The Fractal Rangers: The Incrediflummoxular Capacitor™ Caper

The Fractal Rangers were intubating a transdermal flow to generate an echo as to increase the probability of a favorable event to occur (Perfesser Prof had been unsuccessfully courting a certain high-echelon female British politician he met during an explosive day at a Brighton hotel. With this operation, he hoped to artificially ramp up the local probability of her actually falling into love with him) in some n-level of a minor megaflow when they were accosted by fellow reality-trippers, raiders and plunderers of realities, Barracuda Jones and His Crew of Dirty and Rotten Pirates.

The Fractal Rangers escaped, but Perfesser Prof’s patiently and patently patented Incrediflummoxular Capacitor™ was stolen! The Capacitor was built in a closed loop in Time measuring an exact Earth century; the Perfesser stepped into that door in Time and returned in a blink, but in the loop, a hundred years of labyrinthe mathematics and high technology light years ahead of known norms had passed! It was the only one of its kind, allowing Prof’s astounding craft  to move through hydra-headed time and space with ease.  Barracuda Jones got his grimy hands on the Incrediflummoxular Capacitor™ and disappeared into the folds of  worlds! Leaving Prof’s wonderful craft’s fractal shoaling capabilities severely impaired! The Perfesser jury-rigged a less adequate means of moving through the ether, and the Fractal Rangers spent relative eons searching for the Incrediflummoxular Capacitor™. Their search is now at an end, and this is where our tale begins.

“They’ve invaded a military planet.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone’s got guns.”
“Yes.”
“And bombs.”
“Yes.”
“We’re gonna die!”
“No, Amigo, we are not going to die.” Perfesser Prof placed a liver spotted hand on Archetype Amigo’s shoulder. It was meant to be reassuring, but Amigo trembled nevertheless.
“I don’t wanna die, please don’t make me do it! Prof, please!”
Princess Pop rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t be such a Yossarian!”

Perfesser Prof looked into Amigo’s eyes. “You’re still alive, are not you? After all this time. Your inordinate luck will keep you.” He squeezed the shoulder. Archetype Amigo was the rare individual who was blessed with a sort of eternal luck, balanced with a perpetual bassline of minor bad luck which made him, in simpler terms, accident prone.

Perfesser Prof looked over at the princess. “Pop, you’ll be running interference, as usual, while Amigo does his thing. Due to the circumstances… you’ll be given full rein of the armory.” Princess Pop squealed, fists akimbo in the air, and launched herself at the prof, wrapping her arms around his birdlike neck.

“I’ll be at Communications, standing by for extraction,” continued Perfesser Prof, “and… we’re here. Happy hunting.”

Perfesser Prof’s marvelous ship, in a state of rest, despite its diminished nature, simultaneously occupied several thousand realities, its hull pulsing with vignettes of worlds. Sunlight warmed one patch, while another is abraded with high velocity sandstorms. Rain pattered along starboard, reflecting gliding alien avians. A green lizard scuttled, flickering into a cloud of gnats superimposed over dull grey steel. The ship is a quilt of realities, a throbbing thing of probability.

BANG!

The force of Princess Pop’s kick embedded the ramp in the asphalt. Radiant light streamed past the silhouette form of Pop. Archetype Amigo lurked fearfully behind. The princess strode down the ramp in her jackboots, clutching in her hands the model Infinity Series no. 2, which housed a miniature teleportation device that fed a diversity of ammo from a planetoid wide warehouse facility several fractal years away. She faced an army of Barracuda Jones’ Dirty and Rotten Pirates. All sorts of technologies. Princess Pop giggled like a schoolgirl who has stumbled into the boys locker room. She fired the first shot.

