– 8 –
Mr. Matsuda, the inventor of the Konami Thunder Dance, is dead.
He dreams as he dreamed in life.
In his dreams he is standing in a field of red and lightning; red petals, red flowers, red silks, and the argent fire of the clouds.
He is standing in a single still spot of the storm.
A man is there. The man is wearing a hat. Mr. Matsuda cannot see the color of the hat.
“This world should run on love,” says the man, “and not on hate.”
The man shows Mr. Matsuda the world in the palm of his hand. It is spinning. There is red fluttering around Mr. Matsuda. He tastes of the air and it is like drinking cranberry juice: it is cold and crisp and pure in him and its flavor makes him strong.
The man in the hat reaches his other hand for Mr. Matsuda.
“The world,” he repeats, “should run on love, and not on hate; and people should know how beautiful they are.”
– 9 –
So Emily sets up her PlayStation. She plugs it in. She takes her position. Then she waits while Lucy goes off to rob a department store to get one of her own.
They stand facing one another.
Sid’s corpse isn’t rotting. Not while they’re facing one another. The next enemy isn’t approaching. That’s how it is with the Thunder Dance. There isn’t a yesterday. There isn’t a tomorrow. There’s only a now.
Then they move their toes across the keyboard of the feet.
And Emily has always been the best at this; one of the best that there has ever been — but there is a gulf now between them.
You should not have your yellow, yellow hat, Navvy Jim had told her, nor be in your yellow House.
She has fought hard to overcome it, but she is still a girl sorted into the Keepers’ House. She is still a girl whose eyes struggle to catch and seal, to keep the magic bound.
And Lucy has become something more than human; more than Fan Hoeng.
She dances HER EVIL PROPHECY in the name of the wicked god of space. It humbles Emily; it strikes her low; it kneels her, it takes her body and it kneels her, and her head comes down.
It isn’t even a contest. The evil prophet is just plain better than Emily now.
Emily was ready for this. She’d half-expected it. She hates it, and she hates herself, but this is for all the money; this is for the world.
She cheats.
She activates the Unlimited Cheat Code and enables the Great Networked Thunder Dance.
Lucy congeals herself. She frowns at Emily.
“You shouldn’t —”
Emily presses the Nobody Wants to Hear Your Opinion You Stupid Evil Prophet Anyway button with her toe.
Then she auto-activates the Symbol GATHERING to begin the Networked Dance.
– 10 –
I imagine that there was some Konami executive or programmer who’d dreamed of it, though I do not know their name — someone who’d dreamed the grandest dream ever dreamt by a middle-aged gaming console programmer, that people across the world should hook their dance pads together via a wireless Internet connection and the Ultimate Konami Cheat Code and dance the Great Networked Thunder Dance to sweep away the evil prophet of space.
It has been there, implicit in the code, waiting;
And the dancers have been waiting too.
They did not even know it, most of them, but they have been waiting.
Now they are not waiting.
There’s no turning back now!
Riding the Symbol of the Gathering, they fly southwards to Mount Hook.
They stand there, then, a baker’s dozen of un-chilled bodies in the snow.
There are Emily and Margerie. There is old, hobbling Kalov. There are Doug and Meredith, Ben, Christine, and Kasumi — um, not that Ben, obviously, not the one who was eaten, that would be just gross, it’s a different one — and Dancer X, and Hot Coffee; Footwork, and Phobos; and, of course, Lucy Souvante, the evil prophet of space.
“Hunh,” says Lucy.
She starts to throw paper. She starts to brandish an evil prophecy.
She forgets to count one-two-three.
The wind of the dance falls upon her and it is howling as it comes.
It rends her.
It rips her apart as she has ripped apart others. She hangs in the air in pieces. Her hands and her feet and her mouth scrabble at the air to try to draw her back together again.
Emily dances THE SCISSORS.
Margerie throws GLORY.
And so many others! So many Symbols! Even Doug, that sweat-drenched beginner, is desperately dancing MISSHAPEN METAL LUMP in opposition to the evil prophet of space.
