The True Meaning of Smekday (Smek 1)

“Hold on! Hold on!” shouted J.Lo, running out the door. The hood yawned open and belched a fireball into the sky. J.Lo dove into his toolbox, threw what looked like an aspirin into the flames, and suddenly the car was covered in two feet of foam.

It took about a half hour to clean off the foam. It was cold and smelled like dessert topping.

“You know,” I said as we prepared once again to leave, “I don’t know if this is going to work anyway. There isn’t much gas left, and I don’t know where we could still buy some. Come to think of it, I’m not sure my money is even worth anything anymore.”

J.Lo smiled. “Ah. I to show something.”

He crouched by the gas tank and snaked a length of hose inside it. Then he sucked on the end, which was gross, and soon a trickle of gasoline dripped out. He caught a few drops of it in this weird machine. It looked like a balance, with small glass vials on both sides and some kind of computery thing in the middle. Then he let the hose fall, and gas spilled out onto the chewed pavement.

“Hey! You’re wasting it!”

“It does not to matter,” said the Boov. “Look.”

He fiddled with the computer, and the whole thing hummed. Then, as though its plug had been pulled, the little vial was emptied of its gasoline. I couldn’t tell where it went.

“Nice trick,” I said. “Now it’s all gone.”

J.Lo ignored me, and a second later the bottom of the other vial filled with gas from I didn’t know where.

“Wait. What just happened?”

The Boov grinned. “I did to teleport the fuel fromto one place and the other.”

“Teleport? Teleport? That’s amazing! You guys can teleport things?”

J.Lo’s smile fell a little. “Some things,” he said.

“But…” I said, missing the point. “How does that help us? We still need more gas.”

J.Lo’s smile widened.

“Feedback loop,” he said.

“Feedback loop?”

“Feedback loop.”

We just stood there, looking at each other. A crow cawed in the distance.

“Are you gonna make me ask, or—”

“The computer, it changes up the gasoline into computer datas. A long code. We to transmit the code, the gasoline, but only a little bit. Not all.”

“Not all,” I repeated.

“But…herenow is the trick. The trick is, we are to fooling the computer into thinking we have to teleported it all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But we have not.”

“Sooooo…”

“So we are keeping most the gasoline on the one side, and to fooling that it is all on the other side, so the stupids computer duplicates the gasoline for to fill the cup. Like copying a file. Thento we are sending it back the others way, thens back another time, and back and back. Like so.”

J.Lo fiddled again, and again there was the hum. What happened next looked like one of those time-lapse films where you watch a flower grow. Both of the vials buzzed and filled quickly with liquid. There was a hundred times more gas than when he’d started.

For a moment my brain wouldn’t let me believe what I’d seen. But then, I was getting pretty used to seeing unbelievable things by this point, and I snapped out of it.

“You made gasoline,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You just…like…cloned some gasoline!”

“As you say.”

“This is incredible!” I shouted. “You guys can teleport! You can clone things! You could, like, teleport to France and leave a clone of yourself behind to do your homework!”

The Boov frowned. “Everybodies always is wanting to make a clone for to doing their work. If you are not wanting to do your work, why would a clone of you want to do your work?”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “But you can teleport. You can go anywhere! Why are we driving?”

J.Lo really scowled now. This seemed to be a touchy subject for him.

“Boov cannot to teleport. Humans and Boov cannot be teleported, can not to be cloned.”

“But you just—”

“Impossible. Gasoline can to be teleported and cloned because it is all the sames, all mixed up. Complex creature like the Boov is not all the sames. Even simple creature likes the human is not alls the same.”

“Hey—”

“The teleporter computer does not to have to know what order whichto arrange the new gasoline. Does not matter. But for Boov and humans, matters.”

I was finally getting it. “You mean—”

“If Gratuity teleports, the computer cannot to keep track of all the molecules. Gratuity comes out a mixed-up puddle of Gratuity.”

“Oh.”

“Like a Gratuity milk shake, fromto the blender—”

“Okay, all right,” I said, raising my hands. “I get it.”

Again we fell into an uncomfortable silence. Then J.Lo sat down to make more gasoline, with Pig purring around his feet.

“Hey…did I…are you mad?” I asked, wondering immediately why I did. “What’s wrong with you?”

J.Lo sighed. It made a crackly sound.

“The Boov have tried to fix this problem for long time. For…” He raised his eyes like he was doing math. “For an hundred of your years,” he said finally.

“Jeez.”

“As you say.”

After a while we were on our way. The new controls for Slushious were hard to get used to, but I’m a quick study. J.Lo only gritted his teeth and clutched the door handle for about the first fifteen miles, so afterward I had to throw in an occasional dip or wild turn to keep him guessing.

“I’m a really good driver,” I said after a particularly daring and unnecessary dive. J.Lo bleated something in Boovish that I hoped was a prayer. Or a curse.

Later a stray dog crossed our path, and I hit the brake, or rather the gas, a little too hard. J.Lo sailed forward and hit his head on the dash with a wet slap.

“Seat belts,” I said.

“Perhaps I could also to drive from time to time,” said the Boov.

“Nope. Sorry. Not your car.”

J.Lo rubbed his head. A bruise had already formed, swirling and changing color beneath his skin like a mood ring.

“I rebuilded it,” he said. “Is like half mine.”

I thought about this.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “but it wouldn’t be legal, you driving it. You don’t have a license.”