Space Team: Planet of the Japes

by Barry J. Hutchison

  * * *

  The crew, Dave and the thing everyone had thought was a clown-bot, but possibly wasn’t, all stood in a large freight elevator, swaying gently as it roared downwards towards the planet’s center. Of them all, Cal was the only one currently clutching the handrail until his knuckles went white. He was also the only one pressing his face against the elevator wall, hoping the cool metal against his skin would help him fend off the rising feelings of nausea and utter brain-melting terror.

  “Holy shizz, this thing is fast,” he said, gulping back mouthfuls of bitter-tasting saliva. “I think, like, six of my vertebrae were just compacted into dust.”

  The others mostly ignored him, except for Splurt, who gave him a consoling pat on the back. Everyone else had focused their attention on the mascot. He had identified himself as Bobo 4, and was in the process of trying to deflect as many of their questions as he could.

  Mech was asking most of the questions, although it was largely just the same question over and over again, with occasional alterations to the exact phrasing.

  “What the fonk is going on?” he demanded. Again.

  “Everything will make much more sense once we reach the complex,” Bobo promised. “The systems picked you up on your arrival, Commander. I wanted to reveal myself sooner, but the risk was too great. I did, however, dispatch a squadron of security guards to assist you when you were in the hub…”

  “Wait. You mean the little dudes? You sent those guys?”

  “…but you bludgeoned them all into unconsciousness, leaving me no choice but to…” He looked down at his bare chest and dirty underwear. “…go undercover to bring you in myself.”

  The mascot’s face brightened, taking on an almost hopeful expression. “Still, you’re here now. Please, Commander, don’t consider this impertinent, but it is good to see you again.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say,” Mech muttered. He looked to Loren, but all she could offer as a shrug.

  “Are these more inmates?” Bobo asked, glancing around at the others.

  “Inmates? What? No,” said Mech. “These are my… Uh… These are my travelling companions.”

  “Seriously?” said Loren, raising an eyebrow. “After everything we’ve been through?”

  Mech sighed. “Fine. These are my friends. There. Happy?” He pointed to Dave. “Except that guy, who I don’t really know.”

  Bobo regarded Dave, making the Earthman shift uncomfortably.

  “He cut off my finger,” Dave said, holding up his right hand as Exhibit A. Some sort of rubbery wad now covered the severed stump, preventing any more blood loss.

  “I noticed,” said Bobo. “The sealant will encourage healing.”

  Dave studied the putty-like lump. “Will it grow back?”

  Bobo raised one eyebrow. “Does it normally?”

  “No.”

  “Then I expect not.”

  “Oh,” said Dave, failing to hide his disappointment.

  Miz, who only now seemed to be catching up with the conversation, voiced a concern. “What do you mean by ‘inmates’ anyway? Isn’t this place, like, the lamest theme park in the universe? Why would a theme park have inmates?”

  “All in good time,” Bobo promised.

  Mech shifted his weight in a calculated display of menace. “I’d say now’s a pretty fonking excellent time,” he said. “Answer the question.”

  Bobo appeared pained for a moment, but then nodded. “Very good, Commander,” he said, addressing the group in general. “Funworld is not a theme park. Not really. That’s just a cover story we used to explain the extensive construction work required. We, under Commander Disselpoof’s direction, built this whole place from core to crust.”

  “OK, first of all – no, you didn’t, because I ain’t ever been here before,” said Mech. “And second of all – why would you build a whole planet?”

  A brief flicker of bemusement flitted over Bobo’s face. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remind me.”

  “We didn’t build a planet, Commander,” Bobo said. “We built a prison. A prison designed to hold a single inmate. The most dangerous man in the universe.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Cal wheezed, his voice muffled by the way the elevator wall was squishing his face. “Why do I get the feeling this is not going to end well?”

  * * *

  Cal fell through the elevator doors, spent a few moments hugging the floor, then was hoisted to his feet by Loren and Miz. As soon as they let him go, he began to fall again, so they both hooked one of his arms through their own, propping him up.

