T'Skala and Vivian Steal a Rocket

A Short Story

“You want me to skip school?” I scratched my head with my cyborg arm, touching the back of my neck. “I don’t know.”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun!” T’Skala looked at me with three wide, pleading eyes. “I used to do it all the time on Taurus Prime! You just have to pretend you’re sick.”

“People do that on Earth too, T’Skala,” I said, rolling my eyes. “That’s, like, the oldest trick in the book.”

“Well, do people on Earth also have custom androids to take their place and act sick?” the foreign exchange student asked.

“Come on, you know Earth is light years behind Taurus when it comes to realistic looking android technology,” I said. “People only use those things for weird sex stuff. It would never fool anyone, and then I would have to explain to my parents why I have a sex doll.”

“That’s where I come in,” she said. She took my hand in her purple tentacle and led me into the closet of her room in her host family’s house, where I had come to pick her up in my beat up flying saucer and drive her to school, NOT to be dragged into another one of her schemes.

All of a sudden, it was like looking in a mirror, if that mirror had a blank expression on its face.

“How the hell did you do this?” I asked in wonder, circling the android and touching its skin and hair, running my fingers over the robotic arm and leg. It all seemed a hundred percent real.

“Like you said, Earth is light years behind when it comes to androids,” T’Skala said. “It took a lot of fiddling around to make my old droid look like you. The hair in particular was hard, because we don’t have any. And your skin is a different texture.”

“But how good is it when you turn it on?” I asked.

“Even better,” she said. She touched something on the back of its head. It started blinking and breathing and sort of swaying patiently in place. “Act sick,” she commanded. All of a sudden its eyes got puffy and sunken, its skin turned a pallid greenish color, and it coughed and sniffled.

I pressed my hand to the android’s forehead. It was just the temperature of a human with a fever.

“You can ask it anything,” T’Skala said.

“What are you doing home already?” I asked.

The droid moaned and held its stomach. “I don’t feel so good. I think I might -” It retched, and then ran to the bathroom.

I nodded at T’Skala. “That’ll probably work. Could’ve fooled me. What are you going to do though?”

“Don’t worry, I brought two droids with me from Taurus just for this purpose,” she said. “Mine’s already in bed.” She gestured toward the sleeping pod in the corner of the room.

“You brought a droid just so I could skip school?” I said.

“Well, to be honest, I always wanted to make a human android, but before I came here, I had never seen one of you in real life,” she explained. “So I was sort of...studying you to make this android more realistic.”

“I guess I should be flattered,” I said. “You could’ve chosen any human to make into an android, but you chose me.”

“I’m glad you think so, because it is a little creepy,” T’Skala admitted. “But you’re my best friend! Who else would I choose?” She pulled me into an embrace. Being hugged by a Taurian was an experience. All four of her arm tentacles wrapped around my waist, and she pulled me close to her warm, invertebrate body. I could feel her heart beat against my stomach, and her skin was smooth and also slightly damp.

It was at times like these that I wondered if we could ever become more than friends.

“Although to be honest,” she said, still clinging to me, “The fact that I could just buy cyborg parts for half of it made it a lot easier.”

I laughed. “You little -” I picked her up and started spinning her around, which was easy not only because of my enhanced limbs, but also because T’Skala, though the weight of a normal human, was about half my height. She squealed and pushed me with her tentacles so we both fell down in a heap on the floor.

When we stopped giggling, I sat up, sending her tumbling to the floor again.

“So what do you say?” she asked. “Are you in?”

“You went through all this trouble to make a bot of me so I guess now I have to,” I said.

“C’mon, let’s go to your house to drop her off then!” She gestured to the android to follow us, and to my surprise that was all the instruction it needed. “Your parents are gone by now, right?”

“Yeah…” I pulled out the keys to the saucer and we all climbed in. “Sorry about the mess,” I said habitually to the android.

“I’m an android, I don’t care,” said the bot.

