The Endless War That Never Ends

by Christopher Brimmage

  “Is it safe to have on board with us?” continued Normal-Art.

  Officer-Ginny sighed. “Of course it’s not safe to have on board with us, you fool! If it gets jostled the wrong way and we accidentally set it off here in the Barrier before we reach Earth 55,777, we’ve gone and screwed the entire Multiverse beyond repair—not just because we’d have failed to save it from those damned cosmic bears that’re attacking Earth 55,777, but because this type of bomb’s effects on the Barrier have never been tested or calculated. The Barrier exists simultaneously in infinite space and no space at all, so the bomb’s effects would likely spread across the entire Barrier and be too infinite to be reparable by B.I.T. engineers. And the likelihood of the B.T.T. intervening to help with such a problem is approximately nil now that we raided them.”

  “Why is it so dangerous? What happens when we detonate it?” Normal-Art asked again as the barrier between realities sped by on the view screen.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” replied Officer-Ginny.

  Normal-Art sighed, knowing she was baiting him and that there was deeper meaning to her simple statement. Her answer brought up terrible flashbacks of conversations with the hyper-literal god-version of himself, and Normal-Art shuddered. Finally, he sighed once more and asked, “Then why’d we sacrifice so many soldiers to steal the stupid thing?”

  Officer-Ginny scowled. “No, I mean literally nothing is going to happen. It’s a Stasis Bomb, and it freezes time.”

  There it is, Normal-Art thought. She and God-Art would have gotten along splendidly. “And this will save the Multiverse how?” asked Normal-Art.

  Officer-Ginny reached up and tapped a few buttons. Ahead, the view screen labeled a particular patch of swirling nothingness Earth 55,777. Then she said, “That’s Agent 27142’s big gambit. When we detonate this bomb on Earth 55,777, it will freeze time across the entire dimension, stopping everything and everyone in the reality in their tracks. That will allow forces offsite who were unable to render aid at the time we requested it to find a way to dispose of the frozen incursion forces, find a way to imprison those cursed bears again, and then find a way to unfreeze us all as soon as it is convenient for them to do so.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Us all?’”

  “Well, we’re the ones who are going to detonate the thing. I’ll try to jump us out of there before its effects envelop Earth 55,777, but the likelihood of success is miserably low. We’ll almost certainly be frozen in place along with everyone else in the reality. So I must warn you: from what I understand of this weapon, time will seem to pass normally to those affected by it, but they will be unable to move. So make sure you’re comfortable and try not to go insane, because who knows how long we’ll be stuck in place, and there’ll really be nothing to do but explore your own mind.”

  Art’s stomach dropped, and he felt himself beginning to panic. “Wait, can you just drop me off somewhere else first? I’m really not up for this.”

  Officer-Ginny ignored him and patted her eagle on its back. “Alright, we’re here,” she said, and the eagle fired lightning into the metal pole. The ship flew through it, and the infinite colorlessness-colorfulness was replaced by the vast city of Earth 55,777.

  The B.S.S.C. Mimessiah loomed before the view screen. An explosion ripped through the middle of the ship, and it lulled to the side and began drifting down toward the ground. Normal-Art’s panic was replaced by confusion. “Wait, what the hell? We left as that thing was about to go down.”

  Officer-Ginny jerked the stick to starboard to avoid crashing into the falling monstrosity. She yelled over her shoulder, “Time passes much faster on Earth 4. What seemed like hours and hours to us was only a few seconds here.”

  Normal-Art groaned. He hated the Multiverse, so he began to pray a silent prayer that one of the many concurrent threats to it might win out and destroy the stupid place. However, before he finished, all thoughts fled from his head as Officer-Ginny jerked the stick hard in the opposite direction, barrel rolling to dodge a Ginny in a floating cauldron who was throwing flaming skulls that exploded upon impact. Normal-Art squealed.

  “Be silent!” demanded Officer-Ginny. “I need to concentrate! And keep your eyes peeled. We must confirm the bears are still present on this reality before we drop the bomb!”

