2765 - pt. 4

So how !@#$ed is !@#$ed?

Well, I'll admit it's seemed like forever since we were outside, but I really do not remember there being a big, tall, stark white marble wall wrapped around the !@#$ing place. I mean, I think we would have noticed on the way in.

And if I had noticed that, going in, I'm pretty !@#$ sure I would have noticed a giant face carved into the wall, looking down at us like it just scraped us off its giant, white shoe.

I'm wondering what this might mean when I take a good look at that scowling face, and see that it's female. And then I realize who it is, and I just about !@#$.

"Holy !@#$," I say: "That's Zalea Zathros."

"It isn't..." Mr. USA says.

"It is. Trust me."

"Are you sure?" the President asks.

"Well, I've shot at her enough times. !@#$, I have shot her enough times. That's her."

"No way," Mr. USA says.

"Yes," the giant face says in a loud, deep voice, the stone moving like flesh: "I am."

"Oh, that's not good," the President says.

"That's..." I start to say it's impossible, but I really should !@#$ing know better: "Let me guess. The Compuconqueror came here, too?"

"He did, yes," the stone head says: "And we welcomed him with open arms for the kind gift he brought us from the future."

"Is that what he told you it was?" I ask: "Wait til he comes back, honey."

"Oh, that is no longer a concern," she says, smirking, and I know exactly what she means by that. Kindness is weakness, here on Alter-Earth.




"So the whole city's alive, and they gave it to you to play with. Great."

"Play?" she smirks: "No. Shepherd. Protect. Occasionally discipline. But I reserve my play for... other things."

"Like what?"

She gives me that nasty smirk, again, and suddenly my head's being used as a TV Set. I see the face of a young man in extreme distress, and from the way he's babbling and moaning, I know it's my "friend" Juan, the Alternaut who's been over here since HONEYCOMB ported him through the dimensional barrier.

The view pulls back, and now I can see his head and shoulders. Further back, and I can see that all he has is head and shoulders. That and a bunch of tubes and pipes leading from it to his organs, which are secured and floating under the surface in a large tank of what I hope is nutrients.

Further back still and I see the nutrient bath is a weird shade of yellowy brown, and there are things floating in it. Brown things.

And then, once we're pulled back far enough that now that I can see the whole tank, I see that people are hanging their bare !@#$es over the side of the tank and !@#$ing into it.

A turd drops onto his head, and he tries to scream through de-diaphragmed lungs that just barely keep him oxygenated. The TV show picks that moment to go off, and I feel very, very sad that I couldn't have kept my promise to myself to just !@#$ing shoot him.

"You look a little pale, (REDACTED)" Mr. USA observes.

"Yeah, let's not !@#$ing get into that, right now," I say, looking up at the white face: "You feeling !@#$ing proud of yourself, you nasty !@#$?"

"Traitors and spies deserve no less," she answers: "You should approve. I am certain you have done worse things to the ones you catch?"

"Not like that I don't. Is that what he does, then?"

"You mean your reflection, here?" she says: "I could spend all day telling you the things that he does, but I think this has gone on long enough. You have intruded within my city. Within me. You have harmed its people and broken its laws. These transgressions will be severely punished."

At that moment, the wall shudders, and a number of nude, white marble statues of Zalea Zathros walk right out of it as though stepping out of water. They step forward and stop in eerie unison, staring at us with that haughty smirk of hers.

Mr. USA just smiles: "It's been a while since I got to let loose on walking statues, lady. I'm not impressed."

As if to answer him, the statues open, just slightly, revealing that they're not hollow, inside. Each one contains a nude, teenage girl, wide-eyed and in pain.

Zalea closes the statues back up again before they have time to scream, and suddenly Mr. USA isn't smiling, anymore.

"Can you shoot your way through an entire city?" the face and the statues all ask, as one: "Can you smash through innocents? There are many, many more where these ones came from. You will have to kill them all to get through me."

"That won't stop me, lady," he says, putting up his fists: "You all made a bad mistake, taking our President. Where I come from, that's an act of war. And if we're at war, then I'll kill every teenager on your planet to win."

The President's jaw just drops to hear him say that. I maintain a poker face, knowing it's bull!@#$, and hoping that's just him stalling her in the hopes that I've got something up my sleeve.

