Tuesday, May 31, 2011

5/31/11 - Brief Notations in the Cold and the Dark

* We have now explored all corners of the Ice Palace. Some of the things we've found defy easy description. Others defy all sane attempts to comprehend them. Therefore, I, in the name in scientific inquiry, have done my best to remain at least marginally drunk at all times. I find it helps keep it all in perspective. It also keeps my underlings from bothering me with anything but extremely important things for fear of being mistaken for a pink elephant and shot at.

* Never ask me about the night of the pink elephants. James Joyce is a bastard who needs to be reanimated just so he can be shot back dead again. That's all I'm saying about that.

* Speaking of being drunk at all times, we are, at long last, rid of the fermented penguin stuff. I made a command decision to flush it all out into the ocean, environmental consequences be damned. We've been getting a steady supply of proper, fine, and upstanding lagers from South Africa and Argentina that were not made by fascists, for fascists, out of the unmentionable parts of the noble penguin.

* The oceanographers have reported a number of killer whales acting, and I quote, "strangely," after we dumped the penguin hooch. But as long as they don't sprout extra heads and start talking in Portuguese, I'm calling this a moral victory.

* On the subject of penguins, the hypnotic stag films we cobbled together seem to have done the trick on our leftover sapient suicidal religious fanatic penguins. Unfortunately, we now have a gaggle of sapient porn-addicted religious fanatic penguins on our hands. We've sent for some disgraced, 80's evangelists to videoconfernce with them and help them over this hurdle. Then we're going to try and remove their explosives really !@#$ slowly. 

* I feel like that one guy with the crazy eyebrows in that awful Dune movie, having a meltdown over success. We won too easily, butchers bill notwithstanding, and we're finding the werewolves and boobytraps too easily. There's got to be something we're overlooking. I'm afraid we won't find it in time.

* The commie pinko from Alternet has actually proven his worth. He's decided to focus on the last group of kids that came out of the replicant tanks, documenting their first steps in a new life. He's trying to get them to understand that, for the last fifteen years, they've been listening to total !@#$ that doesn't do anything except make people want to kill you. I don't know how journalistic this really is, but it beats having him following me around with a camera and me shooting at him when I mistake him for an elephant.

* I haven't walked back into The Chamber, yet. They tell me a lot of questions we've had about ABWEHR's lopsided technological achievements since they moved down here have their answers, in there. For now I'm content to look at what they're finding back there, drink myself silly, and wake up the next day hoping that the bad dreams were hallucinations brought on by too much penguin juice. Except now I don't even have that as an excuse any longer, do I? !@#$.

* The President's still dodging !@#$ back home from our surprise invasion, and getting caught with his pants down for lying about knowing about it. I wish I could say I feel sorry for him. He was as much of a tool about this as the rest of us were. All those years we let this !@#$ go on, just so we could have a slight eye ahead of the evil scientist curve. And all this time...

* I've started and stopped Lady Lightning's eulogy fifty times and have run out of proper paper that doesn't have swastikas all over it. This counts as an emergency. I am authorizing a fact-finding mission to South Africa to get more proper paper. Also some DJs, tranny hookers, and European college kids on spring break in Jo'berg. We'll abduct them at gunpoint if we have to, and have the best coercive rave party this bleak, godforsaken continent has ever seen!

* ... once I get up off the floor.

(SPYGOD is listening World In My Eyes (Depeche Mode, by way of The Cure) and drinking Cerveza Quilmes by the boatload)


Monday, May 30, 2011

5/30/11 SPYGODMAIL - Sex and the Single Uplifted Religious Fanatic Penguin

IT'S SPYGODSCOUT MAIL TIME!!!

Super-Scout Harold Wilikers of Yakima Falls, Washington asks:

Dear SPYGOD, the other day, when you were describing the attack on ABWEHR, I noticed you referred to suicide penguins as being a major key to victory. 
Would you please explain why The COMPANY is enslaving poor animals to use as munitions? Doesn't that go against certain treaties which the USA is currently a signatory too?

Dear Harold:

First of all, I don't give a flying !@#$ what the United States of America is currently a signatory to, or not. We don't play by those UN rules down here in the pit of the real world. I'll ride unicorns on manatees into battle while swinging spotted owls with explosive pellets shoved up their !@#$ if I think it's going to bring us victory, or at least make America's enemies !@#$ their pants and run.

And Lord knows, I have tried so many times to make that work. Just one simple request! But no one can find any unicorns left anywhere in the world. I suspect they're hiding out of justifiable fear. Or marshaling their forces in secret.

But as to the meat of your question, it is a good one. The answer gets back to the notion of Uplifting, which, I'm sorry to say, some of our big bad science outfits tried their hands at back in the 90's.

Do you remember Uplifting, Harold? I understand it's gone out of style, along with Nehru jackets, parachute suits, and politicians who don't have sex scandals. In fact, I hear most kids these days think it's a genre of self help books.

But there was a time when, if you gave a geneticist a couple billion dollars with no strings attached, and a remit to use those dollars to do something absolutely mind-blowing, they would immediately grab some poor stray kitty from the back alley trashcan, dose it with exotic radiation and genetic material, and try to teach it quantum mechanics.

No, this is not a joke. This !@#$ was real. They tried to bring any numbers of poor creatures up to sapience, with results that ran from pathetic to comic, sometimes both. Various evil geniuses had tried their hands at it, back in the day, but usually stuck to primates, probably because it was easier.

And let me tell you, having to fight your way through an army of irradiated Soviet spider monkeys is no fun. Especially when they throw their nuclear poop at you.

But let's be honest, Uplifted apes are pretty boring. They're just like us, only moreso. Eerily moreso. Right down to the penchant for bad suits and porkpie hats.

Once standard, accepted science (that is, science without the tesla coils, mad cackling, and mommy issues) caught up with what those weird-ass pioneers had been up to, the door was thrown open to any and all attempts. They tried housepets, reptiles, fish, birds, anything with a central nervous system big enough to manipulate with the tools they had back then.

Some poor soul in Albuquerque even tried to uplift swarms of bees. The ominous message !@#$ YOU ONE MAN, spelled out in stings on his corpse, may be all that needs to be said about his attempts, and "Do not raise up what you cannot put down," quickly became the big government money people's motto after that.

(I think there's still a few independently wealthy folks out there trying to make talking sharks, but that's their problem. Every once in a while I listen in to their email list and try not to laugh, especially when they try to teach them who not to eat. There's not a lot of those folks still typing with their original hands.)

So take that innocent, wide-eyed pet away from your screaming kids, stuff it into the strange machine you built in your basement, and what do you get? 

Uplifted dogs? Well, they're a little eerie at first. They look at you when you talk to them with this "not quite getting it just yet" look in their eyes, repeat back what you said, and then still don't understand but try it anyway. They're really happy when you're happy, but near-despondent when you're not, even if your mood has nothing to do with what they just did.

But once you get used to having a bipolar servant who's constantly fishing for complements, they have their uses. You will never have a more attentive listener to your stupid, nonsensical bull!@#$ ever. And they'll still bring you the paper without slobbering all over it.

Cats, on the other hand, are borderline useless narcissists. The first phrase they learn is inevitably something like "scratch me, furless being" or "pat my butt." They're shameless about the fact that you don't have enough of their scent on you, and have a literal hissy fit when they smell some other cat's unique perfume on your legs.

And trying to get them to cooperate with each other? Forget it. Dogs will at least try to make nice with one another, once they've got that pecking order thing out of the way, but with cats its constant war.

You see, son, that's the big problem with Uplifting. You can make those animals smarter, and give them the ability to communicate with you, but at the end of the day a talking dog is still just a dog. And that's the reason why Uplifting really went nowhere.

I mean, why did you need to blow half a billion dollars to have a talking bomb sniffing dog when you really only needed it to be able to sniff out cordite and bark at you?

But Penguins? Now that was different. You know how I said that Apes were like us, only moreso?

Penguins were us.

When we uplifted them it was frightening just how much we had in common. Highly social? Check. Reasonably intelligent? Check. Monogamous up to a a point? Check. 

But what really made it interesting was the fact that they believed in God.

Yes, son, you just read that. Penguins believe in God.

Not the same God that you might hit your knees and pray to so that no one finds out about what you and the Reverend's daughter got up to last Sunday after the bake sale, except for SPYGOD (who knows all) but a God, nonetheless. And whether it's because of a racial memory concerning what happened in Antarctica, millions of years ago, or just general spiritual yearning, it is genuine and real.

Sadly, it was also sorely tested by exposure to the internet.

Those stupid, well-meaning, dip!@#$ researchers let those penguins loose on the unfiltered world wide web to better understand the wide variety of human belief. They did so without direct supervision, as they didn't want to hinder their development. And while they were out there, those Penguins' beliefs were challenged and changed, and not always for the better.

Case in point: you remember about a decade ago, when some idiots in a cave in Afghanistan tried to blow up a certain landmark pair of buildings in Neo York, along with the Pentagon and the Capitol? Well, those idiots had friends, and those friends have an internet presence that, try as we might, we cannot completely shut down, compromise, or twist around to our own special needs.

And these penguins, searching for a greater definition of God, talked to these idiots for way too long.

Next thing we know, there's a nasty religious schism going on in the government cold climate species Uplift lab. Penguins are killing each other over religious orthodoxy. And by the time those shocked researchers separated the belligerents out from the ones who were just trying to have a civilized conversation, most of the living are Penguins who think the best way they can repay their Uplifters for the gift of sapience is to die as martyrs for their holy cause.

So you see the dilemma that left them in? If they told the penguins they were  wrong, they'd be interfering with their development. But if they let them continue, they've got suicidal penguins in search of a war.

