“So, you definitely don’t want me to press the button?”
Under the watchful eyes of my alien overlord, I witnessed the planet explode seven more times, but I refused to budge from my seat. On the eighth explosion, the sluggers shocked me again. I lost control of my bladder and flopped onto the floor in a puddle of my own urine. My jaw was sore from clenching, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.
“You know, if you just told me what you wanted me to do, we could skip the excruciating pain portion of this experiment.”
They restored the planet again; only when I tried to sit, they shocked me and blew it up. The next time the image was whole, I scrambled to the button and slammed it with my hand. I was rewarded with an intense burst of euphoria that began in my feet and surged up my legs, spreading to my fingers and the tips of my ears. It was pure bliss, like I’d ejacu-lated a chorus of baby angels from every pore of my body.
“That didn’t suck.”
? ? ?
I lost track of how many times I pressed the button. Sometimes they shocked me, sometimes they dosed me with pure rapture, but I never knew which to expect. Not until I saw the pattern. It was so simple, I felt like an imbecile for not seeing it sooner. Being shocked until I pissed myself probably hadn’t helped my problem-solving abilities.
Those shocks and bursts of euphoria weren’t punishments and rewards, nor were they random. They were simply meant to force me to see that there was a causal relationship between whether I pressed the button and whether the planet exploded. The sluggers were trying to communicate with me. It would have been a much more exciting moment in human history if I hadn’t been wearing soggy underwear.
I decided to test my theory.
“Are you going to blow up the planet?”
SHOCK.
“Am I going to blow it up?”
SHOCK.
I finally gave up and stayed on the floor. “Is something going to destroy the earth?”
EUPHORIA.
“Can you stop it?”
HALLELUJAH!
My eyes rolled back as a shiver of bliss rippled through me. “How do we stop it?” I looked to the slugger for a clue, but it hadn’t moved since slapping me. What I knew was this: when I pressed the button, Earth didn’t explode. When I didn’t, it did. It couldn’t be that simple, though. “Pressing the button will prevent the destruction of the planet?”
UNADULTERATED RAPTURE.
“So, what? All those other times I pressed it were just practice?”
BABY ANGELS EVERYWHERE
“Great. So, when is this apocalypse set to occur?” I wasn’t sure how the aliens were going to answer an open-ended question, especially since they’d never answered me before, but they were capable of interstellar travel; providing me with a date should have been cake. A moment later the projection of the earth morphed into a reality TV show called Bunker, and a hammy announcer’s voice boomed at me from everywhere at once.
“This group of fifteen strangers has been locked in a bunker for six months. With only one hundred and forty-four days remaining, you won’t want to miss a single minute as they compete for food, water, toilet paper, and each other’s hearts.”
“You guys get the worst stations up here.” The commercial faded and Earth returned. “So, one hundred and forty-four days?” It took me longer than I’ll admit to do the math in my head. “That means the world is going to end January twenty--ninth, 2016?”
SWEET EUPHORIA.
I never got tired of being right.
When my head cleared, I came to the conclusion that the sluggers were screwing with me. It was the only logical explanation. I refused to believe that they had the power to prevent the world’s end but had chosen to leave the decision up to a sixteen-year-old nobody.
But if it wasn’t a joke, if the choice was mine, then I held the fate of the world in my sweaty hand. The aliens probably didn’t care one way or another.
“Just to be clear: I have until January twenty-ninth to press the button?”
EUPHORIA.
“And if I do, I’ll prevent the planet’s destruction?”
EUPHORIA.
“And if I choose not to press it?”
The earth exploded, the projection disappeared, and the lights died.
8 September 2015
I darted across the dawn-drenched lawn in front of my duplex, gushing sweat in the muggy Florida heat and shielding my privates with a trash can lid I’d stolen from a house a couple of streets over, hoping Mr. Nabu—who sat on his patio, reading the newspaper every morning—was too busy scouring the obits for names of friends and enemies to notice my pasty white ass scramble past.