And yes, son, I do. We just have to give it time, apparently.

"You know, I like to say that I know everything," I say, holding up my gun in what could be misconstrued as a peaceful gesture: "But I have to say, I'm a little confused about something."

"Given your mental state, that is not surprising," Zalea says through her legion of press-ganged girls: "I'm detecting at least twenty chemical substances in your bloodstream."

"What can I say? Live hard, ride long, leave a pickled corpse. But let's just clear the air, here?"

"That depends on what you wish to know."

"How about 'Why?'" I ask: "What's the endgame, here? The me from here goes over there, to us, hamstrings my friend, here, and pretends to kill our President? Then brings him back here, running the risk that I'll follow?"

"Those are statements posed as questions. What is your question?"

"Well, it's just that it seems a really complicated scheme just to mess with me. There's dozens of other ways he could have put me out of the way. Why this one?"

The mouth opens, and for a moment I'm about to get my answer, or maybe an insult or two. But then there's a flash of light, and Simon Pure is standing right next to me, his silver suit gleaming with eerie light reflected from another world.

"Thank !@#$ing God you came-" I start to say, but then he scowls and hits me, right in the kisser. As he does, my entire life sails in front of my eyes, and I find myself literally reliving every sad and disappointing moment, stacked atop one another like a poorly-curated exhibit in a museum of personal failure.

As the exhibition unfolds, and I see my many mistakes and shortcomings, I keep coming back to a sad, solemn day, close to the start of the 21st century, when Dr. Yesterday and I, along with a few other strategic talents, saw to the freezing of one Simon Pure. After the fifth time I see him going under, and us locking the cryo-coffin down, I realize what this means.

It means that, while we've been rescuing the President, the nice, happy, but still confused kid I unfroze from his life support has fully come to, and found some things out.

It also means that, rather than being philosophical about it, or understanding that we had no choice, other than killing him in his sleep, he's gotten angry at having lost ten years of his life.

And that means that one of the most powerful beings to ever walk the planet is up, awake, and one temper tantrum away from destroying not only me, the President, and my ally, but possibly the entire world, or more.

In some ways, I almost wish I don't wake up. But when I come to, as I know I eventually have to, the scene has shifted.

There is no longer a white wall. There is no longer a city around  us. There is only bare earth, the President, Mr. USA, Simon, and a white, marble statue of Zalea Zathros who's screaming as she turns every which way but back to what she was.

"You wanted to live without limits?" Simon asks, watching as she splashes on the ground like water, and then rises up into a form that doesn't resemble anything so much as a gelatinous, deep sea creature. She continues to scream and shift, spiraling up, down, and out into a dozen other, less recognizable forms in the space of a few seconds.

All the while she's screaming and in agony. I almost feel sorry for her.

Almost.

"What the !@#$ just happened?" I ask, getting to my feet. I can see the President is white-faced and terrified, and Mr. USA is... well, I think the last time I saw him like that was one of the concentration camps.

"He made the city vanish," the President says: "He waved his hand and it all went away, like... like the tide going out. They had enough to time to scream, but then..."

I look around, and realize he's not talking out of his !@#$. The landscape looks exactly like Neo York City would have looked if you just scooped up all the buildings, filled in the basements and underground structures, and left nothing but the ground. I can still see their version of New Jersey, across the way, so I guess his rage had limits.

This time, anyway.

"You are worthless," Simon hisses, letting her drop to the ground in a rough approximation of her own form. Then the marble goes away and there's just Zalea, there, naked and afraid. She !@#$es herself in pain and fear and goes fetal, her eyes bugged right out of her head, and Simon can't resist kicking her in the !@#$.

"I think that's enough, son," the President says: "We're safe, now."

"Safe," he repeats, mockingly: "You do not want to be talking to me about safe, right now."

"Why not?"

"Ten years," he says, turning around so we can see the anger that's practically running from his eyes like tears: "Ten years. Three months. Ten days. Eleven hours."

"And you look magnificent," I say, smiling and hoping he just kills me quick. But better me than the President, and that's how this is going to end if it escalates.

"I don't know what you mean, son-" the President says, but falls quiet when Simon's suddenly up in his face.

"My name is Simon Pure, sir. I went to sleep in January of 2002. They told me they were going to help me, and I went to sleep believing them. Now I wake up and I find out I was in a metal coffin all those years, locked away like a criminal."

