There was a mysterious beeping coming from behind him and to his right. But it didn’t sound like his alarm clock. This beeping was much less melodious than the beeping that he woke up to every morning.
LeBron opened his eyes to look. But when he saw his surroundings, all thoughts of his alarm dropped from his mind.
He was in a small room that was unlike anything he had seen in his life. The sinuous walls were made out of some smooth ice-blue material. There were no hard edges or corners to be found. The “bed” he was on was more like a slab extending organically from the floor. It was covered in a spongy weave of short white stalks. There was no source of light, other than the walls and floor, which provided a strong glow that was like blue daylight. The window behind him only looked out on blank space dotted with stars.
A crevice appeared in the wall in front of him, and then a section of the material seemed to slide away. A being that was very clearly an alien entered the room.
“Welcome. My name is Zorpxog. We are glad you are awake,” said the thing, which was only four feet tall and had eight multi-purpose limbs arrayed around a central sphere, covered with one-inch long skin tubes, that was a head and torso combined. What LeBron interpreted to be its mouth was a deep indentation out of which dripped purple mucus. As it talked, its hue changed from bright blue to a subdued green.
“So aliens speak English too, huh?” LeBron quipped. He had already come to the conclusion that this was a dream, so there was no reason to be too concerned about the fact that he had been abducted by aliens and held captive on their UFO.
“You have many languages on your planet. Thousands of them! Our team of highly-trained neuroanalysts needed several of your…what do you call them…’sun revolutions’, to analyze your synaptic connections and determine which language was yours. Of course, when we found out about “English”, it was easy to intercept your planetary communications and teach it to ourselves.”
LeBron wondered when he would wake up. “Oh. Cool.”
“You are taking this rather well, LeBron,” said Zorpxog. “Your friends were much more violent when they awoke. Carmelo in particular managed to injure my colleague Zixthglub rather seriously.”
LeBron envisioned ripping the limbs off one of these little aliens and having purple ooze spray out of them. “Carmelo?”
The alien had turned and walked out the door, using three of its limbs for propulsion. LeBron followed. “He was part of your ‘Banana Boat Crew’, correct? We are very interested in your Banana Boat. It represents a level of technology that we have not yet reached, and it surprises us that the intellectually inferior human race had mastered its secrets.”
They had entered a larger room full of odd whirring devices. Some sort of laboratory, LeBron decided. A pile of bananas, both peeled and unpeeled, caught his eye.
“Our neuroanalysts inform us that your brain operates at a higher level than that of your banana-mates,” Zorpxog said. They passed through another spontaneously-appearing doorway to a room where Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Dwyane Wade had been made to sit on a large, metallic banana replica. They appeared to be unconscious. More aliens were probing them with bananas and communicating via an unintelligible language composed seemingly of sighs and other exhalations. “Perhaps you can aid us in a way these lesser humans cannot.”
LeBron wondered why he wasn’t awake yet. “Uh, the banana boat only works in water.”
“We understand that. But there is no water in space. Bananas are not native to aqueous environments; our testing indicates that they quickly lose their integrity when submerged. Surely there is away to harness the power of the banana for faster-than-light space travel.”
It occurred to LeBron that he might not be dreaming after all. If that was the case, he needed to trick this advanced, but surprisingly stupid, race of beings that he had bestowed upon them the secrets of the banana. “Can we make a quick stop at Earth? I need to buy a few things.”
—
The UFO was parked in the remote New Mexico desert, far away from any probing eyes. LeBron oversaw as a small team of aliens, each armed with five or six paintbrushes, enthusiastically covered the ship in a coat of yellow paint.
“You are sure that this will work?” Zorpxog asked. “The list of chemicals on those canisters does not overlap with any of the chemicals which comprise banana.”
“It’ll work. I’m the one who invented the banana boat, remember?”
Zorpxog turned bright red. “Yes. Sorry.”
—
LeBron watched the ship rise off the ground and then disappear into the sky. He remembered that his friends were still on it. He wondered what would happen to them when the aliens found out that the yellow paint didn’t make their ship go any faster. He decided he didn’t want to think about it anymore.