Work Text:
Brain gazed balefully out over the podium at the assembled crowd. This ought to be his crowning moment, metaphorically as well as literally. The trouble was, he'd experienced it too many times before. As a small additional disappointment, the podium had already been used that morning to fete a woodchuck, so he wasn't even the first rodent these yokels had assembled to gawk at.
He cleared his throat to give himself a moment to think. The last several dozen times around, he'd been improvising these speeches. “People of Earth, I'd like to congratulate you on your impending rule by a superior intelligence. Unfortunately, I am trapped in a time loop and have only minutes before the anomaly deposits my consciousness back in bed at a very twee inn at six o'clock this morning, listening to inane drive-time radio. Ergo the victory is, I fear, a hollow one.”
The crowd stared blankly. Behind him, Pinky applauded wildly.
“But perhaps it's just as well.” He was riffing now. “To be brutally honest with myself, and at this point why not, I don't know what to do with the world now that I've got it. In time, most likely, I'd become another Alexander, weeping for lack of additional worlds to conquer. Or Zuckerberg when he stated turning really creepy. Instead of railing against my fate, perhaps I ought to appreciate the opportunity to linger in this moment of triumph and possibility, atop my Darien, and reflect on how priceless such moments are.”
Pinky started to speak. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, he had latched on to the “Darien” reference and was about to say something about casting changes in Bewitched. Brain plunged on.
“But a glimmer of hope—” The crowd was growing restless. Of course it was. By now he knew each and every person in this benighted town, and they were all cretins. “Where do you think you're going, Steve?” he snapped at a man shuffling toward the parking lot. “You'll learn to value your time on this earth if I have to beat it into you with your own rocket-powered smart snowboard! Pinky, fetch me the snowboard control.”
“On it, Brain!”
“Where was I? Ah yes. A glimmer of hope occurs to me: perhaps this personal revelation about valuing time and so on is precisely what is required to break the time loop. In that case, I promise I have learned my lesson and will continue on to tomorrow not simply as a despot, but as an enlightened despot, so there's no need for me to repeat another—”
Rise and shine, sleepyheads! You're listening to WB-B-CHEAP—
“Raaaugh!”
The clock radio flew across the room and smashed against a pastel wall. It didn't matter. Noise complaints never came to anything. The crash would wake Pinky, but he was guaranteed to wake up by 6:07 at the latest, no matter what. Speaking of...three...two...
“Oh, Brain, I was having the most wonderful dream. We were living in an experimental research facility, and the horrible genetic testing had made one of us a genius and the other insane.”
“That's a nice dream, Pinky. I envy you your dream.” Brain flopped back against the goosedown mattress. He missed the lab. He missed the makeshift bed in their cage. He had booked the inn as an indulgence while temporarily flush with cash—his plan to take over the world by luring online influencers to a dangerous but ironically entertaining backwoods adventure park had been a flop, but the park itself had turned a tidy profit—but now he never wanted to see another Amish quilt in his life.
Brain stared at the ceiling. He never wanted to see vintage crown molding again, either. But the time loop was unbreakable. He was trapped in Pennsylvania purgatory. As was Pinky, not that Pinky knew it.
Pinky clambered on the bed. “Ooh, this is a quality mattress! May I—?”
They'd been down this conversation fork a few times. “Yes, Pinky, you may jump on the bed.”
Not for the first time, Brain almost envied Pinky his far lower intelligence enhancement. There he was, bouncing around without a care in the world, his tiny brain ricocheting around his skull like a single hydrogen atom in the CERN collider. In his way, he was perfect. Meanwhile he, the Brain, had to get busy formulating yet another plan for world dominion.
Or did he?
Of course he did. What a thought. Taking over the world was the only thing keeping him sane. Facing eternity in the Rust Belt without a goal, he could easily lose his mind, and what other goal was worthy of his genius? Helping others? Bettering himself as an individual? Learning to play Rachmaninoff or carve ice sculpture? Absolutely not, and besides, he was already pretty good at ice sculpture.
On the other hand, a renegade thought whispered, it wouldn't hurt to take a day off. Logically speaking, if he was stuck in an infinite time loop, he could take infinite days off and still have infinite days of conquest before him. This could be a free day. Just one. Why not?
