The black hood no longer covered Sparky’s head. It had been off for hours. A part of him wished it had remained on. They slapped him on a bench, handcuffed him there. His guts ping-ponged between the top of his esophagus and the very bottom of his asshole when the ship tore up through the atmosphere of Stuffopedia with all the grace and elegance of a thrown cinderblock.
They took the head he didn’t even realize he’d been holding, and they went away.
And for the last several hours, he was surrounded by a motley—nay, the most motley—group of superfreaks he’d ever seen. A dog with two back legs, but no front ones. Two identical fat men in diapers. A prairie dog with a wide-eyed gaze and a look so panicked, Sparky wondered if someone was constantly trying to shove something—maybe a hot pepper, maybe an ant-covered stick—in his ass.
A woman in a full body and full-faced purple latex catsuit slinked around in the background. A ninja quietly nursed an orange soda. Someone who may or may not have been Charlie Manson ate spiders out of a cardboard box.
All of them had weapons. A few were strapped with what looked like grenades. Nobody said a thing.
Really, though, the one that worried Sparky the most was the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
He was probably a baby, but that didn’t stop him from filling the back of the ship, and then some. His neck bent to accommodate his head. His jaws worked, gnashing on cookies, leaving what amounted to a rather tremendous mountain of crumbs. Nobody seemed to address the dinosaur. And the dinosaur didn’t seem to address anybody else; he just stood there eating cookies and watching Sparky, like he was quietly imagining that Sparky was the cookies, or vice versa.
Sparky processed all of this.
Eventually, the crowd parted—even the T-Rex inched aside, pausing in his cookie-chewing—and Sparky’s captors came to the fore.
A fat man, maybe more of a fat kid, shambled out in a pair of fatigues and a blood-stained white t-shirt—the blood almost entirely blotted out the image of a cat’s face replete with pink nose and green eyes. He adjusted his glasses. The grin that spread across his face made his cheeks shine.
Next to him was… well, Sparky was pretty sure he saw this guy before. Way back when, in that crazy-ass marketplace. A Nigerian Prince in full finery. Standing as the truest definition of tall, dark, and handsome. The Prince whispered in the other’s ear. The other nodded.
“Sparky the Wonder Weasel,” the fat man said, still beaming. His forehead was a slick sheen of sweat. Sparky detected a faint accent. “I am Kitty Kitty Guy. Do you know me?”
“I do not,” Sparky said.
“You must! I am the one who dances. On the ViewToob? The funny techno beat? Oonch-oonch-oonch-oonch.” As he mimicked the beat, he raised his hands and danced, as if caught in the throes of some mad religious rapture. His man-boobs bounced around under his shirt like bags of goldfish. He stopped, panting. “I used to be Nuba Nuba Guy. I am the one who dances.”
“You said that.”
“Yes. Well. This is Bakuku Ajudua, fake Nigerian Prince, and king of the 419 scam.”
“You said Pillow Cat vouched for me.”
The grin widened. “Yes! She tried to recruit you before, did she not?”
“She did.”
“Yes. Back then she thought you could help us. She hasn’t been… seen for a time, but we mustn’t let that stop us! We are on the cusp of winning. Others have frowned at our level of… commitment, but because we have been particularly… ah, dedicated to the cause, to the Revolution, we are close to bringing down the machine. And now, with the head that you brought us, we know so much more.”
Sparky blinked. “Would you care to enlighten? I’m feeling a lot more cogent these days. Seems a good time to reveal to me exactly what the hell is going on around here.”
Kitty Kitty Guy whispered to the Nigerian (non)Prince. The Nigerian whispered back.
“Yes,” Kitty Kitty Guy said. “I will tell you.”
And he did.
•••
The Avatar and the Keykeeper stood against a wall. Glowing blue collars, appearing to be made of nothing but light, held their necks (and thus, their heads, and thus, the rest of their bodies) fixed to the hull. Everything on board this ship was clean. Stainless steel and white plastic. Fake plants. It was unsettling. Even this room, the cell, was all bubbled plastic merged with hard lines. A plastic orchid sat on a white table in the corner next to a little Zen pebble garden.
“My ears are still ringing,” Grebok said.
“What?” Chuckles asked.
