Blood.
R.T. fell to her knees, the pain in her gut like a knot of tightening bowel. She sneezed. The ground was wet with red. Something was wrong. Something was happening. Kyle tried to help her up.
The Lord of the Lemmings did not. He was too busy staring at the sky.
A tiny dot of light shimmered and flickered – an uncertain star, a winking firefly.
“Poop,” he said.
R.T. reached out for him with a blood-smeared hand.
“Weirdo,” she croaked. “Hey. Help. Help me up. Something’s wrong.”
But the Lemming Man didn’t move. He only said:
“Window’s almost closed. I shouldn’t have come here. I thought that because you were an anomaly, that the gooey God-Energy would have to come from you. But I guess not. Poop, poop, poop.” He shrugged. “Anyway. Gotta go. I’ll make it all better from the other side, Spaceride.”
His cloak rippled – the sound of a flag caught in a gale wind – and then it folded in on itself with a faint lemming squeak. And then he was gone. R.T. cried out and coughed up more blood.
•••
Darkness.
Things had gone awry. Grebok and Chuckles were content to do nothing, to sit and wait for all this mess to resolve itself (both of their newly-intelligent brains computed the chances of it all just working itself out as being low, but still higher than the other options presented). It was easy to plunk down on the floor in the newborn darkness and see what happened.
It wasn’t long after that the screams and gunfire and dolphin cackles reached a crescendo, as if it was just outside the door of their cell.
That’s because it was just outside the door of their cell.
The metal door tented inward, and blasted off its hinges. A short robot with a wedge-shaped head backed into the room, furiously typing on a translucent, almost ghostly keyboard jutting out from his midsection. In the air around his dented head, rocks and canned goods and baseballs appeared, each with a vacuuming pop, before launching forth against a handful of hallway interlopers. Googol Men toppled like pawns on a chessboard.
“It’s that robot,” Grebok said. “We know him.”
But the Avatar’s only response was, “People used to throw canned goods at me. The canned yams were always the worst. I was just a child. It was the start of something. The start of my secret loneliness.”
Denthead, the robot, staggered backward, ducking more gunfire. Bullets dinged the wall behind the two Shadowstories. Both flinched, as both were only recently made aware that death was a very real possibility, a fact that had not occurred to them before.
The Scum-Bot waved them forward. “Let’s roll. I have a dolphin waiting.”
“I cannot parse that sentence,” Grebok said, hunkering down, hands over his head. “I am left to conclude that you have gone off your programming, and are now deranged.”
“Last I checked,” Chuckles said, “you were content to send us to that awful Friendmonger-dot-com place. We aren’t following you anywhere.”
More gunfire. In the hallway, Googol Men had set up barricades. Ernst Godwin was a shadow behind the soldiers, stalking the spaces, bathed in red emergency lights.
Denthead’s ocular processes tightened. “Fine! But can’t you see they’re shooting at us? Go out there! Do your thing! Be heroes!”
The Avatar winced, and huddled up with his buddy, the Keykeeper. “No chance, Scum-Bot. We don’t do that anymore. By the way – why is a Scum-Bot even involved in all of this? It makes no sense. Literally no sense. I feel a headache coming on.”
Denthead manifested a bundle of screaming monkeys above his head with piston-taps from his keyboard, and sent the monkeys screaming down the hallway. Googol Men were suddenly besieged by biting, poo-flinging simians.
“I can’t do this all by myself!” Denthead cried.
“You’re doing just fine,” Grebok said.
“Monkeys out of thin air?” the Avatar moaned. “We are motes of sanity floating in the bright light of craziness.”
A bullet clipped Denthead and spun the Scum-Bot like a top. His one arm hung limp. Scowling as only a robot can, he vented air through his respirator and hissed, “Obviously, you morons need a little help.”
“We’re not morons,” Grebok said from behind his hands.
Chuckles added: “We’re geniuses!”
Denthead typed fast and furious into the keyboard with his good arm.
•••
Dust.
Sparky’s robot legs hit the ground, sending up a cough of red dust.
Violence ensued out here in the Badlands.
Things happened before Sparky even knew they were happening. He twisted a Googol Man’s skull so hard it popped off like the head of a poppet doll. His legs kicked out and shattered spines, crushed knees, stomped bodies. His clawed paws shoved guns unceremoniously up asses before firing them. The little weasel within Sparky ran rampant around his heart and soul, chattering and giggling and biting at the air.
