by Mia Archer
So I held back from vaporizing her even though she deserved it. Instead I dropped the fancy new weapon in my hands. It dematerialized before it hit the ground. CORVAC was always very good about catching things like that.
I activated the antigrav units in my suit and went for a little flight. I was careful to avoid the part of the city that Fialux had disappeared into. The last thing I needed was to meet up with her for round two.
No thank you.
“CORVAC, I need you to go ahead and hack into the records for the university,” I said. “You’re looking for enrollment details specifically. Female students only.”
“Oh?” he asked. “Is there any reason in particular why we’re looking at these?”
“I’ll tell you more about it later when I’m back in the lab and I don’t have to worry about someone listening in,” I said. “In the meantime just pull those records and make sure you don’t get caught doing it.”
“I’d never get caught mistress,” he said, a hint of insult coming to his voice.
I grinned. The only thing that could make sure that he did something exactly as I wanted him to was to imply that it wasn’t possible for him to do what I wanted. He was easy to manipulate that way, which was a surprise for a megalomaniacal super computer who was at least as hellbent on world domination as yours truly.
“Right. Well make sure you don’t get caught this time either,” I said. “Because the last thing we need is someone realizing I’m looking for Fialux’s secret identity.”
There was a long moment of silence on the other end. At least what passed for a long moment of silence as far as CORVAC was concerned.
In reality it was just a few milliseconds, but to paraphrase a famous android that was an eternity in computer terms.
“Most impressive mistress. What makes you think she’s enrolled in the university?”
“Later CORVAC,” I said. “Right now you pull those records, and then we’ll work through them an talk it out when I get back to the lab and we don’t have to worry about anyone listening in.”
I smiled as I made my way across the city to one of the many hidey-holes that had entrances to the lab. I wasn’t the only person smart enough to disappear into a random building around the city so it wouldn’t be too obvious where my lab was located to anyone who might be inclined to watch via satellite.
If the hacked information I got from the government was any indication there were a lot of people out there who made their living trying to find the location of my lab via satellite, but they’d whiffed so far and they were going to whiff again tonight thank you very much.
It was time to get down to work and find out who Fialux was. From there I’d track her down and finally get a chance to take her by surprise with the anti-Newtonian device and show her who was the best in this city.
At least that’s what I told myself. I tried to ignore the shiver of excitement that ran through me at the thought of getting to know her on a more one-on-one level when we weren’t trying to destroy the city around us.
23
New Job
"I'm sorry Miss… Terrare?"
"It's Terror," I said with a smile. “It's pronounced just how it's spelled."
The human resources drone shuffled some papers uncomfortably on her desk and pointedly didn't look at me. "I see. That's an… interesting name."
If this was a real job interview I'd be worried right about now. The way she barely glanced over my resume, the derisive sniff as she looked at my nonexistent qualifications, the way her lips compressed into a line and frowned. No, if this was the real thing I'd be screwed.
It was a good thing for me this wasn't the real thing. This HR drone just didn't know it yet.
I glanced around the small office. I couldn't believe this was something I'd actually aspired to once upon a time. A tiny postage stamp of a room with a window open because the air-conditioning was so ancient that it rarely reached the sad little vent on the other side of her desk.
The building was probably built back in the '20s, maybe even older, and there was so little space that papers and books were piled high all around the desk.
The life of a starving academic. Four years of undergrad. A few years working on your Masters and PhD. And then if you were lucky you got to spend the back half of your life in an office barely half the size of the cramped dorm room you spent so much time in trying to get the office in the first place.
And was this lady teaching? Doing research? Adding something of value to society and academia as a whole?
Nope. Administration. She was stuck doing HR because the journalism department probably didn't trust someone without a doctorate with the academically challenging task of hiring adjunct faculty. A job she could've done with half the education and less than half the student loans if she was in the private sector. A job that would've paid much better in the private sector too.
No, I was very glad I’d decided to take a different path in my career.
"Well Miss Terror," the woman said. "I thank you for taking the time to come down here, but we haven’t even advertised this position yet and honestly you don't have any skills, degrees, certifications, or job experience that would make you remotely qualified to be an adjunct instructor for a journalism course. In fact, I'm still trying to figure out how your resume even made its way across my desk."
It made its way there thanks to liberal application of teleportation, that’s how. Not that I was going to explain that to her. I didn’t expect a journalism Phd turned human resources drone to understand the intricacies of teleportation.
So I didn’t bother getting into it. Better to talk about why I was totally qualified for this job.
"Oh I'm sorry," I said. "I just figured you might be in need of some help quickly seeing as how Professor Benton ended up quitting after he found that winning lottery ticket in his interdepartmental mail."
