Black Man With a Whip #1
"Few know about the man, but when you see him it’s a trip. He’s that brother runnin’ round with one mean electric whip."
The following tale is from an Alternate Timeline that feasts on the events our own.
If you’ve received this transmission via digital mail, you may encounter errors that have been eradicated in the living document. Time is tricky. Use the order of alternate events as your guide.
BLACK MAN WITH A WHIP (AND THE TERROR FROM TECH-TOWN)
Written by Tim Barnes
Loosely inspired by the July 28 premiere of ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ as well as the June 21 controversy over the A.I. generated title sequence in Disney+’s ‘Secret Invasion.’
Event Date: 1972-2023 (Earth Years)
—Street Rhyme, circa 1983—
“A rising star of ‘Blaxploitation,’ climbed mainstream to heal the nation. But a tragic fall in a slave-themed thriller, cut his head clean off, but now its back, and he’s a killer.
Few know about the man, but when you see him it’s a trip. He’s that brother runnin’ round with one mean electric whip.”
- Unknown
—Los Angeles, circa 2023—
A knock—A smash—Confusion—Panic—Running—A whip?!
“Jake! Jake!!”
Trapped in a whip-like cable, Cory watched with a mixture of awe and frustration as his heavy-set housemate, Jake, hopped the fence ahead of him, and into their neighbor’s back yard.
“What the hell, man?! Help me out of this thing. That guy could kill me!”
That guy—a stranger in a bucket hat, tightened the whip and nodded at two back porch lights as if they were old friends. The lights obediently dimmed, and his voice filled Cory’s ears like concrete. “Don’t worry. Jake will join you shortly.”
Due to the night, and the largest bucket hat he’d ever seen, Cory could barely discern the stranger’s face. But he was certain that the gloved man, donned in grey slacks and a brown houndstooth patterned blazer (despite it being one of the hottest nights in Los Angeles), was either Black or really good at sounding it.
After digging through Cory’s wallet and locating his ID, Bucket Hat’s voice poured again. “Funny… You go by Cory in real life, but Tariq online? Tell me, Cory. Do you know many Tariqs?” He whistled in a downward slope that sounded like bad news.
“Is… is this about the bots? I swear, we’re just trying to have f—”
“Don’t lie to me. I already know you’re getting paid by Russians on the dark web. Why does the evil part of the internet gotta be ‘dark’ anyway?!”
“Well, I had no idea that they were—”
The exposed electric wiring of the whip sparked and sizzled—giving Cory a sharp shock. He squinted through the pain, and watched through the darkness as Bucket Hat leaped over the fence.
“Jake!” Cory shouted. “Watch ou—”
The cable shocked him again, knocking him unconscious. On the other side of the fence, Bucket Hat punched Jake with the force of a sledgehammer.
An hour passed.
Jake whispered through bloody teeth and between heavy breaths.
“Hey… You up yet? You okay?”
“Yeah…” Cory responded, groggily.
They were seated back-to-back on the floor their take-out-filled living room, tethered by the same whip.
“…But you should’ve helped me out back there.”
“Come on. I was going to get help before that brute gorilla-punched me in the face.”
Bucket Hat paced their kitchen floor, preoccupied by what sounded like a Bluetooth phone call. “I told you not to track me, Old Man!”
Miles away, in a dimly lit downtown office, Old Man—known to Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Vanity Fair as talent agent, Michael Saint—sipped his whiskey. “I’ve been your manager since, what… 1972? Tracking you is my job. How else am I supposed to make sure I get my commission?”
“You’re my agent, Old Man. Nobody manages me but me.”
“Toe-may-tow, toe-may-gent. It’s all the same when everyone thinks your client died forty years ago.” Michael glanced at the lone poster on his office wall of the 70s flick, White Flight, Black Heat… It was the first project he had ever worked on with Bucket Hat… Of course, no one called him that then… As light from the freeway danced across the immaculate, umber face of the hero at the center of the framed image, Michael remembered his client as the man he once was… Movie star, Nate Noble, with his goatee and charming signature freckle…
—
So, the story goes that Nate’s head broke off when he fell down a cliff during production of the unfinished 1982 film, Wade (which was meant to be his breakthrough into the mainstream). But what most don’t know is that Michael, being the greatest agent in the world, found Nate’s head, put it in a cooler, made a deal with the coroner, and brought all his broken pieces to props department legend, Leigh Compton, who was just as unheard of as she was mythic… on purpose. And with a little bit of Hollywood magic, she brought Nate back to life, claiming to have only done it because she owed Michael a favor. And as a nod to the slavery focused theme of Wade, she even threw in a whip with a few upgrades.
