Inside the core of the Scourge, couldrons of creation bubbled.
The DeathGrasp DNA gave rise to an instinct memory, which augmented with some animal DNA whipped up a faint residual consciousness.
Which seeped into the organic and cybernetic neural pathways, and spread out, and became more complex, and became a primitive mind.
Which soaked up the stores of knowledge from the absorbed humans and computers, and guided by it's primal instict memory, sought out and kept only what it recognized as resembling it's former self.
And thus, it reconstructed everything that DeathGrasp knew.
Then, augmented by the metaphysical properties of the derkonite in it's system, the Deathgrasp mind latched on to it's original metaphysical energies, it's lifeforce.
And with that reassembling of mind, ego, and spirit, DeathGrasp was re-created.
And with that re-creation, the original program of the Mandroid Emergency Beacon Reciever Device was complete.
And thus, the growth of The Scourge momentarily halted.
DeathGrasp awoke in a cold blackness, and after some momentary confusion, began to become aware of other minds, and through those minds, became aware of his situation, and by telepathicly scanning the vast memory banks of his new body, he came to a conclusion.
The human populace of the westernized world was too docile to incite to revolution, and the third world was too unstable to repair in any single lifetime, thus, the human race was beyond hope.
Politicly.
But this new form, this Scourge, was just the thing to bring about his new order.
Digest all life, and instantly create utopia in it's neural web.
The ultimate manifistaiton of his political ideals.
And thus, DeathGrasp and the Scourge truly became one, and it's growth continued unimpeded.
All of this took an elapsed 40 seconds.
Harry watched as the green dot of Hembug vanished on the horizon.
It had taken some hardcore verbal abuse to make him leave.
He still kinda felt bad about it too.
Harry looked down, and sighed sadly as he noticed the battery on the I-pod was dead.
A damned shame, he wanted to play Pagliacci by Pavorratti for his death song.
Would've brought the pattern of his life to a perfect circle, Harry figured.
Harry shrugged, and took a stab at a few pidgeon italian verses himself as he slid down poles and climbed back up laddars to work some switches and dials for the final reactor buildup.
His voice was terrible, but hell, no one could hear, and the lyrics were made up gibberish, but he knew the translated meaning, and knew where to put the "oomph".
"Bah, sei tu forse un uom? Tu se' Pagliacciooooo!"
(Bah, you think you're a man? You're just a clown!)
He ran across a walkway to toss a couple switches.
"Vesti la giubba e la faccia infarinaaaa!!!"
(On with the show, man, and put on your white-face)
Running back up to the top deck to see the first glimps of black howling tendrils.
Fists on hips.
Extended one hand out with a flourish.
"La gente paga e rider vuole quaaa.
EEEE se Arlecchin t'invola Colombinaaa, ridi, Pagliacciooooo...
e ognum applaudiraaaa! Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il piantooooo!!".
(The people pay you and you must make them laugh.
And if Harlequin should steal your Columbine, laugh,
you're Pagliaccio, and the world will clap for you!
Turn into banter all your pain and sorrow)
Extending both hands outward, and with an almost defiant snarl he brought it home.
"In una smorfia il singhiozzo e'l dolor...
Riiiidiiiiii Pagliaccioooooo, sul tuo amore infrantooooooooo!
Riiiidiiii del duol che t'avvelena il coooooooorrr!".
(and with your clowns' face hide grief and distress...
Laugh loud, Pagliaccio, forget all of your troubles,
Laugh off the pain that so empoisons your heart)
And with that, he sank to a full down to the knees bow, head down, as the tendrils began to batter the machine, and drain it of it's built up speed.
Harry's head popped back up with a defiant smirk.
A wave of black ooze riddled with bullfrog burbling mouths and red eyeballs loomed up on the horizon.
Harry chortled.
The wave roared closer and closer, a chilling sound warbling through it like a strong hurricane wind punctuated with bearlike growls, and a faint sprinkle of female pitched screams.
Harry held his ground.
As the wave roared closer, tendrils loomed up on either side of the machine cube.
Harry noted them in his periphiral vision.
Then, having guesstimated letting them get close enough, he stomped down on a red button inset next to him.
