FOREWORD
This is the end. I almost feel guilty about the way I've treated Dib. Poor Dib. You can go be
happy in someone else's fic now! After this, you are free, my poor crazy-monkey!
Installment 3
Someone in the line at the pharmacy shook a hand in front of Dib's face. "Gawd! Wake
up, ya psycho, you're holding up the line!"
The little girl dangled from Dib's arm, wide, round glasses crooked on her nose.
"Daddeee!" she complained. "They want you to move!" The child pulled his arm as though she
would drag him to the counter, leaning her tiny frame into the motion, the impractical soles of
her dress shoes slipping on the linoleum floor. "C'mon, it's your turn now!"
"Sir?" The young man behind the desk frowned nervously, throwing panicked glances at
the other employees stationed like pillars amongst the rows of bottles. "Are you okay?" His
eyes had the wide and bubbled look of a fish. He grimaced, eyebrows raised with surprise and
dread. "Do you want me to call someone? Is there... um..."
"C'mawn!" Dib's daughter jumped up and down, pigtails snapping. "I wanna go now!
It's spooky in here!" she chirped, throwing spooked rabbit-like glances at the dentures and enima
bags. "Spooky!" Her the flit of her panicked gaze was suddenly snagged by a brightly colored
cardboard box set on a low shelf for better child viewing. Her dark pupils narrowed in with
concentration, lip slowly protruding. She blinked anxiously, and, finding a sweet and mild
expression for her father, asked, "Buy me those?"
The man stared down mundanely. "Buy you which, Rikki?" The child swung both arms
emphatically to the box on the shelf. "Adhesive medical strips?" She nodded with glossy-eyed
gravity. Dib smirked and shook his head slightly, ready to state the obvious and obviously not
important to a child. "But you don't even have a boo-boo!"
Her jaw dropped for exactly that reason. "So?"
Dib chuckled softly, tossing a hand in dismissal. "Go ahead and get them."
"Woo!" The little girl swam through the impatient crowd like a little crustacean, them
angry but struck too dumb by the display to do anything. There was the sound of some papery
impact as she stuck a claw into the mire to fish out her prey and sent the spared objects fleeing
into a spill on the floor. She immerged again with her prize clutched high and slapped it
gleefully upon the counter.
The young man from behind the counter snatched the prescription away from Dib's loose
fingertips with nervous speed and stumbled to the back. The motley cavalcade of customers
fidgeted like vultures, cocking ebon plumes at the bizarre creature lain before them. A bolder
one might have given the meat a peck but would have been startled to realize that the quarry was
alive. As it was they mumbled gutturally to themselves, the crooked beaks in their naked heads
clacking with agitation.
Dib exchanged a loosely folded pamphlet of bills for a little brown bottle and shot a
quick, feral glance at the scene of predation as he turned to go.
The three kept an awkward dash along the wall, gusting around the wires and conduits.
"Geez, is that a camera?" Dib stumbled over backward betwen two pipes, hastily
dragging himself from the view of the glassy glint caught in the corner of his eye. The pink-eyed
Irken peered at him curiously, stopped a pace ahead. She tossed a glance back to ZIM and
pointed with blank silence at Dib, belly to the floor and eyes wrenching warily in all directions.
ZIM frowned with annoyance. "Yes, I know that, Irken child," he quipped. "Of course
its a "camera" Dib! Now, come on, they're probably coming for us right now!"
Dib's eyes flared with suspicion. "Hey... What do you need me for anyway?" He stood
up, stalking swiftly through the tangle to where ZIM perched impatiently on a coil of metal.
"Why do you care if I come with you? Huh?"
"Dib," he hissed, "as much as you disgust me, there isn't much time before both of ours
home worlds smash each other into little bitty pieces." His voice was empty, ringing with an
unreasonable lack of fear. "Since it's your filthy planet out there about to crash into mine, I
figure you might as well help me."
Dib raised an eyebrow, running his lip between his teeth. "Wait... but... why can't those
other aliens just fix it? Ya' know the entire rest of the 'empire'?" He wiggled his fingers in
front of him. "With all their big ships and lasers and stuff? I'm sure they're doing something."
"Nothing compared to the mighty resourcefulness of ZIM!" the alien supplied.
"So you're saying that you're the only one who can save the planet?" he asked with the
dull, accustomed exasperation inevitable in any conversation with ZIM.
The alien blinked his wide red eyes twice and replied with a subdued certainty, "Yes.
Yes, I am. They will all thank the mighty ZIM!" He squinted, teeth borne with glee, and
suddenly popped a finger in the direction of the young Irken. "All of you!"
The little creature observed him sourly, wide green eyelids heavy with disinterest. "We
need to go!"
"Alright, let's go," he agreed and nearly stepped backward into a rush of laser fire. Dib
and ZIM dove into the thicket of wiring, hissing and sparking under the searing volley. The
Irkens guards hugged the corner of the hall, red eyes agleam with the reflection of the fuchsia
blasts, strewing the ill-lit hall with an irradiated quiver. Dib and ZIM cringed behind the low
conduits, hands clawed over their heads. A choking escaped from Dib's throat, what would have
been adressed to his companions, but for a strike on the wiring over his head, coughing a shower
of sparks. He clenched his eyes shut, in a panic to think as the squealing roar richocheted over
his head.
The little girl, unmoved, stood her place watching the Irken guards like fish in a bowl,
eyes to the brim with the liquid clarity of a faint and calm interest. She stood clear amidst the
contorted shrieks of the purple streams eroding the corded nest into its very thread, unraveling
the twine of wire, the plates of metal into beards of knarled charcoal, spewed from gasping
mouths which sparked and glowed. The child was unimpressed, untouched. She watched the
fish like a cat hiding in a bird's nest.
Dib shivered, hidden in an eddy of the swamp of fire. From the spare glimpses he could
steal in the orchid shimmer, he saw the little Irken girl still standing, serene, like a little human
girl watching the clouds change. "Geez!" He flung out an arm to grab her ankle, fingers taking a
swift and tremendous sweep of nothing. And as through with the motion he had spilled it upon
them, a kind veil of blackness decended, sweeping out the shriek of gunfire with a single
feathery flutter swept quickly down the hall. The air was frozen in its wake, holding a tense
breath as it got a handle of itself, casting wary glances about the hall, and then rushing out with
full liquid fury, evaporating on the metallic tinge of seared metal as it struck it, then it was air
again.
