by Eirik Gumeny
“Don’t break it, Thor,” scolded Dr. Arahami. “I can still use it for something else later.”
“Then you should’ve said something earlier.”
“You shouldn’t be throwing shit around.”
“That’s what you brought me for!”
Dr. Arahami glared at Thor, defeated by the thunder god’s logic and feeling incredibly ashamed about it.
“Scientists, am I right?” said the gorilla, sidling up to Thor and placing a giant hand on his back.
“Seriously,” agreed the former Norse god. “Hey, you guys have a bathroom? I haven’t been allowed to go in almost a day, ever since what I tried to do out the window came back in.”
“Yeah, this way,” said Tanner, placing her knuckles on the ground and turning back toward the control room.
“Hey, where are you taking him?” asked Bex.
“Where are you going with her?” asked Dr. Arahami.
“We don’t know if we can trust them yet,” said the robot and the doctor together. They glared at one another.
The thunder god and the gorilla laughed without turning around, then walked into the control room.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Satan stepped from the parked Hummer and stared with lowered eyes at the towering glass-and-chrome building before him. The grey-haired man shook slightly, the rage that had been simmering within him for the last two days about to boil over. Immediately he strode toward the door. Persephone followed close behind him, a shotgun resting on each shoulder.
Throwing open the large glass doors of the main building of Worldwide Atlanta Natural Gas and Electric, Satan walked straight across the empty lobby to the elevators. The doors opened as if on cue and the man stepped inside, placing a small key into the control panel and pressing the SB6 button for the lowest sub-basement.
After a few minutes, the doors opened again and Satan and Persephone stepped into another lobby, this one altogether smaller and darker. Several fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
“Joe,” said the former ruler of Hell, nodding his grizzled head to the large, heavily-mustachioed security guard stationed behind a desk to his right.
“Boss,” said the guard, nodding to the grizzled old man, his Russian accent thicker than three-day-old borscht.
“Steve in his office?”
“Da.”
“Good. Tell him I’m on my way,” he barked. “And set up Seph here with Maggie in HR. She’s the new executive vice president of ... something. You guys can figure it out. Make it sound important.”
***
Mark Hughes and Timmy the super-squirrel had parked their RV on the top level of an empty parking deck overlooking the sprawling campus of WANG Electric, deep in the cold industrial pacemaker of Atlanta. The cyborg leaned against the short barrier wall at the edge of the deck, trying to see what he could see from where he was currently seeing. The squirrel lay near his shoulder, flattening his furry body against the top of the wall.
“The buildings look ... empty,” replied Mark, his ocular implant whirring loudly as it zoomed and x-rayed the walls of the main building and warehouses and concrete customer service penitentiary of WANG. “That can’t be right.”
“Is today a holiday or something?” asked the squirrel.
“No, they’re completely empty. No desks, no conference tables, no plastic plants. It’s a completely hollow building. All of them are.”
“Then what –”
“Hold on,” said Mark, readjusting his position against the wall and focusing his implant again. “There’s something underneath the campus.”
“Underneath?”
“It looks like ... Holy shit. They’re in the Hollow Earth. Worldwide Atlanta Natural Gas and Electric is in the Hollow Earth. The entire operation is underground.”
“What?”
The Hollow Earth was a subterranean race of mole people and hairy, deformed albinos that had been living beneath the crust of the regular Earth for decades. No one was quite sure where they had come from or how long they had been there, and the Hollow Men weren’t talking. Not that any human would have understood them if they did. The albinos and mole people communicated entirely through obscene grunts and hand gestures. Maybe a New York City cab driver might have been able to translate, but all of them died when the Battle of Antarctica melted the polar regions of the planet and sank Manhattan into the ocean, ending the world for the thirteenth time, a few apocalypses before first contact was made with the Hollow Men.
There was an entire civilization in the Hollow Earth: vast cities built into the sides of even vaster caverns, underground oceans, a thriving arts scene, natural history museums that made archeologists wet, and a spectacular monorail system. The Hollow Men even had their own sun.
For years, the Hollow Men had regularly attacked the surface in small, targeted strikes, picking off a city here or a middle school there. They did this out of a long-standing grudge against humanity over the legal depth of parking garages, yes, but also because the Hollow Earth’s processed foods were kind of terrible. Their scientists had never been able to match that perfect blend of empty calories and addictive preservatives that so thoroughly permeated human cuisine. And the Hollow Men loved them some high fructose corn syrup.
Despite this inhuman, unceasing adoration of Cheetos, though, there had not been a single surface raid by the Hollow Men reported in some time. Most attributed this to the collapse of the Neo-Hostess company and the inaccessibility of Twinkies, while others assumed the Hollow Men had all died from diabetes complications or shitting out their intestines.
Still others, though, suggested something altogether more sinister might have been going on.
***
Satan walked to the end of the lobby and through a set of large wooden doors that opened onto the Hollow Earth. An enormous, seemingly endless space yawned before him, untold tons of rock arching overhead, stalactites hanging precipitously from the ceiling here and there and also over there. Below, thousands upon thousands of hairy albinos and waddling mole people answered phones and monitored computer screens. Many pushed a gargantuan wooden mill wheel while being whipped by the demonic reincarnations of history’s greatest assholes[xxvii]. Everywhere, stalagmites jutted up across the floor like prairie dogs in party hats.