“No, you’re not,” T’Skala said, turning around from her shotgun position to stare down the android in the back. “You’re Vivian Zhao, and you’re home sick from school.”

“Yes ma’am,” the android said. It sounded exactly like I did when I was being sarcastic.

“So what are we going to do next?” I asked T’Skala.

“Road trip, road trip!” she chanted.

“Where?”

“Orion system!”

I shook my head. “There’s no way this old thing’s gonna make it. I’m not getting stranded on a remote planet somewhere because my ship broke down.”

“Well….” she started, and I could tell she was scheming again. “What if we didn’t take this ship?”

“We’re too young to rent,” I said.

“Well….” she said again, and this time I caught her drift.

“NO,” I said slamming on the brakes. We were only a few hundred kilometers from my parents’ house. “My mom will kill me if anyone even TOUCHES the rocket.”

“She doesn’t have to find out,” T’Skala said. “It’s so fast we can get there and back before she comes home from work! It’s perfect!”

“There’s so much that could go wrong with this.”

She pouted at me with those big purple puppy-dog eyes. “Please? I triple dog dare you!”

I don’t know what it was about those eyes. The fact that there were three of them meant they were 50% cuter than a human’s, maybe.

“I never should’ve taught you that one,” I grumbled, and she grinned because she knew she had won. “Fine, but if it gets so much as a scratch…”

T’Skala unbuckled herself and launched herself through the air gracefully, wrapping me once again in an embrace. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I need to drive, we’d better get going if we want to go to Orion and back before my mom gets home.” I blushed as her facial tentacles, almost like whiskers, grazed my cheek.

The rocket was parked underground in my parents’ bunker. It only took a minute to grab the keys from the nightstand in my mom’s room, where I knew she hid things ever since I went looking for my birthday presents as a kid.

It was glorious, pane of the elevator revealing, as we went down into the bunker, more and more of its sleek gray exterior, its aerodynamic fins, and of course the huge rocket thrusters at the bottom.

I pulled out the keys and pressed a button, and the lights went on, and a panel slid open revealing the luxurious interior.

T’Skala was already halfway up the stairs. “Wait,” I begged her.

“You’re the one who’s in a hurry,” she teased.

“You’re gonna mess something up,” I said, following behind her to make sure her leg tentacles weren’t leaving any residue on the velvet carpet.

She hopped in the pilot seat but I said “Nuh-uh, if anyone’s going to drive this thing it’s going to be me” and plucked her out of there. She settled for shotgun, the copilot seat to the right of me, tucking the tentacles into the leather harness that would keep her and me in place when we re-entered zero-G.

I clicked the button and the garage door opened, the large metal panes of metal on the ceiling telescoping open to reveal a blue sky. Then, strapping in, questioning in my head again why I was doing this, I put the key in the ignition and turned the spacecraft on.

The engine roared to life beneath us, hissing clouds rising like smokestacks into the skylight. Slowly, I eased the rocket straight up and out of the bunker, but T’Skala smacked my hand and said “That’s no way to pilot a rocket ship.”

Before I knew what she was doing, she had punched the gas and sent us shooting up into the stars like - well, a rocket. I could feel the fluids in my body dragging me toward the floor with inertia from the sudden acceleration. T’Skala whooped and threw her tentacles in the air. I screamed and clung onto the control sticks for dear life and prayed we didn’t hit a satellite.

Once we had somehow managed to safely exit the atmosphere and were at a cruising pace, I turned to T’Skala and smacked her back. “I can’t believe you! Are you trying to kill us? You didn’t even check where we were going, I could have crashed it!”

“But you didn’t!” she sang.

I glowered.

“Come on, you know these luxury ships have all these safety features,” she said. “You probably couldn’t even crash it if you tried.”

“Let’s not test this theory, shall we?” I said through gritted teeth. My heart rate still had not returned to normal.

T’Skala put her tentacle on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.” Then, she grabbed onto my harness and undid her own so she floated up in the zero gravity environment, tethered only by her grip on my harness.

