Dragon Ball Z Uncensored

[Big Fagot]

Part 1: Awakening

Chapter 1: Mysterious Symbol

IN THE YEAR 2009 …

A light midday breeze ruffles a sheet of green vines growing across a grey, fifteen foot steel fence. The fence, which was built long ago to keep prisoners in, now serves to keep intruders out. Ironically, the corrosion-proof fence, still retaining its original color and strength, is the only part of Vanadium Devil Prison to have remained in good condition after so many decades of disuse.

Nicolas Sparta lands in a crouch on the inside of the fence. He is a young man of above average fitness. He wears jeans, boots, a T-shirt, and a grey backpack. His hair is short and blond. Stepping through a broken glass door, he enters the prison.

In some places, vines grow across broken windows, letting in a bit of sunlight; in others, it might as well be midnight on a new moon. Over and over again, Nicolas passes showers, cell blocks, and cafeterias that all look identical. Vanadium Devil, he recalls, was the first American super-prison, the start of a series of United States government experiments that continued right up until the end. Nicolas muses that at least it’s not Iron Devil, Vanadium’s more recent world famous cousin, which even compared to this is nightmarishly labyrinthine – or at least, that’s what the rumors say.

He passes through a doorway and finds himself in the grandeur of the famous Cell Block Z. Block Z is where, for a brief time between the prison’s opening in 1964 and its closing in 1979, the worst criminals in the United States were housed. The room is gigantic: a highway a mile long and ten stories tall. On both sides are ten rows of caged cells stacked vertically. The ceiling is collapsed, letting in a bit of sunlight. Even lit from above by the early afternoon sun, the far side of Block Z is barely visible at such a distance. Nicolas begins to make his way across the room, being mindful of the rubble on the floor.

Halfway through, he senses something out of the ordinary. He looks up and sees unusual shadows all the way up on the tenth floor. He realizes from the shapes of the shadows that it’s people, leaning over the balcony to look down at him. He watches as three silhouettes jump over the railing, thunderously crashing to the ground after two and a half seconds of free fall.

“Hee hee hee!”

Nicolas sizes them up. The man on his left, dressed in green, is freakishly tall and slender, like an insect. He is unerringly silent. Grey hair grows around the edges of his conical bald head. In his right hand he grips nine rattlesnakes just above their tails. He cracks them like a whip, causing them to rattle in response.

At his right is a woman, a rare sight in such a place, dressed in a red bodysuit. Her head is shaved, exposing surgical scars. Her face is expressionless; her jaw is slightly slack, and her eyes are haunting and dead. A crank protrudes from her crotch. She grabs it and turns. At this, she finally smiles. As she turns the crank, her tits spin like drills. “Come get some,” she cackles, “come get some, come get some …”

He turns around to face the third goon, an obese man dressed in blue with goggles over his eyes. He carries a cattle prod that crackles with electricity. Nicolas is puzzled at how such technology is possible in this world. “What’s the matter,” says the fat goon in his girlishly high voice, turning to show his back, “haven’t you ever heard of good old American ingenuity?” Protruding from his back is a large hamster wheel, connected to the prod by a cable, containing a small ratlike man. The rat-person runs a bit, causing the cattle prod to spark, then stops, panting.

“What do you want?” asks Nicolas.

“I could ask you the same question,” says the fat goon, his cheeks billowing with each word. “I am Biggie, and my friends are Snoop Dogg and Beyonce. Oh, and this fellow,” he says, pointing to the rat-man on his back, “is Paul Wall.” The rat-man sneers, displaying a set of rusted metal teeth. “We don’t want much, just your food and water. If you give them to us, we’ll kill you painlessly! Hee hee hee!”

“Whatever, assholes,” quips Nicolas, setting down his backpack. “I’ll exterminate you all without revealing my secret fist.”

“COME GET SOME!” screams Beyonce as she charges like a masturbating eggbeater. Nicolas is still bent over setting down his backpack, and it looks like he’s going to get killed, but he jumps and kicks her in the face! He flips and lands, only to have to dodge again as Snoop Dogg whips snakes at him. The force of the strike shreds the cement floor. The snakes rattle menacingly.

“DIIIIEEEE!!!” screams Biggie as he thrusts his sparking cattle prod! Nicolas grabs the fat lard of shit by the wrist and puts him in a hammer lock. He jabs Paul Wall with the cattle prod, using his own energy to incapacitate him! Snoop Dogg wants to whip Nicolas, but he’s using Biggie as a shield. He pushes Biggie into the other two, then kicks him in the ass hard enough to knock them all over!

“You’re pretty good,” wheezes Biggie, making no small effort to pull himself to his feet. Paul Wall shakes off that last attack and sneers. “Vanadium Devil belongs to us. What do you seek here?”

Nicolas is silent. However, without him realizing it, in all the commotion, the three goons ended up between him and his backpack. Snoop Dogg picks up the pack and mutely shows it to Biggie.



“This … this emblem!” blubbers Biggie, beholding the symbol on the backpack. The other two crowd around him and look over his shoulders. “It can’t be … THAT organization!”

Nicolas grits his teeth, cursing himself for letting his pack out of his sight. “I guess it can’t be helped,” he says. The three goons look up quizzically at him. Nicolas rears back and throws a punch … but it misses by about 20 feet. However, Biggie is shocked to feel the sensation of a fist against his face! The phantom punch causes him to drop the backpack. Nicolas dashes forward and grabs it, then leaps into the air, sailing over the three goons as Beyonce and Snoop Dogg attack, and miss, simultaneously. Nicolas lands behind the three, facing away from them. “Looks like I needed my secret fist after all,” he says without turning around. “Now I definitely can’t let you leave. The next time you attack, I’ll kill you all.”

Snoop Dogg runs in whirling his snakes like a mace! Of course he does the one and only attack he knows, swinging straight down. Nicolas TOSSES HIS BACKPACK STRAIGHT UP and sidesteps past him! Snoop Dogg spins around to see Beyonce screaming “COME GET SOOOOOOME” while flying in midair toward Nicolas. Nicolas sidesteps again and she lands on Snoop Dogg, gouging out his eyes with her tit drills! Snoop Dogg wails in agony. Beyonce pulls her tits out of his eyes and turns around to attack again. She rushes in at the same moment as Biggie attacks. Nicolas ducks and the cattle prod electrocutes her tits, sending current straight into her heart! She collapses face down with smoke leaking from all of her orifices.

“I CAN STILL HEAR YOOOUUUUU!!!” shrieks Snoop Dogg, speaking for the first time! He swings his snake flail at Nicolas, who grabs all nine snakes and pulls. Snoop Dogg, unwilling to let go of his weapon, pulls back, and all the snakes’ rattles rip off in his hand! Nicolas kicks him in the stomach, sending him staggering backward through an open cell door. He tosses the snakes in after him and locks the door.

“What’s going on? Where are they?!” screams Snoop Dogg, swiping the rattles in his hand before realizing what’s happened. “WHERE ARE THEY? I CAN’T HEAR THEM!” He staggers blindly around the cell as the snakes bite his ankles, injecting him with deadly venom.



The backpack, sailing upward, just barely passes through the ruined ceiling of Cell Block Z, then starts to fall back down.



Nicolas turns around to deal with Biggie. “TOO LATE!” screams Biggie as he thrusts his cattle prod directly into his chest!

“Ah?”

But nothing fucking happens!

“Ah? Ah?” He pokes him in the neck, and then in the face! Nothing!

“Batteries not included, motherfucker.” Biggie looks over his shoulder and, to his horror, Paul Wall is dead from a broken neck! Biggie stumbles back in terror, falling onto his ass! He gets up and tries to run away, but he explodes into shreds, with Nicolas standing behind him with an outstretched palm! The bag then drops straight into Nicolas’s hands.

“That was close,” he remarks, examining the pack’s contents. There is nothing valuable or mysterious inside, just food. “I need constant nutrition, or I’d quickly starve to death.” He zips up the pack and puts it on. He steps over the smoking corpse of Beyonce and walks out past Snoop Dogg, who is swelling up and barely breathing. “And it’s all because of that man …”

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 2: The Man From Vanadium Devil

Nicolas Sparta exits Cell Block Z and finds himself at his destination: the warden’s office. He locates a statuette commemorating the life of a prisoner named White Power Bill and pulls it. The wall opens into an elevator furnished with a throne. Nicolas gets in and looks for a way to activate the elevator, but there are no buttons. He tries to look behind the throne; in doing so, he places his knee on the seat and puts his weight on it. At this, the door closes. The elevator begins to move.

