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R.T. darkened her lenses again.

The Badlands were an expanse of blinding white as far as the eye could see. The occasional structure or swathe of generic lettering would interrupt the scenery, but mostly it was miles and miles of bright, shining, whiteness. She swore she had a permanent dot burnt into her left eye.

Not for the first time, that little girl’s words echoed in her head. About LiveDiary; about Shadowstories.

Was it possible they were in the Infi-Net too? How would any of them know how to work a computer? They were basically apes who stood more-or-less upright.

She cringed at her own appraisal. That wasn’t fair.

Regardless of how they got caught up in… whatever glitch had caused all these people to get trapped here, they were better off without her. She needed to find Brin and fix this.

Finally, she arrived at the church steps. The Children of Kendra Parish 403, Our Lady of Forbidden Zones.  A make-shift cathedral, cobbled together out of pop-up driftwood and the same irritatingly iridescent stuff the ground was composed of.

Shielding her eyes, she approached the door.

•••

Kyle stood at the pulpit.

He had come so far from being an assistant stagehand at eTunes; done so much since the night of the cataclysm.

He shouted over the jeers and derision, “You are right that she has left this digital plane, but she has not left us as guideless as you have been lead to believe!”

“Heresy!” A woman cried.

“Lies!” A middle-age man in an undersized, torn Kitty-Kitty-Bang-Bang shirt booed.

“Heresy!” A twenty-something male shouted, annoyed that he hadn’t said it first.

“It isn’t heresy it is the truth!” Kyle banged on the pulpit to impose some order over the congregation. “Please, you must believe me, I have conferred with her! I have spoken to Kendra!”

Just as with all the other Kendrite churches, this sent a wave of exhaustive denial and disbelief. Some called for his head, others sobbed in hysterics. The truth was a blunt force striking their fragile beliefs in the genitals.

“False prophet!” A canned good for the food drive flew past his ear.

The doors pushed open, and a woman covered in rags cast a long shadow down the aisle.

A hush fell over the parishioners.

•••

The crowd turned as one.

R.T. stood in the door, the brilliant whiteness streaming in behind her.

She smiled shyly and shuffled next to the door, stepping around the marble bowl fizzing with Holy Fresca. “Please, carry on, I was just… nothing, go on.” She motioned back to the focus of their attention.

She had only just heard him as she was coming in. After a month of being in the Infi-Net it was still a mystery to her. She had spent all her time in C&C making the place work, she had no idea what people had been using it for. Every day she was confronted with a new way of life.

A cult around Kendra Shields? Several of them? Really?

“Heretic!” a boy several rows up shouted to get the rancor started again. He looked oddly proud of himself. True to form a lot of shouting and clamoring picked up right where it had left off.

“I was a stagehand at Kendra’s last concert!” the man in the pulpit appealed. The crowd continued to raucously complain, but lowered the volume enough to hear what they were going to be outraged by next. “I am the last person Kendra spoke to before that doughy man-child blew up the stage.” A chorus of yells followed, but this time they weren’t aimed directly at the man speaking. “I hid in her dressing room during the riots and found this!” he held something up.

Everyone leaned forward and squinted. As revelations went it wasn’t very big or impressive. A woman in the back row mumbled that this might have gone better with a Potence-Point presentation.

Seeming to recognize that this didn’t have the desired effect he lowered his hand. “It’s a transmitter/receiver. A very small one,” he excused. The crowd was as confused as they were agitated, but a round of nods made its way around the assembly. He tried to recover, “It is linked directly to Kendra!”

Another burst of calling for heads and such overtook the crowd.

“I spoke to her. After she left us. After she returned to the physical universe!”

R.T. perked up.

•••

Kyle had half the crowd in attention, and the other half that were going to decry anything he said at this point. He knew the point of this slapdash religion wasn’t to know what Kendra wanted, but to interpret and wonder what Kendra wanted.

Still, he had to strike while the iron was on. “I spoke directly to your—our—savior. And she is our savior.” That caught a few of the more attentive old folks. This wasn’t the usual hippie, atheistic proselyte nonsense that they usually had to deal with from young homosexuals. “She is out there in the real world as we speak, trying to save us all!”

The crowd wasn’t sure what to do with that, so they more or less had to grumble aimlessly until he made a point they could really froth about.

“She travels around within a special spaceship, depositing devices around the universe that will help us all achieve our ascendance, and return once again to our real bodies!”

A hand went up, from a paunchy man in the front.

Kyle wasn’t used to taking questions. Usually torches and pitchforks were brandished by this point. He must be getting better, he surmised. “Um… yes? You sir?”

“A spaceship?” The man’s mouth scrunched up like an agitated anus. “I always pictured her in more of a gold chariot drawn by snow leopards and the like. Maybe a couple, giant ponies.”

The crowd agreed.

“Or unicorns!” A woman cried.

“Or uni—ah fuckit!” A young man sat down angrily.

Kyle shushed the crowd with his hands. “Yes, yes. And that would be cool. Definitely. But so is this!” He tried to add some flourish that might make the spaceship idea as cool as a gold sleigh pulled by unicorns through space. It fell a little short.

The latecomer, the woman in rags was the most attentive out of all of them at this point as they argued over the sorts of quasi-mythical creatures Kendra might hang with in the proto-afterlife they saw for her.

“This vehicle is very important! It is the mother of the Infi-Net! It is the vehicle of our ascendance! It is the Resurrection Transcendence Portal!”

The woman in rags stood straight. Her eyes locked onto his. He felt a little uncomfortable, honestly.

The crowd turned the whole presentation over, collectively mulling whether they were into this whole Pedestrian Reformation he was selling. Had they brought all these ReadyLite torches for nothing?

“Kill the heretic!” the agitated boy in the back pumped his fist in the sky.

That’s usually all it takes.

Kyle looked for which window was going to be easiest to jump out of.

•••

As the crowd lit their torches and queued up for pitchforks, R.T. shoved a path to the front.  She had a sudden need to talk to this young man.

•••

No windows? Really? What kind of Church doesn’t have any windows?

•••

R.T. elbowed a dude in the solar plexus, and shoved an old woman into a pew, which toppled over and took several other would-be rioters with her.

•••

Oh shit, the rag woman looked really angry. She must be a fundamentalist from the Holy See in ViewTube. This could truly be his end.

He knew better than to pray to Her, but he had to do something.

Kyle gripped the transmitter and hoped real hard.

•••

“Excuse me.” R.T. tapped a man thrusting a broken piece of molding in the air like a weapon. He half-turned to see if the rioting plan changed and caught a fist to the jaw.

She clasped her hands together and wedged her way to the front of the throng.

•••

The scary warrior woman was almost upon him. He really wanted to tinkle, but stayed strong.

He had to say something really inspirational. That way these jerks would make him a martyr in a couple of years and the truth would get out there.

The crowd clamored behind her as she walked right up to him.

Here it goes: “I—I’m—it’s just—truth is—sorry.” He gave a wan smile and cringed internally. That wasn’t going to look all that great on a triptych.

He closed his eyes.

“I believe you,” the rag woman said right before grabbing him around the waste and crashing through the flimsy back wall of the church. Flimsy enough that Kyle really wished he had thought of that.

•••

R.T. and Kyle landed in a crouch as the confused parish gathered around the her-shaped hole to shake fists and found object weaponry.

