Episode 1 - Pilot

Team Bangkok

Writer: H. G. Shaes

Co-Writers: Hugh Mann, The Film Shark, Doug Halmyr, Silas Horde, Lyonz Cher

Editor: Lyonz Cher

Art: Grey Cracker

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The scientists of the Venusian Astrobleme Garrison are introduced. Zed has an unsatisfying testing session. An exclusive look inside of the Thunderhead, Vanilla’s factory of despair where the weak are mulched into a horrifying concoction. Pesh and Luis discus naming conventions, the gang goes to Cracker Barrel, and some handy exposition is doled out for reader benefit.

The 12 O’Clock Elektrick Lolita in the AM

A Tale of Science, Taken to its Logical Conclusion

Episode 1 - Pilot

“Kent Vargas, you’re paroled. Come with me to get your things and get out.”

Kent Vargas, high-school dropout and convicted carjacker, looked over the top of the MMA magazine he was reading and met the steely gaze of the warden. The fat cowboy-wannabe and two of his biggest, meanest thugs stood just on the other side of the metal curtain that had kept him locked away from the outside world for so long, glaring at him through the peeling bars and snarling like dogs. He blinked a few times and sat upright. Had he heard that right? Paroled?

“That’s right, Kent. Your appeal went through. You’re out of here.”

“Well it’s about goddamn time,” Kent laughed, tossing his magazine to the floor and climbing down from the upper bunk he had been lounging on.

“Watch that mouth of yours, boy,” the warden growled through a mouth full of dip. “I can have you hauled back here anytime I want.”

“Whatever you say, ese.”

“Just keep your nose clean.”

The warden and his two goons escorted Kent across the cellblock under the strobe of the flickering fluorescent light and amidst the chorus of shrieking inmates.

“Kent’s getting out!”

“They’re lettin’ Ken out!”

“Good luck on the outside, amigo!”

“Libre como un pájaro!”

“Hey, man! Have fun on the outside!”

The convoy reached the first of many security doors guarded with a well-worn keypad. The warden punched in a series of numbers quickly and instinctively. A loud, droning buzz and a cacophonous rattling announced that the code had been correctly inputted and that the door would be opening shortly. After a wait, the large metal door slowly slid open with a loud grinding noise. A jab to the back with the end of a nightstick herded Kent through the gate and into a well lit hallway. This new corridor was long and deathly quiet compared the chaos and noise of the cellblock. One of the guards ran his club along the white expanse of the painted brick wall as the warden chewed his tobacco grotesquely and the shined black shoes of his two escorts squeaked on the placid tile. Kent found the accompaniment of the normally unnoticeable noise to be disconcerting. He was not used to such an encompassing quiet; such a morbid stillness.

It would take some heavy adapting once he was on the outside. That was, if he wanted to stay out of trouble anyway. He definitely didn’t want to wind up in prison again. At least, not in Texas. He resolved to take the warden’s advice and keep his nose clean. Find a job. Get an apartment. Refrain from stealing cars and selling them to chop shops for easy money. Those sorts of things. Easy enough. Maybe he’d even get his high school degree. He’d be the first man in his family to do so. Baby steps.

“Got any plans for the outside?” the warden asked, almost condescendingly.

“Not gonna be stealin’ no more cars, that’s for sure.”

“I should hope not. I don’t want to see your face around here no more.”

“Right back at you, warden.”

They reached another security door at the end of the hallway. This one had to be activated remotely. The warden punched the red button on the small intercom near the door and leaned in to speak into it.

“It’s Rivers. Escorting a parole-case.”

“I’ll buzz you through.”

There was another piercing buzz and a rattling drone as the old metal door slowly slid open, biding the four to pass. Kent was ushered into another hallway and past a bulletproof window that girded a staffed security office. Pushed along by his armed shepherds, he was led to a windowless door which one of the guards stepped forwards to unlock using one of the many indistinguishable keys that jingled about on the eclectic key ring  that all of the guards carried. Allowing his mind to wander, Kent pondered on how the guards always seemed to know which one went to which door, despite carrying dozens and dozens of nearly identical keys. Was that just something they had to learn? Was it some sort of “prison guard sixth-sense?” Kent pushed the rambling thoughts from his mind. With luck, he’d never have to see another prison security guard again. At least, not in Texas.

“Where we going?” Kent asked as he was pushed through the door.

“Security office,” the warden replied gruffly. “Get your stuff.”

Kent tried to remember what had been taken off of him when he had been booked. His old clothes, definitely. Maybe half of a pack of cigarettes. He couldn’t remember. It had been so long.

As Kent was escorted down yet another long corridor, he began to wonder when they’d ever reach the security office where his possessions were being held. He seemed to have been led down hallway after hallway in succession, and was growing slightly suspicious. These thoughts of doubt, too, were pushed from his head. He had nothing to worry about. He was being released. Going home. They’d get his things and push him out the gates and then he’d be free for the first time in seven years. He had the rest of his life to look forward to, what was he worrying about?

“Has Vargas been retrieved? The pod’s warmed up.”

The pod? Kent could’ve sworn he’d heard something about “a pod” crackle through one of the guards’ radios. It had to have been a mistake. Maybe the “pod” was just prison guard slang for the box of a prisoner’s possessions. That was it. They had found the box of his possessions and had it all laid out for him. Halfway down the narrow corridor, Kent was steered through an open door into what looked like what had once been a conference room. There was a smudged whiteboard on the far side of the room and several chairs and folding tables had been pushed up against the wall.

“Hope you like space, Vargas.”

The door slammed behind him and Kent immediately realized that something was very wrong. His eyes darted frantically around the room and settled on something that he had not previously noticed: a large cylindrical apparatus suspended on a rolling frame. It looked like some kind of stasis pod, straight out of a science fiction movie. It was covered in strange panels and hoses and the glass door on its front sat open, white mist slowly spilling out of the bottom of it.

“What is th-this?” Kent stammered.

“Kent Vargas,” a voice uttered. “You’ve been chosen to serve a participant in a government-funded scientific study.”

Two Neanderthals in white coats emerged from Kent’s blind spot and surrounded him. They were far bigger and meaner-looking than the warden’s goons, and Kent didn’t dare try to overpower them. He simply stood, trembling as the two heavies grabbed him by the arms and dragged him over to the open door of the pod in the center of the room.

“Where are you taking me?” Kent demanded, writhing against the python-grip of his assailants. “What’s going on?”

“You are being placed in stasis,” one of the men answered. “For your trip.”

“Trip to where? Where are you takin’ me?”

“To the Venusian Astrobleme Garrison. The Dome.”

