@jollysunflora, who suggested an AU with modern technology. Going to split this one in half to avoid one ginormous post, because this is one headcanon per book.
1. When Cassie calls out to Elfangor, Marco whispers, somewhat hysterically, “Don’t be silly. Aliens don’t speak English. Haven’t you seen District 9? Arrival? The Avengers?”
- Elfangor proves them wrong, of course, but when Marco blurts out a question he merely explains (with a hint of amusement) there are some forms of communication more sophisticated than mere words.
2. After Rachel sneaks back out of Chapman’s house, they listen intently to everything she describes.
- “So what you’re really saying,” Marco says, “Is that the yeerks have enough technology to travel between stars, create impossibly advanced illusions of just about anything, take over entire other species… And all they did with it is make Skype 3D?”
- “Yeah,” Rachel says, “but, like, good 3D. Not shitty have-to-wear-glasses 3D.”
- “Nah,” Marco concludes, “still lame.”
3. Rachel gets Tobias a smart watch. She tells him it’s so that he can keep track of their time limit, but in reality she knows he’s lonely and bored out there in the woods, and at least this way she can call him. He can answer calls and check the time if nothing else; they talk for almost an hour before bed every night.
4. With Ax’s help, they turn off location and tracking and wifi and cookies on their phones. After that, there are a lot fewer meetings in Cassie’s barn, a lot more group messages with carefully coded content. Tobias proves to have something of a knack for coming up with ways to talk about yeerk plans (usually disguised as discussions of video game or movie plots), suggestions of morphs slipped into long-winded anecdotes that happen to mention a single animal species by name, and meeting locations’ coordinates as extra phone numbers added to the group chat with no actual phones connected. Jake encourages them not to talk in person, once their phones are secure from traces, because it’s safer this way.
5. After they get back from the mission, Marco spends almost two hours scrolling through Eva’s Facebook page, forever set to In Memoriam. The messages still come in sometimes, from friends and coworkers and distant family members Marco has never met; as the page admin, he filters them all.
- So much wasted grief, he thinks. So much pain and loss and longing, all of it caused by the yeerks. Sound and fury, all over a death that never happened. Helpless and sick, he writes on her wall one last time: “I love you, Mom. I miss you. I WILL find a way to help.” And then he deletes the page.
6. “Don’t send anyone to Jake’s house,” Marco says, “it’s too risky. Instead, we just have Jake…” He gestures at Ax. “Video-call his parents a few times a night to reassure them that he’s still doing just fine working on that project at my house and not…” He gestures to Jake, who is currently tied to a chair with zip-ties using a technique Marco found on a Pinterest tutorial.
- “Of all the stupid ideas you’ve come out with so far, that has got to be the stupidest,” Temrash 114 says in Jake’s voice. “Do you seriously think my parents won’t notice anything off about Ax? How clueless do you think they are?”
- “They never noticed your sorry ass living in their house for over four months,” Marco says coldly.
- In the end, it works, more or less. Jake doesn’t exactly appreciate the long lecture about communication when he finally gets home, but no one asks whether he was replaced by an alien so at least there’s that.
- The next day, Tom’s inbox displays a single new email from an anonymous sender.
7. Rachel’s Instagram account is, in many ways, its own work of art. She copies down famous quotes onto post-it notes with swirling writing, multicolored pens, and even tiny illustrations crammed between the words. She has over 5,000 followers, and she doesn’t even think about how much she’s lost interest in the project until one of her mutuals messages her to ask when she’ll start posting again. She opens her account and realizes that she hasn’t posted any new photos in almost a month, and stares at the multipack of micro-tip Sharpies on her desk for a few minutes before she shuts her laptop without responding.
MM1. They don’t worry about Rachel not texting them back—after all, her gymnastics camp is way off in the mountains and it’s entirely possible she doesn’t have a cell signal there. It’s not until Ax tracks down her phone and finds it abandoned in her bag next to the bus stop that they all start to worry.
- There’s a weird incident with a tornado at Darlene’s house in the middle of the Rachel crisis, but after the twenty-third different cell phone video of the incident gets uploaded to YouTube, the bizarre dust storm made of tiny mouths disappears into thin air and no one hears about it again.
8. “I don’t think I can do yeerk pool reconnaissance tonight,” Rachel says. “Too much homework.”
