By Alexi I. Amnirov

I: METALHEAD OFFERS SOME UNSOLICITED ADVICE

Suzy had been doing Bitch! for going on a month and at least in Fred's mind, she was rapidly turning into an insufferable cunt. But she simply had to pass the real estate boards this time around, and as the tests spanned property law across seventeen dimensions, the going was rough and complex and confusing and she needed, positively needed, all the chemical help she could muster. Bitch! was not necessarily the drug of choice as its use more or less guaranteed failure on at least one plane of reality-indeed, the depressing results had come in three years ago, before she had even thought of changing careers, but by then it was too late. On certain levels of existence, retests are mandatory and it was either go to college or get ready for a few years playing tennis with other white-collar criminals on one of the more dubious moons of Neriam. The taxpayers, so went the demand notice, are not in the habit of subsidizing failure, and it has been determined that.... It was probably all some sort of complex scam-a little known dimension boasting spectacular properties no one could actually visit, charging fees for loans no one ever remembered receiving to take courses no one ever passed. The interest rates were all in imaginary numbers and the payment schedule routinely violated Planck's Constant. She decided instead to cheat. She just hoped that all the other versions of herself were equally savvy.

Lately, Suzy - at least the Suzy of this dimension - had taken to grinding up the Bitch! pills with the flat head of a Licon fetish sculpture, then hoovering up the pink, speckled dust through a bendy straw inserted all the way into her spiral turbinates. Instead of studying, she paced their townhouse, pretending that she was going to start studying in just a few minutes. Every now and then, letters, emails, zip-notices and telegrams arriving warning her that she apparently failed some new and more complex test that she had never heard of. Textbook bills suddenly appeared, demanding payment for courses she was apparently going to take as much as a decade in the future. It was getting to the point that their credit rating was decreasing logarithmically.

The really discouraging part was that all of these universes just kept multiplying-every new potentiality, however modestly realized or barely failed, created a stupefying maze of competing realities. In her heart of hearts, Suzy knew that if she wanted any measure of success in life, she had to master all of those cocksuckers at once, and beat every single alternate reality into one master shape. It was never enough to have it all work out in this one place. However close to impossible it was-and, theoretically, in some more logically rigid universes, success might actually be impossible-Suzy, at least, was giving it the old college try. Or she would have been giving it the old college try, had she gone to college.

-Who needs an education, Fred sneered. Aren't you glad you dropped out of high school and got a job in that auto parts store?

There had to be something, somewhere, that was significant enough to hurl at him, she thought. He had been no help at all in this; he had the habit of bursting into hysterical laughter whenever a new student loan default notice arrived on the hot grid. Worst of all, he never gave up ribbing her once he sensed a hole in her defenses.

-Fuck fifth dimension you, he mused. A little bit hotter, granted, but she's one dumb piece of shit. I wonder what she's doing with all that student loan money? She already maxed out the VISA getting a new rack.

Suzy chose to ignore Fred.

-Suppose we're all writing the wrong tests, she said. Have you considered that? What if the reason I keep failing is that it's somehow out of sync? That the two-dimensional me is trying to take a test in one dimension?
-And what sort of sense does that make? In a single dimension, paper itself is impossible, let alone a three bedroom raised ranch.
-Fuck you, dipshit.

And with that, Fred retreated to the garage. As he clumped down the stairs, he could hear her grinding up more pills, like that was going to help anyone pay the bills. Instead of trying to argue with her, it was easy enough for Fred to spend his time tinkering with Metalhead, his gleaming robotic sidekick. Although only a little more than 4 meters tall, owing to a serious design flaw and the use of profoundly substandard hyperalloy-never read robot assembly instructions while drunk off your ass-the thing weighed in at an astonishing 12,000 kilograms. Public transportation, for the most part, was out, and until Fred got up the energy to reinforce the stairs, the thing had been trapped in the basement. Bored and alone, it had shrieked blue death and continuously strobed in all available wavelengths and frequencies for a week, reducing Fred and Suzy to a shadowy half-existence, made barely acceptable through Fred's brilliant tinkering with the medicine cabinet's built-in autodoc. The autodoc's delicate sensors had been re-programmed not only to sever their optic nerves every night and re-attach them every morning, but also to remove several critical bones from their inner ears. All fine in theory, but Fred's hands were a little shaky for such delicate work. Finally, sick of living in a darkened world of limited timbre, he made some calls. Within a couple of days, the stairs were fixed up and Metalhead was no longer imprisoned in the basement. The robot was ecstatic. Finally, it was able to sit at the kitchen table like everyone else and pretend to drink Suzy's coffee.

