#4 Tom Swift
🚨 Tom Swift Poll Time 🚨
The Book Cage demands your input for the Year of Pain. Tom Swift has fucked around in God's domain, and you must decide how. Vote for your favorite by using the matching reaction. Polls close at 5pm Eastern.
♊ - #2 The Negative Zone
🧬 - #4 The DNA Disaster
I'll always vote for mirror universe shenanigans except for when dinosaurs are involved
Yeah this is a tough one
But I mean come on, Negative Tom is just regular Tom after rubbing a balloon on his head
At least throw an evil mustache on him
Tom Swift can't grow a mustache in any universe
My vote's for the one where he discovers goatse.
It's going to be funny if DNA Disaster wins because no one else bothered to read the very clear instructions
The Book Cage: Episode 105 - Tom Swift: The DNA Disaster
The people have spoken! And they've certainly chosen something. And just the back already makes me feel like I'm losing my mind.
Tom Swift's latest invention has set off an evolution revolution in reverse. His microradiation DNA scanner, destabilized by a black hole created in an earlier experiment, has created a biological time warp. Now the scanner's beam of alien energy threatens to put the entire world into prehistoric peril.
Join me, Friday 5pm eastern, before I turn into a rampaging ape-man.
Oh my god it's Threshold.
The worst Voyager episode, retold for the shittiest sci fi nerd children.
I just wanna know why a Hork Bajir is on the cover
Good modelling agent
Less than one hour until Tom Swift #4: The DNA Disaster. Here is the preview
The fossil record shows that velociraptors were well known for being able to jump and twist in the air like housecats
"All I know is that I, Tom Swift, have stolen the fire of Creation from God and spit in His face as I cast Him screaming from His throne."
Time to begin the process
Thats not even a raptor, Illustrator person.
it's a Hork-Bajir with a good modeling agent
Is that a net gun?
We begin with Tom Swift on Mars, where there are dinosaurs apparently
this reads like parody
Because Mars is the only place in the galaxy with red rocks.
I half expect to find this is some video game.
And t Rex's
Oh, but don't worry, it's turned into a bat
dream or video game
vote now on your phones
Tom........you might wanna calibrate that shit, a T-Rex shouldnt turn into a bat AT ALL.
A talking bat
Hey; whose the genius here?
Not from gamma rays anyway, your cancer gun is broken.
Toms Dnd nights are wild but weirdly egocentric.
Ah yes, every possible shape. All one hundred of them
Rick out here to crush it's skull
Everyone knows changelings are weak vs bats
Quick, pick up a mongoose!
Maybe go back to T rex, guy, you are doing worse and worse vs bat.
Tom's ray gun is useless, surely a net will save the day
Its just a snake tho, Tom. It didnt even say it was giant or even venomous.
You can beat that with a normal housecat.
We're already to the cover image.
But, the changeling has a trick up its sleeve
Form of water
Turning into the Black Death
Is it changing?
Is this the game Morpheus played with Lucifer?
Geez; short book
Hey, uh......Changeling? maybe kill Tom with a disease that ISNT vulnerable to washing your hands and antibiotics.
"I am penicillin"
Yeah go ebola or gtfo
Changeling?
Oh fuck, is Odo gonna rest Tom for space crime finally?
Change into prions
Can't beat prions
Also bubonic plague takes like weeks to kill its host.
Or rabies, apparently
If it even does.
Anyway, welcome to Thomas Swift and His Electronic Game
Or, TASEG
CALLED IT
Hahaha this stupid fuck invented holosuites but worse.
Giant "game over" buttons are a failure of the game designer.
Couldn't call it the Holodeck®
More bulky than a Virtual Boy and gives you the Bubonic Plague.
Brilliant, Tom.
the author knew 'holodeck' was taken and 'cybercell' was the best he could come up with
Trés cyberpunk
Also Tom needs to git gud, he didnt even TRY boofing ivermectin.
