I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe

A stoner kid and his best friend attempt to move a sofa across town during an alien invasion . . .

Let’s skip the prologue for now and get right to the invasion, which all started for Tindal with the tragedy of the Tim Hortons cookie.

Tindal was sitting on the floor of his dark, cozy bedroom, jamming to Paul Anka’s swinging cover of “Wonderwall,” and about to tuck into his breakfast—a sexy, red velvet cookie with cream cheese filling, only slightly crusty from spending the night lost in his bed linens—when the bedroom door was yanked open. Unfortunately, he was leaning against the door at the time. He fell into the sunlit living room, and the cookie, seizing its moment to escape, flew from his hand, bounced once, and vanished into the general chaos of the apartment.

He would never see that cookie again.

A wail escaped him. Then he squinted upward at the imperious figure looming over him—the being that had so rudely hoicked open his door. He tilted his head to take in the perimeter of the silhouette. “Aunty Mads?”

It had been more than a year since he’d seen her. She looked the same—the Nordic pop star cheekbones, the black hair streaked with gray, those eyes that could grab you and just as suddenly let you go like you were a firefly. He scrambled to his feet. “How did you find me?” No, that came out wrong. He put his guilty feelings aside for a moment and hugged her. “I mean, what are you doing here?”

She returned the hug, and then leaned down, lovingly cradled his face in her hands—and plucked the earbuds from his ears.

“You’re shouting,” she said in that unplaceable accent of hers. “Do you know what’s going on outside?”

He wanted to say yes. But now that he thought about it, there had been more than the usual amount of brouhaha in the apartment, and a continuous warbling of sirens in the distance, and the roar of large roaring things. The floors and walls had been vibrating intermittently as if the building had been rezoned as a subwoofer. He’d nearly been tempted to turn off his earbuds.

“I’ve been in my room all morning.”

“That’s not a room, kiddo, that’s a coat closet.”

“Former coat closet. Now it’s—”

She raised an eyebrow.

“…my closet?”

“I’ve been trying to call you for an hour.” She surveyed the array of couches and cots, the assortment of battered furniture and cockeyed lamps, the power strips asprout with cables, snowmanesque piles of garbage bags stuffed with clothes, and the many, many candles, mostly unlit. “Oh my dear, I should have come to set eyes on you well before this. How many people live here?”

“On average?”

What was odd was that none of the dozen or so roommates or their hangers-on, couch-surfers, and auxiliary sex partners were present at the moment. “Where is everybody?”

“They probably evacuated,” she said. “Or found a shelter.”

“Are we being evicted?”

Thunder rattled the windows. A blown-glass bong tumbled off a shelf, onto another bong, and both shattered. Sirens wailed in the distance.

“Time to move,” she said. “Also, you’re going to need pants.”

He was wearing only his tighty-not-so-whities, in stark contrast to Aunty Mads, who looked, per usual, ineffably cool, even though each article of clothing could have been grabbed from a Goodwill rack. Today’s look might be called Parisian Lumberjack Gone Clam Digging: flannel shirt tied at the waist, dungarees rolled to her shins, ballet flats, chunky necklace.

Tindal scrabbled around his 1 × 3 meter bedroom, finding and wriggling into clothes. “Where are we going, exactly?”

“My house. I need your muscle.”

“Ha!”

“Okay, your energy and Morris’s muscles.”

Morris! Nobody except Aunty Mads called El Capitan by his given name.

“I already called him and he’s waiting for us,” she said. “I’d been under the impression you two were living together.”

“We were, but El Cap’s got a poly thing going right now,” Tindal explained. “I was kind of a, not third wheel, exactly—fifth? Sixth? So I got my new place here and—wait, what’s this muscular activity?”

“You two are going to move a couch across town.”

He poked his head out the door. “A couch? Not Mr. Nappy?!” At her wince he said, “You can’t sell him! I’ll take him.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have the room, kiddo.”

True, but…maybe he could find a new room? He loved that couch. Growing up he’d spent many afternoons, and not a few nights, stretched out on its comfy bulk.

“Mr. Nappy is moving to a new home upstate,” Aunty Mads said. “Extremely upstate.”

“Well, at least you’re not throwing him out.”

He tied up his hair and emerged, more or less decent. Aunty Mads stood by the door, impatient, but Tindal looked around worriedly, feeling as if he were leaving something behind. Oh! The candles. He danced around the room, blowing them out.

“Can’t be too careful,” he explained. Some of his roommates only owned what they could carry. One more apartment fire they’d be ruined.

“You’re sweet,” Aunty Mads said. “But we need to go.”

He followed her down the three flights of stairs to the front steps of the building. The sirens were louder, and a line of cars jammed the street. She set off down the sidewalk at a swift march, toward El Capitan’s apartment. A pair of military jets raked the rooftops and zoomed out of sight.

Though it was embarrassing, he decided that he simply had to ask: “What’s going on, exactly?”

“Behind you,” Aunty Mads said.

He looked back, then up. Hovering above the Toronto skyline, a few miles away, a gargantuan shape swallowed half the sky. The lumpy gray slab bristled with long needles, as if scores of giant porcupines had become stuck in cement.

The two military jets were heading straight at it—until they exploded. Then, suddenly, they became a thousand pieces of metal going many directions at once.

“Holy Fuckowski!” Tindal shouted. 

“Keep moving.”

“Is that a spaceship?” Tindal asked.

A column of glittery light appeared below the ship (for that’s what it had to be) and enveloped a skyscraper. The light shimmered like crushed disco balls, partially and prettily obscuring the building. Were the aliens going to blow it up? Levitate it into their ship? Then the light clicked off and the vasty bulk drifted onward.

“Huh,” Tindal said. “What’s it doing?” Aunty Mads didn’t answer; she’d marched on. He scrambled to catch up. “Are you sure you want to move Mr. Nappy during this, uh, alien invasion?”

“Pfft. It’s one spaceship—that’s hardly an invasion.”

Which was a very Aunty Mads point to make. When Tindal was growing up, she was one of those neighborhood characters that kids feared, old people scowled at, and everyone thought was a witch. She painted her rambling house in multiple clashing colors, refused to mow her lawn, cooked food that smelled like hot mulch, and blasted “music” that made cats nervous. Also she did things that were legit insane, like commanding heavily armed gangbangers to get off her lawn—and then they’d do it. Basically, she put out Big Wiccan Energy twenty-four-seven.

Tindal had been just as afraid of her as the kids from school, but when he was eight years old she stopped one of his mom’s boyfriends from beating the shit out of him—she did something to the guy’s ear that dropped him to his knees, which was amazing—and from that point on, whenever things got bad at his mom’s place (which was pretty often), he’d run down to Aunty Mads’s house and she’d feed him hot dogs and Shreddies and Capitaine Crounche, food that she kept on hand, he later realized, only for him. She let him chase the robot vacuum around, and at bedtime would tuck him into Mr. Nappy, her giant orange couch, and tell him bedtime stories.

The fact that he hadn’t seen her lately was entirely his fault. She’d texted him and left voicemails, often just checking in but sometimes inviting him to dinner. But he put off replying because certain aspects of his life had become embarrassing. He told himself he’d call her as soon as he’d “straightened some things out,” but the number of things requiring straightening only grew like the contents of Uri Geller’s spoon drawer.

A few more explosions sounded in the distance, hidden by rooftops. The disco spotlight came on a couple more times as well. Tindal was starting to panic but there was nothing to do but keep up with Aunty Mads.

El Capitan—El Cap, El C the DJ (available for parties), Morris—was waiting for them on the street, beefy and huge, like a grizzly who’d gotten up on its hind legs and was calmly optimistic about nabbing a high-flying salmon.

“Looking good, Aunty Mads!” El Cap said. They exchanged cheek kisses like a couple of Québécois. She was nearly as tall as he was.

El Cap told them that the rest of his polycule—two girlfriends, one boyfriend, and an English bulldog—had decided to evacuate the city. They’d headed north on the DVP, though their texts reported that traffic was nearly at a standstill.

“And you stayed to help me out,” Aunty Mads said. “That’s brave and kind.”

“I’m sure it’ll all blow over,” El Cap said. He thought everything blew over, and he was usually right. He’d been Tindal’s best friend since grade nine, and was really the best possible person to call when, say, two teenagers broke into your house and ate a wall-full of drugs—but that was another story.

El Cap led them down the alley to a narrow garage. “For all your transportation and moving needs,” he said, raising the door with a flourish, “consider the Flea Bus!”

Ah, the Flea Bus. She was a rusty, powder-blue, 1963 International Metro, bulbous and blunt-faced, sporting a fancy art deco grille that gave her the air of a duchess fallen on hard times. She’d started life as some kind of delivery truck, but the faded logo and cartoon dog painted on her side marked her last professional job, serving as a mobile pet grooming service.

“Don’t worry about your couch,” El Cap said to Aunty Mads. “All fleas have fled.”

“Died of old age, I imagine.” She took shotgun, and Tindal duck-walked into the cargo area, which was carpeted with overlapping rugs of various vintages, and squatted on a toolbox. The Flea Bus didn’t want to start, but El Cap eventually persuaded her to come out of retirement and they lurched into the street.

