(back to part one) (estimated reading time: 30 minutes)

Spin the Room

Awash in dream, Aloysius thought he smelled blood. His semiconscious form was tilting back and forth rhythmically, leading to just one addled conclusion. He was on a raft in an ocean of blood. The logic met the approval of his dreaming mind. What an appropriate nightmare for all the recent goings-on. The nicest part of his lizard brain had manufactured bucket after bucket of blood for all the Dustrious that didn’t have any.

Soon he would drown in it, just as they hoped, for the sin of grabbing the sun and putting it in a diamond to keep, suffering nothing worse than a blistered palm. Well on his way to making sense of the tranquil horror, it was interrupted by a falling flake that struck his dozing cheek.

Its texture combined with the smell. Not blood, iron. Not a flake of iron, but rust. Nothing in his apartment was rusty, so he wasn’t there. Even if his dream had him in Antarctica or hell or the department store on the third floor he should’ve still been in apartment 433 of the Ice Palace. Awake before his eyes would open, Al gritted his teeth.

The last thing he wanted to see was anything out of the ordinary, anything rusty on his ceiling. With his recent luck, the entire apartment above had been filled with primordial soup, which had eaten through the pipes, and was now about to crash in on him with every piece of the ceiling and end his life under a single unit flooding landslide.

Trying to rip off the bandage, Al fired his eyes like a pair of popguns, his gaze rebounding horrifically off an expanse of blooming gray swirls, flaking reds, chafing oranges, and the tangy pale creep of oxidizing stalactites. Wherever the ceiling wasn’t rust it was something worse. Al grabbed at the bed on either side, finding that the blankets and sheets were at least still there, mattress too.

He sat up and whirled around on all fours like a cornered chipmunk, teeth bared more in disgust than fear. Was this still his apartment? The layout of the bedroom was the same. All the furniture aside from the bed was missing. A few large rectangular lumps here and there might have been different trunks and wardrobes, or they might have been rust and calcium buildup forced into molds for some absurd reason.

The walls and floors were rust, coral reefs of it, six colors of degradation, three odors of leaky locker claustrophobia. Rusticles hung and sprouted, each threatening lockjaw, a demon-tended garden of tetanus.

Flakes of the stuff fell around him, dusting the bed further, coming in waves. Each was accompanied by, no, preceded by, a forward shudder, almost undetectable when his weight was shifting on the bed springs. His apartment was robbed, ruined, and also on the move as if the Ice Palace had grown a pair of glass slippers.

Al peered over the edge of his comfort life raft. His sock feet would be little protection against the nasty mottled spines across the floor, but a path had been cleared for him in a narrow line, rust and creep broken through by a tool he couldn’t guess at, something that had managed to both break up sweep the chunks and powders away so he had just enough width to walk. It led out to the sitting room.

The room was already going somewhere with or without his consent, meaning there was no point in staying put. He gingerly tested the path with one toe, found it more stable than before. His wooden floor was not metal like this one, somewhere under the rust at least. A chill ran up and through him. Where had the heat from his radiator gone? The heat from every other unit?

Holding himself, Al crept forward, watching every step, groaning as he exited the bedroom and found the rest of his place in an identical state: décor gone, walls overgrown with a ghoul’s landscape painting, red flakes falling in layers. Only one piece was clean, save what had fallen atop it in the last few minutes, a simple card table and its two accompanying chairs. Unlike the bed, they didn’t belong to Mr. Grand.

On cautious approach he immediately checked the seats for any discarded articles of clothing or witchmelt residue. Whatever this was, he assumed a connection to the last baffling thing that had happened in good ol’ 433. Clean as a whistle, at least until he pulled one out and the first rust flakes found it.

Only a deformed shred of a door in a bottom corner of the frame had been present between bedroom and sitting room; Al looked to the front door to see if it was the same. No, that was still in one piece, though an organic peephole had been eaten through. The hinges caught his eye, new enough to gleam in comparison to their surroundings. He would’ve tried the knob to see if it disintegrated in his hand, except someone beat him to it.