Pinky, airborne, had worked himself into a fit of hysterical laughter. “Brain, you should try this! You were so lucky to get the bed! It's so much softer than the floor!”
Despite himself, Brain felt a twinge of guilt. Why had he made Pinky sleep on the floor, anyway? They shared a bed, or Brain's best attempt at constructing a bed from scrap material, back at the lab. But he knew why. He'd realized his mistake the moment they'd walked into the room at the inn. Two prisoners consolidating their bedding in a cold cage could be rationalized as a pragmatic choice. There was no platonic explanation for booking a room with one bed (oh my Galileo there was only one bed) in a charming country inn on the weekend of a rodent-themed spring fertility ceremony. He had panicked and ordered Pinky to sleep on the floor, and Pinky, bless his simple erratic heart, had cheerfully unpacked his collection of stuffed animals and lined them up along the wainscoting. In the moment, Brain had congratulated himself on being able to spend one night without all those beady eyes staring at him.
Pinky launched himself off the bed, smacked into a window, and slid down to the sill with a long rubbery squeak. “That was fun. So what next? Brunch?”
“No, you wall-eyed goon, we're not on vacation, we're—” Come to think of it, in all the iterations of this day, he hadn't yet stopped for the breakfast half of bed and breakfast, even though he'd paid for it and vaguely recalled that it included quiche. “Tell you what, Pinky. What do you want to do today?”
“The same thing we do every day, Brain. Try to—oh, no, I've gotten all mixed up. What is it we do every day, Brain?”
“Never mind that. What do you want to do?”
“Ooh.” Pinky gazed out the window over the snowy rooftops. “Only the obvious springs to mind. Surfing!”
“We're in a landlocked state in February.”
“But there's a fellow down there selling surfboards.”
“Touche, Pinky.” In Brain's estimation, genetic meddling had given Pinky almost exactly the intelligence of the average H. sapiens. It wasn't an impressive level of brainpower, it might even be a downgrade from ordinary mouse intelligence, but it did make Pinky useful as a sort of canary in the coal mine of human idiocy. If Pinky had a ridiculous idea, a bunch of naked apes out there probably had it, too.
Well, it would be an amusing challenge. “All right, Pinky. If that's what you want, I will find a way for you to go surfing.”
“Oh, goody goody!” Pinky hopped off the windowsill. “Don't peek while I slip into my bathing suit.”
“Why did you pack— No, never mind. If this is going to work, I need to acquire a kite, a disposable pie plate, and a very small boot.”
*
Brain peered over the mansard roof. Below, in the town square, the usual crowd had gathered for Woodchuck Day. Normally, he would be gloating over their immanent domination, but this time around was different. He turned. Snow had piled high on the roof, an architectural inevitability with this type of flat-topped, multi-sloped construction. Pinky, clad in a pair of billowing Day-Glo trunks that Brain had to assume he had sewed himself, because the alternative was positing the existence of a business that sold tacky swimwear for three-inch-tall surfers, perched on Brain's smallest model of rocket snowboard, which Brain had reconfigured into a surfboard by the brilliant feint of removing the rockets.
“Ready when you are, Brain!”
Brain tied the kite string he'd been playing to a finial. Here was the biggest challenge of the project: keeping Pinky from ruining it. He had given this a lot of thought. “Pinky?”
“Yes, Brain?”
“I need you to stay right where you are for precisely one minute and fifty-nine seconds. Do you understand how to keep track of that time?”
“Count to...sixty and...then to...fifty-nine?”
“Great Pythagoras's ghost, no, Pinky; you can't count that high. You must sing 'Rock-A-Hula Baby' from the original Blue Hawaii soundtrack.”
“Will do, Brain!”
Brain leapt to the nearest drainpipe. From here on out, timing was everything. He started sliding down the drainpipe, had a thought, shimmied back up. “The original, Pinky. Not the 1990s reissue.”
“Of course not, Brain!”
He started down again. Clambered up again. “Or any of the archival outtakes.”
“Wouldn't think of it, Brain!”
Well, he'd done his best. There was no such thing as a fully Pinky-proofed plan.