Always with the guns! Archetype Amigo ran, his hands sheltering his head. As ineffectual as that was, it made him feel a bit more safer. He hurled himself into an alley, going heads over heels across a clatter of garbage cans. He got to his feet blindly and careened from wall to wall. Pretty soon he was running as fast as he could, wrists flapping at his sides. A rotten raider tackled Amigo, and they went down in a tangle of limbs. A mist of blood sprayed Amigo’s face and he was rolling loose across a cratered face, his feet slipping on gore. “Geez, shave that a bit closer, Pop!” he yelled, pumping his legs. Her laughter answered him. That fucking demented kid! He slipped over a wrought iron fence (losing his boxers in the process) into the outdoors sitting area of an abandoned eatery, tripping and stumbling over the tables and chairs before shattering the wall length glass window. Hanging pots and pans banged his head in his mad flight through the gloom of the kitchen. He pushed through an emergency exit and dented the side of a rusted dumpster. Gunfire drummed on the steel box. Amigo coaxed more from his legs, and ran as if he were in free fall. A wooden fence loomed. As he vaulted into the air, hands outstretched, the fence became a wall of napalm, courtesy of his trigger happy partner, and then he was passing through, his eyebrows igniting, his scalp a mane of flame, his eyes widening with horror: there was no ground on the other side.  “Aww, thanks a lot, Pop!”

Pop’s grinning face, smirking pixie nose passed through his field of vision like slow moving train scenery. She was running down the cliff face. She gave him a thumbs up. “Oh, go on, sweetcheeks!” she said and slapped him on his way. She tossed flashbang grenades at the sky and toppled away. Princess Pop had worked with Archetype Amigo long enough to know to let his luck do the work; it would narrow down the available choices, until there was only the inexorable conclusion. She killed a filthy raider from one mile away and gutted another using only the rotten raider’s own pinkie. All the choreography found in action movies was distilled within Princess Pop then executed with ballistic perfection. Besides toting a massive and powerful gun, she also augmented her constantly changing circumstances with agile versatility and acute instincts; she shed spent machine guns, bazookas, samurai swords, handguns, bolos, pocket knives, throwing knives, nunchuks, mini guns, and enough firearms to fill a weapons catalog.  She was an artist of Death and the gates of Hell swelled with sinners.

For the rest of his life, a Proustian moment would visit itself upon Archetype Amigo every time he sat down to void his bowels, filling his nostrils and his gag reflex with an unforgettable violence of odor; as a result he was perpetually constipated. He hit the waste reclamation basin headfirst and then there was a drawn out WHUMMMMP! as Princess Pop bombed the opposite end. Archetype Amigo gasped and snorted, thrashing as he was drawn out of the ruined facility in a logjam of human and alien excrement. The stinking flood churned across the arable land that marked the south border of the city, subjecting our poor protagonist to a lesson in vertigo he would not readily forget. He washed up, a sore sack of shit, against the warm metal hatch of an idling spacecraft. The hatch opened, revealing leather boots. Amigo looked up, tracing the jodphurs on the too short legs to a massive barrel chest of purple spandex draped with a leather vest to a Lenoesque chin under an Elvis hairdo. “What the hell is going on?!” exclaimed purple spandex dude in falsetto, not quite recognizing the foul thing at his feet. A polka dot kerchief was knotted around his sinewy neck. Archetype Amigo drew himself up, a grin sketching itself, white and vehement, on the ubiquitous brown dripping and dropping, his hands curling into toxic claws. “I am having the worst day of my life,” said Archetype Amigo. “But it can’t get any worse. Barracuda Jones, you and I are having words!” With that, Archetype Amigo threw himself murderously at the larger man, and they tumbled into the ship, the hatch slamming after them.

“Pop, is everything all right?” crackled Perfesser Prof’s voice through Pop’s thoughts. “Having  the time of my life!” she exulted, her dainty feet impossibly navigating the 500 RPM rotor of an ornithopter that twisted and weaved through the fractured city, her Infinity Series no. 2 hammering burning tracer fire into battalions of multi-billion dollar war weaponry. The ornithopter, yawing  into the bilious smoke of flaming wreckages, began to climb, and Pop’s feet neared invisibility as she ramped up her speed. In the almost vertical orientation Pop was relentless, slinging the Swiss army knife of guns onto her shoulder and withdrawing a nanothin super carbon alloy wire which she slid into the rotor, before arching backwards into freefall. The ornithopter buckled, couplings tearing apart in a howl of tortured metal. It fell like a stone and Pop followed, her pink transparent raincoat streaming behind like the wings of an angel. She was smiling. The gun lay against her breasts. At the elevation of one thousand feet above sea level, she pointed the muzzle planetwards and fired a single shot.