"C'mon, we need to go," called a soft voice. The little girl stood poised around the
corner, an Irken gun dangling casually from her hand. She watched them passively with her
deep pink eyes, standing in an empty black hallway. "C'mon," she said, "we really need to go."
"Do think that- um... ya know- in general are people good or bad?" She fidgeted
nervously with her little box of adhesive medical strips, clutched like a toy. There was one on
her knee where there wasn't really any injury at all, patterned with the pointed ovular heads of
black and blank eyed aliens printed in a bright, crisp green. The girl looked up at her father
plaintively.
"Rikki?" The man stopped walking and leaned against the black park fence, watching
the child with concern. "How old are you?" He saw the girl pull out her fingers but interrupted
as she started counting with a pinkie. "No, no, never mind, but, Rikki, what makes you ask this
all of a sudden?"
The girl frowned shortly in the equivalent of what was a shrug and looked down with a
feigned interest in the little cardboard box. "Oh, I dunno. I was just thinking, looking at all
these people. You never really know what any of them is like, I guess. You always say not to
talk to strangers, but adults do it all the time." She lifted a tendril of dark hair away from her
glasses. "I dunno. But you really don't like people, right?"
Dib bit his lip leaning back into the wrought-iron bars. "I don't know whether I'd say
that, Rikki."
She watched him blankly. "Well, adults never say it."
He threw a glance at the child in curiousity. "Well, I don't know whether I believe that,
either, at least the part about good and bad. I don't really know if any of us are either, or if there
is even such a thing," He slowly rapped a finger across a long, cool bar. "but I'm not supposed
to tell you stuff like that."
"Why?"
"I really shouldn't even explain that to you."
"Aww." She sounded only mildly disappointed, like she had been told that her surprise
would have to wait until later. "Alright." She walked on again, swimming through the leaves
cast upon the heather sidewalk.
"Yeah," Dib agreed to the wordless action, "I guess we need to go." He followed the
child and they loped side by side in silence, her little hand eventually creeping into the cup his.
The wind waved the leaves in the neat green poplars attractively, snapping the leaves with the
sounds of flown banners and waved ribbons in the raised arms of the branches tilting giddily
over their path. The park was green beyond the fence, glowing in sunlight, glowing in shadow,
and shrinking with the pegs of trees until, at the edge of their vision and exactly their opposite,
there was another fence and another path. It was very far away.
It was Sunday and the roads were muted muttering only occasionaly to the pedestrians on
the walk. Their house lay just down the lane, a respectable old structure, one of the layers of
many respectable old structures packed in along the same road. It was a nice house, but they
were all nice houses, plastered in weathered brick and molded concrete. They edged up the steep
gray steps, gripping thin iron rails and stepped through the splice of a tall wooden door with a
low brass handle into a yellowed threshold.
"Rose?" The shadows played across the fine old wood of the deep, trodden floors.
Rikki skipped through the wide rooms back to the kitchen, shaking her box of adhesive
medical stripsfrom side to side. "Hey, mom! Look!" Dib kept stiffly in the hallway, watching
the sun warp through the lead-glass windows and waited coldly for the reply.
"Adhesive medical strips." It was a statement, concise and uninflected. "Why do we
need those?" The woman's voice, deep and businesslike grated with a harshness, made milder
only by disinterest. "And what's that on them? Yeah." She wasn't surprised. "Oh great, we
really need more of that in the house. Give me those."
"Hey..."
"Give them here. I haven't got time for your father's crap. Wherever he's lurking, you
can tell him that we'll discuss this later. I've got business." There was the grunt of a briefcase
dragged off the counter, the rap of high heels across the floor and the sticking wood of the back
door gurgled open and yelped shut with a tremor of glass.
The little girl peeked through the doorway past the staircase down the hall. "She took my
adhesive medical strips!" she exclaimed, with more surprise than offense. She made a face.
"Well, I draw better anyway." She smirked. "I'm gonna get some crayons."
Dib twisted his head, his hand held to his neck. "That's good, honey."
"I'll make a picture for you."
Dib smiled thinly, the black wraith in the shadows of the old brown hall, drinking the
sunlight into his substance and looming dark and straight in its corner, like a pillar to the familiar
old structure. He trembled a little when he breathed. "Thank you, sweetie." His eyes were
closed. He shook his little bottle as he climbed the dark stairs.
"Alright, human, do you have any idea how we're going to stop this?" ZIM dragged an
icon on the glowing panel traced in shades of crimson. A three dimensional skeleton appeared of
both their planets, Earth and Irk. The model spun, displaying the distance between the two
bodies, what looked on the screen like the span of a human's thumb. The blip of its trajectory
was displayed in spinning rings of green. The computer panned out as they objects collided
shattering into skeletal shards. Of each orb left, there was about half.
Dib pressed his fingers to his temples. "Am I supposed to have the answers here? First
tell me, how did you get us into this?" The little Irken girl wedged herself between the two,
swinging her head over the monitor with curiousity.
ZIM narrowed his eyes but slid a finger across the dark panel to bring up another
diagram. "Your Earth is in orbit around that sun of yours and stays where it is because of its
pull."
"Yeah," Dib prompted with a tight impatience, hearing nothing new.
ZIM scowled at the human. "Well, through the amazing capacity of my goo-filled head, I
realized that if I reversed the magnetism of the sun and-"
"What?" Dib shoved himself closer to the panel. The girl squirmed away and shuffled
toward ZIM. "Magnetism?" Dib gaped, glasses lit with the bizarre image on the screen.
ZIM steered the child out of his personal space. Three were not intended to fit in a Voot
Cruiser. He waved in dismissal. "Yes, Dib, the attraction between the magnetic core of your son
and the metallic center of your Earth-"
"What?" He leaned in towards the alien, face dark with disbelief. "What are you talking
about?" His shuddering breath escaped between his teeth. The little Irken frowned with slight
offense and worked herself over to the panel behind Dib, oblivious the tone of his voice rising
hysterically. "What are you talking about?" His lips dragged down into a grim sneer, teeth
borne like the peeling gums of something left dead in the heat. "The sun is not a magnet, ZIM!"
