Thousands of lumpy round rocks jutted up from the ice. Normal-Art used one of them to gain his balance as he stood.
“Okay, I gotta get back to work. See ya, Artheoskatergariabetrugereiinganno,” said the giant, and then returned to standing upright without waiting for a reply.
Normal-Art could hear little over the chattering of his own teeth. He glanced about and noted how hairy the six pairs of giants’ feet were that surrounded him, and then noted how similarly they smelled to rotted cheese that had been placed in a freezer.
God-Art began leading the trio toward a small arched passageway at the back of the gigantic stone well when the sound of a familiar female voice stopped Normal-Art in his tracks. It called his name.
That’s when he realized all the lumpy frozen rocks that covered the surface of the ice were not rocks at all, but were in fact frozen people, cold and blue and hard. Some were frozen so that only their chests and heads poked up from the frozen water, some such that only their heads were visible, and some were completely submerged, which Normal-Art only realized when he pressed his face close to the ice.
The familiar voice called his name again. He spun around, looking for the source.
“Yes?” he called back.
God-Art tugged on his arm, pulling him toward the exit. There! His name again. “Wait,” he ordered the god.
The female voice yelled his name a few more times. He scrambled across the ice toward the sound. He slipped over and over, and finally resolved to scrabbling along the ice on his hands and knees.
Finally, he found the source. It lay near the crusty pinky toe of one of the giants. It was a woman with naught but her head poking up above the ice. Her skin was pallid and frozen, but he would recognize that face anywhere.
It was Ginny.
Chapter 19
VISITING PLACES FROM THE PAST
Lightning flashed, and Agent 27142 landed on a parking lot on Earth 920,527. He closed his eyes and inhaled as deeply as he could, taking in the smell of the wet cement, the first scent he had smelled in years. His eyes watered at the intensity of the petrichor.
He bent over in a fit of coughing and opened his eyes. Black smog hovered in the sky, blotting out much of the sunlight. Gigantic, squat buildings made from plastered-together gray stones stretched as far as the eye could see, each with three large smokestacks poking out of its top from which more smog billowed to join the layer of murky blackness that hung in the air. The grinding sounds of factory machines filled the air, every now and then punctuated by the soft beeping sound of a forklift backing up.
Agent 27142 sighed in between coughs. It had been so long since he stepped foot on this reality that nostalgia had all but clouded the less-than-beautiful qualities of this place.
The gourd began coughing, too. “There is something terribly wrong with this place,” the vegetable commented in its monotone, depressed voice. “Just my luck that I’d be forced to jump to this reality.”
A hint of a smile formed on Agent 27142’s lips. “There’s nothing wrong with this place. This is a reality that the B.I.T. turned into a factory. Happened centuries ago. It’s where we build all our ships and equipment for the Outer Quadrant Navy. One of my first command positions was to oversee production in our shift-shuttle factory here and make it run 15% more efficiently.”
“How’d you do?”
Agent 27142 scowled. “Well, I wouldn’t be standing here as a captain of my own B.S.S.C.-class ship if I hadn’t performed admirably, would I?”
The gourd wilted a little. “I-I guess not.”
“That was a rhetorical question, you fool. I brought 25% more efficiency to the factory. The B.I.T. gave me a commendation for it. See?” Agent 27142 rolled up his sleeve and showed a tattoo on his forearm. It was a golden award badge with a picture of a gray factory inside it. Dozens of other badge-tattoos lined his skin, marking his long and excellent service to the B.I.T.
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t see, and I don’t really understand rhetoric. I’m just a gourd.”
Agent 27142 grunted in annoyance and abruptly ended the conversation. He trudged nearly a mile with the gourd in tow and then entered one of the many identical squat buildings with three large smokestacks. If the gourd had been able to see, it likely would have asked how the agent knew which building to enter, as there seemed nothing distinguishable about this one, and there were no obvious markings on its outside.
