Guide to Interdimensional WTF?

The amazing Russell's done up one heck of a guide to, uh, hideous Lovecraftian things from beyond sanity over on his site, Merzo. Check it out. They're freakin' freaky and obscenely awesome. Some of the best representations of Deep Ones and other Old Ilk since Barlow.

Looking good, Cthulhu baby!

Best of all they come in small, medium and large.

Like coffee.

Gaze upon them all and go mad!

Ever wanted a ray gun?

 

Now you can buy one of your very own thanks to Dr Grordborts, the brain child of New Zealand artist Greg Broadmore.

 

He's been developing a whole steampunk alternate reality for years now, ranging from physical props to art, comics, and animation.

Think pompous Colonialist buffoons armed with disintegrators, eh wot?

Amazing, madly talented, and quite cheeky.

The fun, steampunk and ray gun aspect of it is counterbalanced by sharp criticism of colonialism and the racist attitudes inherent in it.

Which is clever and interesting, but unfortunately, also serves to poison the pie, as it were, making it impossible to enjoy the escapist aspects of the altverse. Socially relevance comes at a cost. It gives the stories a serious underpinning, but the fact that the lead hero is a bombastic racist oaf makes them difficult to enjoy.

Just when you think you're escaping the surly bonds of earth into the land of unbridled imagination, of fun and rocket ships and ray guns, the ugly aspects of human society drag you back to earth and beat you about with an atomic two-by-four.

It's anti-escapist escapism.

The essential size comparison chart for Sci-Fi

Ever wonder which is bigger, a Super Star Destroyer or Babylon 5? Now you can see for yourself with this handy dandy comparison chart of imaginary space craft. Reference for all your heated nerd bar arguments.

Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom Chapter Three

Justice and honour.

It was bullshit, but yeah, whatever, thought Thrax.

Seemed to motivate the androids.

Well.

Some of them.

“For honour. Home. Civilization. And triple replicator box rations! Listen up, bad-ass babes! I got me a real nice little disintegrator missile here,” declared Thrax, giving the portable launcher a pat, “But if I fire this puppy straight in, it’ll be rendered inert before it penetrates the outer membrane, see?”

The squad, except for Jez and Andromeda, looked at him blankly.

He sighed.

“Lemme make it simple. The squid’s kinetic negation field not only holds it together— things too damn big to exist otherwise—it protects it from kinetic energy attacks. The only place the field is absent is at the centre point, the node—the nanorganic pineal eye itself. Make sense? Shut up. I gotta fire through that hole in the field, which just so happens to lead straight into its brain. Okay. Break into two groups. First section— Andromeda, you take Bambi, Amber, Crystal, Fabius, Don Juan, and Jasmine. You’ll go left, towards the meat smoking pits. Jez, you lead Candy, Ginger, Kitty and the rest and break right. Fan out in a semi-circle around the quid—hit it from all angles, distract it.”

Andromeda nodded. “On my life, we will not fail you.”

“Whatever. Just keep it occupied,” continued Thrax. “That’ll give me a chance to move in from the front. Soon as I have a clear have clear shot, click, bam! Meat market opens.”

Jez smiled wickedly at the prospect.

Thrax bumped fists with her and tensed for action. “Okay, count of ten—Fabius Two- Eighty-Eight! Put that mirror away! Your hair looks fine. Concentrate, freakabots!” He turned back towards the squid.

Its flailing tentacles were making short work of just about everything in the village not made of diamacrete. It shifted towards the dust shrouded grain silos.

No time to waste.

“Go!”

The magnificently built androids, specially designed to run in six-inch high stiletto heels, bolted out of the ditch and sprinted across the dry grass, their fit, haunches pumping legs furiously.

They shot wildly as they ran. The squid was so large they couldn’t miss.

Except Candy, who did.

Twice.

Jez screamed obscenities at her.

She skittered to a halt and yelled back, “I didn’t miss by much!”

Thrax sighed. Candy was the squad medic, so what could you expect? He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Hold your breath when you shoot!”

He zoomed the view plate in on her and watched as she concentrated, her tongue absentmindedly sticking out, and fired again. A bolt of energy streaked out.

He followed it with his view plate.

“I grazed it! I grazed it!” she yelled triumphantly, pointing at a faint burn mark on its mammoth flank. She smiled from ear to ear and beamed at Thrax.