“My ears! Are still! Ringing!”
Chuckles tried to nod, but found the collar sparked his neck with a hard electrical charge. Instead, he ‘nodded’ with his eyebrows.
“Mine too,” he said, trying to watch the Keykeeper’s mouth in case it moved again, so maybe he could just read the lips and be done with it.
“I continue to feel very smart,” Grebok said loudly.
Chuckles nodded. “Me too. Except, it’s making me feel very dumb.”
“Yes! Yes! That’s true. Like, by being smart now, it only serves to highlight how dumb we were.”
“That, but it goes deeper. It’s like our intelligence is limiting us. I feel hobbled. Hamstrung.”
“It’s a paradoxical loop,” Grebok said both loudly and smartly. “By being smart, we are incapable of acting dumbly, but in acting dumbly, we accomplish smart things. Heroism, I think, is driven by a certain lack of intelligence. It must be. And when you think about it, it makes sense. To run into a burning space-cruiser to rescue a scullery maid and punch out a malevolent star captain, or to lasso a rampaging mutant Nebula Pony, it takes a profound degree of thoughtlessness—by being intelligent, we realize personal consequence, and by realizing personal consequence, we are held fast by notions of uncertainty and the certain coming of our own mortality. I’ve never before conceived of my own mortality. We’re all going to die someday. And nobody dies well. It’s always an evacuation of fluids, a stifling gasp, a list of things that go forever unsaid. I’m smart enough to realize I was dumb, but I’m also smart enough to know that being dumb was much simpler. If only we could be dumb again.”
Chuckles shrugged. “I didn’t catch any of that. My ears. I thought my newfound intelligence might grant me the ability to read lips. Not so much. Sorry.”
Grebok sighed. “It’s okay.”
•••
It all came together.
Well – no. Not all of it. Some parts were still dark, like shadows on an X-Ray.
But the rest was lit up like a circus.
The little Sparky within the bigger Sparky rattled his cage louder than ever.
He laid several of the puzzle pieces out on a table in his mind. R.T. betrayed them. She worked with GoogolSoft to create the hungry beast that was once the Infi-Net and was now the Infiniverse.
The Infi-Net exploited the stories of many, destroying their lives and parading them on millions of screens, their terse narratives fraying the threads of the Storyverse.
Then came the upload; the billions of citizens within the Storyverse, siphoned up into the Infi-Net. Competing universes. Battling for dominance.
The Infiniverse was winning. By a country mile.
But the Revolution was here to stop that. Sparky saw that, now. They were like he was, once. Just a little animal in a cage. Exploited and abused for the amusement of others. The cruel machinations of GoogolSoft.
They were the ones who put Gunther up to the task of blowing himself to careening Gunther-chunks (a lie, but Sparky did not know that; it was easy to believe that Gunther could be led astray by any who offered him more than a passing glance and wave).
And this GoogolSoft. The little weasel screeched within. It wasn’t this “Brin” character that disturbed him so. No. It was Godwin. One of Ottgar’s protégés. Ottgar, who ran the science station on Alpha Beta Soup, who forced his mother into crass incontinence, who butchered her with tiny knives.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
All of this went through his head with cold, clinical detachment. Sparky’s mind looked at it with grim dispassion, an adult’s displeasure at a child’s drawing.
The little weasel shrieked and gibbered inside his heart, however.
“I’ll need help,” he said. “I did something to myself. I made myself smarter. It isn’t helping me. If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to track down R.T. in the Badlands—that’s where Gary said she was?”
Kitty Kitty Guy nodded and smiled.
“If we’re going to track her down in the Badlands and end her tyranny, then I’m going to need to do something about this intelligence. I’m taking suggestions, should you have any.”
Ajudua, the not-quite-a-Nigerian-Prince, said nothing, but held out a fist. He turned the fist upward, and opened it, revealing a palm full of drugs.
“Drugs,” Kitty Kitty Guy said, his smile broadening so far across his chubby cheeks that Sparky could almost hear it. “Dick pills. Ambien. Smart drugs. And methamphetamines. If this doesn’t cook your brain, then nothing will. It works for me!”
Sparky grabbed the pills, and with hesitation—a new feeling, this hesitation—he eased them into his mouth and swallowed them dry.