Inside, a gruff foreman stood watch over dozens of greasy agents who were pressing buttons and operating machines. Pieces of steel rolled down a factory line. Sparks flew everywhere as welding machines bound pieces of steel together. Toward the far end of the factory, a portion of hull for one of the carrier-sized B.S.S.C. ships was being assembled from thousands of the smaller pieces of steel that were concurrently rolling down the factory line.
Dozens more B.I.T. workers hung from harnesses attached to thin black cords that dangled from the ceiling. They darted to and fro like bumblebees pollinating flowers as they jumped to new spots that needed attention, placed small robots there, controlled the robots via remote to bind the spots in place, picked the robots back up, and then leapt into the air to ride their cords to new destinations, where they placed the small robots somewhere new.
As Agent 27142 entered the factory floor, the foreman turned toward him. The foreman was a young man with a bushy mustache. He furrowed his large brow in annoyance at being disturbed, but then when he realized Agent 27142’s rank, he leapt to his feet and ran over to his superior, groveling.
“Hello, sir. I’m Agent 8888990. I run this factory, sir.”
“I can see that,” said Agent 27142. “I’m Agent 27142. I used to do the same, back when it used to produce shift-shuttles.”
The foreman understood the implication and grinned. “Oh, yeah? How long did they keep you here before moving you to military command?”
Then the foreman noticed Agent 27142’s shoulder, and concern filled his eyes. “A-Are you OK, sir? Is that your eagle? I can get a medic down here right away.”
Agent 27142 pursed his lips. “Agent 8888990, I’m in a hurry, and I have time for neither a chat nor a medic. It’s an emergency, and the Multiverse is at stake. I need to access Store Room 9.”
The foreman shrugged. “Go right ahead. You outrank me, so I couldn’t stop you even if I wanted to.”
Agent 27142 nodded and strode away. “Bye,” the gourd called out to the foreman.
Agent 27142 walked around the outskirts of the factory floor. He passed eight large doors that lay on rollers, each with a large red number painted on it. When he reached the one marked with the numeral 9, he pressed his palm against a pad embedded in the wall to the right of the door. A scanner passed over his hand and then glowed green. The door to the store room rolled up, and Agent 27142 walked inside. He pressed another button to shut the door behind him.
Row upon row of shelving filled the room. The shelves were tall enough to nearly touch the ceiling, twelve-stories high. Tools lined the shelves, ranging from extra screwdrivers to drills to welders to forklifts. Agent 27142 walked forward, counting out the ceiling tiles way up above. When he reached the fifty-fourth tile, he turned to his right and began climbing the shelving unit that stood there. About ten minutes later, he reached the top, where he found himself crouching next to some dusty hammers.
He extended his hand up and popped off the ceiling tile. It opened onto a gigantic room, inside which lay computers and a bed and, toward the back, a shift-shuttle much like the one in which Agent 29333 had escaped the B.T.T. home reality with Prisoner-Art, except it was painted red rather than black. Agent 27142 climbed into the room and put the ceiling tile back in place behind him.
“Where are we?” asked the gourd, a hint of panic in its voice. “We left Earth 920,527, I can sense it.”
“Oh, calm down,” said Agent 27142. “We’ve merely entered a pocket reality I set up back when I ran this factory.”
Agent 27142 sat down in front of a near
by computer terminal. He dropped the gourd onto the ground and pressed the button to power on the terminal. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Again, nothing.
‘Hey, gourd, I need you to shock this terminal,” said Agent 27142.
The gourd sighed. “I have a name, you know. It’s Henry.”
Agent 27142 sighed right back at the vegetable and said, “OK, Henry. Shock the terminal now, or I will be eating squash soup for dinner tonight.”
“Fine, fine,” said the gourd. “Just show me where it is. No need for the threats.”
