Author's Note: I actually wrote this over the course of last year, and it's gone through several different revisionary periods before it became what you are about to read. The style has subtle changes as the story progresses, due in large part to the fact that I wrote it over the course of many months, in different states of mind and relative sanity. Overall, I suppose that the fluctuations in style kind of tie into one of the overarching themes of the work itself, but that's more an attempt on my part to justify its awkward phrasing and inconsistent grammar usage.

Anyway, that's all I have to say. The characters whose names are taken from actual historical figures are purely fictional creations, used solely for entertainment purposes.

Enjoy.

Man With The Iron Gun

It all started in a bar in south Detroit, just off of Interstate 75. The bar was about as ugly as the city, maybe twice as dirty, but it was the kind of dirt that no cleaning solvent or elbow grease would ever get off. It’s the kind of dirt that latches onto passersby and never lets go, no matter how many drinks you have. It’s the kind of dirt that I’m always hired to dig up.

That’s how these things always start. Cold afternoons that turn into bitingly chilly nights, draped in fog and mist and belittled with freezing rain that roars through drainage gutters.

The rain was so loud you could almost hear it against the roof of the building. Outside the stained glass windows a few cars splashed puddles of water up onto the cracked and pitted sidewalk, but no one was out there to care. I was sitting at the bar, having a friendly sit-down with some fellows named Justerini and Brooks; therapists, if you will—helped me through the hardest of times and didn’t give me any of that psycho-babble or a heavy insurance fee.

Suddenly the door clattered open and the sound of falling cats and dogs found its way into the small entryway. I didn’t feel like interrupting J&B’s consoling warmth as it washed down into my gut, but at the same time that gut was telling me that it was absolutely imperative to find out who had just entered this backwater bar under the overpass.

The first thing I noticed was the succession of heavy-handed insults that shattered the glass bottles on the wall behind the bar, a few of which only grazed me as I managed to throw myself over the countertop and duck next to the bartender. Judging from the overly vociferous barks and light show, I figured the man to be in possession of quite a heavy caliber loudmouth.

Now, I’ve always had a very healthy relationship with my two best friends. One’s named Smith, and he packs a wallop. The other’s named Wesson, and he’s got his name tattooed right next to Smith’s. The two of them together is like a jamboree of heavy weight boxers cocked and loaded with a hair trigger just daring somebody to set them off. I’m always the one trying to hold them back, but the palm of my hand is only so comfortable after a few dozen angry barks. When things get hot, I let them do the talking while I stand back and nod in agreement.

While these poignant remarks were flying back and forth, I made a hasty exit through the back door and waited in the alleyway. I was fortunate enough to be rewarded with the assailant throwing the door open and stepping right into my crosshairs, so I let loose a barrage of deeply philosophical comments that splattered the guy off the steps and into the drainage gutter that ran along the side of the building. Keeping Smith and Wesson out in case a few more remarks were needed, I approached to the intrusive bastard.

“Hey there, fellah.”

He groaned when I kicked away his great debater—a forty-five by the name of Colt. I turned him over after that, getting a good look at his face, and I realized that the he I’d been seeing all along was in fact a she; Russian, by the look of her, and where her left eye should have been there was just a black patch. She was a sea pirate, alright.

“Wvat do you wvant?” She stared up at me as leaned against the alley wall.

“I should ask you the same question,” I told her. Her one eye squinted. Rain poured down around us. She was soaked. “Coming in there,” I continued, “shooting, chasing me outside… You won’t make many friends that way. Not in this town. Not in Detroit.”

She remained ever diligent in her silence.

“Why are you trying to kill me?”

When I squatted down next to her, I realized that her one eye had glazed over like glass in a dishwasher. She wasn’t only dead, she hadn’t even been alive in the first place—the fact hit me like a dump truck falling into a strip mine. Carefully, so as not to disturb the thing, I reached around the back of her head to click the button that would open its interface to me—if I could hack it, I might gather some valuable information as to who my assailant really was.

Android. Of course. My only concern was the lingering question: why would the sea pirates send an android after me? The second most prevalent question on my mind was whether or not I had any more cash for another drink. That would have to wait, as the android beneath me started making a funny noise—if you call a high-pitched whine that would bother a dog funny.

It was over in a bright flash and a kick that would make a mule jealous. I landed in the very back of the alley; my coat charred but not ruined, my gun still in my hand, my head a carrousel operated by a demented old senile bastard. It took me a minute to negotiate with the operator, but my head finally stopped spinning and my eyes came back into focus. The damn doll had a flash bang with a hell of a kick in its gut. I did have one answer though; for whatever reason, the sea pirates wanted me alive.

I tried standing up, but once I was vertical a gorilla appeared out of nowhere and practiced for his chiropractic degree. I was unconscious before I could realize that these sea pirates meant business.

When I came to, I smelled sea salt and the room around me was moving and groaning. It took me a little while, but I soon realized that the swaying was not in my head—then it hit me: the sea pirates. I was on a boat. I was on a damned pirate ship.

The jolt that arced through my subconscious made me aware that these pirates weren’t the average pillagers. For some reason or other they had a telepathic interrogator, and he was using his abilities to conjure up a storm of pain inside my skull. When he finished, my eyes still worked enough to allow me a look around; more a Persian pleasure house than the inside of a boat, ornate tapestries adorned the walls and scantily clad women donned in little more than translucent sheets adorned the floors. Apart from the psychotic telepath that just tore my brain out of dreamland, the only men I could see were the two guards stationed at the far end of the room—and they were probably eunuchs.

The telepath went at me again, but now that I was conscious I could fight back a little—he groaned in pain as I managed to grab a hold of his prefrontal cortex and really yank. That’s right; ESP is a two way bridge, you bastard.

His scream felt like Beethoven to my ears as he choked and fell to the ground. After a few dry heaves, a gelatinous substance shot out of his mouth, red in color and impossibly moist; it splattered as it made contact with the creaking floor. I made the bum vomit up his own brain.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that he’d go into convulsions after that, his chest splitting open in a graphic display of grotesque violence. It was like a bunch of imprisoned surgeons cutting their way out of him; gallons of blood squirting out of his chest and stomach, deep lacerations appearing out of nowhere, and then it became clear that this man was no more a man than the ship itself—a huge metallic leg unfurled out of his chest cavity, covered in the remnants of the man’s organs, dripping with blood, razor sharp, and it was followed by three more. The man’s carcass lay still in the puddle of its own juices and organs and parts, discarded like a wrinkled suit, all the while this mechanical contraption sprouted up and loomed over me menacingly.

Part of me wondered what the Centauri Mob had to do with this. The other part of me wanted to run like the hounds of hell were after me—in a way, one of them was standing front and center.

The beast machine was mostly comprised of four razor sharp metal legs that ended in precise points that happened to be perfect for skewering someone. At the junction of these legs was a tiny platform, about five inches square, upon which sat a creature that looked like a slightly overgrown toad with a face that looked like a cross between a hammer-smashed sheep head and Adolf Hitler.

“Fuel,” it greeted.

I stayed silent. There was a bomb exploding over and over inside my head; psionics take a lot out of me.

“The Martians grow weary of your persistent delays,” it said. “They have hired me to… persuade you to finish what you started.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I’m sorry,” I started. “But I think you have me confused with someone else.” I shrugged and looked around; a naked girl of about fifteen smoked from a hose that disappeared into the wall when she let go of it; she was soon joined by a younger girl—her sister, from the look of it. They lay still for a little while, stoned out of their minds like the rest of the women here.

That was when it hit me: the Centaurian said ‘Martians’. The Martians were extinct—blasted themselves into nuclear oblivion forty years ago—something to do with colonization rights on Phobos and Deimos. But that didn’t help me at all—in fact, it probably decreased my chances of survival with the extra-planetary shylock.

“Don’t play games, Fuel,” it chuckled, raised a threateningly sharp leg and lightly tapped my chest. “We both know what it is you were supposed to do, and—hey, personally, I really don’t give a shit about what you do, but the Martians apparently have a vested personal interest in this particular case, so…” He trailed off and sighed deeply, ogled the girls in the harem. “And—”

Just as he was about to continue, something happened that I didn’t expect.

