Oh, Bender. How do you always know just what to say?

36. Visting the Vivarium

For seven billion people, the end of the Earth was the end of the universe, but to us it was business as usual. Tak redeemed her old shame, gave her address, and turned her attention to new conquests. The minutiae of planetary conversion were beneath her, so there was no reason for us to stick around while the Assimilation Council did its thing.

We took the Armada off down the band of the Milky Way – drifting slow, like a sated shark – and the Earth and its ruins were forgotten, another checked box on the Empire's to-do list. And why shouldn't we forget it? Nothing had really changed.

Nothing save the fact that I had a feral hybrid teenager squirreled away on the Massive, and Dib skulking around putting us all off our sodas. He didn't do or say much of anything, just hung around brooding and creeping everybody out, to the point that the crew began altering their routes to avoid him. Often, I'd find him just sitting slumped in front of a viewscreen, the space that surrounded us reflected in his glasses.

He refused to be fitted with a pak, so not only did I have to speak to him in English, I had to procure a room for him to sleep in and food that he could eat. And when I say I, I mean it. Tak, true to her word, had made sure everyone knew that I was responsible for Dib, and that my duties were not to be delegated.

So, long story short, it frickin' sucked. Dad had been easy enough to take care of, but I was more than regretting having taken pity on Dib – and after a week of playing babysitter, I had decided that a plan of action was necessary. Two plans, actually.

Plan A: Finally find out what the fuck's going on with him and J4 (well, I had to call her something shorter than J499-62A, and it wasn't like I was going to name her Sparky), and see if that doesn't snap him out of his funk. I had no idea what he knew about her or how he'd react, but I figured he'd at least have to wake up and smell the mutilated lab rat unlucky enough to be schlepping his genes around like a sack of potatoes.

Plan B: If that doesn't work, throw him out the airlock.

So I showed up at his room one morning, unlocked the door (yeah, that was what we were reduced to; I'd had to set the reader not to let him out during certain times, so he wouldn't make trouble while I was asleep), and strode over to his bed, where he sat staring at the wall. "Get up," I said, shoving him in the shoulder. "There's something I've got to show you."

Normally, I'd have been bringing him breakfast at that point (because apparently, my stupid obligations had turned me into a service drone), but he didn't question the change in schedule. He just got up and followed me out the door into the hall, shuffling sullenly behind me as I headed down to the lower decks.

It was there that I'd decided to keep J4, hidden amid storage pods and spare rooms. The crew didn't go down there often, and when they did, it was only for a few minutes at a time. I felt sure no one would notice her there.

I hadn't wanted to stick Rel with her for good, so I'd told her to appoint somebody else to take care of her – somebody who didn't have anything better to do. Somebody the rest of the crew wouldn't miss. So she'd foisted the job off on PI, the random pink-eyed SIR unit whose story I'd never bothered to learn. When I swiped my palm over the reader outside storage pod twelve, we found her on duty just inside the doors, perched on a little stool in her pink helmet with its cables and triangular ears. I nodded to her and she nodded back, unspeaking.

We stood in a little antechamber, on one side of the glass wall that divided the room. On the other, I'd converted the storage pod into a kind of vivarium, with soft floors, warm, sleepy air, and gently curving walls – well, walls from where we stood. Inside, they would disappear behind holographic projections of any environment in the computer's data bank, expanding the smallish space infinitely in all directions.

The images were full-bodied, seemingly three-dimensional, and supplemented by all the sound and motion of their sources. More than once, I'd watched J4 smack into the wall trying to explore her new world, before she realized it only went so far.

PI and I had cycled through several different environments, and we still switched them up sometimes; J4 didn't seem to mind. So long as it didn't include humans, she was as amenable to a city as to a sea. Today's landscape, as displayed on the console outside the vivarium, was a jungle.

