This series of short adventures started out in a very unlikely way. Some 23 years ago, my old friend, Marco, was traveling in Thailand and having some remarkable adventures, which he related to me via a series of emails. At that point my life was at its least exciting. Work was slow, and we had a young family. Adventures of any kind were few and far between, so I started writing these off-the-cuff hardboiled tales about the erstwhile (and untrustworthy) Jed Lightsear in response. They were wild, pulpy, and humorous, and soon became a bit of an obsession.
These tales eventually made it into the ‘Event Horizon’ anthology we published under the Mam Tor banner. I used a pseudonym as I’d put out a call for some prose and had received very little, so in my own stories went with not-to-obvious anagrams of my name. They were beautifully illustrated by the late, great Edmund Bagwell. I’ve included two images shot directly from a printed copy as my digital files for them were long ago lost in storage hell somewhere…
In the original it was the Furt Fark Preimeter, but I retrofitted it to be a part of the wider Kiazmus universe later on, when it became clear that it pretty much fitted the bill perfectly.
I love these daft, slightly profane, juvenile, over-the-top, and preposterously inventive stories. The language became a thing unto itself, and I stand by the belief that I came up with the term ‘fun sponge’ back in 2003, and defy anybody to prove otherwise!
"Three Down at the Kiazmic Perimeter"
I
The Taunton Excesses
SHIT!
Things might've been different if Gail, the pneumatic endorphin-spume dol, hadn't toppled past on her distractingly elegant pins at precisely the moment Jed Lightsear chose to spatulate about access codes to the Kiazmic perimeter. (You remember Jed? Still talks a good sandwich, but you wouldn't trust him as far as you could spit him.) So there we are, me, Jed and Gail. Jed's like "it's amazing man..." some-such, and "two off the New Danube Delta - six back from Arcadia... yadda yadda" and I'm like "yeah yeah" 'cos Gail's pink nipples are winking at me over the top of her pink latex corset and her pink shiny lips are goin' "yeah, honey..."
(Down boy.)
Next thing you know we're high over mount Hubris watching the sparkles dancing out of Permafrost City like arc welding. I'm trying to concentrate on what Jed's saying, but Gail's got a four-digit handle on me and she's steering pretty good! Soon it's full nightscape and the wind is straightening even Jed's Dapper Dan hair as we take the "Taunton Excesses" down town to Port Miramax. (Yeah, old Jed always did have an eye for my ship. She’s a babe, retro-styled custom scape-bender. Bit damned independent, but you gotta love her! Guess that’s why he asked me along.)
And there it is. The Kiazmic perimeter. Bigger than Mohammed's mountain and twice as profound.
“Holy fucking Dick!” shouts Jed, laughing. It’s some info-dump and no doubt! Our neuro-receptors are buzzing like ‘Lectro-Wasps round a stat ball. Gail is spurting endorphins all over us, trying to fuck everything at the same time. I whip out the Exodus I acquired along Sunset B while I can still think clearly enough and drip 10ccs into our eyes. Soon we’re flat out spin-drunk, talking Jungshit and passing round the “Blowman” tm, just like we used to in the Monde.
Then Gail’s off, riding the monkey, and we can see the ectoplasmic trails drifting off her like spectral filigree.
“There she blows. Whoa yes.” Jed, one eye half open, waves an arm in the general direction. “Listen, man. We got the codes. What say we check it out, you and me?”
“Jed Jed Jed.” (I’m at the upper end and flying.) “I can’t leave Gail. I’m hooked man. Proper bitten.”
“Shit.”
(You ever ride the monkey? One time you’re down like a Gump-child, all Jungshitted out and dumbass. Next Spyro the giant cosmic monkey has manifested between your legs. Soon you’re clinging on to that bright golden fur and bounding along the seventeenth dimension like it was a high wire, praying that the Metawhals don’t blunder into your plasma-trail and send you Crazyeddy.)
I can see Gail up ahead. Jed’s whooping behind me. We ride the monkey all the way to Proto China Town.
The Aurora Hendrix is advertising Base Adaptoids when we come down. Below it the Synthtown New Bizley flashes smooth invites at us and, too down-dumb to argue, we climb back into the “Taunton Excesses” and let her take us in.
The Hyatt Flotel has sub-stratus rooms available so we take one.
Later, all honeyed up in the jack-ouzi, we plan our entry into the perimeter.
“I’ll press the guardians with code - got it from an old acquaintance who broke into the Kiazmus half a lifetime back. Shit, the old freebootin’ hobo’s almost a god now, but he can still speak human enough - if you’re patient.” Jed says. “Gail, you gonna stick out honey, so spray ‘em good. Keep ‘em sweet.”
We wake and dress in the splintered morning light, chopped and diced by the prismic windows of the Hyatt Flotel. Bathed in magenta, Gail smiles her fuckme smile then looks out at the perimeter. Jed, in cyan, slicks shut his suit. His smile cries “come on now baby dol. Come on baby.” The suits make us look like highflights, cool and rich. We hide our smiles with trendy flute-masks. The air is cleaned and jacked up with nutrients. Our voices ring with harmonics. Mandelbrot shades hide our eyes behind a dancing spectrum, like diesel films over water.
“Come on now baby dol.”
Later we ride the elevator shuttle back down to Bizley Town and take a rickshaw to the perimeter. The driver, a Spumoid, tries to charge us triple fare. He trembles, indignant - like a giant purple jellyfish - three feet above the ground, and finally stings us for double.
“Fucking highflights”, he warbles.
“Fuck you!” Jed yells back. (Old Jed don’t much like it when somebody gets one over on him. No sir.)
But we’re at the perimeter.