She landed on the screaming white ground at the feet of something that was so black it was out the other side of darkness.

Her eyes followed it up to its peak.

“Toodles,” The Lord of the Lemmings greeted with a little wave.

Together, they had just slain the CyberPillar—a massive mechanized caterpillar that had come from the deepest reaches of forbidden space to tear the Storyverse asunder with mandibles capable of severing the delicate threads connecting stories. With one bite, it could unravel whole narratives: a guideless apocalypse leaving much of the realm bloody on the cutting room floor.

Now, the two Shadowstories stood atop its ruined head after the great robotic invertebrate had crashed down on this murky swamp planet. To make sure it was dead, the Avatar thrust his blade deep into the beast’s metal head, straight through its core processor: crunch. Grebok added his own nails in the CyberPillar’s coffin with three quick shots from his pistol: pop, pop, pop.

The glow of nearby fungus lit them in a swimmy bioluminescence. The beast’s head hissed steam.

“The Storyverse is safe once again,” Chuckles said, wiping sweat from his brow. He leaned forward on the pommel of his sword.

“Do you ever get tired of all this?” Grebok asked, twirling his pistol right into its holster. “You ever think about retiring? Settling down somewhere? Get a herd of goats or something.”

Chuckles answered quietly, “I do. I do, old friend.”

They got close, nose-to-nose, and started making out. Their tongues thrust madly against each other, each a squirming pink tentacle smashing against teeth and the roofs of each other’s mouths. Hands roamed, groping the valleys between buttocks.

Grebok reached down and felt Chuckles’ swollen tumescence straining against his dark leather breeches. The Avatar, in turn, felt Grebok’s powerful priapism, a pistoning hound trying to buck the leash that kept it contained within his space pants. They thrust their bulging cock barrows against one another.

Chuckles pulled away, gasping for air.

“I want to cum in your glorious dreadlocks,” the Avatar whispered.

“I want to drink mead from your delicious asshole,” Grebok hissed.

“First—“ Chuckles said. “I must feel it again.”

He then slid his hand under Grebok’s shirt, letting his touch drift across the roundness of Grebok’s pregnant belly. His mind reveled in the feeling of those fine dark hairs, of the rotundity of their shared child growing within the Keykeeper’s bowels.

Chuckles whispered in Grebok’s ear: “I love that you have my child inside of you.”

“I love it when you’re inside of me. Inside my rectal canal.”

“Let’s go find Gunther.”

“We can hold him down and take out both of our cocks and—“

“Cut!” came the voice of the Marvelous Marmoset.  He came scuttling out of the darkness—not a marmoset at all, but actually a 19-year-old pimply boy genius with a shock of red hair and a pair of black hornrim glasses that he quickly pushed up his nose.

His eyes had a milky cast to them—a cloudy film that swirled over the irises.

“I just don’t know,” he said. “I can’t be sure if this is right yet.”

He turned to the Grand Council of Beta Readers.

“Your thoughts, Grand Council? I seek your… wisdom.”

…

Most of them had gone half-blind down here below the crust of LiveDiary’s ruined surface. The Revolutionaries that came to this world for solace, to escape war and find a place of peace for their blogging efforts and fan-fiction epics, soon found that the color of their flesh waned to a grub-like pallor, that strange cataracts began forming over their eyes. Some lost teeth. Other developed sticky cilia upon their fingertips and toes that allowed them to scamper up sheer surfaces.

They subsisted on a diet of the weird glowing fungi, scuttling cave bugs, and screeching cavern bats.

Bloggers sat huddled in corners, claiming an elbow turn or a long stretch of maze for themselves, etching their messages—angry screeds, rambling poems, remembered movie reviews—into the rock walls or the flesh of fulsome toadstools.

Fanboys and Fangirls gathered together in ecstatic orgies, their pale and naked flesh slapping together as they babbled in tongues about their love of Homeric epics or the Space Knight series or, most cherished, the sacrificial lamb known as Kendra Shields. With wet lips they sang paeans to those intellectual properties they loved above all else.

Then came those who were not content only to worship and sing praise: the ficcers, slashers, shippers, all coming together and staging theater held in the cubbyholes and dead ends of these blasted catacombs, giving praise to their Creators and hoping to appease them with plays and songs weaving in and out of that pop culture which was so beloved it was now held sacred.

All of these tribes came together under the aegis of a single mythology given to them by their de facto leader, the boy wonder known as the Marvelous Marmoset:

One day, the Infiniverse would find peace. The Revolution would succeed.

And when it did, the Children of LiveDiary would emerge ready to entertain a war-struck universe.

…

“It’s not slashy enough,” hissed Betty Boo 42 of the Grand Council. A creamy cave cricket danced across her eye. Her mouth opened, and a black tongue shot out to claim the bug. It crunched as she chewed.

“It’s never slashy enough for you,” the Marmoset said. “I think it’s plenty slashy. And the male pregnancy thing really is too squicky for me—“

“It’s what the Creators would want,” Queen I-Can-Haz-Kittehs barked, her head turning at once-impossible angles. Her vertebrae grinded and popped as her head pivoted, owl-like. “When we are finally revealed to the world, the world will demand more M-Preg. UST—“ Unresolved sexual tension, is what she meant. “—is also critical to how we entertain the masses.”

“Be that as it may—“ the Marmoset tried.

“I wonder,” said Janefan, a college-aged girl who made her way in the fanfic world by writing Jane Austen furry-fic, “if we can’t involve the Wonder Weasel somehow.”

“You always want the weasel!”

“I love the weasel,” she said, giggling. She was still pretty, despite the deepening pallor and the orange mold that had started to grow across her left eye.  “Let’s put him in a Civil War outfit. I tire of the Nazi regalia.”

The Marvelous Marmoset rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses, and pinched his nose.

He knew it, then. He’d ceded too much of his authority to the Grand Council of Beta Readers.

Every day—or night, what did it matter down here?—they gained sway.

And when they gained it, he lost it.

“I want to take this on the road,” he blurted. The idea had just come to him. “USO-style. Entertain the troops and all that. I’ll take the Shadowstory Players, maybe a handful of bloggers, and we’ll go out and do a song and dance for the workers of the Revolution. A real dog and pony show. Or, dog and weasel show.”

With that came an unspoken promise: I’ll be out of your hair, and you’ll be out of mine. You can do whatever rapey gender swapping Space Knight theater-porn you want.

…

“So we haven’t had a chance to chat,” said Dave, the guy who played Lord Chuckles. He poured some creamer (really just powdered fungus) into his coffee (really just the diarrhea of cave mice). “How’d you get the gig?”

“Let’s see,” said Ronald, eating a cruller (really just a ring of mashed cricket paste on a deep-fried batwing). “I got the invite to the Grebok audition… I guess I was standing in one of the ViewToob bread lines? Someone handed me a napkin, and on it said something about a free sundae, and I figured—y’know, c’mon, a sundae?”

“Better than bread, right, right!” Dave laughed. “That’s how they got me, too. Totally. I’ll never fall for the sundae schtick again.”

“For real. From your lips to the Creators’ ears.”

They sipped and ate for a little while.

“I’m not really gay,” Dave finally said.

“Gay-for-pay. That’s cool. I’m… pretty gay. I have to tell you.”