The stored up energy of the machine released in a four pointed yellowish orange starburst accompanied by an ear splitting stereophonic buzz like a prolonged electric guitar note.
The wave dispursed as if it had smacked into an invisible breakwater, and the tendrils recoiled.
The energy shaft eminating from underneath the machine boiled the black ooze in the ocean, and gave off a roaring greenish cloud reeking like burning garbage.
Within a few minutes, Harry noted the smoke and stench cleared.
Suspicious, he squinted through some remaining smoke, and noticed that the black in the water was retreating, leaving behind the usual transluscent blue.
"Oh no you don't! son of a bitch!", he hissed.
He ran to the back of the machine, and climbed down some ladders.
Finding a sturdy enough structural point to hold onto, he fired up his boot gravity lifts, and began to push with maximum flight power.
Slowly, ever so slowy, it began to microscopicly budge.
Harry's face was bright red and sweaty from the effort of merely holding his body vertically erect without getting crushed.
Finally, he gave up.
"Fuck....not gonna move, can't catch him, fuck...need Hembug...he's long gone..fuck", he gasped while sitting indian style rubbing his sore legs.
The massive electrical starburst and hum still filled the sky.
"Shit, and this damned thing will pour out all it's juice in about an hour...fuck..", Harry mumbled with a note of grim defeat in his voice.
"Ah well, I'll have a lethal dose of rads in just 10 minutes anyway. Least I'll miss the apocalypse".
5 minutes later, Harry passed out.
Harry opened his eyes, and found himself laying in the middle of a grassy field.
Helen looked down at him from a tree limb dangling overhead, her broad mouth grinning warmly with a touch of sarcasm, and her heart shaped face as always, framed by a thick shoulder length mane of chestnut hair.
"Get up already, ya pussy", she said with a chuckle in her voice, as her sneakered feet dangled in a musical rythm.
Harry looked up and smirked.
She was the open and outgoing one.
God help him if he ever lost her.
"Remember, I'll always love you, I'll always be here when you need me, and most important of all, whenever you doubt yourself, there are no limits but those you set for yourself", she said warmly.
Harry smiled and said "yeah, babe, I'll try to remember".
"There's my man", Helen said with an equally strong smile.
Harry blinked, and he was back aboard the machine.
He climbed to his feet, and noticed the last vestiges of what seemed to be radiation sores vanishing from the back of his hands at the same rate that strength and lucidity were returning to his body.
"No limits, baby. I remembered this time", he said with an excited smile.
Harry kicked off his gravity lifts, plucked off his neural scanner and timewarper, and chucked them all into the sea.
Finding the sturdy structural point he held onto before when he'd pushed with the grav-lifts, he held his body vertically erect with healing power augmented upper body strength, and concentrated.
Slowly, ever so slowy, the machine began to budge.
And not microscopicly.
And not with crushing gravity pressure.
Indeed, the effort it was taking to hold himself up was what was becoming negligable.
Within 20 seconds, Harry was pushing the machine in the direction of The Scourge's retreat at 40 miles an hour.
Within 2 minutes, he had accelerated to 200 miles per hour.
Within 5 minutes, he breached mach 1, and started to see tentacles.
The Scourge tried to retreat, but Harry's machine splashed into it's oozy structure with a roiling boiling fizzle, and a roar of the green odiferous smoke.
Thousands of it's hellish maws wailed.
But, it wasn't dying.
Harry felt a wave of defeat, and realized it had spent too much of it's power.
His hope further sank as a literal wave of black ooze began to pour down towards him overhead.
He envisioned Helen looking over his shoulder shaking her head, and his mind screamed "NO!!".
He grasped two beams on the machine, squinted his eyes really hard, and poured his willpower at it for something, anything to happen.
If his eyes hadn't been squinted, he would have seen what did.
His hands became transluscent, like DeathGrasp's.
But yellow, and full of the healing energy Helen had given to him.
The orange glow from the machine which now was being snuffed out by The Scourge, lit up to white and blinding, and blasted free from the ooze, and burnt it all off, and then continued to grow larger and brighter, and filled the sky for miles with a trillion pointed starburst that made the air molecules on it's perimeter give off a squeaking crinkle sound like dry ice.