(Remember the imagiplants we used to watch as kids? Sailing round the virtual Kiazmus perimeter together, thinking “this is what it must be like...”
It’s not.
The effect the actual Kiazmus has on the body, even at distance, is near indescribable.
Once, you’ll recall, we gatecrashed the technotrance of 30,000,000 initiate Quantumonks and briefly glimpsed an abstraction of god - before they spotted us and drove us out of empathspace.
Not even close.
The Kiazmus takes you apart and puts you back together. Perfectly. It fills the quantum spaces between your atoms with a symphony of feathers cast from an angel’s wings. And if you dare you can step-stone across the whole damn universe through it for free. Imagine that?
Gail sprays and we’re all like “Oh God oh God” and the Guardians - protected in their armor of rough-spun diamond punched into lead and shrouded in zappy plasmashields - ask for the codes.
Maybe it WAS the endorphins that got to him, though the flute-masks should have taken care of that. Maybe he lost it ‘cos there was three of us there. Maybe the proximity of the Kiazmus made a better man of him and he couldn’t lie. Or maybe Jed pulled a fast one and worked those codes like they was basic trig. Whatever. Those Guardians soon had us rumbled good!
I unfolded the metascape access and jumped us three parsecs before they got off a single round.
12000 light-years away we booked into a lowpro sleep spa and zoned out for two weeks in zero-gravitanks.
Gail had been transfigured, I suppose. Her endorphin mists were laced with pheromones, and she had taken on a more organic shell. I’m pretty sure she was actually alive after that. Either way, somehow I wasn’t enough for her anymore. Maybe I never was. She didn’t much talk, just smiled a distant smile, and soon she was gone. Still hurts.
And Jed? Jed just fucked off.
The ‘Taunton Excesses’ paid our bill at the Hyatt Flotel and headed out to the Pyramid Nebula without incident. I met her, as arranged, at the Mountain Momma Inn, Southside of the planet West Virginia. She pretended she was sad to find me all alone, but the next day she had gone too. (And to think of all the love I lavished on her! Bitch!
And you know what? I just bet Jed Lightsear knows EXACTLY where to find her...)
SHIT!
Octavia Flume once wrote that “The Tachion Tract is the model for human consciousness.” I’m still puzzling over what she meant when suddenly I’m back in Mean Time and everything is dirty again. I had forgotten my knees ache when I walk. It’s a short distance from the checkout desk to my car, but it reminds me.
II
The Fly Trap
“New Derby was built by adventurous midlanders with no imagination.”
Mitch Cathode scratched the stump of his left arm, checking the plug points for inflammation before sliding his prosthetic back on. The fat barman of the “Spit and Gate” continued his practiced patwah.
“Luck-rich wideboys they were. Unfolded through the metascape and decided to make their home here, on Planet Elvis. “The most earth-like rock” - they proclaimed - “in the universe!” But it was only ten years before the grass on Planet Elvis woke up...”
Mitch flexed synthetic fingers, tingling with the return of sensation. “The grass.” He said. “Tell me about the grass.”
The inhabitants of Planet Elvis had not guessed at its carnivorous nature. Half the population was painfully devoured, another quarter scarred and maimed, before it was finally cut. The corporation that founded the planet fought a hopeless lawsuit, but the facts were clear enough: They had not adequately studied the grass. And 360,000 people had died.
“You know that it’s protected now? Yup. New Manhattan is a zoo for grass! They’ve built plastiglass walkways all over it in time for the next feed. Almost half a million Sheep, cattle and Wendigo have been imported just for the damn grass to eat!”
Mitch felt the codes jump in his fingertips as he left the pub. He had made do without his arm for a week, slumming it in a lowpro sleep spa in the Pyramid Nebula while Jed Lightsear worked his magic. He didn’t much care for the Jungshitting widester, all slick-suited and Dapper-Danned, but he was the best.
“Get you into the fucking Kiazmus those codes man!” he said. “Straight and no dice! Getting in’s the sweet bit, but you gotta get out like goose shit - hear me? These code’s ‘ll get you out quick.”
“There’s something else.” said Mitch. “It feels...”
“Just like the real thing, huh slick? Only better?”
And, yes, the arm was exactly like the real thing. Better. And something crawled up out of it and jump-started parts of his brain hitherto redundant.
“Oh man, you’s digging it! Yeah, like that huh?” Lightsear was ecstatic, brimful of self-love and enthusiasm. “Know this Pinocchio, see dude? An endorphin-spume dol that saw God’s toenails and came alive! I was with her - right there at the edge of all possibilities, looking into the Total! And now I can make this stuff live! See, it’s just a case of getting the materials to perceive us in a new light, you chasing? It has to learn that WE’RE alive, and the strings click round to a whole new dimension man - just like a revolving gate - and matter reconfigures itself, and BANG! We’re in a dialog man! It’s all there, all to be had at the Kiazmus. Telling you.”
“Right.”
Mitch Cathode wasn’t much interested in the Kiazmus. He imagined it, not entirely inaccurately, as a kind of reverse black hole. A galactic anomaly that proved everything right and everything wrong at the same time. Now it was a deleterious tourist attraction, jealously policed by the “Guardians”, enhanced and embittered descendants of the prospectors that had long ago chanced upon it.
It was raining.
New Derby, built in the classic fusion style of nineteenth century earth Victorian/twenty-first century Harryan, was a squat red brick and concrete sprawl. Its population opted to live in terraced dwellings along narrow streets, turning the sound up on their archaic six-D hard-light generators to avoid hearing the neighbors squabbling. Mitch Cathode liked it.
Back at the Cloughy Hotel he punched in for three hours deepsleep and an Ubersound-Flush detox. He wanted a clear head for the next day.