Thunder peals.
The Dancers rip the evil prophet down to the seething particles of her and her smile.
The PlayStation 6s through which the Dancers dance grow hot. They suckle at the arctic evening air. A single particle of the evil prophet finds its way in through the vents and touches on the networked code.
“Do you know what I am going to do?” Lucy whispers, to Hot Coffee.
“No,” says Hot Coffee.
“I am going to redefine LIVE_BURIAL to TRUE.”
And before any of the dancers can say anything — before they can even utter a word —
Lucy does just that, and the mountain falls.
They are still guarded by the dance. Among other things — when she used the Cheat Code — Emily turned off the safeties. If the safeties are off — perhaps this is ironic — there is no way a Thunder Dancer in an active Konami Thunder Dance can die.
So none of them die in that moment —
But even so.
Most of them never wake up again.
Margerie opens her eyes long enough for a moment of satisfaction. A good dancer ought to be buried alive.
Kalov grumbles with finality.
Phobos wakes fully but to no avail; his chest is pinned and he screams silently until he dies.
Time passes.
Emily startles open her eyes.
She is buried under the mountain. She can scarcely breathe. She can’t move: there are rocks pinning her. Everywhere she is held down. The pain of it is horrible.
She is only alive because the PS6s are sturdy. They are not breakable by anything so small as a mountain falling upon them. Sure, the power is gone, now that she failed to finish the dance that she was dancing — but the machines themselves are sturdy. They have propped up the tumbled rock in certain limited ways.
“Oh,” she says.
It is soft and meek and the word is lost in the channels of the fallen mountain and she coughs and only the red light of a PlayStation on standby breaks the darkness.
She has a moment’s hope that Jeremiah Clean will come and rescue her; or Fred —
Wait. No.
Fred, like Eldri, like . . . so many of her friends . . . he’s dead. And Jeremiah Clean isn’t a tame janitor.
A few gleams of red light under Mount Hook’s rubble isn’t messy enough to draw him this far south.
“I feel,” she says, to unseen angels, “that I should apologize to the world, for now the evil prophet of space will probably kill everybody —”
She stops speaking with a gasp of pain. The rock has shifted. It grinds awfully into her back.
And laughing and crying she thinks, “Rock beats scissors.”
A concept pushes itself into her mind. She starts to think something. It is billowing in her mind like wind-tossed clouds and unfolding itself like a flower. She tries to articulate it but it is as if the mouth of her mind is full of cotton; she cannot find the words for things, she cannot find the names, she cannot find that beautiful fire that once had filled her mind. In the pain and the cold and the isolation of it all she has lost the thread of the jaguar-light that once possessed her.
The edge of something else catches on her consciousness instead.
It’s ridiculous. It’s really quite stupid. But she can’t help it.
She counts to three under her breath. She is caught up in a memory. She counts to three and she closes her fist.
The rock shifts again.
It lifts from her, just a bit. Then it is grinding, grinding, pushing back away from her, and in the little cavern that forms she sees the cross-legged form of Navvy Jim.
One hand is holding up an improvised roof.
The other, paper.
Emily giggles. Then she laughs. Then pain shoots through her ribcage and she chokes and she says, “Oh.”
“You cannot think to defeat me at rock-paper-scissors simply by draining my battery, taking me apart, packing me in boxes, and hiding under a mountain,” says Navvy Jim. “That is the kind of hijink only beneficial against amateurs.”
“Oh,” she says, and brokenly she smiles at him. She isn’t alone.
So much pain and so much silence; but she isn’t alone.
“But . . . it is dangerous to play rock-paper-scissors here,” he says. “The mountain throws rock. So rock and paper, perhaps, are safe, but if you had played scissors, you would have been crushed under tons of rock.”
“Mountains don’t care about rock-paper-scissors,” says Emily. “They’re not like robots.”
Navvy Jim hesitates.
“What is a mountain?” he says. “What is not a mountain? There is only the world.”
“You saved my life,” Emily says.
“I am a good robot,” smugs Navvy Jim.
There is silence for a while.
