The Avatar opened his eyes and saw black bricks floating in the sky far above his head, drifting lazily against the backdrop of shuddering clouds and tangled pipes. Spaceships. A cavalcade of ‘em.
Cannonfire boomed in the distance.
His head felt like a halfway house for drunken, kick-happy elves.
The ground rumbled. Somewhere, someone screamed the screams of the dying.
He tried to say something, but it came out a croaky, mumble-tongued moan. He decided that speaking internally would be the next best thing.
Something’s different. Think, Chuckles, think! Your hand hurts. That’s something. Flip through the little storybook in your head, see what fairy tale reads back to you. It’s in crayon, just like Gunther might have drawn it. You like crayon. Who doesn’t like crayon? They have a lot of weird colors, though. Like Kookaburra Blue, or Licorice Biscotti, or Burnt Lakefoam. Why can’t they just tell it plain? Baby Shit Brown. Dark Black. Yellow Snow. They have some real cocky pricks down at the crayon factory. I really need to tell Grebok this. He’ll understand.
This wasn’t helping.
He reached some memory, some brief flashbang image of a rodent attaching itself to his arm—his nasal memory recalled the scent of a lemming’s stink glands, and his ears played back the recollection of a horrible mechanical whine, like a circular saw gnawing through bone.
But before he could reach for the reminiscence and pull it to him, a shadow blocked out the spacecraft-peppered sky above.
The hard metal mouth of a proton dissembler hand cannon thrust up under his nose.
The shadow resolved into a barbarian’s shape. A tangled beard hung slick with mucus, blood, and was woven through with little bones. What skin lay bare was painted a glowing green, as if procured from the smashed butts of lightning bugs. The berserker was bald, and electrodes lined his ruddy scalp.
“Well, looky here,” he growled. “We, the mad army of Faceworld, born from the grinning maw of Spaceface-dot-com, claim Planet Friendmonger as our dungheap and portable toilet! Seeing as how we’re not friends, I’ll say—prepare to have your protons dissembled!”
The freak pulled the trigger.
•••
She was resplendent. The diva daeva, the divine Miss Shields. Her blonde hair moved of its own accord. The white panther beneath her slinked forward in powerful strides. She whipped off her purple glittery dress to reveal a PVC corset with garter-held stockings with fishnets so thin and silky, the threads could’ve divorce electrons from their atoms. She kicked off her red pumps—
They sailed over Gunther’s head.
The device on his chest hummed; he could not hear it, only feel it. The crowd noise—millions of people, maybe more—was as palpable as a roaring, rising tide.
“I’m a hero,” he said to nobody but himself.
He clambered up onto the stage, beaming.
•••
The proton dissembler belched forth its quantum buckshot; it went wide, firing up in the air.
A sharp beryl beam danced across the barbarian’s neck: a dizzying disco light.
The head tumbled off the shoulders. Chuckles smelled bacon and burning hair. Beard fibers floated.
A hard boot from Grebok kicked the freak’s body over. Grebok took a deep breath and winked his one good eye.
The other eye wasn’t so good. In some ways, it was great. In other ways, bowel-souring with its abnormality. Instead of a regular eye, it was a red lens bolted to the socket with gleaming chrome. A machine part affixed to Grebok’s face. A trembling LCD reticle shuddered upon it like an army of twitching ants.
Clumsily, Chuckles stood.
“Thanks,” he managed. He caught sight of the Keykeeper’s face and blanched. “Your eye.”
“My eye? What my eye?”
“It’s different.”
Grebok paused. “Did I just shoot some kind of laser beam out of it?”
Chuckles nodded.
“And that’s how I killed that guy?”
Another nod.
Grebok felt the eye. He tapped it with his finger. It seemed to be made of glass.
“Your hand,” Grebok said.
“I’m not giving you my hand,” Chuckles said. “You might look at it with your sinister eye. That thing is cursed, man. It’s like a witch’s eye. You’re a witch, now. In my neck of the forest, the Druids would cut that thing out of you and fill your eye socket with dried boglestongue and smoke-of-sphinx-hazel. And they’d probably cut off your penis, too. The Druids are kind of backward.”
“No, look at your hand.”
Lord Chuckles did as his pal suggested.
He blinked.
