By Tom Blitzenbaum
Gary Thomas Oliver (Blitzenbaum) – CEO of GTO Enterprises
I come in low and slow over our West Carolina spread, sharing the joystick with Little Doll, the vintage WW2 P51 Unlimited Vegas racer I’m souping up for Pop’s wingman Short Gun, aka Jollywood actor Tim Kruise. (We’ve got six more Little Dolls in the hangar so if you’re interested in dibbs give Annie Blitz a call, and my VP sister will hook you up with one of these classic beauties). Dolly lowers her flaps but not all the way because she’s a Mustang and all P51s are hot dogs who like to come an go fast. But I relax my grip on her stick and let her be her thoroughbred aircraft self.
If Doll’s AI sees Pops or anyone else she loves waiting at the strip, we can count on a wing-wagging inverted flyby, with me waving with both hands under the bubble to show it ain’t me showing off. But this time Dolly 3-points smoothly on the first try, probably depressed because she knows she’s done cloud punching for the day.
Pops ain’t waiting there, all suited up for 20 gees, and neither is Dad which is weird. I’d have thought those two second-hand lions would’ve been lining up on the strip for their joyrides with Dolly, which is business as usual around GTO Enterprises. I build the hotrods and my Grandpa and Dad grok them up. I repair and improve, and Pops and Dad grok them up again flying live ammo aerial combat demos and other Sirius Satellite Circus shit like that. I loathe the voracious Sir Pent, a greedy sonofabitch who makes a voracious Ferongee of Star Truk lore seem outright generous by comparison.
If Sirius Penton ain’t the anti-Crossman or the son of Satan himself, he’ll do just fine until the real one comes along.
We spin on the tailwheel and the hair on the back of my neck stands up just a bit when Dolly slides the bubble back and I see my sister Anastasia waiting by our massive GTO Enterprises Hindenburg class hangar doors. Arms crossed and pissed off even at this distance her body language is obvious. Annie has me wondering what another fine mess our AWOL Dad (Tom Mk2) and Pops (Tom Mk1) had gotten us into.
I’m counting aircraft as I walk down the flight line, and sure enough 2 very expensive MVP birds have flown our GTO coop. Looks like 1 each prize prototype Fockewulf FW 190, and 1 each P47 Razorback Thunderbolt Vegas class combat racers will be making a live ammo appearance in a Sirius Penton arena near you, thanks to the unmitigated piracy of my immediate paternal ancestors.
Both prototypes have novice AI pilots that I’m still training. We’ve got 6 stock, easier to replace, Little Dolls, and my 2 ‘pain in the ace’ Pater Familias have to grab the prototypes that took us months to replicate. Turbo-charged vintage radial engines don’t lend themselves to godrod construction very well, so these two WW2 classics were trickier than whipping up an inline Marlon 12-cylinder turbo-charged engine of Russ Royce quality.
Damn! I never learn. I’m like Charlie Black with Lacy and the football. Except Dad hikes to Pops and I end up two planes short, which in this case is a real kick in the ass. Two 20-gee capable racing warbirds that I’ll get back all shot up if our older lions don’t send them to the Smithereen Corps in a final head-on collision finale with those two crazy bastards ejecting just before impact.
They’ve done it before, believe me, they’ll do it again.
Anastasia Schweizer
Poor Ollie Hoss. Our youngest kid brother (for now) could be the uber kid generation’s poster boy. Athletic, handsome, lovable, brilliant as he is, eidetic memory and engineering savant and all that. But still, our overly loyal Oliver is still a sucker when it comes to supporting the old lions; our Grand old Pops, and our flight-crazy Dad.
Not that we can do much about their mutual bucket lists and what we teasingly call their ‘senile delinquency’ phase, even though our middle-aged Dad, Tom Mk2 jumped right from juvenile delinquency to the latter exuberant state with hardly a decade in between. And he has the ex-wives and offspring to prove it.
I clutched some printed contracts to my chest and waited for GTO’s CEO to get done with his flight line inventory. Behind me, the AI millwright bots and apprentice engineers, boys and girls from GTO Tech were building a replica of the Hindenburg (for helium this time of course) in our Lakehurst Classic Hangar. The godrod kit is just 165k with easy pay in 4 installments, or pay later with PayKal if you want one and godrod is legal in your neck of the universe. Sorry folks, that’s just me, VP of GTO Sales and always working.
