Kevin Durant and Chris Paul are fertile ground for NBA fan fiction, a sci-fi adventure story that teeters on the edge of horror.
In all the dark fabric of space twirl plenty of planets and stars. In all the dark fabric of space, there is, for lack of a better term, plenty of space. In all that space traverses naked bands of light perceptible to the human eye, but in all that space, too, twist bands of light obstructed by the mechanics of solid objects spinning through a sea trapped inside a mollusk. A ship hangs in this eerie fabric. A ship floats through all this space. A ship eclipses the very light that makes it visible.
The commercial towing vehicle Demon Deacon 3 with a crew of one carries a very precise number of tons that are a very specific mineral ore. The course is set for Final Earth-77. The purpose of the mission is a return on investment.
The outside of the clipper ship is all skeletal structures made from advanced alloys that allow the ship to repair and replace its exterior cell walls as it travels. The inside is all conduits and switchboards. The occasional coffee mug needs a squeeze of glue to reattach a severed handle. Most of the crew is all a slumber in various stages of hypersleep. They awake in spurts according to what’s stored inside the computer.
When the transparent doors to these hypersleep chambers unseal and swing open toward the ceiling, they resemble a lotus blossom. Not every chamber is full, though. And only one crew member is currently awake.
Chris Paul might as well be alone aboard the Demon Deacon 3. He has been alone for mere moments stretched into light years. He turns on a monitor. He inputs questions and reads maps. He charts the premise of future charts. He goes about his business until a silver droid enters the room. Chris Paul welcomes the droid with a cold familiarity bordering on disdain. Adam, he says.
The silver droid stares at him with wide mechanical eyes and blinks.
“What is it, Adam?” asks Chris Paul.
“I interrupted your hypersleep because of a distress signal the ship’s computer received in a nearby system.”
“Is that why the charts aren’t making any sense to me?”
“Quite possibly, sir.”
“Is a C3PO unit certified to make that kind of call?”
“It’s in my programming.”
“It’s in your programming.”
“And there is a clause in all contracts that specifically states—”
“You don’t have to read it to me—I get it. I pay my union dues.”
“—any systemized transmission—”
“Seriously, I don’t need to hear it.”
The distant planet is a shadow. A thin ring runs round it, but the ring is ephemeral. More like the idea of a ring than ice and rock. The approach is slow. The crew member cannot yet understand how dry and barren the surface is, that the planet being approached is a desert rock. A corporeal Tatooine hidden behind a veil.
A landing pod pulls away from the main ship. Computers are in communication. Circuitry is at work.
Everything is in real-time. Everything is slower in real-time. Everything slow is more flagrant. More alarming. More worth the wait.
The ship creaks. The sound is a metallic shriek. Chris Paul grimaces. He and the machinery shake off the rust together because in space human and machine are parts of a single organism. This stop was not part of the plan. They stretch off the buffering lag of hypersleep. Everything hums and quakes like a bustling hornet hive in late winter.
The landing pod touches down in the dark of the desert night. Sparks fly. Exhaust and smoke spew. Chris Paul is on top of it with a fire extinguisher. He is not panicked. He is deliberate. Sweaty, but deliberate. He has read the charts that the charts were based on. He knows the HSEQ Manual by the shine of his metallic heart.
The wind is horrendous. A torrent ripping apart the outside world. The ship’s exterior alloys glimmer in repair.
“Adam,” Chris Paul shouts under the howling wind and over the humming machinery, “Adam, run a systems check, will you?”
The silver droid answers in the affirmative, and Chris Paul cusses under his breath.
“Has the signal changed?”
“Not in the slightest, sir.”
“How long is this storm supposed to last?”
“Not long, sir.”
Chris Paul prepares to exit the landing pod.
“Sir, you should know the surface here is not hospitable. I am sending you a readout on the atmosphere. It’s quite toxic.”
“How far to that signal’s source?”
“No more than ninety feet, sir, ninety-four at most.”
Chris Paul pulls the oxygen mask down over his head. He flips a switch. He breathes. The system checks out. He flips the switch off. He waits for the storm to pass. He waits for the day to arrive.
As Chris Paul walks the surface in the uniform gray of an alternate dawn, he does not moonwalk or twirl. He is all business. Distant strobes of lightning etch crooked pictographs in the smoky clouds. Thunder rumbles and echoes. More like the sounds removed from a memory than something real and immediately present. He will add it all to the charts.
Ninety feet, he whispers to himself, but the distance feels much farther as he walks it alone.
The sun continues to rise, but the cloudy haze of the planet’s poisonous air remains. He shuffles footprints in the sandy, red rocked surface. He thinks about a proverb or parable he once saw framed in a doctor’s office. Is this one of those moments where the footprints belong to God? Was this part of some strange plan? Or was he simply trapped in isolation? He remembers the recurring dream of a wounded griffin.
“Adam, can you see this?”
“If you can see it, I can see it.”
