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Tony hated his job.
He’d never admit that, of course. Overseeing the production of numbers was, after all, critically important to the survival of all mankind. Big numbers stop the Sun from exploding. Simple as that.
Just… why did it have to be Nubby?
Poor, sweet Nubby. A little spherical… thing… with big wet eyes and chubby cheeks, a cooing creature from beyond the stars, was humanity’s only hope. Tony had been fairly indifferent to it at first. It could interface with the numbers in a process he called “popping pegs”, and with sufficient number energy, it could clone itself, creating a whole new Nubby. It was perfect for satisfying the Sun’s hunger. It kept the Earth alive.
Until one fateful day, about five years ago. One of the Nubby clones escaped.
Tony wasn’t sure when it happened. Probably when the night shift manager, Bologna Tony, was working. That guy was a loose cannon, probably convinced the factory workers to sneak one out and send it to his house as a weird prank. Regardless, Tony woke up at 5:00 on a balmy summer morning to prepare for yet another shift at the Number Factory, and…
There was Nubby.
Sitting on his chest.
Tony wasn’t sure he had ever screamed louder. It had awoken his son, Tony Jr., from the other room of the apartment – and Junior. was not a light sleeper.
Tony’s original plan was to take Nubby back to the Factory. Pop it right back in the tubes, send it out to make some numbers. Easy peasy.
There was just one problem.
“I dunno, Dad, I think he’s kinda funny. Can we keep him?”
Junior had taken a liking to Nubby, it seemed. Judging by the way Nubby cooed when Junior petted the top of his head, the little creature had also taken a liking to Junior.
“Kid, we don’t really know what Nubby is,” Tony had said. “I have to take it back to work where it came from.”
Junior was fifteen at the time. He was old enough to be rational about this sort of thing. And, to his credit, he was. He didn’t put up a fight. He let Nubby go willingly, even if his face betrayed a strange sort of sadness as he followed his father downstairs to the lobby.
Nubby, however, was not rational.
As soon as Tony had carried it outside, it started whining like a dog. It shook violently in Tony’s arms, burying its face in his chest.
“Woah, Nubby, hey!” Junior bolted to the lobby entrance to check out the noise. Like a bat out of hell, Nubby squeezed its way out of Tony’s clutches and back into the apartment complex, cowering behind Junior’s leg.
“Ugh…!” Tony had tried to lunge for Nubby, but the orb was too fast. It bounced around the lobby, knocking paintings off walls and cracking window panes.
“Get… back… here…!” Could Nubby bounce forever? Tony wasn’t sure. But what Nubby couldn’t do was bounce out of a corner. And sure enough, once it had made its way into such a corner, it had nowhere to go but into Tony’s expectant arms.
“Gotcha!” Nubby was rubbery in texture, yet a little bit sticky and warm to the touch. A weird sensation, to be sure. The creature once again began to whine and shiver, but Tony just gripped it tighter.
“All right, time to take this thing out to… the… truck…” Tony had no way of ensuring Nubby didn’t escape. He had to drive to work, and he couldn’t exactly hold Nubby and be safely behind the wheel at the same time. He briefly considered asking Junior to hold Nubby while they drove, but…
Tony held Nubby out, so he could better see its face. Its eyes were watering. He didn’t want to prescribe human emotions onto a weird alien baby thing, but it almost seemed like it was crying.
He glanced towards his son. Junior was staring at the floor. He briefly looked up, caught sight of Nubby quaking in his father’s arms, then looked back down immediately.
Tony couldn’t make his son take Nubby to The Factory. Just because Nubby can clone itself doesn’t mean that this specific Nubby wouldn’t meet certain doom inside that damned building, and while Tony tried to keep the details of his job away from his son, there was no way that Junior didn’t know that Nubbies were dying en masse in there.
“...okay. Fine. I give up.”
“Dad?”
“Nubby can stay, if you promise to take care of it.”
“Yes!”
The next few weeks consisted of a lot of learning about Nubby. Tony spoke with the folks in charge of loading up the Nubbies into the Factory, Octo-ny and Glass Tony. Apparently, Nubbies didn’t need to eat anything except for raw number energy, but Glass confessed that he sometimes fed the Nubbies bits of his lunch. So far, there was nothing a Nubby wouldn’t or couldn’t eat.
Junior was excited to find this out. He immediately took to sharing bits of his food with Nubby, pouring a few chips from a bag into his hand and letting Nubby eat from his palm. The creature was docile while eating, taking small bites of chips until there was nothing but crumbs. Since then, Nubby would beg for scraps at the dinner table like a dog. Tony tried not to indulge it, but sometimes, those big wet eyes would tug at his heartstrings in just the right way, and he’d give the thing a couple of kidney beans from his plate.
What Nubbies really needed more than food was enrichment. Junior’s old toys from when he was a little kid were finally taken out of storage, giving Nubby a wide variety of stuffed animals and action figures to roll around the apartment. Nubby’s favorite was an odd stuffed toy that the incredibly mature Junior from a decade or so ago had lovingly named “Poop Butt”. The little blue ball would push Poop Butt around and occasionally mouth one of its plush legs. Nubbies do not have teeth, but God-dammit, this little Nubby tried to chew on whatever it could anyway. At first, Tony had been concerned about it getting too mouthy with the electrical cables, but Octo-ny had assured him that the rubbery skin of the Nubby meant it couldn’t get electrocuted. That didn’t stop Tony from discouraging his son’s weird pet from playing with dangerous items, of course. One could never be too careful.
It had been five years since this particular Nubby had come into the Tony household. Junior was now twenty, still living with his father, but now working at the Number Factory, in customer service. He had insisted on working with the Nubbies, but…
Well. Tony knew they died down there.
Junior was still so, so attached to his own Nubby. He had leash trained it, like a dog, and took it into work with him every day as a sort of “Nubby ambassador”. Tony couldn’t risk his son forming the same sort of attachments to the other Nubbies in the factory. Junior was too soft for that.
It would wreck him.
And Tony? Well, Tony wasn’t all too different from his son.
He’d been taking to covering his ears whenever he oversaw a Nubby launch. He didn’t want to hear its little Nubby noises as it hurtled to its death.
He had taken to playing tug-of-war with his son’s Nubby back home. Jake the Snake made for a nice substitute rope.
Nubby snuggled with him at night sometimes, and in those moments, Tony caught himself thinking of the little thing in much the same way one might think of a dog or a cat.
That’s my Nubby, he’d think.
He struggled to not see his Nubby in the faces of those sacrificed to the Number Factory.
At present, it was four thirty in the morning. The three of them — Tony, Junior, and Nubby — were still in the same old two-bedroom apartment, with the same old furniture and the same old routine. Go to work. Go home. Repeat.
When the Sun is threatening to explode, it’s kind of hard to have hobbies.
Tony didn’t have to be up for another 30 minutes. The Sun hadn’t even risen yet, in all of its wobbly glory. But he couldn’t sleep.
What do I do? Tony thought to himself. I don’t know how much longer I can keep sacrificing these little guys. Nubby, blissfully ignorant to the man’s internal dilemma, simply cooed in response and nuzzled itself into the crook of Tony’s arm.
The monotony of daily life in Nubby’s Number Factory. The unending Nubby slaughter. What was one guy, one simple Tony, going to do about it?
He sighed.
Probably nothing. After all, what was a little sacrifice in the face of saving humanity?
Tony wasn’t sure.
The Sun began to peek into the window. Wavering rays of light, a constant reminder of the celestial threat looming overhead. Nubby cooed again, and Tony gave it a scratch under the chin.
Guess I’ve got to head to work now.