The president continued his speech for a little longer, but Kohn was no longer paying attention. He was staring intently at the text scrolling at the bottom of the screen, which read “VOLUNTEERS CALL THIS NUMBER”, while his hand robotically dialed it on his cell phone.

The voice of what he surmised to be a cute girl answered on the first ring. “Hello, you’ve reached the volunteer hotline-“

“I wish to volunteer.” He interrupted before she droned on with her little prepared speech.

“Wh-what!? Volunteer as in volunteer?” Probably a little too excited.

“Is there any other volunteer word that you know?”

“Yes-I mean, no. Volunteer is the only word. Umm, sorry, most people that call the hotline simply call to complain or prank us.” She sounded kind of desperate to get someone who wasn’t immediately yelling at her.

“The speech only happened a minute ago, how could there be that many people calling?”

An almost audible pause came from the other line at his comment. “The President’s speech was almost twenty minutes ago. It’s going to continuously play until the end of the 48 hour period.” She said incredulously.

“Oh.” What had he been doing? “That must have been when I jumped in the shower. I was just finishing up in the gym so I was sweaty.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Yeah, so what happens now?”

She took down his relevant information before asking thousands of questions. Things like “what do you do for a living?” and “any hobbies?” and a series of questions that Kohn swore was from a psych evaluation.

The Police arrived at one point and he was taken to an airport to wait for a plane.

Every time Kohn thought she was done she’d find something else to ask him, or someone would hand her more questions and they’d be back at it again.

At one point, after the military plane took off he’d had enough and said “Look, I’ve had just about enough of this. If there are any more questions you can follow me into space.” To which he didn’t even hear a goodbye or a thank you for volunteering before she hung up.

After that Kohn made a phone call to let his boss know that he was going off into space for an unspecified amount of time. He told her it was okay to give his position away to someone else if she needed to, but she was yelling at him not to go and that she wanted to ‘do him’ so much that he wasn’t sure she heard. So he sent her and her assistant Darcy an email and text message just to be sure.

Finally he called his dad and the two had a short, terse conversation.

“I’m going into space.”

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“On the Prince’s ship?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re want to learn magic?”

“Yeah.”

“What about your stuff?”

“Sell it.”

“What about your mom?”

“Tell her I love her.”

“What about your sisters?”

“Tell them to not touch my stuff.”

They went on like that for a good eight minutes, and with the fast pace of their questions and answers, that was a heck of a long time.

Once he was done with the phone he lent it to the guy sitting next to him who dialed one number and then bawled his eyes out while whimpering into it for the next hour of flight.

Since he wasn’t going to get anything out of him he turned to the person next to him. That guy’s gut was probably a good two feet past his own knees and the suspenders that were meant to keep up his pants looked more like a weak play at bondage. For some reason he smelled of stew.

“How come you’re not on the phone?”

“I said my goodbyes when the police arrived at my door and both my parents died years ago. At this point there’s no one to call other than my neighbor or my boss and one of them still hasn’t returned a DVD I lent him while the other cheats at cards.”

A woman sitting on the other side of the plane jumped into the conversation saying she had just uploaded pictures of her cheating boyfriend.

“You took pictures of him cheating on you?”

“What? No! I caught him cheating on me just as FBI agents arrived to pick me up. I posted pictures of him with my strap-on up his ass!” Jeers and cheers filled the plane, her story taking everyone’s mind off what was happening to them. A few of the other girls were using their phones to look up those pictures.

It only took a few seconds before a series of “Ewwws” could be heard from their section.

A few more stories came out after that, but even though most of them were sure it was just people jumping on the bandwagon no one called anybody out on it.

Pretty quickly though people ran out of stories and the conversation came back to the plane they were on. “Why do you think they didn’t just send the military? Is anyone here from the military?”

Heads denying it could be seen all around.

Someone pointed at Kohn. “You’re pretty fit. You’re not from the military?”

“No. Ever since I dropped out of high school I’ve regularly gone to the gym.” He was always amazed at how well his personal education outclassed his schools.

“Okay, not military then. What about CIA or some spook agency?”

His neighbor gave him a love tap to the chest with the back of his hand. “You’d need to be smart enough to become a spook. They probably wouldn’t even notice a high school drop out.”

Maybe in a strange sense of comradery a smaller guy spoke up. “My brother was telling me that the military would be exempt from the draft. He’s in the marines.”

People started asking ‘what’ and ‘why’ but there were too many to actually hear the rest of their questions. “He said, it was rumored that they would need all the trained soldiers they could get soon.”

“Maybe they’re going to fight back?”

“If that was the case why even bother with the draft? Or sending us out into space?”

“I don’t know! Maybe they’re waiting for some of the ships to leave?”

“What? And we’re just the sacrifices?” To which people started yelling at each other.

It didn’t really matter to Kohn about the military avoiding the draft or what Earth would do after him and the others left. The way Kohn figured it, either he would never return to see his family again or he’d come back with his own ship. And of course magic.

Kohn had his own plans.

All the arguments and conversations ended when light flooded the cargo bay as the doors opened up into Africa. Just in the distance they could see the ship that would take them away from their home planet.

“All electronics and non-personal items are to be left here with me. Just put them in this bag.” A government agent in non-descript clothing met them as they left the plane, a sack in one hand and a clip board in the other. “It will be useless once you leave Earth and will more than likely be destroyed by the Prince’s forces so please don’t fight me on this. Pictures are allowed to be taken with you.”

Then he started to call out names and social security numbers before making a notation on his clip board when someone answered.

“Lowson. Kohn. 222-##-####.” The agent looked up, Kohn stood right in front of him. “The World Leaders would like to speak with you before you leave.”