It was metal. The knuckles glowed blue. The fingertips cast ambient pink light. The whole hand had been replaced by this techno-mockery, this shiny robot’s glove.
“Lemming-Man did this,” he said, scowling. “I can’t believe it. He mauled us. My… my hand’s gone. Your eye, poof. If I saw him right now, I’d run that sonofabitch through with my sword if I had it—“
From the center of his new hand, a gleaming, reflective blade thrust out with a near-silent hiss.
“That’s kinda cool,” Grebok said. “Though, really, the Druids’ll probably cut your dick off, too.”
The blade retracted.
•••
The glorious Kendra Shields sang:
Boom-boom, I go bang-bang with my kitty-cat
Come here, dog,
Boy, come on get up in my lap
Pow-pow, I make bang-bang with my pussy tail
Lick my bowl
Boy oh, I know your tongue won’t fail
Gunther, slack-jawed, his chest thrumming, crawled on his hands and knees toward the teen pop goddess riding her slinky white panther.
I’m part of something, he thought. Yay.
•••
Sparky ran by.
He had steel legs. Piston-driven tendons. Each step cracked the earth. Thoom thoom thoom. He leapt up high—higher than he could’ve ever leapt before—and landed right on the berserker’s headless body.
It mashed like soft banana beneath his crushing feet.
“Woo!” Sparky hooted. “That’s right, bitches. Sparky got himself an upgrade! I could kick a hole in the fucking universe! Bam!” He did a faux-karate kick, narrowly knocking the Avatar’s head off. “And check it. Brushed nickel finish. Pow. That’s all the style. Not like your poser-ass chrome throwbacks.”
“We’re not human anymore,” Chuckles said, looking actually sad. “I won’t be able to get any friends now. I’m a friendless cyborg. Just another lonely robot.”
“Feh. I was never human,” the Wonder Weasel said. “Humanity is over-rated.”
“You’re probably happy about this,” Chuckles said, pointing at Grebok. “You’re part robot dude, and now you can feel more comfortable sexing up our spaceship.”
“Not cool,” Grebok said. “What’d we talk about in therapy? About all that misplaced anger?”
“Yeah, and you were the one who had it. You were all pissed off about that pinochle game? The one I wasn’t even in?”
“Oh.” He frowned. “I don’t even know how to play pinochle. Still, I just don’t think now’s the time –“
Boom! Above, one of the spaceships exploded in a rain of fire and black bits. Smaller, wasp-like fighters darted from the blooming flames.
“Is there a war going on?” Chuckles asked.
“This whole place is turning to Crapopolis, capital city of North Shitfucksburg,” Sparky opined.
Grebok looked up, and set his mouth in a firm line. “We need to get on one of those ships and get the hell out of here. Now.”
•••
The crowd went silent as Gunther stood before Kendra. Kendra, too, went silent.
It was eerie. A slow hush, as much a tangible thing as the noise had been.
Gunther’s face appeared on all the screens. It terrified him and exulted him in the same moment.
Kendra looked to him. He knew what he had to do.
He went to press the button, but—
“I can’t,” he said. His voice boomed out over the crowd, and it made him pee a little. “I can’t do it. I don’t think I’m a hero, after all.”
The panther looked up, confused.
Kendra smiled. She mouthed three words to him:
Be. A. Hero.
Then she put her hand over his, and helped him press the button.
•••
The timer ticked down. Brin smacked the screens again, but R.T.’s image wouldn’t resolve, and her face kept dissolving into a fractal spray of broken pixels. Her voice, too, was distorted.
“The signal’s fucked, man,” he said to nobody. He hit another switch, turned it back to the Kendra Shields show, the concert that was equal parts ascendance of the Infi-Net and devastation of the Storyverse, and it was dead silent.
He cranked the volume, but it didn’t help. He tried to figure out why some pale, pasty-faced geek was standing on stage with—
Wait. No. No! That was one of those Shadowstory idiots. The chicken said they were taken care of. The chicken said this was handled.
The pop star mouthed something to the tow-headed geek.
Then, a small motion. Hands moved.
Then—
A white explosion. It took out the whole stage. A panther screamed. Harsh feedback rang out. The monitors went black.
The timer ticked to its penultimate second.
Moments before GoogolSoft—and all of Planet Portland—almost uploaded itself into the Infi-Net, Brin wondered how it all went off the rails.
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