The screen flicked on as Greg and Izzy sat, patiently waiting. Older Izzy and Christophe appeared on the other screen.

  "Hey!" Young Izzy smiled. "Something is wrong isn't it?" she said as Older Izzy did a familiar eye roll.

  "I told you she would see through that, it's her fake smile too." Older Izzy muttered to Christophe.

  "Sis…" Young Izzy pried.

  "It's not all bad. There is some good news. Great news, actually. Currently 4 out of 14 universes were viable for colonizing and they are going as planned, one of them is ahead of schedule and even though your universe was considered…not suitable, you did discover Jenny's plan to wreck everything and we found her Trojan personality file. So everyone will be happy to know she has been thoroughly deleted to death.

  "That's a relief." Greg nodded. "So what's the bad part?"

  “Lawg stood with a toothbrush in his mouth, staring at a red brick on the kitchen counter.”

  “You tweaking out, bro?” asked Marley

  “Brick.” Lawg said.

  “I’m gonna take that as a yes.” Marley said snagging the brick and placing it in the brick pile over by the bulkhead. He pondered for a moment, tilting his head.

  “You ever notice how Greg and Izzy seem to be accumulating bricks and leaving them in our ship?” Marley asked.

  "Have they been in the kitchen today?" Lawg asked.

  "Don’t think so, they got this whole phone-home thing going that I don’t wanna bother them about. Seems personal and drama-filled." Mar yawned.

  "I swear these bricks weren't here a minute ago."

  "Well obviously they were, or someone just put them here. Only 2 options, given the presence of bricks. Not like they can walk in here on their own."

  "So Does Maggy ask about me?" asked Young Izzy.

  "No sweetie…you're a copy. You're still Maggy's room-mate back home, so Maggy doesn’t ask about you, because Maggy doesn’t know you're gone…because you're not. Kinda." Older Izzy explained.

  "Right, I keep forgetting that." she sighed.

  "Hey dad." Christophe said with a wave.

  "Son…you get that virus fixed?" Greg asked.

  "Yea it was pretty bad there for a while, I lost 34 Christophes but it's fine now."

  "Sorry to hear that, but that's why we have backups. Back when I was young, we didn’t have copies. You got killed and you just…you just died." he shrugged.

  "I know. It was barbaric. I can't imagine living with just one me, knowing it's mortal and inevitably going to get killed by something."

  "So…Conquer any new worlds lately?" Greg asked.

  "We still don’t use the word conquer, dad. Terraformed a few moons, nothing noteworthy, you do anything fun?"

  "Blew up a moon."

  "Hopefully not inhabited." Christophe sighed.

  "Just Jenny and about 8 murderous pirates that worked for Jenny."

  "Eh, that's not really worth putting in the books I guess." he shrugged.

  Marley sighed and grabbed the 2 bricks from his bed and stomped into the den with a look of parental scolding.

  "Menace…are you hiding bricks around the ship for some reason?" he asked, noticing she was gone. He checked the scanner and made his way to the upper-floor shuttle bay where she was hiding. He opened the shuttle door and noticed her munching on a food ration bar with a sopping wet sponge on her head.

  "Safety Hole." she whispered.

  "Okay…Are you hiding bricks around the ship?" he asked.

  "Safety!" she repeated, closing the hatch door and locking it.

  "Great, always helpful." he shrugged.

  He trotted back down to find Lawg, who was nervously holding his air-drill in his gun holster like he may need to quick-draw on something.

  "Menace is freaked out and hiding, probably for the entire adventure. Why are you carrying your drill-gun?"

  "Something's not right, it's downright left. The Osirians aren't coming out, and the bricks keep moving around. This is bad." he said, bravely cowering in his paranoia.

  "Dude, if you can't handle my chronic, don’t try." Marley started as he saw a brick spontaneously move about an inch and stop. "Okay this is bad. Get the Greg."

  "I tried, the transport trailer is locked down. They may already be dead. This is what we trained for in academy…self reliance and survival."

