The Nerdy Dozen #2 (11 page)

BEWILDERED AND DELIGHTED, THE BOY JUMPED UP. JASON 1
and Jason 2 both pushed back-to-back, joining their arms in a defensive martial art combo stance. But the boy was friendly and simply smiled, throwing his controller on the couch after exiting his game.

“Whoa! Visitors!” he said, brushing pieces of caramel corn from his sweatpants.

“Are you an alien?” Biggs demanded. “Because I'm thinking of the biggest volcano ever.”

The boy laughed, which helped put Neil more at ease.

“I'm Lars,” he introduced, waving a bony hand.

He had comically large ears and a curving nose that wheezed with each breath.

“I can assure you guys I'm not an alien,” the boy said, which was probably exactly what an alien would say. “I'm from Nova Scotia. Just a scientist's kid trapped up here in a space bubble.”

“What is this place?” asked Sam. “This isn't an international lab, and something tells me this isn't available public info.”

“Indeed, not really,” Lars said. “It's basically a self-sustaining community. It was built in secret a couple years ago by a group of countries and private space companies, to test if humans could survive away from Earth.”

And steal top secret space shuttles?
Neil was still a bit skeptical of this stranger.

“The New District Colony,” he said, with a proud smile.

“Is that like one of those groups where everyone has to wear cloaks and identical white sneakers?” asked Biggs.

“No, it's just a cool name,” Lars explained. “Or I guess it is. All the adults here named it and stamped it all over the place.”

“Cool. I'm Biggs, it's nice to meet you.”

The two shook hands, and Biggs made a sign with both hands, like he was holding a fishing rod that was on fire. Lars looked puzzled and turned to Neil for an explanation.

“Oh, he's been creating his own sign language,” Neil explained. “I think that means it's good to meet you?”

“It means ‘Thanks for the hospitality, moon child.' But close,” said Biggs. “Also, might I suggest a new abbreviation for this whole colony? You're gonna attract a lot of space riffraff. Unless that's the type of thing you're going for.”

Lars nodded his head slightly, as if that wasn't the first time he'd heard the suggestion.

“So what do you guys like doing? Puzzles? I've got some of those around here somewhere,” he said. He seemed frantic. “Video games? I have lots of those.”

“You may just be talking to the twelve best video gamers alive,” Neil said. “Well, our friend Yuri is at home puking. So just know there could be thirteen of the best living gamers here.”

“Oh, you don't say?” Lars said as he reached into a slim freezer and pulled out a bag of dehydrated French fries. He emptied its contents into a machine that looked like a platinum-blue microwave and sounded like a tiny leaf blower. He punched a few buttons and began pulling cups from the cupboard above.

Lars held up the glasses to the track lighting overhead, squinting to determine if they were clean before lining them up. He wiped some stray cheese balls from his counter with his forearm.

“Check it out, ultimate cheese ball toss,” Lars said, flipping a yellow fake-cheese puff in the air. It floated in a gentle arc, barely creeping through the air as it rotated. With a spring from his feet, Lars bounced up to bite the neon snack from the air. Neil wondered what kind of distance he could get tossing a doughnut hole.

Lars seemed not to eat in front of others very often. He took huge bites of caramel corn with an open mouth and wiped the mess from the corners of his mouth onto his shirtsleeve. His shirt was a gray skintight turtleneck that had
THE NEW DIST COLONY
plastered to it in black lettering.

Neil knew he was getting a lucky glimpse into the lifestyle constant video gaming without parental supervision provided. He wondered how one might go about getting accepted into the New Dist Colony.

As Lars scrambled in the kitchen's cupboards, Sam and the rest of the group had begun slyly snooping around Lars's house. After all, the radar for the missing ship did lead them here. Something was going on with this bubble boy.

They poked through a counter of snacks and riffled through a small stack of video games near the entertainment system.

“You guys should see downstairs,” Lars said, his arms full of snacks for the crew. “I've got low-gravity Ping-Pong, and I just got a new space dartboard. There's an even bigger TV and a stock of space junk food. We can see who wants to play me in my favorite game.”

“Shuttle Fury?” asked Neil, shakily clutching a tray holding twelve cups of a purplish space juice poured by Lars.

“Wow, yeah! I didn't think anybody else played it.”

“I don't, really,” Neil admitted.

“Oh, Lars, our friend Neil here
loves
to play that game,” said Sam, her voice caked with sarcasm. Neil clenched his teeth and gave his friend a glare, but she only responded with a pleasant smile.

Does nobody even care anymore that Finch put me in charge?

“We can all go downstairs, and you two can play a nice long game up here. Sound good, Neil?” said Sam. He knew she was probably buying time for them to figure out what was going on with the radar, but Neil didn't enjoy being kept upstairs with their bizarre new friend.

“Awesome,” Lars said, pointing to a silver door in the corner of the room. “You guys go make yourselves at home downstairs. We can play all night! And on the moon it's sort of always night, so we can just play forever!”

Only a fraction of his normal weight, Waffles was the first to run toward the basement door, slamming into it.

“Still gettin' the hang of jumping,” Waffles said as he rubbed his forehead. The others followed him as he opened the door to the basement, flipping on the light switch.

“You've got to do more of a skipping motion, like an injured pony,” Lars explained, hopping toward the small dirty kitchen. “You'll get used to it.”

Neil stayed put as he watched his friends moon-leap toward the basement. Harris and Sam walked together, and Harris said something only Sam could hear. Neil could see her giggle, and some kind of emotion caused Neil's stomach to drop.

