She was strapped into the pilot’s chair, half in, half out of her spacesuit, utterly bored. Her space helmet floated somewhere above, accessorized with stickers she had saved for her machine gun. At first she had tip-toed around the controls, not wanting to upset the delicate balance of any life-support system, but after the fourth week so was so bored she had ceased to care. Perhaps a life-threatening emergency was all she needed to get her mind off the brain-numbing lifelessness of the haunted castle. She was chewing bubblegum, sealing off the pink balloons with her tongue and then spitting them all around the control booth, where they would stick on things. She stabbed randomly at buttons while she did this. Various mundane things occurred with each button combination: monitors changed views, external lights activated, shutters opened and closed etcetera. At one point, she spied a pulsing red button, which seemed vaguely dangerous and pushed it on impulse. A blinding crimson laser beam fired from directly below the control booth, all the way down to the surface of the planet. She jumped in delight and began pressing it repeatedly, discovering a nearby toggle which allowed her to wave it around like a wand, making crazy patterns, as one does with a flashlight at night. She wasn’t watching the surface of the planet with her binoculars, but if she had been, she would have seen the beam cleaving through whatever it touched. At one point, the red line sliced randomly through the clouds above one of the dingy cities, slicing off sections of old decaying buildings and concrete bridges, which crashed to the symbiote infested areas below. Halved cars tumbled while the green creatures observed. The beam did not harm them for some reason. Instead, they seemed to absorb its intense heat drawing strength from it.
She had an idea whilst playing with the high powered laser and scampered down to the retro fridges in the lounge beneath. She was grinning in insane excitement as she pulled out armfuls of paint-filled milk bottles, which she then ferried to the trash ejector. She loaded as many of the rainbow bottles into the trash receptacle as would fit and sealed the hatch. A handle had been placed alongside the containment unit and she jerked it down, watching the coloured bottles flush out into space. As soon as she could see them tumbling outside the glass of the lounge, she bounced back up and buckled herself back in. The bottles had just begun to tumble past the control booth and she chuckled at the sight of the spilling out into space. She rubbed her hands together with glee and began togging the laser at them. The bottles began detonating just as she imagined. Amoeboid forms of vacuum pure color flashed and froze, spreading and extending into one another in delicate sprays of frozen particles, lit brightly against the luminous blackness of outer space. Taty began dancing around with glee screaming ‘Pollock! Pollock!’, utterly overjoyed with her invention of a new form of painting. To celebrate she used a tube of liquid eyeliner to quickly scribble a swirly mustache beneath her nose. She then pulled on a beret and scarf and set about using up almost half of the supply of paint bottles, creating her fauvist jellyfish bonanzas and watching them morph slowly away into the void of orbit, their colours too frozen to mix. She would rig up the external security cameras to track them and take hundreds of holographic snapshots, which she had no idea how to view. All the same, it was the highlight of her week.
She was in the spherical bathroom, switching the floodlights on and off for no reason. She had also been eyeing the red button for some time. She bit her lip. She chewed her finger. Eventually she just pressed it. Somewhere along the scarred underside of the vast megalith, an area of flagstones jettisoned, leaving a space about the width of two cars. A metal surface extended into the sharp light and began to extend down toward the surface of the planet at the end of a collapsible metal tube. It bore an unmistakable resemblance to a vacuum cleaner of some kind and was in fact something of the sort. The segmented tube unreeled, down through the great planes of the upper atmosphere, dropping into the clouds. It trailed through dense formations of vapour and emerged, shining above the ocean. It fell like a comet, crashing magnificently into the waves. Large machine parts activated along its head and the device began to suck up great quantities of water, trawling its load up, beyond the clouds into space. Once beyond the upper atmosphere, the pleats in the tube began glowing red as they superheated the interior. This kept the water from freezing before it reached its destination. It also sterilized it to some degree. If Taty had been up in the control booth she would have been amazed to see the glowing red coils of the pipe, snaking down into the churn of clouds below. The pipe led to a large empty vault in the basement regions. The root of the suction device was located in a large construction site set into the stone floor. This site resembled a large electric generator in some ways, lit by floodlights and surrounded by a halo of floating barbed wire fences. DANGER signs wafted placidly about like tropical fish, in and amongst the loose rubble of the site and one or two stray statues. A klaxon activated, rendered soundless in the vacuum while warning lights began to strobe. Shortly, a vast fountain of heated seawater began to gush into the vault, freezing instantly as it left the pump. Parboiled sharks exploded like balloons in the drift of glacial matter as the boulders of fresh sea ice began to collect, slowly filling up the chamber like an explosion of gigantic polystyrene. Taty meanwhile was turning her head this way and that, looking around the shower sphere, waiting for something dramatic to happen. She hummed to herself. She tapped her foot against the wall. After awhile, she deactivated the red button in disappointment. Down in the ocean, the device abruptly shut down with a clank, retracting quickly up into the sky. By the time she reached the control booth, it was as though nothing had even happened.