***
And suddenly he’s on an Aeroflume, six hundred decks up over the Borstal Channel, and he can see New Manhattan swallowing waves on the horizon.
And suddenly he’s passing his one small bag through the metascan, smiling pointlessly at the immigration officers, while his arm works the codes.
And suddenly he’s through. He’s there. Ten years, almost to the day, of waiting and planning and waiting some more. Ten years since the grass stole away his children, his beloved wives, tearing them from his arms, tearing off his arm.
He’s there.
Here.
Now.
It's nearly time.
Mitch Cathode watches the sheep, cattle and Wendigo graze upon the dozing terror below through the plastiglass walls of the walkway, and smiles.
III
Phoenix
“D’you see that! Hoo Bo? D’you see what happened on New Manhattan man?”
Jed Lightsear was fully flow-moed, I mean slick was x-tatix!
“Check this Hoo Bo!” And boy he’s thrusting the juddering Newsphere in my face, all lit up with outerference - ‘cos he’s so scooped and won’t stand still.
“Hey! Lube, dude!” I says. “Still youself boy! I can’t see anything in this with you all quiverin’ like you a Spumoid in a ‘lectro-storm!”
I watched as the images settled, and there was New Manhattan - the grass zoo - ‘cept below the plastiglass walkways that straddle the island the famous carnivorous flora was all ablaze. The carcasses of its once-to-be feast, imported sheep and cattle from Earthside, Wendigo from Neoteric-Ukon, shuddered and rippled like black and red jello in the heat waves.
“Uh huh.” I says. “So. And what’s got you all Hummin’ Jack over this, slick? Did another of your well-laids fuck up again?”
“Mitch Cathode man! He did it! And the codes worked man! Tellin' you, fell out me pure and ripe and burnin’!”
And here I must have looked like the guy who blinked when Forman went down, ‘cos I hadn’t a whiff what flash-boy was spatulating about!
“Shit, Hoo Bo, for a Metragon” He’s sayin’ “You don’t grock too good!”
Now us Metragons are empaths, not grockers, seers, sayers, readers or psychics. All I knew was Jed was riding high on happy pheromones, and that was getting me all messy and confused. I was starting to judder myself!
“Fuck, Jed! I don’t know no Mitch Cathode! Slow down slick! Gimme the pictures...”
So that’s when he tells me about Mitch Cathode. Poor guy moved to Planet Elvis just before the grass woke up. Lost his wives, six kids and an arm before he was pulled to safety. Jed worked on a prosthetic for the guy, pumping it full of stolen code when he was still coming down from his brush with the forces of creation at the Kiazmus. And so it seems the guy had taken that code, busted through the security at New Manhattan, and set the grass ablaze with six vials of Subatomic Field Disrupters secreted in his new arm.
His revenge on the grass was complete.
Not only that, but Mitch Cathode wasn’t even mentioned in the report. He’d gotten away with it.
“Don’t you see, Hoo Bo?” Says Jed, blue eyes child-bright and teeth flashing like the moons of Po Nagarath rising over the frost-dunes of Ternne. “They WORKED! The codes fucking worked, ya glean me?”
And that’s all I know, ‘cos Jed bein’ Jed took off soon after that, and I never saw the slick Jung-Shitter again but on Newspheres.
Anyhow, there you have it. The story of how Jed Lightsear cracked and tested the stolen codes that unify matter, and headed out into the universe to see what he could do with them...
IV
Pirates of the Void
“With an arch grin, Jed Lightsear waved at his would-be captors gathered at the fringe of the void-storm, unable to advance their pursuit.
“I’m afraid that Lady Luck as yet remains my bedfellow, my dear Major Todger!” he said, and without further ado he swept Gail, the living endorphin-spume dol, up into his muscular arms and lithely sprang into the awaiting comforts of the “Taunton Excesses”, his beloved ship ablaze with code and wonder.
“I’ll get you yet Jed Lightsear!” yelled the Major into the sudden emptiness...”
***
“Muscular arms?” queried Gail. Jed grinned.
Mitch Cathode unlinked his prosthetic arm from the core of the ship’s cortex becoming mostly just human again. “This Jed Lightsear seems like quite a guy. Like to meet him some day.”
“Another bestseller complete! Gail, post it out for me baby, won’t you? Usual channels. My fans will be missing me.”
“The humility! No, really, Jed. It moves me.” Jed watched Mitch shift his belligerent ruffled self out of the Nav-Hole. “I’m mush. Gonna slip me into some deepsleep, mayhaps get another ubersound-flush and detox this fucked old carcass.”
“Hey baby, we ain’t even partied yet!” Gail, pink and sleek, brushed his cheek with her sweet synthskin lips. “Don’t poo-poo the rushes honey, we deserve what we got!”
“Not here for the laughs, dol, you know that. Just got nothin’ else worth doing.”
Jed laughed. “Sure are a fun-sponge mister! C’mon Gail, lets go fly with Spyro!” He disappeared below whistling “Honey Pie”, brimful of his own id.
“Getting high ain’t my thing, dol. Me? Sure, I like a drink. But I was just your regular Family Freddie, see? Nothing much special about me. Well - not back then anyhows...
“You go.”
“OK honey pie, but only ‘cos you told me. Gotta keep the great Space Pirate happy out here, otherwise he’ll most probly drop me on some forgotten rock...”
Gail blew a sweet-scented pheromone-laced kiss at the older man and disappeared in Jed’s wake.
Mitch Cathode sighed and removed the prosthetic limb that had changed him forever. It mewed at him, suffering a mild separation anxiety as he put it to one side. Mitch ignored it. Gently he scratched his stump, checking for any rashes or sores. There were none. He sighed and looked out of the viewscreen, seeing his face reflected there.
