Super Suspenseful Cliffhanger! 💖

“Anyway,” Snowcube continued explaining. Yes, she was still explaining her genius kidnapping plot or whatever. It was starting to grate a little, honestly. “Since Snowball knew my plan already, things started to go awry right away. First, Snowball showed up in the specified bathroom this past Monday with the energy of a miniature sun. She was all like, ‘Hi, Snowcube! I’m here for the big plan! I can’t wait! I brought the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 for you to reference in case you forget the directions!’”

Her Snowball impression was scarily good. If she put that chipper voice and faux attitude on when we first stumbled across her, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to tell she was a different person.

The fact that Snowcube didn’t incorporate that into her plan to get rid of Snowball tells you all you needed to know about the two of them, really. I said it at the beginning and I’ll say it again: like most geniuses, Snowball was an idiot. And that went just as much for her creator as it did for her.

Even Snowball herself was impressed. “Wow, that’s really me! Cool! Keep going!”

So Snowcube did. “‘Huh? Snowcube? Where are you? Oh, are you in one of the stalls taking a [REDACTED]?’ I was not taking a [REDACTED], I’ll have you know. I was just ‘freshening up.’ Ok? Get it straight, alright? That part’s important.”

“Sure. Whatever. Just keep going.” I really didn’t care.

She continued in Snowball’s voice: “‘That’s ok. I’ll just leave our diary right he— aahghdgfhahggHdhdjSLdju90ur!!!!!’ ← That was when Snowball tripped on nothing and fell, shattering her glasses. ‘Oh, rats,’ Snowball said. ‘Not again. I hate when this happens! It makes me feel so clumsy and useless I just can’t stand it. I’m going to go to the abandoned bathroom hideout in the woods and think carefully about my actions and how I can stop being such a klutz for a week.’ ← … is what she said. As for how she made it out here with all the visual acuity of a blindfolded cavefish, well, I guess it was down to dumb luck, emphasis on ‘dumb.’ Snowball’s pretty smoothbrained when it comes to anything other than science and inventing, so she has plenty of that.”

“Oh,” I said, “so she basically enacted your entire plan for you, through sheer coincidence. Lucky you.”

Snowcube looked at me like I had just violated every last one of the Geneva Conventions simultaneously, personally launched nuclear warheads at every major population center on the face of the planet for the fun of it, and ate the last pudding cup she’d been saving in the fridge. “Enacted part of my plan? Were you not listening when I explained the steps in detail! This was not part of the plan!”

“But like… same difference, right?”

“No! No, no, no!” There she went with the tantrum-throwing again. “Different difference! Completely different! This was supposed to be my epic plan! Why does Snowball always have to ruin everything for me? Why, huh?!”

Well, the two certainly had one thing in common. Their maturity level. Not that I was one to talk, but hey.

“So why did we find you passed out in the woods then?” For once, Fence was asking the smart questions. He was the kind of guy who’d surprise you like that every now and then. He’d also graduated from flicking his earwax balls into the sink to popping them into his mouth.

“Well of course I went after Snowball,” Snowcube said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I couldn’t let her get away with ruining my plan. But I had dedicated so much time and energy to making sure this thing went off without a hitch that at that point, I had forgotten to eat for a couple of days. Halfway to this abandoned bathroom, I passed out from hunger and exhaustion.”

“Seriously? And you definitely haven’t eaten anything since.” I was kinda worried about her. She may have been hamming up the evil supervillain act or whatever, but part of me thought that maybe she was just acting like this cause she was hungry. “Here,” I said, reaching into my pocket and breaking off a piece of the Australia-sized and -shaped cookie, “have a piece of this Australia-sized and -shaped cookie.”

“Thank you.” She scarfed the cookie down readily. “I’m ok though. I think bumping into you for the first time kickstarted my heart, got it beating again. You really did save me.”

Yeah. On accident. And she knew it. Was that really worthy of praise? If what she said next was any indication: yes.

“When you tripped over my lifeless body and epically faceplanted in the dirt like a complete nitwit and utter failure of a person completely incapable of the simplest of basic motor functions… I just felt my heart beating so fast!” She cupped both cheeks in her hands as her face lit up redder than a Christmas ornament.

Ok, in hindsight, maybe that wasn’t technically “praise.” But that was probably how she meant it, right?

In any case, she brought up a good point. When it came down to it, I was the cause of all of this. At least a portion of this craziness — even if just a small one — was on me. I never asked to get roped into a love triangle with an identical robot and clone, but here I was. The least I could do was try to resolve this as amicably as possible. After all, Snowball and Snowcube, I had realized, weren’t bad people.

“And, well,” said Snowcube, sounding resigned now. I broke her off a few more pieces of the cookie and she ate as she finished her story. “I thought that since my plan had obviously failed and you had suddenly appeared, I had better come clean. About everything. Bring you both here where Snowball was and get everything out in the open. Which is what I’ve just done. That way I could start fresh, with a clear conscience before getting married.”