After several minutes of descending, he arrives at the elevator’s only possible destination: a bunker thousands of feet underground. When he steps out, there is a generator already running. The room, and all the adjoining rooms and hallways, are lit by fluorescent lights. For this area Nicolas has no map, so he explores. He finds enough bedrooms for a few dozen people, a kitchen with plenty of canned food, a hot chicks room filled with skeletons – all indications that whoever built this place was planning for a long stay.

Finally Nicolas Sparta comes across a locked door.

“Here we are.”

He stands before a solid steel vault, tall enough to reach the ceiling and just as wide. The surface is polished and unpainted. Nicolas drops his backpack and approaches the door.

He makes a fist with his right hand and presses his knuckles against the sub-millimeter slit where the door meets the wall. He braces his forearm with his free hand. Gritting his teeth, Nicolas swipes his arm down as fast and as hard as he can. The echo of nine rapid metallic clangs briefly fills the hallway before being replaced by the omnipresent fluorescent hum. He pulls on the door’s handle; with great effort, a seal is broken, and it swings open. The hinges pop and snap, apparently being turned for the first time in many years. Nine metal cylinders, pieces of the door’s locking mechanism, fall out of the wall as the door opens.

Nicolas is surprised. He imagined he’d find something like a hospital operating room. Instead, behind the door is a room – no, a closet – barely large enough to contain the hospital bed inside it.

A naked man is lying on the bed.

Nicolas freezes for a moment, then quickly becomes embarrassed. Shit, what’s to be surprised about? Isn’t this exactly what I expected? He walks through the door and approaches the bed.

The man on the bed is completely still. Not even breathing, Nicolas observes, putting two fingers to the man’s neck. And no pulse. But his skin is warm.

There is not so much as a ventilation duct or an electrical outlet in the room; the only opening of any size is the door. There are no lights, so therefore the man on the bed has been in pitch black since the last time this door was opened. The man’s long hair and beard obscure his face, but he looks about the same age as Nicolas, who will be 30 in March. The sheets of the bed are pulled taut from his shoulders to his heels, as if the man has grown larger in the time he’s been lying there.

Nicolas picks up the body, throws it over his shoulders, and heads out the way he came in. Upon exiting the building, he pulls out a satellite phone, almost certainly the only one for hundreds of miles. He makes a call.

“I’ve got it.”

“Very good. What’s his condition?”

“It shows no sign of decay.”

“Were you spotted?”

“There were some goons.”

“If you were seen, then you’re in danger. You know what’ll happen if he’s damaged.”

“No, I don’t. But it sounds like you do.”

“Hurry to the extraction point.”

He hangs up and walks toward the wilderness with the man from Vanadium Devil on his shoulders.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 3: The Incident

I won’t wake up … I won’t …

Wake up, Nick …

I won’t get up … I don’t want to …

Get up! Get up!!

I can’t …

Nick, you’re scaring me …

It is scary … the world is scary …

Nick, don’t fuck around! Wake up!

I can never wake up …

Nick? Has something terrible happened?

I can’t … as long as you’re alive …



Nick Sparta feels his body being jostled. He can open his eyes a little, but all he can see is blurry brightness. The way colors are flowing past him looks like he’s moving forward.

trilligant quine no complications … phosphore entangled particles fumic …

He breathes in and smells the time when he was 8 years old and skinned his knee. No, that’s not it; he smells antiseptic.

… rustage bulgous consciousness wallard transplanted …

His body begins falling. He keeps falling and falling without stopping. Fell? How much left? Nothing below?

Then he realizes he’s lying down.

Good. Sleep.

Only a moment after he closes his eyes – or maybe it just seems that way – some sort of loud noise stirs him. There are people screaming. He opens his eyes and sees a tiled wall with fluorescent light panels on it. He cranes his neck forward, only to have his head flop back. Feels like he’s lying down. Not wall, ceiling. He looks around and sees a curtain, sink, window, TV; a hospital room. More screaming, more noise. It sounds like popcorn.

He drapes his legs over the edge of the bed. He tries to stand. Something is tugging on his arm; he rips out an IV. He slowly walks toward the hallway door. He sees another bed that was behind the curtain. There’s someone in it. Someone he recognizes. Hobbling toward it, he grabs the rail and leans over to get a good look.



It’s him. The person in the bed is Nick Sparta.



Nick freezes and stares. Three seconds – or maybe ten minutes – pass while he gawks. His brain tries to put it all together but gets nowhere slowly. He – or the clone sitting in the bed, rather – has his head completely shaved. There’s a bright red spot on his scalp, smaller than a dime. It’s stitched up.



He feels his own scalp – the one on his own head, the head growing out of the body he sees when he looks down. His head is shaved too. He feels stitches in the same spot, a little dot that’s soft and sore.

The floor shakes, and he falls over. An explosion in the hallway hurts his ears. He reaches a hand toward the door and it closes itself. He notices for the first time that his vision is warped. Drugs.

As his hearing returns, he hears more screaming, more firecrackers. Guns? He grabs the bedrail and pulls himself up. He yanks the IV out of his arm – Nick’s arm, the arm of the man on the bed, that is. He puts his own arm around his shoulder and picks himself up. Seems familiar.

Lugging himself along, he hobbles to the window. He takes his free hand and starts drunkenly slapping the window, trying to break it. Another explosion in the hallway shakes the floor. He turns and looks over his shoulder at the door. For the first time since he woke up in this room, he’s cognizant that something dangerous is happening, and he’s afraid. A second later, the window shatters inward, pelting both Nick Spartas with sharp glass.

He realizes the window was broken by the explosion.

Yes. Even though it was delayed a second, the blast made the window break inward.

He cleans the remaining glass out of the windowsill and looks down. He’s on the second story, maybe the third. He knows he can jump down without hurting himself, but he doesn’t know why.

It should kill me, but it won’t.

He climbs up onto the windowsill and drags the other Nick Sparta with him. He picks himself up securely in his arms and jumps. He hits the ground going fast, fast enough to break his bones, but the impact is soft. With himself in his arms, he walks in the direction away from the sounds of explosions.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 4: Dr. Diaz

Nick wakes up in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. There is music playing in Spanish.

“¿Estás despierto?”

A young Hispanic man is driving. He is clean shaven and has longish hair.



“Do you speak English?” The driver turns off the radio.

“Yeah.”

“I thought so,” says the driver. “Your buddy is still asleep in the back.” Nick looks back and sees himself (it’s weird, I know) lying down on the back seat. His face is covered in cuts. That’s right. The window exploded. He feels his face – the one on the front of his head, not the one in the back seat. He has plenty of cuts of his own.

“I cleaned those cuts on your face with water, but I don’t have any first aid. I’m going to drop you off at a hospital.”

Then something occurs to him. He feels the back of his shaved head. There are cuts there, too. I was looking away from the window when it exploded. He looks back at his clone in the back seat. Unbuckling his seatbelt, he turns around and reaches back.

“Is everything alright?”

He feels the back of the clone’s head. The skin is marred by wounds. There’s a big one running diagonally. He feels his own head; there’s a similar gash in the same place.

“I would have taken you to the Conner Foundation’s medical center if I could have.” The driver eyes Nick to see his reaction.

Nick studies the clone’s face, memorizing the pattern of cuts. Then he turns around and leans forward to look at his own face in the side view mirror.



The face in the mirror is not the face of Nick Sparta.



Nick stares, transfixed. His eyes go wide. Staring back at him, wearing his own shocked expression, is a face that doesn’t belong to him, and that is TOTALLY FUCKED UP.

“But then again, it looks like you two just came from there anyway.” The driver glances to the right again, looking for a reaction.

Nick sits back and buckles his seat belt. “Yeah, the Conner Foundation,” he says, agreeing before he can even remember what it is he’s saying. That’s right. It was the Conner Foundation facility. “Good guess.”

“Not really,” replies the driver. “I live near there and I’ve seen plenty of guys looking like you. Just about every city in Cuba’s got a bum or two ranting about Conner.”

Right, the Conner Foundation headquarters are in Cuba. I know that.

“I wouldn’t normally let a Conner patient into my truck, but I couldn’t leave you by the side of the road where I found you. And I figured you must have something to do with the incident there.”

Right, those explosions. Something happened. “What incident? I mean, what happened?”

The driver looks over at Nick, then back at the road. “The facility was attacked by armed guerillas. A lot of people died.”

Nick stares straight ahead.

“You know anything about that?” the driver asks, eyeing him again.

“No, no, no idea,” says Nick, unsure if he’s telling the truth.