Tendrils of evil mist slowly slip into the chamber. The evil prophet congeals.
She looks between them.
“My God,” she says, referring neither to the Judeo-Christian God or the evil god of space but rather expressing both a blasphemy and a sense of wonder:
She is staring at Navvy Jim.
“I knew it,” she says. “I knew it. I knew there was someone on this planet who was good enough to give me a proper game.”
“What?” says Emily.
But Navvy Jim is nodding. “You would be a worthy rock-paper-scissors opponent,” Navvy Jim concedes.
“I didn’t expect to find you,” says Lucy, “while finishing off these dancers. You vanished before I got to this stupid planet. You left me.”
There is relief in her voice. There is a strange joy in it. She is as Emily, when first Emily saw the jaguar Bahlum; when first Emily understood what beauty was, that it was there, just waiting, in the world, for her to witness it: O See It Move!
The evil prophet of space is actually wiping away a tear.
Navvy Jim is hesitant. “Did you wish to play,” he says, “then?”
“Navvy Jim!” Emily says.
But their faces. Emily can’t bear it. Their faces.
“Fine,” she says.
She looks away. She sulks.
“You must understand,” says Navvy Jim, “that if I do not play, she wins by default —”
He trails off.
She’d say something here. She really would. She’d reassure him, or she’d critique him — but it’s not like she’s really gotten better, magically, just because she took her hat off; at best, she’s gotten pretty good by now at pretending to be a normal girl.
So she’s quiet there. She doesn’t say anything. Navvy Jim nods to her gravely.
Then the evil prophet of space, and Navvy Jim, square off.
“I should warn you,” says Lucy, “that I always throw paper. That’s how I’m going to kill you and the human. With paper.”
Navvy Jim’s eyes dim, then brighten.
“Why would you do that?” he asks.
Summarizes Lucy Souvante: “It is what I do.”
“Well,” says Navvy Jim, “the three symbols are mathematically equivalent, in any case.”
The evil prophet laughs. It’s startled from her. It’s pure and clean. And she says, “Yes. Yes, of course they are.”
And in a flash of insight Emily remembers the mountain that surrounds them, the great bulk of rock around them, and a shout bursts from her, racking the inside of her with pain: “Don’t throw scissors, Navvy Jim!”
The evil prophet is counting to three.
Navvy Jim glances at Emily.
“Of course I won’t,” he says. “The mountain always throws rock.”
And the evil prophet brandishes her evil prophecy. And Navvy Jim’s palm is flat. The aegis of evil prophecy burns around him, it scars his metal, but his palm is flat, so it does not kill.
“A tie,” says the evil prophet. “Rethrow.”
Softly, he counts to three.
She brandishes her evil prophecy, and Navvy Jim his palm.
“A tie,” says the evil prophet. “Rethrow.”
Navvy Jim says, “For all the money?”
“Of course,” says the evil prophet.
“If I win,” says Navvy Jim, “you’ll leave this world?”
“Navvy Jim,” says Emily, and her face is as pale as the snow.
“Perhaps,” the evil prophet says.
And Navvy Jim’s eyes glow blue.
And softly the evil prophet counts to three.
“Oh, no,” says Emily. “Oh, no.”
Her hand is twitching on the ground. She is drawing with her finger. She goes up up down down left right left right B and A, but she is still working on that last A of the Konami Cheat Code when the third count is counted —
And the evil prophet brandishes her evil prophecy; and Navvy Jim, with a great screeching of metal, splits into scissors the fingers of his hand; and simultaneously with BEING CRUSHED BY ROCKS, Emily finishes the code and she throws Dynamite with her foot.
She isn’t the kind of player who would do this. She really isn’t. Not since the hatting.
But she does.
And the last things that Emily sees as the world goes white are Navvy Jim lunging for her to catch her as she falls and the hideously betrayed expression of the evil prophet as she shouts:
“You can’t throw Dynamite. This is rock-paper-scissors!”
They don’t let you do things like that, it seems, at the evil academy of space.
