Current mood:	silly
Current music:	My friend confessed, she passed the test and we will never sever.
Entry tags:	invader zim

Title: Irony pt 1: Surrender
Author: Icka! M. Chif
Beta: Waywren
Word Count: 2,212
Rating: Teen
Author Note: The subtitle for this is 'Zim and Dib Conquer the Galaxy' or 'Zim and Dib's Most Excellent Adventure'. Still figuring itself out. Angst now, crack later.
Disclaimer: No recongisable characters belong to me, used without permission for no profit.
Summary: For Dib’s 16th birthday, he went crazy.

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A friend in needs a friend indeed,
A friend who bleeds is better.
-'Pure Morning' by Placebo

For Dib’s 16th birthday, he went crazy.

It was a rare treat on the part of Professor Membrane, inviting Dib to his laboratory. Usually the Membrane Labs were off limits to Dib and his sister Gaz, their father was doing important research down there and could not be interrupted for anything. Dib was still slightly haunted from the time he was 11 and the gauntlet he’d had to run in order to get a permission slip signed.

In retrospect, he still wasn’t sure if his father had even realised what he was signing, or who he was signing it for.

The section of the laboratory that he was directed to was deep underground, farther underground than any of Zim’s alien bases that Dib had so far explored. Which was saying something; the Irken’s base continued underground for a dizzying, complex confusing depth. Much like Zim’s mind.

The inside of Professor Membrane’s labs was much like some of the things he’d seen in Zim’s base, which was both perplexing and somehow reassuring. He loved sneaking into Zim’s base. At least until Zim or his little pet robot kicked him out.

The walls in this part of Professor Membrane’s laboratory were lined with huge transparent cylinders, each one large enough to hold a grown human. The low rumble of machinery at work echoed through the room, thrumming through his bones. The glowing green liquid in the tubes burbled occasionally, making him twitchy.

There were bodies in the green liquid. Humanoid bodies. Partially formed, some mere skeletons, some looking like they were rotting away to skeletons. Some had fish tails or animal looking ears. Others yet had antenna.

And they all had his face. What he looked like when he was younger, one with half the face torn off that looked like him now and a few that appeared to be what he might look like when he was older.

”What…” His voice cracked embarrassingly as he stared in horror at the tubes surrounding him. He was a Paranormal Investigator, the strange and the bizarre were no shock to him anymore, but all of –this- with his –face-…. “What is this?”

The doors on the far end opened, the tall shadowed figure of his father standing there, some sort of mist or steam creeping through the doorway along the floor. “Ah, there you are!” Professor Membrane boomed as he stepped inside the room, the door sliding shut behind him. Dib flinched slightly as the door sealed, unable to escape the trapped feeling it gave him.

”You’re old enough now to know the truth now, Son.” Professor Membrane continued without hesitation as he stopped next to Dib. Dib swallowed, staring up at his father. The view used to be a lot different when he was younger, but even with his head just above his father’s shoulder, it was no less intimidating.

”Truth?” He managed to squeak out.

”TRUTH!” Professor Membrane boomed, throwing his hands up into the air. “20 years ago in this very lab, I came to realise that I was not going to live forever. For I am mortal and every human must die eventually. But, there is still so much to do! Mankind is constantly in need of saving itself from various threats, more than I could answer in my lifetime!”

”So therefore I came up with the perfect plan!” A massive finger was pointed in Dib’s face. “I would clone myself! The experimentation was hard and we went through many failures until we made the most amazing discovery!”

Dib blinked, trying to see around the finger. “Oh?”

”YES!” Professor Membrane grabbed his arm and pulled him down to the first set of tubes by the door he had walked through. Dib felt his eyes grow wide as he took in the creature floating in the tube.

It was an Irken. An Irken Invader, from the remains of the uniform. This one had the same curled antenna and massive eyelashes as Tak had, so he guessed it to be a female. And a very long time dead from the state of the grey skin and the large missing chunks of skin and flesh.

”This species has amazingly evolved beyond the need of sexual reproduction and now propagates via cloning random mixes of its own variant of deoxyribonucleic acid! They had completely solved the very problems I had yet to conquer!” Professor Membrane continued.

