Ginny groaned again. She and the Pink Marauders had fallen into a trap. They would no doubt be blasted from existence while pinned between two equally deadly forces: a metaphorical hammer that shot deadly disintegration lasers and a metaphorical anvil that was a shield seemingly made out of the same wipe-you-from-existence lightning.
Ginny turned back toward the shield, looking around for anything that might turn the tide for herself and her army. She ignored the Pink One’s hateful screaming inside her skull. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the Pink One launch herself toward the incoming B.I.T. carriers that loomed overhead. She hoped that the Pink One being distracted would mean her stupid godly demands would stop ringing out directly inside Ginny’s brain. But she did not allow these hopes to raise too high, as hope had never helped her in the past. She instead stared past the shield to the portion of the city inside it, hoping to find a weakness.
She used her pink blob to grow tentacle-stilts that took her high, high, high into the sky so that she could look down into the shield from a better vantage point. And that’s when she saw it, about twenty blocks southeast and deep within the bubble. There sat a power plant that covered a good five square miles of city. It looked exactly like Central Park if Central Park were about five times bigger and also a vast tangled forest of metal and concrete. That must be supplying power to this part of the city, she thought. And if I’m wrong, it’s not like we’ve got much to lose.
Regular-Ginny caught sight of Arthur the Putrid. He was just beginning to fly toward the airships to fight at the heels of the Pink One. She screamed his name, but he did not respond. So she launched a tentacle toward him, which wrapped around his ankle. He turned toward her in fury, moved his hands in a circular motion, and formed a green ball of light that hovered in front of his torso. He fired it at her.
She knocked it aside with a tentacle, and it caromed away to the west and crashed into a nearby skyscraper, leaving a gigantic smoking hole in its wake. “Stop that!” she screamed. “Listen to me!”
She lifted him up to her vantagepoint high in the sky. Then she pointed down to the field of generators, visible within the hazy confines of the shield. “That’s got to be supplying a huge amount of power to this part of the city. I bet if we destroy it, it will knock out power to the Olympus building, and the shield will come down.”
Arthur the Putrid frowned, but then he nodded. “You’re both smarter and stupider than you look. You are likely right. It likely is supplying the power to this shield. But it’s also inside the shield. How are we going to get to it? We can’t use the Pink One to jump inside.”
Ginny stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth and bit down upon it. She scanned the streets and in moments had her answer. She pointed down at a nearly blind version of Art who wore the thickest cokebottle glasses she had ever seen. This one they had murdered and recruited from within his home in the core of his reality’s earth. He was the king of his underground people, and he sat mounted on his reality’s version of Ginny, a great mole that stood twenty-stories tall with forepaws that had been amputated and augmented into shovels the size of bulldozers.
“You will dig!” she screamed to Arthur the Putrid, deciding in that moment that he would attack the generators while she helped the Pink One fight the doom looming in the sky overhead. She would return to assault Olympus as soon as the shield fell. “Find all the diggers you can. Order them to dig below the shield. Then emerge from below and destroy the generators.”
Arthur the Putrid frowned. Then he shook his head. “I think not. You dig. I shall go win glory up in the sky, in the sight of my pink god.”
Regular-Ginny sighed in frustration. One of them needed to lead the attack on the generators. She knew it must be him, for she was exponentially stronger and would be more help than him up in the air in the fight against the B.I.T. warships.
She began shaking Arthur the Putrid with more fury that she had ever shaken anything. “No, you shall obey me!” she screamed, her voice cracking and squealing. “I am the Pink One’s Right Hand of Destruction. You are my underling! You shall obey me, or you shall die.”
He tried shooting her with more magical beams, but she simply smashed him against the rooftop until he acquiesced. She then dropped him, and he and his Death Cavalry flew to the ground below to gather diggers and begin the underground assault.
Meanwhile, she turned toward the airships. The Pink One’s rage at the lightning-shield seemed to be fading, its focus shifting toward the fleet. With this shift in focus, Ginny’s overwhelming desire to throw herself against the lightning-shield to try and break it also faded. She felt pink hatred flow through her veins and draw her fury toward the airships. She breathed a deep breath and made ready to wreak havoc upon the B.I.T. fleet.
