A/N: I'd originally intended Going On to be a Dib/Tak fic, but it never really panned out that way. Call it weakness as a writer or integrity, that's the way it turned out. However, this didn't change the fact that I wanted to write a Dib/Tak fic, mainly because I always had a thing for that pairing, and because there ain't a whole hell of alot of them out there. Hence, you have this story. Apologies to those who were expecting updates to Going On... I had to get this out first.
This also affords me an opportunity to deal with Dib, Zim, Gir, Gaz, and Tak in their "natural" habitat.
Hopefully it does not suck, or at the very least, does not offend. With that being said, on with the show!
"Just a castaway, I am lost at sea. Another lonely day, no one here but me. More loneliness, than any man could bear. Rescue me before I fall into despair. I'll send an S.O.S. to the world, I'll send an S.O.S. to the world, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, message in a bottle..."-The Police, Message in a Bottle
Six years ago...
Dib sat up on the roof, monitoring the random transmissions that inhabited the airways near his home and contemplating the events which had transpired that day. Normally he'd be overjoyed and celebrating his victory over the Irken race, but today his "victory" seemed hollow.
The earth had almost been destroyed, and it hadn't even been Zim's fault.
In a way it had almost been his. He'd been too blind to see through a simple facade, too blinded by... what? Attraction? Yes, he supposed, there was that, he was, after all, around the right age. Still, it was more than that. The possibility of companionship, of someone who didn't think he was bugfuck crazy, a friend... it had blinded him to what was glaringly obvious, in reflection.
The fact that that possible companion had been female had certainly not aided in his detection of it.
Tak.
He should have known, should have seen it, but he'd been blinded by her intelligence, her refusal to be bent or broken by the other kid's petty cruelty, indeed... she'd had a strange, hypnotic effect on them. Perhaps on him as well, despite her claims otherwise. They'd seemed kindred spirits, but it had all been one big lie.
Of course it was. Who'd be interested in HIM? Least of all a girl.
It had taken the combined efforts of Zim, his insane robot, an apathetic Gaz, and Dib himself to thwart the Irken female's plot. Despite the ridiculousness of said plan, it had almost worked, and the potential for damage and loss of life struck Dib to his very core. So many innocent people almost vaporized by escaping magma, or whatever catastrophic effects having over 90 percent of the earth's mass replaced with junkfood would have entailed... what a tragedy that would have been...
Well, he could think of a couple of people he wouldn't mind becoming puffs of irate vapor... come to think of it, he didn't think he'd met anyone who didn't make him wish they'd drop dead and leave him alone, but there were an awful lot of people he didn't know, and one of THEM might have been a worthwhile human being, damn it.
Still, it was all said and done. Tak had been defeated, her plan to reduce the earth to a huge, snack-filled pinata had been stopped in the nick of time (he still couldn't believe he'd missed that gigantic switch for so long) and Tak herself had been presumably defeated by Zim himself in an out-atmosphere aerial duel.
Of course, it was sometimes wise to take anything that Zim said with a grain of salt.
A large grain of salt. Fricken dump truck sized.
The little Irken had a very.... skewed vision of reality.
Dib turned his gaze towards the sky and sighed deeply, the stars winking at him. Some people referred to the stars as cold, uncaring objects, but Dib had never agreed with that perception. They burned with a warm light that never failed to remind him that a thousand thousand mysteries awaited him among them. Space truely was the last frontier of man, and anything connected to it had an immediate veneer of awe and wonder for him. Even Zim, in his petty, stupid, and quite frankly, pathetic attempts to take over this spinning ball of dirt were, at the very least, not boring.
Retarded as an inbred gluesniffing chipmunk, but never boring.
He sighed in a strange mix of contentment and wistful sadness and mused to himself.
"Look at it, Gaz! We've only seen what's come to us from up there. Don't you wanna just fly out there and see it all?"
Gaz, in her usual display of boundless enthusiasm, shrugged and emitted an at least nonthreatening, "Eh." Before the fading light drove her inside for a better view of her flashing Game Slave 2.
This was something of a positive reaction from her regarding his obsession, so he simply smiled to himself, returning to his monitoring of the skies.
A bright shape caught his attention and he gaped in astonishment.
-What the hell is THAT!- He stood, grinning in anticipation. -WOW! Is that an unidentified object! I must be the luckiest-
Self preservation kicked in a second too late and his grin of anticipation became a wince of "please don't hit me", not that it would have helped much, had the object actually struck him. Fate is kind to the underdog however, and Dib hadn't been an overdog in... well, ever. The object, nearly red hot from reentry, slammed into his backyard, but failed to ignite his father's patented supergrass. The shockwave DID knock him on his ass however, and he spent several minutes attempting to prevent himself from sliding over the edge of the roof and onto the hissing object.
He crawled to the edge of the roof, peeking over in shaking trepidation, half expecting some tentacled horror to emerge and begin its reign of terror right here in his own backyard.