The energy wave reacted with the derkonite within The Scourge, like Harry's original handheld matter-porter had with DeathGrasp's Derkonite core, and magnified the starburst even more.
Pulsing rainbow energy waves at a strobing amplitude poured forth from it's core for 15 seconds, and then, the energy burst exploded forth even more fantasticly.
The starbust let out another massive guitar-like thrum, and encompassed the whole lower two thirds of planet earth itself.
And just as it was reaching it's ultimate crescendo...
...it fizzled and winked out, like the dot on a switched off television.
And it was all gone.
The Scourge, every little drop of it, gone.
The energy wave, and the machine that spawned it, gone.
Harry.
Gone.
Harry opened his eyes, and immediatly regretted it.
His retinas were finger banged by a swirling kaleidescope of ultra-violet and x-ray colors as arranged by Picasso smoking Pollock as a big human joint.
He squinted, and the distorted miasma began to slide together into a slightly more comprehensible purple vortex with all sorts of trippy psychedelic energy patterns and plasmatic paisleys swirling about, and buffetting his senses.
Finally, with a sudden jolt of acceleration, a cool and refreshing waterslide feeling washed over him, soothing his senses, and his view cleared to that of a transluscent tunnel with jillions of pretty multicolored planets and nebulae whizzing by outside like on Star Trek or something.
He took stock of his surroundings, and noted he was virtually alone.
Except for the little black wriggling speck miles ahead of him which was clearly the Scourge.
Somehow, it had been hurled out ahead of him.
Or else, he'd been stuck for awhile in the gateway to this vortex, and it had gotten a head start.
Suited Harry fine.
But where was he, and where was he headed?
Clearly the machine had been a larger scale version of the matter-porter, but as with the first miniature model, the dream blueprints hadn't specified where it was keyed to take him.
Also, the first one had taken him to DeathGrasp's lair instantaneously.
Presumedly, it had merely seemed that way because the target destination was only several hundred miles away.
Harry shrugged, and decided to passively resign his fate to the providence that had guided him so far.
Looking like an insane Picasso/Dali-esqe Frankenstienian kitbash of several ships from at least five different SF universes, the freshly upgraded Green Mamba speeded along hyperspace back towards Earth, piloted by a youthful, svelt, and spritely Steve Torrent (having been medically rejuvinated in the future).
An alert light flashed on Steve's screen.
Steve checked the readout, and saw that a huge object was in hyperspace transit along a slipstream channel adjacent to his own.
A little TOO adjacent, he noted.
Steve grabbed the controls, and yanked the Mamba over in sidespace to avoid the object.
He saw it whizz by in 2 seconds.
Indeed, it WAS huge!
The size of a planetoid.
Black, and covered with....tentacles?
While gawking at the startling sight, he'd missed a second alert.
The ship rattled hard, and was bumped essentially back to his original track in hyperspace.
"What the fuck?", he said as he called up damage report.
It had been a 20 foot long chunk of a green radioactive meteor.
An element scientists of the future had referred to as "Derkonite".
Luckily, the telefractal shields had handled it perfectly, dissolving it into frinkifrat particles.
Steve shrugged, and realigned the Mamba back onto it's original course.
Planet Earth reorganized its shape like morphing watercolors.
It's injuries from The Scourge vanished.
For without The Scourge, the damage hadn't ever happened.
For without DeathGrasp, The Scourge never arose.
For without the crashing of the Derkonite meteor, there was no DeathGrasp.
Or Legion Of Liberty.
Or the animation of Hembug.
Or the empowering of Harry Hembock.
For The Green Mamba had just deflected the Derkonite.
By dodging The Scourge.
Which was sent into hyperspace by Harry Hembock.
Thus, the world was once again saved, but once again unaware.
Thus, nobody loved Harry Hembock.
All was back as it was once more.
At great sacrfice.
Of which all were oblivious.
The Kool-Aid clouds hung over Steve Torrent's house as if to say "where are ya, Steve? It's time for Osbournes!".
Suddenly, with a flash of pseudo lighting, a popping like a giant pickle jar being opened, and a big whiff of ozone, The Green Mamba appeared in the sky.
The ship wobbled to a landing in Steve's back yard, and then the cloak was switched on, perfectly concealing it's existance from the neighbors (who were miraculously all at work, or shopping at the moment).