What do they do? Well, after bouncing the problem around from department to department, they wind up shipping these suicidal sapient penguins over to the Weird War Division, for various armed forces, spookshows, and intelligence companies to make use of.

And since I happened to be going to war in Antarctica, I got the lot of them.

Sadly, they did not all get used up in the initial push. We've been using them as forward spotters as we excavate the Ice Palace, hoping they'd deal with werewolves. But sooner or later we're going to have covered every last inch of the base, and if we don't find any more enemies for them to explode themselves all over, we're going to have a real problem.

Some of them are already trying to leave to indoctrinate their lesser brothers and sisters, out there on the ice. That is not going to end well at all.

So, God help us, we've engineered a plan. This most certainly not our finest hour. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and this definitely counts.

You know the "special" movies you watch in university-level zoology classes, late at night, for a laugh? Well, using a great deal of scientific know-how, we have added hypnotic suggestion to those old, grainy nature films, and have, in fact, made mind-bending stag movies for penguins.

The theory is that if we can get them mindsmashed on pornography, Discovery Channel-style, we can possibly erase the negative social programing. Then we can show them there's other things to live for besides blowing themselves up for the US of A. Like being trained to retrieve nuclear missiles in super-freezing deep water, or infiltrating terrorist websites and feeding them false, but credible information.

Like I said, not our finest hour, but this is what happens when science runs wild and people like SPYGOD have to clean it up. Hypnogogic animal sex films, for America.

(SPYGOD is listening to Weird Science (Oingo Boingo) and having an entire crate of Castle Lager flown in from Jo'Burg, just for him)

Sunday, May 29, 2011

5/29/11 (RANDOLPH SCOTT) Werewolves of Antarctica

Dateline Neuschwabenland. New Swabia, for the non-German speakers out there. Also known as the Eisschloss (Ice Palace) to the seemingly-late terrorist organization called ABWEHR.

I say seemingly-late because, as of ten this morning, we had our first werewolf attack.

Goldenfist and a detachment of COMPANY Agents were searching the western submarine pen when they were set upon by what they tell me was a Mark IV Eisenmann (Iron Man) suit, hidden in one of the bulkheads. It severely wounded three Agents before Goldenfist could use his namesakes on it. After that, the battle was over in six seconds.

The suit was a vintage, made in the heyday of the Wehrmacht, back in 1940 or so. So was its operator. The nonagenarian German soldier had been surgically and biochemically bound to the suit, ages ago, and put into suspended animation. They were then buried alive, and set to activate if certain security protocols weren't followed every 24 hours.

I guess the invasion of the Ice Palace, currently being called Operation NAZISMASH by the mainstream media, disrupted that schedule a bit. I'm told the wonder isn't that we found one, but that we haven't found even more, or what else might be ticking down here.

"We could be sitting on a time bomb, right now," one of the Agents later told me: "If you knew what was good for you, you'd get back to Neo York and stay there, and pray the shockwaves don't reach Manhattan."

Typical right wing establishment antipathy towards progressive reporters, or genuine concern? I haven't figured that out yet. I'm going to give it a few more days before I decide.

But the worry about werewolves is very real, and highly understandable.

After the fall of the Third Reich, in May of 1945, the Nazis continued to be a problem for the occupation. The surviving members of what had become ABWEHR fled into the hills and valleys of what would become Western Germany, and, linking up with the remnants of the German Army that hadn't lost hope, partisans, commandos on deep patrol, state-sponsored sorcerers, and other ubermenschen on the run, they began an insurgent campaign against the occupiers. Based on a plan by Joseph Goebbels, now an ubermensch, himself, they called themselves the werwolfen.

The Werewolves.

At times, the Werewolves were little more than a tactic of irritation. At others, they were deadly serious. Numerous stories have it that, unknown to most outside of certain intelligence and strategic talent circles, the world nearly ended about five times between 1945 and 1950, and only bad luck, a lack of determination, or what some have termed ABWEHR's propensity to use "cack-handed tomfoolerly disguised as a plan" saved us from facing a doomsday scenario.

In case you're wondering, the "cack-handed" comment came from someone who was actually there, at the time. That would be SPYGOD, who, after yesterday's unveiling of where the Fourth Reich was coming from, decided to go up to his new room and get earth-shakingly drunk on the strange alcohol they were fermenting from what might be penguin milk, down here.

At least we hope that's what it's being fermented from. I confess to being afraid to go and look. But since I am point blank refusing to drink it, even out of a sense of journalism, I think it's going to be a moot point.

How many werewolves are we looking at, here? No one's really sure. There might be more Iron Men buried in bulkheads throughout the base. There could be even more terrifying things lurking under the main floor. That time bomb could be a real threat, too. It remains to be seen.

For this reporter's part, it's enough to find a safe corner, somewhere off the main hall, and watch as the troops go back and forth on exploratory sorties, wondering if they're going to come back with a good story, and some fresh bruises to back it up, or not at all.

Randolph Scott, for Alternet, signing off.

(Randolph Scott is listening to War Songs (Gary Numan) and sticking to bottled water, thank you)

Saturday, May 28, 2011

5/28/11 - Welcome to the Ice Palace

World, meet Jurgen.

Jurgen's just turned 15, today. I know that because it's what the timestamp on the tank he was !@#$ out of says. Slooshed out of a tube and onto a cold, concrete floor, a mile below the ice and snow.

15's when they want you, here at the Ice Palace.

If things had been normal, someone would have been waiting for him with a towel. He would have been checked out medically to make sure he was firing on all cylinders and could at least say his name. If he passed that, and didn't have any signs of imperfection, they'd walk him down the green line, and into a waiting room.

Any deviations from normal and he'd be walked down the red line. More on that later.

The green line led to the green room. There he would have been suited up, asked more questions, and introduced to the other boys and girls who'd shared his birthday. 30 in go, provided it was a good batch. Maybe as low as five, judging from the records.

Especially early in the program, when they hadn't quite gotten the balances right. Who'd have thought, given how many kids Joseph and Magda had?

There'd have been a meal fit for kings, and careful monitoring to make sure they could handle solid food. That used to be a problem, apparently. If anyone had problems they were quietly escorted off to "treatment," down the red line.,

After the meal, Jurgen and his new friends would have been told that all they'd been learning in that tank, over the last fifteen years, was to prepare them for their true role in the world. They'd be soldiers in the new army, sent to make the impure world burn before their feet, so that a new age could begin in the ruins.

Cue the Leni Riefenstahl film fest, including the ones most people never see. Triumph des Willens. Zu die Welt Erobern. Warum wir die Juden Zerstören.

And, of course, Das Schwarze Wunder. Probably the most hideous movie you'll ever see in your lifetime, provided you know what they don't show. The experiments in the camps. The live trials on volunteers. The steady stream of failures.

What happens to the human body when its genetic makeup changes so fast that it just can't handle the chemical sturm und drang.

But oh no. Not for these special kids. They get to see the glamorous end result. The perfect men and women of the future. The ones who will be leading the next thousand years, and may actually be alive to see its end.

The super soldiers of the Fourth Reich, whom these special kids may someday join, but will for now be protecting with all their strength, all their heart, and all their mind.

If today had been like any other day, the kids would have been paraded before one of their aging leaders. One of the last few supernazis that ABWEHR had produced, either back during the Night of the Black Pill, or more recently, before the !@#$ that knew how to make them died a messy, well-deserved, but long-overdue death. They would have been welcomed into the fold, and congratulated, and told that their service to the Reich required sacrifice, order, and unyielding, unflinching loyalty.

Then he would have picked one of the new kids at random, and ordered the others to kill him or her, right there, on the spot, to prove it.

I don't know what makes me more sick: the fact that someone thought this up, or the fact that, in each tape I've seen thus far, the kids don't disappoint. They just go to it like a flock of birds pecking the weakest link to death. Fingers, feet, and cutlery, they don't stop until the poor kid's a smear.

And the worst thing is that the kids who got fingered for the loyalty test don't even fight back. The urge to obey is that strong. They die proud and smiling for the Fourth Reich.

Thusly blooded, Jurgen and company would be cleaned up, and assigned to something. Probably soldier training. Maybe technical training. Maybe they'd be put to work mining impossible things out of The Chamber, down in the back, so as to use the science of the gods in their quest to take over the world.

And it would be a good life, while it lasted. The Nazis knew how to party. They worked their people hard and then let them play hard. Rough sports, sexual liberties you couldn't imagine, a flourishing of certain, state-approved arts... all available down here, in the Ice Palace. 

But the plans to take over the world never came. Not before the last big battle they had with the outside world, and not after, either. So the chances were good they'd train and work and sacrifice for the big day, but that it wouldn't come. And they'd just wait, and wait, and eventually the inevitable would happen.

They'd start to fall apart.

I've seen this before in full scale replicant operations. The human body can't just be decanted for however many years and then started up. They have to be active and fully functioning in those years, or else cell death starts to accelerate a lot faster than it should.

So they're in bottles until they're 15? They get maybe five good years past that, and then they start to age like cheese left out in the sun. They grow wrinkled and gray in days.

Some just don't wake up.

They're the lucky ones. The others, they get taken down the red line, along with the kids who didn't turn out quite right or couldn't handle solid food. They're given some comfort, but ultimately stripped naked and tossed down a chute marked Wiederverwertung

Recycling.

They might make beer out of fermented penguins, here at the South Pole, but everything else has come from what they had to work with. And they had a lot of genetic material lying around.

"Sometimes pigs will eat their farmers just as the farmers will eat their pigs." I think that's a German expression, but I could be wrong. You hear a lot of stupid !@#$ when you parachute into someone else's country and try to blend in, and after a while it all runs together.

Today, not so stupid.

That's what we just stopped, down here. I had no idea things were this bad. We'd heard rumors, of course, but we could never get any Harolds in here, and the Harolds they turned were too unstable to tell us much under questioning. Now we know why.