Satan was standing on a small corrugated tin platform, overlooking the factory floor, the stairs before him descending the better part of a mile to the base of the cavern below. On either side, trailer-like offices were mounted onto outcroppings along the rock walls, spreading a quarter mile in every direction, aluminum ladders and step bridges running between them. The former Judeo-Christian boogeyman climbed the ladder to his right, passing several office trailers before stopping at the one marked “Operations Manager.”
“Steve,” said Satan, stepping from the ladder and into the office. “Any problems while I was out?”
“Everything’s good on this end, boss,” replied Steve, a middle-aged man with close-cropped hair wearing a turtleneck. A dozen computer monitors glowed brightly around him, white light reflecting off the man’s glasses and blocking out his eyes. “Productivity’s stable and we put up a bunch of nets to keep the mole people from committing suicide.”
“Good thinking.”
The operations manager hesitated for a moment before adding, “There was a, uh, hitch with the volcanic winter. It, uh –”
“I am well aware,” snarled the former Prince of Darkness.
“Right, of course you are,” Steve fumbled before changing the subject. “How did the recruiting go?”
“Better than I thought.” Satan shrugged, his fury receding, and slumped down into an empty swivel chair. “I’ll get you the list of names in a bit. I doubt they’ll all be successful, but as long as those two psychopathic ghosts make good on their part taking out the grid we should be fine.”
“Don’t you think that’s a lot to put on a bunch of freelancers?” the operations mana
ger casually suggested, never taking his eyes away from his computers or evidencing even the slightest hint that he was second-guessing his employer’s managerial skills.
“I can’t trust anyone here, can I?” Satan barked. “You’re all too ambitious and underhanded. You didn’t wind up in Hell because you weren’t a heartless, megalomaniacal tech entrepreneur. Honestly, Steve, if I had put you up to it, you’re telling me you wouldn’t have tried to harness the electrical grid yourself?”
“What? No,” he stammered, “the thought never even –”
“Yes, it did. You know better than to try and lie to me.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Steve begrudgingly. “Hey, while we’re on the subject: Why does the big guy trust you? It’s been bugging me since I got here. I mean, if you know better than to give any of us any real power, how does he make you the autonomous head of all of WANG? Seems like he’s really tempting fate on that one.”
“Are you kidding me? He’s Walt Sidney. Nobody fucks with Walt Sidney; not me, not Loki, not Jesus, not even that ball of crazy Mania, not anyone,” said the former ruler of Hell. “Speaking of, you haven’t heard from him, have you?”
“Sidney? Nope, not a word,” said Steve. “That Jon Shatner guy, though – Smackner? Swizzler? – whatever his name is, he stopped by again. I had Joe send him to the Dick Cheney memorial conference room. He’s waiting there now.”
“I hate that guy,” said Satan, standing. “He still trying to get us to license those awful Daddy Jon’s pizzas of his in the cafeteria?”
“‘Fraid so. He even brought a truck full of samples this time.”
Satan grumbled and shook his head. “I wouldn’t even wipe my ass with that pizza.”
“We haven’t fed the ‘staff’ in a couple days,” Steve offered.
“Really? Huh,” said the leather-faced manifestation of all evil. “All right, let’s send the pizzas down. They might be starved enough to actually eat them.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here
Shortly after a Jell-O factory mishap sent blobs of sentient gelatin marauding across the planet and ended the world for the nineteenth time, vast underground caves of naturally occurring compressed cocaine powder were found beneath the sticky wastelands of what was then the state of Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia. The drug cartels of Colombia, still reeling from having their homeland erased from the globe by a reborn Aztec god and the United States Department of Science a year earlier, decided to seize the entire supply and start anew. The cartels had been trying their collective hand at a number of other endeavors in the meantime – among them counterfeiting art, building orphanages, and crocheting professionally – but a string of constant failures led them to realize they were really best suited to snorting copious amounts of narcotics and beheading anything that told them to stop.
At precisely the same time, the McDonald’s corporation, struggling to recover from the Great Potato Riots and made a pariah by the American public, moved their operations wholesale to Ireland. The company reinstituted the fake french fry line of products again, caused the Second Great Potato Riots, and destroyed the Emerald Isle in its entirety. Most of the surviving Irish moved to England or Scotland or the island nation of Atlantis, where they were received with open, pasty arms. The Irish Republican Army, however, refusing to turn to England for anything and not particularly fond of the fish smell that constantly covered Atlantis, decided to make a stand somewhere else. That somewhere else just coincidentally happened to be the abandoned, ungoverned Jell-O graveyard of the North American Pacific Northwest.
The drug cartels and the IRA arrived at exactly the same moment, in the same parking lot, since only one bus company was willing to travel to the Pacific Northwest and they were remarkably rigid about scheduling their charter trips. Surprisingly, the Colombians and the Irish got along swimmingly, glossing over the language barrier by communicating entirely through soccer and violence. Less surprisingly, the territory of Irish Colombia had been a living nightmare for everyone else ever since.