"Foolish human-" ZIM began.
"The sun is not a magnet!" The Irken rolled his eyes and patronizingly shook his head,
but the human continued, "The Earth's orbit has nothing to do with magnets! How do you
always manage to do stuff like this, ZIM? How do you make all these crazy things happen? It
doesn't make sense! It doesn't make any sense at all!" He seized the alien by his pink collar.
The little one slipped off the control panel in surprise. "There's no way you should have been
able to do this, ZIM!" ZIM blinked, mouth agape, eyes fixed on the human face for a lack of
anywhere else to place them. "How do you do things like this, ZIM?" The shocked alien
squirmed slightly in his grip, completely at a loss. "How do you do things like this?" Dib could
see the quiver in the creatures huge red eyes, the maddening pulse of existence itself. They
shone with a polished gloss, worn smooth by the grit of a thousand more. There were thousands
and there were billions and they were all the same, huge and round and red like blood. They all
stared, stared at him and they were all the same. He could feel the starting singe of their
collective gaze and he knew what it was they wanted from him and Dib raised a hooked hand to
gouge one of them out.
"Daddy?"
"Daddy?"
"Yes, Rikki?"
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing." He rolled the empty pill bottle under his palm, gliding it across the cool white
tile and the blackened grout between the bathtub and the toilet.
The little girl frowned but shrugged and flopped out a legal document size piece of paper
crumpled with fingermarks. "I drew you a picture."
Dib's eyelids hung over the man's eyes like metal shutters, sliding on a loose track. He
spoke with an soft and empty reverence, voice barely fit to slip between his teeth and his lips.
"Thank you, honey."
The child held the out the paper with a loud and expectant flap, waiting for it to be taken
from her hand, but her father's wrists lay with an unnatural limpness, dragging the icy tile, void
of the intention of movement. She hopped in place to draw attention. "Don'cha wanna look?"
Dib raised his head from the bathtub mechanically, face bright with the stick of its cold
enamel. "Oh. Yes, Rikki, of course." He didn't feel the hand that drifted up to clip the paper
between two fingers and he couldn't feel it fall into his lap but his head dropped down, lips
pendulous with ragged breath. The floor swam as he gazed down, his own black legs stretched
lengthwise and snapped back into place, and the blur of green and red scrawled on the lithe sheet
sunk into a pool of disparity. "What is it?"
The child held her lower lip between her teeth. "Look at it, Daddy!" She demanded.
"I-" His hand stepped across the floor, dragged finger by finger, edging to the blight on
his lap. "What-" The roughly carved streaks of green and red bled before him. "I-" With his
next breath, they were wrenched into solid figures, flung sharply at his face with a cutting
definition. There were three figures, a small boy with wide glasses, swathed in the fiercely
scribbled black of a long draping trenchcoat, a little green alien, just his height, a pair of black
antennae sprung from his head and eyes a solid and meticulously pressed crimson. There was a
smaller alien, a child, garbed in a vibrant pink dress with wide pink eyes, the pungent shade of
artificial raspberry. She held the hands of both the others, arranged in an uneven two-
dimensional row upon the harshly looped scribbles of a grassy field beneath the crude circles of
two huge orbs.
The child tucked her head between her father and the drawing. "Do you see?"
Dib rubbed a fist into the hazing gum of his eyes. He whispered hoarsely, "Do I see
what?"
Rikki flicked the man an earnest glance, the glint of a question in her eye. "Uhm," she
started unsurely. "You know. It's us." A tiny finger flicked from the little girl with shining eyes
to the man crumpled half unconscious on the bathroom floor to someone else in another
direction, something that Dib couldn't see. "It's you."
ZIM pressed the hard point of the Irken gun into the flesh stretched over the human skull.
"You stupid, filthy creature!" He ground the metal piece against Dib's skull, leering over the boy
with fervent disgust. "You know, Dib," he said, an edge slicing through his high strange voice,
"there's a simple solution to all of this. There's always a simple solution." He snorted softly
with what was short and quiet laughter. "I blow up your planet and I save mine. I blow your
head off and I save myself a lot of trouble in the future." The alien smiled oddly, pleased with
himself. "Ya wanna say something, Dib?"
"I don't even think you're real, ZIM." Dib lay, unmoving, head against the floor, eyes
upon the foreign workings of the alien vessel. He felt the gun bite into his temple.
"What's that, Dib? Did you just say I'm not real?" The alien smiled ruefully, red eyes
wide with a gleeful disbelief. He shook his head. "Well, that certainly is interesting, but do you
really want that to be your final words? Don't you think you could up with something- oh, I
dunno- a little less stupid?" He paused. "Nah." The Irken took an eager breath and grasped the
trigger with a black gloved finger trembling in exultation.
"Wait!"
ZIM's concentration was broken by a light touch on his hand. The Irken child stood
before them staring at ZIM plaintively, staring at Dib pleadingly. Her eyes glittered. ZIM's
slender antennae twitched. "Well, what do you want?" he demanded, leaning into his weapon
impatiently.
"Are you really going to let this happen?"
"What?"
"Are you really just going to let it be this way?" She was talking to both of them, warm
pink eyes, fixed on the two creatures sadly.
Dib lifted lifted his head slightly, against the press of the gun, just enough to look up at
the child. "Little girl," he said, voice clear but empty, "I don't think I even care anymore."
"What is she talking about, Dib?"
The human sighed thickly. "I've told you. You're not real, neither is she. As for me,"
He blinked at the alien floor. "I guess that hasn't been decided yet."
The little Irken child nestled beneath a console, craning over his head, peering into his
eyes with her own, alive and lit. "But can't we decide? Everything can't be all bad. I don't
think that everyone is bad. I think-" The child looked up to ZIM wistfully. "I think that we
could all be okay. People- we don't have to fight because we're different. I don't know why
people do the things they do, to each other, and do to themselves, but I think we could accept
each other." There was a film of tears spread down her green face. "I don't think we have to
fight. If we're different- well- then we just are. I don't think that any of us are bad, we just...
don't get it. If you are what you are then..." Her voice broke off. "It's not supposed to be this
way! It's not right. It's not-" She considered the word a moment. "good? Different people can
live together." She was pleading. "We don't all have to be the same. We can all be us and
maybe- maybe if we try then everything will be okay." The child watched them both, the human
boy, uncaring, and the bright-eyed Irken with a gun to his head.
