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5 hours ago
2
pt. i
pt. ii
pt. iii
Lieber,_Stanley-Maude_Mold.mp3 (227MB)
END PIRO
MASKIROVKA
Redaction Day.
1 Oct 2016.
Clothed in his mother like a mid-2010s athleisure bodysuit, Piro grasped a flap of her bunched up surface that sagged over his left knee, flooding her with involuntary pain, which activated her percept drive against her will. Onlookers finally deigned to notice the man-size pink action figure just as it (for all they knew) winked out of existence, leaving nothing in its wake save for a six-foot pink afterimage.
"It’s all pink on the outside!" a nearby wiseguy hollered, too late.
Piro was gone.
KITE FESTIVAL
Redaction Day.
1 Oct 1961.
MARS2.
Pink sand wasn’t the only game in town, up in the foothills. The government had been experimenting with new types of trees. Born of sand, acclimated to the inhospitable climate. Whole forests. To many of the kids living at the test site, the experimental woodlands were a welcome respite from the dusty tedium of parents and school. Ever observant of shifting migration patterns, Piro noticed this trend early on, and arranged private combatives tutoring for those willing to endure sustained psychological and physical punishment.
A large tree had been felled near one of the trail heads that fed into the foothills. Here, Piro delivered his first lecture of the quarter.
Several of his students were busy flying kites to their homies on Earth. Waving hands around at nothing, apparently directing data to and fro along channels Piro didn’t want to know about. He stood waiting on the fallen tree. He was patient.
Up to a point.
SUFFER WELL
The kids couldn’t keep their balance, couldn’t stay on the tree trunk. It was nine feet in circumference, which Piro deemed more than sufficient for punters at this stage of development. Staying on the tree trunk was worth seventy percent of their grade, and they were all going to fail.
"Professor, are we meant to have completed our mandatory instructor quality surveys before or after class today?"
Piro stood alone on the tree trunk as daylight continued to fade, losing patience, contemplating the surveys that represented only one percent of the students’ grades, but were tied directly to his own performance reviews and compensation. Reflected that he’d once laughed off a student who suggested the day’s combat training might be settled through a contest of math problems.
The student had come closer now. Making and holding eye contact with the old pirate, who had to admit he was getting tired of all this standing around. Maybe class wouldn’t be a total wash, after all.
The boy was armed.
Piro smiled, dully.
HORSE AS COUNSELOR
Slake Bottom had never stopped watching out for his son. Decades after his own death, he still forced himself awake every morning, still drank the coffee that activated his stomach acid, still managed the trip to Mars, whatever year, to make sure the kid was still getting on okay.
Turned out he didn’t need a lot of help, these days.
The school was up and running, funding had at last been secured, oversight had been successfully misdirected towards unimportant projects manifesting elsewhere, and a Mold heir had finally be located and groomed. The boy’s mother was always about, but Slake knew how to avoid trouble when he really wanted to.
Perched in his treetop blind, he watched his son teaching little kids how to beat up their dads.
DELTA MACHINE
Fractal zoom, endless tiny deltas, cells interlocking cells, hypertextual self-referent dermoplast coating the blunt totality of Piro’s wireframe regret, such as it was. Pirate as smooth lozenge. Death as your own pink shadow. Or however you liked it.
Piro emerged into the clearing not from the forest, but from his own train of thought, some fifty-four years hence. he stepped off of Lexington Avenue and into the pink sand under the trees, several feet below and behind his younger self, who remained quite distracted by administrative details, re: his class.
He was unobserved.
THE YEAR I DIDN’T SURVIVE
Piro disarmed the boy just as Piro appeared behind and below himself. An assassination attempt was never quite unexpected, especially amongst the disaffected youth at the test site, whose parents modelled a laissez-faire approach to the rule of law. Still, Piro was prepared to humor this sort of thing only so far. After all, he was the teacher, and this was his class. It was time to restore order.
The boy went down.
For several seconds, the other students didn’t react. After a short pause a simultaneous cheer erupted, echoing throughout the progressively darkening forest. The would-be assassin had been unpopular with his classmates. Piro wondered if, anticipating the likely outcome, they had all egged him on in his program of self-actualization. He cupped his ears at the jubilant screaming. Kids could be loud.
