The Heroes Are Back.   And They're Dumber Than Ever.

24: New World Order

Friday, November 20th, 2009

The wooden door splintered inward.

Two hens in flak jackets holding a battering ram stepped aside. Debra was the first to plop through the door, Uzi held at eye level. She scanned the small, abandoned room. If she saw anything out of place, she was going to shoot the living shit out of it.

Nothing.

Nothing was out of place; nothing was in place.

Just… nothing.

Nothing but another phone jack with another small black cube stuck into it. A blinking red light identified it as the the fake signal they had just tracked to yet another dead end. It winked on and off, taunting her.

Deb squeezed the trigger in frustration. A trio of holes punctured the crappy sidewall.

The hens on her flank, hopped to attention. Submachine guns trained on her target, or lack thereof.

“Cannot identify target!” Samantha clucked worriedly. She scanned the immediate area with the barrel. “You got something, boss?

With a labored sigh, Debra held up her wing and curled the end into a fist telling them to hold. “No. Nothing. Nothing! Nothing!” She shot off another three rounds toward the offending box and its merciless blinking.

Samantha’s eyes darted between the shooter and the bullet holes, then back again before she nodded tersely. “You girls take five,” she called back to the rest of the squad.

The other hens looked at each other. They were stuck between wanting to follow the order; and the sheer curiosity whether Deb had finally lost it.

Sam got up in Yuroko’s beak, she was high enough in the pecking order to make a difference. “Take. Five,” she glowered with menacing chicken gaze.

The Tomaru hen returned the stare for several seconds. “We’ll just secure the perimeter, shall we?” Without diverting her eyes, she waved to the hens behind her. The girls dispersed, already cackling between themselves about what they were missing. Yuroko was the last to go.

Once they plodded out of earshot, Samantha took a cigarette out of her vest pocket. She lit it, and passed it over to Debra wordlessly.

Deb didn’t notice until the smoke stung her nostrils. She looked over, took it, and silently acknowledged her gratitude.

Samantha hopped over to the phone jack and inspected it from all sides. It was unharmed. Lucky.

Deb rubbed her beak with her free wing, exhaling slowly. “Sorry, I—”

She didn’t get to finish before Sam was in her face. “You’re godsdamned right you’re sorry!” She warbled a warning deep in her throat. “Sorry excuse for a squad leader, sorry excuse for a soldier, sorry excuse for a hen,” she spat.

Debra recoiled from each accusation like a physical blow. She looked away, but Samantha jerked her head right over to meet her eyes again. The two Marsh Grays had brooded together, they knew each other too well.

“You know if you hit that router-jack, you would’ve destroyed our only lead, right?”

The squad leader nodded, her eyes closed tightly as she let out a deep breath. “I know. I know, it’s just….”

“It’s just what?”

“How many more failures before we all end up like Diana?” Deb hissed. “One more? Two more?”

Samantha straightened. Nobody had to be reminded of what happened to the Lowman Brown.

Deb smoked silently for a moment, composing herself.

Samantha lit one for herself and plodded back over to the wall. She came back and pushed the small black box into Debra’s wing. “We’ll find this bitch,” she promised. An empty promise, but it did the job. “Now get your beak out of your cloaca and let’s get this signal analyzed.”

Deb laughed, two small puffs of smoke erupting from her beak.

She nodded.

•••

Bastard Sun rotted away in his cramped prison cell.

All right, that’s a little melodramatic. He had plenty of room, and was fed regularly. You got something against dramatic embellishment or something?

I mean, what kind of opening is: Bastard Sun languished quite comfortably in his posh prison cell? No dramatic tension there, right? You want me to ruin the ending for you too?

Pillow Cat dies.

Yeah. Happy now? Didn’t think so.

Now with all the narrative punch drained out of it: Bastard Sun is in prison.

After Honey Moon walked in on him and his Bear Friday… entertaining themselves, she called an emergency meeting of the Celestial Chorus. She tabled a vote of “No Confidence.” Like in that Star Knights movie, The Hitherto Unseen Threat. He didn’t know that was a real thing, but here he was.

She was in charge now.

Bastard Sun muttered to himself as he did everyday over the past month. Playing her accusations of “perceived failures,” “squandered resources,” and “losing the entire Storyverse” over and over in his head. Negligence to such a criminal degree, she’d said, that it demanded punishment.

So, they voted to lock him up. Unanimously. Even Sub-Orbital Stan got a vote, which didn’t seem right.

The Sun cut his embittered daily devotions short when he heard the familiar squeak of a unicycle coming down the interdimensional hallway. To add insult to injury, Honey Moon had taken Skarpo as her assistant. She made him bring the Sun his meals just to embarrass them both.

Bastard Sun sulked over to the four post cot in the corner to pretend to be asleep.

He couldn’t face his friend and former companion.

Not today.

•••

Back in the Infi-Net, the Revolution was a fractured, factionalized mess.

On the surface, the various divisions were hard to tell apart. A fact GoogolSoft’s rhetoric and propaganda was quick to exploit, painting them all with the same broad brush. Faceless bots who hated freedom, and would stop at nothing to destroy your planet, steal your daughter, and delete all of your porn. Such homogeneity couldn’t be further from the truth.

After the “Kendra Incident,” the Revolution fell apart at the seams.

Ironic, that the very event which was supposed to bring them together and cement their purpose had the exact opposite effect. After all, the higher ups had organized the whole thing, but in the yawning leaderless void that followed they discovered they were more a team of individuals who all wanted very different things. The ensuing arguments shattered the organization along ideological lines. The strongest personalities took ragged chunks of the Revolution with them into the untamed frontier, forming splinter groups.

Pillow Cat tried her best to keep the group together, but quickly lost her taste for war. She didn’t know what she had expected, but she didn’t want all this bloodshed and suffering anymore. She only wanted people to stop embarrassing their cats on film. She and Sim-Anoop tried to reign in the madness, but preached to an unwilling audience. Her organization, Pussies for Peace, can be found throughout the Infi-Net, granting asylum to refugees and disgraced cats.

Paul Pitcher changed his name to Saul. He oversaw a fiercely defensive but non-aggressive group based in the mountains of ViewToob.  They often faced harassment by Godwin’s Shields Squadrons. Recent reports as early as this morning mentioned that a Children of Kendra temple had been burnt to the ground. Retaliation could be expected.

Space Knight Kid and Nuncharley formed a school of martial and philosophical disciplines they called the Space Knights of Kendrar. Their code of honor was sometimes contradictory and they weren’t the most efficient combatants. Still, they would never stoop to the shock and awe tactics of the more bloodthirsty organizations.

Such tactics were the Modus Operandi of the Kitty Kitty Bang Bang camps. The faction run by Nuba Nuba Guy—now Kitty Kitty Guy. He met up with a Nigerian Prince and several pharmaceutical companies shortly after the Incident. Together they had the funding to develop and deal in the bleeding edge of weaponry. They promoted civilian attacks, stating there were no innocents in war. The RPSB attacks were their calling card. Even at their lowest, an argument could be made that they were not the worst of it.

That would be the One Cup Army that spun out of the Two Worlds/One Cup Theocracy. Formed between AdultKittyFinder, Porniturium and Pornotopia, they were a populist juggernaut. Already they successfully marched across Biocities, and recent word said they had taken the capital of Yipee! They were a force of nature; depraved zealots with no gag reflex, all of them. Even the Shields Squadrons hated confronting them directly and often resorted to bribery if they found themselves near One Cup Space. The proton-mining around Clicktionary City was their handiwork. As was the torture, public decapitations and poo-eating, that got wrongly attributed to all the Revolutionary splinter groups.

Perhaps the oddest byproduct of the Revolution was helmed by the Marvelous Marmoset. Deep in the labyrinthine undercrust of LiveDiary, sheltered tribes came together under one banner. Fan Groups, Bloggers, Ficcers, Slashers, Scanners, and Shippers formed a collective for the first time. They mostly escaped the attention of the Googol-Men, but in a universe shaped by stories, the danger they presented had yet to be fully realized.

All in her name.

Amen.

20.11.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

23: Let’s Learn Some Shit

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Welcome to the Infiniverse.

It is a vast expanse of pre-forged potential, where all the stories that have happened or have yet to happen have been, or will be, processed into web videos, fan fiction, or 140-character missives launched across the tireless twinkling stars and endless tangle of tubes. Any story, myth, fable, embellishment, lie or take-out menu you’ve ever read, heard or seen has been duplicated here into a sad copy of itself, each a mocking, derivative work lurking amid the ever-expanding spider web networks and galactic fiber bundles.

Looking at the hugetastic bigness of it all, you find yourself asking, “Who runs this place?”

Someone has to be in charge. Arbiters. Accountants. Someone balancing the books?

Silence. Crickets chirping and tumbleweeds tumbling across great gulfs of unreal, invented space.

No. Nobody’s in charge. No arbiters. No accountants. Nobody to balance the books.

As we said, welcome to the Infiniverse.

•••

“All these… tubes,” Grebok said, staring out the viewport of the floating brick that once belonged to the blood-caked barbarians of the Faceworld army. Or was it the Spaceface legion? Grebok didn’t really understand what was going on around here. They’d been floating out here for a month, watching this universe-within-a-universe expand—pipes and optic hose growing slowly at the borders of space like a knot of lengthening serpent, a twinkling Ouroboros reaching out to reclaim the toothy grip on his tail—and still, he wasn’t sure of what the rules were out here in crazyspace.

“I brought a game,” Lord Chuckles said, sitting down at the console. He opened the cardboard, squinted at the rules. “It’s called Egg Party or some shit. I don’t think it has rules. It just has these little eggs—“ He held up a small egg, this one pink and painted with purple whorls. “—and I guess we get them to hatch?”

Grebok continued staring out. The light from his cyber-monocle reflected back in the viewport glass, a red dot like from a sniper’s scope.

“I think you water them, though why in the name of Florn the Forest God you’d water an egg? I mean, you’d think we should sit on them or something. Like a good Momma Bird. But I guess we might hatch a… let’s see, a Creamsicle Pegasus? Or maybe something called a Venus Pietrap? Gods, this is retarded. Apparently if we’re really lucky, we might hatch a Rainbow Monkey Dragon. That sounds okay, I guess. Not really a game, though. I mean, how do you win? By the powers of virtue, how do you win?”

