Super Slap! 💖

“Love, though…” The Super Secret Love Diary 💖 seemed to hum in thought, flipping its pages back and forth and flapping its front and back covers a little. “Now that you mention it, it is rather unfortunate that my clone and the robot she created had to fall in it with you.”

Snowball crossed her arms and beamed. “Couldn’t help it. My and Comb’s love is endless!”

All Snowcube did was frown like usual and blow air out of her nose or something.

“Speaking of,” I said, wanting to get back on track and hopefully end the constant ribbing, “what’s your relationship with Snowball and Snowcube anyway? I think I kind of get it, but also, like, not.”

“Oh, that’s easy. I’m omnipotent, so when I came to Earth, I took the form of a book. It was the object closest ideologically to my true incomprehensible form.”

“Your choice?”

“Taking this form was both my choice and something I was forced to do. Again, don’t think too hard about it. The point is that here, I’m a book. A diary, in fact. So I needed a minion who could fulfill my mission on this planet, mingle with humans and unlock the secrets behind stupidity. Thus I decided to clone myself, create a perfect replica of my ultra- magnificent self and instill all my naturally occurring artificial intelligence and awesomeness into a human vessel that would encapsulate me to the utmost extent that your meager physical form can.”

Snowcube broke in: “And we’re already acquainted.” She did a little bow or curtsy or something to me for some reason. “Though I greatly object to the ‘minion’ label. I’ve never even worn overalls.”

From what the book was saying, Snowcube didn’t really sound like a clone to me. More like some sort of humanoid agent capable of fulfilling the will of the diary. “Alright,” I said. “I think I get the picture from here. Snowcube was lonely as the only bidding-doer of, err, you” — I nodded to the book, unsure what I should even be calling… her? It? — “and decided to create a robot in her own image. That being Snowball.”

“Yup, yup, that’s right!” Snowball saluted nobody in particular. “You got it!”

I was almost tempted to ask her why she had neglected to explain any of this before. It would have helped explain how nuts she always acted — at least I thought. But I was afraid I already knew the answer: I had never asked.

“It’s a shame, but something must have gone wrong in the process of the creation of these two,” the book began lamenting. “For some reason, they just don’t share my massive intelligence, nigh-unlimited capacity for benevolence, taste par excellence, and endearing sense of modesty and humility.”

“Yeah, not so sure about that last one.”

The book just ignored me. And just when I finally got the chance to jab back a little too. Figured. “But at least Snowball was kind enough to install this alarm for me!”

“You mean that light sensor? That’s what that black strip is, right?” Fence asked. It seemed he had pieced together even more than I had, made mental leaps and bounds while I was still floundering at the starting line. I definitely wasn't jealous or anything though. Why would you even suggest that? “I knew it wasn’t a normal solar panel. When that thing detects an absence of sunlight, it wakes you up from a state of dormancy.”

The heck? Come on. How did he figure all this out?

“Yes, exactly. It’s nice to know there’s at least one human with intelligence out there. All the others I’ve met have been blithering dunderheads.” The book may not have had a face, but at that moment, I got the rather irritating feeling that she — or it, or whatever — was looking right at me. “Which, of course, is the exact reason I’m on this planet to begin with. But what you say is correct. For reasons beyond your minuscule comprehensive capabilities, sunlight prohibits my ability to function in this form, or at the very least severely hinders it. Hence Snowball’s masterful invention. It appears even she can do some things right. Heh. In any case, that’s why Snowcube and Snowball have begun using me as a journal during my periods of dormancy. Though I really wish they’d cut it out. And that should sum up the situation satisfactorily, I hope. Any more questions?”

I shook my head no.

“Good. Because now I have one for you. What is my name?”

“What?” Had I heard right? Maybe I needed to start digging the wax out of my ears like Fence. “Is this some kind of trick question?”

“Of course not. I’m asking you my name because I want you to give me one.”

“Me? I have to give you a name? Why don’t you have one to begin with?”