“That’s entirely great. I don’t want you to think I’m—what’s the word? Squicked out by it all.”

“That’s good to know. Because what that Grand Council wants… it gets pretty intense, doesn’t it?”

“It gets pretty intense, yeah.” Dave crumpled the cup, tossed it into a hole dug out of the cave wall. “I mean, at first, I thought it was a little strange, but everyone seems on board.”

“Especially the girl playing the weasel. What’s her name?”

Dave knitted his brow. “Uhh. Nancy? Nelly. No, Nancy! Nancy. Yeah. She really likes wearing the apparatus.”

“Apparatus?” Ronald seemed surprised. “That’s not an apparatus, dude. That’s… that’s her penis.”

“She can’t have a penis. She’s a chick.”

“No, down here they have power over stories.” Ronald paused, narrowed his eyes. “You know I’m really pregnant, right?”

Dave went white as a sheet. “Wait. What?”

“I’m pregnant with your baby. That part’s real.”

The air went out of Dave, and Ronald reached out with a steadying hand.

“I… I’m a father,” Dave said.

“Yeah, Dave. I’m sorry you didn’t know that. But we’ll make it through this okay. I promise.”

Dave offered a tiny, terrified smile.

…

The Marmoset, bolstered by his approval from the Council, marched down the tunnel looking for his Shadowstory Players. He didn’t want to fuck around. They had to get out of these tunnels and off this rock but fast before he pulled out his hair. (Which was already happening in great clumps thanks to not having seen the sun.)

The ground rumbled. Dust and fungus drifted in streams from the ceiling.

Sand whispered from between cracks.

Somewhere above, the distant whine of an engine somewhere.

The ground shuddered.

Someone, or something, had landed.

The ocean.

He could hear the ocean.

He could feel noise happening around him, but all he could hear was the waves.

Then a shrill, keening whine.

Slowly the sound of gunfire, machinery, and screaming pierced his eardrums.

The Avatar opened his eyes. Immediately he had to blink and clear them of dust and gravel.

A metallic talon came crashing down next to him, spearing a cat wearing headphones; its life ended with a gurgled invective.

Lord Chuckles put his hands over his head and ears.

Intellectually he understood that he needed to move. That he was in just as much danger staying still. That he could manage his escape in all this chaos.

He just couldn’t get that message down to his legs.

Instead, he curled up into a ball in the mud and dirt of Stuffopedia.

•••

Grebok kept his feet as war rose up around him.

Drunkenly he stumbled back and forth. No place was safe; no refuge even back the way they came.

A Virus-Killer fell. A chorus of cheers went up as it came down. The subsequent rush of dirt and dust almost blinded the Keykeeper. He threw up his arm as an ineffectual shield. Grebok blinked until fat tears carried the grit out of his eyes.

He watched as a pair of faceless men hoisted Sparky—with a black sack over his head—onto a flying skimmer. He couldn’t make out the pilot or who else was around him. It was too far away. Too many Googol-Men and a surprising amount of satyrs between here and there.

He’d never make it.

•••

Godwin was hoisted to his feet by rough hands.

He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs from it. An army of angry will-o-wisps danced in his eyes. His helpers almost came into focus but waxed back into formless blurs.

He blinked hard, the one and zero that were his eyes reduced to hyphens before exploding back into binary.

A mostly naked woman with tassels over her dee-daws and a gigantic, black strap-on member dangling from where her hee-hoo should be was on his right arm. A malamute in a diaper standing on its hind legs was on his left.

Revolutionaries.

The filthy things were touching him with their filthy things.

Ernst tightened his left hand into a fist; a palm sized blade ripped out from the elbow of his jacket. With a quick jerk backwards he got a satisfying yelp as he stuck the comically overlarge dog in between the 8^th and 9^th rib. The Doctor slipped from his useless doggie grip and drove a fist into the woman’s breastbone; she stumbled back a step.

Blam!

Just enough room for his gun to clear its holster. She went down. Her tassels spun in a flailing, macabre dance.

Blam!

The dog clutched vainly at his tender, exposed belly as he fell to the unforgiving earth.

Godwin turned to survey his war.

•••

“We got what we came for, let’s move it.”

“But, sir? All these people—”

“This is war, private. They knew what they were signing up for.”

“Sir?”

“It’s the cold reality of combat, soldier, now move it, move it, move it!”

“Sir!”

It’s hot in this sack, Sparky opined to himself miserably. He made no effort to move or resist. It was what it was.

His younger—inner—self was getting angrier by the minute. Sparky ignored him. What did that kid know? Had his anger ever served him in any capacity? Did anger save his mother? His father? His grandpappy? No, no, and nope.

Better to lie here like a good weasel.

•••

Grebok was trained for this.

They were all heroes, sure, but Grebok was the only one with any formalized military training. He was taught how to shut out distraction, how to overcome fear, how to think rationally through the fog of war.

Chuckles. He needed to find Chuckles.

No, first, he should arm himself.

He understood in the abstract that he was armed with a laser eye. How could he forget? It was was assaulting him with information at a maddening pace. He couldn’t bring himself to put his life in the hands of lemming-tech. They were lemmings for chrissakes, not rats or martens. Those were mammals with a touch of smarts. He would probably use their laser eyes.

Belying that notion, when the eye alerted him to a fallen rifle, he was quick to scoop it up. But then he froze in indecision. If he shot at somebody—anybody—he only drew attention to himself as a combatant. He didn’t want to do that.

As he sorted out what to do next he scouted around for the Avatar. It was a as inoffensive as he was likely to get.

A mortar exploded nearby sending kittens and Googol-Men flying in all directions.

Grebok ducked instinctively and ran low.

Eventually he spotted the telltale red frock of his companion. He was hard to make out, covered in dust, debris, and blood as he was. The Miradorian hastened step toward his friend. If he could get him to his feet, they might be able to slip away in this mess.

As Grebok lurched across the battlefield he heard a scream approaching. He turned to see a portly man in a sports coat charging him  (in fact, a weatherman who accidentally crapped himself on live TV, making him inadvertently famous for all time). Dark, stinky smears ran across his cheeks like warpaint. A splintered femur gripped in his hands like a makeshift spear.

He was coming in high; much too high to attack effectively. Grebok could easily shoot him mid-charge, or wait until he got close and hatchet him across the stomach with the rifle-butt.

As he surmised his options, he caught sight of the wind-tossed, ill-shaven good looks of Jason Priestley: sitting in a dark robe atop a toppled Virus-Killer.

Death!

His scythe leaned nearby; he ate ramen. He gave Grebok a little wave.

The Son of Drogmar flinched and dropped the rifle to the ground.

•••

Godwin shot one of the faceless throng in the… where the face should be.

Another, holding a broken chair-leg like a de facto tomahawk jumped over his fallen comrade, shouting to whatever god he pleased. Godwin caught the offender’s arm, kneed him in the breadbasket, and helped him the rest of the way to the ground with a sharp tug.

A single bullet through the back of the head sent him to have it out with said-same god.

Where were his prisoners? More importantly, where was that head?

Scanning the chaos he caught a glimpse of the simpering pile of soot-smeared Avatar, cowering in the shadow of a downed Virus-Killer. Godwin emitted a shrill whistle and circled a finger in the air. His Shields Squadron disengaged and made their way to their commander.

