Now.
The Lord of the Lemmings adjusted the dial again on the back of the lemming. The little creature’s mouth hummed. A wire connecting from the creature’s ear disappeared into the darkness of the Lemming Man’s cowl. He nodded, sweeping it one last time over R.T. as she shook the communicator box Kyle had given her just before swatting its side.
“It’s clear now,” the Lord of the Lemmings said, “that things are becoming very unclear.”
R.T. paused in her abuse of the comm box to once more address him.
“No, really,” she said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He pondered this.
•••
A very long time ago.
A small man in a tattered houndstooth suit with moleskin elbow patches knelt at the edge of a crumbling cliff. Far below, foamy caps like the heads of white lions roared and crashed against jagged rocks.
The man—an insurance agent, or at least he was—fell to his hands, weeping.
In his head ran a marathon of actuarial figures: 0.024% chance of fatality by margarine allergy, 1.2% chance of slagworm infestation, 0.45% chance of intestinal stoppage due to rectal softball insertion, 1.9% chance of electrocution by vengeful robot, 100% chance of death of wife and child by drunken father and husband piloting a brand new Finesse Coil-Rider 4-door sedan by Captain Motors, an acquisition and future liquidation of HappyCo…
He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, and looked to the empty bourbon bottle next to him. With a clumsy grab, he hoisted it in the air, letting the last drops dot his tongue before pitching it off the cliff and to the consumptive tide below.
Then he stood, spread his arms, and tilted forward toward his death.
Something stopped him.
Something fuzzy.
He looked up. What appeared to be a tremendous – meaning, at least as big as a city bus or even a small asteroid – rodent floated in the air past the edge of the cliff. The giant creature stared at him with black eyes like shiny beads, its fat head squished back on an even fatter neck. It out held a stubby arm, its paw gently withholding the man from what he felt was his just reward among the rocks and waves below.
It did not speak aloud, but it spoke inside the man’s head.
YOUR SUICIDE PLEASES ME.
The man said nothing. What could he say?
I AM THE GREAT BIG LEMMING. I AM AN ANCIENT SPIRIT. THE DESIRE TO END YOUR OWN LIFE CALLED ME. YOUR DESPERATION IS PLEASING TO MY KIND.
“Buh,” he stammered, “—but I thought that was a myth. Lemmings don’t really kuh-kill themselves.”
THIS IS THE STORYVERSE. ALL MYTHS ARE TRUE.
He sniffled, wiped snot from his upper lip, and shrugged. “Oh-okay.”
The two remained like this for a time in silence.
“Can I kill myself now?”
WILL YOU BE MY HOST? WILL YOU ALLOW YOUR BODY AND MIND TO BE OBLITERATED BY THE INFINITY OF MY ANCIENTNESS AND THE AWESOMENESS OF MY ENDLESSNESS?
He blinked back tears. “That suh-sounds like a tuh-terrible fate. Sounds puh-perfect. I accept.”
The Great Big Lemming smiled, and licked its buck-tooth incisors.
YOU WILL BECOME A GOD ONE DAY.
“Sure.” He didn’t even care. He just wanted –
The lemming withdrew its paw. The man plummeted.
Cold wind caught in his mouth, bulged his cheeks. His wet eyes were scoured by sea mist. Rocks tore through him. Vengeful surf pulled his body apart like taffy. Down there in the depths, something swam with him—a giant shadow at first, a round beast, the Great Big Lemming, but then it broke apart into a hundred littler shadows, then each littler shadow became a hundred more, and a hundred more after that. The shadows swarmed him. Little teeth chewed at his belly, his neck, his nose. He felt them stuff into his body—tiny tumbling balls of fur and tickling whisker and scraping claw—a billion fuzzy clowns in a clown car made of ribs and meat. His ribs and meat.
All went dark for a time.
Sometime later—days, weeks, maybe years—he washed up on the shore, his body covered in a cowl of seaweed and shadow. The sopping cloak shifted and changed, became a thing not unlike a robe formed of sentient squid ink.
Things moved inside of him. Lemmings.
He didn’t remember who he was. He remembered nothing about his wife, his child, his past life.
His glittery eyes blinked.
“Ain’t that a buttery satchel of beans?” he asked aloud to nobody. He giggled.
•••
A while ago.