Chris Paul wants more from Adam’s response. He wants expletives and dropped jaws. But he doesn’t get any of that. He listens to the sound of his breathing apparatus. He listens to himself in isolation.
A voice in his head tells him to turn back, but in the dark space of his own mind, another voice refutes this doubt: Why on earth would we turn back now?
Small by comparison, he enters what could best be described as someone else’s mothership. Dear God, he says to himself, what is the point?
But he knows. The point of any ship is to move from where one was to where one wants to be. The ship is the point.
The inside of this ship is like a cave and yet not. The inside of this cave is sinewy and organic—like a cavernous, robotic throat. Like an industrial womb.
“Adam, it’s like I’m walking on an exoskeleton, but it’s internal.”
“So not an exoskeleton, then, sir.”
Chris Paul hates the correction. He had sensed the incorrectness of his description even as he said it. He didn’t need the droid to second the motion. He stares at the center of the ship’s tomb. Seated together on a long seat and all facing in the same direction are three fossilized lifeforms. They are like wax or stone.
“Are you getting this, Adam? The bones are bent like they all exploded from the inside.”
“Sir, are they sitting on a banana boat?”
Chris Paul clicks on a beacon of light attached to the top of his oxygen mask and takes a step back. His face twists into a scowl behind the fog gathering on the inside of the mask. “They are, Adam, indeed they are.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t linger, sir.”
Chris Paul agrees, but he also can’t help noting how the silver droid is the one who woke him from hypersleep and sent him here as opposed to anywhere else.
Chris Paul turns to leave, but he teeters on the edge of a pit. The pit swallows him. He is all the way down in something now. He adjusts the light on his helmet for a wider, deeper view into the darkness.
“What is it, Chris?”
“I’m surrounded by what looks like,” he pauses here, not really sure about what to say, “what look like leathery ping pong balls.” Each one reflecting the white light of his head beacon like the surface of a moon.
Not at all nervous, Chris Paul leans in and studies one of the pods. He watches whatever is inside move the globe it occupies. The damn thing opens. And here is where all hell could break loose. Whatever the living thing is it could come to occupy Chris Paul’s body, but remember he is the only crew member. So where would that story go from here? How would it exist as anything other than fiction? And whatever he is to this young, organic thing still learning how to survive in pools of its own carnivorous battery acid, he could squash it with his knowledge and passion and will to live.
He could set fire to the whole lottery field. But both those cases would assume some sort of nihilism between the two — that annihilation is the only way out, that one must dominate the other, when the truth is Chris Paul and this thing are symbiotic and the only thing that matters is mutuality, well, that and the ship. Believe it or not, the only way off the abandoned desert moon for all of them is to book a ticket together. Always was. Always is. Always has been. Such is the fate of a franchise. Such is a situation carved out by choices. And the only question remaining is how to breach the hatch doors.
“Chris,” the silver droid speaks into a microphone aboard the ship. “Chris, are you there?” Still no answer. “I would like to review certain protocols.”
While standing outside the hatch doors, Chris Paul notices a second landing pod not far from his own. “Adam, is that what I think it is?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can sense your disappointment, but when you didn’t respond, I activated the Rescue and Recovery Procedures. Cam Johnson and Mikal Bridges are currently searching for you. However, you turned off all transmittals, making their job much more difficult.”
“How long have they been out there?”
“I will notify them of your return.”
Chris Paul sat in the dining quarters when Cam Johnson burst in, “I think you need to see this!”
Chris Paul lifts a repaired coffee mug to his lips. The liquid is lukewarm. He takes his time before rising to follow Cam Johnson to the medical bay on the Demon Deacon 3. He feigns surprise when he arrives there, as if he didn’t already know what to expect, “What’s wrong with, Mikal?”
“Adam is running searches through every system database he can access, so far nothing.”
Chris Paul takes another look at Mikal Bridges who is flat on his back and seemingly unconscious. “Is that a tentacle?” The question refers to the tentacle-like appendage over Mikal Bridges’ face.
“I don’t know what that is,” says Cam Johnson.
“Where did it happen?”
“We followed your signal to where it had last been readable. We were walking through this field of, I don’t know, eggs or whatever. We saw this thing scurry by—couldn’t have been higher than our shins—it was a blur. Then it scurried back. I shot at it. I missed. It was all over Mikal’s face. He tried—I tried—we couldn’t remove it.”
Chris Paul did not speak.
“I lit the rest of them on fire, though,” said Cam Johnson.
“Excuse me, sirs,” said Adam, “but I believe I have identified the organism—the tentacle is a Durantula.”
“A what?”
“A Durantula. It seizes onto whatever organism is the most viable for its survival and fuses its cells with the host.”
“Like it’s laying eggs inside Mikal?”
“No, Mr. Johnson, it fuses with the host, which is to say the host is made to fuse with it. They are one and the same.”
Chris Paul’s eyes flicker in unison with the ship’s exterior alloys. The return journey is a long one.
Check out The Step Back for more news, analysis, opinion and unique basketball coverage. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to our daily email newsletter, The Whiteboard.