The Things we Find, Chapter Three

As soon as Croldon Thragg wasn’t quite so busy Joe was going to propose the construction of a bridge between Nottingham and the factory. Our hero envisaged everything being in walking-distance one day. Next morning however, while such plans were still on the drawing-board, he let his rotor-blades take the strain and took the Valour up while Neetra still contentedly snored.

Through gates about which clung the ghosts of industrial grandeur Joe passed, into the empty forecourt and so the silent shopfloor. It might have been a sad place. Our hero supposed in many ways it was. Perhaps it would even have been so to him, were it not for what he felt on every breath he drew within its walls.

A corridor of dim office-windows widened into the workroom. Dusty and unlit, its conveyor-belt was a lonely highway linking lost cities portcullised and walled, their square summits somewhere in the overhead gloom. Sitting on a crate by this deserted nation was a Mini-Flash boy with freckles and a grey tunic on.

“I knew I would find you here,” Joe said to him.

Flashtease turned and shone back a smile the equal of our hero’s.

“Neetra, as we predicted, did ask,” went on Joe. “Yet it was no light undertaking to make my reasons clear to one who was not present when you and I first beheld this vista.”

“I had a feeling she’d have something to say about it,” Flashtease agreed. “So did you tell her?”

Joe would just as soon have not gone into the circumstances under which he hadn’t quite got around to it, for fond as he was of Flashtease there was no Mini-Flash who so lived up to his suffix. “She is sleeping now,” was what he settled on, well aware it didn’t answer the question. “On her side,” he added.

“So would you like to watch the documentary again?” asked Flashtease.

Joe told him truthfully there was nothing he should like more. Sometimes our hero wondered at the opposite poles his closest and sweetest acquaintances occupied. Thanks to one and her zeal for intimacy he had woken with a dozen aches and pains, not that these were exactly impossible to bear. It was a different kind of intimacy he sought from the other, and this he waited meekly to be offered, as might a shy high-school girl hoping for a date. Deciding not to think about any of this Joe took a crate for himself and sat down facing Flashtease.

Our hero was touched, and more than a little humbled, by the immediate and unhesitating way that one let him into his mind. Flashtease’s first experience of telepathic congress hadn’t been the kind you forgot, but nor had he ever allowed this to define him. He’d forgiven the inflictor, was dating Flashstanch, had moved on. Joe aspired to one day attain the maturity and strength of his far younger friend.

From a privileged perspective within Flashtease’s thoughts, our hero looked on as the factory began to come to life again.

This memory was one of newsreel flickering on some childhood holo-screen, and true to form the effect was that of a three-dimensional projector steadily warming up its beam on the long-abandoned machines, lending them the light and colour they had known long ago. Those empty cities were prosperous manufacturing hubs once more, and a rising rumble of wheels was herald to the road between them teeming with such one-way traffic as it had known in its heyday.

The travellers, like all their kind, gained from every port of call and came away each time with something new. They ended their journey however as complete wind-up monster toys identical to Flashshadow’s and Joe’s. Before the moment he stepped onto this factory floor with Flashtease, our hero had lain eyes on just those two. Now he gazed on hundreds, traversing in seemingly endless succession the last stretch of conveyor-belt before busy pseudopods packed them briskly into boxes shoulder-to-shoulder and twenty at a time.

This was making Joe’s heart race as the very young Flashtease’s had done.

An unseen newsreader was holding forth on productivity, everyone pulling together to make sure these toys arrived on the shelves in time. A certain much-anticipated air-date was only a few days off, and every child in the quadrant wanted one by then. Wind-up musical monsters were now by some distance the galaxy’s most in-demand item.

It was something for Joe to share in what that pronouncement had meant for Flashtease. Likewise our hero was complicit in his glee when the monsters rolled out of the final unit standing on their heads. Upside-down made perfect sense technically speaking, for once the circuitous route had bestowed on each a pair of legs, a motor and the little coiled spring that played its tinkling tune, the last step was to screw the two halves of its black plastic body around the whole. From where Joe was however, the sight of them thus was every bit as hilarious as it would have been to a small child. He loved this.

And the best was still to come. They were getting to it now. The documentary itself was a memory within a memory, and Joe stayed immersed in it as the factory and commentary began to unfurl before the shining heart. Flashtease was on his way. The shuttle full of Mini-Flashes trawled through space that sparkled like snow, and huge seemed the double-seat on which one little beige-clad self rested. Joe seemed to be picking up a habit of running into spectral iterations of Flashtease in his younger days. Had that one ever been on such a journey before? Our hero remembered Flashshadow that day, how she’d barely even existed.

Where they were all going and what they were going to do there, besides open presents and watch television, remained one of those Mini-Flash mysteries. Joe had to keep reminding himself it wasn’t Christmas. Wrong galaxy. It had been a festival of some sort though, even if this particular cycle the broadcast schedule had worked much of the excitement. Joe was also more than aware of the quadrant’s old religion, in which most Mini-Flashes with some justification believed, and had done long before he ever came along.

There sat Flashtease on his shuttle seat, held forever at that moment between the thrill of watching the documentary and the joyful time stretching ahead.

There was the core.

For he was getting a wind-up toy of one of the monsters from the programme he was going to watch, and they were already the galaxy’s most in-demand item.

It was official. It had been on a documentary.

Nothing could change it now.

And safely part of a phenomenon that embraced the friendly stars, Flashtease had but to sit at blissful rest and look forward to his happy holiday.

Joe never wanted it to end, but knowing it must he let the old Mini-Flash shuttle soar on as he himself returned to the echoing workroom and the Flashtease of today. For several soft breaths there were no words, only smiles. Joe decided his advice to himself earlier on should still stand, about not dwelling too much on the resemblances between this experience and last night.

Flashtease meanwhile was thoughtful. He had tucked a finger inside his underpants and was tracing it back and forth along the elastic, which was a sure sign.

“It’s ever so funny I forgot I had one of those toys,” he declared. “Flashshadow must have shown me hers a hundred times. Trust the second gender to be ahead. And, she’s in the Special Program,” Flashtease added fairly, as if this clinched the argument.

Joe smiled. There was some truth in his friend’s way of looking at things. Flashtease’s recollections of the television programme hadn’t been among the most vivid, and without Flashshadow’s extraordinary grounding in that event Joe could see how two plastic toys at the recent convention would have been just two plastic toys. What with Nottingham and the war and Gala and another Nottingham spanning the long interval, there would not have been enough in the things themselves to connect their present-day context with the memory that mattered.

“It was not about the toy itself, Flashtease,” was how Joe phrased it to him in explanation. “Remember, you had not yet unwrapped it at that moment which meant so much to you.”

“I guess not,” Flashtease agreed. “Looking back though, it must have made watching the TV show more special to have had a new toy from it just that morning.”

Joe gladly took this on board. It was always the right time for intimations he wasn’t wrong, or leading his faction to his miscreant son in a manner that might destroy the universe.

“But no sooner did I see this room…!” went on Flashtease, and in wonder he beamed at Joe.

Our hero knew. It had all still been there. He reached for his friend’s hands, which had the added advantage of stopping him fidgeting with his underwear.

“In that alone was reason enough for me to be certain this factory is inseparably bound up with our interpretation of the cause, and we could not be without it,” Joe told him. “The place holds secrets as it did for you, my friend. That which we have thus far found here, and will share with all Nottingham soon…it is but the beginning.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE