The Symphony
of the Physics Police
Chapter
Four: The Futurama is NOW!
Flash.
Bang, boom!
And suddenly, the entire world was spinning, end over end, escaping that reality in a last ditch effort to avoid annihilation. All because of that child Wally West. All because of the Flash.
To think, the great Brainiac defeated by a child—he would not allow it! And that is why he had fled, using what energy he could muster to send a part of himself into another universe. Or had that energy come from the fists of the one moving at the speed of light? No matter.
He was here now, and he had to move on. Earth was Earth, after all, whenever and whatever dimension it was in.
Where he had ended up was rather odd. It looked vaguely like New York City, but it had far greater level of technology than Earth cities possessed. And he could tell that with nothing more than sensors. The nanomachines throughout his being slowly but surely built an eye. He could look around now, and saw that he had arrived near a body of water, a bay, it seemed to be, and on the other side of his landing site was the rear end of a red building..
Brainiac knew he wouldn't have much of a chance just lying there, but he couldn't do anything just yet, so he turned on his vast mind and began to think, while his nanomachines began to build him a method of transportation.
Then, the door on the red building burst open, and a metallic automaton, a humanoid, walked out.
"Ugh. They make me so mad some times!" complained Bender, grabbing a beer from his innards and chugging it. "Going off to one of Farnsworth's demonstrations and leaving me here without Fry and bored out of my wasted mind." Bender chugged another beer, and lit a cigar, and then began to skip rocks he had removed from his chest cavity, trying to hit the pelicans in the bay for fun. "Hah! Two points!"
So focused was the drunken robot, that he did not notice the small, spider-like creature behind him until it was two inches from his foot. Bender whirled around, and saw the small spider android that Brainiac had become. He would have arched an eyebrow if he had them.
"Who are you?" he said. "Do you want to share a beer? Well HAH! You can't. These here are all mine!" Bender thumped his chest with his hand, and a hollow metallic ding reached Brainiac's audio receptors.
"Interesting," Brainiac said. "A robot that consumes intoxicating substances. I will have to study this technology from the inside out, and remove the worthless applications. Then I can turn the practicalities of organic fuel to other uses."
"What?" Bender said. "Hey, I don't eat food. I just drink beer for the buzz!" He took another puff on his cigar. "What can I do ya for? Seriously, hurry up. Spit it out; I want to go back to killing pelicans."
"I require… your body!" Braniac said, menacingly, though to all the wrong effects.
" NO!" Bender blurted, backing up. "I ain't THAT kind of robot, you pervert!"
Brainiac did not answer, but moved closer, and suddenly, a thought occurred to Bender…. He was tiny! Why should Bender be afraid of a little spider-drone, even if it did talk in a creepy voice…
"You think you can take me, little man?" Bender said, moving into a 'fighting' stance, and pumping his fists. "Bring it on."
Brainiac leapt towards Bender, but was snatched out of the air by Bender's hand. "Ha! You're lame!"
"Please. Put me down you interfere with my mission."
"I could probably make some good money off of you," Bender said gleefully. "After I finish with the pelicans, you and I have a date to the pawnshop!" With that, Bender opened his chest cavity one last time and stuck Brainiac inside…
Big mistake…
Immediately, Brainiac sent out his nanobots, and clawed upward into Bender's head, interfacing with his neural network and overriding his program.
"If you think you're going to override me, then you can kiss my shiny metal AAAUGHUGH!"
The robot began to twitch uncontrollably, spasming in place as the two personas warred inside him. The machine staggered backwards, smashing through the door of the Planet Express building and tore through the lower floors, finally collapsing on the ground in the kitchen…
oooo
Space itself tore open high above New New York, and Bob and Joe burst through the barrier between realities. It was just as Bob had imagined!
"I can't believe it! We're really in New New York!"
"You've seen Taris and find this amazing?"
"That city planet was nice, but I never really got into Knights of the Old Republic. THIS on the other hand… it's like stepping into a fantasy."
