Cody Sky Episode 1-The Night

To be alive, all that Cody needed was to feel the wind against his face as he meditated. The grass beneath him was cool. The sky above him was empty. The Sky inside him was full. The world around him was serene. He opened his eyes after ten minutes and watched a troop of black helicopters fly overhead, overlapped by twittering birds. The dog in the next yard had been barking for the last ten minutes, at the yeowling cats another yard down. Cody smiled and stood calmly as his own dog, Mr. T, bounded up slobberingly. As he reached down to ruffle the fur atop the dog’s head with his right hand, he reached up to his own curly-brown afro with his left. He had taken some flak from his classmates about being a white boy with an Afro, but as he couldn’t help his hair style very much he ignored them. Coming down from his spiritual high from the meditation, he began to think about how he got Mr. T.
Cody had always been a smart kid. When he was one year old, he was walking and talking. At eighteen months he was reading. At two years, he had realized that his skin was white, but other kids had tan, brown, and black skin, and that didn’t matter. At three, he understood the basics of death. At four, he had read The Federalist Papers, the Communist Manifesto, and Aristotle’s Politics. At five, he understood the basics of most of the sciences, in particular Newtonian physics, evolutionary theory, and psychology. At six, he realized that all of those, as well as the Christianity his parents had enforced upon him, were a crock.
His early lessons occured over time, albeit quickly. His lesson at the age of six, however, came almost literally overnight. For months prior, he had wanted a dog. He had initially tried asking his parents for one. Afraid of what he would do to the dog with his massive intelligence, they wouldn’t get him one, under the pretense of him not being ready. After a week of this progression, he had begun scheming to determine ways in which he could coerce them into getting him a dog. After three weeks and two faked Lassie-Timmy-Well situations, He gave up on coercing them. Instead he began to go about figuring out how he could obtain a dog on his own. But he didn’t know how to. It was one thing he couldn’t figure out. His grandparent seemed like good candidates-but he needed them to get him that book about Freud. He had no plots or schemes to heist one himself. So he returned to trying to convince his parents to get him a dog.
The first thing he tried in this round of attempts was logical discourse. That had no effect beyond confusing them. He moved on to the first staple of manipulative children and girlfriends everywhere: the puppy-dog eyes. This served only to creep his parents out, as someone that intelligent should not have puppy dog eyes. It seemed to them, as it would seem to most rational people, that it when against the very nature of the universe. Cody metaphorically cursed under his breath and moved on to the classic technique of Tantrums. For over a week, whenever he encountered his parents he’d begin by calmly asking them if he could have a dog. When they inevitably said no, before they could begin to explain he began wailing, screaming, kicking, and crying. After a couple of days of this technique, his parents learned to ignore him. This was even worse than when he just couldn’t have a dog. So he stopped the tantrum throwing after 9 days. He spent a couple of days in silence, trying to decide what to do next. Instead, he got distracted by a desire to name his future dog. Even child geniuses are still children.
“Maybe I’ll name him Killer,” He said to himself. In his mind, of course-he had unintentionally taken a vow of silence when his parents had denied his tantrums. “Nah, that’s stupid. How about Sub-Zero? Or Spot? Fluffy is a dumb name. Maybe Damien? Or Spike? Peter? Paul? If it’s a girl I could call her Mary-No, dogs aren’t supposed to be girls! Oh, oh, I know! I’ll name him Dog!”
That thought-sequence took him two entire days to think out. Mostly because in between nearly every thought, he tried to convince himself to stop thinking of what to name his dog and go back to thinking about how he could get a job.
After another month of various insignificant and unsuccessful campaigns, he still hadn’t resigned himself to his dogless fate. He had made up his mind to call the dog Dog, and after those two days, he had barely given that matter any more thought.