"Not a criminal," Mr. USA jumps in: "Simon, you have to believe me. We did it for your safety."

"I make cities disappear in my sleep. Tell me how my safety was at risk."

He's got nothing, and he knows it. So I say it: "Our safety, Simon. You're a good kid and you mean well, but you couldn't control your powers. We put you under in the hopes that one day we could find a way to make it happen. And, offhand, it looks like it's worked?"

"Yes, it does," he says, looking at his armor: "For now, anyway. This suit gives out in ten hours. That gives me enough time to find a replacement, or find someone who can fix it."

"So there's a plan?" I say: "Great? Why don't we just go back to our world, and then-"

"But maybe you could tell me why you didn't use this before," he says, now up in my face: "This suit was in the museum basement since before I was born. You can't tell me it wasn't on the list of options."

"It was, yes," I admit, seeing no sense in lying to him: "But, like you said, it was a quick fix at best. A day, maybe. And it would have been cruel to give you your life back, only to have it be gone again in less than a day."

"So what were you going to do when the day was up, this time?" Simon presses me: "Put me back to sleep? Put me back in that coffin? Forget about me for another ten years?"

"I was going to move heaven and earth to get you the help you needed," I said: "I have connections I didn't have, back then. I have more options. One of them would work out."

"You hope."

"Hope's all we have, sometimes," the President says: "And-"

"Thank you, Mr. President, I have seen your !@#$ing campaign posters," Simon spits, not bothering to turn around and look at him: "And unless you want to change into something easier to step on, I'd suggest you shut the !@#$ up and let the adults talk for a change."

"Hey!" Mr. USA says, putting himself between Simon and the President: "You will not speak to this man in that fashion, young man. This is the President of the United States. You will show him the respect he is due."

"He's just a man," Simon says: "I am..."

"You are a citizen of the United States of America. You are a young man who is expected to behave in a responsible and respectful manner. And you will respect this man and what he stands for."

Simon turns to look at Mr. USA, who's putting as much steel in his eyes as he can. If I didn't know any better, I'd never know he was !@#$ing terrified, right now.

Not for his life, of course. For the President's. For the world's.

Simon just shakes his head, and then waves a hand. Mr. USA has enough time to try and say something, and then he's gone.

Vanished, like he was never there. Even his footsteps in the bare earth are missing.

The President gasps, and I step forward to protect him, gun raised. Of course, the gun vanishes, too, a second later. Then the rest of my guns as well.

"Appeal to my humanity," he mocks me: "Tell me I have an obligation. Tell me to be grateful."

"How about I beg?" I ask, putting my hands up.

"Don't debase yourself-"

"It's what you want, isn't it?" I ask, getting down on one knee: "You want me to humble myself? To say that I'm sorry for abandoning you? I will."

"Too little, too late."

"And I'll go a step further," I say, just as he's about to wave me out of existence, or worse: "I'll tell you the truth, Simon. You were right. We could have gotten that armor out of storage anytime. We could have woken you up and told you what was going on, and tried to fix things with you being awake.

"But we were scared, Simon. We were terrified. And you know why, right?"

He blinks, and takes a step back, putting his hand down.

"It was January, 2002," I tell him: "There was a fight in Steubenville, Illinois. We weren't there too long. You did the things you can do, and the Hyperboys were locked up in no time. I know you remember that."

"I remember," he admits, and knows what's coming next.

"And then someone in town said something rude to you," I remind him: "He laughed at you because you weren't wearing a costume. He asked if you were the mascot. And I know you laughed it off at the time, but you were hurt. I know you were hurt."

"I was," he says, tearing up a little.

"And that night, while you were asleep, Steubenville disappeared," I tell him, watching his face fall: "The whole !@#$ing town, gone. 5000 people, gone. And not only was it gone, but other than the people who'd been with us that day, no one remembered it had ever been there."

He sits down on his haunches, white-faced and crying.

"That was in your sleep. And I know you didn't mean to do it. You're a good kid, Simon. You mean well. But you did it in your sleep. Unconsciously. And we were scared. We were scared you'd do it again. Or worse."

"I didn't mean to..." he whimpers.