The driver puts his eyes back on the road and sighs. “Cuba’s been through a lot lately,” he says as he turns the radio back on. “Fidel died, and for a moment there was optimism in Cuba, but his brother Raúl ended up being just as bad. Then HE arrived … the savior of Cuba … El General Encima Del Cristal Caballo … and there was hope …”

Nick, or whoever he is, looks out the window, trying on the one hand to make sense of the situation and on the other not to think about it at all.

“That man saved Cuba, but times have changed, and I’ve got a bad feeling about Conner …” The driver extends his right hand to Nick. “My name’s Carlos Castellan.”

Nick shakes his hand. “Uh, Sparta,” he says, fumbling for a fake name. “Al Sparta.”



Nick spends that night in a hospital bed at Nuestra Señora De La Paz hospital. He has a room not unlike where he woke up before, though a bit less sterile (which is a nice way of saying it’s dirty). The only light is from the full Moon. His sleep is light and fitful.

The squeak of the opening door wakes him. A figure enters and clicks the door shut behind him. Nick sits upright, watching the shadow of a man walk across the room.

“Do you remember me?”

“Who are you?”

The man steps up next to the window, finally allowing himself to be illuminated by moonlight. He is a slightly fat Hispanic man, at least 50 years old. He wears a green suit and vest. His tie is blue. He has a bit of grey hair growing out of his round head. His voice is soft and his accent is light, like a waiter at an expensive Mexican restaurant. He wears rounded glasses over his relaxed eyes. His constantly dipped eyelids give him the appearance of perpetual calmness.

“Are you sure you don’t remember me?”

Nick searches his memory. “You’re the doctor … you operated on me.”

The visitor smiles. “That’s right. Do you know my name?”

“Doctor … Doctor Diaz. You’re the chief surgeon at the Conner Foundation medical facility.”

“That’s right, that’s right!” says the doctor gleefully, and then, still smiling: “Something terrible happened after your operation. They wanted me to stay and help treat the injured and dying, but I told them nothing could make me wait to come find you.”

Nick says nothing.

The corners of Dr. Diaz’s mouth turn down. “I have a question for you, and it’s very important,” He pauses and licks his lips. “Do you know who you are?”

Nick hesitates. “Nick Sparta.”

The doctor’s face turns down toward the floor. “No … no, no, no,” he says as he walks over to Nick’s bedside. He places both hands on the bedrail and looks his patient in the eye.

“Nicolas is your brother.”

There is a pregnant pause. Neither man so much as breathes.

“Show me your ability, Alessandro.”

[Big Fagot]

I know I'm posting promos ridiculously fast but I have a certain amount I want to get posted before this thing in a week.

[Spamdini]

Gosh, I have a feeling my mind is about to be totally blown away.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 5: SWAT

“Alessandro. That’s your name. Show me your ability.”

Nick – or Alessandro? – sits frozen in place.

“I want to see that amazing power for myself. What can you do?” He leans over further. “Can you knock me off my feet? Lift me to the ceiling?”

Dr. Diaz grabs Nick’s paper gown by the lapel and moves his face about an inch away from Nick’s. His eyebrows shoot up, but his eyelids stay drooped, as he rotates his face sideways and whispers:

“Can you bend the walls, Alessandro?”

Artificial light pours into the room once again as the hallway door opens. A new figure walks in and stands behind Dr. Diaz. A tall, wide man with massive shoulders. In the moonlight, Nick can see that he’s wearing a military uniform, complete with medals and cap. The outfit looks Russian. He has a grey moustache.

Dr. Diaz releases Nick’s lapel. He takes three steps back. “General Kasparov,” he says, polishing his glasses with his sleeve, “helped me locate you. Do you remember him, Alessandro?”

Nick looks at the general by the window. The general returns his stare. His gaze is piercing and unfaltering. Nick looks away.

“That’s okay,” continues Dr. Diaz. “There’s plenty of time to learn names.” He smiles. “We’ve come to check you out of here. The Conner Foundation facility is much better suited to your treatment. You and your brother will flourish there.”

Nick says nothing, but his breathing is quick and harsh. His pulse races. His eyes dart around uneasily.

“Do you remember why we’ve gone to so much trouble for you and Nicolas?”

Nick’s silence is his answer. Dr. Diaz lurches forward and grabs the bedrail. Like before, his eyebrows shoot up and his face twists sideways. So close that Nick can taste his breath, he whispers:

“Because you two twins have the power to save the world.”

Nick’s mind explodes. Memories of words like “twins,” “gravity,” “electromagnetism” and “salvation” burst uncontrolled and incoherent to the forefront of his mind. As he stares into the eyes of Dr. Diaz, he passes out.



He wakes up looking at the ceiling once again.

How long has it been?

Yellow light, the kind that reminds him of the dentist’s chair and all the associated awful feelings, bleeds down from the tall ceiling. On the sides, his bed is almost completely encircled by beeping machines. He retches and realizes there’s a tube in his throat. He pulls it out and gasps. There are several electrodes on his chest to pull off, a number of IVs in his arms, and so on. He rips away at them all until he’s finally unattached.

Nick exits the room into a hospital hallway. He looks left, then right. Which way to go?

He hears a door slam open. He looks in that direction and sees two men emerge from a room.

He looks closer.

It’s one man, backing out of a room while pointing at something, carrying another man.

He runs toward the commotion and looks even closer.

It’s Carlos Castellan, pointing a gun at someone inside the room, carrying the man that Nick retrieved from Vanadium Devil Prison.

Nick hauls ass in that direction. Suddenly, Carlos’s eyebrows shoot up. He snaps his head toward Nick and shouts something.

Nick spins around to see a living shadow walking toward him. He wears all-black tactical gear over every square inch of his body. Like a human stealth bomber, the cloth and plastic of his outfit is minimally reflective, making him almost invisible even under direct light. Even his electronic goggles seem to suck in any light that hits them. Every ergonomically accessible spot on his body has a tool or weapon attached to it: a pistol on his left thigh, knives on his chest, grenades at his hips, etc. There’s something else, too; he’s asymmetric. His right arm is completely gone, not even a stub. His gait, with his lonely left arm doing double the work balancing his weight, is unsettling to watch.

As the man in black approaches, he reaches his one arm behind his back and produces a baton. He presses a button and the baton unfolds into a submachine gun. Holding the gun up against a magazine attached to his thigh, it automatically loads itself. He then plants his feet, aims at Nick with his one arm, and fires.

Each one of the dozens of shots feels like ten thousand bullets slamming into his whole body. The sensation is like being beaten with baseball bats. Nick instinctively bends over and puts up his arms. He has an acute, overwhelming, instantaneous understanding of his own helplessness. He knows with crystal clarity at that moment that he would trade anything to end this feeling.

Suddenly, both Nick and the mystery figure are blasted back, like a bomb exploded between them. The man in black slides 40 feet down the hall, unconscious. Nick lands on his back. Snow flutters down from above – or rather, the remains of dozens of pulverized styrofoam ceiling tiles. The exposed pipes in the ceiling spew various liquids and gases. Nick climbs to his knees and dry heaves. His skin tingles and itches furiously, like he’s dying of strangulation. But his skin is not pierced.

“Come on, Nicolas!”

Carlos is yelling to him. Nick weakly stands up and hobbles to the doorway where Carlos is standing. He looks in the door.

It’s the hospital room he was in just before he passed out!

Bizarrely, Dr. Diaz and the military man are still there. Have they been here the whole time I was passed out? Though his vision is partly blacked from whatever just happened, he peers in. The doctor and the general are still over by the window. Dr. Diaz has his hands in the air in a gesture of surrender; General Kasparov is unconscious, half erect against the windowsill. Nick notices blood leaking from his nose. Strange that the general still has his cap on after being knocked unconscious.

“Nicolas …” pleads Dr. Diaz.

As Nick limps away from the room, he hears Diaz hissing “That was dangerous!” in a scolding tone.



Carlos and Nick load the man from Vanadium Devil into Carlos’s truck and take off.

“Where are we going?” asks Nick.

“We need to decide that. You have to go someplace where you’ll be hard to find.”

“What about America?”

“It’s a sad day when the safest place is the wasteland of America,” Carlos sighs. “But I agree. I will help you get to America. We’ll go north to the coast and set sail from there.”

A police car with its sirens on speeds by in the opposite direction, and then there is silence.

[Vinny]

I'm interested in this.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 6: Top Gun

“I’m starting to remember a little bit.”

“Is that right?”

It’s now morning. Carlos has been driving since last night.