The object, whatever it was, was badly damaged, and somewhat hard to make out due to the distortion caused by the intense heat coming off of it, heat that he could feel even from his position atop the roof. Squinting hard and leaning forward a bit more than was probably good for him, he stared at the strange visitor to his backyard.
Then he recognized it... it was an Irken craft! He blinked in astonishment. This particular model looked different from Zim's, almost as though it had been patched together from several different sources. Still, its somewhat battered but still recognizable lines sent a shiver of anticipation through him...
Tak's ship. This MUST be Tak's ship! Still, judging from the gaping hole in its front, it looked as though it had been abandoned... probably Tak's last ditch effort to save herself from annihilation at the hands of her hated enemy. A twinge of something... regret possibly, lashed through him momentarily, but was lost in sudden flush of excitement... Zim thought this ship was destroyed, which meant that no one knew this ship was here!
No one, that is, but him.
He grinned in satisfaction, then went to work.
It took him most of the night, but he finally managed to get it cooled down and into his freakishly huge garage. Let it never be said that the Membrane family lacked space for their mad ventures into science.
If Zim had any suspicions as to why Dib was so subdued and tired the next day at Skool, he said nothing. He simply stared at the human in suspicious paranoia.
Of course, he always did that.
Elsewhere, Tak floated in the cold outer reaches of our solar system and contemplated the fate which had befallen her. She replayed the events which had lead to her being trapped in a coffin-like contraption of Irken alloy and glass-steel, without any hope of rescue.
Nope, not a chance of that. Even if Zim DID notice her distress beacon, unlikely, considering his amazing ability to ignore things that did not interest him, all she'd probably get from him was a ration of gloating before being reduced to her component atoms. Nor could she count on the humans to find her, their spacefaring capabilities were pathetic, and she doubted they even had any equipment capable of recognizing her signal as an intentional broadcast, much less decode it.
So she replayed the events in her mind, and realized there was nothing that she'd have done differently. Not a thing. HE'D won by luck. She'd beaten him at every turn, outsmarted and outplanned him in every way, and in the end, a malfunctioning robot servant and meddling humans had ended her dreams of conquest.
Zim's part in the conflict had been largely incidental.
She'd underestimated them, the humans. She realized that now. Oh not the race as a whole, they were pathetic, and the funny thing was, most of them were so easy to fool and manipulate because they didn't WANT to see anything beyond their safe, simple little lives. If she'd ever seen a race ripe for conquest, it was this one. The fact that Zim had spent over a year amongst them and had yet to make the least bit of progress towards their subjegation was simply undeniable proof that HE was no Invader. Why, in the few short weeks that she'd infiltrated the planet, she'd not only gotten lightyears ahead of Zim in her schedule to conquer the planet, she'd also fooled his greatest enemy into thinking she was a human.
Dib. There was a subject that sat poorly with her. It had been... amusing, dancing on the edge of discovery by the perceptive human, interacting with him as humans did, all the while concealing her true nature. There had been an undertone of danger to their every conversation, and it had, she admitted, thrilled her. The boy had never suspected, and she took pride in her ability to blend in with the local populous. She attributed that to her ability to get inside the heads of her victims, she'd done extensive research, after all.
Still, it hadn't been an onerous task, interacting with the Dib human. He was smart... impossibly smart, for an inferior species. Perceptive too, and impossibly curious. The other stinkbeasts had annoyed her, with their petty squabblings and idiotic displays of dominance, from an intellectual stand point, it was like watching a tribe of chimps in a zoo throw feces at one another and shriek, and then turning and finding one of those chimps attempting to figure out how to read the plaque that instructed how to open the cage.
Still, he'd been an obstacle to her goal in the end, and she would have destroyed him, had she not been... distracted.
Yes, that's what it was.
The look of betrayal he'd given her as she'd gloated to him about his species inferiority had given her a strangely mixed set of emotions. On the one hand, she'd found his complete shock at her betrayal gratifying... he'd never even suspected her otherworldly origins. On the other, she would miss their conversations, if only because none of the other beings within several thousand lightyears would have been able to keep up with her.
Another secret, hidden part of her remembered that there had been precious few among her own people capable of doing so as well, but she shoved that into the darker recesses of her mind.
Besides, she'd fully intended to erase his memory of the events, to continue their game without him ever being the wiser. She'd never expected him to be too strong-willed to hold under her influence though, he'd seemed so weak when the other children had persecuted him almost daily. That had forced her hand, forced her into the endgame with Zim quicker than she might have chosen on her own. Not because of any weak sentimentality towards the human mind you. Never that.
Just that she would have liked to see Zim squirm on the hook of her superiority a little longer.
She was well aware that being told you were worthless long enough and by enough people would cause even the strongest mind to start believing it, after all, hadn't her fellow Irkens been telling her she wasn't cut out to be an Invader for many years now? Still, she couldn't imagine how he'd held up all those years.
She wasn't quite willing to accept that he might be just as strong as she was. Not even after everything she'd seen.
A crackling Irken computer voice interrupted her musings and brought her back into the now.
