That’s stupid, thought Ginny. She considered the situation for a moment. She wished she could scowl. Then she thought at the Pink One, Your pink gift is still inside me, and time becoming frozen didn’t remove it. I didn’t renege on our deal. I’ve done everything you asked! I’ve murdered, and I’ve pillaged, and I’ve destroyed entire realities for you. I don’t care if the way your magic works means that I die when the pink stops flowing through me. I didn’t quit on you! If I’m dead whenever time unfreezes, then simply make the pink flow again and bring me back!”
“Me no make the rules here. Pink must flow to keep Ginny’s soul bound and keep her as Me Right Hand of Destruction. When that bind be gone, Me attack Ginny’s home reality first. Me gave Ginny Me word, and words be binding.”
Ginny thought a curse and then, Of course you make the rules here! Our deal being broken because of time becoming frozen—something completely out of my control!—is stupid and illogical and, frankly, unfair.
“No, no, no. Completely fair and logical. Me hoodoo be now overpowered by time-freezies, and Ginny soul will be freed by time-freezies. Me will not be able to retrieve Ginny’s soul from its afterlife to bring it back to Ginny’s body in a peaceful way—that power be in the realm of the Blue One. If Me make pink flow through Ginny’s body again after Ginny’s soul escapes, then Me just be resurrecting a mindless corpse no better than Me puppets. This no sacrifice, and nothing that make Me satisfied. Ginny be Me Right Hand of Destruction because her soul be tethered to her corpse because of Me hoodoo. For Me to retrieve Ginny’s soul to retether to Ginny’s corpse and turn Ginny once more into Me Right Hand of Destruction, Me will needs to devour Ginny’s home reality—including her afterlife—and then regurgitate her soul into her corpse. Thus, Ginny be gone to Me forever when Ginny dies and soul leaves unless Me destroy her home reality. And Ginny only agreed to be Me Right Hand of Destruction if Me spared her reality until last, so if Me destroying her reality must happen immediately to get her back so she can keep her end of bargain, Ginny unlikely to agree to keep being Me Right Hand of Destruction, because there would be no reward in it. Is Me right?
Obviously, I wouldn’t agree to help you if you’ve already destroyed my reality, Ginny thought to the image of the Pink One. But you don’t need to turn this into the worst Catch-22 of all time. You could still do the right thing and spare my reality. Please!
The Pink One shook her head. “But words are words and deals are deals. Ginny just confirmed to Me that she no longer would be Me Right Hand of Destruction if she died and her reality must be destroyed for Me to get her back. Me made binding contract with Ginny to spare her reality so long as she agrees to be Me Right Hand of Destruction. Me must deliver the consequences that Me promised in the covenant we made. Powerful hoodoo be living in covenants, and even Me must abide by these agreements to keep access to this hoodoo. So Ginny must hang on and keep her soul inside her corpse. Ginny must not let herself pass on to her reality’s afterlife, or covenant between Me and Ginny will be voided, and Ginny will be at fault. Me will be bound by hoodoo of covenant to ensure consequences promised to Ginny are fulfilled. Me will attack Ginny’s home reality first when Me eventually am free.”
Ginny thought another curse followed by, How the hell am I supposed to know how to force my soul to stay inside my corpse? This is totally unfair! I didn’t do anything wrong!
“But Ginny did do wrong. Ginny didn’t stop the time-freezie bomb. Me saw Ginny miss the ship that dropped it and then Me felt Ginny resist Me instructions to pursue because Ginny was distracted by the drilling robot. Ginny only have self to blame.”
The pain spread from Ginny’s chest into the rest of her body. She cursed one more time and then blackness descended across her eye. In her last few moments, she tried to think of ideas for how to keep her soul bound to her corpse. Unfortunately, no matter how much she attempted to concentrate on the soul-binding conundrum, she could only think inanely about strawberry ice cream and how much she was going to miss it. Her soul drifted away.
To casual onlookers frozen in time and staring at her, they would not have known that she had just died inside her reanimated corpse and doomed her reality to destruction, nor that she had just experienced a long mental conversation with her pink master. They would have thought she was merely frozen in time, just like themselves.
