Muffy heard a noise behind her and looked around. The fireplace door slammed shut - Kinky was gone! She was alone in the passageway. Suddenly the bare bulb in the passage flickered, then went out completely. Absolute and total darkness.
Gosh, thought Muffy, what a pickle!
"Kinky!" she called out. "Where are you? Somebody help me!"
As if in answer to her cry, the light came back on. It seemed brighter than before. The sudden glare of it was too much for Muffy, and she squinted, shielding her eyes with her hands.
The three doorways were still there in front of her, yet they were somehow different. Two of them were much larger than before. Richly colored, with bright, seductive messages all over them, they just begged to be clicked on.
"Oooh!" said Muffy. "I know what this is! These aren't doorways anymore – they're portals! Gateways to a magical new world of interactive excitement and profits beyond belief! Mmmmmm, portals!"
The very word made her feel better, and she repeated it to herself several times. For a moment she thought of her time at the brokerage, and all those arguments she used to have over the absurd valuations of the "internuts", as they had called them.
"I wonder how Kinky did this," she said. "Should be good for an extra few billion in market cap if he can survive the current market uncertainties."
Muffy looked closer at the intoxicating, ethereal glow of the first portal. Yaheee! it read.
"Sounds like fun. What else do we have?"
The next one was not so promising: Raging Bull Sports Porno Stock Chat.
"Euuuuwwwww, no thanks," thought Muffy.
The third and final portal was more austere, a massive ancient-looking wooden entrance that said simply e-Chartres.
"What's up with that?" thought Muffy.
Muffy clicked on the link and went through the doorway. A booming voice said, "Welcome to e-Chartres, the first great medieval French cathedral in cyberspace, a glorious yet almost useless relic of another age, a monument to gothic verbosity, a massive structure of flying buttresses, over-vaulting ambition and pointless posting pedantry."
Muffy walked open mouthed up the aisle, her neck craned upwards as she drank in the richness of the virtual stained glass and anatomically correct sculptures. Then she stubbed her toe on a long and quite boring post that some careless person had left on the floor.
"Ow," said Muffy, and sat down on a pew so she could yawn and rub her eyes. She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder. Looking up, she saw an older man in a thick tweed suit, with a shock of white hair. Your basic mad scientist, she thought.
"At last, my dear Muffy! So glad you could come, I've been expecting you, you know. Now, where was it you wanted to go? I can take you anywhere, you know."
"Greenwich Village," said Muffy. "But who are you? And how do you know who I am?"
"Charters is the name, diggin' in dirt's my game. This is my little web site. Like it? Anyway, come with me..." and he grabbed Muffy's arm and dragged her off towards a door in the West facade of the great cathedral.
As they walked, Charters started telling her the story of his childhood. Apparently he was a member of a race of Ethiopian Mayans, or E-Mayans, descended from a small group of brave explorers who had set out westward towards Africa around 4500BC from what is now Mexico, and who had settled in relative obscurity in the nicer suburbs of Addis Ababa, where they kept themselves pretty much to themselves, building monumental stone temples, quietly worshipping their alien deities and sacrificing teenage girls.
Charters was a young man when the Second World War broke out. He and the rest of his tribe old enough for military service had joined the fight against fascism on their own continent by enlisting in the British General Montgomery's Eighth Army, the "Desert Rats". Their construction and excavation skills earned the E-Mayans the nickname "Dirt Diggers", and Charters personally convinced Montgomery to let them build a series of massive sand traps intended to disable and destroy Rommel's crack Panzer tank brigades. However, a swift attack by Axis forces at the desert battle of El-Farakahn had left the "Dirt Diggers" outflanked and unprotected, and they were all captured by a squadron of Russian "Sand Cossacks" without a shot being fired.
Deported to a prison camp near Yakutsk, the E-Mayans' civil engineering skills were rewarded by their forced participation in a top secret Soviet project, a tunnel dug deep under the Bering Straits in order to attack and destroy the huge fish meal plant in Anchorage so vital to the Allies' war effort. The E-Mayans' enthusiasm far surpassed their subterranean navigation skills, and their tunnel finally broke to the surface a little to the East of Saskatoon, Canada in October, 1951.
Learning from the surprised locals that the war was over, many of the E-Mayans chose to return to the warmer climate of their Ethiopian homeland, but Charters decided to stick it out in the Great White North, and devote himself to a life of science and discovery. After inventing the juke-box, frozen chicken nuggets and the HP-11 hand-held calculator, he turned his massive intellect to the deeper enigmas of time and space. His studies of time, and his discovery that the advance of time was dependent on only a very small subset of the vast number of molecules in the universe, had led him to the creation of a device for displacing a person along one or more dimensions of the space-time continuum.
At this point in his narrative, Charters stopped before a two-car garage built into the outside wall of the cyber cathedral..
"This is it, my dear, something many men have dreamed of, but I, EEEE Charters, am the first to build! Behold!"
He flung open the doors to reveal a sleek low-slung sports car with a brushed aluminum finish. Muffy looked at the car and had the vague feeling she had seen something like this before.
