Nuklear Age (33 page)

Hm, maybe they didn’t notice
, he thought as debris rained down upon them.
Best just to play it off
. “So. How about that university sanctioned sports team? That particular rival establishment of learning doesn’t stand a chance on the field and/or court when next we face them in a match,” Nuklear Man said through a nervous smile while trying to pretend he hadn’t just obliterated a dozen BMWs. Small bits of flaming wreckage skittered around their feet.

“Wah?” the frat kid turned to the inferno that was their parking lot. “I had beer in my car.” He seemed to quadruple in size.

“We
all
had beer in our cars,” another growled. “How else are we supposed to make the five minute drive from here to campus? Sober? While
driving?
I think not.”

“Eheh. Well, that probably explains why they all exploded. Well, that and my random Plazma Beam, but I think, overall, when we look at the evidence, that played a relatively minor part in all this.”

“Get him!” A mob of frat boys stormed from the flame-licked house like the invasion of Normandy.

Nuklear Man proudly held them at bay while screaming
“Eeek!”
like a small frightened girl and flying away as fast as his Nuklear Power could carry him. He breached the atmosphere in a matter of seconds.

They may have uncovered my little bush inspector ruse, but I’ll be back. And this time, I’ll have the benefit of my impenetrable cunning! I’ll just give ‘em a few years to cool down. But then, they better be on the lookout!
He soared back to the Silo as a beam of golden energy.

__________

Atomik Lad sat hunched hunched on the steps outside Wayne Hall. He stared half-numbly at his History Paper while waiting for Rachel to show up.

“Something wrong, Sparky?” Rachel asked as she stepped from the clean glass doors of her dorm.

Atomik Lad immediately sat up at the sound of her voice and the back of his mind hoped that his damn spandex hadn’t given anything away. “I seem to vaguely remember something that had troubled me at some indeterminate point in the distant past.” She smiled as she neared him. “But it seems to have gone. Hungry?”

“Foooood,” she said in a zombie-like monotone.

“I like a girl with an appetite,” he said as she dragged him down the stairs.

“I see,” she said with a leer.

Atomik Lad instantly flushed. “Er. It’s just the spandex. Really. I mean, not that you, I. Um.” He was sweating profusely at this point.

She stopped them, looked him square in the eyes and pronounced him. “Silly boy.” Again, she took to dragging him by the sleeve to the nearest food place. “Now c’mon, I’m starving.”

“Me too.”

__________

Nuklear Man zoomed down the Silo and smashed through his Danger: Nukie’s Room door, leaving a circular hole through the middle of it. The rim glowed white from Nuklear Man’s intensely hot Plazma Aura.

The Nukebots sighed. “Why, why were we programmed to perceive stupidity?” Nukebot Alpha inquired.

Nukebot Beta shrugged.

Pookaboo, after uselessly puttering around the floor on its side, finally managed to stand upright after a complex procedure involving a stool the details of which are not fit for print. “Finally!” Dr. Menace exclaimed. She hunched in front of her giant, overly complex computer display once more. Pookaboo obeyed her every joystick command.

Nuklear Man peeked through the new hole in his door. “Lousy Sparky. Always breakin’ my stuff and blamin’ it on me.” His eyes darted back and forth. “When not being here.”

“Atomik Lad did not break your door, Nuklear Man,” Danger: Computer Lady informed him.

“Oh, what do
you
know, omniscient computer thingie? Never you mind these mortal matters, oh mysterious voice from the heavens!”

“I’m not from the heavens, I’m from speakers arranged in key acoustic points in every room of the Silo in order to maintain—”

“Oh please! Do not smite me, Great One! I will make a mighty Danger: Sacrifice in your honor!” He eyed the Danger: Nukebots hungrily. “A mighty Danger: Sacrifice indeed.”

“What iz that boob prattling on about?” the Venomous Villainess hissed into her computer display. Pookaboo, the inhumanly evil Fubar doll, observed Nuklear Man from behind the Danger: Couch as he continued to rave.

Danger: Computer Lady, with the help of an introduction into the history of electronics, a video presentation describing the theory behind basic computer operations, a discourse on the world’s religions, several commentaries concerning the existence of God, an in-depth discussion of the Book of Job, philosophical discussions concerning the nature of good and evil, and a puppet show presented by the Nukebots featuring such colorful characters as Digital Danny, Nietzsche, Moses, Buddha, Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, and Charles Babbage, instructed Nuklear Man on the finer points of why Danger: Computer Lady was not a deity. At the end of this epic of education, Nuklear Man blinked dumbly at the players.

