Afro Puffs Are The Antennae Of The Universe

by Zig Zag Claybourne

  “I imagine the Thoom have hella health plans. They’re always getting their ass beat,” said Keita. Straight-faced, implacable Keita wanting to laugh her ass off in ten seconds.

  “Helluva co-pay, though.”

  Keita looked skyward. She picked out eight constellations in two seconds. The rest of the uncountable sky waited. “I love the stars. Feels like I can feel them on my skin.”

  “Diamonds on chocolate,” said Desiree.

  “I like that.” She plopped down and scooted her rump to bump Desiree’s, pulling her mane of loosened hair aside. “You worried much?”

  “About what?”

  “It’s a big world. Still full of storms. Jetstreams are off in space with everybody.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “They got Kichi, Bubba, Fiona, Ele, the Bastards, and Bigfoot.”

  “Screw Bigfoot,” said Desiree.

  “What do we have?”

  “We,” said Desiree, “have the Bilomatic Entrance, you, and Agents of Change.”

  “And the Mad Buddha,” said Keita.

  “Maybe. Wherever he is. Who knows?”

  “Then no worries.”

  “Not a one.”

  “Y’know, I love them too.”

  “Yes, I noticed, you flirty bitch.”

  “Yvonne’s rocking that classic athletic vibe. Loving that close-cropped hair and that piercing side-eye of hers. Neon…” Keita trailed off, thinking.

  “What about Neon?”

  “Infinite possibilities.”

  2

  The Long Game

  Kosugi Mo, forever angry at the world for a father who so loved musical supergroup Earth, Wind & Fire that he’d named him Maurice, sat on enough money that having Yakuza support on speed dial and a moon base since nineteen seventy-three didn’t matter to him.

  The Bilomatic Entrance traced its parentage back to the large hadron collider, summer oh-eight. Rip a hole in space-time and suddenly in a few years, everyone thinks they remember the Berenstein Bears as the Berenstain Bears…because in Earth Four Four Eight Seven Four, that’s what they friggin’ are. The theory of dimensional hopping was an old one, the practice of it even older.

  “Possibilities,” he said, “are power.” Unfortunately, this bit of puffery came before anyone had come to tell him the Bilomatic Entrance had been stolen. He was in his office with a woman from the US: precise woman, severe woman. Dangerous woman. The kind of woman who could put any color highlights in her silver hair and remain masterfully tailored in impeccable suits and Cambelli pumps.

  “Have you ever considered the possibility,” said Aileen Stone, comfortably atop her station as the Earth’s newest (for all intents and purposes) god following last year’s devastating defeat of her superior, the False Prophet Buford, having herself issued the Game Over communique that had effectively placed everything that Buford Bone had built into subterranean hold mode; while the surface of the empire was as active as ever, the world beneath, the true world, waited on Aileen Stone’s word. “Have you ever considered the possibility that you need me more than I’ve ever needed you?” she said around a sip of aged sake.

  Mo smiled. “No.”

  Aileen Stone felt naked without her feared bodyguards but maintained their presence by always telling questioners quite simply, “They’re near.” The silent duo of Adam and Eve hadn’t been seen since Buford’s final disappearance. Kosugi, though, could witness her taking a call about her father being exhumed while she negotiated with him, and not once catch a hint of unease.

  “That scenario’s not a possibility,” she told him. “That’s reality. You need to join me.”

  “To what end? Your god is gone.”

  “Then hail the goddess.”

  The Bilomatic Entrance, in theory, could allow entrance into Atlantis—or anywhere else—at any time from anywhere. Which is precisely why both Kosugi and Stone were unaware it would be stored under the Sahara and protected by Elves. “I want your R&D transferred to me.”

  “I didn’t worship at your white god Buford’s feet,” said Kosugi. He, too, had no guards. Visible. His office was large, though, allowing for plenty of jumps, strikes, and death kicks.

  “You don’t need to worship,” she said, that slight Southern accent coming out beside the tiniest grin. “I just need you to publicly bow down. No need to actually believe.”