The gull-wing doors were open, and Charters lowered himself into the bucket seat on the driver's side.
"Get in, honey, we're going for a ride. Greenwich, you wanted, eh? Do you care particularly about the when side of the equation?"
"Um, no..." said Muffy as she slid into the car gracefully. "This is safe, isn't it? I mean, you do know how to drive this thing?"
"This is her maiden voyage, my dear, but fear not! I have read all the literature most thoroughly, and even watched something called a NASCAR on the television last week. I have supreme confidence in my own abilities."
Charters quickly tapped at a few keys on one of the many dashboard instruments, pushed a lever towards a setting that read "maximum velocity", and turned to Muffy with the smile of a little boy about to use his most wished-for Christmas present for the first time.
"Buckle up and clench that sphincter, baby, it's time to oscillate!"
An unbearable noise and a blinding light ensued. Muffy shut her eyes and was overcome by wave after wave of nausea as the DeLorean hurtled into a spinning molecular vortex. At long last the g-forces subsided, and the noise abated somewhat. Muffy thought she could hear the sound of police sirens. She dared to open her eyes. The vehicle was on some kind of divided highway, and they were proceeding at a speed that approached the limits of what Muffy thought was possible with an internal combustion engine. From his rapid lane changes and lack of concern for other road users, it was quite apparent to Muffy that Charters had little or no driving experience.
"Ha! Guess I showed them! Man, what a rush!" yelled Charters, as a deft turn of the steering wheel on his part caused two pursuing police cruisers to collide and spin out of control on the highway behind them. Charters looked over his shoulder in triumph, and a collision with a tanker truck in the right lane was only avoided by a quick tug on the steering wheel by Muffy.
"What are you doing?" she screamed. "Where are we? I thought we were going to Greenwich Village. This looks like the freakin' New England Thruway at rush hour and you're driving like a madman!"
Overhead, helicopters from the local TV stations and Fox's "World's Deadliest Car Chases IV" jostled to get the best view of the speeding silver vehicle.
"Hey, look, we're there already!" said Charters. "Welcome to Greenwich," he read, as he cut a perpendicular angle across two lanes of traffic and towards the exit. Muffy was shaking as Charters brought the car to a screaming halt at the bottom of the ramp.
"This is Greenwich, CONNECTICUT, you idiot, not Greenwich village. This is just some overpriced dump full of stuffed-shirt rich people. I want the Bohemian beat-generation charm of the Village, where everyone's an artist, everyone's a poet, where love and freedom are free to..."
Muffy's voice trailed off as she became more aware of the landscape outside the car. This was no sheltered enclave of nouveau-riche bond traders. Abandoned buildings were on all sides, grass and weeds grew through the broken pavement, newspapers and fast-food wrappers blew across the sidewalks, which were strewn with broken glass. In a ditch by the side of the road was the burned-out rusting hulk of a Zabar's delivery truck.
"Geez, Charters, I don't like this. Let's get back on the highway. Go under the bridge here, there's probably an on-ramp on the other side."
Charters slowly drove under the bridge, but there seemed to be no access to the highway. This is a baaad neighborhood, thought Muffy. Gang insignia were painted everywhere. She recognized those of the Bloods and Crips from her days at the brokerage house, when both factions had tried to recruit the staff, and still remembered fondly the disappointed looks on their little gang faces when they were told of the staff's decision to go instead with Teamsters Local 141. But covering many of the old gang signs was a new, larger sign that Muffy had never seen before, and it sent a chill up and down her spine. In surreal lettering of silver edged in black, it said "KGHFP - Killa Gangsta Hedge Fund Posse."
"Looks like we have company," says Charters. Muffy turns and sees that two bulky figures in black leather jackets have appeared by the driver's door. They are wearing shades, black baseball caps (peak backwards in the urban style), and carry 9 mm automatic weapons. The taller of the two motions with the gun for Charters to lower his window, and leans down to within a couple of inches of his face. She speaks.
"Shee-yeet. Wha y'all be hangin yo white asses in this hood fo? Tell you some bad muthas comin down sho nuff, fade yo ass. Juss like him done to dat Greenspang gang, bro. Shee-yeet, take more'n no tree billion gone bail us out! Word up. You bess turn yo honky ass ride aroun an git outa here."
Charters grins like a smitten schoolboy.
"My dear lady, thank you so much for your kind offer. I must confess to an enduring fantasy involving a heavily-armed woman of color such as yourself. I, ah, don't have a lot of cash on my person, but I'm sure we could come to some arrangement with my American Express card. Do you have a place nearby? I'm afraid I must insist that we have clean sheets, just a personal quirk of mine, but otherwise..."
Muffy grabs his shoulder and pushes him back into his seat.
"Let me handle this, you moron," she hisses, then turns and glares at the gun toting woman.
"Was'sup sistah. We done be chilln wid no punk-ass mofo Greenspang. You ain hear no In-national Monetary Fun yit, y'all be hearn soon nuf, git yo sorry ass outta all dis levridge n bad sheet you in, iffn you like it or not."
Just then the sound of squealing tires is heard, and around the corner pulls... |