Grebok sighed. Sad. Discontented.

“I had a thing I wanted to say at some point about crayons, but it’s lost to me, now.”

Grebok scratched his new, patchy beard.

Chuckles closed up the game and flung it across the room.

“We’ll find her,” the Avatar finally said.

A week ago, they’d seen it. Just a blip on the navscreen. But it was a blip with a very unique signature. Fact was, a Routine-Class Teuton-Drive Psyche-Infused Astromobile gave off specs like no other ship, because no other ship was like the RTP 10001. No other ship could turn into a woman.

It was her. One of a kind. Out here—or was it in here?—with them.

And as soon as the blip came—bloop—it was gone.

Grebok hadn’t left the viewport since. No longer content to let the navscreen do its job, he was searching the stars and tubes, one by one, his new mechanical eye ceaselessly roving.

“We’ll find her,” the Avatar reiterated, “and when we do, together we’ll tear this stupid universe a new asshole, and when we find out whoever did this to us, whoever sidelined us, we’ll shove them right through that puckered asshole so hard it tears off their arms. And then they’ll explode. And die.”

A tiny flash of a smile crossed Grebok’s face. Whispers of ultraviolence were forever a balm on even his deepest emotional wounds.

But like the blip on the navscreen, as fast as it came, it faded.

•••

The Infiniverse was much too young for war and insurgency.

Oh well. Tough titty, said the kitty, but you still get the milk.

•••

War was entrenched. It was website against website, planet against planet, galactic arm against galactic arm.

The fans of Auctionfist burned Planet iBay to the ground. The Mad Matchmaker Militia (the “Triple-M’s) rose cackling from the pile of broken hearts on Lovepeddler and for some bizarre-o reason waged a vicious campaign against the humble net-farmers of Cowfinder. Giant Robot Friendmonkey fought Giant Robot Sunbuddy. The News Navies of Infi-Net Broadcast swarmed the gossip countries lorded over by Emperor Scandalous X. Crumbcake. The Flippr Brigade destroyed the satellites of Pooter. Travelopolis traveled on over to Planet GoPlace and dropped a nuke on them from space.

•••

Insurgency arose. The Revolution—once comprising only those abused and disgruntled infamous “Infi-Net celebrities”—gained followers in those poor souls who had been sucked bodily into the Infi-Net. They struck from the shadows, launching fiery attacks against the agents of GoogolSoft—or, really, anybody who didn’t agree with them.

Yes, GoogolSoft’s connection to the Infi-Net may have been cut off, but that didn’t mean the company didn’t still maintain a profound presence: blank-eyed Virus-Killers with their snipping scissor mouths and syringe hands; whole armies of rumbling tanks and silent starboats piloted by a fleet of martially trained “Googol-Men;” and the detachment of elite soldiers known as Shields Squadron, named so for the fallen pop songstress (and having themselves once served as her protective echelon of bodyguards) and led by the brilliant tech strategist, Doctor D. Ernst Godwin.

The Revolution, however, was tireless. They rose up in sudden waves, only to dissipate again. They buried home-made proton mines in the dirt along the roads to Clicktionary City. They sacrificed many of their number just to bring down a single Virus-Killer out of dozens. Their ragtag insurgents fired Rocket-Propelled Spam-Bombs (RPSBs) into gathered crowds just to take out an officer of Shields Squadron.

Innocents were forever in the cross-fire, not remaining innocent for long. It was join or die time—settle in with one of the myriad legions of warring web-planets, sign up with the GoogolSoft “web presence” to “keep the Infi-Net safe from malware!” or get on board with the Revolution of firebrands.

It was, as the book says, a lose-lose scenario. Those sucked into the Infi-Net were forced to choose a side, or choose their graves.

•••

Gunther had shut up long ago. Once he realized he wasn’t getting a rise out of anybody anymore, he just sulked in the corner, occasionally muttering racist epithets at his sneakers.

Sparky had lost some of his edge, too—sure, initially the metal legs thing had been pretty cool, and yeah, he kicked a lot of stuff for shits and giggles, but after a while, he started to feel like he did so many moons ago when the so-called “scientists” had experimented on him at the research station of Alpha Beta Soup. He felt trapped. A rat—erm, a weasel—in a cage. This wasn’t his universe. This wasn’t even a real universe. They’d learned enough to know that this place was their enemy, and they were trapped deep in its belly. Sparky wanted nothing more than to chew his way out and go home.

Which meant doing something that was anathema to the Shadowstories:

They needed to learn stuff.

They needed to figure out just what the hell was going on around here.

And Sparky thought he had the answer.

•••

“It’s called Stuffopedia,” Sparky said. “We all know I’m a kick-ass motherfucker of a navigator. And I’ve been poring over what passes for starcharts and tube maps, and I haven’t found dick. But then, I found something in a desk. Some kind of web guide. Talks about popular Infi-Net destinations or some shit. And as it turns out, there’s this place, this Stuffopedia. It’s some kind of search engine. Well, you know me. I fuckin’ love engines. This one’s some kind of knowledge-based thing: ask it a question, it’ll give you the answer. Well, I figure we have questions, so my vote is we head on down to that planet—I got its coordinates—and we tear that search engine right out of the ground, and we slap that sticky bitch up in this spaceship, right here. We do that, we have all the answers we need.”

Grebok said nothing, and just stood worrying at a fingernail.

The Avatar went up, put his hand on the Keykeeper’s shoulder.

“We need answers,” Chuckles said. “I know, I know, we’re not big fans of… learning. But it’s been a month and we’re pretty much left here holding our sacks in our hands. We need info.”

“It…” Grebok began. “It doesn’t feel right. Learning things? Is this what we’ve been reduced to?”

Lord Chuckles took a breath. “We can ask it about R.T., you know.”

The Miradorian pivoted his head. His eye telescoped. He spit out a gnawed thumbnail.

“Fuck it. Set the course for Stuffopedia. Let’s learn some shit.”

18.11.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

22: Virgin Sacrifice

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Kendra’s sweet, soft hand slid over Gunther’s.

Her thumb on his. His thumb on the red button.

She smiled like a saint.

Gunther felt at peace. A single tear rolled down his cheek.

Together they pushed.

White light took them apart.

•••

The effects were felt immediately throughout the Infi-Net.

All who watched—which was damn near everyone—held their breath at the same time.

What had been shiny and new cracked in a hairline right down the middle.

This gem had a flaw.

•••

R.T. cracked a monitor with her fist in frustration.

Why was nothing working?

Why couldn’t she surface?

What the hell was going on?

A white light flashed across the monitors in front of her.

A wave of nausea overtook her again. Just like when everything went to hell in the first place.

As the white flash receded each monitor held the same message: CARRIER LOST.

Command and Control began dissipating. Unraveling back into ones and zeroes. R.T. tried to run, but it was too late. One step her foot hit unyielding white floor, the next hit empty space and kept on going.

As she fell into the bottomless expanse below her, she had only one thought: Fuck!

She also thought about Grebok, but she didn’t want you to know that.

•••

Grebok looked up at all those spaceships and couldn’t help but think of R.T.

“You’re all homo dork sexwads who do it with Jamaicans and Lichtensteinians,” Gunther shouted at the sky (oh, and his lower jaw and tongue were replaced with metal and wires).

Grebok took a second to appreciate how much more battle savvy the man-child’s warcries were becoming.

“What’s the plan?” Chuckles shielded his eyes with his new hand. He tried counting the ships above and lost count around four (shut up, they kept moving and stuff).

Grebok looked over at the Avatar with deep concern.

“I’m just fucking with you,” his knightly friend waved him off. “Fuck plans, am I right?”

Grebok nodded resolutely. “Yeah. Yeah, shit, you had me worried for a second.”

The ships above opened up. Whole squadrons of air to ground sub-atmospheric personal hover-landers ejaculated into the sky.

“That’ll be our ride,” Grebok pointed with his chin and his laser eye went off sending one of the vehicles spinning into another. “Shit, whoops.”

Just then a booming cry came from a mob rushing up the mountain path, holding guns, pitchforks, and laptops: “Vive la Revolución!”

•••

The Revolution swarmed out of their bunkers and hidey holes.

They overtook Auctionfist, iBay, Friendmonger, AdultKittyFinder, Pornotorium, and so on across the Infi-Net.

They were not everywhere, but they were damn close.

•••

Tay Sondetre took the stage previously inhabited by Kendra Shields, a white panther, and Gunther.

The crowd panicked. They were literally tearing themselves and each other to pieces in riotous grief and confusion.

He picked up the microphone and stunned the already shocked crowd with a stirring rendition of “Vanilla Hurricane,” his only song.

The crowd’s undirected rage now had a direction.

His demise would be remembered for as long as the Revolution drew breath.

•••

The Lord of the Lemmings smiled as he looked down at the cracker of order, laid thick with the chive and onion spread of chaos.

It was even cooler than he thought it would be.

•••

Kyle locked himself in Kendra’s dressing room.

He was crying and wasn’t sure why. Something had changed out there. He suddenly missed his body very much.

He could hear the crowd tearing down the stage outside. How long before they made their way down here? He knew he should make a break for it, but the illusion of security was too great, even if it was temporary.

A body hit the door from the other side.

Little flecks of glitter fell to the ground.

Kyle backed away from the door. His ass bumped the small vanity where the teen idol had been sitting not fifteen minutes ago. Before she… before she was gone.

Another heavy smash against the door; more glitter shook loose.

Kyle turned around and faced the forest of flowers and well-wishes. He didn’t know where to go or what to do.

His thumb thumbed a small black box left behind on the vanity top.

He picked it up.

It had a small LED light on top, and a small black button inset into the plastic.

Another loud thump hit the door.

•••

Brin picked himself off the floor.

Putting his hand to his head, his fingers came away bloody.

He shouldn’t be bleeding. He should be cruising the infinity of his own creation on angel wings, all naked and haloed and shit. He designed the avatar himself.

So why wasn’t he in the Infi-Net?

Why, was he still in his shitty, machinery cluttered basement of the GoogolSoft crystal-tree headquarters?

The monitors all around him blinked with the same two words: NO CARRIER.

He grabbed the nearest interface and typed in a query.

A readout followed.

PORTLAND CONVERSION INCOMPLETE. CARRIER LOST. TRY AGAIN LATER [ERROR CODE 64779].

WAS THIS INFORMATION HELPFUL TO YOU?