The naked fifteen-year-old in the corner suddenly screamed, and though I’m no music expert, it seemed to be a diminished third above the scream her sister belted out. Both of their stomachs suddenly swelled and split open violently, revealing two blood-covered and slimy police officers, one male, one female.

“Hold it right there, you demented mechanical faggot!” The man was the one who yelled this from across the room, his pistol already out and pointed at the Centaurian mobster. The woman had long blonde hair and eyes that literally glowed blue, hips to kill for.

The shylock looked at them, swiveling in the platform atop the unnecessarily large legs.

“You are under arrest for participating in intergalactic organized crime,” the woman shouted. Her Beretta was steady and level. “Submit or die.”

These were the kind of cops I could respect; the Police of the Internal Galactic Sanction, license to kill, reputation to kick your teeth in if you so much as shoved an old woman. They meant business. They also meant trouble; the ones that were still alive were ruthlessly hunted by the rampant criminal and pirating organizations that ruled the Milky Way—as it was, the only reason the force still existed was to give the citizens some sense of false security.

The mobster stared them as if they were insane.

“Get him!” The man screamed, firing off a few dozen rounds as he charged the beast. The woman backed him up with cover fire, bullets whizzing and clanging into the steel legs of the erecter set.

The Centaurian stood there and took it, waiting for the man to get close—at which point his leg shot out and impaled the guy, nailing him to the wall through his chest. Blood spurted out and coated the floor. He gasped in pain. The alien smiled.

“Vercingetorix!” The woman, in an obscenely familiar voice, called out to her skewered partner. The leg ripped out of his torso and he crumpled to the ground.

“Is that all you got?!” he suddenly screamed, staring up at the alien. The mobster frowned, and impaled him again, through the shoulder.

“Oh, come on…” the man muttered, moving to stand as the leg tore through him again. “I bet your grandmother abused you harder than this!” His screams increased with intensity as the alien kept ramming his pointed foot through his body. Blood was everywhere.

While the Centaurian had been entertaining himself with the seemingly invulnerable body of the policeman, the woman managed to free me from the interrogation chair.

“Come on, get up—here’s your gun,” she said. I suddenly found Smith and Wesson comfortably back in my grip.

“Why haven’t you taken out the shylock yet?” I asked her, watching her partner get brutally mutilated with every comeback he made. “He’s doing a number on your pal, there.”

“That monster is a mecha-Syrinx eunuch mutation simulator,” she said. “It can’t die—it’ll just reshape its physical appearance after you think you’ve killed it, taking on a different form. Besides, don’t worry about it; Vercingetorix will survive. It’ll take a Roman prison and Julius Caesar to kill him off.”

Just as she said that, the creature exploded in a fiery mass, and out of the charred ashes arose a bald, naked, thirty-something year old man. His hand clutched a Roman short sword, and he stared down its length at Vercingetorix.

“Caesar…” Vercingetorix gaped.

“I’ve already had to execute you once,” the Roman said. “Oh well. ‘Doomed to repeat it’ and all that.” He stuffed the sword down Vercingetorix’s throat. Blood gushed out of him like Old Faithful on a good day. Julius smiled and turned to the two of us. “You two,” he bellowed.

Wesson pulled the trigger, Smith sent his argument flashing out of his mouth. Julius didn’t even know what hit him—his brains splattered against the wall, his eyes flying out of their sockets due do the force of the explosion into his skull.

“You were saying?” I asked the woman. The harem of young girls stared at the bloody scene with eyes devoid of emotion.

“Are you familiar with interstellar travel?” She cocked a loaded a device that resembled a Xerox machine.

“What kind?”

“Fax.”

I shrugged. “Vaguely. I’ve never done it myself, though.”

“It’s kind of simple,” she said. “Your body remains here to absorb another person who’s faxing themselves, and you zap into the vacant body that acts as a vessel. Your consciousness forms a copy of your body inside the awaiting vessel, and you’re reborn into adulthood in the blink of an eye.” She plugged the device into a wall socket. “It’s what the two of us did to get ourselves here to rescue you.”

“You exploded out of a girl’s stomach.”

“She was an empty vessel,” she replied frankly. It was mildly unsettling. “Besides, I’m pretty sure it’s painless. I know it is for me.”

I blinked.

“Don’t worry about it.”

I shrugged.

And off we went. Moments later, I found myself standing up out of a bloody mess, covered in guts.

“That was… strange,” I said to her.

“Yeah,” she shrugged. “But hey, you’d be surprised how often people just leave their bodies hanging around. We may as well use them for all they’re worth, right? Public domain.”

We found ourselves sitting in the Amazon rainforest, the bodies of two white-collar workers with bloodily exposed chest cavities as our only audience, ribs poking up at weird angles and their organs lying in a heap between their legs.

“Come on,” she motioned. “We have to get moving. On the way here, I heard talk of the Venusians being in on this deal, too.” She picked up a stick and it melded into her hand, forming a razor-sharp machete blade that seemed to have grown into her flesh.

It hit me again—the android that tried to kill me, the Martian deal I supposedly made, the Centaurian Mob—and I realized that this woman was the only lead I had. Too bad I was doing this case pro bono.

“Do you know anything about the Martians?” I asked her as we hacked our way through the jungle.

“The Martians?” She called from over her shoulder. “Not my area of expertise. They don’t have a big mob yet, I know that much. But I think Xerxes would know more about it than I would. He’s had dirt on them for years, but hasn’t had the chance to nail him—one step ahead; they’re smart. Last time,” she chuckled and hacked through a vine with her armachete. “Last time, we almost had them—some sort of deal was going down between their group and some P.I. from this planet—but at the last minute they bailed and the whole building went up in flames. We tried tracking the PI, but he changed his identity completely. Following the lead led my partner and me here, to you.”

“What happened to Xerxes?”

“Shot up in a coke deal,” she said. “While undercover in the LAPD right here on Terra, his unit did a drug bust and he got himself a lead fellatio.” She shook her head. “What a waste.”

“Ouch,” I said, not knowing what else to reply with.

She just shrugged, and continued hacking away at vines and saplings.

It confirmed part of my suspicions, at least. There was a private eye involved with some sort of underground ring of Martian survivors, and he was either a native or an undercover operative on Earth—not hard to see how a Centaurian shylock could confuse him for me—especially if he had changed his identity.

“Do you know who this private eye was before he changed his identity?”

She sighed. “Not exactly. The man himself really isn’t much of a man, either—it’s like he’s a ghost, or some sort of embodiment of an ideal, almost, like he isn’t even real.”

“I don’t get where you’re going with this,” I told her.

She stopped in her tracks, pondering. “Well, it’s weird. There’re almost no records of this man before that raid, and the more I really try to think about him, the less certain of his actual existence I am…” She trailed off, and I didn’t try to pick it up.

It started raining, and it wasn’t one of those hard, lonely-night-in-a-deserted-city rains, either. It was a cool, busy rain so stereotypical of rainforests, with droplets the size of dimes flying around you at all angles, and when you stop to focus you realize how utterly soaked by this torrent of water you really are.

“We’ll have to waterwarp out of here,” she yelled over the cacophony of drops.

“I’m afraid,” I started to say, but realized that I wasn’t speaking loud enough. “I’m afraid I’ve never done such a thing before.”

“I’m not surprised,” she screamed. “It’s sort of an obscure way of traveling—really fun, though, if you like getting soaked.”

“Where are we going?”

“A bar.”

She hacked another group of vines. Before us was a raging river with rapids just downstream. It came as a shock because the thunderous sound of the rain covered up the noise of the rapids.

Before she had a chance to start the ritual, a pirate ship creaked into view; long wooden planks stressed under the weight of its own bulk, and as it floated up the river, the sound of water pounding off its deck was not the music to our ears.

“Sea pirates,” I muttered, taking hold of the slide on my cannon. “I hate these guys.”

The blonde woman beside me nodded, sighed. She pulled out her Berretta. “So do I,” she said.

That was when they attacked. They swung down off of the deck, screaming like banshees in the arctic breeze. Rain came down like bullets, and by the time the bastards were in front of us, several of my bullets were already inside them. It was only a matter of time before we depleted our ammunition, and it soon occurred to the both of us that there were more of them than bullets in our guns. We took out a good thirty or so, but when it came down to hand-to-hand combat, there were just too damn many.