Thrax lowered the viewer and gave her a thumbs up. He noted all the first team was now peppering the quid with energy bolts, as ordered, so he scanned for the first team.

Team One had reached the smoke pits and jumped into them with the fluidity of expert gymnasts, just moments ahead of an enormous barbed tentacle. Only dust and detritus were disturbed by its passage.

Andromeda poked her head out and gave him a thumbs up signal. Great stuff, thought Thrax.

Jez barked orders that Thrax didn’t catch, but team two started peppering the beast’s air siphons with energy bolts. The outer membrane blistered and the protective slime coating steamed away. A thick gush of fluid spilled out of a black edged gash and began to congeal into an organic heat shield.

One of the putrescent, bulbous black eyes snapped towards them and focused on Jez. A half-dozen tentacles, each a hundred meters long, spun round in the air and came hurtling towards team two from the left, right, and above.

Thrax could hear Jez scream orders. The androids scattered and hit the ground as the tentacles struck.

THOOOM! THOOOM!

Ginger the go-go girl was caught in the back by a barb, and sent flying off into the sky, her lustrous, furious pink hair streaming magnificently behind her, never to be seen again.

In an instant, the squad was back up on its feet, running madly for the diamacrete ruins. Thrax didn’t blame them.

But the canny mollusk had anticipated this, and had kept a tentacle poised, in reserve, waiting. Now it snapped earthward. Thrax could hear the howl of air flowing in its wake.

WHAM! The earth heaved. Great gouts of dust shot outward. The bronze skinned Fabius, who had stopped to check his hair, was caught dead centre.

As the barbed tentacle curled back up, Thrax could see a bloody smudge mark of guts and leather straps smeared on the underside.

Action time. Thrax snapped open the safety locks on his weapon, primed the warhead, and sprinted out of the ditch.

Respirovores pumped oxygen at a heightened rate into his bloodstream. Nanite muscle and skeletal enhancers allowed him to exceed human physical limitations.

After building up speed, he leapt and soared fifteen meters, just undershooting the factories’ recessed emergency exit which lay to the fore of the quid.

“Warning,” interjected Darwin, who oddly had a thing for ancient cultural references. “Danger! Danger, Magnum Thrax! There is—”

Then Thrax noticed it: a sudden increase in air pressure behind him. Sneaky squid had slithered a long limb round, behind him, and now...

Instinctively he ducked. Not fast enough.

The tentacle struck him in the upper back, a grazing blow that sent him spinning. Gravity was thrown into abeyance. His vision was a flash of images from bizarre, incongruous angles.

He landed with a thud on the chipped concrete stairs of the emergency exit. It took him a moment to reorient.

Inside his gut, medbots pillaged the chemical sludge that had been his lunch and used the nutrients to repair damaged tissues. In a moment, he was able to stand, and the pain was gone.

The missile launcher lay nearby on the stairs, beeping angrily in protest at the rough

treatment. He picked it up, activated a maintenance sequence, and peaked over the concrete lip that lined the exit top.

That last tentacle was sailing down out of the sky.

Thrax looked ahead of it.

There was Jez, standing her ground, in the open, beamer aimed skyward.

She looked resplendent, even regal, in her buckled black leather bustier and thigh-high boots. A steady column of shimmering energy poured out of her buzzing beamer. She waved it in tight circles.

“Bring it on, you gigantic, tentacled freak!” she bellowed defiantly. “Bring it—”

WHAM! The cephalopod’s limb smacked into the ground. The creature let out a warbling, gurgling cry of dismay and pulled up the sizzling limb, revealing a laughing and very much alive Jez surrounded by a thick, putrid mist.

A circular, charred hole five feet wide had been cut eight feet deep into the limb. Jez had avoided death by blasting a tunnel.

She laughed and her whole body shook, giddy with adrenaline. And something else. She shivered. He could see fear, shock and relief on her face. A second later her patented sneer reappeared.

The squid went brilliant violet. Iridescent waves of outrage in white and purple cascaded over its body.

“You go, girl!” yelled Bambi, pumping a plastic gloved fist in the air.

Equilibrium recovered, Jez headed for cover. That synthelady was all about appearance, thought Thrax. Poise. Status. Counting coup. Confirmation of her legendary prowess accomplished, she’d rejoin the safety of the group to bask in the accolades.

