Agent 27142 smirked. All he need do was get rid of this Fiery-Art—who was obviously high on the power scale if he could imprison the robot in flaming bonds—and he would have his opportunity to exact his revenge on the robot without interference.
Agent 27142 pitched Henry at the Fiery-Art. “Jump him out of here!” he yelled, and then pointed his Scatter Gun pistol at the robot. He squeezed the trigger and a jagged lightning bolt launched from its end.
The robot dove out of its way, unfortunately, and the bolt slammed into the base of the Muse Electronics billboard that rose high over this street. Sparks flew, a large portion of the right side of the column that held the billboard in the air disappeared, and a loud groan issued from the billboard as it began tottering in the breeze.
Meanwhile, Fiery-Art furrowed his brows. Then he looked at the antennae on the gourd hurtling through the air in his direction. He grinned. He leaned his head forward and grew a small, fleshy pole from his forehead. Henry slammed into the man’s torso and then fired lightning. The pole acted like a lightning rod, somehow attracting the lightning into itself.
Henry bounced from Fiery-Art’s chest and flopped onto the ground, rolling a few inches back toward Agent 27142. Fiery-Art began shaking back and forth as though he were seizing, and then immediately sat down. His eyes crossed.
“Henry! You stupid vegetable! I said to jump him out of h-”
But Agent 27142’s rebuke was interrupted when the deafening sound of thunder and lightning erupted from Fiery-Art’s ears. His head exploded with a crack that echoed so loudly that it sounded like it must have emanated on a cosmic level. From the wreckage of Fiery-Art’s head launched a cockroach nearly two-feet long.
It landed on its back legs and reared up, clicking its forelegs in what sounded like fury. It raised its wings and exposed turquoise runes that covered every inch of its dark brown exoskeleton. Thin blue lightning bolts danced between the bug’s antennae. It shot a small bolt at Agent 27142. Agent 27142 watched with mouth agape, having expected this not at all.
He looked down as the bolt crashed into the Scatter Gun pistol in his hand. It disappeared. He cursed. His cursing was interrupted when Prisoner-Art and Agent 29333 emerged from the manhole. Prisoner-Art glanced around the scene. Horror filled his eyes when he saw Agent 27142—which caused Agent 27142 to beam with pride—but then total joy seemed to chase the terror away when he noticed the gigantic bug.
“Beverly!” he squealed. He raced over to the bug and picked it up. He squeezed it with a loving bear hug. It squirmed from his grasp, skittered a few loops around him, and then stood atop his head. It raised its wings again and flashed lightning between its antennae.
“She’s telling you that you had better leave us be if you know what’s good for you. You have no idea what kind of Artheoskatergariabetrugereiinganno’s Box you just opened,” said the Fiery-Art to Agent 27142, his exploded head now fully repaired. He was already back on his feet. Nobody present cared to point out that they had no idea what an Artheoskatergariabetrugereiinganno’s Box happened to be.
Agent 27142 let out a quick gasp before he could stop himself. “Wait, your head just exploded.”
The Fiery-Art nodded. “And I thank you for that. Your jump totem jumpstarted a process that was going to take me at least another few days to accomplish.”
Agent 27142 stared at him blankly and did not reply.
“I’m a god, mate. Mischief god at that, and resurrecting myself is sort of my thing. Beverly’s my jump totem, and she gets reborn from my forehead when she dies. She died back when I was running around with this guy attempting to get my hands on those cosmic bears,” said Fiery-Art, jerking a thumb toward Prisoner-Art.
Agent 27142 nodded. “I suspected you were the other culprit involved. That was an illegal caper. You are under arrest, and I will ensure that you suffer on one of the B.I.T.’s worst penal dimensions for the remainder of your existence.”
Fiery-Art laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Though I shall enjoy flaying you alive if you are indeed serious about trying to arrest me.”
Agent 27142 looked from Fiery-Art over to the female. “Agent 29333, you are back, right alongside our prisoner! Why are you wearing that ridiculous outfit? Whatever. It matters not. I am simply excited you are returned. Prepare for maneuver number twenty-eight decimal five-four.”