“I don’t know if they’re memories or just ideas … or hallucinations. I keep imagining this sheet in front of me, moving about and pushing things around.”

“A bedsheet?”

“No, it’s invisible. I guess that sounds crazy.”

The scenery is nil. This stretch of highway, in addition to being completely empty except for Carlos’s truck, runs straight through a flat, empty, dull region of Cuba.

“That man, Dr. Diaz … he said my name was Alessandro, and Nicolas was my brother.”

Carlos says nothing.

“Yesterday I told you my name was Al Sparta, but at the hospital you called me Nicolas.”

Carlos still says nothing.

“Do you know who the man in the back seat is?”

Carlos hesitantly answers: “He’s your brother.”

Nick shakes his head. “I don’t have a brother.”



About 300 yards ahead of them, the road explodes.

“SHIT!”

A brilliant flash scorches Nick’s eyes. The concussion bounces the truck off the ground. Carlos slams on the brake. With the burning flash still filling his vision even with his eyes closed, Nick screams “What was that?! A land mine?!”

“We have to turn back!” Carlos floors the gas pedal and drives off the road to turn around. Then he suddenly stops. “Shit!”

“What is it?”

“Look up ahead!”

Nicolas squints and tries to see with his burnt retinas. Indeed, a few miles away, several SCARY BLACK TRUCKS are approaching.

“Then the mine was to stall us?”

Carlos slams the truck into reverse and does a three point turn, facing back in the direction they were originally going. He accelerates as hard as he can.

“What are you doing?!” shouts Nick.

“We’ve only got one way to go now – FUCK!”

From the sky, a dark shape is rocketing toward the truck with incredible speed! Carlos panics and steers off the road, scarcely keeping the truck on four wheels in the process. As they bounce haphazardly over the ruts and crags of the untilled earth, the dark shape roars past like a shrieking banshee. Nick spins in his seat to see an F-16 blow by with a ferocious backblast.



The F-16, officially codenamed Flying Falcon but informally called Viper, was the first result of the Light Weight Fighter program of the 1960s and 70s. The jet was based on lessons learned from the F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, and the controversial F-111 Aardvark, as well as the failure of increased reliance on missiles in Vietnam, and Major John Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability theory, emphasizing the power of lightweight designs. The program was highly successful: the jet was a mainstay of the US military until the end of the United States in 2007, and though production has stopped, the collective fleet of exported F-16s continues to serve the needs of nations worldwide.

The F-16 was the first fighter to use a weight conserving fly-by-wire control system. The computerized control allows for the revolutionary intentional use of negative static stability to increase the pilot’s freedom of movement. The design also makes use of the phenomenon of vortex lift – the lift created by vortices forming at the leading edge of swept wings – to augment the achievable angles of attack, further boosting maneuverability. A thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 1 gives it the ability to accelerate at any angle in a fight. Though designated a fighter, the F-16’s versatility earns it the title of multi-role combat aircraft, capable of carrying a wide variety of payloads from air-air missiles to heavy bombs.



The jet nearly slams into the highway, only to nose up and make a steep ascent, coming within three feet of the road. The pavement behind them for a hundred feet shines in the sun, partially melted by the jet’s afterburners.

“A plane!” exclaims Nick. “It wasn’t a land mine, it was a bomb!”

“Whoever he is, he’s got some skills,” growls Carlos. “Using that precision maneuver to run us off the road …”

Carlos steers the truck back toward the road and starts driving. Just like that, hundreds of bullets tear up the vegetation around them, forming a ring around the truck. The plane screams by overhead.

“Shit! We can’t do anything!” says Nick.

“Okay.” Carlos turns around and reaches under the back seat. He pulls out a rifle so large that Nick has to duck so he can bring it into the front seat.

“Jesus!”

The gun is almost six feet in length. The bore is about an inch, but the walls of the barrel are even thicker than that. Carlos pulls back the slide and loads in a single round: a cylinder, about four times as long as it is wide. He also loads a black rectangular device with two metal terminals into a separate compartment. He hits a switch and the gun makes a noise like a camera flash charging up.

“What the hell are you going to do with that?”

“Come on, come on …” says Carlos to himself as the gun’s whine increases in pitch.

Two ovals fall from the bottom of the F-16.

A green LED on the gun illuminates.

Carlos kicks open the door of the truck and leaps out, hitting the ground no less than ten feet away to accommodate the size of the rifle. He lands on one knee and points the gun straight up.

He pulls the trigger.

The gun kicks back hard against his shoulder, like a hundred pound weight just dropped onto him. There is no muzzle flash, but the sound is like a bomb exploding. For a moment, dry leaves swirl around Carlos in the turbulent wind produced by the shot.

If the rifle’s shot sounds like a bomb, then the sound of two bombs actually dropping on both sides of the truck is like a comet impact. The light is so bright that everything appears monochrome. Carlos is blasted against the side of the vehicle, leaving a dent in the metal panel. There is silence for a moment, and then dirt starts to fall from the sky like rain.



Inside the plane, the pilot checks his gauges. “Damn, the fuel tank’s pierced,” he says unemotionally. He dips the plane’s nose and points it at the highway, then turns his head and makes use of the F-16’s high cockpit visibility to watch Carlos stumbling to his feet. “That was some rifle,” he admits. “If I knew they had such a weapon I wouldn’t have made it so easy for them. And such a good shot, too. She’d be jealous.”



The F-16 crashes into the highway at full speed, exploding into a burning inferno, but it’s okay, I can see his parachute. With his helmeted head hanging from his shoulders as if dead, the pilot floats lazily downward. You have to look closely to notice, but his right arm is missing.

Carlos throws the rifle into the bed and jumps in. He puts the truck in drive and maneuvers back onto the highway. About half a mile behind are the black trucks still in pursuit. About a quarter mile ahead there’s a large swampy lake, which the highway bisects. Blocking the only path through the swamp is the pilot’s last attempt to halt their progress: the burning wreckage of his jet.

With no other way to go, Carlos steers through the blaze. The flames obscure the view of the road; burning jet fuel threatens to destroy the tires; smoke instantly fills the truck’s interior. Somehow, Carlos manages to avoid any and all debris and escapes the wreckage safely. As they speed away, Nick stares back at the flames for several minutes, waiting for the black trucks to pass through, but they never do.



Somewhere nearby, a pile of grass starts to rustle. What looks like a disordered heap of green and brown weeds starts moving like an animal. The heap takes form; a human being made of plants stands erect, like the Toxic Avenger. The figure then sheds its grass skin, revealing a woman underneath. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Strapped to her back is a rifle that’s longer than she is tall. She has no right arm.

“That WAS a nice rifle …”

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 7: Sniper

“What’s this doing here?”

The broken silence stirs Nick Sparta. He opens his eyes to a highway enclosed on both sides by solid rock. The serpentine road passes through a harsh mountain range. The only two ways to go are the two ways the highway can take you, forward and back, north and south. Carlos is pulling over to a chorizo stand, uniquely located in the middle of an isolated mountain highway.

“What are you doing?”

“You need food. I think you’ve gotten thinner since yesterday.”

Nick scratches the stitches in his scalp and yawns. “I’ve always needed more food than most people.”

“I’m hungry too, so let’s get something and get back on the road. We’re almost there.”

Nick and Carlos exit the truck. Considering its location, the stand enjoys a surprisingly healthy patronage. A mother and her two daughters sit at a picnic table while their father orders; three teenage boys sit on the trunk of their car, laughing and eating; an old woman holds a baby while an old man feeds him pieces of sausage; two women in sunglasses lie back in their classic convertible and stare up at the afternoon sky.

“It’s amazing,” says Carlos. His eyes are moist. “Average Cubanos driving cars, traveling, enjoying life … under communism none of this would have been possible. It’s all thanks to that man, Señor Padre.”

Despite all he’s been through, Nick smiles. The scene is too sweet for something nightmarish not to happen.

“¿Qué quisieran?” asks the friendly young female attendant behind the stand.

“Dos,” says Carlos.

“Tres,” says Nick, correcting him.

It takes her only a moment to complete the order. She turns around to hand the men their chorizo, but instead drops the food on the ground.

“Are you alright?” asks Nick. She gives no response. “Is something wrong?” He thinks she’s looking right at him, but on closer inspection, it’s more like she’s staring through him. Slowly, he turns around.

Everyone is fucking dead!

Bullets through the head of the mother and daughters at the picnic table. The father, who never made it to the table, lying next to his brain. All three teenagers face down in the dirt, bleeding from the temples. The two grandparents, and even the baby, all with pierced skulls. The only sound is from the idling engine of the convertible with two dead women in it, their shattered sunglasses nowhere to be seen.