"Warning, emergency oxygen supplies running low, estimate sixty minutes remaining."
She blinked. "Computer, status of primary recirculation system."
"Primary recirculation system has sustained 94% damage and is currently offline pending repair." The computer voice was calm and unshaken, delivering the facts with cold certainty, but it nevertheless caused a shiver to run down her spine.
"Estimated time to repair?"
"Damage is beyond current repair capability. Recommend depot level overhaul."
She gritted her teeth. "What about the secondary system?"
The computer paused for a moment, then continued. "Secondary recirculation system is operating at 15% nominal value. Estimate failure within twenty five minutes."
"What about that?! Can it be repaired?"
"Negative. Damage is beyond current repair capability. Recommend depot level overhaul."
She growled in frustration, her eyes flicking over the controls with a sudden sense of overwhelming claustrophobia. Out! Out! She wanted out of this tomb! Panic struck her like a cold slap of water going over the head of a drowning man.
She forced herself to calm down and surveyed her current situation.
The shattered remnants of MiMi (she'd been forced to dismantle the robot to end its mad frenzy) lie scattered about the pod. No help there. She'd built this ship, including its control pod, from the ground up using the discarded remnants of a thousands ships back on planet Dirt, and MiMi as well. She knew every inch of their circuitry, and they were not compatable, at least, not for what she needed.
She considered her situation.
She'd never given up, not during the brutal pace forced upon her by her instructors during Invader training... there were few female Invaders, possibly because the Tallest, off the record of course, considered females to be physically inferior. The instructors had been hand picked and shared this prejudice, they'd been particularly brutal with the females. She'd preservered. Even when she'd been shipped off to planet Dirt in disgrace after missing that last, most important exam, she'd never given up... and she certainly wasn't going to give up now.
It wasn't in her nature.
In forty five minutes she was going to die. The reason she was going to die was going to be a lack of breathable air. She had no way of creating more oxygen with her current resources, so she had to find some way to make her supply of available oxygen last longer.
She considered this for a moment.
An idea came to her, it would be painful, and possibly fatal, but she had nothing to lose.
She released her safety restraints and manuevered herself towards the atmospheric condenser unit. Opening it quickly, she closed the out valve and released the hose from its canister, her spiderlike manipulative limbs dexteriously picking up spare bits of MiMi and fashioning them into a connector of sorts. Having done so, she took deep breath, than began her work.
The atmospheric condenser took a highly caustic substance, H2O, and converted it into oxygen and hydrogen, using the hydrogen to create cold fusion as a secondary power source for the ship. It then mixed the remaining oxygen with trace amounts of nitrogen, creating a breathable atmosphere.
What she was going to do was very simple. She was going to connect her Pak to the oxygen side and use its diagnostic capabilties to maintain her at minimal life support. In order to do so, she would have to freeze 98 percent of her body, leaving only the brain and Pak still operating at minimal levels. Just enough to keep her alive.
Not a pleasant proposition, but not unsurvivable. The Irken body, unlike the human one, could survive being frozen and then thawed. Irken blood contained no water, and thus didn't expand when frozen, ruining the cells. In a state of suspended animation, she might be able to survive for years, decades even.
A moment of panic struck her as she completed her task with barely twenty minutes to go... her hand hovered over the "vent nitrogen" button.
Once she did this, there was no going back. No saving herself. She'd be at the mercy of whoever found her.
She'd go to sleep, and she might never wake up.
The alternative of course, was death, and so she steeled herself and pressed the button, closing her eyes as the nitrogen began to vent into her system.
Cold... so cold it was like her veins were being stabbed with daggers of ice, coursing through her, stiffening her chest, her limbs, her lungs... she cried out in agony, her Pak screaming warnings at her.
Frost formed on her Pak, and crept over the rest of her body. Comprehension faded, faded... it was like dying...
She didn't want to die.
She couldn't move.
And then it was done.
The bit of Irken flotsam drifted on the solar tides, passing various planets, sending its weak signal in all directions, eventually finding itself amongst other abandoned solar bodies, rocks and bits of dust. In an asteroid belt it tumbled, coming to rest among several highly ferrous rocks, their inherant electromagnetic signature quite aptly masked her distress signal.
There it would stay, undisturbed and undetected for a long time.
Current Day...
Space is an amazingly big place.
No really... it's friggin' huge. The amount of territory that humanity occupies is so infinestimally small, so utterly and completely insignifigant, that it has driven some of our greatest minds mad simply trying to catalogue what we are capable of seeing of it.
Even what we are capable of seeing is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.
An example. The psychic boll weevils of planet Grommada existed for millennia before we were protoplasmic jelly crying for our single-celled mommies, a futile sort of gesture, which simply had a bunch of cells looking at one another in confusion, because mitosis being what it is, there ain't no going back, and buddy, the cell you just came from is in the same boat as you, quite literally.
I digress. The Grommadan boll weevils developed an amazingly complex and peaceful culture based on the simple premise that there was enough cotton to go around for all, and were summarily wiped out by a universe that does not allow such simpering, nice minded sentimentality to exist, all in the space of tens of thousands of years.
