“Why wouldn’t I remember tonight?”
“You never remember any of the good parts.”
“You say that.”
“It’s true. You only remember the bad parts. The before and after. Anxiety and regret. Never the moment.”
“Who says this is a good part?”
“That’s a cutting remark.”
“I just think we have different definitions of the good and bad when it comes to certain things.”
“So this is a bad part?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Which is it, then?”
“It’s good to see you.”
“You know what my favorite memory of us is?”
“Leon.”
“I’m sure you don’t remember it.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s not weird or anything. One time I came over to your place, and you smiled that smile you have—not the usual one, the good one—and you gave me a hug. Just a long, deep hug, like you were just really happy to see me. Genuinely happy. Not angry or annoyed at all. Just cruisin’, y’know. Just cruisin’. We made out afterward, and maybe had sex? I don’t remember that super great.”
“The fact that you don’t see anything weird about that is why we had to break up.”
“Whatever, lady.”
The door flies open. The man in the police uniform shouts for everyone to get down. A flashbang grenade is thrown inside. Apollo pushes Naomi away but is unable to get away. He suffers critical burns to his head and chest. After being denied medical treatment on the scene, he dies weeks later in the hospital from opportunistic infections. Ironically, the man in the police uniform was actually meant to go to the next apartment over, where a minor marijuana dealer lives.
They didn’t even get to the cool part. There was going to be a living wormhole in the closet, and all kinds of space shit was going to come out, and in the process of dealing with it they were going to rekindle their love. It was going to be awesome. We can’t even have love stories anymore? What do we have if we can’t have love stories?
Okay. Now I’m thinking that the issue is with the milieu. 2015 is a weird time. Shit is going down. It’s politicizing this story. I’m not into it. What we need is a rip-roaring space adventure in the far future. That’ll be cool. All this shit will be sorted out by then, and we can all focus on what really matters: space shit.
The crystal spires of New Virtua throw tangles of intersecting rainbows onto the silver-lined streets below, such that a Citizen going about his daily duties cannot help but be enmeshed in a transpicuous net of light and color. A Good Citizen knows that this is Good, that beauty is a gift of Science, and he wears his smile the way men of lesser worlds might wear a coat and hat to ward off the cold damp of an unregulated atmosphere.
Lord Tklox is not a Good Citizen, and he rarely smiles at all. On those occasions when he does experience something akin to happiness (when his plans are coming to fruition, when he imagines the bloody corpses of his enemies, when he thinks of new ways to crush the Good Citizens of New Virtua under his foot), his smile is not so much worn as wielded, as one might wield the glowing spiral of a raymatic cannon.
“Soon my vita-ray projector will be complete, and all New Virtua will tremble as I unleash the Omega Question!” he exclaims to no one, alone in his subterranean laboratory two thousand miles below the surface.
Cackling to himself, Lord Tklox waits in his lair for those who would challenge his incredible genius.
He waits.
He keeps waiting.
Lord Tklox coughs, perhaps getting the attention of any heroes listening on nearby crime-detecting audioscopes. “First New Virtua, then the universe! All will be destroyed by the radical subjectivity of the Omega Question!”
Waiting continues to happen.
More waiting.
Still more.
Uh, I guess nobody comes. Everybody dies, I guess.
So I checked, and it turns out there are no black people in the far future. That’s my bad. I really didn’t do my research on that one. I don’t know where we end up going. Maybe we all just cram into the Parliament-Funkadelic discography at some point between Star Trek and Foundation? Whatever. That’s an issue for tomorrow. Today we’ve got bigger problems.
It’s time we faced this head-on. Borges teaches us that every story is a labyrinth, and within every labyrinth is a minotaur. I’ve been trying to avoid the minotaur, but instead I need to slay it. I have my sword, and I know where the monster lurks. It is time to blaxploit this problem.
Who’s the plainclothes police detective who leaves all the criminals dejected?
[Apollo!]
Who stops crime in the nick of time and dazzles the ladies with feminine rhymes?
[Apollo!]
Can you dig it?
Apollo’s cruiser screeches to a halt at the entrance to the abandoned warehouse. He leaps out the door and pulls his gun, a custom golden Beretta with his name engraved on the handle.
“Hot gazpacho!” he says. “This is it.”
Patrick pops out of the passenger seat. “We’ve got him now.”
They have been chasing their suspect for weeks now, some sicko responsible for a string of murders. In a surprising third-act twist, they discovered that the one responsible is one of their own, a bad apple who gets his kicks from harming the innocent.
“We’ve got him pinned down inside,” says Apollo.
“He won’t escape this time.”
“Let’s do this, brother.”
They skip the middle part of the story, since that has been where we’ve been getting into trouble. They rush right to the end, where the man in the police uniform is waiting for them.
“Congratulations on solving my riddles, gentlemen. I’m impressed.”
“You’re going down, punk,” says Apollo.
“Yeah!” says Patrick.
“I doubt that very much.”
The man in the police uniform pulls his weapon and fires three shots, all hitting Apollo in the torso. He crumples to the ground. Patrick aims his own weapon, but the man in the police uniform is able to quickly shoot him in the shoulder, sending Patrick’s pistol to the ground.
“You thought you could defeat me so easily? How foolish. We’re not so different, you and I. You wanted a story about good aliens and bad aliens? Well, so did I.”
“How’s this for foolish?” says Apollo, pulling up his shirt to reveal he was wearing a bulletproof vest all along. Then he unloads a clip from his legendary golden Beretta at him. The man in the police uniform falls to the ground, bleeding.
Patrick clutches his shoulder. “We got him.”
“We’re not quite done yet,” says Apollo.
He walks over to the body of the man in the police uniform. He tugs on the man’s face, pulling it off completely. It is the face of Lord Tklox.
“This was his plan all along,” says Apollo. “By murdering all those innocent people, he was turning us against each other, thereby making it easier for his invasion plans to succeed. All he had left to do was answer the Omega Question and boom, no more civilization. Good thing we stopped him in time.”
“I knew it,” says Patrick. “He was never one of us. He was just a bad guy the whole time. It is in no way necessary for me to consider the ideological mechanisms by which my community and society determine who benefits from and participates in civil society, thus freeing me from cognitive dissonance stemming from the ethical compromises that maintain my lifestyle.”
“Hot gazpacho!” says Apollo.
They share a manly handshake like Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in Predator. It is so dope.
“I’ll go call dispatch,” says Patrick. “Tell them that we won’t be needing backup. Or that we will be needing backup to get the body and investigate the scene? I don’t really know how this works. The movie usually ends at this point.”