"I know," I say, putting a hand on his shoulder: "And I know you wouldn't mean to do anything else, either. But what if you got angry at someone, and made them vanish? What if you got angry at a country, or a planet? What if someone broke your heart, or was mean to you? Could you really be sure you wouldn't fall asleep and make them disappear, too?"

He shakes his head, but he knows I'm right.

"So we were scared, Simon. And every time we thought about getting you out of there, we had to ask if we were sure that, when we did, we could be sure that whatever we were going to do would work. And even Dr. Yesterday... okay, even his wife couldn't figure out a way to be sure."

"His wife," Simon says, his face suddenly going from sad to angry again: "You don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

He just smiles, and I don't like the look of the smile: "'SPYGOD knows all.'"

"Well, don't believe the hype," I try to joke: "But look, let's get back to our world. I'm going to try and get in touch with Shift, okay? If there's anyone who could help you-"

He backs up, shakes his head, and screams. I try to calm him down but he won't stop screaming.

The world goes white and black, and we-

(Sephiroth - The Clock of Distant Realms. Oblivion)

8/17/11 - Computer City Come Alive

Got the call early yesterday AM, still bleary-eyed and flopping all over the bedroom floor like a sucker-punched spidercrab. A spidercrab filled with enough space beer, amyl nitrate, and ladyboy joyjuice to kill a gaggle of East German woman wrestlers, or at least make them really !@#$ happy for all of three seconds before turning their brains into schnitzel-flavored smoke. It was hizzoner, finally on the phone with me at long last, and I was in no shape to handle the inevitable battle over my unique method of assassin disposal.

But this was, to my surprise, not that phonecall. That phonecall can apparently wait until later. Maybe when the bodycount gets into four digits, or I decide to stop being the biggest backer of the Computer Hell Virus Concern. Or it's an election year and he wants to look all butch.

Anyway. The call's first four words after "SPYGOD" were enough to sober me the !@#$ up better than the biggest tjbang stick I ever tossed in my mouth, propel my newly-sober !@#$ out of the five person katooey meat tangle on the floor, and get me moving to rendezvous with Neo York City's emergency services.

"The buildings are moving."

In any other city, that'd mean an earthquake, or maybe some weird science terrorist !@#$ rolled into town with a weirder plan. Some clown actually tried to kidnap Denver, back in the early 60's, using shrink rays and a legion of tanktreaded robots. Strange Justice settled his hash real !@#$ quick.

But in this town, twenty years after Compuconqueror turned it into the city of five hundred years into the future? It means the city's incredibly-slowed-down thought processes just crunched a digit or two, and it needs to move some or all of itself around in order to move into the next computation.

This is life in Neo York City. There's free housing, electricity, heat, A/C, food, and water for everyone, the public transportation is awesome, and the external defense grid kicks serious !@#$. But every three to five years everyone needs to get the !@#$ out of town for a few days while the city literally rearranges itself, and we have to figure out where everyone's old place has moved to.

A little over 20 years ago, it was New York City. It was crowded and dirty and loud and nasty, filled with crime and urban blight and all the bad things they say about cities. But once it held your heart in its concrete hands, and kissed you with its steel lips, you were a New Yorker forever. Bought and sold.

Then came the Compuconqueror, who was (and still maybe is, or at least will be) some time-traveling !@#$ from the year 400 Billion or something like that. Imagine a man-shaped pile of gears and wires with large clocks for joints, and you're kind of getting the picture. That and some really corny dialogue, which I guess goes to show that, 400,000,000,000+ years in the future, some things never go out of style.

What did he want? Like the old joke goes, "he didn't say." What he did do was release some kind of substance out into the central water supply of the city. And this !@#$, after getting everywhere in the grid, blew out of the toilets and taps and fire sprinklers everywhere, turning every street and block in town into silvery metal imprinted with gold circuits, and sending metal supports up the side of the buildings and houses that sit on them. 

The conversion was both fast and total. One minute we're standing around, complaining about the Yankees. The next the streets and buildings are all sheathed in steel and gold and they're !@#$ moving.  

Fast.

The blessing was that, whatever it'd been turned into, the city was kind. That kick-!@#$ external defense grid must have been looking inward, because it gently grabbed every single living thing inside the city, even birds in the park and stray cats in trash cans, in force fields and sent them outside. A few people died from heart attacks brought on by shock and stress, but as high-tech city-jackings go, it was actually one of the gentlest ever.

