1

"Dear God," said the President of Tuggerkistan, Joseph Darius Cornelius John Edgar Jameson Edward Matheson Findooley O'Cunningham Koratica Tugger—or President Tugger for those who liked to save time. "Dear God, I say!"

"God's been dead a long time, Mr. President," said his right-hand man, Vice President Ronnie Ruggratt, former Captain in the Tuggerkistan Guard Royale (TGR). "We killed him, remember? And with all due respect, you're a big fuckin' idiot for thinking that useless old turd would be listening if he were around in the first place. He ain't doin' shit for this one, bud. I mean, look at that data."

The VP pointed at President Tugger's personal presidential monitor.

President Tugger cleared his throat and swallowed visibly. "Wh-What, uh— What exactly do women's booties have to do with this crisis, Vice President?"

Ruggratt slammed his fist on the presidential desk. "Damnit, asshole, I had all the spreadsheets and live data open, and you came in here and jerked off or something! You better not have been farting!"

Ruggratt clicked away all the presidential porn, and there it was.

The latest data on the virus plaguing the planet, codenamed the TUGG-5H1S virus. Eighty percent of the population had been infected, and swiftly rising. It had only sprung out in the last forty-eight hours. Symptoms of nausea and flatulence came on blazingly fast. One minute you were shaking hands with all the galaxies' planetary leaders, negotiating peace treaties to collectively protect hundreds of trillions of people, the next you were sobbing on the floor, farting your guts out, pleading for the Prime Minister of Fukkyuvia to at least fetch you a blanket.

President Tugger wanted to forget that day. Yes, he was infected. Yes, it had happened that very morning. But he had a wicked-hot immune system. His body was stable.

Others weren't so lucky. The next symptom was death.

Nausea and farts, then death. That's how it went.

Five billion were already dead.

"This is bad," President Tugger said.

"We need someone who can handle this mess," said Ruggratt.

"Agreed. But there's nobody who can beat this virus. It infects everybody who inhales the fart, even if it's been diluted with fresh air."

"But it doesn't kill everyone, clearly."

"Yes, true, true," said President Tugger.

"If only there were someone else like you."

"Yes, if only," said President Tugger.

"If only you had shagged some random groupie many years ago, one night after a gig when you were drunk and stoned and super-fucking-horny."

"Quite right," said President Tugger, wistful. "I wish."

Ruggratt swore under his breath. "Might I suggest your long-lost son, perhaps?"

"Who? Tugger?" President Tugger scratched his thick, masculine, presidential beard with extremely short and thick, equally masculine, equally presidential fingers. "I dunno, I haven't seen the little slugger since I abandoned him and his mother to go join an intergalactic Van Halen cover band called 'Van Halen in Space.' He might've been two? Or maybe Josephina was still pregnant..."

He frowned. "I can't remember. I wasn't the best guy back then, but I could play a mean bass guitar." He proceeded to finger-thump away on an invisible bass guitar, bobbing his head and gyrating his body to some imaginary rhythm.

Ruggratt sighed. "Please.... just stop... everything. You're the President of Tuggerkistan, the finest nation-planet ever to be run by a long and glorious lineage of cosmic giants. You don't need to reduce yourself by reminiscing about the glory days. We can beat this, my liege."

"I appreciate the brownnosing, Ronnie."

Nodding and licking his lips, Ruggratt continued, "Anyway, I did some digging. Your son is known across the galaxies as a guy who can do practically anything. He was a Space-Cop for a while. Even became a doctor so he could perform late-night live-streamed brain surgeries for charity. Latest news says he went into hiding."

"When? Where'd he go?" President Tugger asked.

"Five years ago, and nobody knows, dumbass Mr. President, sir. That's why it's called 'hiding.'"

"Oh." President Tugger saw the breaking news pop up on the presidential monitor, revealing that nearly one hundred percent of Tuggerkistanis were now infected with TUGG-5H1S. "Damnit, we need solutions. Police have already killed four deranged men wielding machetes, and none of the corpses were actually found with machetes. One guy had a butter knife with some peanut butter on the end, but it couldn't cut shit. They tried. All it did was kind of mush it around a little."

