Doldrum Ophinnias was splitting into polyhedrons. They were elongating angles, stretching and spreading, sharp-edged, acute, obtuse, pointed at the ends and leaving swarming hovering cuts in space. So colours flirted in the air, swished and twisted–purples to reds to pinks to ones unnamed, blooming flowers, acidic, hallucinogenic, crystalline and mechanical–though Doldrum was foremost aware of the nonexistence of all colours, that it was the movements of photons through pigments, and neither of those really existed, either. Compressions slid by like water and Doldrum stumbled and shifted across the room towards the dresser, bumped against a wall, tripped over the corner of their bed, and slipped suddenly into a compression where they had always been next to the dresser the whole time, had never moved, had never been anywhere else.
Compressional fragmentation was always a pain in the summer. There were cracks in Doldrum’s presence in the universe, cracks in the ley lines, cracks in the world and air and the humidity and stinking burning heat made everything throb like old bruises. They swarmed up at the sack squating atop the dresser and slipped hastily a small grey pill that tasted like concrete and clay down their mouth-concept and waited for–everything–to stitch back together.
So colours blended and shifted into solid blotty shapes, squares and circles splitting apart and expanding in size and form until–the lamp swinging from the ceiling, fuzzy orange light sending blobby moving shadows under Doldrums’ feet. Tatty yellow curtains burbling, plump, under a warm breeze. Beige walls and dark furniture and cloaks and shirts and sacks hanging in dusty corners, off the end of the bed, jutting out of the dresser. It was all greys, browns. Ugly as hell. Solid.
Doldrum Ophinnias patted themself down, head to thorax, bending down, patting their legs. Everything, generally, was still around, though they were fairly sure their exoskeleton was a slightly darker shade of green than it had been previously.
‘YOURE LATE YOURE LATE YOURELATEYOURELATEYOURELATEYOURELATE–’ and the chatterer burst into Doldrum’s room, scraping beneath the door and knocking a bare hat stand over.
‘I’m not late,’ Doldrum huffed. ‘Get the svtch*s out. You’re invading my privacy. Legally, I’m naked. I could sue.’
The chatterer had no eyes and no conception of privacy or of being sued or of any ideas at all, really, other than the ideas of punctuality, of personal responsibility, of co-operation, and of the non-rights of employees lower on the hierarchy than it. The chatterer was a pair of flapping lips and glinting teeth wrought from some smooth stone Doldrum didn’t recognise that glimmered obnoxiously in sunlight and that propelled itself forwards by opening and shutting itself as it talked. It made no sense. How could it be so loud? Where were its lungs? Voicebox? Surely it needed an esophagus, at the very least?
‘LATELATELATELATEYOURELATELATELATE–’ Doldrum slapped it aside and wrapped a cloak around themselves and glanced at the lopsided clock that hung above their bed and realised they were late.
‘Oh. Lkkas^vvt. I’m late.’
‘LATELATELATEYOURELATELATE.’
‘Tt**ading compressional shift,’ hissed Doldrum and they hoisted their pack onto their back, pummelled the chatterer aside and burst out the door. The staircase was winding and inconsistent, spidery shadows and rust on the rickety handhold, spiralling awkward down the dark apartment complex that stank like mildew and old metal.
‘Mornin Doldrum. Bit late aren’t you ayy?’ said the pest vine who had been wrapped around the handhold ever since Doldrum had moved in and who the landlords had long given up hope of being rid of.
‘Late,’ sputtered Doldrum, sprinting down the steps.
‘LATELATELATELATE,’ agreed the chatterer, whizzing behind Doldrum.
The science behind compressional fragmentation was primitive and inconsistent, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the rules of science and physics and the very conceptoform of ‘science’ itself changed wildly across compressional layers (Doldrum would never forget the compression they had extended into where gravity was chocolate). Doldrum’s perception had been split into uncountable fragments through uncountable compressional layers and had ended up being spit right back out in a compression that was exactly an hour and a half after they had woken up. After they had woken up early and everything!
The flat was largely empty. The people who were on conceptual planes Doldrum could perceive had all already gone to work, or were sleeping, or were otherwise out, or were rebirthing themselves into updated iterations, or so on. The place was like a big empty shell, shadows coagulating in corners, skittering feet of insects. And round and round and round Doldrum went, hollow echoes, sharp steps ringing. Doldrum burst from the front door and suddenly Volghoss Station Town was yelling at them.