Chapter 7
A MANGLED ESCAPE
Agent 27142 cursed and fired his Scatter Gun, disintegrating the boulder hurtling toward him. He pointed to three soldiers. “You three, cover us. The rest of you, get to the nearest shift-shuttle!” he ordered.
Agent 27142 sprinted from the cave toward the nearest shift-shuttle. He aimed his Scatter Gun pistol at the nearest Cyclops and fired a disintegration bolt into its chest. It disappeared, and its boulder fell onto the foot of the Cyclops next to it, who began hopping up and down in pain.
Agent 27142 cursed again as this Cyclops lost its balance and fell onto the nearest cloaked shift-shuttle. It did not understand what had happened when it crashed atop something invisible, only that it had fallen on something it could not see, and this confusion manifested in screaming fury. The brute got to its feet and began smashing the spot with its rock, crushing the invisible ship into a useless ball of metal.
Agent 27142 immediately changed direction, sprinting toward the far ship. He and his soldiers blasted multiple Cyclopes with their Scatter Guns. Agent 27142 rolled to his left just in time to avoid being crushed by a boulder, frowned as three of his men were flattened by it, and then fired a bolt to disintegrate another boulder thrown at him from a nearby Cyclops.
The remaining shift-shuttle now sat not a half-dozen yards in front of him. He dove toward its open hatch. However, giant hands swooped in from the side and snatched him.
Agent 27142 was lifted into the air. He looked down at the six remaining soldiers who had accompanied him into the clearing. He watched them aim their Scatter Guns at the Cyclops who had snatched him. But then he sighed a frustrated sigh when they were all crushed by yet another gigantic boulder tossed by yet another massive, one-eyed brute. Agent 27142 glanced toward the cave from which he and the soldiers had emerged. When he saw that the three soldiers he had left stationed in the cave mouth to provide covering fire were too distracted by firing upon the dozen boulders currently hurtling their way, he knew that no help was coming.
Agent 27142 cursed as he found himself tossed into the open maw of the Cyclops that had snagged him. He noted that its breath smelled foul and rotten, like sheep fat that had rotted inside a cocoon made of seaweed.
Once inside the wet gullet, Agent 27142’s eagle dug its talons into his shoulder. He smirked. He had refrained from using his jump totem earlier because he could not jump away an entire squadron, but now that it was only him who remained alive in the party, he screamed to his totem, “Jump! Now!”
The eagle’s antennae stood on end. Lightning flashed between them. The Cyclops’ tongue flicked Agent 27142 toward bony yellow teeth. The teeth snapped down on him.
Lightning filled his vision in a flash as it launched from his eagle’s antennae, but the slavering teeth crashed down in a flash, too. Agent 27142 felt a crippling pain explode across his left side, and then blackness descended across his eyes.
*
When Agent 27142 came to, he found that he was floating in the infinite barrier between realities. Pain shot through his left side. He forced himself to look at it.
His shoulder was a mangled wreck the shape of a Cyclopean incisor. His collarbone felt as though it had been broken in a dozen places, his left arm was twisted in an unnatural direction behind his body, and blood poured from rips in his uniform. But this dire cocktail of injuries was not the direst of news.
Agent 27142’s eagle lay embedded in his shoulder, crushed into his flesh by the ungodly chewing power of a fifty-foot-tall giant. He could swear that he could feel every single one of the eagle’s broken bones where they lay impaled in his flesh.
He
screamed a curse. He touched the communicator in his ear, but he picked up no signal. He touched the distress call button on his belt, but the eagle’s interrupted jump must have disabled its functionality, so it shorted out nearly immediately.
He screamed an even louder curse. He would likely be stuck in The Barrier for eternity.
He collected himself and began sizing up his surroundings. Eternity was a long time, and surely such a high-ranking officer in the B.I.T. could find a solution for just such a predicament. When one did not present itself immediately, he cursed a third time.
