On the Meteor

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Karl Jak

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There was a distinct pop as the twosome were splashed with a warm blend of blood, flesh, and fragmented ‘bits.’

“Mother fucker,” Biggs groaned as he wiped his face clean and looked at the headless corpse. “Why isn’t this working?”

“You’re still using the same calibrations as before,” Wedge snapped as he smeared away a layer of sanguineous viscera from the tablet screen. “I’ve been telling you all morning that we can’t rely on the old settings. The physics is completely different here.”

“The fuck you mean the physics is different? I’m walking, talking, and shitting all the same, so why the fuck is the physics not the same?”

Wedge furrowed his brow as he stared at the algorithms. He had always excelled at the technical aspects, but the original formulas had too much magic mixed into them for it to make perfect sense to him. “For starters, you see anyone around here shitting rainbows?”

“So?” Biggs pushed as he gestured for the crew to bring in another test subject. “Up is still up and down is still down. You don’t make this work, and Damon is going to put us in the queue to test out this technology.”

“Calm your tits, I’ve got this… we just need to have a little patience.”

Biggs shook his head as the cleanup crew picked up their most recent failure and carted it off to incinerator.

***​

Damon Dukes bristled at the ineptitude around him. The setbacks had been momentous and cost them nearly an entire calendar year. His original plans had been pushed back time and time again because extra obstacles kept coming up, and in the end, he could barely blame most of it on the crew of miscreants and half-baked lunatics housed on the meteor.

How hard can it be to design an adaptive biotoxin? How about a modular dampening field? Or a self-sustaining fusion reactor?

Half the projects they had completed had required entirely too much time. Most of the crew had been used to a way of life where they could just press their brains hard enough and manifest their end goals, but here in this slice of the multiverse, they had to rely on grit and genuine intelligence. In that regard, there were few true geniuses among the lot.

A glance at the screen of his tablet showed Damon that they were managing to make up for lost time, even if they were still behind schedule. In some capacity, they would have to find a way to trim a little fat from the lists.

Failing that, he’d have to make a call.

And Damon had zero interest in placing any calls until the facility and its various pet projects were all functioning as they should.
 

Karl Jak

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Truth be told, there was something that always smelled a little… synthetic about this place. The odor wasn’t as rancid as the other place, but from time to time, you couldn’t help but get a whiff of that vintage ‘fake car smell.’

Damon flattened out his dress shirt as he made his way up the ramp and into the observation deck. Like some type of eldritch magic, the last week or so had been marked by rapidly increased production across all subsystems on the meteor.

Pardon me, ‘the comet.’ The board was opposed to what he would have deemed a ‘technically more correct’ label for the massive chunk of unnatural rock they drifted throughout space upon. While Damon didn’t care either way, he personally felt like calling it a comet was little more than trying to give it some sexier PR.

Ascending to the platform, Damon smiled faintly at the emptiness of the observation deck. Over the last few days, he had been hard pressed to find himself some time up here, in what had been his private spot for the last year and a half. Marching his way across to the other side of the deck, he glanced down at the simulated environment that stretched out for nearly thirty square miles around the structure. A blend of plains and dense forests bordered with inescapable mountains, the deck itself would be invisible to anyone on the ground.

For the last few days, they had been performing what he would call a ‘dry run.’ This was their second such experiment, as the first had been marred by faulty wiring in much of the personal protective equipment they provided to those down below.

From the far corner of the deck, Damon spotted the blip on the screen. Understanding what the indicator meant, he briskly jogged to the console and scooped up a nearby sheet of paper that spat out from the printer. With a smile, he glimpsed up into the ‘sky’ above the observation deck and saw that the sun was cresting. Glimpsing back to the sheet, he walked over to the central control panel and thumbed the red button.

“Hello, lovely little ladies and gentlepersons. You were all very busy in these mornings hours, and we must bid farewell to some people…

#12 Geoff
#08 Baco
#03 Steve

The following are your danger zones that will activate after these next six hours,

A3
A2
C3
C5

If you’re interested, there’ll be a parcel deposited into the diner. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I’m fairly certain it’ll be a pair of shiny earrings, but you’re going to need a BFF for those to work, if you catch my drift.

Ta-ta for now!”


Lifting his hand off the button, Damon took a few steps back and fed the sheet into a disposal receptacle. If the tracking systems were right, there were only a few more individuals left in the trial zone. With any luck, the experiment would run to a conclusion by the end of the day.

“Maybe I’ll stay up here for the bird’s eye view,” Damon muttered softly to himself as he went to go fetch himself a drink and a snack.
 

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While the people down below had attended to their business ‘on the island,’ Damon had mulled over the variety of reports he had pulled on the AR simulation. From what he could tell, everything was operating well within functional parameters, and that, despite having to bend a few laws of physics, they had managed to finetune their equipment to match the new and ever-changing environs.