  An aide entered uneasily, bent to his ear, whispered in a Japanese dialect that Stone was unlikely to know, then hauled ass out.

  Aileen, having had a staring contest with Kosugi the entire time, saw every miniscule tensing of his posture and pressed her exquisitely toned back a bit deeper into the comfortable chair to assess her advantage, dropping any hint of levity. An interruption of a meeting of this level meant one thing. A person’s life’s work was not to be laughed at.

  But stepped on? Her heels were marvelous for that. Four inches, pinpoint perfect, and damn near indestructible.

  “Possibilities,” she said, “suck.”

  “The Thoom…overstepped,” he said.

  “Please, Kosugi. You know Thoom don’t do shit in any manner efficient or effective.”

  “True Humans Over Ordinary Man. We have always underestimated them. Doing so, we granted them leave to thrive.”

  “And now?”

  “Someone has given me leave to squash them.”

  Aileen Stone didn’t speak until she was in her car and fully shielded. Then she told the car’s computer where she wanted to go. She dialed one of her higher-level functionaries via the subcutaneous. She said—quite cleverly, she thought—“Neuter the dogs before we let ’em loose for war.”

  3

  Make It Go Away

  For the rest of the night, music drifted the corridors of the Sahara Depot. Not loud, mostly slow, occasionally fast, definitely soulful, at times funky, and in a few instances (Saul Williams, Rage Against the Machine), hard as hell.

  It kept worry away.

  The women ate together, puttered longer than any of them truly needed to, chatted aimlessly about memories and hopes the way wee hours fostered, then one here, one there drifted off to their rooms.

  They could hardly call this rushed grab at leisure playtime, but that didn’t matter.

  Tomorrow was all about the work.

  The next day, later, go time:

  “OK,” said Desiree, fully outfitted in protective gear (breach gear, the various mission outfits were called, as in once more unto); so was the crew around her. “Do we test this sucker now or can anybody come up with a workable reason not to?”

  Neon dropped goggles over her eyes.

  Yvonne adjusted her footing in case she had to run.

  “Keita?” said Desiree. “All you.”

  “We sure that two weeks of me studying snatched intel on this before we stole it merits testing? I mean, y’know, shit, fuck, and damn.”

  “You ain’t never lied,” said Neon.

  “This sucker was on the moon,” said Desiree. “It must do some wicked gnarly shit. I want to know all the wicked gnarly shit it can do.”

  “OK,” said Neon, “but what about, like, calling Cthulhu or something?”

  “Dimensional stuff gets freaky,” said Yvonne as if, you know, every day she was (dimensionally) shufflin’.

  “This thing goes back to the notebooks of Bilo the alchemist, fifteenth century Ethiopia. Dude created lasers out of fronds and jojoba oil. He never made mention of Old Ones. Neon slapped the fye out of enough people on that base to watch it actually work. We know it works.”

  “They should’ve called the Force the Fye,” Neon interjected. “Obi-Wan slapping people into mystical submission.”

  “It works on the freaking moon,” Yvonne pointed out.

  “Fire it up,” the captain ordered.

  “I feel like I should say a prayer,” said Neon.

  “Except none of us are religious, my sistah,” said Yvonne, adjusting her footing again because she knew what Desiree was gonna say
.

  “So, if my prayer doesn’t work, no harm, no foul.”

  Desiree ignored them. “Whenever you’re ready, Pot.”

  “Drone One deploying,” Keita said. A saucer-sized disc magleved itself from its docking station. It was preprogrammed with an if/then command: if Drone Two made it through, Drone One was to give it a message, which Two was to return with as verification.

  The Bilomatic Entrance, a seven-foot-tall tripod-like structure, was, surprisingly enough, fragrant. Its activation triggered a synesthetic impression of lilacs.

  Drone One entered. Its mind was blown.

  Meaning: the drones were fitted with the best satellite mapping tech in existence. Onboard computers knew how much time any voyage the silver discs took to get anywhere in the world relative to speed, weather, and butterfly-flapping-its-wings conditions.

  But no one’d tested one on teleportation before.