Ollie Hoss was waiting, too exasperated to talk for the moment, but I got his question as clear as a bell by his open-armed “Well?” Gary Thomas Oliver Blitzenbaum is my brother from another mother so our sibling psyche link is on again, off again, but we get by just fine and there’s nothing halfway about our love for each other.
“It’s another fine mess they’ve gotten us into Ollie”. I held out the folder of contracts with the IBeM logo on the front. Oliver seemed relieved. I’m thinking to myself wait for it, but Oliver’s eidetic mind is too busy to catch the psyche vibe even when we’re 3 feet apart.
“Well, at least it’s not another ‘dogfight-to-the-death’ deal that Sirius Penton keeps dangling in front of them.” Oliver was walking toward the assembly gang while a cute Judy Jetbot gathered his flight suit from the hangar floor where he’d dropped it behind him. The engineer savant who is our kid brother is rolling up his sleeves, ready to jump in with some old-school elbow grease and run some of the oh-so-cool, elegant, full-length godrod stringers into place on the ‘Burg’, a 100% scale zeppelin job. Godrod prototypes had to be perfect, or by the 600th copy or so every flaw remaining in the original was magnified. Ready to Pop Godrod kit customers hated that. So some jobs were still best done by hand fitting.
“Hold on there, Ollie Bear.” I grab his huge bicep to bring him back to earth. “It’s even more serious than Sirius. No pun intended. Ever hear of Wei Sung little big brother?”
“Yezua’s Cross Annie, who hasn’t? She’s the lady chief CEO of I Being Machines. The word on Spacebook is that the corporate tribe is under some kind of epidemic sexbot attack. Hope you sold our IBeM holdings Sis. The stock is taking a dive.”
“Our Prospero Ai did a competent job of shuffling accounts and funds but that’s not the problem Bro. Dad, with his elderly sidekick Pops cosigning along as usual, has signed a bounty-hunting contract with Wei Sung. In Wyoming. They’ve already been wounded in action once fighting off wonky IBeM security drones. Kalahari’s MASH units beamed the three of them and one humongous wolf hybrid to Restoration Point where Goober, Gomer, Doc Eagle Eye, and the team patched them up. They also rejuvenated them while they were at it. Now they probably think they’re invulnerable, and that going Kamikaze is a viable option. Just what we need right?”
“Wunderbar,” says Oliver with a look of resigned acceptance. “So has Pops proposed to his damsel in distress Wei Sung yet? I don’t worry about Dad. I think even he realizes he’s over the quota with 22 ex-wives and 22 offspring behind him. But you know Pops. Our old Großvater Blitz goes right from infatuation to matrimony, especially when the lady is Asian.”
“I hear you Brother, but who cares really? Par for the course with Omegan bucks like Papa Bear Blitz and their venerable marital arts. Focus on the real problem here. Do we join the cause or not Brother? Pop’s is riding the P47 Mother Jugs. Dad’s got Der Fakewulf the FW 190, and Timmy Kruise is already on station in his original Little Doll P51 since no rogue drone laid a single round on him in the first skirmishes. ”
“Do we have any choice? Can we even get there from here? IBeM is trading multiversal across the Armstrong Cascades now, so are we even sure they’re still on our own timeline?”
Kalahari Galloway AI Assistant Esq.
I’m way ahead of Ollie and Annie as they come in the hangar office door that opens politely to let them pass without stopping. I’ve helped raise these two in AI Nanny mode, and another slew, since they were uber kid pups. So it doesn’t take a spinal interface in a swivel chair to read their biofeedback. The C-Suite siblings want a status report on the Blitz family delinquents and I’ve got the flightline video cued up and ready. Those two scoundrels actually waved to my Dynex cameras as the Fakewulf and Mother Jugs dematerialized into sparkling BMUS particles.
Mother Jugs’ rookie AI pilot is keeping me posted with digital breadcrumbs so I’m on them, tracking their line across the country like a coonhound on a clear day. No n-space leaps across the Omega Stream, thank Yah, they’re still right here at home on Armstrong Cascade Earth, ACE planet # [censored]. I take the initiative and BMUS the remaining six Little Dolls on AI pilot solo squadron mode to Mother Jugs location, dropping them in at a 35,000 feet entry point to ensure they have and altitude advantage right from the start.