Is that enough exposition for you?
—
Cory and Jake tried writhing their way out of the whip, but it constricted even more.
“Who the hell is that guy?!”
“I don’t know, but he’s pissed about our Black social media accounts.”
“So, he’s some sort of ‘Woke Batman’ who runs around whooping people with an extension cord? Should we call him Wokeman? Does he have a Woke-mobile?”
“Shh! I think he hears us.”
Bucket Hat tilted his head in their direction and raised it high enough for them to see bits of metal lodged between his flesh.
“It’s all connected,” Cory whispered. “He can… control things.”
The cable jolted them.
“See! I think he just told it to do that.”
Jake shot crimson spit at Bucket Hat’s shoes. “This is getting really old, motherf—”
Nate nodded. The cable did its thing again. And Michael nearly spit his whiskey when he heard the sizzle through his office phone.
“Was that… are you shocking people right now? Nate, I need to know everything you’re working on. You can’t keep doing these rogue unpaid passion projects. You need to help me help you make us money.”
“I know… I know… But these fools have been messing with my grandson on the internet. You know how easy it is for Honk—I mean, Caucasian people to pretend to be Black these days? There ought to be a law against it.”
“The trolls didn’t recognize you, did they?”
“Nah…”
“You’re wearing the bucket hat again, huh?”
“Gives me way less run-ins with the cops than the hoodies do.”
“Alright, well, get out of there. I need you to rest up, and then drive to San Fran first thing tomorrow morning. Pay is legit, and they think you’re perfect for the role.”
‘Rest’ wasn’t the best way to describe for what Nate did when he closed his eyes at night. He more… powered down. It felt like death every time. No confusing images or oddly erotic scenarios to sift through. Pure nothingness. Luckily, there was a timer that powered him back up again.
“What is it?” Nate asked through his Bluetooth. “Another hit job?”
“Better. Some technical Silicon Valley bull that I can barely comprehend because I still write phone numbers down in a physical book.”
“Well, shit. So do I. Just because I’ve got computer parts in my body doesn’t mean I like using all of them.” Nate removed his left glove and turned to his captive audience. “Y’all got a pen in here somewhere?!”
He turned to see that Jake had been knocked out by the last blast of electricity. But Cory, eager to avoid more jolts, responded promptly to his query. “There’s one next to my laptop on this living room table.”
“This is the one you use to impersonate Black people online and spew hate with slang you don’t understand, isn’t it?”
Nate grabbed the pen and nodded at the laptop—which glitched, fritzed, and died as he jotted numbers and names down on his palm.
“…And if you get lost,” Michael continued on the other end of the line. “…just ask around for a place called Tech-Town. And when you get there, find Corrine Lewis. She works for a company called CordCut, LLC. Tell her you’re my client.”
The call ended, and the cable loosened. Cory watched the whip jump into Bucket Hat’s palm, but pretended to be asleep as the stranger stepped out of the door, just in case he had second thoughts about letting them live. He knew full well that reporting the stranger would only lead to more trouble, but couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d overheard the stranger say on his call… « But these fools have been messing with my grandson online... «
Grandson? thought Cory. Bucket Hat is 30, maybe 40, tops. It’s impossible for him to be grandfather of the young, progressive City Council candidate, Ivan Burke, right?
By the time Nate reached San Francisco, he’d been pulled over thrice for his logoless, unmarked car—and had rejected four emails from Michael about movie studios seeking the digital rights to his old likeness. The hell are they gonna do with a digital version of me in the movies… he thought. …make ‘The Help 2’?
Since his death and re-birth in the early 80s, Nate bitterly watched technology surpass the very wonders that kept him alive—only to solve nothing. He despised every bit of it. The studios. The tech companies. Didn’t matter what they called themselves… Apple… Amazon… Microsoft… Tesla… Nuetech-Co…. CordCut… They were all labels on a jar full of lies. And as much as those companies touted their ability to disrupt the status quo and pave future streets with gold, he’d only ever seen them replace human beings with machines and turn intricate craftsmanship into anonymous minimalist trash.