One minute and fifty-nine seconds. Brain plunged down the drainpipe, raced across the town square, scooted under the feet of the mayor's entourage, and hoisted himself into an all-too-familiar animal hutch. He pulled on a miniature Army boot, paused for exactly five seconds, then delivered a thoroughly satisfying kick to the rear end of purportedly prophetic woodchuck Pennsylvania Bill.
With a squeal, Bill shot out of the hutch and across the nearest street. When motivated, he was surprisingly fast for someone shaped like a wet burrito. Brain hoped that didn't throw off the timing. No, things seemed to be unfolding according to plan. The mayor ran after the woodchuck. The entourage ran after the mayor. Traffic veered aside to avoid them. A truck carrying sheets of plate glass crashed into the surf shack, sending glass flying. For a crucial second, sunlight bounced through each sheet of glass in turn, then reflected off an aluminum pie tin tied to the kite Brain had flown off the roof. A breeze spun the kite around, swinging a focused beam of heat onto the mountain of snow piled on the roof. The snow liquified en masse at one minute and fifty-eight seconds. Close enough for horseshoes.
The double slope of the roof made an ideal waterway. The waiting crowd in the town square was drenched in a perfect wave as, overhead, a voice called out, “Look, Brain! I'm Annette Funicello!”
All in all, there had been worse plans.
*
Pinky emerged soaking wet, deliriously happy, and in real medical danger of hypothermia. They returned to the inn to dry off. Brain ordered coffee and a cheese plate from room service. Why not? The bill would never come due. Miraculously, the hotel cable had Last Year at Marienbad, a tolerable watch that would allow him to brush up on his French. In every loop in which he'd destroyed the G20 summit, Macron had laughed at his accent, and it was that irritating haw-haw type of laugh.
“I don't get it,” Pinky said around a hunk of farmhouse cheddar. “The black-and-white fellow says they've been to the hotel before, but the black-and-white lady says they haven't. They can't both be right, can they?”
Brain hadn't expected his companion to be able to read subtitles, let alone follow the plot. “There isn't a pat answer, Pinky; that's the point. I was just thinking it could be read as an allegory for subjective experience. For Person A, each night spent with someone may be fraught with emotion and significance beyond his capacity to express, while for Person B, it's forgotten as easily as—”
“Brain! Look! I can fit an olive up each nostril!”
“Exactly.”
“Sorry. You know how I get when you start using the words with syllables.”
“Yes, well, it was just an example.” Brain sighed and reached for a snack that hadn't been up any of Pinky's orifices. “Maybe the man in the movie is trapped in a time loop, and the dratted hotel is so familiar because he keeps waking up there over and over again.”
“Ahh.” Pinky nodded wisely. “Like that Tom Cruise movie where he's forced to live, die, and repeat until he's pushed to the very edge! Of! Tomorrow!”
“I don't believe I've seen that one.”
“Are you kidding, Brain? After this, we absolutely have to watch Magnolia!”
“I have no respect for Paul Thomas Anderson,” Brain muttered. “Were I the son of Ghoulardi, I'd have no trouble taking over the world.”
Speaking of which, it was high time he drew up his next plan. He could rework the heat beam into something more destructive, maybe. Or take advantage of his new pie plate supplier. He didn't have much time before he was shunted back to 6:00 A.M., so he ought to settle on an idea. But inspiration failed to strike. For once, he was in too good a mood to scheme. He already had the best the world could offer, right in that room: strong coffee, local cheese, Pinky, avant-garde film, he did not say Pinky under no circumstances could anyone prove he had mentally put Pinky on that list, and high-thread-count sheets.
“Eek! Scary part!” Pinky shrieked in response to nothing in the movie that Brain could discern, and all but jumped into Brain's lap.
This was Brain's cue to shove Pinky away if he was feeling indulgent, or bop him on the head and then shove him if he wanted to be firm. But...here came another dangerous thought...he didn't have to. The day would soon end, or rather begin again, and he'd wake up with a clean slate. Only he would remember what had happened between them. He could do, or not do, anything he wanted.
So he let Pinky lean against him. His companion's fur was still slightly damp, which deepened his familiar scent. It wasn't unpleasant; on the contrary, Brain reflected ruefully, something in his animal hindbrain was soothed by the presence of another mouse. He'd often tried to work in isolation, a sensible arrangement, only to find that it made him irritable and, yes, bored. Counterintuitive as it might seem, plans came to him more easily with Pinky around.
