Todd’s cigarette cast the only light. “Duuude…what the hell?”
Mike tried the key, but the ignitors didn’t even click.
Teenagers across the parking lot and in the street issued excited screams and laughter.
“Weird shit, huh?” Todd took a long drag, bathing the front seat in ruddy ember light. “This is awesome. If we leave now we can break in, grab the shit, and get out before the power comes back on.”
“How did the cars and the power both fail at the same time?” Mike mumbled, not listening. “I read about stuff that can do that, but…”
Sheriff Dodson’s silhouette waddled across the parking lot toward were Jimbo and Kaylee stood. He kept banging one of those long, black policeman flashlights against his open palm, obviously trying to coax it into operation.
“This can’t be happening,” Mike whispered and leaned forward, scanning the sky.
“What? What can’t be happening?”
“EMP. Electro-Magnetic Pulse. I did a paper on it for AP science. But it can’t be happening because only a nuke can cause it.”
“Like what, Russians? I thought we’re best buds now or something.”
Across the parking lot, near where Kaylee, the Sheriff, and Jimbo stood, a flashlight blinked to life.
“Hey, someone has power…” Todd trailed off.
The flashlight steadily grew brighter. Then, to his horror, Mike realized it floated autonomously. Like a will-o-wisp hovering a few feet above the pavement, it bathed the parking lot in a sterile blue hue.
The light grew into an orb, taking on shape and depth. Kaylee, the Sheriff, and Jimbo took a few steps back.
“Do you hear that?” Todd asked in a hushed tone. “I got a bad feeling.”
“Yeah.”
A low thrumming, like a washing machine spinning on its final cycle, vibrated throughout the truck, steadily growing in volume. Static electricity crackled through the air, and the hair stood up on Mike’s arms.
And then the universe split open.
The blue sphere rapidly ballooned, momentarily giving the illusion of accelerating towards Mike. The trio in the center of the parking lot fell over backwards. Kaylee screamed and held up her hands, as if to block the featureless, glowing orb now looming over her.
Led by the screaming West Flatte offensive line, the crowd fled the Dairy Queen and scattered into the street. Kids abandoned their dead trucks and cars, and bolted into the night. Transfixed, Mike’s curiosity overrode his fear and kept him firmly in place.
Sporadic electric bolts arced from the orb and danced off the Dairy Queen sign. It flickered insanely, bathing the parking lot in a drunken strobe. Electric fingers popped and sizzled across nearby power lines and caressed the tornado siren, which howled in response.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” Todd cupped his hands over his ears and screamed over the siren, but neither of them moved. Immobilized by burning curiosity, and the impossibility of what unfolded in the parking lot, he was compelled to watch.
The orb’s glowing belly gave birth to giant, ladder-like structures. Once beyond the glare, they sharpened into focus, and became recognizable as mechanical legs, which were quickly followed by an enormous metal torso. It slid from the orb much like a child erupts feet first from the bottom of a slide, and then squatted with a clang on all four limbs.
“Oh, shit,” Todd said.
The robot crouched like a mechanical gorilla; high tech, yet primal, like some force of nature twisted and perverted by the hands of a cruel intelligence. Its chest looked like a tank chassis. Black pistons and gleaming hydraulic servos, visible inside its metallic exoskeleton, pumped furiously. Oversized forearms and hands terminated in human-like fingers sheathed in black synthetic covers reminiscent of thimbles. Heavy armored plates shielded each set of knuckles. An ethereal umbilical of light extended from the orb to the machine like a tail, or perhaps a leash. A tiny array of sensors, perched absurdly on its massive shoulders like a shrunken head, swiveled left and right as if the machine attempted to gain its bearings.
It knuckle-walked forward like an ape until the Sheriff, Kaylee, and Jimbo lay at its feet. The Gorilla-bot’s tiny head swiveled impassively at the three figures; a terrible pagan god come to life, debating what to do with the living sacrifices at its feet.
“Oh, shit,” Todd repeated.
A thread of red laser light flickered in and out of view in the humid air. A little red dot came to rest on the Sheriff’s horrified face. Mike could almost see Dodson’s wide eyes behind those Coke bottle glasses.