Thrax knew she wanted to be squad sarge, to usurp Andromeda, but in his opinion, she didn’t have the right temperament for command.

But she sure had balls. Great big balls.

He zoomed in on her and found his gaze fixing upon her chest. Her heaving, voluptuous, curvaceous—Concentrate!

The beast bellowed in outrage and frustration. Chromatophores flashed indignation.

Tentacles reared up again and whirled in agitated frenzy, striking one after another at the smoke pit.

Thrax waited for a clear shot. He only had one missile. Had to make it count.

A dozen panicked mutants ran past, their stubby arms waving in the air. Good, thought Thrax. More distractions. More targets.

The dashing Don Juan jumped into view, cape flying, and ran in front of the Squid to take a few shots of his own at the gibbous pineal eye. Trying to compete with Jez, no doubt. Damn stupid androids!

Soon he’d have no squad left.

A tentacle began to unfurl. Seeing the danger, Don Juan bolted, but he misjudged the squid’s speed and with a solid smack, his torso was liquefied. His trunk flopped onto the ground with an undignified splat.

“Juan!” shouted Andromeda, her expression a mixture of horror and disbelief. She charged recklessly out from cover and swept her disruptive nanite sword towards the mollusc. “You shall be avenged!” she bellowed in her majestic voice. “Amazons! To me!”

Aw, great, now everyone would run into the open, thought Thrax. He activated his subvocal communicator: “Back into cover, you lot! Stay put! That’s an order!”

Multiple tentacles slashed madly at the sexbots. They left the squids pineal eye vulnerable, open to attack, much to Thrax’s delight.

Yes! He settled the streamlined missile launcher over his shoulder and angled the barrel at the gibbering horror’s malevolent pineal eye. Lined up the sights.

Now!

He squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp retort, and a shimmering missile blasted out and lanced towards the squid’s eye.

It hit dead centre with a loud wet GLOP.

A jet of jelly and fluid spat out of the eyeball, followed a second later by a brilliant flash.

Unimpeded by matter, the disintegration field expanded inside the squid, transforming it into a globe of brilliant shimmering colours, which sparkled and winked out, leaving a cavity where the beast’s brain had been.

The great cephalopod shuddered and its hydrostatic skeleton lost tension. All two-dozen tentacles fell at once to the ground, shaking the earth and knocking Thrax off his feet. There was a crack as his head hit the diamacrete.

Thrax lay still for a moment, dazed. Over the radio he could hear Andromeda haranguing the team. A few raptors had indeed followed the squid into the compound, and now Andromeda was leading a counter-attack. In a few minutes the archosaurs had been driven from the compound. She was very efficient.

The battle to defend the Pleasurepit colony was over. The battle over the meat of the dead squid was about to begin.

Already the megalovultures were landing atop the deflating cephalopod and ripping hunks of flesh out of the carcass.

Kitty turned away from the beast, then bent over and did a victory twerk, her taut buttocks weaving complex patterns in the air like a voluptuous bumblebee.

Thrax pulled out a sleek atomic cigarette, lit the radioisotope fuse and took a deep inhalation of cool hot flavoured radiation. Nothing like a smoke after a good kill. Thrax blew out a cloud of glowing radioactive particles and watched them dissipate slowly into the air.

High above he could see nanite machined and virtually transparent air cleaning cubes, each a mile across, micron thin and buoyed by hydrogen, which would eventually filter out the gamma particles he’d just spewed into the air. Eventually.

Beautiful system the Ancients had set up, he thought.

Pity they’d mucked it all up.

He looked over and caught Andromeda squeezing out a bag of Cleansit on the remains of Juan. The cleaner nanoblob swarmed over the guts, scanned, then snapped up the targeted DNA into a tough skinned bag of guts, blood, and bone fragments, leaving not a single drop of blood on the ground.

She picked it up and headed off to the funerary recycling chute.

“Hey!” shouted Thrax. “We don’t use those on Androids. Humans only.”

Andromeda rolled her eyes, waggled her hips, and gave him the finger over her broad shoulder.

Fuckin’ androids, grumbled Thrax wearily. Such bullshit.

The Andromeda Five Fifteen model got worse every iteration. Required more nerve polyps to build than any other type. Not as bad as Jez, but still annoying.

