Clones vs. Aliens Read online

  First published by Egmont Publishing, 2015

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Paper Lantern Lit, 2015

  All rights reserved

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.theclonechronicles.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Castle, M. E.

  Clones vs. aliens / M.E. Castle.

  1 online resource. — (The Clone chronicles ; #4)

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Fisher Bas and his clone work together to save the world after aliens disguised as twelve-year-old girls invade their town.

  ISBN 978-1-60684-534-9 (hardback)

  1. Cloning—Fiction. 2. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 3. Twins—Fiction. 4. Bullies—Fiction. 5. Middle schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Science fiction. 8. Humorous stories. I. Title. II. Title: Clones versus aliens.

  PZ7.C2687337

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014036369

  ISBN 978-1-60684-535-6 (eBook)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  v3.1

  For my Grandma Martha,

  Who showed me every summer

  That the simplest gestures of love

  Leave the deepest impressions.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  I walked into school one morning and destroyed a math test. I walked into school the next day and destroyed the school.

  —Fisher Bas, Journal

  “One … more … piece…,” Fisher Bas said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His breathing slowed to near hibernation levels, his hand shifted tremblingly into place. It was Friday afternoon, the end of the school week, and most kids were already on their way home. He, however, had one task left. An outdoor project of unprecedented scope. He was a single piece away from completing what was without a doubt his greatest feat of engineering.

  Click.

  With the gentle sound of a final, perfect connection slotting home, it was done. Fisher stepped back carefully, shading his eyes against the sun. It truly was a wonder of geometric achievement, a proud symbol of humanity’s eternal struggle against gravity.

  It was the world’s largest freestanding structure built entirely out of King of Hollywood Spicy Star Fry boxes—and would, Fisher hoped, serve as the basis for Wompalog’s most impressive Thanksgiving float.

  “It’s beautiful,” breathed Alex, Fisher’s clone. Or, to be more specific, his first and least evil clone.

  Two weeks earlier, Fisher’s second and very evil clone, Three, had attempted to take over the city with an army of androids that all looked identical to Fisher. He had very nearly succeeded. In the final showdown, the Wompalog school building had been utterly wrecked. So for now, school was a bunch of trailers hauled into the massive parking lot surrounding the King of Hollywood—which meant constant access to the mind-numbingly delicious fries, and lots of time during lunch to fiddle around with their packaging.

  For the first time in a long time, Fisher was relaxed. Thanksgiving was next week. And better, Dr. X was in jail. Three was in the most secure custody the FBI could arrange for minors. Veronica was happy with Fisher. And Alex was his own person instead of a dark secret.

  Fisher and Alex had been through an awful lot together in the few short months of Alex’s life, whether saving the world from Dr. X, freeing Palo Alto from Three’s clutches, or devising a method to trick their dad’s genetically engineered cookie-sniffing mongoose when she came into Fisher’s room unannounced.

  Unless something fell out of the sky in the next few days, then finally, finally, Fisher could take it easy for a little while.

  Fisher’s ears perked up.

  “Do you hear something?” he said to Alex.

  “Like what?” Alex said.

  “Like a hiss, or a whine, or a …” Fisher turned, horrified. Oh, no. “… squeal.”

  With a resounding oink, a fuzzy, pointy-eared pink missile careened right through Fisher’s fry box tower and into Fisher’s arms. Fisher tumbled backward with such force that he crashed into Alex, and the three of them—boys and pig—sank into the pile of toppled boxes.

  Flying Pig, Alex and Fisher’s pet, was a loyal and lovable creature who also seemed to be, aside from a black hole or a gamma ray burst, the single most destructive force in the universe.

  After a minute or two of awkward clawing, Fisher’s head finally breached the surface of the cooking oil-scented heap.

  “Tell me you at least got a picture,” he said to Alex. “That was a week of work.”

  Alex’s arm popped up from beneath the cardboard tide, phone clutched in his fist.

  “Thank Higgs,” Fisher said, hauling Alex out of the wreckage of his masterpiece. “I would’ve had to reassemble it with glue before mounting it on the float, anyway. The important thing is that we’ve got the photo to guide us.”

  FP emerged from the pile a few seconds later, a grease-stained box hanging from each ear.

  “It’s two thirty,” Alex said, dusting the oily remains of fry residue from his shoulder. “Time to head home. Maximizing our time away from Wompalog would be optimal.”

  “I know,” Fisher said. “I wrote the equation.”

  The pleasant residential area Fisher and Alex passed through on the way home showed barely any indication that it had, briefly, been the victim of a hostile android takeover. FP sniffed happily at well-maintained hedges. There weren’t any scorch marks or car wrecks, no burned gears or other robotic debris. It looked like any other ordinary neighborhood, where decent people led happy lives and did not have to deal with mechanical armies commanded by under-five-foot tyrant clones.

  Fisher breathed easily, hoping it would stay that way at least until the new year. That didn’t seem like so much to ask, really.