The door was thrown open, shrieking across the floor, stirring up a cloud of flitting rust as an imposing figure strode over the threshold just to stop and stand, knowing full well the effect his appearance would have on his abductee. It would be the same on the vast majority of the human species. An off-the-wall finicky firebrand such as Aloysius Grandstand was absolutely no exception, as he collapsed right into the chair he’d just pulled out like a drunk succumbing to a spinning room.

If he’d had a popgun on him, or even just a hyperdiamond, something to match this titan in the power of presence, he might’ve kept on his feet. Al was just too damn tired to pretend at this point. Whatever he wanted, he would have it.

“I hope this is hello,” said none other than the immortal Professor Confabulo, rediscoverer of ozjoe, incidental inventor of the Lightheaded, of aqua ingredients and their corresponding threats, and much more intentional god of the Dustrious.

“What else would it be?” Al asked. “Just don’t say goodbye.” The professor smirked, and around that smirk Al saw his living eyes, knew that it wasn’t appropriate to describe all eyes that way, mostly just the professor’s. The light in them was like balled-up sunlit reflections shot out of a cannon. Around them was a small chrome mask bridging his nose, covering only the tops of his cheekbones. Around it were his dark thick eyebrows, as arched and refined as a suspension bridge. Around them sat the chrome crown of Confabulo, his mysterious radio transmitter in the shape of angular moth antennae.

Around that was his garb, that of a dressed-down academic, humility undercut once he had foregone a suit jacket for a green cape. Chains hung from his pockets; Al knew there weren’t watches on the other end. In his hand was a scepter nearly as tall as himself topped with a cylindrical Dustrious head, eyes aglow, life still unclear until it turned to look at Al on its own.

The most wanted and rejected man in the world swept the edge of his cape and himself forward, sitting in the chair opposite Al, nothing but rusty dust on the table between.

“I could just be talking to myself,” the professor said, despair flashing across his tempestuous expression, quickly restored to electric enrapt focus. “I would love to be talking to Aloysius Grandstand, inventor of the hyperdiamond, rival to Professor Connor Fabulo, and genuine human being.” Without warning he reached out and grabbed one of Al’s wrists. The fabricator recoiled, not enough to free himself, but enough to recognize that neither of them were particularly strong men. Whatever powers waited in that body, super strength didn’t seem to be one of them.

Al let the man flex his grip, as it seemed to fascinate him, give him some kind of longing. His fingers rolled on Al’s skin, counting hairs by touch, or something similarly arcane. The professor released him, thumb now circling his own fingers, measuring microscopic parts of Al left behind.

“Rival?” Al repeated. “In what world have I done anything to rival you?”

“The one and only world, I pray,” the professor said. “Disregard scale Mr. Grand, as you must learn to do in all matters. The difference in our impacts is entirely based on the assumptions you and I make. Look at it conceptually. I created robots, a most revolutionary invention to those of drab intellect. Time-savers, that’s all they are, important only in their implication, of my knowledge, of my mastery. And you made the diamonds that can destroy them. Conceptually these things are equal in power.”

The limbless Dustrious atop his scepter turned to look at him, which the professor did not acknowledge. He looked like he could only acknowledge Aloysius, like his five senses could only pick up on this other man across the table.

“Where are we?” Al asked, put off by this first line of conversation that answered nothing and muddied the already rusty waters.

“It isn’t your apartment,” Confabulo confirmed. “And what you think was your apartment never was. It belonged to my wife.” Finally, something the artist partly understood.

“Eudora Nodding,” he said, ready to paraphrase everything Vicky Champ had told him. “I know she used to live there.”

“And now it’s her final resting place,” Confabulo said, voice fading to a near-whisper. “I escorted her myself, not long ago. Do you still know? Or know now?” It had hit Al. His investigation had never focused on the identity of the body that had ruined the dress. As far as he knew, there was no way to determine what witchmelt used to be, aside from organic. It could’ve been a dead polecat in that dress, a washed-up sea lion, a selection of deli meats strung together with hemp, it was all witchmelt after ozjoe touched it.