Dib lay still for the full appreciation of the cool foreign metal pointed at his brain. The
child's wide and earnest, deep and wishful bright pink eyes poised like a bird set on a branch, a
frail thing, eminently intended to end in a moment. They were like the eyes of some urbane
goddess, cast down upon the Earth to behold the grief wrought there, but whatever she may have
wished for them, the creatures there who toiled their lives into oblivion, there was nothing she
could do. As soon as she was divine, sooner she was touched by the taint of a breathing world,
the fine layer of ether about her head stained with the fleeting violent crimson of reality. All
who looked upon them were destined for the same. Her eyes were now pink because they would
soon be red like everyone else's.
"You poor doomed child."
Finally at the end of his long-held patience, ZIM pulled the trigger.
"So has he been doing after the treatment?"
"Much better," the doctor said, "Our presumptions were correct it seems. The delusions
have been clearing up and he doesn't seem to have suffered any physical damage."
"How much does he remember?"
"Only what we've let him." She fixed her thin wire glasses back on her nose. "That is,
we've reprogrammed his memory from the time this 'ZIM' persona appeared onward." She
glanced up at the man. "We've had some opportunity to experiment in the alteration of his
perception in many ways. It's been fascinating. However, it all had need to be erased since this
one is scheduled to be released back into society. It's really too bad, but we've others subjects to
replace him. He won't remember having ever had this treatment. The story is, he's been abroad
on some kind of a spiritual awakening. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but we will
before we release him."
The man nodded. "So he's fully functional now? Fully sane and ready to face society?"
The woman pressed her lips. "Yes and no. We've managed to eliminate the deviant
source in his personality, but there are still gaps left in his memory. I wouldn't worry," She
tapped a pen to her clipboard. "Just try not to rile him up." She suddenly extended a hand to the
man, taking his in a professional manner. "Thank you, Professor, for your time and your
cooperation. This project could never have been so successful without you. I'm afraid I have
business to attend to, but it's been a pleasure." She gestured toward the steel door, white painted
and set with a tiny window stripped with black bars. "The attendants will show you in."
The professor nodded again. "Thank you, Doctor Morado, and congratulations on your
success." The doctor was already walking swiftly down the sterile white hall, but tossed back a
hand in dismissing acknowledgement.
The guards in the control room, punched a button, unbarring the doors with an
exaggerated buzz. Within, the room was white and square, furnished sparsely in medical fixtures
of stainless steel. An aging man stood over the operating table in the center of the room.
"Professor Membrane," He nodded. "It's good to see you."
"Doctor Akai." He nodded back. "So how is he doing?"
The old doctor tapped a pen to his lips. "Well. Quite well." His deep, stagnant voice
cracked slightly with the exertion to talk. "He should remember you. Do you want to talk to
him?"
There was a pause. "Yes." The doctor turned without further word and adjusted a knob
on the IV stand. They both watched the body on the table intently as it stirred slowly into
consciousness.
Dib's eyes were sticky, unglueing tediously, splitting to reveal a wash of whiteness. It
was a numb sort of cold where he lay.
"Son?"
Dib squirmed, jaw working open into what would have been a yawn but hung senselessly
in a fish-like gape. "Mmm... Dad?" All perception ran damply around him into a single mass
pool.
"It's me, Son."
"Oh." The young man's face tweaked slightly into what was somehow intended to be a
smile. He could now make out the round of his father's dark goggles through the unifying haze
upon which he drifted.
"Are you feeling better, Son?"
"Yeah." He tried to move his arms. "I guess. Thank you." His tongue felt disconnected
from his mouth, gathering a pool of saliva. "Do they say I'm getting better?"
"Yes, Son, they say you're much better." He patted the young man awkwardly on the
shoulder. "They say you can come home soon."
"Oh," he whispered hoarsely, "good."
"And you won't have to worry about any of the disruptions in your head any more." He
waited for Dib's reply but the young man was motionless, eyes glazing over slowly, jaw relaxing
to let the gathered saliva spill. He shot a quick glance at Doctor Akai, who pointed to Dib's
heart rate, still even.
"He's only falling unconscious again. He'll be okay." He tinkered with the knobs again.
"But we'd better just leave him. You should go home now." The professor nodded and waved
to the guards behind the one-way mirror. The doors unbolted with a deep and brief percussion,
throwing Dib awake at the jolt.
"Dad?"
The professor turned back to the young man strapped to the table. "Yes, Son?"
"Can you tell me something?" His voice was dazed and almost awkward, as though he
where shy to ask it.
"What's that?"
Dib needed a moment to figure that out for himself, laying silent, motionlessly extending
a feeble grasp for the contents of his brain, and finding them plucked by the roots, one by one.
He wanted to rub his eyes but he couldn't move his arms. He couldn't see for the brightness of
their blur. "What color are my eyes?"
His father frowned thoughtfully, casting a glance sidelong at the doctor. "Why do you
wan to know, Son?"
Dib squinted. "I-" He choked on a net of his own saliva. "I-" he continued in a bleak,
hoarse voice, "I don't know." His fingers worked in the air, grasping at something that wasn't.
"I just... Can you tell me?" The young man lay strapped in a square white room to a table cast
in metal. From his pale soft flesh, tubes ran in and out, hooked to machines, frisking chemicals
in, draining blood. There was a light above him, the muting white deadness of fabrication. Dib
couldn't feel his own head. He wasn't sure if there was really something there. "What color are
my eyes?"
"Red."
POSTSCRIPT
Still confused? Yay, I am too. 0.0 But that's all there is. There isn't any more.
I've started working on a thing I'm calling "Lavender" unless I happen to notice that title
floating around here somewhere, which I might. It's completely and utterly unlike "Constancy".
