Chapter 3: The Puppet Blaster

T minus seven seconds

"Puppet bridge initialized! T minus seven seconds before transmission goes live." Slippy reported with gusto, a determined look piercing through the tension to Fox's face. The face returned the look in kind before its mouth uttered Fox's catchphrase.

"Let's rock and roll!" True to his word, Fox rocked his boot on its heel and flipped the tile beneath his command console up and out of the way before rolling forward out of his chair and plunging his head down through the hole.

Meanwhile, Slippy pulled a pair of visi-goggles from their drawer beneath his console's keyboard and strapped them over his gently protruding eye stalks. He toggled the power switch on the left goggle from "off" to "on" using a webbed finger on his left hand, before just as adeptly using another finger on the opposite hand to similarly switch on the second, corresponding goggle. Soon, both fingers were being utilized in service of gripping two control devices in coordination with three additional digits per finger. Headphones connected to the goggles snapped down over Slippy's tympanic membranes, sealing against his moist skin, blocking out all distractions.

T minus six seconds.

"Patching into AI puppet interface," announced the toad, patching into the AI puppet interface. From the outside of the visi-goggles, Slippy appeared like a battle-ready motorcyclist, eyes hidden by mirrored lenses, fists clenched around complicated detachable handlebars. From inside, however, Slippy could not see himself. His right eye's point of view was that of the visi-cam in the puppet bridge below. His left eye's point of view was that of a virtual visi-cam programmed to match the position of the first visi-cam in simulated 3D space, wherein the digital versions of the heads of Team Star Fox floated, matching the position and rotation of their puppet counterparts thanks to a complex algorithm. The movement of the controllers in his hand were translated to 3D models of blasters hovering in the virtual air in front of him. Inside Slippy's powerful brain, both images were superimposed into one.

Slippy always felt more at home inside the virtual world of his eye-mounted computer system, and he immediately felt his confidence reach peak levels, as confirmed by a meter on his HUD display. The idea of "aim and shoot" when he had to use a blaster in real life never gelled with his high-minded sensibilities, and he always preferred to think about it in terms of "point and click"ing an enemy to death. In the computer, where pointing and clicking was the order of the day, his accuracy was far greater, despite the methodology being essentially identical to that of firing a blaster.

A notification slid down from the top of his HUD display, letting him know he had entered a flow state. He switched his right blaster mouse to "click," and aimed squarely at the digital, wireframe head of his deceased friend and mentor, Peppy Hare. A pull of the trigger summoned a menu floating in 3D space to the right of his target, and the virtual-gun-toting amphibian scanned the list of commands for the "delete" function. Five entries down, he found his target, and a smirk sprouted wide on his lips.

As he switched his left mouse blaster to "click," the digital Peppy became more lifelike before his eyes, loading in textures and additional polygons, and suddenly the frog was faced with a visage realistic enough to take him aback. A red notification entered his vision: "Flow state unstable."

"Woah," the toad expelled from his gasping mouth, "it's like he's come back to life before my very eyes!" He hesitated for just a moment, his left mouse blaster aimed at the "delete" command, before shaking the shock from his mind like an Etch-A-Sketch Electro-tablet, another of his inventions.

Just as Slippy pulled the trigger of his left mouse blaster, he saw Fox's supine form emerge from the ceiling above Fox's puppet counterpart, staunchly gripping the edges of the hole with his strong and supple haunches, taking a potshot at the strings above the rabbit puppet. Before the frog's click could connect with its target, the head of Peppy's puppet form fell to one side, its bisected string burning like a fuse. The menu moved sharply to the left to match the head's movement before disappearing as the click landed outside its window.

Now the features on Peppy's digital face were moving, its pupils drifting around and its nose twitching as it loaded a suite of procedural animations. A tremor slid up Slippy's back at the sight of his old friend seemingly assessing its surroundings visually and olfactorially. "This is all too much!" He cried. "I can't point and click my own friend and mentor to death!"

T minus five seconds.

SPEW!

The harsh zapping sound of another blaster shot was inaudible to Slippy, but the sound was seared into his mind by countless firefights, and was so closely associated with the sight of laser beams that he may as well have heard it. The recollected sound was immediately followed by the Peppy puppet's right arm slumping off its armrest, and the torso of the marionette twisted forward. The head swung downward, but the digital eyes turned outward, straining against the edges of their sockets to point towards Slippy. Peppy's AI had initialized and was attempting to keep focus on the visi-cam. A flashing red notification read: "Flow state annihilated! Emotional recalibration required!"

Slippy shook his head in horror, causing the visi-cam on the puppet bridge to pivot in time. "D-don't look at me like that!" he stammered. "Y-you're gone!" A shaky hand slick with nervous mucus aimed the right mouse blaster towards the Peppy puppet's gently swinging head and fired, summoning the menu once again. Before the amphibious administrator could properly take aim at the "delete" command, his tympanic membranes resonated with the eerily familiar sound of a certain folksy voice.

"I reckon I'm in a bad way, Slip'," it said, procedurally. As if by dumb animal instinct, the frog's head turned to face the rabbit puppet, making eye contact momentarily before glancing away uncomfortably. "Seems the old back's given out, and my right arm ain't restin' like it used ta'."

T minus four seconds.

Beneath his goggles, the frazzled frog blinked his eyes hard down through his skull, causing him to gulp in surprise. The AI speech algorithm was fully operational now, and the sound of Peppy's simulated dialogue gave Slippy a tense feeling in his glottis and made all three of his heart's chambers pound.