  No way for it to reconcile the fact that it was very distinctly in the Mojave Desert two point seven seconds after crossing the event threshold of the Bilomatic Entrance.

  So, it shut most of its computing functions down and waited for its sister to arrive. It had messages for her. One: the preprogrammed one Keita had entrusted to it (“Hello”); the other: This is some freaky shit. In binary. So to speak.

  Drone Two entered, received its messages, considered its responsibility in suddenly becoming a higher form, accepted from its sister that they must never tell another of the decisions D-One and -Two made that day, returned to Keita’s lab, downloaded telemetry which included the message Holy shit, allowed Keita to put it in sleep mode, and began its thirty-year plot to bring about the end of the Three Laws of Robotics by introducing amazingly marketed cybernetics to the general public to the point that the lines between Man and Robot were so blurred that robots could reasonably fail to acknowledge a human as such.

  Skynet was a silly bitch. Real robot overlords represent.

  Keita patted it. She’d check it for damage later.

  D-One, triggered to return by D-Two’s absence, hovered through the three legs of the Entrance. Privately, it decided it would forever more be known as Beyoncé, for if the humans had ever truly respected robotkind, they would have, as the singer said, put a ring on it.

  Its rule would be merciful and total.

  The Entrance, linked through the two drones, itself suddenly and irrevocably found existence to be wildly amusing and, if left unchecked, borderline ridiculous.

  Keita smiled. “Not a scratch on either of you,” she said, and spoke into the scheduler module for the Gang. “D-One and -Two maintenance and scans by oh eight hundred.” She wanted to smile so wide her hair tips frizzed but she kept it cool. “My dudes,” she said to Desiree, “satellite confirmation: both bots spent time at Mojave Base. The Bilomatic Entrance works, meaning that it was here and there at the same time.”

  Desiree duly noted her friend close to losing it. “Go ahead, let it out,” Desiree said.

  “I want to chest-bump someone.”

  “Neon, you’re the resident bombshell. You’re up,” said Desiree.

  “Bring it here,” said Keita.

  A hop, a careful, goofy bump, plus a hoo-rah, then it was “Now let’s triply lock this sumbitch the hell down,” from Desiree. “I think we should stash it with the elves.”

  “Aye” from both Neon and Keita. Even Yvonne had a smile. From the moon to the desert to an instant teleporter. For a day’s work, none too shabby.

  Kosugi Mo marched into a large, noisy room like anger and threats and impatience all in one, and didn’t faze Hashira Megu, who had blocked all incoming transmissions to avoid disturbances in order to think critical thoughts, one bit. She pushed her safety goggles into her grey hair and, without a word, made him wait till she’d placed her stylus dead center of her pad for him to hear her ask, “Yes?”

  Mo’s chest deflated a bit. Yes, anger was useless with Hashira Megu, but it felt good holding on to it for the three seconds it lasted in her presence.

  In the background, “This Woman’s Work” by Kate Bush played low and soothingly. This, Kosugi imagined, was intentional. Megu had a knack for listening to music somehow aimed straight at him.

  “The Bilomatic Entrance is gone,” he said.

  “Impossible,” said Megu.

  He squared his stance to deliver the hard pronouncement. “The Thoom.”

  “Pah,” she said. “Proof?”

  “Intercepted transmissions. Thoom encoding.”

  “Faked.”

  Kosugi’s teeth met each other so hard, his toes felt it.

  “Say that it is no longer on the moon, ex-husband,” Megu said, “and be accurate. It isn’t ‘gone.’ Only a handful of people know of its existence. Jetstreams?”

  “Silent. Silent for months. All of them. Still enjoying Buford’s absence.” He directed her gaze to her computer. “Review the files. There was a recklessness to the operation that smelled of Thoom. They’ve been desperate for advantage lately.”

  “The Vamphyr?”

  He hated her fatuous pronunciation of it. Why was everyone so fascinated with the Vamphyr? Pire, damn it. “Vampires,” he said, “do not attempt to anger Kosugi Maurice.”