Venusian? Kent may have dropped out of high school but he knew what Venus was and he also knew that it was a place that he most definitely did not want to go. He tried to struggle against the grip of the two gargantuan men but one injected him in the neck with a syringe filled with a strange, clear liquid and he immediately felt the strength leave his body.

“Vitamin shot,” one of the goons growled, as he tried to force the flailing Kent into the pod. “Vitamin shot, sedative, and something to keep your blood from freezing. Road to Venus is a long trip and we can’t you fucking anything up in the meantime.”

“Why are they sending me there?” Kent slurred as his limp body was forced into the waiting maw of the open pod. “How are they doing this? Who’s doing this?”

“Think of this as a business opportunity. An apprenticeship. You’ll be working under some of the greatest minds of our generation.”

And with that, the glass door was slammed shut over Kent, locking him inside of his mechanical casket. He suddenly became aware of how cold it was inside the pod, and how it was quickly getting colder and colder. The glass began to fog up, obscuring his view of the outside, but he could feel the pod being moved. They were wheeling him out the door and down the hallway he had just walked through a few minutes earlier; the hallway he had hoped would deliver him to freedom. He heard the voice of the warden nearby, laughing about something. He tried to call for help but found that no words would escape his mouth. He suddenly felt very dry, as if the moisture in his body was being leeched out of him by the agonizing cold. He saw frost begin to form on the glass. Then on his skin. Then over his eyes.

And for Kent Vargas, the world fell silent and grew dark.

***

Amidst the turmoil and turbulence of the new decade, a secret war was being waged by the bureaucrats up on Capitol Hill. It was a war against science, and all of its perceived evils and blights. The politicians and senators seated behind their desks in the marble halls of Washington stood embattled against what they saw as a “plague of unchecked technology” and signed off on an order to “scrub the immoral scourge of unrestrained science from the face of America.”

A watchlist was formed. Men and women deemed “immoral scientists” were spirited away in the dark of the night by armed men in black vans. Many of them embraced what they thought would be their deaths, unknowing of the scientific Eden that was to be granted to them, for the years following the peak of the U.S. space program and borne an amazing discovery: just beyond the moon, there existed a tear in the fabric of space; a point of condensation where a puncture in the very void had formed. A secret project was carried out to study this rift, and a probe was launched, slingshotting around the gravitational field of the moon and catching on this mysterious rift. When the signal from the probe was regained, they found it nestled and intact in the orbit of Earth’s younger sibling, the dead planet of Venus.

Utilizing classified methods that remain unknown to this day, the U.S. government commenced the construction of the Dome, a massive self-contained base built within the crater of a large astrobleme. Though the project was completed, funding cuts and the ever-increasing risk of exposure forced the U.S. government to abandon any potential use for it. And so, the Plexiglas geodesic dome and the mass of buildings, tunnels, and modules underneath it, were left vacant and hollow in the expanse of an empty impact crater on a dead wasteland planet.

But the Dome did not remain silent for long.

The U.S. wanted to be rid of its captives, but feared the can of worms that would be opened if they simply killed them. Remembering the abandoned base they had left empty and alone on Venus many years ago, Washington developed a plan that would benefit everyone: they would send the scientists there, and provide for them the means to continue their work in a location where their questionable pursuits could not have a direct effect on Earth and its people. A large spectacle was made of the whole ordeal and the government’s top PR officials played it up as a massive pilgrimage in the name of progress, rather than the ashamed banishment that it really was. The gathered scientists were sent off with a massive banquet and celebration before being placed in cryogenic stasis and stored like cargo along with their possessions on an experimental deep-space vessel and launched into the unknown abyss that lay beyond the moon.

In just over a week, NASA scientists received word that the ship had successfully reached the Dome, and that thawing, moving-in, and unpacking had already commenced. The relocation had been a success. It was under the judgeless expanse of the Dome, that labs of every science known to mankind (and some new scientific disciplines that were discovered and developed within the Dome itself) began to take root. The U.S. government promised to adhere to the scientists’ every whim and to provide with not only animals for scientific testing, but human subjects (furnished from the overcrowded U.S. prison systems) as well. The only request made of the scientists of the Dome was that they keep their irresponsible and immoral black projects contained within their new home, and that they never return to Earth under any circumstances.

Years passed, and life under the Dome flourished. Unrestrained by judgment or morality, the highly-perceptive men and women who toiled in the electric forges made astounding leaps in scientific progress. Artificial intelligence, light-and-sound-based weaponry, advanced metal alloys, the cures for almost every known disease, space age robotics, teleportation, gene splicing, and the development, discovery, and even creation of new elements and lifeforms were but some of the monumental advances made by the intrepid tenders of the hearth of science within the solitary technological playground of the Dome. Soon, the Dome was renamed the VAG (Venusian Astrobleme Garrison) to reflect what it meant to the scientists who called it home. It was no longer just the dome that ensured that survival, but the fortress that protected their minds and bodies. It was a bastion of safety that allowed them to flourish, marching ever onward in the name of eternal curiosity.

The brilliant men and women of the VAG labored not for the benefit of society, but to satiate their own thirst for curiosity. They sought to answer their own questions, to push their own boundaries, and to strive for discovery, not for the benefit of mankind, nor for the greater good, but for the simple ecstasy of discovery itself. Some dared to call them selfish, but words such as those had no meaning within the VAG. Until the day when humanity learned to accept these masters of thought who knew no restrictive concepts such as restraint, taboo, or regulation, striving only for the edification of their own kind and of the thinking world as a whole, they would continue on as they had always done; seeking out the answers to any question the universe dared to pose. They’d remain there within the embrace of their final home, the VAG, cracking open the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything, one by one and one step at a time.

***

Kent Vargas awoke with a start and found himself staring into the white heat of blinding fluorescent lights. Was he in Heaven? Everything was brilliantly white, almost blindingly so. As his eyes adjusted, he became aware of his surroundings and just how disturbingly ascetic they were. Everything felt like an iPod; it was all clean and colorless, with not a harsh angle or sharp corner anywhere. Kent tried to sit up to get his bearings, but found that his arms and legs had been restrained. He had been strapped to some sort of table. From what he could see out of the corner of his vision, he was no longer in his orange prison jumpsuit but was clad only in a pair of white sweatpants. An IV was hooked into his arm and he began to consider the dubious possibility that he was in a hospital. Maybe somebody had intervened and rescued him from the cryogenic pod he had been forced into. He couldn't actually be on Venus, could he?

Kent heard a pneumatic hiss and his blood ran cold. A section of what had looked like unassuming, unblemished wall had just slid open and in walked a man pushing a cart covered with a white sheet. Kent struggled to twist his head so that he could see who he presumed to be his captor. As he drew closer, Kent was met with the view of a very imposing-looking man with an unkempt mustache, a curly mop of hair, and dressed in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and a pair of golf shorts worn under an unbuttoned labcoat. The man also wore a pair of tacky yellow aviators and carried a bottle rocket clenched between his teeth, the way one might hold one of those long, fancy cigarette holders.