(Not that they're too common. See my earlier comment about Denver.)

Our job was to go into the city and find out what had happened, though Dr. Yesterday called it the moment he saw the orbital footage. The city had been turned into a giant Positronic computer, whose circuits were constantly rearranging themselves as it worked on whatever problems its creator had given it. God only knows what that was, as the Compuconqueror had both the mother of all glass jaws and a back door to the future, which he triggered as soon we cornered his weird !@#$.

What to do? Everything in the city was still there, more or less. It was just moving every which way at speeds so insane even the speedsters were getting bloody-nosed headaches trying to watch where they went. But we didn't have a prayer of changing the city back if we couldn't even understand what the !@#$ could effect such a massive conversion in the first place.

Of course, Dr. Yesterday had the bright idea of the hour. He overloaded the computer controls with every single nonsense, impossible equation he could think of. And then, when no one was looking, he had Gertrude come up and put in every crazy thing she couldn't figure out in there, too.

The end result was that, taxed beyond its ability to think, the city's computations slowed down. Immensely. Now, instead of moving at near-light speeds, the buildings were moving only once per hour. And after a few more of the super genius set got done inputting their laundry list of unsolved equations, pet theories, and the occasional mathematical joke, it wasn't even doing that.

Problem solved, we all patted ourselves on the backs and figured out what to do with this weird, super-futuristic pile of !@#$ we'd been handed. There obviously wasn't room to rehouse all the people who'd been kicked out, but none of the surrounding states or cities wanted them. And, strangely enough, most of the people wanted to come back in. Mayor Dinkins was out there with his megaphone and a big crowd every !@#$ day, asking to come back in, and every day the crowd got larger and louder.

So we said uncle, and let everyone back in. They found where their old things were, picked themselves off the ground, and got their lives back as best as they could. It didn't hurt that the city, in spite of being bogged down by massive computational demands, was able to sense that living beings were inside of it, and attended to their needs as best it could. Hence the free food, water, A/C, heat, electricity, and so on.

It was touch and go for a while, and people are still finding "lost" apartments, homes, and businesses, two decades later. But the city pulled together, and before you knew it the town was back in business, only with new rules and a new feeling.

Which is why it's Neo York City, now. Guiliani was the first one to call it that when he ran in 1993. It's stuck like gum on our shoes ever since.

But there are still problems in this paradise. And the chief problem we have is that, ever couple of years, the city gets a little ahead in that big pile of computations we handed it, back in 90-whatever. And when that happens, the city starts twitching, and will soon be moving again.

The first time it happened was back in 95. We had no idea it was coming, and it was not handled very well. People panicked, there were stampedes and riots, and the force fields that had carried everyone off to safety the time before didn't cut in until the very last minute, just before the actual move occurred. I think we lost about 500 people that day, and it's still something of a sore spot amongst the super genius types.

Worse still, once the city stopped moving, it took an act of massive faith to get people to come back. And even then we had a major problem finding everyone's homes and businesses again. Maps had to be redrawn, signs changed, roads repainted. All kinds of messes, big and small.

By the next time, we had everyone's place tagged with a chip, which everyone calls their "drunk beacons" since so many use them to get home after a night at an unfamiliar bar. We also had the warning systems in place, so that when people saw the buildings start to twitch and shift, they knew to contact the authorities and start packing.

Hence the call from Hizzoner this morning, and why I've been downtown with the emergency people all day long, helping to oversee the evacuation. It should all be over in a day or so, and then we can get back to getting back to life as we've made it, here in the somewhat kneecapped city of the future.

All the same, whenever I look out the window, seeing the towers and buildings I remember (and remember them being somewhere else, once upon a time), I can't help but feel uneasy. Whatever that weird robot !@#$ from the future wanted this city for, he got most of what he wanted on that day. And I can't think it was anything good.

Are we living inside a time bomb? If so, when it goes off, will we know it for another shift?

I don't know. All I know for sure is that BeeBee and METALMAID are already up on the Flier, along with anything I don't want getting smashed against the walls when The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. goes near-luminal. And that's all I can do for now.

That and wait.

(SPYGOD is listening to Erotic City (Prince) and staying sober until this whole !@#$ move gets through. Maybe.)