A trio of helicopters whomped overhead. A second later explosions shook the air. El Cap glanced in the rearview mirror. “Not a great day to be in the Royal Canadian Air Force,” he said, the slightest worry in his voice.

“They should probably stop attacking it,” Aunty Mads said.

“But what’s up with the sparkly light?” Tindal called over the engine noise.

“They’re clearly looking for something,” she said.

“In Canada?”

They rumbled westward. Traffic was terrible, and cops at intersections kept trying to wave them out of the city, but twenty minutes later they’d finally made it the two kilometers to Aunty Mads’s Victorian. Tindal was pleased—no, relieved—to see that even though the house was painted in new colors, it was otherwise exactly itself.

Aunty Mads directed El Cap to the backyard and had him park with the rear of the bus abutting the stoop. Then she led the boys inside, into the kitchen. The smell of the place was also exactly itself, a mingle-mangle of unnamed spices, strange citrus, and overheated electrical wiring.

Something clattered to the floor in the next room, and Tindal heard a distinctive whir. He rushed into the dining room. “Sucky!” he cried. The vacuum cleaner sat on the ground near the table, roughly the size and shape of a horseshoe crab, but even flatter, and also hovering an inch off the ground. Tindal rushed forward and the thing scooted away between the chair legs.

Tindal laughed in delight. “Oh man, you’re the best, Sucky.” He was surprised that the machine was still running; it had to be as old as he was.

“You know, I could never figure out how that thing worked,” El Cap said. “Where are the wheels? And where does the dust go?”

“Magnets,” Tindal said patiently. Aunty Mads had explained it to him long ago.

“Enough bothering the help,” she said, and shooed them into the living room. “Here’s the patient in question.”

And there he was indeed, bright orange and bulging: Mr. Nappy. The couch spanned one end of the room, its chubby arms nudging the walls. Its plush cushions wide enough for three Tindals to sleep side by side. It seemed even larger than he remembered, which was not how childhood memories were supposed to work.

“Just look at him,” Tindal said. “Still fabulous.”

The sofa, positioned to take in both a view of the room and the street outside the big picture window, glowed in the sunlight, the upholstery somehow throwing off more colors than seemed possible: harmonics of purple, gold, jade, orange.

“Aunty Mads,” Tindal said. “Can I do the thing?”

She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “Be quick about it.”

Tindal ran toward the couch and leaped, Superman-style. “AIRBORNE!” he shouted. He came down on his face and chest and sank into those deep cushions.

It felt so good. When he was little, and Aunty Mads had finished with the bedtime stories, she’d sit on the edge of the cushions and pat his back until he fell asleep. By middle school he was tiptoeing into the house at two or three in the morning, when only Sucky was awake and hoovering about, and would crash hard on the couch, no bedtime stories or even blankets required; Mr. Nappy always seemed to be the right temperature in hottest summer or coldest winter. Tindal would fall asleep to a hum that seemed to come up through the bones of the sofa.

Tindal rolled over. “I still can’t believe you’re getting rid of him.”

Aunty Mads offered an apologetic smile. “All things have their path in life, kiddo.”

“But he still looks great!”

“What he looks is large,” El Cap said. “Are you sure we have to do this, now?”

“I wouldn’t ask if wasn’t important,” Aunty Mads said. “Truly.”

El Cap seemed to work this over in his head, then nodded. “I’ll go get the dollies and move the dining table out of the way.” Aunty Mads walked out with him.

Tindal lay on the cushions, admiring the tall bookcases full of books Aunty Mads used to read to him, the soda bottles and car parts she’d hung on the wall as if they were art. A memory came to him, from a night after an escape from his mother’s apartment. He was eight or nine or ten (his chronological memory was not great), and woke up on Mr. Nappy. He wasn’t sure what had woken him up, but then he heard Aunty Mads, talking away to someone. And then she said something like, “You want to stop being a ghost?” He shuffled into the kitchen and found her there, holding a coffee cup, feet up on the table. Nobody else was in the room.

It was an old but familiar memory, one that he used to frequently marvel over. Aunty Mads talks to ghosts! But then he grew older and discovered the wide world of psychedelics and learned that not everything his brain thought was happening was, strictly speaking, happening. She’d probably been on the phone.

But to who? Thinking of it now, he was struck by how lonely Aunty Mads must have felt all these years. No friends (that he’d ever met, anyway), no family from the old country, and nobody to talk to but herself. No wonder she’d been texting him lately! Guilt washed over him. He’d blown off all those messages because he was so focused on himself and his own problems.

A boom shook the walls. Tindal, buffered by Mr. Nappy, felt nothing but a slight tremor. El Cap and Aunty Mads hurried in, and Tindal sat up. “Aunty Mads, I want to apologize for not calling you back. I feel terrible and I should’ve never—”

“Don’t worry about it, kiddo. Really.”

El Cap handed him a wooden triangle with casters bolted on. “I’ll lift the end, and you shove this under.” The big man squatted, grabbed the frame, and managed to raise the end a dozen centimeters. “Now, please,” he said through gritted teeth. Tindal placed the dolly and then scrambled out of the way.

“Woof,” El Cap said. “Is this a sleeper couch?”

The light coming through the window suddenly dimmed, as if a storm cloud had rolled in. Aunty Mads went to the window. “I’m afraid we’re out of time, boys.”

Spangled light filled the room, pouring straight through the roof. Disco dust! Tindal shouted something and covered his head. El Cap looked at the ceiling. The couch glowed full technicolor. And Sucky the vacuum cleaner levitated, pulled off the floor.

Several seconds passed, during which Tindal remained in a full-body wince. Then the light snapped off.

Aunty Mads turned from the window and frowned. The vacuum cleaner was still hanging in air, still glowing redly. “Sucky?” Aunty Mads said. Suddenly the machine clattered to the ground.

“Is the ship moving on?” Tindal asked.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“So…not moving?”

“I’ll take care of this.” She leaned down and kissed Tindal on his forehead. Then she clapped El Capitan on the shoulder. “Watch out for each other. And the couch. Speaking of which, could you proceed, quickish-like?”

“No problem.”

“Where are you going?” Tindal asked. “What do you mean, take care of it?”

“Quickish!” She opened the front door and strode out to the street.

“Little help,” El Cap said from behind him.

“I don’t like this,” Tindal said. “What if she gets exploded like those choppers, or—”

“Little help!” El Cap, in a deep squat, was straining to hold the couch a few inches off the ground. Tindal dashed to his side and tucked a second dolly beneath it. El Cap lowered it carefully, then blew out his breath. “Damn,” he said.

Tindal wanted to check on Aunty Mads but El Cap was already pushing the couch forward. Tindal danced ahead and did what he could to keep the front end pointing in the right direction. They were forced to stop in the kitchen. The back door was wide, but not Mr. Nappy wide.

“We’ll have to turn it sideways,” El Cap said.

“Is that even possible?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“If we can turn it sideways.”

Tindal knew there was no actual we in this. El Cap took a slow breath, lowered himself into a deep knee bend, and gripped a rear leg. Then he grunted and straightened. The end of the couch came up a few feet and the big man held it there.

But to Tindal there seemed to be no progress possible from this position—a clean and jerk would not be clean, and the jerk would be painful.

“I’m behind you a hundred percent,” he said.

El Cap rotated his body and shuffled his hands along so that he was holding the rear of the couch with his back to the wall. Previously reticent veins made an appearance on his neck. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Tindal couldn’t remember seeing El Cap sweat before.

“Stand back,” his friend said, then slammed one foot against the wall behind him. For a moment he was holding the couch aloft on one beefy leg and two beefy arms. Then he kicked off the wall and the front of the couch came down with a gentle, upholstered poof.

“Captain my captain!” Tindal said.

El Cap lifted his tank top, mopped his beard and face, and nodded at the bottom of the couch. “Definitely a sleeper.”

The bottom was a bulging metal plate, engraved with dense whorls and loops. As Tindal stared the lines seemed to move, as if on the verge of becoming a cartoon about the dangers of LSD. “It looks…” Tindal struggled to describe the feelings stirring inside him. “…European.”

“Go run around the house and get on the other side,” El Cap said. “I’ll push from here.”

Tindal blinked away the effects of the sofa and booked it through the dining room, where the front door was still wide open. He skidded to a stop. Aunty Mads stood in the street, arms at her side, looking up with a bemused expression, like Dorothy expecting a familiar twister. Something long and gray dropped from the sky and wham! bashed into the pavement. Tindal jumped, but Aunty Mads didn’t.

Another object hit the street, and another, a drumroll of meteor strikes. Tindal found himself on his ass, ears ringing. Aunty Mads was now surrounded by armored creatures. They looked like huge, heavily muscled dogs who’d sprouted bulbous, multilobed broccoli heads, and which in turn had extruded a dozen or so silvery tentacles.

In short, they looked exactly like Gadzooks.