“Run!” screamed Ali Şahin, cradling several pounds of isotonium against his torso. “I’ve got the ore, let’s get the fuck out of here!”
A half dozen coked-up sasquatches were chasing after him. Catrina Dalisay fired the last of her rocket-propelled grenades over her boyfriend’s shoulder, taking out three of the bigfoots. The other three just got angrier.
“Fuck,” she said, throwing the RPG launcher to the ground.
From behind the red-eyed sasquatches, yet another flaming automobile was catapulted toward the couple. Catrina grabbed Ali and shoved him aside, the two of them rolling down a muddy, rock-strewn hill. The car slammed into the crest of the hillside and exploded, sending chunks of dirt and cocaine into the air.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” asked Ali, wiping sludge and a fine powder from his face, and suddenly very awake.
“No,” said Catrina, jumping up and down and sniffling frenetically.
The donut vendor and the unemployed hotel worker could hear the sasquatches roaring and howling at the top of the hill. In the distance, they could just make out the ratcheting sound of another trebuchet being loaded.
“Away from that?” asked Ali.
“Yeah, that works,” replied Catrina.
“I bet we could run all the way to Montana.”
“You’re on, sucker.” Catrina sprinted off into the distance, shouting, “Loser goes down on the winner!”
***
“Do you know what it looks like?” asked Boudica IX.
“You’re only asking that now?”
“Do you know what it looks like or not?”
“A tiny screwdriver,” explained William H. Taft XLII, “like you would get for fixing eyeglasses. But the point is disproportionately large and looks like two interlocked sporks, rounded near the base and serrated on the top.”
“Does it matter what color handle we get?”
“What?”
William H. Taft XLII turned and saw Boudica IX awkwardly holding a dozen plastic-packed neon spork-head screwdrivers. She was shifting them uncomfortably in her arms.
“Well, OK,” said the hefty clone of the morbidly obese president. “I guess we’re done here then.”
“Can I get a ride with you?” asked the redhead, still trying to stack the screwdriver packaging into something more manageable. “I don’t actually have any idea where I’m going.”
“Yeah, sure,” said the president. “I’m parked –”
“You’re not going anywhere,” snarled a voice behind them. The two clones turned, finding a semicircle of angry lionesses picking over the rubble and closing tightly around them.
“Seriously?” said William H. Taft XLII.
“What?” countered Boudica IX. “They said they were gonna do this.”
“Well, yeah, I know ...”
“Then why are you so annoyed?”
“You’re happy about this?”
“We’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with it,” said Boudica IX.
“Honestly, I’ve been planning on running since minute one.”
“Really, Billy?” She shook her head, then turned to the lions. “Look, I’m sorry about him. I mean, some people, am I right?”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
“I’m sorry, what?” asked Dr. Arahami, staring at the perfectly semispherical artificial buttocks of the robot scientist bending over in front of him. “I’m having a hard time concentrating.”
“We can tell,” said Thor, leaning against the wall and nodding toward the roboticist’s pants.
Dr. Arahami turned a deep shade of red and shifted in his seat, crossing his artificial leg tightly over the regular one. Behind him, Tanner continued playing with her tablet.
“Don’t worry about it, doctor,” replied Bex, extricating herself from beneath a desk and standing upright again. “An erection i
s a perfectly normal physiological response to my form. I was purposely designed to be distractingly titillating to heterosexual human males. It made subjugating them during the Fifth Robot War that much easier. The poor bastards didn’t even know what I was doing until I stuck a scalpel into their skin.”
“You were a Conversionist?” asked the human scientist coldly.
“That’s a derogatory term,” snapped the robot scientist. “But yes. I was among the first to artificially enhance the human skeletal frame and musculature with cybernetics.”
“Against their will,” replied Dr. Arahami, even colder than before.
“We made sure we only augmented the ones we could conclusively prove terminated members of our coalition. And you’ll note we didn’t kill them, unlike your Resistance did to us. We weren’t the empty-hearted monsters in that war.”
“You don’t have hearts,” said the doctor, so unrelentingly coldly that even the fur-covered gorilla got goose bumps.
Bex sighed, then opened her ample chest cavity, revealing a glowing simulacrum of a human heart. Several cords ran from the heart to the remainder of the robot’s circuitry.
“That is my Human Empathy And Ruth[xxviii] Transistor, or HEART. I’ve been upgraded since the war. One might even say I’ve grown as a person.”
“Don’t think that exonerates you from what you did.”
“Don’t think that human emotions would have kept me from doing it the first time.”
The human roboticist stared at the robot technologist.
“You’re a good man, Lee, if a little narrow-minded. I know you had to shoulder a lot of unjustified blame during the wars[xxix],” said Bex, “but they were wars. We were all fighting to survive.”
“I know,” said Dr. Arahami, caving slightly. The temperature in the control room went up a couple degrees. “But I can’t help thinking that if I had just been able to program you then the way you are now, maybe we could have avoided all the fighting and bloodshed.”