Volghoss Station Town was one of those places that naturally clotted and coagulated and built up around one of the Halfways Company Train Stations. For whatever reason people were caught on it like rocks in a filter, built up and bloomed outwards like a flower, cobwebbing all over the place. The rules of such phenomena were arbitrary and there were yet many more Halfways Company Train Stations that drifted in the empty still darkness as dull, glowing slabs of concrete and lamplight.
So Volghoss Station Town had built up like dust in a corner and buildings began to sprout outwards from that dull, dark platform, square buildings with windows gleaming yellow against the empty skies like giant gazing lamps, square buildings with straight spines rising above each other over rounding hills. Old voluminous buildings that gathered dust and dripped and stank like mildew in the rainy months. Gargoyles of all forms and shapes perched on their edges to vomit that water down into angular sprawling streets that wind always sang in and that slipped suddenly in and out of thin alleys where flies danced atop spilled rubbish bins.
Doldrum came face to face with the shuffling forms of shoulders of all varieties and origins. It was always tired people at the Halfways Company train stations, tired people shuffling from one transition to another and waiting to rest at the very end of it, part of the sweaty grey blur between moments of peace and sleep. Volghoss, the town, could not be separated from Volghoss, the station. Everyone looked tired, constantly. Doldrum looked tired, too. Doldrum was tired.
Doldrum was tired of the chatterer and they slapped it away one more time as they seeped into the crowd, all shufflings and mumblings, half-baked snippets of conversations pulsing in the air.
Doldrum Ophinnias was a station custodian. The physical messes, spills and stains and litter, were left to the robots and the other sentients with better union representation than people like Doldrum. Doldrum was actually a meta-custodian, and they dealt in all manner of noospheric smudges and psionic masses. It was a bit higher in concept than the work of a regular custodian, just as dirty, and harder to clean. So they were bumped and shoved and shuffled around, and wind howled and the trains roared in from the darkness clattering tearing rattling metal.
Doldrum had a picker wrought from centipede shells and faraway-steel and a tank on their back with its insides spun all over with spider silk newly shipped from the Congress of Eyes. They had a pair of blinkglass goggles that through magical rituals of esoteric lines of code–wild ceremonial movements of electrons–allowed the perception of the local noosphere as if it were physically there, though they never used them because they gave Doldrum a headache. Doldrum had pretty good eyes anyway and all they needed to do was squint to get a good look at things.
So Doldrum was shuffled and shoved and bumped for a whole day, snagging old dreams off street lights before they could rot and turn ugly; scraping off the floor and from between bricks lingering sticky prejudices that made Doldrum wrinkle their face up and try not to think of their actual contents; wiping from windows the seeds of unruly urban legends and unwholesome rumors before they could sprout into things bigger, less easy to manage. The chatterer provided constant helpful advice, screamed at helpful volumes directly into Doldrums’ earholes.
They saw things in stores, in janky roadside stalls and counters that they could not afford. Glimmering things that might have been ripoff garbage, might have been rare and exotic jewellry. Dancing gimmicky machinery with purposes inconceivable to Doldrum other than as deadly traps for wandering fingers. Rising smoky scent of spices beyond their monetary range, books or booklike things that sprang open and sucked you away into places Doldrum could never afford to go. They fed themself off food stall samples and ignored the looks the owners gave to them and the noxious judgement of the chatterer. In the far corner of the town square passersby were treated to test a series of fancy advanced guns on a shopkeeper’s very own spawned iterations.
‘Isn’t this unethical?’ asked one.
‘Not here!’ said the shopkeeper and her iteration at the exact same time.
Doldrum passed periodically by to pick up the dying thoughts left floating behind by the dead iterations. They didn’t think too hard about it.
Bounty hunters passed by–they always did. Always trying to look inconspicuous, but Doldrum had learnt to smell them miles away. They were always cleaner than everyone else or, if dirty, it was in a kind of attractive, masculinely grizzled way. Doldrum saw sometimes light glinting off weaponry they couldn’t even recognise, couldn’t fathom what they did, how they hurt.
They shoved through, tough, determined. Doldrum couldn’t help but blush when they got shoved aside, too.
Doldrum wondered where they were going, what they were doing, why. Doldrum dreamt up adventure scenarios about them from the thinnest of evidence and scrapped them away when they realised what they were doing and just how embarrassing it was. Doldrum hated the bounty hunters.
