For that matter, what motivated fans of reruns of canceled sci-fi TV shows to memorize massive amounts of information about complex political intrigues between planetary empires, study how long it took to go through officer’s training for the Astral Fleet, or to learn completely artificial alien languages like Gagme, but not want to touch the required readings necessary to pass the CPA exam? Why could geeks who spent years in their parents’ basements hoarding comic books in plastic bags argue for hours over the discrepancies between issue #67 and #68 of Galactic Gal and Millipede Willie, when Jonas the Black-Hole Sniffing Dog inexplicably changed costumes, but couldn’t tell you who their congressman was, or how many justices sat on the Supreme Court? For that matter, why did aficionados gather every year to argue the arcane intricacies of the Topham-Shipley Meteoric Family Tree, but put no effort in solving the population explosion, or world hunger?
What, in short, caused people to waste massive amounts of time convincing themselves of the reality of complete make-believe, especially when there was never the possibility of ever visiting those realities, and exhibit such blatant disregard for the one they were stuck in?
It occurred to me that such people—the extreme cases, certainly, if not the casual consumer of entertainment—felt they actually belonged in another reality, much like Tempy felt that he belonged in a differently-gendered body than the one he was born in. These were souls, in other words, who were out of place.
I never felt such severe displacement, although I never had the best body image. I never felt the desire to escape to other realities—although I could enjoy a campy comic book, schlocky TV show, and trashy paperback novel every once in a while. But I never wanted to actually visit those places.
Yet here I was, in the Forbidden Future…
I felt the hard, gravelly ground beneath me as I picked myself up. It felt like sharp, busted-up concrete; around me, half-crumbled brick walls and rusted girders marked were buildings once stood. Mountains of rubble about suggested an urban neighborhood leveled by war.
I stood up, brushing myself off. In the distance, as far as the eye could see, were the ruins of a once-sprawling metropolis; acrid smoke wafted through the air, mingling with dark clouds that clotted the sky. Far away, the rumblings—of explosions or collapsing buildings, I could not tell.
Kozmik Kat was on the ground a few feet away, still sneezing. These fits didn’t propel him any great distance, or with as great a force as the one that had knocked us both through the Multimensional Portal, but they were still violent. After they subsided, he blew his nose into his cape. “Sorry,” he said. “They sometimes sneak up on me.”
I didn’t see the Multimensional Portal anywhere about. “Where are we?” I asked. “And more importantly, how do we get back to Troy?”
Koz got to his feet, standing erect on his hind legs, and dusted himself off. He looked about with apprehension. “I told you, sweetie, this is the Forbidden Future. I’d recognize this burgh anywhere, even on that tiny little viewscreen Jasper showed us.” He looked in the direction of the distant explosions. “Yep, the real deal. And if memory serves, we don’t have too long before they’ll be coming.”
“Who’ll be coming?”
“The Urban Renewal Eradicators,” said Koz. “Or UREs for short. They’re levelling what’s left of these scraps to make way for a new strip mall the size of Texas, or whatever. And they’re ruthless, let me tell. Giant, flying gunboats shooting laser beams, disintegrating everything in their path…”
As he explained, a dark, sleek aircraft of some kind soared overhead, perhaps only forty feet above our heads; it disappeared in the direction opposite of the explosions, its high-pitched engines seeming to slow for a landing
“That’s our cue,” said Koz. “It’s all coming back to me now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you, I’ve seen this script before. I visited the Forbidden Future with Yarn Man—Rex Rigid sent me on the Time Turntable to the Forbidden Future to rescue the double-knitted sap. You and I must have gone through that portal-kabob thingy and landed here at almost precisely the same time. I’m betting just beyond those ruins yonder, we’ll see me and Yarn Man, and the landing party from that hotrod.”
The rumblings behind us were getting louder and seemed to be coming closer.
“Well, what are we waiting for?”
Koz and I ran in the direction we’d seen the aircraft go. We must have run three or four city blocks, over piles of debris and around half-toppled walls, until we came to a pile of concrete leading up to a wall. Peering over it, we saw the aircraft—a sleek, black thing with three jets on its tail that stood on three wheeled legs, a cross between an airplane and a giant-sized speed boat. The craft stood at the far end of a relatively large clearing, free of debris, a couple hundred feet away. From our perch, we could not be seen, but we could spy on them: two young women and a young man, whom I presumed to be the crew. They were helping three other people with luggage prepare to board: a thin, bald guy in trench coat who wore opaque glasses who clutched a metallic briefcase; a man in a red beret in a turtleneck and sport jacket who smoked a pipe; and a little blonde girl clutching a teddy bear.