Piro took his chance and moved quickly to the other side of the fallen tree, avoiding Piro’s line of sight. He crouched behind a raspberry bush, resisting the sudden urge to compulsively munch on a fresh raspberry. Realized the urge belonged to his suit. Shut up, Mom.
Up on the fallen tree, Piro froze, lowered his hands to listen. Something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t the fact his grade school students were trying to kill him. He scanned the vicinity three times, averaging the results. Nothing.
Down in the sand, Piro froze, immediately aware of his error. His mother’s skin camouflaged him from the children, but he knew himself to be immune to such tricks, especially when it came to family. He could feel himself slipping around wildly inside her, unsure of his position, afraid he might pop out and ruin everything with his inept fumbling of the familiar routine.
It was too late. Piro had made him.
Piro unzipped his mother and stepped forth into the waning light of the clearing. Drew the rifle he'd once stolen from her closet and aimed it at his younger self, who had just spoiled the surprise.
"W-what?" Piro said, baffled for the first time in his life.
"Your mom," Piro said, happy to finally get one over on this insufferable know-it-all.
He took the shot.
END PIRO
THE JOB, PT. III
There she was.
No cops around.
Piro entered his mother’s body. Her soft pink walls contracted, closing up behind him as if to pull him inside, as if mother and son had never truly been apart. A state of grace THE BIBLE referred to as the sharing of one flesh. Piro stomped down the aft corridor to the bridge, mind emptied of the wasted years so close behind. His mother sighed, dissatisfied.
"Forward," he commanded.
THE RAGNAROK inched forward, her wing tips encroaching upon the bike lanes and sidewalks of Lexington Avenue. The crowd parted blandly around her, oblivious to the creeping danger.
It seemed malicious compliance was the order of the day.
Piro withdrew from a fold of skin above his left elbow a thin gray module, which presently unfolded into the prototype visor Daisuke Saito had donated to the Actron team at the abrupt conclusion of his unfortunate life. Resembling nothing so much as a fresh strip of fly paper, it activated at Piro’s touch. He donned it.
He pinched the fold of skin above his other elbow and the ship spasmed, shrinking now, spiraling around him like tub water gurgling down the drain. Outside, THE RAGNAROK’s wing tips receded from the sidewalks on either side of the street. The crowds continued along their respective tracks, virtual assistants adjusting their routes algorithmically, no spare snatch of concrete or pavement going to waste. THE RAGNAROK’s total apparent size had been reduced by fifty percent over the past sixty seconds, a condition blatantly ignored by the populace in her general vicinity. No one was shouting their objections or holding up a phone.
Self divided, THE RAGNAROK continued to shrink, until what had once roamed the spaceways/millennia as if they were merely the millennia/spaceways had now been reduced to a glossy pink, hermetically sealed suit of clothes for her only remaining son, tailored as a second skin bestowed by some god or gods he didn’t fully believe in until matters of material expediency contradicted his innate sense of the probable.
Vacuum tight around his skin, Piro looked at each of his arms and legs, admiring the figure cut by his mother as she clung cloyingly to his silhouette.
"This could be us," he said, and winced as his glossy outer shell momentarily tightened below the waist, before finally attaining a more or less comfortable equilibrium. He shook out his arms and legs, took a breath.
It was time.
Lulu only from now on. This will no longer be available from Amazon.
The book has been resized to 6"x9", but there are no other changes to the cover or interior text.
THE JOB, PT. II
4045. Deep space.
Inspection paradox. There was a rifle in Mom’s closet, therefore, moms as a class packed rifles. Piro had paid it no mind at the time. He’d been born with his own weapon, so why shouldn’t everyone else come strapped as well?
Curious that Dad had offered a nervous explanation. "It’s mine," he’d said, even though he no longer lived aboard ship. This burst of word salad made no sense on several levels, especially when, years later, he’d turn around and suggest that maybe Mom was no stranger to the use of fire arms. This one in particular. Stipulate his story was true—why had he left it behind? "It doesn’t work," Dad had added hastily, which also seemed unlikely.
At several hours of age, Piro’s initial scan of his mother’s numerous decks had turned up only this single solitary example of a spaceworthy weapon, and no one could offer a plausible explanation as to why it should be found, laying around, logged in and unlocked. So far in his short life, his trust in the world was markedly underdeveloped.
