Chapter 7

“Customer service requested in the produce section. Any available attendant, please assist,” the awkwardly synthesized computer voice screeched through the supermarket’s audio systems. It would probably be half a day later before a service bot showed up, assuming the place had any on call. I pressed the service button again just to make sure.

Ah, the wonders of your local corner market and its antiquated charms. Prices were catalogued and changed by hand with bulky scanners that still read ancient radio frequency tags on the products, which was no doubt the source of my problem. The store had its honeydew and cantaloupe mixed together in a large bin with three prices displayed on a plastic sign: $2.50, $3.00 and $7.93, each unlabeled. They were also priced per pound, a unit of measurement familiar only by the obsessive and insane.

A human attendant finally arrived, a prickly-faced teenager equipped with the face of utter boredom.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Yeah, I want to buy some of these melons, but I don’t know their prices.”

“The prices are on the tags, sir.”

“Yes I know, but there are three of them and only two products.”

He gave a deep, annoyed sigh. “Only two of them are for the melons, sir.”

“I know that,” I said, becoming slightly irritated. “But I don’t know which ones.”

“These ones, sir.” He pointed to the sign above the melons.

“I know that!”

The clerk stared at me with blank, stupid eyes. Gritting my teeth together, I forced a smile and said, “Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.”

The kid rolled his eyes and walked away. I took one of each melon and checked out.

Honestly, I didn’t have a terrible liking for these fruits, but they weren’t for me. Instead of the usual sack lunches, I thought I’d bring something new for the twins as a treat. Despite being natural carnivores (or so I’ve been told), they had a curious love for fruit. And I discovered that, for them, there were none greater than the cantaloupe and the honeydew. Not strawberries or mangoes or peaches or any other tooth-destroying delicacy. Just cantaloupes and honeydews. Well, one or the other, anyway. Tia adored honeydew while Basil preferred cantaloupe. They weren’t interchangeable, either. The twins wouldn’t touch the other’s melon-of-choice, and prolonged arguments about the superiority of either fruit often resulted.

Blistering air sharpened by Summit’s air conditioning froze off the traces of sweat on my body when I took refuge from the summer heat. More than a place to escape the roasting sun, though, the building’s igloo could refrigerate the Isians’ fruit until I could give it to them.

“Greetings, Mr. Ivano,” Aimee greeted when I came to her desk. “Wonderful day, is it not?”

“Absolutely wonderful,” I said. Since the company didn’t bother buying a sarcasm module for her, she took my words and smiled. I brought up the sweaty melons for her. She examined them with curious respect.

“Oh, Mr. Ivano. That is kind of you, but I am afraid that I am not quite fond of fruits.”

“Gifts for the Isians.”

She took the melons and carefully balanced them on the tips of her fingers, so as not to bruise them against her metal hands, and transferred them to a large wicker basket on her desk. It held all sorts of other delectables: bananas, apples, cans of tuna and assorted meats, cereal, beef jerky, protein insta-meals, and a pomegranate. These were all offerings from other employees. Mine were far superior.

“I feel sorry for those other guys and their crappy fruits,” I said to Aimee as she snuggled my melons with the other food in the basket. “They just can’t compete. It’s so unfair, it’s downright criminal.”

She turned back to me. “How long do you think you can continue with this cantaloupe and honeydew secret?”

“As long as no one else knows.”

“Someone is bound to figure it out.”

“Nah. No one is going to go home, lay on the bed, and think, ‘Hey, you know what? I should bring honeydew and cantaloupe. They’re gonna love that stuff.’ No way.”

“The Isians are fickle, Mr. Ivano, and there are thousands of other fruits in the world. Someone is bound to find something that would catch their fancy. Such as me?”

I laughed at her. She brought food for the lizards? How can a machine possibly know what tastes good? Last time I checked, they didn’t have taste buds. Or taste sensors. Whatever.

Aimee smiled and pointed down, below her desk, and I leaned over to see. Underneath was an enormous, oblong, and green object with a bow tied around its circumference.