Since then, Fred and the robot had been inseparable.

Fred and Metalhead. Metalhead and Fred. A real team.

Metalhead, granted, had its problems. Obviously, there was the weight issue-or when space-bound, a mass issue-but there was a whole host of other more troubling inadequacies. The thing was powered by raw solar fusion delivered via a hot link Fred unsuccessfully tried to hide in obscure stars. Unfortunately, the robot was so energy inefficient that it was responsible for a string of dismal crop failures around the galaxy as it shrank stars to brown dwarfs as readily as raisins. Cooling it was close to impossible. At the best of times, the thing gave off frightening, terrifyingly withering radioactive exhaust gasses that Fred was forced to phase shift to some random location-closing his eyes, he had typed in the coordinates and hoped that it never made the local news. Nevertheless, every now and then the robot overheated, and glistening white hot, it would sink deep into the planet's crust. At the time, it had caused quite the argument:

-They're going to add those holes to our mean volume determination, you know, Suzy had warned. Our property taxes are going to go way up.
-Basements don't count, Fred said.
-Of course they fucking count, Suzy said. Just like second floor balconies.
-Bullshit, Fred said. There's no way we pay tax on a motherfucking porch.
-Hands up if you're studying a certain class in college.
Fred scowled.
-Thought so, she said.

Fred's solution to his robot's heat issues was to try installing a cyanide-based cooling system. Cyanide was not a particularly efficient way of keeping anything cool, but Fred was able to make the system do double duty. Metalhead was now able to express a variety of basic emotions via the subtle pumping of liquid poison. Eye protection was mandatory as it was prone to springing inopportune leaks. Sometimes, of course, it purposely spat, and however unlikely, its aim was uncanny. One day Fred was going to have to downgrade or break its trajectory engine.

In fact, the hulking giant was so potentially lethal that tinkering with it was usually motivated out of a genuine drive for self-preservation. It was a battle just to keep up with Metalhead's most basic malfunctions. Fred had bought it as a box of parts-the thing had been in some sort of barn fire and Fred's initial excitement was due to the frame and the block's matching serial numbers. Given its age and scarcity, it would have been collectible, had anyone actually been foolish enough to collect model EC780-3C3 Servo robots. Putting it back together had been a challenge; corners had not only to be cut but ineptly filed down afterwards. Some of the corner, truth be told, had been left jagged. The only instructions he could find had been lining the bottom of a parrot cage on Zibar-9. Fred's solution to a missing 34th page involved hiding a handful of computer chips and lug nuts in old desk drawer and then selling the desk. One unexpected byproduct of Fred's inability to follow basic directions was Metalhead's ability to seamlessly force apart the multiverse, carving disturbingly huge wormholes across space and time.

For the most part, the ability to travel through time at will was a little on the disappointing side. After giving himself a shiny, new Electro-static Nixogun-whose origins he could not rightly remember-Fred was basically at a loss for interesting things to do. The past was pretty dull and the fashions embarrassing.

Even with the ability to control the universe's ebb and flow, Metalhead was a constant worry. It almost never listened to instructions, it would get caught in near-endless loops where it would make the exact same barely audible clicking noise for weeks at a time, and was prone to breaking down in bank lineups and on highway entrance-ramps. Complicating matters was Metalhead's latest unexpected behavior.

It had started around Memorial Day. The holiday weekend had begun early with a single mojito. A couple of hours later, after Fred had passed out, Tom "Spyzowin" Angola, jaded after being drummed out of Captain Zero's "famous" Space Cadets, had reprogrammed the Metalhead to go on a 3.14159265 hour murderous rampage whenever it witnessed the destruction of anything more or less "round." Spyzowin had burned the change into Metalhead's EPROMs; there was nothing to be done. The very thought of a clanking 12,000 kilogram instrument of nearly arbitrary death squealing and screeching and flailing psychotically through innocent crowds, although amusing in concept, sent quivers down Fred's spine. He picked up a wrench and started beating at the robot's thick, armored neck.