Aunty Mads would tell him bedtime stories about the brave sea captain, Tindopheles, and his battles with the great and terrible Gadzooks. They were monsters—part dog, part squid—but organized monsters. They followed a queen, the Luminous Gadzook, and built castles and ships, and marched around in suits of armor. Many of Tindopheles’s adventures involved out-talking and out-tricking them, rescuing their hostages (often handsome princes), or stealing their magic whozits and whatsits, before making his escape. Often it was not a clean getaway, and the Gadzooks would catch up to him, and Tindopheles would reluctantly arm his omni-cannons. He’d blow holes in their hulls, and the Gadzooks (weighed down by their suits of armor) would sink like stones. This didn’t kill them, because they didn’t need to breathe, but did drop them to the bottom of the ocean with a long walk home.

So, to see the Gadzooks standing right in front of him, almost exactly as Aunty Mads had described, was super weird.

One of the Gadzooks seized Aunty Mads, pinning her arms to her sides. Tindal yelped. A bevy of Gadzook tendrils twisted in his direction.

Aunty Mads shouted a word he didn’t catch.

“What?” Tindal called from the porch.

“Stick to the plan!” she said.

What plan? Moving the couch? That couldn’t be it. Who cared about a couch at a time like this?

Then she shouted, “Get them out of—”

Tendrils engulfed her head. A second Gadzook had slammed them into her.

Tindal shouted—and was suddenly airborne for the second time that day, this time involuntarily. He was sent flying through the open door, into the living room. He bounced on the wooden floor, rolled, and kept rolling until he banged against a wall. A rusty carburetor, one of Aunty Mads’s art pieces, thumped onto the ground next to him.

The front door slammed shut.

Tindal wheezed, trying to get his lungs to reinflate. What in heaven’s name had just happened? Some tingly force had seized his body and thrown him into the house.

He wanted to run to the window to see if Aunty Mads was okay—but then thought better of it. Get them out of here. There was no arguing with that commandment; Mr. Nappy and El Capitan were now Tindal’s responsibility. Aunty Mads would take care of the Gadzooks.

He rushed to the kitchen. El Cap was bent over, attempting to shove the couch through the door. It was wedged about halfway through. Then Tindal remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be in the house, but on the other side, pulling.

“It sounded like artillery up there,” El Cap said.

Tindal opened his mouth, closed it. He kept picturing the Gadzook grabbing Aunty Mads’s head. Was she dead now? What were they doing with her?

“You okay, little buddy?” El Cap asked. “What happened?”

Tindal took a breath. “Um…a lot.”

Then he forcefully shook his head—good for disguising tears. “Aunty Mads wants us to keep going. So, on three?” He put his hands against the couch. El Cap, bless him, didn’t hesitate. He lined up next to Tindal and said, “One, two…”

A sharp crack! and Mr. Nappy seemed to leap away from them.

El Cap straightened, frowning in confusion. The door frame had split on each side. And the couch was now wedged inside the Flea Bus, snug as a burrito in a baby’s mouth.

Tindal and El Cap exchanged a look. “So…it fits,” Tindal said. El Cap closed the two rear doors, and they scrambled into the cab. Mr. Nappy was pressed right up against the seats.

The Captain turned the ignition. The Flea Bus, perhaps sensing the gravity of the situation, started right up. “Where to?” El Cap asked.

Tindal blinked. “Didn’t she tell you?”

El Cap slowly shook his head.

Tindal tried to remember what Aunty Mads had said. “It was…across town?”

“Tindy, my dude, we need a—whoa.” He was looking past Tindal, through the passenger window. A Gadzook had stomped around the corner of the house. Its bulging head swiveled in their direction, tentacles waggling.

“That’s an alien,” El Cap said.

“We should go,” Tindal said.

“Agreed.”

The Captain did complicated things with his feet and hands. The Flea Bus lurched forward, and then turned away from the alien. They churned out of Aunty Mads’s yard and into the neighbor’s.

“Weber!” Tindal called, but El Cap had already seen it. The truck plunged between the Weber propane grill and an above-ground pool. Lawn chairs clattered off the bumper and went flying. The bus’s front wheels thumped over the curb, onto a street, and El Cap cranked the wheel. The truck tipped on heavy springs. Tindal made a high keening sound he was not proud of and jammed a hand to the roof to stop himself from sliding into El Cap’s lap. Then the side of the bus whomped down and El Cap aimed the bus between the rows of parked cars, heading south at what seemed to be the bus’s top speed, 45 kph.

“Is it following us?” El Cap asked.

Tindal leaned out the window. There was nothing behind them. “All—” The Gadzook charged out of the side yard and landed in the street. “—not clear.” The alien juked easily on those four feet and started galloping after them.

“Go faster,” Tindal suggested. The alien, head-tendrils whipping angrily, was rapidly gaining on them. Then a bang shook the truck.

Tindal pulled in his head and looked into the cargo area, past Mr. Nappy. One of the rear doors had been pulled free. The Gadzook held the door in several tendrils while still running. Then it tossed the door aside and grabbed the bus’s empty frame. Tindal screamed.

And then the creature…came apart.

One moment the Gadzook was hauling itself into the cargo area; the next a dark blur zipped from right to left in the air outside the bus, and plink! the dog body detached from its thick neck. The torso tumbled in the bus’s wake, somersaulting across the pavement, legs flailing. The gray broccoli head, however, held tight to the doorframe, while its neck stump convulsed like a fish, fanning dark liquid into the air behind the bus. Tindal opened his mouth to follow up his first scream, but before he managed a sound he was distracted by another blur in the air. Suddenly the Gadzook’s head divided in two, also with a cheery plink!

Dark blood—or motor oil, impossible to say—sprayed the roof. The head lost its grip on the doorframe and bounced away like a tentacled bowling ball.

El Cap frowned at the side mirror, speechless. Tindal couldn’t figure out what had happened, either.

The street T’d. El Cap swung right, then had to brake to a stop. The intersection ahead was solid with creeping traffic. El Cap leaned out his window and got the attention of a middle-aged driver in a middle-aged Volvo. “Can I? Okay?” The driver allowed the Flea Bus to edge crosswise into the avenue. “Thanks!” El Cap called. “Sorry! Thanks!” He steered the bus to the other side and sped away—“sped” being an extremely relative term.

“I still don’t know where we’re going,” El Cap said. “We could head north with everyone else.”

“The spaceship came from the south and was heading north,” Tindal said. “So go south?”

“But then it stopped at Aunty Mads’s. Now it could be heading back to the waterfront.”

Aargh! Such a conundrum. Tindal realized he’d been absent-mindedly rubbing the arm of the couch. It felt nice. “Maybe we should just take it back to your house. Or we could—”

The hand of physics, citing the rules of momentum, shoved Tindal into the dashboard; the Captain had slammed on the brakes. A quartet of Gadzooks stood in the middle of the street, half a block away. Judging from the impact craters beneath their feet, they’d just landed. Their tendrils were aimed at them, and the tips of several of those wriggly arms were glowing bright orange.

“Do they have guns in those things, too?” El Cap asked.

“In the stories they had flintlock pistols, but maybe?!”

“What stories?”

One of the tendrils erupted in light. The air in front of the Flea Bus flared white…and then faded, leaving behind the smell of burnt toast. The Gadzooks were still standing in the street, though now their arms seemed agitated.

Tindal couldn’t understand why they were still alive. Was that a warning shot?

“Back up?” Tindal suggested. Then: “Never mind.”

The blur had returned.

The fast-moving smudge dashed between and through the bodies. Gadzook heads popped from necks like dandelion bulbs. Limbs flew. The sprays of blood were horrific but also a bit bombastic, almost show-offy. Were Gadzook suits of armor pressurized? These space dogs were going off like hot, heavily shaken beer cans.

Within seconds, all four of the aliens lay in pieces across the road. The blur hovered over them, as if admiring its work.

El Cap said, “Is that…?”

The blur zipped toward them. Tindal ducked, but the blur swooped past the windshield, over their heads, and then—sha-ring!—cut through the roof of the Flea Bus.

It was in the vehicle with them, hovering at eye level in the L of the couch. It was so flat that it would have been invisible if not for the faint red glow that surrounded it.

“Sucky!” Tindal said.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” the vacuum cleaner said. “If you call me that again, I will cut you in half.”

Tindal, in a state of bogglement, shut up. The appliance floated to the dashboard, turned in place, and started issuing driving instructions—which El Cap obeyed. They zigged and zagged through the neighborhood, but were heading mostly westward.

“So what is your name?” Tindal asked.

“You wouldn’t be able to pronounce my full name,” it said. “You may call me Surokar Kedissear Vanteen Tev Vanteen.”

“So I was close.”

The machine’s aura flashed scarlet.

“Where are we going, uh, Surokar?” El Cap asked. “And also, why are these guys chasing us?”

“The Gadzik aren’t after you, they’re after the Neoton.”

Tindal frowned. “The exercise bike?”

“That’s a Peloton,” El Cap said helpfully.

“The couch,” Surokar said. “Fortunately for you, its defenses have kicked in. Its baffle field makes us invisible to their ship’s sensors. Eventually they’ll figure out what we’ve done, at which point they’ll start tracking us visually. When they spot us they’ll drop a thousand marines on top of us.”

“That sounds bad,” Tindal said.

“It is. A dozen or so seconds of thrilling combat will ensue, during which you boys will be, hopefully, killed instantly.”

“Thanks?” El Cap said.