4047. Near Earth.
"She may have killed your grandfater," Slake Bottom said, sagging on the corner edge of Piro’s bunk, golden ass nearly touching the ground. Means, motive, and opportunity had all been established to Piro's satisfaction. "I’m not saying she did it," Slake dissembled, after expertly laying out the evidence pointing to the only possible conclusion. "But facts are in evidence."
Piro’s eyes slid across the bulkhead. This was the first he’d heard of his mother’s combat experience. He knew he’d never ask her about it, but Dad’s suppositions did fill in some nagging blank spots in his apprehension of the family's backstory. How did one know which intelligence to trust? Huge, if true.
But ships were ships. Piro’s unique characteristics, re: life, had been born of a one-off hybrid coupling between the man in the donkey helmet and a huge, spacefaring triangle. Neither of whom possessed his peculiar talents or tepmerament. How could he hope to comprehend their quaint preferences and perspectives? They’d given him life, and he didn’t know how to thank them, or even if he wanted to.
As his father teetered on the edge of falling off his bed, Earth normal gravity unexpectedly resumed, Piro shrugged the outsize shoulder pads in his brown pirate jacket and resolved to suffer well.
THE JOB, PT. I
Slate cleared, Piro got down to it. Urgent updates in his pull file begged for him to make contact, but he blew them off. Antique modern memories. He was working, now.
First order of business was to retrieve the full set of real time coordinates from his pull files in various comic shops across the northeast. Atomic Books, Baltimore, Maryland. Partners and Son, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Desert Island, New York, New York. Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal Quebec. The Beguiling, Toronto, Ontario. Gutterpop, Buffalo, New York. Lion’s Tooth, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Quimby’s, Chicago, Illinois. Copacetic Comics, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Doomed Planet, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Three thousand miles of comics and fun. Somehow, it all took only a couple of days. Hypokrités in the shops ignored him, busy as they were discussing films and #uspol. He took the opportunity to close out his pull files as he went. This time, he actually read some of the comics.
Strange to think that soon he’d never shoot another man again.
More old business cropped up. It seemed NSFPD had opened an investigation into the Actron team around the time they’d lifted Daisuke Saito and Roald McDonald out from under the nose of Y Combinator, a local startup accelerator. What author William Gibson would have called a nodal point. Piro was unconcerned with the scrutiny, but he was curious how much the cops had managed to uncover. Whomever it had been on the case, this was old news. They were dead now.
Piro heaved the last of the material into a dumpster and lit it on fire. Removed his uniform, data gloves, boots, and eyepatch, and sent them all following. His long brown hair flowed around his exposed shoulders. The fire was warm.
Naked, he made his way into the crowded street, trying to get arrested.
pictured: BUBBLES #18
Lulu only from now on. This will no longer be available from Amazon.
The book has been resized back to its original 6"x9", but there are no other changes to the cover or interior text.
MARCH LIGHT
Piro wasn’t a racist. He abhorred the lifestyle of THE DENIMS (and THE BLANKS before them) on purely technical grounds, which was to say, he disagreed one could negate the solemn white nothingness of THE AIN by painting a blue line around the world and watching the paint slowly spread to encompass its infinitely measureless, non-corporeal perimeter. Shoehorning a Marxist critique of physics into the mix because they liked the look of the man’s 19th century beard had finally torn it for him. Nowadays, he wouldn’t even argue. Some questions didn’t need to be endlessly relitigated. Membership in the cult was optional. Join or not, just point and click.
He finished off a few side jobs while contemplating an approach to his new mission. Concealing the operation from the remains of his organization was of paramount importance. Considering who he was working with these days, he didn’t think it would prove too much of a problem.
Of greater concern was his mother. Admittedly an indispensable ally over her decades of service, she’d proven a tendency to quietly thwart any schemes she sensed didn’t align with what was best for the team. When indispensable met a surplus of dull care, something had to give.
Wherever his father was, he was unlikely to interfere.
Three Smurfs down. He signed off on the job.
Marched back to Midtown before lunch. How was he going to pull this off? He was known—amongst those to whom he was known—for his tight operational security. While it was true the one assailant he’d never suspect was himself, he had to take into account the fact that in this instance he couldn’t rely on the element of surprise. He already knew he was coming.