“Darwin,” he subvocalized, “Notify the council that the witch can send out her swarms to rebuild the wall now. Jez’ll keep it clear of raptors.”

Victoria, often referred to as The Queen, was the colony Technowitch, a human who was compatible with the electrical signals of command and control nanite symbiots that dwelled in the brain stem.

They could direct nanite swarms within broadcast distance, allowing the so-called witches to perform all sorts of feats that uneducated mutants regarded as magic. It was the perfect blend of bottom-up nanite organization and top- down human control.

“Noted and conveyed,” replied his virtual assistant happily. Thrax hated dealing with bureaucracy, and Darwin loved being needed. The virtual being paused for a moment, then added, “My dear fellow, you really shouldn’t smoke those things, you know. I calculate a thirty per cent chance of—”

“Aht,” interrupted Thrax with a harsh thought. “When I want your opinion, Darwin, I’ll ask for it.”

“Very well, understood, it’s your choice. Free will and all that. I would add something else, but... ah, well. If you are not accepting unsolicited information....” Darwin let the sentence hang in the mental ether.

“Oh froog. Don’t sulk. What?”

“There is an item that may be of interest to you deep inside the deceased cephalopod’s belly.”

On criticism…

I thought this was a thoughtful post by Devin Faraci over at birthmoviesdeath.

It was sparked by an article Jesse Eisenberg wrote over at the New Yorker, in which he satirizes film critics.

Film critics in general got their knickers in a knot over it, as is their wont, and wrote snarky responses.

Faraci makes note of this, then muses on what it is to be a critic:

"…How many times do you think you've generalized actors/acting in your career as a critic? And how many times do you think you have been profoundly wrong about the actors about whom you're writing? I bet a lot, and I bet that very few film critics have been trained as actors or had any real experience as actors. I bet very few have even been on a film set. Maybe some have made a short in film school, but that's like saying your canoeing trip lets you understand how the captain of a Navy destroyer does his job…

And this is true. It's something I've thought about since I started reviewing films and television shows for my piddly little echo chamber -- I mean blog. I'm keenly aware that there's a lot going on behind the scenes in television and film (akin to chickens running around with their heads cut off), most of which I'm entirely unaware of.

Feeling entitled to being entertained at the cinema, I criticize.

And yet I know my complaints can be unfair, and lack appreciation for the pressure creators are under, which is enormous.

Working in film and television is tough, and audiences are more ornery than ever.

Take the recent article by Steven Moffat about the difficulties he faced making the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who, or the recent video in which Peter Jackson is very candid about how messed up making The Hobbit movies was. As noted over at slashfilm:

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Jackson admits. He recalls having to call for extended lunch hours just so he could figure out how to approach a scene. Compare this to the literal years of pre-production he had on The Lord of the Rings.

I didn't like The Hobbit films, but I admire Peter Jackson for soldiering through it, knowing how it would impact his reputation. There were jobs and livelihoods depending on him.

Some franchises are so 'beloved' that dedicated fans will issue death threats against the creative team.

Moffat writes in the Radio Times:

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything that was as difficult, terrifying and as much of a responsibility as writing the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who. I wanted everybody to love it. I knew that was impossible, but I wanted people – from those who had never seen it, to the absolute diehard fans who hate every episode I’ve written – to love it. So it was monstrously stressful and very hard: the uncastable cast, the impossible brief, the unwritable script...

I can remember sitting with my wife saying, “I can’t tell if it’s good any more, it could be rubbish – I’ll have to leave the country. I’ll have to fake my own death.” And then going for a meeting with the producers the week I was meant to hand the script in, and we were still trying to assemble the cast. We all just sat there, thinking, “This is impossible, this can’t ever work!”

Who needs the hassle? Obviously the positives outweigh the negatives or they'd have left the field long ago. Something keeps Jackson and others doggedly plugging away, offering up their creations to a fickle and ornery audience.

When Eisenberg directed barbs back at the critics, they didn't respond with grace.

Devin Faraci:

"But there's one other thing to consider: if you can dish it out, learn to take it. I struggle with this a lot; the nature of my opinions and writing seem to give offense on the regular, and that leads to people lashing out at me… 

As critics we're saying a lot of shit into the abyss, and while it doesn't feel personal from where we stand, it can be taken as personal… 

I can get a hundred nice comments about something, but I will always fixate on the nasty ones, due to whatever is broken inside of me. I suspect that a lot of people in the arts are similar - the same thing that makes you want to put yourself and your performance/thoughts out there is the same thing that makes you truly feel the slightest negative feedback.