Flashback: “Nithrid Methodology”
One morning, Professor Zimmerman is running the nithrid through its physical when a bull with wings and the head of a man interferes.
It lands amidst billowing dust in the clearing.
It is a flayed bull. It is terribly bleeding. But its voice is polite. It says, “Please back away.”
And maybe Professor Zimmerman is afraid, or maybe heroic, I don’t know, but he doesn’t. He stands there, as the creature draws closer. He even stands straighter; until the nithrid, it interferes.
“It’s OK,” the nithrid says. “He’s working for Gulley.”
It is easy to read the bull’s expressions, because it has a human face. The bull has no idea what the nithrid is talking about. The bull is not sure why it should be reassured by the name Gulley, but grasps that she believes that it should.
All of this is only visible, of course, because the bull has a human face. It is quite likely that it would have been utterly unreadable if it had just been a bull. That’s why regular bulls win most every poker tournament that they can get into, and if they lose, it’s because they have terrible hands.
“It’s not OK,” the bull says, because the nithrid is attached to hundreds of wires, and has one eyelid clamped back, and it doesn’t look comfortable at all, but the nithrid is reassuring:
“It’s fine.”
And after it departs, the nithrid says, “We were together. On the farm.”
“Is it some sort of natural phenomenon?”
“It is a bull,” says the nithrid, unnecessarily, “with the face of a man and the wings of a . . . winged thing. And it is holy. It is sacred. It is a gift to the world.”
Professor Zimmerman begins unwiring the nithrid. “You’re stable,” he notes.
“Thank you.”
“Why would Hans keep something holy?” Then, with sudden, horrid realization: “Why would he SKIN it?”
“It would have made the world better,” says the nithrid.
Professor Zimmerman raises an eyebrow.
“. . . But it didn’t belong.”
It’s long gone by then. It’s just a dream in the distance. It’s like most flying bulls that a person encounters. It’s there for a time, and it bleeds. Then it’s gone.
Flashback: “Non-Euclidian Hydrodynamics”
The moon base explodes, as they always do. The last star Nazis shake their fists ineffectually after the zeppelin of Xavid, Professor of Non-Euclidian Hydrodynamics in the Science division of the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth, a magnet school in Brentwood operating under the aegis of the Lethal Corporation with a mandate to gather young minds and train them in the limitless possibilities of one day being able to defeat giant wolves and other parties and entities that may or may not at some point in the future devour the world, which is to say, the world shining like a blue marble jewel in space under the light of the moon and the glittering exploding moonbase of the star Nazis as the zeppelin majestically sails away.
“Curse you!” the star Nazis cry out. “We were so sure that parallel lines would always converge!”
That is the relentless Euclidian hydrodynamics of the star Nazis—
And their fourteenth-worst failing.
The zeppelin slips through the twisting water-like channels of the cruel demiurge’s innards that pervade ordinary space and time. It is momentarily in Venice, Sweden, Mars. It inverts and reverts and resounds in the medium. Then it docks at the edge of the Department of Esoteric Studies.
There isn’t enough time for a coffee.
It’s almost enough to make you want to drink the demiurge medium— reputedly pineapple, purportedly caffeinated, and with just a bit of the taste Dr. Pepper once had.
Almost— but not quite.
Xavid hits the emergency caffeine button in passing. There is a perturbation in the luminiferous ether. A Lethal drink swirls into his cup. And he has just enough time to take a gulp and a half from it before throwing open the doors to the class.
Three students. One is dead. Two are sleeping. It’s so hard to get students!
Everyone knows Hydrodynamics’ a bore.
– 1 –
One day Martin will hear about it on the radio.
He will say, “Jane! Good news! The last of the Fan Hoeng has been stopped!”
He won’t understand the tears that fall into the cookies that she’s baking.
He won’t know why that could possibly upset her.
He’ll just look a little goofy, and he’ll tousle her shoulder, and he’ll walk away.
That is not today, though, anyway.
That is later.
Today the evil prophet of space isn’t dead. Today she won’t be dead.
