Revelations and Revolution

Sam is the eighth episode of Cyberpunk. The previous was Sam, and the next is TBA.

Story
The sky was the first thing SpongeBryan saw when he came into consciousness. Dark and muddled, just like his memory at the time. ''What happened? How did I get here?'' he thought. He tried to move his arms and his legs, but he couldn’t. He tried to say something, but there was a towel stuck in his mouth. He turned his head. Pat and Ron were lying next to him in the same condition. Neither of them were awake yet.

“Where is he?” uttered a voice.

SpongeBryan recognized the voice, and suddenly, memories of his skirmish with Sam came flooding back to him. Before he could make anything of those memories, he was distracted by the sound of a boat’s door closing.

“Sorry we’re late,” said a voice that was different from the first.

SpongeBryan didn’t recognize the second voice. He tried to sit up, but his body was still in pain from the electric jolt. He opted instead to just raise his head, and he saw Sam talking to a fish in a brown trenchcoat and hat.

“You’re not Arthur,” said Sam.

“Good eye,” said the fish. “Now give us who we came here for.”

“Not until you tell me who you are.”

“Don’t make this difficult for yourself.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Do you know who we are?”

The fish removed his trenchcoat to reveal that he was actually two fish, one standing atop of the other. The fish separated and took out their laser guns.

“How cute,” said Sam before knocking the laser guns out of the fishes’ hands with electric sparks.

SpongeBryan turned to Pat and Ron and gave them a slight nudge with his tied-together feet. Pat and Ron opened their eyes, looked down at themselves, and attempted to scream.

“Tell me who you are,” said Sam, holding the two fish by their gill slits.

“Never!” said one of the fish.

“Besides,” said the other. “Those laser guns were just a distraction to keep you from noticing the fish coming up behind you.”

“Wha-“

A pair of mutant fish grabbed Sam by the arms, and another placed a bag over his head.

“Let go of me!” cried Sam as bursts of electricity exploded from his palms.

“What would the fun be in that?” said another voice behind Sam.

SpongeBryan, Pat, and Ron turned their heads just enough to see the owner of the voice. It was another fish, this one tall, muscular, and with a single blinking eye.

Sam chuckled. “You think just because I can’t see anything I can’t electrocute you and your mooks right now?”

“If you had been able to electrocute us, you would have done it by now,” said the one-eyed fish.

Sam was baffled. “Don’t you know about me? I fought off entire Atlantic armies by myself!” “Yes,” said the one-eyed fish. “I’m sure you were capable of that twenty years ago, but you’re getting old, and I can see it.”

Sam tried to turn around and attack the one-eyed fish, but the mutants who were holding his arms tightened their grips.

“Yes,” said the one-eyed fish. “You aren’t nearly as powerful as you make yourself out to be. You operate on fear, and that’s usually good enough to suffice when you’re out hunting criminals, but you’ll have to do a lot more than shoot lightning bolts out of your hands to scare me.”

“What do you want?” screamed Sam.

“You know what I want.”

“The yellow guy? His freak friends?”

“Yes, but first, I must ensure that you’ll never be a threat to us again.”

The one-eyed fish took out a weapon that was unlike any other weapon SpongeBryan, Pat, or Ron had ever seen.

“Wh-what’s going on?” asked Sam, noticeably frightened. “Take this damn bag off my head! I can’t breathe!”

“Don’t worry,” said the one-eyed fish as he pointed the weapon at Sam’s back.”This’ll only hurt for a minute.”

The weapon powered up, then it let out a beam so deafening that many of the mutants had to cover their ears. Sam felt electrical sensations all over his body, and when they stopped, he felt his spine break in half.

“How are you feeling?” said the one-eyed fish with a smirk.

Sam was in such immense pain that he was unable to speak. He believed that he would die at any moment. He hoped that he would die. The agony was getting to be too much for him.

SpongeBryan, recovering from his own pain, managed to stand upright and hop into the one-eyed fish’s view. Pat and Ron followed suit.

The one-eyed fish removed the bag from Sam’s head. “It seems we didn’t need you after all.”

“Why?” was the only word Sam could muster from his mouth.

“Because we found your fugitives, that’s why.”

“No.” Sam pointed to his broken spine. “Why?”

“When you’re at war,” said the one-eyed fish. “You leave no stone unturned.”

Mutants cut apart the rope that bound SpongeBryan’s arms and legs.

“War?” SpongeBryan whispered as the towel that gagged him fell to his feet.

“There’s somebody else!” shouted Ron the second he was able to talk. “Jim Carpfish! He was left behind in Electric Man’s boat!”

The one-eyed fish looked surprised for a moment, but then he nodded.

“I’ll send some people to find him,” he said. “But first, we’ve gotta get you two to safety.”

“Who are you?” asked Ron.

“I’ll answer that and more once we get to the HQ,” said the one-eyed fish.

“The HQ?” Pat and Ron looked at each other.

A small group of mutants threw Sam’s weakened body into the trunk of their boat. SpongeBryan, Pat and Ron squeezed into the boat’s back seat with the rest of the mutants, and the one-eyed fish sat in the front seat. The one-eyed fish pushed coordinates into a touchpad on the dashboard, and everything around them turned into a fast-moving blur. SpongeBryan made out the greyness of clouds and the sapphire of scallops in the blur and realized that the boat they were in was flying.

I haven’t seen this kind of advanced technology since our last visit to the Upper Ring, thought SpongeBryan. Can I really trust these people?

The boat came to a halt, and the one-eyed fish announced, “We’re here!”

SpongeBryan, Pat, and Ran stumbled out the boat, dizzy from its speed and sudden stop.