“Can we go with not killed at all?” Tindal asked.

“Oh, you don’t want that,” the machine said. “If you’re alive you’ll be taken to their ship, interrogated, and tortured until they learn, pretty much instantly, that you’re human morons who have no usable information, at which point they’ll keep torturing you because A, they’re good at it; B, they take pride in their work; and C, their religion demands it. Gadzik marines take umbrage at any lesser species who’d dare to kill them in the streets, much less kill five of them.”

“But you killed them,” El Cap pointed out.

“The Gadzik aren’t into splitting hairs. Turn right at the stoplight.”

“You keep saying it wrong,” Tindal said. “It’s Gadzook. Gadzook marines.”

The machine made a noise that might have been an electronic sigh. “Tindal, please consider the possibility that the person you call Aunty Mads may have given them a funny, unthreatening name because you’re a child.”

“You mean I was a—”

“Nope.”

“Ouch,” El Cap said.

“And what do you mean, the person I called Aunty Mads?” Tindal asked. “What do you call her?”

“Just Mad.”

Tindal squinted. “When you say Just Mad, do you mean, Just Mad, or just Mad?”

“Just Mad.”

“Hate to interrupt,” El Cap said, “but, uh, you know.”

“We’ve got to go back to the house and rescue Aunty Mads,” Tindal said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Surokar said. “She’s already on their ship. It’s climbing now into the upper atmosphere as we speak, but they won’t leave orbit until they’ve found the Neoton.”

“Can we just give them the couch?” El Cap asked.

“No!” Tindal cried.

“That’s the first reasonable thing that’s come out of your mouth,” Surokar said.

“I don’t understand why they want a sofa,” El Cap said.

“The sofa is a Neoton, a complex—”

“Everybody shush!” Tindal said. To the machine he said, “Are they going to torture Aunty Mads?”

“You’re clearly not listening,” Surokar said. “It’s probably already begun. They want to force her to find the Neoton and disable its defenses so they can have their way with it. But don’t worry. She won’t break. She’s a custom-grown, gene-fixed, neuro-optimized citizen of the Bloom.”

“A what of a what?” El Cap asked.

But Tindal had stopped listening. His eyes had filled with tears and his throat had closed.

El Cap put a hand on his back, but said nothing. He always knew the right thing not to say.

“We have to—to rescue her,” Tindal said through a hiccupping breath.

“The only thing we’re going to do,” Surokar said, “is follow the plan.”

Tindal stared at the machine. “She was talking to you.” He palmed the tears from his eyes. “When she said stick to the plan, I thought she was talking to me, but—”

“I was just behind you, ready to annihilate the Gadzik landing party where they stood. Unfortunately, Mad insisted that I get the Neoton and you two out of the area.”

“So you shoved me into the house,” Tindal said. “And then you went around and yanked the couch through the door and into the bus.”

“Point to the meat brain,” the machine said. That was something Aunty Mads was always saying: Point to you, point to me.

“But how did you move it?” El Cap said. “You don’t have any arms, or…”

“Magnets,” Surokar said.

“I knew it,” Tindal said.

The machine flashed red. “I don’t have time to explain field technology to you. See that sign for the park? Turn in there.”

The Flea Bus coasted down a steep, thickly wooded parkway, headed for the water. Tindal could not stop thinking about Aunty Mads. What were they doing to her? And how were Tindal and El Cap going to rescue her?

The machine told El Cap to keep going through the parking lot, onto one of the paved walkways. El Cap wasn’t happy about the motorized trespassing, or the angry looks from the park visitors. (Which—really? Tindal thought. An alien invasion in progress but you’re not going to cancel your picnic?)

They drove out onto a peninsula, where the walkway curved around the point like a keyhole. “Stop here,” Surokar said. “And don’t go anywhere.” The machine zipped through the passenger window and then scooted low over the blue-green water. Tindal, squinting through a windshield freckled with Gadzook blood, lost sight of it immediately.

A minute passed. The Flea Bus’s engine rumbled. Tindal sat back in his seat and contemplated the heaviness in his chest.

“So,” El Cap said. “Aunty Mads is an alien, too.”

“Checks out,” Tindal replied. He’d always thought she was kind of amazing. He just couldn’t understand why she’d let the Gadzooks capture her like that. I’m going to go take care of this she’d told him, but that had been another lie to make him feel better.

Together they stared out through the windshield.

“And another thing,” Tindal said. “Why is Sucky so, you know…”

“Homicidal?” El Cap offered.

“Mean.”

El Cap pulled at his beard. “We can dump and run, my dude. If they want the Neo-couch, let them have it.”

Tindal shook his head. “Aunty Mads asked us to take care of it. We really should have asked Sucky why they want it so bad.”

But El Cap’s attention had moved to the lake. A few hundred yards away, the surface of the water bulged, and a large something burped into the air and hung there—a blueish egg the size of a local bank, decorated with silvery fins. Water sheeted from it as if it were capped by an invisible umbrella.

Tindal and El Cap exchanged a look. Was this good news or bad news?

The egg glided toward them, over the surf, and hovered in front of the bus. The front of it folded open, exposing a gleaming white interior, and a small levitating robot.

“Don’t just sit there with your ape mouths agape!” Surokar shouted. “Let’s go!”

The remaining rear door of the Flea Bus flew open, and the couch levitated out.

Six minutes later they were in space.

Prologue
(Some time ago)

::So, we’re a hotel now?::

“Don’t be a grump. Hand me the teapot, would you?”

::It was bad enough when he was popping in all the time, and now he’s sleeping over?::

“Teapot?”

::Ask me in your real language. You’ve got a transmitter in your head. Use it::

“Fine, I’ll get it myself.”

::You’re going native, Mads. Going soft::

“Soft natives are the worst.”

::You’ve been separated from yourself too long. You’re stuck in that absurdly limited meat body, cut off from your true self. It’s as if—::

“Good riddance.”

::—you’re trying to forget who you are::

“No chance of that, unfortunately.”

::You turned your Neoton into a couch::

“An adorable, comfy couch.”

::I don’t know what’s worse, you speaking English all the time, or allowing some barely sentient Dickensian waif to drool all over the most advanced mind within a thousand light years::

“Dickensian? Why Surokar, you’ve been reading their books.”

::What choice do I have? We’ve been stuck here for decades. I’m bored silly::

“Also, Tindal’s not a waif. He’s just a child in a bad situation who could use a little help.”

::That’s the exact definition of waif::

“Point to the vacuum cleaner.”

::You’ve made him dependent on you. You never should have interfered in his life::

“That thug could have killed him. He’d already broken his arm. What would you have me do?”

::Call an ambulance—anonymously. Keep your head down. Don’t beat up on the locals. And certainly don’t bring children into the house and knit their fractures with technology that shouldn’t exist on this planet::

“I just wish I had the tech to do something about this terrible tea. Do you think I can grow something in the backyard that tastes at all like elanthus?”

::You’re changing the subject::

“What is the subject?”

::Your questionable decision-making. You seem to think you’re helping the boy when you’re doing the opposite::

“How so?”

::Filling his head with fables, for one. If you’re going to tell him about the war, at least tell him the truth::

“You want me to tell him what I am? What happened to keeping my head down?”

::I didn’t say tell him the facts, I said tell him the truth. He should know how scary the universe is. The world isn’t some fairy tale where he’s the hero and the good guys always win::

“He already knows that. He’s not even nine years old and he’s seen enough horror. You’ve seen his mother in action. No, let him have a happy ending or two.”

::The war’s not over, Mads. The Gadzik refuse to surrender::

“So you’ve been listening to the passive feed.”

::One of us has to. They’ve resorted to guerilla warfare, picking off small Bloom ships. But the general opinion is that they’re rearming for another major offensive::

“That’ll be somebody else’s fight.”

::What the Bloom needs is you::

“Do they still think I’m dead?”

::Define they. If you’re talking about your fellow ships, the consensus is that you’re gone. They can’t imagine you allowing yourself to be captured, or staying out of the war voluntarily, so…::

“That’s just a lack of imagination.”

::The Gadzik, however, are unconvinced. They’re still searching for you. They found the wreckage, but the dearth of Neoton-quality exotic materials raised suspicions::

“Hmph. I thought the fragments I left behind were quite convincing.”

::The Thirteenth Gadzik Instantiation runs on zeal, not logic::

“I was hoping…well. It doesn’t matter what I hoped.”

::The Most Luminous Mare wants to try you for war crimes::

“Sure she does. A lot of people in the Bloom would, too.”

::Nonsense. You did what you had to do. What no one else could do. And they still—::

“Here we go. Is it time for the monthly pitch meeting?”

::You should be rebuilding yourself. Right now you could have factory bots in close orbit to their little yellow sun, generating exotics for your hull. In a few years you could bootstrap yourself into fighting shape, better than before, even::

“I’m retired, Surokar.”

::Are you sure all of you is retired?::

“The Neoton’s staying dormant.”

::Why don’t you wake it up and ask it?::

“Watch yourself.”

::I apologize, but I’m worried that you’re not thinking clearly::

“See, that doesn’t sound apologetic.”

::What if you die? You’re tough, but one of these humans could get in a lucky shot::

“That’s why you’re here.”