Chapter 8
A ROBOTIC VISION
Drillbot tapped the button next to the door and it swung open. “Honey, Drillbot’s home!” he called as he rolled into the foyer. He felt more than heard his wife’s footsteps approach as they shook the house. The chandelier hanging from the rafters vibrated, teetered, and finally fell to the ground when its chain snapped—as it did every day when his wife ran to meet him at the door.
Drillbot smiled his version of a smile as Ginny Rex stepped into view. She no longer wore her spiked leather jacket. It was now replaced with an apron covered in a design that featured dozens of fluttering hearts. Her blond mullet and crown remained perched atop her head, apparently unaltered in her costume change. She grinned at him, bent down, and hugged him. Her arms stretched barely long enough to surround his shoulders. He nuzzled her and allowed his engines to purr. She giggled, as she always did when he vibrated against her.
She looked over her shoulder and called, “Kids! Your dad’s home! Come say hi!”
He looked to his left at a set of carpeted stairs that led down from the second story of the house. The sweet giggles of children wafted down from a room at the top. Then three children rumbled down the stairs. The eldest had the head of a tyrannosaur and a body just like Drillbot’s. The second was the opposite, with Drillbot’s head and Ginny Rex’s body. The third looked just like Drillbot’s former master, Art.
“Hiya, Pop!” they all yelled in unison.
Drillbot smiled at them and waved. They waved back. Suddenly, the third child, the one that looked like Art, said, “Wake up, Pop. You know this isn’t real.”
Drillbot frowned his version of a frown. “[whir] B-But you’re wrong. You – CLACK – You – CLACK – You are Drillbot’s family. Drillbot loves you.”
Drillbot looked back over at his wife. Her pupils shifted into the shapes of a tyrannosaur skull-and-crossbones. Her lips were suddenly covered in blood and she tried to mouth something to him, but she disintegrated before she was able to finish.
“[whir] No!” Drillbot shrieked. He looked up at the kids. The first two disappeared in a puff of smoke. The third, who look like Art, shifted. His hair caught fire. His toddler clothing fell away, replaced with a cloak made from the hides of white wolves and baby seals. A necklace of severed ears hung from his torso, and a belt of thick rope hung suspended around his waist, attached to which were a dagger, a leather pouch, and tools made from obsidian. The boy now looked like a toddler version of the god manifestation of Drillbot’s former master.
“Drillbot,” said the boy. “You know this vision is a lie. This is a hallucination brought about by grief and boredom and self-pity.”
“[whir] B-But it’s not – CLACK – not fair.”
The boy frowned, and the flaming hair caused shadows to dance across his face. “Nothing ever is, mate. Some of us plan for millennia and still don’t get what we want. Others—like you—stumble into someone who fills you with joy and then lose her. But deceiving yourself with these lies is the same as giving up. And giving up seems like the last thing that your dinosaur lover would ever want you to do. Maybe rather than wallowing in your own despair, you should get up and find a way to atone for your failures. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for your dead love and for the multitudes of people in the Multiverse that will be doomed without your help.”
Drillbot frowned and nodded. His telescopic eyes twisted, and the interior of the house faded away. The bridge of the shift-shuttle came into focus.
Drillbot looked at the date log on the ship’s console, and he sighed. He had thus far drifted aimlessly for five years. He stared out the view screen and watched the afternoon sky shift into evening sky shift into fresh greenery shift into waving plains shift into roaring sea. And on and on and on.
Millions of realities had popped into view before Drillbot only to disappear just as quickly. But as he thought back to his most recent hallucination, an idea sprang forth in his head. He plugged into the ship once again and asked the CPU in his nicest tone to give him a warning when they were about to pass through a certain-numbered earth. The CPU agreed, and Drillbot smiled his version of a smile. He would need to time this perfectly.
Drillbot turned away from the view screen and back toward the hatch. He frowned as he looked at the bodies of the B.I.T. version of Ginny and his former master. The skin on their corpses hung loose and sallow. Their lifeless eyes stared at him accusingly. “[whir] Drillbot – CLACK – Drillbot – CLACK – Drillbot is sorry, master,” he said to Art for probably the thousandth time.