“What are you doing?” I said, instinctually grabbing onto her and trying to hold her in place.

She moved fluidly through the air, like a space octopus swimming, and grabbed onto more of me until she was wrapped tightly around me again. “I’m apologizing.”

I wanted to tell her to stop, that it was dangerous, that she was distracting me. But I just hugged her back and savored her warmth, feverish to a human, against my skin.

Her face tentacle gently caressed my cheek again, then my lip. Her eyes were so close I could see myself reflected in her pupils.

All of a sudden the seat buzzed, warning me of an upcoming asteroid just in time. I swerved out of the way, throwing T’Skala off of me and against the wall of the ship.

“Sorry! Are you okay?” I said, but I couldn’t help adding, “That’s why you wear your seatbelt.” I extended a hand to help her up. She took it and gingerly climbed back into her own harness.

“So, what are we doing on Orion?” I asked after a long and kind of awkward pause.

Her eyes lit up like a three-bulbed vanity. “There’s this bar I want to go to…”

I sighed and shook my head. “I suppose it’s useless telling you we’re too young to drink?”

“Do you think,” she said in a sardonic voice, “I would go through the trouble of making an entire human android replacement, and I couldn’t even come up with some fake ID?”

“You have a point,” I said.

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m not going there for the drinks,” said T’Skala.

“Then what -”

“First of all, they have some bomb ass fries,” said T’Skala. “Second, my friend works there. He’ll comp us. He’s the coolest, you’ll love him.”

She told me some more about her friend the bartender, places he’d been and people he’d met. The way she talked about him was so reverent, I started to get jealous of the guy. I hoped he was really as good as she made him out to be, or I would have a hard time pretending to like him.

I was rehearsing what I should say to him in my head when the melodic chime of a incoming call pierced the air.

“Shit, it’s my mom.” My thoughts spiraled quickly out of control. Did she know I took the rocket? I was dead, so dead.

“Just answer it, you’re home sick,” whispered T’Skala urgently. “She might not know yet.”

I gave a fake cough for good measure and put on my most pathetic, nasally sick voice. “Hi mom.”

“Where are you? They just called me saying you were not at school.” My mom’s tone was even; it was hard to tell if she was worried or suspicious.

“Yeah, I decided to stay home,” I said, sniffling. “I’m not feeling well.”

“Why didn’t you tell me first?”

“I didn’t want to bother you at work,” I said. T’Skala mimed texting, and I added “I was going to text you later.”

“Are you all right? What are your symptoms.”

I looked in panic over at T’Skala. She mimed rubbing her nonexistent neck. “Well, my throat hurts and I have a headache and I feel nauseous,” I said, following T’Skala’s charades.

“Do you need me to come home?”

“No,” I said, trying not to sound too anxious. “It’s okay, I just need rest.”

“Well, make sure you make up the work by tomorrow,” my mom said. “And drink up on fluids, I don’t want you missing more than one day of school.”

I gave a sigh of relief as my mom disconnected. “I think she bought it.”

“Of course she did, you have like a perfect attendance record,” said T’Skala.

“Thanks for the help,” I said.

“This is gonna be easy,” she said.

The three-armed bouncer looked from the ID card to me, then back again.

He grunted and nodded, moving aside to let T’Skala and me through. I breathed out a sigh of relief - it had worked.

Pulling the rocket into the parking structure had offered a decent view of the canyon, but up close it was another thing entirely. The light of the sun glinted off crags of agate stone that looked like living crystals, as if it were a bluish moss of some type clinging to the sheer gray walls of the canyon. It was like nothing on Earth or any planet I had been on.

The bar was directly in the middle of the canyon, an open air structure shielded from the elements by a force field, which I could barely see glimmering over a circle in the center, where there were tables and chairs and a bar. It was connected to the side of the canyon, where the bouncer had just let us in, by a spindly glass bridge that looked far too unstable to be supporting the bar, which was built atop a large chunk of the same blue agate as the canyon.