Where were the rest of them?

•••

The man in the sports coat gnashed his teeth at the air as he stormed over fallen bodies. He snapped the neck of a wounded Googol-Man who had been struggling back to his feet. The weatherman shoved the now-limp body aside.

Grebok had nowhere to go.

He looked down to his unclenched hands. He knew they should be white-knuckled fists, tense with intent to harm; but this poor bastard didn’t know any better. He probably had kids at home who had to put up with no end of teasing from their school-chums about their father’s incontinence. Maybe an estranged ex-wife who couldn’t bear the shame. What right did he have—even in self-defense—to end the man’s life?

Grebok looked back up and over the shoulder of his onrushing assailant. Death shot him a thumbs up, then made a rude gesture involving moving his hand back and forth while sticking his tongue into his cheek rhythmically to simulate oral sex. It was uncalled for.

Grebok resigned that his last thoughts would be those of mild indignation.

The weatherman bore down on him.

The jaundiced and fractured bone committed to its deadly arc.

Grebok’s eyes squeezed shut.

He thought of R.T.

Blam!

When Grebok did not, in fact, expire, he risked a glance.

The be-sportscoated man—missing the better portion of his head—fell limp to the earth.

Grebok turned to see his savior, Doctor Ernst Godwin marching up to him, his elite squadron falling in behind him.

•••

Lord Chuckles wasn’t a religious guy—might sound funny coming from a guy who identified himself as the Avatar. That usually insinuated the embodiment of a godform and all. He just never got much spiritual learning growing up. Beyond that, what with his newfound intelligence, it didn’t make a lot of sense to discover spirituality now. Not really.

So he wasn’t sure who he was beseeching to preserve him through this. Only that whoever they were, he hoped they had room on their dance card for him in all of this mess. Also Grebok. Probably Sparky as well. You know, while he was hoping for miracles and all.

So when he was tapped—somewhat politely—on the shoulder, and he rolled over to see Grebok looking apologetic, he wasn’t sure who to thank. Only that he was very happy to see him alive.

Even if he would prefer slightly less armed men reaching down to haul him to his feet.

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.”

Honey Moon hung in space, deliberately worrying at her lip, staring off into the eternal distance.

“So, is it everything you though it would be?” Sub-Orbital Stan’s voice was a barely heard whisper.

It took a second for Honey Moon to come back from whatever far-off place occupied her attention. “Is what, everything I thought it would be?” She peered down at her tiny brother. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I mean. Being in charge. Running the show. The big moon on campus, etcetera, etcetera.” He winked at her. At least, she was pretty sure he was winking. It was tough to say, he was really tiny.

“You think I wanted this?” She sneered and rolled her body in such a way as to indicate omnidirectional space. “This? This is a lightless vacuum; a devastated hole with a population of mere millions. I have always been prepared to take charge if the need arose, but don’t insult me by thinking this is something I wanted or could wish for.”

Stan whistled and retreated  slightly. “Yeah. Yeah, sure, I get it. Sorry, I don’t really—I’m not good with lifeforms, so much, you know. It’s all the same to me, I guess.” He looked around innocently. “So, it’s bad then, I guess?”

The moon shot the little shithead a look of practiced disgust. What was he even doing around here. Hadn’t they demoted him? Was he even in the family anymore? Not for the first time in this past month, she wished her older brother was here. The Bastard Sun was a blowhard—and a bastard—but he was always confident and sure. Bah! she thought, I’m just waxing, by the time I’m full all this second-guessing and self-doubt should be gone.

“Yeah, sure is dark,” Stan interjected. “Makes you wonder, if it’s not all deliberate.” He shrunk under another of Honey Moon’s steely glares.

She was ready to dismiss him entirely, but something he just said struck her. “What are you on about?”

“Hm? Me? I was just saying that the timing of it is all rather suspicious. Everyone’s gone, the Bastard Sun taken out for incompetence, his vaunted heroes missing. It’s like someone meant for it to happen.” The little planetoid gazed off into space.

Honey Moon found herself tracking his line of sight, only to find nothing all that interesting. “You think we were set up?” She urged him on.

“Huh? Oh, what do I know? I mean, maybe GoogolSoft did this all on their own and the rest is all coincidence. Like, I said, I’m not so good with lifeforms. I’m not really up on what they’re capable of. Still, you have to ask yourself who profits? Who benefits from the Storyverse descending into a cold, lightless expanse, devoid of life?”

Honey Moon visibly chewed that over. Who indeed?

•••

Lord of the Lemmings was tired of setbacks, but wise enough to know that nothing worth having, came easily. If he wanted to be a God, it was going to take a little more doing.

Still, always setbacks. Who knew Gunther was so into blowing up little girls? Who knew that blowing up a little girl would cause so much trouble?

In its way, this boded well for his plans. If a virgin sacrifice stirred up this much trouble, achieving his godform in the digital realm was a realistic aim. Unfortunately, he needed GoogolSoft themselves to arrive, which had been derailed. His contact had since cut off communication with him, but he knew enough to know they were stuck over there in the really-real world. That would never do.

Still, not a lot he could do about it.

He’d done his part: His delicious companions, the Shadowstories, were digitally improved in order to eventually become his little champions. They each hosted a piece of data that would be necessary to his ascendance.

But he had lost them.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. He was going on omniscient, and he had lost the pieces to his god puzzle. The bacon, lettuce, tomato, and… mayo with which to make the B.L.T. of his apotheosis.

His agents were out cruising the Infi-Net for word of them, but so far, no good.

Conveniently and in a flagrant display of dramatic laziness, a faint beeping announced an incoming call on his touchscreen wristwatch.

He called up the image of one of his many lemming followers.  Larry, maybe? Or was it Sven? They all ran together sometimes.

“Hey, guy.” He played it safe.

Dutifully, the lemming popped and purred on the other end of the transmission.

Now that was a surprise. How long had she been here?

“Are you 100% sure it was R.T.?” he probed.

•••

They all regarded Not-Gunther’s body.

The leg twitched a little. A pool of green blood spread from his head, while a stain spread around the seat of his pants. None of them mourned per se, though a fair amount of thought was spent on the squandered potential of the troll and the unsung mystery of his origin.

Click.

Doctor Godwin reminded them all of his presence by recocking the gun.

“That was probably our best chance to give this guy the bum’s rush,” Chuckles mused at their wasted opportunity.

Grebok nodded in agreement. “Still, none of us could be sure that that bullet wouldn’t have come for us. I mean, tactically speaking I would have shot myself, or Sparky hear, before the Troll, who’s physical acumen was questionable.”

Chuckles and Sparky murmured their ascent.

“Stand aside,” Godwin growled and shooed them toward the wall with the barrel of the gun.

Sparky shut his eyes tightly. He was in the grip of some internal struggle, which he apparently lost because he announced, “You should really have one of us carry the head for you. There’s no way you can keep the gun on all of us if you’re burdened with carrying it.”

Chuckles leaned forward from the line they’d unconsciously formed and seemed to have—not scolding or inquisitiveness on his brow—but pity in his eyes.

“Well then, hop to, Ferret.” Ernst pointed with his upturned chin.

“I wouldn’t have told him that, man.” Grebok didn’t sound as sure as his words suggested.