  “Is it… Are we still moving down?” Cal asked.

  “No,” said Loren.

  “Because it feels like it’s still moving.”

  “It isn’t.”

  Cal closed his eyes for a moment.

  “I think it is.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” Loren assured him.

  Cal turned to Miz. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Are we going down?”

  Miz’s eyes lit up. “I would totally be into that.”

  “In the elevator, he meant,” said Loren. “He thinks the floor is still moving.”

  “Oh.” Miz was unable to disguise her disappointment. “Then no. We’re not moving.”

  Ahead of them, Mech, Dave and Splurt followed Bobo towards a heavily reinforced door.

  “What’s happening?” Cal asked.

  “We’re moving,” said Loren.

  “Ha! I fonking knew—”

  “Not like that,” Loren added, then she and Miz hoisted Cal off his feet and carried him after the others.

  There was a scanner next to the door, positioned roughly at Bobo’s head height. He leaned towards it, then stopped as an idea hit him. He turned and gestured to Mech. “Commander? Would you do the honors?”

  Mech hesitated, glanced at the others, then approached the door. He ran a finger across the metal casing of the scanner, and looked the door up and down. Then, he ducked forwards, bringing his eyes in front of the little rectangle of glass. A red light appeared and began swooshing from left to right and back again.

  “So that’s what happened to KITT after Knight Rider ended,” said Cal. He grinned in Dave’s direction, but Dave was too interested in his missing finger to notice.

  “Welcome, Commander Gluk Disselpoof,” the door said. There was a loud, angry-sounding buzz, like a big wasp with an attitude problem, then a series of clunks, rattles and thuds as various locking mechanisms disengaged.

  The door slid aside, revealing a short corridor and another almost identical door up ahead. Bobo led the way, with Mech padding along behind.

  “How did that work?” Mech asked. “How did that know me?”

  “Like I said, because you built it. You built all of this.”

  “What about that other guy? With the cane. On the video?” Cal asked. “Tingle? Something Tingle?”

  “Ah. Thurp Tingle. Yes,” said Bobo. “A bio-bot playing a role. He is no longer with us.”

  “Aw. I wanted to meet him,” Cal said. “He looked fun.”

  “He beheaded a guest with his bare hands,” Bobo said. “I destroyed him myself.”

  “You know, I thought there was something worrying about that guy.”

  They reached the next door, and this time Bobo took care of the ID scan. “I should warn you, Commander, much has changed since you left us,” he said. “We did what we could, but our forces are deteriorated, our resources depleted. The prison itself is still intact, of course, but staffing levels down here in the complex are… minimal.”

  “How many of you are there?” Loren asked.

  The door swished open, revealing a vast room with a heavily armored box-like building at the center. While the dark metal sides of the box were pristine, the rest of the place was badly in need of repair. Damp and scorch-marks stained the clinically white walls. Rust pock-marked the walkway-style metal floor. Through the gaps i
n the metal, the blue glow of some enormous power source provided a softly flickering light source that made the whole room feel like it was part of an underwater lair.

  There was no sound from inside the room. No movement.

  “There’s me,” said Bobo. “There’s only me left now.”

  He pressed on, leading them into this new area. Cal nodded to Loren and Miz, letting them know he could walk on his own again. His first few steps were awkward and zombie-like, but he soon got the hang of it again, and made his way over to Dave.

  “Hey. How’s the finger?” he asked.

  “Still missing,” Dave replied, but there was a suggestion of a smile in there somewhere.

  “Sorry,” Cal said. “He can be a real shizznod sometimes.”

  Even though he’d deliberately raised his voice to make sure Mech heard him, the cyborg didn’t respond. Instead, Mech just plodded along after Bobo in a sort of angry bewildered daze.

  “It’s fine. It’s not your fault,” Dave said. He glanced away, his cheeks reddening. “Sorry if I freaked out back there.”

  “Freaked out? You? Nah,” said Cal.

  “I think I might have,” Dave insisted.

  Cal grinned. “Well… maybe just a little.”

  “Maybe I should’ve been Shaggy.”