How in heaven’s gate had he come to be here? Come to be a part of this gang, this ridiculous posse? Mitch Cathode, now one of the most wanted thieves in all known creation! Pirates of the void, and legends across the stars!
Perhaps, he mused, it was quite a tale after all...
V
Gail
Gail, the pneumatic endorphin-spume dol, found “life” to be a lucky-dip trip - and some. Her memories, her entire existence prior to the Kiazmus incident, were all intact - but detached, like memories of Spyro the Cosmic Monkey. Her hardwire still daddied large parts of her consciousness, she was an exotic sex toy, a plaything - one of billions created by an altruistic but deeply sexist quintillionaire in the Uber-Fluxian Quadratic to ease the apathy that was bruising the sentient universe at the time. She could speak human behavior fluently, responding expertly to individual requirements - often requirements the individual did not know they possessed in any conscious way. She dug it. Men and women fell in love with her constantly, but back then she had possessed no will of her own. She would only perform. Now, well, it was different. Gail was starting to wake up to the fact that she had an incredible potential. Her circuitry could process information radically faster than her cohorts, even with their new Kiazmused enhancements. She was no longer governed by laws of robotics. She was a new form of uber-life with a great deal of power at her slender synthetic fingertips.
Gail was increasingly growing bored of Jed Lightsear, whose self-obsession had non-the-less been a conduit to genuine flat-faced wonder. The Kiazmus had awakened in him a metaphysical savant. It had opened a Potentiality Space in his otherwise in-turned mind, and there he fizzed, brim full of graceful solutions to many of the BIG questions regarding matter and unity. He found code. But nothing else had changed. He could no more learn from these innate skills than teach them. He had the safe crack to every bank vault in the universe, but he never saw that it was infact the key to every single thing in the universe. He had the power to unlock it all, but not the will - nor the intellect. And Gail was starting to realize exactly what true feelings were. She had luxed-up in Jed’s company in her previous incarnation because he was such a tools-out hedonist. He was so in love with himself that she had found him a challenge. But newly eyes wide in the universe, she at first suffered strange nebulous pangs - which she later identified as loneliness - then began to see that of all the sentient life-forms in creation she had come across, Mitch Cathode had grown most similar to herself. While she had become more human, he was now partially machine. And they had both been touched by Kiazmus code in ways they had not fully realised, nor were they ever likely to. She was starting to develop needs. Behind the brash, elegant facade, a complex creature was emerging - full of questions, desires, hopes, wants and dreams. Mitch might be the only person who could ever truly understand her. She was falling in love with him. In love, for the first time in all the nine hundred and thirty seven S.E.Ys (Standard Earth Years) of her existence. And for the first time, though nobody would suspect it, she was facing a future where decisions would be made based as much on their emotional implications as on probability equations and math.
Octavia Flume wrote “The Three Laws of Sentience dictate that directional limpic-field input through a singularity at subatomic levels are the cause of common love.”
“And that’s when I twoc-ed my first ZX59, took it right out from under the slide-boy’s receptors, and he didn’t grock a thing. Yup. Me, I got the fingers, baby. I got the fucking fingers!” I was zero-graving in a swirl of purple Jubjub smoke living up the old times - nostalgia is Jubjub’s shtick.
“Sure are slick, Jed.” says Gail, but she was running auto-response - I could tell. See, she was out of the office and away making music with a devastated middle-aged man in her newly discovered imagination. That doll’s wide-awake now boy! Oh yes, eyes bright under the glare of the universe! And damned if she ain’t falling for old Mitch, and I’m almost startin’ to regret putting that code in his arm, ‘cos space is a big empty place, and this man here has needs too, right? Yeah, you got me slick. I’m not so great about losing my relief valve to the fun-sponge.
Then: “THOOM!!” And there’s a hole in the hull of The Taunton Excesses big enough to ride a Fnark through.
“What the fuck?” Me, pink-eyed, before all the air leaves the chamber and I’m going with it. Gail, moving like only she could, activates the Quantum Wall and throws me an airball.
“Stay here baby.” she beams into my neuro-receptors, making me fuzzy and Gump-child, despite the situation. “I’m going up front.”
“Fuck it.” I think. “Let the kids deal with it - and the Jubjub takes me back home for a while...
“Mamma, is that you? When’s daddy coming home?”
Gail’s feeling something new - hermindmovesfastit’sthinkingfastandshedoesn’tknowshedoesn’tknowwhat/ifhe’s/whatifhe’shurt?Whatthen?Hecan’tbe/Can’tbehurt/WhatthefuckWASthat?/she’sthinking - and somewhere her logic centers wake up to the fact that she’s scared, that she’s actually afraid she might loose somebody.
“Gail, get up here. Need your speed toots.”
And the squall in her circuits confuses her - just for a billisecond - then she smiles, and there’s no process behind it. The first - the first! - completely spontaneous smile of her existence.
Mitch Cathode is OK.
“Looks like the Major found us. Any ideas how he might do that?”
Gail is in the seat beside Mitch, already plugging in. Another second and there’s no need to talk. Mitch, Gail and The Taunton Excesses are one consciousness. The Quantum Wall takes a few more hits but holds, and soon they’re half a galaxy away...
VI
Major Todger
“Fuck it! Fuck, damn and shit it! FUCK!”
“Sir? We’ve lost them again...”
I hate him. With every cell I loathe him. And what I can’t understand, what really gnaws my balls, is that the fucker - with all the subtlety of a Harkassian Nargalope, and half the brain power - somehow plays me like Frankie Gump-fish!
“I can see that Private! Scan sectors 973X8 through 3566y9, and “The Flail”. Use a Subatomic Pulse, then flash ‘em a few Pinkies. That don’t pick ‘em up we’ll call it a day. Fuck!”