Carlos and Nick both move simultaneously, taking cover behind Carlos’s truck. And then, incredibly distant, the cracks of eight rapid gunshots.

“What’s going on?”

“A sniper,” says Carlos. “Come on, we have to get Alessandro out of the truck.”

The cashier behind the counter finally screams. Carlos and Nick open the door of the truck. The cashier’s scream is cut short; simultaneously, there’s a noise like a dart being thrown into plywood. As they drag Alessandro out of the back seat, all four tires explode. Two bullets shred the engine block and one pierces the fuel tank.



On top of a nearby mountain, the sniper reloads with frightening speed. She slams in a magazine with her left hand and then grips the stock and peers through the scope.

“Now there’s no one to interfere,” she says coolly, hidden among the trees.



“God damn … where’s that rifle you used before?”

“It’s still in the bed. I can’t get to it. Besides, he’s got the drop on us. There’s no way I could countersnipe even if I had a rifle.”

“What should we do?”

“Let’s just wait and see,” answers Carlos. The faraway sound from the last round of shots, eight cracks in under two seconds, finally arrives.

While he’s waiting, Nick does some mental arithmetic. I wasn’t counting, but I think there were at least five seconds of lag before the sound of the shots reached us. Sniper rounds like that are probably going, on average with air friction, two or three times the speed of sound – call it two and a half – and sound goes a mile every five seconds, so …

No, that’s impossible. He rechecks his math. Holy shit … no way …

Is this monster really making these shots from three miles distance?



They only manage to wait fifteen minutes before they get impatient. “We need to get out of here,” says Nick. “This guy might be just stalling us like the pilot was. We could have been picked up a hundred times in the time we’ve been hiding.”

Carlos nods in the direction of the idling convertible with the two dead women in it. “That car’s still running,” he says. “I don’t know how much gas it has, but we’re not far from the coast.”

Nick nods. “We need to check if the sniper’s still there.” He looks around and sees a corpse that fell not far from where they’re hiding. It’s the father of the picnic table family; he died with his eyes open. Nick drags him over. He grabs the corpse by the wrist and darts its hand out very quickly, mimicking a naive person testing a sniper. He then carefully rotates the head out, revealing no more than one eye, as if cautiously searching the mountain. He does it so that no blood is visible, no evidence that the eye belongs to a corpse.



“Tch,” the sniper scoffs, “you think you’re going to trick me with that dead eye? Like I would forget a face I’ve killed. Asshole … for that insult, I’ll take both your ankles.”



“I don’t know if he’s still there or not,” admits Nick.

“If we’re going to do this we have to move as fast as possible,” says Carlos. He points to Alessandro. “You take his head, I’ll take his feet, and we’ll throw him in the back. Understand?”

“Okay.”

“Idiots … they’re going to run to the car now,” whispers the sniper. “Three seconds.”

Nick counts. “Three …”

The sniper lies as motionless as a sculpture.

“Two …”

She squeezes the trigger in preparation.

“One …”

“¡Caiga su arma!”

The voice comes from behind the sniper. It’s a Cuban forest ranger. He’s pointing a pistol at her. She watches through her scope as Nick and Carlos run to the car.

“Damn, you broke my concentration,” she sighs. “I can’t believe you snuck up on me!”

“¡No muévese!”

“It can’t be helped,” she says, irritated. Faster than you can blink, she spins and swings her rifle, using the barrel to swat the gun out of the ranger’s hands. She jumps to her feet and smashes him in the face with the stock. The ranger crashes to the ground half conscious. Using her solitary arm, she rests the tip of the barrel on his chest, pointed at his heart.

Rather than firing, she turns and looks down at Carlos and Nick dragging the women’s bodies out of the car. While she looks away, the ranger grabs the rifle by the barrel. Without looking, the sniper pulls the trigger. She tugs the barrel out of the ranger’s clenched hand, now sprayed with blood like a Jackson Pollock piece. The ranger gurgles and sputters pathetically, belching blood. “Tch, it’s not my fault you acted like a fool and got shot in the lung. You deserved it!” She fixes her ponytail, then collapses in an unconscious heap.

The sound of footsteps grows until a huge motherfucker emerges from the woods. He carries a big-ass M60 in his left hand, modified to be even larger. He looks exactly like a bigger, meaner version of Animal Mother – or like Animal Mother would look with no right arm. He walks across the dying ranger’s chest, audibly cracking ribs with the weight of his massive body. Stepping up to the summit, he glares at the convertible as it disappears down the mountain pass.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 8: Commando

Wind splashes across our heroes’ faces as they race out of the mountains at 100 miles per hour. As the convertible crests a hill, they can see the northern coast of Cuba for the first time.

“Good,” says Nick, “We’re almost home free.”

“Almost,” agrees Carlos.

Taking every turn as fast as the tires will allow, they descend the mountains toward a harbor town. “When we get there,” says Carlos, “we’ll take a boat and head north to Neo Florida.”

Within a few minutes, the harbor is in sight. Carlos barrel-asses through town like a maniac, running red lights and passing on the right. Colorful buildings whiz by like a drunken pledge barfing up jello shots. A careless fruit vendor pushes his cart out right in front of the convertible, but Carlos avoids it completely. Fruits of myriad colors and shapes don’t go flying anywhere.

In an instant, a trail of smoke crosses their field of vision. It emanates from somewhere above, the window of one of the buildings, and disappears underneath the hood of the car. A rocket propelled grenade slams into the ground, nearly flipping the convertible. The vehicle quickly grinds to a stop on its rims.

The screams from pedestrians sound to Nick like they’re playing on a speaker system made completely of subwoofers. In spite of his spinning head, he grabs Alessandro from the back seat (luckily, he didn’t fly out) and limps for cover in a nearby building with Carlos. Four secretaries come running in high heels and meet them in the hallway. “¿Qué pasó?”

Carlos turns back toward the half-open front door, cautiously edges close, and taps it to swing it closed. Bullets tear through the wood mercilessly, letting in needles of daylight. As the secretaries scream, Carlos, Nick and Alessandro run for the back door and find themselves in an alleyway. As they take off in the direction of the harbor, machine gun fire can be heard in the hallway behind them. When the gunfire ceases, the secretaries are no longer screaming.

Nick and Carlos sprint toward the street up ahead. From an adjoining alley, a little metal pear rolls out in front of them.

A grenade!

They duck and cover, and magically take no damage from the shrapnel. “Shit,” says Nick, “We’re surrounded!”

“Up there,” says Carlos, gesturing to a fire escape. They climb, Nick’s thighs burning from carrying Alessandro up stairs, and find themselves on a second story roof.

“What are we doing here?” asks Nick.

“The streets aren’t safe,” says Carlos, removing his shirt. He wraps the shirt around a guy wire that’s fastened to the ground on the other side of the street, and slides down. “Come on! The harbor is just ahead!”

Nick removes his shirt and does the same, holding on with one arm while carrying Alessandro under the other. He lands and turns around to look back. A hemispherical piece of metal, smaller than half a baseball, catches his eye sitting in the middle of the street. As he watches, a car goes by. When it gets close, the device explodes. Hundreds of pellets shred the car’s tires and texture its metal doors like a golf ball. The windows on that side of the car shatter; the driver is peppered with shrapnel.

Nick and Carlos run toward the harbor. Even if I don’t know what’s happening, the harder I run, the better my chances are, thinks Nick. He’s so single-minded that he doesn’t notice the shattered windows of the bait shop, or the black scorches and ruby colored streaks on the concrete floor of the warehouse, or the bullet holes and powder burns on the tour boat ticket stand. He doesn’t notice anything amiss until he reaches the waterfront.

Every boat in the harbor is on fire!

“Impossible,” says Carlos.

Nick scans the water for any boat that can be salvaged. “There!” He points to a moldy rowboat sitting upside down on a distant part of the boardwalk. It’s past a long, narrow stretch of planks, about 20 feet above the surface of the water.

Before they can get there, there is an explosion. The boardwalk is ripped apart, destroyed. The rowboat is now sitting on a wooden island, a pedestal of wood no longer connected to the rest of the marina.

“Shit,” says Carlos. He spots a rope attached to that part of the boardwalk and traces it back to its other end, tied to a nearby post. It stretches from where they are to where they want to be, and looks sturdy. “Come on, we’ll use that,” he says.

“I can’t cross that without dropping – without dropping Alessandro!” objects Nick.

