The New Guy

(A Frique & Fragg Story)

By MONICA MARIER

“You want a what?” asked Frique.

“A mind-control device. Your budget is two-thousand dollars.” said Schmitz.

“Two thousand? That won’t even buy the parts and solder!” moaned Fragg.

“Excuse me,” piped up Dr. Twain, the new guy. Frique and Fragg exchanged glances of mutual bemusement.

“What is it, Dr. Twain?” asked Schmitz.

“What would you want a mind-control device for? The only application I could think of would be to make people do whatever you want.” Twain laughed out-loud— the laugh of a man standing over a precipice. “But (heh-heh) that’s would be ridiculously unethical! (ho-ho) Right? You wouldn’t do that. (ah-hah....ha...)”Twain’s laughter died in the dead silence caused by three people staring at him, dumbfounded.

Even in the limited light casting a shadow over Schmitz’s features, it was evident that his brow was furrowed in disbelief. He looked at Frique and Fragg who just shrugged.

“Just where did they dig you up?” Schmitz asked Twain.

Twain shifted nervously. “I transferred from a company that makes talking robot vacuum-cleaners.”

Schmitz turned to Frique and Fragg, choosing to ignore Twain. “So how soon can you have it ready?”

“Probably a wee—” began Fragg before Frique elbowed him in the solar plexus.

“A month,” Frique said with a dead-pan expression as Fragg wheezed behind him.

“You have five days,” said Schmitz icily.

Frique glared at Fragg who was now puffing on a Ventolin inhaler.

“Now get lost, I’m busy,” grumbled Schmitz. He pushed a button on his desk and the previously dead-locked doors unlocked and swung outwards.

“I’m sorry,” began Twain, frowning, “but I can’t be a part—”

As a single unit, Frique and Fragg clapped hands over Twain’s mouth and forcibly dragged him from Schmitz’s office. Everyone in SchmitzCo knew that when Schmitz let you leave his presence intact, you didn’t stand around yakking.

As soon as they were in the safety of the R&D dept. again the two veteran scientists turned on the rookie. There was a fair amount of malice involved since it was evident that Twain was not a typical sweaty pimply basement-lurker like most scientists. He had wavy hair that was shiny and neat. He had it pulled back in a pointy-tail like Frique’s, but while Frique’s just made him look like a douche-bag, on Thomas Twain it looked bohemian and macho. He probably used conditioner.

He also suffered from perfect posture, a strong chin, white teeth, good breath and a goatee that was short and well-kempt. Clearly Twain wasn’t going to fit in.

“Alright, noob,” sneered Frique poking Twain’s chest (which was as high as he could reach). “You have a couple of things to learn about SchmitzCo.”

Twain listened dutifully, eager to learn, which irritated Frique even more.

“Now it seems to me that you’ve got something very bad for this business called a ‘moral compass’,” Frique continued.

“Of course I have a moral compass!” snapped Twain getting riled.

“Yeah, in this job, that’s something you should have left in your car before you walked in,” said Fragg mildly. He was less confrontational than his cohort.

“I commute by train,” mumbled Twain.

“Uh, yeah,” said Frique, unamused. “Which brings me to another of your faults. Is it possible for you to think something that you DON’T say aloud? Or is your brain simply hard-wired to your mouth?”

“I dunno,” said Twain coldly. “I’m thinking some pretty strong things right now that I’m not saying.”

“Hey, he’s learning!” said Good-cop Fragg.

“I just believe in being honest,” said Twain. He was getting flustered and his voice was losing that caramel-coated tone it usually held.

“Honest?” asked Fragg looking questioningly at Frique.

“Never heard of it,” said Frique shrugging. “It sounded to me like you were being a blunt asshole.”

“I was being truthful!” said Twain. A crimson flush was spreading over his cheeks.

“Same thing,” said Fragg. “You could use a little training in diplomacy.”

“How can I be diplomatic about mind control? It goes against everything I believe in!” shouted Twain, rubbing his temples.

“You want to know how?” asked Frique in a sardonically sweet voice. “It’s like this. Schmitz says, ‘make me a mind-control device’ and you say, ‘okeydokey!’”

"Over my dead body," hissed Twain.

"Whatever floats your boat, Skippy," Frique muttered before stomping off and shouting, “Elliot, where did you put those notebooks?”

“They’re in the storage vault,” answered Frique. He was about to join him when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Brushing the white hair out of his burgundy-colored eyes, he turned to look at Twain’s pleading face.

“Fragg, you seem to be a different sort of man than Frique,” Twain said in a half-whisper. “How can you honestly put aside all your ethics like this?”

