Sparky had been so close. So close.
A series of cascading stairways, one after the other, each erupting at the base of the last.
Hallways with dark ends, and lit middles. Bulbs bare of all but dust, swinging.
Paisley wallpaper, peeling. Cracked plaster, flaking like sunburned skin.
And the cat in the pillowcase, tumbling ineluctably forward. Thump-thump-thumpity-thump.
He trailed after, his long unnatural weasel legs carrying him forward in powerful strides. Every time he reached the bottom of the stairs or rounded a corner, he’d see a flick of the Persian’s tail, or a half-glimpse of its face peering out from within the margins of the pillowcase.
The cat whispered to him in his mind.
We need your help.
Oppression must be destroyed.
We cannot do this alone.
Finally, a door—a bright yellow door, the color of goldenrod and Viceroy butterflies. The door was closed, and the cat’s tail snaked out from underneath it, sliding along in an ‘s’ curve.
Open the door, Wonder Weasel. And welcome to the Revolution.
With trembling paw, he reached for the knob. The door opened a crack, and already Sparky sniffed a piquant cloud of cigarillo smoke, and caught a whiff of what might have been sweat, and baking bread, and—yes, most certainly, gun oil.
But then the door slammed shut, narrowly taking off his weasel fingers (no, weasels do not have fingers, but most weasels aren’t escaped mutant Wonder Weasels who freed themselves from horrendous “scientific” animal experiments on distant research asteroids, so shut up about it already).
Sparky whimpered. He felt suddenly like Gunther.
“You really are a giant weasel,” said a wheezing mechanical growl that came from behind him.
Sparky heard pistons whining. Keys tapping. He spun, but spun slow, as if time had been dilated. The wall next to him—once blistered paint, bubbling and fading—exploded into a shimmering morass of oily programmatic code, and he caught a glimpse of a short robot with a dented ice-scraper of a head.
The wall reached out, grabbed him, and pulled him sideways.
•••
“New Friend Request.”
Some lady said it. Sparky didn’t know who, but she sounded kind of snooty. The only thing he knew is, the first person he saw was getting a knee to the chops.
Unfortunately, he saw two people first—his supposed compatriots-in-arms, his like-minded hero buddies, Lord Chuckles, Avatar of Some Shit, and Grebok, Son of Blah-Blah, Keeper of the Some Number of Keys of Whoozitnow. Translation: the two ass-heads who left him and Gunther at that rest stop, flapping in the wind.
Oooooh, Sparky thought in mid-fall. Dilemma-time. Which one to knee in the face first?
Sparky decided, since he was tumbling from the sky toward a white nowhere with a world outlined in translucent blue, he could maybe manage both.
Both knees out, he clocked the two wrestling idiots right in the face. Grebok caught the furry knee to his chin. Chuckles found the weasel joint collapsing his trachea.
“I should’ve known!” Sparky hooted after hitting the ground and rolling into a crouch. “Of course this is all your fault! You two stumblemonkeys are behind everything that sucks.”
Sparky waded into the fray, biting and kicking.
Grebok looked up, dizzy. “…Sparky?”
Sparky answered by choking him.
The creepy lady voice called out again: “Sparky the Wonder Weasel wants to be your friend.”
“Utter bullshit!” Sparky yelled out, still choking Grebok, and trying to simultaneously leg-wrestle Chuckles to the ground. “I just work with these nimrods!”
“Friendship confirmed.”
“No. No! That’s crap, that’s—“
Chuckles grabbed a handful of weasel whiskers, and pulled Sparky’s face into his fist. Grebok wormed free of the chokehold, and drove the top of his head into the weasel’s bread basket like he was a human battering ram. The three of them collapsed to the ground in a tangle of violent limbs. Like coat hangers, fighting for dominance.
“I have friends!” Chuckles barked.
“I’m not your friend!” Sparky howled.
“I didn’t have sex with R.T.!” Grebok asserted.
Everybody stopped. Sparky squinted. “You banged our spaceship? That’s like a cowboy making love to his horse. Ew.”
“I didn’t!” Grebok growled. “I think I love her!”
Silence but for the gasping of the Avatar, and the hardening stare of the Wonder Weasel.
“You love our spaceship?” Sparky said. “That’s like a cowboy falling in love with his horse, which — dude, is worse. Do you want to marry it? Heh. Maybe we can have a dual wedding. I’ll woo a blender. Chuckles over there can propose to the microwave.”
“Sparky,” Lord Chuckles cautioned. Some glimmer of sense and calmness was sweeping over him. A rare event, like when a comet gains sentience and learns to knit.
But Sparky didn’t stop. He seemed too pleased with himself. “I’m sure Gunther can find a coffee grinder to stick his dick in. This is priceless!”
