by j. baugher

Shigeru Ito was a famous comic book writer.  His biggest hit was a manga called Robotto no Jobu (Jobe the Robot in the US and Europe) and a motion picture was in the works.  The only things he loved more than comics were martinis and Korean prostitutes.  Ito’s hedonism was legendary, and one was always reminded of the time he supposedly snorted cocaine out of a hooker’s ___hole at one of SMAP’s record-release parties.

Jobe the Robot’s storylines centered around an android superhero charged with saving the world from evil shadow governments and his wicked android counterparts.  The main complaint critics had about this manga was the insane amount of bloodshed within and without its pages.  Indeed, while most comics are black and white, Jobe’s pages were actually stained with what was suspected to be real blood.

Jobe didn’t just defeat his enemies, he tore them limb from limb.  He didn’t arrest or shoot villains, he ____ized them and hung them from the rafters by their intestines.  His powers were commonplace and extensive:  super speed, super strength, super intelligence, super all across the board.  Many people argued that Ito made him too strong, since his villains never managed to get him on the ropes even for a second.  They were always torn apart like steaks tossed to rabid Kenyan children.

Ito always brushed aside criticism by saying, ‘I don’t write fiction.’

The Jobians live outside space and time.  They used to live inside space and time, but found the situation too precarious.  Sure, it was an okay place in the short term, but in the long term the universe did too much expanding and contracting for their taste.  Being blasted apart into neutrinos every thirty billion years, sucked into the mother of all black holes, and then hyperexploded back into existence was an unappetizing prospect even for the most laid back creatures living there.

When the Jobians were advanced enough to realize what was going on, they resolved to escape their race’s death sentence.

They retrofitted their planet into a spaceship.  Where the Death Star was a spaceship the size of a moon designed to blow up planets, the Jobians’ ‘Life Star’ was a small planet the size of a moon designed to keep them all from being blown up at some point.

Ito is in the penthouse suite, being ridden by a demure girl named Da Mei.  His arms behind his head, he’s mentally laying out storyboards, thinking of layouts, positioning bodies and lights and shadows and, of course, splotches of blood. 

She’s straddling him, pumping up and down for all she’s worth.  She turns around into a reverse cowgirl, she switches holes, she screams, she pretends to cry, and Ito is paying very little attention to all of it, until it’s almost time for the finale.

Jarred back into the present, Ito’s attention is caught not by the sweat flying off Da Mei’s __s, but by the subtle clicking of mechanisms in the door that is supposedly locked.

He puts one hand under his pillow, grasps the gun there, and focuses for the fight he knows is coming.

Da Mei keeps pumping.

The door opens and a gun-toting man in a blue suit opens fire, sending a few rounds through the Korean girl, the force of the bullets blasting her right off Ito’s ___ and into the wall, Ito’s juice shooting up into the air like a white geyser.

The intruder glances at the bullet-riddled girl, then back to Ito, but Ito is already off the bed and nowhere to be seen.  Six hollow-point rounds echo through the room; Ito is standing behind the intruder, holding his revolver in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

“Roku!  You son of a ____!  You think you can just pop in here and snuff me?  You have any idea how expensive that ___ was?”

“You’re wasting your damn bullets.”

Ito raises the shotgun, its oversized barrels looking almost cartoonish.

“I helped build you.  You think I can’t end you?  This ain’t no ordinary shotgun.  This here is what I call a ___ing ‘robot-killer’.  Now get the ___ outta here!”

And Roku leaves, closing the door behind him.

Ito walks over to the prostitute’s bloody body and shoves a few fingers into her.  He looks down at his ____.  Tears stream down her face as the last traces of life leave her body.

“Well, at least you’re still wet…”

He wakes up in a dumpster, covered with fish guts and sanitary napkins.  He climbs out and brushes himself off, trying to remember how he got there.  He finds that he can’t remember anything about anything.  Thinking he might have amnesia, he’s thankful that he can at least remember what amnesia is.  He reads the street sign, ‘Serpentine Boulevard,’ and is thankful that he didn’t forget how to read.

An even dirtier man who looks as if he lives in another dumpster nearby gives him a disgusted look.

“Got any change?” the homeless man asks.

“Lots,” he says as he shakes his pocket and continues walking down the street.

Krastin’s laboratory encompasses the entire seventh floor of the Mu Institute.  There are no walls, only giant tinted windows.  There are a few support beams throughout the lab, and tables ringing the windows.  On the tables are all the accoutrements of any respectable mad scientist: bubbling beakers, computers connected to strange apparatuses, mutated animals in cages, and more.