World, meet Jurgen. Jurgen, meet Randolph Scott. He's snapping photographs of the operation and, to his credit, has not yet been violently sick. This both impresses and worries me, but we'll see how he handles the rest of the place. What we found. What we saw.

When we got to Burgdorf and Kietel they were eating and !@#$ the last remnants of the last batch. The ones who would have been getting Jurgen out of the tank and gently checking him for webbed fingers or a club foot, or reflexes just a touch out of sync with Aryan perfection. All on the floor for the master race, taking it in the neck or the backside with a last, dim and patriotic smile.


The Fourth Reich, endlessly eating itself while waiting for the final call to end the world for a dead madman.

Welcome to the real world, Jurgen. I wish there was more we could do for you, now. You've got five years to live free, if we can get the programming out of your head. And then, well, maybe we'll see what some American know-how can do. You never know.

Right now I don't feel so optimistic. I just feel sick and angry and wish there was someone I could hit who actually deserved it. But all I've got are dead supernazis and these poor brainsmashed kids, and the proper booze the Alternet guy brought was used up hours ago.

Welcome to the real world indeed.

(SPYGOD is listening to Elemental (Tears for Fears) and stuck with fermented penguins, again)

Friday, May 27, 2011

5/27/11 - The Last Time This Happened

I hate reporters. Always have. They're either trying to crawl up my ass with a pen and give me reacharound or trying to crucify me with a typewriter.

And let me tell you, son, typewriters make damn lousy nails. You try building a garden shed with one, sometime.

So why am I letting this left wing smartmouth come down here at Taxpayers expense, to see things he maybe shouldn't, and see us in a way that might actually embolden America's enemies? Is it just because he caught me colder than the wind down here?  Is it because he had the balls to stand up to me but was somewhat awkwardly polite about it?

If I'm being honest, and I really !@#$# hate being honest, it's because I remember the last time I did something like this I completely !@#$ it up. And I'd like another chance to do it right, this time.

Saigon. 1960-whatebverthe!@#$ it was. I was there on an above board mission, lending some visibility to the fact that America was taking a keen interest in Vietnam, and was not wanting the Chinese or Soviets to lend any of their strategic talents to the Vietcong. The deal was "if you don't, we won't, but if you do, you bet your ass we will, too."

Detente, in other words.

I was there with some of those Strategic Talents, making a milk run for the boys. Just USO bull!@#$, really. Watch Mr. USA pick up a helicopter. Watch Lady Liberty shake it for the cameras. Time was, I'd have preferred to see the reverse, but me and Mr. USA aren't trading Hanukkah cards anymore.

So there I am, chewing tjbang sticks like they're going out of style and wondering where I can get something silky for the night, and here comes this tall, black guy with a camera and this look in his eye like he's going to eat me for breakfast.

Ben Graines. New York Times. Special to Saigon. Not taking "that's classified" or "none of your business, son" as answers. Tries to wear me down for a half hour, outside the Happy Time Lady Drink Eat Bar, with question after question, and then follows me down the street another fifteen after that.

The real joke here is that, for once in that stinking sorry excuse of a war, I wasn't engaged in some secret operation. I really was just minding shop for the capes, and making sure neither of them got assassinated while humoring the troops. But he was convinced, rightly, that SPYGOD meant spying was going on, somewhere.

The real pisser was that this was back in The COMPANY's heyday. This was when our flying cars actually looked cool. This was when we had secret agent man tech toys out the wazoo and were engaged in epic, running battles with the Soviets on a weekly basis.

This was when SQUASH and ABWEHR were legitimate, world-threatening menaces, and GORGON was still shaking its way down the block on training wheels with its dad two steps behind the back tire.

So I could have done a whole lot of things to this uppity fellow, who I later learned was assigned to Vietnam because his bosses at the NYT thought he was too obnoxious and pro-Vietcong, even for the Washington press pool. I could have turned invisible, or had him chasing holograms down back alleys. I could have taken his voice away with a tainted drink or arranged to have him shipped to Australia in a burlap sack full of Burmese testicle-eating millipedes.

But instead I let him harangue me. I let him accuse me of being an imperialist pig, trying to interfere with another country's self-will. I even let him accuse me of war crimes, even though I hadn't really done any since Korea. And that was a whole different kettle of !@#$.

Do you know what? I actually laughed. I offered to buy him a drink, and actually acted hurt when he refused. I told him to meet me at the Happy Time Lady the next day, 8 in the AM sharp, and I'd talk to him some more. 

He agreed, and by the end of the day, I'd made a few calls, and gotten him assigned to me, personally. I saw to it he could go along for the ride. See everything I did. Be there when certain shades of !@#$ hit the helicopter blade.

And you know why I did it? Because he pissed me off with his pro-commie bull!@#$, and I wanted to watch him cry.

I wanted him to see the horror. I wanted him to be up to his knees in someone's steaming pieces and trying to write copy to call home. I wanted him to see why we were going to be fighting, and what the real stakes were. Especially if the People's Protectors got involved.

I wanted him to walk into the jungle with me, like so many other men had done before, and leave so many pieces of himself in there that when he came back out again, he would not be the same person ever again.

Obviously, he didn't get a lot of copy out on a daily basis. He filed maybe three big stories a month while his colleagues were averaging one a day. His bosses must have been !@#$ kittens through their navels. And what they got often read like he'd been writing science fiction while done up on major amounts of opium.

But what he wrote was all true. Every word. And it destroyed him.

He went home after Saigon fell. I never saw him again, but I wasn't the only one who could say that. He quit his job, wandered somewhere out into America, and was never heard from again. Word has it he died in the 80's, sometime, but Ben Graines died somewhere in the jungles, watching The COMPANY work.

Every day I looked at his face and saw a little less of the man I'd met that day, years earlier, and more of a twisted reflection of myself. I knew it was over when he shucked the camera and kept the pad and paper. But one day I started talking and he started finishing my sentences, perfectly, and I knew that I had done an evil thing.

I don't regret a lot of the people I kill. I regret Ben Graines. I should have just punched him out and left him sitting outside the Saloon with a sign reading "collaborator" around his neck. It would have been kinder.

So this time, here and now, I'm going to do it right. I'm going to let this left wing !@#$ from that website follow after me and see why we've done this, here and now. I'm going to answer his questions without trying to push him down the rabbit hole without a parachute.

And I am not going to turn him into me. Not again.

(SPYGOD is listening to Watching me Fall (the Cure) and still drinking fermented penguins)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

5/26/11 - SPYGODCHAT - How to Not Kill Reporters with Your God Powers

MODGOD: Okay, mikes are set. Sir, if you'll just sit here, I think this has the best background.

SPYGOD: Dear God, is it that time again? !@#$ me running. I'd rather wrestle rabid jackals naked than do another one of these post-battle things.


MODGOD: You okay to go through with this, sir?

SPYGOD: Am I okay? I just tabulated the butcher's bill for our side, son. I'm gonna be writing letters to the bereaved for the next six months at this rate. And I am not in any mood to put up with any !@#$ from FOX News, again. Not about that anyway.

MODGOD: I'll make sure they follow the rules, sir. But it would be good to remember that we have to do this as a chat session so you won't go stark raving ape!@#$ and kill reporters with your bare hands...

SPYGOD: ... and that looks really bad in front of appropriations committees.

MODGOD: Super duper bad, sir.

SPYGOD: Okay. I've drunk enough of this weird fermented penguin beer we found in the commissary to be able to handle this in a forthright and mature manner without shooting the satellite hookup. Let's do this !@#$, son.

MODGOD: Okay, we're about to go live from Antarctica. Everyone looking good. Now you all remember the rules. We don't want a repeat of the last time this happened, okay? I'm looking at you, Geri.

GERI: I assure you that I will not be making the same mistake my colleague, did, sir. Ex-colleague, actually.

DICK: Ex-everything, way I hear it.

CHARLES: No, he's still ticking away. Just don't unplug him.

SPYGOD: Darn straight, son. Don't forget I can kill you all by pointing my finger in your direction and thinking "100 ton weight falls on Porky Pig's noggin."

(5 seconds of silence)

RANDOLPH: I'm here. Did I miss anything?

MODGOD: And we're live from Antarctica, where The COMPANY, along with a number of strategic talents, under command of SPYGOD, has just dealt a mortal blow to the super-terrorist organization known as ABWEHR. This was the organization that began as the last gasp of the Third Reich, when a group of Hitler's generals, surrounded by Allied forces at the end of war in Europe, took primitive enhancement drugs and managed to hold our forces off long enough for some of them to escape. They have been a worldwide menace ever since, turning up like bad pennies every decade or so, but today it would seem that their back has been broken for once and for all. SPYGOD, how does it feel to have smashed the Fourth Reich?

(3 seconds of silence)

SPYGOD: It feels !@#$ good, son. I look across the ice and snow and there isn't a square inch that isn't the final resting place of some supernazi son of a bitch that won't be bothering the freedom loving world, anymore.

MODGOD: Okay, we'll open up to questions--

SPYGOD: Several supernazi sons of bitches, actually. After we let the suicide penguins on them it got hard to tell who was who. But I did make sure the big names got tagged.

DICK: SPYGOD, Dick Brix with ABC news. I look behind you and see all the devastation, and what I think are bodies being put into stretchers or what might be mobile incineration cannons, and I can't help but be happy that the South Pole is Nazi free. But can you tell me how it all went down, sir?

SPYGOD: That's !@#$ classified information, son. And before you go trying to suck my !@#$ from a few thousand miles away, I want you to know that we lost a lot of good people here, today, making sure the South Pole was de-Nazified. This was no school picnic. This was war, and people died. Not just the enemy. Show some !@#$ respect you little worm.

