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.
Q: State your name, please.