“Who are you? What’s going on?” Kent demanded shakily.

“You’re on Venus, boy!” announced the hairy man, throwing his arms wide quite theatrically. “The Dome! The VAG! We’re like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory except we make science, not candy, and I’m Willy-goddamn-Wonka! You gettin’ the picture yet? Want me to draw you a fuckin’ picture? You’ve been in the cold-storage for awhile. Starting to get freezer-burnt, you were. Not that it’s gonna matter when you’re down in the Thunderhead later, getting mulched.”

Kent felt his heart drop into his stomach. This couldn’t be happening. Not in a million years. He kept hoping that this was some sort of bad dream, that he’d wake up at any moment back in his cell. Prison was looking pretty good right about now.

“What are you going to do to me?” Kent asked as he eye nervously trailed the bizarre man as he paced about the room.

“We’re gonna chat for a bit. Then I’m gonna cut you open and find out what makes your ticker tick. Get it? Let me introduce myself, first. Dr. Zedekiah Vandermause. You can call me Zed. Just because I’m about to carve you up like a Christmas hooker doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, right?”

Kent felt his heart begin to beat out of his chest and he struggled against his restraints, to no avail.

“Please, let me go! I didn’t do nothing!”

“Now don’t go telling lies, Vargas,” Zed admonished mockingly. “I read your file. So you like cars, boy? You like stealin’ them? Chopping ‘em up?”

“I needed the money! I’m sorry! You don’t have to do this! I did my time!”

“You’re still not getting this, Kenny. Mind if I call you Kenny? I don’t care if you were in the joint for unpaid traffic tickets or if you killed your granny! Your number came up and that means you’re my new pincushion! Now, I’m meeting some friends for lunch in about an hour so I’m just gonna dig right in. We’ve gotten pleasantries out of the way and now it’s time for science!”

“What the hell could you learn from cutting me up?”

“Mind if I tell you a secret, Kenny? It’s not always about the science. They probably told you things. Told you that this was for the greater good. Well, a lot of it is. We’re developing cures for cancer up here. Sure, you folks down there on Earth will never get them. Y’all were the ones who sent us up here in the first place. No toys for you, I’m afraid. Not right now, anyway. Maybe if y’all come up here in a few centuries and beg. Yeah, that’s right. We’ll still be around. Secret to immortality. Nailed that one in an afternoon. Yeah, there’s all kinds of wondrous things being made up here. Things for us to play with! But sometimes, we just need to vent. I want you to know that your death isn’t going to accomplish anything. I just want to cut you open and play with your guts for a good 45 minutes because it’s funny to me. Maybe I’ll snap some pics and show them around at lunch. Have a few laughs. Here, let’s get one now. Congrats, buddy! You’re about to get a free gut-removal operation, anesthesia free!”

Zed reached into the pocket of his shorts and withdrew an iPhone. He held it over Kent’s head and said, “Say cheese!”

The picture that showed up on the confirmatory screen depicted the face of a scared and hopeless prison inmate from Texas who had just been told that he was going to be murdered in the same manner that one would be notified that they had just won the lottery. Kent began to scream.

“Oh, that’s going to get annoying real fast,” Zed groaned as he pulled the white sheet off of the cart, revealing all manners of horrific instruments of surgery and torture. “Shit. I should of brought my speakers. I could play some Huey Lewis and dance around the room like Christian Bale. Eh, never mind. I’ll do it later tonight. Now let’s do something about that screaming.”

Zed pulled a pair of disposable latex gloves from a box sitting on the cart and stretched them over his massive hands. He then stood over Kent and inserted them into his mouth, grabbing the roof of his mouth and his lower jaw. Kent tried to bite his fingers, but he was simply too strong. It was futile. Zed rolled his head about for a second, took a deep breath, and then went to work pulling Kent’s upper and lower jaw apart with all of his strength. A man of his size, it didn’t take long for him to reach the satisfying crack that let him know that the subject’s jaw had been successfully dislocated. Kent saw bright spots of light flash in front of his eyes and screamed in agony as his jaw was forcibly pulled out-of-place.

“Now let’s get at those pesky vocal cords,” Zed muttered, returning to his cart. “Wish humans had snooze buttons, like alarm clocks. Now that’s an idea! I’m going to pitch that to Vanny later. Y’know, I actually do enjoy the screaming. It’s just that I’ve recently gotten over a bad migraine and I’d like a little bit of quiet.”

Kent was paying no attention to the rambling madman and continued to scream, as if anybody would come to help him. He felt like he had been hit in the face with a hammer and there was an awful pounding in the back of his skull that kept rhythm with his heart beat. Saliva was pooling in his throat but he found himself unable to swallow due to the paralyzing pain. He was somehow in mortal agony yet experiencing a loss of feeling in his jaw and throat at the same time. As he rolled his aching head about within his restraints, he heard the faint chords of a Nirvana song playing somewhere. Was he hearing things? Experiencing auditory hallucinations brought about by stress?

“Hold on for a second, Kenny. Getting a call.”

Zed withdrew his phone once again as Kent’s head dropped back to the table.

“Vanny! How’s it going, baby girl? You need somethin’? Yeah. Okay. I’ve already got one. Yeah, he’s fresh. Haven’t even started cutting. Sweet. We still on for lunch? Awesome. Got it. Love you. Bye.”

Amidst the unbearable, throbbing pain he was experience having just had his jaw forcibly dislocated, Kent couldn’t help but wonder what the brief conversation had entailed and whether it had pertained to him or not.

“Sorry ‘bout that. Good news though! There’s been a change of plans.”

Kent’s eyes widened hopefully.

“You’re not dying in vain! Vanilla wants to extract your adrenalin and other pineal-secreted hormones for some new experiment she’s doing. Knowing my Vanny, it’s probably something good. I’ve been asked to ensure that you experience as much pain as possible before death! Goddamn, I love gettin’ up for work in the morning!”

Kent’s eyes widened further, but in horror this time.

“Now let’s get back to those vocal cords.”

“Letch meh go ooh sich fugh!” Kent sputtered, having lost much of his previously top-notch enunciation skills right around the time his jaw was pried out of place.

“What was that, Mumbly Joe? You gotta speak loudly and clearly if you want to get heard in this world, Kenny. You take debate in high school?”