"I know, Mr. President. I briefed you on this earlier."

"If only there were a way..." President Tugger said, trying to be thoughtful, "to send my son a message... I would tell him, 'Daddy needs you.'"

Ignoring him, Ruggratt pulled out the presidential phonebook from a nearby drawer. "In the meantime, let's get the furnace warmed up. We're gonna have a lot of corpses to dispose of soon enough."

Then, lifting his shirt and revealing a plasma pistol, he added, "You fart around me, I'll kill you."

2

Daddy needs you.

There it was. The answer he'd been looking for all along. Where he'd come from—"the spunk of a wandering badass" he'd been told by his old Space-Cop boss. His father was out there still, somewhere, and the man needed his help. He sensed an entire planet needed his help. Maybe they were even his people.

He waded through the waning fog, pushing the clouds out of his path. He could see the exit now. The way out from this place of visions. Some had been twisted... nightmarish, even. On the other hand, some had been of such astounding beauty he'd been shaken to the point of orgasm.

Blowing a wad while tripping balls on whatever the fuck was in that intergalactic fungus the wafers were made from was an enlightening experience in itself. But more intriguing was the psychospiritual entity associated with it, appearing to the user each and every time they ate a wafer. Studies had actually been done on laboratory-raised crickets given wafers and found they, too, had psychedelic encounters with Her. In fact, the whole Earth worshipped Her in some official agreement laid down from above.

Deity? Spirit? He still only knew two things about Her: The Holy Oak was Her name, and hallucinogenic wafers were Her game. He'd eaten buckets of them—intentionally—and had lived a thousand lives inside Her fanciful dimension.

For what? He'd simply been wanting to know who he was.

Finally She'd granted him an answer.

He opened his eyes and found himself lying naked in an empty bathtub, hunched up against one end.

Joseph Dar-Cee Tugger, ex-Space-Cop, and what the hell, ex-MD., too. Five-three, fifteen pounds soaking wet. He used to think he'd been born to kill, but as he stared at the body of an emaciated pacifist—his body, apparently—he now questioned everything.

All that he'd lived for, all the bodies he'd buried and left rotting on their respective planets, in Dumpsters behind orbiting taverns in the furthest reaches of space, and even stuffed inside random lockers on ghost ships he'd cleaned out on the way to various jobs and fun side-activities.

Was that shit even him?

There was a knock at the open door. A guy whose head was almost completely shaved, save for the curtain of hair that hung from one sideburn. He stood five feet seven, one hundred thirty-five pounds of honey-glazed donuts and french-fry fat. Nothing too impressive—or at least that's what Tugger would have thought before this damn spirit quest of his. Now he feared this weird-haired individual might furiously beat him, dress him up and turn him out on the streets as some kind of girly-boy sex-slave.

The thought alone made Tugger pee.

"Oh, good, you're up," Hair said to Tugger, then he threw his arms up and howled, "Bless the Holy Oak!"

Tugger said, "Am I still tripping?"

"No, and it's a good thing, too, 'cause we gotta move out. The landlord found out I've been keeping a waferfiend in the bathtub for the last five years without paying any extra rent, and they are one maaaaad robot."

Tugger said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because he hadn't understood a thing Hair had said. Five years? Waferfiend? Rent?

"C'mon," said Hair, motioning with one hand as his head poked back around the corner. "Let's go."

"I can't," Tugger said. It was true. He couldn't move, not his legs, not his arms. Couldn't even rotate his head. Couldn't get the signals to fire. This emaciated-pacifist shit sucked. He felt so weak. The power he'd had before all this hallucinogenic-wafer bullshit was where it was at. He'd kill for some of that sweet, sweet power.

Tugger vowed to regain all his former height, weight, strength, length and, by the looks of it, girth—plus more. But he'd be satisfied with getting back to his Local Legend days— eleven feet tall, five hundred fifty pounds of muscle, a permanent hard-on for killing evil motherfuckers. Man, he missed killing those Speedos.

