Chapter Text
The alien was dead. That much, Dib knew.
He didn’t know why there was an alien corpse stored unceremoniously in the corner of a supply room at his dad’s laboratory complex, but he did know it was dead. The little body floated in its tank, inert and pale in purple liquid. The alien was dead, and Dib was ecstatic.
He stared at the cylindrical tank from his kitchen, biting his bottom lip with glee.
He may or may not have stolen it from the lab.
“It was just sitting there!” he babbled as he paced from the kitchen to the living room, circling the pod at a rapid clip. A floating screen followed him, displaying his sister's face, "next to a bunch of defunct equipment and some gross old mops! Can you believe it?! A real alien!”
“Uh-huh,” she replied. She had a game controller in her hands and a bored expression on her face. Dib ignored the tone. He wasn’t about to let his little sister’s disinterest ruin his find.
“I asked Dr. Simmons about it, and he said it’d been there forever. Years! I guess they did some experiments and autopsied it and then forgot all about it. How can you forget about a real alien?! I told you, Gaz! I told you they were out there! And here’s the proof! Right in front of me!”
“Gonna rub it in Dad’s face?” Gaz asked flatly.
“Uh, duh! For as long as I can remember he’s given me shit about how ‘aliens don’t exist, son. Focus on real science, like reverse-engineering beavers or creating radon-infused string cheese’, while all this time, there’s been an alien in his lab that he didn’t even know about!”
“Well, it is a big building.”
“He’ll have no choice but to believe me now,” he continued, ignoring her, “the whole world will have no choice! I brought it home, I’m gonna take it down to my lab and mess around with it. See what I can find. There weren’t any autopsy notes left behind, so I’ll just have to--”
“Wait wait wait,” Gaz interrupted, and he could hear the tension in her voice, “you took it HOME with you?”
“Well, yeah. Simmons said they were thinking about trashing it because the containment chamber was taking up too much room and they needed more storage for nitroglycerin and cheese balls.”
“I cannot WAIT to see the look on your face when you get fired.”
“They’re not gonna fire me, it’s Dad’s lab! Besides, no one even knew it was there anymore. It’s doing the world, no, the universe a disservice to just leave it sitting there unstudied! There was a bunch of other stuff in a box next to it, too. Some metal junk. And a mummified burrito, not sure what that’s about, but I’m gonna study it too. Might be some kind of...space burrito.”
“Okay, Dib. Have fun playing with your space trash.”
“I’m not playing, I’m—hello? Gaz?”
Hung up on mid-sentence, a usual end to his long-distance talks with Gaz. She was never one for long conversations. Or short conversations, for that matter.
He approached the tank again. It was a little hard to see, blurry and distorted among the liquid, but the view was clear enough. This was something that had not been of the earth. The small body was naked, hairless. Arms terminated into three-fingered hands, legs into three-toed feet. Two black antennae lay limp against the smooth skull. The eyes were closed, and a T-shaped incision along the chest and down the torso had been pulled together with staples.
It was disgusting. He couldn’t wait to get a better look at it.
And so, he loaded the tank and the box of alien scrap metal onto a floating dolly and began to trek into his basement lab. Being the son of the world’s foremost scientist had numerous drawbacks, but at least money and equipment access weren’t among them. He’d barely graduated college before being set up with his own state-of-the-art lab, nestled beneath an immaculate two-story house in the city. His father had done the same for Gaz when she graduated (though she opted for a game room instead of a lab), and part of Dib wondered if that was Professor Membrane’s way of getting his children to stay nearby. Not that it mattered. His dad was just a scarce in adulthood as he had been in their childhood, even though they worked in the same building.
But Gaz had been right, it was a big building.
The awful thought had occurred to him that this alien corpse could be a hoax; a setup to trick the excitable young scientist who wanted to study Bigfoot and chupacabras instead of making power generators and super-toast. He wanted this to be real. He wanted to prove that he wasn’t crazy; he was a visionary! His father had turned the world of “normal science” (if you could even call it that) on its head, and Dib had vowed to do the same with paranormal science.
