And here we have our first new perspective since Tak's in chapter twelve. Plus flashbacks! Who doesn't love a nice flashback?
37. PIGI
PI speaking
In my first memory, I look out at the world from inside a beam of orange light. Not that there's much to the world, at first. In the beginning, my world is a lab, bathed in a pale red glow; in one corner, a small figure is hunched over a workstation. I can only see him from the back, but instantly, I identify him as Irken, one of the Master Race. An invader, or—something like it.
Suddenly, another figure pops into my field of vision, even smaller and crackling with energy. He blinks round aqua eyes at me, and shrieks, "PIGI!"
He says it like you'd say the word 'piggy', but I know how it's meant to be spelled. I also know that it doesn't stand for anything. And I know another thing: we're already friends.
I hop out of the beam onto the floor with the clatter and clank of metal limbs, landing in front of him. I don't have anything to say, so I burst into laughter, the sudden joy of life and freedom and curtains and bacon exploding into shrill, screaming peals that echo throughout the lab. I realize that everything is funny. The walls, the floors, the orange column shimmering empty on the workstation above us – somehow, it's all hilarious, and I couldn't stop laughing if I wanted to. Which I don't.
"GIR!" barks the Irken at the workstation, whipping around to face us. "Is it so much to ask for you to—"
He cuts himself short when he sees me. I find myself blinking at my reflection in wide red eyes. "What have you…" His voice trails off and his eyes narrow, his face crumpling into a glare. He stomps over to us, shouting, "What is this?! What did you do now?!"
"I made a friend!" GIR announces gleefully.
"What?! Who told you to do that?!"
GIR and I look at each other and shrug. He waits a second, maybe so if an answer to that question blows by, he can jump up and catch it and put it in a jar and give it to Master, to make him stop frowning. But the answers are migrating elsewhere this year, so he just starts again. "She's PIGI!"
Master furrows his brow. "You named it Piggy?"
"No. PIGI!"
"Well, that's—" Again, he interrupts himself, curling his finger back into his fist just as soon as he lifts it to lecture us. His eyes become slivers and he yells, "Just get rid of it! I don't want—"
His command is drowned out when GIR begins to cry, fountains of tears arcing from his eyes and flooding the floor. I retract the plates on my head and out comes a little umbrella.
"You're mean, Master!" he wails. "You always take my piggies! My bestest frieeends in the wholewideworld, and Michigan! Didn't you ever hadda bestest friend? Somebody to loves you, and hugs you, and make hats out of noodles and corn? My piggies! MY PIGGIES! They all did gones back to the sea!"
"I don't care!" Master snaps after looking bewildered for a moment. "Throw it in the incinerator! I'm not having—wait." Suddenly, he stops and glances about him, swiveling to search the whole of the lab with his eyes. "GIR," he says, his voice growing dangerously low, "what happened to the Tharlian power core?"
"I gave it to PIGI," GIR says brightly, then turns to me. "Happy Hanukkah!"
"YOU DID WHAT?!" Apparently displeased by this display of generosity, Master grabs GIR by the antenna, lifts him to eye-level and starts screaming at him, gesticulating wildly with his free arm. "YOU HORRIBLE SNOT-SUCKING WEASEL COW! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW POWERFUL THAT THING IS?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET MY ARMY OF CYBORG VAMPIRE PONIES INFILTRATING CITY HALL BY TUESDAY IF YOU'RE USING THE THARLIAN POWER CORE TO MAKE YOURSELF A SPLUNKING PLAYMATE?!"
GIR blinks at him. "BEANS!" he cries in reply, after a second, and Master puts him down.
"Well, you'll just have to give it back," Master demands of me, holding out his hand. "Hurry up. Do not waste the time of ZIM!"
I consider that. I'm not entirely sure what a Tharlian power core is, but apparently it belongs to me now, and I don't know that I want to give it away. I mean, you wouldn't, would you? If someone gave you a really nice present, like a trout, or a big wheel of cheese, you wouldn't just hand it over to the next hobo who walked by in striped socks, would you?
Of course you wouldn't. You would feed it and pet it and walk it twice a day and buy it a pretty dress for the prom. You wouldn't open yourself up like a music box just so some glowering not-even-invader could reach in and snap off your ballerina.
