The Fifth Way

Nathaniel steps off his ship into the tunnel locked around the ship’s door. He is on T’n’fer’prey to meet Boss Zack about something important he could not say through normal channels. “So what is it?”

Zack takes off his sunglasses and rubs his eyes. He has clearly been under a lot of stress. “Yo, Nate. I got to tell you about the mindwhip.”

“What is it about the mindwhip that I had to come here to hear about it?” Nathaniel asks.

“Right. I’ve been using them – millions of mindwhip machines. I lock onto random brainwaves to cause pain without telling who the minds are or how far away they are, dig?” Zack summarizes.

“I know. I’ve read the reports. You say you can tell apart the minds of boys, girls, adults, and animals and are careful to only target girls,” Nathaniel recaps.

“Right bud. That’s right. That’s how I roll,” Zack says.

“So what’s the problem?” Nathaniel asks.

“There’s a fifth psychomorph, bud,” Zack says.

“A fifth psychomorph? Is it new?” Nathaniel asks.

“We first saw them seven days ago – a bit like a boy-girl mix,” Zack says.

“Well, that’s interesting. They might make good allies if we could figure out where they are. Are there a lot?” Nathaniel asks.

“That’s the bad news. Their numbers are growing fast. They used to be boys and girls. Individual girl minds we locked onto began to change, so we started scanning boys too. The new way is taking over, Nate. I don’t know how many boys around you might have been affected already or how many will soon transform. That’s why I couldn’t send you a message. It might have been intercepted,” Zack says.

Nathaniel scratches the feathers on his head. “Show me the data.”

Several hours of intense study later, Nathaniel speeds back to President Bobot’s space station headquarters to tell him the bad news. He never gets the chance. There is a failed coup attempt in which Bobot is killed. Nathaniel is the boy president now. “They look like boys, they act like boys, they were boys, and they know where our secret capitol is,” Nathaniel tells General Best. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

Nathaniel and his entourage hop from planet to planet to stay ahead of any assassins. They receive reports at every stop. The fifth way spreads through sports. Boys love physically active play and trying new things, so it is easy to get them to play sports. However, after playing only once, boys can lose their creativity and individual initiative, mindlessly suppressing them according to the rules of the game and their coaching. Over time, the boys change personalities, gaining the ability to unify and manipulate adults the way girls do while retaining their strength, speed, and bravery. The contagion is so insidious, that even Nate’s secretary gets tricked into playing sports before Nathaniel snaps him out of it. “Sports are for girls!” he yells.

Eventually, Nathaniel lands on planet Shoogarood – colony world of the Shoogoot, short, four-armed hominids with beards resembling fettuccini – and is shocked to find the contagion has fully taken over. Former girls and former boys play sports together. They do little else. Nathaniel announces edicts banning sportsplay, but is ignored. He has lost control of this world already.

He decides to stay just a few more days to better understand the phenomenon and learns that the Cheeraliens are coming to observe the big game that will decide the winners of the whole planet. They arrive in large, very flat, circular ships. They are excessively annoying. Their every attribute seems designed to annoy. They have scaly bodies, gaudy uniforms, skinless faces, defecate constantly, occasionally spit up burning vomit, and will chew their own fingers off only to regrow them. Worst of all, they cheer. Each hand ends in many floppy fingers that they use as pom-poms. They celebrate absolutely everything with loud, obnoxious chants that drive Nathaniel absolutely insane. Haticat and Fred have to wrestle him to the ground so he will not murder the Cheeraliens and get them all in trouble.

Just before the big game, it is announced that the queen herself will be tossing the ball into play. Nathaniel watches through binoculars. It is Katie. “So that’s where you went to!”

He watches as she skips into the middle of the field, takes the ball, and raises it up, only for it to be shot out of her hand. A tank drives onto the field as hundreds of girls suddenly crawl out from hiding places and start shooting at the Cheeraliens, the players, and the fans. “Hey, that’s what I wanted to do,” Nathaniel says.

Katie gets away and the girl strike is quickly crushed, so Nathaniel decides to leave the city, but not before calling all boy forces to invade the planet while Katie is still there and hopefully putting an end to the fifth way. He soon learns that girl warships have already arrived. Someone releases a cloud of fog in the domed city, cutting visibility to twenty meters, slowing traffic and Nathaniel’s escape. Rather than risk driving the roads, he and his entourage walk twenty-eight kilometers to the next city outdoors. Shoogarood is largely air-poor desert with domed cities in every major crater. The boys survive by breathing from the air-filled fruit of the native balloon trees. They eventually meet up with some boys in the desert and Nathaniel manages the battle from there.

During the first two hours, boys and girls land and take positions, unsure how to tell friend from foe, and all of them susceptible to sportsplay themselves. There are fights here and there, but nothing sustained. Then Nathaniel delivers a stirring speech by radio broadcast to the entire planet. “I don’t care what you look like or what you call yourself, but if you love rules you hate fun, if you love sports you hate imagination, and if you are friends with Katie or Allison you cannot be friends with me. Friends help friends. If you want to be my friend, then help me exterminate the diseases of Allison and Katie from the galaxy forever!” Within minutes, there is a full-blown, three-way battle for control of the whole planet.

More ships arrive from Beerbele, Ninosa, and Tarrat. More Cheeraliens arrive from the outer fringes of the galaxy. There is heavy fighting for three days, but gradually the boys under Nathaniel gain the upper hand. On the fourth day, Allison and Katie withdraw their forces from Shoogarood, regrouping elsewhere. Shoogarood becomes the new boy capitol and this change of capitol comes with a change of rhetoric. Bobot spoke of the virtues of propagating boyhood. Nathaniel speaks of the moral imperative of preserving friendship and eradicating all enemies of whatever ideology. The boys that do not play sports start calling themselves “Friends of Nathaniel.” In response, the other two galactic factions start calling themselves. “Friends of Allison” or “Friends of Katie.” They rally their troops not by exposing the abuses of the enemy institutions, but by making fun of the leadership.

“Katie is gross and Nathaniel is stupid,” Allison says in her speech. “That’s all you have to know.”

“Allison is boring and bossy!” Katie declares loudly. The Boy-Girl War is over, but the war of the siblings has just begun.

SUPPORT