We're Not from Here: Chapters 16–27

And if it backfired on me, I might get in serious trouble.

It was the perfect setup for a giant pratfall.

I loped forward in bouncy steps so wide that I could feel the strain in my hamstrings.

“It is best if you lie on the floor until the effects of the neural disrupter wear off.”

He usually held his prong weapon low and pointed at the ground, but as he followed me to our pod, he held the business end of it up in front of his chest, tilted slightly toward me. It was such a hostile move that as we got into the pod together, I wondered if I’d survive the trip.

Need HUGE FAVOR ASAP: can you search ship’s archive and send me clips of best 10+ moments of physical/slapstick comedy you can think of?

It crossed the fence with a piercing BZZZT!, paused in midair, then zipped off toward the center of the city.

“Today marked a disturbing new development in the Unified Government’s human immigration experiment. The children of the Iseeyii Interspecies Academy were terrorized during their midday nutrition when a human younger ran amok.”

She opened one of the bottom drawers along the wall. It was empty, but she bent down and probed with her fingers along the inside of the upper frame.

We just have to get it in front of people without the government censoring it.

After a while, two of the soldiers stepped out of the house and returned with four sets of the toaster oven-sized handcuffs I’d seen them use on Dad after the venom attack. They trussed our hands up in them, gathered all our screens, and led us outside, where three pods were waiting.

It passed through the fence with an electric thunderclap and landed just a few feet away, heat billowing from its engine.

A strong undercurrent of sour-milk fear began to mix with the gasoline anger.

“What do some people think?” Mom prompted him.

Whatever weird legal loophole Leeni was using to take Ila and me to school, it didn’t apply to Mom and Dad.

The doughnut odor wafted over to us.

Watching them dance was so hypnotic, and I’d had so little sleep over the past days, that as the song went on, I started to get light-headed.

I felt my equilibrium change. Was I tilting down? Up? I was still so dizzy from the neural disrupter that I couldn’t tell.

Right away I started to careen to one side.

“Human Lan Mifune, who have you conspired with?”

It was so strong now that it felt like it was searing my nostrils.

“Humorous ones. To trigger the laughter smell. Crude amateur stuff, mostly—household accidents, Zhuri falling down, flying into windows by mistake...the occasional Krik trying to eat something bigger than their head, then getting it stuck in their mouth…”

We entered a large, high-ceilinged room that looked like a giant mausoleum.

“I should’ve realized it was too hot to touch. But I got greedy. So I sold the ones I’d found on your sister’s screen, and they spread like a virus. I barely had a chance to build her a guitar and record a new one before the government got wind of what was happening and came after me. The music was just too potent—they had to shut it down before the whole planet’s emotions got out of control.”

When the pod struck it, there was a jarring crash, and all of our forward motion stopped.

Marf kept throttling us forward, the whine from the stymied engine so loud that we could hear it over the screaming swarm.

I tried to keep my eyes and my left hand on Marf’s back while I leaned on the prong with my right, angling its business end away from Marf as I hobbled forward.

He helped Ila and me inside as Marf clambered in and took over the controls.

A minute later, Ila and I were putting on makeshift overalls that looked—and, worse, felt—like they were made from plastic garbage bags.

“Because human and Ororo brains can’t process such quick changes in their visual environment. Thanks to the ship’s inertial buffer, we won’t feel anything. But if we looked out the window, we’d get so disoriented that we’d vomit all over ourselves.”

Hoping Marf’s speakers were loud enough to cut through the racket, I pantomimed strumming the guitar.

I tried to ignore the pod zipping around and watch the swarm’s reaction instead. It seemed to contract on every downbeat, lunging farther down toward the hangar. On the upbeat, it expanded again.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there Which through the world is never met elsewhere

NAYA: It wasn’t like that on Earth! We loved our pets. And they loved us! MARF: You are fooling yourselves. They could not possibly have loved you. You were oppressing them.

NAYA: I feel like we’ve had this argument before.... EZGER: Many times. And you are always wrong about it. LAN: As much as I’d love to rehash the food argument, it’s time to read the news.