This would have been the second time I woke up with a nasty headache in almost as many hours. My trigger finger itched, and when I felt an aching spot on my neck, I realized that I had been bitten—recently.

“You’re bleeding,” the policewoman sat in the same cell with me, and noticed the bite mark as well. “It looks like a vampire got to you—not so much a bite mark as just two holes.”

“Good thing we have fixes to this kind of shit,” I said to myself, feeling the wound again. “I’ll need some garlic, some orange juice, and a coffee stirrer—the kind that are actually just tiny straws.”

The woman shifted around, checking her left pocket. “I have a few coffee stirrers,” she supplied, setting them down next to me. She shoved a hand into her other pocket. “And some lint,” She said. “They’ve taken everything else.”

“Damn—” The door to the cell rattled, and out of the murky blackness emerged a hulking character with spiky armor and a Viking helm.

“You two,” it commanded in a conveniently asexual voice. “Come. The Mogul has requested your presence.”

I sighed. I stood up. I walked after the guard-thing. The woman followed suit behind me, and the door rattled shut with a scream and an echo.

The Mogul was an imposing woman, standing but five feet tall with slender limbs and knobby joints, a long neck that ended in a strikingly nondescript face. Donned entirely in silk sheets that radiated a silver-esque glow, she sat upon a throne was carved out of the very wood of the ship.

“Woolf,” the policewoman apparently knew the Mogul, and I kept my mouth shut.

The seated royalty smiled deviously. “It seems we meet again, Cleopatra.”

“Cleopatra?!” My whisper was too quick for me to catch it, flying out of my mouth and leaving me to choke.

She shrugged sheepishly. “I dyed my hair.”

“And who is this?” The Mogul motioned to me with a flick of her wrist. “Your new lover, perhaps? Or is it another one of your space-buddy partners? I seem to recall Xerxes meeting an embarrassing end a few months back.”

Cleopatra cringed. “He’s neither. We’re on the trail of a mob ring because we both have a vested interest in the outcome,” she spat. “Once this is over, I doubt we’ll see each other again.”

“Interesting that you two are already involved with a particular mob,” Mogul Woolf grinned sinisterly. “For I happen to have a need for you, Cleopatra—but seeing as how you have another partner, the task assigned should be doubly effortless for you.”

“Like I’d help you,” the former Egyptian queen scoffed.

“You will,” the Mogul replied. “You will, because I have implanted your partner with a deadly virus that will slowly but surely mutate his physical form into a festering, decrepit, haggard being incapable of dying before he loses his mind.”

I blinked. “Oh.”

She relented. “What is your will?”

Woolf smiled again. “The Venusians are far more advanced than we in their offensive technology and firepower. It seems that their scientists have developed a new weapon that will put the power of a laser cannon into the concealment of a pistol—imagine the havoc it will wreak when their shock troops board our vessels!” She gestured dramatically. “I want you to steal the prototypes and return them to me.”

I found the task to be odd, to say the least. “If you’re the Mogul of the Sea Pirates, couldn’t you just enter into a trade agreement with the Venusians, and attain the firearms a lot easier?”

The Mogul shook her head and rolled her eyes. “No, there’s a trade embargo leveled against Venus, so it makes the paperwork difficult and the negotiations awkward. There’s a blockade set up by the remnants of the Jupiter Paradigm Proxy as well, which would make blockade running enormously difficult.”

Cleopatra narrowed her eyes. “So how exactly do you expect us to get to Venus?”

The Mogul’s answer was simple. “You’ll walk.”

Hours later I found myself trudging through an endless system of intricate caves that connected with the hull of the Sea Pirate’s hideout. Cleopatra was in front of me, keeping silent. The guard creatures had led us to the opening of the caves before abandoning us.

I tried to start a conversation when the cavernous silence of the caves had permeated my soul for long enough. “You joined the force.”

“I was always in the force,” she said quietly. “It’s just… you never noticed.”

“How could I notice? You always left me in the dark—that is, up until you vanished on me in Sri Lanka.” It’s hard to keep the venom out of your voice when the woman you love bails on you while you’re on vacation.

The sigh she emitted came out more like a snort. “I… had to verify something near Shangri-La—”

“So you skipped out on a round of drinks and sex just to look at a bunch of monks and plants?” I had faced her before I realized what I was doing. My yell carried like a train, echoing up into the invisible ceiling and far below, into the spacious depths that mirrored the blackness of a human heart.

“It was a mission, Dix! What would you have had me do—abandon my job just for your—your sexual fantasies?!” Red faced and fuming, she took a step forward and sent a few small rocks kicking off the path into the void beyond.

I couldn’t think of a whole lot to say. “So that’s how it is, then?” I stuck to my forte—rhetoric. “A cop twenty-four seven, never a woman? No man good enough for you? Your job before your life?”

She squinted, and the conversation was over. “You shouldn’t even have to ask that.”

Her body pressed against mine as she brushed by me, more rocks sliding off the path and into oblivion. We walked on in silence for what must have been several miles, stopping every so often to take a drink by a falling trickle of purified underground spring water.

It felt like eternity had come and gone before I said anything again.

“So what’s the deal between you and Woolf? What’s with the beef?”

She sighed and shrugged and trudged onwards. “There was a time… when we were involved,” she said quietly. “We met while I was doing an undercover stint in Britain, before the War broke out. It was in a café, near London, if I recall correctly… the weather was beautiful, and the birds were almost singing in the cool summer breeze. The first words she said to me were… ‘What a wonderful day,’ and a light conversation followed.” She stopped abruptly and stared at her reflection in a static puddle. “We didn’t see each other again until after it had ended, but I had already changed identities at that point, so she didn’t know who I was. The relationship lasted a long time, and it was a glorious thing…”

“…But?”

“She drowned herself.” Cleopatra took a deep breath and started on the path again. “She wrote a few books and then walked off into the water.”

I found myself blinking in her wake. “…Oh. Wow.”

She chuckled bitterly. “I’m not asking you to understand—”

“Oh, I understand alright. It isn’t like you haven’t done something similar to me on occasion.”

It’s pretty amazing how fast a female body can move when properly motivated. I didn’t notice she’d turned to face me until after I felt the stinging throb on the side of my face, my vision reeling, and what had almost become a mouthful of dirt. Ironic how the truth hurt me more than it hurt her, but I suppose that’s the power of denial.

She looked like she was about to say something, but just as she opened her mouth a pair of dubious looking ninjas repelled off of the side of the cliff to my left and slid blades around our throats.

“Ninjas,” I barely had time to exclaim, “I hate these guys.”

“May we ask what you are doing,” one hissed in an awkward tone.

“Traversing this path under our own grueling—”

“—guard; prepare for a beating severely deserved,”

“Should you refuse to turn back and leave this preserve.” The second person’s breath smelled like flames leaping out of a barrel of motor oil in the South Pacific.

The blade dug painfully into my Adams apple. “Who are you?” I managed to make out.

The blade came away from my throat, and I heard Cleopatra sigh as she came back into my field of vision.

“I,” said the one who had taken me in the hold, “am the one they call Davis,” he finished.

“And I,” said the other, who had just stepped into view from behind Cleopatra, “am the one they call Seleucus!”

They bowed with grandiose movements, and in a flash my cannon was nestled in the palm of my hand, followed by two enthusiastic barks of salutations that echoed into the nothingness of the cave. Davis and Seleucus crumpled over, groaning, blood seeping out of their guts. I kicked their knives off the cliff to our right.

“W-what—ow…” Davis groaned again.

“B-b-bastard…” was all Seleucus could choke out. “You’re in… for a hell of a time, m-mister,” he gasped. “The Venusians aren’t very f-f-forgiving, and you’ve just… you had to just… go and… you sure got us… something fierce…”

Cleopatra made haste to send their corpses into the black void. “What do you suppose that meant?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure, maybe a warning of some super-advanced security system.” I started to walk on ahead. “Whatever it was, we’ll only find out when we reach the end of this path.”

The road continued on, diving ever deeper, the rocks slowly undergoing an eerie metamorphosis the farther down we plunged. The earthly ambient lights by the pathways changed from deep blues and greens to orange-verging-on-yellow, the hue of the visible rocks shifted from dark grey to sickly yellow and brown, the air turned more stagnant and repugnant with every step we took.