”Um.” Dib was starting to feel slightly queasy. “So what does this have to do with me?”

”Everything!” Professor Membrane boomed. “The Human Genome was not quite ready for cloning, but by mixing my DNA with the creatures, we were able to begin to grow viable clones!”

”Grow?” Dib glanced down the tubes, at all the dead beings in the green liquid.

”Even after all of that, it wasn’t entirely successful.” Professor Membrane shrugged. “We could get the clones to grow from a zygote, but attempts to grow them into a fully sized human failed. Therefore a new plan was created! To grow a human outside the tubes like a normal human being!”

Dib felt the ground lurch out from under his feet and put a hand on the container holding the dead Irken for balance, to verify that he wasn’t falling down. It couldn’t be. No, it was impossible. He had memories of his mother, of Gaz’s birth. There was no way… “w-What do you mean? ‘Like a normal human being’? d-Dad?”

”A zygote was placed inside the body of a female volunteer for science, where it developed into an embryo and finally a fetus. Nine months later, out you came! The perfect clone! Of course, we had to wait for you to grow old enough to start in my footsteps. Unfortunately, we failed some where along the line and you developed this flaw, this fixation on ‘para-science’, but we can fix that. REAL Science is what you should be focusing on, not this madness with alien nonsense.”

”But…” Dib looked at the Irken in the tube. Proof. The proof he’d been looking for all these years, right there under his hands. “Aliens do exist.”

”Of course they do.” Professor Membrane waved it off. “We researched and reverse engineered all the technology years ago. Set us decades in advance, nothing left to be explored there, it’s old news. Best to look Forward to the FUTURE!”

If anything, Dib’s stomach sank even farther. All those years of being told to stop with his alien nonsense, not because it was nonsense, but because anything new he discovered was –obsolete-. All those years, trying to breakthrough, get people to listen to him, to –understand-, completely wasted.

Professor Membrane clapped him on the back with a large hand, sending him pitching into the plexi-glass tank. “You’re 15 now, son. Old enough to set aside your insanity and start taking responsibility in the world of Real Science! Starting next week, you’ll be joining me in the labs as an assistant! Isn’t that great?!”

Under his hands, the dead Invader’s eyes stared at him hollowly and he had an image of Zim floating there in the tank, red eyes dull and lifeless. If Zim had arrived earlier, that could have been him floating there instead of some un-named Invader. “s-Sure.” The words barely made it past the lump in his throat. “Great.”

His father couldn’t even remember that he was 16 today, not 15….

”Excellent!” Another pat on the back sent him back against the cool smooth surface of the tank. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m incredibly busy. Glad we had this talk!”

Heavy footsteps began to march away. “w-Wait!” An idea sparked in his head. “Dad! I mean, Professor Membrane!”

It was the second name that garnered the attention Dib was searching for, not the first. “I want to know, I mean, I’m curious to know about how I was bo… Created.” He caught himself, berating himself for the catch in his voice. He continued on, his voice thankfully staying level. Emotions weren’t scientific. ”Would it be possible for me to have access to those files? Look them over before I start in the labs?”

”Excellent!” Professor Membrane exclaimed. “Glad to see you taking an interest in Real Science!!!” He lifted up a wrist, talking quickly to someone on the other end of the communicator as he strode out of the room. The door at the end opened for him, then just as quickly closed again. Dib watched him go, leaning against the Invader’s tank, waiting to regain his equilibrium.

He was a… a…

Dib gulped, forcing his mind blank. If he thought about it now, he’d have a breakdown. Better to do that away from the labs, who knew what kind of spy equipment they had, watching everybody’s movements. There was a lot of expensive stuff down here. Government stuff. Secret stuff. He knew some members of the Swollen Eyeball network would give their toenails for a glimpse of down here. Where was his camera when he needed it?

The door opened again, an anonymous lab coated assistant walking in with a data pad. Dib stared at the assistant for a moment. In a week, that would be him. Just another random person in a sterile white lab coat.

The assistant held out the data pad to him. Dib stared at it for a second. The assistant waved it a bit and Dib belated realised it was for him. “Oh.” He took the data pad. “Thank you.”

