ET, a long-haired terrier, and maybe Alvin of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

But that form was apparently just a default. They easily, effortlessly, became balls of pulsing light, lightning streaks of pure color, and nearly transparent clouds that floated hither and thither. Sometimes, they even seemed to turn completely invisible.

The screen now filled with a chemical study of what I quickly realized must be pleiochromatech, the unique lifeblood of these creatures that, combined with their pacifist ways, had led to their demise. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in its chemical complexity. It seriously put the DNA double helix to shame. Its structure—containing elements ranging from neon to lithium to magnesium—looped, intersected, folded, and refolded itself in front of our eyes. Impossibly, it seemed to be a
living
molecule.