It's alot more clear, somewhat more low-key, and a little girly perhaps. A
Drama/(maybe)Romance. That will be out... sometime. Thank you and goodbye! ^-^
This is the end. I almost feel guilty about the way I've treated Dib. Poor Dib. You can go be
happy in someone else's fic now! After this, you are free, my poor crazy-monkey!
Installment 3
Someone in the line at the pharmacy shook a hand in front of Dib's face. "Gawd! Wake
up, ya psycho, you're holding up the line!"
The little girl dangled from Dib's arm, wide, round glasses crooked on her nose.
"Daddeee!" she complained. "They want you to move!" The child pulled his arm as though she
would drag him to the counter, leaning her tiny frame into the motion, the impractical soles of
her dress shoes slipping on the linoleum floor. "C'mon, it's your turn now!"
"Sir?" The young man behind the desk frowned nervously, throwing panicked glances at
the other employees stationed like pillars amongst the rows of bottles. "Are you okay?" His
eyes had the wide and bubbled look of a fish. He grimaced, eyebrows raised with surprise and
dread. "Do you want me to call someone? Is there... um..."
"C'mawn!" Dib's daughter jumped up and down, pigtails snapping. "I wanna go now!
It's spooky in here!" she chirped, throwing spooked rabbit-like glances at the dentures and enima
bags. "Spooky!" Her the flit of her panicked gaze was suddenly snagged by a brightly colored
cardboard box set on a low shelf for better child viewing. Her dark pupils narrowed in with
concentration, lip slowly protruding. She blinked anxiously, and, finding a sweet and mild
expression for her father, asked, "Buy me those?"
The man stared down mundanely. "Buy you which, Rikki?" The child swung both arms
emphatically to the box on the shelf. "Adhesive medical strips?" She nodded with glossy-eyed
gravity. Dib smirked and shook his head slightly, ready to state the obvious and obviously not
important to a child. "But you don't even have a boo-boo!"
Her jaw dropped for exactly that reason. "So?"
Dib chuckled softly, tossing a hand in dismissal. "Go ahead and get them."
"Woo!" The little girl swam through the impatient crowd like a little crustacean, them
angry but struck too dumb by the display to do anything. There was the sound of some papery
impact as she stuck a claw into the mire to fish out her prey and sent the spared objects fleeing
into a spill on the floor. She immerged again with her prize clutched high and slapped it
gleefully upon the counter.
The young man from behind the counter snatched the prescription away from Dib's loose
fingertips with nervous speed and stumbled to the back. The motley cavalcade of customers
fidgeted like vultures, cocking ebon plumes at the bizarre creature lain before them. A bolder
one might have given the meat a peck but would have been startled to realize that the quarry was
alive. As it was they mumbled gutturally to themselves, the crooked beaks in their naked heads
clacking with agitation.
Dib exchanged a loosely folded pamphlet of bills for a little brown bottle and shot a
quick, feral glance at the scene of predation as he turned to go.
The three kept an awkward dash along the wall, gusting around the wires and conduits.
"Geez, is that a camera?" Dib stumbled over backward betwen two pipes, hastily
dragging himself from the view of the glassy glint caught in the corner of his eye. The pink-eyed
Irken peered at him curiously, stopped a pace ahead. She tossed a glance back to ZIM and
pointed with blank silence at Dib, belly to the floor and eyes wrenching warily in all directions.
ZIM frowned with annoyance. "Yes, I know that, Irken child," he quipped. "Of course
its a "camera" Dib! Now, come on, they're probably coming for us right now!"
Dib's eyes flared with suspicion. "Hey... What do you need me for anyway?" He stood
up, stalking swiftly through the tangle to where ZIM perched impatiently on a coil of metal.
"Why do you care if I come with you? Huh?"
"Dib," he hissed, "as much as you disgust me, there isn't much time before both of ours
home worlds smash each other into little bitty pieces." His voice was empty, ringing with an
unreasonable lack of fear. "Since it's your filthy planet out there about to crash into mine, I
figure you might as well help me."
Dib raised an eyebrow, running his lip between his teeth. "Wait... but... why can't those
other aliens just fix it? Ya' know the entire rest of the 'empire'?" He wiggled his fingers in
front of him. "With all their big ships and lasers and stuff? I'm sure they're doing something."
"Nothing compared to the mighty resourcefulness of ZIM!" the alien supplied.
"So you're saying that you're the only one who can save the planet?" he asked with the
dull, accustomed exasperation inevitable in any conversation with ZIM.
The alien blinked his wide red eyes twice and replied with a subdued certainty, "Yes.
Yes, I am. They will all thank the mighty ZIM!" He squinted, teeth borne with glee, and
suddenly popped a finger in the direction of the young Irken. "All of you!"
The little creature observed him sourly, wide green eyelids heavy with disinterest. "We
need to go!"
"Alright, let's go," he agreed and nearly stepped backward into a rush of laser fire. Dib
and ZIM dove into the thicket of wiring, hissing and sparking under the searing volley. The
Irkens guards hugged the corner of the hall, red eyes agleam with the reflection of the fuchsia
blasts, strewing the ill-lit hall with an irradiated quiver. Dib and ZIM cringed behind the low
conduits, hands clawed over their heads. A choking escaped from Dib's throat, what would have
been adressed to his companions, but for a strike on the wiring over his head, coughing a shower
of sparks. He clenched his eyes shut, in a panic to think as the squealing roar richocheted over
his head.
The little girl, unmoved, stood her place watching the Irken guards like fish in a bowl,
eyes to the brim with the liquid clarity of a faint and calm interest. She stood clear amidst the
contorted shrieks of the purple streams eroding the corded nest into its very thread, unraveling
the twine of wire, the plates of metal into beards of knarled charcoal, spewed from gasping
mouths which sparked and glowed. The child was unimpressed, untouched. She watched the
fish like a cat hiding in a bird's nest.
Dib shivered, hidden in an eddy of the swamp of fire. From the spare glimpses he could
steal in the orchid shimmer, he saw the little Irken girl still standing, serene, like a little human
girl watching the clouds change. "Geez!" He flung out an arm to grab her ankle, fingers taking a
swift and tremendous sweep of nothing. And as through with the motion he had spilled it upon
them, a kind veil of blackness decended, sweeping out the shriek of gunfire with a single
feathery flutter swept quickly down the hall. The air was frozen in its wake, holding a tense
breath as it got a handle of itself, casting wary glances about the hall, and then rushing out with
full liquid fury, evaporating on the metallic tinge of seared metal as it struck it, then it was air
again.