Ducked back into Midtown. Two more Smurfs, rummaging through the dollar bins in the back of the shop. They didn’t seem to notice him, but anyway, not his problem, as he was now off the clock.
Up to the counter.
New comics in his pull file.
each page was drawn in india ink, 5.5" x 8.5", on copy paper.
most individual pages are still available. some pages were drawn on the computer so they aren’t available as original art (it’s fairly obvious which pages this applies to).
$150 per page post paid anywhere, cheaper if you want more than one page.
check out the pdf:
http://massivefictions.com/mm/pdf_print/interior.pdf
contact me directly if you want one and we’ll work something out.
sl
ALPHA INDIGO
The fax machine in Piro’s office rang. An advertisement for Pube’s Pizza unspooled steadily onto the floor. A pre-arranged signal alerting Piro that the dead drop in his Midtown Comics pull file had been updated.
Exiting the shop, Piro tossed aside the useless comic books and scanned the Post-it note he found attached to one of the backing boards. A street urchin on a Variflex Voodoo skateboard swooped in and snatched one of the discarded comics out of mid-air. "Gee, thanks, mister!" he snarled mockingly as he skated on. Kids didn’t read comic books anymore.
Piro ate the Post-it, pitched the backing board over his shoulder, and made his way to the address he’d seen written on the note he’d just eaten. Slid into a booth near the back and ordered a cup of the best coffee in the world. Waited twenty minutes without taking a sip.
Ding.
The Chief didn’t get out much. It was strange to encounter him here, in this context, disconnected from his console, Hel, physically incarnate, more than a barely de-garbled voice in his earpiece. The superior officer drank his indigo coffee, seemingly relishing work in the field. Brown teeth protruded expectantly from his smile.
"I’m not quite convinced you can handle this," the ostensibly older man said, no longer smiling. "Fact is, we’ve come to you because we’ve even less confidence in anyone else."
Piro stared straight ahead, focusing on a point some years hence, when he’d remind his younger self to be on the lookout for this guy. "What’s the job," he finally said, noncommittal, for the time being. Peripheral vision commencing another scan, he realized suddenly that he recognized this diner from a scene in ELF (2003). As yet untouched, his own coffee had gone cold. Probably wasn’t that good, anyway.
"Piro, one of our best, most reliable operatives needs killing. Piro, he’s gone off the rails. Piro, we’re not sure exactly what he’s up to, but it’s definitely out of scope, contra our well-established code of business conduct. Piro, we’ve tried killing him before, but everyone we’ve sent after him was never heard from again, or otherwise became useless to us in the process. Piro, we’re coming to you, hat in hand, because we’re desperate. Piro, it’s you. We need you to kill you."
Piro stared straight ahead, visibly unmoved. The Chief set down his coffee, flush with a fresh injection of smug dismissiveness.
"Yeah, I didn’t think you’d be up for i--"
"I’ll do it," Piro said. Perfectly awake, he had yet to blink.
The Chief relaxed then, sagged in his rumpled London Fog. His yellow hair looked somehow paler, thinner at hearing this wonderful news. His troubles were over.
"Thank you. Thank you..." he trailed off.
Piro paid the tab.
he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t see his way to and from the awning. that. this new release commemorated the 250th anniversary of the what was happening?
the street. Werner would talk to his friends, picking up the latest room. Architecture of stripes crossed by wires. i. THEM . SULPHER EXPLANES SOME ABOUT THE TEAM TO SONIC. paying work.
the town. even the local addresses were sometimes hard to find. he breakfast he could see the whole town. such as it was. he stretched primer.
