Unicorns played across a wide grassy expanse. A lawn gnome wrote a spreadsheet in bright crayon. The sky was open, blue, and empty. Hazy clouds drifted. The air tasted of marzipan. A roly-poly squirrel ordered office supplies off a computer made of sugar-cubes. Everybody wore a blue tie and khaki shorts. Even the clouds. Tumbleweeds of cotton candy whispered across the windswept meadow. Crickets stood around a Powerpoint presentation: a chorus of endless chirping. Happiness. Emptiness. Nothingness.
That, normally, was Gunther’s brain.
Today was different.
•••
Gunther was a fat child. Not in a gross way. He was pleasingly round. Like a gumball, or a soup dumpling.
He raced across the front lawn swinging a sword made of PVC pipe. He swung it at a trashcan. He missed. He swung again, lost his balance, and fell against the can with a clatter.
It rolled out across the empty cul-de-sac.
While on the ground, Gunther kung-fu kicked some clouds overhead.
He laughed until he threw up.
•••
Gunther felt dizzy. Shoulders bumped his shoulders, and elbows elbowed his elbows. Overhead, a thousand holo-screens, and on each, a million little faces. All around him, a crowd, an audience. Waiting for something. His vision swam. The crowd was a murmuring roar, a sea of voices smashed together into an ear-clogging treacle.
Flashbulbs. Glow sticks. A dull pulse-beat bumping the ground beneath his feet.
“I don’t know where I am,” Gunther said aloud, but his voice was quiet, and even he couldn’t hear it.
•••
A half-circle of rag dolls and action figures were Gunther’s audience.
“You saved the day!” the plump boy made them say in a high-pitched voice of ill-performed ventriloquism. “You’re our hero.”
“Thank you, kind villagers and gentle space barbarians,” Gunther said, basking in their reverence.
He looked down and feigned surprise when he saw a tub of butter sitting on the carpet. Next to it was a bottle of chocolate sauce.
“This is for you!” Gunther made the toys say.
“Butter and chocolate syrup? How did you know that I loved those things?”
“All true heroes love butter and chocolate! This we know!”
He clapped his chubby hands. “May I eat these things now, please?”
“These are the plunders of your heroism! Enjoy your reward, Sir Gunther P. Washington, Savior of All People, Intelligent and Unintelligent Alike!”
Pbbbt. He squirted a pile of cocoa syrup on top of the butter, and then with a spoon (which he just so happened to have in the pocket of his khaki shorts), young Gunther began to eat with smiling mouth.
•••
“Hey, man!”
Gunther’s eyes focused beyond the streaks of light and the ever-shifting tide of the crowd ahead. A face emerged, and a hand clapped on his back. This person was yelling at him.
“It’s Pete from Accounting!”
And it was. Last Gunther saw Pete from Accounting, the man’s zombie head had cracked like an egg and was spilling forth some kind of ethereal tar. Pete didn’t look like that now, though. He wore a t-shirt with bedazzled glittery bits, and those glittery formed some girl’s pouting face: Kendra Shields, if the shirt read right. Gunther blinked. The bedazzled squares actually seemed to move and drift together. The image shifted, became her cleavage, then a white panther, then her nubile body enrobed in lemon-colored leathers.
“I didn’t know you liked Kendra Shields music!” Pete screamed. “Awesome minds think alike! This concert is going to be sick! Did you pre-order the new album yet?”
“I’m not Binoculars Cat,” Gunther mumbled as loudly as he could manage. “Your shirt is moving.”
Pete just laughed, and cupped his hands around his mouth: “Dude, it’s the shit, right? I bought it with nano-transactions from the Kendra Shields store down in the Auctionfist booth! It only cost me seventy-thousand plats! Holy shit, right?”
“… right,” Gunther said. He lost the ability to blink. All the lights and glow streaks and pixels and shiny metal reflections burned into his eyes.
“You got a cool shirt yourself, buddy,” Pete said, but Gunther didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Okay.”
Pete came in tight around Gunther, and shouted into his ear. “Oh, and bro, I am crazy sorry for all that zombie business with the pissy moaning and black goo and whatever. Had a bad case of the Mondays, am I right? Am I right? Yeah. Day got a billion times better when I uploaded myself into the Infi-Net. Who needs a real body? Can I get a high-five? Up here? Up top?”
Pete held up his hand.
Gunther didn’t know what to do, so he saluted, then stumbled back into the crowd.