Mike had seen Terminator and Predator enough to know red laser dots always meant Bad Shit.
And then Bad Shit happened.
Mike jumped in his seat as a metal knuckle rotated and slammed into the concrete with lighting speed and jackhammer force. Cracks erupted in the asphalt, radiating outward in every direction. Time seemed to slow as Mike struggled to understand what the strange flecks were that suddenly speckled the windshield. Cold realization dawned on him, just about the time Todd began screaming.
Jimbo scrambled up and bolted toward the street, leaving Kaylee to fend for herself. Covered in blood, she shrieked and crawled away from the pit containing the Sheriff’s flattened body.
Mike grabbed the handle and opened the door, determined to save Kaylee. Todd snatched his arm, pulling him back.
“Don’t be stupid, it’ll kill you!”
With grace Mike wouldn’t have thought possible, the Gorilla-bot leapt over Kaylee and through the air, landing between Jimbo and escape. A second later, a metal knuckle sent Jimbo sailing through the air and smashing into the top of the Dairy Queen sign. Plastic and glass erupted in a spray of sparks. Jimbo’s lifeless body sat in a reclining position atop the sign, imbedded in its shattered remnants.
“It bitchslapped Jimbo!” Todd shrieked.
Mike glanced right. A red dot, steady as an evening star, rested solidly on Todd’s chest.
The Gorilla-bot slowly rose on two legs. Mike couldn’t see if it had eyes, but felt its alien stare locked firmly on them.
“Oh, shit,” Todd said for the last time.
“Run.” Mike reached for the door handle again, but before he reached it dust and trash exploded upward as his head violently slammed against the cab’s ceiling.
Mike’s chest erupted in pain as he fell forward into the steering wheel, knocking the air from his lungs. Once the stars cleared from his vision, he looked directly into a single red light. The Gorilla-bot’s cycloptic eye stared malevolently at him through the spider-webbed windshield.
He felt something warm trickling down his chin and tried to push away from the steering wheel, but couldn’t understand why it required so much effort. That’s when he saw the machine’s two massive fists, interlocked into a single sledgehammer, resting in the crumpled metal pit that used to be his truck’s hood. The truck’s entire front end had been flattened, causing Mike to lean forward against the steering wheel.
The machine leaned closer, as if examining Mike. There, on its chassis, he clearly saw the letters “I.D.”
“Mikey…” Todd groaned beside him, slumped against the dashboard.
The cold red light flicked right. Something slammed violently against Mike’s right side, and then his left.
The world went dark.
He awoke to the sound of scraping and tinkling glass. Mike tried to move, but something pinned his right arm. He tried to lift his left, only to be rewarded with agonizing pain. Mike ordered his eyes open, but only the right one obeyed.
The nightmare wasn’t over. The Gorilla-bot still loomed before him, gently brushing away the windshield’s remnants from the dashboard, which now slanted bizarrely right. With his good eye, Mike followed the dash until it terminated in a twisted mass of metal and plastic that, only a few moments ago, had been the truck’s entire passenger side…
And Todd.
Tears of rage and sadness filled his vision. He glared at the metal monster, which had
leaned in closer still, its tiny head almost poking into the cab. Behind the red light, Mike spied a camera lens, and detected a servo’s faint whine. The camera’s aperture tightened into a pinprick.
Someone is watching me, studying me, Mike thought. Someone, not something, did this.
Someone murdered my friend.
“Fuck you,” Mike croaked and spit at the monster, but the bloody wad fell short, splattering on the dash.
Gorilla-bot’s head slid deeper into the cab, and was now mere inches from Mike’s face. He could feel heat emanating from electronics, hear the thrum from some mysterious power source located deep in its body. Then, in a voice like a submerged sub-woofer, it spoke.
“Todd Toobin is a dick.”
With that, it turned, and in the same knuckle-walk, loped back to the orb, stepped in and vanished. The orb dimmed and shrank until it extinguished, abandoning the West Flatte Dairy Queen to darkness.
***
mike. mike. Mike. Mike! Mike! “Mike!” “MIKE!”
