Hard static. A high-pitched whine. Silence.
Nothing, for a little while.
Then, a tiny white pixel.
The pixel grew bigger. A solar flare. A train at the end of the tunnel. A miner’s headlamp coming closer.
Static resolved into sound. From noise back to signal.
Denthead blinked his ocular processes. Vision returned as his heavy metal lids scraped away dirt, rust, and other artifacts of disrepair.
Staring at him was the massive round body of a block-headed Recyclo-Boy.
“I fix you,” the Recyclo-Boy said, clearly happy about it. He clapped his big rubbery mitts together. “I fix you super-good.”
…
Godwin decided that this was a good day.
He emerged out from the bowels of Stuffopedia, shielding his numerical eyes with his forearm. He placed his blue neon-ringed glasses upon the bridge of his eagle-beak nose.
The ground was pleasantly littered with corpses.
Stuffopedia had been taken. Tilting pillars of yellow smoke rose over the horizon. Googol-Men were repairing broken Virus-Killers, polishing their weapons, beheading insurgents. Sloppy soldiers, but they were the chaff, not the wheat. The wheat—Godwin’s own elite echelon, Shields Squadron—stood in a perfect line, awaiting his emergence into this world. The ruined battlefield reflected in the mirrored shades of his men. They saluted him: right hand held high, first an index finger thrust to the air, then the hand shifted to form an ‘o’ shape. A one and a zero. He designed the salute himself in the break room about three weeks back. He felt clever.
“The fight has been taken out of this place, gentleman,” he said, holstering his pistol. “We own it, part and parcel. Better still, we have the GARY module in our possession.”
The men applauded.
Ah, but one hangnail still stuck out in his mind: these prisoners.
They didn’t make sense. He felt like he should know more about them. Certainly something felt familiar. Mentally, he chewed at the nail, threatening to bite it bloody.
“We have a captive,” said Praetorian Regiment Commander, Rickman Oberst. The square-jawed, dark-eyed fellow wore his neon-blue visor cap well—only a single curl of blonde hair graced the man’s wide expanse of a forehead. “One of the insurgent’s vile organizers. A lowly goat-man.”
The good doctor waved him on.
The line parted, and two Squadron War Troopers shoved a filthy satyr through. The goat-man—Finchback—fell to his furry knees. Someone had blackened both eyes, and split his lip.
“You disgust me,” Godwin said, frankly. “Goat people. Why is it that your insurgency comprises only mutants and deviants? Cat lovers. Obese miscreants. Nigerian homosexual poo-eaters. Hardly a normal human among you. I wonder if my mentor would’ve favored this uprising, or despised it. Professor Ottgar so deeply enjoyed collecting freaks and beast-men. Of course, he also liked to cut into them, so…” He sighed. “Well. No more caprine gambols for you, my friend. Any last words?”
Finchback smiled, and spoke.
…
Denthead’s first words were a mechanized babble: a sound of hisses and buzzes. He vented a cough of hard air through his vocal screen and tried again:
“You have to get me to an Infi-Net hub! I put it all together. Some of it, anyway. It’s a conspiracy. Against HappyCo. Or the entire Storyverse. I should’ve seen it sooner, but the processor, that shiny HyLon processor—damnit! GoogolSoft is only a part of it. They’re creating a competing universe, and putting this one to bed, and—why aren’t we going? Let’s move, big boy. Hup-hup.”
Recyclo-Boy just smiled, giddy, his toothless grin framed by white rubbery lips.
“I fix you big good,” the Recyclo-Boy said.
Denthead growled. “Fine. I’ll do this on my own. Thanks for fixing me, you fat piece of—“
He tried to take a step, but didn’t. His upper torso simply imbalanced, and fell.
His dented scraper-head hit face first.
“I not fix your legs big good yet,” Recyclo-Boy said, holding up what looked like a tangle of steel spaghetti. The giant robot’s smiling mouth turned into a sad pout.
Denthead rose on trembling arms. His vision re-pixilated, but thankfully corrected itself with a quick banging rattle.
Recyclo-Boys weren’t smart. Frankly, most of the HappyCo bots were limited in intelligence on purpose—you can’t have a robot whose job was to cool your drink suddenly get all think-for-yourself on you and stir some kind of robot revolution. Only reason Denthead possessed intelligence is because a Scumbot had to navigate the labyrinthine pipes and chutes of HappyTron’s churning bowels, and you could only do that with a little extra processing power. But for the most part, the robots here were task-driven. That only required so many smarts, and the Recyclo-Boy’s job was to recycle old materials—usually, that meant recycling them into their barest components. This one, for some bizarre reason, had decided to fix him, instead.