Zed continued rambling on as he took a device that looked like a stainless-steel electric toothbrush topped with a mixing blade from the top of his cart and proceeded to lower it into the mangled mouth of his restrained subject. Once he hit the flesh at the back of the throat, he raised the large fist of his free hand into the air and brought it down on Kent’s diaphragm while pressing the button on the strange device with his thumb. The impact caused Kent’s throat to involuntarily contract around the blade, and there was a sickening squelch as his windpipe and vocal cords were blended by the whirring and shrieking device. It whipped around in his throat as its bladed head spun, pulling flesh into its metal embrace and slinging it about like cake batter. As his pipes were severed, Kent’s frantic screaming degenerated into horrified quiet wheezing and then a sick and agonized gurgling.

“That’s better. See, that wasn’t that hard. Now let’s do a little tracheotomy so you don’t choke on all the blood and meat I just riled up.”

Grabbing a handy scalpel, Zed thrust the blade into Kent’s throat and twisted it before pulling it out, tearing a ragged hole in his esophagus.

“That’s just dandy, that right there. Now you can breathe. No worrying about you conking out before we’re done. Vanilla needs your heart pumping! At least for now.”

Kent thrashed about and wheezed violently as he struggled to break his bonds. Somewhere deep down, he knew he was going to die, but refused to acknowledge those thoughts. He still had his hope. Zed intended to destroy it.

“Now that we’ve gotten you to shut up, let’s start getting rid of some of these unnecessary organs. I have some joke bits I want to work on. I think you’ll like them.”

Zed took his trusty scalpel and proceeded to smoothly carve a large “I” shaped incision on Kent’s abdomen with surgical precision. He then peeled back the flaps of skin and whistled in admiration at the churning guts underneath.

“Hoo-wee! Got some healthy organs under that skin, Kenny. I’ll save the best for last! Who needs a fucking pancreas?”

Showing a surprising amount of surgical knowledge, Zed plunged his hand into the sliced-open belly of his convulsing victim and tore out his pancreas, holding it aloft.

“This is some fucking Indiana Jones shit, right here!” the psychopathic doctor laughed, tossing the organ over his shoulder.

Though he could not express it vocally, Kent was in more pain than he had ever been in his entire life. He wanted nothing more than to die. He did not want to survive this. If by some miracle that he did, he would be ruined for the remainder of his pitiful life. Crippled, broken, and scarred. There would be no reason to go on. Kent only hoped that the good doctor would kill him quickly.

Even that hope would not be realized.

“Man,” Zed laughed as his wandering hand groped about underneath Kent’s flesh. “You really need to liver little.”

And with that, he proceeded to plunge his other hand into the open body cavity and tear Kent’s liver out, holding it aloft with both hands.

“Get it? Liver? I apologize. My jokes can be hard to stomach sometimes.”

And then Kent’s stomach was torn out with brutal force and crushed in the crook of Zed’s armpit like a bagpipe, spraying the acid from within all over Kent’s chest and face, burning into his flesh with a sickening sizzle.

“Whoopsie! Did I do that?”

Kent convulsed and wheezed, trashing about in mortal agony as his own digestive juices ate away at his flesh. Nothing was entirely dissolved, but everything was pinkened and blistered. Some of the acid had landed on Kent’s forehead and to his horror, was slowly running down his brow and on a direct crash-course with his eyes. The yellow chemical pooled in his eye sockets and burned everything. It worked its way into his tear ducts and was spread across the surface of his eye every time he blinked, like mud smeared across a windshield by the wipers. His vision faded to a pale yellow and then to a splotchy brown as his eyes were corroded and he wanted nothing more but to tear the pained organs from his head and throw them across the room to get the pain to stop.

“Shit get in your eyes? Sorry about that, man. Well’p, I hate to cut a good round of experimentation short, but I’ve got a date to keep.”

Kent’s scarred eyes widened.

Zed grabbed a meat tenderizing hammer off of his cart and after a second’s hesitation, he proceeded to bring it down right on top of Kent’s forehead.

Mercy at last.

“You like that you stupid fuck?” He screamed, slamming the hammer into Kent’s head over and over again until it was sufficiently pulped. “You enjoying this you piece of shit? Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Zed was splattered with blood and a psychotic rage contorted his face and drove his hand until suddenly a instantaneous calm fell over him.

“It’s done.”

Zed dropped to the floor and leant against the operating table as he took the bottle rocket out of his mouth with a trembling hand and set it aside. His hands still shaking, he drew a cigarette and a match from the breast pocket of his labcoat and proceeded to have a nervous and exhausted smoke break.

“That was… Unsatisfying. I didn’t enjoy that.”

He had too many mistakes. He had hurried. Cutting the “subject’s” vocal cord had been a mistake. As much as Kent’s screaming had given him a headache, he was disappointed that he couldn’t have listened to the whelp beg for mercy a bit longer. Zed was also disappointed in himself for rushing the “experiment.” He resolved to refrain from ending the “testing courses” so early in the future. If someone very dear to him had not made a last-minute request, Kent’s “testing” would have gone on for longer than it did. Much, much longer. Finishing his cigarette, Zed stubbed it out on the forearm of Kent’s lifeless body and solemnly left the “testing chamber” to see if anybody had a gurney they’d be willing to lend him.

***

Dr. Vanilla Van Dirge had built up quite reputation as a member of the scientific community, both on Earth and within the VAG. Descended directly from the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele himself, she was a ruthless young woman and a firm believer of the words “wissenschaft über alles” or “science over all.” On Earth, she had risen to fame within the global scientific community, not only because of the age at which she began to make her name (at the age of 17 to be precise), but also because of her groundbreaking work on developing “human pain theory” and “weather control technology,” not to mention the astounding work she did for NASA and her brief internship working on the Large Hadron Collider. After her transfer to the VAG, she singlehandedly developed a machine that could extract the pigment from human skin to make dyes, numerous groundbreaking leaps in robotics, functional alchemy, a machine that could turn human pain into a life-extending elixir, and the secret to creating life itself. In honor of her contributions to science, she was given her very own laboratory by her peers within the VAG, fashioned out of a massive unused chamber underneath the facility. Accessible only by a private elevator, this facility was known as the “Thunderhead,” and was the deepest point of construction underneath the dome. Inside the Thunderhead, Vanilla paced along the catwalks that hung over the gore-spattered workfloor where her robotic “employees” were hard at work, torturing “subjects” to extract the chemicals necessary to create a steady supply of the horrid elixir that would ensure that every scientist within the VAG would live forever. She saw the subjects, drawn from prisons on Earth, to be less than human; nothing more than cattle that existed only to further her mad designs. Likewise, she viewed herself and her fellow scientists as demigods who had ascended from a primitive world that did not understand their genius and to her, the subjects she experimented on were nothing more than mortal playthings. The ones she did not grind up into her patented life-extending slurry, she took to her private operating theatre, the “Knowledge Chamber” where she perpetuated horrific genetic and surgical experiments that would have made her great-grandfather queasy.