The lights of the lab buzzed into life as he descended the stairs with the dolly and led it toward what Dib called the Autopsy Corner. Not a very imaginative name, sure, but it was what it sounded like. He’d installed the equipment ages ago, and still it remained, untouched and unused. A clean, gleaming steel table. An array of sharp tools, neatly laid out.
He’d been waiting for this day.
He donned a lab coat and gloves and set about removing the corpse from its tank. As the seal was broken and circular lid pulled off, the smell of the preserving fluid filled the air; not formaldehyde, but something organic; it smelled of decaying flowers. A robot arm attached to the wall reached into the goop and lifted out the little body, laying it gently on the cold table.
Its skin was an unmistakable shade of green. Dib had to physically stop himself from doing a little jig. Instead, he pressed a little button in the wall, cleared his throat, and began.
“All right, we're recording! Doctor Dib Membrane speaking, I’ve just discovered an alien corpse in storage at my D--uh...at an...unnamed science lab and have...borrowed...it for research purposes. These are my autopsy notes. I’m sure this recording will be pretty important in the future, so lemme set the stage for you. Scene opens! We see a big, impressive lab! Bright lights! Lots of expensive equipment! And, of course, our hero scientist, clad in white; a white lab coat, not a straightjacket. That part is important. Uh, anyway, our hero scientist steps forward and begins the cursory examination! He looks important and handsome. Quiet now, as we listen to his brilliant observations! Let’s see...humanoid in shape...it seems to be about...four feet tall or so. Two antennae on the top of the head, black...almost like a bee’s or a wasp’s. The eyes…”
Dib bent forward, gently spread open the left eyelid with a gloved thumb and forefinger. A raspberry red orb stared back at him.
“Large,” Dib concluded and removed his fingers, allowing the eyelid to slide closed again, “pure red, no visible pupils. The body has suffered several lacerations and some burning...the major abnormality is an autopsy scar on the anterior of the torso. It’s been stapled together, but I’ll open it back up in a minute and see what I can find. There also seems to be some kind of...thing...on its back.”
He grasped the corpse by its shoulder and turned it face-down, noting the odd dome. It was some sort of metal, with three dark spots, one toward the top and two angled toward the bottom. It was badly dented on the bottom-left side, the spot there cracked. With his free hand, he grabbed a scalpel from the tray beside him and tapped it against the dome. It gave a metallic ring.
“Weird. There’s some kind of unit attached to the body. Reminds me of a ladybug shell. I don’t know what kind of metal it’s made of...and there seem to be some compartments within it. Let’s see if we can get into this…”
He grabbed a tool he called the crowbar. It was, of course, not really a crowbar, but it served more or less the same purpose; prying open things that were hard to pry open. Beyond the handle was a razor-thin rectangle of metal; less than the thickness of a sheet of printer paper, and a hundred times as strong as steel. He tried to slide it between where the lip of the metal met the darkened compartment. No good. It was flush.
“Incredible,” he breathed. He pressed a button on the side of the crowbar’s handle, and a small arc of electricity buzzed from the blade. He jammed it back into the barely perceptible seam.
The compartments on the dome gave a couple of little electric flickers, then began glowing a violent pink. Startled, Dib dropped the crowbar and backed off. The three spots on the thing glowed hot, made soft buzzing noises. The body it was attached to tensed and shuddered in what Dib assumed at first was a merely an electro-physical stimulus response.
Until the alien corpse moved its arm, bracing one hand against the metal table.
It pushed itself up.
Dib stared. Two red eyes stared back at him. It seemed like an eternity, their eyes locked together in the cold, sterile room, with only the slight sparking and whirring of the creature’s dome breaking the silence. Then, without so much as a warning, the alien scowled, baring pink-white teeth, and lunged at him. Dib shrieked and leapt backwards, but his impressive feat of agility was totally unnecessary. The alien’s pounce was weak, and it dropped off the table and fell with a wet ‘plop’ onto the floor.