Other big pieces fell into place. Those were the real antennae Carmelo Duff had seen in the window, not Ohmaha’s homage. The body was his wife’s, returned to her old haunt, except… there was a time gap that didn’t fit. She died over thirty years prior. If her body was still intact it would’ve been embalmed tissue that refused to melt, leaving behind what Al imagined as the most horrific things to ever be described as ‘chunks’.

“Why disturb my peace?” was his opening question before he got to the one that would vex most others more. “How and why would you disinter her now?”

“My own bases are all over the planet Mr. Grand, including in places where the glaciers occasionally disgorge woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers with their original eyes and fur. When my dearest Eudora passed I transferred her body to one such site and preserved her in the ice, where I could look at her as if through glass whenever I pleased. There she remained until I brought her to Iron Baltimore.

But you care about why more than how, yes? I thought you would, and you’re on the right track, I’ll tell you. ‘Why’ is always the question. Eudora, my beloved, my hyperdiamond ring if that keeps you interested, never partook of my greatest triumph.”

“She never had a cup a’ joe,” Al clarified. “And no aquas.” The professor scowled at their mention.

“Of course she was never a threat; she saw what a threat they were! Those are mere ingredients, taken prematurely they spoil the whole thing.”

“From where I’m standing they seem like lifesavers,” Al said, careful not to disclose his own status as a single threat. “You take any of them and you can’t go Lightheaded.”

“People don’t become the Lightheaded,” Confabulo said in an extremely unhelpful fashion, “not if they’re true, like me. I’ve taken the primordial soup, and now I could rule the world if I wished. The only reason I don’t is that I understand its illusory nature. There’s almost nothing to rule, or I should say, no one.”

“You’ve lost me professor.”

“No! No Mr. Grand I’ve found you! Look around you. I replaced your whole world without you even waking. Imagine what it will be like if I do it again, but this time you are conscious. Put yourself in the rush of that epiphany, if you can. There is no greater sensation in reality, because it is reality, aha!

But, I can see what you mean… you don’t follow… perhaps I’m not leading well enough. I must ground myself in the illusion once more, difficult, given that there is no ground there at all. It takes care not to fall straight through.

Where to start? Where it all started, the mind, perhaps mine, maybe even yours. Mr. Grand. Consider this… Consciousness is the nature of reality itself. What you think of as the world is nothing but projection, thoughts and ideas from powerful minds, given tactile presence as a side effect of conviction and imagination.

There is no such thing as an object; those exist only insofar as they can be dreamed up, down to the last atom, even though there is no first atom. I hope I don’t offend you by saying your hyperdiamonds don’t exist; it’s no insult! They’re wonderful, in theory, because that’s what they are and where they belong. The same applies to my Dustrious.”

Al wasn’t only stunned, he also wondered what cuckoo clock figurines were running around inside the professor’s head, and if they were violently murdering each other. The presumably mute dusty topping his staff kept rotating to look at him, as if it couldn’t believe its internal crystalline ears. Hadn’t it heard this spiel a thousand times already? Was it so kooky that it got more unbelievable every time? Confabulo went on, with more inertia than before.

“The robots are compelled to obey my every command, without exception. Ozjoe was the realization that I am real, true, existent. The machine-men I built after were the first logical fruit of that. If I am real, and most are fake, delusions sprung from my subconscious, proliferating worse than weeds or germs, then I should be able to control their behavior.

And so I can, with the Dustrious. The more of them there are, and the fewer so-called humans, the more I have cut away the illusion, the more I have learned about existence. That is why I make so many, and why I hand them out to every company in the world that wants them, so they will replace their false workers with my less deceptive and more useful ones.

It needn’t be more complex than that, or so I first thought. Then Eudora came, and I knew immediately she was no fantasy from the back of my mind. She was too argumentative for that, and too alluring at the same time. She had to be as real as I was. I wanted her to imbibe the soup and see as I had, but she refused, nobly. I believe it was to reach the conclusion her own way, with her own idea, so she could climb the mountain of intellect and stand beside me as a true equal.

