The Merman and the Moon Forgotten - By Kevin McGill Page 0,3

chocolate syrup, chased down with Pepto-Bismol. But that wouldn’t cause hallucinations . . . right?

The Rones lie about their true intent. They enter the city of Huron at the peril of us all.

Nick looked down to his feet. The voice came from under the floorboards. “Ha, ha, Tim. Funny. I can hear you under there.”

The Rones lie about their true intent. They enter the city of Huron at the peril of us all.

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.

“I will not hear voices . . . I can’t hear voices.” Nick had to give every ounce of his focus to the machine.

For a moment, Nick wondered if it was, in fact, his machine, the Prometheus 10,000, that was speaking to him. Maybe it was picking up one of those old time radio signals? He looked down to the scuba diving goggles, which served as a sort of viewer into the Prometheus 10,000. The machine’s skin had been stitched together from a theater spotlight, an unwary antique television and three different game consoles. One could see lights blinking deep within its belly while cables escaped from various holes, only to be dragged back in. His brother, Tim, often referred to it as the greatest abuse of technology. To Nick, it was the machine that would get him off this rock.

Earth.

One must understand. Five years ago Nick had been practically abducted from the Lunar Colony by his own parents and forced to move to Earth with its suburban globalization. Nick remembered de-boarding the transworld shuttle at the Colorado Spaceport. He walked through the rampway to Gate F10, clutching his red backpack. The gate dumped out into a mash up of passengers and shoppers, all clutching their respective possessions. But that wasn’t what made Nick sick to his stomach. It was the mass lying on the ground. At first he assumed someone had unknowingly dropped their luggage, until he saw those brown eyes.

A teenage boy was hemorrhaging.

From nowhere, an ambudrone flew past Nick, announcing, “Geneva virus detected. Geneva virus detected.” It then smothered the boy in quarantine jelly, leaving him there like some dying cocoon. The shoppers, with their department store bags and eyes in perfect balance, stepped over him, around him, beside him. But their eyes never fell on him.

Nick dropped his backpack, tore through the crowd, and kneeled down to the boy. He didn’t know it was the Geneva virus at the time, all he knew was the boy needed help. Nick screamed at the top of his lungs, “Help! Somebody help him!” The course of shoppers slowed as they searched for the voice. When the source was found, they glared at him, glowered at him, and a few even shushed him, but no one helped him. Not knowing what to do next, he reached out to the jelly. Suddenly there was a flash of light and he lay ten feet from the boy, stiff as a board.

The ambudrone had tazed him and now floated over him in its white, orbish body, saying, “Please keep your voice down. You are disturbing the shoppers.”

Looking up at the plastic outline of the ambudrone, he had only one thought: I need to get off this planet.

And Nick’s mind never changed on the subject. He missed Moon.

He also missed the sun.

Like some global cataract, a fog had covered the Earth for the last one hundred years. One political party blamed it on their opponent’s unchecked consumerism and continued burning of fossil fuels. The other party blamed it on their political enemy’s CO2 pumps, which were placed all across the globe to suck out the supposed overabundance of CO2 and balance the ecosystem. But it was now believed the pumps sucked out too much carbon dioxide, sending the ecosystem into a tailspin. Nick didn’t care who was to blame. He just wanted to go home, back to Moon. Everything there was black and white. Everything there was . . .

“Simple.” Nick blinked. “Now I’m talking to myself. Just like Grand.”

So, when the philanthropist announced that he would give out a million dollars to whomever could build an effective solar transference machine and return solar radiation to the planet’s surface, Nick had found his ticket home, literally. All he had to do was build the machine, win the prize, and buy a one-way transworld shuttle ticket back to the Trafalgar Lunar outpost. Sector nine. Quadrant 4b. Easy.

Just like the movies.

Some might call Nick naïve, simple, even an arrogant fourteen-year-old—they usually did. But Nick didn’t care.