Dib stayed frozen, eyes trained on the being before him. The alien groaned and pushed itself up onto its hands and knees...then opened its mouth and vomited up the same purple preservation fluid that it had been contained within minutes prior. The pink circles on its domed metal shell buzzed and retracted slightly, revealing the compartments within; more fluid poured out from the recesses, little rivers of purple among the pink glow. The compartment lids shuddered and clanked, continuing to open partway and close again, open and close.
“Holy shit,” Dib whispered, hazarding a cautious step forward, “you’re alive…”
The alien looked up at him miserably, its eyes narrowed in the apparently universal sign of contempt. It opened its mouth again, possibly to say something...but instead just made an awful choking sound and hacked up more fluid.
“Okay, okay! Uh...okay, um...calm down, I can help you. I think…” Dib said, though he was aware he was talking more to himself than anything. The alien seemed to be thinking the same thing, and it stared warily up at him from its prone position on the floor. Dib reached forward and the thing let out a soundless scream, scuttering backwards until its back hit the wall. Its teeth were still bared threateningly, but its eyes were wide, antennae standing straight up in an unmistakable signal of alarm.
“It’s okay!” Dib urged, “I’m not going to hurt you-I mean, I was going to cut you open-” he continued and the alien’s eyes grew wider, “but that’s when I thought you were dead! Look, you’re safe! You’re not in that lab anymore, you’re at my house. This is my place.”
It blinked at him, then swiveled its head around, taking in the surroundings. It seemed to relax a little before dropping its gaze down to its torso and the nasty T-shaped wound stapled together there. It immediately shot its head back up and glared at Dib again.
“Hey, I’m not the one who did that!” Dib insisted, holding his hands up in defense, “I uh...okay...hold on a sec. Don’t move.”
Its burning eyes never left him, and Dib hurried up the stairs. He wasn’t too worried about leaving it alone for a minute or two; he didn’t think the alien could cause much trouble even if it wanted to. Years half cut open and floating in a vat of liquid in a dark closet couldn’t have been kind to anyone, not even a creature from beyond the stars. He grabbed a towel from the linen closet and scrambled back down into the lab.
“Okay, I’m gonna clean the preservation fluid off of you, okay?” he asked, approaching slowly with the towel held in front of him like a matador’s flag. The alien just stared. When Dib knelt down and started drying it off, it raised tensed hands in an attempt to swat him away. But the effort was short-lived, its arms falling uselessly back to its sides as quickly as they had been raised. “Yeah, you probably want to save your energy. Don’t fight, I’m helping you, okay?”
It made some kind of growl deep within its throat, but, after a moment, closed its eyes and turned its head away, allowing Dib to continue. Dib could barely keep his hands from shaking as he gingerly ran the towel along the alien’s body, sopping up leftover moisture. Part of it was from the adrenaline of having a dead body wake up on the autopsy table, sure, but another part was excitement. A dead alien was good, but a live one was so much better! All those years of being called crazy, of being tossed into various asylums, having eggs thrown at his head, those days would all be over when the world saw this. A real live alien.
Once finished, he sat back on his heels, studying his work. The alien turned its head back toward him and gave him a long look. Then it snatched the towel out of his hand, wrapping it around its slender body.
“Oh, uh...are you...cold? Or you need something to wear? Um, hold on…”
He made another trip upstairs and returned with one of his t-shirts, which he handed over. A three-fingered hand snatched it from him and the alien looked down at it, frown deepening. It tossed the towel aside and, glowering at Dib the whole time, pulled the shirt over its head and down its body. It was so small that the shirt functioned more like a dress or nightshirt, but it was better than nothing.
Dib suddenly wondered if aliens wore pants.
The alien gathered a bunch of the fabric in its hands, made a big show of sniffing the shirt (with what, Dib didn’t know, since it had no visible nose), then made a disgusted face, a long, segmented tongue flapping out of its mouth in an exaggerated gag.
“Hey! It’s clean!” Dib insisted, but was answered with a snort. The creature tried to rise to its feet, but its knees wobbled dangerously under the long shirt; just when Dib was about to reach forward to steady it, the thing’s backpack-like dome whirred and two long, spindly metal legs unfurled from within, planting their sharp tips on the floor for balance.