HOwever, the method in which they were disposed of... the developement of an artificial polyester fabric by their scientists, which sparked a holy war that destroyed their small planet, goes to show that though the universe doesn't care, it does have a particularly nasty sense of humor.
What does this have to do with us, you ask? Nothing. That's the point. All of this living and dying took place around a little star that just so happens to be our closed celestial neighbor, and we never even knew.
Still, if you had asked the psychic boll weevils of Alpha Centauri I, they'd have told you that their little part of the galaxy was the center of the universe.
Well, for them, it was. Still, you can't blame a culture based around sitting on cotton leaves chewing all day for being somewhat egocentric.
With the sheer vastness of space, it is almost impossible for two objects to collide at random. Its rather like two extremely burly men with cuesticks shooting balls the size of marbles at one another across a pool table the size of a football field each trying to hit the other's balls exactly. (the marbles, not the... you know) All you're going to get from that sort of situation are two very frustrated large men.
Alright, that analogy was slightly more homoerotic than I normally go for, but I think you get the gist.
In fact, with space being so phenomonally huge and all, the frequency with which objects collide only goes to show just how many objects there are out there.
Of course, it also goes to illustrate, once again, that the universe has a wacky sense of humor.
Since all of you were probably expecting this to lead up to something, I shall not disappoint you. This celestial body, for the sake of brevity, we shall call it Bob, though it really could just as well have been a Tom or even a Sally, as its sex could best be described as cold, was shooting through our solar system as it so often does, without a care in its icy soul. Comet Bob had passed through our solar system without incident 14 times previous, and it felt confident that this trip would be no different. As with many great moments of personal tragedy, Comet Bob's overconfidence would have spelled its undoing, had it had any control over its velocity, but since it didn't, we can't exactly afford it any personal responsibility in its demise. However, since if it HAD had a personality, it would undoubted have been best described as overconfident, brash even, we can take some solice in the knowledge that it deserved exactly what it got.
Ahem.
Anyway, Bob was shooting its merry way through the cosmos when it noticed a strange something in its path up ahead. This solar system had changed since Bob's last visit... either that or it had taken a left when it should have taken a right. Regardless of this, Bob didn't have much time to contemplate this error, as it immediately slammed into an object several times bigger than itself, turning itself into the celestial equivalent of margueritta mix, only, you know, without the alcohol.
Or the fruit juice.
The fates of anthropomorphic celestial bodies aside, Bob's velocity could be best measured in miles per second rather than miles per hour, so you can imagine that its death caused quite a large bit of chaos in the asteroid belt it had come to rest in.
Bob would have been proud.
In any case, had Bob collided with Tak's pod directly, all that would have come of it was some scientist several centuries from now might have wondered why a rogue comet had the impression of a rather dismayed Irken on its face. However, this didn't happen. In a celestial game of billards, Tak was afforded the equivalent of a full pocket sweep, as asteroid collided with asteroid, juggling about in the hierarchy of the heavens, until finally, one cold, ferrous bit of rock nudged her pod out into a slightly clear space than it had been before.
In an amazing stroke of coincidence, at that exact MOMENT, NASA scientists were discussing a problem with their equipment.
David Treskell stared down at his lap in dismay. He'd just turned for a moment to take a look at the busty naked lady that his co-worker had received by email, when his leg had bumped the wobbily desk stand and knocked his black morning coffee all over his lap and keyboard. Cursing in pain and frustration, (this was his first cup, damn it) he wiped the steaming liquid off of his crotch, then proceeded to try and get the stuff off the damn keyboard. Since he neglected to unplug the offending device first, his random, rag induced keystroking caused a 1.5 billion dollar satellite dish to began a slow pan across the heavens.
Had the coordinates entered been two numbers less, he would have gotten absolutely nothing, a state he was infinitely familiar with, in his job as WELL as his personal life. Had he accidentally entered two digits more, he'd have gotten some of the best pay-per-view Vortian soft Porn this side of the horsehead nebula. This would have been a trifle more excitement than he could have handled, however, and so a forgiving universe instead settled him on coordinates 00045.43:11103.56.
An offtone, ominous sounding beep caught David's attention. He set the now cleaner (if slightly sticky) keyboard down and stared myoptically at the screen.
He blinked.
David Treskell owed his position more to the benevolent gods of favoritism than anything else (his father was also his supervisor) and so his paltry scientific degree did not afford him enough knowledge to make sense of the strange, static sounding waveform being repeated on his screen. He also wasn't smart enough to realize that a intentional, exactly repeating waveform like that DIDN'T just appear at random. What he did know was that his equipment was very sensative, and spilling coffee on it probably hadn't helped it any. So, with a sideways glance both ways to see if he'd been noticed (no one would have cared) he entered a few elementary keystrokes and returned the satellite dish to its regularly scheduled nothing, and thus single handedly obliterating mankind's best chance for proving the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life since the 1940's.
Ironic, huh?