"C'mon, we need to go," called a soft voice. The little girl stood poised around the
corner, an Irken gun dangling casually from her hand. She watched them passively with her
deep pink eyes, standing in an empty black hallway. "C'mon," she said, "we really need to go."
"Do think that- um... ya know- in general are people good or bad?" She fidgeted
nervously with her little box of adhesive medical strips, clutched like a toy. There was one on
her knee where there wasn't really any injury at all, patterned with the pointed ovular heads of
black and blank eyed aliens printed in a bright, crisp green. The girl looked up at her father
plaintively.
"Rikki?" The man stopped walking and leaned against the black park fence, watching
the child with concern. "How old are you?" He saw the girl pull out her fingers but interrupted
as she started counting with a pinkie. "No, no, never mind, but, Rikki, what makes you ask this
all of a sudden?"
The girl frowned shortly in the equivalent of what was a shrug and looked down with a
feigned interest in the little cardboard box. "Oh, I dunno. I was just thinking, looking at all
these people. You never really know what any of them is like, I guess. You always say not to
talk to strangers, but adults do it all the time." She lifted a tendril of dark hair away from her
glasses. "I dunno. But you really don't like people, right?"
Dib bit his lip leaning back into the wrought-iron bars. "I don't know whether I'd say
that, Rikki."
She watched him blankly. "Well, adults never say it."
He threw a glance at the child in curiousity. "Well, I don't know whether I believe that,
either, at least the part about good and bad. I don't really know if any of us are either, or if there
is even such a thing," He slowly rapped a finger across a long, cool bar. "but I'm not supposed
to tell you stuff like that."
"Why?"
"I really shouldn't even explain that to you."
"Aww." She sounded only mildly disappointed, like she had been told that her surprise
would have to wait until later. "Alright." She walked on again, swimming through the leaves
cast upon the heather sidewalk.
"Yeah," Dib agreed to the wordless action, "I guess we need to go." He followed the
child and they loped side by side in silence, her little hand eventually creeping into the cup his.
The wind waved the leaves in the neat green poplars attractively, snapping the leaves with the
sounds of flown banners and waved ribbons in the raised arms of the branches tilting giddily
over their path. The park was green beyond the fence, glowing in sunlight, glowing in shadow,
and shrinking with the pegs of trees until, at the edge of their vision and exactly their opposite,
there was another fence and another path. It was very far away.
It was Sunday and the roads were muted muttering only occasionaly to the pedestrians on
the walk. Their house lay just down the lane, a respectable old structure, one of the layers of
many respectable old structures packed in along the same road. It was a nice house, but they
were all nice houses, plastered in weathered brick and molded concrete. They edged up the steep
gray steps, gripping thin iron rails and stepped through the splice of a tall wooden door with a
low brass handle into a yellowed threshold.
"Rose?" The shadows played across the fine old wood of the deep, trodden floors.
Rikki skipped through the wide rooms back to the kitchen, shaking her box of adhesive
medical stripsfrom side to side. "Hey, mom! Look!" Dib kept stiffly in the hallway, watching
the sun warp through the lead-glass windows and waited coldly for the reply.
"Adhesive medical strips." It was a statement, concise and uninflected. "Why do we
need those?" The woman's voice, deep and businesslike grated with a harshness, made milder
only by disinterest. "And what's that on them? Yeah." She wasn't surprised. "Oh great, we
really need more of that in the house. Give me those."
"Hey..."
"Give them here. I haven't got time for your father's crap. Wherever he's lurking, you
can tell him that we'll discuss this later. I've got business." There was the grunt of a briefcase
dragged off the counter, the rap of high heels across the floor and the sticking wood of the back
door gurgled open and yelped shut with a tremor of glass.
The little girl peeked through the doorway past the staircase down the hall. "She took my
adhesive medical strips!" she exclaimed, with more surprise than offense. She made a face.
"Well, I draw better anyway." She smirked. "I'm gonna get some crayons."
Dib twisted his head, his hand held to his neck. "That's good, honey."
"I'll make a picture for you."
Dib smiled thinly, the black wraith in the shadows of the old brown hall, drinking the
sunlight into his substance and looming dark and straight in its corner, like a pillar to the familiar
old structure. He trembled a little when he breathed. "Thank you, sweetie." His eyes were
closed. He shook his little bottle as he climbed the dark stairs.
"Alright, human, do you have any idea how we're going to stop this?" ZIM dragged an
icon on the glowing panel traced in shades of crimson. A three dimensional skeleton appeared of
both their planets, Earth and Irk. The model spun, displaying the distance between the two
bodies, what looked on the screen like the span of a human's thumb. The blip of its trajectory
was displayed in spinning rings of green. The computer panned out as they objects collided
shattering into skeletal shards. Of each orb left, there was about half.
Dib pressed his fingers to his temples. "Am I supposed to have the answers here? First
tell me, how did you get us into this?" The little Irken girl wedged herself between the two,
swinging her head over the monitor with curiousity.
ZIM narrowed his eyes but slid a finger across the dark panel to bring up another
diagram. "Your Earth is in orbit around that sun of yours and stays where it is because of its
pull."
"Yeah," Dib prompted with a tight impatience, hearing nothing new.
ZIM scowled at the human. "Well, through the amazing capacity of my goo-filled head, I
realized that if I reversed the magnetism of the sun and-"
"What?" Dib shoved himself closer to the panel. The girl squirmed away and shuffled
toward ZIM. "Magnetism?" Dib gaped, glasses lit with the bizarre image on the screen.
ZIM steered the child out of his personal space. Three were not intended to fit in a Voot
Cruiser. He waved in dismissal. "Yes, Dib, the attraction between the magnetic core of your son
and the metallic center of your Earth-"
"What?" He leaned in towards the alien, face dark with disbelief. "What are you talking
about?" His shuddering breath escaped between his teeth. The little Irken frowned with slight
offense and worked herself over to the panel behind Dib, oblivious the tone of his voice rising
hysterically. "What are you talking about?" His lips dragged down into a grim sneer, teeth
borne like the peeling gums of something left dead in the heat. "The sun is not a magnet, ZIM!"
