"Recall" - Part One

 

Part One

            “AH! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!”

            Gumball woke up screaming those words, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. The last few hours were a total blur. The last thing he could remember was waiting for the school bus with his fish brother, Darwin, and then suddenly being chased across ten blocks by Tina Rex. After that, it was all a mystery to the young blue cat-boy.

            Now, he was inside some sort of futuristic cab with a driver – a smiling robotic mannequin in an old-fashioned cabbie’s uniform – with Darwin sitting to one side of him. Sitting at his other side was a strange lady with short blond hair, wearing a red flannel shirt and ripped denim jeans. She was unlike anything Gumball had ever seen around Elmore.

            “Bad dream, sport?” He heard the robot driver ask him.

            “I…can’t remember,” Gumball replied, which was one of his odder responses – though this one was more justifiable than others in the past.

            His screaming woke up Darwin and the woman. “Where are we?” his brother asked, before he glanced over to the woman and asked her, “And who are you?”

            The woman rubbed the side of her head, nursing a headache. “Well, therein lies a conundrum,” she told them. “I’ve gone by several names. But, under the current circumstance, you can call me ‘Cara’.”

            “O.K., Cara,” Gumball said, “any idea as to how we ended up sharing a cab?”

            Cara shrugged her shoulders. “I’m just as in the dark as you, kiddo.” Something about the way she addressed him as “kiddo” sparked a sense of familiarity in Gumball, as if he heard it from her somewhere before.

            “Maybe our driver knows,” Darwin suggested. He looked over to the robot driver and called, “Hey, Mister Driver!”

            The animatronic driver’s armless body swiveled around to face the passengers whilst still “driving” the cab. “Name’s Johnny Cab, son. What can I do for ya?”

            “Can you tell us how we got here?” Darwin inquired.

            “The door opened. You got in.”

            His vague response did nothing to solve their baffling dilemma. “Well, that sure cleared things up,” Gumball remarked wittingly.

            “Do you dream of a vacation at the bottom of the ocean, but you can’t float the bill?” They heard a sophisticated male voice advertise, speaking from the cab’s only television monitor, situated behind the Johnny Cab robot. It broadcasted some sort of commercial with footage that corresponded with the narration.

            “Would you like to ski Antarctica, but you’re snowed under with work? Have you always wanted to climb the mountains of Mars, but now you’re over the hill? Then come to Rekall where you can buy the memory of your ideal vacation – cheaper, safer, and better than the real thing. So don’t let life pass you by. Call Rekall for the memory of a lifetime!”

            “Rekall…” Cara pondered the name in reminiscence. “I feel like I should know that place, but…I can’t seem to remember how.”

            “Maybe that’s where we’re all headed – to Rekall,” Darwin surmised. He turned to the animatronic driver again and asked, “Is that it, Mr. Cab?”

            “How should I know, sonny?” Johnny Cab said. “I wasn’t given a destination.”

            “Why would we get in a cab and not know where we’re goin’?!” Gumball griped.

            “I asked myself the same question after twenty miles, sport.”

            “Well, whatever this ‘Rekall’ place is, I’m guessin’ they are the reason why we can’t remember anything, like how we got into this cab,” Cara figured.

            “So, let’s go there and get our memories back!” the determined Gumball proclaimed, punching his fist into his palm. He then reflected on the gesture, “I’m not sure why I did that. I’m not actually gonna fight these people, not after watching that nice commercial.”

            Now given a destination, the Johnny Cab took them to Rekall, Inc. headquarters. Once there, Cara and the Watterson boys stormed in. “We want to speak with a representative right now!” Cara demanded.

            The secretary at the desk outside salesman Bob McClane’s office was digitizing the color of her nails at the moment Cara and the boys entered. One look at Darwin and Gumball and she immediately started screaming. “Get those filthy mutants out of here!” she specifically demanded Cara.

            “Mutants?” Gumball uttered the term with an eyebrow raised in curiosity. “That’s a new one.”

            “Hey, there’s no need for name-calling,” Cara told the secretary. “Sure, these lil’ guys aren’t something you see every day, but there’s no reason to condemn them for it. They are part of your world, so deal with it!”

            “Much as we appreciate you speaking in our defense, lady, there’s one minor detail you got wrong: Darwin and I aren’t from here,” Gumball said.

            “Yeah, wherever ‘here’ is, we’ve never been to it,” Darwin supported.

            “Really?” Cara frowned. “Then where are you guys from?”

            Before either Gumball or Darwin could answer, the videophone on the secretary’s desk rang and a bespectacled, bird-like woman appeared on screen. “Tiffany! It’s Dr. Lull!” she screeched. “Get Bob on the phone! We got an emergency happening in the memory studio!”