“You have a laser eye.” Sparky whispered aside, seeming to urge the Miradorian as he turned to fetch the head of Gary.

“How does that even work? It’s nonsense,” Grebok protested. “What’s its powered by? How can I hope to be accurate with it? If I miss, what then?” He raised his voice so Sparky could hear him as he walked up the steps to retrieve the search engine. “Then he shoots me, or you, or Chuckles. I couldn’t live with that.”

Chuckles put his hand on Grebok’s shoulder. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

Ernst squinted his one and zero eyes at the remaining trio. These were the agents of chaos the Cenobite was gloating about? Somehow he didn’t suspect agents of chaos would be this polite or obliging.

“Well, I don’t know that I ever could have put it into words before. I believe I always felt this way—”

“You are a romantic after all.” Chuckles interjected.

Grebok nodded in agreement. “Indeed. And while you’re pragmaticism can be, at times, off-putting, I very much consider you to be my friend. Perhaps the best I’ve ever had.”

Somewhere inside of Sparky, a younger, angrier Sparky rattled at his little cage. That Sparky wanted him to knock the Avatar and Keykeeper’s sentimental heads together and shake them all out of it. It just wasn’t practical, he warned himself, someone would get hurt. Sure it sounded comical on the outside, but head wounds could be a silent, lingering killer.

THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED! SURELY DOCTOR GODWIN INTENDS TO USE ME TO DO HARM, AN OUTCOME WHICH IS UNDESIRABLE TO ALL PARTIES, SAVING HIS OWN, OF COURSE. The head’s cadence didn’t change so much, but Sparky imagined for just a second that it was pleading.

“Sorry, head. In a small way, you only have yourself to blame. You shouldn’t have made us so smart,” the weasel explained and put both paws on either side of the head.

DO YOU WANT TO TAKE IT BAC—szzt!

The head faded from glowing ice blue to a deep hue that was almost black.

Chuckles watched as Sparky clunked down the steps on clumsy metal legs. He looked to Grebok, whom he felt a deep affection towards now that his brain was less dominated by violence and occulted behind irrational homophobia. Lastly he looked at the Doctor.

“I finally feel as if I have a glimpse of the big fucking picture,” the Avatar announced to all present. “Frankly, I’m not at all impressed.”

They met in the center of the void, wandering the black channels and tenebrous spaces until each came to a nexus. At this nexus stood a white pedestal of the less pretentious Doric order (Ionic columns are simply too brazen for this simple darkness), and upon that pedestal sat a head.

A head with no body.

A head formed of gleaming crystals glowing ice blue.

A head with a jagged mustache the color of smoky quartz, and industrial shop-teacher glasses too large for its beady hematite eyes.

The head was smiling. Big, white teeth that flashed like sunlight across polished stone.

The four came to the column in silence. The Avatar surmised Grebok, who in turn surmised Sparky, who in equal measure surmised Gunther. Gunther surmised nobody, and instead played with himself through his khakis.

“That’s not Gunther,” Chuckles said. “I’m a little surprised I didn’t see it before now.”

“So many clues,” Grebok noted, furrowing his brow and rubbing his chin. “The foul teeth. The smell of stale sweat and corn chips. And all those things he said. Gunther’s a nice boy. This thing… isn’t.”

Sparky frowned. “In many ways, he’s like the Anti-Gunther.”

“You’re an anti-fag!” the duh-not-actually-Gunther snapped.

“That makes no sense,” Sparky said. “No sense at all.”

The Avatar agreed. “A lot of things aren’t making sense.”

“A whole lifetime of nonsense,” Grebok said, his  voice quiet. An invisible, existential threat pressed down upon his shoulders, a weight that threatened to mash him like a grub beneath a cosmic boot.

YOUR GENIUS HAS BEEN ACTUALIZED, came the computerized voice once more.

It came from the crystal head. Curiously, the mouth didn’t move when he spoke, but the mustache did—jostling up and down with each syllable.

“Actualize,” Lord Chuckles said, “as in, to realize, to give substance.” He blinked. He couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad. “I don’t think I knew what that word meant before. Though I probably would’ve said I did.”

The head’s mustache bobbled upon and down: THE SMARTNESS PROTOCOL IMPROVED YOUR COGNITIVE FUNCTION ABOVE THE ANGRY TRILOBITE LEVELS PREVIOUSLY EXPERIENCED!

“I do feel more intelligent,” Grebok said.

Sparky paced the darkness. “Before now, I would close my eyes and see two women. Human women. Naked. One had a guitar, and she was playing these… hard metal chords. You know, jugga jugga jugga. The other was oiling a trench gun. Slick hand, up and down the barrel. Again and again. Pyrotechnics would go off in the background and I’d ride down from the stars on a horse made of fire.” He paused and gazed, a thousand-yard stare. “Now I close my eyes and I see my mother.”

“I didn’t even know you had a mother,” Grebok said.

Chuckles nodded. “We thought you were made in a lab. With duct tape. And anger. Though, now, looking back, I can’t believe I let that theory slide.”

“You  wanna hump your mothers!” Not-Gunther cackled, parading around like a loping baboon. “Your Moms are gay Latvian trannies who work the donkey show!”

“This guy is really unpleasant,” Grebok said, genuinely surprised.

HE IS A TROLL, the head announced.

“A troll?”

“Trolls don’t look like that,” the Avatar noted. “Not as I recall. Plus, he’s not under a bridge.”

A TROLL IS AN INFI-NET CREATION: A HUMAN, CREATURE OR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DESIGNED FOR MAXIMUM OBSCENITY WITH THE AIM OF PROVOKING A RESPONSE FROM THE INFI-NET COMMUNITIES. THE ETYMOLOGY COMES FROM—

“Trolling the waters,” Grebok interrupted, almost unaware that the words were his. “Like in fishing. Dragging the bait across, to troll for fish. Infi-Net trolls use their invective as bait, trying to hook dupes into arguing with them. I can’t believe I know that. I can’t believe I know what ‘etymology’ means.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t stop listening halfway through,” Chuckles added.

Sparky watched the troll gambol about with profane hand gestures. “I can’t believe that’s not Gunther. We’ve been feeding this troll for weeks. And that means the real Gunther is somewhere out there. I abandoned him. I’ve been really mean to that poor bastard. I’ve been really mean to everybody.”

The Avatar wheeled on the head. “Okay, head. Who are you? What is this place? For all my presumed intelligence, I’m still drawing a great gaping blank when it comes to you.”

I AM GARY, the head announced with bouncing ‘stache. GENIUS ACTUALIZATION REVELATION YIELD: GARY. I AM THE SEARCH ENGINE THAT POWERS STUFFOPEDIA. I WAS BORN WITH THE INFI-NET, A SEED OF CONSCIOUSNESS POWERED BY THE HYLON PROCESSOR FOUND WITHIN THE ROUTINE-CLASS TEUTON-DRIVE PSYCHE-INFUSED ASTROMOBILE THAT AMPLIFIES THE NETWORK SIGNAL. THE CENOBITES OF STUFFIST PRECEPT HAVE TENDED TO MY NEEDS SINCE MY GENESIS. FOR INSTANCE, I VERY MUCH LIKE FIZZY DRINKS.