  “Nah,” said Cal, shaking his head. “Listen, I bet even Fred gets scared sometimes.”

  “Think so?”

  “Sure!” Cal said. “I mean, I don’t know why, exactly. You’d think they’d have figured out by now that all those ghost sightings are bullshizz, and the monsters are just some creepy janitor dressed up, right?”

  “Right,” Dave agreed. He frowned. “So… are we actually just talking about Scooby-Doo now, or is this a metaphor for something?”

  “Hmm? Oh. No, we’re just talking about Scooby-Doo,” Cal said. He shook his head, looking genuinely quite angry about the whole thing for some reason. “Fonking janitors.”

  “Yeah. Fonking janitors,” Dave agreed. He gestured ahead to the box-like building. “This is exciting, isn’t it? I’ve been coming here for years and had no idea all this was down here. I mean… it’s amazing.”

  Cal shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so. I mean, I’ll be honest, I’ve seen weirder shizz. A lot weirder. One time, we found this old castle filled with clones of this inventor guy, and…”

  Up ahead, Bobo stopped at an apparently arbitrary spot roughly halfway between the door and the metal construction, and Cal decided to continue the story another time. The building stood around three stories tall, and was only slightly less wide. The longer Cal looked at it, the more enormous he realized the rest of the place had to be to accommodate it.

  Several complicated-looking control panels rose from the floor around Bobo. His sausage fingers prodded at the controls, and a hologram of Funworld appeared in the air. The image flickered and rolled a little, like the technology was old or in need of repair.

  Once Bobo had fixed the image in place, he turned to Mech. “You have questions, Commander.”

  “You bet your fonking ams I got questions,” Mech said.

  Bobo gave a curt nod of his large domed head. “Then please,” he said. “Allow me to explain.”

  And he did.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Normally, Cal was not a fan of PowerPoint presentations. Back in what now felt like another life, he’d gone through a whole variety of jobs in quite rapid succession, and several of those changes of career had come about directly as a result of having to sit through a presentation involving PowerPoint.

  There was something about watching all those slightly blurry slides click by on a cheap fold-down screen that made him question all his life choices leading up to that moment. If only he’d gone left instead of right. If only he’d worked harder at school. If only he’d stayed in bed that day. So many if onlys, all of which would have meant he wasn’t sitting in a semi-darkened room listening to someone with all the charisma of a door handle explain a series of tedious graphs.

  He wasn’t alone in feeling that way, of course - joined as he was by every other living creature in the entire history of the world – but his loathing for those presentations was of a raw, visceral type that ran far deeper than that of most people.

  Space PowerPoint, on the other hand, was much better.

  Well, a bit better.

  Well, not so awful that he contemplated self-harming.

  Much.

  Bobo, for all his jolly, demented-looking exterior, was a pretty dull public speaker, and if it hadn’t been for Loren prodding him in the ribs with a finger a couple of times, Cal would almost certainly have glazed over during the entire presentation.

  As it stood, he picked up maybe ninety per cent of it, and was reasonably confident he had the basic gist.

  The whole of Funworld had been constructed around a single sphere, which was currently housed inside the metal construction dead ahead of them. Inside the sphere was a collapsing black hole, frozen in something called a ‘stasis field’. Inside the collapsing black hole was someone Bobo insisted was ‘the most dangerous man in the universe’. From the way he whispered it, and the expression on his face as the words passed his lips, Cal knew the prisoner had to be Grade A bad news. The lengths that people had gone to in order to keep the guy locked up – collapsing a star on him, then building an entire planet over the top – also suggested he probably wasn’t someone Cal wanted to get any better acquainted with.

  The idea of turning the place into a theme park world had apparently been Mech’s from the start, although he was still in a state of denial about that. Keeping the black hole in a state of permanent stasis wasn’t cheap, and the proceeds of Funworld were intended to help offset the massive cost.

  The massive one hundred million credits a year cost.

  “So, wait,” said Miz, cutting in at that point. “That’s what the hundred million Kevin found in Mech’s head was? Like, the running costs, or whatever? You mean there’s no treasure?”