“These rides can take a lot of you, I know,” said the one-eyed fish. “You get used to them.”

“So where’s the HQ?” said Pat.

“Right under you.”

Ron stomped a foot, and he heard an echo. Pat and Ron leaned down and started wiping away sand until a wooden door was clearly visible.

Ron stared at the one-eyed fish with a bewildered expression. “Who are you again?”

The one-eyed fish used a crowbar to open the wooden doors, and he climbed down a ladder to an underground base.

“Come on!” said the one-eyed fish.

SpongeBryan, Pat, and Ron cautiously descended into the base behind the mutants.

The base was not elaborate; in fact, it seemed to have been constructed in two or three days. Despite this, SpongeBryan was amazed that such a thing would ever exist, much less that he’d be standing in one. He found the one-eyed fish sitting at a table with three empty chairs.

“Have a seat, make yourself comfortable,” said the one-eyed fish. “I’ll have some of my guys bring you coffee.”

SpongeBryan, Pat, and Ron sat in the empty chairs.

“Why did you help us?” said Pat.

“Because you’re important to our movement,” said the one-eyed fish.

“What movement?”

A fish with four arms came out of another room and gave SpongeBryan, Pat and Ron a cup of coffee each.

“Thanks,” said SpongeBryan.

The fish bowed then went back into the other room.

“So,” said the one-eyed fish. “You wanted to know my name.”

“Yes,” said Ron. “Among other things.”

“I’ve gone through a range of identities in my lifetime,” said the one-eyed fish. “But most people call me Cyclops nowadays.”

“Cyclops,” repeated Pat. “What an…interesting name.”

“Yes,” replied Cyclops. “But you’ll find that my name is the least interesting thing about me.”

Cyclops stood up from his chair and headed for the other room.

“Coming?” he asked.

SpongeBryan, Pat, and Ron shrugged and followed Cyclops into the other room. They looked around and saw dozens of mutants either tapping away at laptops or convening with each other about the news.

“This…is the future,” said Cyclops. “Our future.”

“What’s going on?” asked SpongeBryan.

“I guess I’ve been putting it off long enough,” said Cyclops. “It’s time that you know the truth.”

Cyclops walked over to the coffee-maker, put a mug under it, pressed a button, and watched the warm brown liquid fall into it.

“You know,” he said. “My mother used to tell me stories of a time when the sky wasn’t this dark. Hundreds, thousands of years ago, it was brighter. Colorful, filled with clouds shaped as flowers.”

“Yes, that’s a nice fairy tale,” said Pat. “But what does that have to do with any of this?”

Cyclops took a sip from his coffee mug.

“Alveus, just like the sky, has gotten dark,” he said. “It used to be a nice place, where everyone got treated equally, but as the income gap widened and technology slowly but surely make the working man extinct, that changed. Today, equality is little more than a dream. Folks like us get taken advantage of because we’re different, because we’re poor. The elitists in the Upper Ring think of us as nothing more than insects to step on whenever they get bored of us. I know this firsthand.”

Cyclops took another sip from the coffee mug.

“When I was 13,” he continued. “A drunken man broke into our house and started doing awful things to my mother. My mother tried to escape, but the offender was too strong, and after a violent struggle, she ended up dead. I tried to tell the police, but the man who killed my mother was a high-status socialite, and they wouldn’t touch him. I went to the man’s house, and all he did was say a half-assed ‘sorry’, put a 50-dollar bill in my hand, and tell me to have a good life.”

Cyclops finished off the coffee and put the mug on top of the coffee-maker.

“The mutants around me all have similar stories of abuses by the Upper Ring,” he went on. “We’re sick and tired of letting the wealthy get away with what they do to us, so we’re going to change the system for the better. We’re going to be the sparks that lead the way to a brighter future, and we plan to do it through insurgency.”

“Insurgency? Like rebellion?” asked Ron.

“Yes,” replied Cyclops.

SpongeBryan was hysterical “Why are we so important to this rebellion? Why did you track us down? Why did you save us?”

“Because, SpongeBryan,” said Cyclops. “Your escape from jail was what encouraged us to start this rebellion in the first place.”

“What? But that happened a few weeks ago.”

“Well, there were always rumblings before that, but your open act of defiance was something we had never seem before. It inspired us. We made you the symbol of this insurgency.”

“Wow, I’m flattered.”

“Wait a minute!” said Ron. “How do you plan to carry out this rebellion?”

“Well,” said Cyclops. “First, we’ll cut off all the electricity to Alveus, then we’ll burn the Upper Ring to the ground.”

“What?” Ron was horrified. “You’re going to kill every living soul in the Upper Ring just because a couple of them wronged you?”

“It’s not just a couple! You’re a mutant! You know how vicious they all are.”

“Even so, they don’t deserve to be massacred!”

Cyclops sighed. “Listen, starfish, you’re either with us or against us, and if you’re against us, we’ll have no choice but to imprison you.”

“I agree with my brother,” said Pat. “This is too harsh.”

Cyclops growled. “I should have known that you two would have opposed this! Our uprising sprouted from SpongeBryan escaping from jail, and you’re the ones who got him sent to jail in the first place!”

“What? That’s crazy!” laughed SpongeBryan. “Right, guys?”

Pat and Ron were silent.

“Right, guys?” SpongeBryan said this in a much softer voice.

A pair of mutants grabbed Pat and Ron’s arms, and they dragged them into another room.

Cyclops patted SpongeBryan on the back. “Forget those traitors! We’re about to take back Alveus, and you’re about to lead us!”

SpongeBryan was still in shock. “M-m-m-me?”

“Yes, so you better get prepared. The revolution starts tomorrow!”

SpongeBryan fainted.