She, alas, succumbed to mortality before she could, giving me the parting kiss of that knowledge. Mortality, like me, like her, is real. I know not yet if it can be bested, but as you can see by my youthful appearance, I’m on the right track, the one that comes right after the one I’m placing you on as we speak.

You see, while missing my Eudora recently, with special intensity, I had another idea. Since my emotions created much of ‘the world’, I trust them during the inspiration stage, incredible flint as they are. What if she wasn’t dead, instead dormant, perhaps searching for her own conception of reality in a deeper dream space?

And what if, by treating her as deceased and putting her on ice, I had trapped her there and prevented her return? This was most distressing Mr. Grand. The only time I suffered more was when she first left me. Of course I recognized plain old death as the most likely answer, but the slightest possibility, lit ablaze by hope, meant I had to try.

Taking her out of the ice wouldn’t have been a sufficient enough shock to the system. Remember, she was a mind, which is really so much greater than the body. The body is just the mind’s conception of the self, already once removed from reality.

So to bring her back I needed to restore her to her most lifelike, and I knew exactly when and where she had been her most vivacious in all the time I knew her. It was back when Iron Baltimore was just lower Baltimore, when she was living in apartment 433, going out with her imaginary friend Belladonna Brooks then coming home to me. The juxtaposition between Belladonna’s edifice of luxury and my grounded invention polarized Eudora, put her in an intractable position where she would eventually break, and break toward me. As that happened she was so passionate, happy, angry, hungry, sick, so many things, all so radiant to me, the man blissfully watching her discover her own powers over herself and the lack thereof. She was learning the tides of her awareness, and yes Mr. Grand they do come with highs and lows.

Ultimately in vain,” he said, crestfallen as a deflated cormorant, “I escorted her to the home she loved best, in her favorite dress, and applied to her the primordial soup… And I watched as she left my perception all the more, body dissolved back into the materials that claim to compose everything.

I was wrong, but always knew it to be long odds. I take solace in the knowledge that her body wasn’t needed as keepsake, because even that was just my memories of her, all of which are sharper than any blade, tough as hyperdiamond.”

The professor bowed his head, shedding tears that almost made Aloysius a believer, as he wasn’t certain he’d ever seen such real sorrow, or ever felt it himself. He was always more angry, and now he feared a love that could turn him into the weeper across the table, a version that might accidentally forge a blue diamond more brittle than the rest of the universe.

“Zounds,” the fabricator said, word unfamiliar without exclamation. “I’m sorry for your loss, but it was a long time ago. I’m raw about the goings-on of right about now. The whole city thought me a murderer. Was it you that tipped off everyone under the sun and sent them a-knocking at my door?”

“It was,” Confabulo crooned, recovering with remarkable speed, tears still glistening on his cheeks as they turned into the sweat of nefarious creation. His eyebrows danced, and somewhere within a song was playing, seeing as he couldn’t help but move his shoulders like an accordion. “You’re right, my loss was long ago. That night, if anything happened at all, I found someone: you.”

“But what do you want with me!?” Al blurted, not smacking the table solely to avoid introducing any jagged ceiling flakes to his bloodstream.

“Beyond companionship? Possibly nothing Mr. Grand. There are only two things to understand. One is the nature of my own delusion, chipped away at on the regular, progress reports always positive. The other is who suffers alongside me. Who is real. Symbolism is a path to the truth, everything means something, but always at an angle, always cast in a color of emotion.

Tell me, were the world and all its supposed people genuine, what would the odds be of my wife’s old apartment now housing another person of such incredible invention, an invention that bears so much relation to mine? Incalculable, Mr. Grand, incalculable. It must mean something, and I hope it means that you are a fellow human.

After Eudora melted away I took stock of our surroundings. Only then did I spare a thought for you, the current tenant. My tugging hope brought me to you, and so it was time for another test, one far more complex than tipping a vial.

