Chapter Eight: Ronald Elastic’s Goo-Be-Goon

By the time Jackson woke up this time, his head was already out of the foam. Tarza had been awake, with her head freed, for 2 minutes and 39 seconds before him. As his eyes adjusted from his second foam-induced nap, he made out the fuzzy shape of a slender Byzong standing in front of them. He knew it instantly to be Inquisitor Slah.

Clearly in the middle of an important conversation with Tarza, Jackson decided the best course of action would be to close his eyes again, and listen to the Inquisitor before making his presence known.

“It will be not pleasant,” said the Inquisitor in a sinister tone. “But if you comply with me now, I will make sure that your punishment lasts only three orbits. Otherwise you may face as many as ten.”

“Comply with you how?” snapped Tarza. “I’ve nothing to confess, nothing to admit, and nothing to say.”

Jackson couldn’t help but smile ever-so-slightly.

“Shall I write down all three of those?” asked an assistant. “Seems a bit redundant to me.”

Jackson heard the jarringly loud footsteps of the Inquisitor as she approached Tarza, and tried his best not to wince.

“Just put down that the prisoner is hostile,” smirked the Inquisitor.

“Hostile,” scoffed Tarza. “I’m not the one about to drain a planet of all its water.”

Jackson’s eyes opened almost involuntarily to watch.

The Inquisitor leaned in, just inches from Tarza’s face.

“Is that why you tried to free their President? Why you concocted that false alarm? Because you thought you could save them?” Inquisitor Slah gave a cold smirk.

The guards behind her looked at each other and laughed.

Jackson felt a sense of dread that he had not felt the entire time he’d been on the Byzong Warship. 

“Tell me, in all the years of earth’s existence, how many times have they battled the Byzongs?” asked the Inquisitor. “President Racha?” She turned her head sharply until her eyes rested on Jackson’s.

He froze. 

“No answer?” she pressed. “Well allow me to enlighten you. In the 4.543 billion years that your planet has existed, you have battled the Byzong’s exactly zero times. In fact, your planet has somehow managed to never, not once, be attacked by a foreign planet. Do you know how rare that is?”

Jackson let out a breath that he’d been holding in, by sheer coincidence, for 4.543 seconds, rounded to the nearest thousandth. He did want to know how rare that is, but found himself stating a fact of his own instead.

“I am not President Racha.”

The Inquisitor decided to no longer allow herself to be distracted by what she deemed to be the lies of a prisoner. In her years of Inquisitor training at the U U of U, she had trained under none other than the Byzong-renowned Inquisitor Saxel. 

It was during one of their first labs, where Parlodin Turs, a species of vertebrae that most-closely resembles an earth rat, were introduced to distract and create chaos, that Inquisitor Saxel first introduced the idea of “radical focus” to not-yet-Inquisitor Slah. And with a Parlodin Tur taking a nap inside her left ear, she proved herself a rising star, by completing the interrogation of a fellow student with unmatched efficacy. Although she would, at times, engage with the frivolous answers of her captives, the Inquisitor reminded herself in this moment why she became known as Inquisitor Saxel’s star pupil.

“There are only three planets with sentient life, in the the entire known universe, who have never been at war with a foreign planet. The first is a planet whose inhabitants just became smart enough to qualify for inclusion in this list two hours ago. The planet is so primitive that it does not even have a name. And yet, a Vlop warship is on its way now to be the first to attack it anyway. They drew the honor in a raffle.”

Jackson attempted to interject, with his real name once more, but radical focus, it has been said, is harder break than a brick wall. 

“The second,” she continued, “is a planet named Goozor. Goozor, and its primary species, the Goozons, are made entirely of a viscus jelly-like substance that sticks to your skin permanently on contact, and carries with it a smell so vile that anyone who touches it is banished to a distant solar system, where they are given a case of Ronald Elastic’s Goo Be Gone, “The only gunk strong enough to get your goo gone for good,” compliments of Those In Charge.

Those in Charge, affectionately known as TIC, is a group of super-intelligent beings who rule all planets and species in existence. They govern from a central station called the Rainbow Realm, and their members are recruited as the best and brightest from all corners of the universe. It was actually a member of TIC who first discovered that the universe did, in fact, have corners. Of these corners, two are purely theoretical, while five have been observed. These corners are rumored to be dreadfully hard to clean, during the universe’s Spring cleaning each cosmic year. 

It is worth nothing that, while many dream of being summoned to the Rainbow Realm to become a member of TIC, Inquisitor Slah was never one of them.

“The third is Earth. A planet so tribalistic that is has been at war with itself for eons. Until now, no civilization thought it worthwhile to invade, preferring instead to wait for the planet to either unite or self-destruct. But time has run out for your planet, President Racha. The need for your most precious resource has recently become… dire.”

“Our oceans you mean? Why is there a dire need all of a sudden?” Jackson was growing tired of the mounting questions in his head.

“That’s not important!” she snapped. A pause. “Well, it is important but I’m not going to tell you. What I need from you is a layout of Earth’s defense system. All of it.”

