We Are the Ants (14 page)

“What?”

From my supine position on the metal slab, the sluggers had all looked the same, but this one was close enough that I could distinguish fractal patterns on its skin in a million shades of green and brown. The deeper I followed, the farther they led. And they weren't static, either. The intricate designs changed in subtle ways. I sat up, swung my legs around, and slid off the edge of the slab.

“Is that how you communicate with one another?” I wondered aloud as I observed the body markings swirl and transform in an endless dance. They were beautiful. I shed my anger standing there, sloughed off the dead weight of it.

“Do you want me to press the button?” The slugger didn't respond. It simply lingered, motionless except for the designs on its skin and its round eyes floating on their stalks. “If you want me to press it, I will, but you've got to promise never to send me back.”

Without my anger to support me, I faltered. My legs trembled, and I collapsed to the floor. I searched for the horizon but saw nothing. Without my anger, I was adrift and drowning. Marcus had attacked me and Nana had Alzheimer's and Jesse had killed himself and Charlie was having a baby. I was helpless to stop any of it; I'd been robbed of hope as surely as Nana was being robbed of her memories.

“Please don't send me back.”

The alien turned and crawled toward the darkness. I thought it was abandoning me, but it stopped at the edge of the shadows and waited. This behavior was new, and I watched it curiously. After a moment, a floppy appendage grew out of the upper half of its body and waggled in the air, almost like it was waving at me.

“Do you want me to follow you?” My voice was thick with mucus, and I scrubbed away my tears with the back of my hand. The slugger waved until I stood up, and then its arm melted back into its body.

The slugger led me into the shadows. I'd always imagined there were walls behind the dark, and I was surprised when there weren't. The shadows enveloped me, and I stopped and held my hand an inch in front of my face. It wasn't simply dark; it was the complete absence of light. My heart began to race, but I walked on. I was prepared to spend my life in a cage as the centerpiece of their intergalactic zoo if it meant never returning to Calypso.

The farther I walked, the more confident I grew. I kept my hand extended in front of me to avoid stumbling into anything. I didn't even know if the slugger was still there; I just kept walking. I wondered how it could see without light, and it dawned on me that the darkness was probably natural to the aliens. The lights in the exam room were for my benefit. The possibilities were endless and exciting. Did their eyes perceive heat? Radiation? Maybe they could see my atoms, and I was merely bits of organic code for them to manipulate. The sluggers were so fundamentally different from humans that it was a wonder they understood me at all. How ugly we must look to them, spilling light into every dark corner to push back the shadows, blinding ourselves to the true beauty of emptiness.

Thank God for nipples.

My hands brushed against something smooth, and I halted. I searched for a door or handle but found nothing. “What now?” As if to answer, a hole appeared in the wall, and a narrow beam of light struck my face. I threw up my arm to cover my eyes. I'd been in the dark so long, the light hurt. When I lowered my arm, I screamed, thinking the sluggers had jettisoned me into space. I stood surrounded by stars. I dropped to my knees, comforted by the solidity of the floor even though I couldn't see it, expecting at any moment to be sucked into the gelid void, frozen and dead. It took a moment for my brain to process that I wasn't floating in space. I perceived no walls, no ceiling, no floor, yet that I was alive proved that some kind of barriers protected me. The slugger who'd led me into the darkness was gone, as was the hallway from which I'd come. It shouldn't have been possible. I was surrounded by heaven. The sun, the moon, the earth, and all those living stars. They weren't static like in pictures taken from impossibly far away—they breathed, they glowed. They were future and past, possibility and memory. They were beautiful.

“I never knew there were so many,” I whispered. We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Our deaths will mean nothing to them.

“I feel so small.” No one replied. I wondered as I watched the stars, really seeing them for the first time, whether they could see me, too.

It begins a thousand years from now. Dr. Jiao Hatori discovers time travel.

A new and exciting industry emerges from the breakthrough. Those willing to pay the exorbitant fees are shifted backward in time to view history firsthand. Time tourists can finally discover the truth of who shot JFK, they can watch the first majestic performance of
Hamlet
, they can dine with Cleopatra or Queen Elizabeth I or Amelia Earhart the evening before her ill-fated flight. Future humans infest history like cockroaches.

The problems begin when the North American Alliance's prime minister sends soldiers to the year 2213 to prevent the Texas uprising that turned much of what was once known as the United States into an atomic wasteland. The plan succeeds, which is the problem.

History becomes fluid. Factions with varying agendas fight to rewrite the events of the past to their advantage. The government that controls the past controls the future.

The Guilde Immuable, an anti-time travel organization, forms in response to the deconstruction of the past. Citizens applaud its goals while condemning its methods. Its members destroy art and literature, kill famous figures throughout history, demanding time travel cease or they will dismantle the whole of time. They sow chaos to bring attention to the plundering of humanity's history.

World leaders declare war on the Guilde Immuable, vowing never to bow to the will of terrorists.

Emmanuel Roth arrives in Geneva on 29 January 2016 to destroy the Large Hadron Collider, the site of the groundbreaking discovery of gravitons, without which time travel would be impossible. Emmanuel knows that scientific progress cannot be stopped, and that someone else will eventually discover gravitons, but he admires the symbolism of the act.