            Tiffany (the secretary) transferred the call. Within seconds, Bob McClane rushed out of his office and to the studio. Cara, Gumball, and Darwin chased after him, in spite of Tiffany ordering them not to. They entered the studio to see a man shouting and thrashing about in a chair, violently struggling to break the straps that held him down.

            “Mr. Quaid! Calm down!” McClane urged him.

            Quaid managed to break the strap holding his right arm and grabbed McClane by the throat. “My name’s not Quaid!” he menacingly stated. He nearly killed McClane had Dr. Lull not intercepted, using a syringe gun to fire dose after dose into Quaid’s thigh until his grip on McClane’s throat weakened and he passed out.

            The entire scene horrified Gumball, Darwin, and Cara.

            “What did you people do to this man?!” Cara confronted McClane.

            Gagging, McClane finally noticed her and the Watterson boys standing in the studio. “Security!” he summoned. A pair of muscled, black-suited guards immediately swarmed in. “Get this woman and those mutant freaks out of here!”

            “Again, with the ‘mutants’ thing!” Gumball grumbled irritably. “Does this town have some sort of infestation or something?” No one gave him a direct response or even bothered to listen to what he had to say. He, Cara, and Darwin were accordingly tossed out of Rekall, Inc.

            “Now what?!” Darwin ranted. “We still don’t know why we can’t remember how we got here!” In his ranting, a vehicle sped through their area. When it passed in front of them, something was thrown out through the passenger side window and landed at the feet of Cara, Gumball, and Darwin. Looking down, the trio discovered it to be a suitcase.

            “Well, that was weird,” Gumball perceived of the circumstance. He noticed Cara picking up the suitcase and taking it to the nearest, darkest alley to pry open, much to Gumball’s disdain. “What’re you doing?! There could be a bomb in that thing!”

            Cara didn’t heed his warning and opened the suitcase to reveal its sole content: a miniature videodisc player/TV set. She turned it on and the first thing that popped on the screen was Cara’s own smiling face. “What up, girlfriend,” she spoke in a rather spunky tone. “Now, you’re probably askin’ yourself, ‘Why am I watching this video of my own gorgeous face?’ Well, that’s because I am you.”

            “No kidding,” Cara muttered.

            On the video, two more faces squeezed in around Cara – those of a blue cat-boy and an orange fish-boy. “Are we recording?” the former whispered. “C’mon! We gotta let them know we’re here, too!”

            Gumball and Darwin’s faces sparked upon seeing themselves. “What the what?!”

            “Hey, Other Darwin and Other Gumball,” Darwin waved his flippers in the recording.

            “Darwin, honey, I can’t see the camera!” The recorded Cara gently pushed his blubbery head down long enough to address their counterparts. “Listen, if you’re watching this by now, Rekall has stolen our memories.”

            “I knew it!” The present Cara clutched her fist in anger.

            “We came here to investigate a conspiracy surrounding Mars but were caught by the Agency and sent to Rekall to have our memories wiped,” the recorded Cara explained.

            “Say what?!” the recorded Gumball reacted to her words. “How do you know what’s happened to us when it hasn’t happened yet?”

            “Fair question,” the present Gumball praised his past self.

            “I don’t,” the recorded Cara responded. “This is just collateral, in case all of it does happen.”

            “Fair answer,” the present Cara praised her past self.

            “Anyway,” the recording continued, “You have to follow Douglas Quaid, but don’t let him know you’ve found this video. His memories have also been tampered with and he may not be who he appears to be either. Good luck and keep our butts from imminent peril!” The video message ended there, leaving Cara, Gumball, and Darwin in awe.

            “Douglas Quaid,” Cara pondered the name. “Wasn’t the man who went berserk in that chair earlier named ‘Quaid’?”

            “You’re asking us?” Gumball returned. “All I remember from that moment was being scared he was going to jump out and kill us all.”

            “Well, let’s hope he doesn’t, if he’s the key to our mystery,” Cara said.

            “There he is, right now,” Darwin pointed a flipper towards the Rekall, Inc. entrance where the secretary and two of the technicians from the memory studio were dumping the unconscious Douglas Quaid into a Johnny Cab. Cara hailed one for herself and the boys to follow.

            By night, they arrived at Quaid’s apartment complex, albeit a few minutes late due to their Johnny Cab taking a shortcut that wasn’t as short as he claimed.

            When they crossed the central plaza, they were met with a haunting display:

            Douglas standing over dead bodies with a gun in his bloodied hands.