Carlos looks at Nick without speaking for a second, trying to decide how to respond. “You need to trust me, okay? If I wanted to harm you I wouldn’t have come back for you at the hospital. Leave your brother here, you and I will cross, and I’ll tell you what to do. Trust me, this will work.”

Nick has a thousand objections to this, but he hears gunfire not far away, and he doesn’t have a better idea, so he does as Carlos says. Carlos grabs the rope with his hands and then hooks his knees around it. Nick does the same, and they both pull themselves across the 50 foot rope, dangling over the water below. They reach the boardwalk on the other side. Nick leans over the railing and looks at Alessandro, suddenly seeming miles away.

“Okay,” says Carlos. “Now. Look at me.” Nick does. “What do you think Alessandro is feeling right now?”

Nick stammers. “Uh, he’s passed out. He doesn’t feel anything.”

“You answered too fast. Think hard. What do you think he’s feeling?”

Not thinking hard enough, huh? Nick envisions himself in Alessandro’s body. Well, smartass, he’d feel the dock pressing against his back … warm breeze on his skin … the sun’s in his eyes, even though they’re closed …



Alessandro’s eyes open.

Were they closed?

“Alessandro!”

He’s on his back. He looks where the voice came from. It’s Carlos, holding Nick’s unconscious body.

“Come over here! Use the rope!”

Too confused to do anything else, Alessandro grabs the rope and pulls himself across. He gets about halfway and looks ahead. He sees an upside down vision of Carlos pushing the boat and oars into the water. They fall 20 feet and smack the water, floating gently.

He also sees someone climbing up.

As Carlos peers down at the boat in the water below, a left hand appears gripping the edge of the dock behind him. At first, he sees only a man’s face, then a torso, as he lifts himself without using his legs or his right arm. No, it’s not that he didn’t use his right arm; he doesn’t have one.

Alessandro watches as the soldier lifts himself up and unlatches a heavy machine gun from his back. Easily wielding the cumbersome weapon with one arm, he aims it at Carlos and puts bullets in both of his knees from behind.

Carlos collapses screaming onto the wooden boardwalk.

As Alessandro looks on, the man then walks over to the motionless body of Nick Sparta and points the gun at his head.

“Come on,” he shouts, gesturing with a nod for Alessandro to continue crossing.

[Action Hank]

So he can Capt. Ginyu between the two bodies?

[Big Fagot]

People were confused about this, so to clear up: Vanadium Devil prison is in America, but everything else so far has taken place in Cuba.

[Action Hank]

The Cuba stuff is all flashbacks leading up to America, right?

[Big Fagot]

Yeah, this all takes place in a short period in the year 2009 (FTUW present day is 2010).

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 9: Krokodil

Blood pools in Alessandro Sparta’s face as he hangs upside down, watching a massive soldier point a massive firearm at his brother’s head.

“Get over here,” demands the soldier. His voice is rough and throaty, as if he’s just finished a marathon cigar session, or maybe he’s just practicing his Macy Gray impression.

What the hell do I do? asks Alessandro. I can’t do anything except finish shimmying over there, and as soon as I do it’s over.

He looks down at the moldy old rowboat floating below, the one vessel in the harbor that’s still seaworthy. He thinks of America. We came so close … He looks back up at the soldier, and at his brother pinned under his gun.

“Let’s go,” says the soldier, calmly but quite insistently.

If only Nick could do something …



Nick’s eyes open.

Instantly, Nick spins and parries the commando’s M60 so it’s pointing away from him. The soldier pulls the trigger, making splinters of the wooden pier. Nick grabs the gun and pulls; the soldier, unwilling to release his weapon, unwittingly helps Nick pull himself to his feet! Nick smashes his shoulder into the commando’s stomach and pushes forward with his legs. The next thing he knows, the soldier is flung over the railing! He watches him hit the Caribbean with a smack.

Without hesitating for even an instant, Nick pivots, jumps over Carlos, and dives blindly over the opposite rail. Just under the surface of the water, sinking slowly, is Alessandro. Nicolas grabs him and swims. He deposits Alessandro in the floating rowboat, face down to drain. He then climbs the ladder to retrieve Carlos.

He gets to the last rung and pulls himself halfway up. He sees something he didn’t expect. There is a person standing on the mainland part of the dock. A huge person, in fact. The figure picks up a knife off a nearby crate and severs the rope adjoining Cuba to the wooden island where our heroes are. He then plants one foot on the railing and JUMPS ALL FIFTY FUCKING FEET TO LAND RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM.

It’s god damn motherfucking General Kasparov!

He’s dressed like M. Bison. In daylight, Nick realizes what a hulking monstrosity he is – shoulders as wide as my arm is long, he thinks, and arms twice the size of my legs. Same as always, the general’s face shows no emotion whatsoever. In the presence of this icon of fear, Nick vacillates for a fraction of a second, which proves far too long with this man as an adversary. Still holding the knife in one hand, he grabs Carlos by the head with the other – which is massive enough to clutch his entire skull like a melon – and LIFTS HIM UP OFF THE FUCKING GROUND WITH ONE ARM. He holds his entire body dangling at arm’s length in a terrifying display of strength, and then SLAMS the back of his head against the railing. The hard wooden post flexes and cracks. Blood seeps from the general’s palm and runs down the sleeve of his shirt. Nick is frozen.

The general then grips Carlos by his long hair and holds him up. The lower half of his face is drenched in blood from his nose. The Cuban is unable to support himself on his shattered knees, and frantically grips the shoulders of the general’s uniform. Kasparov raises his knife to Carlos’s throat. Just like that, no instructions for Nick, no demands, no words at all.

And then, as if somehow excited by the situation, the general’s face begins to change. His lips peel back, baring gritted teeth. His forehead wrinkles as his brows raise. His nostrils flare out like an animal. The tendons in his neck tense up, puffing him out like a king cobra. His eyeballs swell and protrude insanely, almost pointing in different directions. Finally, General Kasparov has displayed an emotion. But by what name can this emotion possibly be called?

The scene continues like that for several seconds. Nick is too terrified to move; Carlos can’t do anything; Kasparov has already said everything by saying nothing.

“Leave,” hisses Carlos through his teeth, struggling to get out even a single syllable.

Kasparov just stares.

Nick slowly climbs the rest of the way up the ladder and stands up. Why does it have to be like this? This isn't fair! I already beat that other guy! Carlos wants me to leave, but he’ll definitely die if I do, and this monster probably won’t let me go anyway …

He searches his memory. Wasn’t there something I used to know that could help me? Some sort of technique? Is there any way to beat this monster in this situation?

Before he even realizes what he’s thinking, it’s done. Nick throws a right straight that strikes nothing but air, but nonetheless his knuckles feel the contours of General Kasparov’s chin, a sensation transmitted across 10 feet of space. The teleporting of sensations works both ways, knocking both Carlos and the knife out of Kasparov’s hands. The small blade slides into the water. Emboldened, Nick charges forward and plants his shoulder in the general’s stomach in order to push him over the rail like he did with the commando.

Trying to push back General Kasparov in this way proves as easy as trying to uproot a telephone pole by the same method. The general promptly throws Nick down so hard his head smacks the ground, jostling his brain. He doesn’t even have time to think before Kasparov is on top of him. The general plants just one hand – his left – on Nick’s throat, and squeezes.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 10: Realization

Fuck … my head is definitely going to pop off …

More than a hundred million years ago, a time so remote that neither bees nor flowers had yet arisen on Earth, a prehistoric crocodile existed that is now known as Sarcosuchus. Sarcosuchus was a giant compared to modern crocodiles, weighing more than four tons and having a length of up to an astonishing 40 feet. What’s truly remarkable about Sarcosuchus was its jaw strength: based on measurements from its skeleton, it’s estimated that it could apply 80 kilonewtons (18,000 pounds) of force with its jaws! Of course, this is just an estimate based on the mechanical qualities of its skull. We can never know for sure. It’s a frustrating truth that knowledge is sometimes permanently lost as time marches forward.

In contrast, at a certain Soviet military training academy in the 1970s, the federal government mandated that all cadets were required to take certain physical fitness tests for record keeping purposes. The 10 kilometer run, pushups, situps, all manners of weightlifting tests; the requirements were extremely harsh, but one cadet performed outstandingly on every single one. His most amazing performance was on the grip test. The testing device measured accurately up to 2000 newtons (450 pounds), but this cadet sat down, grabbed the handle with his weak hand, and destroyed the machine! Of course no one could believe what they had seen.