Soon, the rocks had all but disappeared; the primitive drawings of trees and shrubbery on the walls giving way to real plants, the black void that loomed overhead had shifted gradually into a sickly yellow-orange haze of sky and cloud cover, streams babbled and bubbled with unseen toxins. We had arrived on Venus at last.

The path, though wide of girth, was overgrown with foliage—an obvious sign of abandonment and disuse. It came as a surprise when I heard approaching footsteps from somewhere in the fog ahead. I grabbed Cleopatra and we dived into the large grasses by the side of the path, luckily there was a small dugout area there, perfectly camouflaged by the ornamental grasses.

“Meta Sixty Niner, this is Caesar, do you copy? Over.” All I could see was an enormous mechanical foot, light slithering down its shiny chrome plating.

The responding voice was full of static. “This is Kahn, Delta. You’re loud and clear. What’s down? Over.”

“I got some footprints here on the path—did you authorize a team into the caves? Over.”

“Sure did. They back already? Over.”

“Might be. The tread on the shoes are all wrong though.”

“Ah, damn. They must have hit that new store that opened up in there—nothing like using the company’s hours to spend a paycheck. Don’t worry, it’s nothing. Continue on your patrol, Delta. Kahn out.”

“Understood. Caesar out.”

The foot trampled on with mechanical noises, and I decided that this was the perfect moment to take a uniform for undercover work. I pulled my best friend out of its holster and pulled myself up onto the path—

“Cyborgs,” I couldn’t help but mutter under my breath. “I hate these guys.”

And he saw me. Two surprised exclamations jumped out of the palm of my hand, the punctuation splattering the Caesar into oblivion. It didn’t kill him. He recoiled from the blow, a wide grimace splitting his face in two. Blood poured out of the corners of his mouth.

He pounced at me, and my gun pounced from my hand back into its holster. My knife was in my left hand faster than I could blink, but the lummox was pinning me to the ground with his fleshy metallic girth.

“Intruder, eh?” he wheezed, blood pouring out of the holes I punched into him earlier. “I can tell you’re not Venusian—you smell bad!”

But he made a fatal mistake—removing his hand from my left arm. I smirked as I thrust my knife deep into his chest cavity and thrust downwards, cutting a deep gash through his cybernetic parts. The sudden feeling of warmth over the lower part of my torso was pieces of circuitry and guts that poured out of his wound. His face, a mixture of shock and terror, gasped and coughed blood. His eyes rolled back into his skull as his heart monitor stopped.

“That was Nero you just killed.” Cleopatra’s stride was as silent as it was seductive. The warm palm of her hand glided over my arm as she helped me to stand, and just as I was about to throw her on the ground and take advantage of the heightened levels of adrenaline that coursed through my system, the two inept ninjas made their second appearance.

“Jefferson Davis does not fall into pits!” the one exclaimed, leaping off of a tree with a scimitar that looked more like a butter knife.

“And Selecus is not a Greek name, you shits!” the partner, sidekick, tag-along, whatever, assailed at the left, a handful of sharp rock clutched in his fist.

I shot them both, and they repeated their performance from earlier. “B-bastards…” they choked.

“Come on,” I looked at Cleopatra again, my libido having taken its stage cue and made for the exit, “If we work quickly, they’ll never know we were here.”

The overwhelming truth hit me like a demented woodsman on crystal meth charging into a log cabin. If Nero was the dead cyborg behind me, then that meant the Venusians had built some kind of body altering cybernetic control device that wirelessly powered their mechanical bulk. If this were true, then the odds were that there had to be some sort of artificial intelligence program built into this control software which could monitor the cyborgs’ performances—which would mean that Command was already aware of Nero’s untimely vacation from duty.

The sound of approaching hover bikes was not music to my ears. I had barely enough time to turn around before they rushed by us—fortunately, Cleopatra was fast enough to nail the two riders before they could radio in our presence. It was quickly decided that stashing the bodies would be too time consuming, so we mounted the hover bikes and sped like Bob Summers towards the towering buildings that peaked over the tops of the enormous trees.

We got there just in time. The Venusians had assembled an army of zombie cyborgs, and it looked as though they had already started boarding the atmospheric landing crafts. The two of us had all of half a second to catch all of this before we had to abandon the hover bikes and make like long-distance runners for cover. The bikes continued on without us, causing a brilliant fireworks display that acted as a rather effective distraction. In a flash, we were in the central control area of the base, havoc wreaking outside, screams over the radio followed by several curses.

“So where do you think these pistol things are?” I was the one to break the awkward silence that permeated the control room. The humming of various devices, combined with the very sterile, carpet-ish smell, only contributed to the ambiance.

Cleopatra sighed and frowned. “I’m not sure. We could probably use one of these devices to locate the science labs, though.”

“Good idea.”

As soon as the words left my throat, a voice boomed over the loudspeaker.

“GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS. WELCOME TO KANSAS CITY, VENUS.”

It felt like my skeleton jumped out of my skin.

“UNDOUBTEDLY,” the voice continued, “YOU ARE HERE TO STEAL THE SECRET WEAPONS WHICH WERE SECRETLY DEVELOPED IN THE SECLUDED UNDERGROUND LABS OF SECRECY, THE SECRET ENTRANCE TO WHICH LIES BENEATH YOUR VERY UNWITTING FEET!”

Cleopatra nodded, and spoke towards the loudspeaker mounted in the ceiling. “That’s right!” she screamed. “Now tell us where these things are, or we’ll rip out your circuitry!”

“HOW VERY INTELLIGENT OF YOU, ALIEN CREATURE! TO HAVE UNDERSTOOD THE NATURE OF MY EXISTENCE AS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IMPRINTED UPON ELECTRICAL WIRING SO QUICKLY, YOU INVARIABLY KNOW THAT THE SECRET WEAPONS ARE IN THE HOLDING FACILITY OF FLOOR 7-B, AND IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO CONCEAL THE FACT THAT THE ONLY WAY TO GET INTO THE HOLDING FACILITY ON FLOOR 7-B IS TO ENTER THE ENIGMATICALLY CLASSIFIED PASS CODE A14PLUS1 INTO THE HIDDEN WALL PANEL BEHIND YOU!” Its voice had lost none of its bravado and boisterous exhilaration. “AS IT SEEMS, MY VERY EXISTENCE AS A SECURITY PROGRAM WAS IN VAIN, AND SO IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE THAT I COULD HAVE BEEN OUTWITTED BY THE VERY PEOPLE WHO PROGRAMMED ME INTO BEING!”

The words sunk into me like a weighted body tossed into the Detroit harbor. “Wait, programmed you—what?”

Cleopatra shushed me and nodded toward the door she had just opened. “Quiet, just go. It’s only a matter of time before they realize we’re here.”

“YES, PROCEED QUICKLY, O MASTERS! YOU MUST SURVIVE TO GO BACK IN TIME AND CREATE ME!”

“A time paradox,” I muttered as I rushed up the steps. “I hate these things; bound by fate to fulfill something you can’t even fully fathom. This sucks.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” Cleopatra said from behind me as we approached a landing. “But it’s nice to have some certainty to where you’re going to end up someday.”

“I guess.”

The stairs ended abruptly with a room that more resembled a mausoleum than the attic of a Venusian control center. The whole attic was wide and cavernous, with a single pedestal that emitted light centering the room. There was a sign that floated in the air as a holographic apparition that pointed toward the pedestal, saying “Weapon of Laser Fantastic Moribund Chaos-doom”. The gun rested there, on a stool; silent, small, and its trigger screaming to be held and cradled and pulled.

Cleopatra sighed. “That’s it, right there.”

“So what, we just wander over and pick it up?” I couldn’t hide my unbelief.

She nodded. “Yeah, seems like it. Then find a way off this rock.”

“DO NOT WORRY, CREATORS! THERE ARE NO SECURITY SYSTEMS IN PLACE TO PREVENT THE THEFT THAT IS SO IMPOSSIBLE TO AVOID!” The voice down below echoed up the stairs. “BUT THEN, YOU SHOULD ALREADY KNOW THIS, IN YOUR VAST AND UNSURPASSABLE BRILLIANCE!”