“You brought a watermelon?” I said, and then laughed some more. “Sorry, Aimee, but no way. They’re not going to like that over mine. It’s a watermelon. Everybody’s eaten watermelons. If they don’t like them by now, they’re not going to like yours.”

She smirked at me with beady eyes, the look of someone armed with unfair enlightenment. “That is where you are incorrect, Mr. Ivano. They have not.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yes. They always had a belief that they are, literally, water inside of a melon. A bulbous ovary of fluid, if you will. Hence they never wanted to try it.”

“That still doesn’t mean they would like it.”

“Oh I believe that they will,” she said. She pulled the enormous melon out, hugged it close on her lap, and rubbed it as a pregnant woman stroking her belly. The goddamn thing was larger than the Isians themselves. “This specimen was grown in the bioengineering department and was specifically engineered to have many times the fructose of your typical watermelon, plus a meatier, more substantial flesh. I believe the Isians will thoroughly enjoy it.”

Oh, damn that devil robot woman.

She left the debate with a smirk and sat gargantuan watermelon back underneath the desk. I asked her where the twins were, and she replied that Ms. Tiamat was still asleep in the maple tree and Mr. Basilisk was taking a bath. I thanked her and went to visit Basil.

The Isians was floating on his back in his bath, his proud, blue chin upturned so his nostrils poked above the water’s surface. His tail swept through the water in lazy swathes that propelled him body across the pool without purpose, but he somehow managed to avoid the jets of water from disturbing his swim. I sat down on the rim and watched. He had a few other admirers that did the same, and a couple of them tossed a few useless coins into the water.

Figures that an Isian would use the lobby’s water fountain as a bathtub.

When he swam near me, I whistled for his attention. Startled, he shrieked and bounced off the surface until his feet found the bottom of the pool. He shook his head of excess water and panned around until he found me. “Ly-lee!” he said after spraying out errant bits of water from his nostrils. He gripped the rim and climbed out of the fountain.

“How’s the water?” I asked.

“Cold and viscous.”

He stood on the fountain’s ledge and, not unlike a dog, shook himself dry. He then came and sat next to me, bits of water still dripping from the tip of his nose, and started scratching behind his ears with a talon on his hind leg.

“Hey Ly-lee, can I ask you for some advice?” he asked.

“Sure. About what?”

“Our project. We can’t agree to what kind of propulsion system to use. Tia wants to use an Applied Dynamics K-series engine, either the 600 or 600AT. But I want to use a Sarmine P-70. Which do you think is better?”

“Really Basil, I’m not the best person to ask about this. Aerospace engine systems aren’t my expertise. I’m just a dumb engineer from Secondary.”

He chirped and shook his head. “Oh, you’re not dumb, Ly-lee! You’re one of the smartest people I know!”

“Well, thanks for the compliment.” I expressed my appreciation by scratching his neck, which he returned by purring. “Anyway, is the system you want that much better?”

“Oh sure! I mean, the K engines have a lot of power, but get pretty unstable if you push them too hard. And it’s worst with the AT version and its dumb vectoring system. The P-70 system better. It’s smaller, easier, and takes a third less energy than Tia’s system. If you put hers in, we might run into power problems.”

“There you go then. That issue means you can’t use it, right?”

“Well, Tia’s idea is to increase the size of the power plant.” He billowed his arms apart. “Use a big, double-size reactor.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Eh, yeah.” He shrugged. “But it’ll look kinda ugly.”

“Well buddy, I don’t know what else to say. You’re just going to have to convince her that you have the better idea.”

He shook his head in a wide arc and let out a contemptuous snort. “No, no, that’s not going to work. Tia won’t listen to me. She’s too stubborn. That’s why I came to ask you, because she’ll listen to you. You bring her food, I don’t.”

“This is just part of the design process, guy. Someone thinks one way is the best, someone else wants to do it another way, and then a third person thinks they’re both wrong. There’s going to be disagreements in any project, so you either convince them you’re right or compromise. You’re just going to have to convince her somehow, unless you want to let her win and fit an inferior system into your project. Do you really want that?”