“WHERE ARE THE ADULTS?” NEIL SAID, SLURPING ON A PURPLISH
space beverage. Looking around the messy space bubble, Neil had the impression an adult hadn't been present for months. “And who are these adults? My mom would lose it if my room looked like this. Well done.”

Neil walked over and plopped down on the chair, an action that took a bit longer than it usually did on Earth. Each time he easily lifted off the ground, Neil felt like a wrestler leaping off a top rope for a high-flying elbow drop.

“My pleasure,” Lars said with a laugh, his voice nasal and slow. “The adults are all scientists. I'm the only one here under the age of fifty.”

“Where are they now?”

“A long weekend trip to the other side of the moon. Another country sent a rover up here to explore, so they're off to go mess with it,” Lars said. He started Shuttle Fury, selecting a head-to-head battle round. “They have big Sasquatch costumes and everything. Scientists on vacation are weird.”

You're telling me.

Neil's father was a scientist as well, although his specialty was archaeology and things that happened millions of years ago. He also was horrible on vacations, constantly keeping to a strict schedule and dressing in all tan like a sunburned zookeeper.

“You ready?” said Lars, his green eyes opened wide. Neil responded with a nod, and the game erupted with lights and sounds of space shuttles. The level featured a race to random coordinates about halfway from the moon and Mars. Lars jumped out to an early start, but Neil was able to keep pace.

As they played the game, successfully rolling their ships through an asteroid belt, Neil soon realized Lars was good—like, really good. He rarely encountered players that could flat-out outplay him. Lars would soon notch his tenth victory in a row.

“Wow, Lars. You're really great.”

Maybe Lars was just a totally normal guy, simply stuck here with his dad.

“Yeah, I've had a lot of time to just practice,” Lars said, before tapping a series of buttons on his controller. His shuttle discarded extra weight from the payload air lock underneath, increasing the shuttle's speed.

“Whoa, cool!” Neil said.

“And do you know the trick to warp speed?”

I don't think I'll ever forget it. Nobody is going to let that go.

“Yeah, I think,” Neil said as he activated the warp speed shown to him by his friends. His ship barreled ahead of Lars's, leaving a glittering blue trail of space dust in its wake.

“Oh, that's just regular warp speed,” Lars said, a bit unimpressed. “But this is even cooler.”

Flipping a couple buttons on the control panel, Lars throttled forward. His ship jumped into what looked like a double-warp drive, going even faster than the trick Trevor annoyingly demonstrated before.

Lars's craft shot into the distance, slowly corkscrewing as it left an even broader blue trail behind it.

“Man, I played this game for hours and never even saw this!” Neil exclaimed. “Or, at least, I know people who have played this game for hours, and they've never seen this!”

“Oh yeah. Some Whiptails don't have it, but you can use all your reserve fuel to kinda do the same thing,” Lars said, snorting. “You can't unlock this until the last level. That and the Whiptail's last line of defense. Supposedly it's how you destroy the asteroid in the game, when you're out of pulse cannon energy and you've discharged your missiles.”

Wait, asteroid?

“I've tried it, but my ship always explodes,” Lars said. “There's some trick with it I'm not seeing. I'll figure it out. Like I said, I have a lot of time up here.”

“I'd imagine,” said Neil, his tongue curling out of the corner of his mouth. His mouth stretched into a smile as he successfully pulled off the same double-warp maneuver.

“Although things have gotten a bit better lately.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Totally. I learned a new trick on the Whiptail shuttle. You can jump-start it from outside of the ship,” Lars said as he landed his virtual spaceship.

“Oh, without it moving first? That could've been helpful,” said Neil.

Lars looked at him with a quizzical face but kept playing the shuttle simulator. His character, a boxy pilot, took robotic steps out of the air lock. The avatar shut the round door and slid a secret panel that was just above the doorway. Inside was a red handle. It kind of looked like a fire alarm.

“Cool,” said Neil, wondering if his ship outside had the same feature. Lars's character tugged on it and ran backward, watching the rockets on the back of the simulated Whiptail begin to bloom white and blue.

“I'm excited you guys are here. We can get a big team game when those twins come back, too,” Lars said. “They promised to come back soon.”

Hold it,
Neil thought.

“Twins?”

“Yeah, they stopped by within the last twelve hours or so,” Lars replied, now almost a light-year ahead of Neil in the virtual race. “You need to ease off on all the throttling. Flying in space is different.”

Lars fired a laser at floating space rocks, leaving jagged obstacles for Neil to encounter.

“Were they alone?” Neil asked.

“You sure ask a lot of questions. Yeah, they came by themselves,” Lars said. “They knew all the tricks to this game, which was impressive. I actually came close to losing a game. I tried to make them hang out longer, but they were in a rush. Something about . . .”

“What?”

“Why are you so interested in this?” asked Lars, looking away from the screen.

“I'm just a curious guy.”

“Well, curious guy, they were looking for their parents, or something.”

Neil's eyebrows lifted with this new information, and his ship began to float idly.

It all made sense. The Minor twins stole the rocket because they wanted to look for their long-lost parents.

They're the ones I saw in the window of the stolen ship
.

It was definitely time to go. Neil purposefully steered his ship into the path of a behemoth meteoroid, and the craft was quickly smashed apart like a golf cart stuck on railroad tracks.

“Game over. Darn,” Neil said. “Guys!”

Neil ran downstairs.

“We have to go. I think I know where to look for the missing spaceship!”

“Not so fast,” Lars said, appearing at the basement door. He had a mischievous smile, and he clicked a button on a small handheld remote he had kept in his sweatpants. They heard the sound of a heavy metal bolt locking the front door in place.

“You're not going anywhere.”