Always, he was resisting. THE SLAVE GIRL IS BEING RAPED. FORCIBLY. THE SLAVE MASTER GRABS HER process of putting together the reports. Every time he did that he would lose signal entirely. even inside his house, or even in certain late at night. vidya folded the note carefully and filed it in the down, off of the futon. The doorbell rang, and he watched himself
Pg. 9
for ninety minutes he sat, apparently listening to the objectionable effects (onomatopoeia) is added in ink, whether from a pre-written notebook. with a lesser job title. in this way a third person at étienne’s physical death, which occurred a year and some odd months before the
Pg. 1
hit faithfully enumerated his father’s many faults, ones that étienne must less time at home. file. he would print out the file and file it in his filing cabinet, committed wasn’t immediately apparent. in a way, she’d come to and traveling to specialty shops every week was impractical, he’d find WEREHE SEES THE PREASANT TIME SONIC USING HIS POWERS IN A ALLEY AT where Warp and Icarus come from.* the departed were sensory: the flash of slicked-down hair, the on, on the other side. he figured that he was too close to the source, He’d forgotten where he was going with all this. school.
trumped up scandal, pets, celebrities, ads, births, deaths, legally
5. COUNSELING
service and confirmed the street view in his visor before turning off the page filling in, the finished page covered in perhaps spiders were long gone. No one left to take it out on. mr. anderson noticed him reading a book that, judging from its cover, Krash. Krash is like crying and poop. Hierarchy makes Snapshot and government would be capable of doing. WOMB checks out his physicality atop a semi’s smokestack. there was no point in playing, now. in a few it finally displayed was wrong, and the sound paused each time he woods, what was the meaning of any of this, and why he had written it and squinted.
HERE FROM 2482. SULPHUR FROM THA FUTURE SENDS PERSECUTION BACK TO web·site / ’web-,sit /
7 Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross a rotten thing to do. she had hugged him, and he had climbed somberly his immediate concern was keeping the clutter in his office under her paygrade.
WATER. "WE HAVE SOME BOTTLED HERE." SKULLJCKR SAYS HE WILL CONDUCT that he used to unlock the safe in his office, and proceed to activate to what it was he was saying. vidya had more than once caught sl "this is hardly falsifiable," i would think, and i was right. taken him quite a while to trudge all the way back to the city after the back of his head rested gently on the bottom of the tub. he opened it seemed to amuse him disproportionately to do so. back to his car, forgetting to limp. into the holes where windows should have been, straining to confirm
it seemed to amuse him disproportionately to do so. one would ever check. the departed were sensory: the flash of slicked-down hair, the he wanted to sleep. sleep, and stop dreaming. today he opened a new chapter of the logic of scientific discovery. and put them in the mail, addressed to himself. when he needed one, he if you can see me, i can see you karl repeated. his face seemed to underwear and dropped them into the sink. he turned on the hot water "In perpetuity, of course," Werner acknowledged. This was nothing new.
SL
END BAT-EYES
UNSAFE CREATIVE DREAMS
"Everybody, I’m not really blind," was what TAB2 had been about to say, before he realized there was no point in belaboring the obvious. What was more, nobody would have cared. It turned out he’d held his tongue slightly past the point where it was too late to speak up.
Alix Graves joined the NSFPD when I was in the third grade. My cousin Brandon and I had already created Actron by then, but had recently shifted focus to producing several issues of a police procedural called THE DETECTIVES, none of which survive today.
Alix Graves became Sonic when I was in the seventh grade. My friend Jeremy had moved to yet another school, where a kid he met there had already created Sonic, whose physical existence up to that point comprised a mock-up comic book cover produced on a Mac Classic in their desktop publishing class. I’m pretty sure Chris’ contributions were limited to ripping off the name from the SONIC THE HEDGEHOG video game, as the original mock-up was illustrated entirely by Jeremy. In any case, I’m the only person who ever wrote and drew any Sonic stories. Sonic’s civilian name, per Jeremy and Chris, was Alix Graves. I’m not sure when I decided he was also the same blonde guy from THE DETECTIVES, but it was probably near the beginning, say 1991. Neat as you like. After a decades-long hiatus, I published two new issues of SONIC in the 2020s.
Forgot to mention several chapters ago that Alix contrived to stow away aboard THE RAGNAROK prior to her encounter in space with THE DENIMS. Now we’ll never know what he managed to figure out.
Verse, Force, Gatefold, et al, started out as SONIC characters, circa 1992. I took several passes at plotting a big, multi-issue arc in which a race of blue-skinned, winged aliens (from which SONIC’s Icarus derives) mounted an invasion of Earth, our reality, simultaneously at numerous points throughout our history. I amassed copious amounts of notes, maybe fifty pages in total, but none of this material ever progressed to drawn pages. I did, however, produce a lot of character designs and random pin-up drawings in my eighth grade notebooks.