That is NOT to say that the thirty three seconds of recorded data went completely unnoticed.
Just that the two individuals who noticed it were already aware of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
One because he was intelligent.
The other because he was... well, at least, extraterrestrial.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This also affords me an opportunity to deal with Dib, Zim, Gir, Gaz, and Tak in their "natural" habitat.
Hopefully it does not suck, or at the very least, does not offend. With that being said, on with the show!
"Just a castaway, I am lost at sea. Another lonely day, no one here but me. More loneliness, than any man could bear. Rescue me before I fall into despair. I'll send an S.O.S. to the world, I'll send an S.O.S. to the world, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, message in a bottle..."-The Police, Message in a Bottle
Six years ago...
Dib sat up on the roof, monitoring the random transmissions that inhabited the airways near his home and contemplating the events which had transpired that day. Normally he'd be overjoyed and celebrating his victory over the Irken race, but today his "victory" seemed hollow.
The earth had almost been destroyed, and it hadn't even been Zim's fault.
In a way it had almost been his. He'd been too blind to see through a simple facade, too blinded by... what? Attraction? Yes, he supposed, there was that, he was, after all, around the right age. Still, it was more than that. The possibility of companionship, of someone who didn't think he was bugfuck crazy, a friend... it had blinded him to what was glaringly obvious, in reflection.
The fact that that possible companion had been female had certainly not aided in his detection of it.
Tak.
He should have known, should have seen it, but he'd been blinded by her intelligence, her refusal to be bent or broken by the other kid's petty cruelty, indeed... she'd had a strange, hypnotic effect on them. Perhaps on him as well, despite her claims otherwise. They'd seemed kindred spirits, but it had all been one big lie.
Of course it was. Who'd be interested in HIM? Least of all a girl.
It had taken the combined efforts of Zim, his insane robot, an apathetic Gaz, and Dib himself to thwart the Irken female's plot. Despite the ridiculousness of said plan, it had almost worked, and the potential for damage and loss of life struck Dib to his very core. So many innocent people almost vaporized by escaping magma, or whatever catastrophic effects having over 90 percent of the earth's mass replaced with junkfood would have entailed... what a tragedy that would have been...
Well, he could think of a couple of people he wouldn't mind becoming puffs of irate vapor... come to think of it, he didn't think he'd met anyone who didn't make him wish they'd drop dead and leave him alone, but there were an awful lot of people he didn't know, and one of THEM might have been a worthwhile human being, damn it.
Still, it was all said and done. Tak had been defeated, her plan to reduce the earth to a huge, snack-filled pinata had been stopped in the nick of time (he still couldn't believe he'd missed that gigantic switch for so long) and Tak herself had been presumably defeated by Zim himself in an out-atmosphere aerial duel.
Of course, it was sometimes wise to take anything that Zim said with a grain of salt.
A large grain of salt. Fricken dump truck sized.
The little Irken had a very.... skewed vision of reality.
Dib turned his gaze towards the sky and sighed deeply, the stars winking at him. Some people referred to the stars as cold, uncaring objects, but Dib had never agreed with that perception. They burned with a warm light that never failed to remind him that a thousand thousand mysteries awaited him among them. Space truely was the last frontier of man, and anything connected to it had an immediate veneer of awe and wonder for him. Even Zim, in his petty, stupid, and quite frankly, pathetic attempts to take over this spinning ball of dirt were, at the very least, not boring.
Retarded as an inbred gluesniffing chipmunk, but never boring.
He sighed in a strange mix of contentment and wistful sadness and mused to himself.
"Look at it, Gaz! We've only seen what's come to us from up there. Don't you wanna just fly out there and see it all?"
Gaz, in her usual display of boundless enthusiasm, shrugged and emitted an at least nonthreatening, "Eh." Before the fading light drove her inside for a better view of her flashing Game Slave 2.
This was something of a positive reaction from her regarding his obsession, so he simply smiled to himself, returning to his monitoring of the skies.
A bright shape caught his attention and he gaped in astonishment.
-What the hell is THAT!- He stood, grinning in anticipation. -WOW! Is that an unidentified object! I must be the luckiest-
Self preservation kicked in a second too late and his grin of anticipation became a wince of "please don't hit me", not that it would have helped much, had the object actually struck him. Fate is kind to the underdog however, and Dib hadn't been an overdog in... well, ever. The object, nearly red hot from reentry, slammed into his backyard, but failed to ignite his father's patented supergrass. The shockwave DID knock him on his ass however, and he spent several minutes attempting to prevent himself from sliding over the edge of the roof and onto the hissing object.
He crawled to the edge of the roof, peeking over in shaking trepidation, half expecting some tentacled horror to emerge and begin its reign of terror right here in his own backyard.
The object, whatever it was, was badly damaged, and somewhat hard to make out due to the distortion caused by the intense heat coming off of it, heat that he could feel even from his position atop the roof. Squinting hard and leaning forward a bit more than was probably good for him, he stared at the strange visitor to his backyard.