Archetype Amigo fled, slipping and sliding out of the dirty and rotten pirate ship, clutching something against his belly. “I’ve got it!” his frantic voice echoed across the common thoughtband. He was running and  weaving through the wreckage. The projectile from Pop’s gun rapidly expanded into a bluegreen sphere the size of an elephant. It struck the ground and trembled like a giant upended bowl of Jello. Princess Pop punched into it, its superdense composition absorbing the impact of terminal velocity by spreading the energies outward in effervescent reaction until Pop was kneeling in a halo of surging and twitching foam. She turned and ran easily along Amigo (who was doing his best huffing and puffing impression of a locomotive), skipping and hopping and tumbling and cartwheeling as Perfesser Prof’s fantabulous ship poured itself real, molasses slow, flickering with Lyapunov ball lightning. “Ooh, something stinks!” cried Pop as the ship swallowed them.

As the world folded into itself, Princess Pop had time to see the head of Barracuda Jones extrude from the open hatch of the naughty ship Funtimes Violator and wave his kerchief, “Fanks for the good time, amigo!”
“Hey, what’s all about,” she asked with a pointing thumb.
“Leave me alone.”
“Why are you walking funny?”
“I said, LEAVE ME ALONE!”

Perfesser Prof took the Incrediflummoxular Capacitor™ and inserted it into the recess above the Captain’s seat. He smiled benevolently at his two wards. “Great job, kids! Full fractal ahead!”

“Ka-pow!” Princess Pop flung fingerguns at unfolding eternity.

oopas

From above an ink black teardrop trembles pendulously, surrounded by oopas of the same shade and varying sizes. It shivers once and detaches, collapsing into a small black dot. The oopas cheer, throwing exclamation marks throbbing into space like hats. A question mark flickers above the dot until it realizes it resembles the oopas! The oopas welcome it into their fold and make much merriment, revolving in the circular dance of sub-atomic particles.

The quintuple calumphs, extending from the upper surface of the eggshape membrane enclosing the oopas, are excited by the oompa romp. The calumphs convulse, whipping from side to side until they are tumescently taut and the quintuple meatuses irradiates the space within with a pointillistic exudation.

The oopas dart to and fro, absorbing the calumphs’ ejecta into themselves. The gorging oompas of various sizes increase their personal dimensions with each morsel they consume. As the frenzy of consumption gradually decreases, interrobangs erupt from the oompas. The largest oompa is sinking! It is frantic, and all the other oompas are frantic also, beseeching it to come back.

It sinks to the inky sludge that puddles at the bottom of the eggshape membrane enclosing the oopas and is consumed. The oopas mourn in soft, dizzy circles until exclamation marks whip into existence. From above an ink black teardrop trembles pendulously!

Zoom away from the eggshell membrane enclosing the oompas and note that either end is connected to another eggshell membrane enclosing quintuple calumphs, oopas of varying sizes, and an inky pool. Each eggshell membrane enclosing oompas are in turn connected to other eggshell membranes enclosing oopas.

Pan away far enough and observe that the chain of eggshell membranes enclosing oopas is, in fact, not a linear chain, but a curve along an oval path of eggshells enclosing oopas, to become the eggshell membrane enclosing quintuple calumphs, oopas, and an inky pool. This eggshell membrane enclosing oopas is then connected to other eggshell membranes enclosing oopas.

I Might Have Been Five

I remember the smell of my lunch box, the plastic ones with a companion thermos. The smell of sandwich in its ziploc bag and the futility of searching for morsels on the long bus ride. It was a long bus and I sat in the back with my too small coat. I would run up the gravel drive when the bus pulled up to my rural address in upstate New York.

