Gojiro by Mark Jacobson Read Free Book Online

pinwheeled from the dank skies, settled on the matted fur of all the furtives dug deep in their burrows and onto the creaky wings of the impossible insects struggling through the gales off Corvair Bay. Again and again he came, with the clockwork regularity all things innately understand as symmetry. In no quarter was he unexpected or unwelcomed. He felt connection with everything in this freshout, untried world.
    He was Budd Hazard, ’tile for all times, one of the roughs, one of the smooths, a Cosmozard.
    * * *
    Was it inevitable, what happened next? Gojiro reckoned so. He didn’t need a goading encounter group of former offenders to tell him that with a personality like his, addiction is not many truck stops down the highway from intoxication. That’s what Budd Hazard bred: total dependency. Just as later it got to the point where he couldn’t get through a half-hour sitcom without firing up a gluey ball of hardcutting 235, he became addicted to Budd Hazard. He became a Cosmo junkie.
    With quicksilver slivers of the Scheme’s great jigsaw hot on his clawtips, he obsessed to possess the rest. He declared war on the white areas of his map; no territory would remain Unknown. All levity left him. No longer was there time to stroll with Komodo out by the lurching precipices of Past Due Point. The reptile’s every instant was hostaged to Budd Hazard’s consuming wigstretch.
    “Come to bed,” Komodo would say, bleary-eyed from the seemingly endless clocksweeps of transcription.
    “Not yet,” came the reptile’s breathless reply. “I’m on the edge of a great breakthrough concerning the progression of Beamic knowledge relative to the development of a full Bunch as opposed to the individual within the Bunch. Can’t you see? We’re about to shoot the definitive hole in the theory of the ontogeny and phylogeny of consciousness.”
    “Perhaps this is the question of a philistine,” Komodo ventured, “but is it possible to know too much?”
    “ Know too much? I thought you fancied yourself a man of science—a philosopher! How can you know too much until you know it all ? You want a Universe mottled with pocks and dings? Don’t you want the perfect sphere?”
    Gojiro told Komodo he could go to sleep, if that’s what he wanted to do. “From now on, worldview constructing goes on twenty-four hours a day around here—just like the world. Get your forty winks. I’ll put the transcriber on automatic.”
    The behemoth grew increasingly withdrawn, solitary. Subtle neuroshifts occurred inside his burgeoning brain. No longer did he have to summon up Budd Hazard. The Muse became a constant, a macro to his program, always there, defining, refining, pumping up Cosmo and more Cosmo. It was as if the reptile had merged with his drug, and it with him.
    Then, one night, Gojiro called Komodo into the ’cano. The two friends hadn’t seen each other for days. Tension ruled.
    “I want to discuss a matter of the utmost magnitude,” Gojiro intoned, circles around his red eyes, his leathers sagging. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for weeks.
    “Yes, my own true friend,” Komodo said tentatively.
    “It concerns the Triple Ring Promise,” Gojiro monotoned, as if he were reading a year-end report. “Recent Budd Hazard visitations indicate this proposition has reached a superannuated circumstance. It exists only within the context of base sentimentality and therefore is meaningless within the evermarch of the Endless Flow. It must be subject to major revision.”
    “Excuse me,” Komodo said, stunned. “Are you really talking about our Triple Ring Promise?”
    “Yes! In its current form it is hopelessly primitive. We must modernize it, update it, bring it more in line with the current state of Evollooic Thought.”
    “But . . .” Tears beaded up in Komodo’s eyes. “Update our Promise—how is that possible? When we swore it, it was for . . . forever. How can you modernize forever?”
    “We must jettison