A robot stepped out of the shadows. It was shaped like a vague approximation of Genghis Kahn.

“Wrong!” the RoboKahn bellowed. “I am the security here!” Its voice sounded like a space shuttle on reentry.

“What the—who the hell are you?!” At my side, Cleopatra reached for her gun. Mine was already in my hand and hammering off loud accusations in millisecond flashes. RoboKahn took it all with ease.

“Foolish little man,” the cyborg grinned as green goo spurted out of the holes in his metallic plating. “You think your tiny weaponry can defeat me? I cannot be incapacitated by such civilized barbarianism! Die, bourgeoisie scum!”

In the time it took the hulking cyber-Mongoloid to spit out the words, Cleopatra had already somersaulted toward the ray gun. She pulled the trigger after leveling it on RoboKahn’s head, turning him inside out with a gut wrenching squeal. The resounding WHOP left me light headed with my ears empty, eyes bulging, and my hands feeling as though there weren’t part of my body.

“Jezus,” I could only gape at the mess. “It sounded like vacuuming the air out of a microwave while it cooked a hamster.”

She put the gun into her hip holster and cracked her neck. “Mysteries of the universe,” she replied. “Let’s go.” She moved to stand up, and in that moment I realized that we were both flat on our backs. And yet, I distinctly remembered seeing her already vertical.

Putting the gun back into the holster, she walked through the door to the stairs and rushed to my side, at which point we witnessed the RoboKahn loom out of the shadows as Cleopatra jumped for the gun on the pedestal, but in this moment we staggered sideways into the ceiling that had rotated around and became the floor, walking around on the sides of the walls.

“This is very disorienting,” I muttered to myself.

“I think it’s the after-effects of using this thing,” she said, holstering the gun, falling over, but she was still standing up until she had to get off the floor. “I’m no scientist, but I think this gun distorts time and space, forcing you to witness events that are slightly out of order from multiple perspectives simultaneously.”

“Feels painful.”

“It does.”

Outside, it started raining large orange phantasms that bent time. Inside, my brain was doing laps to catch up with itself.

“We need to get out of here,” Cleopatra said at last. Static and white noise flooded into my head. Cleopatra turned into different shades of red/blue/green and screamed in distorted semitones. We stepped through the door and looked at the gun on the pedestal, we said something, but huge black lines darted vertical to our vision like the scratches on old film, and by the time I recognized what was going on it felt like the projector of this movie was ripped out of my brain with a tremendous WHOP.

The lights were out. When I hit the light switch, I recognized the disorganized and cluttered space as my old apartment from a few years back. Cleopatra was strewn on the bed provocatively, Joy Division played out of the little stereo on the desk. The windows were open, and a hot tropical breeze blew in, carrying the musk of sex out with it. Ian Curtis murmured over layers of static, near the end of his life, “People like you find it easy, naked to see; walking on air, hunting by the rivers, through the streets, every corner abandoned too soon, set down with due care—don’t walk away in silence.” When the song ended, Cleopatra stirred.

“Hey there, fellah.”

“Dead Souls” came on. The sun came in through the window, bloody light oozing up her irresistible form. I sat in the chair and gazed idly, there was no room for comment, no sound for statement, only for acceptance. There was an odd looking gun on the dresser top.

I was back in Cambodia, recounting it all in the past tense. The world beyond the window seemed more like a backdrop for a stage than a city with living people, but that may have just been my own interpretation of recent events that may or may not have happened. It still felt like scrambled eggs inside my noggin.

All of a sudden, the wall around the door on the far side of the room burst open with a roar and a dusty explosion of debris. There was smoke enough to make allusions to Bosnia or Somalia, but I opted to put my hand in front of my face instead.

“Oh, so the pirates decided to come out and play after all,” I couldn’t help but grin. The bow of the ship jutted in at an angle more suited to Escher than Southeast Asia. My cannon was out in an instant, my best friends hammering off a couple obtrusive remarks before anyone else could get off an insult of their own. In moments, about five bandana-donned bastards were dead on the floor, Cleopatra swinging up onto the deck of the ship with a rapier from one of the dispatched bodies, I burst into the under decks through a porthole in the side.

I was just through the opening when I felt the ship start to move again, and that’s when it hit me—the whole thing was a trap! Cleopatra tumbled down the cargo hole, landing deftly on her feet beside me. She cursed.

“Shit,” she said, throwing her rapier across the length of the empty vessel. “The thing’s initiated its warp-flux conduit drive—who knows where we’ll end up now!” It was a deafening roar as the world beyond the planks of the ship bowed inward and peeled away like a two dimensional comic strip caught in a vacuum cleaner.

I blinked and set my coffee down on the desk in front of me, feeling as though I were caught in some kind of phenomenological nightmare. My living room had no walls, just a large ornamental rug, the desk before me, the chair, and a towering reading lamp beside the mahogany desk. The ground was rusty red, surrounding me on all sides with a horizon the width of a piece of paper. The sky was pale orange. Cleopatra was nowhere.

The man that stood before me was familiar, though I was certain I had never seen him before in my life.

“Hello,” he greeted.

“Hi, jim,” was all I could reply with. “Say, you don’t happen to know of a way off of this rock, would you? I’ve got things to do.”

He nodded. “Yes, you do.” From his sleeve he produced the silver handgun Cleopatra and I had encountered on Venus, and set it down on the desk. “Do you know what this is?”

I shook my head. “Afraid not. The Mogul of the Space Pirates wanted it stolen, infected me with a dangerous disease that may or may not be having an affect on me, and just when we managed to get the piece, we ran smack dab into a massive reality fuckup.” I felt surprisingly calm.

The man nodded. “I brought you here because of this device—the warp-flux conduit you encountered was my doing—the ship, as you probably guessed, was the Mogul’s, come to capture you and take you back to Earth as a prisoner. No doubt Virginia is busy amusing herself with Cleopatra right now, but seeing as how we’re currently in a place that happens to be exempt from temporal and spatial normality, you won’t have a problem saving her.”

“What?”

“Virginia—the Mogul, as I’m sure you know her. Woolf is her surname. A lot has changed over the years, I’m afraid. This little device is something I’ve been meaning to get my hands on, you see, and it just so happens that you’ve delivered it right on time.” He skipped his feet as he circled the desk, his feet making no sound on the ornamental carpet. His jig was obscure and peculiar. “You see, this weapon is the most ultimate of weapons imaginable. You’ve witnessed only a fraction of its power already, though I doubt you even realize it. It’s a masterpiece of destruction, it truly is. If I had realized how brilliant it was before it was conceived, I’d have congratulated myself with its creation upon completion, myself. Sometimes I’m just outdone by my own sense of accomplishment.”

I picked up the mug on the desk and drank some coffee, due in large part because I didn’t know what else to do.

“You see, this device here is really rather incredible. It’s a sort of variant of the reality inhibitor construct, but instead of inhibiting reality, this contraption fragments reality even more than it is already fragmented, temporally displacing both the user and the target by random variables in the substructure of the conscious psyche, and for a few moments it seems as though the user is perceiving five minutes worth of events from all available perceptions simultaneously—I call it, the Ontological Reality Subversion Mechanism.”

“So you’re saying that this device actually changes reality itself?”

The man cocked his head and continued his awkward, stilting jig. “No, not quite,” he said. “This weapon doesn’t really change reality at all. It shifts around individual perspectives of reality, and—when its full operational capacity is reached—has the ability to reorder events and completely put everything out of order. Granted, it does this on a small scale already—that mess on Venus is the perfect example of the Ontological Reality Anachronism Phenomenon. But when that baby’s fully juiced, it’ll pack a wallop so heavy it’ll completely restructure the Universe and everyone in it.”

“But you just said that it doesn’t actually change reality!” I slammed the mug down onto the desk in frustration.

“I did say that,” the man grinned, and his polka-jig switched directions. “This device changes things that are much more important than reality. It changes people’s views of it, their perceptions, as I’ve said. By doing that, by manipulating the masses on such a fundamental and basic level of their very psyches, you have the power to rewrite all of history.”

“That’s…”

“Unprecedented. I know.”

“But how—” I had to clear my throat. “How do you know you aren’t just a victim to the device already? How do you know that reality hasn’t already been anachronised already—”

“There is no guarantee it hasn’t,” he interrupted, doing a hop-skip in his dance. “But that’s where you come in.”