  At the end of their short walk, the Bas home came into view. It was, in fact, very difficult to miss. A cluster of antennae sprang from the roof, transmitting, receiving, and collecting data from dozens of experiments. Mrs. Bas’s garden was visible from more than a block away, mostly because of the massive cornstalk that jutted higher than the house. Mr. Bas had named it Fee, as in Fi Fo Fum.

  “Tomorrow’s going to be fantastic,” Fisher said. “Loopity Land will be the biggest thing in town since the first King of Hollywood opened.”

  “I’m still shocked that our parents helped design an amusement park,” Alex said. “I mean, I could see Dad putting together a roller coaster for marmosets or flatworms or something, but entertaining people? New territory.”

  “It’s true,” Fisher said thoughtfully. The Bas’s Liquid Door front gate, as dense as lead when sitting idle, reduced itself to a vapor-like state as it recognized Alex a
nd Fisher’s DNA, allowing them to pass through. “Our parents might be geniuses, but their social skills are definitely remedial.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bas had announced earlier in the week that they had secretly been working for over a year on a vast amusement park that was at last nearing completion. Tomorrow, Saturday, would be a trial run to which only the designers and builders were invited.

  Fisher, however, had other plans. He’d engineered a special hovering pickpocket drone. If it worked correctly, it would secretly float up behind his parents after they’d entered the park, slip the special entrance passes from their pockets, and deliver them right back to Fisher.

  “We’re home!” Alex said as he pushed open the front door, which didn’t change shape or scan people for DNA because it was just a regular door made of wood. No need to reinvent the wheel, Mrs. Bas always said—which was a slightly confused philosophy, since she had, in fact, reinvented the wheel. Three times.

  “Hey, boys!” their dad said from the landing halfway down the stairs. “Welcome ho—oooooooooo—” He was interrupted mid-greeting by one of his more recent genetic experiments, Paul, the walking octopus, who had just wrapped himself around Mr. Bas’s ankles. Paul had lungs as well as gills, and two extra tentacles that were strong enough to let him glide around on the floor.

  With a loud thunk, Mr. Bas and Paul landed in a tangled heap at the bottom of the stairs. Paul’s tentacles waved in panic as he wiggled underneath Mr. Bas. Fisher was grateful he had recently installed shock-absorbing, impact-reducing stairs. Living with his parents, and his dad in particular, had made them an obvious invention to pursue.

  Walter Bas rolled over so Paul could slip out from underneath him. The good-natured cephalopod freed himself, shaking his tentacles out and rubbing his bulbous head. FP stepped up and sniffed at Paul curiously. He was still getting used to having the strange animal around. Paul gave FP a little pat on the snout, and the pig gave a friendly snort.

  “Getting into the roller coaster spirit a little early, huh?” said Alex, helping their dad up.

  “I guess I am,” Mr. Bas said, chuckling a little as he straightened up. “Tomorrow’s the big day!”

  “I can’t wait to see it,” Fisher said, feeling the gentle pressure of Paul’s many-armed hello on his left calf.

  “Unfortunately, you’ll have to, at least for a little bit,” Mr. Bas said sternly, adjusting his glasses on his nose. Fisher felt Alex’s sideways look. “There are a lot of things we need to test before the park can open to visitors,” Mr. Bas went on. “We won’t be certain everything is safe and working properly until at least a week of trials have been done. Especially on the M3.”

  Fisher’s heart skipped. The M3. Short for Mega Mars Madness. Soon to be the greatest roller coaster in existence. His parents had finally relented and showed Fisher the architectural plans they’d drawn up for its completion. The M3 was so complex even Fisher didn’t fully understand it. All he knew was that the beauty of the physics of it overwhelmed him.

  Fisher had never been on a roller coaster before; he’d always been too scared. But no more. Maybe it was the influence Alex had had on him. Fisher was still scared, there was no doubt about it. He was just less willing to let fear stop him.

  “Of course, we understand,” Fisher said, smiling nervously and nudging Alex with an elbow. “We can be patient. It’s only a week, after all.”

  “Boys! I had no idea you were home. Is it three o’clock already? I haven’t even had lunch,” said Mrs. Bas, stepping in from the living room with a small beaker in her hand. She tapped the beaker a couple of times with a fingernail. “You know how time flies when I’m working on something. Well, I’d better get back to testing this project.”

  “What is it?” asked Fisher, stepping forward to get a better look. But it just looked like a beaker full of water.

  “I call it H2Info,” she said. “Scientists have talked about the idea of storing information in liquid form for years. But I imagined going a step further. What if, instead of just storing information as a liquid and then putting the liquid in a machine that could read it like a disk, you cut out the middle step? What if you could ingest the liquid and have the information transferred directly to your mind?” She shook the beaker slightly. “There are millions of nanomachines in here … tiny drones that can interpret the information coded into the water molecules and create new neural pathways … literally writing information into the brain.”

  “Wow,” Fisher said. “What’s in this one?”