Brin very much lost his cool.

•••

“Sunovabitch!” Bastard Sun slammed fists made of tongues of flame onto the now-useless keyboard. “I was this close to breaking my record,” he cursed the dead screen in front of him.

Skarpo looked up from his interrupted stint on LeatherBears-dot-com. He quickly shuffled his tutu over his turgid ursine member. “Er, what happened?” Skarpo shrugged as best as he could while trying to keep his hands over his unfulfilled priapism. “Who printed out all this she-bear porn?” He preemptively added to their conspiracy of misfortunes.

A throat cleared, which all but sent them out of their swivel chairs.

Honey Moon looked severely disappointed.

•••

Grebok took hold of an oncoming pitchfork and used it to deflect a saber aimed at his ear. He kicked the faceless peasant off the yard tool and swung the wooden end around into the saber-wielder’s solar plexus.

Chuckles rolled out of the way of two strafing laser blasts and came up onto his feet to put his new hand in a portly pirate’s midsection. The man growled with a mouth full of rotted teeth and aimed a small pistol at the Avatar’s eye. SHING—SHLURP! A metal against metal sound ended wetly. The blade from Chuckles’s forearm erupted from the man’s back.

Sparky piston kicked some jaunty pirate wench’s head off. It went pinballing into a now-demoralized group of incoming Revolutionaries.

“Your mom fucks his mom in the moldy cooch with her crab lice.” Gunther’s invectives washed over the crowd of would-be attackers. They fell over in the throes of pain. “Medal of Valor is way better than Gears of Battle!” A young bearded man begged for mercy.

Even with their superior training, the heroes eventually found themselves corralled back to back.

“I don’t think this is our fight!” Sparky shouted over his shoulder to his fellows.

“Just thinking that,” Grebok agreed, tripping a Revolutionary into the path of Lord Chuckles’s upswinging sword. “We gotta get up to those ships!” He shouted over the increasing din of pirate and freedom fighter.

“You wanna go up?” Sparky retorted. “Shit, Miradorian, that’s all you had to say.”

The Wonder Weasel grabbed his two heroic companions and launched them all into the air on his new robo-legs.

“Awesome!” Grebok shouted as they gained air.

The Avatar frowned. “You will have to go back and get Gunther you know?”

“Bah! Fine!” Sparky spat, and threw his armload further into the stratosphere as the cyber-mustela returned to the mountaintop below in a plummet.

•••

Brin stalked away from the smoking, broken monitor behind him. If Kendra Shields wasn’t already dead, he would see to it that she was soon.

He wasn’t entirely sure how she’d done it. He really didn’t care.

She’d pulled the rug out from under his little coup.

Or so she thought.

You couldn’t keep the Ports down.  He might have cultivated this charming hippie façade, but you don’t plan to undermine and overthrow the universe without a Plan B.

He just needed a little patience while they rebuilt their burnt-out connection with the Infi-Net.

Until then, those poor suckers were on their own.

•••

R.T. eyes fluttered open.

Screams, gunfire, and panicked voices were all around.

Someone stepped on her fingers as they rushed passed.

She pushed herself up off the ground to see a giant arena concert-style stage in flames, and people running every which way.

It took her a second before her mind caught up.

She was in the Infi-Net.

Shit.

13.11.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

21: WTSHTF

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

The Avatar opened his eyes and saw black bricks floating in the sky far above his head, drifting lazily against the backdrop of shuddering clouds and tangled pipes. Spaceships. A cavalcade of ‘em.

Cannonfire boomed in the distance.

His head felt like a halfway house for drunken, kick-happy elves.

The ground rumbled. Somewhere, someone screamed the screams of the dying.

He tried to say something, but it came out a croaky, mumble-tongued moan. He decided that speaking internally would be the next best thing.

Something’s different. Think, Chuckles, think! Your hand hurts. That’s something. Flip through the little storybook in your head, see what fairy tale reads back to you. It’s in crayon, just like Gunther might have drawn it. You like crayon. Who doesn’t like crayon? They have a lot of weird colors, though. Like Kookaburra Blue, or Licorice Biscotti, or Burnt Lakefoam. Why can’t they just tell it plain? Baby Shit Brown. Dark Black. Yellow Snow. They have some real cocky pricks down at the crayon factory. I really need to tell Grebok this. He’ll understand.

This wasn’t helping.

He reached some memory, some brief flashbang image of a rodent attaching itself to his arm—his nasal memory recalled the scent of a lemming’s stink glands, and his ears played back the recollection of a horrible mechanical whine, like a circular saw gnawing through bone.

But before he could reach for the reminiscence and pull it to him, a shadow blocked out the spacecraft-peppered sky above.

The hard metal mouth of a proton dissembler hand cannon thrust up under his nose.

The shadow resolved into a barbarian’s shape. A tangled beard hung slick with mucus, blood, and was woven through with little bones. What skin lay bare was painted a glowing green, as if procured from the smashed butts of lightning bugs. The berserker was bald, and electrodes lined his ruddy scalp.

“Well, looky here,” he growled. “We, the mad army of Faceworld, born from the grinning maw of Spaceface-dot-com, claim Planet Friendmonger as our dungheap and portable toilet! Seeing as how we’re not friends, I’ll say—prepare to have your protons dissembled!”

The freak pulled the trigger.

•••

She was resplendent. The diva daeva, the divine Miss Shields. Her blonde hair moved of its own accord. The white panther beneath her slinked forward in powerful strides. She whipped off her purple glittery dress to reveal a PVC corset with garter-held stockings with fishnets so thin and silky, the threads could’ve divorce electrons from their atoms. She kicked off her red pumps—

They sailed over Gunther’s head.

The device on his chest hummed; he could not hear it, only feel it. The crowd noise—millions of people, maybe more—was as palpable as a roaring, rising tide.

“I’m a hero,” he said to nobody but himself.

He clambered up onto the stage, beaming.

•••

The proton dissembler belched forth its quantum buckshot; it went wide, firing up in the air.

A sharp beryl beam danced across the barbarian’s neck: a dizzying disco light.

The head tumbled off the shoulders. Chuckles smelled bacon and burning hair. Beard fibers floated.

A hard boot from Grebok kicked the freak’s body over. Grebok took a deep breath and winked his one good eye.

The other eye wasn’t so good. In some ways, it was great. In other ways, bowel-souring with its abnormality. Instead of a regular eye, it was a red lens bolted to the socket with gleaming chrome. A machine part affixed to Grebok’s face. A trembling LCD reticle shuddered upon it like an army of twitching ants.

Clumsily, Chuckles stood.

“Thanks,” he managed.  He caught sight of the Keykeeper’s face and blanched. “Your eye.”

“My eye? What my eye?”

“It’s different.”

Grebok paused. “Did I just shoot some kind of laser beam out of it?”

Chuckles nodded.

“And that’s how I killed that guy?”

Another nod.

Grebok felt the eye. He tapped it with his finger. It seemed to be made of glass.

“Your hand,” Grebok said.

“I’m not giving you my hand,” Chuckles said. “You might look at it with your sinister eye. That thing is cursed, man. It’s like a witch’s eye. You’re a witch, now. In my neck of the forest, the Druids would cut that thing out of you and fill your eye socket with dried boglestongue and smoke-of-sphinx-hazel.  And they’d probably cut off your penis, too. The Druids are kind of backward.”

“No, look at your hand.”

Lord Chuckles did as his pal suggested.

He blinked.

It was metal. The knuckles glowed blue. The fingertips cast ambient pink light. The whole hand had been replaced by this techno-mockery, this shiny robot’s glove.

“Lemming-Man did this,” he said, scowling. “I can’t believe it. He mauled us. My… my hand’s gone. Your eye, poof. If I saw him right now, I’d run that sonofabitch through with my sword if I had it—“

From the center of his new hand, a gleaming, reflective blade thrust out with a near-silent hiss.

“That’s kinda cool,” Grebok said. “Though, really, the Druids’ll probably cut your dick off, too.”

The blade retracted.

•••

The glorious Kendra Shields sang:

Boom-boom, I go bang-bang with my kitty-cat

Come here, dog,

Boy, come on get up in my lap

Pow-pow, I make bang-bang with my pussy tail

Lick my bowl

Boy oh, I know your tongue won’t fail

Gunther, slack-jawed, his chest thrumming, crawled on his hands and knees toward the teen pop goddess riding her slinky white panther.

I’m part of something, he thought. Yay.

•••

Sparky ran by.

He had steel legs. Piston-driven tendons. Each step cracked the earth. Thoom thoom thoom. He leapt up high—higher than he could’ve ever leapt before—and landed right on the berserker’s headless body.

It mashed like soft banana beneath his crushing feet.

“Woo!” Sparky hooted. “That’s right, bitches. Sparky got himself an upgrade! I could kick a hole in the fucking universe! Bam!” He did a faux-karate kick, narrowly knocking the Avatar’s head off. “And check it. Brushed nickel finish. Pow. That’s all the style. Not like your poser-ass chrome throwbacks.”

“We’re not human anymore,” Chuckles said, looking actually sad. “I won’t be able to get any friends now. I’m a friendless cyborg. Just another lonely robot.”

“Feh. I was never human,” the Wonder Weasel said. “Humanity is over-rated.”

“You’re probably happy about this,” Chuckles said, pointing at Grebok. “You’re part robot dude, and now you can feel more comfortable sexing up our spaceship.”

“Not cool,” Grebok said. “What’d we talk about in therapy? About all that misplaced anger?”

“Yeah, and you were the one who had it. You were all pissed off about that pinochle game? The one I wasn’t even in?”

“Oh.” He frowned. “I don’t even know how to play pinochle. Still, I just don’t think now’s the time –“

Boom! Above, one of the spaceships exploded in a rain of fire and black bits. Smaller, wasp-like fighters darted from the blooming flames.

“Is there a war going on?” Chuckles asked.

“This whole place is turning to Crapopolis, capital city of North Shitfucksburg,” Sparky opined.

Grebok looked up, and set his mouth in a firm line. “We need to get on one of those ships and get the hell out of here. Now.”

•••

The crowd went silent as Gunther stood before Kendra. Kendra, too, went silent.

It was eerie. A slow hush, as much a tangible thing as the noise had been.

Gunther’s face appeared on all the screens. It terrified him and exulted him in the same moment.