She stared at him with no comprehension. Prisoner-Art glanced over to her and said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “He thinks you’re a different version of you. There was a you that used to serve him on his ship. He was totally in love with her. Everyone could tell. But he was too cowardly to act on it, and between you and me, she confided in me that she could never be with him because his breath is terribly foul. I happen to agree. The worst torture he ever performed on me was when he’d speak too close to my fa-”
Agent 27142 screamed in rage. He sprinted forward, leapt into the air, and kicked Prisoner-Art across the chin. The bug began to fire a bolt of lightning, but Agent 27142 punched it and it tumbled to the ground. He landed on his heel and spun to face Fiery-Art, who was stalking toward him with long strides. Agent 27142 pulled from his holster one of his brass pill-shaped objects and a small black cylinder the size of his palm. He flicked his wrist and the black cylinder telescoped out to become a metal whip. It crackled with electric energy.
“Henry, deal with the hostile jump totem,” ordered Agent 27142, snapping the whip at the approaching mischief god.
Prisoner-Art lay on the ground, still reeling from the kick to his face. The Agent 29333 imposter raced to him and held him in her arms. “I’m thinking maybe we stay out of this, at least until those two wipe each other out,” she whispered into his ear. He nodded his consent.
“[whir] If you loose Drillbot from his bonds, Drillbot could – CLACK – could help,” called the robot to the Fiery-Art, standing in its flaming bonds back near the manhole cover.
Fiery-Art ignored the plea, and Agent 27142 ignored everything but the gargantuan version of himself that was stalking his way like some sort of predatory cat. The god drew a gigantic serrated dagger in one hand, its hilt made of some hairy green-furred tiger’s paw. He filled the other with an obsidian hammer.
Behind the approaching god, lightning flashed lamely between the bug and the gourd. Their attacks seemed to have no effect on one another, so after a few seconds, Henry resigned to making conversation with the bug, and it clicked its forelegs together in reply.
Agent 27142 decided not to wait for the god to reach him. He sprinted forward. He cracked the whip at the god’s face. The god did not flinch as Agent 27142 had hoped, but the electric crackle did cause him to blink. It was enough of an opening. Agent 27142 pressed the button on the brass pill-shaped device and spun to his right, twirling quickly away from the god’s dagger hand. He stabbed the brass device three times, once into the god’s obsidian hammer, once into the god’s left palm, and once into the god’s left collarbone.
All three melted, puddling onto the ground at the god’s feet. The god grimaced in pain, and fury filled his eyes. He swiped with his dagger, and Agent 27142 dodged it. He swiped again, and Agent 27142 dodged it again, this time using his momentum to bring his whip up and swipe it across the god’s face.
The god grinned. The melted portions of his body had reformed on the ground without Agent 27142 realizing it, and the severed left hand had snatched Agent 27142 around the ankle. It jerked to one side, tripping Agent 27142. The hand then grew larger, and now held both of Agent 27142’s ankles in place like a handcuff.
Agent 27142 cursed and lay sprawled on the ground. The god stood over him, raising the dagger high above him. Little fleshly sinews began stretching from the disembodied portion of the god’s body up to his torso proper, beginning to reconnect the severed portions. “Checkmate, mate,” the god said as he stared at Agent 27142. “You were a worthy opponent. I shall chant your vigil after your death if you have no one else to do so.”
Suddenly, the large bi
llboard on the opposite side of the street groaned another loud groan and began falling toward the group gathered in the middle of the street. Agent 27142 stared past Fiery-Art and up at the tattered and crumbling Muse Electronics advertisement. It was the same sign from when he had arrested Prisoner-Art decades ago. He wondered inanely if the place was still in business, doubt filling him at the prospect.
Fiery-Art followed his gaze, turning his head backward like an owl’s without moving his body. He continued rotating it until it had turned a full three-hundred sixty degrees, now back to facing Agent 27142 once again. “Well, looks like a bad day for those who can’t resurrect themselv-”
An orange light flashed, and the god stopped talking. Agent 27142 found that he could not talk, either. Nor could he move. He wanted to blink, but he could not. He wondered if this was what everyone felt just before death, if maybe time slowed to a halt. From what he had heard, he had expected his life to flash before his eyes. But that did not happen, either.