In each hand, a Laser Lemming. Gripped tight, the little lemmings wore blast-shields and round collars, and whenever the Lord of the Lemmings tickled their bellies with his trigger fingers, they spit searing red laser bolts. Ptoo, ptoo, ptoo. The beams tore holes through the skulls of the skeletons that shambled closer, clattering their teeth. Somewhere in the graveyard, an owl hooted.
The heroes, besieged on all sides, met back to back, shoulder to shoulder, atop a flat concrete tomb here on Deadworld. The skeletons jogged forward, green mist hissing from cobwebbed sockets. Chuckles swung his blade, taking off three skulls at once. Whackwhackwhack. Grebok, out of ammo, was using his revolver like a hatchet, scalping them left and right. Chop! Sparky blasted spines and ribcages to dust and bone-spurs with each bark from his shotgun. Blammo! Gunther had one of those little cootie-catchers he made out of paper, and he kept opening and closing it (it told him that he was gay, and his favorite color was “puce”).
Lord of the Lemmings leaned back, so that all could smell his rodent’s breath and hear his voice.
“I’m going to become a god one day,” he chirped, giddy.
“We know,” they intoned together. They probably rolled their eyes, too.
The fight raged on.
•••
A little while back.
The Lemming Man floated in the void in front of…
Well, the Void.
His cloak rippled silently here in the far-flung nothing of the Storyverse.
The deepest darkest (and creepiest) member of the Celestial Chorus regarded the Lord of the Lemmings silently. The Void said nothing.
“Hello,” Lemming Lord said. His voice echoed within the Void. “I need a favor, flavor-saver.”
The Void said nothing.
“I’m going to be a god someday,” he continued. “Not soon. But sooner than never. Later than now. I can do it alone, probably, but I’d rather not. I like friends.”
The Void said nothing.
“Thing is, I’m going to need a whole new universe, yessir. A whole new cabinet of clothes. New patches for my elbows! All that. New universe will need a new middle, though. Can’t have a big wide open space of nothing without giving it a center. It’d be like having a lollipop without a stick, or a baby without the creamy nougat filling.”
The Void said nothing.
“Maybe you want to be a part of my new universe? I could make you the center. I could make you the middle man. You down with my noun, Big Bad Blacky Brown?”
The Void said nothing.
But then, the Void said something.
He grunted.
Lord of the Lemmings gave a thumbs-up.
“I’m just going to need a little something,” he said, reaching a cloaked arm into the deep cosmic chasm of the Void’s nega-body. He seized on a small fist-sized globule of…
Glittery star-ooze. He withdrew it, and marveled at it.
“That’s the goop Daddy needs.”
•••
Not that long ago, really.
“And you say this is the magic right here?” Brin asked, holding up the little glass case, big enough only to hold a pair of earrings—or, as it did now, a fingernail-sized microchip.
The chip’s surface glittered darkly—it was blacker than black, a tenebrous shade intimating a tiny mouth. Little pinprick stars winked upon its surface.
“That’s the chip that Daddy needs,” the small man in the houndstooth jacket with the moleskin elbow patches said. His eyes twinkled when he spoke. “I call it, the Infi-Net chip. But don’t eat it.”
Brin cast a wary gaze toward his new friend. “All right, man. Let’s talk brass tacks. What do you want for this little gem?”
The small man shrugged. “Oh, you know. A big bucket of nothing, really. Access codes is all. I want open access to enjoy the low-hanging fruits of your playful labor.”
“Just access? That’s it?”
“Yuppers. I’m hoping there will be cat videos.”
Brin nodded, licking his lips wolfishly. “Good call, bro. People love cats.” He pocketed the little case. “This’ll take GoogolSoft to new heights. And it’ll cram my success down my family’s throat. Or up their ass. Whichever you’d prefer. Once we invest in the tech necessary to bring this to fruition, we’ll have this baby up and running in five, maybe ten years.”
“No! That’s too long.”
“Chillax, elbow pads.”
“I can help you get it up sooner.”
“…Can you, now?”
“I know a girl,” the man in the suit said. “Relationship troubles. A real high-tech, spacey broad. I’ll get you her number. She’s a good… engineer.”
•••
Now.
R.T. asked him again, waving her hand in front of his face. “I said, what the hell are you doing here, weirdo?”
The Lord of the Lemmings stopped pondering.
“Oh, you know,” he said. “Nothing much. Just getting new patches for my elbows!”