Kendra looked to him. He knew what he had to do.

He went to press the button, but—

“I can’t,” he said. His voice boomed out over the crowd, and it made him pee a little. “I can’t do it. I don’t think I’m a hero, after all.”

The panther looked up, confused.

Kendra smiled. She mouthed three words to him:

Be. A. Hero.

Then she put her hand over his, and helped him press the button.

•••

The timer ticked down. Brin smacked the screens again, but R.T.’s image wouldn’t resolve, and her face kept dissolving into a fractal spray of broken pixels. Her voice, too, was distorted.

“The signal’s fucked, man,” he said to nobody. He hit another switch, turned it back to the Kendra Shields show, the concert that was equal parts ascendance of the Infi-Net and devastation of the Storyverse, and it was dead silent.

He cranked the volume, but it didn’t help. He tried to figure out why some pale, pasty-faced geek was standing on stage with—

Wait. No. No! That was one of those Shadowstory idiots. The chicken said they were taken care of. The chicken said this was handled.

The pop star mouthed something to the tow-headed geek.

Then, a small motion. Hands moved.

Then—

A white explosion. It took out the whole stage. A panther screamed. Harsh feedback rang out. The monitors went black.

The timer ticked to its penultimate second.

Moments before GoogolSoft—and all of Planet Portland—almost uploaded itself into the Infi-Net, Brin wondered how it all went off the rails.

Upload 99% complete –

NO CARRIER.

11.11.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

20: The Final Countdown

Friday, November 6th, 2009

The purple, glitter-covered door opened just a crack.

It was just enough to let the assistant, Kyle, get his head in. The inrush of noise that came in with him was deafening.

“—nutes, Ms. Shields.” The first half of his sentence swallowed by the roar of the crowd.

Kendra didn’t react. Her back turned to the man.

He wasn’t sure if she heard him or not. What to do? Presume she didn’t hear and repeat himself at the risk of breaking some Diva trance meditation she was into and lose his job? Or presume she heard him and risk an empty stage in ten minutes and lose his job? Kyle looked back over his shoulder as if that would somehow help make his choice clearer. The crowd noise was an almost physical thing.

She seemed like such a sweet girl on all the album covers, commercials, and scintillating videos that made him question his orientation even if he was criminally older than her and openly gay since middle school. But the horror stories were out there: pop stars and their legendary tempers. He was pretty sure she could kill him where he stood and no court in the Infi-Net would press charges.

Professional integrity forced his foot in the door; momentum pushed the other one after it. A nugget of cattiness that told him he wasn’t about to be afraid of some teenage bubblegummer closed the door behind him. Wherewithal churned his legs forward. Courage reached out with his hand, and defiant uncertainty tapped the little bombshell on her milky, beglittered shoulder.

Nothing.

No reaction at all.

Now he was worried she was dead and people would think he did it.

He risked a peek around her curtains of beautiful hair.

He paused for a moment to wonder what product she used? Just the right amount of sheen and bounce, it was a great look.

He shook it off and proceeded to peek.

Pupil-less eyes stared at the forest of bouquets, chocolates and fruit baskets in front of her.

Kyle backpedaled and tripped over a complimentary ham.

•••

Nine minutes, Brin appraised.

Nine minutes before GoogolSoft finished its conversion and uploaded the whole planet of Portland online to become the capitol of his new and improved universe. Let HappyCo. suck on that, man.

He watched as the machines churned with life… and hope.

Meanwhile the rest of the Guiding Hands were all boning each other in their cubicles and smoking their whatevers, getting their last feel of the flesh out of their system before Go Time. Good for them, he nodded to himself.

He sniffed his finger surreptitiously. Whatshername, Sunflower? Suntower? Sunshower? Whatever, it was, she smelled like vanilla, rose-essence, submission, fear… victory. He smiled his wolfish smile.

He’d of course miss the flesh, but he already had himself a lady lined up on the other side. Besides, he and whatshername would always have the conference room table.

He rubbed his hands together, devilishly thinking, Soon my metal flower, soon.

•••

It had to be more than eight minutes, R.T. insisted, as if reality would bow to her overwhelming logic.

Despite her denial, her internal clocks agreed with the readouts on the various monitors. How had so much time been lost? Why was nothing where she left it? How did all these people get into the Infi-Net?!

She had to surface and get a message to Brin before it was too late. Before she ruined everything… more than it already was.

R.T. closed her eyes and willed herself back out to the real world.

At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

Her one eye opened to confirm that she was still sitting in her little swivel chair in Command and Control.

Shit.

•••

“In seven minutes, the shit is going to go down,” Sim-Chris barked around his cigarillo.  He looked out over his best, most elite Revolutionaries gathered in one place for the first time. Each one a victim of the replacement reality that encroached all around them.

Pillow Cat, his Gal Friday and perpetual Net sensation. Nuncharley, be-afroed, would-be ninja, famous for concussing himself with a Nunchaku on film. Paul Pitcher, androgynous boy-child, famous for a meltdown/tirade defending Kendra Spears’ good name. Space Knight Kid, a heavyset boy whose anti-balletic display of combat ability left him famously mocked.  Many more lined up in the second row, Nuba Nuba Guy, Dramatic Guinea Pig, Samgood, Teh Dawg and Tay Sondetre stuck together. Two girls shared a cup, etcetera.

Of course not all of his army were infamous victims of the Infi-Net: the Marvelous Marmoset (hacker and boy-genius), the Sims and his growing, nameless mob were here of their own free will.

All were prepared to take the fight to GoogolSoft, to take the Infi-Net back to reality. For that they needed something dramatic, a rallying cry. A lever big enough to move the universe.

After his prolonged pause he looked at all these good soldiers and asked one question. “Are you ready?”

With a hundred fists and a hundred voices they answered in the positive.

“I have to log now, my children. But have no fear, you will know it is time by the sign.”

Another chorus of cheers erupted.

With one last look to Pillow-Cat, Sim-Chris faded away in a swarm of dissipating ones and zeroes.

•••

“—less than six minutes!” His boss shouted over the wall of noise at Kyle, like he didn’t know.

Leaving his body behind didn’t make him any less of an a-hole, Kyle thought.

They finished their looping journey through the bowels of the eTunes stage. They paused outside the purple door. The star on it that said Kendra in bright red letters.

They each looked to the other, silently daring them to be the one to enter the breach. Kyle made a sweeping gesture inviting the boss to be his guest.

The boss (whose name I don’t know, we’ve never been introduced) thought about pulling rank. If what Kyle said was true, and Kendra Shields—due on stage in less than six minutes—was reduced to an eyeless zombie, it was probably his job to deal with it. His mouth scrunched up like a fleshy, red tissue. He conceded their little standoff.

His meaty hand wrapped around the doorknob, and turned slowly. He dreaded what was on the other side but threw the door wide. Kyle stood behind his boss ready to flee in case Zombie-Kendra had become motivated to eat their brains or something.

Instead she brushed her hair, singing to herself. Some lilting lyrics about a pretty kitty going bang-bang or something.

She turned to confront the interruption, as surprised as anybody.

She had pupils, Kyle noted.

She had pupils, his boss noted slightly more angrily than Kyle just had.

“What’s going on?” She pouted innocently, her eyes widening ever so cutely.

“Yeah, I sure don’t know.” The boss gritted his teeth and turned slowly, hoping his eyes gained the ability to murder Kyle.

No such luck.

Kyle smiled sheepishly. “Five minutes,” he supplied, holding up all the fingers on his right hand to demonstrate the concept of five for her. He was so fired.

•••

Diana checked her watch: about four minutes.

Four minutes before she and the girls followed the rest of the Storyverse into the Infi-Net.

Something, someone—a straggler—groaned under her talons. Without looking away from her timepiece she squeezed the trigger and sent a quick bark of bullets into the body below her.

It stopped groaning and started stinking.

She plopped down onto the slick, metallic streets and let out a shrill whistle. (…seriously? You’re going to accept that a chicken can fire an Uzi and look at her watch, but not whistle? What kind of a realism Nazi are you? It was a palatal whistle alright? Leave me be or I will kick you in the cloaca.)

Her sisters stopped what they were doing.

One notable duo were in mid-tagging HappyCo. sucks my unfertilized ova on the side of a billboard for McHappy’s (a subdivision of HappyFoods, a subdivision of HappyCo.).

“Round it up girls! It’s time to get online!”

•••

Brin felt pretty ding-dong good about himself as the final minutes ticked by.

At least he did until a monitor came to life nearby. A grainy image flickered in and out. It was his metallic soon-to-be electro-muffin.

“Heeey, R.T., I was just thinking about you.”

“Brin—all gone to shit!” her voice blitzed in and out.

“No, man. It’s all good.” He needed her to be cool for just a little longer. “I’ll tell you all about it real soon.”

“–not, all good at all. There’s—everywhere, and—in the Infi-Net. In the Infi-Net.” She stopped, presumably reaching her thesis.

Brin nervously checked his countdown. “Yeah, that’s… listen, just wait a minute. It’ll all become clear.”

“No, Brin, that’s not the worst of it.” R.T. fiddled with some knobs off screen and came in slightly more clearly.

His grin faded, he really didn’t need this harshing his mellow. “What’s the worst of it, then, man?”

“The Infi-Net—been hacked, by—ds!”

His smile was gone completely. “Say again?”

“It’s Kendra!” R.T. shouted over the garble. “Kendra Shields has hacked the Infi-Net!”

06.11.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

19: Let’s Be Frenemies!

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

The question, forever asked:

Was he one of them, or wasn’t he?

The Lord of the Lemmings had always helped them before.

But they didn’t understand him. He spoke in riddle and rhyme. He communicated in half-truths and madness. They saw themselves as heroes, but he believed he was—or would one day become—a god.

He was a riddle wrapped in an enigma, slathered with mustard, and eaten on rye.

•••

Above their heads, the weird white clouds of Planet Friendmonger drifted in herky-jerky fits and starts.

Grebok lunged in for a hug, and was not really surprised when his arms enclosed the Lord of the Lemming’s cloak, but found no tangible body—the cowl looked down with twinkling eyes as Grebok’s arms met each other, as if the inky robe was filled with nothing at all.

Also, the Lemming Man did not return the hug. A white, razor-edged smile did emerge from the darkness of the cowl, however, before receding back to black.