And that’s when he heard a familiar voice. He wanted to cringe, but he could not move.
Chapter 24
ALWAYS LATE
OLDER-ART’S MUSTACHE BUZZED and vibrated, and he smacked it, once more silencing the alarm in it that he had set to go off. An electronic clock nearby beeped and beeped and beeped, and Older-Art slapped it, too, so it would give him some peace and quiet.
Peace and quiet, that sounds nice, he thought. I’ll have lots of peace and quiet after today when I finish this damned mission.
“Dammit!” he screamed, sitting up in his bed. “The mission! Of all the days to oversleep!”
He leapt out of bed and onto his feet, panic filling his mind at the prospect of sleeping through this cosmically important mission for the Bureau of Time Travel. Dread overwhelmed him at the idea that he might never be free of the agency if he botched this task, and thus never free to do what he had always wanted to do: finally relax forever on a couch, watching television.
The bedsheets lay tangled around his feet and tripped him as he attempted to scramble about his business. He crashed to the ground, cursed again, and jumped to his feet. He threw on the first piece of clothing he could find—a ratty old pale blue robe made from a scratchy material that itched his skin. He pulled on a pair of boxers that lay nearby on the ground, the ripe smell indicating to him he had not chosen wisely. But he had no time! He had waited twenty years for today—had even refrained from drinking last night so that he would wake up early—and he had still managed to oversleep.
He cursed again. He shoved his feet into a pair of carpet slippers, grabbed his holster from where he had hidden it in the cabinet under his sink, and then raced out the front door. He returned a few seconds later to grab his keys from the counter only after reaching his car and realizing he had not brought them.
He opened the door, turned on the car, and blasted from his parking space. His tires squealed at each turn, and he was sure that at one particularly sharp turn that he took at a speed too fast for any sane man to take, a hubcap detached itself from his wheel and rolled into a bum sitting on the street corner. He did not slow down at all and did not deign to see if the man needed help.
Older-Art raced toward his old apartment, the one in which he had lived with Ginny before they had been pulled their separate ways by their annoying Multiversal counterparts. Art blasted through red lights. At one particularly busy light through which Art zoomed without stopping, a police car turned on its sirens and began chasing him.
He glanced at the clock in the car and cursed. He was late. He was supposed to arrive before a fight occurred in the street between the B.I.T. agent and the other Arts. That fight was supposed to start at 10:15 AM, and it was now a solid 10:16 AM.
He reached into his holster without looking and pulled out a tiny metal disk. He cranked a nob on its front to the two-minute mark, and then dropped it out of his driver-side window. When the cop car passed the tiny mine, it froze the car place. It would be stuck in time at that moment for the next two minutes, at which point Art would have reached his destination and hopefully completed his mission.
He turned the corner onto another street, then another, and finally slammed his car to a halt. He jerked open his door, jumped to his feet, and pulled from his holster a pistol that looked like a toy ray gun he might have bought as a kid. It was called a Time-Phaser. It had small red rings around the barrel and its contours were pale green. He cranked a dial to the Shotgun setting, and the little red rings that encircled the barrel of the ray gun widened to about a foot in diameter. He cranked a second dial so that it rested on the two-hour mark. He cranked a third dial until it stopped on the Stasis setting, bypassing both the Evolution and Devolution settings.
He cursed as he surveyed the scene in front of him. He had been ordered to do what he needed to do before the group caused a scene, a task at which he had obviously failed. The gigantic Muse Electronics billboard was falling, about to crush everyone. God-Art stood holding his serrated dagger in the air over the supine B.I.T. agent. Art’s younger-self lay on the ground being cradled by Ginny. Drillbot stood motionless, encircled in bindings formed from flames. Beverly sat next to a gourd with antennae.