So we're dishing it out, every single day, every single movie we see. All the time. And sometimes somebody hits back, whether it be Eisenberg in The New Yorker or Innaritu in Birdman, and the true test of us as people and professionals is how we deal with it."

I find it harder to criticize now that I'm trying to create. It expanded my perspective. I'd like to laud the positive, and yet, paradoxically, it's the stuff I really don't like that compels me to write commentary.

Even a Uwe Boll movie is an accomplishment.

I don't think I could do what he does.

It's basically like running a small military campaign.

I appreciate his work, but not his product.

C'est la vie.

Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom: Chapter Two

Android in battle armour facing down the gargantuan land quid, shrouded in clouds

The quivering, gelatinous mass of the gigantic land cephalopod towered over flat plains like an enormous vibrating pustule. Its presence was a sign that winter was at last releasing its death grip over the barren plains of the Betafields.

Soon the Glorious Biobloom would begin again.

Air siphons jutted out from its blubbery flanks below black, beslimed eyes, sucking in air with a steady roar that could be heard a kilometer away. It was four hundred tons of unstoppable mollusk slowly migrating its way to the West coast, sucking up airborne nanoplanktonites and anything else that got in its way, edible or not. It wasn’t picky.

Magnum Heironymus Thrax of the Klenstaf Clan watched nature’s mutant horror keenly through his viewer sheet for a moment and grimaced.

He toggled the telescopic enhancers and zoomed in on the bloated belly.

“Bingo,” he muttered under his breath, and grinned, revealing perfect teeth like white chicklets.

The behemoth’s sleep gas sacks, tucked in above the Ctenidium, were clear.

That meant empty.

At least temporarily.

With the amount of organic matter the beast had just consumed, they’d refill quickly.

Thrax’s otherworldly, clear blue eyes gazed along the path of destruction behind the beast: it had breached the outer wall of the surface village, and crushed flat as a paper pancake the flying pig’s pen. They were the docile kind of flying pig, of course, not their eat-anything entelodon hell-pig relatives.

Thrax hated those.

He hated their tendency to shit while aloft most of all. He thought back to the cholera epidemic and shuddered. At least they’d been genetically re-engineered to excrete less phosphorous materials.

Thrax could see the distorted outlines of wiggling, winged pigs, still alive, in the Squid’s semi-translucent gullet as they were shunted along by its powerful throat muscles.

Tasty, bacony goodness all gone to waste.

Wouldn’t be long before the great land snail-squid reached the grain silos on the other side of the mutant’s squat diamacrete dwellings.

Time to move.

He dropped the flexible viewer sheet and let it hang by its strap from his neck.

Taylor Swift rocking the babes, guns, and explosions playground

In the sky far above, menacing black silhouettes of circling megalovultures, gigantic black birds with bald, burnt red heads, circled. Black snowflakes swirled about their open beaks, and if one got too close they’d be caught in a high intensity electrical field.

Fry a man into sauceless BBQ in seconds flat.

This lot probably feasted on the snail squid’s excrement trail. Disgusting.

Thrax’s virtual assistant, Darwin, noted his gaze. It superimposed a holographic image over his field of vision of the semi-transparent disembodied head of Charles Darwin, only wearing chic recorder sunglasses and Bril Cream. It was transparent enough not to interfere with his vision, and automatically shifted away from anything he focused on.

Digital Darwin’s brow furrowed. “Teratornis Incredibilis,” commented the virtual assistant. The words flowed directly into Thrax’s brain through a neural tap. “Remarkable creatures. If only my namesake were alive now to appreciate them. Wingspan up to twelve meters. Their nanobot symbiots can generate an electrical field of—”

“Yeah, I know. Not now,” interjected Thrax. He had to think. Take all the variables into consideration, and Darwin never shut up unless you told him to. “Not time for a lecture, baby.”

“Please don’t call me that,” huffed Darwin. “I’ve never even been a baby.”