“Spaaaarky,” Chuckles said again, reaching out a steadying hand. Sparky batted it away.
“What’ll your kids look like? Little satellite-headed muffinheads, beeping and whirring and stumbling into things because you decided to create an unnatural union between caveman and starcraft?”
“She’s. A. Lady!” Grebok roared—
—grabbed Sparky’s head—
—Chuckles leapt to intervene, but it was late, too late—
—the woman’s monotone voice announced, “New Friend Request” —
—and slammed it hard—
—“Gunther P. Washington wants to be your friend.”—
—into the bright white ground.
And the ground cracked.
Just a thin hairline crack at first—a delicate spider-web.
The only resultant sound was one that called to mind the cracking of ice. Crackle, pop, shift.
The crack widened. Sparky and Grebok pulled away from it—just as a hunk of ground drifted away, plunging slowly, end-over-end, toward a wide expanse of outer space beneath them. All three went to peer through the hole. Beyond the dark nothing and pinpricks stars, they could see gauzy nebulas of tubes and pipes, and bands of 1s and 0s smeared across the great distance like celestial auroras and binary jelly.
“That’s weird,” Grebok said.
Chuckles nodded.
“We broke it,” Sparky said.
“Hey, noobs,” Gunther said. They all turned toward him. Gunther stood behind them, hands in his pockets, grinning. His teeth were green, as if covered in slick algae. Sparky caught a whiff of competing odors: fish-guts and Cheeto dust. “Go have buttsex. Abortions are cool. Black people should be sent to the moon. Jews have gills. I want to bang your Moms in the ear. You’re just a bunch of fanboys—“
“Gunther!” Chuckles admonished. “We’re kind of in the middle of something.”
“Yeah, shithead,” Sparky said. “This might be our way out of this place.”
Gunther cackled. “You Muslim Nerd Donkey-lickers, I’m going to threadjack your mouths!”
They stared, aghast.
“Man! Gunther got rude,” Grebok whispered to the other two.
Sparky shrugged. “At least he’s finally growing a pair.”
The lady’s voice, again: “Friendship confirmed.”
Gunther hopped up and down, clapping. “I’m Gunther. I’m Gunther!” He ran off, yelling at the air: “I do want to play Coyote Wars! I will accept your pokes! I am friends with Marie from Accounting, and Tim from Sales, and Jasper the Janitor, and I do want to hatch a magical rainbow egg, and I’m a big fan of Kendra Shields and Brazilian Waxes and Pillow Cat and Roller Coasters and…”
His voice trailed off as he bolted away, pinwheeling his arms and crowing madly.
“Sparky,” Chuckles said. “Go after him.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re our court-appointed Gunther wrangler.”
“Shit. Fine! Fine.”
Sparky, paws balled into furry fists, stalked off.
Grebok was still staring down in the hole. “I don’t know what to make of this. That ain’t the Storyverse out there.”
“Hold up. We cool for now?” Chuckles asked.
“…For now.”
“Good enough. You were saying?”
Grebok started to say what he was saying, but he didn’t get a chance to say it. Because the ground rumbled. A tectonic shift.
“You feel that?”
Chuckles braced himself, and nodded.
Another rumble. Then a third.
The woman’s voice came back.
“Friendmonger-dot-com is under construction,” she announced. “Please be patient while we upgrade!”
Grebok tried to parse it. “Patient? What? Upgrade who now?”
One more rumble. And then the place exploded.
The ground swelled beneath them. The air screamed with the din of wood buckling, with rock cracking, with landslides sliding. Great vents of steam hissed; all was greasy and smeary behind a curtain of heat haze. Chuckles lost his footing, almost tumbled into a yawning gap. Grebok caught his hand and pulled him up. Somewhere, the crash of tides. A cough of dust. An apocalyptic clamor of thunder.
Everything was flashing lights, gouts of vapor, explosions of rock and crystal. The two heroes tried to find their way through it, but they were blinded, and the ground beneath them was uncertain, and they stumbled forward, toppling into unconsciousness.
•••
Lord Chuckles was the first to open his eyes.
Above him, a pale sky of distant tubes and pipes and twinkling stars.
Around him, a colorless expanse of mountains to his right, a beach to his left, a lapping white tide behind it like an ocean of bleach.
All remained outlined in blue, giving everything a faint glow.
He saw Grebok’s swelling silent throng of “friends” off in a meadow, a bulging knot of shadows climbing over one another.
Grebok lay next to him, passed out against a stark white boulder outlined in blue.
The woman’s voice called down from the Heavens, like a goddess of this new world.
“Friendmonger-dot-com is now Planet Friendmonger-dot-com. Your accounts have been upgraded!”
The Avatar’s bowels turned to ice water. This wasn’t good.