Gulp.
The black hood no longer covered Sparky’s head. It had been off for hours. A part of him wished it had remained on. They slapped him on a bench, handcuffed him there. His guts ping-ponged between the top of his esophagus and the very bottom of his asshole when the ship tore up through the atmosphere of Stuffopedia with all the grace and elegance of a thrown cinderblock.
They took the head he didn’t even realize he’d been holding, and they went away.
And for the last several hours, he was surrounded by a motley—nay, the most motley—group of superfreaks he’d ever seen. A dog with two back legs, but no front ones. Two identical fat men in diapers. A prairie dog with a wide-eyed gaze and a look so panicked, Sparky wondered if someone was constantly trying to shove something—maybe a hot pepper, maybe an ant-covered stick—in his ass.
A woman in a full body and full-faced purple latex catsuit slinked around in the background. A ninja quietly nursed an orange soda. Someone who may or may not have been Charlie Manson ate spiders out of a cardboard box.
All of them had weapons. A few were strapped with what looked like grenades. Nobody said a thing.
Really, though, the one that worried Sparky the most was the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
He was probably a baby, but that didn’t stop him from filling the back of the ship, and then some. His neck bent to accommodate his head. His jaws worked, gnashing on cookies, leaving what amounted to a rather tremendous mountain of crumbs. Nobody seemed to address the dinosaur. And the dinosaur didn’t seem to address anybody else; he just stood there eating cookies and watching Sparky, like he was quietly imagining that Sparky was the cookies, or vice versa.
Sparky processed all of this.
Eventually, the crowd parted—even the T-Rex inched aside, pausing in his cookie-chewing—and Sparky’s captors came to the fore.
A fat man, maybe more of a fat kid, shambled out in a pair of fatigues and a blood-stained white t-shirt—the blood almost entirely blotted out the image of a cat’s face replete with pink nose and green eyes. He adjusted his glasses. The grin that spread across his face made his cheeks shine.
Next to him was… well, Sparky was pretty sure he saw this guy before. Way back when, in that crazy-ass marketplace. A Nigerian Prince in full finery. Standing as the truest definition of tall, dark, and handsome. The Prince whispered in the other’s ear. The other nodded.
“Sparky the Wonder Weasel,” the fat man said, still beaming. His forehead was a slick sheen of sweat. Sparky detected a faint accent. “I am Kitty Kitty Guy. Do you know me?”
“I do not,” Sparky said.
“You must! I am the one who dances. On the ViewToob? The funny techno beat? Oonch-oonch-oonch-oonch.” As he mimicked the beat, he raised his hands and danced, as if caught in the throes of some mad religious rapture. His man-boobs bounced around under his shirt like bags of goldfish. He stopped, panting. “I used to be Nuba Nuba Guy. I am the one who dances.”
“You said that.”
“Yes. Well. This is Bakuku Ajudua, fake Nigerian Prince, and king of the 419 scam.”
“You said Pillow Cat vouched for me.”
The grin widened. “Yes! She tried to recruit you before, did she not?”
“She did.”
“Yes. Back then she thought you could help us. She hasn’t been… seen for a time, but we mustn’t let that stop us! We are on the cusp of winning. Others have frowned at our level of… commitment, but because we have been particularly… ah, dedicated to the cause, to the Revolution, we are close to bringing down the machine. And now, with the head that you brought us, we know so much more.”
Sparky blinked. “Would you care to enlighten? I’m feeling a lot more cogent these days. Seems a good time to reveal to me exactly what the hell is going on around here.”
Kitty Kitty Guy whispered to the Nigerian (non)Prince. The Nigerian whispered back.
“Yes,” Kitty Kitty Guy said. “I will tell you.”
And he did.
•••
The Avatar and the Keykeeper stood against a wall. Glowing blue collars, appearing to be made of nothing but light, held their necks (and thus, their heads, and thus, the rest of their bodies) fixed to the hull. Everything on board this ship was clean. Stainless steel and white plastic. Fake plants. It was unsettling. Even this room, the cell, was all bubbled plastic merged with hard lines. A plastic orchid sat on a white table in the corner next to a little Zen pebble garden.
“My ears are still ringing,” Grebok said.