Around this month-later point was his last day of First Grade. That was about two months before his seventh birthday, and five days before he finally got a dog. Cody Sky lived in the general proximity of a high school known as George Custer Memorial High. Their school year ended only four days after his elementary school did. The high school year had been supposed to run for another two weeks, but a series of gruesome murders that had begun on the first day of school had finally convinced the administration to shut down George Custer. Parents around the city of Moda Garden-where Cody lived-were outraged by how long the school had stayed open. The killer had not yet been caught. A large number of people, in particular students at the school, didn’t think that there was a murderer as such, as the killings were not consistent with each other, and a large number of them didn’t even seem physically possible. Cody knew all of this because he read the newspapers frequently, looking for things that hadn’t been explained. He then clipped them out and put them into a folder, hoping someday to explain every single one of them. His dream job was to be a researcher. Most children his age who wanted to learn more about the world wanted to be scientists; even that number in his age group was relatively small. But Cody? He wanted to sit with books, magazines, newspapers, and the internet, compiling a sufficient explanation and correlation for all events in the world.
Which is why that fifth night after his school got out for summer, the first night after George Custer Memorial High got out for summer, Cody got excited when the car driven by his father and containing himself, his mother, and his six-year-old cousin Mark passed by George Custer Memorial High. At his insistence, his parents-fed up now with trying to ignore him, just as they had become fed up before with trying to pay attention to him-slowed down as they passed. Cody noticed a number of cars in the parking lot. There was a light on in one of the windows, but he couldn’t quite identify the color of the light. It was from that light’s glow-the moon was new and residing beneath the horizon-that Cody noted the presence of two people in the parking lot. One of them seemed to be motioning hurriedly to the other, as the other stood where it was. A van squealed into the parking lot and out jumped two dark figures. One went to the hesitant one and began motioning to her. Cody presumed that the motions were accompanied by words-but he didn’t have time to try to figure out what they were saying, as the second dark figure pulled out something that looked like a narrow cylinder and violently slammed it against the head of the second figure that had originally been there. The hesitant one yelped and began running. The darkened figures followed her as she came towards the car that Cody was in. Cody watched her mystified as his father began to press the gas. She came beneath a street lamp and looked into the car-right into Cody’s eyes. He looked back into hers; they were green and terrified. She looked to be about eighteen, and, had Cody been older, he knew that he would have considered her beautiful. Time seemed to freeze right there-they had a connection, but Cody didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t think that she did either.
The car gunned off just as the darkened figures reached the girl. Cody tried to turn to watch what happened to her, but he didn’t see it in full. The car turned a corner just as the darkened figures began to catch up to her.
“Woah,” Mark said very simply.
“We need to get to a phone,” Cody’s father said. He angled the car towards the nearby parking lot of an S-Mart, wherein payphones were prevalent and surprisingly well maintained. He parked near the front and ran to the phone. As he picked it up, a terrible sound wracked the air. It was like a million screeches from all different sorts of animals, tires, and things rubbed against chalkboards, in combination with the explosions of uncountable bombs of unknown nature, with an undercurrent of the ghastly hymns of an infinite number of unearthly deities. As the sound began, Cody was the only one who didn’t cover his ears. He turned as quickly as he could to see an eruption of multi-colored light burst from just about where George Custer Memorial High would have been. Cody unbuckled his seatbelt and opened his door, then ran off. The following week, his parents would have the car fitted with child safety locks, which would only make it slightly more difficult for Cody to do such a thing. His cousin Mark, being the only one who had enough sense to pay as much attention to Codya s to his own pain, unbuckled his own seatbelt, opened his own door, and pursued Cody.
Within moments the two of them were just across the street from the high school, which was now not so much a high school as a glowing mass of multi-colored light, including some colors that had never occurred to Cody or Mark. The light seemed to be essentially a dome around the school that didn’t-Cody didn’t quite understand this-allow light to escape. From its top seemed to come a towering pillar that went farther than either of the children could comprehend, and yet didn’t go any farther than the top of the dome. Cody didn’t understand that either. Nor did Mark.
