A/N: Written to the sounds of "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Set about two weeks after Day the Earth Stood Still.
Click.
"Seriously, though," David Letterman told a live studio audience. "It was a multi-billion dollar organization, had over fifty thousand members at its peak, and the best tagline they could come up with was 'Sharing is caring?' Sharing is caring? And no one ever thought that maybe, just maybe, it was being run by aliens? I mean, what was it going to take before somebody noticed that-"
Click.
"I swear, Carlsberg," the man in fatigues and eyeliner yelled into his phone, as computer-engineered explosions went off behind him. "If these new recruits were any younger, they'd be goddamned Animorphs!"
Click.
"This is Katie Couric, reporting live from San Luis Obispo," the news anchor said. Behind her, the shot showed the steps of a courthouse, complete with stereotypical marble pillars and another dozen reporters. "Where the California courts have just made the historic and ground-breaking decision to release a man who served over eighteen months of a life sentence for murdering his elderly next-door neighbor, after a review of security footage from the prison revealed that a yeerk crawled out of his ear three days after he was first incarcerated."
Click.
"New reports from a close personal friend of the deceased suggest that the so-called 'lost Animorph,' one Rachel Berenson, may have actually been-"
Click.
"Now, it's understandable that you would regret the affair," Dr. Phil told the woman on his couch.
Her only response was to sniffle into her wad of tissues some more. Her husband, sitting next to her but looking away, held out a few more.
"It's understandable," Dr. Phil went on, "But who should we really blame? You? The yeerk who made you do it? What is a yeerk but a voice inside each of our heads?" He turned to look at the camera. "By blaming the yeerk, aren't you really just blaming yourself?"
"Woman claims not guilty of cheating on husband because of possession by alien," the ticker at the bottom read.
Click.
The shot zoomed in on a creepily smiling woman who was alternating between looking at the camera and typing on a multi-colored touch screen. "IBM presents!" the voiceover said. "A brand-new revolution in z-space technology, now available inside your home!"
Click.
"So you've taken on some controversial issues in the past, but how do you feel about the recent accusations that the vampires you write are just thinly-veiled metaphors for yeerks?" the interviewer asked.
The balding, red-headed director leaned forward in his chair. "I think that the vampires I write are a metaphor for anything you want them to be a metaphor for. But the subtext is there if you want to look for it. I mean, I think a lot of us have experienced that feeling of loving somebody and then suddenly that person becomes someone completely different. They don't always have fangs and sunlight allergies..." He laughed. "But it still happens."
The interviewer nodded. "So do you feel that you bring comfort to the families who have lost loved ones to the recent war with your show?"
"People get what they want to get from my writing," the director said. "But I'm hoping that the recent plotline with the revelation of Willow's connection to the neo-pagan andalite mysticism is going to speak to a lot of people."
"I think the connection between vampirism and yeerk infestation is clearly-"
Click.
"Coming up next, our investigators tackle one of the biggest mysteries of our time: Tobias Fangor, national hero... and missing person!"
Click.
"I'm so sorry, Marlena!" Lexie sobbed into the phone. "It was as though I was watching myself do and say all those terrible things, but I couldn't do anything to stop it. Please, you have to believe me that I never meant a word of it. It was all the yeerk in my head!"
The screen split down the middle to show Marlena staring at a photo of herself and Lexie hugging in the sunlight. "Of course I forgive you," she said. "I know that it wasn't your choice, and I don't care what Vi says!"
"Oh, Marlena! You're just like a-"
Click.
"And we're in for a real treat today, ladies and gentlemen," Steve Irwin said. "Because today we're going to be meeting with one of the famous hork-bajir of Rattlesnake Canyon Park. Now these beautiful folks might look fierce, but in reality they know more about how to harvest trees than any primate like you or me can ever hope to." He turned to grin at the camera. "Think I can keep up with 'em?"
Click.
"You know, at this rate," the commentator said, "We're going to have people getting away with all sorts of shit. 'It wasn't me, it was someone else in morph!' 'Must have been the aliens!' I swear to God, if some of these whiners don't shut the hell up-"
"Gerald!" his co-host said sharply.
"Sorry." He held up both hands, smirking. "Aliens in my brain made me say it."
Click.
The screen switched to a black-and-white shot of a man standing in the doorway of a white-walled room, frantically struggling against the orderlies that were trying to hold him back. "Make them listen to me before it's too late!" he yelled, as dramatic music swelled in the background.
Huh. I stopped channel surfing, lowering the remote onto the couch next to me. I remembered this one.
There wasn't much in the way of selection for television channels at three-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday, but I'd always had a soft spot for classic sci-fi so I let it play. Honestly I wasn't looking for anything that deep or engaging to watch; I was mostly looking to distract my brain enough to try and fall asleep without dreaming.