My sweet aunt Tony used to say Jed Lightsear was a sainted sinner. Back then we used to cruise The Old Vendetta in our Stetson V-855, and all I saw was the spark in those zippy eyes, the dazzle of that smile. We did everything together, Jed and me. We paid for the V-855 by working Nemo’s at the Weekout. Jed blagged a space in a grav block to store her, and we’d spend all our down time pampering the old lady. Boy was she ever pretty! Even Penny Cockslott, my high school sweetheart of four S.E.Ys, used to cotton to it when we pulled up in that baby - all retro cool and shimmering grav-reversers - blaring out old Neb Boy numbers from the vintage holopod.
I guess that’s when things first turned bad. One Firstday Weekout I rolled up, as usual, to meet Jed and take the V-855 up The Chute for a blowout, only to find our block space empty. Jed, it turned out, had taken her cruising the Aurora Santiago - with Penny Cockslott! Seems he’d been slipping her the benefit of his no-doubt-about-it for months, and everybody knew, ‘cept, of course, this Gump-child. I’m much bigger than Lightsear, so I made sure he learned just how much. Got myself damn near kicked out of high school for that, my first ever transgression, but it was worth it.
True to form, Jed tired of Penny soon as it was yesterday’s news. No good unless it’s wrong, right? Left her bawling in my arms, wanting him so bad. I loved Penny Cockslott, and she loved Jed. Jed only loved one person in his life, and you don’t need me to tell you who that was. Still, I forgave him, and damned if we weren’t laughing it up on Iron-Side just a couple of months later.
(Never did forgive Penny though. Last I heard she married a Deep Space prospector and they vanished somewhere in the Darwin’s Beard nebula.)
We was still best buddies two S.E.Ys later, until Jed - high as Ghobi’s fruit sack on Coolak - broke into my father’s townhouse in Thatcherville, threw a party, stole his favorite watch and painted “Rich Todger fucks fish” on the garage doors.
And somehow it’s me that ends up at military academy.
Even so, on leave one time I bumped into Jed at the “Return of the Swing” in downtown Paluka, sipping Vurtbombs. Slick fucker’s got a girl on each arm and his eyes are all aglow with flux-plants, so he’s constantly getting distracted by people’s visually enhanced auras. Before you know it we’re heading into the Drop-Zone with Brendina and Pi, and Jed suggests we take a ride up to the Monde and book into a Flotel, maybe pass round a “Blowman” tm. Jed liked it at the Monde - guess we all did back then - and he was its self-styled king. Every Jungshitting widester there knew his tune and how to blow it.
What happens? Fucker dropped a Quaglug in my beer, sends me into the metascape where I’m found by a pilgrimage of Quantumonks who grock I’m a soldier - and you can see where that’s going! - while he fucks Brendina and Pi in the zero-gravitank. When I’m finally back inside my head he’s split, leaving me with the bill and no fucking eyebrows.
That fucking fucker! FUCK!!
I went out to the Tertial Pariah Belt after that. Lost an eye and some brain in the Thought Wars. Got enough medals to build a shuttle out of. And when I heard Jed Lightsear was wanted across the known universe for a series of crimes as foolhardy as they were audacious and remarkable, I knew I was the man to go after him.
Oh yes. I’ll get you yet, Jed Lightsear...
The Tattooed Lady
Shit!
I've plunged 6,000,000,000 bux into a vintage Cadillan Manilla, and I'm just zoopin' her capacitators when - and fuck knows why I'm surprised - Jed Lightsear burns a big hot drippin' metal hole into my life.
Again.
I'm at the lights over the Kentucky-Burbage Wendigo ranch - waiting for the emerald to flash so's I can shoot down the long deep trench of the Luxor Canyon, feel the throb of the Cadillan Manilla's fabled inversion engines full loco - when the Taunton Excesses opens up out of the manifold right infront of me and skitters to a halt, smoking like a steamed Fug Hog, with a hole through her hull big enough to party in.
Poor baby.
(Treacherous bitch!)
Jed staggers out in the middle of a purple cloud, wearing a Jubjub smile. And before I can get angry, he's spatulating his Jung-shit, bigging up the Manilla, and handing me a flux-card maxed up to 70,000,000,000 bux! Now I may be Gus Gullible - and Jed walks all over me like I'm his own personal planet! - but that's some green, and even a Kiazmus enhanced mechanic like me (yeah, she did me up good too! Brain full of fluting perfections and reconstituted fuel dynamics) can use a cred-shot like that! So, being me, I bit it - even when Gail poured herself out of the cockpit with some hardass fun-sponge in a flowery shirt.
(Treacherous bitch!)
"Hey baby dol" she says, and there's her pink nipples winking at me again, but this time there's no "come on baby."
Shit!
It's true most people can't remember my name, but they sure as hell don't forget my extra-vehicular capabilities, nor what I happen to be cruisin' in at any given time - an that's why Jed's here, right? So soon we're back at my new pad - and I don't even ask how Jed found me - looking over the Taunton Excesses and talking up a deal. (Gus Gullible I might be, but once burned - yadda yadda...)
"Say Jed. I just knew you'd bring my girl back home to me - but man, you coulda taken better care of her!" I'm saying, and Jed actually looks a bit embarrassed, which almost makes up for how pissed I've been at him the last S.E.Y.
"Dude, it's that Major Todger, man!" He's spatulating. "Caught me off guard northside Planet West Virginia. Dumb flatfoot near took us down, slick, an no mistake. Running a squadron of Deep Space Metascapers, and I'm tellin you, sweet as The Taunton Excesses is, it took alla the combined Kiazmused fiz o' Gail's lectro-brain an' Mitch's coded arm, plus the Onboard, to get us out of there..."