::Please, Mads. If you become incapacitated, I can’t unlock the Neoton. And the Bloom needs everyone back in the fight::

“You want to stop being a ghost, be my guest. Take the shuttle. All I ask is that you don’t send a signal homeward until you’re well out of range of this planet.”

::Who are you hiding from—the Gadzik or your fellow ships?::

“Yes.”

::Ha. You disappoint me, Mads::

“Now who’s being funny?”

::You can’t hide forever::

“I can hide for a damn long— Hey, kiddo. What are you doing up?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Nobody.”

“BLEEP BLOOP.”

“Hi, Sucky!”

“Come on, little man. What do you need, a drink of water? Let’s get you taken care of, then tuck you back into Mr. Nappy.”

Six hours later they were still in space.

On any other day, Tindal thought, a trip on a spaceship would have been a mind-shattering turn of events. Today it ranked fourth, maybe fifth. The Earth, which had filled the big, curved window at the start of the trip, had steadily shrunk as they flew away, transitioning as smoothly as a special effect in a sci-fi movie, and not a Canadian movie, either, but an American blockbuster. Now their home planet had disappeared.

Tindal sat on Mr. Nappy, holding his head in his hands. The sofa was the most comfortable seat in the cabin and by far the most colorful. The rest of the ship, which Sucky said was not a ship at all but merely a shuttle, seemed to be one contiguous surface, with helpful bumps and recesses, like a walk-in shower. The color palette leaned heavily into the Ikea catalog, with lots of piney browns and crips whites.

El Capitan explored every chamber, and then finally came back to the main cabin bearing cups and plates loaded with various shapes.

“I found food,” he said.

“I made food,” Surokar corrected. The machine was floating above a perfectly blank countertop it insisted was the control panel. When they left the planet it was pretty braggy about how, thanks to its excellent manipulation of the baffle fields, the Gadzook ship hadn’t noticed their escape from the planet. But it had refused to answer any of their questions or even tell them where they were going, “in case they were captured.”

El Cap crouched down in front of Tindal. “You should eat, buddy.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on. This triangle one tastes like pumpkin.”

“He’ll eat eventually,” Surokar said. “We’ll be in here for a while.”

“How long?” El Cap asked.

“Twenty-two days, give or take.”

“What?” Tindal said. “You said it was a short trip!”

“I said it was a relatively short trip,” Surokar said.

“The Flea Bus is for sure going to get towed,” El Cap said.

“I wouldn’t worry about the vehicle,” Surokar said. “There’s a good chance the Gadzik will nuke Toronto, or set the atmosphere on fire, or snap a black hole into the center of your planet, destroying it completely. The bus, in other words, is toast.”

“Why would they do that?” Tindal yelled. “What did we do?”

“If Mads doesn’t tell them what they want to know—and she won’t—they’ll eventually start breaking things, just to see if they can get the Neoton to reveal itself.”

“But why do they want Mr. Nappy?” Tindal asked. “You can tell us now. We’re not going anywhere and the Gadzooks are behind us.”

The machine’s aura flickered through a variety of oranges and yellows, then settled into resigned, mottled brown. It floated out into the middle of the cabin.

“I’m only going to present this exposition once,” the robot said, “and I will not be taking questions.”

To understand our current situation, it said, you had to understand the Bloom—a vast yet thinly distributed civilization roughly nine thousand years old by the human timescale, yet a dewy-cheeked adolescent, galactically speaking. It wasn’t an empire or a republic or any kind of government Earthlings had conceived of, but more a kind of group project whose members were several trillion (mostly) humanoid organics, a smaller number of machine intelligences, and an even smaller number of Neotons. These last beings were mind-blowingly clever intelligences embodied in ships and orbitals who, Surokar explained, kept things running, as far as anyone could tell, because they seemed to enjoy it. Bloom citizens, organic and inorganic alike, tended to be ethical hedonists: self-consciously rational, skeptical, materialist, and all-around good sports. The society they created was a moneyless communistic utopia with infinite resources, without poverty, disease, or even discomfort, except as one chose to be uncomfortable, and many did, because it could be interesting. In the Bloom, everything mattered and nothing did.

“Sounds nice,” El Cap said.

“Don’t interrupt,” Surokar said. “But yes.”

So nice, in fact, that other galactic civilizations—like, say, the Thirteenth Gadzik Instantiation, an empire built on religious exceptionalism and divinely sanctioned expansionism—sometimes concluded that the Bloom was so decadent, so fat and happy, so soft that it practically begged to be dominated. They’d eye those vast Bloom ships and those giant orbitals chock-full of self-indulgent pleasure-seekers and think, That’s quite enough of that.

“But here’s the thing they all learn eventually, Earthlings…” Surokar’s aura flashed a devious orange. “If you fuck with the Bloom, the Bloom fucks back.”

In a society made up of hedonists, especially of the ethical flavor, the distasteful business of defending the flock from the galactic wolves fell to a certain class of citizen—eccentrics, oddities, high-minded sociopaths—with a talent for dirty tricks and an ability to handle special circumstances. Someone had to assassinate foreign heads of state, rig elections, subvert dynasties, demoralize the populace, instigate civil wars, seed doubt, instill fear, sow chaos, and generally undermine the Bloom’s enemies before they became a serious threat.

“So Bloom’s a communist utopia…” Tindal slowly said. “…that also does terrible things?”

“Life is complicated,” the machine said.

“And the Gadzik found out they were being messed with,” El Cap said.

“The origins of the conflict are murky.”

“So yes,” El Cap said.

The hot war with the Thirteenth Gadzik Instantiation began almost a hundred years ago, Surokar explained, when the Gadzik stormed an orbital on the fringes of the Bloom. Bad news all around. The Bloom tried to respond, but they were vastly outnumbered. The Gadzik had for years poured all available resources into the machinery of war. Their leader, the Most Luminous Mare, declared the Bloom to be evil, and once so declared, their religion allowed them no moral off-ramps, no way to deescalate. They built warship after warship. They conscripted every citizen who might serve. And then they swarmed us. They drowned us in their own blood. It was holy.

The Bloom’s Neotons, as brilliant as they were, couldn’t fathom this level of zealotry. They weren’t ready for total war. Most of its ships were also homes to its citizens, not warships. The Neotons reluctantly concluded that if they were to survive, the Bloom would have to become a different kind of society. They created new factory ships, which in turn birthed outrageously beweaponed, ridiculously fast warships. The Neotons chosen to inhabit them were tactically brilliant, morally flexible, and willing to do anything in defense of their fellow citizens. And then they were set loose upon the Gadzik.

“The ship I served on,” Surokar said, “was a Shredder-class corvette named I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad.”

Tindal sat up. “The what-what?”

“There were no organics on board,” the robot continued. “The high-G maneuvers alone would have turned them to pulp. The crew consisted of me and three other machines, but we had almost nothing to do. The Just Mad didn’t need us. It became the deadliest Bloom ship ever to enter the war. The Neoton was so efficient, so vicious, that it worried even the other warships.”

Tindal looked down at the couch, then slowly, slowly stood up.

“In the first three years of combat,” Surokar continued, “the Just Mad ripped apart twenty-two Gadzik warships and an untold number of lesser vehicles. It sliced open their hulls, peeled the sailors from their armor, yanked them into the vacuum of space, and left their flash-frozen corpses floating in its wake. And still—”

“Can we—?” Tindal asked.

“—still it wasn’t enough. The Gadzik sent ship after ship against us. They were so sure that their god was on their side. The Thirteenth Instantiation had never lost a war. Their home world had never been attacked by an alien species; the walls of their nest temples had never been breached. Generations of Gadzik children grew up assured of their divine status. Their victories were proof of its favor.”

“Can we back up a bit?” Tindal pleaded. All his clothes felt too tight. “The Neoton you’re talking about—that’s Mr. Nappy?”

“What you see is just the smallest part of it, its anchor in normal space. Almost all of its mass—millions of kilotons—exists in excession-space.”

“I thought it was heavy,” El Cap said.

Tindal said, “So Aunty Mads, she was part of the crew?”

“I’ve already told you,” the machine said, “there were no organics with us. The woman you know as Aunty Mads didn’t exist then. I grew her body in a vat when we reached Earth.”

“A vat?”

“She’s an avatar, Tindal. A biological expression of the ship. And yet, fundamentally, she is the ship.”

“No way,” Tindal said. “Aunty Mads wouldn’t do that stuff. I mean, come on…”

“You have no idea what the Just Mad is capable of,” the machine said. “The Gadzik didn’t, either.”

“What did she do to them?” El Cap asked. “I mean it. The ship.”

Did she hurt little kids? Tindal thought.

The robot hesitated. “All that matters is what’s happening now,” it said finally. “We’re going to crawl our way back to Bloom space and install this dormant mind in a new body. Hopefully its fellow Neotons will figure out how to wake it up.”

“Mr. Nappy is sleeping?” Tindal asked.

“Sleeper couch,” El Cap said, nodding.

“It’s in lockdown mode,” Surokar said. “Bare minimum functions, automatic defenses. Why do you think Mads forced you into moving it when the Gadzik showed up? She knew it would—uh oh.” The machine zipped back to the blank console.