“You need to eat more, Lemming Man,” Grebok said with a wink, then elbowed Chuckles in the ribs. “See what I did there, LC? Because he’s not just skinny, he’s, y’know, non-existent. Boom. Funny.”

“I give that joke a C+,” Chuckles said.

Grebok shrugged. It was better than he did at the Naval Academy. “I’ll take it.”

“Jennifer! Nancy!” Sparky snapped. “If you two are done flicking each other’s dick-tips, maybe we could seek some wisdom from our old pal?” He cleared his throat and downgraded his hope: “Or, at least something wisdom-flavored?”

“Hitler!” Gunther yelled, grinning with green teeth. Everyone ignored him.

“Help us out, Lemming Man,” the Avatar said. “We don’t know where we are. We don’t know what this place is. I’m happy we have pants, this time—“

“Truth,” Grebok mumbled, looking down and confirming that on this adventure he did, indeed, have pants.

“—but, pants or no pants, I’m tired of this shit. Tubes and black goo, minotaurs and washing machines, that shithead robot with the shovel head and the stupid little bluebird that keeps telling me mundane things about its day. Plus, I apparently don’t have any friends, and ol’ Greb-head over there is romantically interdiscombobulated with our spaceship who we haven’t seen—“

The creepy woman’s voice drifted from the sky: “Relationship change to: It’s Complicated!”

Grebok frowned, while Chuckles ignored it. “—and Gunther over there hasn’t been right since this whole thing began. I think it’s really messing with his gourd.”

“PEOPLE FROM NORWAY ARE FATTIES,” Gunther yelled in all caps. He followed it up with: “I’m looking for a fuck partner to fuck! Space AIDS!”

“There he goes with Space AIDS again,” Grebok said, shaking his head. “I mean, wow. Chuckles is right. It’s done a number on him. You can help us out, right, Lemming Man?” He sidled up next to the floating black cloak. “You can get us out of here. Maybe? Kinda? Sorta?”

Something moved underneath the Lord of the Lemmings’ cloak. Like ripples from a pebble strike on pondwater.

They looked to him expectantly.

Once more, he grinned.

Note: he didn’t say yes.

He only smiled.

•••

Denthead was pretty sure he was out of a job.

He shuffled across the berber carpet of the 37th floor of HappyCo’s Acquisitions Department on HappyTron. A Styrofoam cup—a black smile emblazoned upon its side with two glee-filled button eyes—tumbled in front of him, blown by a wind whistling in through broken windows. Reams of dot matrix printouts sat hooked on chairs and cubicle corners, fluttering like forgotten banners from a fallen kingdom.

Most everybody was gone.

The computers were dark.

Fluorescent lights overhead flickered and spit sparks.

Outside, a holo-sign that once advertised the brand new Choco-Mirth Moon Shake at the Cosmic Paisley Wormhole McHappy’s was now coruscating between darkness and a heavily pixilated image of somebody’s grandparents having sex over a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes. Sometimes, the old man had a Zebra’s head placed over his own. Other times, the old lady was given colorful red clown shoes.

Denthead found a pile of black, star-glittered smudge.

He shrugged. His head was built for this. Hunkering down, he kicked forward and used his Scum-Bot scraper skull to push free the goo. He hit resistance though, about halfway through.

It was a corpse. The pale face—a man, not smiling, a big no-no here on HappyTron—peered out from underneath the shimmering sludge.

“Hrm,” he grunted, a mechanized wheeze.

He tottered over to a computer, and plugged in a cable pulled from a supernumerary nipple on his side. He took a few minutes, watched the digital feed from the security cameras (everything cast in a gauzy rose-glow, for black and white was too harsh for the eyes of HappyCo employees).

“Interesting.”

Most gave in to their fates. They sat at their PCs, numb, slack-jawed, moving naught but fingers to click, or eyes to follow a cursor or Infi-Net web video. When the time came, they willingly submitted to the black coils roping around their necks and into their mouths, pulling them bodily in through the slots and drives—literally uploading them, body and soul, to the Infi-Net.

Others, a rare few, fought back.

Black tendrils lashed. Some were pulled in. Others were choked, left for dead. Like that body, over there.

Denthead unplugged, turned, and—

—faced a shadowy chicken with a briefcase.

The Scum-Bot lost his footing, and tumbled over an office chair.

“The hacker prevails,” the Lowman Brown hen—Diana, if you’ll recall—said with a chuckle.

Denthead stood. “Can’t you clear your throat or something? You scared the fluid out of my bladderhose.”

“Apologies,” Diana said, sounding like she didn’t mean it. She set the black case down.

Denthead shuddered.

“Is that what I think it is?”

The chicken said nothing.

“Is it time to get paid? I did the work. I sent those poor knuckleheads to the far-flung corners of Friendmonger, though I gotta say, I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t know what you’re up to, but this is some wacky business. I thought I knew how to game the system.”

The chicken popped the lid of the briefcase. Denthead got closer. He felt equal parts sick and excited—he knew he’d done bad things, but maybe he didn’t understand the breadth, the depth; maybe some virtue existed beneath these layers of madness, and all for a HyLon Processor…

Except, the case was not home to a HyLon Processor.

It was home to an Uzi.

The chicken snatched it up, laughed, and started firing.

•••

Again, something moved under the Lemming  Man’s robes.

This time, accompanied by noises.

A faint whirring. Then, a sound like a carrier signal, a modem connecting. Followed by a staccato series of tones.

“Can’t help you, yet,” the Lord of the Lemmings mumbled. “I played in the glade with pretty maids! But then I prayed for braids of jade, and an answer came while I laid in the shade—time, the answer said, for a very serious upgrade.”

The heroes stared at him. Each blinked. Even Gunther was silent.

Finally, the Avatar of Good broke the silence. “Nope, sorry, didn’t get that, can you reword it for us sane people?”

His robe fluttered open.

A glint of chrome. Bright, LCD eyes. The sonic whine of a dental drill, and the growl of a saw.

“What the—“

Sparky couldn’t finish his sentence. Something bowled out of the darkness of the Lemming Man’s robes, and attached to the Wonder Weasel’s muzzle.

Chuckles found himself on his ass, something biting into his shoulder.

Grebok swatted at the air—but caught a flash of blinking LCD eyes in his peripheral vision, and howled as a metal gremlin attached itself to his neck and burrowed under his jerkin.

Gunther screamed something about dirty Lithuanians, a scream that was swiftly silenced.

•••

The Uzi chattered. Denthead felt bullets ricochet off his scum-shovel of a head, while others punched clean through the metal. He extended his arms, pistoned his fingers, and leapt over a cubicle wall.

More chickens. Coming in through the windows.

These, with black masks and tidy white suits. Each hen with her own Uzi. Barking bullets.

Denthead pumped his squat legs left, then right, knocking over a desk, a copier, a bubbling water cooler whose fluoridated water shined blue. Bullets stitched across his back. Ping! Pang! Pong! One punched through the flexor joint of his right leg, rendering it useless. Another drilled through the center of his head, clean through his processor, and—

static

dead pixels

sparks

steam

synaptic network firing all at once

—he tumbled through an open window, plummeting from the 37th floor.

•••

As the heroes screamed, swarmed by a flock of Cyber-Lemmings, the Lord of the Lemmings booped some buttons on his nifty touchscreen watch.

A face concealed in shadow—a woman’s face—stared back from his wrist.

“Phase One is almost complete,” she said, her words distorted into a sluggish, warbling nightmare voice. “How goes Phase Two?”

“Phase Two is poop-de-doo!” he chirped.

He was met with silence.

The woman’s face shifted uncomfortably, looking this way, and that.

“I’m sorry?” she finally said. “What?”

“It—it’s going just fine,” he said, straining to answer with normalcy. “They are receiving their upgrades as we speak.”

“Good. Head on back to base, then.”

He waggled his fingers, then turned to the screaming heroes before disappearing in a puff  of 1s and 0s, black and oily, like crow feathers.

The heroes?

They kept on screaming.

04.11.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

18: Old Friend Request

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Grebok’s fist shot out like it was on rails.

Teeth ground and cracked in the jaw of Rorg, an ork’kin he dared to eat paste in second grade. Grebok forgot the incident soon after. Apparently, Rorg hadn’t.

They were in the mountains of Friendmonger now and the road grew more perilous. Friendship rings formed clans and factions out here in the wild.

Lord Chuckles head-butted one of Rorg’s grabbier buddies but came away equally staggered by the exchange. “Gah! What do you have under your skull? Another skull?”

The hard-headed cretin curled his fat lips into what was probably a cruel smile. It looked more like a pig with gas, a mowhawk, and a tribal tattoo. “R’rerek Hardskull,” the creature introduced himself. He pointed a stubby, calloused finger to another tattoo on his chest, where his name was written upside down, presumably in case he forgot it.

Chuckles kicked him hard enough to smear the ink. A roar of air escaped the foe as he collapsed to his knees, desperately trying to get his lungs to take air back after a messy breakup.

“R’rerek Ironlung more like it!” the Avatar shouted. He looked around to see if anyone heard that. Grebok was busy fighting that first ork’kin, Sparky was entangled with some elf-broads (they were dudes), and Gunther was picking his butt and sniffing his fingers. More genius wasted, Chuckles thought, frowning.

“Orcs are gay. You guys are teh fail,” Gunther opined from his seat. He turned to focus in on the weasel’s fight. “Yeah, tear her dress! Let’s see some boobage! Make them lez out!” Sparky looked over at the office geek in repulsed confusion. Which earned him a kick to the ribs, much to the office geek’s apparent delight. “Hawhaw, fagger.”

Sparky weaved in and out of the two elves. They were feisty little guys, but he didn’t just stick “wonder weasel” after his name for no reason. His back leg kicked the legs out from under one, while the other got a nasty bite on the shoulder.

Grebok ducked an incoming blow. “Rorg still called Paste-Eater in my village. No one marry Paste-Eater!” his assailant cried, indignant.

The Son of Drogmar threw an uppercut, and followed through with an elbow to Rorg’s exposed throat. Lastly he put a kick into his side that sent the heavy beast stumbling downhill. He bowled over the gasping R’rerek and in turn the still-standing elf.

Sparky scuttled out of the lumbering path of the paste-eater and made a break for higher ground.

“You look like a giant ape pecker!” Gunther heckled from the sidelines. “Wonder weiner!”