“What the…” Dib stared in amazement as it walked a few exploratory steps with those bizarre robot appendages acting as crutches. It seemed particularly interested in the box of junk Dib had found in the closet. It rummaged through the box, throwing random pieces of metal over its shoulder. The mummified burrito narrowly avoided hitting Dib in the face. At last, it seemed to find what it was looking for; it grabbed onto something and hauled it out of the box, letting it clatter to the floor.
It looked like total garbage at first, but upon second glance, Dib could see it was some kind of robot. Tiny and more like a collection of tin cans than a mechanical servant, but that had to be what it was. He could make out two huge, blank eyes, a little mouth, spindly arms, conical legs. Whatever the case, it didn’t seem functional. Actually, it didn’t look like it ever had been or ever would be.
The alien gave the robot a swift kick in the head. It didn’t move. The alien grunted.
“Is that yours?” Dib nodded his head toward the robot. Two red eyes stared back at him, “okay, better question...can you even talk? Can you understand me? I had a translator around here somewhere, but I don’t-”
He was interrupted as it burst into a hacking fit, vomiting up more purple fluid. It made a gurgling noise before collapsing, stone cold unconscious on the ground. The robotic limbs retreated and the pink dome compartments closed with a screeching grind.
Dib stood there in his lab, a half-dissected alien unconscious on the floor in a puddle of chemicals, and a little broken robot laying motionless at its feet.
“Well shit,” Dib said, staring, “now what”?
“You stole an alien corpse and dragged it to your house to mess around with it, and now you’re surprised that something’s gone wrong?” Gaz asked, though her voice was as disinterested as always.
“No! I mean...well, yes. It’s not like I was expecting the thing to still be alive!”
At a loss for what to do, he had wrapped the little body in a soft blanket (its skin looked fragile, to say nothing of the various wounds) and carried it upstairs to the spare bedroom. It was a place Dib had set up if his dad or Gaz ever wanted to spend the night (of course, they didn’t). So now it was mainly used for storage, housing the collection of strange artifacts he’d picked up throughout the years. But it did still have a bed, and that was the important thing. He’d carried the alien’s junk robot upstairs too. The thing was obviously important to the alien, and he didn’t want some spaceman waking up in the middle of the night and going ballistic trying to find it.
“Uh-huh,” Gaz said, “well. What are you gonna do now?”
“I don’t know...it’s not like I can go to sleep with a real live alien in my guest bedroom. I’ll just have to stay up and...watch it.”
“Please,” Gaz scoffed, “don’t act like this is some huge sacrifice on your part. Creepily watching an unconscious alien has probably been among your top ten fantasies since you were like, five.”
“Three, but point taken. It’s exciting, Gaz! You sure you don’t wanna come over and see it? There’s that mummy burrito too, remember?”
“Pass.”
“Anywho, remember that universal translator I developed? The one that let me communicate with those mermaids?”
“No.”
“It’s broken right now, you know, the zombie antelope incident, but I’m pretty sure I can fix it up by morning. Then I’ll be able to talk to it! Do you know how incredible this is, Gaz? This’ll be the first documented time a human speaks with an alien! Imagine what we’ll learn!”
“Okay, Dib. Have fun on your date with the alien. Don’t get killed.”
Dib began to retort, but it was too late. Hung up on again. It didn’t matter. He’d use this time to fix the translator, and soon, he’d be making history.
As he headed back into the lab to fetch the translator, his daydreams led him to fanciful places. Not only would everyone realize he WASN’T crazy, they’d realize he was a genius! Just as deserving of renown as his father was. HE’D be the one to revolutionize the world, to provide a clear and concise answer to that ages-old question, ‘are we alone in the universe’?
He was mentally in the middle of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize when he walked back upstairs into the living room and found the alien standing there with the help of its robotic legs, the blanket still wrapped tightly against its body. It stared up at a calendar on the wall.
“Is this date correct?” it asked in flawless English. Dib stared, shocked, before looking down at his broken translator. He looked back up.
“Buh???” he asked stupidly.