The irony of his complaints didn’t escape him. In fact, they tortured him every day.
“So, what exactly should I call you? Your manager didn’t say.”
Twenty minutes into her grand tour of Tech-Town, Corrine Lewis paused to ask for Nate’s name. She was much shorter than him (rendering his bucket hat useless), and so unphased by his appearance that he was certain she knew far more than her cheerful voice, vibrant sunglasses, and penchant for humming pop tunes between short bursts of information, suggested.
“Call me whatever you want,” spoke Nate. “As long as it ain’t a slur.”
“Bucket Hat it is!”
She continued the tour, pointing left and right at nothing in particular. “Much like Silicon Valley, Tech-Town isn’t a formalized city. It’s ten blocks of regular old San Francisco, only with buildings that happen to be owned and operated by CordCut.”
“And CordCut is owned and operated by?..”
“That gets complicated. Let’s just say we’re co-owned by a consortium of international thought leaders. Anyone is allowed in, but only folks in the sample group live here. They’re the ones you see wearing the two orange pins on their foreheads. ‘Specters,’ we call them. They aid users by providing olfactory-visual-synesthetic recon. Basically, the ability to alter what people see, smell, and taste in real time.”
He took a cold look at the people walking down the busy street. Many of them had distant, fixed smiles on their faces. A Black woman with specters on her forehead, lifted an apple from a street vendor’s cart and blew at the top of it as if it were a candle.
“Are any of the ‘folks’ in your sample group white?”
“Oh. Yeah. There are a few around here, I think.”
He nodded at the specters on Apple Woman’s face, but couldn’t commune with them in the same way he could with most pieces of tech. A new question emerged.
“And are all of these people seeing, smelling, and tasting the same thing?”
“No. That’s the beauty of the specters. They create pro-active alterations. I’ll show you!”
She lifted grey tablet to scan Apple Woman’s face.
“This is… Charlize Perkins. She looks totally fine to me, but she joined the Tech-Town experiment because she doesn’t like her weight. You and I can see that she’s blowing an apple, but she thinks it’s a delicious birthday cupcake. In fact, she thinks she’s at a birthday party right now instead of a city street. The specters give everyone an individual, fluid, positive experience. One that we can hopefully fine-tune to avoid interruptions.”
“Like, commercial breaks?”
He hoped that’d make her laugh, but it didn’t.
“No, silly! Interruptions, as in moments from reality that clash with what the specters are simulating. For instance, we can make what’s actually a car, look like a pony. But if the car does something too unpredictable too quickly, the specters might not be able to improvise fast enough. Yet another bug we’re trying to fix… Ooh! There’s one!” She pointed at a white woman with specters.
Nate glanced at the white woman, but his focus veered toward the man standing behind her in a suit: Ivan Burke, his grandson.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Oh, Mr. Burke! Lovely young man. He’s using Tech-Town as a sort of mental retreat. Have you heard? He’s getting a lot of flack from the African American community online. Honestly, I don’t blame him for wanting a break. I’ve gotten some flack from the—well, never-mind.”
Nate looked at his grandson, his grandson looked through him, and Corrine searched for words to fill the strange silence.
“Probably a good time to explain that when wearing the specters, anyone outside of the experiment, like yourself, gets a randomized digital face plastered on. Or, if they’re too stationary, they’re made to look like an inanimate object.”
“What does Ivan think he’s looking at right now, then?”
She lifted her tablet.
“For him… he thinks he’s looking at a tree. To the woman with the apple… you look like a water fountain. Everything is tailored to what users will accept and be pleased by. Think of how many wars could be stopped if people literally no longer saw race, or—”
“You mean, instead of seeing Black people they just saw trees instead?”
“No! I mean—”
“People chop down trees, you know.”
Nate watched on as his grandson pressed what in reality was a slender block of wood, but to him was his phone, and then boarded a Lyft that was actually a bus.
“Do you know him?”
“Let’s just finish the tour.”
And so they did.