"Foolish human-" ZIM began.
"The sun is not a magnet!" The Irken rolled his eyes and patronizingly shook his head,
but the human continued, "The Earth's orbit has nothing to do with magnets! How do you
always manage to do stuff like this, ZIM? How do you make all these crazy things happen? It
doesn't make sense! It doesn't make any sense at all!" He seized the alien by his pink collar.
The little one slipped off the control panel in surprise. "There's no way you should have been
able to do this, ZIM!" ZIM blinked, mouth agape, eyes fixed on the human face for a lack of
anywhere else to place them. "How do you do things like this, ZIM?" The shocked alien
squirmed slightly in his grip, completely at a loss. "How do you do things like this?" Dib could
see the quiver in the creatures huge red eyes, the maddening pulse of existence itself. They
shone with a polished gloss, worn smooth by the grit of a thousand more. There were thousands
and there were billions and they were all the same, huge and round and red like blood. They all
stared, stared at him and they were all the same. He could feel the starting singe of their
collective gaze and he knew what it was they wanted from him and Dib raised a hooked hand to
gouge one of them out.
"Daddy?"
"Daddy?"
"Yes, Rikki?"
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing." He rolled the empty pill bottle under his palm, gliding it across the cool white
tile and the blackened grout between the bathtub and the toilet.
The little girl frowned but shrugged and flopped out a legal document size piece of paper
crumpled with fingermarks. "I drew you a picture."
Dib's eyelids hung over the man's eyes like metal shutters, sliding on a loose track. He
spoke with an soft and empty reverence, voice barely fit to slip between his teeth and his lips.
"Thank you, honey."
The child held the out the paper with a loud and expectant flap, waiting for it to be taken
from her hand, but her father's wrists lay with an unnatural limpness, dragging the icy tile, void
of the intention of movement. She hopped in place to draw attention. "Don'cha wanna look?"
Dib raised his head from the bathtub mechanically, face bright with the stick of its cold
enamel. "Oh. Yes, Rikki, of course." He didn't feel the hand that drifted up to clip the paper
between two fingers and he couldn't feel it fall into his lap but his head dropped down, lips
pendulous with ragged breath. The floor swam as he gazed down, his own black legs stretched
lengthwise and snapped back into place, and the blur of green and red scrawled on the lithe sheet
sunk into a pool of disparity. "What is it?"
The child held her lower lip between her teeth. "Look at it, Daddy!" She demanded.
"I-" His hand stepped across the floor, dragged finger by finger, edging to the blight on
his lap. "What-" The roughly carved streaks of green and red bled before him. "I-" With his
next breath, they were wrenched into solid figures, flung sharply at his face with a cutting
definition. There were three figures, a small boy with wide glasses, swathed in the fiercely
scribbled black of a long draping trenchcoat, a little green alien, just his height, a pair of black
antennae sprung from his head and eyes a solid and meticulously pressed crimson. There was a
smaller alien, a child, garbed in a vibrant pink dress with wide pink eyes, the pungent shade of
artificial raspberry. She held the hands of both the others, arranged in an uneven two-
dimensional row upon the harshly looped scribbles of a grassy field beneath the crude circles of
two huge orbs.
The child tucked her head between her father and the drawing. "Do you see?"
Dib rubbed a fist into the hazing gum of his eyes. He whispered hoarsely, "Do I see
what?"
Rikki flicked the man an earnest glance, the glint of a question in her eye. "Uhm," she
started unsurely. "You know. It's us." A tiny finger flicked from the little girl with shining eyes
to the man crumpled half unconscious on the bathroom floor to someone else in another
direction, something that Dib couldn't see. "It's you."
ZIM pressed the hard point of the Irken gun into the flesh stretched over the human skull.
"You stupid, filthy creature!" He ground the metal piece against Dib's skull, leering over the boy
with fervent disgust. "You know, Dib," he said, an edge slicing through his high strange voice,
"there's a simple solution to all of this. There's always a simple solution." He snorted softly
with what was short and quiet laughter. "I blow up your planet and I save mine. I blow your
head off and I save myself a lot of trouble in the future." The alien smiled oddly, pleased with
himself. "Ya wanna say something, Dib?"
"I don't even think you're real, ZIM." Dib lay, unmoving, head against the floor, eyes
upon the foreign workings of the alien vessel. He felt the gun bite into his temple.
"What's that, Dib? Did you just say I'm not real?" The alien smiled ruefully, red eyes
wide with a gleeful disbelief. He shook his head. "Well, that certainly is interesting, but do you
really want that to be your final words? Don't you think you could up with something- oh, I
dunno- a little less stupid?" He paused. "Nah." The Irken took an eager breath and grasped the
trigger with a black gloved finger trembling in exultation.
"Wait!"
ZIM's concentration was broken by a light touch on his hand. The Irken child stood
before them staring at ZIM plaintively, staring at Dib pleadingly. Her eyes glittered. ZIM's
slender antennae twitched. "Well, what do you want?" he demanded, leaning into his weapon
impatiently.
"Are you really going to let this happen?"
"What?"
"Are you really just going to let it be this way?" She was talking to both of them, warm
pink eyes, fixed on the two creatures sadly.
Dib lifted lifted his head slightly, against the press of the gun, just enough to look up at
the child. "Little girl," he said, voice clear but empty, "I don't think I even care anymore."
"What is she talking about, Dib?"
The human sighed thickly. "I've told you. You're not real, neither is she. As for me,"
He blinked at the alien floor. "I guess that hasn't been decided yet."
The little Irken child nestled beneath a console, craning over his head, peering into his
eyes with her own, alive and lit. "But can't we decide? Everything can't be all bad. I don't
think that everyone is bad. I think-" The child looked up to ZIM wistfully. "I think that we
could all be okay. People- we don't have to fight because we're different. I don't know why
people do the things they do, to each other, and do to themselves, but I think we could accept
each other." There was a film of tears spread down her green face. "I don't think we have to
fight. If we're different- well- then we just are. I don't think that any of us are bad, we just...
don't get it. If you are what you are then..." Her voice broke off. "It's not supposed to be this
way! It's not right. It's not-" She considered the word a moment. "good? Different people can
live together." She was pleading. "We don't all have to be the same. We can all be us and
maybe- maybe if we try then everything will be okay." The child watched them both, the human
boy, uncaring, and the bright-eyed Irken with a gun to his head.