“Astromobile,” Grebok said, letting the word fall out of his mouth like a turd tumbling out of the leg of his pants. His blood went cold. His brow, hot. “You mean R.T., that’s who you mean. She… she powered this place?”

CONTINUES TO POWER IT, THOUGH SHE MAY NOT BE AWARE OF THAT FACT GIVEN THAT HER BIOMECHANICAL FLESH MATRIX HAS BEEN UPLOADED INTO THE INFI-NET. SHE IS MY MOTHER. I LIKE HER VERY MUCH. I HOPE TO MEET HER SOME DAY!

“We should all be so lucky to know our mothers,” Sparky said to himself more than to anybody else.

Chuckles went over to Grebok. “This is good news. She’s out there. This is confirmation. And the fact that she’s connected to this whole place gives us a potential edge. We can go find her now, with the help of Gary over here.”

“This isn’t good news!” Grebok barked, shoving the Avatar away. “This is the worst kind of news. We’re no good for her. Don’t you see? All this time, we’ve been like a bag on her hip. I’ve been a bag on her hip. A fucking boat anchor. She’s not like us. She never was. We were like a… a bunch of idiot children clinging to their mother’s breast!”

“Breast!” Not-Gunther echoed, pulling on his nipples through his white  shirt. “Tits! Boobybags! Milk monkeys! Suck-sacks! Creamy bilge balloons!”

“We won’t find her. The best we can do for R.T. is stay as far away from her as possible. We’re poison. Think back of all the things we’ve done. We’re giant, violent babies!”

Chuckles blinked. “You… you’re right. It’s bad news. It can’t get any worse.”

UNTRUE! Gary said, chiming in. CONSIDER: YOUR FELLOW SHADOWSTORY, GUNTHER P. WASHINGTON, ANNIHILATED HIMSELF IN A TERRORIST ACT AGAINST POP-STAR KENDRA SHIELDS. SURELY THAT NEWS IS TILTED TOWARD THE NEGATIVE?

Jaws dropped.

“Gunther,” Sparky said, his voice trailing off. He sat down in the darkness.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Chuckles stammered. “He’s not the type to kill himself.”

“He is the type to do what anybody would tell him,” Grebok corrected, his voice flat and sad. “They probably told him the bomb was a Speak-and-Say or something.”

Sparky’s lip quivered. “He loved his Speak-and-Say. This is all my fault.”

“This is too much,” Chuckles said.

“Too much to take in,” Grebok agreed.

“I feel crushing guilt.”

“Like I’m falling into a profound pit of disappointment.”

“What is wrong with us?”

“What isn’t wrong with us?”

Click.

They turned at the sound, hearts leaping.

Doctor Godwin stood, pistol pointed, the barrel drifting from target to target.

“I do not know who you are,” he hissed, “but I worked very hard to break my way into this cube. The search engine is mine. I care little if you’re terrorists of the insurgency, or greedy-fingered mercenaries come to claim the spoils of a war that GoogolSoft has rightfully won, or the agents of chaos that the cenobite believed you to be. Back away.”

Grebok paused to think. This in and of itself was unusual. So much so that he decided to vocalize it so that his fellow Shadowstories—and Not-Gunther—could hear.

“Normally, I’d already be breaking your neck. By the time a single thought crossed my mind about it, the act would have already been done. Meanwhile, that silly thought would be ushered right back out the door like a moth or a fly that came into the house unbidden.”

“Unbidden,” Chuckles said. “Good word.”

Ernst’s finger tightened on the trigger.

“But now,” Grebok continued, “I know the consequences of my actions. I don’t know you. You might not be a bad guy. You might even be one of the good guys, and there I’d be, crumbling your vertebrae like cookies because violence was almost always my first and best response. While we’re at it, let’s take a look at the odds—yes, all of us could probably jump you. You wouldn’t make it out of this cube alive. And yet, you’re tensed up. You’re older, yes, but with age comes experience, and I’m certain you’d have gotten a shot off—a well-aimed shot, at that. The bullet—the pistol looks a bit antiquated, so I assume it’s packed with lead—would punch one of us in the chest or head. Probably kill us. Only now do I recognize our mortality. How strange.”

The group of them stood in silence, eyeing one another up.

That is, except for Not-Gunther.

He hooted and gibbered, molesting the silence with greasy hands.

Then he ran at Godwin, arms pinwheeling.

“Faggots!” he yelled.

Godwin shot the troll in the head. A jet of green blood, like wheatgrass juice, spurted from Not-Gunther’s head as he did a faceplant on the black nothing.

Godwin smiled. “Yes. It is packed with lead, well-spotted. Now. Move. That search engine is mine, and you three are my prisoners.”

The F.T.L. drive whined to life just as incoming signals flashed to life on the other side of the planet.

“Must go faster!” The blond urged the blonde.

“On it!” The engine hit its highest pitch. The blonde pushed forward on the throttle; the mid-sized Astromobile jolted across the cosmos.

“That was hoo-boy close,” the blond remarked.

“I know,” the blonde agreed.

“They’re getting closer.”

“I know.”

“Chickens are ruthless trackers.”

“I know.”

“We need to—”

“I know, I know. But what choice do we have?” The blonde slammed a fist against the steering wheel before regaining her composure. She turned with renewed sincerity to her companion. “So long as they’re only finding the fake transmitters and not the devices, we’re good. We have to keep going.”

“I know,” he answered.

•••

The wanderer pushed open the de facto door to Phreaky Pete’s, a small saloon-style joint in the Badlands.

The Badlands weren’t so much a planet as a series of bad URLs, unclaimed domains, blocked pop-ups, and other Infi-Net flotsam and jetsam clustered together like hair stuck in a drain. Here squatters, claim-jumpers, transporters (both legal and otherwise), refugees and outlaws made their home.

Phreaky Pete’s took all those and more. Today’s crowd was small, just Old Flinchy, Rascal, Beth-Anne, and Pete himself. They all stopped what they were doing to look up at the stranger. Her head was covered like a shroud; her one-piece jumpsuit almost entirely concealed behind a long coat.

Old Flinchy and Rascal put their cards down and reached for the same glass. Money was tight so they were sharing their spirits today.

Old Flinchy was a trader by… trade. Too old for this new-fangled Infi-Net, but his son-in-law had insisted he needed to join the modern world. Now here he was on the edge of nowhere, bodiless and unemployed. He hated his son-in-law.

Rascal was a short-term scam artist who mostly dealt in World of Age of Groghammer Gold. A business once booming now bust. That stuff was worth more than “real” money these days. Nobody traded with him anymore.

Beth-Anne pretended to be washing cups. She’d been worrying at the same spot since the stranger stepped in. She was 12 going on 50 for all the trouble she’d been through. A refugee, her parents were killed in a crossfire between Googol-Men and the One-Cup Army. The things she’d seen… she couldn’t unsee.

“Can I get you, stranger?” Pete asked, trying to get a glimpse under her makeshift shroud; she turned away just enough to deny him.

“Information,” she produced a shining plat and showed it to the now-captive audience before slapping it down on the bar.

Without taking his eyes off the money, Pete interrupted the silence, “Beth-Anne, at least turn the cup a bit.”

The tween girl jumped for the attention, and dutifully pretended harder by rotating the glass.

“What kind of information?” Rascal put the cup down so Flinchy could take his turn.