Cody wanted to run up to the dome, but he managed to resist. He could tell that it was dangerous, in part from the continuation of the sound of eruptions, screeches, and hymns. A military jeep swung into the parking lot all of a sudden. As it did, Cody noticed that the van was gone, but the rest of the cars that had been there still were. Out of the jeep came an old looking man, whose skin began to shine as he cursed loudly. It was a language that neither Cody nor Mark recognized, and Cody suspected that few people on Earth would recognize it. Both of them, though, knew somehow that the man was cursing. The man began to run towards the dome of light, and as he did his skin turned silvery and he stopped looking quite so much like a man. He seemed to be almost a silvery string as he passed through it. As he did, arcs of light began shooting out of it, twisting through the air and striking things. The things it struck vanished, or were transformed. One of them struck nothing and produced, just beyond the military jeep, what looked like a tall man with skin so dark that it actually glowed. He crumpled to the ground at the same instant that an arc of multi-colored light darted towards Mark. Cody turned to look, and found absolutely nothing. He yelped and turned back to the dome. He began to back away, but only in time for another arc of light to strike him. Everything went dark. Or maybe it went light. Or maybe sight had nothing to do with it; maybe it went loud or quiet instead. Maybe it went blue. Maybe it went sweet. He could never remember afterwards, and he wasn’t quite sure if “everything went...” would ever sufficiently describe it.
When he woke up he was somewhere else entirely. Perhaps not entirely; just a few blocks away, he realized as he sat up. Standing over him was a large dog with fur so black that it seemed to glow. It was panting happily and it almost looked relieved. It barked gently at him and stepped back so he could sit up all the way. Cody reached over and touched the dog’s warm fur gingerly, then absent-mindedly began to pet it.
“He’s ours,” a gentle, almost Godly voice echoed through his memory suddenly. Despite its angelicness, it sounded fierce.
“No, we programmed him in!” he remembered a voice hissing. Despite the phrase’s complete lack of ess sounds, Cody recalled an undercurrent of sibilant esses.
“You can have the other one,” the voice, one that he recalled reminding him of a preacher’s sermon on Jesus, had said dismissively. “He’s the pinnacle of our experiments on their minds. It doesn’t interest us anymore.”
“The other one is gone!” the hiss had snapped violently. “We lost him as much as you did!”
And that was all Cody could remember before his mother’s voice yelled out “Cody!” right behind him. He turned to look at her; the dog stepped back submissively but happily and sat down.
“Mom!” he yelled out in response. She ran up to him and took him up in her arms.
“Never do that again!” she said urgently. “No matter what what happens!”
“I won’t mom,” he lied, knowing that if he said anything about what he had just experienced or how important it was, she would panic and lock him in his room. “Where’s Mark?”
She squeezed him harder and leaned back from him, holding his shoulders lovingly. Her eyes were full of puzzlement. “Who’s Mark?”
Cody stared back at her. Very rapidly he thought through what was happening. He nodded internally. “Sorry. I must have hit my head.” He said surprisingly convincingly. He smiled at her and she smiled back, a little bit worried. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Mr. T helped me out,” he said, motioning to the dog. He was surprised that he had said Mr. T; he barely knew who Mr. T was, and it was very different than the Dog that he had intended to name him. He let it pass, though. Mr. T barked gently, and then panted smilingly at Cody’s mother. She smiled back at the dog. “Well, then, we’re just going to have to give Mr. T a good home, aren’t we?” Cody smiled externally, but allowed a look of puzzlement to cross the face he bore in his mind. It was damned bizarre.
Now, Cody was looking down at Mr. T, whose fur was still so black that it glowed. He was only slightly smaller than Cody now, five years later. He was just as friendly, and just as mysterious.
“Who are you?” Cody asked Mr. T for the eightieth time in five years. The dog’s grin seemed to become more mysterious and understanding, just as it always did. He barked toward the window.
A man in a black robe was talking to his father. Cody strained his ears to listen.
“...if you programmed him in. He’s my son! He’s already screwed up enough!” he heard his father’s squeaky voice become angry. “He doesn’t need your occult things to push him farther.” Cody smiled to himself. Well, that sure was a coincidence! He stepped through the back door.
“Dad, it’s okay,” he said as soon as he was in. “I’m ready.”
His father wasn’t surprised by the fact that Cody had overheard him, though he did a fine job of pretending he was to try to put off the black-robed man. But it wasn’t what he asked about.
“Son, why were you naked in the backyard?” he asked in honest exasperation.
“I was meditating. I really think I need to learn from this man,” Cody said meaningfully. Mr. T trotted into the kitchen through the dogdoor and sat down. The man looked at the happy, mysterious dog. Beneath her robe, Jennifer frowned at the whole thing. She had to readjust the voice alteration device to maintain the masculinity of her character.