Twenty minutes later, they approached CordCutHQ. It looked less like a corporate building, and more like the home from Full House.
“I’ll take you to the generator so you can take a look at the problem,” Corrine chirped.
The generator, which Nate assumed would be some clunky piece of machinery in the basement, turned out to be slender tablet with a golden exterior, placed on top of a marble table.
“The generator is an app on this iPad?”
A smirk came across Corrine’s face as she witnessed the look of confusion on his.
“First of all, this isn’t some cheap name-brand device. This is the generator—our only view into the vortex of ever-evolving simulations mined from data across the globe. It’s what the specters use to create individual matrices.”
“May I?”
Following Corrine’s affirmative nod, he lifted the tablet and stared into a cave of colors so dense that he almost attempted reaching in to take one of its infinite, shifting shapes out. The cave expanded and contracted every few beats in a way that seemed—
“Is this thing alive?”
“No, but something inside of it thinks it is. See, Tech-Towners—”
The term made Nate want to throw up.
“—can do whatever they want during the day, but because we use so much data for those individualized simulations, we need them all to go to sleep at the same time so that the system can recoup. Instead of individual experiences, the system gives them one, solid, mutually accepted experience. It’s a shared dream built out of things that are guaranteed to bring people joy.”
“But…?”
“But something in that shared dream is resisting CordCut. We work hard to make Tech-Town a purely positive experience. In fact, no one ever reported encountering anything resembling a nightmare in our beta trials. But as of two days ago, a few users have referenced seeing something they call ‘The Beast.”
“Can I talk to those users?”
“Unfortunately, no. They all expired in their sleep. You haven’t heard about it until now because, well, our international consortium of thought leaders has pretty deep pockets.”
“If those users are dead, how do you know they called it ‘The Beast?”
“Because they spoke out loud in their sleep! And… those were their only two words. ”
“You have to shut this all down then. Maybe I can tinker with this glorified iPad or something.”
He tried communing with the golden tablet but it apparently wasn’t into small talk.
“Yeah, that’s the thing. We can’t. Users need a few days to wean themselves off the specters. And if we shut it down completely, even for just five seconds… everyone gets shut down with it.”
“But Ivan is here!”
After hearing Nate shout Ivan’s name in such a fatherly, or more specifically—grandfatherly manner, Corrine listened intently to a pair of CordCut soundpods in her ears. Nate hadn’t noticed them before, which was surprising because he usually noticed anything that required charging.
She removed her sunglasses, and he couldn’t look away from the serious, dead eyes that had been hiding behind them.
“Okay, Bucket Hat. Let’s get real here for a second.” The perkiness in her voice faded.
“I knew that bubbly personality of yours was an act.”
“And you know a lot about acting, don’t you? You can take off that stupid hat, by the way. I knew what you are. That’s why we hired you. Dead men don’t need to sign NDAs. But now I know who you are… Nate Noble, right? Can’t say I’ve ever seen any of your movies. But luckily, the CordCut system told me that your voice is a 100% match for the long-dead star of Wade. However, up until now, I was confused as to why it also told me your voice has so many similarities to a certain Mr. Ivan Burke. But now it makes sense. You’re his grandfather, right? I bet he doesn’t know that… I bet his own mother doesn’t even know you’re her father. Am I correct?”
Nate removed his hat, nodded, and thought of Josephine.... The married background actor he fell in love with on the set of Rhythm Silk (1974)… They crossed eyes in a dinner scene… One thing led to another… But he didn’t know that she birthed his child until he saw footage of her with a toddler at his own funeral... The child had his same signature freckle and pair of killer eyebrows… But by then, Nate figured Josephine’s husband, Melvin, would be a much better father than some resurrected cyborg…
“Well then…” Corrine spoke while lifting a pair of specters. “I hope the added pressure of saving your grandson’s life means we’ll be getting quick results. The communal sleep begins in three hours. I suggest you kill the beast before then."
Fear ran down the intertwined metal and bone of Nate’s spine as she placed the specters on his face.
“Can you see what happens in the dream?”
“No. But we’re working on a fix.”
He set his timer for three hours, closed his eyes in the in the real world, and opened them in a dense cave of colors that swirled toward a golden door.