Homer became the first one to join me, padding down the stairs and flopping on the couch with his head across my lap. He made a quiet noise of contentment even after the disappointment of discovering that I didn't have any food with me, and before long he was snoring almost loud enough to drown out the actors on screen. I buried a hand in his fur and stroked absently as the frame story gave way to the long opening and the hard-bitten young doctor reunited with some woman he knew in high school and argued with her, unaware that in a matter of less than three days they'd be professing to love each other forever and discussing the possibility of children.
I was just starting to doze off when Jake appeared in the door of the living room. He looked okay-not as though he had just woken up from a nightmare or even as though he had just woken up at all-but I knew that was probably the only reason he was down there.
"Hi," I said quietly.
He walked around to the edge of the couch to look at the screen. "What're you watching?" he asked.
"Invasion of the Body-Snatchers," I told him.
Jake gave me a startled look, started to say something, changed his mind, and just stood there continuing to watch me.
"What?" I said defensively, even though I knew perfectly well why Jake was looking at me like I had just sprouted a second head. "It's a classic."
"What about memories?" the doctor on screen said into the silence. "There must be certain things that only you and he know about."
Doomed Female #3 shook her head, forehead crinkling in distress. "I've talked to him. He remembers them all down to the last small detail, just like Uncle Ira would. But Miles, there's no emotion-None! Just the pretense of it. The words, the gestures, the tone of voice-Everything else is the same, but not the feeling! Memories or not, he isn't my Uncle Ira!"
The piano music in the background got louder in sympathy for her plight.
Jake sat down on the couch on the other side of Homer. "Okay," he said.
"It doesn't have a happy ending, so we can find something different if you want," I offered.
"Really?" Jake glanced at me.
"Spoiler alert. The aliens win. Everyone becomes pod people in the end." I went back to watching the screen as the tragically doomed young blond went on begging the protagonist to believe her about her family being taken over by aliens.
"Huh." Jake pulled his legs up and sat cross-legged on the end cushion in a way that made him look like an elementary schooler. "I kinda thought that all movies had to end happy back then."
"Nah." I shrugged. "The book has a happy ending though."
On screen, the inevitably coupled-off last survivors were pushing their way into the greenhouse and discovering the body-filled alien pods inside, the men gasping in stoic horror while the women hovered uselessly in the background.
"The aliens give up and leave after a while," I explained, even though Jake hadn't asked. "They find out that humans fight too hard to keep their messy emotions, so they're too much effort to colonize."
"They just go?" Jake asked. "Then what?"
"I don't know," I said. "That's it. The book ends there."
"I can't believe you read the book, you nerd." Jake shook his head in mock sadness.
l laughed-it was good to hear him teasing me again. "Like I said, it's better than the movie. You should try reading one sometime."
"Sure, Mom."
We both fell silent again, watching as the doctor and his lovely female plot device fled the aliens to the sounds of more screeching violins and thrumming percussion.
"Why doesn't she take her shoes off?" Jake asked as we watched the attractive brunette struggle to flee up a hill while wearing high heels.
"It was nineteen fifty-six," I said. "She's there to look pretty, not think logically."
He snorted.
I glanced over at Jake every so often as the main character frantically tried to convince everyone in the town that alien threat was real, but he kept his eyes on the screen, not moving except to pet Homer occasionally.
It was better than I remembered, cheesy and overdone but with just enough heart underneath the melodrama to keep it interesting. The main character once again lost the love of his life (or at least the last few days) to the infestation-she really should have taken those shoes off and saved herself a messy end. "Their bodies were now hosts, harboring an alien form of life, a cosmic form which to survive must take over every human man!" the voice-over proclaimed, just in case we hadn't been paying attention to the last hour of film.
And then it ended, the main character frantically banging on car windows and yelling about the invasion while a crowd of smiling pod people watched from the sidelines, waiting for him to be taken away by the police. The words "the end" scrolled across the screen-apparently in the 1950s no one had any faith in moviegoers' ability to figure these things out for themselves-and the credits started rolling.
"That's it?" Jake said. "'You're next?' And the whole world is now..."
I shrugged. "Told you so."
"Well, it's realistic," he muttered.
The screen showing the credits shrank to quarter-size around the ads. "Don't go away!" the voiceover said. "The best of science fiction through the years will continue in just a few minutes with Jurassic Park, airing on this channel after these messages!"
"You still in to keep watching?" I asked Jake.
"Sure, just as long as they don't show The Fly anytime soon," he said.
I shot him a questioning look.
He raised his eyebrows. "Trust me, you don't want to know."
"Yeah, that's probably true." I shuddered. I could guess well enough, and the mental image alone was horrifying.