Professor James Krastin, that modern-day Mad Hatter of the science world, is sitting on the edge of one of the less-cluttered tables having a conversation with a six-and-a-half foot tall bald monster in a blue suit.  It’s Jobe.

“We’re almost ready for it; I’ve got the cameras set up, and the sixty-inch plasma TV is coming tomorrow.  Still, there are a few loose ends;  your idiot doppelganger needs his memory back, and we need to find a way to get in touch with Ito so he can tell us how to kill these damn things.”

“Can’t we just call his cell?  Send him an e-mail?”

“I tried that.  Apparently your friends are using that stuff to track him.  He’s laying low.”

“I’ll go.  I could be back here in 24 hours.”

“And leave this place unguarded?  They’d come.  And the festivities must begin on time, or else…”

“Yeah, yeah.  Fire and brimstone.  I get it.”

“What we need is a civilian.  Someone naïve enough to charge blindly into extreme danger.”

“You’re the silver-tongued devil himself.  Get out there and start recruiting.  Got anybody in mind?”

Krastin smiles.

“You really are the devil.” 

Propelled by ninety-three pounds of Filipina rage, I marvel as the plasma screen television actually describes a little bit of an arc as it flies out the second-story window and into the roof of my ’87 Toyota Corolla.  It’s a perfect little explosion of plastic shards and transistors, the crowning achievement of ten thousand years of human evolution.

Standing a block away, it occurs to me that my secret tryst may not be so secret after all.

Halfway through my cigarette, I watch as my shirts sail into the wind and flutter to the damp sidewalk below. 

A man walking down the street dodges a two-hundred-and-fifty dollar bottle of sake as it barely misses his head and shatters into a pile of glass on the concrete.  I stamp out my cigarette and see my baritone ukulele fly into a parking meter, reduced to chips of rosewood and plastic strings.

I light another cigarette, wondering if I even have anything left for her to destroy.  I see the glint of a pistol as she empties all nine rounds of my 9mm at my car’s tires and windows.  I hear police sirens.

I turn around and walk the other way.

The Jobians themselves were some shade of pale green, with large eyes and big hands.  They bore a striking resemblance to what we think of as ‘little green men,’ with the main difference being their six-fingered hands.  That little trick of evolution was what saved them from becoming neutrino dust oh-so-many links ago.

We will eventually learn that evolution has a few inevitable states.  For civilized beings who develop computers and machines and the capacity for rational thought, it’s only natural for the other features to fade, leaving skinny little bug-eyed mediaphiles.

Beings without rational thought tend to evolve into giant cockroaches.

A thing to note about D’Starkville:  it is perpetually overcast.  The weather really falls into three categories:  cold precipitation, humid precipitation, and about-to-precipitate.  Oh, and sometimes it’s foggy.

With nowhere to go, I wander down the street with my cigarette dangling from my lips and my fingers nimbly navigating little Tetris blocks down the screen of my cell phone.  I’m about to close the hundredth line when I notice that I’m lost.

Getting lost in D’Starkville is no easy task, but I’ve somehow managed to achieve it.  The storefronts around me don’t even bear English words.  None of these (few) pedestrians are white.  Hell, I don’t even recognize the models of the cars here.

With a steady influx of Mexicans and Chinese moving here to man the factories on the outskirts of town, I’m not incredibly surprised by this. 

I give up on my game and decide to use the GPS feature on my phone to figure out where the hell I am.

Of course, I have no signal.  I light another cigarette and consider the pangs in my stomach and the six dollars in my wallet. 

Jobe is upset.  He met himself and learned his real name, but he has no idea what he is supposed to do.  He doesn’t remember why he woke up in a dumpster, and he still lacks all his relevant memories.

He’s sitting on a bench at the bus stop.  If not for D’Starkville’s unnaturally large population of misshapen and deformed people, someone might gawk at Jobe’s gorilla-like frame.  As it stands, the blind man sitting next to him doesn’t even look up.

An old man with glasses and grey hair sits next to Jobe.

“Your memories are gone, Jobe.  On your own, you’ll never be able to remember.  Don’t despair, though, I’m pretty sure there’s a way to get them back.”

This is the thrilling conclusion of Section 1/12. 

The other sections are mostly finished.

Stay tuned to http://peachycomics.com for more info!

 (c) 2009 jordan baugher

                                      send comments or questions to jbaugher[at]rocketmail.com