The woman sat my resume down and peered at me over her half-moon spectacles. "How did you know about how Professor Benton left? Do you know somebody who works in this department?"
"No," I said. "I was the one who mailed him that lottery ticket."
Her face scrunched up in obvious confusion. "But that ticket was worth millions. Why would you…"
I shrugged. "That's simple. The lotto system is easy enough to manipulate, but if I started winning it every other week people would ask questions. Questions that would draw the sort of attention you really don’t want in my line of work.”
"I'm afraid I don't follow…"
"Of course you don't," I said. "I don't mean for you to follow. The simple fact is I need this position. I need to be in that classroom, and so Professor Benton wins the lottery and here I am to take care of your little HR problem."
She seemed to gain control of her senses at long last. She picked up my resume again and flopped it down on her desk. "But you aren't remotely qualified for this job. You don't have anything that would recommend you for teaching a journalism class."
"Oh really?"
I fished in my pocket and pulled out a small silver disc with a big blinking red button in the center. I liked big blinking red buttons. I felt like it really tied a piece of evil super science together in a way that other colors of the rainbow just couldn't pull off.
"Because I have this mind control device here, and my mind control device says I'm more than qualified for the job."
This was one of my babies even though I never used it. Something I came up with back before I left the Applied Sciences lab at this very university because they said my stuff was too dangerous, too unethical, all that stuff that scientists say when what they really mean is they’re afraid of progress.
Inventing this baby is a big part of the reason why I was able to recognize the mojo that strange hero had been working on me in that back alley. It was a big part of the reason why I’d thought I had a counter to that mojo, for all the good it ended up doing me.
I kept this baby close to my chest because of what it co
uld do. I didn’t want this one getting out there where someone could use it against me.
A week back in that alley was proof enough of why it would be bad if this tech got out.
I pressed down on the blinking red button and it made a satisfying click. I also liked satisfying clicks. There were too many UIs these days that left out the satisfying click ever since capacitative touch screens became the new hotness.
A strange screeching noise filled the room and then it settled down to a steady hum. I resisted the urge to wince at that sound. Unlike crazy eyes in that back alley this thing worked via the auditory receptors in the brain and I hadn’t figured out a way to get the damned device to work without that screech. One of many reasons why I didn’t like using the damned thing.
I really don't like using the mind control stuff. It was an inefficient and brutish way of getting things done, and it also had the pesky problem of not always working one hundred percent of the time. Especially with heroes.
The last thing I needed was to have a super supposedly under my complete control, doing my bidding in the middle of my lair, and then all of a sudden the mind control device falls off of the table or the big red button gets jostled. Suddenly there's a very cranky living god in the middle of my lair ready to do some damage.
I'd been there. Trust me, it was never fun.
But for this lady? Whatever. I was in a hurry so I figured I could risk getting a little sloppy with a normal. At least I hoped she was a normal. No self-respecting hero or villain would pick a secret identity this soul-crushing and boring.
As soon as I hit the button she went slack-jawed and her eyes deadened. Yup. Definitely a normal. Not even a normal who took precautions against mind control, though in all fairness to her I figured I was probably the only mortal in the city, maybe in the world, who bothered to incorporate mind control nullification.
Sometimes that nullification was in my visor, though CORVAC was still running tests to figure out what the hell had gone wrong there. Of course the visor wouldn’t do a damn thing against auditory mind control like I was using now.
Thankfully I had two handy nano devices embedded in my ear canals. They were always embedded in there. Mostly because I was the one who invented the technology in the first place and how embarrassing would it be if someone managed to get their grubby hands on it and turn it against me?
I leaned forward and inspected her pupils. If I was doing this right then I'd get out a flashlight and make sure they weren't dilating, but I figured this was close enough for government work.
Literally government work, since I was going to work for a state school. Again. Though of course all the proper paperwork would be submitted with all the improper information so no one could try and track me down via any pesky paper trail.
"You are going to give me this job," I said.
"I am going to give you this job," she replied.
"Stop repeating what I say. That's annoying," I said.
"Stop repeating what you say. That's annoying," she parroted back at me.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. Whatever. Just telling her I had the job was probably enough suggestion for now.
If she started to show a little mental fortitude, something I definitely wasn't expecting from a glorified middle manager stuck in academia, then I could always give her a booster down the line.
I flicked the big red button and immediately she shook her head and looked at me. A big smile spread across her face.
"Well I don't think we need to go over anything else here," she said. "I'd say it's safe to assume you've got the job."
I reached out to take the hand she offered over her desk and smiled back at her. "Glad to hear it."
Fialux was somewhere on campus. I was sure of it, and it was time for Professor Terror to find her.
Track her down. Discover her secret identity. Hit her with the anti-Newtonian field when she least expected it.