“Board will be pleased,” the man whispered into the quiet, mostly dark observation deck. If everything held true, that meant that they could shift into the next phase of the operation. The crew at the PSF would be thrilled to hear that their bonuses would soon be kicking in.

Somewhere down on the surface, something exploded with enough force to jar the heavily reinforced structure. Damon swore as he stumbled and nearly lost his balance. His eyes show over to the wall of camera feeds, but he couldn’t see what was going on in any of the live devices. A glimpse out the windows of the deck showed nothing but a thick haze over most of the simulated city’s suburban district. From up here, he understood he was in zero danger, and during the live event, the crew would be nowhere near the island itself. Nevertheless, Damon was a man who preferred it when the world didn’t quake beneath his boots.

Over on the wall of monitors, one of them switched to static before clicking off—the indicator that there was nothing remaining on the other end of its feed.

The man sneered. “How tragic.” A beat later, two of the other feeds faded away, and he saw that there were only two remaining contestants in the testing area. Unfortunately, neither of them seemed apt to do anything.

A voice from a nearby comm pulled Damon’s focus from the man and woman who were pacing around in the remains of the diner. “Hey, Damon, are you up there? I know you usually like to creep up there.”

Walking over to the communications array, Damon sat down onto the stool and slipped the headset on. “Hello, Wedge, this is Dukes. What’s the issue?”

“This is the situation we didn’t want to happen. Those are the two that like, fell in love or some shit. The angsty teenage girl and the artsy teenage boy whose all warmhearted or something.”

“They just fell in love over the last four days?”

“I dunno… the file says they were both picked up on some derelict ship outside the travel lanes.”

Damon rubbed the bridge of his nose as he pushed gently upon his building ire. “I thought I was clear that we weren’t supposed to use anyone who had picked up at the same location. One of them should have been reprogrammed and dumped off at Cevanti or Erde.”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger! I’m just letting you know that they probably aren’t going to murder each other. You think we should just let them both win or something? This is just the test run, anyway.”

“Of course we’re not going to let them both win… it doesn’t matter that this isn’t the real thing!”

“Well, uhh, you should know that the chairman of the board is heading to the deck. I’m sorry, pal.”

Damon felt the blood in his veins run icy cold as he peeled off the headset and let it fall down to the console. “Fuck,” the man muttered as he turned to glare at the video feed of the two lovebirds. They didn’t even seem like they cared about each other that much! For all he knew, they were faking it to extract an emotional response. But the chairman? The chairman had left clear instructions that no one was to involve him until all the testing phases were complete.
 
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Karl Jak

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With a pneumatic hiss, the doors to the observation deck split open. Damon winced at each sound the expensive shoes made as they smacked against the polished metal floor. As the doors snapped shut, the chairman of the board ascended the stairs and shook his head. While his perfectly coiffed hair contained too much product to allow it to move, the message was clear from the twist of his and the hands on his hips.

“Oh, Damon Dukes,” the man in the suit spoke softly. “You know, I never really liked the actual Damon. Did I tell you about the time he tried to take my job? He thought he could run my baby better than me… do you think I put a little too much of that in you?”

“I… I don’t understand,” Damon muttered. “Everything else is right on schedule, we ju—”

Snap.

Damon Dukes vanished without so much of a trace of the overly macho cologne he saturated himself with on the daily.

Karl Jak chuckled at his outstretched hand. “Ahhh, I wish I could have done that with the real Damon. Talk about getting your rocks off,” the producer laughed once again as he checked the time on his outstretched arm. The expensive watch told him that the show below had overrun its timeslot, and it was time to air the season finale.

Turning to look at the screens, Karl shook his head. If this was the live show, he’d just trick them into killing each other, but he wanted to save all of the plot twists for the main event. With a snap of his fingers, the pair were gone from the screen and returned to wherever it was they had come from. Karl, who had failed to read their files for lack of giving any shits, had failed to understand that they had been taken from a point in the deep of space.

“All right, let’s clear out this set,” Karl shouted as he waved his hand. Down on the surface, the mountains and forests and tiny rivulets all started to convulse. A beat later, they were all peeling away from the surface below them like dried up stickers. As Karl turned his attention away from the rapidly vanishing environment, his mind immediately shifted to the public relations campaign that awaited him.

He had been on an extended layover… that much was certain.

The staycation on the comet had been a necessary one. He had needed the time to adjust to his newest slice of the multiverse.

It had been a bummer at first. After all, he had been a sort of god in his own little personal domain while a part of the other place.

But here? After his meet and greet with the people who ran the place?

Here, in these Crossroads, he was an actual cosmic space god.

“Life’s good,” Karl spoke to no one in particular as he stared down at the newly desolated terrain beneath the observation deck. “Time for the season premiere, Lovelies.”
 
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