“So.” He ventured, “Danger: Computer Lady is
not
a god?”

“Yes,” she, the Nukebots, and Dr. Menace answered simultaneously.

“Therefore,” Nuklear Man said for the first time. “God is a computer!”

The Nukebots collapsed, Pookaboo fell over backwards, Dr. Menace flopped from her Evil: Chair, and Danger: Computer Lady would have toppled had she the capacity to do so.

__________

Rachel and Atomik Lad sat at a table in the crowded Campus Center, a home for fast food franchises to overcharge students for something resembling food. They stuffed their faces between bits of conversation.

Rachel wiped her hands with her thoroughly-used napkin and flipped through Atomik Lad’s History Paper. She made an effort to swallow the last of her meal before commenting, “Redistribution of wealth to the masses, using advanced communications technologies for a true democracy, a practically invisible government. This is awfully ambitious, John.”

“Dr. Volcano said the same thing.”

“It’s also next to impossible, you know.”

Atomik Lad sighed. “He wasn’t as optimistic on that point.”

“People are just too, I don’t know. Stupid, greedy, and paranoid for this kind of thing.”

“All they have to do is cooperate. Is that such a hard thing to do? Serving everyone’s best interest is often in the best interest of the individual. There’s such a thing as enlightened self-interest, after all. That’s basically what I was trying to propose. Under this system, artists would be free from labor to do their real work, people would become doctors or lawyers, not for money, but for the love and passion of helping people. Politics wouldn’t be corrupt because there’d be no money for them to steal and very little power for them to abuse. Companies wouldn’t waste time cheating the competition and choking airwaves with pointless and expensive advertisements that mean nothing and waste all our time. Those resources could be better spent researching and discovering new technologies by combining their efforts instead of trying to outdo one another. The arts and sciences would flourish, humankind could reach for the stars!”

“It’s noble, but it won’t happen.”

Atomik Lad sunk in his chair.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. It’s just that everyone I know – Norman, Nuke, the Minimum Wage guys, Dr. Genius, even little Angus – we’re all doing everything we can to help all of y—everyone. It’s not that bad, really, I guess. I mean sure, sometimes I wish I was just some normal shmoe, but you don’t have to be overpowered to make the world a better place.”

Rachel crossed her arms and gave Atomik Lad The Look.

“Er?”

“‘Normal shmoes’ huh?”

“You know what I mean.”

The Look dissolved. “Yes. But, Sparky. You can’t expect such selfless action from billions of normal people who would rather cut you off in traffic and nearly cause a wreck than, heaven forbid, slightly inconvenience themselves and slow down just a little to let one more car in front of them. I think they like the competition of it all.”

“But we’re not in competition with one another. This is like a sinking ship, we’re all in this together.”

“Maybe, but someone’s got to be at the front of the line to the lifeboats.”

__________

Issue 27 – A Cult Above the Rest

Atomik Lad walked Rachel to her Megaeconomics class. The trip was taking longer than one would expect because he wanted to leave her presence about as much as she wanted to attend the hellish class of arcane theories that made no sense to anyone.

“Who would’ve thought you could make supply and demand into such a cauldron of meaningless numbers and phrases?” he asked as he flipped through her rarely-opened Megaeconomics Book.

“That’s what happens when you get a lot of old white guys together in a small room. They instinctively overcomplicate any and every subject that flitters across their feeble little minds,” Rachel answered sweetly. “It’s either that or turn gay like a bunch of hamsters in a box.”

“You have such a way with words.”

“Guilty as charged.” She winked.

“I’m going to be an old white guy some day, you know. So watch it.”

“I already am, and I gotta tell you, you’re on shaky ground, Mister.”

“Am I?”

“Let’s look at the facts. You have an eye for style,” she jeered his spandex. “You hang around a bunch of older guys who
also
have eyes for style, and you live with a flamboyant, mysterious gentleman who’s never been on a date.”

“Have you talked to Nuke? Do you know any girls willing to date that?”

“You’ve got me on that one, but what about yourself?”

“I could prove it to you, if you like.”

“Oh, baby,” she grinned.

__________

Dr. Menace’s patience had worn so thin it was transparent. Through the Evil: Spy Camera installed in the incomprehensibly evil Fubar doll affectionately nicknamed Pookaboo, she had agonized through the laborious task of witnessing Nuklear Man as he desperately tried to learn and then pathetically fail at it. Upon hearing him reason that “God is like a car that never breaks down,” she piloted Pookaboo into another room.

Unfortunately, due to her evil genius, Pookaboo’s sensor array was sensitive enough to still pick up the stupidity going on just outside. “Argh!” she growled in rage while directing her Fubar probe into the pocket of a coat that was carelessly discarded on floor of Danger: Nuke’s Room.