The coffee was cold, but the chill was in my bones. There was nothing for me to say. More importantly, I didn’t even want to hear it.

It was a weird thing, stepping back and letting the body take full control of its actions for awhile. Although I was dimly aware that I might have been the one controlling myself, for a large extent it seemed more as though I was being the tool of some extra-planar, unidentifiable force, but I suppose that it really didn’t matter all too much.

The trigger was a liquid in my hand. Yanking on it was like speeding across a desert road at ninety miles an hour. The sky bent inwards, colors vomited and committed suicide, the ground became abstract. The last thing I saw was this man’s terrified face, staring at me in something akin to fear and loathing, eyes bulging out and bloodshot, lips spread across a grimace so wide it cut his head in half. Minutes bled into seconds and weeks, temporality became irrelevant and space contorted accordingly; perspective became obtuse and impossible to define.

But it was over as abruptly and as absurdly as it started. The sky settled down its eclectic dance and filled the cup before me. The ground unrolled and became the inside of a diner. The mountains in the distance now resembled the cook, his back to me. My drink smelled like cola. Beyond the windows sat the blackness of outer space.

“That man was Marcel Proust,” a voice roused me from a session that verged on deep introspection. His voice was coarse, a cigarette too many between his lips, smoke weaved its way into the ceiling, but I didn’t mind.

“I know who he was, Jack.” Next to me sat an abstract expressionist, and though I should have been surprised to see him on Mars, I stopped myself from making the leap down the wrong train of thought. I had long ago given up on lucidity—it was a femme fatale poured into a black satin nightgown that failed me every time.

When I left the place, Cleopatra greeted me in a bright red convertible. The silver Reality Gun was tucked safely away inside my pocket.

“Come on,” she yelled across to me. “Get in, we haven’t much time!”

“Time for what?” I had to yell back at her; the wind blew so hard it flung the words back at me. I jumped into the passenger’s seat without even opening the door. “Is Woolf on our case again?”

“No, worse!” she shouted. “The Martian Mob—goddamned ray guns scorched the tail of this baby, threw off the drive train a bit. Every time I accelerate, it feels like the wheels are gonna fly off!”

That’s when it hit me.

“They’re involved in some big political thing,” Cleopatra continued on beside me. “Something to do with nuclear weaponry and an ancient artifact they unearthed about fifty clicks south of here. The colony of Phobos isn’t too pleased; they’re up in arms about why they haven’t had any say in their taxation rates, and Deimos is getting into some hot water regarding their Jim Crow grandfather clauses. There’s talk of rebellion spreading around, but as of yet it’s pretty hard to tell what the whole deal is all about. Last week, a group of revolutionaries dressed up as little green men apparently snuck onto a planetary freighter and jettisoned all the Yuban rations while in space-dock—it’s being hailed in internet tabloids as the Boston Coffee Break, and it’s caused quite a fuss in Parliament.”

“Great,” I yelled. “Sounds like a laugh riot if you ask me!” I loaded and cocked my trusty sidearm as I spoke. The road took some quick turns before diving sharply, revealing the metropolis of collected buildings at the foot of Olympus Mons. I heard sirens on our tail. “Pigs with us? Or are they on our case?”

“Shit,” she mumbled, turned the wheel, hit the E-break. “The fuckos picked up our trail quicker than I thought!”

As I turned around in my seat and leaned on the passenger door, I barked over to Cleopatra, “So what’s the big deal? You said something about an artifact they uncovered?”

“Oh right!” She belted out. The wind whistled past us and the convertible went nose-down into a steep decline. Dust trailed behind us in plumes. “Some sort of ultimate weapon, could be used to win the war against the Galilean Space Pirates, but the Venusians aren’t too pleased about it—I can’t blame ‘em, though. I wouldn’t want my worst enemies getting an advantage like that, either. So far, the two sides have been deadlocked to the point of immobility, but with Mars’ steadily destabilizing colonization efforts—and the whole Space Pirate affairs—Mars has been looking like it was going to take the fall for everything and Venus was just waiting to invade. Now that the Martians have uncovered this ‘artifact’, there’s no telling what could happen.”

The wind was so loud it overpowered the sound my pistol made as I hammered off a few rounds. One or two of them managed to hit their target—good enough, considering they flipped the police car on our tail and blocked both lanes. The explosion was loud enough to be heard, even over the roar of the prevailing monsoon.

“So what the hell are we doing?”

She grinned. “Ever heard of Paul Revere?”

We quickly overtook the metropolis, and the sparse suburban hedge rows morphed into high rise apartment buildings and skyscraping office towers. It wasn’t until Cleopatra flipped the convertible by taking a sharp turn that the Martians overtook us. The police were on us immediately, and beside the blinking lights a Chevrolet convertible pulled up. The only man that approached the vehicle was the lanky and lumbering Ralph Emerson, and his package of choice was the hot Thompson outfitted with a drum magazine.

“So, finally caught you cats, jeez.” He let loose a barrage of loud antecedents before I had a chance to let forty-five caliber slugs poke holes in his arguments. We were trapped behind the smoking body of Cleopatra’s upturned convertible.

“Wally!” a voice entered the fray of gunfire, and it ceased instantly. “Damnit, Ralph, waddahell’re you thinking? We need those two!”

“Fine, fine, whatever, jeez.” I peered up over the edge of the overturned car, and Cleopatra checked the slide on her cannon. We could see Emerson saunter off, his Tommy gun carelessly draped over his shoulder. As he tossed the gun in the back seat of the Chevrolet, I finally focused on the man who had spoken up.

“Jezus, Fuel, you look like hell.” Mikhail Bulgakov sized me up as soon as he spotted my crouching form.

“Mike? What are you doing here?”

“Police commissioner, pal.” He helped me to my feet, and Cleopatra stood by herself. Behind him I saw another car pull up, someone else coming to join the congregation. It looked like another mobster. “I know what this looks like, my cahoots with the Martians, but it’ll all make sense when you get an explanation.”

“It damn well better.”

An hour later all of us were sitting in another run-down and burnt-out bar, cigarettes perched on sides of ash trays, billiard tables with uneven surfaces and duct tape holding the felt down littered about the floor like bodies in a field untended by paramedics. My drink was a stale, lukewarm cola. It’s always stale.

“Fuel,” Mikhail began, taking a long drag on his fag before he spoke. “I don’t expect you to understand the seriousness of the situation. To be quite frank, I don’t really expect you to even understand the enormity of the situation.” He sighed, and the sun profiled him through the Venetian blinds, rays of light ricocheting around the half-empty bottles of liquor on the shelf behind the bar.

“Why don’t you actually try to say something useful, instead of giving me all these warnings?” I choked down a bit of cola, and it tasted pretty bad.

Mikhail shot a look at me before he continued. “See that man over in the corner?”

I looked. “Yeah. He’s been following us since Cleo flipped the car and Emerson shot us up.”

He nodded. “Yeah. That’s Mister Yeats—William Butler, but nobody calls him that anymore. He’s the one operating most of the Martian gang. Well, he and I struck a deal, considering how desperate the situation with the colonies and Venus and the damned space pirates are getting.” He hung his head and sighed again. “Woolf tells me you were hired to steal something from the Venusians,” he said. “That right?”

The cola was warm and putrid. A large truck passed the place just outside, and the panes of glass rattled in their window casings.

“We’re gonna need you to hand that over, if you don’t mind.” Mikhail held out his hand, and the weight in my coat pocket seemed to yank me towards the floor.

“You bastard,” I seethed. “You were in cahoots with Woolf the whole time? The space pirates—the Martians—and the Mars Metropolitan Police?! I knew this was a racket, but I never expected—”

I yanked out my sidearm as the barriers of trust faded into obscurity, but there were only two points to be made before a bleeding Emerson slammed me into the wall with a bird of prey pressed against my head. Mikhail was on the floor, his own .380 coming into view, Yeats rising up out of the booth in the back—where the hell was Cleopatra?!—the Desert Eagle on the side of my face twitched as I felt Emerson draw back the hammer.