  Normal-Art watched Officer-Ginny scan the battlefield. Then she pointed toward the ground over near some toppled skyscrapers next to the flaming generator field. “There!” she screamed.

  As Normal-Art looked, he wanted to groan, but he held it in. The blue bear and the pink bear flew at each other, crashing into one another. Pink and blue lightning exploded out from them as they crashed. They whirled at one another in fury, punching and kicking and biting. Destruction erupted in their wake, only to immediately be reconstructed and healed.

  Officer-Ginny turned the stick toward the bears and punched the throttle. The city transformed into a blur below. Officer-Ginny tapped the communicator in her ear and then reached her right hand down to hover over the button that would open the hatch to drop the bomb. “Agent 27142, if you copy, we have payload drop in 5… 4… 3… 2… Shit!”

  Suddenly, a mammoth pink tentacle thrust into the sky in front of the ship. Normal-Art glanced down toward the tentacle’s source, and as expected, it belonged to Regular-Ginny and her skyscraper-sized blob. Officer-Ginny grabbed the stick with both hands, jerked it port, and barely evaded the tentacle.

  However, the desperate evasion caused the ship to spin out of control. It lost altitude and plummeted toward the ground. Normal-Art screamed. Officer-Ginny shut off the throttle. She gripped the stick and jerked it backward and sideways. The ship pulled up just before crashing to the ground. Officer-Ginny twisted the stick farther to the side, and in another few seconds, the ship steadied. She breathed deep. Then she pressed the throttle and pulled up on the stick, regaining the altitude that had been lost. She swerved the front of the ship so that the bears were once again immediately in front of the screen.

  She tapped her communicator once more and said, “Let’s try this again. Agent 27142, if you copy, we have payload drop in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…Now!”

  She slammed her palm down on the button to drop the bomb.

  The whistling blast of cold air in the cabin signaled that the bomb was now airborne. Officer-Ginny shouted to her eagle, “Lightning! Now!” The eagle launched lightning into the pole that stood erect from the console. As the ship flew toward the matching bolt of lightning that appeared in front of the ship, bright white light exploded across the city below. Normal-Art covered his eyes too late, for when he pulled his hands away, he found he could see nothing beyond the blinding afterimage of the explosion.

  Soldiers below deck screamed. When their screams became gargled and grew slower and abruptly cut off, Normal-Art sighed, assuming their terror had become frozen in time. The ship’s engine seemed to blare more loudly than ever, and Normal-Art wondered if it had taken some sort of damage in the bombing run. It sounded like the engine had become unhinged from its normal place in the ship and had travelled up onto the bridge and was now literally standing right next to him. Normal-Art assumed these were all the aftereffects of the Stasis Bomb and that they had thus not escaped Earth 55,777 in time to prevent being frozen.

  He next experienced a sensation that felt like a giant knife was stabbing him through the back and exiting his chest. Then he felt as though he were lying on the cold metal floor of the shift-shuttle. Since he had never been frozen in time before, he did not know whether these were typical feelings associated with stasis.

  He tried to ask Officer-Ginny. His question emerged from his lips as a liquidy gurgle.

  He sighed. He wanted to go home. Instead, he died.

  Chapter 24

  DEUS EX MACHINAS DOING DEUS EX MACHINA THINGS

  Arturo crawled through the air ducts in the skyscraper marked Olympus. Before he gained his superpowers, enclosed spaces had made him feel claustrophobic. But during the tenure of his
short superheroing career, his rogues’ gallery had managed to capture him in a multitude of elaborate traps and bind him with plenty of intricate constraints. He always managed to escape, and by now, he had grown relatively numb to the sensation. He sped through the ducts by reaching hand over hand and contorting his legs up at angles that would have left them dislocated if he attempted the movements during the non-powered portion of his life.

  Arturo’s mind drifted as he crawled. He remembered the shield wall disappearing, its bright lightning there for the entire battle and then suddenly gone. At that point, he felt a tickle in the back of his brain that told him it was his time, that the mission for which he was destined was now at hand. He swung through the city from the north, dodging attacks from the pink army and evading disintegration bolts from the fighter jets careening by overhead.