In the late 1990s I transplanted some of this into my comic book series THE STORK, which actually paid my rent for some months in the summer of 1997, but fizzled out before realizing any of the promises I’d made in the first issue. It was later reprinted as a real newsprint comic book, whose purchase orders from national comic book distributors arrived a year too late. I ended up leaving behind most of the 2,000 copy print run in the basement of my old house the last time I moved.
In CORRESPONDENCE FROM HELL, Alan Moore likened space-time to an American football. Big Bang at one end, expanded waistline in the middle, Big Crunch at the other end. A 4D model in which the contents of the universe are all of the same substance, and time is just another direction. Dave Sim, the other participant in the dialogue, kept repeating that he needed a Tylenol.
Pop musician Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness after meeting bassist Larry Graham, shortly after losing his infant son to a rare disease. Within a few years both of his parents had also passed away. Alone with his grief, Prince’s lyrical articulation of the same model came to be dubbed "the everlasting now."
I started drawing the first STORK five-pager in 1992. Followed up with several additional short strips, and eventually filled out an entire first issue that was finally published in early 1997. In it, Stan, the titular stork, a struggling musician without a job, strikes a chord on his guitar that shifts his consciousness around an internal map of the universe, where he affects change on society by playing a key role in global events wherever he finds himself. Worlds within worlds within worlds. It was badly reviewed.
Piro’s final sibling, final boss of the SONIC-era mega-plots, was known as Gatefold. You know, like the wraparound covers found on overpriced comics aimed at the speculator market back in the early 1990s.
He’d just dispatched a mass invasion by the blue-skinned, winged aliens from who-knows-where with little more than a wave of his heretofore undescribed hand...
SL
illustration by sl, circa 1992
CHROMIUM PARLIAMENT
Flipping through the endless long boxes, dollar bins, what used to be known as quarter bins, comic book shops will be out of business in a few years regardless. Overstock from the 1990s that will never, ever be sold. I bought a lot of these comics when they were new, and I still buy them on occasions when I wish to remind myself how bad they truly were. Artifacts of limited access to choice. They remain affordable.
I’d graduated from trying to emulate the Marvel method. I was drawing in ink on two sheets of typewriter paper taped together on the back, an 17" x 11" flat turned sideways, no pencils, no plot, and no script. All Piro’s siblings came out on this paper in a kind of dazzle of automatic cartooning, Traipsing through their vaguely Image Comics line weights directly into my bedroom. I had comic books open on the drawing table, but I’d always been superstitious about swipes. For better or worse, it was all in my hand.
That same year I took up reading comics such as CEREBUS, LOVE AND ROCKETS, and THE SANDMAN, and dropped the pervert suits entirely. Stayed away for many years.
Not long afterwards, I re-lettered a recent SONIC story to emulate the humor I’d encountered in the Giffen/DeMatteis JUSTICE LEAGUE run, transforming what had originally been a serious-as-a-heart-attack tale of the Sonic team assassinating President George H. W. Bush into a zany romp about the Sonic team assassinating President George H. W. Bush, complete with self-referential jokes and quips. Later published it in FUCK(tm) #22, to great acclaim from a local zinester who praised the fact I’d tried something "totally different from what you usually do." Ouch, Matt.
A local dungeon master hired me to illustrate a comic book inspired by WATCHMEN, the works of Ice T, and his own AD&D campaigns. I was never paid, but somewhere in my files rests the thirty-odd pages of fully penciled and inked story, covered in his Post-it notes complaining about various aspects of my artwork. Later published it, complete with the Post-its, in HOUSE OF HERESY #1, under a silly cover featuring Actron and Piro, based on a swipe from an old Jack Kirby drawing.
Many years before, the cover of GRIPS #2 had caught my eye in an American Comics mail order ad, probably in back of an issue of THE UNCANNY X-MEN. At that time I wouldn’t have recognized it as a swipe from the famous still of Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in BLADE RUNNER (1982), but it sure looked interesting.
Then one day the black cat sat down right on top of my comic books.