I remember the birch trees in our rather large yard. How I liked pulling the silvery bark apart! It made me think of zebras. I also loved how its leaves looked like twirling coins during autumn. I remember, in the third person, myself running while wearing a brown coat, or maybe it was blue and grey? and pulling along a rainbow hued kite as my father looked on. His hair was jet black at the time and he didn’t have his belly. He looked like I do now, skin draped on bone by virtue of genetics. I remember a white window, and tunneling in the snow. My mother dug a cave in which I huddled.I think I fell out of my bunk bed that night. My mother remembers me smearing petroleum jelly on the old faux wood vinyl wall paneling of our trailer home.

I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to gather the clouds into a jar and hold it forever, captured within the glass, as I soared across the continental United States, leaving the only home I remembered. Now I don’t remember so much; my memory is a box of old photographs, of moments arrested in Time.

The Fractal Rangers: Princess Pop’s Predicament

Princess Pop descended from the lights, a flaming nude angel. Halogen green panties, its elastic snapped by an expert military slingshottist, rocketed from the stage to snugly wrap against her pubis and tuck around her hips. Sparks sprayed from stage rear, sending arrows of multi-hued bottle rockets pinwheeling.

Princess Pop favored her fans with a chiclet grin as electronic spiders crawled on her torso, rapidly knitting a horizontally striped purple and black tube top. The spiders, bidding adieu, flung themselves outward, their spinnerets weaving a night black cobweb skirt, and exploded retina-etching flashbangs of poptronica emoticons in a crackling arc to dust.

Princess Pop waved her arms and ghost limbs, phosphorescent blue, slurped along kaliesque trajectories. Riot red fingerless dukes fell from the psychedelic koi trawling heavens of the riven warehouse ceiling and spun onto her punching, twirling fists.

“Hey!”

Pop’s first word resounded, a fell wave, a tsunami of sound flattening the salivating horde and extinguishing the sea of lighters already, before the show even started, clamoring for an encore! Android cherubim wafted like demented bumblebees, their tiny clicking fingers draping upwards her legs sheer purple knee-high leggings.

Princess Pop alighted, finally, onto the polished stainless steel floor, her delicate feet slipping into steel-toed jackboots like a sigh. The audience, prone, rose like grass under a footprint, their moan of anticipation a sexy stench washing over her mohawk.

“Hey!” Princess Pop began again, rising on a blast of thunder, the sweet acoustics sending the first chords of the instant classic Power Pop steamrolling. A transparent bubblegum pink raincoat flanked by the cherubim floated out of the constant pyrotechnics and draped itself onto Pop’s outstretched form. Her boots slapped on cold steel and the multi-billion dollar musics systems took it up a notch.

Pop’s lips as pink as her coat plucked and plicked over whitewash teeth, deepthroating the words that made her a goddess. She sang of punk princesses in kingdoms of garbage and intravenous needles, of the madness of FTL travel outside cold sleep, in the quaintly distilled jargon of the times. She sang: The Ballad of Shandy Peaches the Intergalatic Punk Pirate, Holograms Can’t Love, The Beep Be-bop, Pop and Her Pussy (the clean version), and the honey lava drawl of Tarpit Tangos.

Princess Pop was in the middle of Space War Brutes when she felt a familiar presence crackle through her thoughts. It was Perfesser Prof! He was saying, “…need to be careful, Pop. It’s the big one and as you know, the most likely moment…” Indeed it was, her crescendo was coming up after a couple more songs, that big finale without a fucking denouement, like a body rolling in the midst of an orgasm with the flow abruptly unstoppered. Lights out. Her fans would be pissed, and they would love her for it.

Pop first came to this corner of reality in torn fishnet stockings and a tattered pullover dress. The Prof had outfitted her throat and diaphragm with the abilities of meta-historical she-crooners, and she had charmed her way to the top of the billboard in two years. What her fans  didn’t know, she was deep undercover, and her subsequent disappearance would be as a much a mystery as her appearance.

Pop, as she sang, recounted the cat and mouse game that was her life. A real princess, as real as anything in reality could be, her youth was the smell of hyacinths, the murmurs of wet nurses, and the joyful frolick of her and her twin sister. They lay in the womb, mirror images, and grew up, their violet eyes and peroxide blond hair mirror images. One side of the mirror was Pop and the other was Pip.