“How does it stay up?” I asked T’Skala.

“Magnets,” she said vaguely, taking me hand in tentacle and leading me onto the transparent bridge. Somehow, it was clean, even though dozens of feet and wheels and tentacles had clearly passed it on the way to the bar, judging by the large and diverse crowd occupying the area. As I walked, I turned around and noticed a laser behind me, sanitizing the floor. As a result it was perfectly transparent, making my heart skip a few beats as I placed my feet carefully on the pathway, T’Skala slithering blithely ahead.

The canyon was even deeper when viewed from directly above. I couldn’t see to the bottom, only miles and miles of blue crystal formation on a gray stone wall, looming beneath me as if I could fall down at any minute.

We entered the crowded bar and made our way through a sea of arms, tentacles, antennae, and tails until we found a lone empty seat at the bar. I claimed it, then hoisted T’Skala on my lap.

“Get out of here!” came a shout from behind the bar. “Is that T’Skala Zeutruggen I see?” A large Taurian turned to face me, each of his many tentacles occupied with holding a different bottle or pouring a glass of some exotic cocktail.

“D’Xuuzu!” T’Skala cried. She leaped up on the bar (she was short, so it wasn’t attention-catching) and performed what I assume is the tentacle version of a secret handshake.

“Are you skipping school?” said D’Xuuzu. “Right on.”

T’Skala nodded. “I had to take Vivian out! She’s never skipped school before.” She had to shout to be heard over the din of voices and music; it wasn’t the greatest place for conversation. To D’Xuuzu she shouted, “I’m doing an exchange program on Earth,” and to me she yelled “D’Xuuzu used to be my babysitter way back when!”

“Let me get you your fries,” he said, reaching behind the bar and instantly producing a suspiciously normal looking basket of french fries. I tried one. It was good, but not drag-your-friend-halfway-across-the-galaxy good. And I felt a stab of jealousy as she leaned in to say something I couldn’t hear to D’Xuuzu and he laughed.

“That was fun,” he said. “You should go do it with your friend.” He winked at me. T’Skala started to say something to him, but he had already turned away and started a conversation with the next patron.

“Finish your food and let’s go,” T’Skala said to me.

“Where are we going?” She was pulling me through the bar toward the edge of the giant crystal.

She stopped me at a glass railing. I leaned over the edge. “Wow,” I said. The dizzying depths of the canyon awed me again.

T’Skala jumped up on the railing, perching on the thin edges of the wall.

“Careful!” I cringed at her precarious position.

She grinned her Cheshire cat smile at me. “I’m not going to fall. I’m going to jump.”

I’m sure my eyes were as wide as hers.

“And you’re going to jump too,” she continued.

I gulped. “Aren’t we going to, you know, die?”

“The force field will catch us,” said T’Skala.

“But won’t we get in trouble?”

T’Skala laughed. “Lighten up! Drunk people do it all the time.”

"That's not a no..."

It was her turn to pull me onto her lap, tentacles forming a harness around me. Then, she tipped backward and we were falling.

Adrenaline filled my body. I felt the gravity of the planet, pulling down on my heavy half-metal body, making me accelerate faster and faster until I reached terminal velocity and I felt weightless, as if I were in space, and the air rushing around me like a strong wind. I screamed and clung onto T’Skala, who whooped and threw the rest of her tentacles in the air. She looked like a purple comet streaking toward the infinite depths of the chasm. The crystals glinted in the sunlight, getting darker the further we fell.

Suddenly I felt a jerk on my body, and the force of deceleration as I slowed to a halt inches from the shimmery silver barrier of a force field. We had fallen down so far I could see the bottom of the canyon through the translucent field, a dark river rushing turbulently over sharp crystal rocks.

I breathed in shakily - I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath - and started laughing maniacally. T’Skala joined me, and that was how we slid down the force field to the edge of the ravine: cackling like a bunch of witches.