If you were real, then you would be able to best any situation thrown at you, an instinctive reaction to your understanding that the illusion cannot actually harm you. The worse the predicament, the clearer the evidence of your consciousness. I had to know, have to, I should say, as this is not a swift process. We’ll be at this for years, just to make sure I’m not pulling one over on myself, constructing a particularly detailed mannequin to console my lonely heart.

And you did it Mr. Grand! I called you a murderer, a lie yes, one that almost became real given my mastery of the illusion. The statement from me became evidence, stolen jewels and smashed bodies. But you did not give in! You investigated on your own, escaped the authorities’ clutches, rallied elements to your cause, and marched into battle, not for justice, but for truth, your own fundamental knowledge of what wasn’t!”

“You did all this… just to see if I could wriggle out of it?” Al asked in a thin croak. That explained why the Steel Triangle did not seem particularly enthused about their own ruse; they’d been pressed into service by their creator and were providing the minimum viable effort. Better for them, he recognized, to follow a relayed order in a more calculated fashion than have their own goals undercut by the irresistible obedience in their nature, only to return to their full intellect after the fact and have to deal with the consequences.

He knew the trio had added their own touches by the color in their eyes, which wasn’t the green indicating an enslaved response. The professor was something they had to accommodate like the weather, working around it, never against it. In fact, their creator’s actions were still problematic, given that they’d been forced to reveal, at least to Al, the extent of their power in Iron Baltimore and beyond. Stealing two hyperdiamonds, causing blackouts, crashing half the advertisements in the sky, and faking multiple death scenes, then resolving it cleanly, was a small task overall. That got Al thinking about the aspects that seemed the least competent.

“And Guise? Was that you too?”

“Beg pardon? What guys are you referring to?” the professor asked.

“Three times I got attacked by dusties, during your little test. Every time they tried to hide who they were, someone in the shadows, just an armature, and then two knuckleheads stuffed in a marquee. It’s some kind of club I think, and membership requires beating up on yours truly.” Confabulo dismissed what was to him extremely unrelated with a wave of his hand.

“I am only responsible insofar as everything the Dustrious do is a whim of my subconscious. A weaker version of my test perhaps, occurring incidentally as an echo, but you seem to have handled that as well, so bravo. That said, this Guise may not dissolve, given that you have much more to prove.”

“I don’t have anything to prove to you.”

“That’s the spirit Mr. Grand. Perhaps I’m not real. I could just be the form of the question, finally come to you after years of whispered reputation. Test me if you like; I will pass. For now, you may relax. Think all of this over, and take exactly as long as it will for me to come up with my next challenge for you.”

“This isn’t a full package kidnapping?”

“No no. We’ve just gone for a ride.” Al looked around.

“In what?”

“Pig-iron. This is her chest cavity, where I once built an exact replica of Eudora’s apartment, so she might be more comfortable traveling the world with me. As you can see, it has fallen into severe disrepair since her passing, as I’ve had no use for it until now. The original triangle were prototypes, and I’ve never upgraded them to be watertight. Pig has swam across a few oceans between then and now.”

The fabricator bit his tongue, nearly swallowed it along with his objections. He would’ve curated his word choice better, definitely called them Dustrious instead of dusties, if he’d known he was being carried around in the guts of the largest one ever manufactured. Technically he didn’t know which of the Iron Triangle was the biggest, so maybe Pig-iron stood on the bronze podium beside her sister Slag and their brother Dross.

Back when Professor Confabulo was first coining his name, when the Dustrious were the marvels that would change the world only for the better, every publication used the same picture, with the genius stood in the palm of a gargantuan Dustrious child, the first to be built and properly animated by ozjoe.

The reason for their scale was to allow the professor to work and experiment without precision until his technique was refined enough to go smaller. From what Al knew, they weren’t talkative, at least not outside quartz circles; he’d never read an interview from any of them. Wherever the professor went, they were his transportation and guardians, armor thicker than most artillery could pierce, hands strong enough to to tie girders into shoelaces.

“How did you get a giant into the Ice Fields and pull me out of my apartment without waking me up?” Al asked pointedly. He’d need as many points as a porcupine to cover all the inexplicable things this man had done and would do.