“I brought the son-of-a-bitch,” Zed yelled over the din as he pushed the gurney holding Kent Vargas’s mutilated body along one of the suspended Thunderhead catwalk. “I finished him off early, just for you, baby-girl.”

Vanilla was a prime example of the notion that beauty does not equal morality, purity, or even sanity. At the tender young age of 19, she was quite the pretty young lady, if not a bit bleached as a result of the horrid work she did. Her skin was deathly pale, almost translucent and her long hair, fashioned in a “hime cut” with low bangs, was the color of dark-purple violets. Nobody was sure if her hair actually grew in that color (as a side-effect of some awful self-experimentation), had been dyed, or was actually a wig. She changed its style and color often, so it was a very real possibility. In her line of work and unending dedication to scientific discipline, the young lass had been exposed to enough radiation to kill a bull elephant, and it was quite probably that she had lost her hair long ago, replacing it with a very well-made wig. Not even Zed, her boyfriend, knew for sure. Additionally, despite having a thin and almost birdlike build, she was notable about the facility for being quite “well-endowed,” but it was a popular rumor that her ample bosom was most definitely the result of self-experimentation, as many swore that she hadn’t been that big a few years ago when she arrived along with the other scientists. Her most notable and captivating feature though, was her face. It seemed almost deceptively innocent, with soft, feminine features and large, glistening, almost child-like eyes. Within the industrial hell that was the Thunderhead, she wore a pair of heavy industrial goggles that, coupled with the perpetual manic grin she wore when watching her test subjects being dismembered, the low light, and the deranged and twitchy way she carried herself, gave her a frightening and ghoulish appearance.

“Tell me what you see down there,” Vanilla requested.

“Uh… Well,” Zed took his place at her side and gazed over the railing of the catwalk down to the floor below.

On either side of the wide, auditorium-like room, there were blood-spattered conveyor belts covered in what could only be described as “corpse-mulch” that was in the process of being sliced and diced to an even finer degree by a shrieking workforce composed of vaguely-humanoid androids who wielded hacksaws, hammers, sickles, and other instruments of improvised pulping. Chains dangled haphazardly from the ceiling, large circular saw blades were propped up against the wall in one place, boxes containing everything from empty glass bottles packed with hay, to rusty meat hooks were pushed up against the walls throughout the facility, and everything seemed generally grungy, chaotic, and industrial. In the center of the room, there was a large rectangular hole in the floor, inside of which were numerous live test subjects, starved, dirty, and sobbing. Zed saw one of the androids grab a long pole with a hook on the end and lower it into the pit, hooking a screaming test subject between the shoulder blades and hoisting them out with inhuman strength. The hook was torn out with extreme prejudice and the test subject was dragged towards a mezzanine on the far side of the room where a rickety lift supported by chains was waiting for him and his escorting jailer. They stepped on the lift and another android on the platform above pulled a rusty lever, raising it up to the mezzanine where an operating table outfitted with restraint straps was waiting. The wailing subject was slammed onto the table and quickly secured without issue. One of the androids withdrew a power drill from an ironically reappropriated toy chest that sat just against the mezzanine railing and proceed to castrate the shrieking subject with it, turning his genitals into a crimson slurry that splattered the platform floor. Zed pulled his head back as a strange machine, suspended and moving along a set of railing built into the ceiling, slid by him and made its way over to the other side of the room. Once it was dangling over the raised area that housed the operating table restraining a freshly-castrated subject, it began to lower and unfold, mechanical parts shifting and rotating until it was revealed to be some sort of massive energy-redirecting device, looking much like some sort of alien death ray from an old cartoon. Its defining feature was a large antenna emerging from the center of a focusing dish and ending at an orb that glowed a sickly green. As the device began to activate, the Thunderhead was immediately flooded with a piercing din and the machine began to draw in energy, its orb glowing brighter and brighter as electricity arced about the rim of its focusing dish. Once the device had reached its capacity, it unleashed a beam of brilliant green light that enveloped the screaming test subject below and proceeded to drain him of what could only be described as his “life energy.”

“Uh… I see a Van Dirge Device, operating at peak efficiency? Extracting the electric neural impulses from a tortured human that can be refined into a ingestible liquid that ensures our agelessness and eternal life, at least until the sun inevitably explodes and we all die anyway?”

“Yes, but look closer. Do you see it?”

“Van, I’m not sure what-”

“Science! There is science in here! Progress! And the weeding of a beautiful garden. Killing the weak to ensure the survival of the strong, that’s what life is about. According to Hyde, great-great-grandpa used to say that like it was going out of style. I hope he’s looking down on us right now. I hope he’s proud of me.”

“I’m sure the good doctor is very proud of you, baby. Now where do you want this dead fucker?”

Vanilla strolled along the catwalk, nodding her head along with the rhythm of the hacksaws colliding with the conveyor belt below. Dozens of metal clicks and clacks over the din of machinery and screaming, all echoing together in unison. It was music to her ears, a shrieking tribute to her doings.

“Bring the body this way.”

Zed took control of the gurney and pushed it along behind Vanilla as they walked towards a primitive cage elevator at the end of the catwalk. It was barely large enough to hold the two scientists and the gurney, but with a little shifting about, they made it work. Vanilla pushed the directional lever into the “up” position and they began to rise gradually, lifting higher and higher over the factory floor until they receded up into a hole in the ceiling, in which they found themselves travelling through a narrow and pitch-black shaft, only the sound of grinding metal and the jostling of the floor to let them know that they were still moving. Finally, emerging from the darkness and into a dim grey light, the elevator shuddered to a stop and Vanilla slammed the rusty lever into neutral to keep it still. The doors opened with a harsh squeaking and the elevators occupants (the living ones, anyway) stepped into a long stone hallway, dimly lit by the string of mining lights that hung from staples in the wall. At the end of the long and claustrophobia-inducing corridor was a rusty iron door with the words “knowledge is power” painted sloppily on its face in something red.

Vanilla left the elevator first and Zed followed close behind, pushing the gurney. As they walked the length of the silent corridor, Vanilla began to ramble on about things relating to some facet of science or another; some trailing thoughts she wanted to entertain. Zed could never tell if she was talking to him, herself, or the horrid apparitions that she saw flitting about the edge of her vision on a daily basis, but he was content to listen.

“Scientists have a great responsibility. The greater our resources, the greater the responsibility. This facility is the greatest resources of them all. I’ve made us immortal with my machines, and now it’s my duty to ensure that we keep that immortality. As long as those bureaucrats down on Earth keep sending us their failures and prison scum, I can keep draining their life force and making the elixirs that ensure that we will be able to do science forever. There’s always my responsibility to expand on that, though. To make it better. Refine it. Always brewing a better elixir. Finding new recipes for weeds, in a way. If we have an infinite resource, why not experiment. See what we can develop with it.”