Agent 27142 tapped Henry against the terminal to indicate its location to the gourd. Lightning flashed from the gourd’s antennae and crashed into the computer terminal. The screen flashed to life. Agent 27142 tapped his fingers impatiently on the metal desk as he waited for the computer to boot up.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” muttered Henry. “First, you commandeer me away from my owner, who was far nicer than you. Then you force me to perform menial blasts from my antennae that are far below my pay grade—well, if I ever got paid, that is—without even the slightest bit of thanks. And that’s all I ask. I don’t give a seed who or what I’m hauling from earth to earth, I just want a little acknowledgement sometimes. Just a little would go a long way.”
The vegetable continued rambling, but Agent 27142 ignored it. As soon as the prompt popped up, he logged in with his username and password. He first opened his electronic mail and found over two million unopened messages. He ignored most of them. He filtered the inbox to only show messages from Agent 29333, but there were none following the time they split up on the B.T.T. home world. Dread filled the pit of his stomach. He cleared the search filter and scrolled through the unopened messages until he came to one from this morning that was marked urgent. He opened it and read a blanket warning message to all B.I.T. agents.
The message ordered them to stay away from Earth 55,777, since the earth was still frozen in time and all agents who had subsequently jumped there since its reality-wide stasis event had also become stuck. The agency had not yet found a solution, but agents were encouraged to send any unconquerable Multiverse-level threats to the reality straightaway, as the threats would become frozen in time and could be left there until a solution was uncovered.
OK, good news so far, he thought. The Stasis Bomb appears to have performed as intended. This means the Multiverse is as good as saved. It also means there’s still hope for the woman I love. I knew there was heavy risk that Agent 29333 would get stuck on Earth 55,777 when the Stasis Bomb detonated. If she’s stuck there, then she’s likely still alive, just frozen in time. I must know for sure whether she is there.
He opened an application on the terminal labeled Ship Tracker, and an interface popped up. Agent 27142 typed the identification code of his personal shift-shuttle into the proper text box. After a few moments, an error message popped up on the screen. Agent 27142 cursed and tried again. This time, a reality number popped up. It said 6. Then it changed to 709,865. Then it changed to 50,989. Then it changed again, over and over, faster than Agent 27142’s eyes could comprehend.
Agent 27142 sighed. If the tracker were to be believed, the ship was jumping from reality to reality at a frightening speed. Agent 27142 picked up the gourd and walked over to a far corner of the pocket reality. He walked past the shift-shuttle and entered a cylindrical plexiglass tube barely large enough in diameter to fit him inside. A metal pole hung from the top and a small touchscreen lay in the middle. He tapped the screen with his forefinger and it sprang to life. A prompt asked him which ship he wished to board. He typed in the identification number of his shift-shuttle, along with the override code.
“Henry, shoot the pole above us with lightning.”
The gourd sighed. “Don’t you ever just want to have a conversation?” asked the gourd. When Agent 27142 did not respond other than to tap the gourd against the pole, Henry shot the lightning as requested.
The cylinder blasted into the barrier between realities. Being back here made Agent 27142 shudder. Then a targeting program on the touchscreen beeped and glowed yellow.
“Again!” Agent 27142 screamed to Henry, who promptly obeyed. The cylinder blasted once more, this time out of the Barrier, and appeared in the boarding station within Agent 27142’s shift-shuttle. Henry in hand, Agent 27142 exited his Mobile Boarding & Tracking Cylinder and walked toward the ladder that would take him up to the bridge.
The howling of reality after reality passing by hole that had somehow been ripped open in the side of the ship assaulted Agent 27142’s ears, but he ignored it and pressed on. The corpses of Squadron Twelve that had been shredded and spattered across the hold assaulted his eyes, but he ignored them and pressed on. The horrid stench that wafted down from the bridge above assaulted his nostrils, but he ignored it and pressed on. Dread filled every inch of his body. He climbed the ladder.
Agent 27142 ascended onto the bridge and moaned in horror. Dried blood lay splattered everywhere. A pair of corpses and a dead eagle lay sprawled across the bridge. He walked up to Prisoner-Art and scowled. He seemed to have suffered merely a single hole through the torso. Nearby, lying on the ground in front of the control panel, lay Agent 29333. Her body was maimed and broken and filled with hole after hole after hole.