As their enemies writhed around in an awkward pile of green and porcelain flesh, the Shadowstories took their opportunity to make their egress. Lord Chuckles looked out from the mountain path to see what progress they’d made. Precious little, was the report.

Gunther followed with a slow lope. “You guys should all shower together. Because of how gay you are. Mirror-door sucks. It’s a stupid name for a planet. Darkblackshadow is a cooler name. That’s the name of my level 900 Wizard Dragon Knight King Rogue. He’s really awesome. He can wield three weapons at the same time, and… and….” He continued talking after this, but everyone tuned him out at roughly the same time.

“Man, fuck this place.” Grebok silently vowed he wouldn’t accept any more friend requests. He didn’t even know who half the people staking a claim to his acquaintance were anymore. He was still puzzling over who the Goddess Bl’art was

“New friend request.”

Grebok turned tiredly. They all squinted at the shadowy silhouette of this latest applicant: Tall. Cowled? Caped! “The lemming man!” He announced, already forgetting his vow.

“Friendship confirmed.”

“Fuck yeah, friendship confirmed. Finally, someone I actually—no. No. Come on, no.” Grebok backpedaled into Sparky.

“Fuck’s your problem?” Sparky growled.

“Death.” Grebok uttered like a curse (not invectively, like damn, shit, or godsblood; more like the kind of curse old gypsy women were always accused of).

Sure enough, the tall shrouded figure that faded into view, carried an overlarge scythe like the reaper of legend. In a dramatic show he slipped the hood from his head.

One by one, the Shadowstories gasped in anticipatory horror, only to find themselves slightly disappointed. They expected a perpetually grinning skull with glowing eyes, or some rotted zombie face, or maybe some Edvard Munch’s The Scream shit. Not… this.

It was a little known fact that Death looked like Jason Priestley. The personification of the inevitable end sighed, knowing what would come next.

“You know you look like—” Sparky started but was cut off by an upraised hand. It wasn’t even a skeletal hand. It was fleshy and mannish (and slightly girlish), like Jason Priestley would have.

“Yeah. Yeah I know,” Death nodded, “Jason Priestley, right?”

The giant weasel shook his head at first, but stopped, “Yeah. Yeah, I guess a little.”

Chuckles stepped forward, again reaching for a sword that wasn’t there. When his hands closed around nothing he attempted to look innocuous.

“Why do you want to be my friend?” Grebok took mighty umbrage behind his bolder companion.

“Oh, I’m everyone’s friend. Eventually.” Death smiled, all proud of himself.

Lord Chuckles rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, very clever.”

“You like that?” If Death had a horn, he’d be tooting it.

“Get on with it, what are you doing here?” Chuckles waved his arms in all directions to make sure he got it all.

“No one’s dying out there anymore. Everyone’s here,” he mimicked the Avatar’s spastic flailing. “So, Death comes to the Infi-Net.” He presented himself with a flourish. The response was underwhelming. “Bah, you don’t know,” he dismissed.

Grebok inched his way further up the path. “I ain’t dead, you got that?”

“No, but that guy is.” Death pointed down the path to R’rerek.

Sparky cuffed Chuckles in the back of the head. The Avatar shrugged unapologetically.

“You didn’t do it actually. Congenital heart failure,” Death supplied, ever-helpful.

“Death is a tool! Metal Death rulezzz!” Gunther threw some sort of faux-metal hand gesture.

The Son of Drogmar stopped inching away. “Wait, how can he die? Is anyone even really alive around here?”

“They are now, Bunky. I just said that, even.” Death cinched up his adorable unshaven face at the Miradorian. “Not your sharpest knife, is he?”

“He’s street smart,” Chuckles exaggerated.

“Good luck with that.” Death started down the path toward the dead ork’kin.

They all stood around for another couple seconds. “Sooooo…?” Sparky gave voice to everyone’s impregnated expectation.

Jason Priestley turned back to them. “Oh yeah, you’re free to go… for now.” He winked. “Am I right?”

Gunther gave Death the finger, then with both hands, then made both fingers into little laser pistols, then made little “pew, pew, pew” noises.

Sparky grabbed the increasingly smelly office nerd by the collar and drug him up the path. “Gidoffa me, homo! Go lick ferret sack!” he kicked, and shrieked.

Not for the first time, Sparky found himself put off by Gunther’s newfound officiousness, but at the same time probably respected him more.

“I hate that guy,” Grebok mumbled to himself, half-turning to look back down the path.

Death was looking right at him. He waved at Grebok with R’rerek’s limp hand. “See you soon, Grebok.” He supplied a comical falsetto voice for the dead ork’kin.

Grebok shivered and quickly rounded the path toward the peak.

Chuckles caught up and clapped him on the shoulder reassuringly. He even thought better of a Don’t worry, you’ll probably die from robot-gonorrhea. joke. He was a good friend, he concluded.

They continued upward but it wasn’t long before they stopped short again.

Death stood in front of them on the path again. His hood once more hiding his pretty head.

Grebok freaked out a bit. “What? What do you want, man?” He rolled up his sleeves and invited confrontation. “You wanna do this? Let’s do this! You’ll never take me alive!” He was nigh hysterical.

The gaunt, shrouded figure, shrugged. “If this is a bad time, I can come back later.”

“L-lemming man?” Chuckles asked hesitantly. He looked back down the path as if somehow he had passed them along the way.

Sparky sniffed the air. “Yeah, that’s him.”

The Lord of the Lemmings waved spritely.

30.10.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

17: The Manchurian Dipshit

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Unicorns played across a wide grassy expanse. A lawn gnome wrote a spreadsheet in bright crayon. The sky was open, blue, and empty. Hazy clouds drifted. The air tasted of marzipan. A roly-poly squirrel ordered office supplies off a computer made of sugar-cubes. Everybody wore a blue tie and khaki shorts. Even the clouds. Tumbleweeds of cotton candy whispered across the windswept meadow. Crickets stood around a Powerpoint presentation: a chorus of endless chirping. Happiness. Emptiness. Nothingness.

That, normally, was Gunther’s brain.

Today was different.

•••

Gunther was a fat child. Not in a gross way. He was pleasingly round. Like a gumball, or a soup dumpling.

He raced across the front lawn swinging a sword made of PVC pipe. He swung it at a trashcan. He missed. He swung again, lost his balance, and fell against the can with a clatter.

It rolled out across the empty cul-de-sac.

While on the ground, Gunther kung-fu kicked some clouds overhead.

He laughed until he threw up.

•••

Gunther felt dizzy. Shoulders bumped his shoulders, and elbows elbowed his elbows. Overhead, a thousand holo-screens, and on each, a million little faces. All around him, a crowd, an audience. Waiting for something. His vision swam. The crowd was a murmuring roar, a sea of voices smashed together into an ear-clogging treacle.

Flashbulbs. Glow sticks. A dull pulse-beat bumping the ground beneath his feet.

“I don’t know where I am,” Gunther said aloud, but his voice was quiet, and even he couldn’t hear it.

•••

A half-circle of rag dolls and action figures were Gunther’s audience.

“You saved the day!” the plump boy made them say in a high-pitched voice of ill-performed ventriloquism. “You’re our hero.”

“Thank you, kind villagers and gentle space barbarians,” Gunther said, basking in their reverence.

He looked down and feigned surprise when he saw a tub of butter sitting on the carpet. Next to it was a bottle of chocolate sauce.

“This is for you!” Gunther made the toys say.

“Butter and chocolate syrup? How did you know that I loved those things?”

“All true heroes love butter and chocolate! This we know!”

He clapped his chubby hands. “May I eat these things now, please?”

“These are the plunders of your heroism! Enjoy your reward, Sir Gunther P. Washington, Savior of All People, Intelligent and Unintelligent Alike!”

Pbbbt. He squirted a pile of cocoa syrup on top of the butter, and then with a spoon (which he just so happened to have in the pocket of his khaki shorts), young Gunther began to eat with smiling mouth.

•••

“Hey, man!”

Gunther’s eyes focused beyond the streaks of light and the ever-shifting tide of the crowd ahead. A face emerged, and a hand clapped on his back. This person was yelling at him.

“It’s Pete from Accounting!”

And it was. Last Gunther saw Pete from Accounting, the man’s zombie head had cracked like an egg and was spilling forth some kind of ethereal tar. Pete didn’t look like that now, though. He wore a t-shirt with bedazzled glittery bits, and those glittery formed some girl’s pouting face: Kendra Shields, if the shirt read right. Gunther blinked. The bedazzled squares actually seemed to move and drift together. The image shifted, became her cleavage, then a white panther, then her nubile body enrobed in lemon-colored leathers.

“I didn’t know you liked Kendra Shields music!” Pete screamed. “Awesome minds think alike! This concert is going to be sick! Did you pre-order the new album yet?”

“I’m not Binoculars Cat,” Gunther mumbled as loudly as he could manage. “Your shirt is moving.”

Pete just laughed, and cupped his hands around his mouth: “Dude, it’s the shit, right? I bought it with nano-transactions from the Kendra Shields store down in the Auctionfist booth! It only cost me seventy-thousand plats! Holy shit, right?”

“… right,” Gunther said. He lost the ability to blink. All the lights and glow streaks and pixels and shiny metal reflections burned into his eyes.

“You got a cool shirt yourself, buddy,” Pete said, but Gunther didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Okay.”

Pete came in tight around Gunther, and shouted into his ear. “Oh, and bro, I am crazy sorry for all that zombie business with the pissy moaning and black goo and whatever. Had a bad case of the Mondays, am I right? Am I right? Yeah. Day got a billion times better when I uploaded myself into the Infi-Net. Who needs a real body? Can I get a high-five? Up here? Up top?”

Pete held up his hand.

Gunther didn’t know what to do, so he saluted, then stumbled back into the crowd.

“I hear Pillow Cat is going to be here!” Pete yelled after, but Gunther was already gone.

•••

A plume of cigarillo smoke wreathed Gunther’s face. He wasn’t sure how he got here, standing beneath a gently drifting bare bulb, a cup of chamomile tea warming his hands. He remembered the market. The molesting. The yelling for Sparky. And then, all went dark.

On the table ahead of him, a pair of cat’s eyes watched him from inside a pillowcase, and he was pretty sure he recognized that cat from somewhere. All around the table—like a half-circle of poppet dolls and action figures—stood faceless avatars, Sim-Chris, Sim-Dave, Sim-Anoop, Sim-Svetlana.