Chapter 12
AN UNSURPRISING TWIST
Normal-Art wished his hands were free so that he might scratch himself. The gray constraints that crisscrossed his body and bound him to the equally gray chair dug into the flesh of his neck, and even after all this time at the mercy of these bindings, the chafing was as bad as ever. Long ago, he clung to the hope of eventual calluses providing relief, but he no longer hoped for anything, because he knew that the Multiverse was an awful bitch and had for some reason destined him to be the single Art whose life was naught but one calamity after another.
Instead, Normal-Art tried his best to ignore his misery by staring at his counterpart. From the back, Officer-Art’s checkered hat dug into his oiled hair so that it puffed out just below the band. Normal-Art had learned the hard way not to encourage the man to switch to a larger hat, as it was a guaranteed ticket to a beating. But a bigger hat would go a long way toward reducing ugly rings and hat hair when his interdimensional twin removed the thing. Normal-Art shrugged, his unconscious cue for breaking himself off from such inane, wandering thoughts.
Like a fascist eclipse blocking the sun, Officer-Art’s bulk blocked much of the screen from Normal-Art’s view, so Normal-Art had to stretch his neck to one side as best he could to glimpse what was happening in the view screen.
Outside, skyscrapers and city filled the vast expanse of the ground below. Normal-Art had seen the place in the daytime when an invading army was not threatening to smash it to pieces, so he knew that the city stretched for thousands of miles, covering this entire reality’s earth in one gigantic urban sprawl cut only by the occasional city park. Normal-Art also knew that this earth represented the economic and cultural center of the Multiverse, for it was where all realities converge for the sake of bureaucracy, and the wealth from taxation and administrative fees that have accumulated here over the millennia have allowed the city to continually expand and grow5.
Early in his captivity, when Normal-Art had once asked to be let out for a walk, he learned that members of any societal caste higher than the absolute destitute avoid the bottom few floors of any building. Many in this reality have thus spent their entire lives never leaving the confines of the skyscrapers—except, of course, to jump to another reality, which is quite common—and have never set foot on the ground. Many of the upper class from this reality—Officer-Art included—bragged of the number of generations that separated them from having set foot on the barren streets far below. Thus, though long forgotten generations had broken the sprawling cityscape with parks and greenery, you would never dare enter them unless you wanted to be mauled and probably murdered by the desperate citizens on the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Travel between buildings occurred via a spiderwebbed network of bridges connecting the upper floors of the skyscrapers or through the dirigible-busses that travel from building to building during peacetime. Upon news of the incursion forces approaching, Officer-Art had ordered public transport on these steampunk fares halted until the cosmic threat was deterred. With the speed of those having much practice in preparing for cosmic threats, these busses had cleared out long before the pink army had arrived.
Normal-Art assumed that none of the inane
social norms of this earth mattered to the population now, as the members of every caste must be clinging to desperate hope that the B.I.T. Navy would keep them safe. Normal-Art imagined all eyes across the horizon were intensely watching the lightning-hologram of Officer-Art standing sixty stories high in the sky, its booming voice ringing out across the horizon. Normal-Art found it oddly entertaining to watch Officer-Art perform a gesture or speak, and then seconds later watch the hologram version that encompassed most of the view on the screen in the bridge repeat the movement or words.
Officer-Art’s voice cut through the cluttered wanderings of Normal-Art’s brain. His alternate-self said, “As I’m sure you have experienced by now, you shall find yourselves unable to bring your incursion bubbles within our shields, as one of their functionalities is to cease all interdimensional travel within their confines. So bring your worst, and enjoy breaking yourselves against our defenses.”
Seconds later, Art watched the back of the hologram’s head move as it spoke. The echo of its voice sounding out across the city filled Normal-Art with a mixture of awe and numbness. He found himself glancing down at the hologram’s posterior, and inanely noted to himself that he should get a pair of these uniform pants if it would make his butt look like that.
Officer-Art then clicked his heels together—again, the nervous tick that had grown so annoying Normal-Art would have torn his hair out had his hands not been encased in plaster and rendered useless—and reached his right arm to the side to press a button on the control panel of his captain’s chair. He said, “Captains, you may commence your attacks.”