Tears rolled down Agent 27142’s face. It was one of the few times he could ever remember crying. He considered telling Agent 29333’s corpse how he felt about her, but instead, he clinched his jaw in anger. Something had murdered everyone here, and Agent 27142 knew exactly who the guilty party was, for all of the evidence pointed to the exact same beast. It was that robot with drills for arms that belonged to the blue bear.
Agent 27142 stood, drew his Scatter Gun pistol, and searched the ship. No evidence indicated that the robot was still here. As he passed the hole in the ship below decks, he nodded. He walked back to the bridge. He stared at the control panel. Its keys were melted together, and all the knobs and dials were deformed and blackened. Without any hope that it would work, he attempted to enter a few commands into the terminal using the control panel’s melted keys. But they did not work, and the terminal did not respond.
He returned to his Mobile Boarding & Tracking Cylinder in the ship’s boarding station. He removed the CPU from it and brought it with him back to the bridge. He pulled a wire from the CPU’s back and plugged it into a port in the terminal. He typed a command into the touchscreen keyboard on the CPU.
The shift-shuttle’s view screen lit up with information. He watched a grainy video filmed from the camera on the wing of the ship that showed the robot hanging from the hull and then dropping away. Agent 27142 typed a query into the computer. It flashed an earth number.
Agent 27142 used the CPU to enter his override code, canceling all current commands to the ship. The ship stopped hopping wantonly from reality to reality. Agent 27142 typed a new number into the destination prompt. He squeezed Henry and said, “Henry, I need you to blast lightning into the pole on the bridge terminal.”
“Why must you keep reminding me that I can’t see anything? Does it make you feel better?” whined the gourd.
Agent 27142 smacked the gourd against the blackened pole. “There. Now you know where it is. Fire away.”
The gourd sighed and did so.
Chapter 20
THAW AND ORDER
Regular-Ginny’s body was dead weight below her.
Her head stuck out from the frozen lake, which she had heard the demons refer to as Lake Cocytus long ago, way back when she was dragged down here. She had been stuffed inside the lake once they had chiseled away a small portion of the ice. Only her neck and head remained above the ice, and it was constantly pelted by frigid wind and small pieces of snow and ice that whipped across the surface of the lake. She had expected her body to go numb from the cold long ago, as her knees did when she iced them after a basketball game back when she was a teen. But her body never did go numb, and the horridly cold water made her skin constantly feel like
little frozen needles were making pinpricks on every square inch of her submerged body.
But the cold was not even the worst part. The worst part was that the demons had implanted her in the ice mere feet from one of the giants’ toes. Never had she so strongly wished to have her pink powers returned to her than when the demons laughed about it before flying away. Hair from the nearby giant’s foot would whip across her face when the wind changed direction, and the smell from the never-washed appendage seemed to burn itself into her nostrils.
The giant had some sort of foot fungus and would often use its far foot to scratch the toes of the foot nearest Ginny. Flakes of fungus-covered dead skin would fly into the air, and chunks of it would rain down on her face. The first couple times this happened, the skin flakes dropped into her open mouth, and she quickly learned not to stare with mouth agape. After finishing with the scratch, the giant’s far foot would slam back down in place atop the ice, often breaking it and splashing below the surface. This would cause ripples in the water beneath the ice, and the water’s shaking would cause it to feel colder than ever. During these times, the poor wretches trapped completely underwater would grab hold of her to hold themselves in place to prevent themselves from being tossed about too violently.
As she did about a million times a day since she got here, she cursed. She hated this eternal fate and hated how unfairly she had been treated when she died. The more she thought about it, the more she raged.
Back when she had died and found her soul standing before the arched stone gateway to Hell, she had shrugged. She had never been particularly religious, nor had she been particularly perfect, so it had not really been a surprise that if an afterlife were to exist, she would be resigned to a less-than-heavenly fate. She had assumed she would receive a light sentence, since she had at least been a good person. Thus, she passed through the arched gateway with her head held high.
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