The twist of a doorknob—A flurry of light—Welcome to Tech-Town (the dream version)
The golden door took Nate to the same streets of Tech-Town he’d just walked through with Corrine. However, everything had a false, polished sheen to it. He was the only person there, and quickly noticed that any item that could have a brand on it, did have a brand on it. The parked cars were BMWs. Book stores bore once popular names that were long defunct. Even fresh fruit in the cart of a vacant farmers market had Dole stickers on them—which Nate was keen to express, “…Makes no goddamn sense.”
But suddenly, everything clicked.
CordCut’s goal must be to turn dreams into advertisements, he thought.
Then, a bigger realization… They tricked me.
Nate had indeed been double-tricked, and Corrine played double-stupid to pull it off. She knew Ivan was his grandson the whole time. The long, pointless tour of Tech-Town was just a means of making sure they bumped into each other. Corrine and her consortium of international thought leaders knew he’d never agree to help some giant corporation for money alone. But they gambled that he would help them if his own flesh and blood were somehow in danger.
Jazzical notes floated through the air, carrying the scent of cotton candy. He was free to roam and do whatever he pleased. And roam he did, until the reflective window of a Whole Foods supermarket caught his attention. He rushed to the window and stared in amazement at himself. A lush afro stood in place of his bucket hat, and there were no scars or metal on his face—only a goatee and signature freckle. Somehow, here, in the dream world of the specters, he was the Nate Noble known by moviegoers, unknown by his daughter and grandson, and forgotten by himself.
Past his reflection stood rows of name brand goods inside of the market. Beans… chips… dips… cookies… cereals… soft drinks, and more. Far too detailed for a dream.
The automated doors of the store opened, and he entered.
Low, long, bothersome notes rose from beneath the pop music that blasted from the store’s speakers.
Roaming from aisle to aisle, he searched, uncertain of what he hoped to find, until something massive hit the ground behind him and rumbled.
He turned to see what it was but found nothing.
Closer… closer…
The rumble intensified as he continued through the aisles.
Closer… closer…
He realized they were footsteps.
Closer… closer…
The abstract tones melded with the pop music—shifting it into one ghostly jingle.
Closer… closer…
Name brand jelly jars in his aisle began to jiggle.
Closer…
He reached for his whip, but it wasn’t there. Instead, he felt the scaly hand of whatever it was that lifted him from behind.
He turned to face—
“The beast…” he whispered.
He took in every detail of its five pale heads, two pale hands, two pale feet, and six pale toes, as it tossed him down the center head’s throat. He expected stomach acid, but instead saw a tunnel of swirling colors that led back to the golden door.
He turned the knob, and was greeted by Corrine as his eyes opened.
“Did you kill it?!”
His silence told her everything.
“What did it look like?”
“Snakes. Five of them, technically. A white, five-headed snake with arms and legs. Is that what everyone sees?”
“You’re the only person to ever see it and survive. Likely because you aren’t a full biologic.”
“How much time is left?”
“Everyone joins the dream in ten minutes.”
There it was… the boost of adrenaline he’d been waiting for. It pushed him past the surprising fact that he’d been dreaming for nearly three hours, and even beyond his anger toward Corrine for tricking him into being there. He needed answers, quick.
“I was in a store in the dream. And a song started playing. It sounded familiar. Do you recognize this?”
He started to hum.
“Corn Snakes!” Corrine shouted. “It’s the jingle for the cereal commercials.”
Nate felt like a fool. “Yes. Of course! I loved Corn Snakes when I was a kid.”
“Did the beast look like the Corn Snakes mascot, Razzy Rattles?!”
“I mean, the head kind of did. But, like I said, there were five of those suckers. Man… Razzy Rattles…”
He drifted into one of his pleasant childhood memories from the 50s… Sitting in front of the TV… Eating Corn Snakes… And making sure the front of the box wasn’t facing him as he watched Superman with his pops…
“…As good as that cereal was, Razzy Rattles always gave me the creeps.”
“Me too.”
The math started mathing for Corrine as she recalled her own fond memories of watching the short lived animated Razzy Rattles Show, Saturday mornings on ABC, only not for Razzy. She watched for his sidekick, Buzzy Bee.