Jackson and Tarza began to protest at the same time, but the Inquisitor simply raised a hand to stop them. 

“I expected your objections. That’s why we won’t be waiting around for your cooperation.”

Inquisitor Slah waved a hand towards a guard.

Dusty and Plod entered the room again and wheeled themselves in front of Jackson.

“Our ROBs will be extracting the memories of your defense meetings. We will soon have all the information we need to attack earth.” The Inquisitor leaned in. “And when we do, you will no longer be of any use to us.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jackson saw her assistant shuffle in his chair and clear his throat. This Byzong also did not like being in the uncomfortable position of correcting his superior. In addition, their usual chair was being repaired for a taste malfunction, and their current chair was designed for a Byzong with smaller hips than theirs, so they were shifting due to a literal uncomfortable position as well. 

“Um, remember what the Boss said?” The Byzong immediately sunk down in his chair to appear smaller, but this only made the chair even less comfortable, which he would already have deemed an “Awful” on the U U of U’s Discomfort Scale for Clothing, Conversations, and Chairs, which ran from “Perfect” to “Perfectly Awful”.

Inquisitor Slah narrowed her eyes at Jackson in disgust. She let out a scalding sigh. 

“You’re lucky that the Boss believes you to be an important bargaining chip. Otherwise I’d throw you right back into that black hole and leave you there.”

Jackson tasted peppermint.

The Inquisitor backed up and smirked. 

“Now, these ROBs will find your memory no matter how long it takes, and this time, I’ll make sure you don’t escape… I’m not going anywhere.”

As the Inquisitor moved to the back of the room to join her assistants behind blinking control panels, Jackson and Tarza looked at each other. 

“What are we going to do?” whispered Jackson. “She’ll find out I’m not the President and then she’ll toss me into that black hole!”

Tarza furrowed her brow in thought. “Dusty and Plod must not have told her who you are yet. If I know them, they’re still running calculations on who to trust. If I can convince them to help us, we might have a chance.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked Jackson.

“Trust me,” she answered. And despite himself. Despite having just met her on a strange ship under stranger circumstances, he did.

Dusty and Plod wheeled themselves over in front of Jackson and prepared to take his memories.

“Inquisitor!” shouted Tarza. 

The Inquisitor looked up from her station.

“I fear you’re going to waste an awful lot of time looking for his memories.”

“Oh?” replied the Inquisitor. “And why is that?”

“Think about it,” said Tarza. “He’s the President of Earth. Don’t you think he’s been trained on memory repression. You could spend weeks, if not months, trying to find the information you’re looking for.”

“Then he’d better get comfortable,” she said coldly. Without glancing up again, she began fiddling with buttons and mechanisms.

Dusty and Plod got closer.

Tarza shook her head. “But, there’s a better way!”

“Out with it,” said Inquisitor Slah from across the room.

“He told me about their defenses!” blurted Tarza.

The Inquisitor stopped what she was doing. 

“He did?” she asked.

“Yes!” nodded Tarza. “We discussed them at length. I can tell you exactly when and where he told me. You can find the conversation easily. Even the best memory suppression won’t stop a targeted search like that.”

The Inquisitor pondered this. “You expect me to trust a traitor? You’re just as likely to lead us on a wild scronge chase.”

Before Slah could consider grabbing her pair of X-Ring Lie Detector Glasses, Tarza spoke out again.

“He also told me about their counteroffensive…”

“Counteroffensive?” Inquisitor Slah stood up sharply.

“Thats right,” said Tarza. “They’ve known about your plans for a while now. They have spies too, you know.” 

The Inquisitor was flummoxed. “And… and why would you help us now?”

“I want to make a deal. I tell you where to find the memories and you let me go.”

Slah rubbed her chin. “You give up the memories, and then I will decide if they are worthy of release.”

Tarza shook her head and closed her eyes. “No deal. I need assurances or else you can go fishing in his head for as long as it takes for all I care. He’ll never give them up.”

The phrase “fishing in his head” did not sit well with Jackson. He had gone fishing with his mother once back on Earth. After three hours on the lake by his childhood home, Jackson had gone home soaking wet, smelling like worms, and without a fish. He didn’t like the idea of a Byzong roaming around his brain with a fishing rod, even if they proved better than him at staying inside the boat.

The Inquisitor thought for a moment, and then began to smile. 

“You may be right, Tarza, that he would prove a difficult target. But, you’ve just revealed that the information we need is in your head now, too. And you were not trained in the art of memory deception, were you?” she asked with a sinister glare. 

Tarza acted stunned. “No… I… I guess I wasn’t.”

Jackson began to sweat. But the foam didn’t budge. They’d been ready for him this time.

“Well then,” said the Inquisitor, “I think I’ll be having those memories…”

Dusty and Plod turned to face Tarza, and opened up their windows, suction cups ready.

“And you won’t be going anywhere.”

As the suction cups flew through the air towards her forehead, Jackson caught Tarza’s eye and the ever-so-small glint of a smile.