“Let’s have drinks all around.” The wanderer rotated her finger in the air. Beth-Anne straightened up. “Water in a clean glass for the girl.” Beth-Anne’s shoulders fell.

Old Flinchy and Rascal didn’t need to be invited twice to elbow up to the bar near their new best friend. Petey snatched up the coin and inspected it closer to determine its legitimacy. He actually didn’t know what he was looking for, but he bit on it for show because he saw that on TV once. It tasted real he seemed to decide.

Now that she had their attention—well, shared it with their freshly filled cups—she deigned to speak. “I need to find the end of the Infi-Net.”

Silence followed.

A silence interrupted by Old Flinchy’s slurping as he gulped down his drink. He hoped for a second round before they told this bint she was moonshit-crazy.

Unfortunately for Old Flinchy, Beth-Anne had no such compunction. “Ain’t no end to the Infi-Net,” she protested innocently scoring a trio of dirty looks. She sipped her water, “Think that’s why they call it that.”

Petey held up his hand to silence the girl and tried to recover, “What’d you do if you found such a thing?”

The stranger held everyone’s attention as she took a sip of her own drink. Finally, she responded, “Leave.”

That sent everyone into curious asides and furtive glances.

“C-can… can you do that?” Rascal looked to Flinchy who noisily put down an empty cup in hopes that the debate was ongoing.

“My body is out there. Presumably all of our bodies are out there somewhere.” She watched as the notion visibly sunk in with her audience. “Ergo, it’s possible.”

Pete caught enough of the woman’s face to see her jaw was set, her conviction clear. She may be a lunatic, but she believed herself, straight up. “Girl already said there ain’t no end to this place,” he tilted his head over to Beth-Anne—rapt with the wanderer—before continuing, “but there’s a Kendrite Church a ways further on a 404 drift. They’re always on about how that little girl and the goober what blown her up, transcended the digital plane.”

“Kendrite?”

Seeing an opportunity, Old Flinchy leapt in to volunteer, “Children of Kendra they call themselves. Run by that—whatchacalled—girlboy what cried on the Infinitube.”

Not to be outdone, Rascal suddenly felt a rush of charity coming on, “You know, a lady can get hurt out in the Badlands. I could take you there, if—” The door swung wide, the goldmonger caught his tongue.

Googol-Men.

Two of them.

If Rascal had anything else to offer, he wisely forgot it.

“Evening, scum.” The one in the lead chewed noisily on air.

His partner with the thick porn mustache snorted a laugh.

Pete looked to the stranger. Mysterious wanderers were exactly the type to be dragging the law behind them; she showed no reaction. “What can I do for the G-Men, today?”

They sauntered up to the bar, the partner openly brandished a sub-machine mood alterer. “That’s Googol-Men, pally. Show some respect.”

The wanderer moved, and Pete tensed.

She only raised her glass to her lips and sipped. Oh shit, what if she was the champion of the underclass, wandering samurai type? He was totally going to inherit two dead Googol-Men any minute now.

Old Flinchy suddenly remembered something he had to do… anywhere else, and left in a hurry. Rascal was too dumb to rationalize a similarly hasty exit.

“Starts with a G, don’t it?” Pete winced as Beth-Anne piped up. This is how it starts.

The leader spat on the bar in front of Beth-Anne. “Why don’t you use that mouth for something more useful,” he invited by grabbing the crotch of his jumpsuit.

Pete took a step away from the bar.

“Yeah boss, you get that one, I get this one!” Porn-stache snorted his last snort as his hand came down on the wanderer’s shoulder.

She wrung the man’s arm like a wet towel. A stomach-churning crack, followed by horrible bellowing.

The leader was in mid high-five swivel when his throat came down with a case of the elbows. His Adam’s apple stuck to his spine.

The woman’s head cover slipped to the floor, her dirty blond hair trailed her deadly arc.

A handful of dove’s took flight.

Her follow through delivered a swift mercifcul death to the screaming, mustachioed soldier.

Their bodies hit the floor with heavy thuds. The officer gasped like a dying fish… until he died… like a dead fish.

Pete massaged the bridge of his nose and nodded. He hoped she was the noble pay-for-the-damages kind of samurai wanderer, not the kill-the-witnesses kind. He let out his breath as he heard some metal hit the bar with a clink.

The stranger wordlessly recovered her shawl and strode toward the door.

“Who are you?” Beth-Anne called after the woman she very much wanted to be when she grew up.

“I’m a Shadowstory.” R.T. found herself taken aback by how quickly she identified herself with her erstwhile group. She was pretty sure she still worked for Googol—although it was admittedly unwise to own up to that affiliation at present. She’d have to have a talk with Brin about recruitment standards. When she found him. If she found him.

“Like from LiveDiary?” Beth-Anne asked cheerfully. She didn’t know girls could be Shadowstories too.

R.T. cocked her head at the refugee. “Like who-what now?”

•••

Sunshower didn’t feel so good.

Her head was all woozy, and hurty. Plus, her left drag foil was rubbing against her anterior drive coupler. She didn’t even know she had a left drag foil. Was she floating? Suspended?

She looked through the dangling shroud of her bright, blond hair. Sure enough, she was hanging in the air by an array of tubes and wires.

“Shush-shh-shh-shhh,” a voice whispered in her ear, brushing her tangled hair and microfilament wires off of her neck. Brin? What was going on here? “You’ve been promoted,” Brin answered her unspoken question. “Now you’re the Vice President in charge of getting us back on the Infi-Net. He plugged something into the back of her neck; a thrum-thrum-thrum whooshing sound started in the near distance.

When did she get this tattoo?

What did R.T.P. 10002 mean?

The Faceworld craft bucked and shuddered as it entered the atmosphere of Stuffopedia. Fat packets of disconnected knowledge battered the hull and smacked hard against the viewport—

—Professor Darwin Charles Ottgar, leader of the—

—critically-endangered monkey-footed Dung Vulture, that eats—

—the trousers of immortal explorer and famous gourmand, Olasky Hslinvin, which he found—

—in the poison glands of mad reptilian dictator, Betadeotus, whose toxins simulate—

—the pagan holiday of Goornock’s Epiphany, in which ancient hero Goornock Pilvus discovered one night in his tent—

—bacterial chancroid stagnotosis, a venereal disease that turns the anus into an unwanted thumb—

—but Sparky, gripping the levers with white knuckles (er, they were white beneath all that fur, of course), gritted his weasel teeth and held it together. He ducked an asteroid-sized bundle of data (something about ducks being used as building materials), and the ship lurched hard to the right. Chuckles tumbled into Grebok, who shouldered hard into Gunther, who screamed something disparaging about someone’s favorite ice cream (and maybe gypsies) before throwing up on himself.

And then?

Silence. Stillness. Gauzy atmospheric light through the viewport.

“We’re through,” Sparky said, exhaling a relief breath that fluttered his whiskers.

“That sucked,” Chuckles said.

“You threw up on my shoe,” Grebok said to Gunther, who just grinned back with yellow eyes and green teeth. Grebok wrinkled his nose. “Gunther, man, you need to shower. You smell like nacho chips and B.O., I mean, c’mon, get it together. We’re industry professionals.”

“Shut up, assholes,” Sparky said, leaning back, arms behind his head. “Relax and enjoy the rest of the ride for Chrissakes. Smooth sailing from here on out.”