A stray combination of buttons and levers accidently opened a secret panel in the control booth. Taty watched with shiny eyes as a glowing pedestal emerged, crowned with a pulsing Smiley Face button. Meanwhile some distance away, the astronaut was completing his one hundred and sixty eighth orbit of the globe. Paradise Discothèque was still only a tiny golden speck and he was ready to put his plan into action. He had to wait until this particular circuit because his orbit was growing steadily more elliptical. Each pass brought him nearer to the stone leviathan, but unless he acted within the next three orbits he would begin to pass beneath the temple, and then drift further and further out. His radio had been broken in the tussle and he was unable to ask for Taty for assistance or reach the computers of his control booth. He was also running out of water, nutri-feed and concentrated oxygen tablets. His suit was able to release vast amounts of oxygen from tiny tablets and he would have been able to survive for another two months had he stocked his suit fully. But, alas, the Boy Scout motto had again not been applied. Now he had to act swiftly if he was to survive his predicament. The plan came about whilst he was cataloguing supplies on his sixty-fourth orbit. He had no fuel, but he did have three vacuum resistant cans of cola. Theoretically, if he were able to open them at precisely the correct vectors, he would be able to use their fizzy outpouring to launch himself back to Paradise Discothèque and thus avoid a tedious death in space. All that was required was a little push to get him on course and this would do the trick if he shook the cans enough. To this effect, he had calculated and recalculated distances and geometries, throwing a wire-frame alignment of his own hands onto the digital display so that he would know exactly where to position the can in relation to the giant stone structure. He also had a countdown clock running, which was ticking down fifteen minutes to cola-launch. Luckily, he had three cans and therefore three chances. Even if he was way off with his first two, they would still make things easier for him on his third try - Unless, of course, he was drastically unlucky and managed to throw himself on an even more disastrous orbit. He was readying himself for this first attempt when he began to notice large nuclear eruptions occurring in and around the vast dark sprawl that was the Outzone. The mushroom clouds swelled beautifully through the cloud layer, blowing circular whirlpools through the vanilla milkshake clouds, annihilating everything around them.
“I wonder how she found that secret button…” he chuckled in amusement.
A flicker of color caught his eye and he turned his head to see a rapidly approaching fauvist painting, spread out in the void like some psychedelic jellyfish.
“Art!” he cried. “What the hell?”
He threw up his arms to protect his visor as he smacked through the warps of colour. The curtains of frozen particles succeeded in instantly spray-painting his dirty white suit. He passed through several successive paintings and emerged, lashed with bright, hazy rainbows and utterly bewildered.
Taty watched in horror as the detonations spread below. She snatched her hand from the button and tried to push the secret button panel back into its niche.
“Oh shit!”
She fumbled for the binoculars and saw buildings and sprawling quadrants of jungle erased by expanding rings of atomic fire. The walkie-talkie crackled and Number Nun’s voice came through.
“I’m registering large scale nuclear impacts on the other side of the globe. Can you see what’s happening?”
“Er! Uh, it’s nothing, I think… Oh shit!”
“Childbride, what have you done?”
“Nothing! Fuck! I have to go!”
She turned off the walkie-talkie and held her head in shock, watching the blast waves spread while Devoid bounced around her in playful obliviousness.
The rainbow sprayed astronaut positioned himself according to his onscreen co-ordinates, aiming his can of salvation cola, looking very much like a prog rock album cover in motion. He waited until the various digital contours aligned themselves before cracking the soft drink. An ejaculation of frozen soda plumed out in a jet of amber crystal, propelling him off on a tangential course, toward the great golden beehive. He had to hold onto the can with magnetic finger pads to avoid it rocketing away, but when the can had spent itself, he released it. It travelled beside him like a pilot fish, carried along at the same velocity. He watched as the great stone walls of the lower courtyards approached, growing immense as they towered before him, dwarfing him with their great height. The spiral terraces loomed above him, their perspective realigning as he felt himself shrinking against the mass of ancient stone. It was so strange, he thought, how so much time in orbit had distorted his sense of scale. He had begun to feel at times that he was gigantic, a titan caught between the glowing plane of the planet and the lightless void of space. Now the shocking immensity of the temple reminded him again of the true state of things. Dark, frozen windows grew larger, like spiracles along the patterned flanks of some monstrous sea creature. Junk floated past at intervals. An entire dining table passed him by as he entered the proximity of the slowly turning building. He shot over the angular walls of the lower courtyard areas and passages, narrowly missing a watchtower and ricocheting off a terrace pillar. The impact was heavy and he rebounded into a wide, colonnade. He entered the edged shadows of the structure, spinning into a far wall and finally coming to rest in a wide statuary niche. He quickly scanned for damage and was relieved to find that he had made it in one piece. He then pulled himself out of the shallow depression and into a nearby archway, activating a line of lights along his helmet. He passed through the shock-void of the passages and rooms, floating up staircases and down long, swooping galleries until he finally reached the first set of airlocks. He entered the sealed corridor and released the PURGE control. The doors sealed while massive fans began to blast oxygen into the passage. Thermal plating kicked in and all the ice began to melt, releasing twists of liquid into the air. The passage depressurized within minutes. He was finally able to reach up and blow the locks around his throat, removing his Smiley Face helmet for the first time in ages.