Thoughts and emotions and feelings flecked lazily off people’s heads and nobody did a thing to keep them in check. People snoozed openly on benches. Somebody fiddled their tendrils together, glancing at a phone. It was a transitional place that none of them had any responsibility for and so it was flooded with their rubbish. When Doldrum sniffed hard enough, focussed enough, they caught the scent of sentience. The unrestrained concentrated miasma that was feeling waiting chuckling anxious lives, intercrossing and bumping–zig zagging paths from distant places or nearby places, visiting the first time or the second or third or many others, intertwining. Alchemical concoction of memory and prejudice and ambition and the stupid kid-dreams nobody really let go of, not really, no matter how far and how hidden and rotted they were left in the backs of dreary, tired skulls. Glorious, unstable, alchemical Rebis. The stink of personhood–sentience.
It smelled like rotted strawberries and paint.
‘Excuse me. Are you a custodian?’ Doldrum struggled to regain control over their verbal mechanisms, powered against both the surprise they would need them and a total unwillingness to use them.
‘Hn? What? I mean: hello, yes?’
He was a carbonoform of some description that Doldrum was unfamiliar with. An angular fellow, sharp edges, triangulating downwards to a waist and legs absurdly small for his upper body. Blank and blue, like something wrought from clay, wearing one of those cheap dark green jumpsuits tailors would customise for you in a jiffy for a price obnoxiously high yet low enough to draw you in. A polygonal form, almost, but for the eyes. Something about them was unfitting–like scars in his face more than organs. Round, sharp at their ends, ovaloid. Wet, lively, they shifted here and there and gazed up and down where the rest of the man’s body remained strangely still. He loomed over Doldrum.
‘I apologise. You see, I feed almost solely on the noospheric resonances of annoyed blue collar workers. It’s in my nature. I’m sure you can tell where this is going.’
‘No, what–’ and the man had, with wasplike speed and sudden jutting strength, shoved Doldrum over, reached around and slapped the tank off in such a way that the rubbish within seeped suddenly out, flapping away like plastic bags or skins and drifting, spinning in the breeze.
‘I’m sorry. It’s in my nature.’ The man paused and locked eyes with Doldrum, then looked away. ‘If it makes you feel better, your annoyance is very tasty.’
‘Vh^po! Can–you at least help me get them back?!’ Doldrum hissed, scuttling to their feet and swiping a ripped nightmare off a confused passersby’s face.
‘No. Sorry, it’s in my nature.’ The man drifted into the crowd and Doldrum watched, silent, awestruck, as he slinked away, paused, and then slinked right back forwards.
‘Sorry, I’m still kinda hungry,’ he said, sprinting at Doldrum and shoving them to the ground once more and immediately disappearing again with another: ‘It’s in my nature!’
Doldrum Ophinnias found themselves fragmenting a little as they reclaimed the rubbish. They were not paid overtime.
‘Oh! I thought that he had entered unsentience. Hee-hee!’
GOLGO was a 558th Compressional Conceptoform representative of the idea of Candlewax Mining. It gave him a very high position with lots of respect in the Candlewax Mining Companies he shifted between working at. It also meant that all of his work was completely unpaid.
Doldrum, in contrast, was a Quad-Compressional Carbonoform. They perceived only three dimensional space through a constant involuntary drift of four compressions at a time and, as such, GOLGO looked to Doldrum like chopped up Cubist art.
He was all angles and sudden curves and jutting corners and unexpected lines. If you tried measuring him with a ruler you would determine that he was a perfect square composed of only acute angles. Doldrum tried taking a picture of him once and the camera, in response, folded inside out, entered a stage of cocooning, and hatched weeks later as a kind of plastic butterfly. All you could really consistently perceive of him was a hovering eye that he winked with far too much and a giant, stupid, toothy grin.
‘He did. That’s why he saw all his dead family.’
‘Really? Has he perceived the sentient-unsentient recursion? I didn’t know carbonoforms could do that!’
‘Yeah. But he wants to save his friends.’
So blueish light spilled onto them and the windows creaked and crackled with noises of insects and nighttime sentiences of all kinds. Croaks and beeps and claps, though they sunk into the background.
The television was howling. People were yelling at each other in a language neither Doldrum nor GOLGO really understood. Doldrum read the subtitles. GOLGO perceptually shifted halfway into a compression where he did understand the language. He kept leaning in towards the television, swirling polygonal forms and disconnected angles, until Doldrum hoisted him back to the couch, eyes planted silently on the screen.
‘Hee-hee. The power of friendship must be immense if it can make a carbonoform transcend their perceptual layering and obtain direct consciousness of the recursion of sentience and unsentience.’