He sat and brooded with frowned for a moment, then crossed his arms and shook his head. “I guess not. But it’s going to be a pain.”

“It’s one or the other, Basil. You can’t exactly compromise by smashing both engines together. So you’re going to persuade her you have the best choice. Otherwise, you best get comfortable with the K600. Unless you guys want to design and build an entire engine yourselves, you’re gonna have to do it.”

Basil tapped his toenails on the ledge a few taps, and then his eyes lit up with understanding. “You’re right, Ly-lee!” he exclaimed. “I think I got it now! I know how to convince her.”

“That’s great, little buddy. Go out and make it happen.”

“But in the meantime, can you still try to convince Tia that the Sarmine P-70 is better than the dumb AD K600? She’ll listen to you.”

“I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything.”

He thanked me with affectionate licks on my face. I laughed during my attempts to avoid the sloppy wet kisses.

“Hey, hey, down you silly lizard. I have a surprise for you. Stop and I’ll tell you about it.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s a surprise treat. I think you’ll like it.”

“Oh!” he yelped, his tail straightening in attention. “Basil loves treats!” He skipped along the edge of the pool, his energized tail thumping wildly on the rim and water, and repeated, “Treats, treats!” I had to grab his flailing tail and rein him in.

“Calm down. Lunch time’s not for several hours yet. Now get to the lab and work hard, and I promise I’ll give it to you, all right?”

He bobbed his head in affirmation, jumped off the fountain’s rim, and trotted off to the engineering wing. I followed him along the line of hungry saliva he left in his wake on the floor.

The Alie-Grommot blazed (“blazed” in a relative sense) through mountains of data in record time with the twins at the helm. They didn’t take time off for their scheduled 10:30 hide-and-seek, and even ignored the jerky an employee had placed on the platform. Model employees, really. If only management knew about the wondrous motivational qualities of cantaloupe and honeydew.

At twelve, on the atomic dot, the Isians dropped their work and flew madly to my station. I could make out a few coherent sentences between the shrieks of excitement.

“The treats you promised!”

“Yes! Treats! Promised!”

“We worked hard!”

“We really did!”

“Hard and working!”

“Working and hard!”

“Can you give it to us now?”

“Please?”

“Pretty please pretty?”

By the grace of God, I managed to keep myself from being trampled by excited lizards, and I eventually pried them off of me. They sat down on the floor in front of me, their child-like eyes glistening in anticipation, and I told them to head out first and I’d meet them in a few minutes with their surprises. They bolted off to claim Aimee’s contribution basket in the meantime.

I finished my last unit for the morning without bothering to spot-check it. I was probably just as excited as the lizards, if not more so. Amazing, isn’t it? I was excited to feed a couple of dangerous predators. I guess in the few months since I’ve met the Isians, I finally reached the point where I could truly say I felt no fear from them. I had realized this lying in bed one night when, unable to sleep, I stared at the ceiling and attempted to justify why.

Respect was one reason. I certainly respected their speed, strength, teeth, and venom glands (never seen that one and never intended to), but those kinds of respect are visceral and unsustainable. You can respect a tiger’s ability to kill you without respecting it as an equal. So I valued the Isians’ intelligence. I could look them eye and say I respected them as a fellow intelligent being on this little planet Earth.

I couldn’t sleep when I came to that answer. I tossed around and raked my pillow in obscene positions trying to find comfort. The notion disturbed me too much because I couldn’t resolve it with the other part of Isian nature: the animalism that imprisoned them to be uncultured, uncultivated, uncivilized, unsophisticated, and… naïve.

Look, in a day and age where you had to give away millions of dollars in prizes to even garner a simple “thank you,” the lizard slobbered all over me just because I brought them something to eat. Not Russian caviar sandwiched between filet mignon and dipped in fucking gold, but cantaloupe and honeydew for Christ’s sakes. Cheap, old, and mushy ones, at that. But I know once I gave these pieces-of-shit fruits to them, they’ll think I’m Santa Claus and lick my face until my skin pruned. Guaranteed. No sentient being should be that simple-minded.