Back to Operation: Former Glory.

He started by willing himself to wiggle his penis. In his glory years, such a feat would have been a cinch. In fact, not only could he wiggle his penis, he could make his three testicles sing the Canadian national anthem while his penis made a hot lunch for a family of seven.

Tugger used to be a vessel of immense self-control.

Used to be?

Try is.

He focused, needlepoint, right on the base of his shaft, those new thin arms of his barely keeping him suction-cupped to the side of the tub.

Move, Little Baby Tugger, move! he shouted in his mind to his flaccid penis.

It twitched, wiggled, stood up straight and sang a rendition of Smashmouth's "All Star" that was so haunting Tugger needed a few moments to cry.

Then he had an idea.

"Where are my clothes?" he asked Hair. "Beam me up to my ship. I've got all the issues of Tush Squish magazine, and enough cans of baked beans to enrich my soul and get me back to the height, weight, strength, length, and girth I used to be."

Hair blinked twice and said, "Okay, bro, but I'm not gonna, like, feed you, or help you crank it or anything, 'kay?"

"I can crank myself, thanks."

Hair disappeared for a few moments, returning with Tugger's clothes, wallet, passport, and assorted-buttplug keyring.

"You'd be surprised how much the ladies love this thing," Tugger said, grabbing all his stuff and digging through the pockets of his fifty-pound pair of parachute-sized jeans. He found the teleporter fob and beamed himself over to his ship's medbay/urinal just as the agents from SOSTII burst in and arrested Hair for harbouring a dirty waferfiend.

Life was good.

Life was even better after he managed to army-crawl to the pantry and coax his arms into moving so he could grab the first of many magazines and cans of baked beans.

Tugger had a thousand lifetimes of appetites to feed.

3

A few hours later, Tugger—thirteen feet nine inches, seven hundred pounds of muscle and delicious, factory-style baked beans—sat exhausted on the floor, surrounded by thousands of empty cans and sticky magazines.

He was back. Mostly. All he needed now was to punch a few heads off, squeeze someone until they were just a puddle of goo, maybe pick up a hooker at a gas station in the Outer Rim and show her the stars, Tugger-style. Get back in the groove. Things were wide open. Five years had apparently passed. He'd quit the Space-Cops already. And he'd only meant to get away from the brain-surgery gig for a week-long vacation. Odds were he'd been fired years ago.

All those brains that didn't get sliced and diced for charity on a livestream. He almost shed a tear.

The thought crossed Tugger's mind to check his answering machine, but as he sat down in the comfy captain's chair a hail request came in from— Tuggerkistan. What a name. And to think he'd never heard of it.

"Computer, go," Tugger told his ship, then he pushed the button that actually initiated communications.

A man who could've easily passed for Tugger's uncle, cousin or brother—maybe an ugly sister or aunt—appeared on the dashboard monitor. The man looked ill, his skin exhibiting a greyish hue, and he opened the transmission by letting rip a glorious fart Tugger could almost smell through the screen.

Regretting chinsing out on the monitor's accessories, Tugger broke the awkwardness and said, "Smells great. Who are you, exactly?"

"I'm Vice President Ronnie Ruggratt of Tuggerkistan. I don't need to ask who you are. You are the spit and image of your father. I'm sending you our coordinates. We have a planetary disaster on our hands and your father is very, very sick."

The camera panned to a bearded man who could've passed for Tugger's older, more-weathered brother (or maybe a drug-addicted clone), lying on the floor with blood dripping from his mouth and nostrils.

"Come quickly," Ruggratt said, face pressed up against the camera, first giving a close-up of his black nose hairs and green-white boogers, then showing only his tongue. "The virus looks to be working quickly on the old man."

Tugger punched the monitor to pieces, then punched in Tuggerkistan's coordinates with his feet and slammed the hyper-drive into ultra-space—a little-known aspect of space–time he'd studied while under the Holy Oak's tutelage.

He was there five hours ago.

4

There weren't many things Tugger didn't know how to do, including but not limited to urinating from a ladypart (he'd tried, rather unsuccessfully), though he was a quick learner.