  "Okay, chill. First off, you barely graduated, like by a razor thin margin, so your training is bullshit, secondly, I never went to any academy for space stuff. I got an online degree in gaming computers and a highschool diploma from Delmar's 3 week bounty hunter class. So the bricks are moving…not a fan of that concept at all, but it's not a definite combat situation. It could be spacebugs that live in bricks and move their homes around for shelter. It could be…hover bricks." he struggled.

  "You made that up." Lawg snipped.

  "Of course I made that up, this is weird shit. Bricks are moving on their own power and I got no other explanations. Let's carefully snag one and scan it. Then we can freak out if it's a bad thing."

  The scanner beeped and displayed the results.

  "Yea this is a bad thing." Marley said. Looking at the brick scans. "The bricks are definitely alive. Silicon based life forms, nothing on the alien database about them. And yea, the ship scans show they are in fact multiplying, kinda rapidly."

  "We're boned." Lawg said, gripping his drill and racking the slide.

  "Probably, but keep trying to get into the other ship. If the Osirians can't help us we may be boned. This is a quick fix for a Greg or Izzy."

  "We can smash the door with a battering ram." Lawg suggested.

  "No, it's too strong." Marley sighed.

  "It can't be THAT strong of a door."

  "Yes…yes it can. It's a prison hauler for dangerous aliens. If it's semi-Greg-proof do you think we can just whack the lock off with a hammer? It's designed to keep violent, monstrous-sized aliens from getting out, despite their freedom being literally separated by whatever lock that is made of. It's probably just shy of indestructible. Maybe we can pick the lock from this side, but there is no way we can just smash through it."

  "So what is the bad news exactly?" Young Izzy asked. Old Izzy looked like she was about to cry.

  "The council…um, doesn’t approve of our request to bring you back."

  "Oh that's bullshit." Greg huffed. Christophe nodded and turned the cam.

  "Yea we agree, but they won't budge. They feel it's a matter of ethics, ironically. since Young Izzy here was illegally made to begin with, and accidentally copied there, faxing her back would essentially be making another illegal copy and merging would risk mission data being corrupted since Young Izzy 1 doesn’t even know you exist and isn't cleared for the mission at all. As for dad…well frankly they just consider it a blessing to get rid of a Greg however they can, and nobody is gonna change that opinion."

  "That part makes sense." he nodded.

  "So they're just leaving me here?" Young Izzy asked.

  "We haven't given up yet, Christophe and I are working very hard to persuade them to re-evaluate that decision. You know how politicians are." Old Izzy said as she switched to a private holographic feed and the screens divided, leaving Christophe and Greg alone in silence.

  "Well. That's depressing." Greg said.

  "Yea…so you and that Izzy…" Christophe tiptoed.

  "You wanna talk about literally anything else, boy?"

  "Sasha is doing great." Christophe diverted.

  "Oh nice, she finally get that planet of hers fixed up?"

  "Yea, it's populated, she's taking well to leadership and the inhabitants seem to like her. Mari is staying with her for a while to help her with the architecture."

  "She's my favorite granddaughter. Normally I hate children, but she's really creative and I see a lot of my artistic side in her…minus the violent outbursts I had when I was her age. The brilliant artist minus the…frequent homicide."

  "Yea, she hasn’t killed anyone. Her generation is really looking great in the human eyes. So avoiding the obvious territory, Is little Izzy happy overall? She getting enough sleep?" Christophe asked.

  "We live on a prison transport trailer painted pink to match the space icecream-truck that hauls it. So our lives aren't really the lap of luxury. She doesn’t get bored very often if that helps."

  "I'm not sure that it does actually. The readings from that universe are just…weird. What's it like?" Christophe asked.

  "Well if you look closely you can actually read the dialogue."

  "What the hell?" Squinted Christophe.

  "I'm fairly convinced it's a TV show."

  "Oh that's horrifying. Are there commercials?"

  "None so far but, there are the occasional vague product placements, we've eaten a lot of Twick."

  "I'm so sorry. If you need supplies and something to satisfy a craving without all the empty sugar, I could send you some Red Bison Beef and Cheese combo packs. They're high in protei-"

  "Oh here go with the product placement." Greg sighed, face-palming

  "And with flavors like teriyaki, sweet-heat-"

  "Original, Peppered, bla bla, 90 percent flat-free blah." Greg muttered rolling his eyes. "You're diving into a subconscious ad, son. Just pull away."