A tear arched horizontally off Taty’s eye, like the delicate eyestalk of a snail. It reached out into the air, questing off her saturated eyelashes where it swelled and separated into floating globules. She had curled up in a corner of the walk-in closet’s floor, weeping beneath a screwed down bench. Through the blurry bubbles of her tears, she saw the closet open. A pair of spray painted spacesuit legs floated into her field of vision and came slowly into focus. The figure knelt down and gathered her in his arms. She burrowed into the defaced suit, rubbing at her eyes while she sobbed. The shifting, face of Dr Dali gazed down upon her, rearranging constantly like some multi-dimensional painting.
“That’s some rash you got there,” she sniffed, staring at the absurd shifting of his head.
“Inside I’m smiling.”
She broke into a fresh bout of tears, which lifted from her face like the tangled tendrils of a bluebottle.
“I blew up the world!” she exclaimed hoarsely.
“It’s alright, I was planning to do that anyway.”
“But…but why? All those people…”
He sighed, from a mouth that travelled slowly into an inverting cheekbone, only to emerge inside out, from the warping tunnel of an ear.
“It’s the rancid stink of reality, mon cherie. It deviates in, contaminating every secret dream like rotting food in the next room. I grew tired of the twists, all the tiny pockets of dirt, which made up a staggering portrait of filth. I wasn’t vain enough to save the world. I only wanted to make things clean and uncomplicated for a moment. Just a wipe of the window, so that we could see some light again.”
“But everyone’s dead! No one will see the light…”
“You will one day.”
“You’re mad!”
“Oh, we’re all mad here,” he smiled, his teeth flipping and unzipping to reveal a pair of amused eyes, moving slowly up the hairline tunnel of a throat.
She grew still, sniffing occasionally up at him.
“I suppose,” she admitted. “At least those Symbs are nukefood.”
“Au contraire, thy shall be the only things to survive – in a way at least. I designed them that way.”
“What! What do you mean you designed them?”
“You didn’t think they were really from another dimension, did you. I mean the sexual compatibility with humanoids, the carrots…”
“The carrots were your idea?”
“My idea of a joke, yes. I originally thought of genetically encoding them to react to something more arcane and thematically suitable…like a rare, crushed beetle perhaps. But at the end of the day, carrots were far more amusing.”
“But, why? Why!”
“The Symbs are able to absorb vast amounts of heat and transmute this into physical matter, in other words, extreme heat adds to their mass. Once they had enough time to root, I planned to feed them on thermonuclear fodder. Now they will start growing in long lines that will reach into the sky and curve back down in vast arcs, intersecting and meshing with one another to create an emerald city from the ashes. They will decontaminate the soil and air by feeding off the radiation and nature will reclaim itself within a few decades. They are my seeds of Eden.”
“And the Protoverse? A friend of mine found the door…”
“Ah, yes, their navels, the umbilical portal, yes. The Protoverse is where I grew, incubated and cultured my little building blocks of the new world. It is a fluid universe, an amniotic realm capable of supporting any number of experiments which require large scale womb-ing.”
“My friend wants to live there.”
“Mommy’s boy.”
“Don’t make fun of my friends.”
“Sorry, but I’ve always considered that a compliment.”
“You really are fucking mad, aren’t you?”
“As much as I would like to continue this discussion now, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that I haven’t bathed for a month. Be a dear and wait for me upstairs.”
It didn’t take the Doctor long to get things ship-shape. Taty would hover, cuddling her pet god, watching the ex-spaceman flit about adjusting dials and moving things around with a blank expression on her face. It was weird for her to see him without a spacesuit. He was so much smaller and more intense. He would wear white suits beneath an extravagant silk dressing gown and pointed Turkish slippers. His ties were often holographic and he always had on spotless white magician’s gloves. His head was a riot. She wanted to get stoned and just look at his head. He showed her a food store she had not discovered and she started eating candy bars like there was no tomorrow.
“If you keep eating candy bars like that we’ll run out before we reach the moon,” he told her.