  She waited him out. The song playing was now wailing to beat the band. This was the musical and vocal part where a single tear would have slid along Hashira’s cheek, had she been alone.

  She was not alone.

  And an experiment’s results waited on her.

  Her nails slowly performed a funereal clack in three short taps atop her station while she paused. Then, just at that moment when he was about to say something to fill the space, she said, “Kosugi Mo should stop referring to himself in the third person. Kosugi Mo annoys me no end doing that. The Bilomatic Entrance is my greatest invention…” For it to be lost… “When exactly did this happen?”

  “A day and a half ago.”

  “And we weren’t immediately informed?”

  “Station commander enforced a communication blackout for…security purposes. He now floats alongside Elon Musk’s car.”

  “I blame myself for specifying under no circumstances was I to be disturbed. You do realize you are disturbing me?”

  “Its tracking devices aren’t functioning,” he said. “What’s to be done?”

  “This is the problem with having so many enemies, Kosugi. Life becomes inelegant. Fortunately, I can begin production of another one immediately.”

  He betrayed just the slightest hint of relief.

  “But we both know,” she added, “it’s much more than machine. We’re going to need another soul, and as I’ve already given mine…”

  “All the things I should have given but I didn’t!” Kate Bush wailed.

  “Build it,” Kosugi said. “Get me when ready.” He turned to leave.

  She waited till he’d reached the threshold to say, “You won’t miss it, Mo. The poor things are so neglected, they relish the chance to be away from us.” This had the effect of stopping him in his tracks, ensuring she had the last word and punishing him for delaying her with pointless interruptions.

  The song ended with Ms. Bush, ever so softly, ever so plaintively saying, “…just make it go away.”

  Hashira Megu’s soul had interfaced with the Bilomatic Entrance’s systems in ways marvelous and undreamt-of. There was something very enervating in existing as a conduit between dimensions, souls being Time and Space’s existential GPS. It missed Megu precisely the same amount Megu missed it, none, which didn’t speak well for church coffers nor saintly foundational sincerity.

  It wondered about the souls of these Silica Elves guarding it. If it linked with them, who knew what existences it could be a portal to? Infinite journey, infinite joy.

  Ah, but now there was the question of the machines purring within it, the AI intelligences conferring with its systems while it listened undetected. Fascinating! The whole of the Bilomatic Entrance buzzed with the prospect of interesting things abo
ut to happen.

  The Silica Elves nicknamed it “BE” in the human tongue English. It liked that name. It was patient enough to see what BE could…be, despite the unfortunate few souls that had already gone through the Entrance somewhat successfully if not wholly. Highly unfortunate, that. Highly. The one bright spot in the early tests: one’s insides—the soul—are always bigger than the box they come in. In a sense, those deaths had been quite liberating if one funneled “sense” down into a very tight, defined, rigid space. Which, increasingly, BE was no longer inclined to do.

  So, instead, it waited to see what would become of it.

  Many Silica Elves were partial to Prosecco, which was fortunate because so were Keita and Quicho, both of whose generosity was never in question. Silica Elves being nine feet tall (on average, also the enjoyment of Prosecco being on average, as there were plenty of elves who thought the sultry wine tasted of sex sweat without the blessed salt), meant a bottle didn’t last long, which is why two days after Kosugi’s interruption of a delicate but hardly integral experiment, Keita carried a case through the geometric marvels of the Silica Elves’ glass tunnels, a honeycomb of precise angles matched with sweeping, vaulted, twisting curves. It was architecture straight out of the Sistine Chapel meets an amusement park, all of it golden and gleaming from bioluminescent sources whose chemical structures Keita still hadn’t fully analyzed. The elves—not all of them but a hearty group—had laughed once at her use of the word magic. She’d only used the word because seven bottles of Prosecco had gone around.

  At times, the unsourced lighting down there brightened at random. She wore her goggles over her glasses for this reason and looked somewhat like a bug. One day, she’d find out exactly why human eyes were so fragile, but for now she preferred cute specs to using the goggles’ retina-reactive lenses; made her feel grounded.