Then he recognized it... it was an Irken craft! He blinked in astonishment. This particular model looked different from Zim's, almost as though it had been patched together from several different sources. Still, its somewhat battered but still recognizable lines sent a shiver of anticipation through him...
Tak's ship. This MUST be Tak's ship! Still, judging from the gaping hole in its front, it looked as though it had been abandoned... probably Tak's last ditch effort to save herself from annihilation at the hands of her hated enemy. A twinge of something... regret possibly, lashed through him momentarily, but was lost in sudden flush of excitement... Zim thought this ship was destroyed, which meant that no one knew this ship was here!
No one, that is, but him.
He grinned in satisfaction, then went to work.
It took him most of the night, but he finally managed to get it cooled down and into his freakishly huge garage. Let it never be said that the Membrane family lacked space for their mad ventures into science.
If Zim had any suspicions as to why Dib was so subdued and tired the next day at Skool, he said nothing. He simply stared at the human in suspicious paranoia.
Of course, he always did that.
Elsewhere, Tak floated in the cold outer reaches of our solar system and contemplated the fate which had befallen her. She replayed the events which had lead to her being trapped in a coffin-like contraption of Irken alloy and glass-steel, without any hope of rescue.
Nope, not a chance of that. Even if Zim DID notice her distress beacon, unlikely, considering his amazing ability to ignore things that did not interest him, all she'd probably get from him was a ration of gloating before being reduced to her component atoms. Nor could she count on the humans to find her, their spacefaring capabilities were pathetic, and she doubted they even had any equipment capable of recognizing her signal as an intentional broadcast, much less decode it.
So she replayed the events in her mind, and realized there was nothing that she'd have done differently. Not a thing. HE'D won by luck. She'd beaten him at every turn, outsmarted and outplanned him in every way, and in the end, a malfunctioning robot servant and meddling humans had ended her dreams of conquest.
Zim's part in the conflict had been largely incidental.
She'd underestimated them, the humans. She realized that now. Oh not the race as a whole, they were pathetic, and the funny thing was, most of them were so easy to fool and manipulate because they didn't WANT to see anything beyond their safe, simple little lives. If she'd ever seen a race ripe for conquest, it was this one. The fact that Zim had spent over a year amongst them and had yet to make the least bit of progress towards their subjegation was simply undeniable proof that HE was no Invader. Why, in the few short weeks that she'd infiltrated the planet, she'd not only gotten lightyears ahead of Zim in her schedule to conquer the planet, she'd also fooled his greatest enemy into thinking she was a human.
Dib. There was a subject that sat poorly with her. It had been... amusing, dancing on the edge of discovery by the perceptive human, interacting with him as humans did, all the while concealing her true nature. There had been an undertone of danger to their every conversation, and it had, she admitted, thrilled her. The boy had never suspected, and she took pride in her ability to blend in with the local populous. She attributed that to her ability to get inside the heads of her victims, she'd done extensive research, after all.
Still, it hadn't been an onerous task, interacting with the Dib human. He was smart... impossibly smart, for an inferior species. Perceptive too, and impossibly curious. The other stinkbeasts had annoyed her, with their petty squabblings and idiotic displays of dominance, from an intellectual stand point, it was like watching a tribe of chimps in a zoo throw feces at one another and shriek, and then turning and finding one of those chimps attempting to figure out how to read the plaque that instructed how to open the cage.
Still, he'd been an obstacle to her goal in the end, and she would have destroyed him, had she not been... distracted.
Yes, that's what it was.
The look of betrayal he'd given her as she'd gloated to him about his species inferiority had given her a strangely mixed set of emotions. On the one hand, she'd found his complete shock at her betrayal gratifying... he'd never even suspected her otherworldly origins. On the other, she would miss their conversations, if only because none of the other beings within several thousand lightyears would have been able to keep up with her.
Another secret, hidden part of her remembered that there had been precious few among her own people capable of doing so as well, but she shoved that into the darker recesses of her mind.
Besides, she'd fully intended to erase his memory of the events, to continue their game without him ever being the wiser. She'd never expected him to be too strong-willed to hold under her influence though, he'd seemed so weak when the other children had persecuted him almost daily. That had forced her hand, forced her into the endgame with Zim quicker than she might have chosen on her own. Not because of any weak sentimentality towards the human mind you. Never that.
Just that she would have liked to see Zim squirm on the hook of her superiority a little longer.
She was well aware that being told you were worthless long enough and by enough people would cause even the strongest mind to start believing it, after all, hadn't her fellow Irkens been telling her she wasn't cut out to be an Invader for many years now? Still, she couldn't imagine how he'd held up all those years.
She wasn't quite willing to accept that he might be just as strong as she was. Not even after everything she'd seen.
A crackling Irken computer voice interrupted her musings and brought her back into the now.
"Warning, emergency oxygen supplies running low, estimate sixty minutes remaining."
She blinked. "Computer, status of primary recirculation system."
"Primary recirculation system has sustained 94% damage and is currently offline pending repair." The computer voice was calm and unshaken, delivering the facts with cold certainty, but it nevertheless caused a shiver to run down her spine.