"No thanks," are the first words I ever speak. "I think I'm gonna save it for a rainy day."
"What?!" Master shouts, infuriated. "Who dares say 'no' to Zim?! You will obey the Master Race, robot pig thing! Now GIVE ME the power core!"
"But if I give you my power core, I won't be able to walk or talk or make sandwiches anymore."
"That's the idea," he sneers.
His hand shoots out towards me, and I know he means to take my trout, my ballerina, my big wheel of cheese himself. Without meaning to – without even being entirely aware of it – I do…something. I don't know what. A great wave of power crashes through me, radiates from me, rolls through the air and disappears. Suddenly, Master shrieks and stumbles back, his hand shriveled and smoking where it made contact with the Something.
"Wretched little beast," he hisses, brooding over his hand. After a minute, he shakes it out and it snaps back to normal, but still he regards me with a scowl. "Fine," he says bitterly, almost spitting. "I guess I have no choice but to keep you around until I figure out how to get that power core out of your filthy little belly. But you'd better keep out of my way, or—or—or you shall taste the disgusting wrath of ZIM!"
"Yay!" GIR cheers. "Bestest friends!"
"Feliz Navidad!" I cry, a shower of confetti flying out of my head.
As he stalks back over to his workstation, I can hear Master muttering to himself. "Perfect," he grumbles. "Just perfect. This is exactly what I needed—two GIRs ruining all of my plans."
I sat outside of the vivarium watching J4, as she sat inside watching the hologram. Today's environment was a city – a Vortian city, of course. Not a human city. When Commander Gaz tested her with a human city, J4 had bolted to the center of the room, crouching, hissing, swiping helplessly at the shadows that moved over the walls. Not to mention how she'd cowered when Commander Gaz herself went into the vivarium.
In any case, she didn't mind the Vortians. She could sit all day absorbed in environments without humans, her right eye huge and bright with awe. And so went her days, one after the other, as time passed after the Earth fell and the man left; she would sit in the vivarium watching the artificial world go by, intruded upon only when I came in to bring her food. Sometimes, too, when Vixrai (who, when she learned of her, was fascinated by the existence of a hybrid other than herself, and who appeared Irken enough not to bother J4) came to play.
Commander Gaz said there was no need for titles or honorifics, but we could all tell that Tallest Tak took pleasure in them, and so we (well, some of us; at least those of us as low in station as I) appended to Vix's name the suffix –rai. After all, it would've been inappropriate for us to call her something like Princess, as we owed allegiance to her not as our future ruler but as the issue of Tallest Tak.
But the suffix –rai, historically – in the times before there were words like Captain and Councillor, in the old Irken language from which few relics remained – indicated only a person favored by a leader, so Vixrai she became. In this context, it would mean something like Vix-beloved-by-the-Tallest.
Along those lines, I had nicknamed J4 narai – meaning one-beloved-by-no-one, or forgotten.
It was nearing midday, according to the schedule J4 kept, so I prepared lunch and brought it in for her. I was allowed to choose what I fed her, so long as I kept her reasonably healthy, and today I entered the vivarium with a tray of bread, fruit, and long crispy stalks of a vegetable called klat.
Also balanced on the tray was a mug of warm feeya, which I'd determined to have her try to see if she might like it. I figured she had to be bored of snirp juice, drinking it day in and day out, and surely there was no harm in offering.
"Lunchtime, narai," I announced myself, and she flicked her eyes in my direction, cocking her good antenna curiously. I had noticed that, as she patterned the rest of her behavior on that of Earth animals, she used her working antenna like animals used their ears, even though it didn't serve the same function. "Come on."
I set the tray down and she padded over to investigate her meal, testing it by sight and smell (or as much of it as she could smell, with just her left antenna) before snatching up the hunk of bread. I could tell she was still unused to being delivered her food, having spent so long hunting it. She tore into the bread like it was a rat's hide, and gulped it down as if the Vortians might emerge from the walls to take it from her.
When she had finished with the bread, she dug into the fruit without regard for the juice, splattering her face and hands in her hurry to suck down the flesh. The klat she pecked at like a pigeon, clutching the stalks in her fists.
Only once the food was gone did she attend to its ruins, scrubbing the crumbs from her face and licking the purple stains from her palms. As she made to lollop over to her dish, I reached out to take her by the wrist, saying, "Hold on a minute. There's one more thing."