“Fine,” Denthead said. “No time to fix the rest of me. Pick me up, you lumbering metal ape. You are now officially deputized to become my legs.”
“I make good legs,” Recyclo-Boy said, his grin returning.
“Uh-huh. Just hoist me up onto your—“
The big robot whipped Denthead up onto his square head with a clang.
“Uh. Okay. That’ll do, bot. That’ll do.”
…
Sparky tensed at the name.
Ottgar.
The little weasel within him once more rattled his cage.
He put the pieces together. This so-called “Doctor” Godwin was a protégé of the mad professor that once experimented upon him, his mother, and a whole host of other harmless creatures.
Ottgar had been off the radar for years, but it made sense that some of his students carried on his attitude, if not the specifics of his work.
A mammalian urge rose within him—tear them all apart, bite their heads off, shit weasel pellets into their chest cavities—but his newly-acquired intelligence arose within, a calming hand, a soothing voice. Wait and see. Patience is a virtue. Violence is not the only answer.
He waited, and he saw.
The satyr, Finchback, spoke his last words.
“I’d like to show you something,” the satyr said, wresting his callused hands from the Praetorian behind him. Oberst moved to bash the satyr’s head with his rifle, but Godwin held a steadying hand.
“What can he do?” the doctor asked, amused. “You searched him.”
“We searched him,” the Praetorian confirmed.
“Yes. What can I do? I have a surprise for you, concealed behind my goat curtains. Do you want to see?”
Godwin frowned. “This is just getting gross. Never mind. Bash his head in.”
Oberst raised the gun anew.
But then, all the corpses that littered the battlefield sat up.
Most of them with weapons. Some of them with rocks.
Godwin gasped.
Pinchback peeled back a drape of goaty-fur from between his legs, and what lurked there wasn’t the crooked goat staff everybody expected, but rather, a pair of steel panties bound up with red and blue wires.
It started beeping.
“Proton-mine man-panties,” Finchback said with a wink, just as the rifle connected with his head and the whole thing exploded in a rain of blue fire and sizzling protons.
…
“Dial-up,” Denthead spat like a curse.
Recyclo-Boy had carried him into the lobby of the HappyTron corporate center and sat the Scumbot in the receptionist’s vacant chair. He tried to get online, and found that the only way was to dial a number over the phone system—
The Infi-Net connected with a screech of a carrier signal. He tried to pull up videos, pages, analytical stats, anything. It all loaded slow. Pixels took forever to resolve, and just as they started to form an image, the signal was lost again.
“Fuck me with a gamma-wrench,” Denthead said. “What the hell happened? The whole Storyverse lost connection to the Infi-network? I can’t do squat. I can’t do dick.”
“I fix it,” Recyclo-Boy said.
“You fix it?”
“I recycle the connection!” the robot said.
Denthead narrowed his ocular processes. “Well, don’t just stand there with your mitten up your ass. Go, bot, go!”
…
War rarely exposed its naughty bits. It hid them behind veils of smoke and under collapsed walls. To see it all revealed would be much too much.
Sparky staggered through the smoke and the haze with a wobbly walk, his robot legs carrying him almost on automatic. He smelled burnt fur; his own, or someone else’s? He felt something heavy in his hands. He regarded it: a severed head of dark crystal. Ah. Yes. That.
He couldn’t see the other two Shadowstories—and it was hard to even remember what had happened through the ringing in his ears and the sound of weapons-fire and rocks smashing in the helmets of surprised Googol-Men. Suddenly, a Virus-Killer lurched in front of him, coming out of a whorl of dust and ash—revolutionaries with their red armbands clambered atop it like fire ants taking trying to take down a cat and winning. They were bashing it with rocks. One fired a spitting revolver into the thing’s belly.
Sparky juked left just as the Virus-Killer came crashing down around him. The particular matter stung his eyes, and he backed up just as a broad shadow fell over him. A spaceboat hovered above his head, a clumsy flier obviously controlling it as it swayed this way, and that.
A platform lowered, striking the hard scorched earth. Whonnnnng.
Sparky turned—
And a black hood fell over his head.
“Welcome to the Revolution, Sparky,” someone whispered in his ear through the fabric. “Pillow Cat vouches for you. Now get on the ship, or I blow your Wonder Head out your Wonder Asshole.”