Flying spacecraft wasn't one of those things. Not landing, either. By Tugger's own calculations he'd been flying and landing spacecraft for at least thirty-five years now.

Not bad for thirty-four, he thought, giving his biceps a good kiss. Still got it.

Landing was great. He was currently landing his ship right through the Presidential House's roof.

He extricated himself from the flaming wreckage, gave his jeans a good slap, and walked into the Presidential Office. Instead of seeing his dad on the floor, bleeding, he saw his dad whacking off behind the desk.

Dad came, then farted.

Tugger couldn't help but inhale it as he strode up to the desk and drop-kicked the computer screen. "Is that how you treat Mom?" Tugger asked, ready to fight for family honour.

Dad opened his eyes and sputtered, "Wh-Wh— Tugger? Son?"

"Yeah, I got Ruggratt's message," Tugger said. "Sorry, I skipped time a little on the way over. There's a virus?"

Tears rolling down his chin, Dad nodded. "Yes, and you've already been infected."

Suddenly the door opened and Ruggratt came in. "How— Who— What—"

"Surprise, asshole," Tugger said. "Time travel."

"You destroyed the entire East Wing and killed half our staff, plus eighty-four percent of the planetary leaders from around the galaxies who were here for an unfortunately timed press conference."

"Oops. Now let's take down this virus."

"Tugger, wait!" said Dad. "Don't you want to catch up first? I can tell you about your mother."

"I dunno, this virus seems pretty serious. I had to step over people dying as I was coming in."

Ruggratt butted in and said, "Catching up sounds like a splendid idea. Go do that. Mwahahahahaha!"

Tugger stared. "I suspect you of crimes."

His father opened a hidden passage behind a bookshelf. Before he followed Dad in, Tugger added to Ruggratt, "I will get to the bottom of this. I am relevant. The multiverses do need me."

"Well, you killed half their leaders, so—"

Tugger turned his ears off.

5

Down in the Presidential Pad as it was often called, Tugger learned all that there was to learn about his mother.

Her name had been Josephina Tuggerlina, and Tugger had been named after her. She died of ovarian cancer not long after Tugger had been born. Dad, a young and rebellious royal, had joined a highly successful intergalactic rock band and returned after a moderately unsuccessful intergalactic rock tour to find his wife was dead and his one-year-old son had hijacked a spaceship and taken to the stars.

With Tugger presumed dead, Dad gave up his rock-god dream and rejoined the royal family, sucking off the societal teat for many years to come.

"Cool story, Dad," Tugger said. He hugged his father and then went back upstairs.

Virus time.

6

There was something up with all... this. Tugger didn't know what the "this" was, and he didn't know what the "something" was, either, but he definitely knew that there was something going on here, somehow, regarding something else. Smart money was on the virus.

And it was suspicious as hell.

He started by opening up all the doors, seeing if they went anywhere. Most didn't. Oddly enough, Tugger would open about sixty percent of the doors only to find they led to sections of grey drywall. One bit of drywall in particular had a small hole near the bottom.

Tugger got down on all fours like a rather terrifyingly shaped hairless dog and peered inside. He could see mostly black, but there was a faint flicker of blue light from within.

It was settled.

Tugger got up, pulled back one bazooka-sized arm and fired out a fist the size and shape of a watermelon with many knobby protrusions. The punch smashed the drywall to pieces and Tugger walked through the dust cloud, into the darkness.

Towards the blue light. Which wasn't there anymore.

Hey! Tugger thought, and then the lights turned on.

In the centre of the room was a giant, translucent, pulsating blob sitting on what could only be described as an equally giant white plate. Cables and needles and pumps and tubes snaked every which way, into the jelly-like creature and out into row after row of server farms taking up much of the room.

The creature's internal organs could be seen, an array of blues and greens and yellows, trembling along to the faint rhythm of its heart.

It was dying. Tugger could sense as much, and the feeling filled his spirit more and more the closer he got to the creature's side. When he pressed his twenty-inch-long, Toronto street-meat–looking fingers to its gelatinous body, they were ever so slightly absorbed into its warm mass.