I knew she didn't speak Irken and I wasn't even sure she understood English, but I'd gotten into the habit of speaking to her anyway, more for my benefit than hers. I didn't expect her to understand when I told her to wait, but she knew what I meant when I picked up the mug of feeya and held it out to her.
"Try it," I said as she leaned down to look into the mug, her eye narrowing, her good antenna twitching. "It's good."
After a moment, she reached out and curled her fingers around it hesitantly, with the slightest spasm of her right hand that reminded me it was the bad one. "Careful, it's heavy," I said, as if that would help at all, and steadied the mug myself before she could drop it. Sliding my hand over hers, I pressed it palm-up against the bottom of the mug, where she wouldn't need to worry about sustaining a grip.
"Okay, now try it. You'll like it, I promise."
It sometimes seemed to me that Commander Gaz thought J4 was stupid – as witless as the animals she imitated – but I knew she wasn't. Ignorant, yes, but not stupid. She knew the feeya was hot, and she didn't dive into it like she did the snirp juice; she brought it to her lips and sipped it slowly, pausing to consider the taste. It was sweet, but not burning-sweet like soda, so I'd hoped she would be able to handle it.
She must have decided she liked feeya, because after that first sip she took another, and another, and eventually she closed her eye and lowered her antenna, basking in the sweetness and the steam. As a rule, J4 never smiled, I guessed because she'd never learned how; still, I felt sure that she was happy.
"GIR! Can't you and that pink abomination be silent for once in your miserable lives?! I'm trying to WORK over here!"
With his arm wound up for the pitch, GIR pauses, glancing over at the workstation where Master stands. "We're playin' a game!" he chirps, and hurls the ball my way.
Well, not a ball exactly. It's actually a bunny we found in the yard outside, curled up paws-to-nose so that it looks like a ball, and throws like one, too. It flies through the air and connects with the folded-up umbrella I wield, just in time for me to snap it open and send the bunnyball rocketing over GIR's head.
It smacks into a marinated ham hock glued to the wall, and I throw my arms in the air and shout, "Field goal! Eleventyfive points!"
The bunnyball slides down the wall and scrambles to its feet, dashing down the counter knocking over vials and beakers and pinballing between flickering screens. When it scurries across Master's workstation, sending whatever he's doing crashing to the floor, he whirls and scowls at us.
"What did I JUST say?!" he rages, impotently pinwheeling his arms. "The Tallest said to have these nanobot prototypes ready to beam up for inspection in fifteen minutes! FIFTEEN MINUTES! How do you expect me to have them ready that soon with you spilling them all over the floor like—like—like things that get spilled all over the floor?!"
GIR blinks doubtfully up at him. "The Tallest didn't say that."
Master frowns. "Of course they did! Do you doubt the superior listening abilities of Zim?"
"Nuh-uh."
"Yuh-huh."
"Nuh-uh."
"Yuh-huh."
"Nuh-uh."
"Yuh-huh times infinity! Plus one! Victory for Zim!"
They're both silent for a moment, Master grinning, GIR staring up at him. When Master finally turns to head back to his workstation, GIR shakes his head, and says, "Nuh-uh."
Suddenly, a thud and the tinkle of shattering glass ring out from the other side of the room, and all of our heads whip around in unison. "Bunnyball!" I shriek.
It's bounding through the wreckage of the lab towards the teleporter, all warmed up and ready to beam Master's whosamawhatzits to the thingamajiggy, and I decide I have to catch it. Powering up my jets, I shoot through the air after it, locking in on its white tail as it leaps up onto the counter and scrabbles into the teleporter—and, in a flash of light, disappears.
"PIGI!"
GIR's cry is the last thing I hear before I collide with the light, and feel myself sucked in an instant through a million layers of space. Layers. Layer cake. Yum, cake. Thinking about cake – about a big space-cake sandwiched together with creamy planets, and frosted with sweet stars – I tumble through midair onto a new floor, clanging as I hit the ground.
The bunnyball wriggles in my arms. Looking up, we see new people blinking down at us: a lot of little red and purple people with half their faces cut off, plus two bigger red and purple people, floating like floaty things in the middle of the platform where the light spit us out.
"Hi!" I lift a hand to wave and the bunnyball bolts, disappearing off the edge of the platform. The new people stare at me.
