The Membrane house was quiet.
This was not entirely abnormal. The only inhabitant of the house who made much noise was Dib; and in his absence usually the only noises that were produced were the sounds of videogame carnage from Gaz's videogames.
Thus, the surprising thing about the heavy and pervasive silence that laid over the house; nothing but the buzz of electricity, usually inaudible, broke it. There were no video games being played, even though Gaz was home. The TV was not on.
And under some circumstances, even this would not have been surprising. If Dib and Gaz were in skool, for instance; he wasn't there to talk, and unless Gaz had forgotten to turn one of her gaming platforms off there was no music. Membrane was rarely home to break the silence.
Thus, the abnormality of Gaz sitting at the table, at five o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, the day after Dib had been taken into their father's labs for treatment, with nothing to break the silence.
The light was off. The room was dim. The silence folded and oozed and nestled about her, unconcerned by anything. There was no food, or drink, or videogames at hand. Just the quiet, trapping Gaz like a fly in amber.
Her posture was ramrod straight, her hands folded neatly on the table in front of her. Thick purple lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. For the stillness on her face she might have been meditating.
But wait; look closer, be patient, and there is movement. It is slight but here nonetheless. The minute flexing of her throat as she swallows. The flicker of eyes under lids. The way the shadows change on her interlocked fingers as they bend-bend-bend from pinkie to forefinger and back again. No further evidence.
Tiny, regular movements that have been repeated for hours, until they've become a mantra, a chant, a prayer made by the body instead of the soul.
Flex-flex-flex. The fingers press again and again.
Deep inside, Gaz's control mind is imprisoned. She's been usurped. Unsurprisingly, she's pissed about this. It's a bigger, badder pissed than normal, even; because if there's one thing Gaz values in her life it's control.
And in her head there sits the thing that took all that away. Out in the world, the person… the thing who made it goes free. A neat little device, it is; a sort of miniature pak, encoded with instructions for infiltrating the brains of living organisms (specifically humans) and replacing native controls with the Irken command structure. Plus one other nifty little feature: a receiver to grab instructions from Zim (the mastermind himself) and put them into work. Put them to Zim's work.
One of them was in Dib, put there just to scare him. Until quite recently at least, until it came close to being discovered. One of them sits in Membrane's head, establishing control still in a brain as sophisticated and nearly inhuman and delicate as his. And one of them- the last so far- is here, cuddled up to Gaz's hindbrain, where she's chipping away at it with all her resolve and strength.
But these things were made for normal humans, and Gaz isn't exactly the poster child for that kind of thing. In fact, she is possibly the worst human being on the face of the planet that Zim could have chosen to drop his little surprise in.
Because at this point, Gaz is beyond her usual low current of anger. She's boiling with rage, positively spitting it; it's beating at the inside of her skin. It makes sweat glands pop open and her heart rate increase. When the pak-plant detects the changes it tweaks a neuron and orders the production of a natural calming agent, because physical agitation can lend strength to a troublesome subordinate mind. It's not enough, though; not against Gaz, because she's less about white-hot rage and more about the cold, calculating thirst for revenge. More like an adder than a tiger. She's had years to practice being nasty. This is just an opportunity to put all of that to work.
The fingers flex. The eyes glance rapidly back and forth under their lids. Gaz's tongue emerges, drags across her slightly swollen lower lip. The minutes drag past at their own tempo and Gaz is still fighting.
Zim stood on the roof of his house, looking out on his neighborhood for what he was sure would be the last time. Victory made him swell. Victory made everything better, in fact. The air was less muggy and thick, the water less noxious, stinking children less annoying, the smog less cloying, now that all these things belonged to him.
Or almost, anyway; so close to his he could smell it. Dib was entirely out of the way, for as long as Zim chose to keep him imprisoned; and no other human could resist him, or would even have the spleen to try.
It was a thing Zim had admitted to himself about his human rival: except for some fluke of birth, Dib would have made a formidable Irken. An excellent one, actually; focused and adaptable and with a jittery intelligence that could have made him an Invader.
I will keep the horrible dirtchild, Zim thought, keep him to show what the world will be like under ZIM. Keep him alive to show him how futile his puny resistance WAS, and then when he crawls at my feet like the worm he SO is and begs and pleads and mewls for me to do him the mercy of killing him, I... I WON'T! Even if he asks NICELY! Because no one, NO ONE who annoys Zim ever gets the easy way out!
He erupted with laughter without really thinking about it, cackling insanely for five minutes with hardly a pause for breath. After he got a grip on himself he realized that everyone in the neighborhood had a door or window open and was staring at him incredulously.
Reflexively, Zim made sure that his wig and contacts were intact. Every piece of his disguise was there; reassured of this he extruded the pak legs and went skittering down the front of his house and into the door.
With him gone the house looked perfectly normal, for its standards. Most of the other houses on the block lacked the radioactive green glow, the puffer fish in the front yard, and the men's sign on the door, though one new homeowner has taken a liking to the unique décor and was mimicking it.