Tugger leaned back and closed his eyes, taking it all in.

Its name was Gogo, the last of the Golgolians, a sentient species of vegetarians that once lorded over the lands of Golgolia. They hadn't been bred for war. When the human came, they were no match for him, and there were no fauna who would prove a worthy opponent, either. Everything was butchered, and not all was consumed. Much went to waste, rotting in a landfill just outside of town. A worse fate was in store for Gogo's kind, however. Each and every one of them had been sucked dry, harvested of their essences to prolong this horror concocted by the human.

"Who, Gogo?" Tugger said, removing his hand to wipe the tears. "Not my father?"

"No," said Ruggratt from behind.

Tugger turned to see Ruggratt waltzing into the room with toilet paper stuck to his shoe.

"It was I," Ruggratt said, still unaware of the TP. There was a bit of brown on it. "I obliterated the Golgolians! I did it all! Mwahahahahaha!"

"You motherfucker, that was GENOCIDE!" Tugger screamed, extra-hard. "And not only that, thanks to this virus, eighty billion people are dead! What do you expect the remaining three billion people to do? Repopulate the planet?"

"Oh, Tugger, Space-Cop, I knew you were dim, but not that dim."

"I'm actually pretty smart, so shut up."

"There is no virus. There are no people." Ruggratt spread his arms wide and Tugger saw there was some brown under the man's fingernails. "It's all a hoax. I created it all for my own sick, twisted, definitely sexual satisfaction."

"But what about my dad," Tugger said, "President Tugger?"

"Oh, Tugger, Space-Cop, you are stupid. That's not your dad. I don't know who your fucking dad is, and I don't care. That's just some random set of chromosomes I found in my cryostorage from Earth, like all the other ones."

"But he looks just like me, only with a beard and a different lifestyle! As a matter of fact, you look like you could be my relative, too!"

"You're crazy. Any last words?" Ruggratt said, pulling out his plasma pistol. It glowed blue.

Tugger said nothing.

"Don't want to know why I brought you here, or anything like that?"

Tugger shrugged and said nothing.

"Really? You wanted to know who your father was, went away on a spirit quest, came back five years later and I immediately contacted your ship and said I had your dad here, and you don't want to ask any more questions?"

"No," Tugger finally said, calmly walking over to Ruggratt and punching his head off. "Learn how to wipe your ass without getting shit everywhere."

Satisfied with his one-liner, he went back to Gogo and looked for some indication on how to turn off the damn needles and vacuums.

Gogo's body reached out to him, the jelly stretching like fingers, forming something of a bowl to insert his hand. When he did, that now-familiar warmth overtook him, and Gogo spoke to him some more.

The human had told the truth. There was no virus, and the others were not real, more like husks made to look human using stolen cryopreserved DNA and materials harvested from the Golgolians. The human known as Ronnie Ruggratt was a wanted criminal, a highly intelligent, psychopathic scientist who had fled Earth to start his own civilization. His plan was to lure and kill Tugger, who was feared by criminals throughout the galaxies. Ruggratt knew it was only a matter of time before Tugger returned to the Space-Cops and hunted him down. The other human known as President Tugger was not Tugger's father. Tugger did not really have a father. But he was a perfect genetic clone of someone who once did.

"Then who am I?" Tugger asked Gogo. "Who made me?"

"You are whoever you want to be," Tugger's voice answered, but it wasn't him speaking. "We do not choose to be born, we choose who to be. If you really must know of your past, head to the new coordinates entered into your ship."

"Thank you, Gogo," Tugger said, letting go of the creature.

Before he left that wasteland of a planet, he fulfilled Gogo's last wish: A massive shot of morphine, all the plugs pulled, and all the servers shut down. Tuggerkistan—Golgolia—would be reclaimed by nature with time.

Where would he go from there? Tugger didn't wish to dig deeper into his past just yet. The wound was fresh. He wasn't saying no to the idea forever, just maybe it would happen in a story or two.

In the meantime, he had a fine Outer Rim hooker to pick up and stars to see.