by Eirik Gumeny
“You did the best you could, Lee,” cooed Bex, her voice a warm blanket. “Better than that. We knew exactly what we were doing, and exactly what was happening to us. We did exactly what any of your kind would have done.
“Look, Lee,” she continued, “just because we worship you doesn’t mean we’re going to agree with everything you say. That’s human nature right there, isn’t it?”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Thor, waving his hands. “You worship him?”
“I do. Lee Arahami is our creator.” The robot kneeled before the roboticist in a way that was both reverential and kind of dirty.
“What the – I thought you said all the robots hated you,” continued the thunder god, turning toward Dr. Arahami.
“They did,” said the scientist. “Earlier marks were hard-wired to murder me on sight.”
“Yes, but that was years ago,” clarified Bex, waving a hand dismissively, “back when you were inadvertently prolonging a genocidal battle between humanity and robotkind. We’ve had time to read the history books since then, cool off. Most of us like you again. You know how it goes with gods.”
“Yes,” grumbled Thor, his distaste for a humanity that didn’t venerate him rekindled. “Yes, I do.” He stomped out of the control room, mumbling loudly. “He gets worshipped. He gets worshipped! Motherfucker doesn’t even know how to get out of his house when the lights are out without eating his own foot.”
“Anyway,” said Dr. Arahami, shaking his head, “you were saying something about the grid?”
“Yes,” replied Bex. “I was recounting the steps we took in repairing the physical damage sustained by the electrical grid, as well as what we’ve done to get the ancillary programs online. As it is now, it’s a simple matter of waiting for the rest of the supplies, completing the repairs to the regulator units, and then resetting the perpetual motion engine.”
“You said you replaced all the transformers right?”
“Yep.”
“And got the station indicator online?”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Then why are so many of the lights off?” The Asian man pointed at the station indicator on the wall of maintenance status modules nearest him.
When the substation macro-transformers walling the perimeter of Montana were online and functional, the module indicators lit up green. When the transformers were offline but ready to go, occurring if there was a kink somewhere else in the electrical line, they lit up red. And when the substations had failed or undergone some kind of structural damage, like, say, from a solar super storm or something prehistorically large drop-kicking them, the indicators didn’t light up at all.
At the edge of Dr. Arahami’s finger was a line of unlit indicators, showing failures starting at the easternmost gradient and heading towards the control room.
“Maybe the light bulbs are just out,” offered Tanner, looking up from her video game.
“No, we checked them when we got the control room online,” replied Bex, peering intently at the module.
Another light went dark. A dull bang could just be heard over the noise of the diesel generator in the corner of the control room.
“Want me to go check it out?” asked Tanner, hopping from her chair.
“Yes, please,” said Bex.
“Take Thor with you,” said Dr. Arahami. “But don’t let him try to ‘fix’ anything without detailed and clearly worded instructions.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Who Ya Gonna Call?
The thunder god who hadn’t showered in several days and the silverback gorilla in the sundress stood on the white concrete of substation A258 with heads askew, neat rows of transformers towering endlessly on either side of them. Well, the sides of them that were behind them, anyway. The transformers in front of them weren’t so much towering as mangled and toppled over, from where the pair was standing all the way to the horizon. Also of note, especially to Thor and Tanner, was the fact that there appeared to be several metric fuck-tons of giant sloth standing directly in front of them.
“Well now, Lizzie,” said one of the elephant-sized land mammals, scratching her chin with her enormous claws, “we appear to have attracted ourselves some attention.”
“It certainly looks as though we have,” agreed the other giant sloth, tilting her head and eyeing the man and the ape before her.
“Shall we give them the opportunity to run away?”
“No, I do not think we shall.”
The first giant sloth screeched and reared up on its hind legs before slamming its enormous weight back to the ground, throwing Thor and Tanner slightly off balance. The other sloth threw its Smart Car-sized head into a transformer, knocking the industrial machinery to the ground. The extinct megatherium began charging toward the god and the gorilla, and not as slowly as one might think given the word “sloth.”
“Great,” said Tanner, running her hands over her giant forearms like she was rolling up her sleeves, despite the fact that her dress was sleeveless. “This is going to be a pain in the ass.”
“It’s cool,” said Thor. “Try not to touch anything metal.”
The sky above the group darkened and roiled, thunder echoing between the macro-transformers. Suddenly a blinding light burned through the air, splitting in two and striking both giant sloths simultaneously. Their shuttle bus-sized bodies were incinerated completely, leaving the ghosts of two elderly women standing in the smoking wake. The women scrunched their ethereal faces and looked at one another.
“I cannot say that I was expecting that,” “Typhoid” Mary Mallon stated matter-of-factly.
“Nor was I,” replied Lizbeth “Lizzie” Borden, in a much more confused tone.
“What shall we do now?”
“I am not at all sure.”
“Damn, man,” said Tanner, her hair full of static and sticking out in several directions. “You killed those sloths so hard they turned into old ladies and then died again!”
“I’m not sure that’s what happened,” countered Thor.
“Not sure?” Mary scoffed. “You are not sure that two giants sloths could transform into two human females? How thick-skulled does one have to be to entertain that notion at all?”