“If I keep eating candy bars like this, I’ll probably need to diet by then anyway,” she munched, her mouth full of nuts and chocolate.
After a day or two, things calmed down. He said he needed to recoup his strength before they ‘set sail’ and set about drinking a lot of tea.
Dr Dali was floating upside down in a lotus position, his silk gown all a-swirl, holding a china cup and saucer in his white gloves. An amoeboid tea-form jellied out of the cup and he nibbled delicately at it whenever his mouth slid into view. She was at the window, watching the world in denim shorts and cuddling her little god. A dark cloud of ash now obscured most of the equator, creating a nuclear winter, which was gradually disseminating outward, spreading toward the poles.
“You sure know how to make a mess,” she muttered darkly.
He glanced up absently.
“It took me years to construct and plant all those bombs, moving from city to city in one disguise or another. I often went to the dingiest quarters, vacant districts filled with old shops and tenements, places I knew nobody would suspect. I even composed folk songs on an old guitar.”
She floated grimly, observing the movement of many dark clouds while he continued with his tea.
“How did you meet Alphonse?” she asked out of the blue.
Doctor Dali chewed on a cube of sugar, enjoying the sensation as it crunched through his forehead.
“He was one of the first things I snagged in my inter-dimensional Venus Flytrap,” he replied. “I’m not sure where exactly that imp came from, some strange hole no doubt. I offered to send him back but he said that this reality was too much fun. Now, look at him; butter on the toast of a toasted world.”
“He’s right outside,” Taty confessed quietly.
The Doctor raised an eyebrow – a somewhat ridiculous thing to behold.
“What? Do you mean to say Alphonse Guava is outside? Where?”
“He’s holding hands with the other ghosts,” she said. “Devoid coughed him up like a hairball.”
“Gosh, I wonder who hated him enough to throw him to the gods? I suppose a creature like that accumulates many enemies.”
She frowned miserably and chewed her lip, kicking the glass in inner turmoil.
“Are they really ghosts?” she asked.
“In a way, yes, in a way, no. Devoid over there is not a physical being like you or I. It is a god. Its mass is comprised of a special ectoplasm, which for some reason is corporeal on this plane, as well as others.”
“Huh?”
“It is, for example, just as physical in dreams.”
“Say what!”
“The god is also able to compress and expand its substance at will, so when it ‘eats’ a sno-globe, it is really just storing that person’s consciousness, or soul, in a part of its body. Now when you did what you did to the god, which was very impressive by the way…”
“Gee thanks Doc,”
“Don’t mention it, but when that happened, it shed each sno-globe along with a part of its own substance, which then expanded to mimic the devoured person’s original form.”
“You’re confusing me!”
“Those ghosts out there are physical ectoplasm and maintain all of the characteristics and memories of their old selves, except that their original bodies are dead and these new bodies are really just borrowed fragments of Devoid here - bodies, which are subject to the will of the god - hence the ‘holding hands highway’. Maybe when Devoid has no more need of them it will release them and then they will really be dead. Who knows?”
Taty lifted up the little creature and shook it lovingly, rubbing her nose against its featureless face. It responded by clawing sleepily at her and snuggling under her chin.
“My little super pet,” she cootchi-cooed.
He smiled wryly.
“You were a messiah to the people who built this place you know,” he said. “You fulfilled their racial destiny and released their god from bondage.”
“I should get a reward or something, hay?”
He shook his head and chuckled.
“Devie keeps trying to get out into space,” she mentioned, spinning impulsively into a backflip. “He’s always scratching at the locks.”
“It wants to get onto its highway and begin its fantastic journey to the dark side of the moon. All part of the plan, my dear.”
“Kay.”
“We sail as soon as I’ve got things up to scratch.”
“Hay Doc, listen, my friend Number Nun is down there by the icebergs. Please can you bring her up here? I’ll bust up as many fridges as you want in my swimming costume if you do.”
He blushed heavily and coughed into his glove, suddenly embarrassed.
“I, er, I’m sorry about that, its just that I…damn,” he mumbled.
“Please!” she whined, stamping her foot on the ceiling.
“She’s the one on the walkie-talkie?”
“Yup.”
“I’m not very fond of robot nuns, you know. I’ve had very bad experiences with robot nuns.”
“Pleeeease! She’s my only friend apart from Devie here!”
“Well, I suppose I can always deactivate her if she gets on my nerves. Alright, give me the walkie-talkie and I’ll see what I can do.”
Taty dropped the god and sailed over to the Doctor, throwing her arms around his neck. The impact threw both of them into a mad spin and he flinched to avoid the milky comet of tea.
“Ah! You’re so fucking fab Doc!”
He frowned, disentangling and brushing a spot of liquid from the lapel of his silk dressing gown.
“Now now,” he chided. “I only have three of these fellows left, you know.”
