“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again,” Mech grunted. “Time shizz. Think about it too closely, and none of it makes sense.”
“So, what do we do?” Cal asked.
“We don’t think about it,” Mech replied.
Cal considered this for a moment, then shrugged. “Fonk it. Works for me,” he said. He clapped his unevenly sized hands together. “OK, so now that’s taken care of, what do we do about the teeth guys?”
“I’m pleased to report that I have some good news on that front, sir,” said Kevin.
Cal looked up to the ceiling. A few months ago, a sentence such as this one would’ve gotten his hopes up. A few weeks ago, he’d have known enough to try to restrain his excitement until Kevin revealed the inevitably disappointing conclusion to his statement.
Nowadays, he didn’t even have to do that. Any hope that Kevin had gleaned any genuinely useful information about their situation completely failed to materialize.
“Go for it,” Cal said, keen to get whatever half-baked nonsense Kevin had come up with out of the way so they could move on to figuring out an actual plan.
“I’ve successfully connected to this timeline’s version of Headnet, sir,” Kevin said. “It’s remarkably similar to our own in many regards, except the logo’s a sort of pale blue, as opposed to the traditional dark green. It’s quite refreshing, actually. I prefer this version, if I’m completely honest. It just feels more… alive.”
“Is there a point coming in the near future, Kevin?” Cal asked.
“Yes, sir. Now that I have connected successfully, I have acquired a wealth of information about this reality and its inhabitants, and gained full access to historical records detailing what happened after we journeyed back in time. The changes are really rather staggering, sir. Did you know Lady Vajazzle is now the president?”
Cal shifted awkwardly in his chair, feeling the weight of Mech and Loren’s glares on him. “We did hear something to that effect, yes,” he confessed.
“Oh. Well, that rather spoiled that bombshell,” Kevin said, disappointment coloring the edges of his voice. “I’ve also downloaded all the languages missing from your translation chip software. Would you like me to apply the update?”
Cal blinked. “Seriously? You found out all that stuff?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“You’re not going to wait until we tell you to do the update then say, ‘Just my little joke’?”
“No, sir. That would be rather crass,” Kevin pointed out a little reproachfully. “I hardly think now is the right time for frivolity, do you?”
“No. I guess not. Well… OK,” said Cal. “Great. That’s great, Kevin! Good job. Do it. Apply the update.”
He sat back and closed his eyes.
Then he opened them again.
“Wait. Will we still be able to say ‘ass’?”
“One can but hope, sir.”
“OK, great,” Cal said. He closed his eyes again, then immediately opened them once more. “Will it hurt?”
“Oh, no, sir,” said Kevin.
Cal gave a nod of approval, then closed his eyes again and relaxed.
“I’m afraid it’ll do much worse than that.”
“Huh?” said Cal, then a firestorm of data surged through his brain, and the world became a violent surge of ones and zeroes that constricted his throat, tightened his muscles, and turned his central nervous system into quivering strings of marshmallow.
Eleven
“Wha—?"
Cal woke to find himself face-down on something rough and uncomfortable. It squished his cheek into the side of his nose and rubbed uncomfortably against his newly grown ear.
He spent several seconds trying to force his eyes to open, before realizing that they already were, and that he was in a darkness more utter and absolute than he’d ever thought possible.
With a groan, he tried to stand up, only to crack his head on something solid a few inches above him. The shock of it made him pull forward sharply, which resulted in him smashing his chin against the floor.
These two events resulted, in turn, in quite a lot of swearing.
Once he’d gotten that out of his system, Cal raised his head more slowly until it met the object above. His scalp wasn’t perhaps the best part of his body for the job, but he rubbed it against the object, trying to figure out what it was.
Solid. Slightly rough, he reckoned. Quite big.
No. He had no fonking clue.
He tried to roll over onto his back, but there were walls on either side that prevented him moving more than a few inches in either direction.
It was at this point that an image popped into Cal’s head. It was not an image he particularly wanted to have in there, but it was one he was very much stuck with.