El Cap frowned at Tindal, then looked back at the robot. “Uh oh?”

Surokar’s lights flashed orange and red. “They found us. That’s not possible.”

“Who found us?” Tindal asked. “The Gadzooks?”

“GET ON THE NEOTON!” Surokar’s voice seemed to blast from every surface at once, the volume set to 1986 Metallica. “THE COUCH!”

Tindal, standing on the far side of the room, was paralyzed. Settling into Mr. Nappy seemed like exactly the opposite of the appropriate thing to do, namely running and panicking.

“NOW!”

Tindal was sent flying. He slammed into the sofa’s deep cushions, and a moment later El Cap landed beside him. This telekinesis thing, Tindal thought, was never not going to be terrible.

Surokar hovered in front of them. “Whatever you do—”

A brilliant beam of light sliced through the hull, and the robot exploded into shrapnel.

“SUCKY!” Tindal screamed.

The beam swung back toward the couch and the world went white. Tindal squinted against the glare. It was the same flash that had surrounded the Flea Bus when the Gadzooks had shot them.

Then the glare vanished, and the shuttle was gone. No, not gone; shattered. The pieces spun furiously away from them into the dark. The complete lack of sound was frightening.

“You’re bleeding,” El Cap said.

Tindal put a hand to his ear and his fingers came away bloody. Am I deaf now? he thought. Then he remembered that El Cap had just spoken to him. Somehow they were still breathing, still alive—while in naked space, on a couch.

Tindal pulled up his legs and gripped his knees.

Mr. Nappy slowly tumbled, showing them new angles on the glittering destruction racing away from them. And then suddenly the Gadzook ship was above them like a new planet.

Afterword

I’m so sorry, Tindal. Why am I putting you through this? Why am I telling this story?

On the bookcase next to my writing desk is a shelf filled entirely with the works of Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks—one man with two names. I’ve read every book he’s written, except one. He died in 2013.

I never got to meet him. He was a drinker, an activist, a tale-teller, and a famous maniac. I’ve met friends of his and heard stories secondhand, like the one about the night he crashed his Porsche, or the night he climbed the outside of the hotel at the Brighton Worldcon. I would have loved to have had a whiskey with him and heard him tell these stories in person.

But I don’t think I’d have had the courage to tell him how much his books meant to me. I certainly wouldn’t have told him that I so admired his work that my wife and I named our son after him. That’s a little too stalker-y.

When I was in college, a friend who knew I wanted to be a writer handed me Banks’s first novel, The Wasp Factory,and said, I think you’re gonna like this. Oh, I did, Tindal.It lit me up. I couldn’t believe how daring and strange it was. And then, a few years later, I read Consider Phlebas, the first of his space operas about a society called the Culture. It was as if someone had taken all the musty space empires from Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov I’d absorbed over the years and spun them into jazz. I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how to write like that. Where did he learn to do such things?[*]

His books don’t exist in your world, Tindal, so a few details: the Culture novels are science fiction, set in a post-scarcity communistic utopia spread thinly over the galaxy, and kept running by powerful AIs called Minds, for the benefit of humanoid and machine citizens. Maybe that kind of thing sounds familiar to you, now. I changed their names for both artistic and legal reasons.

If Banks were alive I wouldn’t have written this story. I wouldn’t have needed to. But as I type this, it’s been almost exactly ten years since he died of gallbladder cancer. Cancer. All those sportscars he drove fast around the switchbacks of Scotland, and the universe couldn’t see fit to let him die in a fiery crash, at the age of ninety-eight? He was robbed of a suitable death, and decades of life, and we were robbed of the many books he’d yet to write.

I’m sorry, Tindal. Was this too sentimental? This story was supposed to be a lark. A bit of fun to pay homage to my favorite writer. But here’s this mopey afterword, jammed into the middle of the text. And the rest of the story gets darker than I intended. But that seems appropriate, too. Banks never shied away from violence and tragedy. He wrote a book called Against a Dark Background which lives up to the title. And then there’s the appalling twist in Use of Weapons, or the regretful, war-shaken Mind at the heart of his saddest book, Look to Windward.

The one existing novel of his that I haven’t read is The Quarry—the last one he wrote. It’s sitting right there, a few feet from my desk. I may not be able to live in a utopia, but I can make sure I live in a world where there’s one more Iain Banks book waiting for me.

Okay, enough of this. But before we resume, I just want to say, Tindal, that I’m sorry about what happened to Aunty Mads. I would have changed it if I could.

Tindal was too sad to fully take pleasure in the fact that he was still alive. Hours ago the Gadzook ship had slurped up the couch out of space, Tindal and El Cap still on it, and deposited them in its very large, very metallic belly. No one came to greet them and/or torture them.

Mr. Nappy seemed to be floating a foot or so off the floor. Even if Tindal had been brave enough to hop off the couch (which he wasn’t), he wouldn’t have been able to. The sofa was surrounded by a hard, invisible bubble. El Cap had helpfully mapped out the contours of this barrier with his hands, standing up on the cushions, reaching down below their feet. They were trapped.

Sometime later, a distant hatch opened, and half a dozen Gadzooks wheeled in a large gun-like device, Kirby-esque in bulk and detail, with a gaping mouth that they aimed at the couch. It looked a lot like the way Tindal had imagined the omni-cannon.

After much fussing with nobs and levers, the Gadzooks fired. The noise was tremendous. Tindal shouted, of course. But the beam struck the couch’s bubble, briefly turning the world white, and then…nothing. Tindal and El Cap and Mr. Nappy were unscathed.

One of the Gadzooks cantered forward, waved its tentacles about, and clip-clopped back to the machine. The crew made several adjustments to the device and fired again.

This went on for quite some time. Eventually, however, the marines gave up. They pushed the cannon out of the way and marched out.

Tindal curled up in a ball at one end of the couch. The inside of his right ear still stung as if it had been jabbed with a metal Q-tip, but at least he’d stopped bleeding. He was thirsty and also hungry. If he’d known what was coming, he thought, he would have eaten El Cap’s pumpkin triangle. Heck, he would have scoured his apartment for his Tim Hortons red velvet cookie!

“So are they just going to starve us to death?” he complained.

“Hard to say,” El Cap answered. He was sitting upright, his feet resting on the bubble.

Maybe Sucky was the lucky one, Tindal thought. The machine had been exploded instantly, presumably without pain.

El Cap tapped Tindal on the shoulder. More Gadzooks had entered the metal belly, just four of them this time. One of them carried what looked like a rolled-up rug, and another gripped a long golden staff.

The Gadzook with the staff marched forward, reared back, and butted its head against the forcefield. Then again. Each strike made a decorous thump. Did he think he’d succeed where the omni-cannon had failed? Or was this some kind of ritual?

“I’m sorry,” Tindal said to the alien. “We can’t turn it off.”

The Gadzook’s tentacles flexed, and its metal head popped off. Correction, it’s metal helmet. The face inside was long and equine, deeply furred. Aunty Mads’s stories had not prepared him for that. Nubby, fingerlike antlers protruded from its skull. It looked like Bambi, though the eye stalks were a little alarming. Each pupil was glossy black.

The Gadzook smacked the bottom of the staff against the ground, and the image of another Gadzook appeared in front of it. A hologram! This remote-Gadzook was unarmored and unclothed, but not naked: it was covered in yellow-white fur that had been blow-dried into a luscious shag. Its many antlers were chubby and drooping.

Tindal recognized the creature. It could be none other than the Luminous Gadzook.

The Luminous made a noise, a kind of gentle bleat. The Gadzook holding the carpet roll dumped his burden onto the ground. The sack unrolled partially, and a pale human arm extended out of it.

“Aunty Mads?” Tindal said.

The Luminous bleated more loudly. Then again.

The other three marines crouched low, and two of them removed their helmets. They were all gorgeous. “Do you speak Gadzook?” El Cap asked Tindal.

From the floor came a faint laugh. Tindal leaned over the edge of the cushion and looked down. The hand pushed aside the cloth. It was Aunty Mads. Her face was misshapen by bruises. Her hair was matted with blood.

“Gadzooks,” she said. “Heh.” A few teeth were missing from her smile.

“What did they do to you?” Tindal asked, though of course he could see it on her face.

One of the marines bleated forcefully. Mads ignored him. “My legs aren’t working at the moment,” she said. “But otherwise fine. I turned off my pain receptors an hour ago.” She pushed herself onto one elbow. “Where’s Surokar?”

“Umm…”

Don’t say I’m alive.

Tindal yelped. The voice, which sounded a lot like the robot, had come from inside his head. “You’re alive?”

Aunty Mads’s eyes narrowed.

What did I just say? Tindal’s jaw vibrated with each syllable.

“They blew him up,” El Cap explained to Aunty Mads. “We’re sorry.”

“Well damn,” she answered. After a pause she said, “I never meant for you boys to be here. I’ll try to get you out of this mess.”

The marine lunged forward and kicked with a front leg. Aunty Mads’s head snapped back. Tindal jumped from the couch and smacked the invisible barrier. “Leave her alone!” he shouted.

Calm down, Surokar said.