They were loveable because they weren’t human. Like pets.

So I didn’t fear them because they were smarter than animals. I also didn’t fear them because they were as dumb as animals. I struggled to reconcile the contradiction. A pair of sleeping pills finally gave me the solution. I didn’t revisit the topic.

All I cared about while I was finishing my work was that I wanted to give Basil and Tia their treats as soon as possible.

I locked my terminal and hustled to the Aimee to get the melons. They were the only inhabitants of her basket when I came, and even the mutant watermelon was missing. She handed me the fruits with an obligatory but smug smile and winked when I left with the melons barely in my arms. As a matter of personal pride, I had to hurry if I wanted to give them to the Isians before they could discover the wonders of watermelon. I loved Aimee like a friend and all, but goddamn if I wasn’t tired of losing to her computerized shenanigans.

The glaring sun and its heat didn’t waste any time welcoming me into their sweat-inducing parlor outside. The twins loafed near the maple, as they usually do, one underneath the shade and the other basking on the simmering boulder amid mounds of food. The lizard under the maple looked dejectedly at a pair protein bars on the grass.

The twin on the rock stretched lazily, yawned, and picked up an orange from the pile.

“You know, this is a wonderful fruit,” she said.

Basil picked up and started gnawing on one of the bars. “Oh?” he mumbled between grunts.

“Yep. It’s an orange that’s also orange. A fruit that’s named after itself. It’s so neat.”

“If you say so.” He spat out the mangled but still unopened bar.

“It is. Did you know that oranges have a lot of ascorbic acid? I read about it.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“It’s another name for vitamin C.”

“Oh, neat! What’s vitamin C?”

“I don’t know. But doesn’t it sound delicious?”

He nodded in agreement. Tia sat up and held the orange to her nose for a deep sniff, and then stuffed it in her mouth and chewed it whole. After a few seconds, the only remnants of the fruit were bits of juice squirting from her lips to the boulder, to Basil’s dejection.

I spotted Aimee’s watermelon next to the boulder with the bow still tied around it. Ah-ha, I could win this! I came to the Isians with the melons behind my back. Basil shrieked when he caught my sight, which perked Tia’s ears up in attention. She jumped off the boulder, and they both came after me like hungry hyenas.

“Woah, stay guys, stay!” I called out before they can bowl me over. They seized into the ground, scattering up clumps of dirt and grass, and stopped just at me feet. I shook my head and said, “What’s the magic word, guys?”

“Please!” they said together.

“Nope, that’s not it.”

The twins looked at each other with confusion. Tia shrugged and said, “Aardvark?”

“Zebra?” Basil said.

“Airplane?”

“Submarine?”

“Peanut butter?”

“Jelly?”

“Computer?”

“Abacus?”

“Boy?”

“Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy?”

Kolm—… what?

While they were giving random guesses, Tia had slipped behind me. Her shrieks of excitement almost caused me to drop the melons.

“Honeydew!” she cried. Her brother peeked over and just chirped.

I held up the fruits for them. They gawked at the melons with open-mouth salivation, seemingly trying to enforce a restraint. Before long though, they caved in swiped the fruits from my hand. Basil clutched his cantaloupe to his chest and stooped his body low around it. He flicked his ears alert, darted glances around his surroundings like a paranoid pigeon, and backed himself to the tree. He then quickly left Tia and me to the safety of the canopy.

Tia cradled her melon in arms and purred to it. She stroked it and rocked it as if it were a child. She would bring her head down to the honeydew, chirp softly, touch it with her tongue, and rock it some more. It would be a funny sight if it weren’t so bizarre. The licks became more frequent and the rocking less, though, and before long, she was slobbering over the fruit in long, sloppy licks. She scratched her teeth on the skin. Love turned into hunger, and she began gnawing.

