Nuklear Age (13 page)

“Heretics!”

“Viva la freedom!”

“Do not follow the words of the Destroyer!”

__________

“How about a set of towels? We could emboss them with that ‘N’ thing of his,” Norman said while drawing a little “N” in the air.

“Ah, no. Nuke doesn’t trust towels.”

Norman had no idea how to answer and simply stared at Atomik Lad.

“I don’t know either.”

“Well, then how does he dry off?”

“He uses his, and I quote, ‘Evap-o Plazma.’”

“How very strange.”

“Trust me. You don’t know the
half
of it.”

__________

Nuklear Man stood and dusted himself off as the spiders divided into two groups. Arachnor's Chosen, led by Steve, and the second, The Spider's Front of Arachnopodia, rallied behind Tom. Banners rose, speeches were made, battle cries erupted, threats were hurled, and the air filled with the smell of battle to come.

“Ahem,” Nuklear Man asserted himself over the din of pre-war that was spreading like wildfire across his Danger: Coffee Table. Both armies stopped and stared at the Golden Guardian towering over them. “Could you guys take your little war somewhere else? It’ll mess up the furniture and I’m trying to watch TV.”

Each camp dispatched a diplomat that approached Nuklear Man.

“We are dignitaries, an impartial negotiation party, to decide a battlefield for our war,” one informed the Hero as the other spider nodded in agreement.

“Uh. You could use that Danger: Storage Room,” he said, pointing to a nearby door aptly labeled Danger: Storage Room. “Sparky emptied it out last Spring. He said we didn’t need ten thousand 20Watt light bulbs. Go figure. I just let him have his way. He gets a little weird about some things, if you know what I mean.”

“Thank you, Destroyer. We will wage our war in this ‘Danger: Storage Room’ of yours,” the second spider said cordially with a little spider-style bow.

“Glad to be of service.”

“When we establish a stable government, we will hunt you down, and we will devour you,” the first stated matter-of-factly.

“Oh. Well, um. Thanks?”

The two spiders scuttled back to their respective camps. Within a minute, both mighty armies marched to the Danger: Storage Room. Nuklear Man held the futuristic automatic sliding door open until the final spider-soldier had entered. “Good luck with your little battle for supremacy,” Nuklear Man cheerily said as he waved.

“Death to the Destroyer’s minions!”

“End the Orwellian domination of Arachnor’s pawns!”

The door
FWOOSH
ed shut and cut off the crossfire of taunts.

The Hero sought out his favorite gift: the Quick-B-Labeled. What once was the Danger: Storage Room became the Danger: Religious Differences.

__________

Issue 12 – They, Robots

A couple hours later the sparkling pimp-daddy purple Magnomobile screeched to a halt outside the Silo of Solitude’s main doors embedded in the sweet and only slightly radioactive earth.

Atomik Lad got out of the car, “See you tomorrow at Larson Beach.”

“Right, at 11:00. You just make sure he gets there.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” He waved as the Tungsten Titan turned his car around and zoomed off with a large cardboard box sticking out of trunk with the “This End Up” arrow pointing to the right.

__________

Nuklear Man wallowed.

Junk food wrappers that looked like they’d been torn apart by some ferocious beast of consumption, the crumbs of said junk food, junk food yet to be attacked, soda cans in various stages of emptiness, magazines one would normally only associate with teenage girls, reprints of
Captain Liberty and the Squad of Diplomatic Immunity
comics, and several boxes of Kleenex were piled around the Danger: Couch. Nuklear Man wallowed with such attention to the art, and what he did with wallowing was an art, that he didn't notice when the walls hummed as the Danger: Main Doors opened or when the sun bathed his wallowing in noonday light, and, in fact, barely noticed Atomik Lad standing over him with that “Again?” look.

“Er...” the Golden Guardian eloquently explained as he shifted his girth and caused a small junk food avalanche in the process. “I bet you’re wondering what this is all about.”

Atomik Lad didn’t move for the exact amount of time it would take the laugh track to die down on a poorly written sitcom. “Oh yes.”

“Well, I was watching Silly Sam’s Cartoon Marathon-a-thon o’ Fun, like I do every morning.”

“Naturally.”