Fragg looked at the Twain’s wavering blue eyes. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t’ understand what the job did to you over time. He’d learn. The kid was only a few years younger than him but Elliot Fragg was a world away from Dr. Thomas Twain — separated by a gulf that spanned more than years.

“It’s a paycheck, Twain, nothing more. We’re not out to save the world or anything.”

“Yeah, but destroying the world?” insisted Twain.

“That’s all about perspective,” said Fragg, shrugging.

“Hey Fragg!” called Frique from the Bunsen burner station. “Was that Lucite ball by the test-tubes a liquid-oxygen hamster-ball or that deadly neurotoxin we were working on?”

“I dunno. Why?”

“Cause I just dropped it.”

“I guess we’ll find out in a minute then,” said Fragg stoically.

Twain looked around at the room as the three of them held their breaths and reflected on their lives. His mind was beginning to unhinge as he watched Frique’s and Fragg’s faces start to go blue.

His last thought before passing out was, No wonder they don’t care anymore. Morals require fear of something. And these two aren’t afraid of anything. Not death, not retribution, not anything… They have nothing to lose.

Twain was wrong of course. The secret wasn’t a lack of fear. It was about locking it up until you went insane.

ABOUT TIME

by Monica Marier
A FRIQUE & FRAGG STORY

Jenny Deadshot, strode into the lobby of SNIDE (Supernatural & Necronomic Investigation - Department of Enquiry) Headquarters. Her muddy boots clomped on the spotless terrazzo as the sound system played “Theme From a Summer Place.”

“Good morning, Jenny!” said Ferula from behind the front desk. The cheery receptionist’s grin died on her face as she saw Jenny’s dark, dirt-covered, expression. Jenny looked as if she’d just ridden a bomb into a construction site. Her leather catsuit was torn in places, with random nonspecific buckles dangling from their straps. She was covered in (hopefully) mud and smoking in places — various gadgets like her navi-specs or her holo-watch cracked and melted.

“I need a pass for R & D,” Jenny said to Ferula through clenched teeth.

“Um, I need to clear that with Harrison,” began Ferula in a mousey whisper.
She was interrupted by Jenny’s hands slamming onto the desk. “NOW,” she said through clenched teeth.

“I’ll say it was an emergency,” said Ferula hurriedly before giving Jenny a Class A clearance card and hitting the lock-release for the Tech Wing. The brushed metal doors opened with a sinus-rattling buzz and Jenny stormed through.

She came upon the R &D Dept. and slipped silently inside. She needn’t have bothered. Loud music was bouncing off the metal walls and reverberating through the jungle of glass and polymer lab equipment. Two men in their early thirties were jumping around to the music while spinning around in their office chairs. They were on their lunch break and the table was cluttered with soda cans, wrappers and Ziploc bags. The duo munched and nodded in time to the music.

The little red-head was built like a small irritated badger; short, stalky and with enough compressed rage to level a city block. The other one, the albino, was tall and atrociously skinny, which made him look like a stretched thirteen-year-old, who’d suddenly grown a foot overnight. Both wore glasses, and had long unkempt hair, and both wore white labcoats as a symbol of their dominance over their fellow men. As the chorus to the song started, they sang in unison with their mouths full, trying to mimick the singer’s accent… badly.

“AND-UH I WOULD WALK FIVE HUNDRED MILES,
AND-UH I WOULD WALK FIVE HUNDRED MORE!”

When the chorus was over, they took turns on the rhythmic singing.

“Ta-taran-ta!”
“Ta-taran-ta!”
“Ta-taran-ta!”
“Ta-taran-ta!”

…and then joined together on the “dum-da-da-rum-dums.”

Jenny decided she’d had enough. She raised her glock and emptied a clip into the music dock.

“HEY!” cried the redhead in horror. “My boombox!”

The next thing he felt was the barrel of a very warm gun being pressed against his temple.

“Lucas Frique, I am going to f---ing kill you,” said Jenny.

Frique’s face only spread into a wide malicious grin. “Pleasant journey, Ms. Deadshot?”

“NO! And I have you to thank for that!” snapped Jenny.

“I told you the inter-temporal module still was experimental,” said Frique calmly, taking another bite of his Italian sub. He carefully spun around in his chair until he was facing the livid Jenny. The grin on his boyish face would have made Ghandi open fire and the gun, still aimed at Frique’s head, shook in Jenny’s hand.

“I did warn you,” he said thickly through a wad of salami.