  The entire time he traversed the battlefield, he thrilled at the idea of being the Multiverse’s savior. He remembered a term he learned from his English class: deus ex machina. It translated to “god from the machine.” It referred to resolving a seemingly unresolvable plot point through the intervention of an unforeseen character or force. Though Arturo hated it when deus ex machinas showed up in literature because they always seemed like a copout by a stupid writer without the creativity to figure out how to logically solve a narrative problem, Arturo was rather pleased to play the role of a real-life deus ex machina himself and be the big hero to show up at the end of this long war to help the Army of Life win. As a matter of fact, he was silently considering a superhero name change. Forget Arachnid Pre-Teen, he could change his name to something much cooler, like Deus or Deus Ex or Machina.

  It took him only a few minutes to reach the base of the building with the sign that read Olympus on its top, and by the time he got there, he had settled internally upon the new moniker Machin-Arachnid. He made quick work of a squadron of marines that exited the building just as he arrived, wrapping them in webbing, hanging them upside-down, and punching them until they were unconscious.

  He then climbed up the wall of Olympus to a vent that opened on the side of the building about two stories up. He pulled a tiny screwdriver from his pocket and unscrewed the grate that covered the vent. He allowed the grate to fall unceremoniously to the ground. From below, he heard a loud, “Ouch! Watch it!”

  He looked down to see an odd foursome, each of them seemingly his own age—about twelve years old—the two males sharing identical facial features with himself, the two females looking just like the girl on whom Arturo had a crush in school. The male on the far left wore black robes and a scarf striped marigold and salmon, and he floated upon a broomstick. A tornado-shaped scar covered his forehead from brow to hairline. Blood seeped from a gash in his right cheek, and he was bent over the ground picking up a pair of round glasses. One of the lenses was cracked, but he tapped it with a wand and whispered something, and the crack fixed itself. He was obviously the one who had been hit by the falling grate, the one who had shouted in pain.

  Next to him stood a young girl in a blue jumpsuit with the sigil of a bluebird on both her chest and her shoulder. She carried a bow and had a quiver of arrows hung from her back. She saluted Arturo by holding up the four fingers of her right hand. By her side stood the other male, this one in maroon robes with gigantic sleeves. He held a small metal sword hilt from which rose a blade made from swirling fire and lightning. Finally, next to him stood a female in what appeared to be a red astronaut’s suit complete with a bubble helmet. She wore a holster around her waist that held a black gun. A tube connected the base of the gun to a power generator on her back.

  Arturo dropped to the ground and introduced himself as his new moniker, Machin-Arachnid. However, he soon wished he had not when he realized that he was not as special as he had originally thought.

  Upon speaking with the foursome, Arturo discovered that the blue bear had given them all the same speech and the same task that he had received. The bear had picked them because they were all their realities’ versions of “Chosen Ones,” and from what Arturo could deduce, the blue bear assumed this affinity for being “saviors” on their realities must extend to saving the Multiverse. Arturo felt deflated because he was not as special as he had been led to believe, and he immediately decided that he would revert to his original superhero name—though embarrassingly enough, that would need to wait until he returned to his own home reality, since he had already introduced himself as Machin-Arachnid to his four newfound companions.

  Arturo discovered that the wizard boy with the scar was named Arthur Artter, and he was something of a celebrity on his home reality, since he was the only person to ever survive an attack from his realm’s greatest evil. He was prophesied to set things right for wizarding kind. The female in the blue jumpsuit was named Ginn Yis, and she had led a rebellion on her home reality, overturning a society in which children were forced to fight to the death each year for sport. The boy with the flaming sword was named Artkins, and he was the ultimate incarnation of some hokey religion named The Binding, and he was prophesied as a savior to bring balance to The Binding. Finally, the female in the astronaut suit was named Ginder, and she had attended military school from the time she was an infant to prepare herself for a war against an alien force that had raided her home world before she was born. She was an ingenious tactical commander, and she had been on the verge of leading the final attack on the Insectoid home world when the Blue One had recruited her to help in this Multiversal emergency. She came equipped with a freeze ray, and she claimed her specialty was in zero-gravity combat, though Arturo did not see how that would be very helpful in this fight.