The last time it had gone berserk, everyone had been watching a sort of hick-ass underwater demolition derby deep under the surface of Cranibar-9. One of the submersibles was an old bathysphere, rather ineptly reinforced, apparently held together with thigh-sized rusty bolts, and early on, after being ever so lightly tapped by a shuddering Zoozoobellbloomian Dream Floatah, the thing had popped like a grape, instantly turning its occupant from liquid into a surprised and spiky, yellow cylinder. Protests were lodged, but by then it was much too late. Metalhead had sprung into action, cyanide dripping from its foot-long titanium teeth. It lurched around pulling heads off torsos, smashing everything it could smash-which, given its immense size and strength, was more or less everything. Hundreds, perhaps thousands had died. Covered with gallons of coagulated, multi-hued blood, Metalhead smiled and smiled. Revenge was his. The robot then charged across dimensions, skittering down a rapidly growing wormhole, spewing sub-atomic filth behind it. The damage it must have done in more less spherical, more angular dimensions did not bear considering.

Fred and Suzy had barely escaped with their lives, and the pursuing mob had only backed off after Fred vaporized it with his zap gun.

The zap gun in question, an Electrostatic Nixogun 16, was currently lying in a puddle of anisette in the middle of the garage floor, fully charged and, judging by its indicator, armed and ready to go. Fred kept hammering away at Metalhead's neck. If he managed to get the robot's head off, perhaps he could move the jumpers or fiddle with the dipswitches. His goal was a modest one. If he moved the jumpers over slightly, it was possible that the thing's murderous rampage could be positively re-branded as a gently loving rampage. The results would be very much the same, but the press might be a little better.

Almost on cue, the robot's gimbals came loose and the head lolled sickeningly around on its frictionless axis, sending Metalhead's googly eyes rolling in their red alloy sockets like the wheels in a slot machine. A moment later, the head completely capsized and tumbled off the robot's body. As it fell end over end, Fred watched its foot-long titanium teeth gnashing in frustration and could have sworn that it was crying bitter, cyanide tears.

Before he could do anything at all, the head landed squarely on Fred's Nixogun and, although he wished he had not, he clearly heard a muffled metal pop.

-Honey! Fred called upstairs. I have to go out to the store and pick up a few things. Just having a little trouble with the robot.
-Don't you leave that piece of shit just lying around. Take it with you. I don't want to be in the house with it.
-A round! The disembodied head grunted. A round!

Fred reached inside Metalhead's neck and found a bank of switches. He had misplaced the manual years ago and was forced to rely on the robot's internal copy, which the thing recited in a continuous loop, punctuated with what it felt were helpful comments.

-Dual in-line package switch 3 controls voice gender… dual in-line package switch 4 controls… no, you don't need that one, Fred. It's not switch 4. I'm thinking that… dual in-line switch 5 determines bipedal or quadrupedal gait… that's not it either…

Unable to realize his original plan, Fred was at least able to jury rig a large red off button onto the middle of Metalhead's back. He had to use a crane to get the head back on, and Metalhead only made matters worse by giving Fred a running critique on correct head alignment.

-A little more to the right.
-No, your right.
-Your other right. And so on.

Finally, Fred dribbled solder on its motherboard until Metalhead stopped speaking altogether. Capable only of creating subsonic thumps, weird metallic chimes, and cacophonous shrieks and whistles, the thing was infinitely more agreeable.

II: THE BLACKNESS OF INTERSTELLAR SPACE

Even a child knows the difference between a Blast-o-matic and a Nixogun.

One shoots out pretty green rays and can be set to stun. The other belches out a thick band of positrons, solar plasma and dark matter, instantly reducing all of God's creation into a bland, quarky soup. Space Cadets carry Blast-o-matics. All the cool kids pack Nixoguns. Blast-o-matics have safety features, a coherent manual, factory warranties, and predictable ballistics. Nixoguns came with a red piece of paper with a black skull on it. One manufacturer was in the habit of issuing product advisories and safety recalls, whereas the other simply forced prospective owners sign Byzantine liability waivers at gun point. Nixoguns were for those times where it wasn't absolutely certain that something dead was going to stay that way. A Nixogun could remove even existential doubt. But then again, it also gave its owner a profound case of the space shakes and left a lasting impression that only a transplant could clear up.