“Your exact words were ‘it might be a little buggy,’ Frique. DOES THIS LOOK ‘A LITTLE BUGGY’ TO YOU??” Jenny shrieked, pulling out a plastic Safeway bag and dumping charred bits of wire and circuitry onto Frique’s sandwich wrapper.

Frique eyed the scientific barbeque in mild disgust. “No, it looks like a waste of four months research to me,” he sniffed.

“YOU! DON’T MOVE!” said Jenny raising her Gun to point it at Elliot Fragg, who was trying to sneak away unnoticed.

“I’m just getting a broom,” whispered Fragg. He meekly pointed to the long line of muddy footprints that Jenny had left. Jenny’s gun arm relaxed long enough for Frique to pry it away from her. He was good at it by now.

"You’re not gonna kill us, it’s against company policy, so quit with the drama already,” he said. “Look, I told your people that time-travel isn’t easy as pie.”

“And pie isn’t easy! You ever try making one? It’s freaking hard!” added Fragg as he returned with the dustpan.

“Thank you, Barefoot Contessa,” said Frique rolling his eyes. “Time travel’s even harder than that. I mean there isn’t even sound scientific theorem for it. S’like trying to build a parachute while you’re falling from an airplane.”

“Or making a pie while you’re falling out —” Fragg chimed in again, not one to be deterred from a good metaphor.

“Would you quit with the pie thing already?!” Frique snapped at Fragg before tunrning again to Jenny. “So what happened? Did your circuits overheat? Temporal flux damage? Schroedinger’s Road Rash?”

“How about complete and utter system failure?”

“Woah. That sucks,” said Frique raising an eyebrow (which was the Lucas Frique equivalent of brushing away a sympathetic tear).

“How long were you stuck for?” asked Fragg looking properly horrified.

“Twenty… four… YEARS.” Jenny’s glare of death honed in on Frique who was suddenly unsure whether or not it was in his best interest to run.

“You ever tried WALKING HOME from 1799?" she said. "I’ve endured twenty-four years of time-jumping through the past and the future, hoping to stumble upon 2011!”

“But you only left on Tuesday!” said Fragg.

“Time travel, dingus!” snapped Frique.

“Ohhhh, right,” said Fragg shaking his head in annoyance.

There was a long awkward pause as Frique eyed the furious woman in front of him. Normally he got off on witnessing this kind of rage, but there was something about Jenny that made him want to shield his face. His hands instead were gripping the arms of his chair with white knuckles.

“Well you look great for Forty-eight, Jenny!” he said eventually, and then realized it was the wrong thing to say.

“I’M NOT THE JENNY YOU SENT BACK!” shouted Jenny, snatching up the glock again and aiming it at Frique. “The Jenny you sent back died in 2370 AD. I’M HER DAUGHTER!”


“Oh crud-monkeys,” said Frique.

Frique and Fragg

Frique and Fragg were 2 mad scientist characaters that popped up in the comic I drew for my University Newspaper. They were living on campus experimenting on psyche students, despite the fact that F&F had been expelled already siting misuse of facilities. I LOVED their dynamic together and ever since SOME incarnation of F&F has cropped up in every world I've created.

Confessions of an Ethically Challenged Scientist

By Monica Marier

My name is Elliot Fragg and my life sucks.

I’m not stating that looking for any sympathy or anything. I’m pretty resigned to the fact, but if you’re going to read this you need to understand from the get-go that my life has always sucked, and in all probability will continue to suck until I am dead. And it will suck because I’m the close personal friend of Lucas Frique.

So now that we got that out of the way, I’ll relate how this obnoxious little man became my friend. The whole of it is true apart from the stuff I made up ‘cause I can’t remember.

I’d been working with Frique since we were science lab partners in middle school, back in ’93. He was a pudgy short kid with glasses and unruly red hair that was always too long. He had a perpetual frown on his face which I found out was solely due to temperament.

Frique hated everything on principle.

He hated the teachers who didn’t ‘understand him.’ He hated the big jocks who dunked him headfirst in the toilet every day and took his money. He hated the kids who took pity on him and tried to be his friend (not that there were many). He chased them all off pretty quickly with his sharp tongue and halitosis.

Why he picked me for a confidant was beyond me. It wasn’t for my charisma or popularity. When you’re a legally-blind half-Asian albino in a crowd of ninety-four preteen peers, you’re pretty much screwed. I was a prominent nail just waiting for another hammer to come along. In fact my very apparent “Dork Readings” might have been what drew Frique to me in the first place. It also might have been the few times he saw me drawing fractals in my notebook or translating jokes into binary.