It isn’t possible. It’s just not acceptable. She can’t be dead. She just — she just lost at rock-paper-scissors once. That’s all.
That’s not death. That’s just —
A thing.
You are allowed to live, you know, even if you lose at rock-paper-scissors once. It is not against the rules.
She eats her way out of the mountain in the form of an acidic cloud. She is staggering and gasping. She is blind. She is broken.
Death is near her. She can feel it. Death is bleating.
But she will not let it in.
There is a pressure on her mind.
She is blind — of course she is blind. She lost at rock-paper-scissors! That is what probably happens —
But even blind, for a moment she sees it. It is not bounded by things like perceptions. It is not merely a sense-impression but an actual —
“That is not Death,” she realizes, “but an actual goat.”
It bumps her with its head. It leaves her cut. She is a fog of evil potential, a mist of awful destiny, a film of the wickedness and the power of the wicked god of space —
She is bleeding, violet blood from every piece of her.
She staggers. She almost falls.
She has only lost once. That is OK. You can recover. It is all right to lose once, even if it is at rock-paper-scissors. It doesn’t mean that your ideology or your hopes or your dreams are fundamentally flawed.
“Look,” she says to the goat. She giggles. She throws paper. One, two, three!
The goat is sharp.
“No, look,” she whispers. She holds out her prophecy. “Paper!”
She throws paper. One, two, three!
The goat is sharp.
It eddies forward.
“No,” she whimpers.
That goat’s too sharp. Paper can’t beat it. She brandishes her evil prophecy, but to no avail!
“One, two, three,” she whispers —
She doesn’t throw paper.
She opts on cheating.
She lunges. She bites down upon it. She gulps it down. One bite.
Thus ends Hans’ goat. It is swallowed up by her evil.
One bite!
That’s all it takes!
She eddies on across the Antarctic wastes. She has only lost once, maybe two to four times —
– 2 –
It occurs to her after a while that the goat she has eaten is extremely sharp. It is a . . . very . . . sharp goat.
“It is possible,” she says, “That my ambition to kill and eat this goat, and thus demonstrate my supremacy, has been wrong-headed, all this while.”
It isn’t because she lost at rock-paper-scissors. That isn’t the reason.
It’s the way her stomach bursts inside her, and leaves everything all-over blood.
– 3 –
I know that that isn’t the way this was prophesied. That was bad foreshadowing. I’m sorry.
That goat!
It was just too sharp!
Flashback: “Practicum of Combat”
Three members of the Board of the Education down. Twenty-four to go.
Professor Conor Anderson, of Ninjutsu, breaks into a run.
In the background he can see his Department head waving his hands. Arguing. It’s futile. The Lethal Magnet Professor knows as much. You’ll never sell the Board on giving exams in three-man cells so that the law of inverse ninjutsu will not apply. You’ll never even talk them out of forcing the students to fill out standardized, fill-in-the-circle and feed-the-thing-to-the-great-Machine, out-of-date multiple-choice tests.
Ninjas! And still they want lead-marked pointless standardized tests from them.
It is, in Professor Conor Anderson’s clinical opinion as a Lethal Magnet Professor of Ninjutsu, not sane.
One palm stops in front of the stomach of a fire-type Subcommittee of the Public Trust board member. A shockwave radiates.
It strips the mask from the oni, unwinds the Public Trust creature into an ink glyph bleeding from the air, and shatters it into dust.
Behind him—
Professor Anderson brakes!
The club of Dr. Abernathy, Chairman for Assessment & Accounting of Ninjutsu-Related Education, smashes down as Professor Anderson skips back. It’s slow, it’s too slow to really process at the speed the Lethal Magnet Professor is moving, but he thinks that he can hear a vast roar.
It is close. It was too close. There’s too many of them.
The inverse ninjutsu law does not apply to members of the Board.
Four down. Another—
The club snaps. Pieces of it go in two directions. A tree is sprouting from the ground where the front piece hits—
Twenty-three, soon to be twenty-one, to go.
“The rules are in place to protect the children,” the Minister’s Representative is arguing. Professor Anderson attempts a punch, but the Minister’s Representative is nothing more than an Agency Puppet; it explodes around his fist and then reforms.
