Iterations, Chapter One

“Those are the facts as Mini-Flash Splitsville and her companions related them to me,” said Joe. “Now tell me why I was not warned.”

Scientooth, a green metallic skull, looked on our hero from his column of light.

“The Etherium Actualizor was never meant for human interface,” he commenced. “Rather, it was a weapon with which Prince Agaric and I planned to reconquer the galaxy. Its purpose was usurped, and its mechanisms forced to mesh with psychologies wholly unlike those of its intended operators, when you and your female insisted on turning it to other designs first. Then my masterwork was obliterated and the vision to which it owed its existence never realized, as there is surely no need for me to remind you. Only pray read nothing more into that than admiration for those valiant little organic memory-banks. Your fellow member of The Four Heroes and lifelong friend Dylan Cook is of course the last individual you might be suspected of conspiring with to such an end.”

“Search terms,” was Joe’s response. “Time, inclination, neither.”

“I merely raise the point to impress upon you that the unhappy coincidence of which we speak effectively limited casework on the Etherium Actualizor to one solitary deployment,” sang Scientooth, his tones as lofty as his elevated stance. “And you ask why I did not advise you, prior to this, of any known side-effects? You set great store by my artificial intelligence if you think me equal to that.”

“Your artificial intelligence, Scientooth, was modelled on the lowliest and least consequential minor academic,” Joe replied. “It is beyond me how you reconcile your egotism with the life you have led. Toothfire condemned you, Dimension Borg rejected you, and now you gladly accept sanctuary when it is offered you by the latter’s destroyer. Whatever else your much-vaunted programming might be, it admits of neither dignity nor self-respect.”

Scientooth’s single-hinged jawpiece could sometimes suggest a most unpleasant grin.

“I have processed the various data you supplied,” said he. “So let us hope my funding authority appreciates this humble candidate’s presentation.”

In the darkness to the side of his perpendicular pillar, a screen illumined.

All in bold colours, a rectangular inset. Against its blue a pink pixellated hand, pressing a communicator-button.

“Mini-Flash Splitsville, wait!” cried the voice of Flashstanch.

A new animation. Two beige boots and the bare thighs above marching along a drop-ship’s grey corridor, purposeful steps and the receding scenery continuously looped.

“One big zero on that, swinging sis,” said Mini-Flash Splitsville’s voice.

Several oblongs flickered into view at once, each a cartoon portrait of anxious golden-haired Flashstanch. Her lips moved and her blue eyes blinked.

“Contamination’s message warned us not to go in without him! That cosmic weather-front moving in from Nebula Six must be what’s holding him up. Worse still, if you’re down there when it hits, you won’t be able to get out again!”

Multiple panels switched back to full-screen. The tail-end of Splitsville’s black space-rod revved steadily up and down in the cargo-bay, with appropriate chugging sound-effects.

“B-side is, Contamination digs the single seat and the fast lane. He calls in help, I call that a five-alarm. Creepozoid he was rapping about’s got to be trouble, and I’m talking title-case. This chick doesn’t feature cooling our engines until rain stops play. But laying a far-out Four Heroes vibe on some big buddy-boy thinks he owns the road – to that I’m hip.”

Red loading-lights plinked to green. The trapdoor floor opened beneath the racer and so Splitsville plunged, through vertical blurs which duly spooled then held on a static starscape. As the theme tune hit its tinny bleepy crescendo her jets coloured orange and off she lurched, transfigured in three or four frames to a twinkle on the vanishing-point.

Joe was ready to insert his coin. At least Scientooth had done as instructed. It even made a certain sort of sense he should perceive the universe thus, not that having to work alongside him was any the less disturbing for it.

“May I interject, Scientooth?” said Joe. “This, from my telepathic consultation with Sonica. It is only fair we hear from she herself on her grounds for becoming involved.”

He reached into darkness and a second panel lit, etching further the shape of the one-walled encircling room, a wheel of which Scientooth’s shaft was axle.

“As you wish,” that one burred, his own eye not shifting from his story-screens.

Were it not for the events of that day, Sonica would never have set a shapely foot in Nottingham. The destiny and danger attendant on her kind didn’t interest her, only the power and privilege. For all that Joe’s work had made a difference in the quadrant, she was scarcely atypical of the second gender as far as that went.

Tooling along in her cerise space-saloon, a sporty number much pushed-up by racks of exterior speakers spilling from every contour and curve, Sonica’s thoughts hadn’t strayed beyond staying ahead of the rain. That was until a black hot-rod hurtled overhead and knocked her trusty roadster for a barrel-roll. Sonica fetched up dizzy and inverted on her plush seat-cushions, toecaps skewed above the windshield, her silken Sonickers cluing-in the cosmos as to what day of the week it was.

It would have occurred to some space-motorists that other people were sometimes in a hurry, and that accidents did happen.

Some space-motorists hadn’t spent half a solar cycle getting their hairdo just right.

In the flick of an eyelash Sonica was hot on the tail of that little delinquent Mini-Flash.

END OF CHAPTER ONE