I also hadn't seen Jurassic Park in a while-I hadn't seen any movies in a few years, unless they'd been playing at Sharing events-so I left the TV where it was.
"And would you look at that," I said, as the first brontosauruses appeared on screen. "Actual special effects. Thank god."
Jake didn't answer. I kind of assumed he'd fallen asleep until almost twenty minutes later when, in the middle of watching a tyrannosaurus rex heroically trying to rid the movie of its most obnoxious characters (so far she'd succeeded in eating the lawyer, but I also knew she was sadly doomed to fail where the bratty kids were concerned), Jake suddenly said, "That's not true."
"What?" I turned to look at him.
"Their vision isn't based on motion. They could still see prey even when it wasn't moving." He was still watching the screen intently as if completely unaware he'd just said anything unusual.
"Please tell me you learned that in science class."
He shook his head.
I think my mouth was hanging open. I tried to come up with a response to that one and utterly failed. I knew that the Animorphs had gotten involved in some weird stuff, had ended up on other planets and at the bottom of the ocean and all sorts of other places they weren't supposed to be, but...
"You're shitting me," I said flatly. "I will believe a lot of crap, but... How?"
Jake finally looked away from the screen. "It was a weird time paradox." He shrugged.
I snorted. "No, really? You think?"
"Yeah, remember that downed sub with the nukes that ended up blowing up?" he asked.
I nodded, even though I wasn't sure what he was talking about.
"We were all dolphins at the time, and we were right on top of it-Ax said it made a sario rip or something, and anyway..." He trailed off, looking into space above my left shoulder.
"And then you decided to morph a t-rex," I said.
"Yeah, but I didn't get to keep it." He let his eyes trail back over to me. "Something about the time paradox undoing itself so that we never actually went back there."
"Uh-huh. Suuure." I honestly couldn't tell if he was bullshitting me or not. I couldn't think of any reason that he would, but dinosaurs? Seriously?
"Really," he said earnestly. "We were there for almost a week, and then when the comet hit, we were back where we started and no time had passed at all."
"You watched the dinosaurs go extinct?" I said suspiciously.
He winced, looking down at Homer. "We sort of made them go extinct." He looked back up at me, eyes bright in the reflected light of the screen. "We didn't really have a choice."
"I'm still gonna call PETA on your sorry ass," I said.
Jake grinned, rolling his eyes. "You can't prove I did it, because technically it never happened. Or..." He frowned. "It did, I guess, and it didn't, or maybe it happened without us, and us being there didn't make a difference, and Tobias sabotaging the bomb was just a way of neutralizing our presence... I don't know. Every time Ax explains it to me I just end up more freaked out and confused than I was before."
"Remind me not to get wrapped up in any time paradoxes any time soon, then." I grimaced. "There's already enough bad sci-fi crap in my life."
"Time travel isn't always bad," Jake said casually. "I got shot in the head crossing the Delaware with Washington's army, but then Cassie went to the 1960s to prevent Tobias from killing Hitler so the whole thing never happened."
I opened my mouth to answer-and then closed it again. "You almost had me fooled for a second there," I said, laughing. "But I'm not an idiot, you know."
"Oh, come on. You believe me about the dinosaurs but not about the First Battle of Trenton?"
Yeah, I was so not the only nerd in this family. "You actually know the official name of that battle?"
"I died in that battle!" Jake said indignantly. "Of course I know what it's called."
"You got your brains blown out while fighting in the American Revolution. And then you got better."
"Yeah."
"Because Cassie-"
"Risked unraveling the whole universe to make a time paradox and keep it from ever happening. Yeah."
"Dude, you have got to send her flowers or something." As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them.
Jake's mouth snapped shut and he turned away, staring at the screen like he was suddenly fascinated by the plot of the movie.
I opened my mouth to apologize but stopped, knowing that that would probably only make it worse. I might even end up sounding like Mom and Dad: Jake, why don't you at least try calling Cassie? Jake, how's Marco doing these days? Jake, it's been a while since you've had a friend over, don't you want to call someone? Jake, why don't you make plans for this weekend? Like he was a shy kid who needed more play dates to come out of his shell.
Like he was even a kid at all anymore.
"Please tell me that little girl is going to get eaten soon," Jake said suddenly.
Okay, maybe he had some kid left in him.
"She survives," I informed him. "And fixes the computers."
Jake made a small noise of annoyance but went back to watching the main character attempt to make conversation with the children who couldn't act and sadly wouldn't be killed off any time soon.
I also went back to watching the movie-wondering how many other inaccuracies about the dinosaurs Jake had spotted-and found myself getting pulled into the plot again. Not enough to consider attempting either of the sequels if they came on next, but enough that when Jake said my name a while later I forgot that I was the one who was supposed to answer.