"Estimated time to repair?"
"Damage is beyond current repair capability. Recommend depot level overhaul."
She gritted her teeth. "What about the secondary system?"
The computer paused for a moment, then continued. "Secondary recirculation system is operating at 15% nominal value. Estimate failure within twenty five minutes."
"What about that?! Can it be repaired?"
"Negative. Damage is beyond current repair capability. Recommend depot level overhaul."
She growled in frustration, her eyes flicking over the controls with a sudden sense of overwhelming claustrophobia. Out! Out! She wanted out of this tomb! Panic struck her like a cold slap of water going over the head of a drowning man.
She forced herself to calm down and surveyed her current situation.
The shattered remnants of MiMi (she'd been forced to dismantle the robot to end its mad frenzy) lie scattered about the pod. No help there. She'd built this ship, including its control pod, from the ground up using the discarded remnants of a thousands ships back on planet Dirt, and MiMi as well. She knew every inch of their circuitry, and they were not compatable, at least, not for what she needed.
She considered her situation.
She'd never given up, not during the brutal pace forced upon her by her instructors during Invader training... there were few female Invaders, possibly because the Tallest, off the record of course, considered females to be physically inferior. The instructors had been hand picked and shared this prejudice, they'd been particularly brutal with the females. She'd preservered. Even when she'd been shipped off to planet Dirt in disgrace after missing that last, most important exam, she'd never given up... and she certainly wasn't going to give up now.
It wasn't in her nature.
In forty five minutes she was going to die. The reason she was going to die was going to be a lack of breathable air. She had no way of creating more oxygen with her current resources, so she had to find some way to make her supply of available oxygen last longer.
She considered this for a moment.
An idea came to her, it would be painful, and possibly fatal, but she had nothing to lose.
She released her safety restraints and manuevered herself towards the atmospheric condenser unit. Opening it quickly, she closed the out valve and released the hose from its canister, her spiderlike manipulative limbs dexteriously picking up spare bits of MiMi and fashioning them into a connector of sorts. Having done so, she took deep breath, than began her work.
The atmospheric condenser took a highly caustic substance, H2O, and converted it into oxygen and hydrogen, using the hydrogen to create cold fusion as a secondary power source for the ship. It then mixed the remaining oxygen with trace amounts of nitrogen, creating a breathable atmosphere.
What she was going to do was very simple. She was going to connect her Pak to the oxygen side and use its diagnostic capabilties to maintain her at minimal life support. In order to do so, she would have to freeze 98 percent of her body, leaving only the brain and Pak still operating at minimal levels. Just enough to keep her alive.
Not a pleasant proposition, but not unsurvivable. The Irken body, unlike the human one, could survive being frozen and then thawed. Irken blood contained no water, and thus didn't expand when frozen, ruining the cells. In a state of suspended animation, she might be able to survive for years, decades even.
A moment of panic struck her as she completed her task with barely twenty minutes to go... her hand hovered over the "vent nitrogen" button.
Once she did this, there was no going back. No saving herself. She'd be at the mercy of whoever found her.
She'd go to sleep, and she might never wake up.
The alternative of course, was death, and so she steeled herself and pressed the button, closing her eyes as the nitrogen began to vent into her system.
Cold... so cold it was like her veins were being stabbed with daggers of ice, coursing through her, stiffening her chest, her limbs, her lungs... she cried out in agony, her Pak screaming warnings at her.
Frost formed on her Pak, and crept over the rest of her body. Comprehension faded, faded... it was like dying...
She didn't want to die.
She couldn't move.
And then it was done.
The bit of Irken flotsam drifted on the solar tides, passing various planets, sending its weak signal in all directions, eventually finding itself amongst other abandoned solar bodies, rocks and bits of dust. In an asteroid belt it tumbled, coming to rest among several highly ferrous rocks, their inherant electromagnetic signature quite aptly masked her distress signal.
There it would stay, undisturbed and undetected for a long time.
Current Day...
Space is an amazingly big place.
No really... it's friggin' huge. The amount of territory that humanity occupies is so infinestimally small, so utterly and completely insignifigant, that it has driven some of our greatest minds mad simply trying to catalogue what we are capable of seeing of it.
Even what we are capable of seeing is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.
An example. The psychic boll weevils of planet Grommada existed for millennia before we were protoplasmic jelly crying for our single-celled mommies, a futile sort of gesture, which simply had a bunch of cells looking at one another in confusion, because mitosis being what it is, there ain't no going back, and buddy, the cell you just came from is in the same boat as you, quite literally.
I digress. The Grommadan boll weevils developed an amazingly complex and peaceful culture based on the simple premise that there was enough cotton to go around for all, and were summarily wiped out by a universe that does not allow such simpering, nice minded sentimentality to exist, all in the space of tens of thousands of years.
HOwever, the method in which they were disposed of... the developement of an artificial polyester fabric by their scientists, which sparked a holy war that destroyed their small planet, goes to show that though the universe doesn't care, it does have a particularly nasty sense of humor.