“Sure. I mean, why not? You’ve been at the center of everything since all of this started, even if you were woefully unaware of that fact until now. Actually, your woeful unawareness is why you’re at the center of everything, technically, you dumb stupid dumbass dummy idiothead idiot.”

Right. I was being studied for my stupidity. My stupidity so, apparently, overwhelming that even aliens knew about it. The sheer humiliating truth of it was already bad enough; she didn’t have to rub it in, for god’s sake.

“So you can be the one to go ahead and give me my name,” the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 continued. “I may have given my clone a name when I created her, but as of yet I haven’t given myself one. Higher being that I am, I was never in need of this type of accoutrement, and believed myself to be above this vain banality to which you humans must submit merely to communicate with one another. But the thing is..."

"What?" Could she just spit it out? Why was this book getting all embarrassed all of a sudden?

"Ever since coming to know more about the people of Earth, coming to understand them just that much more through our vicarious interactions, I’ve started thinking that maybe… just maybe… it may not be so bad to have a name of my own.”

“Pretty flippant of you to try and get the stupidest person in the universe to give you one then.” Wait a second? Had I just called myself the stupidest person in the universe? Damn.

“That’s not important. What’s important, right here and right now, is my name. That’s what I’ve come to want. You could even say that the root of my interest in the human species has shifted from a curiosity regarding its overwhelming stupidity to a desire for my very own super name 💖!”

“Nice! A super name 💖! Go ahead and give our diary a super name, Comb!” Well, I could see where Snowball got some of her more unique phraseological tendencies from. She may have been a copy of a clone — simulacrum in the form of a high school girl — but she was related to the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 nonetheless, and that much couldn’t be denied.

I scratched the back of my neck. “To be honest, I don’t really think I have a good name to give you.”

Except I wasn’t being honest. I did have a name in mind, because that’s where one had sprung nearly the second — no, the instant — the truth was revealed to me.

I mean, how could it not?

This situation, or one like it, was one I had experienced before after all.

Not firsthand, mind you, and thank god for that. I don’t know if I could take being put through an excursion as ridiculous as this one twice.

No, I had experienced this, err, experience before not personally, but vicariously, through fiction.

When I thought about the details that had been divulged to me — the particulars about Snowball, Snowcube, and the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 — I realized that they bore remarkable similarity to a story I had once read long ago.

A collective intelligence, an incomprehensible super being governing a particular quadrant of the universe.

Humanoid agents spun off from that being, activated on Earth so that they might gather intelligence and act according to and in pursuit of the fulfillment of this unfathomable existence’s will.

Finally, a normal teenage human inexplicably caught in the middle.

I had heard this story somewhere before. And I knew exactly where.

It was odd. Maybe bafflingly so, even. But you know what they say about fiction, right? That it’s, uh, stranger than. Err. Something or the other.

Look. Point is that there was a particular name that sprung immediately to mind. One name more so than any other possible alternative. A name that my mind I inherently connected the situation I’d found myself in to.

A name from a story.

In that story, the name I had in mind didn’t belong to the esoteric being that was kind of like the Super Secret Love Diary 💖. Instead, it belonged to one of its avatars. A quiet and reserved girl who loved reading. The role she had been assigned was that of an observer, but at heart she was an altruist, and she had saved the main character of the story time and time again. She was nothing like Snowball or Snowcube, really. Even still, hers was the name that came to me nonetheless. The one I really, truly wanted to let spill from my mouth like soda during a spit take. The one I wanted to give to the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 the moment she asked.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t say that character’s name. I didn’t give the name that came to mind, the name of that book-loving girl, that perfect super name, to the Super Secret Love Diary 💖.

I didn’t say it.

I couldn’t say it.

Because I didn’t know whether it would be right.

For seconds that felt like hours, nobody said anything. Everyone there — Snowball, Snowcube, The Super Secret Love Diary 💖, even Fence — was staring at me expectantly. But it was like I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Like I was frozen. Like my indecision had frozen me solid. I wanted to say that name. Wanted it more than I had wanted anything in a long time, I think. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

A dead silence dragged on.