Officer-Art then pressed a different button, and the hologram version of himself winked out of existence, its afterimage remaining purple in the sky for a few seconds before disappearing completely. Officer-Art turned on his heels so that he might face his subordinates on the bridge. In the view screen behind him, Normal-Art could see dozens of lightning bolts as airships identical to the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah in all but history and name flashed into existence on this reality.
The view screen behind Officer-Art morphed so that new viewpoints flashed to life around the borders of the screen, these the perspectives from the bridges of the incoming B.I.T. airships, which Normal-Art surmised because each screen had text on its bottom left that declared “B.S.S.C.” followed by the ship’s name.
“Launch fighter squadrons Alpha, Pi, Nine, and Twenty-Two. The rest shall remain in reserve,” ordered Officer-Art to no one in particular. However, the half-goateed humanoid leaned down over its console and repeated the order into a microphone. Normal-Art glanced past Officer-Art to watch the view screen as the fighters launched into the fray.
Officer-Ginny then chimed in. “Sir, the beetles following the remnants of the blue bear’s army have found something. Shall I display it on screen?”
Officer-Art nodded his assent. Normal-Art listened as Officer-Ginny’s fingers clacked across a keyboard on her console. The view screen then shifted, and grainy footage filled the screen.
Normal-Art and Officer-Art and Officer-Ginny gasped. Thousands and thousands of Arts and Ginnys—even more than those filling the ranks of the pink bear’s army—filled the vast expanse of a dusty canyon, all encircling the reconstituted blue bear, which floated majestically above the crowd. It raised its arms and squealed, “Then it is time to attack!”
The voices and roars and squeals and screeches of the hordes of Arts and Ginnys reverberated through the canyon. On the bridge, awed surprise gave way to dread as the blue bear launched thousands of white bubbles from its hands. Normal-Art’s dread gave way to a stifled smile as he spotted Drillbot in the crowd. He silently wished the best for the robot and desperately hoped the thing would escape being wiped from existence by the B.I.T.’s Scatter Guns.
Soon, all the white bubbles disappeared from the grainy footage, along with all the Arts and Ginnys. As the view screen returned to the scene outside on Earth 55,777, Officer-Art said, “Let us hope we have some time before they arrive so that we might hobble the pink army. Let me know when the blue bastard makes earthfa-”
Officer-Ginny interrupted. “Sir, sorry to interrupt you when you’re ordering me to alert you when the blue bear’s army is making earthfall. But, sir, the blue bear’s army is making earthfall now.”
Officer-Art groaned in annoyance. This annoyance seemed directed at both Officer-Ginny’s interruption and the white bubbles that began appearing across the horizon, some amongst the floating B.I.T. warships, some amongst the pink hordes. Normal-Art considered allowing nervousness or regret or longing for his couch to fill his heart, but since he could do nothing about anything from his position, he merely shrugged and resigned himself once more to watching a battle in numbed silence.
* * *
5 Though now, because the entire expanse of the earth is covered in city, the buildings grow up rather than out, with new floors being added as needed to already-completed buildings to make them taller. The one caveat to this growth is that Olympus must always stand higher than all other buildings, so it is always under construction and growing. Since The Forge must always occupy the Olympus building’s top floor, when height is added to this building, it is lifted up into the air via one of the High Commander’s inventions, and floors are added to its bottom.
Chapter 13
WHEN A ‘BOT LOVES A DINO, CAN’T KEEP HIS ONES AND ZEROES ON NOTHIN’ ELSE
Drillbot’s power core had never felt so full. It felt as though some invisible programmer had rewritten his source code. It overflowed with ones and zeroes so that if you laid them end to end, they would spell out in binary “I’m in love! I’m in love!” unto infinity. Drillbot thought back to that terrible day when he had contemplated suicide back on the earth full of dictator dwarves, and he felt foolish. Every day and every moment of tedium and carnage from then to now was worth it just to feel this way, and to enjoy such a feeling in the middle of an endless war was something to which he knew he must cling for as long as it would last.