“A little?”
“Mary,” said Lizbeth, drifting over to Thor and circling his body. “I dare say we might yet have an avenue for assault at our disposal here.” The ghost sized the Norseman up with surgical detachment. “Neither of these two is in possession of much intelligence.”
“Hey!” said Tanner.
“I think you may be correct,” replied Mary, circling the gorilla and smiling unsettlingly. Although, really, any time the spirit of a dead murderer smiles for any reason it’s bound to be unsettling.
Shortly after the world ended for the fifth time, Japan, while attempting to rebuild the internet, inadvertently altered the sub-theoretical quantum electromagnetic spectrum of the planet, allowing the spirits of the deceased – at least the ones not already in any of the various heavens or hells popular at the time – to roam the Earth freely.
Despite decades of study since, very little was actually known about ghosts, although there did appear to be a few constants. For starters, ghosts always resembled their human bodies at the time of death, right down to the clothes. They could travel through fiber optic cables. If a poltergeist was to try really, really hard it could move a soda can or a coffee mug a couple inches. Ghosts also had a fatal allergy to salt – or sur-fatal, technically, since they were already dead.
The final trick up their ethereal sleeves was the ability to possess corpses of any kind, be they animal or human, reanimated or six feet under. Ghosts were capable of possessing living beings in some instances, though, either because the soul within the living body had given consent, or, in even rarer instances, because the wraith had a more powerful will than the non-dead person. Generally, though, a spirit on the outside was much less powerful than a spirit on the inside.
Unless the spirit on the ins
ide wasn’t very smart.
The ghosts of “Typhoid” Mary Mallon and Lizbeth “Lizzie” Borden drifted around the former Norse god and the current gorilla, circling them and occasionally floating through them. Thor tried to grab one of the ghosts, his hand passing clean through the woman.
“You, uh, you don’t have anything that might help, do you?” asked Thor quietly, leaning toward Tanner.
“This thing doesn’t have any pockets,” she replied, flipping the sides of her dress.
Thor furrowed his brow.
“This is going to be exceedingly difficult, my dear Lizzie,” explained Mary, “and the chances of success are quite low. At best we will probably give them a headache and a few recurring nightmares.”
“You are such the pessimist, darling.”
“I am simply a realist, Lizzie. I do not like to raise my hopes only to have them shortly dashed.”
“I highly doubt two ‘intellectuals’ as these will put up much of a fight ... until we make them.”
“I don’t think I like where this is going,” said the thunder god.
“I want the gorilla,” snarled Lizbeth.
The ghosts dove into Thor and Tanner, a sensation not entirely unlike being injected with hot coffee and angry bees. The blonde man and the silverback gorilla began twitching and swatting at their own bodies, trying to fight off the wraiths despite not having a very good grasp of what was actually going on.
“You ever have this happen to you?” the gorilla inquired, shaking her head around like a cranked-up headbanger with a poor sense of direction.
“No, you?” Thor began pounding his skull like he was trying to get all of the water in the world out of his ear.
“Nope.”
“Then I don’t think this is going to end well.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Wreck-It Ralph
Daddy Jon was weeping inconsolably, his head on the glass-covered mahogany conference table. Satan sat at the opposite end, sans tie and coat, rubbing his fingers across his forehead.
“It’s nothing personal, Jon,” he said, “but your pizza tastes like what other pizzas throw up after a night of eating garbage. I can’t feed that to my people. It would be terrible for morale. I don’t even feel right feeding it to the Hollow Men; I actually feel bad about it. Me.”
Daddy Jon replied by bawling even louder.
“I’m going to go now,” said the prince of darkness, standing and placing his fingertips on the table. “You take as much time as you need, though.”
“Please don’t come back ever again,” he added.
As Satan removed his hand from the glass and turned for the door, the entire conference room began to rumble. The phone atop the table jittered and the fancy executive desk chairs rolled toward the walls.
“What’s going on?” barked Satan, furiously. “What are you doing?”
The pizza maker lifted his head from the table, sniffling and saying, “It’s not me, I don’t know what’s happening.”
The room bucked violently, throwing the head of WANG Electric into his table. Recovering, he rushed towards the pizza maker, grabbing him by the collar of his red polo and dragging him from his chair. Satan pinned the man against the wall.
“You swear on your life this isn’t some form of retaliation? Did you have a bomb in your truck? A detonator in your pocket for when I said no?!”
“What? No! I swear!” sniveled Daddy Jon, tears streaming from his eyes again. “I have nothing to do with this! I don’t know what it is!”
The pizza maker began wetting himself. Satan let him go and, with a final disapproving glance, began walking towards the door. As he did, the room pitched to his left, dropping the grizzled man to the floor. The heavy conference table behind him was thrown squarely into Daddy Jon’s midsection.
“Oh, god, my organs,” sputtered the pizza maker. He began coughing up blood, then collapsed dead onto the table.
“At least that’s taken care of,” said Satan, picking himself up from the floor.
***
Several stories beneath Mark Hughes and Timmy the super-squirrel, the pavement began to buckle. The parking deck was swaying like a man with an inner ear problem stepping off a roller coaster.