“Corn Snakes is one of the oldest brands ever,” spoke Corrine as she typed on her tablet. “It’s been around since 1890 which means… Okay, think about it… Five heads? That’s one for each generation that knows Razzy Rattles. I bet we’re not the only people who loved the cereal but hated Razzy. Everyone’s conflicting feelings about it must be the source of the bug in our system. The specters don’t know how to compensate.”
Nate chuckled as he made calculations of his own. But there was no way in hell he’d give her the lowdown.
“I have an idea on how I can end this.” he said. “Can you get me back in?”
“Yeah, but you won’t be the only person there this time. The communal sleep starts in five minutes.”
“That’s fine. I just need to know one thing. When I was in there… I didn’t look like I do now. I couldn’t even control other devices the way a typically can. Is CordCut restricting me?”
“I’m afraid that’s just you. The specters amplify whatever it is that brings the most joy. You being your old self—well, it clearly must be something you long for. Why do you ask?”
He didn’t respond, but closed his eyes, powered down, and re-approached the golden door.
Hundreds of wandering dreamers danced, talked, sang, read, ate, and drank in the shimmering streets of the connected simulation. Among them was his grandson, Ivan, who recognized Nate immediately as the man from the movies his grandma used to watch on repeat.
“Damn! Nate Noble! What are you doing here? Want some… cotton candy or something?”
Nate grinned from ear to ear. But Ivan’s smile soured.
“Wait a minute. What was am thinking? You can’t be real. I must be dreaming you up somehow. No offense or anything, but you died, like, forty years ago.”
“No offense taken. You’re a fan?”
“Hell yeah I am! You’re the most badass action hero of all time! Hey, your speech in Rhythm Silk is what made me want to get into politics.”
For a moment, Nate considered telling him everything. How he’s still alive. How he didn’t know his mother was born until it was too late. How he’d just kicked the crap out of two losers pretending to be Black on the internet just to mess with his brain. But he knew none of that would go over well. Hell, Ivan might not ever really believe it.
“Look, kid. I need to ask you a favor. You care about people, right? Community and all that? Well, the people here might not be so safe.”
—Corn Snakes Jingle, circa 1930—
“THE WONDERFUL TASTE OF OUR CORN SNAKES WILL FILL YOU WITH DELIGHT! / VITAMINS BURSTING FROM EVERY FLAKE / WILL HELP YOU WIN MOST FIGHTS! / YOU CANNOT CHOSE ANOTHER BRAND / EACH BOX IS LIKE A WONDER LAND! / A SINGLE BOWL FEELS LIKE A FEAST / A MEAL FIT FOR A HUNGRY BEAST! / THE MAGICAL TASTE OF OUR CORN SNAKES WILL FILL YOU WITH DELIGHT!”
- Rene & Bailey Jingle Co.
Cautiously, Nate and Ivan entered the store. There were no traces of broken jelly jars or any other sign one might expect to find in the aftermath of a five-headed beast swallowing someone whole. There were, however, customers filling every aisle.
Nate opened a tube of branded chips and took a bite, only to be met with dirty looks, which he greeted with a middle finger.
“Why are people putting items in carts?” he asked Ivan. “This is a fantasy land. You can just eat anything in here.”
“It’s dream logic. People like the feeling of going through the motions. But the fun part happens at the counter, where it turns out you don’t have to pay.”
“So, you all know that standing in these long lines is unnecessary, but still do it?”
“Is standing in a long line ever really necessary?”
“In the real world where cops exist, it is!”
They both laughed. But Nate’s focus returned. To get rid of the crowd quick, he resorted to the two-middle-fingered whistle.
“Listen up, everyone! This is not a drill! Something dangerous is approaching, and I need you all to exit, single file.”
Laughter filled the store. He’d forgotten that he wasn’t his usual, intimidating self, but instead the symbol of a dated genre of cinema that had been unfairly mocked for too long.
But the laughter dissipated as a slow, moody, instrumental version of the Corn Snakes jingle replaced the pop music on the speaker system.
“Why does that sound so familiar?” Ivan asked.
“Razzy?!” shouted Nate. “I know it was you I met earlier. Show yourself!”
“Wait. Razzy? Like, from the cereal?”
Five long, winding snake heads burst through the supermarket floor. One of their tongues whipped wildly about, knocking down four shelves.
