Iterations, Chapter Five

Joe bet Dylan would have had it in an instant, but fortunately Mini-Flash Splitsville was there ahead of either of the hims. It was going to call for some split-second Splitsville too, and the bolts from the blue weren’t making matters any more convenient, but deftly she and her other Joe negotiated every hazard until at last they were properly aligned. He threw his fire, and Mini-Flash Splitsville popped a portal in the path of that flame-burst then reopened it inside Frank’s shield.

The watching Joe could only imagine how satisfying that would have been with a control-pad in your hands. His alter-ego’s burning barrage, trapped within the ring, bounced from each inner cusp and tore obliquely in and out of the bulk that lay between. Never had one Frankenstinium so flickered, nor looked so discombobulated as theirs did. At length his defence mechanisms were fried, whereat each discus blew outward and was lost to that nothingness which lay beyond the borders of Scientooth’s screen.

The effort had proved too great for Joe’s other seeming. With power-gauge depleted he faltered and fell back, leftwards and downwards, to take his chance amid the cyclone.

Joe couldn’t but revert to Mini-Flash Splitsville’s viewpoint, for in the gaze that held on her rear-view mirror was much. Crazy how one time-interval happiness was the Tablet, then the next you were laying down love-songs like you were as square as Petunia. Only if Mini-Flash Splitsville was digging those kind of lyrics, broken heart meaning broken promise was always one big no-go.

So she shifted her space-rod into gear and stayed on the Frankenstinium. Joe couldn’t have been prouder of his student if she’d honoured a vow made to him. Which, in a way, she had.

Sonica was best-placed to see what happened next, as the thunderclouds directly overhead parted before such a speed-demon as to turn any nice girl positively pale. Ravaged from the turbid track he’d forged, his cobalt-coloured dragstrip vehicle was trailing chaos in its wake while he, leather-clad and snarling, raged as to outdo the celestial conflagration whence he came. Joe however saw past these melodramatics to the admirable exactitude with which Contamination struck, slagging Frank’s fuselage along the very flank that would cut Sonica safely clean. Upside-down yet again she squealed as momentum hurled her for unobstructed sky.

Mini-Flash Splitsville stamped on the accelerator.

Barely aglow, Contamination clanked and clattered under the lee of the highway’s last curve and there scraped to rest.

His strange nephew, though by now half a space-car short, held himself together long enough to seize the high ground. Lurching to a lopsided halt beneath the mighty lantern, Frank was sheltered from the elements and so set about mustering some lightning of his own, to stymie his one remaining opponent that the deluge may take them all.

As Mini-Flash Splitsville rounded the bend and faced her nemesis radiator-to-radiator over the lofty plateau, it seemed it must end no other way.

Then Sonica skirt-parachuted neatly into the passenger-seat beside her.

“My hi-fi’s yours, silky-drawers,” Splitsville announced with a grin. “So get in and wail!”

Manicured hands clasped the Mini-Flash’s eight-track, and a hydrogen bomb of noise detonated at the eye of the storm. It shattered the lamp and blasted back the Frankenstinium and his damaged hot-rod, past the parapet to swirl into space along with the rest of the detritus. Of more sound and fury than even the wrathful nebulae above, that apocalyptic crescendo duly cored through these a roiling funnel beyond whose lip stars were seen.

And Flashstanch, who had kept close to the weather-front’s outer periphery ever spying for an opening, made herself useful. Having been asked so nicely to do so.

Scientooth’s ending-sequence? Why not.

Energy-bars retreated out of sight as the underbelly of Flashstanch’s drop-ship descended onto the stage, where Splitsville’s sprite hovered by the ruined lantern and Contamination’s lay below. Automatic arms lowered to hoist the latter onboard, whilst the former flew herself and Sonica in through the open bulkhead.

Cut to the drop-ship bumping about as it made its escape along the tube through the clouds, accompanied by a diminutive din of simulated thrust.

Then in the same two dimensions and bold primary palette were the four of them, Splitsville and Sonica and Contamination and Flashstanch, side-by-side with their backs to the observer. They were looking out of a large porthole, beyond which thunderheads were starting to swathe the shipyard once more. As these did so, in gradual jerking jumps most unlike the action of what they represented, credits began to roll.

Joe was beyond guessing whose names these were supposed to be. All he had left to tell the only one who might know was that after the heavens had cleared, a thorough search yielded no trace of he who had helped save Sonica and free an honest labouring community from its turnpike tyrant. Our hero however, it went without saying, was proceeding on no assumption other than that his subconscious semblance had survived.

“My friends and I shall find him,” Joe informed Scientooth. “You meanwhile will direct your efforts to determining some means whereby his affliction may be remedied. I should say that given the circumstances, it is the very least you might do.”

Scientooth’s synthesized tones crackled with cold electronic irony.

“Because I, and my wicked contraption, were responsible for his genesis?” he inquired. “Or perhaps this Solarian computer was?”

The credits continued. The clouds closed in.

“I shall do all that is required of me,” was Scientooth’s pompous resumption. “Yet until you confront what it truly was that made him, you will not be near to accomplishing the same.”

Joe had no answer to that. Onscreen the scroll concluded, and the rendering was replaced by one more. Mini-Flash Splitsville, now seated and alone, gazed out into the galaxy. Spanning that luminous infinite was what Joe took to be a portrait of himself, or rather not him at all, for the cowboy hat could be seen. A final credit appeared before this touching tableau.

“Presented by Scientooth,” indeed.

He was mad.

No great comfort then for Joe, that this should be the mind which best understood him.

GAME OVER