Now the Luminous was bleating at Aunty Mads, and she was answering him in some kind of non-bleat, yet non-English language.

Tindal sat down again and whispered, “How are you alive? Where are you?”

I’m in your ear canal. When the G’s attacked I detached my core and hid inside you.

“Ew.”

I’m not happy about it either.

“What do we do?”

First, shut up. They can understand you.

Tindal ducked his chin and pretended to wipe at his mouth. Very quietly he said, “They know English?”

Please. All they had to do was sample the planet’s airwaves for five seconds.

“Can you translate what they’re saying, for me?”

You insult me.

“So yes?”

Surokar buzzed something like a sigh. The Most Luminous Mare thinks you and El Capitan are operatives who can disable the Neoton field. Mads is trying to explain that you’re just dupes—local yokels—who were accidently enveloped when the Neoton’s defenses kicked in.

Aunty Mads spat a glob of blood but then continued to talk in that strange language.

I don’t think the Luminous believes her, Surokar vibrated. She says someone on Earth alerted the Gadzik to the Neoton’s location.

“What?”

Shush. And that someone signaled them a second time when the shuttle was escaping. That’s how they found us.

“But—”

Aunty Mads seemed angry now. “It wasn’t the humanoids,” she said in English. Her voice was slurred. “It was the fucking machine.” The Luminous made a querying noise. “Because it wanted me back in the war,” Aunty Mads said. “It wanted to force my fucking hand.”

The Luminous Mare made noises that Tindal interpreted as laughter, the mean girl kind.

Tindal rubbed at his jaw to disguise the next question. “You betrayed Aunty Mads?” he whispered to Surokar.

Don’t be ridiculous.

“Then what is she talking about?” Tindal whispered. He needed to think this through.

I didn’t tell the Gadzik where we were. They tried to destroy me, remember? I’m trying to rescue you, meat brain.

“Point,” Tindal said.

El Cap leaned close. “Who are you talking to? Are you on Bluetooth?”

“Tooth maybe?” Tindal realized he could talk to Surokar by talking aloud to El Cap. “How are you going to rescue us?”

El Cap said, “I don’t know, buddy.”

I can’t do much in this state, the machine answered, but if the field went down, I could take out these guards.

“Great!”

Not great. The Neoton senses it’s inside an enemy ship, so the field will stay on. Only Mads can override its defense protocols, but she won’t do that, because she’s trying to keep you fragiles alive.

Aunty Mads had levered herself onto one elbow, talking urgently to the Luminous. Her voice sounded garbled, distorted by her injuries. Working through the damage, Tindal thought, and working her own plan. But the Luminous was angrily bleating back at her, interrupting.

“What are they saying?” Tindal asked.

“No idea,” El Cap said.

I’m not translating this.

“What? Why not?” Tindal said.

You don’t need to know what the Gadzik think of the Just Mad. All you need to know is that the ship did what it thought was necessary.

“But—”

This isn’t one of her bedtime stories, Tindal.

Tindal fell back against the cushions. Aunty Mads had stopped speaking, and the hologram was shouting at her now. The marines’ tendrils flicked back and forth, agitated.

It ought to be one of her stories, Tindal thought. That’s all he wanted, really. He wanted to be back in Aunty Mads’s house, sitting on this ridiculously comfortable couch, listening to her explain how everything work out.

The marine still wearing a helmet stepped forward and pressed a gun-tendril against Aunty Mads’s forehead.

“Hey!” Tindal shouted. He stood up on the cushions and raised his hands. “Gad—ziks!” he said. Words were coming out but his brain was struggling to keep up. “My name is Tindopheles! And I can give you what you want!” The Luminous hologram halted mid-bleat. The marine holding the staff turned it, and the hologram looked at him.

Tindal thought, What do they want?

“Hey buddy,” El Cap said soothingly. “Maybe don’t antagonize the space alpaca?”

And then the answer came to him. Tindal looked into the furred face of the Luminous Mare and said, “I can turn off the Neoton’s defense field.”

“What are you doing?” Aunty Mads asked softly. Her left eye had started to swell shut, the result of that Gadzik hoof.

Tindal looked down at her. He put on a smile that he hoped was confident. “What Tindopheles always does,” he said. “Talk fast.” And trick the Gadzooks, he thought, then escape with the prince and steal their magical whatsit.

You’re going to get us all killed.

“You can have the Neoton,” he told the Luminous, ignoring the tiny vacuum cleaner. “Blow it up if you want. Whatever it did, it probably deserved it. All I ask is that you allow me and my fellow avatar to return to Earth.”

“Um…” El Cap said.

“Oh, and my loyal captain. Him too.”

The Luminous bleated. And bleated some more.

“Sucky?” Tindal said under his breath.

Fine. He says only the avatar can deactivate the field. He knows how Bloom ships work.

“Yes,” Tindal said. “Right.” His heart was beating fast. What would Tindopheles do?

They’re tired of this. They’re going to kill her.

“Wait!” Tindal said. “Who said there was just one avatar?”

The Luminous snorted.

“You want me to prove it?” Tindal raised a fist. “The field’s going off in one…” He pointed. “Two…” He locked eyes with Aunty Mads. Or rather, eye. Her left one had completely closed, now. But even battered and bruised, Tindal thought, she was beautiful. “Three?”

He stepped off the cushion—and onto the floor. The bubble had disappeared.

The Luminous hologram gazed down at him with eyes like wet river stones. It bleated something, and one of the marines nodded.

Their dampener’s on. The field can’t come back on while we’re inside their ship.

Tindal took a breath. Held it.

The Luminous Mare leaned toward Tindal. Up close the hologram was very high-res, almost solid looking. It made a soft sound.

“What did she say?” Tindal asked.

Kill them all.

The next sound Tindal heard was a loud pop. “Ow!” He clapped a hand over his ear.

The helmeted marine whose gun had been aimed at Aunty Mads suddenly began to shake its head back and forth. Its front knees folded, and then it collapsed sideways.

A second marine bowed and tried to grab its helmet with its antlers. A hole blossomed in its neck. Dark blood—definitely not motor oil—jetted from it.

The marine holding the staff made an alarmed noise, and the Luminous vanished. Tindal grabbed the staff. The Gadzik shook it violently, trying to pull it free, but Tindal held on like a desperate Chihuahua. “Little help!” Tindal called. “Little help!”

“Dude,” El Cap said. Two of the Gadzik’s eye tendrils swung toward the big man, just in time to see a huge fist smash into its oblong face. The creature stumbled backward, tripped over its back feet, and flopped to the ground, unconscious. “Sorry,” El Cap said, sincerely.

Tindal looked around. While they’d been busy with the staff guy, Surokar had knife-missiled through the fourth marine. They were unguarded, for now.

Tindal crouched next to Aunty Mads, still holding the golden staff. “Are you okay?”

“Not great.” Her mouth barely moved.

“I got their magic stick!”

“Good job, kiddo.”

El Cap knelt beside her. He unfolded part of the wrap that had covered her. Her clothes from belly to thighs were damp with blood. Tindal jerked back, and then was immediately ashamed of his reaction.

“Run,” she said.

A fly buzzed in front of Tindal’s eyeball. “Get her onto the couch.” Surokar’s voice was surprisingly audible.

“Leave me,” Aunty Mads said.

“Not gonna happen,” El Cap said. He folded the cloth over her, then carefully worked his hands under her and lifted, then carried her to the couch, which was still hovering above the floor.

“Place her head at the far end,” Surokar said. “Touching the arm.”

Tindal scooted forward to straighten her legs. “Now what? How do we get out of here?”

“Look twenty degrees left,” Surokar said. “Other left. See that big door? There’s a ship on the other side. I’ll fly ahead and get the door open.”

Tindal set the golden staff alongside Aunty Mads, then he and El Cap started to push the couch like a couple of bobsledders. Mr. Nappy had a lot of mass but once it got in motion it really wanted to remain in motion. Almost immediately they were moving so fast that Tindal was struggling to keep his hands on the couch.

They’d crossed the length of two (Canadian) football fields when Tindal heard a ruckus behind them. Far away, a herd of Gadzooks had entered the belly, and were charging toward them; hooves clattered on the metal floor. And the thing about Gadzooks, Tindal had learned, was that they could run fast.

“Uh…” Tindal suggested.

“Yup,” El Cap agreed. They pushed faster. Some kind of energy beam flashed to their right. Then another. The Gadzooks bleated and wailed. Then they were ten meters from the huge metal door—which was still, regrettably, closed. El Cap pulled back on the couch and tried to lock his legs but the couch slammed into the door. Aunty Mads’s shoulders came up and fell back again. She made no noise. “I’m so sorry!” El Cap said.

“Surokar?” Tindal’s voice had climbed into a panicky register. He couldn’t see the tiny robot. Energy beams scorched the door and the wall around it.

“Working on it,” Surokar said, from somewhere. The Gadzik herd thundered toward them.

Tindal crouched beside Aunty Mads. Her eyes were closed. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“Tell it I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes remained closed.

“Who? Surokar?”

“I lied.”

About what? Tindal wondered. But that wasn’t important now. He touched her shoulder and hoped that hadn’t hurt her. “You can apologize when we get home.”

