The Communique, Chapter Four

Dylan and Flashsatsumas had ridden a Booster-class wheeled robot at full throttle across the Grindotron megalopolis whence Prof’s laboratory towered. Now our hero and his Mini-Flash companion hastened into a far less imposing edifice, the Museum of Monitoring Apparatus, amid asseverations from the former that in quieter times it was well worth a proper trip.

“But what are we doing here today?” Flashsatsumas pleaded. It was hot work, running in a containment-suit.

“Your two friends have helped a good deal by transmitting the hostile’s last known location,” replied Dylan. “With a little luck, we should now be able to narrow it down.”

As he spoke he made a swift survey of the spacious hall and its mechanical exhibits, each an evolutionary ancestor to Prof’s glitching iterations. Dylan selected one and hurried over.

“These saw active service in the Solidity War,” said he. “Might be a little too recent…”

Each scanner was attuned to its own immediate proximity, so as to beam holograms of the museum patrons themselves when they stepped near. Now above the flatbed of the wartime one appeared a miniature monochrome Dylan and Flashsatsumas, their glimmering limbs silently mimicking the motions that went on at full-size above. While cutting-edge sensor-suites projected technicolor effigies on which light and shade fell as they did physical matter, or rather would have done were not every example of that technology stymied at present, these slightly older ones rendered their subjects as spectral transparencies. The little luminous duo atop were well-detailed, but Flashsatsumas in particular was curiously ghostly sans the orange of his protective garment.

“I remember these,” he commented.

The avatars vanished as Dylan worked the scanner’s controls and threw its scope wide, starting with the co-ordinates relayed by Flashbee and from there –

“Thought as much,” declared Dylan grimly.

An ugly squiggle danced its dance, identical to those of the command-room but for being greyscale rather than red.

Dylan, undaunted, sped across to his second choice with Flashsatsumas panting behind. Even the frame of this unit looked more dated than the last, boasting steel sheets with big black bolts and ribbed exposed tubing. What glowed above its horizontal surface were mere computer-generated armatures, made from polygons and grids, the one distinguishable from the other only through their comparative size. Once again Dylan took charge, this time operating plastic switches where previously he had swept his hand over screens.

“Rebooting now,” he remarked with a grin. “It’s been nothing but beast wars. Not getting any of these jokes, are you, Flashsatsumas? Oh, darn it!”

The interference, though much more angular than before, was impossible to mistake.

Next second Dylan was off again, and never had Flashsatsumas beheld a machine worthier of the title museum-piece than that which he this time stopped at. Privately the latter doubted it would be equal to scanning his pants. Dylan meanwhile, who didn’t think in the Mini-Flash vernacular, was put in mind of jukeboxes and old gas stoves. Staying with Earth-analogies, its projection panel was a veritable postage-stamp to those of its historical successors, and the Dylan and Flashsatsumas it manifested were extraordinary. They suggested stop-motion, crude and claylike in barely three dimensions, moving jerkily and hued as if under lamps of every shade but their own.

Yet when Dylan set this geriatric assemblage to the task, there was no obfuscatory scrawl. Instead an image slowly began to swim into focus. Whatever lantern lay deep within the scanner’s compendious housing, it evidently hadn’t marked the eons since it was last called upon. Soon in its patient way it had generated as faithful a model of the white ranging creature as the limits of its design allowed.

Flashsatsumas’s eyes were huge. Dylan smiled back at him in triumph.

“Someone did a great job of making our buddy there sensor-invisible,” explained our hero. “Struck me as the type who sees life as one big battle to beat the newest technology. We’ve got those back home too, and they’re reliably apt to think they don’t have to bother about the oldest. Just think, Flashsatsumas, there was a time your whole galaxy was lit like that.”

“You’re another Intelligentsor,” breathed Flashsatsumas worshipfully.

“If you say so,” Dylan chuckled. “Actually I was thinking about when Seth and I were DJs at our school disco. One computer in the place, with every pre-Nottingham Earth virus going. So we took the gramophone out of the music room and span all our record singles. Try giving those a virus. Saved the night, and made me a hero well before I ever met Joe.”

Telemetry by now was spooling across the ether in lines of chunky digital readout. “Still not sure what it is,” continued Dylan, “but now we know where, and that’s good enough for me.”

So saying he opened a communication channel. That he had called someone other than Prof was apparent from his first word of greeting:

“Babe?”

END OF CHAPTER FOUR