“So what do you want the dead guy for?”

“I’m developing a machine that can turn human hormones into muscle-toner and cupcake batter. I need a sample of adrenochrome and epinephrine to run through the prototype. See if it works before I start on refining it.”

Zed couldn’t help but chuckle. That was his Vanilla, always pushing the boundaries of scientific insanity.

“So what gave you the idea for this new invention?” Zed asked, humoring his severely psychotic girlfriend.

“Cedric, actually. When’s he’s in-between his little ‘manias,’ he’s actually quite a joy to hold a conversation with. He apparated me some chai tea and we talked molecular reconstruction and reappropriation for hours. He’s quite well-versed in that field.”

“Well I’d suppose an awareness of existing simultaneously in every possible reality at once would make anybody an expert in anything. What was he?”

“The tiger-centaur with the white suit and the color-changing cufflinks.”

“Seems to like that one. I was on watch Sunday and he kept alternating back-and-forth between the tiger, the balloon, and the glowing cloud.”

“I like the one with the humanoid reptilian body and the goat head. It looks like something off the cover of a heavy metal album.”

They reached the heavy metal door at the end of the hallway and Vanilla withdrew a key that hung on a chain around her neck and inserted it into a tiny, almost unnoticeable keyhole that sat where a doorknob might on any normal door. This was not a normal door, though. Normal doors weren’t built to withstand direct fire from a tank. Normal doors weren’t covered in claw-marks and dried blood. Normal doors weren’t located inside of a fortified torture-factory on Venus.

“You left the pineal gland in, right?” Vanilla asked as she turned the key.

“Yes. Yes I did. I just removed the pancreas, liver, gall bladder, some of the colon, and the stomach.”

“Let me guess, you were practicing your comedy routine for open-mic-night at Scholty’s on Friday?”

“Yep.”

“I love you, baby.”

Vanilla turned, put a hand on the side of Zed’s face, and planted a quick kiss on his cheek.

“I love you too, baby doll. Now let’s get this stiff cut up.”

Vanilla pushed open the heavy door with some difficulty. Then, she and Zed stepped over the threshold and entered a dark room that stunk of oil, alcohol, and ancient blood. As they stepped inside, lights began to click on one-by-one, revealing the room to be one of those old-fashioned operating theaters; the ones with the horseshoe-shaped audience area separated from the operating area by glass walls. The tile floor was splattered with blood, both old and new, and a disemboweled corpse had been suspended from the ceiling with chains, contorted into a gruesome cruciform pose. Along the back wall of the theater, painted in what looked like blood, were the words “I AM THE KNUCKLE, BOW DOWN AND BUCKLE,” and in the center of the room was a screaming man, strapped to an operating table and thrashing about madly.

“Oh my,” Vanilla gasped. “I forgot about this one. Just push the gurney up against the wall. I’ve still got something on my plate.”

Vanilla removed her goggles and hung them around her neck, pulling a black balaclava out of the pocket of her labcoat and donning it.

“Who’s there?” screamed the man strapped to the table. “Have you come back? Are you going to let me go?”

“Infantile scum,” hissed Vanilla, pacing about the room. “Disgusting child, my patience has been pushed to its limit. You see the splendor of my scientific master race. You’ve been graced by our genius, yet you still wish to live. What would you be going back to? Forced sodomy in that shithole prison in Alabama I rescued you from? You ungrateful wretch. I will hurt you.”

Vanilla picked up a rubber mallet off of a tray by the table and proceeded to smash the screaming subject’s hand with it, eliciting no shortage of agonized sobbing and gurgling from him.

“Elly, sweetheart,” Vanilla called. “Could you come down here and help big sister with something, real quick?”

As if having materialized out of the ghoulish shadows that stretched across the room, an entity that a casual onlooker would not have realized was present emerged from seemingly out of the void. It was a tiny little girl. Dressed in a tattered black frock that dragged the ground behind her, the little creature lurched forward with a crippled gait. As she drew closer into the light, it became apparent that she was by no means, a normal child. Her skin was jaundiced and thin, crisscrossed with numerous stitches and her neck-length, straw-colored hair barely obscured the two large bolts jutting from the sides of her head. Her eyes were large, almost the size of baseballs, ringed in black and having pinprick pupils that lacked irises and her mouth was tiny and smiling, with trailing stitched leading from its corners that made her grin seem much larger than it really was. She walked with a strange gait, lurching forward as if something was weighing her down. A faint metallic clicking could be heard as she moved.

This was Eloise Constance Lenore Van Dirge III, Vanilla’s homunculus, little sister, and greatest affront to God. Shaped from the flesh of corpses, manure, stockyard leftovers, bull semen, and other foul things, Eloise was the capstone of Vanilla’s alchemical revival. Despite her ghoulish appearance, she really was a sweet, innocent little girl who wanted nothing more in the world to love and be loved return. Cradled in her arms was a tiny porcelain music box that played a tinny and haunting chime as she wound it. Even the screams of the doomed man strapped to the table in the center room fell silent as the music box’s lingering tune filled the expanse of the Knowledge Chamber. All eyes turned towards Eloise as everyone quietly watched the tiny little girl struggle to lurch to the aid of her creator. Kneeling down, Eloise set her music box on the floor and then looked upwards to meet the gaze of her sister.

“Do you need something, Sis?” she asked, looking up at Vanilla who looked down on her creation with feelings of immense pride, as she always did.

“I want you to go to your room and bring me Donald. Can you do that?”

“I can do that! I can go do that now.”

“Why don’t you go say hi to Uncle Zed, first?”

Eloise turned and her little face lit up when she saw Zed standing by the door, leaning on the gurney that housed his mutilated victim. As best she could, she ran towards him, stumbling only once or twice. Grinning, Zed stooped down and hoisted the little homunculus girl into the air, taking delight in the child’s laughter before bringing her in for a hug.

“How’s my little pumpkin doing?” he laughed, holding Eloise in his arms.

“Vanilla’s been letting me play with the patients!”

“Is that so,” Zed laughed, setting Eloise back down on the floor.

“Yeah! Me and Donald have been helping.”

“Well that’s good. Have you been a good help?”

“Uh-huh. Sister lets me administer hugs to the patients.”

“Well if that don’t beat all…”

Zed knelt down and tousled Eloise’s hair before kissing her lightly on the forehead.

“Now you run along now, go help your sister.”

Eloise nodded and scampered up the stairs leading up into the observation area where she crawled into an open air duct near the floor. A few minutes later, she returned with a small portable vice clamp under her arm.