"Tom?" he said again.
I had another disorienting second where I remembered yet again that Essa 412 wasn't going to answer if I continued to sit there and do nothing, and finally blinked and looked over. "Yeah?"
Jake had to be aware what had just happened, but all he said was, "You ever read the book of this one?"
"Oh. Yeah." I blinked again, trying to remember if there was anything I should do with my body that I wasn't right now.
"Any good?" Jake was practically spoon-feeding the conversation to me, aware that I was scrambling to catch up but not wanting to draw attention to it.
"It didn't have a happier ending than the movie, if that's what you're hoping for." I rolled the words slowly though my mouth, trying not to mispronounce anything. I hated when I started thinking about how to do really basic things like talk or read, and half the time lost all ability to do so in the process. "A bunch more characters die, including Jeff Goldblum."
"Isn't he in the sequel, though?" Jake said.
"He gets better, I guess." I glanced back at the screen. "I don't know, I never actually got around to reading that one."
"Huh." Jake was looking back at the movie as well.
"The second movie's crap, so didn't seem like it'd be worth it," I said. "But I guess science saves the day, everyone goes home happy, the dinosaurs win, and no one we care about ever actually dies."
Jake didn't speak for a while, and when he did I almost lost what he said under the sound of the movie, but there it was. "So much for real life being just like science fiction these days."
I actually fell asleep in the middle of watching the little venomous dinosaurs eat the diabolical programmer who shut off the power, and didn't wake up until the few surviving characters were flying away in a helicopter as pterodactyls soared past. Jake was asleep as well, peacefully for now; he was half-slumped on the couch with Homer piled on top of his legs in a way that was probably uncomfortable, but I wasn't about to disturb him.
"Don't go away!" the same voice told us. "The best of science fiction through the years will continue in just a few minutes with Jurassic Park Two, airing on this channel after these messages!"
I sighed and reached for the TV remote.
Click.
"Tune in next week to find out how Chandler will react to the revelation of Joey's Controller status!"
Click.
"And then my wife says to me, 'How come you can't get our kids to stop playing video games for thirty seconds, and Eva Alvarez can talk hers into saving the planet?'" Canned laughter. "And sure, I'm nodding along the whole time, but I'm thinking, can you imagine what it would be like to be those kids' parents?
"I mean, between the wolf fur in the beds and the dead aliens on the carpet, I'd be going nuts!" More laughter this time. "And can you imagine a conversation about the birds and the bees that's gotta bring in actual birds and actual bees? Man, we have enough problems with teen pregnancy in this country without bestiality becoming a whole other-"
Click.
"You know, we've got a hell of a lot of people coming out claiming they don't have responsibility for their own actions these days," Rush Limbaugh said. "And the official explanation everyone from the White House on down is trying to feed us is that there were aliens controlling people's brains? Aliens? Really?"
He leaned toward the camera, folding his hands on top of the table. "Am I the only one wondering how on earth it could possibly be that we could have had an alien invasion going on for over five years and the only people paying enough attention to notice were a group of eighth graders?
"I mean, we've got William Roger Tennant's wife simultaneously claiming that her husband became a different person overnight and that she didn't even notice. Let me repeat that: her husband's brain was allegedly taken over by aliens-and she didn't notice. What kind of person are you, lady, if your husband becomes a completely different person overnight and you can't even tell? Am I the only one who smells a fish here?"
Click.
"As you can see," Morgan Freeman said, "The body is perfectly evolved in such a way that it can begin interfacing with dozens of different types of nervous systems almost immediately upon contact." On the screen a CGI-simulated yeerk flattened its way down a model human ear canal-
Click.
"I don't know how the world is going to change in light of the recent revelations, Joe, I really don't. We've got a president who has openly admitted to being controlled by aliens for over half his term, tens of thousands of other people dealing with those same revelations..."
"And let's not forget that close to a hundred of those thousands are also in possession of highly controlled and risky andalite technology, Mika. The government is still no closer to figuring out how it should respond to the so-called Animorphs, and I think we've been lucky so far that they haven't done more themselves."
"We'll just have to keep an eye on the situation as it develops. More on this story next week."
Click.
A/N: So I found out only after writing this that the version of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers I first saw on the sci-fi channel many years ago (which has the unhappy, ambiguous ending Tom describes) is in fact a director's cut. The theatrical cut of the film (which is the version you'll find on DVD or Netflix these days) has one additional scene, tacked on at the end by request of the producers, where the main character succeeds in alerting the authorities about the pod people; apparently Jake was right and all the movies did in fact have to have happy endings back then. Since I like the director's cut a lot better, I'm assuming for the purposes of this fic that that's the one the sci-fi channel always shows.