A ramp lowered from the invisible ship, and Steve ran down said ramp, and to the varanda door, and into the living room of his house.
Steve did a Jackie Chan flip into his recliner, grabbed his remote, and put the Osbournes on.
"Try and make ME miss my fucking shows will you, government, history, and laws of physics? Well, I sure fucking showed you, cocksuckas! NO ONE makes Steve Torrent miss his shows!".
The corrider rumbled with time-quake, and shifted to reddish.
Harry looked about him, confused, oblivious to the temporal paradoxes juggling around outside.
Suddenly, he felt the now familiar warm tingle of Helen's energy envelop him, and then he started as a hand touched his shoulder.
Harry jolted back "Helen! you're...you're really real! I'm not dreaming! oh baby..I..".
It WAS her.
"Shhh, settle down, don't piss yourself, Jesus, it's alright, babe", she soothed.
"But...but how...", he stammered dumbly.
"Something to do with higher dimensions intersecting with the afterlife. I dunno, didn't really grasp it all. Jesus explained it better anyway. Way with words that guy, you'd like him".
She smirked.
"So um...", Harry said trying to find the right words to ask a question that lumped together all of the ones buzzing through his mind.
She jumped into the awkwardness for him "you're not supposed to be here. Time to go home".
And with that she grabbed his hands, spun him around twice, and let go, hurling him back in the other direction along the wormhole with a "hey YUP!".
As he hurtled away from her, she waved cheerily.
Soon, Harry saw a familiar blue and green planet veer up in front of him, get bigger, and then surround him as the vortex finally let go and spat him out onto dry land.
But, he landed in the same spot as a past version of himself.
The two phased into each other, and fused.
He was bombarded with disorientation, as alternate memories flooded in.
Of a life without the Derkonite infusion.
Without the car accident.
Without the Legion Of Liberty to both positively and negatively inspire him.
And thus, by a complex strand of chain reactions, no Helen.
And then, he was bombarded with equal disorientation of absorbing the memories of this alternate self absorbing his own memories, realizing the failure of both lives, and falling into despair.
Which he now also proceeded to do.
Which syncronized both minds, and alleviated the temporal disporientation.
But merely replaced it with an equal emotional turmoil.
Harry, this new fusion Harry, with memories of both timelines, collapsed under the weight of it all.
Knocked into a deep sleep, his disturbed subconscious mind tried to fill the yawning void with fantasy.
Of being in the future, being a member of an order called "The Zone Dweebies", of going on a quest for a lost technology of neutrino-travel, and of teaming up with aliens and robots, and space vixens.
And strangely, midway through this, he was plucked out of time, into some other dream, where he met that blue thing from another dream he'd had, and this scruffy paunchy drunkard named Steve Torrent.
And then, finally, being rudely shunted back into the first dream, and then back to present day Earth, where through a chain reaction of happenstance, ended up in a loony bin, where finally, Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, wasted him with a blast of magic.
Harry snapped awake.
"That was some trippy dream", Harry mumbled.
He climbed to his feet, dusted himself off, and headed back inside.
He tried to review the whole thing, trying to learn from it, but it was all fading away now.
Something about...magic beer? No, it was gone.
Damn shame, he liked telling Helen the weird ones.
Then he remembered.
Helen was gone.
He'd never worked up the balls to even aproach her, and she'd married some other man.
Harry sank into his recliner, utterly defeated.
He sat there like that, television turned off, lights out, sun setting, for a good couple hours.
And then an image snapped into his fading memory of himself in a junky superhero costume grabbing hold of two metal beams and screaming "NO!!".
Somehow, this inspired him to get up out of his seat, and head towards the door.
"Where the hell am I going?", he asked himself.
And then some more memories flickered in.
Of Helen sitting next to him in his car guiding him along to...where?
Something compelled him to get into the car and find out.
On the news, a story unfolded of a strange incident.
A severly disturbed man in his mid-40's entered a shopping mall with a snub nosed revolver, and starded shooting patrons.
Which was eventful enough, except for what had happened next.
A mysterious man in a hooded sweatshirt had subdued him by merely touching him.
The assailant tumbled over in agony as if had had been touched with red hot metal.