Nixoguns were the bespoke creations of the Electrostatic Corporation, and were as rare as Siriusian Self-Extrapolating Ziewzorns or Hygonzorian Quanta-Geese. The playthings of only the insanely rich, if Fred wanted a replacement, he was going to have to shuffle the expense across as many credit cards in as many planes of existence as he could find. He considered going back in time and simply kicking his old Nixogun out of harm's way, but there were two potential drawbacks. First, Metalhead's ability to adjust the time continuum was not entirely precise-he might miss the event by weeks if not years-and second, there was always the chance that he would arrive exactly on time and be crushed under Metalhead's falling noggin. It was easier just to buy a new one. The eventuality of a broken Nixogun, however, had been predicted, and years earlier, Fred had enacted a plan. Whenever a credit card application arrived, it was easy enough to fill them in. Doubly so with someone else's credit history. Lacking a consistent moral or ethical framework, and an infinite number of dimensions, Fred's wallet was bursting at the seams.

His ship, the Blasomäsphar, cut through the horrifying absence that is two-dimensional space with a sickening groan, folding time and existence just long enough to catapult itself from geosynchronous orbit hundreds of kilometers above Fred's house to the other side of a nearby galaxy-a much better galaxy if the truth be told. In Fred's galaxy, most of the spaceships were up on blocks in the front yard, parents did not attend their children's Little League games, and everyone watched reality TV. In Electrostatic's galaxay, on the other hand, all the spaceships were painted dark green, and the neighborhood kids played space soccer. People went to Space Restoration Hardware and bought over-priced space truffle-infused space oil at Space Williams-Sonoma.

Fred parked in the handicapped space outside Electrostatic. He hung Suzy's grandmother's old permit on the rearview mirror.

III: CELEBRATION

As fundamentally implausible as it was, Fred's visit to Electrostatic was an unbridled success. Since he had even managed to escape without a parking ticket, he treated himself to a medium French Vanilla with a couple of artificial sugars from Dunkin' Donuts.

His new Electrostatic Nixogun 16 was plugged into the ship's cigarette lighter and would be ready to use post-haste.

Taking a sip of coffee, he began to plan the rest of the day. Metalhead's massive body gently rocked behind him. Lately, it had become enamored with The Beastie Boys and was busy getting down to "Sabotage." Fred turned the stereo up a little. Today was a good day. There was only one possible way to celebrate: go back in time and murder Jesus Christ.

IV: EVERY TIME A BELL RINGS…

Sterility. Hopelessness. Mean-spirited destitution and no preconceived course of action. The dry earth of first century Palestine was an insult. Clay cup of wine in hand, head and body leper-wrapped to ward off the sun, Fred wanted to find Christ and get the deed over with as quickly as possible. He began by looking in all the usual places-the Temple, the local wedding hall, Simon's house, the Garden of Gethsemane, Pilate's Palace. Then he went to the woodshop.

Christ was a pretty good carpenter and Fred's living room was dirty with the Son of Man's designs-matching Algum wood end tables, a Lebanese Cedar trestle table inlaid with Cyprus and Ebony, Olive and Acacia bookshelves, tastefully varnished with Thyine. The shop was usually a zoo, crowded with giggling time tourists buying tiny wooden crosses. But today it was empty. Not only empty, but entirely absent. In its place was a brothel, full of Roman officers smoking opium and eating boiled land crabs. After a few minutes of embarrassingly bad Latin, Fred was able to determine that he had almost arrived too early, and he hightailed it out of town. Metalhead, trailing after him, cunningly disguised under an immense yet tasteful shemagh, was periodically bogging down in the sand. The robot's solution was to fuse the sand into a vast glass plain and skate on its retractable wheels. Just for effect, it put on an attractive laser light display and randomly sent 100 meter, 10 trillion amp arcs of electricity hissing over Jerusalem's low skyline.

Fred was impressed, but tried to stay focused. After all, he was about to kill the Son of God.