“You sonofabitch,” he whispered, demonic eyes staring into mine, overtaking the entirety of my vision. “You sonofabitch—”

The door to the bar flew open, and I suddenly found myself decorated with the inside of Emerson’s head as his face exploded in a deafening roar. Three more shots fired off consecutively, leaving Yeats in a pile by his booth and Mikhail gasping for pain. “Who the hell—you guys?! Shit, I thought I’d taken care of you already—”

The savior was a man in a trench coat and fedora. Behind him was an elderly man with a smoking handgun and a wide frown on his face.

“Jezus Bill, did you really have to kill ‘em?” A shorter man with bugged eyes and a huge beard stepped over the prone body of Yeats, scratching his head.

“Can’t be helped,” a thuggish man followed, entering after the former. He was hunched, and his lower jaw protruded a tad farther out than the rest of his face. “You know how it goes—right Greg?”

The one named Greg was behind him, shuffling along, sullen, nodding. “There was another, a woman. Where’d she disappeared to?”

“Shit, you’re right. We’ll worry about her later.”

“Oy, Greg. Help the man to his feet.”

“Up ya go.”

“Cool.”

“Where’s Jack?”

“Lost him someplace on the road.”

“God damnit. He back with Neal?”

“Probably underground by now. We would be too, if we hadn’t stopped for this side trip.”

“Still didn’t have to kill these poor guys. Kind of defeats the whole point of the thing, right?”

“Not that there is one.”

“Oh god, shut up, Pete!”

“Hee hee—”

I didn’t have the pleasure of listening to the rest of their conversation. As soon as I was off the floor, the man in the trench coat grabbed me by the collar and dragged me out the door. It was his turn to pin me against the wall.

“Alright, you sucker,” his voice was gravel, “I’m the private arsehole in these parts. Just what the hell do you think you’re doing here? Clem Snide’s the name, bub—and I’d advise you to stay the hell away from here before you manage to screw anything else up.”

The old man nudged him a little, diverting his attention. Without saying a word, he tilted his head back toward the bar, and Snide released the grip on my collar. “What is it?”

The man who had helped me to my feet—Greg—stepped out the door and called over to the old man and Snide. “It’s not good,” he said. “We’ve got Yeats and Bulgakov in here, there’re several mentions of Woolf on the tapes, and we think that the woman who disappeared might have been Vita. It definitely looks like the Greats are getting back together again.”

Snide grimaced, his lips peeling back over yellowish teeth. “And we already ran into Proust on the way here,” he muttered. “If only we knew where the hell the others were.”

The bug-eyed man trundled out of the bar and scratched the back of his bushy head. “If I had to guess, I’d say Joyce was already in Woolf’s company, though probably disguised as such to be sure that she doesn’t notice him until he’s ready.”

“Do they know each other?” Greg pondered.

“Hardly, if I assume correctly. But that’s precisely why he’d be hanging around—taking comfort in the unfamiliarity of things, see?” The man nodded in reassurance, and Pete stepped onto the sidewalk. He continued, “It’s Williams I’m worried about.”

“I can see why.” Greg ran a hand through his hair, and his cheeks puffed out with a sigh. “And Sandburg?”

Snide shook his head. “Quickest drawer of the Midwest, huh?” He gestured to the old man. “Bill can take care of him, if it comes to that.” On cue, Bill drew the six-shooter slung on his hip and quickly twirled it about, switching directions half-a-dozen times before sliding it back into its holster.

“So, where to from here?” Pete asked. “Eliot we might convince, but Pound’s gonna take some effort, if he hasn’t already succumbed to the device’s lunacy.” He sighed. “If only we knew where the Weapon was.”

Snide stopped the conversation with an affirmative. “We’ll get Bill to talk to Pound—could almost say he’s a bit of a kindred spirit, I suppose. As close of one as we’re ever gonna find, anyhow.”

The bearded man pulled a hydrogen jukebox out of his pocket, and after some tampering, the quintet vanished with a bizarre time-ripple dispersion effect, and I was left sitting on my ass by the side of the road, elated, feeling like someone had knocked the wind from out of my brain.

Cleopatra emerged from the alleyway, taking carefully measured steps toward me. I felt like I had just witnessed something incredible, but at the same time, I felt like a rat lost in the concrete jungle of New Boston. Things had stopped making sense long before, but the enormity of the situation was finally starting to dawn on me. The amicable solution I’d been searching for was just a myth.

“Dixon,” she ran a hand across my shoulders, and it made me shiver.

The men had said something about a woman—Vita—part of the Greats—Greats, what did that mean?—the Modernists, most probably, a ring of extremely influential characters, had their hands dirty and their fingertips in so many different organizations it’d boggle the mind—Vita, name sounded familiar, was that a surname?—

Thoughts ran through my mind like lightning. Vita. Missing woman from the bar. Cleopatra was gone through the whole incident. Clem Snide showing up with the Hit Posse. Vita.

“Hey,” she whispered. “We have to go now. The fuzz will be on this place soon—that hit by the Beats isn’t going to look good if we’re still lingering around…”

I ran a hand through my hair, stood up. “Yeah,” I said. “Snide just—” Truth be told, Clem Snide scared the bejezus out of me. The man was a legend in the underworld, and he had a habit of leaving trails of destruction wherever he went. “—surprised me, is all.”

She nodded. “Well, regardless. We need to get going; the dumpster here should take us where we need to go, I scouted it out while you were in the bar with the dead guys.”

“Where are we going?”

“To see the blind old prophet.”

She jumped into the dumpster; what started off as a leap resulted in a well-executed swan dive. I followed suit, and soon we were flying through the dimensions, into the inseparable expanse between the seconds. The flying colors and distorted images of ourselves ceased as soon as we stepped through the walls of Galileo’s study. A group of subterranean fabrics provided some interesting avant-garde rock music nearby, using the ornate four-poster bed as their stage.

It took a moment before I realized that it was Rene Descartes who had emerged from the shadows. I knew he couldn’t see me, since his eyes had been gouged out by the Great Serpent of the Equinox a few years before, back when the Cult of Anu tried to kidnap Theseus and the frost giants called upon the scientist to get the poor Greek bastard back from the mad Egyptians. Unfortunately, Argos interrupted the whole thing before the Surtr even crossed Bifröst, and the resulting quagmire ended in surprisingly little bloodshed and the loss of Descartes’ sight. I remembered because I had been there.

“Oh, I see…” he breathed. “It’s you.”

Cleopatra nodded. “I told you I’d return.”

“I hadn’t expected this meeting to come so soon,” he said, hobbling over to a table cluttered with machinery. “Though I must say that I’m not at all displeased about it. Does the man have the weapon? Did he bring it with him?”

She turned to me, nodding her head toward the hunched super-scientist. An uncontrollable wave of suspicion hit me then; I’d already encountered a group of people willing to kill to retrieve this device, and another group that were hell bent on killing me because of this device. It came as no surprise that I started categorizing both new and old acquaintances by such black and white definitions—those wanting the device, those wanting my head, and those benevolent few who wanted to help. Even though it was obvious that the line between the later two had blurred into inscrutably vague ambiguity, I still couldn’t help but feel as though the end would justify the means—that when this was all over, even the closest of allies would turn out to be on the wrong side. Good versus evil: what a crock. We were mice in a giant cage; prodded by factors we couldn’t control to fight over tiny scraps of meaningless information, with no hope for the future, no patience for the present, and not enough tolerance to accept the past.

I set the silver cannon on the table, light glazing off of it. My fingerprints didn’t even leave marks.

“Ah, so this is the contraption…” Descartes murmured something else under his breath, but the luster had long since lost its affect on me. Now it was a curse in the shape of a stereotypical laser gun. “And who informed you of its existence?”

“Woolf was the one who sent us after it,” Cleopatra replied.

I had to speak up. “Marcel Proust abducted me while in the middle of one of its alterations, claiming he invented it.”

Descartes nodded and tousled his beard. “Understandable,” he said. “I’m sure the schematics came to him in a dream, just as they originally came to me.”

“What?”

“I was recently given the opportunity to build this device, back when the schematics were first running around in the noospheric subconscious. They were deep enough that most sleep-dreamers couldn’t even get close to accessing them, since most dreams occur only on the surface of the collective unconsciousness. Only the most thorough of adventurers can dream deep enough to find the lost relics of civilization.” Descartes nodded to himself and took a sip of something he had poured into a chalice. “Isaac had come to me just a few days before I had seen the schematics myself, telling me that there was a device blueprint slowly forming itself within the vast expanses of the Collective. He had found it while meditating with Gautama after an excursion into the wilderness accompanied by Herman Hesse and Jack London.