Not that he was thinking of plans at the moment. What he was thinking was absurd. Sitting too close together was overheating him, that was the problem. His mental circuits were shorting out. No matter how comfortable it might be, he would not put an arm around Pinky. That was a laughable idea. He was the Brain, logical ruler of the planet. He did not, if he could help it, do hugs. When he took over the world, he planned to outlaw both hugging and kissing hello. That'd really toast Macron's baguette.
And yet.
The day was almost over. The universe would reset. No one would know.
As he stretched his arm back, an illicit thrill ran through him. He really could do anything, couldn't he? He could have joined Pinky in jumping on the bed that morning. He could have gone surfing with him. Not that he wanted to do those things. But Pinky made it look like fun. And as long as he was in this pocket of space-time, he could admit, privately, that it was often fun to do things with Pinky.
His arm successfully circumnavigated Pinky's waist, which was, dash it all, as soft as he'd expected it to be. Hair care was another thing Brain did not, as a general rule, do, but Pinky did. Pinky had cooed over the mouse-sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the inn's shower. Fine, then. This loop would end with the two of them in a comfortable movie-watching position that he didn't need to ponder any more deeply because soon it would never have happened. Pinky wouldn't have time to ask any awkward questions about it.
“You know what, Brain?”
All right, one awkward question. Drat. “What, Pinky?”
“I just realized you must be the genius.”
“What do you... Oh. That dream you had. Yes, nicely deduced.”
“What you said just now, about nights of fruity emotion and zingy pants, and the other person not even knowing. That was real smarty stuff. How'd you know exactly how I feel?”
Brain turned, bewildered. “Pinky, no. That's not how you feel. That's how I feel.”
“Ha! I may be the insane one, but I know feelings. That's spot-on what it's like going out at night to do your nifty plans with you, every time.”
The genetically improbable blue eyes were as guileless as ever. But he couldn't be serious. The idea of Pinky having complex private emotions was preposterous on the face of it. Having emotions about him, Brain, was...well, it wasn't the way the world worked. He wasn't lovable. That was why he had to strive to be feared. Not that Pinky would ever fear him, or even be impressed by him. Someday he would stand astride the planet, worshiped by all, and only Pinky would know he was really a neurotic mess with a swollen head and a record of failure that would embarrass the Washington Generals. No matter what he did, no matter what he became, his old and only friend would always see him the same way.
In the past, when he'd reflected on this, it had always been with a twinge of bitterness. This time, he almost smiled. He didn't, of course. In this already compromised moment, with Pinky staring at him, he couldn't let his guard down —
Yes he could.
At the very least, he had to ask. “How do you feel about us, Pinky?”
“To tell you the truth—” Pinky leaned in and lowered his voice. Brain caught his breath. “To tell you the truth, I think we're both kind of insane.”
“You know what, Pinky?” Brain said softly. “I think you're right.”
“I am? I'm right about something?” It was so easy to make him happy. “Will you...?”
“I will not call you 'Thinky.'”
“Not what I was going to ask.”
Pinky's face was very close. And here was another problem Brain had pondered, from time to time, always telling himself it was a strictly hypothetical thought experiment. The sniffing and darting and other instinctive mating behavior of baseline M. musculus seemed inappropriate for gengineered chimeras like themselves; it would be beneath even Pinky. But by the same token, they weren't human, and there was no logical reason to copy human mating behavior. They were effectively a new sapient species, and as such demanded a new semiosis, rather than rifling through the ritualistic detritus of the past—
Oh, to hell with it. He kissed Pinky.
Pinky kissed him.
And then, astonishingly, blissfully, he didn't think about anything at all.
*
Rise and shine, sleepyheads! You're listening to WB-B-CHEAP, the only station that blew its entire musical licensing budget on one song!
A chasm opened inside Brain as he shrank into a fetal position under the covers. It hadn't happened. Or, alternately, it had happened for him and no one else. It might as well have been a dream, like Pinky's dream about the laboratory. No, wait; the lab was real. It was very important that he remember the lab was real. They might even get back to it someday. But he would never get back to the night before.