“Married?” I froze where I stood. “To who?”

“To you, my l-l-l-l-l-l…! My love!” She smiled at me, her face all lit up like the first beam of sunlight breaking through clouds after rain. That really made her look similar to Snowball. Also similar to Snowball was the fact that she was acting like everything she was saying made all the sense in the world. Like anything she was saying made any sense at all. Like she wasn’t bonafide Looney Tunes in the head.

“Married? Me? To you? I can’t do that. I’m already married to Snowball!” At least I had an excuse to deny, reject, deflect, and/or dodge most of the idiocy coming my way now, and my newly discovered official marital status was it. There was still, of course, the heart of the matter. “And wait, I never agreed to marry you in the first place, Snowball! I want out!”

Snowball’s turn to smile. “Nope!”

Harrowing.

Her small slice of Australia finished, Snowcube started fidgeting and getting all nervous for some reason. “So, now that you’ve heard the story, how about it? Will you accept my proposal and… *gulp*... my love, my love?”

“Heck no.”

Her eyes seized to slivers. The icicle gaze was back. “Wrong answer. Do you want me to super slap you?”

“No!”

“Fine. Then I’ll just do what Snowball did to you before.”

“Huh?” She couldn’t mean… that, could she?!

“That way, Snowball and I will be even.”

She did mean that, didn’t she? She was really going to do it! Right here and right now! In front of everyone!

“Come here. I’m going to give you a big, fat ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-... focus, Snowcube. You can say it. Deep breath, and… a BIG, FAT KI—”

“Uh! Well!” I was rapidly fanning through my mental dictionary, tripping over every word I had ever known just trying to find a handful that would prevent what Snowcube had in store for me. “Err… How about if I defer answering the whole marriage thing? Cause actually, the story isn’t done yet.”

Her eyes globed behind her glasses. “But I’ve explained everything.”

“Nope,” said Fence. “There are a couple parts we're still in the dark about.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “So it’s time to shine a light. First of all, you said you two were going to school to learn about the human psyche and human emotions, right?”

Snowball answered that one. “Yep! Well, one particular piece of human psychology in particular, but yes.”

Yeah, got it. One particular piece. That being human love. And look how that had turned out, right? Moving on. “If that was your mission, who gave it to you? Someone must have, right? We still don’t know. We don’t have the whole picture on that.”

Whoever it was, one thing was for sure: someone was behind this. Someone bigger and more mysterious than Snowball, Snowcube, and both of them combined, probably. Who could it have been? The FBI? MI6? That coalition of intelligent chimpanzees that met at the bowling alley every other Tuesday to train for local tournaments and discuss their world domination plans? I had my guesses, and those were the top three.

“And another thing too.” I nodded at Fence, and he nodded back. Once again, we were thinking the exact same thing, just like the best friends we were. “Snowcube, you said you were a clone. But that makes no sense. How can you be a clone of a robot you yourself created?”

That one was the real head scratcher we’d been left with. I just couldn’t figure it out. Try as I might, and I did, I couldn’t puzzle together what the true relationship between Snowball and Snowcube was. A clone cloned from a robot built by the clone who was cloned from a robot built by the… Just thinking about it was making my head spin. It was an honest-to-goodness “the chicken or the boneless wing” dilemma. Or whatever the stupid saying was. My brain was too fried to think even halfway straight at this point.

That was what was going through my head when, suddenly, I realized things had gone dead silent. And when you’re with people like Snowball and Snowcube, you know: dead silence is very, very bad.

The two of them just stared at me, blinking incredulously, mouths hanging half open, like they couldn’t believe what they had just heard.

“Wait…” Snowcube finally said softly. “You think I’m a clone of Snowball?”

I tried to tell her yes, I did, but for some reason my throat had gone dry and I couldn’t get the words out. All I could manage was a feeble nod. At that point a cloud must have passed by, cause the meager light coming in through the high windows grew even meagerer, the gloom of the bathroom growing even grayer. Outside, it was already pitch dark. The bad feeling I’d been having this whole time was flaring up again, deep in the bottomless pit that was now my stomach.

“I’m not a clone of Snowball,” Snowcube began, “I’m a clone of—”

But she was cut off by a strange sound.

A sound I had heard before, and not too long ago either.

An electronic beeping sound, faint, but definitely discernible.

The cloud passed, and moonlight washed back into the room.

I could see it clearly, because Snowcube was still hugging her and Snowball’s diary to her chest tight: the calculator-esque solar panel on the cover had drained almost all the way.

In the beginning, when me and Fence had first found the book in the bathroom at school, the display had looked like this:

⬛⬛⬛⬛

Later, when we checked again in the woods around dusk, it looked like this:

⬛⬛

Now, as the tide of night waxed, it looked like this:

⬛

And now, that final black square that was staring, I felt, right back at me like the angular iris-less eye of some awful unknown animal, was blinking in and out, in and out.

Then it disappeared.

To be continued!