Blurry hands yanked away the interface goggles, starting the process of sucking Mike back into the here and now. A sharp slap finished the job.
“Sweet Mother of God, please no damage. No damage. No damage…”
The sterile, fluorescent-white control room gelled into focus. Mike’s brain shifted gears, and everything made sense, including Jason’s breathy pleas.
Mike knew he’d gone too far.
“I lost it, didn’t I?” he mumbled.
“Jesus Christ, do you think?” Jason gently pushed Mike down into the chair. “Let’s just sit down, okay? Slide away from all the pretty and dangerous buttons, and take your brain off the stove for a little bit, while I find out what you broke.”
He’d never felt such emptiness, a sickening hollowness like someone had gouged out his soul with a jagged ice cream scoop.
“You’re drooling.” Jason handed him a tissue, and then continued frantically pounding on the keyboard.
Mike wiped the dribble from his chin and followed Jason’s gaze through the thick safety glass. Still on all fours, the I.D. emerged from the enormous quantum portal, a sphere which appeared to be constructed from a zillion erector set kits. It climbed the shallow ramp and returned to the cage-like maintenance gantry. Dragging a thick power cable behind like a tail, the I.D. entered the gantry, turned and squatted.
“We might get lucky. It’s responding normally, and the finger sheaths look intact. I don’t see any damage to the knuckle plates. Thank God for mil-spec, if that steel plate had been commercial grade, it’d be dented as shit. We won’t know until I run the diagnostic.”
Jason shoved another Cheeto in his mouth and chewed nervously. After a few clicks on his keyboard, two thick metal clamps extended from the gantry and locked around the I.D.’s waist.
“Locked and secured.” A dozen bristling mechanical arms plugged into the machine DARPA officially called I.D., Interdimensional Drone, but everyone affectionately dubbed “Sam” after a character in an old 1980’s television series. A laser generated lattice materialized, and slowly began to slide up and down the robot.
Mike smacked his dry lips. “Sorry, man. Dunno what came over me.”
Jason snorted and grinned nervously. “I know what came over you, asshole. You went postal. If that’s the way you want to play, I’m cool, but layoff the Godzilla shit, okay?”
An alert window popped up on the monitor.
“Here it comes…”
The interface’s after-effects almost fully worn off, Mike found the strength to lean forward in the chair. Jason’s apprehension infected him, replacing his emotional numbness. If he had damaged Sam, they could both lose their jobs.
“Power - green; Electro-Hydraulics - green; Interface - Green; Computers - Green…” Jason threw his arms up. “Yes! Structure - Green.”
Jason paused, staring hard at the robot in the sealed bay. He grimaced, and chewed on his lower lip, before taking a deep breath of resolution. “I gotta go in and make sure. If those finger sheaths are damaged, it may not show up on the diagnostic.” Jason ran his fingers through his hair. “If they’re torn, we are in deep, deep shit.”
He tossed the crumpled Cheetos bag beside his keyboard. “Stay here, touch nothing.” He looked at the clock and then at the clean suits hanging on the wall. “Fuck it.”
He dashed to the airlock, tapped the code and, with a hiss, vanished through the white metal door. A moment later, Jason emerged into the clean room, another gross violation in a night of gross violations. He scrambled up the right gantry walkway until he stood level with the robot’s hands. Any other time, Mike would have thought such a sight absurd; an overweight middle-aged man in a bright red Hawaiian shirt, wrinkled khaki shorts, black socks, and flip flops in a spotless white laboratory environment. This wasn’t any other time, and Mike barely noticed Jason’s frantic inspection.
Instead, the grainy, slightly out of focus image on the monitor gripped Mike’s attention. His own blood-covered face, albeit much younger, glared back at him with rage so hot it burned across time-space. In the dark monitor, Mike’s bloated reflection, a depleted ghost, overlapped his younger self. The two faces reverberated in his thoughts, the mental equivalent to feedback from a microphone held too close to the speaker, until it threatened to tear his mind apart.
Mike didn’t hear Jason reemerge from the air lock until he sat down beside him and tapped a few more commands. “Good news, everything is intact. Bad news, we brought back a shit load of quantum contaminant. Sam’s arms are covered in blood.”