“Oh my god! Let’s do it again!” As soon as my feet touched solid ground, I was ready to feel the wind whipping my hair again. My heart still hadn’t slowed down.

T’Skala gave me a squeeze but let go of me and said, “Not now. There’s still one more thing I want to do.”

I looked at my arm to check my chronometer. “More than half the day is gone. We’d better move.”

We took the high speed elevator ride up, the snaking rock formations with vivid rings of color and sharp crystal edges climbing with us.

“It’s just a short trip from here,” T’Skala said as we climbed back into the rocket. “On one of the moons.”

The moon she directed me to was small but dense, judging by the gravity readings. The surface was peppered with volcanos spitting out yellow clouds of gas.

“Are you sure this is habitable?” I asked her.

“Only the most dangerous, extremophile creatures live here.”

I gulped.

“Don’t worry, you can stay in the ship,” she said. And without warning me, pressed her tentacle down on the horn, making the rocket emit a blaring noise.

“That’ll attract their attention,” she said.

It was hard to see through the yellow fog, but I noticed one, then two shadows appear in the distant sky. They were too big to be birds, unless my depth perception was way off, but they soared like eagles. As one drew nearer I noticed they were mammals, as big as horses, with large, batlike wings and twisted, terrifying faces. It perched about fifty feet away from the rocket and sat, folding its wings in, and starting to groom itself.

“What are they?” I breathed.

“Orionese dragons,” she said. “They’re the largest flying species in the galaxy.”

“Dragons?”

“It’s just a name, like bearded dragon. But you’ll see why in a bit. They’re very territorial.”

The second dragon had caught up to where the first one was, who had stopped grooming to turn and hiss at the intruder. The two animals stood their ground, one beneath crouched protectively over the rocket, the other hovering, swooping in and being scared off, trying to find an angle to attack.

Then, it appeared to have found it, because it swooped in and all of a sudden there was fire everywhere, both dragons spitting out some kind of flammable gas whose fiery tendrils licked at their opponents.

As quickly as it had happened, it was over. The first dragon bowed its head to the second one, low on its elbows and knees, and then backed away.

“How? How do they do that?” I demanded to know.

T’Skala shrugged, a sort of jiggly gesture since she didn’t really have shoulders. “They eat flint, I know that. Something also about the sulfur in the atmosphere. Come on!” She had already jumped out of her harness and was heading for the stairs.

“Come on where?” I said, fearing the answer.

“The best way to see them is up close!” she said. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she realized I wasn’t following her.

“What are you waiting for? Are you scared?” she said.

“Take a guess,” I replied coolly. “I don’t know about Taurians, but humans don’t do well when they’re on fire.”

T’Skala frowned for maybe the first time today. “We won’t get blasted. I know how to tame them.”

“No,” I said. “You’ve been dragging me around and forcing me to do things all day.”

“And you’ve enjoyed it, haven’t you?” said T’Skala.

“This is where I draw the line,” I said. “No flame-breathing dragons.”

“Fine,” she said, “If you’re gonna be no fun, then I’m just gonna do it without you.”

The door hissed open and she headed out, waving her tentacles in excitement.

I watched as T’Skala pulled a hunk of dried green meat out from deep in her pockets. She slowly approached a nearby dragon, dropping the meat in front of it. The dragon took a few sniffs out of its narrow nostrils, shot out a quick jet of flame, and then crept forward and snatched the hunk.

While the dragon was noisily chewing the meat, T’Skala stepped forward and waved her tentacles in an elaborate pattern in front of the beast. It waved its head back and forth, following the weaving, sinuous motions. After half a minute or so, the dragon lowered its head down to the ground and T’Skala hurried over and jumped onto its back.

Then with a whoop and a flapping of wings she was off, yelling, “See what you’re missing out on, Vivian?” In no time at all, she had disappeared up into the hazy atmosphere.