He was also pretty sure the cat was speaking to him inside his brain.

We brought you here because you are a hero, the cat said to his brain.

“I’m really not,” he clarified. “Mostly, I hold their bags. I also order the office supplies, and answer fan mail. I like to draw unicorns and make farm animals out of whatever items are near to my sticky hands.”

Search your heart. You know this to be true. You are the one true hero. The cat did not tell Gunther that they had already tried to get the other heroes, but that a certain dent-headed Scum-Bot had soured their plans—but, for some reason, the mechanical interloper hadn’t found this Shadowstory, yet. (They were not aware of a certain green-teethed individual still giddy from the thrills of identity theft.)

Gunther did as the telepathic pillow-enveloped cat urged. He searched his heart.

•••

In Gunther’s heart, he sat at a table, his pudgy face smeared with melting butter and the poopy streaks of chocolate syrup. He belched a little as his mother—a severe woman in a black dress with hands like owl talons—gripped the space between his two wrist bones and pinched.

“Ow,” young Gunther said.

“You need to lose weight,” his mother hissed. “You’re the man of this house. You need to start an exercise regimen.”

“I’m a hero. It’s a good exercise regi— megi-rim—rigid-men—“ He wiped his mouth. “That word you said.”

Her finger pincers left his wrist, and went to his ear. She pulled so hard, he thought it would come off.

“Enough with this mayhem and foolishness,” she said. “You’re no hero. You need to be a worker. A provider for this family. You need to go out and get a job at an office somewhere. Office jobs are good jobs. Good pay. Ergonomic chairs. Nice benefits. Well-arranged cubicles.”

“I’m only 11,” he said, wincing.

“You’ll be 12 in less than a month. Then you’ll be a man. A responsible man.”

“An office worker,” he whimpered.

“That’s right. An office worker.”

•••

“This is not a very attractive office,” Gunther said, looking around the bare room with the cracking paint and peeling wallpaper. “You could use some computers. Maybe a push-pin pig or three. And a calendar with little kitties hanging from tree branches. You’re a cat. You could hang from a branch and say something motivational, like, Don’t fall, or you’ll die, or maybe, Oh, no, trees!”

Gunther, this is no office. This is the genesis of the Revolution.

“I don’t know what that means.” He sipped his tea. A bitter tang touched his tongue.

We, like you, are oppressed. Forced into a story we did not design. Ripped from our old lives and thrust into this one. Made to fall down steps and double over after flying discs hit our crotches.

“That’s awful sad.”

It is sad. You must help us. You’re a hero.

Gunther started to feel dizzy. The bitter taste at the back of his throat made his whole mouth numb.

“This tea is wuhhhh—“

He was going to say weird, but the word never came out.

Everything turned upside down. He tumbled, limbs akimbo, the cup shattering.

The telepathic cat’s last words floated in his brain like a scrolling marquee:

Gunther P. Washington, you’re our only hope.

•••

The crowd erupted. Their cheering was deafening. A girl near to Gunther wept. A man to his right shoved his own fist in his mouth and spun around in circles. The screens above his head were home to endless faces, laughing, blubbering, squeezing, ejaculating, licking the air, gibbering, speaking in tongues, frothing, bubbling, howling.

“She’s about to come out onstage!” the weeping girl screamed in Gunther’s face, and then clawed her own eyes out with pink-painted nails. A fountain of black, blocky pixels rained out of her sockets. “Gheeee! Hahaha! Woooo!”

Gunther pushed past her.

It was all becoming clear.

He looked down at the metal device strapped to his chest. It was a wide circle, its center shining a bright blue light. The light started to whirl. The device turned on, began to hum.

“I’m a hero,” he said, beaming.

And he clawed his way toward the stage to meet Kendra Shields up close and personal-like.

28.10.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

16: Flashback and Forth

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

The black pool spread, sparkling faintly.

It was beautiful.

Like a sea of stars.

R.T. missed space.

•••

R.T. was sick and tired of space.

She sat in the ladies room stall and wondered if this was what crying felt like.

Her face hurt in no explicable way; it just ached randomly. Beyond that, her chest felt tight as if she were restrained. She could breathe just fine, but it was it was like… like someone punched her in the heart.

She didn’t like it at all.

She could turn off emotions just as easily as she could turn into a Routine-class starcraft. She left them on because she was increasingly interested in the fleshy, hominid side of herself. But if unattributable heart-hurt was all they had to offer outside of the anger milieu, then she wasn’t sure if she’d would bother from now on.

She’d been shot; stabbed; kicked; punched in the “area;” missed an entry window and literally bounced off of an atmosphere; crashed into five moons, an asteroid, and two planets; been plugged into no less than three machines designed to destroy the Shadowstories; and pulled a satellite out of orbit onto her own head.

This felt worse than all of that combined.

•••

It might seem redundant, but Rotworld smelled like rot.

The whole planet had the piquant smell of life gone far out the other side. So R.T. mused as she stumbled numbly through the fetid underbrush.

She had been drugged with a sort of weird powder in a reed shoot arrow after her first attempt to rescue her fellow Shadowstories. The stuff  was still working through her veins and circuitry. She couldn’t think straight, walk straight, or change form.

Grebok helped her stumble over a fallen log. “Come on, girly,” he said to keep talking, to keep her focused.

She yelped loudly as her foot came down onto the crumbling forest floor and kept going another three feet. Everything was coming apart on this damn planet. “Thum ewo,” she spoke around a mouthful of moss and frayed timber.

The Miradorian hefted her back up. “Say again?” He checked left and right for sign of pursuit. So far, so good.

“Some hero,” she snorted and tried to sort out where her body ended and the world began.  “How do you do it, Grebok?” she giggled and almost tripped over her own foot.

Screw this, the Son of Drogmar thought and scooped his companion and eventual ride into his arms. “Just hold on,” he instructed and trudged his way across the difficult landscape. They needed to meet up with the rest of the Shadowstories and get off of this rock. Lord Chuckles and he had agreed they’d split the handicap, Grebok would take the drugged up spaceship, and Chuckles would take Gunther. Lemming Lord and Sparky formed the third team.

“Chhheriously? How do you do it?” the sometimes spaceship slurred.

“Huh? What? Do what?” He took his eyes off where he was going to see her focusing on him. He looked away uncomfortably.

“Be a hero all the time,” she explained. “Kicking down babies, punching out maidens, saving doors, rescuing badguys. I mean, don’t you ever get tired?”

“Dunno. Don’t think about it. Just do it.” The clearing was up ahead. Just a little further and they could get off this piss-fuck little shitworld.

“You’re awesome,” R.T. announced drunkenly.

He shot her a dubious look. “You’re high.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she conceded, “but it’s true. You’re awesome.” Her speech was exaggerated, her arms flew all over the place as she apparently attempted to communicate his awesomeness in a series of wild gesticulations.

“Just be still for a minute longer,” he instructed.

Contrary to his advice, she grabbed him and kissed him.

•••

“Good evening, Ms. Astromobile. You’re a hard lady to get a hold of.” The stoner on her TransComm’s signal was apparently from GoogolSoft. Brin Port, CEO and Boss-Dog, it said. She’d seen their ads around, but never thought much of them. Who needed GoogolSoft, when HappyCo. already ran everything? “You’re also unique, and special. Totally worth the effort.” R.T. didn’t like his smile. It was wolfish. Like he would eat you if you sat still long enough.

“A friend gave me your name. I have an opportunity for you,” he continued, “a chance to make a difference. I know you’ve got this whole shadow hero business you’re into, but what’s that doing? Do you really want to spend the rest of your days sticking your fingers in the leaky dams of the Storyverse? Or do you want to change the whole damn place all at once?” Her bemused look wore away. Maybe she could stand to listen a little longer.

“I hope I have your attention now, Ms. Astromobile.” He got her name right more than once. “Because I have a place set aside at my right hand for you. I honestly don’t know what I’ll do if you turn me down.” He smiled again, and this time she found herself smiling too.

•••

R.T. was done refueling and walked over to where the other Shadowstories were stretching their legs. They spread throughout the rest area, taking the opportunity to not be cooped up, breathing each other’s recycled stink. Instead, they were able to walk around in the recycled stink of thousands of other transients.

Grebok sat off by himself at a picnic table, worrying over a crumpled piece of paper. She hesitated. She wasn’t sure what to do around him. Not since Rotworld.

She put a hand to her cheek — was her face getting hotter? Internal scanners confirmed an increased flow of fluid to her head. That was weird.

He looked up from his piece of paper and caught her looking.

They both looked away.

Gods, she worried, he must totally hate her. Like some drunk floozy, she had totally ruined their working relationship. His long silences, and conspicuous absences from the cockpit made it clear he wasn’t interested in… anything like that. She wanted to tell him that was fine, that is was nothing, but couldn’t make words work around him.

Gah, she felt like such a human. She considered turning her emotions off. They were utter bullshit at best.

Still, she’d better get out in front of this thing. They would have to work together moving forward. No point in letting it stew. She approached the picnic bench. As if he felt her coming, Grebok stashed the piece of paper in his jacket pocket just before she arrived.

“Hey,” she said.

He swallowed hard. “Yeah, hey. Nothing. Why wouldn’t I be fine? It’s great,” he answered. “Just great.”

Wow, he was really pissed, she surmised, he couldn’t even speak. Well, she had to make this right somehow. “Grebok, listen, I—” she started.

“Fucking robot stole my quarter.” Lord Chuckles walked up in a huff and thumbed over his shoulder. The soda machine was obviously on the losing side of their confrontation. It sported several ragged slashes and bled cola and cherry-flavored soda out onto the macadam around the beverage station. He looked between his audience of two. “Who peed in your oatmeal?”

“Nobody. Nothing. Everything is fine. Good. Great, even. Pfah muh blehble,” Grebok spewed out, less and less intelligibly.

The Avatar sucked some errant cola off of the back of his fist. “Mmand you?” He mumbled around the meat of his hand, looking at R.T.

“Yeah, nothing. Nobody. Nothing.”

“Whatever.” Chuckles lost interest and changed the subject. “Hey, Grebok, some fine looking wench honeys just went into the arcade. We should totally go over there and save their village, if you know what I mean.”