CHARLES: SPYGOD, sir, this Charles Pendergast from CBS. Now, I know you can't give a lot of details away, but can you at least confirm for us that we may have lost some strategic talents, today? Our sources say that Lady Lightning was killed early in the fighting, and that Flyboy was... I think the word I heard was "fractionated?"

SPYGOD: That's the nice word. I told him to stay the !@#$ away from the micromines. He did not listen to me, nor to his section commander. Now the good news is that he seems to still be alive, by some strange miracle of God, man, or science. But I think he's going to be the poster boy for doing what SPYGOD tells you from here on out.

CHARLES: What about Lady Lightning, sir?

SPYGOD: You heard correctly, son. She went down fighting one of the big names, all by her lonesome. I told her to wait for backup but she was so... so !@#$ gung ho. And I use that term with respect and precision, given that she was, like her father, a Marine. She followed him into the heaven of warriors lost on the battlefield, today, and did her country proud. Next!

GERI: Geri Strutter, FOX News. Sir, I understand that the President is, and I quote, 'very pleased that this combat operation succeeded as well as it did.' He is not, however, giving us a lot of details as to his role in putting this together. Could you give us a timeline of how this raid came about?

SPYGOD: If he can't give you one, I can't give you one. But I will say that we were very happy that the President's people were able to process the information we gathered in the time necessary to pull a raid like this out of our !@#$ with 24 hours notice.

GERI: 24 hours notice?

SPYGOD: Yes, Geri. This was extremely time sensitive. We had--

RANDOLPH: SPYGOD, sorry to interrupt, but I can't let this go on.

SPYGOD: Excuse me?

RANDOLPH: Sir, I'm Randolph Scott with Alternet. I understand that you're probably doing your best to cover up for certain uncomfortable facts, sir. But we have sources within the White House who inform us that the President is, and I quote, "rip !@#$" about not having been informed that this raid was taking place. No one in the Heptagon knew, no one in Congress knew, and the President only found out this morning when he received a photo on his blackberry of what appears to be Oberkommando Alfred Jodl with the words "!@#$ Hitler" written in urine in the snow next to what's left of his head.

MODGOD: Uh, is there a question there, Randolph?

RANDOLPH: Yes, why are you not being straight about the President not knowing this was happening? And why is the President saying that he did know in front of the cameras?

SPYGOD: Are you calling the President of the United States of America a liar, son?

RANDOLPH: I don't know. Either he's telling the truth, or my sources are. And if my sources are telling the truth, then both he and you are lying. I'd just like to know what the truth is, here, sir. 

(5 seconds silence)

GERI: Oh god, no. Please don't kill him

SPYGOD: Well, I bet you just feel special, Randolph. Okay, you win.

DICK: What? Sir, can I ask a-

SPYGOD: Get these bootlicking pieces of !@#$ out of here. Drop them all and leave Randolph on the line.

MODGOD: Okay, sir, it's done.

SPYGOD: We're still live, right?

MODGOD: We are, yes.

SPYGOD: Alright, you win. We lied. The President lied, though I don't blame him. He had no idea we were doing this, today. As far as he knew, we were going after GORGON. And that's because GORGON's next on the list, but we decided to trip them up in a lie, and actually go after ABWEHR, instead. Partly because we needed to do some interior security, and partly because it's been sticking in my craw for most of the last century that we let a bunch of Nazi vermin escape from Berlin at the end of the war because we were flying so high on our own "we killed Hitler" fumes that we just got soft and let it happen. And by God I have had enough of that !@#$.

RANDOLPH: So the President lied to--

SPYGOD: You go ask the President why he lied. I can't answer for him. I can only answer for us. We did it to maintain cover. Not very well, apparently. And now you know. And now America knows. This is how the game is played, sometimes. This is your taxpayer dollars at work.

RANDOLPH: And now you kill me with your god powers.

SPYGOD: No, now I send a transport to your studio to pick you up. I want you down here in Antarctica as soon as you can get here. You're getting first crack at seeing what they were doing.

RANDOLPH: What? Sir, are you saying--

SPYGOD: I can't promise you total and complete access, because there's things in here that no one needs to know about, yet. Hell, there's things in here I didn't want to know about. But someone needs to America's eyes and ears on why we did this. Today that's you, because you had the balls to tell me I was full of !@#$.

RANDOLPH: Should I bring anything?

SPYGOD: Warm clothing. And proper booze. This fermented penguin !@#$ is making me sick.

MODGOD: And that's a wrap! Sir, I think you have a phone call from the President.

SPYGOD: !@#$ it. Tell him I'm busy getting drunk.

(SPYGOD is listening to Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore (Pet Shop Boys) and drinking... ew...)

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

5/25/11 - OPERATION NAZISMASH

* Wait a damn minute. That cannot be the alarm ringing. How did I actually get to sleep last night?
* Note to self, showering Chateau Adolf before a fight is not a good idea. I smell worse than the person I woke up next to. Who was that masked man?
* Morning briefing, thankfully brief. Everyone knows what they're doing, when, and why. I'm going to be conducting from the UFO, which I have rechristened Lady Gilda. No one needs any explanation, surely.
* Gilda !@#$ Radner, you mental midgets. Were you asleep in the Seventies?
* Jesus Christ. We are doing this. We are doing this.
* Does me good to see so many capes lined up by Lady Gilda. They all have the look in their eyes. The look that they're ready to fight this fight. Ready to do what needs doing. Ready to give it their all.
* What the !@#$ is wrong with this UFO? Why is it not moving? We got everyone on board and we're all just waiting for me and I do not like holding it up because of faulty stolen Nazi equipment! Oh, Lady Gilda, how could you let me down?
* Parking brake. Figures. !@#$ Nazi engineers.
* Fleet is away. One hour to Antarctica. Bastards will not even smell us coming.
* No, we are not there, yet. Sit the !@#$ down.
* Should have brought more booze. Not enough to properly share.
* Oh, wait, I forgot I picked up more on the way to Neo York the other day. Boy was that convenience store clerk unhappy.
* Okay, no more booze. Who'd have thought Corporal Flag's grandson was such a lightweight?
* Lady Gilda, you are fast and silent, and filled with wonderful things, but you do not have a coffee machine. This a critical oversight in light of the fact that it takes you a little over an hour to make it from Neo York to the South Pole. Obviously the people (a term I'm using very loosely, here) who designed your interiors were not thinking of comfort.
* No bathrooms, either? Jesus, why did I not notice this, before? Okay, we're gonna !@#$ in the snow, ladies and gentlemen. Call it a warm up.
* Neuschwabenland is in sight. The inside of Lady Gilda's lighting up like a Hanukkah Bush. I figure we have about five minutes before they realize we're sneaking into their defenses on a UFO that's been missing for a decade and start firing.
* We are through and firing. The shield generators are going down like back alley hookers when the sailors come to town.
* And we're down! Out! Out you bastards! Shoot anything that doesn't like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, or Chevrolet!
* Aw man, lost one already. Not the way I wanted to start this.
* See a Nazi, shoot a Nazi. See a Nazi, shoot a Nazi.
* What the hell was that? Oh, right, that was the plague missiles. Good thing we're inoculated. Too bad they're not. 
* Yeah, shove this, Krebs. I see you, but not anymore.  You enjoy the singing smallpox, you bastard?
* What was her name again? Darn it. Ought to remember her name.
* Oh yes, that's my boys and girls, going hand-to-hand with the Luftwaffe. I love to see the professionals at work. Just watch out for the drones.
* Darn drones. Need to fix the programming.
* Sgt. Lightning's daughter. Lady Lightning. !@#$. I owed her dad better than this. I owed them all better.
* Okay, they've gotten their reserves up. Time for Plan P. P as in Penguins. Everyone run for cover!
* I love the smell of suicide penguins first thing in the morning. Smells like dead supernazi.
* Where the hell is that brain cannon? And get up the brown note generators! I want the remnants on the ground !@#$ themselves because Odin isn't happy with them, anymore!
*(No offense meant to the real Odin, of course. Just a figure of speech.)
* Okay, now that doesn't smell like dead supernazi, anymore. That just smells like !@#$. Turn the generators off, please.
*Word from inside the base. We have secured the perimeter. Burgdorf and Keitel holed up in the central hall but we wore them down, one bullet at a time. Jodl's scratched out here. That just leaves Hewel, and I suspect I know where he went.
* Looks like I owe Atlantis after all. Scratch one U-boat. Scratch Hewel. Emperor Thurl says he's bringing me his head but can't make any promises about the rest. I guess his pets are hungry. Or he is.
* I finally get a chance to piss in the snow. I write "!@#$ Hitler" next to what's left of Jodl and take a picture to send home. It's my way of letting the President know what I've done. Gotta love not being able to be fired.
* Dead supernazis everywhere, and not a lot of us even scratched. We'll bury our honored dead in a better place than this. But for now there's cheering and happiness, maybe stunned relief. I'll let them have that, for now. They've earned it. We've earned it.
* Oh no, they didn't turn off the brown note. !@#$

(SPYGOD is listening to Headhunter (Front 242, Empyrion Mix) and trying not to drink the yellow snow)

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

5/22 - 24/11 - NAZISMASH - Sturm Und Drag

The last three days have been kind of !@#$ busy, so I've had to take a break from posting updates. On behalf of the Public Relations wing of The COMPANY, I'd like to profusely apologize for this oversight.

I'd also like to reiterate the contents of my COMPANY-mandated policy from earlier today, in regards to what I tried to do to the Public Relations wing with the gyro-jet pistol and a bottle of Moen when they attempted, quite rightly, to remind me of my ambassadorial duties to the American Taxpayer. I guess I do sometimes get a little carried away, but...

Oh !@#$ it. Excuse me for a moment.