Only ten minutes before, the Nigerian Prince identified the rag-tag patrol of Googol Men out here on the lip of a distant canyon, and Kitty Kitty Guy agreed that it was a good test for Sparky’s newly-minted madness, a madness fueled by dick pills and sleeping pills and uppers and a dollop of inborn repressed Mommy’s-Boy rage.
It was a test for Sparky. It was a test for the Revolution.
Sparky kicked a Googol Men’s head clean off his shoulders.
He spun around, clawing and scratching.
The Revolutionaries watched from within the safety of the spaceboat. The T-Rex whimpered, as he wanted to go out and play with the silly Googol Men, but Kitty Kitty Guy held him back.
They’d let Sparky pass his test.
Then, they’d find that traitorous R.T. bitch and point their new weasel buddy in her direction.
•••
Smoke.
“No!” Grebok cried out as his laser eye flashed – a beam of light arced across the open hallway, cutting a Googol Man’s gun clean in half before taking off his hand.
“Stop! Stop! Rape!” Chuckles screamed as his body herked and jerked like a puppet on strings. He waded, unbidden, into the hallway. His fist launched out and caught a soldier in the breadbasket – and as the fist connected with solar plexus, the sword blade slid out, running clean through the enemy.
“This is why R.T. won’t love me!” Grebok yelled, trying to give that goddamn robot the stink-eye – all he could manage was a laser eye, and it wasn’t pointed at Denthead, but at the waves of Googol Men pouring down the hallway.
“This is why I’m alone!” Lord Chuckles hollered over the din. “My violent tendencies keep others at arm’s length! I want to have friends, not enemies!”
Grebok spun around, the red beam bisecting a whole host of foes. “We’re gonna die!”
“Our lives are finite!”
Both were smart enough to figure out what had happened.
The Scum-Bot with his little keyboard was hacking the Infi-Net. No, he was hacking the whole of the Infiniverse. And now he’s hacked them. He’d hacked into their cyber-parts, and was forcing those weapons to bear against the Googol Men.
Though, each had to admit, against their better judgment and feelings of fear and inadequacy…
It felt very natural, indeed.
•••
Light.
It was happening.
In the center of the Infiniverse, it was like the very firmament was boiling – the blackness of space and the speckled stars and tangled pipes behind shimmered like a heat haze, and a swirl of amber 1s and 0s grew in brightness and color until they were the hue of bright butter and soon an eye-searing stab of whiteness.
GoogolSoft was emerging.
Uploading.
A great big digital butterfly with wings of light and starburst antennae. The cocoon of the old universe – the boring ol’ Storyverse, ptoo – would soon be shed and left behind like so much dead skin.
Manifest Destiny was upon the Infiniverse. Or would be, in moments.
Brin stalked the boardroom, giddy. The walls glowed. Pulsed. The others around the table were caught in the throes of what might’ve been religious ecstasy, or what might’ve been the peyote tabs he’d dropped into the ginseng-acai tee he had Sage serve to all the Guiding Hands.
Jibimy drooled. Flint babbled.
Outside, when the walls coruscated to nothing, he could see Sunshower. Her body floating. Hair streaming behind her. Freckled face and pink skin turning to curved chrome and missile pods and then back again. He had his own were-ship, his own lycanthropic space-queen, and most importantly of all, his own router to help upload himself into the universe he had created for himself. She was doing her job now, and when they finally crossed all the way over – in 30 seconds now, or thereabouts – he’d have more work for her, too.
The others, though? Not so much.
The Guiding Hands had guided the company with their soft hands. Great brownies. Good times. Solid memories: hash pipes and smartphones and corporate synergy.
But this new world demanded a different attitude.
Brin kissed the top of Sage’s head as it rolled around on her shoulders, the eyelids fluttering like moths drowning in a puddle. He wondered what she was seeing. He almost wished he’d taken some of that peyote himself.
Oh well. Regret isn’t cool. Regret’s not the path to the future. No lamentations here, bro.
Then he looped an extension cord around Sage’s next and started to choke her.
He got an erection while he was doing it.
Which wasn’t strange, given that he was naked and all.