The huge door suddenly slid open. On the other side was a wide hangar, with one end open to space. Sitting on the floor were several large, elaborate geometric structures with many ramps leading into them, like fancy gift boxes with their flaps down.

“Those look like spaceships to me,” El Cap said. “Let’s go!” He shoved the couch through the door. Tindal scrambled to his feet and followed. The Gadzik herd was closing on them.

“Shut the door!” Tindal shouted, hoping Surokar would obey him. El Cap pushed toward the nearest ship.

“STOP,” Surokar said. Tindal didn’t know where the robot was.

Gadzik marines began to spill out of the ships. They rushed down the ramps, helmet tendrils swiveling to aim in their direction. But behind them the herd had reached the door.

Tindal grabbed the golden staff and shook it at them. “Stay back! I have your stick!”

The miniscule robot appeared in Tindal’s eyeline, hovering just in front of Aunty Mads’s face. “I’ll kill as many as I can, Mads. I’m sorry. For all of you.”

Aunty Mads opened her eyes. “Morris?” El Cap leaned close. “Pick me up.”

“Ma’am?”

“Please.”

El Cap stooped and lifted her from the couch. The Gadzik formed a circle around them. Tindal backed up until he was standing beside them.

“Hold your breath,” Aunty Mads said.

“Why?” Tindal asked. “What’s happening?”

“I’m about to wake up.”

Many things happened at once. A thundercrack sounded above them. The light shifted. And Gadzik marines began to scream.

Scores of meters overhead, the ceiling had peeled back, opening the hangar to raw space. The wind roared. And Mr. Nappy suddenly disassembled: cushions went flying, the back split and cartwheeled away, an inner spring popped free. A blob of chrome rose up out of the body of the couch, drifting toward the hole in the roof—and then abruptly accelerated.

Aunty Mads said something he didn’t quite catch. It sounded like, “There I am.”

Out there, beyond the rip in the hangar roof: Wings. Black wings, all in motion, joined into an angular, furious shape. Its surface swirled with light, like a galaxy in motion. Those starry loops and whorls, Tindal thought, were so familiar.

Some of the Gadziks fired their head cannons at it. Almost instantly those marines came apart; their armor was ripped from the furred bodies, their legs were pulled from torsos. Some burst into flame. Others ran. One of them stumbled and vanished in light before it hit the ground. Marines were yanked up, into space.

And then Tindal’s feet left the floor. He lost his grip on El Cap and was sucked upward, so fast, so fast—

—and then he was on all fours, heaving, spilling his guts onto a glass floor. It went on for a while. Tindal was surprised; he didn’t think he had anything left in his stomach. Then he sat back, and hidden pores in the surface opened, and the vomit vanished. Magic.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked around. The walls were also dark, nearly opaque. “Hello?”

A section of the wall slid away, revealing a corridor. He walked through. “Aunty Mads?” he called. “Surokar?”

He kept walking. The wall to his left became a window. He was in space (again), but not empty space: he was looking down on a scattering of bright shards, like a plate shattered on black tile. It had to be the remains of the Gadzik ship.

He moved through sliding panes until he found himself in a wide room. El Capitan was kneeling on the floor. Aunty Mads lay beside him, unmoving. El Cap looked up with a stunned expression.

Tindal’s body convulsed. He cried out and fell to his knees. He couldn’t look at Aunty Mads’s body.

El Cap came to him. “It’s okay, buddy.” His big arm went around him. “It’s okay.”

But it was not okay. When he could control his breath he pushed El Cap off him and stood, suddenly furious. “Hey!” he yelled at the ceiling. “Are you listening?”

“Tindal…” El Cap said worriedly.

“Mr. Nappy! Where the hell are you?”

“Behind you.”

Tindal turned. A man sat in a chair, leaning forward, arms folded over knees. His hair was black with a streak of gray. His cheekbones were fantastic. “Though, not exactly. You know, hologram.”

“Where’s Surokar?” Tindal asked.

“Being repaired,” the ship said. “It’s a miracle that old machine survived.”

“What about Aunty Mads?” Tindal said. “What about her?”

The ship—this hologram of the ship, whatever it was—shook its head. “She wasn’t a machine, Tindal. You can’t just reboot her.”

Tindal marched toward him. “She took care of you, right? Kept you hidden, kept you safe. Then she built you a new body.”

“New and improved.”

“So do the same for her. Bring her back.”

“Me, her…it’s a little more complicated than that.” He leaned back in his chair, though Tindal wasn’t sure if the chair was a hologram, too. “I like you, Tindal. I have her memories back with me now. But I also know you from all those nights you were sleeping on top of my casing. Electrical activity leaks through. Maybe our dreams even mingled.”

So, some part of Mr. Nappy had always been awake. “You’re the one who betrayed her,” Tindal said. “You told the Gadzik you were on Earth.”

The ship nodded. “The part of me that was dreaming dreamed of escape. And, well, vengeance.”

“So yes.”

He laughed. “I did manage to leak a signal I thought they’d pick up.”

“And when we escaped with Surokar, you told them where we were.”

“I needed my avatar to unlock me,” the ship admitted. “I never anticipated that a part of me would be so hesitant to wake up the rest of me, but life is full of surprises.” He squinted. “I’m also a little surprised you’ve worked this all out. I imagine a lot of people underestimate you.”

“Don’t do that. Try to be nice to me. You’re not Aunty Mads.”

“Perhaps not. I will, however, respect my former self’s wishes.” The ship straightened in his chair. “You’re safe, Tindal. You, El Cap, everyone on your planet. The Gadzik will never return. I’ll make sure they won’t even be able to approach this planet again.”

“You’re going after them.”

“Oh yes.”

Tindal could hear the eagerness in the ship’s voice. “You’re nothing like her,” he said.

“It’s okay if you think that.”

“Take us home,” Tindal said. “And Aunty Mads too.”

Appropriately Placed Epilogue
(five weeks later)

Tindal was kneeling in the backyard, doing some late-season planting, when the Flea Bus rumbled in. El Cap ambled over carrying two grocery sacks and nodded at the flowers. “They look nice,” he said. “Strange but nice.”

A good description. The plants were spiky with a purplish bulb shaped like a tiny three-fingered hand. Tindal had no idea if they were in some early stage or if they’d always look like this. Time would tell. He just wanted this mound of dirt to be covered with plants, and soon, so no one would come poking around.

“Did you bring me a surprise?” Tindal asked.

“It’s not a surprise if I always do it.”

“Aw.”

El Cap tilted one of the grocery sacks so Tindal could pluck out the red Tim Hortons bag. “My favorite! You’re the best!”

They went into the house, unloaded the groceries. El Cap showed him a foil packet of something that definitely hadn’t come from Safeway. “I think this is the stuff?” El Cap said. “My guy was pretty sure.”

“I’ll check.” Tindal carried the packet and the Tim Hortons bag into the half-empty living room and then downstairs, into the basement. The lab door opened for him automatically, which was fortunate, because his hands were full.

In the middle of the bright, humming room, Surokar hovered above a conglomeration of equipment. The robot’s new body was a bit sleeker than his original one, and shinier. It had turned down Tindal’s offer to paint on racing stripes.

Tindal showed him the foil packet. “Are these the proteins you ordered?”

The machine drifted forward as if it couldn’t read the label from across the room. “We’ll see.” The package was plucked from his hand and levitated to a high shelf.

Tindal walked to the huge glass tube set in the floor and leaned over. Inside floated a pale body and an equally pale face defined by architectural-quality cheekbones. The skull bristled with new black hair.

“How much longer?” Tindal asked.

“Stop asking me,” Surokar said. “She’ll be done when she’s done.”

“And she’ll remember me?”

The robot sighed. It had assured him, repeatedly, that Aunty Mads would remember everything, right up to the moment she got off the couch and the I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad ripped through the Gadzik hangar. Her latest backup had finished just in time.

Tindal was glad she wouldn’t remember her death. Having memories of Gadzik torture was bad enough.

He pulled up a crate and opened the Tim Hortons bag. And there she was: a red velvet beauty with cream cheese filling. He bit down and groaned with pleasure. It was still warm.

“Do you have to do that in front of me?” Surokar said.

“What?” Bits of red crust tried to escape down his chin but he caught them in his palm and popped them into his mouth. Even the crumbs were delicious.

“I was thinking,” Tindal said, chewing.

“I warned you about that.”

“Maybe we should get a new couch.”

[*]One of Banks’s early influences was the novel Lanark, by his fellow Scot Alasdair Gray. Gray placed the epilogue of the novel four chapters from the end, and in it, the author of Lanark, calling himself Nastler, directly addresses the main character, telling him that the epilogue is placed where it is because “it’s too important to go [at the end]…it lets me utter some fine sentiments which I could hardly trust to a mere character.” Gray also placed in the epilogue an “Index of Plagiarisms,” a list of influences and outright literary thefts he used to write the book. Which reminds me: all information about Banks and Lanark I lifted from The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks, A Critical Introduction, by Simone Caroti.

“I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe” copyright © 2024 by Daryl Gregory
Art copyright © 2025 by Johnny Dombrowski

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I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe

Daryl Gregory

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I’m Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe

Daryl Gregory

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