‘He super wants to save his friends.’
The door clicked and clacked and swung dejectedly open and in stumbled Doldrum. They boggled at the fluttering light from the television, at the wild scenes of flying spoilers that they lacked the prior context and build up of to properly enjoy. They boggled at themself laying back on the couch boggling right back at them. Doldrum was shifting and pulling, elastic, between looking at themself in the door, themself on the couch.
They both turned the GOLGO and hissed: ‘What sv(aak are you doing in my room already? I locked it! How long have you been in here?’
‘Since you invited me in!’
Doldrum held out an arm and rested against the doorframe. ‘I haven’t done that.’
Doldrum twiddled a feeler and leant into the couch, folding their arms. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’
‘Oh! Ah!’ GOLGO’s polyhedrons slowed their floating and his smile thinned. ‘I must be on the wrong compression! Ah. Sorry. Hee-hee!’
And so came a flowing, moving sensation, muck and mud dragging over Doldrum, over skin and meat down to bones, down to quarks, every particle sloughing downwards in a horrendous landslide. And a snapping noise like something elastic breaking.
Doldrum blinked and they were leaning against their doorway, watching the blue lights flutter on their couch, sagging and empty. They looked left, looked right, peered into the room and gazed over it. They fled inside and hastily shut the television and all its horrendous spoilers off, groaned and stretched when the door knocked.
‘Hullo Doldrum!’ said GOLGO.
‘Hey, GOLGO,’ said Doldrum. They stepped away from the door, lazily sauntered back towards the couch. They peered around their shoulder and noticed GOLGO still outside the door, grinning.
‘Come in.’
Doldrum blinked again and GOLGO was next to them.
‘Hee-hee. Sorry. I don’t know how you manage involuntary compressional drift so easily.’
‘Eh,’ said Doldrum, collapsing into their couch and gazing tiredly at a part of GOLGO that seemed to be unfolding forever.
‘How planal shift you, Doldrum?’
‘I don’t know what that means.’ Doldrum sunk into the couch, felt the wood spine bite into them.
‘Pardon. Whatwith are you today, Doldrum?’
‘Ghy%allt.’
‘Oh. That is poor to hear.’ GOLGO’s grin faded and then regrew instantaneously. ‘Hey. Was it this compression that you wanted to borrow my watch?’
‘No.’ Doldrum tensed, pulled themself up, digging blindly around their sides for the remote. ‘Uh. Why’d you come here, again?’
GOLGO was twirling with delight. ‘You called me over! You wanted to borrow my watch, or get more antifrags, or something!’
‘Oooooh. H#u.’ Doldrum lazily eyed the pill sack on their cabinet. It was lying flat and wide and hollow. It looked like a murder. ‘Uh. Yeah. I’m out.’
‘Oh! I must be on the wrong compression again.’ GOLGO winked. ‘OK. I’ll fix this.’
‘Hang on–’ and GOLGO had never been there at all. Again.
Doldrum groaned and rang him and laid loosely on the couch glaring at the ceiling until the door knocked once more.
‘Hullo Doldrum!’
‘GOLGO,’ groaned Doldrum.
‘I got your antifrags now. They didn’t take Conceptochits over there, so I paid, myself. You owe me twenty-five Value-Concept-Levels. But you–you know–you wouldn’t believe the guy who sold them, hee-hee.’
‘I’ll try my hardest,’ Doldrum offered, shifting over on the couch, hearing it scrape and groan in response.
‘He was this carbonoform. He was a blue-triangle guy. You know? Like he was made of blue triangles. And he had these wet, wet optical–uh–perceptive–uh–’
‘Eyes.’ Doldrum did not like how easily the words came to them. They glanced sideways at GOLGO. He spun cheerily, dully. Doldrum had a dreadful sensation of coincidence.
‘Majiggers. He looked like he was from the Sniffworlds, by Ring Eight. Anyways he asked me “what would you describe your social class as?”’
Doldrum was frowning. They were perked up far more than they thought themself capable of perking that late, after work. ‘What’d you say?’
‘I am an idea of mining. So I just said “blue collar.”’
‘Yeah?’ Doldrum was gazing intently.
‘And he said “sorry”, shoved me over, threw the pills at me, and just ran away! Hee-hee! Yelling about how it was “ in his nature”. Hee-hee!’ GOLGO’s angles spun faster, harder, a jutting, artificial haste. ‘I’d like to put something in his nature! Hee-hee!’