She took the melon in her claws and, with talons buried into the rind, ripped it in half. Then, after she slurped out the pulp at the centers of the halves, she proceeded to take large bites from the fractured melon, rind and all. She left no traces of the fruit save for a few errant seeds.

“Thanks, Ly-lee,” she said with a smack of her lips “That was de-li-cious!”

“Thank you!” a voice called out from the tree.

Tia stood up to grab my shoulders and lick my face. I let her do it for a while since it was a cool distraction from atrocious heat. Neatly, she replaced the sweat on my head with saliva. I finally had to beg her to stop.

I sat down against the maple’s trunk to shade myself from the sun. Above, I could hear Basil still munching on his cantaloupe in protracted and deliberate bites, savoring his melon more than his sister did. Tia laid her head on my lap, and I took the opportunity to relax and pet her neck.

“Ly-lee? Could I ask you for some advice?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“We’re choosing what kind of propulsion system to use for our, but we can’t agree which one. My little brother wants to use a Sarmine—”

“Hey, woah, hold it right there,” I blurted before she could start rambling. “Your brother already told me about the problem.”

“Oh! Well, then could you try to get some sense into him and tell him that K600 is better than the stupid P-70? He’ll listen to you.”

Oh boy.

“I’ll try.”

“You’re the best, Ly-lee.”

The tree rustled with a disturbance that caused me to look up. Basil poked his head down through the leaves. “Hey Sis,” he called. “Did you ask Ly-lee about that big, green thing yet?”

“What green thing?”

“That green thing with the bow, near the rock.”

Tia propped her head off my lap and looked around in confusion before she spotted the watermelon. “Oh that! No I haven’t asked him.”

“Well, could you?”

“Okay.”

She turned her attention to me and said, “Ly-lee?” oblivious that I had heard everything.

“Hmm?”

“Basil and I were wondering if you could tell us what that big, green thing is over there?” She pointed to the watermelon.

“That? Where’d it come from?”

“I think it was from Arlene.” A chirp came out from the tree. “I mean, Aimee. But we don’t know what it is.”

I waved nonchalantly and said, “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just a watermelon.”

“That’s a watermelon?”

“Watermelon?” came the voice from the tree.

“Hey Basil!” Tia said. “Ly-lee says it’s a watermelon!”

Basil jumped down. “Doesn’t look like it’s filled with water.” He went over to the watermelon and started examining it.

“Watermelons aren’t really that great,” I said.

“Hey, Basil!” Tia called out. “Ly-lee says it isn’t good!”

Basil pressed one of ears to the watermelon and jostled it. “Doesn’t sound like it has water in it, either.” He nosed into the melon and sniffed.

“You better stop him,” I said. “It really, really tastes bad. I had some before. Horrible stuff.”

“Hey, Basil!” Tia yelled. “Ly-lee says it tastes really, really bad and is horrible!”

With his brows tightened in concentration, he continued taking in the watermelon’s scent. “Smells kinda good.”

“Basil! Ly-lee said!”

He ignored her and continued his investigation.

Tia grunted and shook her head. “Ugh! He never listens,” she grumbled. She ran over to him and started nagging with a series of taps, clicks, whistles, chirps, and barks. Whatever it was she was vocalizing, Basil took no heed in his attention to the watermelon. Eventually, she gave up and chirped one final time before lying down.

After he investigated the melon for another minute, Basil tore the bow off with his teeth and patted the rind. A curling smile formed. He faced his back to the massive melon and flapped the end of his tail on top of it. He tapped it again several more times, the bony protrusion at the edge of his tail producing a meaty thump on the rind, and after he seemed to be satisfied with the sound, he pressed his body low. Then, he wiggled his rump a bit and then raised his tail high into the air. I had an idea what was coming next.

“Little brother, Ly-lee said that watermelons weren’t—” Tia started to say as I ran for cover behind the tree. She didn’t finish the sentence, and all I heard was a massive crack followed by dull thumps of melon pieces striking the tree.