"You do realize that this place isn't that great, right?" Joe grabbed Bob by the far shoulder and spun him around to look him in the eye. "Didn't you watch the show? Suicide booths, murder casually discussed, heads of dead people as president? Pay attention. Things make SEEM cool on the show, movie, book, whatever. But when you're actually here, in the thick of it, there are times where it's anything but fun."
Bob thought it over for a moment, and nodded. "I guess if Darth Vader was there, I wouldn't have enjoyed being in Star Wars so much."
"If Darth Vader were there, you'd be dead. Now let's go. We have a job to do and I want to get back in time to watch LOST."
Bob rolled his eyes at Joe's network TV obsessions, but blasted downwards after him anyway, drawing on his ghost powers for most of his propulsion.
By the time the two physics police got to the site of the disturbance, which just so happened to be the Planet Express building, whatever had arrived was long gone, and had apparently taken Bender with. The evidence, including residual tachyon in the atmosphere as well as a Bender shaped hole in several of the walls of the building, lent to the theory that what ever it was had attacked Bender at close range, perhaps even from the inside out.
Based on the way the debris had fallen, Joe had determined that Bender had entered through the broken back door and exited through the wall in the front room after a struggle in the kitchen. Where he had gone was anyone's guess.
"We have no leads. I can't find anything to tell us where the rest of the Express crew is. All of Farnsworth's technology is gone." Joe leaned against a wall.
Bob sighed, and went into the kitchen. He pulled out his communicator and started to contact Sam, when he realized that there was a note lying on the counter. He picked it up and read:
Bender,
Went to Farnsworth's new technology demonstration at pier 41. Be back soon. Not that I wanted to go, of course, but Leela promised she'd take me to see Charlie's Angels LXVII if I helped out.
-Fry.
Well, that was easy. Sometimes Bob wondered if it was Joe's eyesight or his cynicism that made him so blind to the obvious.
"Hey, Joe," Bob said, returning to the front room. "I found this note."
"What? Let me see." Joe took the note and read it. "Where did you find this?"
"On what was left of the kitchen counter," Bob said. "You really ought to be more thorough."
Joe glared at him, but then got serious. "Come on. Bender probably went there if he'd read the note."
Joe and Bob blasted out of the hole Bender had made in the wall, and then blazed towards pier 41 on the opposite side of the city, dodging flying cars and billboards as the went. Bob mused that everything looked very accurate, which said a lot about the society that Futurama depicted. It was so strange to think that so much of what he used to consider comedy was actually happening to all these people…
Man, he hated it when life threw him a sucker punch like that. He LIKED laughing at their pain! How could he ever find Futurama funny again knowing that real people lived that way?
On second thought, what the heck. It's not like they were HIS people to worry about.
….Were they?
oooo
Bob would have worried more if he had known what exactly it was that Farnsworth was demonstrating that night at the otherwise abandoned warehouse on the pier.
"Man," said Fry, "this is original. An abandoned warehouse on a pier. Never heard that one before." His sarcasm was almost, but not quite, obvious.
"Just be thankful that Chaltab is treating us as disrespectfully as we're treated in the show itself," said Leela, her eye looking rather dull. "He could be writing another bad romance between us, or sending me a one-eyed Gary Stu boyfriend,"
"I never thought of that," said Fry.
"Attention, Attention!" came the voice of Professor Farnsworth as he stepped out from behind his machines. "I am ready to start my experiment now. Zoidberg, the sheets, please."
The crablike alien complied, removing the sheets that covered Farnsworth's computer, and the enormous one along the wall. What was on the other side was like a Stargate, a massive circle with conduits of something or another running into it.
It was revealed to some enthusiastic oohs and ahhs from Fry, Zoidberg and Amy, but Leela's and Hermes' reactions were a bit more cynical. "That's it?" Hermes said. "Just another instantaneous matter transmitter. That is so 24th century, doctor."
"Oh, no," said Farnsworth. "This is not any mere portal generator. I attest to you today that his device will break down the Fourth Wall itself!"