Well. This was what he wanted, wasn't it? This was the plan. The previous day was trimmed from reality and safely disposed of. Life would continue as it always had. He'd shove Pinky away and slap his hand aside and bop him on the head, and eventually, when he finally got out of the time loop, he'd take over the world in a way that stuck and he'd be able to keep the rest of the global population at a respectful distance, too. Sampling the alternative had been an intriguing experiment—thinking about how intriguing it had been made him struggle to breathe—but it was far too dangerous.
Seeing Pinky again, knowing that for this Pinky nothing had happened, was going to hurt. No it wasn't. There was no rational reason to feel hurt when all was going according to plan. He'd just have to remember to act casual. Breakfast might help.
...search continues for Pennsylvania Bill as downtown recovers from yesterday's surprise flash flood. What's the meaning of this wacky weather? With me in the studio, an expert who advises replacing weather-forecasting groundhogs with weather-controlling beavers...
Wait. That was off script.
With a yawn, a lanky shape wrapped around his back. He knew that shape. Why wasn't Pinky on the floor? Why was he engaging in physical contact? What in the blessed names of Newton and di Vinci and Bacon and George Washington Carver was going on and why was he only able to think of gay scientists?
“Oh, Brain. I was having the most wonderful dream.”
Brain screwed his eyes shut. “Was it, by any chance, that we were living in an experimental research facility?”
“What? No! That's our real life.” The sheets shifted as Pinky sat up. “I dreamed we surrendered to our forbidden desires and snogged like high schoolers in the hit prime-time soap Teeniacs.”
“Ah. Hrm.” Don't turn around. Don't panic. “That sounds like quite a dream, Pi—”
“Whoops, no, sorry. That's our real life, too. We did do that. Poit.”
Brain scrambled out from under the covers. Pinky smiled at him, the faintest touch too knowingly. The tuft of fur over his eyes was more ruffled than usual, which was distractingly charming. “How? How did this happen?”
“I blame that insouciant brie.”
“What happened to the time loop? This iteration, out of all iterations, why didn't time reset? Why are you up here—” Brain waved both arms wildly at Pinky—“—instead of down there?” —at Pinky's handkerchief/blanket lying unused on the floor.
“Gee, Brain, I was too comfy-cozy to get back on the floor last night. I didn't even bother to pop down and set my white noise machine.”
“Your what?” A chill seized Brain. Surely not, and yet... He leapt off the bed. Another thing he'd never done in that tirelessly, tiresomely repeating day: poke around in Pinky's stuffed animals. Frankly, they gave him the willies. He shoved a teddy bear aside and there it was, a failed experiment he could have sworn he'd thrown out after the first time it had nearly destroyed the multiverse.
“Pinky, this isn't a white noise machine! This is my time machine prototype! This is what's been sending me back in time, day after everloving day, for the past ten thousand subjective years!”
“Sorry, who's been what now with marshmallows?”
Brain stared at the time controls. A roar filled his ears. He tried to steady himself and think. If he gave in to his rage, he would smash the damn thing over Pinky's head and be done with it. If he applied his intelligence, however, he could send himself back one last cycle, undo his day of self-indulgence, and reset their relationship to what it had been. Then he could smash the damn thing over Pinky's head.
And if he listened to his heart...
Listening to hearts was sentimental claptrap.
As he stood there, twitching with indecision, Pinky picked up a plush alligator and trotted toward the nearest suitcase. “Where do you think you're going?” Brain snapped.
“Thought I'd start packing.”
“In case you haven't noticed, Pinky, I'm in the midst of an internal crisis.”
“Checkout's at eleven, Brain! Anyway, don't you want to get back to the lab?”
“You have no idea how much I want to get back to the lab. But what do you care? You never remember why I want us to go there or what we're working on.”
“I don't have to. It's all good if I'm with you.” Pinky kissed him on the forehead.
If he listened to his heart, he could break out of the loop and into a future. He could see himself in love, an idea that was utterly insane, yet undoubtedly a stroke of genius. He could see himself failing to take over the world a million times more and not caring, not really, if Pinky kissed him like that.
“I'm going to flush this thing down the toilet,” said Brain, “and then we'll check out. If we make good time, we can be home tonight.”
“I packed road bingo!” Pinky scooped up their suitcases. “But Brain, what are we going to do tonight?”
“You know,” said Brain, “let's wing it.”