Iterations, Chapter Four

Joe had to admit, Mini-Flash Splitsville was getting the most out of Film Club. Her whole production was even in black and white.

He watched as the door to an empty apartment opened, and his ailing bygone self was helped inside by one who saw none of the likeness. “Say it’s not so bad, dad,” Splitsville implored him. “Don’t be the kind of cat to flake out on me!”

“They were good cats,” the other returned deliriously. “Eight of them lived to see the creation of Nottingham.”

“Sure they did,” said Mini-Flash Splitsville, lying him down on a bare bed which stood in the corner. This was as far as home-comforts went. Exposed ceiling-beams and a window which let in a little street-lighting were otherwise the sum of the room.

“I’ve heard of going contemporary,” Mini-Flash Splitsville remarked.

“Sometimes there’s more…when I’m stronger,” murmured the cowboy. “Then I can shape the environment around me. There might be a book he used to read at bedtime. Or an Earth-movie somehow playing on the holo-viewer, one he remembers from long ago…”

Meaning who, Splitsville was drawing one big blank. Not that she wasn’t hip to all the lingo. His history resonated with the kind of rap you’d hear from an incomplete psychic imprint.

“You understand what I am?” he breathed, after she’d ventured this guess.

“Your narrator’s Special Program, kid, I’m hip to all that jazz,” Mini-Flash Splitsville affirmed. Only she wasn’t bucking for George Washington’s rep. Truth was, this was like a light-year beyond anything she’d learned on psionics from either Joe or The Flash Club.

“Then help me,” her fitful companion begged. “He doesn’t even realise I exist. Go to him. Ask him if any computer can start from nothing. And where would a Solarian one find a ready-made human template, except somewhere in the human who’d just stepped into it? It’s always machines with me, then just as now. Because while he was giving up his conscious desires to the Etherium Actualizor, conferring reality on what he thought he wanted, he never guessed it was going to work on his subconscious too…”

Before Splitsville’s blinking eyes the cowboy began to lapse again, even as he lay amid the weak halogen rays that fell on the bed, such that at times only this dim illumination was left.

“Nothing but struggle,” he suffered, while there. “Having to tell myself every minute I’m real, when I know I’m not. Those lies don’t work when I’m so drained. There’s not enough to ground me in this corporeal realm. I won’t be able to hold out if there’s no part of me that can feel…”

Mini-Flash Splitsville looked on his face. No way could she save Sonica or split this scene without him. More important than that, she wanted him there.

She wanted him with all cylinders firing.

Splitsville made her decision.

“I’ve got your corporeal realm right here,” she told him, and began to take off her tunic.

Joe really wished Scientooth wasn’t watching with him.

That one had at last revolved in his column, and his monocle seemed sharply focused. Joe by contrast averted his eyes, and this time not in the direction of Scientooth’s animated cutscenes. Those were more than our hero wished to imagine, let alone look at.

“I am of one mind with the Mini-Flash,” commented Scientooth. “To my way of thinking, he is most unlike you.”

Joe asked him to explain.

“In the parlance of your homeworld, it was well played,” came the reply. “Claiming he would cease to exist, unless. I do not credit you with so much wit.”

“And are such witticisms on your part the most I should expect of that purportedly vast intellect?” Joe flung back.

“You may expect far more,” Scientooth assured him smoothly, his single optic remaining fixed.

Our hero hoped so. Because then this might just be worth it.

Level Four, the last. Joe may not have appreciated all of Scientooth’s story-segments, but there was so much happening by now that it did help to see a map.

Above the habitation-ring’s rooftops, the final mile coiled like a spring round the tapering summit and levelled at its very top, where flashed a vast lamp which looked to Joe like that of a lighthouse. The cosmic tempest had taken possession of all but the tip of the buoy, rendering impassable all preceding arcs on its one road. As Mini-Flash Splitsville and Joe’s cowboy self struck out, her black space-rod and his rust-red circling each other two-player style, the sky which span endlessly behind them was alight with every nightmare shade. Turning back wasn’t an option. This maelstrom was already nipping at their tailpipes.

Pixel by pixel the Frankenstinium and his fretting hostage pulled into view from the right. He, like the other two riders on the storm, had no choice now but to climb for his life.

The polished purple bodywork of his monster-hog extruded an ambit of spinning discs which proceeded to wheel about him, establishing an impenetrable barrier against the thunderbolts zapping from on high. Splitsville and her companion, while dodging these, gave it their all with fireball and portal. The cowboy’s energy-bar was at maximum – Joe guessed the only reason he’d heard nothing from Scientooth was that the innuendos were obvious – but it was dropping notch by notch as the road-duel wore on.

Multi-tasking with Mini-Flash Splitsville’s memories, Joe’s later persona read that they’d rapped about that beforehand, or the B-side was, afterwards. John Ford had given her the lowdown and odds were he wouldn’t make it to the finish line, but Sonica’s innocent life was worth more than one which wasn’t even whole to begin with. Splitsville would have told him where jive like that belonged, and she wasn’t talking any local stopping service, only he’d made her give him her word. When he spoke that way it was like he reminded her of someone, though she still wasn’t pinning who.

Nor were they getting through that rotary shield. The lightning was punishing both space-racers, and the cowboy didn’t have long left.

What should they be doing that they weren’t doing now?

END OF CHAPTER FOUR