J4 was crouched at one end of the oval-shaped room, under what she probably thought was a banana tree or a hibiscus bush. PI must have given her a snack, because she was hunched over nibbling on something clutched in both hands. She ate like a squirrel, quickly and nervously, jerking her head up every few bites.

Dib and I stood there watching her through the glass. After a minute, he furrowed his brow, and said, "Okay. What the hell is this?"

I raised an eyebrow. "You mean you don't know?"

"Uh, no. Why should I?"

I studied him a moment, propping myself against the console, drumming my fingers in thought. "This is," I said, "aside from Vix, the only human-Irken hybrid I know to exist. I found her hiding out in a warehouse in the industrial district. She grew up in a place called the East End Paranormal Research Facility, as their alien guinea pig." I pulled in a long breath through my nose, and let it out as a sigh. "And her human genes are yours."

He stared at me like I'd socked him in the stomach. "What?"

"She's your fucking daughter, Dib. How can you not know?"

"I—I—" His head swiveled between me and the glass wall. Like he couldn't decide between trying to tell me I was wrong, and looking at J4 to see if I was right. "But that's not possible," he insisted, his voice rising on each word, his face twisted with confusion and shock. "How could it—I mean, what would I have—"

"I did the DNA scan myself. You think I would make this shit up?"

"I don't know what you would do."

I shook my head. "Listen, just because you're a thirty-three-year-old virgin—"

"Who said I was?"

"The fact that you're you, that's who. Now shut up and let me explain." I glanced through the glass at J4, now finishing off whatever she'd been eating. Scrubbing her face clean with her hands bunched into fists, like paws. It was eerie, how like an animal she was; I got the impression she'd learned how to function outside East End by watching the rats in the industrial district.

"You don't have to have boned somebody to have a kid," I went on. "Did you think Tak actually knocked me up with Vix?"

A sneer flickered across his lips, weakened by what I guessed was nausea. "I tried not to think about it, thanks."

"Well, she didn't. All you need to make one of these things are the requisite genes and an Easy-Bake oven; it's far from impossible that half those genes came from a flake of your skin, or a strand of your hair." I eyed him meaningfully. "You want to guess whose the other half are?"

"I—w—I—" His pallor was quickly ripening into a queasy yellow-green. "How the fuck am I supposed to know how she ended up with Irken genes? Until a week ago, the only Irken I knew was Zim, and…and…" The horror came to a head and he was momentarily lost for words, standing there slack-jawed and bug-eyed. When he did manage to pick up his thought, his voice came out squeaking like it had before it lowered, when we were kids and he was yelping and shrieking about aliens and vampires and Bigfoot all the time. "Are you saying she's his?!"

"I'm saying she's yours, Daddy. Plural."

His knees buckled and he crumpled against the glass wall, sliding down it like a pigeon that had crashed into a window. "Fuck," he groaned, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the floor. "Fuck."

I sat down beside him. "That's what I said."

He just sat there for awhile, processing, and I looked over my shoulder at J4. Having downed her snack and cleaned her face, she was heading for the dish of snirp juice (a snirp being a distinctly mild kind of Irken melon, and the juice they made of it the closest thing they had to water; PI had tried to feed her soda, but it was too sweet and one taste had her hacking) on the other side of the room, loping on her hands and feet across the spongy floor.

She flopped down in front of the dish and practically dunked her whole head into it, gulping down mouthful after mouthful like a camel on the run – as if she hadn't much time, and needed to drink as much as she could.

It wasn't that I relished treating her like an animal. I'd thought about giving her a bottle of juice instead of a bowl, but I knew from the brain tap (that and the way she moved an all fours, favoring her right hand, always listing slightly towards the left) that her hands didn't always work so well, and I wasn't sure if she'd be able to handle the screw-top.

I was hesitant to try to fix her, too. It'd have been pretty easy, with the medical tech at my disposal – with the help of a few lab monkeys, I guessed I'd have had her whole with a week's work– but it seemed to me that her scars were her only friends. She'd grown used to them; what life she had, she'd pieced together around them. I couldn't pull this rug out from under her just yet.