(Later)

Okay, now that we've settled the bet on whether the escape pods work from this high up or not, I can get back to business. You can rest assured that the PR flacks who survive the sudden reentry will be duly promoted to something more befitting their excellent organizational and personal skills.

I'm thinking live target practice, myself, but that might be a stretch. They can carry !@#$ around the world to help us sell breakfast cereal and action figures, but I doubt they can carry a cardboard target on their back through live fire without messing their silk underpants. Call it a hunch.

But I don't have time to worry about disgruntled, possibly former, and possibly deceased COMPANY members. NAZISMASH is in full effect as of right !@#$ now.

The last three days we've been preparing, and it shows. I managed to get that Supernazi UFO out of Lake Mead, mostly because I didn't forget to leave the shield generator on when I left, all those years ago. I hate to think what shape the poor thing would be in if it'd had all that water on board for all that time.

(Then again, it might have worked fine. Like I said, before, the tech in this thing is way beyond what those ABWEHR people are capable of. Who knows how badly some plain old H2O would really affect it, no matter how rancid the waters of Lake Mead might be?)

But it's a good thing it's working so well, because it's going to form one of the many backbones of my three part plan. We've got a small group in their stolen UFO, using their own technology to get past their defenses so we can screw them up. Then we've got two more groups coming in after that, one after the other, to pulverize what's left.

We've got everything, here, assembling on the Flier.

We've got Nth generation attack drones that make what they're using in Pakistan look like paper airplanes. We've got semi-sentient mine clouds that slide out of missiles and attach themselves to non-friendly targets, and then go boom after a certain number has attached. We've got holographic projectors that'll convince just about anything made by man or god that an attack wave is mile away from where they actually are, right down to the shadows on the ground.

And that's just the stuff we can cop to in public. We've got brilliant missiles, sentient short-lived plagues, repurposed slaughterbots, brown note generators, and brain cannons that make people think their gods are talking to them and are not happy with their !@#$.

We've got COMPANY agents in jet packs, ready to go hand-to-hand with airplanes. We've got robot bomb penguins ready to throw themselves at ground troops. We've even got Aquamen standing by in case they try to bug out in one of those rotting old U-Boats they have, but hopefully it won't come down to that.

]Bribing Atlantis is kind of tiresome.

I've also got every spare superhero I could get my hands on that still owes me or The COMPANY a big favor. Only a few are fliers, so they'll probably be in the third group, doing mop up. I don't want any of them catching singing smallpox, now, do I?

The rest are gonna be in the UFO with me making up the first wave, and then jumping down into the white to stomp some Nazi ass after we blow the defensive grid. And let me tell you, these are some very enthusiastic people, here. Some of them got to participate the last time we threw down with ABWEHR, but the rest are younger folks who always hear us oldtimers going on about World War II, and wish they could have been there, just so they could have the satisfaction of putting boot to fascist ass and then have a drink afterwards.

I always tell them they should just shut the !@#$ up, because war is hell, and they do not want to have been back there, back then. But on a day like this, I'm just going to let them have their illusions. The smart ones will be having them shattered in less than 12 hours.

The others I can't do anything about. That's why Mr. USA is not along for the ride, but we'll talk more on that sad subject some other time.

Today I want to talk about the satisfaction that comes from reviewing my troops, time after time, and finding them good. I want to revel in this moment, and remember every second of how good it feels to sashay down the Flier in my best Chinese silk gown, looking at these glorious people who are, may the gods help them, now under my command.

I want to remember for all time pouring flutes of Chateau Adolf to every red blooded American man and woman and other I've got standing at attention, and telling them to scream "!@#$ Hitler" at the top of their lungs before imbibing. 

This is going to be awesome. The US Government, the President, the Heptagon... none of them have any idea what we're doing, here, today. They'll read about it tomorrow and wonder if it was so wise to let me have this much latitude, but know that they can't complain about the rights of a bunch of dead, defeated Supernazi scum.

No one ever complains about that, do they?

And I want so badly to take hold of every television in the 50 states and scream "!@#$ yeah, America. This drag queen bastard who can't die is going to go fight and win the last battle of World War II, just for you. So you take your Don't Ask, Don't Tell and shove it someplace dark, warm, and stinky. Because I killed Hitler, and now I'm going to kill his generals, too, so you can take a long suck off my tattooed bang stick. Last days of Disco, baby!"

But then they'd know we were coming. ABWEHR watches TV, too, after all. So I'll save the crowing for the inevitable state dinner at the White House, when a cowed President gives me a medal he hopes I choke on, and I expose myself in front of the rose bushes. Because I can.

Because I won.


The Sun's setting off the port side. I take a swig of Adolf and piss over the side, listening carefully for the sounds of cars crashing.

!@#$ yeah, America. !@#$ yeah.

(SPYGOD is listening to Heads Will Roll (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and drinking the sweet nectar of impending victory)

Saturday, May 21, 2011

5/21/11 SPYGODMAIL - Stealing Vehicles for America

Even in extremis, it's SPYGOD SCOUT MAIL TIME!

2nd Class Scout Winifred Reed of Dublin, Kentucky, asks:

Dear SPYGOD
I saw in your last report from the field that you actually stole a car from an American citizen at gunpoint. I think that's super cool, but is it actually legal? And what Action Badges do I need to have in order to qualify for that awesome ability?
Also, I think my hamster is heterosexual. Please advise.
 
Dear Winifred. 
 
First off, forget about the hamster. I was just joking about the need for more out and proud housepets. Sometimes SPYGOD is allowed to talk complete !@#$ in his fan mail. It is part of the lengthy and hyper-ultra-secret employment contract I fill out every year in the belly of the Heptagon. But I do apologize for any confusion.
 
As for stealing people's vehicles at gunpoint, during emergencies, at taxpayers' expense, that is another one of those perks of the job. All emergency and law enforcement are allowed to commandeer vehicles in a legitimate emergency. And sometimes we're a little wiggly about what constitutes a proper emergency. Especially when we're hung over in Las Cruces and the Flier is not picking up our calls.
 
Of course, by the time I got halfway across the state in that commandeered camaro, I remembered that I'd put The COMPANY on total radio silence after dealing with that little internal matter. So of course the Flier wasn't going to come around and pick me up at the Las Cruces Burger King. They were probably cruising around Neo York and wondering where the heck I was.
 
Probably had a big stack of paperwork for me to fill out to authorize the viking funeral of our unfortunate GORGON mole, too, and lord knows I was in no real hurry to get back and deal with that !@#$. But, on the other hand, the owner of the car I creatively repurposed thought Sammy Hagar was the end all, be all of late 20th century rock and roll, and, having been in the commie-fighting business in the 80's, I overdosed on that fellow a long time ago.
 
And I can't pick up satellite radio in my head when I'm this badly hung over, either.
 
So I decided to drive my new ride over to Las Vegas, instead, and see about commandeering another vehicle. Not because I wanted to rent a limo for the ride home, even though they have the best kind there and it would have been a fun relaxing time to have driven into Neo York in a super stretch neon pink jacuzzi limo with foam shooters, inflatable pink flamingos tied to the back bumper, and a hot tub full of the sexiest Sin City Katooeys your government's money can buy. 
 
(And not because had an urge to gamble, or recreate that one, glorious weekend in which Hunter S. Thompson, Elvis Presley, Ben Franklin, and I actually blew up a casino for America)
 
But because I finally, after many handfuls of painkillers to deal with the bastard of a hangover I had, remembered where I parked that ABWEHR flying saucer, all those years ago.
 
Yes, the supernazis have UFO technology. They have had it since the 60's, it would seem, because that's about when we started seeing them. or not seeing them as the case was.
 
It was sometime after they started making encroachments into South America and before they hooked up with the Rood Broederbond in South Africa, if the intel was right. And of course that's always subject to debate, as sometimes intelligence is a massive contradiction in terms.
 
But when your agents keep telling you that the ABWEHR is showing up out of nowhere, and your planes are being shot down by an invisible aircraft that seem to be capable of silent running, hovering, hairpin turns, and supersonic speeds, you don't have a lot of options. Either the aircraft's otherworldly and invisible or the supernazis are, which is something I'd rather not contemplate without a really big damn drink in my hand.
 
A big damn drink the size of a tanker truck. With a pink umbrella to match.
 
So how do supernazis on the run get their hands on alien technology? That's another excellent question, son. Given that would-be alien conquerers show up at Outland and offer to make deals to would-be collaborators, it's entirely conceivable they made a few tentative deals and got some free samples of their would-be alien overlords' technology. No doubt it was old model and somewhat defanged, but a UFO is still a UFO.
 
We found ways to deal with them during the 90s. They give off weird nuclear emissions that are eminently trackable by certain kinds of air-to-air missiles. That and they made the same mistake most invisible aircraft owners make in putting all the tech into their camoflague and none into the armor plating, which made scaring it off pretty easy. 
 
But every time the missiles made them reverse their buttocks and fly for home, and we never actually scratched it. We stopped their missions, but never denied the high tech to the enemy. And none of us ever got inside one.
 
Not until the day of the World Serpent, anyway.
 
The World Serpent, otherwise known as Jormungandr, was one of the Nazi doomsday weapons that they didn't have the resources for back in '45, and spent decades putting together. They used that invisible UFO to make secret bases all over the world, filled with technical gibberty-flibberty that they probably didn't understand, either, but looked really darn dangerous on paper.
 
Then came the year they decided to tell the rest of the world that they had demands, and if we didn't follow them to the letter we'd be sitting on a blackened cinder formerly known as Earth. We could line up for the ass-kissing at 5 in the AM, sharpish, thank you.
 