At 10:19 UTC, Emmanuel detonates a fission bomb, atomizing the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, and most of Switzerland. Emmanuel is unaware that the Large Hadron Collider is active. An infinitesimal fraction of a second prior to the bomb's detonation, two particles collide with such fierce velocity that they form a micro singularity—a black hole too small to see with the naked eye. It would have lacked the energy to sustain itself under normal conditions, however, the fission bomb provides it with all the energy it requires to grow and become self-sustaining. As the earth's core is devoured by the black hole, the resulting radiation vaporizes the outer layers of the planet and expels them, and all life, into space.

The future destroys the past destroys the future.

Mom let me stay home from school on Monday but refused to allow me to skip Tuesday. She believed that the sooner I returned to my normal routine, the sooner I, and everyone else, would forget about The Incident. That's what we're calling it. It's certainly better than referring to it as the Everyone Saw Henry Denton's Blurry Balls in That One Picture escapade. Anyway, it's impossible to forget about something that haunts me every time I close my eyes. I have to shower with the curtain drawn back and the door locked. And forget about sleep. Dawn and I have become fast friends, and I don't expect that will change any time soon.

Tuesday morning I was sitting at the kitchen table nursing my second cup of coffee and wondering if I knew anyone I could score something stronger off of when Charlie strolled in wearing a dress shirt and tie. He grabbed a Mountain Dew from the fridge and chugged it.

“Come on,” he said, hardly looking at me. “I'll take you to school on my way to work.”

I was the only person in the kitchen, so Charlie had to have been speaking to me, but he'd never offered me a ride to school before. “You don't even have a car.”

“Hurry up, Henry, I don't want to be late.” Charlie grabbed my backpack and headed out the front door, leaving me to toss my dishes in the sink and follow.

Charlie's Jeep was running when I got outside. The engine rumbled and coughed and smelled like burning oil, but it actually worked. I swung into the passenger seat. “Holy shit, dude. You fixed it.”

“It was nothing,” Charlie said, but the giant smile plastered on his face said otherwise. It was the first time I remembered seeing my brother proud of anything other than a particularly putrid fart. The guy beside me, I didn't know him. The aliens must have replaced him with a robot.

Charlie stalled the Wrangler when he put it in reverse, and swore like it was his primary language. I figured I still might have to walk, but he threw it into neutral, got it started again, and we took off. I hadn't expected the Jeep to make it out of the driveway under its own power. Charlie had taken something that was broken and made it whole again.

“What's up with the fancy tie?” I asked. Charlie hadn't even worn a tie to Jesse's funeral, but today he was decked out in a dress shirt, gray pants, and a black-and-silver-plaid tie.

He tugged at the neck. “Zooey's dad gave me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Computer stuff.” Charlie shrugged like it was nothing. “Fixing laptops and helping stupid people figure out their e-mail.”

As a kid, Charlie had disassembled everything he could get his hands on—CD players, watches, our clothes dryer—but he'd never shown much interest in putting them back together. Somewhere along the way he changed, and I missed it.

“What about college?”

Charlie sighed. “I've got responsibilities, Henry. Anyway, I'm not cut out for more school.”

“Is this what you want?”

“I love Zooey. We'll figure the rest out as we go.” We hadn't spoken much since he pissed on my homework, but my attack and humiliation at the hands of Marcus made my fight with Charlie seem petty and unimportant. Brothers fight, and then they move on.

“What do you even know about babies? You can barely look after yourself.”

Charlie punched me in the arm, but Nana could've hit me harder. “Look who's talking,
Space Boy
.”

“You're a dick.”

The brakes squealed and the body shuddered when Charlie stopped at a red light. “Listen, you can't let people intimidate you, bro.”

“I wasn't intimidated, Charlie; I was attacked.” I could still feel the tape around my wrists, see the smooth patches where it had torn the hair from my arms, and my groin ached when I took a deep breath. Every movement was a reminder that I was a joke, every pain a reminder that I was better off not pressing the button.

Charlie gripped the cracked leather steering wheel so hard, his knuckles turned white. “Guys like that . . . They're pussies.”

“Thanks for the brilliant insight.”

“I'm serious.” The light turned green. Charlie gunned it, trying to shift quickly through the gears, but it stuck in third, and the transmission chewed metal like it was grinding bones. “If I'm going to beat someone up, they'll see me coming. Only cowards attack a kid in the showers.”

I knew, in his own way, my brother was trying to make me feel better, but Charlie doesn't know the meaning of subtle. He probably can't spell it either. I looked out the window to discourage him from talking; it didn't work.

“You need to cut it out with the alien crap.” Charlie nodded to himself. He was conveniently forgetting the fact that he was the big mouth who told the whole school about the “alien crap” in the first place. “You make yourself a target.”

“So you're saying I asked for it? That I got what I deserved?”

Charlie backhanded my shoulder. “Jesus, Henry, you know what I mean.”

“You're not a father yet, so stop trying to act like one.”

Charlie was quiet until we pulled up to the front of CHS. He stopped me when I tried to hop out of the Jeep. “If you want people to treat you normal, you have to act normal.”

A few of the other students being dropped off cast stealthy glances in my direction. Space Boy was back for their amusement. “I never asked to be treated normal, Charlie. I just want to be left alone.”

  •  •  •  

Someone left an alien mask on my chair in Ms. Faraci's class that I discovered when I slipped in right before the final bell. I wasn't kidding about what I said to Charlie—I really did want to be left alone. I made certain I was the first person out of class and the last person in.

I froze when I saw the mask. I recognized it immediately, and the memories of the attack rushed at me in a torrent I couldn't stop. I felt the paint oozing down my skin. Felt them kick me in the balls. But I refused to let them see me upset. I made my bones steel and my skin chain mail. I was diamond on the outside, and I would not break.