“Looks like they’re picking up passengers, all right,” I said. “If I lived in this neighborhood, I’d want the next airlift out—it’s worse than the lower Cass Corridor. But who are these people?”
“The guy in the leather jacket is the pilot, if I’m remembering correctly,” said Koz. “The smaller brunette woman is the ship’s mechanic, I think. The bald guy is one of their passengers who was already on board; he’s got some kind of contraband he’s carrying in that briefcase he’s clutching. The dude with the beret is some kind of scientist who maintained a secret laboratory around here somewhere; believe it or not, and the girl’s his daughter—they’re being picked up. The Amazonian blonde woman is also part of the ship’s crew; she is some kind of bounty hunter or soldier of fortune type. She located the scientist and the kid wandering around in these ruins and they were waiting in this clearing for their ride to arrive before I met them.”
“Well, their ride’s here,” I point out. “And it looks like everybody and their luggage is being packed on that flying rig. Only one problem—I don’t see you or Yarn Man anywhere in the group.”
Kozmik Kat, puzzled by this, looked around. “You’re right. I don’t see us anywhere.”
“Maybe this is an alternate Forbidden Future,” I said. “Maybe our arrival has already disrupted time…”
“I don’t think so,” said Koz. “The details are identical. I’m sure we’re here somewhere…if not, we’ll be along any minute.” He paused and scratched his head. “Oh, why can’t I remember? What am I forgetting? Keep in mind, I’d only been sentient for a short time before Rex Rigid sent me on the Time Turntable after Bing.”
“Since it appears we’ve got a moment, maybe you should start at the beginning,” I said. “Perhaps it will jog your memory if you told me the whole story from the beginning. How did it happen that you and Yarn Man came to the Forbidden Future in the first place?”
“That’s easy,” said Koz. “It all started back in the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters—right after See-Thru Girl had quit the team, I was told, and Megaton Man had joined the group to keep it a foursome. Rex being Rex, he couldn’t leave well enough alone, and tried boosting Megaton Man’s powers even further by hooking him up to something called the Tachyon Particle Disruptor. It boosted his energy, all right, the result being a new persona—Captain Megaton Man. But it came with a downside—some rodents were irradiated, too, and the Quartet was suddenly faced with a pesky Megaton Mice infestation.”
“I see. That’s when you were turned into Kozmik Kat, to take on the mice.”
“Right. I’d just been a common alley cat up to that point, living on my wits. But Rex grabbed, stuffed me into a cardboard box, and took me up the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters, atop the Quantum Tower. He zapped with me with the same Tachyon Particle Disruptor, and voila—I was Kozmik Kat. But I didn’t have much luck against the Megaton Mice; they were furtive little buggers, hiding in all the circuit panels in the walls and whatnot. They only came out at night, the little buggers—there must have been a gang of five of them—and they grabbed Bing while sleeping. They threw him onto the Time Turntable and threw the switch…”
“So, that’s how Yarn Man was sent to the Forbidden Future?”
“Right. I managed to nab one of the mice, and gave him a good chomping—they taste terrible, by the way—but the rest escaped on the Time Turntable, right after Bing had disappeared.” Koz looked around at the desolate landscape. “Yikes! It never occurred to me—those lousy Megaton Mice could be lurking among these ruins somewhere—there must be a million places four megapowered rodents could hide!”
Never mind that now,” I said. “What happened next?”
“Well, Rex sent me on the Time Turntable after Yarn Man, to rescue him and bring him back to the present. They figured my claws were best suited to snag his fur and pull him out of the chronological chaos. Sure enough, I did find him, first thing. He’d already run into the little girl with the teddy bear and the swishy dude in the red beret; the blonde Amazon had already located them and brought them to this clearing for their rendezvous. But when Bing saw me, he fainted—we hadn’t had a lot of time to bond back in the present, and I guess the sight of a feline with megapowers who could snag his fabric was more than he could handle. We had to give him some smelling salts to revive him.”
“If you were all waiting for the hotrod, and the hotrod’s here, then you and Yarn Man should also be here,” I said. “Why aren’t you?”
Koz snapped his fingers. “Now I remember! After we revived Bing, he realized I must have come on the Time Turntable, so we quickly said our goodbyes to the others and wished them luck, and went back looking for our ride home.” Koz pointed a claw in a southerly direction toward half-fallen buildings. “It had to be a few blocks that way. But when we got there, the Time Turntable was already vanishing—it left us marooned in the Forbidden Future, the only time in my life I ever missed the blamed thing.”