Dib lay still for the full appreciation of the cool foreign metal pointed at his brain. The
child's wide and earnest, deep and wishful bright pink eyes poised like a bird set on a branch, a
frail thing, eminently intended to end in a moment. They were like the eyes of some urbane
goddess, cast down upon the Earth to behold the grief wrought there, but whatever she may have
wished for them, the creatures there who toiled their lives into oblivion, there was nothing she
could do. As soon as she was divine, sooner she was touched by the taint of a breathing world,
the fine layer of ether about her head stained with the fleeting violent crimson of reality. All
who looked upon them were destined for the same. Her eyes were now pink because they would
soon be red like everyone else's.
"You poor doomed child."
Finally at the end of his long-held patience, ZIM pulled the trigger.
"So has he been doing after the treatment?"
"Much better," the doctor said, "Our presumptions were correct it seems. The delusions
have been clearing up and he doesn't seem to have suffered any physical damage."
"How much does he remember?"
"Only what we've let him." She fixed her thin wire glasses back on her nose. "That is,
we've reprogrammed his memory from the time this 'ZIM' persona appeared onward." She
glanced up at the man. "We've had some opportunity to experiment in the alteration of his
perception in many ways. It's been fascinating. However, it all had need to be erased since this
one is scheduled to be released back into society. It's really too bad, but we've others subjects to
replace him. He won't remember having ever had this treatment. The story is, he's been abroad
on some kind of a spiritual awakening. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but we will
before we release him."
The man nodded. "So he's fully functional now? Fully sane and ready to face society?"
The woman pressed her lips. "Yes and no. We've managed to eliminate the deviant
source in his personality, but there are still gaps left in his memory. I wouldn't worry," She
tapped a pen to her clipboard. "Just try not to rile him up." She suddenly extended a hand to the
man, taking his in a professional manner. "Thank you, Professor, for your time and your
cooperation. This project could never have been so successful without you. I'm afraid I have
business to attend to, but it's been a pleasure." She gestured toward the steel door, white painted
and set with a tiny window stripped with black bars. "The attendants will show you in."
The professor nodded again. "Thank you, Doctor Morado, and congratulations on your
success." The doctor was already walking swiftly down the sterile white hall, but tossed back a
hand in dismissing acknowledgement.
The guards in the control room, punched a button, unbarring the doors with an
exaggerated buzz. Within, the room was white and square, furnished sparsely in medical fixtures
of stainless steel. An aging man stood over the operating table in the center of the room.
"Professor Membrane," He nodded. "It's good to see you."
"Doctor Akai." He nodded back. "So how is he doing?"
The old doctor tapped a pen to his lips. "Well. Quite well." His deep, stagnant voice
cracked slightly with the exertion to talk. "He should remember you. Do you want to talk to
him?"
There was a pause. "Yes." The doctor turned without further word and adjusted a knob
on the IV stand. They both watched the body on the table intently as it stirred slowly into
consciousness.
Dib's eyes were sticky, unglueing tediously, splitting to reveal a wash of whiteness. It
was a numb sort of cold where he lay.
"Son?"
Dib squirmed, jaw working open into what would have been a yawn but hung senselessly
in a fish-like gape. "Mmm... Dad?" All perception ran damply around him into a single mass
pool.
"It's me, Son."
"Oh." The young man's face tweaked slightly into what was somehow intended to be a
smile. He could now make out the round of his father's dark goggles through the unifying haze
upon which he drifted.
"Are you feeling better, Son?"
"Yeah." He tried to move his arms. "I guess. Thank you." His tongue felt disconnected
from his mouth, gathering a pool of saliva. "Do they say I'm getting better?"
"Yes, Son, they say you're much better." He patted the young man awkwardly on the
shoulder. "They say you can come home soon."
"Oh," he whispered hoarsely, "good."
"And you won't have to worry about any of the disruptions in your head any more." He
waited for Dib's reply but the young man was motionless, eyes glazing over slowly, jaw relaxing
to let the gathered saliva spill. He shot a quick glance at Doctor Akai, who pointed to Dib's
heart rate, still even.
"He's only falling unconscious again. He'll be okay." He tinkered with the knobs again.
"But we'd better just leave him. You should go home now." The professor nodded and waved
to the guards behind the one-way mirror. The doors unbolted with a deep and brief percussion,
throwing Dib awake at the jolt.
"Dad?"
The professor turned back to the young man strapped to the table. "Yes, Son?"
"Can you tell me something?" His voice was dazed and almost awkward, as though he
where shy to ask it.
"What's that?"
Dib needed a moment to figure that out for himself, laying silent, motionlessly extending
a feeble grasp for the contents of his brain, and finding them plucked by the roots, one by one.
He wanted to rub his eyes but he couldn't move his arms. He couldn't see for the brightness of
their blur. "What color are my eyes?"
His father frowned thoughtfully, casting a glance sidelong at the doctor. "Why do you
wan to know, Son?"
Dib squinted. "I-" He choked on a net of his own saliva. "I-" he continued in a bleak,
hoarse voice, "I don't know." His fingers worked in the air, grasping at something that wasn't.
"I just... Can you tell me?" The young man lay strapped in a square white room to a table cast
in metal. From his pale soft flesh, tubes ran in and out, hooked to machines, frisking chemicals
in, draining blood. There was a light above him, the muting white deadness of fabrication. Dib
couldn't feel his own head. He wasn't sure if there was really something there. "What color are
my eyes?"
"Red."
POSTSCRIPT
Still confused? Yay, I am too. 0.0 But that's all there is. There isn't any more.
I've started working on a thing I'm calling "Lavender" unless I happen to notice that title
floating around here somewhere, which I might. It's completely and utterly unlike "Constancy".
It's alot more clear, somewhat more low-key, and a little girly perhaps. A
Drama/(maybe)Romance. That will be out... sometime. Thank you and goodbye! ^-^