I peeked out from the protection of the trunk and found the chaotic—and goofy—aftermath of a mammoth mutated watermelon explosion, larger and more devastating than your ordinary store-bought watermelon. Shattered pieces of hard, green rind and juicy bits of melon littered everywhere, the cataclysmic remnants of a once proud and noble fruit. Oh the humanity!

The blast drenched the twins, particularly the unsuspecting Tia, in a translucent layer of juice and ragged red bits of melon flesh. The mess dripped from their bodies and tinted their white scales pink under the sunlight. A large and unbroken piece of the rind had landed on Basil’s head and covered his eyes like a poorly fitted helmet. Tia snorted, ejecting a watermelon seed from her nostrils.

“Why’d you do that?” Tia cried. “Now look at us, this is nasty!”

“You took all the food and I’m still hungry,” Basil replied. “I want to eat this thing!”

She scorned at her brother and licked a piece of melon off her claws. A smile appeared on her lips. They both started licking the mangled red bits off their bodies with excited chirps, and then went to investigate what was left of the watermelon. Remarkably, despite having a large chunk of itself crushed and scattered from the force of Basil’s tail, a good part of the watermelon remained intact in two halves. Each sibling claimed one part and gorged into the fruit with abandon. I could hear the moans of delight and satisfaction as they dined.

Tia swallowed mouthful and whistled to her brother. He didn’t respond as his head bored deep into his melon and nearly disappeared.

I called out for their attention. “How’s it taste?”

“Oh, this isn’t at all bad!” Tia said. She dug into the watermelon and scooped up a handful. “Here, you have to try some!”

“No, that’s all right. I’m fine.”

“You sure?” She held up the pulp for me and then stuffed it into her mouth when I declined again. She began taking loud bites from thick rind.

“So, how is it compared to honeydew?”

“Ofh, muschf beteprof,” she garbled with a mouthful. She swallowed and said it again. “Oh, much better than honeydew!”

“Really?”

“Oh yes! It’s so sweet and so soft and so, so good!”

Basil mumbled something from inside his half of the watermelon.

“It’s even better than cantaloupe too? How wonderful!”

I sighed and sat back down next to the tree. Damn you Aimee. Damn you!

The watermelon didn’t survive much longer against Isian hunger, though it made a heroic effort and hit the twins straight in the gut. After it was over, they sprawled listless on their sides as not to upset their distended stomachs. Basil’s tongue hung out from the side of his mouth, his head still partly buried inside a hollowed-out rind, and Tia burped and stroked her belly in contentment.

I didn’t take it too hard, though. Despite losing the favors of the fruit to Aimee, I was still pleased with the Isians’ delight over the watermelon. It’s just something about seeing them happy, like how your dog thinks you’re the greatest being on the planet for bringing him some beef jerky. You know, I was glad Tia knocked me senseless that night. Had that not happened, I would have never established a relationship with the Isians, a relationship I was beginning to cherish. Watching the Isians spread blissfully under the torpid sun, I couldn’t help but smile.

With nothing else to do and some time yet to kill before lunch was over, I picked up a good-sized stick from the ground that dropped when Basil climbed off the tree. I palmed it a bit. Long and narrow but with solid weight—a nice throwing stick if you had a dog. Not thinking much of it more than that, I threw it out into the distance.

I was surprised when it came back to me, except in the mouth of one of the Isians. The stick dropped on my lap, and the twins sat on their haunches with looks of canid anticipation. So I picked it up and threw it again.

And again.

And again.

I didn’t stop. The Isians would never allow it. Yelping, howling, tackling, shrieking, whistling, and laughing, they beamed onto the stick like a solitary object of worship, all the troubles and evils in the world dissolved with through the power of a wooden rod. It’s amazing how the greatest delight came with the simplest dance of the catch, a rhythm, I suppose, they had listened to for eons since their ancestors first walked the earth. It made them happy. It made me happy.

I would be drenched, dehydrated, exhausted, and over an hour late for work. I would lose pay, go home to an aching back, and collapse from heatstroke. But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered so long I held that maple stick.