  Bobo had explained that no, there wasn’t any treasure, and while he had no idea who ‘Kevin’ was, he confirmed that any reference to that specific sum of money was likely to be referring to the yearly energy bill.

  “Great. So, we came all this way for nothing,” Miz said.

  “You got to have a go on that big slide,” Cal pointed out, but Miz just rolled her eyes and tutted.

  From there, Bobo went on to explain where the rest of the bio-bot security staff had gone (some had malfunctioned and/or gone nuts, the rest were now yellow mush for various reasons) and how he’d managed to keep the place running for so long on his own (with great difficulty, and not very well).

  He also touched on ‘the incident’ that had started the chain reaction of bio-bot insanity ripping through the park, turning it into a survivalist’s wet dream, and severely hampering its ability to generate a self-sustaining income.

  “Can’t you just ask for more funding?” Mech asked. “If you’re really holding the most dangerous dude in the universe, then surely it’s in Zertex’s best interests to up your budget.”

  “Zertex don’t know about this place. No-one does,” said Bobo. “This complex predates Zertex by over a hundred years.”

  Mech raised his eyebrows. “Well then, there you go! Whoever this commander is, it can’t be me. I wasn’t even alive back then, let alone building no planet-sized super prisons.”

  “You were,” Bobo replied. “Your mission was capture and restraint. Once those were achieved, you left. Protocol demanded a memory wipe to erase all knowledge of this place’s existence.”

  “I ain’t hundreds of years old,” Mech said. “I mean, that’s crazy.”

  Bobo’s fingers danced across his controls. The image changed to show a slowly rotating 3D hologram of someone that looked a lot like Mech. His mechanical parts were smaller, and there were a couple of additional fleshy patches on his head and neck, but there was no denying it was him. He wore a tight-fitting uniform, and was pointing
forwards in a, ‘Your Country Needs YOU!’ kind of pose.

  “That does look like you,” Loren said.

  Mech shook his head, but there was no conviction behind the movement. “No, I… I don’t… That’s not… That can’t be.”

  “You’ve put on weight,” Cal pointed out. “I mean, I’m not saying you’ve got fat, exactly, but you’ve definitely put on weight.”

  “Who is it?” Miz asked.

  “It’s Mech,” Cal said. “I thought we’d established that?”

  Miz tutted loudly. It echoed around the vast room. “I meant who’s the prisoner? Who have they got locked up that’s so dangerous they need a whole planet to themselves?”

  “Tell me,” said Bobo. “Are you familiar with the name Geronimus Krone?”

  “Ha!” Loren snorted. “Good one.”

  “Who’s Geronimus Krone?” Cal asked. “You know, aside from the guy with the second worst name in the galaxy.”

  Mech frowned. “Second? So, who’s got the worst name in…?” He caught Cal’s gleeful look, then sighed. “Oh. Right. Gotcha.”

  “Gluk Disselpoof,” said Cal, grinning from ear to ear. “Still gets me every time.”

  “You remember those guys you told us about?” Loren asked, turning to Cal.

  “I told you about a lot of guys,” Cal replied. “Can you be more specific?”

  “The scary ones.”

  Cal thought back. “The Munsters?”

  “No. The made-up ones.”

  “I’m pretty sure the Munsters were made-up.” He turned to the only other person in the room likely to have any authority on the subject whatsoever. “Dave?”

  Dave blinked, as if waking from a dream. “Hmm?”

  “The Munsters.”

  “What?”

  “The Munsters.”

  Dave frowned. “Why are you saying ‘the Munsters’ at me? What about them?”

  “Are they real or fictional?”

  “Fictional.”

  “You sure?”

  “Hundred per cent. Definitely fictional. Same goes for the Addams Family.”

  “Well, obviously they’re not real,” Cal said, shooting Dave a look that suggested he was out of his fonking mind. Cal turned back to Loren. “Like I thought, the Munsters are definitely fictional,” he said, then: “What’s that got to do with anything? Why are you asking about the Munsters?”