The prissy, heuristic artificial intelligence was built into Thrax’s micro-thin, transparent second skin suit, a nanite engineered material that covered him from head to foot. It regulated temperature, filtered air, and protected him from the elements, including radiation.

The battlefatigues he wore overtop were purely for the sake of modesty. Not that Thrax had much.
He scanned the horizon for opportunistic raptors.

“Ahhh, yes, the ever present threat of Neo-Deinonychus,” said Darwin, still trying show off his vast database of useless knowledge. “Already conducted a scan. None detected. You know, their resurrection is nothing short of miraculous, a testament to the technological prowess of my creators. To study them--”

“Yeah, yeah. Too much electromag noise to rely on scans. Shut up.”

Neo-Dienonychus were fast moving archosaurs with scythe-like claws. They’d been extinct, or so the story went. Mankind had actually been rid of the damn things. Until they’d been brought back for an entertainment property. Couldn’t be true, though. Nobody was that stupid.

None of the nasty things in sight.

That was good. But they wouldn’t be far away.

“Perhaps behind the the land squid. They are known to be clever,” mused Darwin.

Whatever, thought Thrax.

Buzzing around the colossal cephalopod were thousands of glittering green flies the size of baseballs.

The beast was its own slow-moving ecosystem.

Squiddy—Thrax had taken to nick naming his targets—needed to be killed before any fast moving raptors got through the inner perimeter and ate all the milk silk producing livestock—not to mention the mutant villagers.

The megalovultures were just a nuisance. Same for the buzzball flies. Opportunistic carrion eaters and parasites. They would let the squid do the dirty work and pick over the remains.

Thrax’s remains, unless he was careful.

Raptors were much more pro-active about obtaining their food supply. That made them dangerous.

The massive, slinking squid let out a sloppy gurgle of joy as its flailing tentacles broke into the mut’s meat smoking pit. Thrax watched a couple of the stocky, bright green villagers waddle towards the beast and fling their spears at it—to no effect. It was like trying to take a bull down with toothpicks. Cilia near the squid’s mouth snatched the morsels up and tossed them into the gaping beak. The glistening tongue flipped them down into the throat in one swift, smooth motion. They screamed the whole way.

Pansies, thought Thrax. Just let it try to eat him. He’d curse and kick all the way down the gullet if he got caught. Give it indigestion.

Thrax couldn’t help but grin in spite of it all.

Fubar was a savage world.

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.

The ancients had become totally disconnected from nature and reality by eons of living in a cushy, high tech crib. Thrax bet that was why they were gone.

But this snail squid and its groupies would put even Thrax’s considerable termination skills to the test. He hadn’t seen one this big, bloated and bad tempered in ten orbits.

He looked back hungrily at his team.

They lay in a shallow, mud lined ditch behind him, fondling their weapons with nervous anticipation: Andromeda, Jez, Candy, Crystal, Jasmine, Kitty, Blossom, Ginger, Lilac, Amber, Thumper, Fabius, and Don Juan. Stunningly beautiful, voluptuous females with hourglass figures, plus a couple token males, with buff physiques, flowing manes of hair, and chiseled features. They all resembled Olympian Gods.

Not human, of course.

Not in this day and age of genetic defects.

The real humans of the underground Pleasurepit Emporium Five Colony were generally a bizarre array of imperfect proportions and distorted, asymmetrical features.

Perfection in imperfection, his mother had called it.

They had what was known as ‘character,’ and lots of it. Their bodies had been ravaged by sickness, disease, and radiation damage since they were born—just like every other natural, living being on the planet.

Except for Thrax.

He’d been born perfect, or nearly so. Two eyes, one nose, two ears, and five fingers per hand. That was rare enough. He was also blessed with strong cheekbones, a square jaw, and a flowing mane of lustrous hair that hadn’t thinned. His physique was naturally muscular; he hardly needed to exercise at all. When he went by, heads turned.

Sometimes he was mistaken for an android, like his team members. He was a freak anomaly. An exceptional exception.

Of course the nanite repairbots that floated about in his bloodstream were constantly busy, under siege from a wildly unstable environment that overflowed with biological innovation and constantly evolving diseases. Luckily his immune system was compatible with a strain of particularly effective nanite medbots, and he had survived plague outbreaks which had felled half the colony.

Two of his sisters had died in the last one.

The Suicide Plague, they’d called it.

Everything alive had nanobots of one form or another inside.

