Spaced Out (Moon Base Alpha) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stuart Gibbs is the author of five New York Times bestselling series: Spy School, FunJungle, Moon Base Alpha, Charlie Thorne, and Once Upon a Tim—as well as the new nonfiction series Spy School Secret Files. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at StuartGibbs.com.

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Spaced Out

EXTRATERRESTRIAL MOVIE NIGHT

Earth year 2041

Lunar day 216

Bedtime

If I hadn’t made the mistake of showing Star Wars to an alien life form, I never would have ended up fighting Patton Sjoberg with the space toilet.

But then, being friends with an alien had been one problem after another. It was far more difficult than I had ever imagined. For starters, there was no end of things I had to explain.

Every single aspect of my life was strange and unusual to Zan Perfonic. She wanted to know the reasons for everything I did. But it turns out, there’s not much reason behind half the things we humans do.

For example, blessing someone after they sneeze.

One day, Zan overheard me do this for my sister, and later she asked why I’d said it.

I had to think for a moment before admitting, “I have no idea. It’s just something we humans do. It’s supposed to be good manners.”

“Like when you use napkins to blot partially eaten food off your faces?”

“Kind of.”

“What does ‘bless you’ mean?”

“Um . . . that you want good things to happen for someone. I think.”

“So every time someone involuntarily blasts snot out of their nose, you humans tell them you want good things to happen to them?”

“Er . . . yes.”

“Do you say ‘bless you’ for other involuntary actions? Like when someone burps?”

“No.”

“Or farts?”

“Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“I guess because farting is considered rude.”

“And yet, is also considered funny?”

“Not by everyone.”

“Your sister seems to think it’s funny.”

“Well, she’s six.”

“Your father does too. He’s not six.”

“Good point.”

“So why do some people find involuntary emissions of noxious gases from their rectums funny while other people find it rude?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it has something to do with the sound?”

It went on like that for twenty minutes, with Zan asking me to try to explain everything from whoopee cushions to “pull my finger” until I was mentally exhausted. For this reason, I’d taken to showing Zan movies whenever I could. They made life easier. I’d used them to help explain everything from dinosaurs to World War II to professional sports.

I know I sound like a crazy person with all this talking-to-an-alien stuff. Like the kind of lunatic who stumbles through the streets babbling gibberish and wearing a tinfoil hat.

But I’m not crazy. My name’s Dashiell Gibson and I’m a totally sane twelve-year-old boy who happens to live on the moon. You’ve probably heard of me. All of us up here are pretty famous, seeing as we’re the first families to colonize someplace that isn’t earth. There’s so much coverage of us down there, you might think you know everything about us.

But you don’t. You only know what the government wants you to know. And a lot of that is lies. Like when you hear that Moon Base Alpha is a really amazing, incredible place? Or that we’re all getting along great up here and having the time of our lives? That’s all a big, steaming pile of garbage.

Plus, there are things we all keep to ourselves. Like being in contact with aliens from the planet Bosco.

Zan’s planet wasn’t really called Bosco. But I couldn’t pronounce its real name. When Zan said it in her native language, it sounded like a bunch of dolphins who’d sucked the helium out of a Macy’s balloon. It was so high-pitched it made my ears hurt. So we went with “Bosco” instead.

No one else at MBA knew I was in contact with Zan. I was the only one who could see her. Or hear her. Or speak to her.

There was a perfectly good reason for this: Zan wasn’t really there. You see, her species hadn’t mastered interstellar travel yet. (Not that we humans have come anywhere close to figuring it out ourselves.) Zan’s species had found a shortcut, though. They could think themselves to other places.

I had no idea how it worked. Zan had been doing her best to explain it to me, and it always left me feeling like I was an idiot. But then, even Albert Einstein would have looked like an idiot to Zan.

The point being, I wasn’t really seeing Zan with my eyes. Instead she was connecting directly with my mind, inserting herself into my thoughts. I didn’t even see the real Zan. Instead I saw an image of her that she wanted me to see: a beautiful, dark-haired thirty-year-old female human with startlingly blue eyes. In truth, I didn’t know what Zan really looked like, because she hadn’t shown me yet.

Communicating with Zan wasn’t actually that difficult. She had learned English and could speak it better than half the humans I’d met. The hard part was that she insisted our friendship remain a secret. However, she had a very good reason for this:

Zan had befriended only one human before me, Dr. Ronald Holtz, who had been the doctor at Moon Base Alpha. Dr. Holtz had wanted to reveal Zan’s existence to all humanity, but he never got the chance. Because the second person who learned about Zan was another Moonie named Garth Grisan, a whacked-out, ultra-paranoid spy for the military who believed humanity wasn’t ready to learn we’re not alone in the universe. Garth killed Dr. Holtz to keep the secret safe, but he made it look like an accident. I’d figured it out with Zan’s help, though, and Garth had been shipped back to earth to stand trial for murder.

So Zan wasn’t in any rush to reveal her existence this time. I understood. Frankly, I was surprised she was willing to give humanity another try. And it was absolutely thrilling to get to talk to an alien.

It just wasn’t easy.

Maybe things wouldn’t have been so much trouble if I still lived on earth. Back there, if I wanted to spend some private time with Zan, I could simply go to my room and lock the door. But on the moon, I don’t have my own room. I share a cramped one-room residence with my parents and my little sister, Violet, and my “bedroom” is a niche built into the wall. On earth, I could go for a walk around the neighborhood. On the moon, I can’t. I’m not allowed outside, because I could die out there. On earth, there were a million places I could go to be by myself. On the moon, there are none. I have no privacy whatsoever. There are security cameras everywhere, half the base is off-limits to me, and even the bathrooms are communal.

So, basically, the only way I could spend any serious time with Zan was late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.

The night I showed her Star Wars, it was well after dinnertime. Mom and Dad had already tucked Violet into bed for the night and were playing chess in our room, while all the other Moonies seemed to be settling down in their residences as well. I wasn’t trying to explain anything to Zan by showing her the movie. I had simply referenced it so much, she demanded to see it.

It was hard to talk about life in space without talking about Star Wars. Or Star Trek. Or any other space movies. Because space travel always looked so cool in those films, when it wasn’t in real life. In the movies,...