“You ‘member Donald Trump #7, don’tcha Uncle Zed?” Eloise inquired, holding up the vice clamp.

“I remember the Donald Trump back on Earth. Now there was a real tool!”

“Well this is Donald Trump #7. He’s my best friend and he helps me sis with the patients she works on.”

Eloise lurched over to Vanilla and held up Donald Trump #7 with both hands. Vanilla took it, lovingly tousled Eloise’s hair, and then proceeded to lift up the restrained subject’s head and set the vice underneath, lowering it between the two clamp plates.

“You are shit. You are lower than shit. You are genetic refuse. I will crush your head the same way a garbage compactor crushes trash.”

“You people are fucking sick!” the subject shrieked. “You’re a fucking Nazi!”

“Why thank you,” Vanilla giggled as she began cranking the vice.

The subject shrieked as his head was squeezed within the vice. There was the audible sound of a skull cracking and blood began to pour from the subject’s nose.

“No! Nooo! Help me! Somebody help me!”

Vanilla kept on cranking. Eventually shit hit a point in which she could turn the crank no further, and had to call for assistance.

“Zed, baby, I need some muscle over here.”

Zed rushed to Vanilla’s aid, taking hold of the vice crank and turning it. Eventually one of the subjects eyes burst. Visible cracks webbed across his head, cracks that were spackled with bone splinters and brain matter. Eventually, Zed gave one last push and the entire skull gave. The subject’s head was splattered like a watermelon under the wheel of a minivan.

“I think some of that got in my mouth,” Zed sputtered, wiping his face.

“In that case, remind me to tongue you later,” Vanilla laughed, pulling off her blood-spattered balaclava.

“Why do you wear that mask when you work?”

“To induce fear.”

“I suppose that’s as good a reason as any.”

“Let’s get the dead guy up here.”

Zed walked over to the gurney and hoisted the corpse on it over his shoulder, carrying over to the table. Vanilla undid the restraint straps that held the headless corpse and shoved it to the floor to make room for her newest experiment.

“So what’s the plan, Vanny?”

“Well, I’m going to extract the adrenaline from this corpse’s pineal gland and see if I can refine it into a muscle-toner and cupcake batter mix.”

“Who are you going to test it on?”

“Beatrix volunteered.”

“I know she likes to help out, but all this testing can’t be good for her. Are her hands back to normal after that radon thing?”

“I think it’s permanent. At least it’s easier for her to clean her toaster out now.”

“That’s gross, Vanny. That has to be painful.”

“She says it doesn’t hurt. Makes it hard to find gloves that fit though.”

Vanilla reached into her labcoat and withdrew an empty syringe, jamming into the base of the corpse’s neck and drawing a clear fluid that was tinged with a few wayward wisps of red.

“Good old C₉H₁₃NO₃,” Vanilla sighed, gazing at the filled syringe. “This’ll have to be filtered and refine of course, but-”

Suddenly, there was a knocking at the door.

“Sis, somebody’s here,” Eloise called.

“I’ll get it,” Zed replied and made his way over the heavy iron door that bid entrance into the Knowledge Chamber.

Pulling it open, he was met by an older man, tall and very thin in build. His short, bristly hair was stark white and he sported a bit of chin scruff, giving him the appearance of an old goat. He wore a pair of thick-rimmed horn glasses. his face was weary and crossed with frown lines, and he was clad in an old-fashioned, starched labcoat with a high Mandarin collar that was buttoned up to just underneath his chin.

“It’s Grandpa!” Eloise announced, upon seeing the steely old man enter the room.

“Hyde,” Vanilla greeted, setting the syringe down on the edge of the table and turning to meet her unexpected guest. “Is there a problem?”

“I’m afraid so. One of the subjects has managed to crawl out of the pit and is causing trouble. The androids don’t know how to deal with this, they’re programmed to chop up corpses, not to quell a breakout. He’s already destroyed three of them and I fear he may try to take out the Van Dirge Device.”

“Son of a bitch,” Vanilla cursed, burying her face into her palm. “Thanks for letting me know, Hyde. I’ll go see what I can do. Go lock down the elevator. Zed, stay here with Eloise.”

And with those words, Vanilla was off.

***

George Franco Jr. didn't know how his life had gotten to this point. One minute, he was in prison on charges of tax evasion, and the next, he was being dumped into a pit in the middle of a hellish factory, being told by a woman in a ski mask and a deranged old man in a labcoat that he was going to be tortured and ground up into mulch whether he liked it or not. He wasn't going down this way. Not in a million years. When he saw one of the ghoulish rusty robots lower a hook down into the pit he and his fellow prisoners were being held in, he grabbed onto the it and used it as a lift to climb out. Once he was free, he set to work destroying and wrecking as much as he could. He knew that they’d recapture him eventually, but he aimed to raise as much hell as possible in the meantime. He had managed to destroy a few of those creepy robots, wreck some equipment, smash some bottles, and get his hands on the hook pole which made a good long-range melee weapon for keeping the robots at bay. He seemed to be holding his own so far. Maybe he would get out of here after all. It was only a matter of getting up to that elevator and-

Wait, it was coming back down.

That woman in the balaclava was on it. And she had a gun. Not a normal gun, though. A long, dirty rifle-like object with a glowing, green glass cylinder where a barrel would go. The gun was covered in tubes and open ports, and was definitely not any kind of conventional firearm. It looked like something straight out of a science fiction movie. The masked woman fired it into the air and instead of a bullet, it emitted a green pulse of crackling energy.

“You down there, genetic scum!” she screamed. “You think you can topple the giants of science? I will break you.”

The masked woman leapt over the edge of the catwalk and George hoped that she would hit the ground and splatter. His hopes were dashed when a bubble of glassy energy that seemed to be made of tessellating hexagons formed around her just before she hit the ground, slowing her fall and allowing her to touch down gently.

“That’s right!” shouted the masked woman. “Velocity-negating force field! What’s up, bitches? I’m about to fuck your world up!”

The androids seemed to sense the presence of the masked woman and parted to allow her access to George, who was beginning to feel quite outmatched at this point. He held the hook pole out in front of him like a blocking staff, but the masked woman simply blasted it with a bolt of energy from her rifle, causing it to break in half. The splintered ends of its two halves fell to the floor, red-hot and smoldering.

“Oh, fuck me.”

The woman fired another bolt, this time, at George. It hit him right in the head and immediately everything faded to a brilliant white and then vanished into blackness. George Franco Jr. was dead, his headless corpse lay on the floor of the Thunderhead, smoke billowing from his charred and ragged neck stump.

“Well that was easy,” Vanilla laughed, pulling her balaclava off.

She sauntered over to the prisoner pit, feeling quite proud of herself and peered down at the cowering subjects huddled together at its bottom.