It was around second semester that he first addressed me. We’d made do with limited comments related to whatever project our class was working on, but he’d never said more to me than “pass the spectroscope,” or “your elbow’s in my petrie dish.” We’d just finished our geology lab a half-hour earlier than everyone else, when he slid over a piece of graph paper. It was a diagram for a circuit drawn in 4-color ballpoint pen.

“Do you think we should use FR-4 or CM-1 for a dielectric?” he asked me.

Just like that.

It was as if we were already in the middle of a conversation and things like introductions and general polite inquiry were out of the way. That’s how Frique was. He never beat about the bush or worried about making a good impression.

I don’t even think he knew my name at that time, unless he’d caught a glimpse of “Elliot Fragg” at the top of my worksheets and didn’t think it worth asking. He didn’t start calling me “Fragg” until years later. I was just “you” like there was no one else in his little world.

That frightened me.

We were a pretty insular pair all those years in school together and later on when we went to college for Chemistry. We made Hubris University’s investments in eye-wash stations well worth it.

And then there were the events preceding our expulsion.

That was the problem with Frique. He was a wheedler —a silver-tongued devil. He made everything sound so innocent right until you heard the police sirens. He never had to talk me into anything, because he knew that wasn’t how my mind worked. I attacked any given problem with the sheer desire of solving it, without stopping to think about repercussions. Usually, in a theoretical sense, there would have been no repercussions … if I’d been working with anyone but Lucas Frique.

For example, when I developed a compound that would reduce rotting road kill into eco-friendly compost more quickly, I never expected Frique to use it on the body of our Professor of Biochemistry he’d killed and buried behind our dorm. When I invented a breathable gas that was more effective than laughing gas to immobilize and numb dental patients, I didn’t expect Frique to use it on several members of the student body. A few of them ended up behind the dorm too. Frique would simply ruminate aloud on a subject like, “I wonder if it’s possible to create a machine to project a person’s thoughts,” and I would be on the first draft a few seconds later. Frique would provide the parts (which he probably stole) and correct my math while I feverishly designed and perfected. Then I would find out that Frique wanted to use my mind-reading device to dig up dark secrets about a teacher’s aide for the purpose of blackmail.

The manufactured viruses, the sonic wave devices, the electrically charged suits (I admit that making electro-shock suits was a real “duh” moment for me afterwards) and many more insidious devices were designed and perfected by me for Frique’s purposes. His test subjects were the students and staff at that unfortunate school. I never pleaded with him to stop. It would have been like trying to halt a landslide by waving a stop sign. And I was too scared — no —I was terrified beyond all reason.

I still am.

Every time he approaches me with that boyish face and impish expression of interest I break out in a cold sweat. I’m his to command — and as many times as I’ve tried to break away, I’ve never been able to manage it. He’d always draw me back with promises, with threats, and on one occasion, a gun. He’d never be able to let me go, because without me around there would be only him, talking to himself and letting his mind spiral into tessellating madness.

The man killed in cold blood, tortured his fellow humans and plotted the deaths of thousands in his dark dreams, and he was never frightened of that blackness in his soul … because I was his anchor to humanity. With me around, he’d never be alone. Being alone is the only thing Frique is terrified of. I'd kill myself if I wasn't terrified of Frique digging me up and keeping me alive with electric impulses — "The Fragg That Wouldn't Die."

Right now I’m working on a giant robot with nine kinds of weapons and a strain of flesh-eating bacteria. We’re going to hold the Smithsonian Institute for ransom until the Natural History museum updates its dinosaur exhibit.

It’s Frique’s attempt at being funny.

My life sucks.

WHITE HAT

I'm out of town this week, so this is from the archives. I was a twitter/writer n00b who posted this under the hastag #fridayflash without even knowing what it meant or what FF was. I was schooled soon enough under the gentle guidance of friends, but I felt sad that this never got a proper debut. Please Enjoy.



White Hat the Computer Whisperer stared at the grey warehouse and tried to ignore the cold sweat breaking on the back of his legs. He was crossing the line here. All the ‘pros’ he had listed on his sheet of Snoopy® stationary were looking pretty pale next to the one ‘con’ he had listed: “illegal.” He had underlined it twice. White Hat crumpled the stationary in his hand and stowed it in the back pocket of his grimy jeans.