There was silence.

“Ah. Thank the godz.” She wiped her brow. “The wool coat iz blinding the sensors. I can plot Evil now that I’m free from that Nuklear Moron’s babbling.”

__________

Side by side, Atomik Lad and Rachel walked among the campus’s lush trees, clean walkways, hurried bikers, lounging students, and religious mutants.

“So, Sparky,” she began. “Why don’t you tell me—”

“Worship the healing power of Zarnak the Loving,” a man so hairless he didn’t even have eyebrows, yelled at Rachel and Atomik Lad.

They stopped, more from alarm than curiosity, and looked. The man was drenched in filthy gray robes that had once been pink. His skin was caked in layers of dirt and sweat that had baked in the sun for the last twenty years.

The sidekick shook his head to reboot his sense of hearing. “Excuse me?”

“Worship the healing power of Zarnak the Loving.”

“Why?” Rachel asked. It was far less wise for her to say that than it would have been to run like hell.

The Zarnakian Zealot shuffled his hands invisibly within his rags. They were arrayed over his body in such haphazard heaps that Atomik Lad couldn’t tell where one stained tatter began and another ended. It was the Gordian Knot of apparel. His grimy hands found what they so eagerly sought. Rachel waited impatiently as the stranger stealthily activated his Victim-B-Found Beeper-N-Pager unit, a handy device that summoned every religious wacko within a 300 yard radius. Every lunatic with a message is issued one.

“Why?” he finally answered, somewhat at a loss. “Well, he’d worship you if you were a god.”

“What yer sellin’, we ain’t buyin’,” Atomik Lad said. He placed an arm around Rachel and proceeded to lead them right into the clutches of—

“GULTANG, THE RAVAGER!” He was a mountain of warrior angst and bellowed at least as loud as the Zarnak guy. “QUAKE WITH FEAR, LOWLY MORTALS, FOR WHEN THE DAY OF RAVAGING IS UPON US, THE SEVEN SEALS OF DARKNESS ETERNAL WILL SHATTER LIKE BONES UNDER THE MIGHTY WEIGHT OF SIEGE ENGINES AS THEY TOPPLE THE GATES OF STURMUNDRANG KEEP HIGH UPON MT. GRIMGOTH WITHIN THE HELLFYRE PROVINCE OF BLOODANIA!” He paused, but whether this was to take a breath or catch up to whatever the hell he was talking about, neither Atomik Lad nor Rachel could hope to discern.

The newcomer had worked up a slight case of Foaming at the Mouth in his torrent of praising GULTANG. He wiped away the mess with one forearm—the one with the spiked gauntlet—since the other had an idling chainsaw with a makeshift flamethrower welded to it. The remainder of his outfit could best be described as a cross between a suit of medieval armor, several instruments of Chinese torture, a shipment of spikes, and a Giger painting mated with a tank.

“Buzz off, Henry. I hadn’t finished preaching the word of Zarnak’s endless Love for all that is, was, and ever will be.”

Henry snarled, though it was difficult to distinguish it from the rumble of the chainsaw engine. “THEN WHY, UPON THE GREAT PILLARS OF DARKMARE’S DEMON PIT DID YOU ENGAGE THE BECKONING? THEO AND THE OTHERS WILL BE HERE ANY MINUTE!”

Zarnak’s mortal messenger shrank. “I never got this far before. I was eager.”

Atomik Lad and Rachel had been inconspicuously running for their lives by cautiously sidling away from the lunatics.

A great iron hand clamped around Atomik Lad’s shoulder, slumping him over from the weight. “THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO SAVE YOURSELF AND THE WENCH FROM THE DAY OF RAVAGING—” Atomik Lad would have asked Oh? But there was no way to stop Henry for a second once he got going. “—WHEN THE HERETICS, THOSE WHO DO NOT SACRIFICE THEIR LIVES TO THE SOULFIRE OF RAVAGING, WILL FACE UNDESCRIBABLE AGONY WHILST SPENDING ALL ETERNITY WITHIN GULTANG’S MIGHTY DIGESTIVE TRACT, MOST LIKELY SOMEWHERE NEAR THE END OF IT. THEY WILL KNOW ONLY TERROR, ONLY PAIN. THEIR MINDS WILL BE IMMUNE TO ALL BUT SUFFERING—THIS IS THE PUNISHMENT YOU SHALL ENDURE FOR ALL TIME UNLESS YOU REPENT IN THE NAME OF ALL-VENGEFUL GULTANG!”