Nothing on Fubar could survive long without them.

Even androids had them. At least, all the organic ones did.

Thrax’s androids, or more accurately adapted sexbots, were grown in vats in the ceramic encased Pleasurepit factory deep beneath the surface.

Over their transparent second skins they wore provocative plastic nothings and leather straps and bustiers, the only clothing The Pit’s reploboxes were programmed to create.

They eschewed hand made battlefatigues as insufficiently fashionable or flattering. Some of their genetically programmed propensities were too difficult to eliminate.

It made for an eccentric and kinky looking army.

Damn distracting, too, thought Thrax, eyeing heaving breasts barely contained by a glistening bustier.

They belonged to the team’s weapon expert, Jezebel One-Eighty-Eight, a six-foot two- inch tall Amazon of an android. She had a body to die for, a beautiful but cruel face with a blood red blotch for a mouth, permanently stained. Her blond hair was cropped close.

She had been born bad right out of the vat, as The Ancients had intended. She was a dominatrix model, the product of the sex fantasies of the Old Ones, back in the Long Long Ago.

The Ancients were beings of unspeakable power and wisdom who apparently liked to be hog tied, covered in whipped cream, spanked, and forced to clean floors.

Why this should be so no one knew.

Who could understand beings of such godlike power?

Jez herself was a control freak. They’d overlaid control grams on top of her core programming repeatedly. Her core ate them for breakfast. Combat was the only time she followed orders.

But even her tremendous ego was capable of recognizing a true genius of destruction when she saw it, and no one had an aptitude for annihilation like Thrax. Blowing stuff up and snuffing out threats just came naturally.

Sometimes this ability made Thrax vaguely uncomfortable, as if there was something wrong with heavy weaponry, explosions, or annihilating outsiders that he couldn’t quite place his finger on.

At least, some people talked about it like it was a bad thing. Whatever.

He didn’t dwell on it.

Thinking was for pussies, anyway.

There was an endless demand for demolition and destruction. It was good to have a purpose, he thought.

Meaning.

All that shit.

He contemplated Jez. She was alluring in a horrifying sort of way, because she didn’t stop. There were no lines with her to cross.

She could make him feel a warped yearning in his nether regions, but ultimately he preferred the less ornery and more numerous Nexdoor sexbot model that made up the armies’ rank and file.

The squad sarge, Andromeda, was an Amazon Warrior Model Sexbot, an upper end design they had few of. Solid, athletic build and raven black hair. Her magnificent armour, metal miniskirt and armoured breast plates fit for a Greek Goddess. An acquired taste for special clients, she would only lie with men who could defeat her in combat. Tougher than a mutant wereboar, she made Jez look like a pussy.

The two hated each other.

That wasn’t the only problem: using sexbots for combat had other drawbacks. An army wasn’t useful if it was too busy, well, shagging.

Bad for discipline.

Thrax had distinct memories from his childhood, when he had listened at the air vents of the Sexbot dorms and been deluged with heated cries of ‘Yeah, baby, yeah!’ and ‘Higher! Higher! Yes! Yes! Oh! Ooohhh! My God! Oh my God! Aauooo-gaaah!’

It was a crazy down there, in The Pleasurepit. Yet it was also the last bastion of civilization in a sea of madness. Technology was rabidly fucking biology out there, creating hybrid horrors that’d curl your toes.

“How long are we going to wait here while you try and work up your nerve, you sniveling little worm?” hissed a voice in Thrax’s ear.

It could only be Jez. He grimaced.

The motion tattoo of a writhing octopus on her beautiful, prodigious, and barely covered breasts danced at the periphery of his vision.

It was terribly distracting.

What was it about swelling mammary glands that made them so compelling?

But she was right.

He had been procrastinating. And he was all out of Beserkide.

He hated when she was right.

Focus! Remember what you’re doing.

“When I say. Not before,” he said, snapping his mind back to the matter at hand.

Lilac and Crystal slinked up beside him to the edge of the ditch, moving like cats in heat, as they were programmed to do. Lilac gazed up at the Squid through her view sheet.

“It’s got a gut load of goodies,” she cooed. “This beastie has been around! Look! Part of a boat in there!”

Thrax looked at her and blinked, partially blinded.