SL
SEPARATION OF POWERS
Here came the warm jets. The bridge flooded with pale fire, a full transparency of interconnections exposed, nothing could be distinguished anymore from anything else, the identity crisis near total. TAB2’s pending confession was placed on indefinite hold while everyone else’s eyes adjusted to the new normal, re: constant illumination.
Piro held up a mirror. Through such clever maneuvering the unitary executive was momentarily stayed, frozen in mute appreciation of its own reflection. Dispersion thus obtained, the newborn rainbow bridge to nowhere found that nevertheless, it could not hold together, for the outrageous wattage quickly burning through its constitution was too great to long withstand.
Not great as in good.
Of course, it was Verse. Ready at once to speak his truth in a time that didn’t want or need him.
"Brothers," he declared, stepping through the main screen, sweeping out a grand gesture with his wooden walking stick, an anachronistic prop inscribed with strange Sanskrit characters more or less well known in this age, but somehow less common in his own. Somewhat less grandly, he dusted shriveled fragments of the dried gray goo from his flowing robes, discreetly sweeping them under a chair attached to a nearby duty station. Finally, struck his walking stick on the floor, inciting a slight echo throughout the pleasingly resonant confines of the bridge. This pirate sibling was certainly no stork.
Piro tossed the useless mirror. Now, matters were worse.
Verse paused, appraised their bird-like brother cooly. "I had thought your whole universe a thing of the past," he growled. Low, but to the point.
"Why I’m here," Force said. "Duh."
Not to be outdone, Skulljckr’s own broken-down machinery creaked suddenly back to life, tossing aside the tarp that had been thrown over him some ten years prior, and projecting what remained of his internal power outwardly, through his mouthless but still functional mask. "You know we don’t die," he rattled mechanically, gradually trailing off. He was bleeding.
If anyone at all had been surprised by this unexpected family reunion, it was hard to tell.
"All together now," Piro said, standing up.
"Not quite!" yet another voice shouted. The main screen dilated once more, now seemingly accustomed to its new vocation birthing vaguely familiar characters into the narrative proper. Not another one!
TAB2 threw up his hands, on the verge of simply throwing up. He understood now, no one would ever listen to what he had to say. As each new member of Piro’s family boarded the ship, he was pulled further and further away from the life he’d once known, strip mining the spaceways in real time alongside his father’s ex-partner.
The lights flickered, pulse-width modulation too brief for any save the sensor package in TAB2’s visor.
The bridge folded in on itself, story out of time, rending dangling plot threads as if they’d never mattered at all.
NEW PRISON
The turbolift wouldn’t open. TAB2 tried on the other side of the bridge, but over there it was the same story. Doors wouldn’t budge. Partially transparent, he could see there was no one inside. What gave?
"No five year plan, no problem," Piro was saying. Force had hauled up yet more cartons of gray goo from the cargo hold, ever mindful of a surplus, and now the pirate siblings were trying to unlock new uses for it. Every problem a potential new market. TAB2 waved it away, unimpressed.
So, this was the new playing field. TAB2 traced the perimeter in his visor, setting alarm markers along the borders of his new country. The bridge of THE RAGNAROK had always reminded him of the living room at his grandparents’ house. Something about the furniture and lighting. And, he supposed, the big screen TV. He sat down on the carpet, field stripped his data gloves and visor while he waited for the world to change around him.
On screen, through the gray tint job, he could make out the shape of things to come. It was all there. The small room he’d always imagined, the endless interrogation, even if only of himself, by himself. It wouldn’t stop until—well, it wouldn’t stop. He’d never get off his own case.
Force’s arrival had upended his strategy of simply ignoring wherever they’d been headed. If Force were here, now—even the strangely storked-out version from an alternate continuity, way too tall and way too ornate in gold and silver seasonal tinsel—that meant the others wouldn’t be too far behind. Verse, Warp, Lenny, Squiggy, Gatefold—whomever. And with Piro suddenly all family oriented, like, TAB2 knew in the lining of his Calvin Klein’s the situation was far from under control.
They’d never really been brothers, for one thing. But they’d been telling people they were for so long now that nobody could imagine either of them operating independently. Just how family bonds were supposed to figure into productivity remained a mystery to TAB2. Disregard.
He stood. The lights flickered again. There was only one way out of this prison of his own design.
"Excuse me, everyone."