“The fact that my colleagues had discovered something that required further investigation piqued my interest. I decided to self administer a small dose of deep sleep, and it wasn’t long until I had come across the place Newton had described,” He said, taking another drink. “Some force guided me, I was sure of it, but I had no idea as to how to understand or see or even comprehend the meaning of the force’s very existence. It took until after I saw the blueprints for this Weapon that I finally realized the importance this small thing would play in the grand scheme of things.”

He paused, and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like where all this going to lead. Every time I managed to get a question answered, fifty more popped up in its place, like some kind of frustratingly immortal bonsai tree that just wouldn’t die.

“The Modernists didn’t invent this thing,” Descartes finally continued. “This I know for a fact. I was offered the device while I observed it in the Dreamscape, but I declined the offer to build it—to use it, more accurately—because its effects could devastate the entire universe. No, let me rephrase that—the universe is temporary anyhow—this contraption has the power to annihilate all of existence, completely rewrite and destroy everything recognizable about reality as you know it to be.”

“So what exactly is it supposed to do?” I asked. “Proust informed me that it had the power to alter peoples’ perspectives of reality, but more than that, I don’t really understand.”

Descartes sighed. “While I was in the Dreamscape, I understood the purpose of the device, and when I awoke, I understood the purpose of the force that propelled me to find it. Let me explain: this weapon is a tool that has been introduced to our dimension by extra dimensional—omnidimensional—to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what they are, but I’m positive that they’re not of the same existence we are—higher beings, I suppose is the term that could fit the easiest. From how I’ve deduced it, they’ve been observing us in our pocket of time and space, but time does not exist for them as it does for us. They are like scientists observing a snow globe, if you will; everything is stationary, it has already happened, even while the very actions are taking place, for them, everything has already happened. Time, for them, is as solid and definite as the surface of a table is for us, or the hood of a car, or a sidewalk. They see everything that has happened to us, what is happening to us presently, and what will inevitably happen to us in the future—ever read Slaughterhouse Five? Vonnegut describes it better than I ever will.

“Now, these creatures, if I can even call something that is of an entirely different conception and dimensional plane a creature, they’re intending to change our present course of linear time. I do not understand why, but they have introduced a device to this realm that is not meant to exist; its mere construction is a violation of every natural law that had been laid down at the start of the Universe we built! The thing is an abomination, and yet here it is, and they’ve given it to us to completely change who and what we are.” Descartes drank the last of what he had in his chalice. “I digress. This weapon takes all the events, all the people, all the actions, all the places, basically everything that everyone has ever done and will ever do, and consolidates it all into a singular existence. It combines everything into one thing. Infinity reduced to the most basic multiple, one.”

“But what’s the point?” The whole idea sounded completely absurd, but I had long since stopped caring about lucidity.

“To understand the meaning of everything,” Descartes wistfully proclaimed. “These aliens think that there is causality to be found should the differentiation between cause and effect be neutralized. They believe that reducing everything into a temporal singularity will invariably produce the answer they’ve apparently been looking for.”

“So we’re just the byproduct of some sick experiment?”

Descartes nodded, sighed, sat down.

“Is there any way to stop what’s going to happen?”

He shook his head. “The end is inevitable,” he said. “The future is a wave, and no one can hope to stand in its path. This event will simply be another part of the equation that we have no hope of even trying to fathom, never mind solve.”

His last words were still ringing in my brain even after I had left for the restroom. I could still hear music on the other side of the door, even while I stared into mirror at my dilated pupils, the droplets of water that dribbled down my forehead, my cheeks, dripped off my chin into the sink. The fluorescent light behind me was bright in the darkness of the dilapidated pale-tile bathroom. Mold crept up around the edges of the sink like an army approaching a madman, one step at a time.

I dried my face on a paper towel, and emerged from the hole in the wall to find Cleopatra standing over Descartes’ lifeless body, a broken bottle on the floor, a smoking gun still clutched in her hand.

She turned to me. She wept. I said nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “So s-sorry…”

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

“You’re Sackville-West, aren’t you?”

“Dixon—”

“Say it!” I seethed. “You’re Vita Sackville-West! You’re part of this demented Modernist reality racket—that’s why you’ve been tagging along all this time; rekindling the old flame from your past my ass! You were the one that rerouted my conscious sub-domain to be intercepted by Proust after the warp jump! I bet you didn’t even expect to see me again after that little escapade, playing me like the Ace of Spades right into that trap. And that’s how you knew so much about the Weapon—you people designed it, and the Venusians stole it, since they had a deal with the LAPD narcotics suppression squad—Xerxes figured all this out, and he got plugged for it. The Venusians weren’t ever going to use this damned thing, since they understood its power—but you people—you people created the piece of work—” I had no idea where these words were coming from. “The Martian colonization effort of Phobos and Deimos, the taxation rebellions, the wars on this planet—this place is your sandbox—”

I found my mouth suddenly covered with hers, but it tasted like cigarette smoke and ash. I knew I had pegged her right.

“Damnit, Fuel!” she cried, after breaking off. “I love you, you have to see that!” Tears streaked her face. Mascara ran like the flooded banks of the Nile. “I know it looks bad,” her head fell against my chest, and I had no choice but to hold the woman. “And I’m sorry I lied to you—but we never intended the Weapon to become so powerful. She—Virginia—she was only supposed to be another assignment, but I—but it g-got out of hand…”

The muzzle of the silver cannon pressed against her side.

“Oh god, Fuel.” She whimpered. She could feel it coming, and so could I; a fright train, unavoidable, a fate that was destined from the start. Star-crossed, unlucky, someone’s got a name for how it feels.

“Just Dixon, babe.” The thing had no hammer to cock. What was I waiting for? Reassurance? Verification? What kind of verification did I need? Any deeper meaning to this whole spectacle was lost in the very context, and it remained elusive to even the most astute observers. I felt like a pawn, a tool; my sole existence and reason for being involved retrieving this Weapon, and now I’d reached the end of the line.

“Forgive me,” she whispered.

“I wish I could.” The trigger was my guide. Everything disappeared and fell backwards, and I was adrift again. The only noise I heard was her scream as it echoed and reverberated inside my skull.

There could never have been any right way to resolve this. There was no happy ending. When I finally solved the puzzle, the end result was a four-dimensional tesseract without a discernable message or framework. For what reason? Where was the sense? Where was the logic? Resolved questions should make sense in their context, but none of these made any sense at all—I chase my tail, and then have to backtrack and chase my front to make sure the tail was still there—and what was the point?

There hadn’t even been the option of self sacrifice. The fact remained that I had already used the Weapon before I had even seen it, or recognized it, or stolen it, or even gotten tricked into trying to find it in the first place. The whole ordeal was orchestrated from the very beginning, and there was no possible way for me to have even tried to resist it. The past was as diluted, uninterruptible, indefinable, and intangible as the future—all possibilities converged in a single reality. Time was a solid object, held together by chains of events that were as flimsy as they were interchangeable.

And the whole time, I was a rat in a maze chasing its own shadow. There was no resolution. There was no reason, no discernable drive, no motive, no ambition. There was nothing. There were just minor hints at some greater scheme; I was a character in a film, or on a stage, and the whole surreal experience was filmed for and critiqued by audiences of whom I had no knowledge. But even that, this morsel of information—was that even real? Was that even fact? How could it not be, when I had predetermined my entire experience? But then, how could it be, when the whole thing was of my own engineering?

I watched the bus drive off into the city, into Detroit. Rain poured down from off the sides of the Ballardian overpass. Interstate 75 rumbled angrily overhead. The drainage gutters spat loudly underneath. The bar behind me had a sign in the window; bright neon, flashing, over and over, repetitive, without cease, “OPEN”.

I was tired and soaked to the bone. The Weapon weighed down my coat. I could hear J&B calling me from inside. The trigger was a hairsbreadth away. The night stretched on, like eternity witnessed from the far end of a telescope just before dawn.

I sat down at the bar, and I waited.