It started on their first jump together when she smiled at him as they recruited the Art who lived on an earth where the inhabitants carry their pets in small round magical balls and force them to battle for fun. Then it grew into periodic stolen glances as they tumbled between realities. And as Drillbot continued traversing the vast reaches of the Multiverse with Ginny Rex, it blossomed into so much more.
On Earth 22,456, after the Blue One resurrected the planet, Drillbot picked exotic flowers for her. She accepted them with delight, hugging him with her tiny arms and gently rubbing the side of his round face with one of her paws. As he pinned one of the flowers to her leather jacket, the electric shock that flushed through his system signaled to him that this was the beginning of something special. On Earth 45,999, she brought him a fresh kill and offered first blood to him. He shoved his drills into it and pretended to thrill at the blood that spattered across his hull. When she could not reach her hands together to clap in excitement, Artkylosaur did so by proxy. On Earth 34,111, where they recruited versions of Art and Ginny who were magical sentient sandwiches that fought with peanut butter and jelly spells, Drillbot took Ginny Rex on a picnic, and she kissed him for the first time. It was but a quick lick across the grill that covered his speaker, but he thrilled at it, knowing that he would remember it fondly for the remainder of his existence.
And now, every time the Army of Life jumped to a new reality, the pair would kiss and then perform their duties. When their duties ended and Ginny Rex could catch some sleep at the end of a long day, she would lie down on her side and Drillbot would wedge himself up under her tiny arms, allowing himself to be spooned. She normally let nobody other than Artkylosaur touch her hair, but in these moments, he would reach up a drill and stroke her blond coif, while reaching his other drill in the opposite direction to rub her soft underbelly. Ginny Rex would breathe her hot breath against his back and fall asleep, and because Drillbot did not need sleep, he would simply lie there thanking every robot deity he could fath
om for these moments, wishing they would never end. Artkylosaur would cover them with a blanket and retire to his nearby bedroll. And then, always long before Drillbot was ready, Ginny Rex’s appointed rest time would end and it would be time for her to return to her duties.
This morning was one such morning. The last weeks and earths had passed by in such a wondrous blur that Drillbot knew not which reality the army inhabited at this point. The blue bear called to his recruits, and they gathered in a dusty canyon. The blue bear floated to the head of the massed army of Arts and Ginnys. Drillbot and Ginny Rex stood near the front of the crowd, Drillbot holding his right arm up above him, its point held softly in the tiny left paw of Ginny Rex as they listened to the Blue One’s instructions.
“Me am gathering you here because it now be time for Me and you all to stop swelling Me ranks and to make a stand,” said the blue bear. It smiled at Drillbot. Though it had not commented on his new relationship, Drillbot knew the bear would have put an end to it if the cosmic being disapproved. Drillbot thanked his robot gods for that piece of good fortune.
The blue bear continued, “Me have foreseen great destruction. And Me knows it is dire. Me have scanned the Multiverse and Me have seen the Pink. Pink will be attacking B.I.T. at B.I.T. home reality very, very, very soon. This our chance to intervene, to stop Pink from destruction, to heal all, and to stop B.I.T. zappy thingies that send you all into unhealy killings.”
The blue bear pointed at Drillbot and then beckoned the robot forward. Drillbot reluctantly broke away from Ginny Rex’s grip. He rolled forward, his wheels crunching across the dry, gravelly ground. He stopped near the blue bear and spun to face the crowd. Thousands and thousands of Arts and Ginnys filled the horizon, and though all their eyes were upon him, the only eyes he felt were those of the tyrannosaurus rex in the front row. The blue bear patted his head and continued, “Drillbot as always is Me trusted right hand. Drillbot is you general, Drillbot you leader, and you listen to Drillbot on battlefield, for as always, Me delegate to him Me will. Me will send him along to each of your squadron leaders momentarily, and he will give you further instructions. For now, go rest and contemplate and meditate, for we shall soon embark on this journey of battle, and most of you will be killed and brought back as Pink’s puppet, or killed by B.I.T. in a forever way with no healies, or both. So, make peace with self and your gods now, and know that Life is forever thankful for your sacrifice, and the realities you save also be thankful for your sacrifice. Dismissed.”
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 12