Of course, every time he got a new gun, the very first thing Fred did was murder Jesus Christ. Over the years, he had dispatched an alarmingly large number of them. Short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, clean-shaven ones, bearded ones, ones with goatees, ones with pencil-thin moustaches, ones who shaved their faces but not their throats. He had killed Serbian Jesus. He had killed Black Jesus. He killed Irish Jesus. He had melted Cheese Jesus into a greasy, orange puddle. He had kicked Three-Legged Jesus so many times in all of its nuts that he had worn through the steel toecaps of his Blundstones.

Over the years, Suzy had let Fred know that she was not a fan of all the Christ killing.

-You're going to go to hell for that, you know.
-Oh no I'm not, Fred said. I've checked. I'm not there.
He stuck out his tongue. Game. Set. Match.
-I still think it's wrong.

Her attitude, more or less, doomed countless Messiahs to various miseries. Just to irritate her, he had murdered good Christs, mediocre Christs and more bad ones than he could count. Obviously, there were a dizzying, perhaps infinite number of progressively shittier Christs, all of whom were well worth killing. Indeed, the laws of probability demanded that across the multiverse there had to be a huge range of particularly lame saviors: from those who preached violent ethnic cleansing through cannibalism to those who merely mispronounced common Greek words. Stammering-One-Eyed Jesus. Jesus of the Perpetual Stomach Flu. Jessuss with Too Many Esses. Pet-Blessing Jesus. As mathematics predicted, many Saviors were neither here nor there: Twelve-Step Jesus, Monkey Jesus, Drunken Jesus, Herniated Jesus, Hydrocephalic Jesus, Not-for-You-Native-Americans Jesus, Roller-Skating Jesus, and so on.

Other Christs-the really meek or revoltingly loving ones-just sort of showed up at exactly the wrong time and proselytized just enough for Fred to figure that they were practically begging to be killed. Heartfelt-and-Unrelenting-Sympathy-for-the-Recently-Made-Homeless Jesus had died a particularly horrific death, with Fred forcing the ragged thing to beg for mercy as he blasted its limbs off one by one with a brand new keychain Fizzpopper whose accuracy was seriously and perhaps illegally misrepresented. When Fred returned the weapon to the store, he thumped down Christ's beatific head theatrically on the counter and demanded both an immediate explanation and his money back.

His guilty pleasure, of course, was that Fred really enjoyed throttling the good but overly preachy ones. Environmental Jesus. Hope-for-the-Aged Jesus. Vegan Jesus. All of these had been a joy to blast into smithereens. Fondly recalling how Crippled Christ had literally imploded under the pressure of a thousand suns, Fred checked the charge level on the Nixogun. So many Christs, so little time. This is how Jello Christ met his end. This is how Jerky Jesus died. This is the Last Supper as interrupted by a frenzied 12,000 kilogram robot. This is the version of the Sermon on the Mount where the mount is suddenly and unexpectedly replaced by a lava field. Sometimes, just for kicks, Fred would leap forward a few millennia just to see how it all played out. Entire cultures worshipped Satanic steel gods. People genuflected by gripping their nuts and falling over sideways. In some realities, the magazine D-Cup passed itself off as sacred gospel.

Clearly, the most rewarding Christs to kill were the ones who really were the Son of God, that sanctimonious third part of the Holy Trinity. Taking advantage of the slow revelation of the hypostatic union, Fred had giggled in glee when an angry ethereal Jesus had been blasted out of Wooden Jesus' easily fractured noggin. Fred and Metalhead used its charred remains to roast weenies on the banks of the river Jordan.

-Serves you right, Lord, Fred muttered under his breath.

This time, however, Metalhead's calculus had been a little off and they had landed much earlier than Fred would have liked: on Christ's thirteenth birthday. Fred zipped up his jacket and popped its collar. The night was cold, and Fred considered using the Nixogun to set the town ablaze. He dismissed the idea. The surprise of it all was going to be a thing of wonder. Perhaps everything would work out after all.

-Well, Fred said to Metalhead, this will be a Bar Mitzvah to remember.

The robot nodded its assent and began to emit a low-pitched whine. Its automatic Christ sensors began to light up as they wandered through the town, causing its shemagh to catch on fire. The two followed the familiar noise of celebration into a small, mud-flanked house. Teenaged Jesus, spotty and depressed looking, was holding up a poorly-knitted hemp sweater.
-Hey, Jesus.

Fred's finger slowly squeezed the Nixogun's trigger.

-Merry X-mas.

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