Girls in Gear, Chapter One

Third cycle initiated

Monitoring...

Metaphysical imbalance detected. Compensating...

Mini-Flash Splitsville didn’t dig the resemblance between Rio Grande and Daddy-O, so to her the absence of the former’s hat wasn’t anything to get in and wail about. Nutrient-bath green was vivid but did the big drop points-wise when it came to his hair, dark jungle swirls which gently rolled and lifted round a face whose viridian dots were spaced wide. We were talking Lichtenstein city, but he was peaceful as well as pale, sleeping as he’d done after the first time. Something else Splitsville could never feature about those lineaments was their Johnny Angel meets Dreamy Eyes scene. A one-way ticket from the Tablet to where her square sisters Petunia and Sonica did their swinging thing. Strictly forty-five RPM.

Infusion successful

Psionico-corporeal solution optimized

Monitoring...

“Child, you will not accelerate the integration process with your gormless pining,” said Scientooth. Long and sterile the laboratory stretched, parallel pipelines from floor to ceiling feeding of one accord the tank. “I am sure your services here are valued. These vigils however are counterproductive.”

“Don’t blow a gasket, cueball,” Mini-Flash Splitsville replied. “I’m hip to when I clock out. Your narrator’s holding down this day-job only until Harry Carey Junior here can drag again.”

Scientooth, a metal skull, hung some distance above Splitsville’s eye-line.

“The forces which converge in this chamber may not be so easily clocked out from, as you put it,” he informed his young employee gravely. “Perhaps that is something you shall find.”

Mini-Flash Splitsville left the Stronghold and drove her ebony space-rod to the bustling heart of Nottingham.

“Hi, Splitsville!” Sonica trilled. All but universally pink, the bobbing softballs of her hair might have been cut from the same construction-paper as her tiny tea-dress and pom-pom shoes. It wasn’t just that opposites made like a magnet though, as Mini-Flash Splitsville had observed to herself just earlier that day. Something else she and Sweet-Cheeks had in common lent tonight the diary-date significance it had borne ever since the latter’s clean bill of health.

“Guess hospital food treated you alright,” Splitsville greeted her, hitting the brakes.

“I know, and from all the chocolates you’d have thought I’d have simply swelled,” sang back Sonica with justifiable pride. Parked by the kerb was her contoured speaker-car, likewise pink, but for the textured grey panels whence would emit those auditory harmonics for which its driver was named. That one clapped a manicured hand on the rim of one door and kicked behind the wheel, flicking Mini-Flash Splitsville a silky reminder it was indeed the Friday they’d waited for.

“Hope you packed some Saturdays too,” said Splitsville, putting her ride in gear. “They’ll be your real-gone style by the time you catch up.”

“Sundays,” Sonica corrected her. “For when you catch up.”

Raucously the girls tore off along the roadway, side-by side, fluttering the skirts of fitful boy Mini-Flashes they passed, on purpose.

The sun was red and low in a sky too heavy to be called white, as one black space-racer and one shocking-pink slewed amid a gaunt jagged landscape of brown-grey. Engine-putters and yellowy residual dust drifted to where the disembarking motorists planted their feet. They did not seem to have travelled too far from Nottingham, yet that city’s skyscrapers had somehow been lost to sight. All that could be made out in the gathering dusk was fen.

Mini-Flash Splitsville explained that her top-end had landed on this far-out strip one night while Sonica was still resting up. Starting from Major Andre’s Tree here, which was Earth-jazz but meant the distinctive gnarled and twisted starting-post to their right, an unmarked road snaked hazardously through every kind of deadman’s curve before hitting a bridge which Sonica would dig, having not long ago spun the record-single of which Splitsville had deduced their present whereabouts were some kind of crazy cover-version.

Sonica concurred at once that it was palpably Joe’s, aware that poor Splitsville’s languishing love wasn’t the only strange by-product of the technology that had made Nottingham manifest. She’d heard indeed this orbital rock was pocketed with memory-fragments from each of the Etherium Actualizor’s operators, and it had to be said, Joe’s first-gender brain yielded much that might interest the girl of today. It was all for the best that Splitsville should have some pleasant diversion while her boyfriend was incapacitated, although Sonica voiced a friendly reminder that such compassionate considerations wouldn’t spare those Mini-Flash knickers from eating her dust.

The girls grinned, both ready by now to quit discussing their Friday of thunder and get on with it. Just before they did so however, they heard engines.

Engines which weren’t theirs.

One freaky sound-effect coming from back along the track, whose font was doing the big enlarge letter by letter.

“Company,” said Mini-Flash Splitsville.

A snapshot frame of inverted skirts as both girls vaulted to their seats. Hands gripped gearsticks and clasped steering-wheels. Feet stamped down on pedals and two space-rods fanned the patina, a chequered flag having swept all at once from the grim final resting-place of Major Andre.

Because there was nothing else in the universe that revved like that.

Vernderernders, a biker-gang whose bodies were motorcycle-parts, tore above the trail. These scavengers of the spaceway liked to run their prey to ground, whereupon their steel vulture-beaks and talons did the talking. Mini-Flash Splitsville and Sonica negotiated the hairpin bends at a pace that churned up sandstorms, pushing every linkage to keep in the lead.

They’d wanted a race. Now they had one.

TO BE CONTINUED