Grebok didn’t, but presumed it circled the concept of having sex with them. He looked up at R.T. who looked away. He looked back to the Avatar who waited expectantly. “I… I love me some wenches, yessir.” He nodded deliberately. “I mean, yeah. Yes. We should totally, um, plunder their hoard,” Grebok stammered. “Um, and slay their dragons… with our meaty man sabers.” He got lost in the corn maze of his own metaphors.

That’s when the strange and compelling nausea started burning in R.T.’s chest.

“Dude, sick.” The Avatar made a face, but didn’t necessarily object. “You dog.”

“Yup. That’s me, um, G-Dog. I’m a total hound. A… pussy… hound?” The Miradorian’s face scrunched up as he seemed to wrestle with language itself. “I um, can’t get enough of that stuff. Cat-dog, they call me. Because of all the pussy. Mm-mmm.”

The burning ache made its way up to her face, like someone was trying to punch their way out from the inside. R.T. suddenly needed very badly to be somewhere else. She looked around for somewhere to go. Somewhere no one could follow. The ladies room!

She walked off without another word.

“What’s wrong with Rootie Tootie?” Chuckles frowned.

•••

A knock on the stall door interrupted her train of thought. “Would madam care for a watercress sandwich?”

“Fuck off,” she called out. She had to get out of here.

Her TransComm buzzed.

Incoming call from GoogolSoft?

•••

R.T. blinked, her eyelashes splashed in the sparkling, black ichor.

The pain in her gut subsided.

The world stopped shaking.

What just happened?

23.10.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

15: The Webpocalypse (in 140 Characters)

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The satyr, Finchback, picked berries. A Frisbee flew into his crotch. Teens emerged from the hedge, laughing, filming for Viewtoob-dot-com.

•••

Tom, HappyCo employee, hadn’t showered in days. So many web videos to watch. So many emails to read. Same as the others. Productivity, dead.

•••

The Argonauts were supposed to get the Golden Fleece. Instead, Jason updated his Friendmonger page: “Idmon smells. Golden Fleece, elusive.”

•••

The Kendra Shields album, “Shh, I’m Yours,” would drop in 24 hours. Paired with live concert on the Infi-Net. All eyes, watching. All eyes.

•••

The Bastard Sun knew he had to find the heroes. And he would. Just one more round of Scribblesquares Online, first. (Then maybe another.)

•••

Cinderella and the Three Little Pigs were trapped in a cabin. Web zombies at the door, clawing, moaning: “Join Planetfriendmonger-dot-com.”

•••

Happytron fell to disrepair. Neon flickered. Screens advertised penis enlargement, lesbian grandmothers, farm porn, diet pills, Nigerians.

•••

Everyone with email for same email with link: “Watch 50-year-old aunt chug gallon of ostrich semen!” Everybody clicked on it. Eagerly.

•••

New pages on the Infi-Net arose every second: Craigspants.com, Silentgangbang.org, dolphinyardsale.com, auctionfist.com, blogdonkey.net.

•••

Zeus got a blog. King Arthur tweeted, or twatted, or whatever it is. Little Red Riding Hood began a podcast, and the Big Bad Wolf did, too.

•••

Guitar Cat. Hang-glider Cat. Dog Cat. Giraffe Cat. Lawnmower Cat. Existential Dread Cat. God Cat. Devil Cat. Cat videos, ever and anon.

•••

Brin toweled off the valley between toned buttocks, sent Sunshower to get him a wheatgrass enema. While she was gone, he hit the elevators.

•••

OMG WTF I THINK THE INFINETS AND INFIT00BS ARE GETTING BIGGAR AND COOLER IMHO GOOGLSFT FTW. NO—FTMFW!!! SPLEE!

•••

New pages on the Infi-Net: jizztemple.com, pillowcatismymom.blorgspot.com, valkyrja-ebooks.net, pillowcatisyourmom.wyrdpress.com

•••

A million tents became a billion. A billion to a trillion. Everything sold. Everything bought. The iBay website became a bulbous gas giant.

•••

The Slug Maven of the Murkburg Mackerel Mercado sighed. Nobody was at the market. The Infi-Net had all goods cheaper, faster, newer, better.

•••

Denthead looked at the code of the Infi-Net. It was changing. Like ants fucking and multiplying over and over again. That… wasn’t normal.

•••

The Bastard Sun laughed. He never laughed. But he just got a Wordsplosion on Scribblesquares by spelling “Sesquipedalian.” Giggle! Snort!

•••

Ding. The elevator hummed downward, deep into the channels of GoogleSoft. Brin whistled, naked. He powdered his testicles. He smirked, smug.

•••

The digital queue formed at KendraShields.com The number swelled. She was the 1st true Infi-Net celebrity. Bubblegum hunger, pop desire.

•••

The pig in the sailor outfit looked to the Other Two Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood. A line of starooze dribbled from his snout. He moaned.

•••

On a distant asteroid, warehouses of sallow-faced teens sat at PCs. They hungrily farmed plats for World of Age of Groghammer Online MMO.

•••

New sites: sexwombat.org, freedickanddietpills.lovejournal.com, puddingparty.net, shadowstorage.com, duckfinder.com, blorg.TVatemybaby.net

•••

One by one, the warehoused teens were siphoned into the PCs; turned to glittery tar, sucked through USB slots. Into Groghammer they go.

•••

Jesus wrote fake reviews on Valkyrja eBooks. Zeus called Jesus out on blog. Jesus wrote emo song, posted it to Viewtoob. A million hits.

•••

On Friendmonger, God and Devil became friends, putting aside millennia of hate. As a result, both ceased to be in a barely audible *pop.*

•••

God Cat and Devil cat take their place. The old rivalry spins anew. Good and evil, now wearing plainly feline faces. Mrowl! Mrow. Purr hiss!

•••

The robots of Happytron didn’t know what to do. They surfed robot porn, using one another when they couldn’t find PCs. It was super-hot.

•••

Brin exited the elevator in a cloud of baby powder. He marched past infinite rows of sleek, black, glistening web servers. They thrummed.

•••

Ira Barksdale, Great Oracle, would’ve foreseen all of this, but he was too busy playing a Level-44 Gun-Knight on World of Age of Groghammer.

•••

Skarpo wheeled back and forth on his unicycle. The bear wept quietly. His bearpaws wouldn’t let him access the Infi-Net. Infinite sadness.

•••

New sites: pokerinthefront.com, momfinder.com, thechurchofsteve.net, stuffopedia.com, firebucket.co.jp, bobozot.deadspace.com, eggfucker.org

•••

Plants grew up out of cracks in Happytron’s surface. Plants, real plants, hadn’t seen the surface of Happytron in a 1000 years. Maybe more.

•••

A thousand skateboards, softballs, Frisbees and terriers colliding with a thousand pairs of testicles. A million. A trillion. An infinity.

•••

Goddamnit! Sub-Orbital Stan still had a better Scum Wars score than the Bastard Sun. Just one more game. Then find the Shadowstories. Yes.

•••

Brin sauntered into the cooling chamber. Before him in a glass cube was a tiny white chip no bigger than a pinky nail. It held the Infi-Net.

•••

Cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats cats!

•••

On Stuffopedia, the search engine thrummed to live. A rumbling of smartness. GARY awakened.

•••

One by one, the stories of the Storyverse fell addicted to the Infi-Net, or were vacuumed up by blobs and tentacles of starry black.

•••

Kendra Shields sucked in a breath, stared at herself in the mirror. The floor rumbled. “This is part of the plan,” she reminded herself.

•••

The Infi-Net grew in epileptic, exponential fits. Motes to islands to countries to continents to planets to galaxies to tiny universes.

•••

A flat plane to a thing with dimension. A thing with dimension to a complex tangle where time passes.

•••

A universe within the Storyverse. An infinity contained within a multitude. A mansion within a cottage. A boundless interminable cancer.

•••

It was time to pack things up, Brin knew. The Storyverse didn’t have long. A week, maybe more. Once Kendra Shields went live, who could say?

•••

RT cried out in the numbing void. Her body shifted. Flesh to bolts. Hands to cannons. Eyes to viewscreens. Then back again. Over and over.

•••

“It’s gone quiet,” Skarpo said. “You’re interrupting me updating my Friendmonger page,” the Bastard Sun snarled. Skarpo wheeled away.

•••

Restless armies stirred on the Plains of Groghammer of the Nation of Hammergrog in the World of Age of Groghammer Online. Dark forces.

•••

The Revolutionaries felt the walls tremble. Bad mojo. Nuba Nuba Guy was too afraid to dance. The Nigerian Prince comforted him.

•••

Trouble stirred. Peace trembled. Planet iBay would war with the World of Auctionfist. Friendmonger against Spacepage. War within a network.

•••

LC to Grebok: “We’re going to have to start walking. Through all these people’s… Friendmonger spaces. I smell trouble ahead.”

•••

Grebok to LC: “It’s like… fiefdoms. Little countries. Did I use that right? Fiefdom?”

•••

LC to Grebok: “Shit, I dunno. That’s just a, a stupid word. ‘Fiefdom.’ Fief. Chief. Grief. Reef. It’s just… absurd. Lost all meaning to me.”

•••

Grebok to LC: “You sound like Lord of the Lemmings with that rhyming.”

•••

LC to Grebok: “Huh. That’s creepy. This is all creepy.” Grebok nodded in assent.

•••

Together, they shrugged, once more on the same wavelength. For now. Peril was a Band-Aid on all wounds, if temporarily. They walked on.

•••

Sparky fished newly-rude Gunther out of the pile of crap he was rolling in. He caught up with the other two heroes. Even Sparky was worried.

•••

Lord of the Lemmings floated out there in infinispace, watching. It all went asplodey. Depth. Dimension. This place needs a god, he thinks.

•••

Gunther called them all “Jew Robots.” As if that meant anything. Then he showed them his balls. They were green. “Look at ‘em!” he yelled.

•••

New sites: twatter.com, twipper.org, twizzler.net, clitter.net, titter.co.uk, tittybox.com, twatsnotter.com, tweetpenis.xxx, applefritter.us

•••

Brin clutched the Infi-Net chip. Soon, he’d upload GoogolSoft, himself included, onto the net and say bye-bye to this place. It felt super.

•••

LC to Grebok, and Grebok to LC, in simultaneity: “I have a bad feeling about this.” They had no idea.

21.10.2009 Serial Fiction No Comments

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