“OK, what’s going on?” asked Mark, ducking low and grabbing for the barrier wall.
“Calm down, chief,” replied the telekinetic squirrel. “I’m taking out the campus generator. You said there were a bunch of Hollow Men pushing a wheel right below it, right?”
Timmy stood authoritatively atop the wall, his cape fluttering behind him. He nodded his tiny head toward the center of the WANG campus and thought. He thought his motherfucking brains out. Figuratively, of course. Timmy’s brains were, literally, still very much inside of his head and, in fact, responsible for all the thinking.
An engine of conjoined semicircular induction apparatuses, about the size of a small park, began to dent and shake on the far side of the main building. The concrete beneath the generator started to crack and fall away, into the Hollow Earth, while the generator itself was lifted several feet into the air.
“Couldn’t you have waited until we got back down to street level?” asked Mark, gripping the edge of the parking deck with white knuckles. Behind him, the RV slid sideways slightly.
“I wouldn’t be able to see anything from there,” explained Timmy, never removing his focus from the mangled engine. “In case you haven’t noticed it, I’m not very tall.”
The cape-wearing squirrel hurled the massive generator into the main building of WANG Electric with his brain.
“You know that wasn’t part of the plan, Timmy!” shouted Mark above the sounds of the WANG corporate headquarters collapsing behind a cloud of dust. “The plan was to come up with a new plan!”
“This was the new plan,” the rodent replied coolly. “I came up with it just now, when I did it.”
“We said we were going to talk it over!”
“You would’ve told me not to do it!”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
What Would You Do If I Sang Out of Tune?
Thor Odinson, despite his lack of book learnin’, was far, far too arrogant to ever be possessed by a ghost. “Typhoid” Mary Mallon had made a valiant effort – her own sense of self-worth on par with that of Donald Trump – but was almost immediately sent careening back out of the thunder god’s body, clutching at her see-through head. The Norse god escaped with only a terrific migraine. Tanner the silverback gorilla, however, had a lot of issues with her self-image and was easily overpowered by the psychopathic compulsions of Lizbeth “Lizzie” Borden. This was why the gorilla was currently straddling Thor’s midsection, pinning him to the cracking concrete and beating the ever-loving shit out of the thunder god.
Thor, unable to think or see straight, and desperately trying not to throw up, wasn’t putting up much of a fight. In fact, he was mostly just bleeding. And getting punched in the face by a great ape possessed by an axe-murderer who hadn’t gotten any saner over the last two hundred years. He lifted his arms over his face and tried to shimmy out from under Tanner, kicking his way backward until his head and shoulders were pressed against the side of a transformer. There was a terrific wrenching sound and then the Norseman felt himself fall back onto a row of jagged metal. Wincing through the pain, he could have sworn he saw the transformer hovering over him. Then it disappeared. Then he was in pain. Then it was over him again. Then it disappeared. Then pain.
The cycle repeated itself a few times before Thor realized that the gorilla was savagely beating him with one of the macro-transformers.
“Quit it,” he slurred quietly, his mouth full of blood. “Tha’s not ... tha’s not ... cool ...”
The car-sized electrical device clobbered him once more.
Thor began to black out.
Lucky for him, though, he had friends.
Even luckier for him, those friends had friends of their own that were thoroughly prepared for random assaults by gorill
as possessed by homicidal grandmas.
A half pound of iodized salt came flying through the air, landing squarely in Tanner’s face. The ghost of “Lizzie” Borden recoiled at the contact, her ethereal form jumping from the gorilla like a sudsed-up naked person in the shower from a spider. Tanner, for her part, fell mewling to the ground, pawing salt out of her eyes. The transformer dropped once more onto Thor before toppling to the side.
Another handful of salt sailed through the faces and torsos of the writhing ghosts. The visages of the old women shuddered and distorted –
“Oh dear,” said “Typhoid” Mary Mallon.
– then blinked out of existence altogether, before the final grain of salt hit the ground.
Thor and Tanner, heads still spinning, turned awkwardly and looked up through teary, swollen eyes. The shadowy figures of Chester A. Arthur XVII, Queen Victoria XXX, and Martin Van Buren XCIX, backlit by the brilliant sun, towered over them.
“Hey, guys,” Thor said weakly. “New guy. How’d you know there were gonna be ghosts?”
“I didn’t,” said Martin Van Buren XCIX. “But I carry salt around at all times for emergencies.” He patted the satchel hanging near his waist. “I’ve got a flare gun, a first aid kit, beef jerky –”
“Beef jerky?”
“– powdered water, an elephant whistle, a towel ... You guys don’t keep stuff like that on you?”
“I have a revolver and a couple knives,” said Queen Victoria XXX, putting a hand on her thigh. “Plus I have a camera that needs charging in my backpack,” she continued. “Which I think I might have left in New London.”
Thor – having removed himself from the jagged metal foundation of the transformer and sprawled on his back on an altogether more comfortable section of concrete – pulled a hand from the pocket of his jeans and said, “I’ve got a Buy One/Get One Free coupon for that steak place outside Cretaceous Park. And an ‘Inspected by Inspector 42’ sticker.”