  "-I'm sure we can get something through."

  "No it's fine. I'm sure I can find sponsors over here. It's shockingly low budget for a space-adventure without ads, I'm fairly sure it's a streaming original."

  "I don’t know if that's good or bad." Christophe sighed.

  "Well there's occasional ass shot and I get to say Fuck about every 2 days so…it's okay. Crap, I Wish I hadn't just wasted my weekly Frig on an empty Frack. Who the hell comes up with the rating systems? You can say as many Forking Shits and Damns as you want, but only one Frelling Frig every few days. That's some bullshot. I swear if they are cutting out all the sex scenes, this is only gonna be like 1 season long."

  "Cheesus-Fork, dad. That's a clone of one of my gorram wives you're fragging" Christophe sighed awkwardly.

  Laser blasts bounced off the door as Marley tried again to hack the release code.

  "They're slowly getting closer." Lawg yelled. Switching from laser to air drill.

  "Good thing they move super slow, or we'd have no chance of just quickly running past them." Marley said. Sparking the wires and shorting out the panel. "Nope, that's ruined. Plan B."

  "You'll never take me alive. Rock beat's paper…but Lawg defeats Brick!" Lawg yelled, throwing a smoke bomb. It detonated and they started coughing.

  "Dude, why? Now we can't breathe!" Marley coughed.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "My eyes are burning." Lawg yelled, rubbing his eyes.

  "You did this to you!" Mar scolded. "I feel no sympathy!"

  Young Izzy wiped her eyes as she looked at her older clone Izzy, who was also emotional and trying not to cry.

  "I just think if I'm stuck here, the least you can do is tell me the truth about some stuff you hid from me all these years, so one day when I try and call and find out I'm cut off forever, I wont just go eternity with unanswered things eating me up inside."

  "Fair enough. What do you need to know?" Older Izzy asked.

  "Were you and Greg ever a thing? Does the reason you hate him have anything to do with me?"

  "No and no. It was between us, and has nothing to do with you. He is an immature jackass, but you know that already and that doesn’t seem to stop you."

  "Are there any weird stages in my life that I should know about that are likely to blindside me?" Young Izzy asked.

  "You may have some subtle bisexual tendencies that surface around the age of 40 ish, but that also may have been a glitch from the illegal body swapping, so just avoid any body swapping and you're probably fine."

  "Right." Young Izzy said, diverting her eyes.

  "When I was around 200, the culture changed dramatically and maybe humans just don’t live long enough for the phases to loop around again. But you'll develop a fetish for pale men with red hair. I dunno, it repeats. Avoid guys named Brad. Not all of them are jerks but after a few centuries, patterns emerge, and I swear there is something there, just don’t. Not worth it. Mushrooms are too dangerous to experiment with if you have friends who don’t grow back limbs. Don’t get into Politics, doesn’t matter what you do it doesn’t make a difference to anything. At some point you are going to think you have a talent for punk rock but you really don’t, everyone is just too stoned to know you suck, and the nice friends wouldn’t tell you anyway, and most of the lousy ones are trying to tap that, so they'll say anything. So, no, you can't sing. I know you think you can but you're wrong, and it's embarrassing. The only ones who say you have talent, are the men trying to score. Does Greg ever tell you that you have a good singing voice?"

  "He once compared me to a small rodent being pulled into a truck's disc brakes."

  "Well at least he usually honest." she sighed.

  "I'm guessing the guys trying to score by saying you could sing well, actually scored, right?" Young Izzy said with an eyebrow raise.

  "Of course they did, sweetie we're voracious sluts, all of us Izzys."

  "Is there anything I'm not likely to do at some point?" Young Izzy asked. Old Izzy opened her mouth and paused, thinking real hard.

  "I can thing of like 4 things you held your ground on, but basically everything else is on the table at some point."

  "Great." Young Izzy muttered.

  Lawg let out a girly shriek of terror and motivation, like a war cry but from a 12 year old girl with no dignity. He darted at Marley and jumped over the bricks, rolling like a Lawg and wanging his head on the wall as he landed. He slid to his feet and then tripped over a transition strip, flailing into the cargo boxes.