“I know what you’re feeling,” Nate continued—staring into the center snake’s eyes. “You want freedom. And you’re so close to it. I can tell. I want the same thing.”
Razzy lifted its tail (which Nate hadn’t noticed the first time) and its rattle shrieked.
“Oh, you don’t believe me? I’ll show you.”
Nate channeled all of his strength into his fingers. They clawed at the smooth flesh of the past, and ripped it open like a Christmas gift, until all that remained was his present-day, distorted, cyborg self.
“I thought nightmares weren’t supposed to exist here,” spoke Ivan. “Are you still Nate Noble?”
“Not anymore. Call me whatever you want.”
“Bucket Hat?!”
Sure, there were downsides to being Bucket Hat again. But there was one perk that he checked for. Ah, yes. There it was. His whip. It flung itself around Razzy’s center neck and shot an electric pulse through its wiring.
Customers ran toward the beast from the cereal aisle, eager to compare it to the mascot. Angered, it attempted to scream, but only emitted a haunting rendition of the jingle, “VITAMINS BURSTING FROM EVERY FLAKE / WILL HELP YOU WIN MOST FIGHTS! “
“Ivan, quick! Get rid of the cereal boxes. Burn them if you have to. They’re trapping Razzy here. That’s why he’s fighting us.”
“Sure… but I’m definitely gonna have to unpack all of this dream in the morning.”
Ivan punched, slapped, smacked and shoved cereal boxes out of customers’ hands and looked for anything he could do to light them on fire. The beast seemed to calm, but something else rustled beneath it. Curious, Nate used the whip as a leash to guide the big, white beast away from the pit it busted out of. It rested in a corner. And Ivan, having finally found a match, lit the cereal boxes on fire.
When the last Corn Snakes logo became ash, the beast transformed into a beautiful, indescribable creature of infinite colors and shapes, that flew up, up, up, away from the whip, away from the store, and beyond the sky.
Nate dropped his whip and looked inside of the cavity in the center of the store.
“This ain’t over,” he muttered.
Hundreds of frightening permutations of other name-brand mascots writhed and wiggled in the darkness of the cavern.
“We need to burn it all.”
Something leaped up from below like a rabid ninja and approached the burned down boxes.
“Is that the Pilgrim Oates guy?!” someone shouted.
Ivan, still watching what was once Razzy Rattles float into space, hadn’t noticed the zombie-like Pilgrim lurking over his shoulder until it bit him in the neck and held him hostage with a knife.
Nate darted to the oatmeal section of the store, intending to burn down every package of Pilgrim Oates, but the shelved had been knocked over by Razzy earlier. He couldn’t lift it on its own, but—
“Speech!” Ivan shouted. “Like the one from Rhythm Silk.”
Pilgrim Oates pressed the knife harder onto Ivan’s neck. Slop dripped from its face of green, rotting porridge as it whispered, “Saaaaaave meeeee… or else…”
Bucket Hat stood on top of the fallen shelf and gave a rousing, Oscar-worthy speech. “Dreamers! We must not feed the beasts. We must not shackle them in the cages of our nostalgia. We must not pump new life into bodies that wish to die. For, if we do, we shall become those bodies. And the beasts shall become the image we see reflected in our mirrors. Let us free them! Let us free ourselves!”
Dreamers joined him in lifting the shelf. And they burned, and ripped, and cut, and stomped on every box of Pilgrim Oates.
The knife became wind, and the Pilgrim holding it became a singular bubble of rainbow-like colors.
The burning was fun, and so the dream allowed it to continue.
Soon, all of dreamy Tech-Town was in flames.
Morphing colors danced across the sky in celebration…
…until it was time for everyone to wake up.
And when they did, the dreamers, thrilled by what they’d done, found so little need in the specters that they weren’t even required to wean themselves off.
They were free.
—
Despite this massive disruption of Tech-Town’s infrastructure, Corrine congratulated Nate, and wired him money with no qualms.
She seemed satisfied by something else.
Nate hadn’t stopped to think about CordCut’s ability to make a digital copy of him from the dream.
Instead, he agreed to drive Ivan home.
They were only pulled over once.
And the next day, on Deadline, The Help 2 was announced.