And get to stare at her in traditional college girl clothes in the meantime. I bet she looked really good in those yoga pants that had become all the rage on campuses after I got kicked out.
Yeah, no matter how you sliced it this was going to be a fun change of pace from the usual world domination that dominated my schedule!
24
Super Survival
"Journalism."
I paused and relished the moment as an entire lecture hall full of students leaned forward eagerly hanging on my every word. I could get used to this.
Well, I could get used to it if it wasn't so dull aside from the part where I had the somewhat rapt attention of hundreds of college students. As rapt as a college student’s attention could get on the first day of a 100 level survey course, at least.
"Is a complete waste of time."
I smiled at the room. You could hear a pin drop. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say you could hear the collective dreams of a few hundred students in a journalism course being crushed at the same time.
"I mean, let's face it. Journalism has been dying a prolonged to death since the invention of television, and you all will be lucky to be the ones who hammer home the last nail in the profession's coffin," I said.
"Assuming, of course, the Internet didn't already hammer that nail home and you're all just the pallbearers."
I was really getting into this. There was nothing I hated more when I was still in school than dealing with an insufferable humanities major going on about how they were totally going to make a living with their writing career. I always wanted to yell at them to get a real degree and a real job, but never gave in to that temptation.
Mostly because I’d seen the kind of neckbearded gentleman who stalked campus trying to get girls to go out with him based solely on how much money his STEM degree stood to get him after graduation, and the results were never pretty.
Sure I wasn’t a dude so I couldn’t have a neckbeard, not unless one of my experiments went terribly wrong, but I figured the neckbeard was more a state of mind than an actual physical manifestation on the underside of the chin. It was a state of mind I desperately wanted to avoid.
I figured getting to tell off a lecture hall full of writing types was the next best thing, though. Sure there was a girl in here I desperately wouldn’t mind getting some alone time with, but mostly I was having fun fucking with the humanities types.
"Let's face it. The only reason there's even potentially a job waiting for you when you get out of school is because this city still inexplicably manages to support a couple of newspapers and networks that are always looking for fresh meat since so many of their cub reporters end up getting smashed, minced, crushed, or disintegrated by whatever villain of the week is coming through and wreaking havoc. And why do those journalists get sliced and diced and reduced to their molecular components?“
I waited to see if anyone was going to jump on an answer. I didn’t think they would. Nobody raised a hand and I wasn’t sure if that was because they didn’t care for the comparisons I was drawing or if it was just your typical lazy college kid apathy that had been ramped up to eleven in the past decade by the introduction of laptops and smartphones to the lecture hall.
“Because the hero gets in the way. They start fights with villains who are minding their own business. They create situations where young journalists have an expiration date that’s shorter than imitation crab meat sashimi being left out at a summer picnic in ninety degree weather.”
I looked around the room trying to gauge what sort of reaction that got. All that talk blaming the hero had to be driving Fialux nuts based on our conversation outside the Applied Sciences building.
She was in here somewhere. I knew it.
I smiled.
I was disappointed in myself that the idea of trying to track down Fialux's secret identity hadn't occurred to me before. It was pure genius. And once I put my mind to it, or rather once I put CORVAC's mind to it, it was a relatively simple matter to track down exactly who she was.
Or who I thought sh
e was.
Of course I was making a lot of assumptions with the data set I had CORVAC pull in, so that's why I was standing here at the front of this classroom pretending to be a journalism teacher. An annoying but necessary charade.
Though the journalism department was getting perhaps the single best qualified person to teach a course like this that they’d ever seen. Not that I was going to be advertising all the practical experience I had in this subject.
Mostly because all that practical experience was on what they’d probably consider the wrong side of the equation. Like it was my fault young hungry journalists kept throwing themselves into situations where they were going to get seriously maimed if not outright killed no matter how hard I tried to avoid collateral damage.
No, she was out there somewhere, but I wanted to be absolutely sure lest I kidnap some unfortunate college student who didn't have a single superpower to her name. I may be a villain but I did have some standards.
No more screw-ups.
I wasn't going to have a painful repeat of the anti-Newtonian stasis field rollout. I wasn’t going to put myself in another situation where I had to rely on the kindness of a hero to save my bacon.
So I was here looking for her based on several reasonable assumptions I made about what a Fialux secret identity might look like.
Assumption one: Fialux was young. Probably a few years younger than me. I figured this was a pretty safe assumption. She looked to be in her early to mid twenties.
Sure, there was always the possibility that another one of her superpowers was lack of aging, that would be just the sort of super perk that bitch would get.
But there was no way to test that particular hypothesis. So I went with the assumption that she was probably in college right about now. If I was wrong then I started over with my assumptions and lost a week or two having fun tweaking journalism students which wasn’t really wasted time at all as far as I was concerned.