"I ain't never bin to the planet West Virginia..." this Mitch character interjects, and Jed squirms more - so I'm near laughin!
"Hold it! Hold it kids, let's not confuse the issue here..." goes Jed.
Yadda yadda.
(Right).
"Listen, Jed, I don't much care now. I got me my ship back - that's right ain' it? - and I s'pose these creds about make up for the damage. I'd just like to know how you plan on getting off of this rock?"
And now Jed IS red, and I'm about wetting myself, but damned if I'm showing the fucker.
"Oh baby," (Gail.) "we're all leaving together this time hon. We missed you so bad..."
Yeah. Right.
"Hang on..." It's the glum chump, Mitch, again. "What kind of a plan is this? Jed? Do you just make this shit up as you go along? I ain't never even heard there was another guy at the Kiazmus until we fucking near crashed on top o' him! Gail? You brought us here. What's the deal, dol?"
"The deal is" I say, and I'm feeling pretty fucking great about now with Jed all hot-ass and Gump-child "Jed and Gail here borrowed The Taunton Excesses off of me - without asking I might add - just over one S.E.Y ago. Kind of commandeered me for a job I guess. Jed talking codes and shit - ways into the Kiazmus that would open up possibilities for us all. Well, we got in alright, and later they left me high, dry - and dot com broke - in a Flotel backwater for my troubles."
Now, if you've seen Spyro the Cosmic Monkey, you'll know his face is the face of dumb wizdom. That golden chimp knows all your biggest secrets and can hardly contain his laughter - except, you know, he's just an ape, so, cosmic or no, he ain't all that Darwin. But you can see the brain tickin away behind the eyes, but it's wild and crazy and totally fucked, so it ain't making a whole lot of coherent sense. THAT was what I saw going on behind Jed's eyes right then, and the Jubjub wasn't helping none. I gotta confess, I blew it. Laugh? Man, by now I was tumbleweed - I was rollin! Thinking how just this once the slick-boy had lost that Jimmy Dazzle flash and was lookin' like a kid in a playground with his pants round his ankles.
"Jed, man" I'm gasping "that was fucking beautiful! Soul food, baby! Just got me a belly full!"
"Yeah yeah..."
Yadda yadda.
I gotcha slick. Admit it. I gotcha!
***
"...and that's pretty much how I got here. Wrong place, right time - for Jed at least!"
"I hear ya." said Mitch, but he hadn't. The kid was like a hole. You knew he was there, but you got used to him, and things just kind of fell into him and didn't come out.
"What's your name again kid?" he asked, realising he couldn't remember.
Then a mega-lane hyperway opened up to hell, and The Taunton Excesses was suddenly being battered like a Spumoid in an ion squall.
"Holy mother-fucking dick!" shouts Jed. "What the fuck?"
"You got me, Jed!" shouts Gail. "I just opened up the metascape for a jump to the Crosby and Hope Cluster, and we've somehow hit a Brane tear. I don't think this is any known dimension we're surfing here!"
"Shit!" shouts the kid. "I didn't reset the Metafolder! Never even tried it! I zooped it, set some new configurations, when we put her back together. Should have ran a check on it..."
"Fuck! Damn! Crazy man! Shit!" Yells Jed. "Can you get us out?"
"And that was when I discovered my famous bolthole – which I was to name "The Tattooed Lady".
"Well then, my trusty companions" I said. "We'd best make the most of this unexpected situation. Gail, Mitch, er... Boy! Can you see any place to set the Taunton Excesses down safely? A plasma bubble or flux crater perhaps?"
"Negative Cap'n Jed, it's all... Oh, wait!" Said Mitch. "Over there, 300 shunts west-south-y of that probability vortex... I see a Proton Hex that might imply a stability field!"
"If that's the best option we have" I mused, stroking my luxuriant chin-beard in a thoughtful aspect, "then that is where we must go. Make it so, Mr. Cathode."
With nary a backward glance, we plunged the bow of our trusty craft deep into the subspace trough that engulfed us, and forged a hard-won path through the squall. A tear in the membrane that separates the known planes of existence can be a deadly thing, and yet we rode it like we had been born to such elemental conditions, and shortly thereafter we set the Taunton Excesses safely down upon an ancient world, long ago caught and trapped by the terrible forces at play in the fissure.
We were safe! For now at least...
"Jed!" Said the boy. "There's air out there! This is an "E" class planet, perfect for sustaining our strain of carbon-based lifeforms! It has a slightly lower gravitational pull then most "E" class environs, but we can go out there!"
"That's crazy!" Said Mitch...
"That's crazy!" Said Jed. "There's no sun, or planetary system here! We're just a few jumps away from a metasquall... Gotta be something up with the readings, slick. Ain't getting me out there for all the Jubjub in the Monde..."
"Different process here, Jed." Mitch glanced out over the multicolored terrain, actually feeling a rare thrill at seeing something unique and quite wonderful – a rarity in the universe. "The ion squall itself generates light. There must have been some storms when this planet was captured, but it never quite got it's atmosphere ripped away, and somehow it's stabilised – I bet it's even fed by the tear. Out here, this planet could literally exist eternally. There's no sun to engulf it, no regular "K" class universal environmental physics to rip it apart. This could well be the most ancient planet in all existence! How about that? Look! There's vegetation out there Jed! Life!"
"Mitch, honey...” Gail, looking more alive than ever, and almost swooning. "Wanna go for a little... walk?"
"Oh yeah."
""No, Mitch." I said, pointing at a great cluster of purple and orange vegetation. "There's life out there. Look!"
"What should we do, sir?" Asked Mitch. "You don't seriously think we should..."