"What is that?" says the big purple.
"PIGI," I say cheerfully. "D'ya want fries with that?"
They didn't seem to hear me. "It's a SIR unit, genius," says the big red to the big purple, rolling his eyes. "What did you think?"
Big Purple frowns. "I know it's a SIR unit. What I meant was, what's it doing here?"
A little red person with curly antennae looks up from her console. "The teleporter signal originates from Earth, my Tallest," she reports. "Which means—"
"Zim," says Big Red grimly, and Big Purple groans. "I wish I were surprised."
"Well, at least it's not a radioactive octopus this time."
"Somebody get rid of this thing," Big Red says, waving in my direction. "Throw it out the airlock or something. The last thing we need is more of Zim's crap cluttering up the bridge."
A pair of little purple people climb out of the ring around the platform and march over to me, their half-faces disappointingly unfriendly. Just when I think I'll have to use my Something to keep them away, Little Red cries out from her console, "Wait! It's got the Tharlian power core!"
The bridge freezes. A kajillion pairs of red and purple eyes snap back to me, and I think how funny it would be if they all slid out of their sockets and turned into red and purple balloons, drifting up and up to cluster at the ceiling. "What?" says Big Red.
"I'm as confused as you are," answers Little Red, looking down at the control panel on her console, shaking her head slowly. "But I'd know that power signature anywhere."
"Why would Zim have had the Tharlian power core?" Big Red demands. "We sent it to the fleet in the Znik system a month ago. If Zim put the core in this thing, what's powering Operation Starcrusher?"
Little Red is quiet a moment, her brow furrowed, her hands dancing across the control panel. These red and purple people are boring. I curl myself up like the bunnyball, magnetizing the long cones of my feet so that they stick to my forehead, and begin to roll back and forth across the platform, seeing how close I can cut the edge.
"Well, I don't know what the fleet in the Znik system is doing," I hear Little Red say after a bazillion years, "but they never got the Tharlian power core. These records show that it was shipped to Earth a month ago; that crate of face-eating fire slugs went to Znik."
"What? Why? Who decided that?"
Little Red shrugs. "The addresses must've gotten switched before they were shipped."
"HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?!" Big Purple wails desperately, clawing at his temples.
"I don't know, but I'm going to set it right." Big Red turns to the Little Purples, and snaps, "Get the power core and get RID of that thing. It's scuffing the platform!"
I roll to a stop, peeling open like a pillbug when you poke it with a stick. It would be fun to be a pillbug, I think. I could make tunnels in the ground and roll down hills like rollercoasters and crawl into people's socks and make them scream, and every TV would seem like a movie theater, and if I had a grande chalupa it would last all year.
Plus I wouldn't have to deal with purples rushing at me with their hands and eyes and making me zap them with my Something, so that they jump back hissing and clenching their fists. Me and GIR could just be pillbugs and bestest friends and play ball with ourselves, and unroll the bunnyball and ride on it like a train.
As I'm deciding that my new goal in life is to be a pillbug, the red and purple people are glaring down at me. "Well, we can't get rid of it," Little Red sighs. "Not if it won't give up the power core. Who knows what it might do with that kind of ammo, floating around in space unsupervised?"
Big Red and Big Purple look at each other sourly. "Then what are we supposed to do with it?"
I was with J4 every day, and near all day, too. It wasn't like I had other obligations. The Massive's crew was glad to be rid of me, and I was glad to be around someone who actually seemed happy to see me – even if it was only because I brought food.
I spent most of that time just watching her, sitting on my stool staring through the glass, acting as a sort of sentient life support. The way Commander Gaz and my internal scans told it, J4's insides were a ticking time bomb, and any misplaced step or especially hard swallow could break the stitch that dammed the flood.
So I watched her, to make sure she didn't set herself hemorrhaging chewing on a stalk of klat, and without meaning to, I memorized her. The lines of her sutures snaking over her skin like roads on a map, with burn scars like mountain ranges in between. The rhythm of her gait, surprisingly graceful for a body that wasn't built to move on all fours. The way she communicated with her intact antenna, so that each flick was as good as a word: yes, no, good, bad, come here, go away, what's that?