Just to prove they were serious, they sank Catanduanes, in the Philippines, and laughed at their own evil. That's what tipped the response from "ho hum, another nutjob with a doomsday machine" to "kill the nazi bastards," in case you were wondering.
Sometime during the fighting, my jet pack was failing, and I needed to spash down and quick. But the Antarctic is no place to go for a swim at any time of year, and my suit had enough holes to shame swiss cheese. So I made the ultimate hail mary and tried to, you guessed it, commandeer an enemy vehicle. I was heading for one of their jetpack riders, but slammed into something large and invisible instead.

Guess what that was?

Once I fought my way inside, I learned a thing or two. One was that ABWEHR obviously did not make this thing, but stole it. The outside of the craft, and some of its systems, were way beyond anything I'd ever seen, ever, and I have seen some amazing !@#$ in my lifetime, let me tell you. But the rest of it looked like someone had gutted a U-Boat and put all the accouterments, controls, and furniture into the crew compartments. 

Which makes perfect sense, of course, but the retro engineering was a little sloppy and counter-intuitive. I was lucky to get away from that battle without crashing into anything else. And when I tried to go back into the fight, the UFO seemingly had other ideas, and headed straight for America.

I was going to take it to Area 51 for study but, partway there, I heard that we'd won and the World Serpent was destroyed. So I got totally mindblasted instead, thanks to my emergency stash of TEOTWAWKI pharmaceuticals. Partly to help me mourn the dead of the brave people of the Philippines, and partly because this is what one does while flying solo in a hard to control UFO after stomping Nazi ass.
 
Thus somewhat brain addled, I landed the UFO on what I thought was the base in question, but was actually a large body of water not too far from Las Vegas.

Yes, that's right, son. An invisible supernazi UFO has been sitting at the bottom of Lake Mead for over a decade. And if we're going to go stomp Nazi ass yet again in less than a week, I am, by God, going to do it with one of their own vehicles. 

And the best thing is that, unlike taxpayer cars, no one gives a flying red !@#$ if we take it, wreck it, and hit something squirming and radioactive on the way back home.

(SPYGOD is listening to Fantastic Voyage (Coolio) and drinking Ruby Mountain Bristlecone Brown Porter)

Friday, May 20, 2011

5/20/11 - Pour My Brains Down the Sink, I've Got Junk in My Trunk

Ever have one of those days when you wake up half-naked in the bathroom of the local McDonalds with little paper umbrellas in your hair, a paper hat over your raging, drunk-hard johnson, and someone's phone number scrawled across your forehead in a sharpie, and no idea who it was, or how you got there?

That was this morning. Last night I got so hammered on well-deserved, post-internal cleaning margaritas that I'm surprised I can even walk, much less ponder the fine details upon which the fate of the free world rests.

Case in point, how many days to NAZISMASH, now? I asked the entire lobby at the fine eating establishment whose gents' I woke up in, but no one had a darn idea what I was talking about. By the time I realized that this was super duper way above top secret stuff I was yammering about, and I was therefore duty bound to shoot my own mouth off, I was halfway down the street to inquire at the Burger King, and realizing my guns were both empty, which made my own attempts at harshly policing my actions surreal. And impotent.

Bits and pieces of yesterday started coming back. The sad first post-wetwork margarita. The commiseration from fellow super spies who, knowing better, don't ask me who or why, and just order me another. The favor of ordering another for them. The vicious circle caused by commiseration, bought rounds, and limitless government-granted platinum cards.

When did we play pin the tail on the bartender? When did someone invent the rules for strip beer pong? When did the 6-D Devil Dogs show up and, not realizing they were in the wrong bar, accuse us all of being as fruity as a banana tree?

When did I empty both those lovely, meditation-worthy Desert Eagles into their leather-clad asses and send them crying home for mommy?

I am not certain of these answers, or any answers at all. But I know that I am hung over and broken-brained, out of ammo, and needing a lift. And for some damn dumb reason, the Flier is not answering the phone I commandeered at this lovely Burger King.

I may have to thumb a ride back to Neo York if this continues. Not as shameful as the time I had to pretend to be a nun hooker to get from Vietnam to Cambodia, that one time, but I still look damn good in a black habit. Especially when I pull out my two babies and threaten to empty them into the driver if he won't let me have his camaro for national security purposes.

First rule of SPYGOD: always have a backup plan you know nothing about, but can assemble from random found objects and at least one deadly weapon at a moment's notice. The life you save may be the entire world's.

(SPYGOD is listening to !@#$ you I'm Drunk (???) and enjoying a Power Blender Beer Margarita)

Thursday, May 19, 2011

5/19/11 - The 50 Caliber Retirement Plan

It's cold up here, on top of the Flier. Freezing, even. You wouldn't know we're cruising above Las Cruces, New Mexico for the frost on my suit.

I figure we're cruising along at 45 miles an hour, 1500 feet up, judging from how the pistols feel in my hand. Nice and cool and slim, just how I like them for this kind of work.

Israel might be lousy neighbors, worse landlords, and be the Ecstasy capitol of the world, but they do some very good things. I especially like their taste in handguns. Whoever would have thought of sticking a 50 caliber bullet in an automatic pistol?

Gods bless IMI. They're too big to juggle or trick shoot with, and slipping one down the back of your pants makes you look like a gangster, but when you need maximum stopping power, or a large floating cloud where someone's noggin used to be, the Desert Eagle AE is your handgun of choice.

I remember the first time I got one of these babies, back in the 80's. The Gunsmith handed me over a pair and told me to sleep with them, that night, arms crossed over my chest right over left, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. He told me that the riddle of the gun is a lot like the riddle of Osiris, who lived so he could die and died so he could live. 

Once I understood the riddle of the gun, he said, every bullet in the world would become my friend.

I have never understood the Gunsmith's riddle. And I think his messy shotgun suicide at age 67 after losing the farm at a craps table in Atlantic City kind of gives the lie to his whole zen gunman shtick. But I still like to meditate on those thoughts with these guns in my hands.

Crossed over my chest, leaning over the port side of the Flier, I feel like they're talking to me. They've got something of a limited vocabulary, of course, but all you need to know about some things in this world can best be expressed with a big, loud bang.

One loud bang on the podium the other day, when I told my people we were going after GORGON. One loud bang this morning when one of my trustier assistants came to tell me that they'd intercepted a lot of chatter between us and a known GORGON operative. One more loud bang when I learned who was sending the messages, and heard what he was typing.

That's why we're up here, the three of us. I'm looking at my watch, looking at the ground, and judging our speed. I'm listening as COMPANY Agent Bradley Munger (37, single, apparent double-dealing snake) is telling his paymasters at a certain bad science outfit all the nasty plans he thinks we're putting into place in five days.

But I'm also thinking of Pharaohs, bullets, and margaritas. That and the craziness that was Cold War Soviet brain research.

Another reason I like Israel is because, back when they were serious players in the Cold War, they were the ones who warned us about the Nebylitsin machine. I guess some of their people had been victimized by it. It's bad enough when they wait until you're dead to sic it on your brainmeats, but apparently some of their Mossad agents had been given the N while they were still alive.

Not a great way to go, and I've seen a lot of them.

That's Vladimir Dmitrievich Nebylitsin, one of the guiding lights of Soviet 60's neuroscience. Brain functions reseacher extraordinaire. Discoverer of Dynamicism. Factor Analysis pioneer.

Mad !@#$ scientist with a penchant for wiring people's heads up like a Christmas tree for fun, profit, and science.

The Nebylitsin machine was a nasty thing that fit in a large, black suitcase. They tied you down and opened it up, so you knew what was coming. Then they rammed electrical leads into your ears and nose, clipped some onto your tongue and cheeks, and put metal Clockwork Orange clips on your eyes. When they turned it on, it electrically leeched every sense memory you ever had in your entire life out of your brain over the course of an hour or so, recording it into magnetic tape.

They say your life flashes before you when you die? Imagine it running backwards out of you, too fast to really see, with all senses strobing into overdrive. Some people who had the process interrupted at some point described it as having your brains scrambled by lightning bolts, and said it was the most painful thing they'd ever been through.

They never fully recovered. Most of them are incapable of forming new long term memories. The rest are little better than vegetables, occasionally shouting "No!" and then losing control of their bowels.

The worst thing is that you can't even scream. The pain is just that disorienting.

Unfortunately, death is no barrier. The machine will work on dead people, too. In fact, it was originally designed to drag the memories out of dead geniuses so the state could continue to benefit from their knowledge after their weak, proletariat bodies finally broke down. Using it on live folks was mostly just done as a punishment weapon, or dealing with possible spies. That and fun.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Cremate the body or at least destroy the brain. But if you don't have the time or inclination to do either, there's one really simple trick that makes the N machine just not work at all.

Shoot their eyes out.

Yes, it's true. We favor our optics above most other senses, and the brain tends to agree. People can deal with deafness or anosmia, but you strike them blind and most of them think their lives aren't worth a plugged nickel. That's our lizard brains telling us it's time to go sit on an iceberg and let the polar bears eat us before the tribe suffers.

It also makes the N machine not work. Which is why, when you're dealing with spies, you shoot them in each eye either pre or post-mortem. It not only scrambles their brains all to !@#$, making scientific or mystical necromancy almost impossible, but makes it totally impossible for someone with one of those devices to get a darn thing out of them.

Which is why we call it the N-xit, or, in my telling, the 50 Caliber Retirement Plan.

Charon asked for two oboli before ferrying the dead across the river, so the Greeks buried their loved ones with a coin over both eyes, or at least under the tongue, to pay his toll. Here at The COMPANY, we put steel-jacketed bullets through their noggin, and tell the Ferryman they're adjusted for inflation.

Three seconds, now. Bradley's almost done typing. I'm leaning further forward. At this angle, at this speed, from the way he sits, facing the window, I should have no trouble putting one in each socket with a shot from each of these lovely guns.