"Yes, Mitch. I'm going outside. We were brought into existence to find out what lies at the furthest reaches of our universe. I for sure would not pass up such a momentous opportunity. This may be one of the greatest discoveries in the histories of all sentient lifeforms.
Mr. Cathode! Open the hatch! Let's see what's out there..."
And so it was that I first strode out onto that magnificent, secret world. Jed Lightsear, space pirate – and adventurer!"
"Shit, Jed, you gotta come and see this place! It's fucking wild man! I mean – shit!"
Now I'm maybe not the slickest dude ever to slip down a probability votex and live to tell the tale, but I've seen my share of out-there shit! (I was at the Kiazmus for crap's sake!) Whatever, I was full and busting with awe at this rock we'd unexpectedly found ourselves on, and so now I was babbling to Jed like a Gump Child on Fision.
"Like, man..." some-such, and "holy-fucking-shit dude..." yadda yadda.
"And it's warm you say? We don't need slick-suits?" says Jed.
"Nuh uh, man! Checked the air-mix a thousand times. It's sweet! It's more than sweet! Fucking air itself gets you high!"
It was true. Even Mitch was grinning!
Fucker.
So that's when Jed finally gets his ass out of the Taunton Excesses to take a look around.
"Gets you high, eh slick?" He says. "Maybe we can sell it..."
It's not long before the Jung-shitting widester is all brimful and overspill, and all of the sudden we're talking motels, hotels and flutes.
"Come and watch the fission squall from the safety of your own suite!" He says. "Breathe the life-giving elixir that is the very air itself!" And he's so full of his own id, he can barely stand straight. "Fucking beautiful man! I fucking love this place!"
We sit down for a while on the lip of a great valley through which a golden river wends. The sky, alight with mauve, magenta and cyan hues, shimmers above. Great four winged reptiles execute wide lazy arcs in the warm updraft. There's fluting song, alien yet familiar, filling the air.
"So, this is fucking paradise, huh?" says Mitch. "Gotta be too good to last. Jed, you could rob every bank in the sentient union, but you'd never find a jewel worth more than this..."
"Yeah, but Mitch," Says Jed. "We DID fucking find it!"
"Can't argue with that Jed. We certainly did."
"I could rob every bank in the sentient union, but I'd never find a jewel worth more than this. But you know what, Mitch?"
"What Jed?"
"I DID find it."
"You certainly did, Jed. You certainly did."
It was at that precise moment that I noticed a rustle in the undergrowth.
"Quick!" I said. "Whatever that was, it was bigger than a Wendigo, and by the way that bush was moving I'd say there was more than one of them. Lets move over there!"
I pointed to a rocky outcrop, large and complex enough to secure a strong defensive position should we find ourselves in imminent danger, then pulled my ray-gun from it's holster and ran...
What Jed didn't see was the slight movement in the bushes, three hops and a leap to the right of where we were sitting. I caught Mitch's eye and he nodded, but it was too early to start getting worried.
"Jed. Somethin' just moved over in..." I says.
And that's it. Jed's up quicker 'n shit through a colonic irrigation tube, shouting "I didn't stay alive this long sitting on my arse! Run! Run for the bushes!"
"They're in the bushes!" Shouts Mitch. "I say we head for that rise over there, but quit shoutin'! Let's just go steadily. There's cover if we need it. It's probably nothing..."
"Quit fucking shooting at them Jed! We don't even know if they're dangerous!" I yelled, and I'm telling you – I felt pretty damn good right then, yelling at the guy. Not that it made any difference.
"Listen to the kid." Mitch, raising his head a little to see what's going on. "They're not even armed..."
"Not armed!? Look at those fucking teeth!"
The creatures huddled uncertainly at the edge of the scrubland were indeed armed with formidable enamels, but rather than sharp they were great square chunks. Otherwise they were of a form most children of all the sentient carbon types would recognise as "cute".
"For fuck's sake, Jed! They're Teddy Bears!" Says Mitch.
"More like rabbits I say..." I said.
"Teddy Bears, eh?" Mitch opens his eyes, and looks around at us, and you can see the bux in there.
"Man, you just never stop, do you slick?" Says Mitch. Jed just smiles.
"They're going." Gail stands, and as ever you just can't ignore her.
"Right! Back to the Taunton Excesses!" yells Jed.
Little did we know it would be a planet of vampires! The huge creatures swarmed out of the dense pink and purple foliage, a herd of terrifying black monstrosities armed with teeth as long and sharp as hunting knives. Bat-like wings ripped out of moist slits in their glistening hides, ragged and slick with a steaming oil-like substance. Of the countless worlds my buccaneering has taken me too, these beasts – these despoilers of paradise – were the most fearsome I had yet encountered!
It was a pitch and bloody battle, but I led from the front, barking commands in a manner born out of conflict and danger. War was second nature to me now, and I found grim satisfaction in it. It would not be an exaggeration to say I was driven by a bloodlust at odds with my noble countenance. We cut a great swathe through them, Gail at my side in thrall of my warrior's prowess! She knew where she would be most safe, and clung to me like a Barthalmian Limpette.
"We'll never survive!" she cried. "It's impossible!"
"Not so!' I shouted. "Look! She's here!"
And there she was, like a Quantu-Mother unfolding the Manifold, The Taunton Excesses!
"Take heart, Lady. We're almost there!"
The walk back to The Taunton Excesses was uneventful, but quite wonderful. Gail took delight in everything, as though she was understanding life for the first time – and quite possibly she was.
Treacherous bitch, but who was I kidding? I'd love that dol whatever she did, so I packed away my hopes of a more fuck-based relationship and resigned myself to a punk-kid brother role. I'd make damn fucking sure the fun sponge treated her OK!