I did wonder if she wasn't getting bored, though. When she wasn't sleeping, or eating, or playing with Vixrai when she came, she had nothing to do but sit and stare at the walls. Which were certainly more interesting than most walls, but still. Commander Gaz might've thought she was simple enough to be content with moving pictures, but I had begun to suspect otherwise.
Maybe it was just a reflection of my own restlessness, but eventually I decided she had to be tired of the holograms, and I came in one morning with more than just breakfast for her. "Wake up, narai," I called, loud enough to wake her. "I've got your cereal."
J4 got up and came over to where I'd laid the tray, a bowl of hot cereal and a mug of feeya arranged on it. She was learning to use a spoon for things like soup and cereal, instead of eating straight from her dish, and she wasn't bad at it, so long as she used her left hand.
It took a little longer for her to eat that way, but I thought it was a step in the right direction. I was also glad that she'd taken so well to feeya; ever since I'd first had her try it, her antenna pricked eagerly whenever she smelled it on the tray.
When she'd finished her breakfast and was cleaning her face, I turned my attention to a small bag beside the tray. I picked it up, undid its drawstrings, and dumped its contents onto the floor between us: multicolored plastic blocks, at least a hundred of them, in all different shapes and sizes. J4 paused and blinked down at them, with the gesture of her antenna that always accompanied an unspoken question.
"They're toys," I told her. "You're supposed to play with them." To demonstrate, I picked up one block and set it on top of another, then balanced a third on top of that. "See? It's fun."
She looked up at me, then back down at the blocks, processing. After a few seconds' thought, she chose a purple block, and began to build.
At first, the blocks swayed and fell each time she tried to stack more than three, the floor too springy and soft to support anything higher. I watched and waited, hoping she would figure it out without being shown. And she did: after her third tower tumbled, she knit her brow, shoved the empty dishes off the tray, and started over again on its hard surface.
"Very clever, narai," I said, smiling, but she was focused on the blocks; she didn't even look up.
Around us, a holographic sun had risen on a holographic meadow, and the yellow of the dawn was fading into blue. Glimmers of gold slid down blades of tall grass, waving in a breeze we couldn't feel. A swallow flitted through the air, then disappeared into the distance, slipping beyond the scope of the computer's data.
In the center of it all, J4 sat and constructed…something. She began with a square of blocks that took up the whole tray, then built upwards from there; she concentrated intensely and worked methodically, though I couldn't tell to what end. For awhile, all I could see in her structure was a slowly-stretching cube.
Then – when she was near the top, and trying to arrange a handful of small blocks into a thick, flat swirl – I finally understood. I put together the four even walls, the spiral-patterned roof, the stripes of alternating color, and I realized she was building a Vortian tribunal tower – part of the skyline of the city stored in the computer's database, last projected in the vivarium at least a week ago. She had picked it out of the rest and she had remembered it, like she remembered the animal behaviors she mimicked, like she remembered the feeya by its scent.
I wasn't sure whether to feel proud of her or sorry for her. If I'd been where she had, I wouldn't want a memory that good.
"That's IT! I have had ENOUGH of this! If the lab doesn't finish with that stabilizer in the next FIVE MINUTES, I swear I'm gonna—"
"It's not nice to swear," I tell Big Red, leaping down from the ceiling (where I'd been perched grating a block of cheese over the platform, so that it would seem like snow, because who doesn't like snow? And cheese?) and landing on his head. I grab his antennae and give them a jerk, so that his eyes snap up to meet mine. "Don't make me tell your mommy on you!"
Big Red half-growls, half-shouts, reaching up to grab me. I jump off his head onto the platform and land in a perfect pirouette, like a ballerina, like my ballerina that's the only reason I'm still here. I'm still not sure whether that's a good thing, or bad.
"You'd think they could just stick it in a closet or something," Big Purple says despairingly, as I begin to dance the first act of Swan Lake. "Has anybody tried that yet?"
"Of course we've tried that," Big Red snaps. "The Tharlian power core was engineered to level galaxies. Did you really think a closet door was going to hold it back?"
"Well, as I always say, never underestimate the power of a well-crafted door."
"You've never said that in your life."
As I watch Big Red and Big Purple arguing, they transform into a pair of giant hotdogs, standing upright on the platform in their buns. All around them, the little reds and purples turn into squeezy-packets of condiments, red mustard and purple ketchup. I shriek with delight, thinking we're finally going to have some fun on this floating hunk of boring, and jump up to start snarfing the hotdog nearest me.