Doldrum promptly stopped caring. The severity of it washed over them in a similar sense to how the body goes numb after experiencing incredible pain. Coincidence it was. So it went. So on.
‘I met that sja@*sa today too. He shoved me over, said the same thing. Knocked all the llk–gb out of my tank.’ Hot anger fizzled in Doldrum.
There he was. There was the man. Doldrum imagined punching him, imagined smashing his jaw across a wall, and taking with it the chatterer, every shoulder that had bumped them when they had least needed it, every stupid word they didn’t understand, every damned self-serious bounty hunter, every loathsome mocking price tag and the ominous, obnoxious, uncaring shopkeepers looming horrid above them, every stupid antifrag pill tasting like porridge mixed with concrete –all those things splattered outwards in a pool of blood with his teeth. So the man stood above, flapping and semiotic and Doldrum figured that all they needed to do to fix everything was to wring his throat clean and leave him dead.
Doldrum inhaled and calmed down. ‘He could’ve helped me pick them up. Even if he can’t eat anything else.’
‘Actually,’ said GOLGO. ‘If he’s from the Sniffworlds, he can eat any noospheric resonance. Blue-collar annoyance is like… popcorn, you know? Hee-hee. He probably just needs a diet if anything.’
Doldrum screamed out their entire day. Doldrum screamed out their entire career. Doldrum screamed about existence in general. GOLGO was feeling left out so he joined Doldrum. He had nothing to scream about, never screamed much at all. It was a fascinating exercise.
They screamed, together, until one of their neighbours poked a thin eye beneath the door and complained that the noise was making their eggs hatch early.
‘What the yggta*v’s even the point of this,’ said Doldrum.
‘The sharp end,’ GOLGO said.
‘No.’ Doldrum scrunched their face up and narrowed their eyes at GOLGO who grinned thoughtlessly right back. ‘I mean. We can’t go anywhere. Or do anything. I keep working for g*ggt all and it goes to food and pills. I can’t even get anywhere far on the train. What the klg^e’s the point?’
‘What the klg^e’s the point?’ said GOLGO, pronouncing Doldrum’s swears perfectly, angles tilting.
‘What the sv**ttu%l’s the point?!’
GOLGO tilted his face offhandedly to the other side. ‘Dunno.’
‘“Don’t know,”’ echoed Doldrum. ‘You’re just avoiding the question.’
GOLGO was genuinely befuddled. He tilted around, a non euclidean eyebrow raised. ‘What question?’
‘What’s the point?’
‘What point?’
‘Yes!’
‘What point?’
‘Yes! That’s the point!’
GOLGO shrugged and it looked like crystalline structures flipping in on themselves. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’
Doldrum groaned and tried to sink into the couch. If they sank far enough maybe it would engulf them entirely, absorb them into it. Crunch them up.
‘There is no point,’ they moaned.
‘That’s what I said!’ said GOLGO.
‘No you didn’t.’
‘Oh. Nevermind, then. Hee-hee. It’s a pretty cool thing to say, though, isn’t it?’ GOLGO had turned to face Doldrum with brainless cheery puppy-eyes.
‘No. It’s a terrible thing to say.’
GOLGO frowned for a moment, but it shrivelled promptly away. He gave Doldrum a sly smile that they were not fond of. He winked, unnecessarily. ‘Doldrum, what do you think of the Meta-Compressional Debate Spiral?’
Doldrum flicked their antennae and leant back on the couch. ‘Uhm. What?’
GOLGO giggled. Polyhedrons twirled. ‘Hee-hee. Y’see, all across the galaxy, firmamentologists are bashing their heads open all day and all night trying to figure out what the real shape of the compressional webwork is. Just last week–hee-hee–Ybattis Olfactory determined it to be the shape of a funnel, containing further funnels. And the week before that–hee-hee–KULK 556 theorised that the compressional webwork could be compared to a stack of pancakes with syrup poured on its top, yet with no strawberries. The pancakes, of course, extended endlessly downwards, the syrup, endlessly flowing.’
‘What?’ Doldrum entered moods, occasionally, when they felt that GOLGO needed a good thump on the head, or maybe a quick choking between friends to straighten him out. They analysed GOLGO all over for any signs of what might have been a throat, or a noggin, or even a toe, and they couldn’t find a thing.