Drillbot rolled back to the hatch and skidded down the ladder. He crawled through the hole he had pierced in the ship a half-decade ago and hung precariously from the ship’s side. The vessel continued bounding across the Multiverse. Drillbot hung on and waited.
Five years later, an alarm blared through the ship. Drillbot smiled his version of a smile.
Chapter 9
A LONG TUMBLE
Agent 27142 tumbled end over end, just as he had been doing for nearly five years. However, he never perceived it as a tumble, since that would have run counter to his basic B.I.T. training. Instead, he knew that there was neither up nor down in this infinite place, so forgetting traditional orientation meant that he could drift and not feel the disorientation and nausea that an untrained body would feel.
Agent 27142 cursed. The beauty of the place had worn off long ago, and he wanted nothing more than to return to some sort of charted reality that would allow him to regain contact with the B.I.T. After all, he had a mission to complete.
He sighed and listened to the rhythmic pumping coming from within the left breast of his uniform beneath his badge. There, underneath the material, a needle poked through his skin and deep into his heart. It had been painful and uncomfortable when Agent 27142 had first stabbed it into his chest, but after these many years, he had long grown accustomed to it. The needle was yet another B.I.T. device invented by the High Commander to allow an agent to survive the Barrier indefinitely if he were ever to find himself stranded in it. The needle connected to a series of tubes enriched with nutrients that ran throughout the lining of the uniform. It constantly pumped an agent’s blood through the tubes, acting like a tiny dialysis machine that recycles the blood and reinforces it with necessary sugars and vitamins, allowing him to survive without access to food or water or whatever sustenance he might need to stay alive.
A lesser agent might have considered unhooking himself from the device and allowing himself to die rather than face the possibility that he might drift forever through infinity. But Agent 27142 was not just any agent, so he instead allowed himself to tumble. And he remained vigilant.
Finally, after another year passed, he caught his first break. He saw lightning flash not too far off in the distance. When it subsided, he witnessed a hulking, hairy sasquatch wearing a fedora and a tiny leather vest clinging desperately to its jump totem, which was a green and yellow striped kitten with floppy ears, a tail that resembled a horse’s mane, and a pair of gigantic antennae sticking straight out from its forehead. A crate was tied to the sasquatch’s ankle by a rope. Agent 27142 removed a small telescope from his holster and stared through it at the beast. His telescope revealed no sign of the musk that would be lingering about the sasquatch as an identification mark if the beast were a legal transporter of goods.
Smugglers, thought Agent 27142. He ground his teeth and
replaced the telescope in his holster. I hate smugglers.
Agent 27142 shifted direction and clicked his heels together in a secret pattern. A small explosion erupted below his heels that sent him hurtling toward the sasquatch. Agent 27142 cursed when the sasquatch looked up and noticed him, because he had hoped to take it by surprise and commandeer its jump totem.
Agent 27142 pointed to his badge and shouted, “I am Agent 27142 of the B.I.T. I am stranded. If you hand over your jump totem, then I may be persuaded to only cite you with a warning for your obvious smuggling infraction.”
The sasquatch frowned. “You must be out’cher damn mind!” it replied, its voice a robust falsetto.
Agent 27142 began to draw his Scatter Gun pistol, but the sasquatch only laughed. It flexed it pectoral muscles, which popped open its vest. The beast had two tiny arms growing from its torso, both of which held pistols that it now trained on Agent 27142.
“Keep your hands away from that iron, agent,” the sasquatch muttered. “You don’t, and you won’t be the first B.I.T. agent I’ve hadda plug.”
Agent 27142 frowned. Duty would not allow him to back down. His hand closed around the handle of his Scatter Gun pistol, and just as he was pulling it from its holster, two blasts rang out from the sasquatch’s pistols. A buzzing sound whistled past his ear, and a sharp pain exploded in his lower abdomen. He groaned in pain, but he managed to draw his Scatter Gun pistol and shoot before the sasquatch was able to fire again.
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 24