  “‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ in Russian,” she said, looking a little sheepish. “I needed something simple for this first test. I’m going to call a physicist friend in Saint Petersburg and see how I do. Wish me luck!” With that, she tossed back the liquid and walked upstairs, already humming the rhyme.

  “I’d better put this little guy back in his tank and get back to work,” Mr. Bas said, patting Paul on the head and scooping him into his arms before heading up himself.

  “They don’t suspect a thing,” Fisher said, smiling at his brother as FP hopped around their feet. “We’ll have to keep a low profile tomorrow, but since the park is so big and there are only two of us—”

  A chime sounded at a control panel in the hall. Somebody was at the gate. Alex quickly tapped the button to manually mist-ify the Liquid Door without bothering to ask the house who it was.

  “Uh, yeah,” Alex said, “about that …” He opened the door.

  Amanda Cantrell stood on the step, black hair shimmering, glasses gleaming in the sun.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” Alex replied, glancing nervously over his shoulder at Fisher.

  She glanced over her own shoulder, as if worried someone had followed her. “You got it?” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper.

  “I got it,” Alex said.

  “It?” Fisher said. “What is ‘it’?” He crossed his arms.

  Alex reached into his backpack and pulled out a small plastic card.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Fisher said, rushing forward and snatching it from Alex’s hand. “Is that one of our parents’ Loopity Land passes? We can’t steal them before they need them or they’ll find out, that’s the whole reason I made the pickpocket drone! Besides, we were going to use the passes.”

  Alex gave Fisher a very large, very fake smile, reached into his backpack again, and pulled out a whole sheaf of the specially encrypted entrance cards. Amanda quickly tucked them into her own bag.

  “I didn’t steal them,” Alex said. “Or, well, I did steal one, briefly. I figured out how to duplicate them. With CURTIS’s help.”

  Fisher’s eye started to twitch, and he fought down a surge of irritation. How could Alex have plotted with Amanda behind Fisher’s back when Fisher had trusted him to plot with Fisher behind their parents’ backs!

  “Let me get this straight,” Fisher said in a harsh whisper. “You conspired with my artificial intelligence behind my back to make counterfeit tickets. You’re going to flood the park with kids, and people will find out, and then—”

  “I made one for Veronica, too,” Alex interjected.

  At the mention of Veronica Greenwich, Fisher’s objections got into a pileup somewhere between his soft palate and his teeth, realized they weren’t needed anymore, and retreated back down his throat.

  “… Okay,” Fisher said after a minute. His cheeks felt like he had Bunsen burners under them. Amanda smirked.

  “Glad that’s settled,” Alex said. “Don’t worry, Fisher. It’s a big park, and we’ll make sure the kids keep a low profile. Besides, I engineered the passes to self-destruct after use so they can’t be traced back to us. All our friends agreed that if they get caught by security, they’ll claim to have snuck in.”

  “Good thinking,” Fisher said, ignoring the anxiety that resurged after Alex said all our friends and wondering if it was sad that the mere thought of his dream girl could defeat him so easily. He could take on evil robots, evil clones, an
d evil mad scientists, but the thought of one single, beautiful girl stopped Fisher’s brain right in its tracks.

  Sharing the brand-new Loopity Land with Veronica wasn’t a chance Fisher could ever have passed up—Alex knew him too well. Even with things so good between Veronica and him, Fisher was still just beginning to figure out how to act around her and what made her happy. It wasn’t as straightforward as relativity or advanced particle physics. Loopity Land was a risk, but one well worth taking. Besides, how wrong could things possibly go?

  The problem with good ideas is that most people don’t have them.

  —Dr. X, Prison Diary

  Fisher pressed himself up against the metal gates of the brand-new, one-of-a-kind Loopity Land. With the cautiousness of a secret agent on a life-or-death mission, Fisher scanned the entrance to the most high-tech amusement park in the world. He hoped Alex’s fabricated tickets would pass the test.

  Joining Fisher and Alex on their mission were FP, Amanda, Veronica, and three other seventh graders: Trevor Weiss, with one of his vintage pencil cases sticking from his pants pocket, Erin “Mac” McLemore, a tall girl who was one of Amanda’s wrestling teammates, and Warren Deveraux, whose constant twitching and bouncing was the only thing that kept him awake.

  “Just look at this place,” said Erin, looking past the tall gates at the rides that towered into the air. “Your folks really built it?”

  “Well, they designed it,” Alex said, opening a canvas tote bag next to FP and using a carrot stick to lure the little pig inside. Alex scooped the now-wriggling bag onto his shoulder. “I don’t think putting a hammer or a drill in either of their hands would be a good idea.”

  “You sure you’re all right carrying FP?” Fisher said.

  “Sure,” Alex said with a small wink. “We’re pals now. Right, boy?” Alex patted the side of the bag. A faint snort sounded in reply.

  “Oh man oh man oh man!” said Warren, almost tap-dancing as he bobbed. “I don’t know what ride to try first. Maybe bumper cars. Are there bumper cars? If there aren’t maybe there are bumper bikes or bumper unicycles or—”