It was a coffin. He was inside a coffin.
And, he realized, he was moving. The floor beneath him undulated gently from side to side, as if gliding along a lazy river. Normally, Cal wouldn’t be adverse to the idea of gliding along a lazy river. It was just the ‘in a coffin’ bit that he was less keen on. Also the ‘unable to see if there’s a waterfall ahead’ part.
He thought back to those glorious ‘not lying face down in a coffin’ times and tried to recall what had happened. Kevin had run the update. His whole body had been consumed by something that wasn’t quite pain, but wasn’t a million fonking miles away from it, either. Something that was more than pain, in many ways. It had gone beyond mere agony and into something much deeper and more profound.
Fonking Kevin.
He remembered lots of noise. He remembered movement. Voices. He hadn’t understood them, at first, then had picked up on a few words. Trying to remember what those words had been now made his brain ache, and while a full-blown migraine wouldn’t have been the worst thing to currently be happening to him, it was unlikely to make the general experience any more pleasant. He stopped trying to remember the past and tried instead to figure out his immediate future. At the moment, it wasn’t looking particularly rosy.
“Loren? Mech? Miz? Can you hear me?” he whispered.
His voice echoed faintly inside the coffin. It was the only reply he received.
He tried again, a little louder this time.
“Guys? Hello? Anyone there?”
Nothing.
He clunked his head on the side of the box a few times. “Hey! Anyone out there?” he called. “I’m stuck inside a box! A little help here?”
Nobody answered. The coffin undulated onward.
Great.
After a few more seconds of this, a thought struck Cal and he felt a surge of hope. Maybe this wasn’t a coffin. Maybe it was a tunnel. He’d only felt walls on either side of him, not ahead or behind. Maybe he could crawl through the narrow chamber, Die Hard style, until he found an exit.
The space was too narrow for him to be able to bring his arms up, so he wriggled himself onward into the dark with his chin doing most of the heavy lifting.
Thunk.
“Fonk.”
Not a tunnel.
There was only one thing for it.
“Hey, let me out!” he cried, kicking and thrashing against the sides of the box. “You can’t do this. I have space rights, you know?”
He stopped when he heard the breathing, and felt his heart break into a samba rhythm. It was scratchy and frantic, and coming from inside the coffin.
There was something else in there with him. Something alive. Something puffing and panting like a wounded animal.
“H-hello?” Cal whispered.
The breathing became more hesitant for a moment, before returning to its prior wheeze. Oh, God. What was it? What was in there with…
Cal held his breath. The sound stopped.
“Oh, thank fonk,” he said, exhaling. “It was just me. For a minute there, I thought something was—”
A movement at his side startled him, forcing a sort of terrified yoosh of panic out through both nostrils. It was only when he felt t
he familiar stickiness of a certain green blob as it rolled up onto his lower back that the yoosh of panic became a sob of relief.
“Splurt!” Cal cried. “I am so glad to see you. Or, you know, feel you on my spine. What’s going on? Do you know where we are?”
Splurt rippled and wobbled for several seconds.
“Whoa, easy there, buddy,” Cal said. “One thing at a time.”
The little blob wobbled.
“The teeth guys stormed the Untitled?” Cal said.
Splurt undulated.
“Twenty of them, huh? With freeze rays? Like… actual freeze rays?”
Splurt vibrated.
“That’s kind of cool,” Cal said. “But, you know, in a boo, they suck, kind of way. Then what?”
Splurt flopped from side to side.
“Hey, don’t worry,” Cal soothed. “They had freeze rays. There was nothing you could’ve done. Probably. I mean, I don’t know how they work, or anything, but I’m assuming if you could’ve stopped them, you would have.”
Splurt boinged on Cal’s back.
“Exactly,” said Cal. “Any idea where they’re taking us?”
Splurt’s gyrations made it clear that he didn’t.