And then, that done, I will air surf down to Black River, which is well known amongst American intelligence personnel to have the best Margaritas in the whole of Arizona. It's often customary to come here and have a drink whenever you have to deal with someone in this fashion.

If Bradley'd been more on the ball, and aware of his surroundings, he might have realized something was up. But he's typing "what do I do now?" and I'm falling and aiming to provide him the answer.

You can die, !@#$ face. And tell Charon I said to feel free to use you as fish bait.

(SPYGOD is listening to Welcome to Planet Mother!@#$ (White Zombie) and drinking the best Margarita he's had in years)

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

5/18/11 ABWEHR - The Flight of the U-Men

I bet you're wondering where all these scorched bags of dog !@#$ came from. That's a good question. A better question is why I'm putting them on the side of the balcony, right now, and loading this pistol with frangible, flammable bullets.

But I'd rather talk about something else for the moment. It's six days away from NAZISMASH, and since you're all invited along, I'd like to talk about the enemy for a moment or two.

Let's talk about ABWEHR, you and me.

Let me start out with the obvious question: does that name sound familiar? If so, give yourself a gold star for either being a grade-A student of World War II, or one of the few people who actually sat through that movie where the guy from Mission Impossible tried to beat me to killing Hitler.

There was an Abwehr before there was an ABWEHR, you see. The original was a joke that the triumphant parties in World War I allowed the Germans to have in the place of any kind of real espionage body. Sort of like the Self Defense Force that Japan's had since the occupation ended, which is great for getting giant monsters out of Tokyo, but would have been in big !@#$ trouble if the North Koreans or the Chinese had gotten uppity.

The joke's in the name. Abwehr means "defense," and that's pretty much all they did. They watched,  they listened, they took polite but meticulous notes. And they did get some decent operations off the ground, but Hitler and his cronies kept giving them the runaround.

Of course, it's hard to cry foul when most of your people are planning on killing your very own dictator. That and a tea party gone wrong pretty much brought the whole thing down around its operatives' spit-polished boots in '44, and the war went on its merry way without them.

Jump ahead to the end of that war. Hitler's in little pieces, thanks to yours truly. His subordinates are hiding in a bunker in Berlin with one of Der Fuhrer's body doubles trying to keep up appearances. It isn't working too well because the body double in question, the only one still left alive, is the worst of the bunch and even more off his head than Hitler was towards the end. And believe you me, son, that is saying something.

So the sad little remnants of Hitler's genocidal knitting circle realize they need to come up with a plan. The best one they have is to keep the Allies at bay long enough for them to activate some of the crazier things that Nazi science came up with. There's at least one doomsday weapon they can throw the switch on, and maybe buy them some time to negotiate or press the advantage, but it's going to take time to get working.

But that's the big !@#$ problem right there. They have no time left. The Soviets are less than 8 miles from them. I'm even closer, though, admittedly, I was busy getting a lot of well-deserved payback. The more upright heroes we had on our side for that conflict aren't too far behind me.

So it's a race between us and the Commies to see who can collect the largest numbers of Nazi ass for the propaganda shorts. No matter who wins, the Nazis lose. You gotta love competitions like that.

Faced with that, one of those people in that bunker comes up with a plan. His name is Wilhelm Ganz, and he's been working with the crazy scientists since before the war started, using every scientific and mystical breakthrough they could find to manufacture superheroes. He's not a scientist, of course, just a functionary and a go-between, but the creation of the Ubermenschen's as much his doing as anyone else's.

I know you've read about those Ubermenschen, the U-Men. Those terrible and beautiful soldiers did the Fatherland proud, early on. Ask the Russians if you don't believe me. Some of their veterans still remember what it was like to see human gods picking up Soviet tanks and throwing them at each other.

But the Battle for Britain and the fighting in Africa and the Middle East did away with a lot of those supernazis. And since D-Day we've been leaving those U-Men in bloody heaps alongside the road, and now they don't have a whole lot left. They don't have a lot of test subjects, either, or conscripts willing to risk death, mutation, or worse in order to take the little, black pills that could make a god out of a man.

Not a whole lot, except for the Nazis holed up in the bunker.

What choice do these Generals and Commanders have? They go ahead with the crazycake that Ganz is selling. They take blood tests and determine who's best suited to try the treatment, which Ganz just happened to have brought along in bulk.

Most wash out. Some try and die, messily. You really don't want to know what happened to the Hitler body double, either.

But the ten men and women who survive the Night of the Black Pill, as ABWEHR still calls it, become as gods in mortal form. They suit up and go out into Berlin, there to become the last line of defense against the Soviets. And they swear that they are willing to die to give time to the ones who are going to stay behind and get the Doomsday Clock working.

You know what happens, next. That's why you aren't speaking German and sending your friends and neighbors off to prison for telling bad jokes. But those new U-Men who survive their tussle with the People's Protectors flee Berlin and go to ground with the werewolves, hoping to enact the scorched earth policy that they couldn't quite get working in time. Ganz escapes with them, and turns up like a bad penny throughout most of the next few decades.

But the supernazis? They're the real stars of this show. They consider their first, failed mission to be a point of honor, and call themselves "defense." ABWEHR. Sometimes it's an acronym, and sometimes it's not, but whatever way you want to bend the name it spells !@#$

!@#$ in South America when they hook up with ODESSA and try taking over a few banana republics in the name of Adolf.

!@#$ in South Africa when they make inroads with the really scary elements in the Apartheid government and start trying to manufacture superhumans.

!@#$ in Antarctica when they get that !@#$ base up and running and use it as a base of operations for their stupid supernazi take over the world plan malarkey.

!@#$ in the Middle East when they make happy tree friends with various terrorist organizations and their supporting countries to try and finish what they started in World War II, only with Israel this time.

!@#$ all over the world, throughout most of the 20th century, until, after a few key battles towards its end, after they throw everything they have into one last, massive doomsday plan, their back gets broken by just about every superspy organization, superhuman, and even a few supervillains who just say no to Nazi !@#$.

As of this moment, they're a sad and sorry remnant of a time best forgotten. They lost the ability to make black pills when Ganz died in a horrible autoerotic accident in Thailand. They lost their oldest leaders in the last battle of the doomsday plan. They lost their money, most of their armory, heck they don't even have that silly UFO they used to travel around in, anymore.

(I personally stole it, got drunk, and crashed it somewhere out West once the worst of the fighting was over. Not sure where I deep-sixed it, anymore. I'll have to look into that sometime this week, I think.)

That's not to say that ABWEHR is not dangerous. That's not to say there's no reason to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't put a single foot outside their Ice Palace, down yonder in Penguin Town. That's not to say they couldn't be a problem again if certain things went their way.

But they're a broken and sorry bunch of ex-players who couldn't get enough people together to make a good football team at this point. So when I throw the weight of The COMPANY at them, six days from now, I think it'll be a mercy killing more than anything.

And you know how merciful I am. Ask the last bunch of nutbags I introduced to the air stairs, just this morning. Neo York's finest sanitation engineers are outside right now, burning me in effigy, and in my mercy I'm not organizing a piss-kill.

But they're going to have a whole new perspective on flaming bags of dog !@#$ in a minute or two, here.

(SPYGOD is listening to The Red Queen (Funker Vogt) and drinking Chateau Adolf off his latest "executive assistant")

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

5/17/11 New Bangsticks and Panties

It's 5:30:23 in the AM when I finally get home from Afghanistan. I crash into Neo York in something flashy I cobbled together from what little was left of the dealer's room in Outland, kiss the handsome young fellow I brought over on a special needs workers visa goodbye, at least for now, and take a much needed shower in Chateau Adolf.

Metalmaid does not seem happy to see me. I'm guessing her circuits are still a little sore after the night of the television. I'll find some way to make it up to her, though. Maybe another duster attachment that turns into a monofilament wire whip. Or a chartreuse shotgun disguised as a vacuum cleaner. 

Something deadly yet sexy, as befits a somewhat-reformed slaughterbot turned domestic engineer. Only the best for my staff!

That reminds me of the meeting I have with The COMPANY in about, oh, fifteen minutes ago. I throw on my suit and abseil into the Flyer as it churns on by for about the tenth time. I don't think the crew's too happy with my lack of punctuality, but that's why I pay them the big bucks.

They're even less happier with my lack of aim, but thankfully no one was standing in front of that porthole. What's a little busted Plexiglas between friends? Not a !@#$ thing.

The meeting's one of those thrown-together things I only assemble if there's some big decision we have to make, or that I've made for everyone already and want to go through the motions with some level of decorum. I've found that drunk 3 in the AM mandatory conference calls are not very helpful in this regard, and lead to lingering resentment. And no one wants that.

At the same time, not everyone is there. You know what I said about the Harolds in our midst? We don't know who they all are, but we know enough to make some educated guesses. And the longer we're in here, the longer they're going to wonder what the heck we're up and why they didn't get an invite.

So I make it short and sweet. Smashing the lectern with the butt of my sidearm sets the right tone.

What I say is "Here's the news, kids. From now on, The COMPANY is no longer in the business of reacting. We are no longer going to just sit back and deal with problems as they crop up, or as we uncover them. We are going to uncover problems 24/7, including things we may have inadvertently let go down the memoryhole, and deal with them right the !@#$ yesterday."

I continue "No more GORGON. No more HONEYCOMB. No more ABWEHR. No more Legion of whatever the heck they're calling themselves this week to avoid a lawsuit. We tell our Harolds to get ready to move on something big, and then we use every piece of info they've ever given us to bring these !@#$s down hard. No remnants, no splinter groups, no werewolves. No doomsday devices or scorched Earth !@#$. All over in a month or less."

Of course, that gets everyone talking. But now is not the time for crosstalk, and a few shots fired into the air makes them shut the !@#$ up. It always does.

(That's why the insides of the Flier are everything-proof. Usually.)