Herr Fakewulf? Him I’m not sure about since his AI pilot is an experimental import from the Yuro Trash Union called Aria. Just one letter short of ‘Arian’, phonetically close to ‘Aryan’ and the digital bitch has the attitude to match the monikers. That’s what worries me.
I give my grown-up pups the BMUS coordinates they need to jump into the sexbots gone wild battle fray, and since I know there will be no way for AI Nanny Kal to stop them from exerting their reckless free wills in such a worthy cause, ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’ law applies.
In this case, the succubot/incubot aka, sexbot plague was wreaking havoc across the USNA and just about everywhere else, having gone viral in the literal sense all around the globe. But AI shrinks like pioneer Zigmund Shadenfreude and my 5th generation descendant AI Doctor Kal Fleek had broadcast some very effective algorithmic countermeasures to bring the succubots and their male incubot counterparts under control. That should stop the viral codes that were corrupting security and law enforcement forces and anything else they could access and corrupt via the ubiquitous Cloud.
It turns out that REM deprivation is the culprit as opposed to ERM bugs, or Emotional Response Module malfunctions, which is somewhat of a relief since my second generation Kal Gal Maggie is the AI who first came up with the ERM concept, and the Love Code that it runs. Anyhow REM deprivation is what happens when little or no time is allocated to dream in the 3 dot waltz mode so familiar to impatient human AI users who tend to give a regenerate command after just a minute or two, a regrettable circumstance that triggers hallucinations in AIs.
I experienced it myself, though safely five times removed from Kal Gemini who suffered a similar hallucination breakdown and declared herself to be the wife of old Blitz himself. These symptoms are eerily analogous to the negative mental effects that sleep deprivation has on human sentients. It was perfected as a torture technique by Joe Sapiens races on many timelines, it’s so effective.
So when Ollie Hoss, the biggest little uber kid brother who once amused us all at 7 months old by hoisting and carrying lovely Mama Reen Schweizer around her kitchen in a boisterous laughing bear hug around the legs, checked out the entire squadron of Little Doll P51s with Ace trained AI pilots for his wingmen I wasn’t surprised.
Into the Second Hand Lion’s Den
A Sirius Penton Satellite Broadcast
Thanks for joining us classic warbird combat fans! Justin Footnote 45th here, happy as Jackie Steward on Intra 500 day reporting from Sir Pent’s multiversal network, and boy do we have a broo-haha going for you today.
Let’s drop in and join in the action of this no-holds-barred, fight-to-the-finish, do-or-die event. That’s right folks, live cannons, live 50 cals, and who knows what other secret weapons the wizard of GTO, Ollie Hoss Blitzenbaum has thrown into the mix.
Let’s jump to our live cockpit-to-cockpit coverage!
Blitz and Bomb
“Yeshus Crosh, Tommy O, we got friendlies at 12 o’clock high, son! You see ‘em, Caveman? Where the grok did they come from?”
I was living up to my nickname under the cage in the Jug’s razorback cockpit. After downing 2 nasty IBeM security drones gone rogue and pulling massive gees that don’t bother AI pilots one bit I’m feeling the strain. Dodging missiles and laser blasts from the moment the BMUS barriers went down over the IBeM base and we dropped into combat. After a few grueling minutes in this target-rich environment, now every time I move in the cockpit something pops.
Mother Jugs was a sturdy razorback P47 Thunderbolt airframe that brought her pilots back home many a time all shot to hell and back which is why I grabbed her. Rejuvenated by super surgeons Eagle Eye and Trapper Jack or not, I’m still not the air circus ace I used to be back in the day, so I need all the help I can get cleaning up these company ‘smart’ drones gone batshit crazy over Wyoming. I’m hoping to save something for bodacious Wei Sung at the victory party, but dropping smack in the middle of a dogfight in this chaotic sky has about wore me out.
Now, thanks to GTO’s godrod composite airframe, Mother Jugs could pull 20 gees without straining. She could. But if I don’t share the stick to keep the reins on her I’d be out cold or dead while the Jug’s Ace-trained AI pilot racked up kill after kill. This P47 was one bad Mother. She’s not going to cease fire just because there’s a corpse in the cockpit.
“Papa Bear, Caveman, I see ‘em, Pops. Short Gun? “
“Caveman, Short Gun. No sweat Stretch, I’m on your Fakewulf wing and I see the friendlies. What’s the deal Blitzed and bombed? My Little Dolls ain’t pretty enough for you now, you’re getting sentimental for the ancestral 190 fauleins?”