  "Stop being a tool and just escape like a normal human being." Marley scolded.

  "No choice…greatness is in my blood."

  "Was the rolling necessary? Where's your air-drill?"

  "Shit!" Lawg yelled, looking back and seeing it on the other side of the bricks. "We've gone too far; I'll have to find another." he added.

  "You haven't eaten anyone on the crew?" asked Christophe. "Not even a chunk?"

  "Not a single one." Greg boasted.

  "I'm kinda proud of you." Christophe smiled.

  "I'm not a child, I can control my impulses and my actions." Greg scoffed.

  "Spontaneous action!" Yelled Lawg, throwing another smoke grenade.

  "Dude?! Again? Why!?" Marley yelled, hitting him with a wrench.

  "I freaked out, I have impulse control problems. I just react."

  "What are you? A child?" Marley scolded.

  "I wish Duffy was still with us. The evil bricks would definitely eat the fat girl first. She runs slow and would provide more nutrition." he yelled as Marley yanked away the last smoke grenade.

  "NO!" he pointed. "No grenades in a pressurized ship, ever! Bad Lawg! Where did you even find a grenade."

  "I don’t know." Lawg cried.

  "Well it was good talking to you son, but I can smell smoke, so clearly Captain Plank has managed to dick-up something really bad and without Izzy or myself intervening…they'll probably all die." Greg yawned.

  "Alright, I'll talk to you soon, dad. Try and murder as few people as possible, for me."

  "It's a difficult request but you have my word that I'll try my best."

  "I know you Elders and your tempers, different times and all, but it's a more civilized universe now, I think you can manage without killing someone."

  "I'll kill him!" Yelled Older Izzy.

  "No you wont, you won't even try to illegally come here to attempt it and fail." barked Young Izzy.

  "The thought of that brute exploiting you for views on some internet sight." Older Izzy barked angrily.

  "I started it! It wasn’t even his idea, sis. And you know what? You're just mad because he's seen you naked. And he's been ALL OVER THIS!" she defiantly said rubbing her hips and sides in an angrily seductive manner."

  "Oh for the love of all that is holy, what is wrong with you?"

  "You mean what is wrong with us? Apparently we don’t even know what we want until it grabs us by the waist and makes-out with us on the dashboard console panel. Maybe you should go find yourself a Greg and try it!" she snipped.

  "Just try it!" yelled Marley as Lawg reluctantly pulled the fire alarm and the sprinklers clicked on.

  "This is a bad idea." Lawg yelled.

  "The Halo system replaces the oxygen and the bricks may suffocate without air. We don’t know that they don’t breathe. We have no other ideas left!" Marley barked.

  Greg opened the airlock and stood with a look of disbelief.

  "The ass is this nonsense?" he said staring at a brick wall, well mortared and solid just behind the airlock opening. "Um…if you guys are playing a game or something you need to move, because I'm about to just punch this wall down and ask questions later…any objections?" he asked. The airlock closed and locked. "Fine. screw you guys." Greg scoffed, heading to the emergency exit and squeezing into the door seal. He popped the door into space and climbed out. He silently mumbled and cursed in the airless vacuum of space, as he stomped across the hull with his mag-boots and looked for the other airlock. He climbed in and pressurized, stepping into the Tast-E-Chill as alarms went off and smoke filled the corridors. "Okay guys, party is over. Put the bong away and let's do come cleanup." he yelled.

  "…what?" young Izzy said, blinking and staring at the brick wall. "Greg what the hell is this? This isn't funny, what kind of stupid crap prank is going on? Anyone? Real mature guys, seal Izzy into the trailer with a brick wall. Ha, ha. Seriously how do I get out?"

  "The bricks have taken over the ship, it can't be stopped!" Yelled Lawg.

  "What did you guys smoke? It's clearly hallucinogenic and smells like Halo. Are you huffing Halo?" Greg asked

  "The bricks are aliens." yelled Marley, firing a round at the nearest pile as it sat there like a pile of bricks. "You know how bricks seem to be everywhere and growing in numbers? They're breeding!" Marley said, firing another shot

  "Like rabbits!" yelled Lawg.