When I glanced away from the glass, I saw Dib looking in too. I watched him watching J4 slurp up the snirp juice, her good antenna bobbing with her head, the limp one lost in her hair. "What's wrong with her?" he asked, frowning. "Why does she act like an animal? Why are you keeping her in a cage?"

"I told you, she was raised as a lab rat. She never learned how to be anything else."

His eyes traced the black teeth of her sutures, like the seams on a patchwork doll. "How old is she?"

"Computer says somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. We can't get an exact read."

"Twenty years! I was—I was a kid twenty years ago! To think that she'd been around—all this time—" He buried his head in his hands, spitting a muttered stream of curses at the floor. "It just doesn't make sense. Why would Zim make something like her? Make her and get rid of her, no less?"

"Fuck if I know. Did anyone ever get what was going on in his head?" I snorted. "Guess we'll never know now. Too bad Tak had him whacked before we could grill him."

"Uh—yeah." He glanced up at me through cracked fingers. "Now that you mention it," he said sheepishly, "there's…something I should tell you about that."

Shit. I should've known. "What did you do?" I snapped, jerking his hands away from his face.

"Well, I—after Tak told me she was going to have him 'eliminated', I went to his house and warned him. I told him everything you told me, and—and I told him to get off of Earth while he could." He flinched like he thought I was going to slap him, and I had to admit I was considering it. "I have no idea whether he actually took me seriously – I mean, he laughed at me when I told him, and he maybe he never came around. Maybe he was in the base when they zapped it. I just thought I should give him at least a chance, since nobody else was; it didn't feel like a fair fight."

"Bullshit. You were just pissed at Tak, and you were itching to screw up any part of her plan you could get your hands on. Since when have you cared about fighting fair?"

"It doesn't matter. The point is, there's a chance he's still alive, somewhere out there." As he climbed to his feet, his gaze strayed again to the glass wall, behind which J4 now lay curled up in the middle of the vivarium. She was absently pawing her face with the back of one hand, her tangles of dark hair billowing out around her, her right eye darting restlessly around the room. He shuddered. "There's a chance I could still find out—why."

"So what?" I said, getting up. "You're just going to take off looking for him? You don't even know where he is."

"Yeah, so? It's not like I've got anything better to do." He looked at me warily. "You're not going to tell Tak, are you? If she knows and she tracks him down first, he'll be dead before he can tell me anything."

"I won't tell her. She's got enough to deal with as it is. But you know," I added, "if you're going to go off into space, you'll need a ship. And knowing you, if you don't have a pak, you'll keel over scavenging for food before you can get within a galaxy of wherever Zim is."

He frowned. "Are you just mocking me, or are you going to help me?"

"Sure I'll help you. I'm a good sister, right?"

"You just want to get me off the Massive, don't you?"

"Bingo."

As far as I was concerned, this was all working out beautifully. For one thing, I would get rid of Dib. For another, if he wasn't around, he couldn't let it slip to Tak that Zim might still be alive, and God knew that wasn't a shitstorm I wanted to weather (I could hear her already: this is all your fault! You were the one who wanted to go and see him, and now look what he's done! Do you have any idea how much trouble you may have caused me, child? I should have you and your slime-licking brother exiled to a sun!).

And if by some chance he did stumble across Zim before a six-armed swacknagger turned him into toothpaste, any answers he got would gratify me in turn. Unlike Dib, I actually had a life, and I wasn't about to put it hold just to find out what was up with J4; all the same, I wanted to know.

Before we headed out, leaving PI to her babysitting and J4 to do…whatever there was to do in the vivarium, Dib paused, glancing over his shoulder. "Does she have a name?"

"She has a number. J499-62A." I shrugged. "I've been calling her J4."

"J4." He repeated the name, such as it was, slowly. Then, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed. "Fuck."