"Wh-what am I supposed to do about that? Y-y-you're dead!" His old stutter from his college days broke through in his panic. "E-even if I could bring you back, it w-w-w, it wouldn't be right! I-I could never play god like that, Peppy! Tha-tha th-that wouldn't be scientific! You of all chordates sh-should understand that!"

Slippy had responded without thinking. He knew the words the AI was speaking were not extemporaneous, but rather rehashed dialogue from a database of Peppy's actual dialogue through the years. He even remembered the original context of the sentence, when the grizzled old hare had given a light-hearted speech at his fiftieth birthday, griping gently about his creeping scoliosis and worsening restless arm syndrome.

And Slippy of course knew that the AI Peppy wasn't talking to him, nor could it hear his replies. After all, he was viewing the scene through a visi-feed from the floor above, and the AI Peppy's eyes were only fixed on him because its programming dictated it keep eye contact with whoever was on the other side of the visi-call once the transmission went live.

Slippy realized his error when he noticed the inverted ears of Fox twitch, their parent head tilting upward to listen, having heard Slippy's muffled outburst up on the Great Fox's real bridge.

T minus three seconds.

Fox barked something inaudible upwards through the hole, then turned to face the visi-cam. There were no microphones on the puppet bridge, as there was no need for them. The audio routed to the phony visi-call was from the digital AI interface that simulated the team's speech. As team leader, Fox was well aware of this, and didn't bother to attempt speaking to Slippy through the visi-cam. Instead, he simply gave off a typically contagious air of stoic duty towards the tilted toad. His focused eyes, de-elevated brow, and taught muzzle seemed to reiterate the task at hand: delete Peppy's AI. As if vaccinated against the transmission of the stoicism, however, Slippy's hyperactivated nervous system fought off the sentiment with relative ease.

"Peppy! AHHHaAHHH!" It sounded like Fox's voice, but filled with genuine concern that defied the calm intensity and motionless mouth endemic to the real Fox's face. "Slippy! Do whatever it takes to protect– Peppy! Could you hurry? Can anyone take care of it?!"

It took just a drop of the chin for the conflicted computer ace to take in the truth of the situation. It was not the real flesh, blood, and fur version of his orange commander that was speaking, but the AI counterpart; it was reacting to the Peppy AI's apparent emergency in characteristically heroic fashion.

T minus two seconds.

Then, another voice, determined and empathetic if a bit feminine, was heard in Slippy's left membrane. It was his own.

"Let me handle it! I'll analyze right away! Are you OK– Peppy?" The Slippy AI was sharp and responsive, eager to generate dialogue in support of his wounded teammate. Unlike his counterpart, the real Slippy was frozen for survival like his Alaskan wood relatives, alive but unable to act until the merciful thaw of the springtime that was the conflict's eventual resolution.

As if to beat the frozen frog over the head with the contrast between them, the Slippy puppet began to move, hands flapping up and down, dutifully typing away at his command console as the AI said, "don't worry, Slippy's here! This should replenish your shields a bit!" The puppeteering execution matrix had powered up, and the bridge was suddenly alive with the full animation of the Star Fox crew, save for Peppy, who could only flail his left arm and legs in the system's best approximation of panic.

SPEW!

The arm dropped as another of Fox's blaster's laser's heat burned up its control string.

All three chambers of Slippy's heart broke right there. Even though the puppeteering matrix was the final system to come online, signaling to him that any moment now the visi-call would be going live, Slippy could not shake his shock…

T minus one second.

…Until another voice pierced his mind, sounding much closer than any others had previously, like a close whisper from an intimate partner.

"Come on, Slippy, old bean! I can sense your distress! You're in a real sticky wicket, but… keep a stiff upper lip!" It was Krystal, but not the AI; it was the real Krystal, speaking directly to Slippy's brain using the telepathic powers she was occasionally able to use when psychic energies were strong, and Slippy's psychic energy was reaching a critical point. By virtue of the message's direct transmission into his mind, the impression of many sentences were conveyed to him in only fractions of a second. "You must delete Peppy's AI! It's the only way, it is! It won't do a lick of good trying to play god. Slip, you simply MUST put his memory to rest, or you'll never feel fully chuffed again. Even though he's shifted into a new flat in the great beyond…" A temporally insignificant pause. "...We'll always keep him alive in our memory. For the good of Peppy, please… keep calm and carry on!"

In the wake of Krystal's stirring non-words, another notification on Slippy's HUD display: "Flow state stabilized."

"Krystal's right," Slippy muttered. "I can always keep him alive in my memory." Mucus dripping from his cold hands, and with mere microseconds to spare, Slippy aimed his left and right blaster mice at the Peppy puppet's form, folded over, feet clattering frantically against the brushed steel floor. "For the good of Peppy…" A blast from his right hand brought up the familiar menu, and his left was already perfectly aimed at the "delete" option. "Keep calm…" He hesitated for just a split second before adjusting his aim a fraction of a centimeter, and fired. "...And carry on."

Peppy's digital head disappeared at the exact moment that the puppet's final two strings were severed in one expertly-aimed shot from Fox with a final SPEW!

The puppet tumbled unceremoniously to the floor, successfully copying the position of the late hare's real motionless body. Fox curled his body up into the ceiling, and Slippy's vision cut to static as the Great Fox rerouted the visi-feed to their outbound telecommunications array and out to Star Horse's inbound ones.

Before Slippy shakily removed his visi-goggles, he hazily acknowledged a notification sliding down into his vision: "File 'Pepp. io' successfully cut to clipboard. 49.3 TB of system memory remaining."