“That’s many questions in one, but the answer is singular as well, in a sense. I have a degree of control over everything Mr. Grand, especially in Iron Baltimore. It is my metal fingers poised on every light switch, capable of darkening the streets completely for the passage of what might be a trundling crane. Every blade was sharpened on my intellect, and so can cut glass silently, say on someone’s window. And it is my inner ear that balances perfectly, expressed with Dustrious precision as notions smaller than Pig-iron sneak inside, lift beds, and pass them through the full length windows certain people just have to have to get a view of the splendorous city I didn’t even intend to build! Wait until you see the one I did!”

Professor Confabulo hammered the end of his scepter on the floor, crackling and echoing at once, the surrounding colossus screeching to a halt. A truer hush set in, Al only recognizing the thin whistles of air through Pig-iron’s fissures in their absence. The fabricator felt small, like a child with a poor report card. If he had Gladys and a Seen something on him he could’ve at least made himself a deadly internal parasite, instead of the nothing Confabulo hoped to test out of consideration.

“There is one more thing before I send you back to your life,” the professor warned, leaning over the table. His eyes were anthracite. The mask was his face. The antennae could spear ghosts and kill them a second time over. “Do not become a threat. If you wish to gain the power to prune and shape the illusion, you must eventually imbibe the primordial soup. Any of the component ingredients will ruin that. You, even if you are real, will have resigned to a false life irreparably. I will not hesitate to punish, then destroy such terrible waste.”

With that he rose, flourished his cape once more and strode out of the often-sunken ambulatory apartment that was also a loyal servant. The Dustrious on his staff proved to have a mouth; it opened just enough to bite the edge of the rusty door and pull it shut.

The artist was barely alone with his thoughts fifteen seconds before the wall behind him cried out in hinged pain. He whipped around to see it angling away, swung open as a single panel, a gale of cold night air rushing in. Outside there was an indigo sky flooded with a silt of white stars, the like of which Al had not seen in a long time thanks to the light pollution of I.B. More. This was well outside the city, and well in the middle of nowhere. That was the sky under which the primordial soup had first formed, and then where it had been formulated billions of years later.

Pig-iron allotted him a scant few moments to appreciate it before eclipsing with one of her monstrous hands, nearly as corroded as the interior, bearing streaky false fingernails of white-green oxidized creep. Just like the Steel Triangle’s compliance, meant to end their master’s meddling in their lives as frictionlessly as possible, Al did not flee to a corner. That would risk him getting smeared across the worst wall he’d ever seen. Instead he let the hand take him, trusted Confabulo enough to assume he didn’t lecture him for the laughs.

Nonetheless Pig-iron’s gentle grip was still surprising. He felt cradled, like in the rocking seat of a rickety golden-hearted Ferris wheel. A few stories down he was released onto a tilled field with sparse weeds, in half his clothes. Instinctively he crouched as the world’s first, second, or third largest boot passed overhead. In the dark he couldn’t get a good look at the giant’s face or details, just the rigid and gnarled shape of a distorted human, of a machine broken free from its riveted base somewhere on a dead continent. Each of her steps thundered, the natural sound of her gait when she wasn’t sneaking through a city with her arms joined over her head, pretending to be a crane.

Even she was absorbed by the night, leaving Al alone, or so he thought until his eyes descended back to ground level. There were Dustrious scattered around, farmhands, frozen in place by the low ambient energy levels of rural midnight. Those that had been nearest to Pig-iron’s feet had absorbed enough of what radiated from her to light their eyes and turn their heads, indicating the giant had an internal power source she was drawing from.

They looked at Al, and he looked back, until they ran down again and their eyes faded to empty. He was pretty sure they couldn’t hear him when they were completely dry like that, but he’d have to ask Louie or Maurine when he got the chance. Either way, he had to think out loud, and many of the professor’s machines probably knew the truth anyway.