What does this have to do with us, you ask? Nothing. That's the point. All of this living and dying took place around a little star that just so happens to be our closed celestial neighbor, and we never even knew.
Still, if you had asked the psychic boll weevils of Alpha Centauri I, they'd have told you that their little part of the galaxy was the center of the universe.
Well, for them, it was. Still, you can't blame a culture based around sitting on cotton leaves chewing all day for being somewhat egocentric.
With the sheer vastness of space, it is almost impossible for two objects to collide at random. Its rather like two extremely burly men with cuesticks shooting balls the size of marbles at one another across a pool table the size of a football field each trying to hit the other's balls exactly. (the marbles, not the... you know) All you're going to get from that sort of situation are two very frustrated large men.
Alright, that analogy was slightly more homoerotic than I normally go for, but I think you get the gist.
In fact, with space being so phenomonally huge and all, the frequency with which objects collide only goes to show just how many objects there are out there.
Of course, it also goes to illustrate, once again, that the universe has a wacky sense of humor.
Since all of you were probably expecting this to lead up to something, I shall not disappoint you. This celestial body, for the sake of brevity, we shall call it Bob, though it really could just as well have been a Tom or even a Sally, as its sex could best be described as cold, was shooting through our solar system as it so often does, without a care in its icy soul. Comet Bob had passed through our solar system without incident 14 times previous, and it felt confident that this trip would be no different. As with many great moments of personal tragedy, Comet Bob's overconfidence would have spelled its undoing, had it had any control over its velocity, but since it didn't, we can't exactly afford it any personal responsibility in its demise. However, since if it HAD had a personality, it would undoubted have been best described as overconfident, brash even, we can take some solice in the knowledge that it deserved exactly what it got.
Ahem.
Anyway, Bob was shooting its merry way through the cosmos when it noticed a strange something in its path up ahead. This solar system had changed since Bob's last visit... either that or it had taken a left when it should have taken a right. Regardless of this, Bob didn't have much time to contemplate this error, as it immediately slammed into an object several times bigger than itself, turning itself into the celestial equivalent of margueritta mix, only, you know, without the alcohol.
Or the fruit juice.
The fates of anthropomorphic celestial bodies aside, Bob's velocity could be best measured in miles per second rather than miles per hour, so you can imagine that its death caused quite a large bit of chaos in the asteroid belt it had come to rest in.
Bob would have been proud.
In any case, had Bob collided with Tak's pod directly, all that would have come of it was some scientist several centuries from now might have wondered why a rogue comet had the impression of a rather dismayed Irken on its face. However, this didn't happen. In a celestial game of billards, Tak was afforded the equivalent of a full pocket sweep, as asteroid collided with asteroid, juggling about in the hierarchy of the heavens, until finally, one cold, ferrous bit of rock nudged her pod out into a slightly clear space than it had been before.
In an amazing stroke of coincidence, at that exact MOMENT, NASA scientists were discussing a problem with their equipment.
David Treskell stared down at his lap in dismay. He'd just turned for a moment to take a look at the busty naked lady that his co-worker had received by email, when his leg had bumped the wobbily desk stand and knocked his black morning coffee all over his lap and keyboard. Cursing in pain and frustration, (this was his first cup, damn it) he wiped the steaming liquid off of his crotch, then proceeded to try and get the stuff off the damn keyboard. Since he neglected to unplug the offending device first, his random, rag induced keystroking caused a 1.5 billion dollar satellite dish to began a slow pan across the heavens.
Had the coordinates entered been two numbers less, he would have gotten absolutely nothing, a state he was infinitely familiar with, in his job as WELL as his personal life. Had he accidentally entered two digits more, he'd have gotten some of the best pay-per-view Vortian soft Porn this side of the horsehead nebula. This would have been a trifle more excitement than he could have handled, however, and so a forgiving universe instead settled him on coordinates 00045.43:11103.56.
An offtone, ominous sounding beep caught David's attention. He set the now cleaner (if slightly sticky) keyboard down and stared myoptically at the screen.
He blinked.
David Treskell owed his position more to the benevolent gods of favoritism than anything else (his father was also his supervisor) and so his paltry scientific degree did not afford him enough knowledge to make sense of the strange, static sounding waveform being repeated on his screen. He also wasn't smart enough to realize that a intentional, exactly repeating waveform like that DIDN'T just appear at random. What he did know was that his equipment was very sensative, and spilling coffee on it probably hadn't helped it any. So, with a sideways glance both ways to see if he'd been noticed (no one would have cared) he entered a few elementary keystrokes and returned the satellite dish to its regularly scheduled nothing, and thus single handedly obliterating mankind's best chance for proving the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life since the 1940's.
Ironic, huh?
That is NOT to say that the thirty three seconds of recorded data went completely unnoticed.
Just that the two individuals who noticed it were already aware of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
One because he was intelligent.
The other because he was... well, at least, extraterrestrial.
-------------------------------------------------------------------