  "Gross, dude. Get your mind out of my species pants!"

  "Oh good lord, they're just bricks." Greg said picking one up and tapping on it. He rolled his eyes and scanned it, looking perplexed. "Oh… my bad. I stand corrected, this is in fact, living." he said, squinting and examining it closer. "Do we still have the dream thingy that lets us enter someone's subconscious?" Greg asked.

  "Yea…over by the GameStation 4." Marley replied with a nervous look. "Why?"

  "I have a weird idea." Greg smirked.

  Izzy looked sad as she logged back on and Christophe appeared on the screen.

  "Hey." she yawned.

  "I thought you angrily hung up with Izzy, in protest."

  "I did, but then the dipshits walled me into the trailer with bricks and mortar and I got bored." she sighed.

  "Bummer. First time being sealed into something by humans?" Christophe asked.

  "Yep." she nodded.

  "They scare easily. Makes it even worse when you smash your way out and then they know they can't imprison you. So…been doing anything fun lately?" he asked.

  "Same ol stuff mostly. Keeping Greg from murdering people, having moderate success, trying to make money…moderate success. We ran into Keanu Reeves, that was fun."

  "I'm sorry…I may have just had a small brain glitch in my speech program." Christophe said checking his data files.

  "No you heard that right. It's a good story, let me tell you of the time." she yawned.

  "I don’t wanna go inside a bricks' brain!" Lawg shrieked as Greg forced a headset on his head.

  "Damnit Lawg, I need someone stupid in case the bricks have a low IQ. You're the closest thing we have to a sentient brick on this ship, and if I'm going in, someone is going with me." he said flicking the device on as Lawg went limp. Greg USB'd himself and sat down.

  "This is really insane." Marley noted. "And if you become a vegetable I will keep your stuff." he said saluting Greg as he flipped the device on and he went catatonic. "Totally keeping that bitchin red bass." Markey shrugged.

  Greg opened his eyes next to a terrified looking Lawg in a grey void with a brick floor. Greg jumped a little as Lawg turned, noticing his head and body were made of about 8 perfectly cornered blocks.

  "HAAA!" they both shouted.

  "Quiet." rumbled the voice.

  "What the hell, I'm square!" Lawg said freaking out.

  "Everything in here is square." said the voice.

  "Like that one game?" Greg pondered.

  "NOTHING LIKE ANY GAME!" yelled the voice.

  "Okay so…what do we do in here?"

  "Whatever you want, craft things. Use the things to mine things. Use those materials to craft more things. The possibility is endless as long as you like squares." said the voice.

  "Why are you attacking our ship?" asked Lawg.

  "Attacking? We have done nothing to you. You brought us aboard on one of your crates and we have survived." it boomed in a very god-like voice.

  "But you multiplied like you were taking over or something." Lawg whined.

  "We're bricks…we don’t have much to do except reproduce and stack and both of those things frightened you. What do you want us to do…construct an economy?"

  "Wait…Lawg." Greg said turning slowly. "You just found alien bricks and decided to wage war on them because they were stacking and having brick-sex?" Greg asked with disappointment.

  "I got scared." he admitted.

  "Shit, no wonder they retaliated, how would you feel if you got stuffed in a crate with some chick, and the aliens who took you got mad when you got laid and took it as a sign of war?"

  "My brain hurts." Lawg said sitting down in more of a square squat, like an L block from Tetris.

  "All we wanted was safe passage to our world" said the voice "and you keep going on stupid side missions and never managed to deliver the cargo. We resorted to our only other plan…try and fill the ship so you would be forced to go back just to unload all the bricks. We never anticipated you would freak out."

  "Lawg…you owe a very square man an apology." Greg said.

  "Okay fine, sorry I tried to blowtorch you for planking in the kitchen." he reluctantly sighed.

  "So what exactly are you?" Greg asked.

  "You…you really don’t know who we are? We left tons of clues on Earth, literally millions of tons of them made of stone and brick. We're the Masonry."

  "You mean the Masons?" Greg asked.

  "No, the Masonry. The Masons are the guys who work with stones…we are the stones. Get it?"