"But we can do that with our words," Fry said. "I just did like two minutes ago."
"Yes Fry, but it would take someone far stupider than even you to tear it all down that way. It would take a million idiots led by someone who makes you look like Thomas Einstein. This way is much more efficient."
"How does it work?" Leela asked. "All your old theories about the fourth wall proved to be completely ridiculous."
"If I told you how it worked, I'd have to write you out of the show!" Farnsworth said, and then started laughing. "Oh, sorry. A little fourth wall humor there. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how it works. Leonardo Di Vinci's head did most of the designing; I just built the thing."
"Well," Leela admitted, "if a genius like Di Vinci's head designed it, then nothing could possibly go wrong."
Something went wrong anyway. Just that moment, the doors at the back of the warehouse burst open, and in dashed Bender… but something about him was different.
Very different. For one, his head was now encased in a smooth shell, and wires and metallic braces laced his body, and on his new head casing, there was a symbol of some sorts. It was made of three triangles, two spaced evenly from the center of Bender's head, and one below it, with a line from both lateral circles down to the bottom one, so that it made a 'v' shape.
"This assembly is terminated," he said. "Allow me access to this device you have constructed, and no harm will come to you."
"Over my dead body!" blurted Farnsworth.
"As you wish," said neo-Bender. He reached into his chest cavity, which now had a automatically sliding panel, and removed a plasma rifle.
"No!" Farnsworth dived behind the computer, even as Bender shot at him, and the beam continued until it slammed into that terminal. The computer melted, but the energy of the rifle somehow tripped the activation mechanism…
The portal turned on!
"Soon the entire multiverse will be mine," 'Bender' said, leaping onto the ramp that led into the portal. Tiny nano machines leaked out from all-over his metallic body. "Antiquing your form of existence—this is my new purpose." And with that, the nanomachines returned to Bender's body, and he disappeared through the portal.
"Bender!" Fry ran towards the portal, but in a sudden flash, it closed, and then collapsed.
"Jumping Jack-o-Lanterns!" exclaimed Hermes. "What in de' blue blanket of death was DAT?"
"Whatever it was," Leela said, "it wasn't Bender."
"How can you be sure? He's been known to do crazy random homicidal things before," Fry said.
"But 'antiquing' is Bender's least used word. He would never talk that way, even if he had inexplicably become an evil genius despotic genius. Not that he wasn't the first two already."
"Good point," Fry answered. "I wonder what he meant by 'multiverse'…"
oooo
Not five minutes later, Bob and Joe finally found the warehouse and dashed in, just as the Planet Express crew was beginning to leave.
"Excuse me," Leela said, "but the demonstration has been cancelled."
"We're not here for the demonstration," said Joe. "We're with the Physics Police."
This seemed to alarm the professor. "Whatever it was, it wasn't me this time!"
"Sir," Bob tried, "you must understand—"
"I already paid the fines! Now please leave me in peace!"
"Professor, do you know these people?" Leela inquired.
"Um, no! Of course not. Never met them in my life," Farnsworth lied.
"Er…" Bob didn't know what to say.
"Farnsworth here has been in trouble for violating interdimensional boundaries for several times in the past with that What If machine of his," Joe explained. "But we're not here for him tonight." Joe held out a half-smoked cigar. "You do know who this belongs to, correct?"
"That's one of Bender's cigars!" Fry blurted. "I know, because it has his initials on it." Fry pointed to the band around the cigar, which read BBR.
"Have you seen Bender lately?"
"Yes," said Leela. "He just came through here five minutes ago saying something about taking over the multiverse, but I don't think it was Bender. I think something was controlling him."
"You think right," Joe said. "We have reason to believe a malicious computer virus from another dimension has somehow taken over his body and the pathetic mess of code he called a mind."
Leela nodded, and then described the symbol on Bender's new head to Joe. And suddenly, Joe was worried. "This isn't good."