There was barely any signal here (of course) so I distracted myself by watching stuff my mom had already downloaded on the rocket’s builtin entertainment system. But I could only watch a few episodes of “Actual Housepons of G’vel” before I started to feel like my brain was going to rot.

After about an hour, I started to get a impatient. If she was going to ditch me, she could at least make it a little quicker. Did she expect me to just sit here all day?

I spent a while just staring out at the rocky landscape and absentlymindedly clicking some buttons on the console. A little part of me thought that I should ditch her and just go home. We’d see how she’d like a taste of her own medicine. But of course I couldn’t just leave her on some random moon.

My frustration began to turn to worry as night began to fall. She wouldn’t stay out at night, would she? It was already hard to see in the yellow haze that blanketed everything, and everything would be twice as hard in the dark.

I was sure there was some life-sign detection technology built into the ship, but there were hundreds of buttons it could have been - it was an old style control set, no voice commands. It was time to use my most useless talent: reading instruction manuals.

After a few minutes, I figured out that a yellow button over to the right controlled the life-sign detector. The problem was, Taurian life signs weren’t all that similar to human life signs (humans don’t usually have three hearts) so it took me a little longer to update the search parameters.

I glanced over the settings: looking for warm-blooded creatures with three hearts and more than four limbs. I hit the scan button and the rocket screen flashed to life, gently beeping as the sensors combed over the landscape.

After a few minutes, it became clear that T’Skala wasn’t in range of the sensors. I was gonna have to fly around to look for her. At least this was a small moon and not a giant planet.

I entered the startup sequence and the rocket rumbled to life beneath me. I left the life scanner running and started flying slowly in a straight line, opposite the rotation of the moon below. I figured this wasn’t the time to zig-zag around randomly, not if I wanted to be sure I had checked everywhere.

I had to steer around a few dragons as I went, but mostly it was smooth sailing. Even with the rocket’s lights on, I still couldn’t see very far, but the gently booping of the scanners reassured me that I wouldn’t miss anything important.

After a few more minutes, the beeping grew louder and more frantic (so did my heart rate). Life signs detected, a few kilometers to the west.

I swung the rocket around and headed over, hoping desperately that this was really her. The journey felt like it took days, even though it was probably less than a minute.

I landed the rocket slowly (after all, I didn’t want to accidentally land it on top of her). Off in the haze, I heard T’Skala yell, “Vivian! You won’t believe what happened!”

She hurried over, and as the hatch hissed open she start exclaiming, “My dragon got in a fight with another dragon, and I had to jump off it! It was fine, Taurians are great at falling, but I didn’t really know where I was. So I was just kind of walking around, so thanks for picking me up. Anyway, you really missed out.”

I just stared at her for a moment. Then all my feelings welled up at once and I started sort of crying and yelling, “T’Skala! I’m glad you’re okay but don’t ever fucking do that to me again! I was so worried, I thought you might be dead or hurt or something and I didn’t even know if I could find you and I had to figure out how to use the scanner on this thing and everything.”

She said, “Sorry, okay? I’m glad you found me. You’re a good friend, even if you do worry too much.”

She came over and gave me a hug with all her tentacles, and I just couldn’t stay mad at her after that.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We have to hurry.”

T’Skala looked at the dash. “We’re more than halfway there and it’s only been an hour.” She unbuckled her harness once again. “C’mon, fly with me.”

She looked so at peace, like she just belonged there hovering in the air like a wisp of smoke.

“One second,” I said. I pressed some buttons and Frank Sinatra started playing through the high-end surround speakers. I unclipped myself from my seat and launched myself gently in her direction, catching her in my arms and pulling her into a half somersault spin.

Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars

We swayed in our zero gravity dance, twirling and spinning around each other’s bodies.

Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars

My hands were around her waist, her tentacles were everywhere: my shoulder, my hip, my hair. Her lilac irises sparkled in the starlight. I leaned in, and she pressed her lips against mine.

In other words, please be true

In other words, I love you