He decides to ignore it, retreats.
The Department head, all present are given to understand, is totally in favor of protecting the children, as are Mr. Gulley and Professor Conor Anderson. Stop that, Professor Anderson. Professor Anderson!
Bureaucrats do not understand the true way of ninjutsu. Not even their friends.
Professor Anderson drags his foot across the scattered paper on the table. Paper writhes up to become a ninja doll in his likeness. It drops grumpily into his chair and attends the meeting. It is pretending that it has gotten over its fit of pique and is willing to listen calmly to the concerns of the remaining twenty-one members of the Board of Education in attendance.
As for Professor Anderson, he has spiraled into ninja space.
“There’s no way you can win this,” says a voice of evil. It is surrounding him. It is pervading the annex of ninja space attached to the Board of Education meeting. There are eyes. There are fangs. And in fact he cannot. It is entirely and utterly obvious that Professor Conor Anderson, of Ninjutsu, cannot.
He is knocked out of ninja space. He is thrown from it, slammed against the wall, left dazed there with his cap slumped off the side of his head trying to remember whether he’s set the DVR to record the latest episode of Whisker Ninjas or not.
It’s very important! The rats can’t operate the DVR on their own.
“Are you done?” asks the chief demon. Right. He remembers this. He is still at the meeting. The demon is looking at him. It is looking at him through and from behind the glass eyes of the committee chair. But he shakes his head. He grins a little.
He’d say something clever but he’s a ninja. He’s swift. He’s silent. He’s like a shadow. Shadows don’t speak up at Board of Education meetings. That’s—
That’s not really that much of a virtue.
He doesn’t say it, anyway, though. He just closes his eyes and imagines it.
The clock hits a standardized moment.
There is a standardized shiver of ki.
Somewhere in the offices of the Standardized Testing Institute, Ninjutsu Division, the papers, the papers filled out by his students, his marvelous students, his marvelous ninjas who will save the world one day, see if they won’t, spiral together. They weave themselves into a great paper dragon. They roar.
Machinery is shattering. He can almost hear it.
Fires are starting.
And the strings of the puppets; the power of the oni; the force that keeps the Brentwood Board of Education Subcommittee Member Responsible for Improving Alignment and Setting the District’s Direction manifest physically rather than confined to his cell in the bowels of Brenthall—
Are cut.
– 1 –
I will tell you the story of Peter now.
He hung in space above the world and the scissors were screaming. They didn’t want to fall, not any longer, not once Jeremiah Clean began his work.
They were no longer a drill-bit of the wicked god’s intentions, twisting and spinning and thrusting into the Earth. They were caught in a funnel, helpless in a storm, instead, dragged down by the vortex of them to be unmade by Jeremiah Clean.
They were like a bully that shoved someone, only to discover inside that person’s shirt was a furnace that burnt their hand away. They were like a person who was teasing a tiger, only to realize that the tiger wasn’t caged. And to a certain extent, that satisfies him, makes him happy, because Peter’s always considered scissors to be the worst.
But the screaming gets to him.
He can’t help it. It gets to him. He is floating in the nothingness amidst the sheer and awful panic of the scissors-swarm, caught in its thoughts as it faces an awful death. And finally in that moment he understands the reason he was born; and hates it; but he does it anyway.
He gathers them, them as he can. He saves them, pulls them back and out, those that he can. Ten thousand pairs of scissors, and two great scissor-ships of the Fan Hoeng.
He pulls them away from the nothingness. He drags them into space with him. He begins, with a baroque and jaguar-like futility, to rotate around the Earth.
– 2 –
Emily comes out of Mount Hook. She is broken and alone and she is the last of them — the last survivor of the Great Networked Thunder Dance.
She is free, she pushes aside the last of it, but she cannot stand. Her robot, her marvelous rock-paper-scissors-playing robot, has been crushed.
She looks up at the sky for quite a while.
It’s really pretty.
Then she points herself north and begins to crawl.
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