Then, the mysterious stranger laid his hands on a small 2 year old girl who had been hit, seemingly lethally by all eyewitness accounts, and helped her to her feet.
Medical examinations afterward revealed not a scratch on her.
Despite the bloody bullet holes in her clothing.
Then, this mysterious person dissapeared into the flowing mob and vanished.
All security camera footage during the time of this incident was garbled.
Hembug snapped off his TV has Harry climbed into the driver's side.
"Damn, nice trick with the little girl there", Hembug remarked, impressed.
Harry pulled back the hood on his sweatshirt.
"Well, I figured, if my hands can animate a freaking Volkswagon, why not a person?".
Hembug smiled "bet you're feeling like a big damned hero".
Harry smirked "yeah, why the hell not?".
Harry looked over in the passenger seat at his manuscript, and patted it out of habit.
"So, how much d'ya think they'll pay for my life story NOW y'figure?".
Hembug chuckled "not Paris Hilton book money, sadly".
Harry chuckled back "no, no, I ain't aiming that high, that'd just be foolishly quixotic".
Hembug started his engine, and pulled out of the mall parking lot.
Harry fiddled with the radio dial.
Vesti la giubba was on the classical station.
He let it play.
A familair face Harry hadn't seen in years looked down at him from her place in the book signing line of his autobiography (which the rest of the world had taken to be science fiction) her broad mouth grinning warmly with a touch of sarcasm, and her heart shaped face as always, framed by a thick shoulder length mane of chestnut hair.
"Loved your book", she said with a shy starstruck quality to her voice.
"Glad to hear it", Harry said with a smirk, as he scribbled in, after his signature of course, his phone number.
"Next one will be even better", he said with a sly wink.
Nolan Buckner handed Harry a free CD from the back seat of his car.
It was home burned, and sloppily labeled with black magic marker.
The title was "The Ballad Of Harry Hembock".
Harry mindlessly went through the motions of cordial acknowledgement, made his way back to Hembug, stuffed it into the arm rest, and forgot about it.
A couple months later, he found it while on the way somewhere important, and decided to give it a spin.
After a few minutes Harry remarked "hey, this kid's pretty good, he's got chops. Thought it was gonna be some lame hippy jam band shit form the looks of him, but this is actually pretty rockin".
Harry reached his destination, and pulled over.
"Can I keep listening?", Hembug asked.
"Sure", Harry said as he got out.
Helen looked down at him from the tree limb and said "get up here already, ya pussy", with a chuckle in her voice, as her sneakered feet dangled in a musical rythm.
Harry looked up and smirked.
She was the open and outgoing one.
God help him if he ever lost her again.
"I dunno, you just done with your divorce, and you were pooning that other guy and...I dunno...".
"You gonna get up here and be with me, or are you gonna keep being stupid?", she asked perterbed.
Harry nodded and stubbornly made his way up the tree, and sat beside her.
"Sure this branch'll hold us both?", Harry said worriedly, slightly jiggling his buttocks to give it a stress test.
"If it'll hold my big butt, it'll hold you. You weigh 100 pounds soaking wet", she said, still grinning.
Harry laughed off both the self deprication, and the barb and said "I s'pose so", while taking in her voluptuous curves, accentuated all the more by the t-shirt and jeans.
They watched the sunset, and all was right with the world.
"Kool-Aid clouds", he uttered at one point like a little kid who'd discovered a new word, or who was advertising his newfound ability to put his clothing on in the right order.
Helen closed mouth laughed out a loving "hmmm", sound.
Suddenly, with a flash of pseudo lighting, a popping like a giant pickle jar being opened, and a big whiff of ozone, a strange spaceship appeared in the sky off in the distance, and turned transluscent and vanished.
"That'll be Steve Torrent", Harry mumbled to himself.
"What?", Helen inquired.
Harry grinned "book stuff, nevermind", and with that, he grinned, and hugged her.
Epilogue-
The Scourge shrieked with indignance as it crashed into the junkyard planet with a wet ugly flabbidy splorch.
Overhead, a garbage ship flew past, and emptied it's load.
The Scourge and the pilot of that ship would meet again.
But that, is another story.
THE END.
Posted on Dec 21, 2006, 7:28 PM from IP address 76.178.216.28