Iterations, Chapter Three

Joe was going to need Scientooth’s digital detachment for what was immediately to come, so Level Two would suffice.

The shipyard’s second tier was given over to the main business of engineering and assembly. Its background was an endless line of unfinished nosecones. Scrolling along before these, tiny Mini-Flash Splitsville in her computerized chariot dodged swinging booms, opened portals to dispense with rolling oil-drums, and negotiated service-platforms for which timing was the difference between a handy lift or a plunge to the smelted steel sea which forever bubbled along the bottom bar.

Joe thought Dylan had vastly underestimated how well he’d get on with Scientooth. There’d have been nothing barbed or uneasy about that alliance with one of The Four Heroes. On the other hand, the pair of them would never have got a single thing done.

Here it was. The manufacturing-floor levelled-out to one interminable scaffolded stretch. Once again Scientooth’s boss-music, both ponderous and urgent, kicked in.

From the left-hand side the terror of the yards shouldered his hulking hot-rod into view, flying in reverse so he fronted Splitsville fender-to-fender. Still Sonica lamented prettily on his running-board, as anyone might whose would-be rescuer boasted only portals to contend with a power which had summarily stalled her once already. Contamination’s grim prognosis looked on the verge of coming true, or as Mini-Flash Splitsville herself might have put it, Frank held all the aces.

Then flames, or rather the same flame twelve or so times over, danced across the deck.

Accompanied by a triumphant burst of yet another theme tune to replace the sombre strains, down from the top of the screen he came. This new sprite flew some kind of long low rust-hued racer, a regular space-Pontiac. His hair was long and brown, and besides a trenchcoat he wore what appeared to be a cowboy hat on his head.

So Joe gazed on the graphical representation of himself, as he had been at a time and place far, far removed from here.

It ought to have been impossible. This cowboy seeming of Joe’s hadn’t been a duplicate or doppelganger as 4-H-J was.

He had been Joe himself.

Yet apparently here too he had been, a discrete entity, in this distant galaxy’s present day.

Splitsville hadn’t noticed the resemblance. That wasn’t her fault, even though Joe and his other self were facially identical. Mini-Flashes didn’t rely on that visual cue as humans did.

Would she have proceeded thus, had she known?

If there was a way to ask her that question, Joe hadn’t come up with it yet.

Nevertheless, what followed could only do so via his and Splitsville’s subsequent psychic interview. The circular wall of Scientooth’s sanctum was by now festooned with patches of light and motion. Joe opened another, and prepared himself.

That real-gone ranch-hand’s fireball zipped past the rocket-ships and laid it on the Son of Frankenstein. What was this, RKO Radio Pictures?

Didn’t take long though for Frank to get with it and make like an amoeba. Down-side was, it’d take more than matchsticks for him to cool it on the caveman jazz booper-wise.

So Mini-Flash Splitsville like Debbie Reynolds surveyed her guardian angel. It wasn’t that she didn’t dig his knight-in-shining-armour scene, even if medieval was the word. Those freaky threads and museum-piece rod should have been so square as to be cubed, but for some reason she didn’t feature, his slow-boat style was doing it for her.

Not that they hit the nearest coffee-shop to get to know each other better over poetry and bongos, because with Sonica’s silks in jeopardy this drag was strictly conclusion pending. Daddy-O would have said they saddled up. Act Three was shot on the same old strip, only tighter curves the higher you went, and heavy rain by now turning those slick. Worse, this was where the shipbuilding crews’ apartment pads were clustered, so we were talking tunnels and blind corners and narrow alleyways flapping with windswept laundry. Worse still, Frankie knew his turf in ways Mini-Flash Splitsville and Harry Carey Junior weren’t hip to. The far-out former began to suspect Flashstanch had spoken as a senior sis should. Only as long as Sonica was making like the cliff-hanger to last week’s chapter-play, that argument was on a one-way train to nowhere.

Taillight-blurs in the indifferent blocky night, liquid streaks reflecting from a tar-black stream. Edgy double-bass thrums amid percussion’s hollow knock.

At last Frank’s caboose appeared in the distance, tearing up the road. So the duo got into tearing up his lead, plasmodic injection at full burn, their carburettors one big roar. Only thing to do was risk another jolt from that electrode while Rio Grande filled in for the short-order cook, rain making his flame-bolts hiss like lunchtime’s burger special. Mini-Flash Splitsville’s portals flipped these in unexpected directions so Frankie’s top-end took its share of the sauce, though the word to the wise was not to serve up a side-helping of Sonica.

Problem was, she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t hang.

Something was shutting the cowboy down. Mini-Flash Splitsville had heard of ghosting out, but he’d taken the express to a fast fade and we were talking final reel. Barely even there anymore he pulled a Leader of the Pack all along that wash of a roadway, and Splitsville hit the brakes. Last she saw of Frankie he was cutting out again, Sonica bundled over his mudguard, her rear bumper high in the air.

Crazy, how some Sundays seemed to go on forever.

END OF CHAPTER THREE