“What?” Chuckles asked.
“My ears! Are still! Ringing!”
Chuckles tried to nod, but found the collar sparked his neck with a hard electrical charge. Instead, he ‘nodded’ with his eyebrows.
“Mine too,” he said, trying to watch the Keykeeper’s mouth in case it moved again, so maybe he could just read the lips and be done with it.
“I continue to feel very smart,” Grebok said loudly.
Chuckles nodded. “Me too. Except, it’s making me feel very dumb.”
“Yes! Yes! That’s true. Like, by being smart now, it only serves to highlight how dumb we were.”
“That, but it goes deeper. It’s like our intelligence is limiting us. I feel hobbled. Hamstrung.”
“It’s a paradoxical loop,” Grebok said both loudly and smartly. “By being smart, we are incapable of acting dumbly, but in acting dumbly, we accomplish smart things. Heroism, I think, is driven by a certain lack of intelligence. It must be. And when you think about it, it makes sense. To run into a burning space-cruiser to rescue a scullery maid and punch out a malevolent star captain, or to lasso a rampaging mutant Nebula Pony, it takes a profound degree of thoughtlessness—by being intelligent, we realize personal consequence, and by realizing personal consequence, we are held fast by notions of uncertainty and the certain coming of our own mortality. I’ve never before conceived of my own mortality. We’re all going to die someday. And nobody dies well. It’s always an evacuation of fluids, a stifling gasp, a list of things that go forever unsaid. I’m smart enough to realize I was dumb, but I’m also smart enough to know that being dumb was much simpler. If only we could be dumb again.”
Chuckles shrugged. “I didn’t catch any of that. My ears. I thought my newfound intelligence might grant me the ability to read lips. Not so much. Sorry.”
Grebok sighed. “It’s okay.”
•••
It all came together.
Well – no. Not all of it. Some parts were still dark, like shadows on an X-Ray.
But the rest was lit up like a circus.
The little Sparky within the bigger Sparky rattled his cage louder than ever.
He laid several of the puzzle pieces out on a table in his mind. R.T. betrayed them. She worked with GoogolSoft to create the hungry beast that was once the Infi-Net and was now the Infiniverse.
The Infi-Net exploited the stories of many, destroying their lives and parading them on millions of screens, their terse narratives fraying the threads of the Storyverse.
Then came the upload; the billions of citizens within the Storyverse, siphoned up into the Infi-Net. Competing universes. Battling for dominance.
The Infiniverse was winning. By a country mile.
But the Revolution was here to stop that. Sparky saw that, now. They were like he was, once. Just a little animal in a cage. Exploited and abused for the amusement of others. They’re the ones who put Gunther up to the task of blowing himself to careening Gunther-chunks (a lie, but Sparky did not know that; it was easy to believe that Gunther could be led astray by any who offered him more than a passing glance and wave).
And this GoogolSoft. The little weasel screeched within. It wasn’t this “Brin” character that disturbed him so. No. It was Godwin. One of Ottgar’s protégés. Ottgar, who ran the science station on Alpha Beta Soup, who forced his mother into crass incontinence, who butchered her with tiny knives.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
All of this went through his head with cold, clinical detachment. Sparky’s mind looked at it with grim dispassion, an adult’s displeasure at a child’s drawing.
The little weasel shrieked and gibbered inside his heart, however.
“I’ll need help,” he said. “I did something to myself. I made myself smarter. It isn’t helping me. If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to track down R.T. in the Badlands—that’s where Gary said she was?”
Kitty Kitty Guy nodded and smiled.
“If we’re going to track her down in the Badlands and end her tyranny, then I’m going to need to do something about this intelligence. I’m taking ideas, should you have any.”
Ajudua, the not-quite-a-Nigerian-Prince, said nothing, but held out a fist. He turned the fist upward, and opened it, revealing a palm full of drugs.
“Drugs,” Kitty Kitty Guy said, his smile broadening so far across his chubby cheeks that Sparky could almost hear it. “Dick pills. Ambien. Smart drugs. And methamphetamines. If this doesn’t cook your brain, then nothing will. It works for me!”
Sparky grabbed the pills, and with hesitation—a new feeling, hesitation—he eased them into his mouth and swallowed them dry.