“And then Days of Our Generally Bold Lives in Another Beautiful Hospital World came on.” Atomik Lad nodded. “How could Celeste do that to poor Drake?” he blubbered and reached for another handful of tissue paper.

“Well that explains the Kleenex.”

Nuklear Man blew his nose with a distinct
HONK
. “And Carl
SNURK
. He's new, how was he supposed to know about Victoria’s conniving against Bill? He’s an innocent pawn in the game of chess that is Days of Our Generally Bold Lives in Another Beautiful Hospital World!”

Atomik Lad shook his head. His face was filled with disapproval. “And to think they call you ‘Hero’.”

“They don't know the horrible truth,” he said meekly.

“It would turn their stomachs.”

“I’m a pathetic slob!”

Atomik Lad squat down and picked up a magazine sticky with dried soda and the dust from some kind of artificial cheese snack. He bent a curious eyebrow while examining the cover. “Teeny Bopper Dreamboat Weekly?”

“Uh...” Nuklear Man's sobs stopped like a heart attack.

“An Interview with the Manson Dreamboat Trio?”

“Um. Is this one of those things that’s so weird you’d rather not hear the explanation?”

“No, I think I have to know.”

“Nuts.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you know as a Hero I have a responsibility to look as good as possible.”

Atomik Lad idly thumbed through the publication, “Of course.”

“I picked up some of those magazines to scope out the up and coming competition, such as it is. So, you can see how it’s perfectly normal for me to have those and not strange. Right?”

“But the average age of the readers of these things is something like fourteen.”

“I’ve got to keep up with the times. Look to the future and all that.”

“Hmm. This oldest Manson kid kinda looks like me.”

“Lucky duck!”

Atomik Lad’s quizzical look was all the inquiry required.

“Well, you know. Because girls think he’s cute.”

“Fourteen-year-old girls, Nuke. Though it should go without saying, that’s just sort of wrong. Besides, they’d think that goth Harriet Hanson freak was a dreamboat if he sung vapid lyrics about girls and homework or whatever it is soulless media machines sing about.”

“So you think that would work for us?”

“I don’t think we have to stoop to their level.”

“Feh! Easy for you to say, Mr. Lookalike.”

Atomik Lad sighed and set his
Physics: The Way Things Should Be
book on the Danger: Coffee Table. He looked to what should have been the Danger: Storage Room but noticed the old label had a new one proclaiming Danger: Religious Differences pasted over it. He didn’t have the energy to care. “Just have this mess cleaned up. I’ll be in my room.”

“Stupid mess,” Nuklear Man muttered. He kicked at the mound of filth he’d acquired over the few hours. He scanned his environs for a scapegoat to delegate the work to. Alas, with the closing
FWOOSH
of the Danger: Sparky/s Room door, the Hero was alone.

__________

Nuklear Man slowly surfaced from the Danger: Main Entrance as if burdened by some incredible weight. And rightfully so because he heaved an enormous garbage bag as wide as the Silo behind him. The Hero majestically rose with his massive cargo. Until it got stuck.

“Hmmm. Dimension trouble.” he surmised.

__________

Atomik Lad raced down the streets of San Diego’s Balboa Park in his custom built Folkswagon Gnat. It sported a crimson paint job with blue racing stripes that almost perfectly matched the color scheme of his spandex. The ordinarily crowded streets were empty save for a few cars driving in excess of 120mph.

“Out of the way, grandma!” Atomik Lad yelled while zipping across the median into lanes of oncoming traffic. It was faster that way.

A sharp left turn was ahead. He was going at least 130mph. A fiery wreck was the only fate available to him. “What is that smell?” he asked himself. Atomik Lad’s sporty car halted its fatal tumble through the air mere inches from impacting a nondescript building as “Pause” blinked across the screen. “Door, open.”

Nothing.

Atomik Lad sighed with the weight of defeat. “Danger: Door, open.” The futuristic
FWOOSH
sound announced his door's obedience.

“Nuke!” he called out.

Nuklear Man was deaf to his sidekick. There was simply too much Danger: Filth stuck in the Danger: Main Doors between himself and the Silo’s interior for any amount of sound to get through.

Atomik Lad stalked out of his room and stopped short halfway out the door. “Where is everything?”