Suddenly from the direction Koz had been pointing, another Kozmik Kat and Yarn Man came running toward the parked flying hotrod.
“There we are,” said Koz, pointing. “Right on cue! We’re running back toward the aircraft before they leave, because we know they’re our only hope of getting out of the Forbidden Future—or at least, this condemned neighborhood.”
The only difference between the two Kozes was that the one running alongside Yarn Man wore only a red cape with brass buttons and Megaton Man-style goggles, whereas the Koz next to me was dressed in his full-body, head-to-toe primary colored uniform, patterned after Megaton Man’s own and mine.
The crew had already stowed the luggage, and were now helping their passengers up into the vehicle. The rumbling sounds in the distant were coming closer. The pilot, a brash young man in a leather jacket was the last in line to board; he heard Yarn Man and the other Koz running and yelling.
“Hey! Wait for us!” Yarn Man bellowed. “Don’t leave us stranded!”
The pilot turned; he must have been startled at the sight of a big, orange man made of yarn charging at ship like a bull. The pilot pulled some kind of laser pistol from his jacket, and quickly fired. A lighting-like streak of electricity shot forth, hitting Yarn Man directly in the “Y” on his chest.
I let out a scream and covered my eyes. When I opened them, Bing, my old boyfriend, had been disintegrated into various component parts: a knit cap, a scarf, a sweater, boxer shorts, leggings, mittens, socks and tennis shoes.
“Oh, my God! Yarn Man is dead!”
I guess my scream coincided with the loud report of the lightning pistol, and must have blended with the echo that reverberated from the ruined walls surround the clearing, because no one looked our way. The little blonde girl was screaming, too now; she had broken free of the man with the red beret and went running toward Yarn Man’s dismembered body parts.
I stood up from the crouch I was in an was about to run down the hill of debris and be by Bing’s side, but Koz grabbed my arm and held me back.
“What are you doing?” he said. “We can’t go down there; we’ll disrupt the flow of time. Haven’t you ever watched a TV show on time travel? I especially can’t meet myself! In the first place, I’d have a heart attack! And secondly, if I did meet myself in the Forbidden Future—not to mention you—I’d remember it after I returned to the present.”
“You know all those shows are fake,” I said. “They’re just cheap TV series trying to save money by shooting on sets for old Westerns, with extras dressed as cowboys and Indians, or set in the Roaring Twenties with gangsters, to save money on props and costumes. Although, I suppose you’re right…. Are you sure you never met me in the Forbidden Future, and just forgot to mention it to me all this time?”
“If I did, I couldn’t have exactly told you, could I?” said Koz. “Imagine me meeting Clarissa James, college student, and saying, ‘Hey, I met you already—you’ve got a brilliant career ahead of you as Ms. Megaton Man.’ You’d have thought I was nuts. Having knowledge of your own future would tear apart the very fabric of time and space…you probably would have become a junkie and quit school, or developed an eating disorder or something. As it happens, we didn’t meet, and for that reason I don’t think it would be wise for us to meet now.”
“I don’t think I would have reacted that badly,” I said. “Although I did go on a self-destructive sex binge when I later gained megapowers. In any case, you’re probably right; even though you and I are both here now, we probably shouldn’t try to contact Bing and the other you and that’s already here. But then, how do we have any hope of getting back to the present?”
We watched as the pilot and the other Kozmik Kat gather up the remnants of Yarn Man in their arms and hastily clamber aboard the hotrod with the others. Momentarily, the jet engines came to life. In seconds, the hotrod lifted off the ground and rose forty feet almost perfectly vertically; the thruster engines roared, and the craft sped away.
Koz suddenly pointed with his paw to the distant horizon. Through the smoke and gloom, the faint outline of a glistening, futuristic skyline could just barely be discerned.
“That’s the ritzy part of town,” said Koz. “We’re in the low-rent area, slated for demolition, but Core City—that’s what the locals called it—was where I was flying.”
“Wait, you were piloting the hotrod?” I said. “You were only an alley cat that had been sentient for a few short hours. What about the pilot, the one who shot Bing? What was he doing?”
“He was busy with the others, trying to knit Yarn Man back together,” said Koz. “They looked like they knew what they were doing. Who was I to disagree? So, I took the wheel. Beginner’s luck.”
We watched the hotrod disappear into the clouds of smoke into the distance.