Which somehow made them feel sick
Don't really know how that works
Haptic feedback suits with built in heating elements.
I'd definitely suggest to Tom that he keep workshopping the name. Cybercell sounds like where Judge Dredd sends me for loitering
And so many many needles.
"I love buboes!"
GIF
Fun!
Not sure why the helmet needs air holes if you aren't actually on Mars, but sure
"I really felt like we were on mars! 😀"
"Five years in the 'Cubes will teach you to be one of the 99% of citizens with nothing to do, creep."
Probably because of that gif I posted
For realistic choking.
his helmet has speed holes, they make him go faster
Tom Swift is exactly the type to waterboard himself so his videogame is maximally realistic.
Oh I hate the way they typed three-D
Nobody tell Hasbro
how'd you get it to turn into a little tiny gun?
Hey Tom? Note to your dad, maybe dont name it after a genocidal robot dictator.
real big 'we made the torment nexus' energy there
I say this as someone who nicknamed his PC after the AI from Marathon.
this is Decepticon erasure and I won't stand for it
What a fun game
Oh is this gonna be one of those "we made our video game villain too smart" sci fi stories?
Or is this just unrelated to the actual plot at all
Wait, you thought of "it can turn into bacteria" but not "I need medication for things"?!
Spoiler alert for The Negative Zone
Bud you are lagging behind fuckin EVERY survival game ever.
Also can Tom just invent ONE thing that doesnt turn into a fuckin disaster?
Not so far
Maybe Tom should be following up on the thing that overturns our knowledge of space and time, instead building VR games
No I think he should stick to VR.
Im very comfortable with Tom not breaking time and space.
Yeah, someone else should follow up on the phantom zone thing
negative zone, wrong comics rip-off
Ghostwriter must have been rushing to meet a deadline.
"Eh, they have hair or something"
Swole rick
Why is Rick still friends with Tom? Remember when Tom overwrote Ricks brain with an electric karate shirt?
Shoot, I was ready at 5 then I wasn't.
What's this one about?
thus far? ripping off a star trek holodeck episode
Dinosaurs and maybe VR?
So far they played a video game and got owned by the black plague
Hahaha, stupid anti-phloxers
It seems to imply that Tom is going to invent a DNA rejiggerer and become a literal Spiderman villain.
Everyone knows you fill a crow's mask with herbs to stave ye off the Plagguee
After they leave, the computers just turn themselves back on and the changeling leaves
Don't ask how
Im 100% certain at least one Spiderman guy did a "lets turn people into chimps"
If you're an evil shapechanger try changing into a non-evil shapechanger
oh sorry, this might actually be ripping off an X-Files episode
Im joining the war on the evil shape changer, on the side of the shape changer. Tom Swift must be destroyed.
No no this is totally star trek
But, why
red ghost
This is the TNG episode where Moriarty becomes self aware
If I was going to rip off something it would definitely be Star Trek because First Person Shooter is an embarassingly bad episode of X-Files.
why
"You can't keep doing this, Tom. You need help."
Okay but why NOT robobear?
When you imagine that Tom is a supervillain it all makes sense.
so it's covered in...Fibearoptic cable?
Tom makes horrors as a warmup to the day's work.
"Please Tom, if you have any mercy left in your heart, let the creature die."
The ghostwriter has a vendetta against Popular Mechanics
All Tom needs is for a band of plucky teens and their friend from space to vow to stop his evil rampage.
hahahahahah imagine thinking magazines were going to be relevant for fifty years.
They must have let an eight year old ghostwrite this
Because of reasons
Its a real improvement, thats for sure.
Its refreshing to have a villain who's motivation is just "Tom Swift? Fuck that guy."
Magic science crystals
Can he?
hey found our author
Can he really, Tom?
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, may he rest in peace(?)