- Ax sighs loudly. «Boo, you whore.»
- There’s a very long pause, and then Tobias says, «Okay, that’s it, I’m deleting your tablet’s Netflix app.»
- «I much prefer YouTube anyway,» Ax says cheerfully. «It has those shorter messages which play before the main video, and often concisely describe goods or services you can purchase through the use of bitcoins or other human currency. Did you know that those messages change so that their information reflects your preferences for different types of internet content? So informative! So considerate!»
9. The six of them spend over nine hours in the woods, morphing and demorphing and morphing and demorphing to try and keep their phones with them. It shouldn’t be that different from morphing minimal clothing, especially not when (for instance) Rachel has her phone taped tightly to the inside of her arm, but even Cassie can’t manage it. By the end of the exercise they’re exhausted, frustrated, and still short one solution for how to prevent Jake’s parents from freaking out when he regularly goes for several hours at a time without texting them.
10. “It’s really simple,” Marco says. “When it comes to resources, there’s a clear power difference here. I mean, seriously. If you only had to bet on one horse, wouldn’t you bet on the one that owns half the planet?”
- “It’s not about who has more toys.” Jake shakes his head. “It’s about doing what’s right. And sometimes that means breaking the law.”
- Marco throws up his hands. “There’s nothing right about Captain America starting a freaking war just because he doesn’t like Iron Man’s law! Anyway, what does he hope to accomplish outside of tearing the Avengers apart? He’s got, what, Hercules, Ronan, half a dozen other B-listers on his team? Does he seriously think he can take on Black Widow and Ms. Marvel and like 700 Thunderbolts?”
- Jake rolls his eyes. “I think you’re forgetting that the Anti-Reg team has Luke Cage, Black Panther, Storm, and Daredevil. Sometimes the battle itself is worth fighting, because the alternative is allowing a huge injustice to stand. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you—”
- “Don’t go quoting the River of Truth speech at me. We were having a perfectly civil conversation here!”
11. Rachel uploads a cell phone video of Jake and Cassie square-dancing to Facebook. Jake leaves dire warnings in the comments section, but Cassie gives it a thumbs-up and he stops threatening to murder his cousin.
12. “It’ll be okay,” Cassie mutters, “Just as long as my mom doesn’t start talking about Nice With Altruism.”
- “What’s Nice With Altruism?” Rachel asks.
- “You know, that one band with the initials NWA? The one whose iTunes album popped up on my mom’s credit card bill?”
- Rachel’s eyes widen in comprehension. “Cassie, you minx!”
13. Tobias becomes a grand master at taking out drones. Each time he manages to snatch one out of the air he immediately dives, hurling it toward the ground at the last second as he flares and swoops away from the metal and plastic exploding on the pavement below. Afterwards, he brings the broken pieces to Ax for dissection like a housecat bringing home kills to a proud parent. Some are yeerk (spy cameras or hunter-tracker bots), some are purely human (neither of them exactly feels guilty about destroying some rich creepers’ toys) and some are disguised as human devices but with yeerk tech inside (“like a human-controller!” Marco says, and no one laughs at his joke). The yeerks notice that their spy bots disappear all the time, of course, but can’t do anything about it short of sending an entire helicopter to check on that one section of woods.
14. After Cassie posts her first and only Facebook selfie, brand-new Aeropostale outfit and all, Marco writes a fifteen-sentence treatise in the comments section to the blinding power of her beauty, which has stabbed him through the heart following this magnificent transformation.
- “How much money did Rachel add to your Steam Wallet to get you to do that?” Cassie asks him in Messenger.
- “$10,” Marco tells her. “Would have done it for $5.”
- Jake, meanwhile, likes Cassie’s photo. After a minute he goes back and changes the thumbs-up to a heart. Then he panics, and changes the “love” back to a “like.”
15. “So we can’t morph brain-control chips,” Rachel says, “and we can’t morph cell phones. Maybe it’s just that we’re not allowed to morph technology?”
- «That doesn’t make sense at all,» Ax says.
- “Do you have a better explanation?” Marco snaps, more harshly than he means to.
- «No,» Ax admits.
- Rachel claps her hands. “All right, then. That’s the one we’re going with.”