Cal sucked air in through his teeth, then wondered if he should be conserving it, and slowly exhaled it all back out again. “Here’s the way I see it. We have two options,” he said. “We can Hulk-smash our way out of this box, fight whatever’s out there, rescue the guys, get back to the Untitled, tell Kevin he’s a fonking idiot and that I hold him personally responsible for this, then make our getaway.”
Splurt rumbled.
“I was getting to the second option, buddy. Patience,” Cal told him. “Or we wait here and see what happens.”
The movements on his back were questioning and uncertain.
“I know, I prefer the first plan, too, but I’m thinking the second option might be the most sensible. We might burst out of here and find out we’re in a river of lava, or thousands of feet in the air, or whatever. Then what do we do? Climb back in? We’ll look like idiots.”
He nodded slowly, convincing himself of his own genius. “But if we wait until someone opens the box, we’ll have the element of surprise.”
Splurt didn’t respond at first, then gave another questioning ripple.
“No, element of surprise,” Cal said. “We discussed this. There’s no such thing as the elephant of surprise.”
Another ripple.
“Yes, I agree, it would be awesome, but it doesn’t exist. Sorry,” Cal said. “So, I say we play it safe, wait until we stop, then be ready to spring up and deal with whatever’s waiting for us. What do you say?”
Splurt wobbled.
“Shizz. You’re right,” Cal whispered. “We have stopped. OK, Splurt, as soon as someone lifts the lid, you grab them, OK?”
Splurt wiggled.
“No, don’t pull them in. There’s no room. There’s barely room in this thing for us.”
Wibble.
“No, not even if you crush them up really small,” Cal said. “Just grab them and hold them while I climb out? OK? OK.”
From beyond the walls of the coffin, he heard the scuff of approaching footsteps.
“Here goes, buddy,” Cal whispered. “Get ready. Three. Two…”
The bottom fell out of the coffin and Cal crunched onto a stone floor that was thick with dust. A moment later, Splurt landed on his back.
“Jesus. They couldn’t have opened the top like normal people?”
He and Splurt both rolled over to find one of the teeth-guys standing above them in an outfit made from sturdy red leather. It held a weapon in its long, slender hands, the muzzle pointing down at Cal.
Splurt gave a shudder.
“Oh,” said Cal. He swallowed. “So, that’s a freeze ray? And here I thought—”
A bolt of blinding white light hit him, and the movements of the teeth-guy reeled into an agitated high-speed blur, before everything around Cal became nothing but cool, wispy whiteness.
Twelve
Quite quickly, the wispy whiteness that had enveloped Cal was joined by a single high-pitched squeal that rattled his teeth in their sockets and made his eyeballs throb.
He tried to move, but he was completely paralyzed and unable to so much as blink. His nose tickled with the beginnings of a sneeze, but it was trapped there, unable to fulfill its destiny and reach its oh-so-satisfying conclusion.
Despite his full-body paralysis and the lack of external stimuli—or external stimuli beyond a sound like the letter E being drawn out forever, at least—Cal’s mind was still wide-awake and functioning perfectly.
OK, not ‘perfectly’ perhaps. That was generous. It had never really worked ‘perfectly.’ But it was working to the usual standard.
At first, Cal considered this to be a good thing. Sure, he might not be able to see anything, hear anything, or move in any way whatsoever, but he was nevertheless pleased that his mind was still active.
Forty seconds later, however, when he’d run out of things to think about, he was feeling less positive about it.
It wasn’t so much the vast empty white space that was bothering him. It was more that droning background hum. That and the sneeze. Probably mostly the sneeze, actually, now that he was focusing on it.
Fonk. The sneeze. That was going to drive him crazy.
He tried to distract himself by playing a game, but there weren’t a lot of games he could play. I Spy was out after ‘Something beginning with W,’ and even then there was no one around to guess, so it had been a lackluster experience at best.
He set his imagination to work, hoping some visualization exercises would take his mind off the sneeze, the hum, and the nagging dread that terrible things were about to be done to him. He imagined himself enjoying a delicious Five Guys burger, complete with an assortment of toppings. Onion. Mushrooms. Mustard, of course. A little relish and…
Fonk.
