(Larry)
People have accused me of not really standing for much in my lifetime, and, to be fair, for the most part that’s true. When I was a kid, I was into the usual stuff with the clear cut good guys versus bad guys thing. You know, GI Joe and Cobra, Autobots and Decepticons, Smurfs and Gargamel. It was always comforting and easy to know that you could define yourself as being against something that was clearly mean, bad, and unable to hit the broadside of a barn with an AK-47. Seriously, as often as the Joe team encountered Cobra in close quarters, nobody ever took a bullet.
And suddenly, when I was in high school and starting to realize that, if they reinstated the draft, I was almost old enough for it, the great force opposing the freedom and democracy of the First World, the Soviet Union, evaporated.
All my kid life I was taught that, on the other side of the ocean, there was this evil empire. One day there would be an inevitable confrontation between us and them and I might have to go all Red Dawn, or if I was lucky and skilled enough, I could go all Top Gun, but either way there would definitely come a time when I’d have to kill the bad guys. Because that’s the way America did it, and I was an American and the Russians, with their godless communism and really long lines for bread, or whatever, were our natural enemy.
And then one day it was, like, all the Russian people called bullshit on that, because they were tired of being the bad guys and having to listen to all their Van Halen on crappy bootleg cassettes or something. They wanted to be able to buy the nice stuff, or even just the pretty okay K-mart stuff and they just said screw it, enough of this communism shit.
And with that I was living in a world without good guys and bad guys. And we were all like, what the hell do we do now? What do we stand for? Did we ever really stand for anything other than the right to buy stuff? Because that’s what the capitalist thing is all about, on the consumer level, right? We have the freedom to buy whatever we can afford, and whatever we can’t afford, we can get on credit. But the hell does that even mean if I can’t get a job at the missile plant because there are no more bad guys to shoot missiles at?
And I think that it was in the midst of this general kind of feeling of aimlessness and lack of purpose that Nirvana came in and said “you are absolutely right in thinking all this is pointless.”
So, bearing that in mind, I’ve spent my first few years of adulthood adrift and without any overall sense of purpose. Also, I learned how to drink cheap beer quickly and in mass quantities. As a result, it may seem like I’m an apathetic slacker with no values. But that’s not true.
I have at least one core value.
Basically, when shit gets real, you get your friends’ backs. That’s a value no one can deny. Now, while the nature of our mentor-mentee relationship might strain the traditional boundaries of friendship, Ishmael was the best friend I had at the moment. And he was naked and fighting a muther-effing dinosaur.
I had no choice but to help him fight that muther-effing dinosaur.
Plus, there was a girl involved. A girl in my age range who, even though we’d barely just met, had a pretty interesting style about her, considering her whole growing up after the end of civilization thing. What I’m saying is it wouldn’t do me any good to look bad, so I stepped up.
The creepy effing velociraptor had just regained its feet in that strange blue wherever we were. It was like a photo lab processing error. The sky, the ground, anything else that might happen to be there, but you couldn’t tell because everything was all exactly the same color. And, to make it all a little extra stupid, there was a blue mist that... forget it. The point is that the only thing I could see was us and this dinosaur as though we were floating in some indistinct sky waiting for the graphics department of some sci-fi pulp publishing house to put us on the cover of one of those paperbacks with the yellow spines. You know what I’m talking about, right? The sword and spaceship fantasy novels from the 70s with the yellow spines and a cover painting of a dude fighting a monster in a vague environment while a mostly naked chick looks mostly helpless. Only Lizzabits was looking like she was down to fight. Otherwise, it was pretty much like that.
So the velociraptor was coming at me and I had no idea what I was going to do. The thing was all claws and feathers and demented giggling. And it was picking up speed.
I dropped into a Wolverine style crouch and was thinking ‘SNIKT’ while I knew I was on the short end of that stick. My adamantium claws were merely imaginary.
I braced for impact as the mini-monster charged. I thought for half a second about where the best place to put my hands would be. All I came up with were several possibilities for the worst place. It became clear that bracing was probably one of the least useful things I could do and, rather than wait, I went on the offensive.
I started running at the monster and screaming holy hell. My hands were flying in the air like I was some kind of demented Dracula.
As I ran up to meet it, the velociraptor started to backpedal a bit. Just a little bit. And I screamed louder and prepared to jump. This was it. The velociraptor, backpedalling or no, was going to call my bluff and tear my soft fleshy bits into machaca. I was resigned to that fact and, in a way, realizing that I was about to resemble one of my favorite taco fillings was a little comforting.
In the middle of that peaceful fit of acceptance and screaming, the miracle occurred.
Just as the dinosaur and me were about to make contact, a posse of those robot ninja monkeys showed up out of the blue. Literally. They just popped out of the blue fog and turned on the T-U-R-T-L-E power.
There were feathers, a dinosaur scream, and surprisingly little blood. The velociraptor seemed to dissolve like a fallen Jedi. Or maybe he just popped back to the Late Whateverous Period that he came from to escape the fate of an unavoidable ninja death.
Either way, my ass was saved in such a way that I actually did not look like a total chickenshit while doing it.
One of the robot monkeys turned and looked me over. Or looked me through. It was like he was checking every single vital sign with some futuristic tri-corder vision. I’m not entirely sure that was what was going on, but I’ve watched enough Next Generation episodes to have a pretty good idea of how advanced technology works. After a thorough scan he turned to the other monkey ninjas.
“Integral timeline enactant preserved,” he said.
“Confirmed,” said one of the others.
“New arrival registered in proximity,” said a third.
“Enactant or infiltrator?” said the first.
“More data required.”
“Return to observation mode,” said the first monkey.
“Let’s boogie,” all the others said in unison.
Like shadows in a cop’s Maglite, all the monkey ninjas vanished, leaving Ishmael, Lizzabits and I on our own in the vast blueness.
“What the hell is this place, Ishmael?”
“I’ve never been here,” he said, “so I can only guess. But it looks to me like it’s the far end of the human era. It looks a hell of a lot different than the beginning of it, though.”
“What happened?” said Lizzabits. “Why’s everything so... why have all the things gone out of the world?”
“The things are still there, we just don’t exist in a way in which we can see them,” said a new voice. For some reason new people like to show up behind me and say some cryptic and menacing stuff before introducing themselves.
“Oh,” said Ishmael, “you’re a long way from home.”
“Indeed,” said the voice, which, as I turned to look, was coming from a man in a sky blue jumpsuit with a giant, bulbous, Charlie Brown head. It would look cute in a comic strip, but in real life it made me woozy. “Events rarely require me to leave the Headquarters,”—It was hard for me to accept that the guy could say the word ‘headquarters’ with a straight face because his head was brobdingnagian, if anything, just ridiculously huge, like, I couldn’t even say the word ‘head’ if I had a head that big—“so, it goes without saying that events are quite extreme.”
“Larry,” said Ishmael, “I’d like to introduce you to the other biggest pain in my ass in life, the Orb.”