The examiners wanted to order a new testing unit with a higher maximum tolerance and repeat the test, but that same cadet approached the dean and reasoned that doing so would only harm the academy. He began by noting that grip strength is a hard skill to improve, and that putting emphasis on it would only cause hurt egos for the many weak students with no real benefit for the strong few. He knew from his classes in economics and leadership that this would be detrimental. Marksmanship, on the other hand, was a useful skill that could be improved with practice. The boy explained that competition on the shooting range was productive, and that friendly contests would create camaraderie, which would help build a stronger Soviet army. He advised that the academy should instead spend Mother Russia’s rubles on more and better rifles.

The dean was convinced by the boy’s argument, and the way events unfolded it turned out the grip testing machine was not to be replaced until after that student had graduated. Simply because that remarkable cadet happened also to be a genius of logical reasoning, the true strength of his hands remains as unknown as the jaws of Sarcosuchus. The only clue we have is the fearsome nickname he received that day, Krokodil …



The back of Nick’s neck isn’t even touching the boardwalk. General Kasparov’s fingers wrap around so far that his fingertips nearly meet on the far side. In a cruel irony, Nick can barely wrap both his hands around the general’s inhumanly large forearm. Capillaries throughout his neck erupt and spew their minuscule payload into neighboring tissues. Nick stares into the bulging eyes of the general, and the general stares right back.

Suddenly, an arm snakes around Kasparov’s neck. It’s Carlos! He’s on top of the general and has his mammoth neck in a sleeper hold! Kasparov looks up with his freakish eyeballs and just glares.

The general plants the palm of his free right hand flat on the dock. His giant hand arches on its fingertips and trembles with exertion. His fingers turn white as daisies all the way up to the third knuckles as the blood is forcibly wrung out of them by the forces being applied. The planks groan and squeak under the terrible weight.

All at once, Kasparov’s fingers explode like bullets into the wood of the boardwalk! He tears out a piece of a plank with two nails sticking out of it. Still glaring at Carlos, he parts his bared teeth and exhales. It sounds more like a hiss. The general slaps the plank against the Cuban’s side, burying the nails in the flesh of his stomach. Carlos relents.

Kasparov turns his attention back to Nick, his swollen tongue protruding through his lips, strangulating under the might of the general’s terrifying left hand.

I … I can’t … I … can’t …



I CAN’T DIE YET!

Even as the situation appears more hopeless than ever, even as the stagnant blood in his brain is rapidly depleted of oxygen, Nick’s will is reinvigorated! He grits his teeth and stares up defiantly at the hulking beast casting its horrible shadow over him!

GET OFF ME YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!!

Nick grabs the general’s wrist and sinks his fingers into it! Showing the qualities that decide which men are remembered by history, Nick focuses his mind and tries to remember how to release his true strength! Secret fist … I used to have a secret fist!

He wraps up his fingers and tightens his knuckles.

Thank you, general … THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME REMEMBER MY FIST!

WITH 100% OF THE POWER IN HIS BODY, NICK PULLS BACK AND LAUNCHES A SHATTERING RIGHT HOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SOLID BONE OF KASPAROV’S SKULL!

And nothing happens!

He pulls back again and fires another punch! Nothing!

I remember it … the fist that strikes at a distance, that fist of power!

THE FIST THAT MAKES ME TERRIFYING!

He throws another right hook! It has no effect! Kasparov doesn’t even move!

Shit … I can’t breathe …

Nick pathetically slugs the general in the face over and over again. It’s less than a mosquito bite to Kasparov.

Wait … stop … I have to talk to you … stop … i need to say something …

Gradually, Nick’s struggling ceases. His body goes limp. The afternoon sun turns dark and fades from his sight. His eyes close.

Kasparov stops. He realizes something has gone wrong. His face returns to normal: the redness fades from his skin, and his eyes retract into his skull. He releases his grip on Nick’s throat. He perches over him on his hands and knees, like an animal, examining him. He smells Nick’s face for the odor of breath.

There is none.



Then a fist slams into his face! Then another! Then another! The general is on his feet but stumbling backward! Kicks and punches hit him like a hailstorm, pushing him back little by little toward the railing! There is hope!

However, the instant his back feels the railing, Kasparov explodes forward with the mother of all haymakers! It seems to slow down time itself! Its appearance is less like a punch than a giant tree trunk, wearing a sleeve, being pitched forward by a tornado. The back of the general’s hand is plucked bald by the turbulent wind tugging on the tiny hairs. The very threads of his uniform stretch and pop with the violence of the attack!

Before Kasparov’s one shot kill can connect, his body is blasted back! He smashes through the wooden railing, exploding it! Kasparov slams into the barnacle covered concrete wall of the marina and drops into the sea.

A pair of feet skid backwards across the wooden dock and then stop.

The only man left standing is Alessandro Sparta, with one palm outstretched. His expression is weary and confused. He remains standing, panting like a dog for a few moments, before he crumples onto his face. All the nerves in his body burn. He remembers this sensation from when the SWAT soldier was shooting at him in the hospital hallway.

It takes him a second to realize that it wasn’t he who was attacked in the hallway; it was Nick. He – Alessandro – was passed out.

Alessandro stands up. He looks at Carlos and shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Put Nick in the boat,” whispers Carlos dryly. He’s using both hands to put pressure on his pierced gut. “Then you can come back for me.”

Alessandro nods and takes Nick under his arm. He descends the ladder and lowers his brother into the rowboat. Then, something hits him on his head. He falls limply into the boat on top of his brother.

For Carlos, hitting the water is incredibly unpleasant. The saltwater hurts like salt in a wound on his wounds. He grimaces and swims to the surface with a gasp.

“Sorry,” he says, tossing the oars into the boat on top of the Sparta brothers. “That rowboat seats two. Plus, I’m dying, and I don’t want you eating me.”

“Here’s hoping you two survive long enough to make the trip,” he grunts as he nudges the rowboat out to sea. “Of course, the merciless seas are still safer than the brutal wasteland of your destination. I hope you can find the truth about yourselves in that country forgotten by God.”

As the current carries the Sparta brothers north, Carlos Castellan floats belly up, one hand weakly clamped over his stomach wound while his blood leaks into the sea.

“I’m sorry … I should have told you … live on and discover the truth for yourselves …”



“God save Cuba …”



THE LEGEND OF AL AND NICK SPARTA HAS BEGUN

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 11: Electromagnetism

The next chapter of the Sparta Brothers’ lives takes place much later, so at this point I have a chronological break point to discuss a different topic. The reasons for this have not yet been made clear by the story.

In Physics, there are precisely four forces that explain all the observed interactions between particles. The four forces are:

Strong
Weak
Electromagnetic
Gravity

Of course, scientific theories necessarily change over time, and this simplistic four forces model is a bit of a relic (there are concerns over what is and isn’t truly a force, and which forces are and aren’t different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon), but understanding this is a close approximation of the truth. The strong and weak forces act primarily on particles inside atomic nuclei, and for obscure reasons they cannot penetrate outside these nuclei, so they tend to be of no concern to anyone other than physicists. They have no role in any macroscopic phenomena.

Gravity is a familiar force, of course. It explains why massive bodies pull one another together, and in certain bizarre situations why they push one another apart. It is, by an enormous margin, the least consequential of the four forces. Consider that a body as colossally massive as the Earth tugs us gently enough that with a little energy we can jump free of its grasp for a moment, and with a little more we can build rockets and launch ourselves to the Moon! Though gravity is significant when extremely large bodies are involved, because of its weakness, it is not involved in an interaction between, say, a pen and a hand, so in the range of medium sized objects (larger than atoms, but smaller than planets), it too is inconsequential.

That leaves only one force to account for the majority of interactions we laymen observe daily: electromagnetism. Electromagnetism (EM) explains more than just electric motors, transistors, refrigerator magnets, the phenomenon of static shock, and why electric power cables are never positioned too closely together or too far apart. EM also accounts for why you can’t push your hand into the wall, and why you don’t suddenly fall through the floor!

Consider an atom.



The nucleus is represented in blue and the electron cloud is purple. The nature of the cloud is necessarily confounding to human beings: it’s not that the electron (for simplicity’s sake, this atom has only one electron) is moving so fast that it appears as a blur. Rather, the cloud represents an electron that is really and truly in all places in the cloud at once. The electron is a point particle which occupies no volume, but nonetheless if you were to run a test that asked “is the electron currently stationed at every point in the cloud?”, the answer is necessarily yes. It’s an extraordinarily vexing feature of quantum physics; even near the end of their careers, many legendary physicists, such as Neils Bohr and Richard Feynman, have expressed their inability to fathom quantum mechanics, so don’t feel bad if you find that it makes no sense.