Now he was hungry, too.
He decided to make use of this free time, and set himself the task of figuring out where he actually was, and what was going on. Splurt had said the gun had been a freeze-ray. So, he’d been shot with a freeze-ray. That was his starting point, from which he’d be able to deduce everything else, he reckoned.
So. Freeze-ray. He didn’t think he was inside a block of ice. That might explain the misty whiteness, but it wouldn’t explain the humming sound or the fact that his body wasn’t responding to any of his commands.
Or would it? If he was completely encased in ice, he wouldn’t be able to move, would he? Or would he? He had no idea. It probably depended on the ice.
He tried waggling his tongue inside his mouth. It didn’t move. He suspected this either proved or disproved something, but couldn’t really work out what.
Wait. Cold. He wasn’t cold. If he was in a block of ice, he’d be cold, wouldn’t he? Even space ice was cold. That’s what made it ice.
So, he was fairly sure he wasn’t inside a block of ice. Not completely sure, but when could you ever be completely sure about anything, he thought?
Which meant… what? The freeze-ray hadn’t frozen him? Or it had frozen him in some other way that didn’t involve plunging temperatures and blocks of ice? Probably one of those, he reasoned, although he had absolutely no idea which one was correct.
Or maybe it wasn’t a freeze-ray at all, and Splurt had simply made a mistake. Maybe it had been just a bog-standard shooting people until they are dead type of gun, and this was Heaven.
Probably not. There were no angels, no Pearly Gates, no giant bearded guy in sandals. It completely sucked.
Hell, then?
He doubted it. Sure, being unable to move while being plagued by an annoying hum and a sneeze-in-waiting that wouldn’t fonk off was bad, but it wasn’t even close to Hell-bad.
Three minutes later, Cal had changed his mind. This was Hell. It had to be. He had been shot and killed, and now he was in space Hell. This was where he
was going to spend the rest of eternity, alone in an empty white space with a sneeze brewing, and the letter E droning endlessly in his ear.
All things considered, he decided he’d prefer the traditional fire and brimstone, even if it meant the occasional spike up the ass. At least a hot spike up the ass was something. Something, he could deal with. Nothing was a whole other imaginary kettle of non-existent fish.
OK, so he knew where he was. That was good. Obviously, it wasn’t great that he had died and gone to Hell, but at least he knew where he was, which meant he could start planning his escape.
Cal looked around. As he couldn’t move any part of his body, including his eyeballs, this amounted to staring straight ahead and focusing his attention on different parts of his peripheral vision. As he did, he mentally cataloged what he saw.
Fonk all.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been hoping for, exactly. A door marked ‘Exit’ would’ve been nice, but he hadn’t been pinning a lot on that one. Besides, this was Hell, so a door marked ‘Exit’ was bound to be a trick, and would almost certainly lead to his situation becoming somehow worse. Much better to go for the door marked, ‘Genital torture,’ or ‘Full of Nazis,’ or whatever, he reckoned.
Sadly, those doors didn’t exist, either. There was nothing. Nothing but white emptiness as far as the eye could see.
Fonking Kevin and his fonking update, Cal thought. It gave him a vague sense of satisfaction, so he thought it again a few times, each time more forcibly than the one before.
The novelty quickly wore off.
He tried I Spy again, but found it unfulfilling.
It was round about this point that, to Cal’s immense relief, his body was flooded with barely comprehensible levels of agony and the whiteness evaporated to reveal a dark cave, illuminated faintly by glowing seams of neon blue in the walls.
One of the toothy nostril guys stood before him, the elongated fingers of both hands pressing firmly against Cal’s head and face. The pain that sizzled Cal’s insides stemmed from the thing’s touch, and Cal’s brain had just pulled itself together enough to tell his mouth to start screaming when the creature backed away and the pain evaporated, leaving behind only the memory of it.
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