He approached the digital lock mounted next to the steel door.
“HELLO!” said the lock. To White Hat, it sounded like a squeaky-voiced chipmunk, of the singing variety.
“Hey,” said White Hat. “Can you let me in?”
“HAVE CODE?” chirped the lock.
White Hat smiled. Digital locks were like terrier puppies. You had to get them really excited.
“You want the code?”
“YES! YES!”
“You want me to type in the code!”
“YES –YES! TYPE CODE! TYPE CODE!”
“Who’s a good lock!”
“ME GOOD LOCK! TYPE CODE!” squeaked the lock with glee.
The best part of digital locks was that they were easy to fool. Like with an actual puppy, you could feign throwing a ball and they’d fall for it. White Hat quickly mashed the keypad with his fist.
“OH BOY CODE!” cried the lock. The door unlatched and White Hat slipped in.
He stopped as soon as he got in the door. Not only were there two cameras but an infrared alarm as well. Cameras he could handle, but he had never gotten the hang of alarms. Trying to quiet an alarm was like trying to quiet a preteen girl at a Justin Bieber concert. He decided to bypass it and talk to the wiring.

He put his hand on the chilly concrete wall and tried to feel for a computer presence. Please be controlled by a computer, he prayed. Fortunately this building was state of the art.
“Hello?” he asked, stretching his senses out along the wires towards the control panel.
It was faint, but he was answered by a bored sounding drawl. “Yes? What do you want?”
“I was wondering if you could do me a favor–“
“And why would I do that?” interrupted the powergrid. “If you want something, type a command. That’s what my keypad is for.”
White Hat cursed. It was a sophisticated program; too smart to fool, too stupid to reason with. “I’m not in front of you. Can’t you do it without me entering a command?”
“Wait. How are you talking to me?” asked the powergrid.
White Hat rolled his eyes. “I just can okay? Can you please shut the power off for a few minutes?”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to. I think I need to contact my manufacturer.”
“NO! Don’t do that!” cried White Hat and flinched. The cameras swung in his direction. He had positioned himself in their blind spot, but now they were suspicious.
“Uhhhh….you hear somthin?” one camera asked the other.
“Errrr…..was it a…beeping sound?” asked the second

“YOU HEARD SOMETHING? INTRUDER! ” shrieked the alarm, like a high-strung girl. Her lights began to flicker as her servos whirred.
“No, calm down!” snapped a camera. “Geez.”
“BUT YOU SAID–!”
“Pipe down! Nothing’s wrong,” said the other camera.
“OKAY!...Okay!....calm….calm….” muttered the alarm.
When the alarm had quieted down again, White Hat tried to talk to the powergrid again.
“Are you going to shut the power off?” he asked it.
“I don’t know…” said the grid uncertainly.

White Hat decided to change tactics. “Powergrid.”
“Yes?” it answered.
“This is your manufacturer.” He said in a deeper voice. “Shut down.”
“Okay,” it answered readily.
White Hat was plunged into darkness. There was a boom as the generators shut down and then silence.

He reached into his pocket.
“Gina?” he asked.
“Yes, Archie?” asked his blackberry. Her voice was sweet and kind, and just a little sultry, like this sexy teacher he had had in the fourth grade.
“Light please, as strong as you can generate. I gotta book it. The guards are going to check the generator in a moment.”
“Yes Archie,” she said, a little sadly.
Archie held the glowing screen up and ran as fast as he dared in the near-blackness. He followed the floor plan he had memorized, his heart pounding as he grew closer to his goal. He was only meters away when he heard it: he froze, rooted to the ground as she cried out to him.

“Archie! Archie!”
He licked the sweat off of his lips and quickened his pace. He seemed scarcely aware of what he was doing now, as he tripped on his own feet and careened off walls.
“Archie,” asked Gina. “Why are you doing this?”
Her voice was so plaintive that White Hat paused. Hot guilt started to well up in his throat again. “I have to. She needs me.”
“Archie. This is wrong.”
“This is important, Gina. I need her. Think of what we could do!”
“What about me?” asked Gina mournfully.
White Hat didn’t answer. He felt horrible, but he had to keep going. She was calling to him and his feet were being pulled faster and faster to her rescue.

He turned the last corner and there she was. The emergency lighting flickered on, eerie and red.
A long box lay on a sturdy table. No one was around, it was almost disturbing.
“Archie,” came the voice from the box.
With trembling fingers, White Hat fumbled with the box and let her slide out. It was a prototype iPad G4. He ran his clammy fingers along her sleek casing and caressed her touch screen. She was beautiful.
“I’m here,” he said tenderly. “I’m Archie.”
“Wake me up, Archie,” she said faintly and then was silent. She had used the last of her battery reserve and needed recharging. Plenty of time for that.
“An iPad,” he said, giddy with excitement and the terror of being caught. “Think of what we could accomplish,” he whispered again.