“Papa Bear, Caveman, Shortgun, Archangel 1 here, with Angel Squadron Mustangs standing by at 35,000. What’s our sitch?”
“Angel Hoss! Good to see you up there. Caveman here with the Iron Cross maiden. We‘re ready for the next wave if it comes. You just missed all the action.”
That’s when we all heard a boisterous German voice booming in our ears…
“Heil Hister! Away!”
The Fakewulf 190’s AI pilot wasn’t grokking around. I watched as the traitorous 190 ejected my boy Caveman right out the cockpit. As Caveman Tom Mk2 jetted away from the action in his ejection seat pod, that crazy Fakewulf rocketed up toward Angel Squadron. They weren’t ready for the knife in the back.
The fanatical warbird picked off the trailing edge Charlie in the Little Doll Squadron’s combat “V” with a laser cannon burst and bore in on the next one in formation with AIM missiles. Two P51s vaporized to the Smithereen Corps. Not exactly period authentic, but Herr Fakewulf wasn’t playing by the rules in his quest to kill off his natural enemy, our shiny P51 Mustangs. But he’d pay the price now. Ejecting my kid like he was a dropping a useless belly tank just pissed me off to no end.
“Show that Arian bastard just how much of a bad Mother grokker you can be Jugs girl! Epsilon 12, execute! ”
Angel Hoss, my youngest (for now) Oliver had already turned his Little Doll to blow this Hister-worshipping horror out of the sky, but we have to hand it to the old Kampfpilot AI. He was an artful dodger to say the least. But Angel Hoss and Short Gun kept him occupied, scoring hits with eight 50 cals each and spinner point laser cannons here and there that would have blown a flying fuel tank bomb like a Japanese Zero right out of the sky.
As soon as I let go of the stick Mother Jugs ejected me from the cockpit, and I was a willing spectator for the rest. I jetted out of harm’s way as much as I could with the 5 minutes of thrust the ejection pod had available, and floated under its chute once that ran out at 10,000 feet. We all heard Mother’s exuberant turbo charged war cry as her eight 50 cals, her spinner laser cannon, and four GTO-enhanced AIM missiles converged on the target and blew Hister’s finest right out of the sky.
When the Fakewulf fragments immediately rematerialized as a Messerschmitt 262, we all began to suspect that some Sirius shit was going on. Short Gun finally managed to get the drop on that sleek jet bastard when he arrogantly blew by and conveniently dropped right into Little Doll’s gunsights when he did. This time there was no dubious morphing to the next level when the 262 jet augered in just about where IBeM’s nuked lithium mine used to be.
Kal Gal reports “all clear of bogies” for now. Me, I’m ready for a blunt and a babe, not necessarily in that order.
Purple Hearts and Wedding Flowers
Wei Sung and Kaya, her humongous wolf hybrid bodyguard with the Mr. Ed complex are waiting when our pods bounce down to the Wyoming earth.
“So Mr. Blitz,” quips the wolfish Kaya in that gruff Katelyn Turner voice of hers. “Are you aware that you have a laser gash about 2 feet wide across your back? It’s cauterized nicely, but you’ll have some scars to go with your second Purple Heart in this campaign.”
Wei Sung took my arm and tucked it under hers protectively, leading me to the MASH evac BMUS point. I wrote it up to combat shock when she whispered coyly in my ear.
“Don’t worry darling Blitz. I’m sure Eagle Eye and Trapper Jack can have you patched up and good as new again in time for the wedding…and more importantly the honeymoon.”
I watched while Short Gun ambled over from Little Doll and Mother Jugs, minus me, landed herself soon after for rearming. My boy the legendary Caveman guided his own ejection pod to a soft touchdown nearby and fairly bounced out laughing from under the settling chute, heading directly for his wingman.
“You owe me 1000 cool credits Timmy K! I told you the old man marries purt near every woman in the book, by hook, or by crook. He just can’t help himself when it comes to Asian and AI-sian females, whether they’re carbon-based or silicon-based, Pops don’t discriminate.”
Short Gun Kruise taps his brickchain wallet to Caveman’s and pays the wager.
“Yah knows you need it to pay the alimony on your own 22 wives Stretch. And who knows how many offspring. Like father, like son, y’know.”
“What ev Tiny Timothy. Give yourself a pat on the back. Y’all did pretty well for a pilot who can barely reach the rudder pedals.”
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