“He’s a nut!” the fabricator yelled, hands almost finding his temples, gesturing as if to quantify and contain the insanity he’d just experienced. “The most powerful and brilliant man in the history of the species, and he’s an industrial-grade tin of salted mixed nuts! He thinks we’re all his imaginary friends! He thinks Earth is a place he cooked up in a dream! What’s… what’s the…”

Al started snapping his fingers, wishing the Dustrious were awake enough to feed him the word he was looking for. He was no headshrinker, didn’t even like talking to them, but he knew it was one of the terms they would use. For as grand as the scale of Confabulo’s madness was, there were still garden varieties of it, enough to diagnose, enough to get common people fired, shunned, or confined.

“Solarpism!” Grandstand declared, finger to the sky. As soon as he said it he knew it wasn’t quite right, so he tried again and again, until the memory bell was well and truly rung. “Sloppyism! Solopolyps! Lipservicism! Solipsism! Yeah, that’s the one! He’s a damn solipsist!” He paused, slack-jawed, as it hit him. The world’s mightiest man thought that world was a crayon drawing pinned over his eyes. That seemed like bad news for everybody drawn in.

Especially bad news for Aloysius Grandstand, since he’d accidentally drawn too, both the attention of the professor and the ire of most of his creations. And he’d been explicitly told not to become something he already was. Now it was truly imperative that the world not catch wind of his status as an aqua-knack single threat. At least three citizens of Iron Baltimore already knew it, and one of them was a cop who couldn’t be trusted if he was chained to the ground with oven mitts tied around his hands.

“I’m doomed,” Al said, what he thought would be his final conclusion on the bad dream he’d just had in the real world. But then the absolute first ray of dawn broke, drawing his eye to the city skyline. The lights had recovered from whatever Professor Confabulo had done to them. As the alarm clocks started going off, everyone would rise and go back to being some of the busiest people, busiest animals, and busiest crystallized mechanisms. Life went on when the professor was nowhere near, and the fabricator was suddenly able to assure himself that no, he wasn’t going to lose anything meaningful to a loon like that who cried at the moon and fled before the daylight could reassure.

Inspiration had struck, he remembered, mostly through looking at his burnt arm. In the middle of the professor’s batty mourning and his game of hostage-taking solitaire, Al Grand had forged another hyperdiamond, a nice one, and it wasn’t to keep. Unlike the poor decision that secured him apartment 433 for life, handing out the white gold ring was something he wanted to do, was supposed to do. It was the first gift he’d ever made with the canvas cube that didn’t have ulterior motive inclusions. He guessed he was feeling generous, since the police had so considerately gifted him aqua-knack.

Al still had his pants on, and they still had pockets, and one of them still had his rotio. He pulled it out and dialed the frequency he now had memorized so that Sandy wouldn’t have to save his life for a tip again.

K-shhk, K-shhk, K-shhk, K-shhk, K-shhk, K-shhk, K-shhk, K-shhk

Caller 1: Ahoy… you’ve reached -hawh- Victoria Champion, and you’ve done so at a forsaken hour, over.

Caller 2: Forgive me Vicky, I’ve only just remembered the world is turning. It’s Al Grand. I truly couldn’t wait any longer. I’m looking at the city right now, from outside it, and it looks preserved, like it’s never going to change no matter how much the light does, even if the big one burns out.

And I just know that I’m not like that. You strike while the iron is hot or you’re eating cold breakfast all your life, over.

Caller 1: Are you asking me out for a stack of hot flapjacks, over?

Caller 2: I’m asking you out for a hell of a lot more than that Vicky. I’m asking you out for everything in I.B. More, and I don’t know what half of it is. I need an operator who can tell me exactly what to give her, over.

Caller 1: You’ve got the right frequency Mr. Grand. Thank you for threatening me with a good time.

Caller 2: Boy, have I got a story for you, and you helped write it! How about I pick you up tonight at seven for dinner without a show? I think the theaters are sore at me. I promise I’ll keep you entertained, over.

Caller 1: If you don’t everyone calling into reference will hear about it. You’ve got yourself a date Al, if you’ll take me on safari in place of the pictures. Over and out.

The End

Aloysius Grandstand and company will return in

Confabulo

Build a Better Mouse