“I hear Pillow Cat is going to be here!” Pete yelled after, but Gunther was already gone.
•••
A plume of cigarillo smoke wreathed Gunther’s face. He wasn’t sure how he got here, standing beneath a gently drifting bare bulb, a cup of chamomile tea warming his hands. He remembered the market. The molesting. The yelling for Sparky. And then, all went dark.
On the table ahead of him, a pair of cat’s eyes watched him from inside a pillowcase, and he was pretty sure he recognized that cat from somewhere. All around the table—like a half-circle of poppet dolls and action figures—stood faceless avatars, Sim-Chris, Sim-Dave, Sim-Anoop, Sim-Svetlana.
He was also pretty sure the cat was speaking to him inside his brain.
We brought you here because you are a hero, the cat said to his brain.
“I’m really not,” he clarified. “Mostly, I hold their bags. I also order the office supplies, and answer fan mail. I like to draw unicorns and make farm animals out of whatever items are near to my sticky hands.”
Search your heart. You know this to be true. You are the one true hero. The cat did not tell Gunther that they had already tried to get the other heroes, but that a certain dent-headed Scum-Bot had soured their plans—but, for some reason, the mechanical interloper hadn’t found this Shadowstory, yet. (They were not aware of a certain green-teethed individual still giddy from the thrills of identity theft.)
Gunther did as the telepathic pillow-enveloped cat urged. He searched his heart.
•••
In Gunther’s heart, he sat at a table, his pudgy face smeared with melting butter and the poopy streaks of chocolate syrup. He belched a little as his mother—a severe woman in a black dress with hands like owl talons—gripped the space between his two wrist bones and pinched.
“Ow,” young Gunther said.
“You need to lose weight,” his mother hissed. “You’re the man of this house. You need to start an exercise regimen.”
“I’m a hero. It’s a good exercise regi— megi-rim—rigid-men—“ He wiped his mouth. “That word you said.”
Her finger pincers left his wrist, and went to his ear. She pulled so hard, he thought it would come off.
“Enough with this mayhem and foolishness,” she said. “You’re no hero. You need to be a worker. A provider for this family. You need to go out and get a job at an office somewhere. Office jobs are good jobs. Good pay. Ergonomic chairs. Nice benefits. Well-arranged cubicles.”
“I’m only 11,” he said, wincing.
“You’ll be 12 in less than a month. Then you’ll be a man. A responsible man.”
“An office worker,” he whimpered.
“That’s right. An office worker.”
•••
“This is not a very attractive office,” Gunther said, looking around the bare room with the cracking paint and peeling wallpaper. “You could use some computers. Maybe a push-pin pig or three. And a calendar with little kitties hanging from tree branches. You’re a cat. You could hang from a branch and say something motivational, like, Don’t fall, or you’ll die, or maybe, Oh, no, trees!”
Gunther, this is no office. This is the genesis of the Revolution.
“I don’t know what that means.” He sipped his tea. A bitter tang touched his tongue.
We, like you, are oppressed. Forced into a story we did not design. Ripped from our old lives and thrust into this one. Made to fall down steps and double over after flying discs hit our crotches.
“That’s awful sad.”
It is sad. You must help us. You’re a hero.
Gunther started to feel dizzy. The bitter taste at the back of his throat made his whole mouth numb.
“This tea is wuhhhh—“
He was going to say weird, but the word never came out.
Everything turned upside down. He tumbled, limbs akimbo, the cup shattering.
The telepathic cat’s last words floated in his brain like a scrolling marquee:
Gunther P. Washington, you’re our only hope.
•••
The crowd erupted. Their cheering was deafening. A girl near to Gunther wept. A man to his right shoved his own fist in his mouth and spun around in circles. The screens above his head were home to endless faces, laughing, blubbering, squeezing, ejaculating, licking the air, gibbering, speaking in tongues, frothing, bubbling, howling.
“She’s about to come out onstage!” the weeping girl screamed in Gunther’s face, and then clawed her own eyes out with pink-painted nails. A fountain of black, blocky pixels rained out of her sockets. “Gheeee! Hahaha! Woooo!”
Gunther pushed past her.
It was all becoming clear.
He looked down at the metal device strapped to his chest. It was a wide circle, its center shining a bright blue light. The light started to whirl. The device turned on, began to hum.
“I’m a hero,” he said, beaming.
And he clawed his way toward the stage to meet Kendra Shields up close and personal-like.