After waiting a moment to make sure that the strange little green boy wasn't going to do anything else interesting, the neighbors all went inside.
"That child ain't bein' raised right," crusty Ms. Tinny complained to one of her cats.
Zim, deep in the belly of his labs, couldn't care less what his neighbors thought of his upbringing. Instead he purred and paced, like a cat to himself, clutching Dib's laptop close to him. Really her was nerving himself to go, for although he had only kept the green house as his base for five years- hardly a fraction of an Irkens life- he had become set there, against his will. He had found a true enemy and a mission.
GIR meandered after him, wearing his dog suit like a child might wear pajamas, paws sticky with some sugary concoction. Every few steps his paused to lick off his gummy feet with ridiculous daintiness. It was a pointless exercise because he had already tracked a layer of goo across the floor and whenever he took another step the furry pads of his suit just got sticky again. Zim only noticed when he realized his boots were clinging slightly to the metal floor. He pulled one foot up with a sucking sound and glared at his minion. "GIR! What are you doing!"
The robot plunked himself down peaceably by Zim's feet. "I went to Cruddy Donuts with pig," he explained. "We got a whooooole big box with varied selection for great value, and also the gots not much carbs!" He blinked up brightly at his master. "I heard that on the tee-vee-eee!"
GIR's usually speech held only a fraction of that coherency, so Zim honestly wasn't surprised. "Okay," he said, eyeing the greasy mess. "I guess I'll just get the computer to clean this up or… eh, doesn't matter."
GIR looked up from where he was sucking his pay. "Arencha gonna yell at me, or get mad or do somethiiiiing?"
"Nah," Zim replied, abruptly decisive. "I guess this is it."
He actually bent down and picked up the SIR unit, though he held him at arm's length. It was so much like what he had done a couple days ago, prying GIR away from the TV, that he had to pause and reorient himself to how much everything had changed. The robot just stared at him curiously, cooperating. "Are we goin' on a fieeeeeeld trip?" he asked.
Zim carried him down the hall towards an elevator. "Kind of, I guess," he replied.
"They gonna give us donuts there?"
Zim wondered what it was like to be so blissfully ignorant and single minded. "Maybe." No point in provoking a crying fit.
"Like the Cruddy Donuts?" GIR asked. "I like them! They have artichoke-and-bacon flavor!"
Zim gagged quietly to himself. "Those are horrible, GIR. You don't want to eat them." They had reached the elevator and Zim stepped onto the pad, flicking instructions from his pak to the computer. The elevator began to rise.
"Awwww," GIR sighed; a surprising subdued reaction from him. Maybe he sensed Zim's pensive, expectant mood. "Hey Master, do you remember a loooong time ago when… uh… when we tried to send Dib to his moosey fate in that place with the moose and you fed it my walnuts?"
The Invader remembered that plot quite clearly, mostly because it had come so close to working. He remembered how easily Dib had become contemptuous towards his fellow humans without Zim's presence; the flat heavy-lidded droll look as he wrote each and every one of them off as a lost cause. Dib seemed to feel that he had to keep up a good front in front of Zim, lest the Irken take advantage of his low morale and push him into giving up a fellow human. Dib didn't like his classmates but he didn't want them to die, at least not most of the time. What the human craved was respect and affection and he sensed that if he let a fellow human down than any chance for being acknowledged by his race would be lost.
And Dib's wariness was completely, utterly, and entirely justified, because Zim would have taken advantage of that, would have used it to grind the human ruthlessly into dust. Dib's ceaseless optimism (because deep down inside, Dib was really the most blindly hopeful kind of optimist, beyond whatever his rational mind said) only held him up so far.
"Yes," Zim said to GIR at last. "I remember that."
GIR nodded and giggled thoughtfully to himself. "That was a field trip."
It was indeed. The elevator stopped with a slight lurch. They were in the house's roof now, where the Voot Cruiser sat on its pedestal, waiting to be used. The cockpit was already open. Zim walked over to it and paused to remove GIR's dog suit, suffering another brief case of déjà vu. The green fabric flopped to the floor, limp and empty, looking like an animal with all the juices and organs sucked out. The floor under it began to recede as it was taken to be disposed of, although in a few short minutes it wouldn't matter whether it was there or not. Then the Invader set GIR in the Voot Cruiser, crawling after him promptly. The windshield sealed down in front of him.
The peaked purple roof began to split open. Zim looked up at it, and outwards, watching the sky, thinking of a world that would soon be his and the invasion he would have to stave off to keep it. And at the last, he thought of his rival.
Bye-bye, DIB, he thought. I'll keep you for a while longer yet. It won't be NEARLY as much FUN saving the planet and having it at my feet if you're not around to WHINE about it.
He thought that soon, he might allow the human to escape, so they could finish this last stage of their war. He had some deliciously nasty little surprises planned out already.
The thruster pods on the Cruiser lit and aligned themselves to blast them out of the fully retracted roof. A second later it went screaming out of the little green house, far into the atmosphere.
END CHAPTER 11
7/3/05
Well, I don't know. What do you think?