16. “I lost my phone,” Jake tells his mom for the third time that year. This time around he’s even telling the truth. Nevertheless, she grounds him. He sneaks out anyway. She grounds him more when she catches him, and he waits until the middle of the night before he once again sneaks out. He starts timing their fights so that, when he has to disappear from all text contact, she mistakes it for the silent treatment. He hates himself a little more every time it happens.
17. “Send help!” Marco texts. “I told my dad that I bought so much oatmeal because it was gluten free, and now he has us BOTH on this stupid fad diet.”
18. When getting new shoes, new clothes, or food on the fly, Ax always buys for them. He does something with his home computer that allows him to literally make his own bitcoins, and so for now the limits of his bank account are nearly infinite. One of these days he’s going to get his accounts shut down by the NSA, but for now he’s (as Marco says) their sugar daddy.
MM2. “You know what’s not fair?” Marco calls over the building storm.
- Jake sighs. “The fact that we’re out here at all?”
- “No!” Marco gestures over at where Rachel and Cassie have both kicked off their boots—Uggs and Timberlands, respectively—and are starting to morph with the rest of their clothes still on. “How come girls get to wear yoga pants and camisoles in public, while if guys tried that same look we’d be the laughingstock of Reddit in less than an hour?”
- “Because,” Rachel calls back, voice dangerously sweet, “if we’re not going to get equal pay, reproductive rights, the ability to choose our own standards of appearance, or a say in Congress, then the least we deserve are a few consolation prizes.”
19. The Amber alert for Cassie and Karen floods the town, and for the next ten days until they’re found, the rumors fly throughout the school. Brittany’s friend Alice heard on their school’s message board that Cassie killed herself. T.T. was texting Andy, who said that Beth’s mom works for the school and she heard that Cassie kidnapped Karen. An anonymous tip to the local police website posts a blurry photo of what appears to be a half-eaten body with some hysterical story about an escaped jaguar.
- Rachel punches her classmate Allison for sharing a post which speculates that Cassie ran away from home to marry a guy twice her age she met on Tinder. Allison tattles immediately, since (she tearfully tells Chapman) it’s not like she wrote the post; she was just sharing it.
- Jake’s science teacher confiscates his phone after she catches him using it to watch a video in class. However, after she discovers that he’s live-streaming footage of a Monarch butterfly chrysalis, she decides it’s probably educational and gives the phone back without even a demerit.
- An anonymous post to their school’s confession board shows a cropped photo of Cassie, with text written over it: “Apparently, you have to disappear into thin air to get noticed around here. I wish someone would pay this much attention to me.” Rachel recognizes the handwriting as Melissa Chapman’s.
20. David leans in close to whisper to Marco. “It’s cool, see? I figured out how to make sales on the dark web using information I got off my dad’s computer, and once I had a buyer I just emailed the guy to negotiate—”
- “You sent him an email?” Marco’s voice gets a lot higher. “From your home computer? Please tell me you’re not actually that stupid.”
- Later that afternoon, the Animorphs assemble in the bushes outside David’s house. «The yeerks have his location, and they’re coming now,» Jake tells them. «So we break in, grab who we can, and run for it.» He hesitates, and then adds, «If we can only save one, the priority is David.»
21. Jake is mid-mission on CounterStrike with David, not actually giving a damn about firing imaginary weapons at imaginary terrorists but trying to bond with the new guy in TeamSpeak, when David says, “Man, that carry. You’re awesome at this! I bet you’re way better than Rachel, and she was bragging up and down about allegedly knowing shooters so well. I hate fake geek girls like that, always talking about their lame records. It’s like, go back to Animal Crossing!”
- Jake straightens up in his seat, not even noticing when blood fills the center of the screen as he meets a messy end. “Actually,” he says slowly, “Rachel kicks my butt every time we play this. She’s right that she’s got a knack for it.”
- “Ouch.” David laughs. “Must hurt, getting owned by a girl.”
- Jake forces a laugh of his own. “Yeah, but at least she doesn’t gloat about it like Marco does.”
- “Last time a girl thought she could beat me at this game, I doxxed the shit out of her.”
- “You did what?” Jake demands.
- “Chill. It’s not like I hurt her or anything. Me—and a bunch of other guys who got her info—were just sending the message that we saw through her bullshit and we weren’t going to stand for it. Not my fault she was too lazy to VPN. She probably even learned something from the experience.”