‘Pulk-Gong-Yohanes, just a week before that, figured that the patterns on his ex-wife’s left horn corresponded with divine exactness to the shape of the webwork, and that the ultimate final discovery of the true form of the webwork all hinged on her refusing to stop talking to him. Do you see where I’m getting at?’
‘No.’
‘Hee-hee. It’s called the Meta-Compressional Debate Spiral. It’s a pattern. It always starts with opposing essays and ends up with scientists strangling each other in a Woolworths car park while their friends and assistants cheer them on. I witnessed it myself: KULK 556 pulling a sickening quadruple DDT and shattering Ybattis’ refractory-leg, before being knocked out by Ybattis swinging at her with the full force of his entire electron microscope. It’s a horrible thing, Doldrum. I wanted to be a firmamentologist once, but you know how much I hate fighting.’
‘What’s your point?’ Doldrum asked, waving aside sliding shapes, floating polygons, looking for something fragile to punch at.
‘Hee-hee. Hee-hee. There’s no point.’
Doldrum went red. They wildly flailed at GOLGO’s shapes and passed through them like holograms, or scraped them by the edges and made them spin uselessly. GOLGO twitched and giggled.
‘No! That’s my point! Hee-hee! There is no point!’ GOLGO floated away from the couch, in front of Doldrum. Smiling still. But his eyes were steely. ‘What is the webwork? What’s a compression? What’s time? Space? Or–’ GOLGO pointed at Doldrum’s fallen hat stand with a floating triangle. ‘What’s a hat stand, anyway? Carbon, rearranged? Inertial forces enwrapping the carbon, repelling, ever slightly, the intrusion of other molecules? A concept invented and sold by hatstand salesmen? Hee-hee.’
‘A hat stand is a bit of furniture I put my hats on,’ Doldrum grunted, aching with hopeless, steaming, confused anger.
‘You don’t have any hats. I’ve never seen you wear any hats. You hate hats. But you have shoes. Why don’t you put shoes on it, instead?’
‘I don’t have any shoes. Why s!aa%k would I put shoes on a hatstand?’
‘Why put hats on a hatstand?’
‘What vv%ay are you talking about?!’ Doldrum frantically looked for something to throttle but GOLGO was both agile and only somewhat existing.
‘And why do firmamentologists beat the hell out of each other in car parks about the shape of the webwork? Why don’t they put their shoes on their hatstands before they fight each other? Hee-hee! It would have saved Brontworth-On-Woods from having their eye put out by Second-Holson’s heel!’
Doldrum battered a polygon. It spun like it was on a wooden peg. GOLGO giggled and wavered.
‘I’m a conceptoform, you know–’
‘I know,’ grunted Doldrum, headbutting a nearby square.
‘I technically exist on every compression that has thought. Or at least, the kind of thought that can think of me. I know exactly what the whole webwork looks like.’
‘What’s it look like?’ asked Doldrum, considering biting into a nearby rectangle.
GOLGO’s smile widened. Doldrum grimaced deeper.
‘Nothing.’
Doldrum felt a flooding wave of tiredness resurge within them, felt their joints clack and clap, weigh down. ‘Nothing?’
‘Hee-hee. Absolutely nothing. Piss all. Hee-hee. It just looks like a bunch of lights and a few gas clouds. But they beat the hell out of each other over it. Hee-hee.’
Doldrum sank into the couch and gazed at the lamp above. And the crickets sung around them, and fuzzy orange light made blaring dancing shadows spin around the room, cast strange shapes against raggedy furniture. Doldrum heard a frog outside the door.
Doldrum giggled.
‘Vv*tlt. Did you say a quadruple DDT?’
‘Hee-hee. It was immense. Especially considering KULK only has two torsos.’
Doldrum felt a maddening, flitting laughter skittering inside them like a noxious bug. They clasped themself, chuckled hoarsely. They covered their own mouth and looked upwards. Doldrum giggled like a damn idiot.
‘We should put on footage of it,’ GOLGO giggled.
‘Yeah. Yeah–yeah,’ Doldrum agreed, scrabbling for the remote.
There are implications about the nature of fate and predestination to be had about the fact that Doldrum Ophinnias and GOLGO never did get to watching their series that night, in fact spending nearly the entire time chuckling stupidly at unfit scholars pounding each other hopelessly into concrete while being cheered on by drunken interns and family members. It was the exact kind of thing that GOLGO would completely ignore and that Doldrum would remain mentally, philosophically tortured about for hours on end.
At least for the night, though, Doldrum didn’t think about it at all.
Meat Girls Dot Org 