The Danger: Living Room was completely empty. Even the blinking lights that should’ve been all over the walls were gone. For the briefest second he suspected the Pearly Gate cult had gotten a stranglehold on Nuklear Man yet again. But an acrid smell scared off the thought like a skunk’s foe. He glanced at the Danger: Main Doors. In their place he saw a great stinking garbage bag wedged into the entrance far above him. It was labeled “Danger: Filth.”

“What has he done now?”

__________

Nuklear Man had dragged the open end of the garbage bag across the sparse vegetation that surrounded the Silo. He tugged a tug that tugged itself into a full heave. His feet dug into the ground and two small plumes of dust wafted along the earth. He left the ground and flew straight up with all the force of a rocket launch.

And then his labor came to fruition. The garbage bag felt weightless. He was too occupied with basking in the glory of a job well done to notice the clouds falling under him or the atmosphere yielding to the eternal void of space.

__________

“Nuke! What are you doing?” Atomik Lad yelled for the third time. He heard the bag’s cramped contents clank and grind against one another as some unseen force.

The monstrous bag lurched upward very slightly and Atomik Lad thought his mentor had finally loosened it. His eyes grew wide as a great chasm tore itself across the bag. His Atomik Field kicked in reflexively and he was covered in a shower of trash and Danger: Furniture.

__________

Nuklear Man, now in low orbit, gazed into the garbage bag he held in his hands. “Oops.” He could see right through it thanks to the giant gaping hole at the other side. “What a wussy trash bag! Strange...I can’t hear myself talk.
Hello?
I’ve gone deef! How could this have happened?” He thought back to what had just transpired.

He remembered tugging.

He remembered
more
tugging.

He remembered ice cream.

And he remembered that same roaring sound he heard whenever he reached escape velocity.

“Could it be,” he theorized, “that the garbage bag exploded on purpose to make me deef? You
deefed
me!” he soundlessly screamed to the bag, shaking it violently as it whipped and waved in the solar wind. “I'll show you, stupid deefing bag!”

He crumpled it into a small ball and hurled it into the sun. “And I hope you think about what you've done!” He dusted off his hands. “Better get back before Sparky suspects anything.”

As Nuklear Man careened Earthward something like a silvery plate with far too many lights and buttons all over it spun through space unnoticed by all but the reading audience. It tumbled out of the garbage bag on its way to die in the sun. It was a Cultural Archive Device manufactured by Überdyne. A learning tool programmed with several sets of encyclopedia, dictionaries, works of literature, philosophy, and history, all with complete holographic audio and visual displays. They were used for a short period of time as devices to help amnesiacs regain their memories. This particular one focused on the 20th Century and was given to Nuklear Man by Dr. Genius after the Hero was recovered from the Dragon’s Strike without a single memory of his life prior to waking up in the lab. He’d kept it ever since, packed it up with everything else that had been in the Danger: Living Room, and now it tumbled through the vastness of interplanetary space.

The universe is a truly big place. Being so very huge, little mishaps are bound to take place, even in the most basic and fundamental gears, especially the ones most people think couldn’t possibly go wrong.

The Archive toppled end over end rather clumsily right into an ordinary wormhole that hadn’t been there a trillionth of a second before, and wouldn’t be there in another trillionth of a second. In that nano-slice of an instant, the Archive fell through space and time and ended up on a planet populated by a primitive race of warmongers on the other side of the galaxy some seventy thousand years in the past.

Strangely, the only reason the universe works at all is that impossible little cosmic mistakes like this happen all the time. Civilizations that finally figure this out tend to disappear in a puff of nihilistic megaweaponry.

__________

Nuklear Man hung his head low.

Atomik Lad glowered at him. He gestured to the mountain of garbage and furniture that was turned into garbage from the long fall. He’d just climbed out of the Danger: Mountain of Trash.

“
Gimme
that!” Atomik Lad snapped as he snatched the Danger: Quick-B-Labeled from Nuklear Man. “And what have I told you about hurling foreign objects into the sun?”

“The trash bag wasn’t a foreign object! You know I only buy goods made in America.”

“Nuke.”

“Oh, I
never
get to toss stuff into the sun like in the movies. Besides, that stupid trash bag burst on purpose to make me deef.”