- Jake doesn’t say anything. He feels a little sick to his stomach.
- David laughs, too high, too late. “I’m kidding, man. Kidding. I wouldn’t actually do that. Swatting, on the other hand…” There’s something calculating in the tone of his voice. “Better watch out, man. If you have a dog, the cops shoot it on their way in the door. Just saying.”
- “I should probably get to bed,” Jake says.
- “Jeez, I’m still joking! Come on, can’t you take a stupid joke?”
- “Apparently not.” Jake quits the game before he gets a response.
22. Rachel comes out of the bathroom to find her phone has a text alert telling her that she has several new picture messages. The most recent photo—the first one she sees—isn’t sent to her phone, but sent from it. It just shows a tiny bit of the curve of her back and her head wrapped in a towel, but it was taken less than five minutes ago.
- Hands shaking, face dead-white but fists clenched in rage, she scrolls up through the photos. All are of her, most taken from oblique angles. When she gets to the first one taken, of Jordan still asleep in bed some time last night, she has to run back into the bathroom to puke her guts out into the toilet.
- “How do you like me now?” says the accompanying text message.
- “I will tear your fucking head off with my claws, and I will enjoy it,” she sends back to David.
23. For his fourteenth birthday, Rachel gets Tobias a tablet which has been specially adapted to be easier for people with arthritis to use; after some experimentation, she and Cassie have figured out it’s not that hard to use with a beak and talons. He downloads Rick Riordan and Scott Westerfeld novels to read when he gets bored during the day. At night, he’ll often put on Ellie Goulding’s music, turned down so low that it would be undetectable to human ears, and he’ll fall asleep to the soft flow of her voice.
24. “If you couldn’t even be bothered to take a picture of the thing, can you at least tell me what kind of toy space ship we’re talking about?” the guy in the shop says. “Rogue One? Endurance? Axiom?”
- “Sort of like the Prometheus,” Rachel says, “with those engines on the sides?”
- “Yeah, but with a big thruster in the back like Serenity has,” Jake adds. “And flat on top, like…”
- “Like a helicarrier!” Cassie suggests.
- “Yep.” The guy nods. “I know exactly which one you mean.”
25. “Jeremiah,” Marco says. “What a beautiful name for a beautiful young man.”
- Jeremiah looks a little startled, but he leans against the locker door anyway to look at Marco through his eyelashes. “Do you like organic food truck rallys?” he asks.
- “I love organic food truck rallys!” Marco enthuses.
- Later, he googles “food trux rallie + organic” to find out what he just got himself into.
- “So much gluten free quinoa!” he texts Jake an hour into the date. “Such cultural appropriation! SO MANY FAUX HIPPIES! Send help.”
- Jake, being the true bro that he is, fakes an emergency call and rescues Marco from the granola overdose.
26. “I don’t think I like this section of Minecraft very much,” Marco says shakily.
- Jake rubs a tired hand over his face, looking around the brilliantly stacked Iskoort world for any sign of Howlers. “Same. I could kill for a cup of black coffee right now. And I don’t even like the taste of coffee.”
- Rachel turns around, slowly taking in his artistically-faded designer shorts and flannel-patterned t-shirt. “You are such an incredible hipster I cannot believe we’re even related,” she says.
27. “So,” Jake asks as they head for the beach, “What do we know about giant squids so far?”
- «Apparently,» Ax says, «giant squids are gay. Not just a subset of the population as would normally occur, but every single member of the species. Which raises several fascinating questions about their system of reproduction, and has important implications for our understanding of squid gender. However, the source of this information also informed me repeatedly that giant squids had copulated with my mother, which leads me to believe that this was partially a case of mistaken identity.»
- There is a very long pause. Tobias becomes the one to break it. «Ax, buddy, where did you go to look for information about giant squids?»
- «Initially, I posted an inquiry to an online platform known as Reddit which frequently encourages questions. However, I was then approached by several individuals from a website called 4Chan…»
- «Do me a favor and please don’t judge our entire species based on anything you saw there,» Tobias begs.
- They walk for several more minutes in shocked silence, and then Marco says, “O-kay! Who wants to know what I learned about giant squids off Wikipedia?”