  "Whaoa, so, let me get this right…" Greg pondered. "You are the stones the Masons of Earth were working with?"

  "More like working for. Humanity, as you probably know, is rather dumb and self destructive."

  "Oh we know…they blew up Earth hundreds of years ago."

  "What? That's depressing." said Mason. "You mean we spent all that time teaching you how to brick and mortar and manipulate society for the greater good and then after we left they just blew it up?" he asked.

  "I think so…I'm from a different universe, but in our universe people dropped stone for steel and slowly replaced the old buildings with modern ones. That's about when society really turned to shit actually…I see the connection."

  "But stone is life. Did the ancients not explain to these steel wielders of the important spiritual powers of a bunch of rocks?"

  "Well they seem to have gone with the cheaper option and shortly after that they built a particle accelerator and made a chunk of strange matter. Everything apparently just exploded after that." Greg shrugged.

  "Did your Earth do any better?" Mason asked Greg.

  "Kinda…not really. Few hundred years more, but then they pissed off some really bad aliens and well, the planet got blown up. Basically every universe has a blown-up Earth chapter. Weather they did it directly or indirectly varies but…yea when left unsupervised, they die. Pretty much every time. They always manage to escape and repopulate somewhere else, and under tremendously strict supervision they sometimes do okay." Greg shrugged.

  "Bummer. Wish we wouldn’t have wasted so much time on the Greek architecture if it just all blew up. Those pillars are a pain to do. Do you know how tricky making a circle is for a species made of squares. You basically have to zoom in until the trillions of squares just smoothes out from a distance. It's really hard." complained Mason.

  "I get you. Anyway yea we'll just drop you off at the nearest planet you like and everything is cool, mkay?" Greg shrugged.

  "Sounds fair…with this Lawg be punished for his stupidity?"

  "I'll force him to only use curves for a month." Greg smiled.

  "That sounds reasonable. Anywhere in the Cubic system would be great. Big yellow square star, you can't miss it, got about 14 planets and countless moons…all square."

  "Yea, that will be easy to scan for, even with a fairly old graphics card." Greg nodded.

  "We would be eternally grateful and owe you a debt of a single favor, assuming it's not too crazy or we forget who you are. You should probably make it relatively soon, like a year or less." Mason muttered.

  "No problem." Greg said yawning and pulling out a hammer. Lawg looked nervous as he turned to him.

  "Hey wait, there has to be a better way to wake up than killing me." Lawg objected.

  "Probably…but I enjoy this and there are no consequences, so Izzy won't get mad at me for it… Bonk." he said lightly whacking Lawg in the head.

  "Need help?" asked Mason.

  "Sure." Greg nodded. The block beneath him vanished and he fell for a good hundred feet or so before waking up.

  "What happened?" asked Izzy as Greg unplugged.

  "It's fine. Lawg pissed off some bricks and they retaliated. Now they owe us a favor and we're gonna drop them off in the Cubic system." Greg yawned. "Normal day."

  "What's this?" Marley asked, picking up a rock and handing it to Greg. He lightly bit it.

  "Looks like a green square of jade, hard as a diamond though. I think this is the favor reminder, put this in a place Lawg can never get." Greg shrugged.

  "A hot woman's underwear?" asked Marley as Greg chuckled and bumped his furry fist in approval at the joke. "Or basically any woman's underwear." Greg shrugged.

  "Just…" Izzy said snagging it, taking it away from the Bro-cluster before someone lost it or ate it by accident. "Stupid men." she said storming off.

  "Damn I'm hungry. Anyone know where to get a good funnel-cake?" Greg asked.

  "FUNNEL CAKE!" yelled Menace.

  "Does anyone know if she can turn invisible or something?" Greg asked, missing the part where she showed up.

  "We really don’t know much about her." Marley yawned. "I've asked questions but she just yells "ORANGE PAINT!" and boops me on the nose, so I stopped asking."

  "Good enough." Greg said, checking his emails and trotting off.

  The pink bucket of idiots percolated its way through space, like a horizontal coffee maker, filled with dumbasses instead of grounds. The usual extro-music played. Another day in paradise. Another adventure solved, another dollar not made.