So, you’re made of matter, which is made of atoms. What happens when you touch a wall or a table that is also made of atoms? You may have been told that atoms never actually touch one another, which is absolutely correct. When two atoms get near each other:



The electromagnetic force acts between them. Both atoms fire photons at each other!



The photon is the transmitter particle of the EM force. Each of the four forces has a transmitter particle. This particle is the mechanism that causes the force to happen. As an analogy, the United States military is the transmitter particle that exerts the force of liberty on Iraq. The photon is more famous for its night job transmitting all manner of radiation – visible light, radio waves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet, gamma, microwave – but its primary role is to mediate the EM force. It’s important to note that a photon can either repulse or attract, depending on the charges of the particle emitting it and the particle absorbing it (opposites attract, like charges repel, as we all know).

These photons carry information that says two electron shells are getting close to each other. Electrons are negatively charged particles; particles with similar charges repel, so the clouds are pushed apart.



When the atom was not near another atom, its electron cloud was uniform; that is, its electron was equally likely to be in any place in the shell. Now, because the clouds are pushing on one another, it’s more likely that the electron is at the far and of the cloud, so the cloud is thicker there.

This has two effects. First, the electron acts like a sail. Normally, when no EM force (“wind”) is exerted, the nucleus is not pulled in any direction. When “wind” fills the sail and pushes it toward one side, however:



The negatively charged electron pulls the positively charged nucleus more from the left than it does from the right. In addition, pulling back the cloud reveals the positively charged atomic nuclei to one another, which also repel:



Now the electron clouds are pulling and the atomic nuclei are pushing in the same direction. The atoms are forced apart and return to their original state.



Thus, the same force that makes your computer work and gives you a shock when you get out of a car in winter also explains why matter doesn’t just pass through other matter. In fact, unless we’re talking about the extremely small (sub-atomic) or the extremely big (large asteroids and up), the EM force is the only force that matters.

Thus, if you wanted to attract or repel medium sized objects at a distance, EM is a good place to start.

We know that atoms never touch – they only interact through forces such as EM. So if we make an EM field that exactly simulates the presence of a solid wall, then the environment will behave as though a solid wall were actually there.

In other words, if we determine how atom A interacts with atom B:



And replace atom A with any device that emits photons in exactly the same way:



Then atom B, and indeed any and all atoms in the environment, will behave as though atom A – or a wall of atoms A – were right in front of them.

Of course, the photon gun will be pushed back the same amount as the “wall” would be, if it weren’t imaginary. If a bullet hits the “force wall”, the device generating the field will feel the impact. If you hit the “wall” with a sledgehammer, you may jostle the generator, even though you never touched it.

With enough photon guns, any corporeal surface could be simulated. The question remains how to manufacture and coordinate those photon guns.

[Big Fagot]

Chapter 12: Gravity

The only other force capable of having a macroscopic effect is gravity. Although it was formally identified and investigated centuries before any of the other three forces, it remains the most mysterious.

Isaac Newton was famously the first to identify gravity as a force attracting any two massive bodies. The Newtonian model of gravity says that gravity causes two bodies to accelerate toward one another.

Think about it. Doesn’t there seem to be something wrong with that?

You can feel acceleration. Even with your eyes closed, you know when the train you’re on is stopping or starting, or rounding a corner. If I push you, you feel it even if you’re blindfolded and deaf – the acceleration of the push is observed directly without any outside input. But when you’re falling, don’t you feel weightless? That is, don’t you feel a total lack of any forces acting on you at all? Isn’t it ironically when you’re on the ground, not going anywhere, that you feel a force pulling you down toward the Earth?

But Newton says that when you fall – say, out of a plane – you’re accelerating. In fact, if I watch you fall, my observations confirm that. The first second you fall 16 feet, the next second you fall 48 feet, the next second you fall 80 feet – yes, it can only be that you’re accelerating.

You think you’re not accelerating, and I think you are. No other phenomenon causes a discrepancy like this, and it’s been right in all our faces for hundreds of years. What’s going on?

The answer that most physicists agree on was provided by Albert Einstein two hundred years after Newton: it’s not that you’re accelerating, it’s that the space you’re in is curved.

This is a tough pill to swallow. It sounds like some bullshit a science fiction author might make up as a quick and dirty explanation for something so he could get back to writing about aliens boning. Maybe we can understand it better by looking at a simplified example.



This is a two dimensional universe. Two dimensional beings live in it. They have no understanding of a third dimension, nor can they comprehend it, just as we can’t comprehend a fourth dimension.



This man lives in the 2-D universe. Realize that he’s standing not ON the universe, but IN it, like a drawing on a piece of paper. If the paper gets folded, he gets folded. Nothing he can do can allow him to interact directly with more than two dimensions.

Right now the universe is flat, uncurved. In order to curve space so we can see what it looks like, we need to introduce a third dimension. It will be invisible to the 2-D beings, but if they’re smart enough to devise their own theory of relativity, they’ll be able to infer its existence. We’ll make the rule that massive bodies cause a depression in the third dimension, and that the potential energy of a region of space gets larger as that region becomes higher in the third dimension. (That is, moving toward an area of space that’s higher in the third dimension is hard, like walking uphill. Moving toward an area that’s low in the third dimension is easy, like walking downhill. Don’t get confused – these aren’t actual grass covered hills that people are walking on top of. Think of all this happening in outer space, if it makes things simpler for you.) So, if we introduce a mass in the center:


Viewed from two different angles

It causes a dent! The more dented downward the space is, the lower in energy that space is – and the more it sucks objects into itself. All physical systems tend toward lower energy states, so objects will fall toward the dent.



The 2-D man falls in toward the center of the dent, toward the body (not shown) whose mass is the cause of the depression. Watching from here, we see him accelerating, but he doesn’t feel it because his motion is normal (physicists would say he’s moving inertially) – it’s the space he’s moving through that’s curved. This is a subtle point, so it bears explanation. If I watch you on a train that’s speeding up, I see you accelerating. If I watch you fall, I can see you moving very similarly to how you were when you were on the train. The difference is that when you’re in the train YOU feel yourself being pushed back in your seat, but when you’re falling into this dent YOU feel nothing. (Maybe you feel wind if you’re falling through an atmosphere, but that’s different). The upshot is this: the curved space due to gravity has caused two different observers to observe two different phenomena! Curved space has caused us to disagree with one another about what’s going on.

You could also imagine another body traveling around the rim of the funnel, using its speed to keep itself from falling in further, like one of those coin vortexes; this is what’s actually happening when one body orbits another, like a moon about a planet. Earth’s Moon rolls around the lip of the depression made by Earth. Man made satellites do, too.

It’s important to realize that although it takes a massive body (like a planet) to cause a dent, it’s the dent, not the body, which makes objects tend to move one way or another. If we could bend space however we wanted WITHOUT needing a huge mass to do it, we could make all manners of crazy shapes:


Viewed from two different angles

We’re used to space bending to pull us in, toward the ground for example; but in this case it bends to push us away! Space itself pushes all matter away from this region, creating a partial or total vacuum.



Forget notions like up and down, forget there’s any Earth at all, just imagine yourself floating about in deep space and coming upon a region that’s curved this way. You could push yourself toward it with your jetpack, and the empty space would push you back! Trying to enter this region and stay in it would be like trying to push the north poles of two magnets together, or balance a chair on one leg.

Of course, as long as we’re getting creative with the shapes we bend space into, we can modify it a bit:


Viewed from two different angles

There’s a little indentation at the top of the lump. Now the 2-D man can hang out comfortably as long as he’s in that dent:



But if he moves too far, he moves into space that pushes him away!



That’s not the only trick we can do with space. We can make a dent, and keep making the walls steeper and steeper:



And if anyone wanders near it, they’ll be trapped! We can make the walls so steep that getting out would be more difficult than scaling a cliff on Jupiter.



There are any number of tricks you could do. You could bend the space around a baseball to give it a high potential energy (that is, put it at the top of a “hill”), then flick it and watch it rocket away as a 200mph fastball. You could make yourself hover above the surface of Earth (although actually flying up, away from a gravity well such as Earth, is a very different problem). You could even make use of the fact that space can ripple like water and create gravity waves that could send objects flying in all different directions about a room!

Of course, to do any of this we need a mechanism capable of bending space in the first place. Such a gravity altering device would have innumerable applications, from achieving weightlessness on Earth to manufacturing artificial gravity on a space ship. Experiments have been performed to explore the feasibility of various highly theoretical concepts, but nothing having any direct practical application has yet been produced.

[Theldorrin]

This thread reminded me that I got Maple from you.