“IS THIS DATE CORRECT?” it repeated in a raised voice, glaring over its shoulder and tapping at the calendar with one sharp fingertip.
“I...uh...y-yeah…?”
“Then I have been out of commission for FIFTEEN of your Urth years!” it turned, frantic, “this is unacceptable! Never has an Irken Elite gone so long without reporting back to Control! UNACCEPTABLE!”
“Okay, calm down!! Wait, what did you say you were? Irken? How do you spell that?” he’d already abandoned the translator and instead picked up a pad and pen, scribbling as the alien spoke.
“I must get into contact with them,” it said, gripping its face in a panic, “I must—“
It paused mid-sentence, eyes wide, before vomiting more preserving fluid all over the formerly clean living room floor.
“Hey!” Dib lifted his foot, narrowly avoiding the splash. The little creature’s robotic legs wobbled and gave out, and it slowly sunk to the ground, liquid dribbling down the side of its mouth. It shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around its body. Dib couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. Sure, he’d been raring to cut this thing up and see what made it tick, but that’s back when he’d thought it dead. Now it was a shivering heap on his living room floor, and as much as the thought of alien guts fascinated him, he did have a goddamn heart.
“Hey,” he started, reaching out a gentle hand to touch the alien’s shoulder, “save your energy. I can help y—ow!”
The alien slapped his hand away and shot him a withering glare.
“Get your filthy ape hands away from Zim!”
“Okay, geez! Sorry! I was just trying to comfort you!”
“Ha!” it spat, “Zim needs no ‘comfort’! He is far superior to you human pig filthies, and...and…” the alien trailed off and seemed to melt even further into the floor, its (his?) sudden fervor draining away so quickly that Dib could practically see it.
“Right. Okay. You don’t need comfort, but you clearly need help. What’d you say your name was? Zim? I can help you.”
Zim gave the man a long stare, berry-red eyes screwed up in scrutiny. Finally, he gave a weary sigh and sunk further into his cocoon of a blanket.
“My PAK has been damaged. It must be fixed before I can regain full functionality.”
“Your PAK? The thing on your back? Okay, I’ve got plenty of tech here we can use to--”
“Do not insult Zim with your children’s playthings, slop-beast! Only Irken technology can repair a PAK.”
“Okay,” Dib’s sigh was edged with frustration, “that's your robot, right? We'll fix it up and it can repair your backpack thing.”
Dib was surprised when the alien smiled and gave a little chuckle. He looked a lot less scary when he wasn’t all narrowed eyes and bared teeth.
“Oh yes, Gir…” he gave a fond little shake of the head, then looked back up at Dib, “he’s a top of the line model, you know. ...I’m not letting him anywhere near my PAK.”
“But you said--”
“Your words are too many!” Zim went back to scowling, struggling to lift himself up, “each second I’m spending not contacting my Tallest is a second I’m spending…not contacting my Tallest!!!”
“Your Tall-what? I don’t even-okay. Okay.”
Dib took a deep breath, a moment to focus. The alien seemed worried, frantic. More than that, it had been horrifically injured and didn’t seem to be on the path to getting better. If he wanted a live alien to show off to the world, he’d have to do something, and quick. He looked at Zim, who was glaring at Dib’s framed 'I Want To Believe' poster.
“Okay. So. What do you need?”
“...the base. My base. If I can get there, my computer can help fix up both myself and Gir.”
“Okay. Do you remember where it is?”
“AN ABSURD QUESTION!” Zim shouted dramatically, looking simultaneously disgusted and offended, “of course my superior brain remembers!”
“Okay. Then I’ll take you to your base.”
“Nonsense, fleshy pig-thing,” the alien flung the blanket to the floor and began limping his way toward the door, neither his biological nor robotic legs looking like they were up for even that short trip, “I need no help, especially not from a human.”
The way he said the word ‘human’ was so strung with vitriol that it made Dib uneasy. But, he figured he’d be pretty pissed off too if he’d come to another planet only to be cut open and tossed in a tank.
The alien fell face-first onto the floor with a pathetic yelp, six feet away from the door. Dib sighed.
“Let me grab my coat.”