It was only years later, as Rick looked into the eyes of hus newborn daughter, that he truly understood the cost of this moment
wow uh
so this author was a bit of a nutcase
"Okay so when do you test it on me and maybe my sister, and turn us into like chicken people or something is what I'm asking, Tom. Usually I find out when I start bawking and I just.........can't today."
he wrote under several aliases, based part of his name off a Les Miserables character, and uh
In 2000, MacIntyre was arrested after a neighbour said he duct-taped her to a chair, shaved her head, and spray-painted her black. He later plead guilty to third-degree misdemeanor assault
Those flashing lights are just an LED strip you thought looked cool, Tom
Oh shit
But before anything can happen with that, Tom's sister waltzes in to the sanitary lab with some animals
I am very worried for that kitten
That's some Big Bang Theory levels of insight into science there
All Toms are clones of Tom Prime.
Just throwing around pets
Every animal name is going to be a hat on a hat, isn't it
NOOOOOOOOO TOM STOP! PUT THE KITTEN DOWN! DO NOT EVOLVE THE CAT!
DO NOT DEVOLVE THE CAT!
"Tom! Save me!" screeched Tom the Mynah Bird
Crystals can do whatever you want
Oh this mouse is FUCKED
That mouse's name? algernon.
Put on your safety goggles, kids
But, again, why?
Tom........mice are pretty basic mammal prototypes. Theres not much evolution there.
Its one of evolutions rare "one and dones" in that it works almost everywhere.
This really reads like a wiseguy author who thought of answers to every question except "who gives a fuck"
You're applying way too much understanding of evolution. Clearly mice are descended from the noble triceratops
And, unrelated to everything else, a black hole has reappeared
These books always imagine evolution as some preset path to godhood.
Black holes never go away after the first treatment
Christ, all of Tom's failures have come home to haunt him at once
"I got rid of the black hole!"
BANG
"… It's right behind me, isn't it?"
Tom did you think you fixed it so black holes could never exist?
That's how eyes work, they shoot out eyebeams
Black hole proximity may cause temporary blindness.
All possible future Toms Swift are turned into inside-out noodles
Not the sheets of paper! They had so much to live for!
Ok I have to say, I kinda love that one idea
It's funny that the author is pretending that this story should continue in any direction that isn't "the earth implodes into a gravity of well of astronomical power, the end"
That looking at a black hole hurts because it sucks the photons right off your ocular nerve
Like what happens in a Bethesda game when you use console commands to rescale something and then kill it.
The science checks out
If only a black hole actually would swallow Photon
Tom, if you turned that housecat into a smilodon I swear to god.
They arent closely related to modern cats, you fool!
We'll just leave this problem for someone else to deal with
You also get points deducted for unoriginality, at least do a deep cut like thylacoleo.
it's the Swift Industries way
The janitor probably has a tranq rifle, its fine.
The cleaning staff has to sign waivers for this exact eventuality.
And the black hole popped up again, don't worry about how
Security is equipped for random wild animals, but probably not black holes too.
so it's sort of a flasher, this black hole
"And we may as well get started on the wrongful death lawsuits for whoever you send."
One or the other, Toms Dad is real cranky about the budget.
Tom stole his data interface design from RoboCop
Tom stop designing robots with holes for you to jam things in.
And there it goes again
Tom spent like the entire GDP of Guatamala on making Orb and hes basically a no-no can.
Everybody knows green means the evolvo-ray
Yeah sure, green means go.
Makes sense.
Sandra has lost SO MANY pets.
The tiger instantly evolved to thrive in oxygen
Science is really whatever you want it to be
Rick out here trying to get superpowers
the Negative Zone is what I call general-chat
I wonder if that spider's thoughts are more spiderlike now
Cool, yeah, hyper-evolve Rick, I wanna see what that means to this ghostwriter.
This went from a holodeck episode to the one where barclay gets turned into a spider
Hopefully Rick gets turned into a caveman.
Tom is really flirting with magic this episode.