The ship floated through bright gray clouds with nary a hitch or a stutter.

Rays of diffuse sun. Snippets of data trailing across the sky like flocks of gulls. A warm glow.

It was nice!

…um.

For about thirty seconds.

The clouds parted–

Hell had come to Stuffopedia!

A booming black blossom of chaff exploded to the right of the ship, rocking it like a cradle crammed with meth-addicted badgers. Below, a war-torn battleground lay revealed—and it wasn’t yet done being torn by the mauling hands and biting teeth of battle.

Giant Virus-Killers crossed the craterscape on clicking spider legs, stitching rapid-fire hypodermics from whirring mouth cannons (spinning just beneath slicing scissor mandibles). At their feet marched a masked battalion of Googol-Men, firing pleasant blue beams of “mood-stabilizing” light from their open palms—and when it struck the backs of fleeing insurgents, it “stabilized their moods” by vaporizing them into a drifting red mist.

GoogolSoft spaceboats churned the air, firing a fusillade of cluster bombs. Whole pockets of Revolution insurgents—wearing their trademark red armbands or baseball caps—disappeared beneath the exhalation of fire and the burping explosion of ruined earth.

“I hate war,” Chuckles said. “War confuses me.”

“Who do we punch?” Grebok asked. “Who serves the side of justice, here? Who deserves my foot buried ankle-deep in their kidneys?”

“Fuck that noise,” Sparky said, once more tightening his jaw and taking their stolen Faceworld craft in lean and low. “We’re the heroes, and whoever we maim is that moment’s poster boy for injustice.”

“Gypsies,” green-teethed Gunther muttered anew, just to make his point.

Sparky flipped a switch, and a three-dimensional holofield appeared to his right—he pointed to a just-visible pulse-point in the thrice-dimensional screen, a bright white dot radiating waves upward. “See that? That’s a geyser of methane. In this case, that also means it’s a geyser of raw information. Data. Knowledge. Whatever. That shit must be spewing from the search engine, which if I read my systems right, has to be buried deep in the crust of this world. Those geysers are venting info like hot vomit after a night on the town with yours truly.”

“And we do what?” Chuckles asked. “When do we stab things? When do we do something stupid so we can become smart and learn shit?”

Sparky leaned back with a grin that could’ve been described as vulpine, or fox-faced (yes, he’s a weasel, but everybody’s just going to have to be comfortable with it, and if you have complaints, you can take them up with Management, and “Management” is actually a cardboard box with the word “Management” misspelled on the side as “Managemint” in permanent marker, and in that box is a squirmy knot of biting chiggers, so how do you like them apples, Mister Contrary McShutTheHellUp?).

“We find a geyser big enough, and we close our eyes and fly right into it!” he said, obviously proud.

Grebok nodded. “That sounds pretty stupid. Chuckles?”

“Works for me. Gunther?”

“Tapeworms run the liberal Zionist media.”

The Avatar nodded. “Gunther’s on board.”

•••

A billion crystalline threads were pulled taut from all corners of the massive canyon. They met in the center, each string coiled around a tiny nubbin like at a switchboard or on the tuning pegs of a guitar—and these nubbins were seemingly limitless, lining a gigantic Lucite cube that pulsed with violet light.

On the floor of this canyon, a tiny man—well, tiny only in comparison to the gaping size of everything else here—in pale robes hurried toward the cube, panting, gasping, reaching.

A gunshot rang out, an echo cast far and wide.

The robed man fell to his knees, blood bubbling out of his mouth.

A tall sort in a long white coat stepped up and holstered his iron pistol.

He licked the center of his two hands, and used his spit-slick palms to press back the shock of white hair atop his too-narrow head. Then he took off his bright blue glasses—each lens a tiny circle framed in glowing neon—and tucked them in his coat.

His left eye was a luminous ‘1.’

His right eye was an equally glowy ‘0.’

Please to meet Doctor D. Ernst Godwin.

He looked down at the bleeding cenobite, then looked up at the tremendous Lucite cube in front of him—it hurt his neck to take in its size.

“All the knowledge contained in the Infi-Net,” he said, clucking his tongue. “You controlled it for long enough. Now, we control it. So sorry.”

The cenobite—Brother Batrim Patrochlus the Reasonably-Studied—coughed blood. “We controlled nothing. Knowledge cannot be contained. You’ll see.”

“Knowledge must be contained,” the good Doctor spat, his lips curled into a bitter smile. “Knowledge is dangerous. It cannot be kept in the hands of fool shepherds.”

The Cenobium of Stuffist Precepts had maintained the search engine since ancient times, which admittedly was only about 32 days, but a degree of subjectivity must be considered for the sake of comparison. This eremitic brotherhood (and sisterhood, if you count Sister Elisita Sempronius the Grammatical) had maintained the democratic flow of information (“Stuff”) as it bulged and swelled, coming in through the crystalline threads like beads of oil down a waxen string.

“Information is democratic,” Batrim sputtered through bubbling lips.

“Democracy, like knowledge, must be contained. This new universe is a stupid place with stupid people, and we mustn’t let the stupid set the pace for the rest of us.”

Then, the monk did a surprising thing. He rolled over onto his back, and laughed.

Godwin smiled. “Yes. That’s it. We should all experience glee as we meet our maker.”

“That’s not it at all,” Batrim said, wiping his lips. “I’m laughing because you don’t know what hell you’ve brought upon you. They’re here, you know.”

Godwin’s smile twitched.

“They? They who? Who’s here?”

Batrim grinned, his teeth smeared with clotting red. “They who will defecate upon your new world order and your best laid plans. I hope you experience glee as you meet your maker, Doctor.”

Godwin fired a shot into the center of Batrim’s head.

•••

It seemed like it was going well.

Sparky brought the ship in tight over the screeching cyborg heads of the Virus-Killers. Their scything maws closed upon the engine fumes of the stolen Faceworld cruiser.

Then, the Revolution found a small victory.

A satyr named Finchback, who once experienced the ignominy of having his nuts crushed by a Frisbee on an exceedingly-popular Viewtoob video, emerged from behind the husk of a fallen Virus-Killer and propped an RPSB on his shoulder. The spam rocket disgorged from its tube in a spray of fat, and hurtled toward one of the GoogolSoft spaceboats—

The Googol-Men, however, were apt pilots.

The spaceboat pulled right.

The spam rocket exploded into the cockpit of the heroes’ Faceworld craft.

Alarms ran over the susurration of steam. Fires broke out, cooking the spam and filling the ship with the stink of improbable meat. Sparky smelled his own burning fur, and saw Grebok trapped under a broken bulge in the hull, with Chuckles extricating him with his gleaming hand-blade. Gunther masturbated gloomily in the corner.

The ship listed and groaned. The cockpit lit bright with a rain of sparks.

“New plan,” Sparky said, scooping up the others under his arms. He let Gunther crawl on his back like a monkey.

“Wuzza?” Grebok asked while dangling from Sparky’s grip, his nose bleeding.

“Wuzza this shit,” Sparky said, and kicked the hull with his robot foot. It tore open. Everything was wind and fire and acrid smoke. Sparky didn’t bother with a running start.

Wuzza this shit indeed, he thought, and jumped.