“How are we supposed to follow them? That city must be huge—there must be a hundred thousand buildings. Do you remember where you went?”
Koz pointed again. “Do you see the tallest building there, that spire?”
Just then, the skies must have opened up over that part of town. Brilliant sunlight rained down, giving the crystalline skyline sudden definition and clarity, even as our part of town remained in smoke and gloom.
“It must be two hundred stories high,” I said, dazzled. “Not all of civilization in the Forbidden Future is crumbling, I see. I’m impressed.”
“That’s where the Wizard lives,” said Koz. “The one who helped me and Bing get back home.”
“You mean, like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?”
“I don’t think that was her name,” said Koz. “It was more like Whizzy or something.”
“Winnie? Winnie Wertz? The megahero who was lost in the future?”
“Winnie,” mused Kozmik Kat. “Yeah, that sorta rings a bell.”
Of course, I thought. Dr. Winifred Wertz was the brilliant team scientist of the Doomsday Revengers, rumored to be even more brilliant than Rex Rigid. It was she that had invented the Multimensional Portal, the counterpart to the Time Turntable. Both devices could not only travel through time, but across the dimensional threshold. Winnie had traveled to the future many times, the story went, and for whatever reason, found it amenable. And stayed there.
“Winnie Wertz only happens to be my favorite megahero I’ve only ever read about, best known as Gargantuella among her many personas and other accomplishments. Maybe she got fed up with the sexism of our present and just decided to set up shop here, in the Forbidden Future. If that spire is where she lives, she’s obviously done pretty good for herself.”
“It was a pretty opulent lab, as I recall,” said Koz. “She was able to fix up Bing with some effort, and send us home. But now without some difficulties.”
“What, did you tap your ruby slippers or something?”
“What, was that in the movie? I could never sit through the while things. I very offended by the Cowardly Lion—what a vicious, speciesist stereotype.”
Behind us, in the direction opposite the city, the sounds of explosions and collapsing structures was growing louder. I turned to see huge, saucer-like flying machines made of hideous, black metal, each with four bulbous turrets, spewing lightning-like streams of fire, much like the pilot’s pistol, down on the desolate ruins below. Only the stream of energy was exponentially greater, and everything the fire touched was instantly pulverized, atomized, into a fine-grained dust.
“There only half a dozen blocks from here,” I shouted in the rising cacophony. “They’re almost on top of us. This may be an odd time to ask, Kozmik Kat, but can you fly?”
“I never tried it, but now would be the time,” he said.
But before we could take off, the mountain of rubble suddenly shifted beneath our feet. The slabs of busted concrete upended, and we went sliding down the other side of the pile we’d climbed up, down into the clearing where the hotrod had been.
Both Koz and I tumbled, stunned, over rusted girders, chunks of brick, and shards of broken glass. By the time we rolled to a stop we were several yards into the clearing, our costumes unscathed but covered in sharp, clinging grit.
We looked up at the pile that had been our perch. Four little creatures scurried down after us, each wearing primary-colored costumes just like mine and Koz’s.
The pint-sized critters had big ears, whiskers, tails, and tiny hands and feet—and shiny little black noses. But their physiques were grotesquely muscular, like miniaturized Megaton Men.
“You killed our brother,” they squeaked at Kozmik Kat, who crawled backward on his back as they approached. “We were already on that platter before we’d seen what you’d done, your mouth clamped around his lifeless form—you killer! Before we knew it, we were thrown into the Forbidden Future, unable to get back. But we’ve been waiting for you…waiting for revenge!”
It was the four surviving Megaton Mice. And they were out for blood.
Next: The Tragic Realization of Temporal-Dimensional Travel
First Chapter | All Chapters | Latest Chapter
Archival Images:
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| The post-apocalyptic future of Megaton Man #3 (Kitchen Sink Press, April 1985). |
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| Yarn Man visits the Forbidden Future, courtesy the Time Turntable in Megaton Man #3. |
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| Bing meets some denizens of the Forbidden Future in Megaton Man #3. |
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| An Amazonian blonde comes to the rescue in Megaton Man #3. |
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| Komik Kat follows Yarn Man to the Forbidden Future in Megaton Man #3. |
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| Yarn Man and Kozmik Kat team up for the first time, to get home, in Megaton Man #3. |
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| The pilot takes Yarn Man for a monster in Megaton Man #3. |
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| The crew of the hotrod pick up the pieces in Megaton Man #3. |
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| Kozmik Kat takes the wheel in Megaton Man #3. |
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All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2020, all rights reserved.
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