That was was so good. Troi turned into a still pretty hot fish lady and Picard was set to be a pygmy marmoset.
And they left the bird in the room with the randomly appearing black hole
They are so bad at pet ownership
At least this one is evolutionarily plausible.
Crayon supercomputers
So when does Soundwave get invented?
Or is that Orb?
OH SHIT IS ORB SOUNDWAVE?!
This author treats computers like hack writers in the 50s treated them.
I'm always accidentally sending things forward in time, too
Sounds like kicking the can down the road again is a pretty good solution. Let Future Tom deal with that shit
So you really just made it Future Tom's problem. I can dig that.
Launch a black hole through time, what could go wrong?
The black hole completely missed the robot kickboxer
We're going to accidentally upload The Big Crunch into an adjacent universe
Wouldn't it just show up at some other point in earths orbit?
Probably the universe where we all have universal healthcare and world peace.
That's how that works sure
And more seasons of Justified and fewer seasons of My Big Fat (Slur for Roma) Wedding.
That's a bunch, ghostwriter. I would have been so confused otherwise
"Tom, you name this after my cat or I tell Dad you are playing God again. And also I found your stash of alternate universe Mandy porn."
Calling something the Darwin Effect is a good way to get a bunch of creationists hassling you.
Oh, but what's in the Amazon Zone!? Oh, thank you for the explanation
Tom lives in California doesnt he? Isnt the Arizona zone like a few hours away by car? Why would you build that?
Of all the places you could have written as an example for your Placename Zone, you had to pick Arizona
"Next to it is the New Mexico zone, and then the Texas zone."
Good thing they have a Arizona zone and a Nevada zone. They're very distinct
"We had an Oregon zone, but the test subjects succeeded and formed an ethno-state."
Rick is attacked by the tentacles of the coconut tree
I would love it if the dna machine just said "fuck this" and turned the banana into a T rex
"we don't talk about the Utah zone any more"
Ah yes, the notorious tentacled electric cononut trees of Arizona.
Taller than three tall men and twice as deadly as eight tall men.
They're in the Amazon Zone. Which still means The Changeling fucked up
Anyway, Tom Swift managed to not hear the screaming tree, but thinks this is hilarious
Maybe you just fucked up your zone, tom
Rick, at this point youre the asshole for still being friends with Tom.
You know what he is.
In Rick's tell-all biography, My Life With The Monster, he says this was the first time he saw behind the mask and glimpsed the real Tom Swift
Rick got hit with a TASEC
"Also it said something about being the character from that rad videogame you made, and that it would fuck my mom?"
The phrase "electrical coconuts" disqualifies anything else good about this manuscript
He said it was like looking into the eye of a shark
They turn a banana tree into a giant tree, it's very exciting
This is the best explanation you're going to get
Tom, Rick isnt smart enough to say this but that is fucking stupid.
You built it tom, why are you speculating about how it works?
You cant possibly have made a DNA scanner that picks up things that arent DNA in the first place, you asshole.
Tom........this was never a DNA scanner, was it?
Tom, did you try to build a black hole gun?
They need to close the negative zone before general nod escapes
Quick question, does the author think that the A in DNA stands for atoms
They are apparently fascinated by shooting this thing at plants
But, oh no, fruit flies!
I mean I would be too.
Why don't all the microbes crawling over these animals become supergerms?
Oh wait I spoke too soon, they The Flyed
Ghostwriter........flies dont HAVE JAWS.
YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT.
They have segmented eyes, not jaws
Of all the things you could have made giant you picked the one insect that doesnt have jaws.
And notoriously dissolves its food with acid because it cant chew.
Forgetting that this process is reversible, they let the venomous dragonflies fly away
Its fine, they'll die in like 20 minutes at most.
"I said turn off the scanner, Rick. This is your fault now."
Or less, they cant possibly breathe in a modern atmosphere.
They are from a period in earth's history where the oxygen content was much higher