Nobody knew what happened. Some said it was the nature of twins, for one to go bad. Pop was no princess (heh heh) but she was a good girl in most respects. Pip broke the mold they both were cast in and escaped north; the kingdom was razed with her pack of slavering wolfmen and the resurrected dead. Princess Pop never had time to mourn. Well versed in the multi-martial-arts of a hundred cultures, she, with a small band of heroes, fought until she was the last one standing.

She owed it all to Perfesser Prof and The Fractal Rangers. He appeared in his fractal foaming craft, like a wild rocket blurring out of nowhere, leaking eddies of  multiverses, his van winkle beard twisting in the entropic currents, his wizened hands waving come on oh, Pop! come on! She got on and never looked back.

Pip, on the other hand, used dark arts and violent technologies that rendered her planet barely habitable to catapault herself into the metaflow of realities. She pursued Pop across dry tales, sent pirates after her in high seas blockbusters, was the dame from hell in noir hardbacks, played the cold-hearted bitch lawyer in massive litigation dramas, was a constant thorn in the meta-metaphoric heel of the Fractal Rangers, all the while laying waste to the worlds within the multitude of multitudes.

So this concert, this artificial narrative was a last ditch effort of the Fractal Rangers to bait and permanently remove Princess Pip from the equation. Quarter through the final song, The Shards of God, Pop spotted a wraith detach itself from a speaker and swoop towards her. Perfesser Prof triggered a curtain of firebrands at stage front, obscuring the twins from the audience. But they didn’t mind, as long as Pop sang. Prof had put on a recording. Pop faced off her sister.

The mirror was broken. The reflected did not reflect the reflectee. They stared at each other and smelled hyacinths from the recesses of memory. Princess Pip was a toothless crone, the horror of her history running through her blood. Her cloak, torn from the furies, moved restlessly upon her decimated frame. There was no room for words.

Princess Pip roared, raising corpse white arms.  She had forgotten why she hated her sister, only that all the pain in the pursuit was not to be for naught. She had subsisted on that rage and pain of others like a crow picks scraps of roadkill from the highway, and a meal of fraternal soul juice would do her right! The hieroglyphics of a tortured language tore through her throat, bringing flecks of blood speckling, and coloured the air with violent violet ideograms. They throbbed and wheeled, spinning into a white hot, flickering artifact, Princess Pop a shrinking black silhouette in the midst of all this light. The audience howled as The Shards of God broke apart in a scintillating mitosis, that would soon inexorably draw together  into a Big Crunch.

The artifact rose, spun on its axis to–hiss and fall apart like a bucket of incandescent water. Pip collapsed! The failed magic ran across the stage, corroding the stainless steel. Princess Pop’s boots sizzled. A couple of concert goers yelped, burnt. Pip lay, a bundle of rags and bones, her neck skewed at a bad angle. Her eyes regarded Princess Pop like an injured puppy’s,  the whites mostly showing.

Diaphanous, bleached of colour and substance, the lines of Pip’s flesh were transparent. She was spread wide and thin, her selves losing objective and straying into lost tales of pain and betrayal, of the disgruntled Catholic mother of twenty children scrubbing pans, of the woman and her smoking gun sent to jail after the murder of a wealthy husband, of the prostitute under the hands of one Jack or another, of the desperate girl and a final candle in snowy streets. Pop was overcome with pity. They had not needed to bait her! All they had to was wait until Pip extinguished herself, her component pieces lost in the megaflow.

In a final agony of movement, Pip moved her mouth into a semblance of words, a creaking vowel falling into a murmur then rising in a sharp intake s trembling into an ohhhrrrweee. Pip faded, a darkroom trick. Pip’s lines, her organic definitions, twinkled into the ether. The stuff of worlds had reclaimed what was left of her. Pop, vital and eternally in the prime of her life, wept as the flames arched above. The song, at its apogee, cut off.

The lights went out.