“Oh, shit. What have I done?”
“Don’t freak out on me, buddy. Its blood from another universe, blood with a different quantum spin, it doesn’t count. I’ll take care of it.” Mike could hear the anger and frustration in Jason’s voice, even through his nervous laugh. “Whatchya going to do next time, buddy, level the town?”
“No next time,” Mike croaked. “Promise.”
‘Decontamination Cycle: Confirm? (ENT)’ flashed on the screen. Jason flipped his graying ponytail and wiped orange-stained fingers on his shirt, jostling his “Contractor, Unrestricted Access” badge.
He tapped enter. With a barely perceptible whoosh, a chemical fog obscured everything beyond the window. Jason leaned back, hands behind his head, and put his feet on the console. “Physical evidence erased. Hopefully, Doc won’t run a contamination diagnostic until after the morning session. She’ll think she did it, and it will be her problem, not ours.
“Mike, run Swipe Virus.” Jason glanced at his watch. “5 a.m.. Doc and the Major won’t be here for another hour. Plenty of time for Swipe to eliminate our digital fingerprint.”
Mike didn’t respond; he felt too sick. The righteous rage had fully ebbed, replaced with nausea.
Jason stared at Mike out of the corner of his eye. He rolled his chair next to Mike’s, and tapped a few keys.
“I got it. Why don’t you mosey down to the break room until the shift ends and get your head straight. I’ll clean up here.”
“I’m good, really.”
“Right,” Jason laughed. He leaned in and nodded at the image on the screen. “You’ve done a good job fixing the quantum fluctuation filters. Two months ago we couldn’t even recognize individual faces. Now I can actually tell that’s your ugly mug. No wonder you never got laid in high school.”
“No big deal,” Mike whispered, eyes still glued to the monitor. “It’s just a matter of energy, transmitted over space at varying levels of power, amplitude and frequency, to deliver a desired effect.”
“If you say so.” Jason rolled back to his console station. Beyond the window, the chemical fog cleared, revealing a spotless robot. Teenage Mike’s image vanished from the monitor. Old Mike stared back for a moment before being washed away by an official DARPA logo and the words “U.S. Army Project VALIANT DANCER. McGregor Aerospace, Prime Contractor.”
Swipe had cleansed the video files, which meant all the security files and cameras had alre
ady been altered with stock footage Jason stored in hidden, encrypted files. All evidence of the night’s interdimensional excursion had been wiped clean.
“Of course, Doc took all the credit for your work on the filters, just like I didn’t get any credit for fixing all the company’s software glitches.”
Jason picked up a clipboard and made a few annotations on a checklist. “The Chinese would have hacked this place months ago if it weren’t for me. We do more for this project than half the Ph.D.s they got crawling around here. If we want to take Sam for a spin on the night shift, so what?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Mike said, still staring at the monitor.
Jason frowned. “Mike, it’s harmless. You know that. It’s a parallel universe. Zero impact on reality. No harm no foul. Killing someone in a video game has more repercussions.”
“I know. I just don’t want to do it again.” Mike swallowed hard, trying not to vomit. “I…I killed people. Oh, Jesus, I killed my best friend.” He swallowed back the vomit. “I kept thinking about how he fucked me, how I hated him for it.”
Twenty years of frustration and anger broke free and burst forth in a babbling confession.
“We broke into the high school that night…got busted. My dad left me to spend the night in jail. I lost my scholarship. That night ruined my life.” Mike lowered his head onto the console and sobbed. “I wanted to fix everything, start over, even if it was only for a different version of me. I never imagined I’d lose control like that, that I would kill.”
“Okay, enough of this bullshit. It’s over.” Jason tapped the keyboard and turned the monitor toward Mike, where a red line split into countless spiderwebs until it painted the screen’s right side solid crimson. “3.14 seconds after Sam showed up, BOOM! Full divergence. BOOM! An infinite number of parallel universes, and not a damn one will ever impact ours. Not…a…damn…one. You can’t change the past, so how about getting your head back into the here and now?”
Terrible Cherubs: Tales of Sinners, Mistakes, and Regrets Page 20