I tell the incredulous that this is my word and my word is law. We're returning to the crazy-ass super spy cowboy ninja spaceman hi-jinks that defined our role in the world back in the 1960s. No more of this post-modern post-cold war realpolitik nonsense that has us sitting on our hands calculating thousands versus billions and drinking ourselves to early graves from stress and guilt.

From now on we get drunk and mindsmashed in celebration, not regret.

I assure them that everyone in the room is now part of a company within The COMPANY that gets to deal with this.Unlimited budgets. Superscience. Personnel they didn't know we even had. Resources they never even knew existed.

First things first, we take down GORGON next week, just to show it can be done. I'd rather it was tomorrow, but everyone's got some catching up to do.

That's it. I'm done. Anyone wants out, they can put their resignations on my desk and go down the hall for a mindwipe. Everyone else, read the emails that are sitting in the new accounts I've just had beamed into your heads.

It's a new day, kids. Rise and shine.

About an hour later, I'm duly informed that three of my former top people are now mild-mannered insurance salesmen in Parma, Ohio, who are hiding terrible and kinky secrets from their long-suffering spouses. Everyone else is along for the ride, at least for now, but we'll see how many I can really count on, especially when the inevitable leaks come through and GORGON starts to !@#$# itself.

Good thing I was lying. We're after ABWEHR first. When in doubt, kick super-nazi ass first. They've had it coming the longest.

I down three bottles of Chateau Adolf and piss off the back observation deck of the Flier, wondering if I can still kill people from this far up. I only aim for the cars with the "Where's the Birth Certificate" bumper stickers, really.

It's a new day, indeed. Bright and sunny. Everything's going to be fine.

(SPYGOD is listening to The Man (The Motorhomes) and drinking a whole wreath of Kolsch by himself)

Monday, May 16, 2011

5/16/11 (ARACHNIDS) Travel, Communication, Entertainment

(CHAT BEGINS)

Dosha Josh Enters

Mikhail G Enters

Dosha: Should we start? I think it might just be you and me.

Mikhail: I say we wait. I think Gavril is coming. Possibly Francois also.

Dosha: Like that gaand ke dhakan contributes anything but Gallic racism.

Mikhail: Is not such a bad man, for oslayob.

Dosha: I thought they were more into sheep?

Mikhail: No, my friend. That is Scotch.

Sir George enters: 

Sir George: Actually, that's the Welsh you're thinking of, old chap. And it's "Scots." Scotch is what you put in your mouth to get the taste of Russian prison out of it.

Dosha: And you would know this because...?

Mikhail: LMAO!

Sir George: Oh sod off.

Francois H enters:

Francois: I see we have been engaged in the usual bashing of Direction Noir?

Mikhail: No, my friend. We are only bashing you. And this is because we care.

Gavril B enters:

Gavril: I see I have missed nothing.

Jomo K enters:

Jomo: Ha! I see I have won the bet with JJ. I have beaten him here.

Dosha: Oh dear me. No one told you that he makes that bet with all the new people? I am afraid the bhen chod has fooled you, Jomo.

Mikhail: And he never makes it to these gatherings. He is as bad as Mister 9.

Jomo: That tibura! I'll teach him not to mess with BUSH.

Gavril: BUSH, you had to call it? Perfect. Now we just need an intelligence group called BEITSIM and we'll have a real fun time.

Sir George: If we could get to the point of this meeting? Thank you.

Mikhail: The point would be Outland, yes? And how many of you have discovered that your comrades were found in compromising positions in the only hourly hotel in Shindand?

Dosha: This being just before it disappeared off the map, of course.

Francois: That would be all of us, my friend. And we should not forget this is all due to one man!

Jomo: You mean that dirty, goat-abusing kumandizi SPYGOD, am I correct?

Mikhail: Well, let us not be too swift to condemn, comrades. You must admit that this year's, how you say, festivities? They were going to be very bad for us.

Sir George: Which was exactly why we had agents there, Mikhail. To see what they were up to and counteract it. This is the exact model that we have been following since before the last World War, and it has been serving us very well.

Francois: Indeed. That impetuous fool was there to observe, only, as we were. In fact I remember him dealing rather harshly with someone who wanted to do the exact same thing he just did not five years ago.

Gavril: I remember. That someone was one of mine, in fact. We still haven't been able to extract that shoe from her tahat

Jomo: And he had the audacity to make fun of my far-reaching plan to deal with GORGON once and for all.

Dosha: That plan was chod bhangra, my friend. He was doing you a favor...

Jomo: Unatombwa na farasi wewe malaya!

Dosha: ... and I for one applaud the randi ke beej. I only wish he'd given our respective agencies some advance warning, not to mention gotten our agents out of the way.

Mikhail: Well, he did. Just not far enough, apparently. Who could have known the entire town would have been blown into dust?

Sir George: He should have. That's careless bombcraft on his part otherwise.

Gavril: Are we sure the town was destroyed, though? The GEOINT we're getting is inconclusive. I think the satellites are being blocked.

Francois: But by what? I would have you know the platforms are of French manufacture. They simply cannot fail!

Dosha: *cough* Maginot Line. Twice.

Francois: Pakistan. Continuously.

Gavril: Look, think about this. How much hardware did they have protecting the mamzer place? Who's to say some of it didn't survive the blast and is now pointing straight up at your eyes, Francois? Can they handle that much chaff?

Francois: Of course!

Mikhail: Then why, my friend, could you not see into Outland, itself?

Francois: Well, that was different, you see. I will have to look at the technical specifications to determine the exact reason why, but there is a reason.

Dosha: Yes, your platform is failing. But perhaps if you move it a little South, so that it's directly over the supposedly missing city?

Sir George: Whatever are you trying to say, Dosha. Does the DIA know something?

Dosha: Doesn't MI-10?

Jomo: I wish you wouldn't talk over me! I need to know what you do if we're to make this mission succeed!

Mikhail: There is no mission here, my friend. Just men who like to talk with other men.

Gavril: And we all know what we call those sorts of chatrooms, Mikhail. But I take Dosha's meaning. I have just had some of our people see if they can get into the platform and move it over Shindand.

Francois: What! How dare you! I won't stand for the Invisible Shield just hacking into our platforms!

Gavril: That's nothing. We hacked into Iran last week and planted some very interesting pictures in someone's hard drive. I wonder how their nuclear program will do when the head researcher's stoned for pederasty?

Sir George: That's hardly a capital crime there, old chap. Should have planted pro-Israeli material instead.

Gavril: Ah, see? There we are. Shindand still stands. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for people standing on the north side of town and wondering what the explosion was. I'm throwing the feed up on a secure site for you all to see.

Francois: I must protest this! C'est des conneries!

Dosha: So is your understanding of how your platforms work. Perhaps you should read the technical manual a little more? I hear the pictures are quite astounding, but anatomically impossible.

Francois H Leaves

Dosha: Kukarchod.

Sir George: Alright then, and I see from your feed that our agents seem fine. It looks like they're still tied up and immobile though.

Mikhail: And who is that man with the videocamera in the room?

Jomo: And why are they all wearing pointed paper hats?

Mikhail: LMAO! Oh that SPYGOD. This is his way of sending us message.

Gavril: Where is that one-eyed sociopath hiding, anyway?

Dosha: Look around the town. He gives off a rather unique electromagnetic signature. It's part of his being a God.

Sir George: Aha! You do know something more than you're telling. What's the DIA hiding this time?

Dosha: Ask the NSI. It happened in Paharpur, not New Delhi.

Sir George: Oh, go ahead. Blame the Banglas. 

Jomo: Ah, I think I see the walking monster. He's... oh my goodness, what is he doing?

Mikhail: If I have to be explaining that to you, Jomo, you should not be here talking with men.

Jomo: Unafirwa! 

Dosha: No, but that strapping young lad under him certainly is...

Jomo K leaves

Sir George: And then there were only the sane remaining?

Dosha: Speak for yourself, cha cha chod.

Gavril: He'll do it without prodding, you know.

Mikhail: Comrades, not that I am trying to change the subject, but have you noticed that he seems to be out of his usual rhythm? Is he perhaps having some kind of stroke?

Dosha: And do you make a regular study of his bedroom habits, Mikhail?

Mikhail: Is always useful to know!

Sir George: Oh dear, I think he's right. And I think it's a repeated pattern.

Gavril: Morse code. I'm translating it now.

Mikhail: Well? What is he saying?

Gavril: Oh that dafuk barosh ben zona makat zayin!

Sir George: He knows we're watching, doesn't he?

Dosha: Of course he does. That kala lund knows everything.

Mikhail: So what is he saying?

Gavril: He says "Consider this notice that the rules have changed. From now on we play it my way. Love, SPYGOD."

Sir George: Well of all the bloody cheek!

Gavril: "PS I can hear everything you're typing."

Mikhail G leaves

Sir George leaves

Gavril: Well, there's another perfectly good chatroom down the tubes.

Dosha: Not to mention the end of Outland, and our usual way of doing business.

Gavril: Tragic.

Dosha: Exciting, actually. What if he's right?

Gavril: Are you willing to risk everything on the whim of a sex-crazed, immortal spy chief who spends most of his days drunk, stoned, or screwed up on things we don't even have names for?

Dosha: Why not? We're used to dealing with imperfect Gods, here. What's holding you back?

Gavril: Better Gods.

Gavril B leaves.

Dosha: Okay, SPYGOD, you're hearing this? Then let us be straight with one another. You have my support for now, but do not let me down. You know the stakes better than anyone. Don't screw it up, friend. Just don't.

Dosha Josh Leaves

Jose Julia enters

Jose: Am I late again? Chinga le!

(The Arachnids are listening to Computer World (Kraftwerk) and drinking many fine international beers, wines, and spirits)