"It's done!"
Little Red's – the same Little Red from my first day here, I think, though they all look the same – voice rings out with the whish of the sliding bridge doors, and the world trudges back to sour reality. The hotdogs are gone and I'm gnawing on Big Purple's foot, which could use some salt.
"Finally," he sighs as Little Red hurries over to us, carrying a little remote control in one hand, and a weird translucent pink thing under her arm. "I was starting to think I was having a nightmare – a terrible, terrible pink nightmare – and I was never going to wake up."
"Don't get too excited," Big Red warns him. "Let's wait and see if it works first."
"Don't worry," Little Red says as she peels me off of Big Purple, plunking me down on the platform in front of her. "It'll work. Okay, PI," she says sweetly to me, using the name they call me here (just half of my actual name, pronounced individually like 'pee-aye', because they're big on Pride and Dignity and it wouldn't be Dignified to walk around calling anybody something that sounds like 'piggy', even if it is her name), "I've got this nice hat for you, and if you'll hold still for me a second I'll put it on. Sound good?"
I like hats, so I nod enthusiastically, tongue wagging like a dog's (even though I'm a PIGI, not a dog, or for that matter a pillbug). Little Red smiles and brandishes the hat, which is really more like a helmet, because when she puts it on me it doesn't just sit on top of my head – parts of it cover the back of my head and curl around my face, like a motorcycle helmet without the visor.
As I imagine I'm on a motorcycle, gripping invisible handlebars and growling 'vroom, vroom', I feel a sudden surge of electricity race through me, crackling in the ports on my posterior panel. Too late, I see Little Red press a button on her remote, and I feel the cables connect.
A bright white flash envelops the bridge, and when my vision returns, everything looks different. The Tallest are staring at me expectantly, Purple hopeful, Red wary. The captain of the bridge crew wears triumph on her face. There are no hotdogs and no motorcycles, and when I think about it, I can't imagine why there would be. Nothing seems funny anymore.
"Now," says the captain of the bridge crew, jabbing her finger in the direction of the doors, "go out to the main deck and see if anybody wants their boots polished. We can always use another service drone."
When I think about it, I can't imagine why I wouldn't obey her. What else I would do if I didn't. So I do.
As I head for the doors, on legs that feel much heavier than they were a minute ago, I hear the Tallest break into relieved laughter, the bridge captain chuckling along with them behind the collar of her coat. "Well, I'm glad that's over," Red says. "Tell the lab monkeys we said good job."
"You're sure it'll stay that way, right?" asks Purple. "It's not going to relapse and run in here trying to eat me?"
"It shouldn't," says the bridge captain. "So long as it wears the stabilizer, its systems will be regulated and it'll be perfectly obedient."
"If it's so obedient," says Red, irritation barbing his tone, "then why don't you just tell it to give us the power core already, and turn it into scrap metal?"
"The power core protects itself. Whether it has reason to or not, the vessel it's installed in will defend it automatically. We're better off engineering a new power source for Operation Starcrusher than wasting our time trying to get this one back."
"Fine. Remind me to call the Tharlians and tell them their technology sucks."
"Duly noted, my Tallest."
"Hey, wait a second!" Purple calls, and from the way his voice travels I know he's calling me. A foot from the doors to the main deck, I turn back towards the platform, to see Purple grinning and beckoning me. "Come back over here. I've got an idea."
"Jeez, what now?" Red groans as I march dutifully back to the platform.
"Hold on, hold on. It'll be funny. You'll see." He grabs the remote from the bridge captain's hands and starts to fiddle with it, snickering under his breath. Reflected in his chestplate, I see the interlocking panels of the stabilizer slide and shift, and a pair of little pink triangles pop out with a click – little pink triangles like pigs' ears, glinting on top of my head.
"You wanna be a piggy so bad?" Purple says, smirking down at me. "You got it."
The Tallest and the bridge captain burst out laughing again, spluttering and gasping and oinking at me, and I can think of nothing to do or say. Before, I might've crossed my arms, stomped my foot and corrected him, saying, 'how many times do I have to tell you? I'm not a piggy. I'm PIGI!' But I'm not really even that anymore. And there are a lot of things I might have done before that I know I won't do again.