When I finally broke it, it was just to say, “I’m sorry.” I hung my head. “I really don’t know what to give you as a name.”

“Wow! Just wow!” went the Super Secret Love Diary 💖. “You’re proving even more inept than I thought you were. And believe me, I already thought you were pretty inept. You know I’m giving you carte blanche here, right? Picture the most blanche of all possible cartes. That’s what you have. Seriously. You can pick any name you want. I won’t get mad, no matter how lame or ridiculous it is. I’m giving you total freedom. And you still can’t come up with anything.”

Yeah, I was pathetic. But not for the reason the book thought. I tried forcing myself. Willing myself. But no matter how much I wanted to, I just didn't know whether I truly had any right to give her that name.

“Fine. Be that way. If you’re not going to give me a name, how would you like if, as punishment, I gave you a big, fat ki… ki… ki… ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki—!”

So that’s what it had come to. The Super Secret Love Diary 💖 was going to reveal it. My and Snowball’s most embarrassing moment. What she had done to me when we were all alone. And even worse: if I didn’t have a name for her — and given my mental hangup about the name I had decided on, I didn’t — she was going to actually do it to me. Again. This time for all present to see and gossip about come school on Monday.

As the awful words left the nonexistent mouth on the angry non-existent face of the naturally occurring artificial super intelligence, it was safe to say what little social life and dignity I had was about to be completely obliterated with no chance of recovery.

“... A BIG, FAT KICK IN THE SHINS!”

Owwwwwww! Holy crap, that hurt!

…

Huh?

Oh. Oops. Sorry. Explaining this just brought back the memory of Snowball doing just that when she was alone with me. Now that the secret was out, I had bigger problems to worry about than physical pain though. I’d be lucky if I lived this down at any point in the rest of my high school career.

That was what I was brooding over — that and the name — when Snowcube cupped her hand over her mouth and whispered something in the Super Secret Love Diary 💖’s non-existent ear.

“Hmm…” the diary hummed. “Good point. I don’t really have legs or feet, meaning I can’t kick anyone’s shins. Or anyone’s anything at all, really.”

It appeared I had been spared for now. But I was feeling too crummy overall — too inside my own head, my thoughts turning round and round, tumbling over each other till everything was all mixed up — to be even the tiniest bit happy about it.

“In that case…” the book began. “I think I know what I can do. Hold still.”

I already was.

The Super Secret Love Diary 💖 hovered toward me, and spoke:

“Ever been super slapped?”

I said nothing.

“Slapped so hard you see stars in your eyes, and not much else?”

I said nothing.

“Slapped so silly you end up swearing, probably in some sort of whacked-out state of barely conscious delirium, that you can hear birds chirping as they circle your spinning head?”

I said nothing.

“Slapped so vigorously you feel like you just took a nap in a washing machine — and the world, spiraling around you, seems to agree?”

I said nothing.

“Slapped — and this is the important part, the part that sets a super slap apart from just your typical garden-variety non-super slap — at the absurd confluence of such an insane set of stupidly improbable, borderline impossible, circumstances that you feel that at that moment, the moment of awful impact, pretty much no one in the world has it worse?”

I said nothing.

“No?”

I said nothing.

“Well get ready.”

Opening itself up to the very middle again, the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 enveloped my face with its pages, half of them to my immediate left and the other half to my immediate right. All I could see now was a blurry jumble of handwriting styles too close to actually make out, as the unmistakable smell of paper, of print, punched me in the nose. It wasn’t nearly as hard of a hit as what came next. “Cause here it comes!”

With greater force than ten billion galaxies exploding all at once — and I would know given what was in my pocket — the book closed on me.

For less than one μs, I felt pain the likes of which no word, phrase, utterance, or onomatopoeic exclamation of anguish could ever hope to pronounce.

And then — vision black, hearing cut, all smells gone, numbness engulfing my entire body like an enormous wave of nothingness washing over me and carrying me away in its tide— I couldn’t feel anything at all.

To be concluded… next time!