"That symbol sounds familiar," Bob agreed. "I take it you know—"
"Brainiac!" Joe blurted. "I should have known. He's secretly behind every thing bad that happens ever. He's the master-mind."
"Brainiac? The Superman villain?" Bob asked.
"By the description of the symbol, I'd say so. Specifically the version of Brainiac from PD-BT-33DM-DCA… The Detective Comics Animated Universe."
"Is that bad?"
"Bob, don't you pay attention? That version of Brainiac is powered by nanotechnology and CANNOT be destroyed unless every last piece of him is vaporized. This mission may be beyond us." Joe turned back to Leela. "Where did Bender go?"
"He attacked my computer and escaped through the portal," Farnsworth complained. "Then he broke that too!"
Joe glanced over, finally realizing that the heap of rubble on the far side of the room was. "Some sort of Stargate…" he ventured. He turned to Farnsworth, suddenly intense. "Where does it lead?"
"Uh…. I er..!" Farnsworth stammered.
"ANSWER ME!" Joe let his ki flare, causing Farnsworth to back away.
Leela leaped to attack Joe, and Bob found himself forced to restrain her.
"Tell me where it leads," Joe repeated tersely, using what little telepathy he knew to pressure Farnsworth's mind.
"It is a portal to the other side of the forth wall!" Farnsworth blurted. Joe stepped back, and Farnsworth fell to the ground and pretended to cry. Or at least it sounded like he was pretending…
"This is bad," said Joe. "His darned law-breaking has let one of the most dangerous things in creation out into the multiverse at large."
Bob let go of Leela, who kicked him in the shin. Bob fought back for a bit, until Joe used the Vulcan nerve pinch on her and she passed out.
"What should we do?"
"We need to get back. We have to find out where he went, and stop him."
oooo
Back at the Physics Police HQ, Joe and Bob worked with Sam in a monitor room, reviewing tapes of interdimensional activity. The lines on the screens each represented timelines of different universes.
"Here," Sam said. "Look at this."
He pressed a button, and a blue line slid across the stage, then snapped back like an elastic band, but a thinner blue line, like a shadow of the first one, snapped back slower, slipping into the area of another line, a red one. Where they overlapped, there was a light purple.
"And this is supposed to show me what?" Bob asked.
"This point in time here coincides with the battle against Brainiac as seen in the Season Four finale of Justice League Unlimited."
"And," Joe picked up, "right as the Flash delivered the last blow to Brainiac, the first and second dimensions of the Futurama universe overlapped the third of the JLU Universe, somehow allowing Brainiac—probably supercharged by Speed Force energy—to slide out of his world and into New New York."
"I see," Bob said, though he didn't. "What about when he left? Can't you track him? I thought this computer monitored all inter-universal travel."
"It does," Sam said, "But whoever designed this machine was a genius on par with the Founder Race, because it left a slice so clean our sensors thought it was an official portal."
Joe gasped. "If Brainiac dissected that portal, then he can do that too! He can be and go anywhere, and the computer can't track it."
"I could recalibrate the sensors to detect only portals opened by the Physics Police, but…"
"But?" asked Joe.
Sam sighed. "There are so many of them, it would still being like searching for a needle in a haystack. Only with less hay."
Suddenly, an alarm started buzzing, and a new sub-window popped up, on the computer, an icon of a clock ticking fifteen minutes forward and suddenly jumping back with a jerk appeared.
"Groundhog Day?" Bob asked, apparently realizing that the icon indicated a temporal loop.
"Yeah, Groundhog Day. On Namek… It seems that a Dragon Ball Z universe was caught in a time loop on Christmas Eve 762 AD—the day Goku defeated Frieza."
"The day who defeated what?" Bob asked…
"Never mind. Let's just go find out what is causing it and fix it. Samir, my friend, open us a portal, and make sure the guys don't start the funeral I had planned for Alias until I get back."
"Will do, Joe," replied Sam. "Good luck."
And with that, the two Police stepped into the teleporter and where beamed away to the planet Name.
And found more than a temporal loop awaiting them….