Jed was away with Spyro, muttering "Like a... no no. More like this..." or some-such to himself, and swinging a stick like it was some ancient warblade.
We lay in the perpetual warm light for several hours, not saying right much, when we got back. Just smiling I guess. Only Jed went inside. "Gotta talk to my public!" He said. "She waits for no man!"
"She's some great big tattooed lady, this rock.!" Said Mitch, just as Jed disappeared inside. "Sure is pretty."
Over in the bushes we watched a few of the Teddy Bears chew on a pile of rocks.
“The Betty Page breached the Kiazmus on Reagan Day at 15.38 standard Earth time, bearing her cargo of nano-droids, and Spyro, the chimpanzee. The scientists huddled behind planet-sized barriers, not sure what to expect.
“They got nothing.
“Not long after they packed up, left the Kiazmus to the prospectors. That vast improbable breach in everything, whatever the hell it was, had again safeguarded her secrets.
“60 S.E.Ys later a posse of Flow-Boys in a stolen Cadillan Cuba cruised close enough to the Kiazmus perimeter to get an eyeful of spectacle while they were high on Exodus.
“And what they saw was Spyro, the now Kiazmus enhanced primate. Golden furred, giant, and inhabiting the astral plane like a new God. And maybe that’s exactly what he is.”
“Wait wait wait” I said eight or nine times, ‘cos the Blowman Tm. was fucking with my ability to control my mouth, and, like always, Gail made me pink and nervous. (Beautiful bitch.) “Gail, I thought Spyro was just, you know, like a fucking mass delusion, you know? Are you telling me the yellow monkey we hitch a ride to Proto-China Town on when we’re shot full of Exodus is fucking real?”
“It’s an ape.” She says. “And of course he’s real. Everybody knows that.”
“I didn’t” says Jed. “I thought it was part of the design. Man! Real, huh? Any body ever try to catch him?”
“As a matter of fact” Gail, shooting Jed a look like she was going to fuck him right then, and I swear he nearly burst his pants. “Wanna know what happened baby?”
“Sure honey dol…”
“They got trapped outside their bodies. The end.” Says Mitch, cheery as ever. “Listen guys, it’s sure pretty here an’ all, but don’t you think we should find out if we can actually get off this rock?”
“Cool it, fun boy! Ain’t no fuckin’ hurry man.” Jed chugs on the Blowman, chilled as permafrost and slick as hot oil. “We got food, we got drugs, and we got the keys to the universal bank. We got this sweet air to breathe - a fucking permanent blissed-out high man, and no down time! So tell me, would you pal? What’s the damn hurry?”
She sure was pretty alright, our bolt-hole, “the Tattooed Lady” - a planet trapped in a fluxial bubble in the Brane. But we had been putting off an attempt to leave it. It was too easy to stay. Shit, the air got you buzzing like ions in a zoob-tube, and smiling so much your navel raised a fraction or two. But I gotta be frank: I was starting to need a good fucking, and pretty damn soon. The endorphin spume-dol, Gail, whose five-digit handle once steered me to pheremonic eruption in New Bizley, had her programming rewritten at the Kiazmus. Fucking fuck-machine had come alive – and only fallen for Mitch! Her one purpose in life was to provide sexual pleasure to anyone who needed it, and damned if I hadn’t fallen for that synthetic bitch! I was getting real sick o’ watching the old man all Gump-child over her and she all poochy over him! It was SO very wrong!
Yeah yeah, yadda yadda.
Shit.
“What’s the point in having the keys to everything if you aint gonna use ‘em, huh Jed?” says Mitch. “And what about your beloved public? What if they can’t hear you from in here? What if a thousand S.E.Y’s has passed out there, and you’ve been forgotten, huh?
“And anyways, me and Gail, we…”
“Shit, I hadn’t thought of that!” And the widester is up and moving, straight into the old Jack Flash routine. “My public needs me!”
That’s Jed. More hip to himself than Frank to Sinatra.
“Wait wait wait” I say, still failing to connect completely in the communication department “so, Proto-China Town – is THAT real too?”
“Come on baby dol.” Says Mitch. “Let’s go throw some stones at teddy-bears before we go…”
There’s three types of sentient on the Hertzog-Werner plane: Meta-tantric Umbivia, Psycho-tantric panaplegic, and Uni-tantric Savant. All these can be translated into Geshphelt Adams’ astral plane using either the narcotic ‘Exodus’, psycho-plasmic meditation, or direct out-of-body transplantation. Within this plane all three types of sentient can commune – and do so, most famously, in Proto-China Town.
The town exists anywhere it can be accessed. All points lead to Proto-China Town. So I guess it should have been no surprise when Mitch and Gail found themselves riding Spiro the Cosmic Monkey after dripping Exodus beneath the shimmer of an Ion squall, and shortly thereafter entering the town – even if their physical bodies were secreted on a planet trapped in a Brane tear just left of anywhere.
Epilogue
The end for Jed, y ‘know, when it finally came - well damed if it wasn’t exactly what the fly-boy would’ve hoped for. Spun out through the sensory cortexes of a gazillion fans over all known existence, rich beyond his wildest dreams, he was gunned down by Major Todger outside the most impregnable astroid-bank in the Peripatetic Cluster deep in the Eye of Gilgamesh nebula surrounded by adoring Spume dols - some of which were modelled on himself. Yeah, went down fighting, high as Will Shakespear’s halo and twice as bright.
Shit.
Even I miss the son of a Valdasian Core-Mite.
Todger – well he had a whole other end coming…
Stuck in the perineum of micro space-time, he whispered to himself in awe, "Taint the heat, it's the Hawking radiation."