Lilac was wearing a form-fitting silver cat suit outfit covered with thousands of flashing pin-lights, each powered by an independent, regenerating solar micro-battery. Her every finger sported what would have been, in an earlier age, expensive diamond rings.

In a world drenched with nanites, diamonds were as rare as dirt.

Fems still loved them.

Kudos to an ancient ad campaign.

Lilac’s big eyes were hidden behind even bigger Jacki-Oh sunglasses that made her look like a sexy Sleestak.

“We’re gonna kill it, aren’t we?” said Candy ruefully as she primed the fusion pile of her laser rifle. She wore a latex nurse outfit. She was the squad medic. “I hate seafood. Can’t we let it go? It’s just being itself.”

“No,” said Thrax. “Sides, it’s an amphibian.”

Candy frowned back at him. “Come on, Thraxy. Squid’s all rubbery and gross.”

“Garlic,” said Jasmine, sucking deep on a doobie. “Butter.”

“Rather eat nutrisoy,” muttered Kitty. She blew out a bubble of chewing gum until it burst with a smack.

“Shut up. It’s good for you.” “You’re mean. And I take vitamins.”

“Sorry,” said Thrax. Candy was sensitive for an android. “Look. Just turn off your tastebuds.”

There was a noise above, and they glanced up. Several green mutant villagers sailed overhead, their hapless screams waxing and then quickly fading as they glided into the distance and smacked soundlessly into the hard soil.

“Haw!” exclaimed Thrax. Silly mutants.

Always good for a laugh.

“I’m with Candy,” said Jasmine, the squad’s foxy faux-guerilla. She wore a tight, mini- Mao suit with a white lily set in her raven hair. She sucked loudly on a gleaming white mint.

“It’s doing too much damage.”

“This is bogus, sophonts. We, like, always get the shitty jobs,” remarked Blossom,

wrinkling her pert little nose. Heavy goggles, equipped with short-range x-ray emitters, kept her eyes hidden from view.

“Should have stuck with Milo’s squad,” groused Thumper, beating her wings lightly against the heavy air. She wore a gleaming white plastic nothing and thigh highs, which were, of course, self-cleaning. Had to be. The omnipresence of dirt and mud in war would otherwise have made such a fashion choice for combat gear impractical.

Thumper was a succubi model sexbot, based on the mythical female demons that seduced men during the dead of night. She had dead white eyes, pale skin, fangs, and a curvaceous figure that made men gasp for breath, topped by retractable nano-film bat wings. Couldn’t actually fly. Hop and glide, yes, but it looked undignified. That was about it. She clucked and cast slitted eyes at Thrax: “Something wrong with this boy. He likes--”

“Okay!” snapped Thrax urgently, blushing, “Pay attention—frag! Amber, Blossom, Kitty! Dammit, how many times have I told you? Put out those atomic cigarettes. The radiation attracts it! And Jasmine, get your tongue out of Bambi’s ear. Focus!”

“Oh. What a joy kill,” huffed Jasmine; she gave Thrax a cross look and for good measure ran her tongue provocatively across her lips and felt up her ammo battery bandoliers. “Ready for combat. Sir Big Boy. Command me!”

The other bots tittered, but it was turning him on.

That wouldn’t do, goddamn it. “Stop jazzing my gonads! Civilization is depending on us.” Bunch of perverts, thought Thrax angrily. Hot, hot sultry, sexy perverts, but nevertheless perverts. Created and programmed by... even bigger perverts and profligates.

“You heard the man,” snapped Andromeda. “Prep up. Today we fight for our homes. For honour and glory!”

Kitty sniffed. “You’re our very own Patton in a bustier, Andy.”

“Do it, cat lady,” said Andromeda impatiently. She glared at Kitty, who was always needlessly mouthy. “Today, justice shall prevail. Got it?”

Kitty blew a bubble and popped it. “Juice tits. Yeah. Whateveh.”

WIRED: You won't live to see the final Star Wars movie

So they say here.

And I imagine they're right. The franchise has long legs.

But the illustration by Ulises Farinas that goes along with the article is a ton of fun. Ripley's loader, Optimus Prime, Wolverine, Indiana Jones, Gandalf, E.T., and that guy from Galaxy Quest are all in there.

Awesome.

Love this sort of mash-up illustration.

So good I'm letting it break over the border...

Take a look at the full thing.