He got something in return that may or may not have been ‘You’re welcome’ or ‘Cupcakes are tasty’ before wandering off again. Dib stared at the data pad in his hand. The answer to his suddenly unknown origins were in his hands.

It should have meant more than it did.

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He holed himself up in his room as soon as he got home, clutching the data pad to his chest the entire way home. He went straight past Gaz, ignoring her comments about dinner, and promptly sat down on his bed and began reading.

With every sentence he read, he felt a little bit of himself die inside. The original data that had been downloaded from the crashed Invader ship had been included. After so long trying to invade Zim’s base, he had a passing knowledge of the Irken language and was able to get the gist of the ship’s it fairly easily.

Invader Nin had had been struck by a passing asteroid, sending her ship careening into Earth. Unfortunately for her, she’d landed in the 71 percent of the planet that was covered with water. The missing patches of flesh were due to the water burning her flesh away, killing her before Membrane’s scientists could retrieve the Voom cruiser from the water.

After reading the files of experiments they did on Nin’s body, the pages and pages of photographs, he couldn’t help but to be slightly glad that she had passed away before the cutting started.

He read about how he was created, the astronomically low chances of it going correctly, how many ‘failures’ were born, how many died, how they processed the bodies. There was a quote by Thomas Alva Edison he remembered, about how Edison didn’t fail to make the light bulb 2,000 times, he learned 2,000 ways not to make a light bulb.

Professor Membrane learned 2,000 ways not to make a clone of himself. According to the files, Dib was the only survivor.

Dib wasn’t even completely human. No wonder he’d fastened on to the Paranormal and Aliens from his earliest memories, he’d been looking for the pieces of himself he didn’t know he had.

No wonder he wasn’t normal.

The woman who had incubated him, the woman he’d thought of as his Mother, donated half of Gaz’s genetic material, the ‘old fashioned’ way - having fallen in love with Professor Membrane while carrying Dib. So he and Gaz were related, somewhat. Although he wasn’t sure if that made him her or some sort of strange father or uncle type of hybrid, since he was still mostly genetically Professor Membrane.

Gaz’s mother was dead, her remains somewhere in Professor Membrane’s labs, in one of the tubes he had seen. He wondered if that was what they meant by ‘donating your body to science’.

It was dark again before he finished reading everything. He felt hollow, scooped out, like there was nothing inside him anymore. He wasn’t Professor Membrane’s son. He was just some… replacement for him. He wasn’t supposed to have a future, thoughts of his own, aside from those that Professor Membrane laid out for him. His entire existence was a lie.

And no one would care.

No one had ever cared, not really, not even when he’d been right. Maybe Gaz, just a little. But it was unlikely that even she would care about this, just tell him to suck it up and get on with it. All of his dreams, crumbled to dust. He could expose Zim for all of his alien glory and it would do nothing. Accomplish nothing. Aliens existed. So what? No one cared.

If no one cared, why should he care? Why should he give a flying duck about anything? All those years, spent trying to protect humanity from alien invasion, for nothing.

Nothing.

Moving on anger so hot it left him cold, he began to gather his things. A few articles of clothing, the data pad, and some of his tools of his paranormal trade automatically went into a duffel bag, minus cameras or weapons. The duffel went over his shoulder and he went out the window with the ease of way too much practise sneaking out in the night.

Once out, he navigated the streets in a half-daze. He didn’t know how long it took him; it seemed like between one eyeblink and the next, he was at the end of a cul-de-sac, staring at the faces of four smiling gnomes. He stared at them, then proceeded to walk up the pathway to the door. The gnomes rotated to keep him in their sights, but he ignored them, standing on the front step. He stared at it for a long moment, distantly surprised that they didn’t zap him on sight.

After a long moment, he rang the doorbell. It opened, the smiling faces of Zim’s robotic parents staring at him. “Welcome home, son!” They chirped at him with their vacant eyes.

”Hi.” He looked up at them, one hand clutching the duffel. “I’m here to surrender.”

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Continued Here

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Happy Lurker Day!
(and just to head anyone off at the pass, this fic is smut free. The chapter title becomes ironic later on.)