“You see what happens when somebody tries to play hero? You see what happens when you unintelligent, inferior pieces of human refuse try to stand up for yourselves? You get squashed. Or in the case of tubby over there, you get your head asploded! Some of you can expect to be sewn mouth-to-asshole later, thanks to fatso over here. Yeah, that’s right. Human Centipede. I watched it. Now stay down there and shut the fuck up!”

***

When Vanilla returned to the Knowledge Chamber, she found Hyde sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette while Zed sat on the floor and played pattycake with Eloise.

“You get it under control?” Hyde asked.

“The floor is secured. Blew the fucker’s head off with that prototype plasma gun Weapons sent down for testing. You can tell them it works.”

“You’ve done it again, Vanilla,” Hyde said dryly while clapping slowly.

“Thank you, thank you.” Vanilla replied, doing a mocking curtsey. “Say, Zed. Wasn’t there something else we were going to do today?”

“Oh yeah, we were going to have lunch with Pesh and Luis.”

“Well we better get to it. Where at?”

“I think at the Cracker Barrel that just opened in the Consumerplex.”

“I’ll go get cleaned up. Hyde, can you watch Eloise? We’ll only be gone an hour or two. You can watch her, can’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ll watch the little wriggler,” Hyde laughed gruffly, picking up Eloise. “Come on, Elly. You ever seen a human appendix the size of a baseball?”

***

The VAG was a facility of cosmopolitan, yet uniform layout, with a circumference of 1.7 miles and surrounded by a 15-foot concrete tambour that supported the facility’s iconic geodesic dome. In addition to supporting the dome and serving as a protective wall, this tambour also housed multiple hollow cells that contained the machinery responsible for pumping in toxic Venusian air and reconstituting it to be breathable by human beings. It went without saying that the VAG was a versatile facility that was well suited to module-based development and expansion, as it would have to be very eclectic in design and layout to meet the challenges of and trials of the inhospitable Venusian environment. In the center of the VAG was the Nexus, a large facility that functioned as the nerve-center for the entire compound, a five-story stone rotunda containing power plants, communication stations, remote servers, and the VAG’s only radio station, deejayed by a certain Dr. Arles Argyle. Branching off of the Nexus was a series of walkways, pipes, tunnels, bridges, footpaths, pipelines, and conduits that connected to the other facilities within the VAG, including the dozens of laboratories, lodging buildings, recreational buildings, testing sites, miscellaneous facilities, and the Consumerplex, a massive shopping mall filled with many of the stores that one who once lived on Earth might be accustomed to. It was within the Consumerplex, that Dr. Pesh Argyle and Dr. Luis Rodriguez sat at a table in Cracker Barrel, waiting on their friends, Vanilla and Zed to show up.

Pesh and Luis had been best friends, practically brothers for the longest time, despite being completely different in terms of personality. Pesh was a genetic abnormality, having lost all of his vital organs in a teleporting accident yet remaining inexplicably alive beyond all scientific explanation. He was forced to drink alcohol frequently to keep himself from rotting, as he was technically dead and thus his body was trying its best to decay quickly. He looked like the stereotypical mad scientist that one might see in an old movie or comic book, with wild and unkempt hair and a coarse stubble that resisted all shaving attempts. His eyes were often glazed over with the sheen of drunkenness (despite supposedly being medically unable to get drunk, or even live at all) and he was just a sociopathic as his colleagues, Zed and Vanilla, though it was driven more by general bitterness rather than outright sadism and psychopathy.

Luis, on the other hand, was a clean-cut, well-groomed young Hispanic man who sported a head of long-but-neatly-kept black hair and a well-groomed goatee that stood in stark comparison to Pesh’s unsightly “hobo stubble.” He was a sober, level-headed, nonviolent man, a vegetarian, and a believer of “science in moderation” which made him a veritable abnormality among his bloodthirsty and psychotic colleagues. They never gave him any flak for it, though. They were far too busy torturing test subjects to pay any mind to his hesitance to do the same, and bore him no ill will for it beyond the occasional teasing.

“So why is this place called the VAG, again?” Pesh inquired, setting up a bit of exposition as he unwrapped yet another packet of crackers from the basket in the center of the table. “Who thought that was a good idea?”

“Because we drew straws several years ago to determine who name the facility and Dirty Steve won.” Luis replied, rolling his eyes.

The Cracker Barrel within the Consumerplex was much like any other Cracker Barrel, just as the Consumerplex was just like any other mall save for the fact that it was huge, on Venus, and filled with mad scientists.

“Well, speak of the devil,” Pesh remarked. “Van and Zed are here.”

“Pesh, we’ve been over this,” Luis replied. “Somebody has to have previously mentioned them for you to use the phrase ‘speak of the devil.’”

“Luis, I’m drunk. You don’t have an excuse.”

Zed and Vanilla entered the restaurant, having exchanged their lab clothes for much more casual attire. Zed was still clad in his Hawaiian shirt and golf shorts, but Vanilla had changed into a dainty mint gingham sundress and a pair of sandals, making her look quite innocent and unassuming compared the outwardly villainous and intimidating guise she wore down in the Thunderhead.

“Sorry we’re late, guys,” Vanilla apologized, sitting down. “Breakout.”

“Test subject get out?” Pesh asked.

“Yeah. Blew his head off with a plasma rifle.”

“How’s Elly doing?” Luis asked.

“Eloise is fine,” Zed replied, skimming over a laminated menu. “A little sweetheart as always. You guys order yet?”

“Nah. Waiting for you to get here,” Pesh replied, taking a swig of some repugnant substance contained within a dented hipflask he carried with him at all times. “Goddamn. Gotta keep myself embalmed. They still have bread here? Somebody get the waiter bot to bring us some bread.”

An android, much like the ones down in the Thunderhead but much less menacing, more upkept in appearance, and clad in a waiter’s uniform, approached the table and withdrew a pad and pen.

“Afternoon, Dr. Van Dirge, Dr. Vandermause, Dr. Argyle, and Dr. Rodriguez. May I take your orders? Will you be needing some more time?”

“You ready?” Pesh asked the group. “Yeah, I think we’re ready.”

The android took everyone’s orders and picked up the menus before returning to the kitchen. If you had happened upon this cast of characters going about your day-to-day life, a large swarthy man in a loud Hawaiian shirt, a pretty young lady with a light complexion and long purple hair, a scruffy man with a slur, and a clean-cut Latino with an air of quiet dignity, you may have written them off as a motley crew of eccentrics, but nothing more. You’d never guess that these four individuals (with the exception of Luis) had just brutally tortured numerous individuals in the pursuit of one thing, and one thing only.

The pursuit of science…

And that, is what life in the VAG was all about.