Art fired his Time-Phaser, and a blast of orange light sprayed in an arc that covered the entire street. Time froze in the area, the billboard hovering mere inches above the group.
Art walked around to his trunk. He opened it and pulled out a flat piece of metal, which he unfolded into a ten-by-ten metal square. He tapped a button with his foot and the bottom of it glowed blue. It lifted itself a few inches off the ground. He pulled a second piece of metal from his trunk and attached it to the floating square to create a hovering dolly.
He pushed it over to his younger-self and Ginny. He remembered the thought that his younger-self would be having at this moment, so he answered the question that his younger-self could not ask. As he did so, he remembered just how much he hated time travel.
“Yeah, I’m your boss, Mr. Reynolds,” said Older-Art. He squatted in front of his younger-self’s eyes for a moment and removed the fake mustache. “But I’m also you, from the future. You were too dense and dumb to realize I looked just like you, except that I had a mustache.
“Anyway,” he continued, slapping the mustache back in place, “as you are aware, that bastard B.I.T.-agent version of us stole a W.M.D. from the B.T.T. and used it against the cosmic bears. The bears are frozen in time on the B.I.T.’s home reality, but that won’t last forever, especially against such powerful cosmic beings as those two. I’ve been sent here to collect you so that you can save the Space-Time-Multinuum from utter disaster.”
Art nodded at his younger-self. “I remember being where you are. And what you’re thinking is absolutely right: this is incredibly stupid, the Multiverse is stupid, the Space-Time-Multinuum is stupid and it sounds like a word I just made up. But unfortunately, this is your life now,” said Art with a shrug. “I wish I could change it, but you’re my ticket to returning to our couch and finally getting to watch television until my eyes bleed and I rot away into nothingness.”
Older-Art picked up his younger-self with a loud grunt and placed him on the hovering dolly. He decided to disobey his commands, which were to only extract his younger-self. He picked up Ginny and placed her on the dolly. Then he walked over to Drillbot and smiled.
Art holstered his Time-Phaser and retrieved a small green rectangle from the holster. A tiny logo read Time Warper, Model II. He held it near the fiery leash that surrounded Drillbot. He tapped a button and the little rectangle made a sound like a vacuum. He touched it gently to the flaming leash. The device twisted time in on itself in a backward circle, and soon, the fiery leash looped backward in time through so many iterations of itself that it returned to its place in this timestream before it ever existed, disappearing from around Drillbot.
Art moved behind the robot and shoved him up onto the square dolly. He then rolled the dolly back over near his car so that it was no longer
underneath the frozen billboard. He climbed up onto the dolly, removed the fake mustache once more, and turned it over. He tapped the little red button in its middle in the pattern he had been taught.
“This is Agent Art,” he said. “Mission complete. Request extraction.”
Thunder boomed overhead, and then a massive dirigible appeared in the sky. Its balloon was shaped like an elongated ellipse, and it was so large that it looked like a second moon had taken residence in the heavens. Thousands upon thousands of cables attached the balloon to a gondola, which was nearly as large as the balloon and shaped like an infinity symbol. A gigantic set of engines extended from the rear of the gondola, these as tall and wide as the gondola itself. The entire vessel was striped blue and white, with the stripes on the balloon oriented horizontally and the stripes on the infinity-symbol-shaped gondola oriented vertically. Its color scheme vaguely resembled that of a tiger if a tiger had entered the circus and been painted all the wrong colors while half its stripes were rearranged in the wrong direction.
A blue beam of light flashed down from the bottom of the ship. It enveloped the dolly, along with Older-Art and the companions he had loaded atop the contraption.
The dolly was lifted into the air. It disappeared inside the ship.
And then the ship disappeared from the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Mark Reddish for all the help. You always take the time to make these things better, and your feedback is always appreciated. It’s definitely not a Moose-take that you’re such a valued friend.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Brimmage is a writer, teacher, marketer, and former boy band front man. He has a wife named Geraldine to whom he loves to sing Meatloaf, a son named Augustus with whom he has formed the Steam Roller Boyz, and a pair of brothers that he loves to annoy.
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 37