  Arturo discovered that the blue bear had stationed each of them at different locations on the battlefield to wait for the shield to go down. Arturo frowned in annoyance, but Artkins nodded in acceptance and said, “I understand. I fought in the Clone-asaurus Wars, and we almost lost because we did not use such a tactic. The blue bear could not afford to place all his hope in a single one of us. And he also split us up because if we were all together, an unlucky stray blast could have wiped out all hope for the Multiverse.”

  Ginder nodded and chimed in, “And in not telling us about one another, the bear also prevented the problem of one of us getting captured and having information about the others tortured out of us.”

  Artkins nodded once more, obviously in awe of the blue bear’s tactical genius. Arturo and the other two members of the group frowned, undoubtedly all feeling the same conflicted emotions. Artkins frowned at them and then waved two fingers back and forth in front of his face. He said, “I can sense that you all feel betrayed and unimportant because you were not the single being destined to save the Multiverse. But do not lose hope. Logic states that we likely will not all survive this mission. So, there is still the chance that only one of us will emerge as the sole living savior of the Multiverse, while the rest become mere footnotes within its vast history.”

  When Artkins finished speaking, Arturo somehow felt refreshed and important once more. “I’m going to sneak into the building through the air ducts, since stealth will be the key to this mission,” he said. “I would invite you all along with me, but you’ll have a hard time following unless you can bend at angles impossible for a normal human.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” said Arthur Artter. The wizard boy waved his wand in a circle and yelled something that sounded like “Tinius Poppity!” Sparks flew from the end of his wand, danced around everyone except Arturo, and shrank them into tiny versions of themselves about three-inches tall. Arturo shrugged and then formed a little web-hammock in which to carry the two females and the boy with the fire-lightning sword, hoisted them over his shoulder, and crawled into the ducts. The tiny Arthur Artter insisted on floating behind them on his broomstick.

  As Arturo crawled through the air ducts, he heard voices below him. They brought his mind back to the present and he stopped to listen. He could not make out every word, but he heard, “…High Commander…ultimate
weapon…in Forge…kill bears.”

  Arturo gulped. He whispered to the others, “Did you all hear that?”

  The boy with the fire-lightning sword whispered back, and because of his new tiny stature, his voice sounded similar to the squeaking of a mouse. “I did. It appears to be guards on patrol engaged in gossip. Hold on a minute, and I shall use The Binding to uncover more details.”

  The boy held a finger up to his temple and closed his eyes. He hummed softly. The boy on the broomstick seemed a little pouty, like he wanted to be the one to use some sort of trick to gain this information.

  Below, the voices began screaming in unison, “THE HIGH COMMANDER IS COMPLETING A WEAPON TO DEFEAT THE INCURSION FORCES, OR AT LEAST THAT WAS THE LAST RUMOR WE HEARD! HIS FORGE IS ON THE TOP FLOOR! DEFENSES UNKNOWN, SINCE NONE OF US HAVE CLEARANCE TO ENTER THE FORGE!

  The voices continued. “THE COMMUNICATIONS VAULT IS ON FLOOR 65! DEFENSES CONSIST OF TWELVE TURRETS AND THREE SQUADRONS OF TWENTY SOLDIERS EACH.”

  Artkins removed his finger from his temple. The voices began speaking in confusion, unsure what had just happened. Artkins then crushed his hand into a fist, and the voices turned into screams hyphenated by gurgling squishy sounds.

  Arturo turned to Artkins. “What the hell, man? You killed those guards! You may as well have set off an alarm!”

  Seemingly on cue, an alarm began blaring. Artkins shrugged. “At least now we know where we need to go. All things happen as they must, as is the will of The Binding.”

  Ginn Yis spoke up. “We need to set our explosives in the Communications Vault at once.”

  Arthur Artter shook his head. “No. First, we need to steal that weapon those guards mentioned so that it can’t be deployed against the blue bear or against us. I know a thing or two about how these types of adventures work, and I will guarantee that if we don’t get that weapon at once, we will find ourselves attacked by it when we’re setting our explosives.”