by Logan Jacobs
We pulled into the driveway of my mansion and got out of the car. I made a bee-line to my living room couch to stretch out on it, but even though it was the middle of the night, I wasn’t very tired. Instead, I shifted my position on the couch until my body faced the open-concept kitchen and I could see my assistant as she headed toward the stove.
“Making coffee?” I asked. “I was just about to ask for one. Good girl.”
“T-thank you,” Norma said with a deep blush. “I thought you might want some.”
I did, but I also didn’t want to sit around and drink coffee for the next several hours. A lesser man might need a break, but there were still plenty of things I could do with my free time. I switched on the screens to show Aileen’s security feed just as my lovely, hourglass-figured robot emerged from the basement herself.
“I am growing tired of hiding,” she announced. “I wish to be useful to you, Creator.”
“You are useful,” I replied. “And once this is over, I’ll prioritize finalizing your skin for you so you can be even more useful to me.”
Her face twitched into an emotion that could have been either excitement or annoyance. It was a bit unnerving to look at it, and I winced as I glanced away. I was really going to need to fix up her facial expression software since strong emotions tended to make her look far too creepy.
Aileen came closer to the couch, and when she stood behind me, she bent down to loop her arms around my neck. She leaned forward to touch the cold skin of her metal face against the back of my neck, and I shivered.
Somehow, I didn’t think that was the effect she was going for.
“I wish to be useful to you in other ways,” Aileen said in her sultry voice.
“Yes, and I promise that when I’m done with you, you will be the sexiest creation alive,” I purred. “Besides, you’ve made amazing progress when it comes to hacking Slade’s AI and cameras.”
“He has rejected all of my assistance so far,” she huffed. “See?”
The screens in the living room swapped images to show an outline of the directions Aileen had sent to the Shadow Knight, but it was overlaid with the route he’d actually taken. Despite her best attempts to get him to his target as quickly as possible, Slade had driven around in circles before he finally caved in and followed her directions.
“It just makes him look like an idiot,” I said with a shrug. “And he is an idiot. It isn’t your fault that he can’t recognize your genius.”
“You mean your genius,” she crooned in a low, sexy tone. “I am entirely yours, Creator.”
I smiled to myself, and if Aileen’s skin had been completed, perhaps I would have tested it out right there. It was probably a good thing for both the mission and the city of Grayville that she was still too incomplete to satisfy my needs in that regard.
“Coffee,” Norma chimed as she handed me a steaming mug of black coffee.
“Right,” I said, as Aileen untangled her arms from around me. “Back to work.”
Norma sat down next to me, and Aileen remained where she stood behind the couch as we flipped through the surveillance screens. There was so much left to do, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until every supervillain was back in prison.
Still, that reminded me.
“After we take a short break, how about we see if Slade was telling the truth about giving us clearance to enter the overflow prison?” I suggested.
“Everything is ready on my end,” Norma replied with a bright, almost mischievous smile.
“Good,” I said and then took a sip of my perfectly brewed coffee. “Aileen, we’ll need your assistance as well. I’ll need to rig the speaker system to ensure that the actual prison personnel get to safety before we set anything off.”
“Of course,” my AI system responded.
There were a few reasons I wanted to visit the overflow prison, and only part of it had to do with what I’d told Dan Slade when we’d made our deal. I was interested in the technological upgrades he was trying to implement, of course, mostly so I could get a closer look at the sorts of tech he tried to hide, but there was another, far more important reason that I needed to go to the prison.
My plan was as simple as it was effective, and since I’d already been authorized to enter the prison and look through Slade’s systems along with Norma, it was going to be just as simple to implement.
Did the Shadow Knight really believe I would allow these criminals to sit back in their comfy cells? If he did, he was even more naïve than I’d thought, but then again, maybe he had just underestimated me since I’d covered my bases pretty well with our deal. After all, I had agreed to return all the escaped prisoners safely back to their cells.
I hadn’t said anything about not killing them afterward.
Norma was wonderfully average at making bombs, so she had prepared multiple ones, and all we had to do now was plant them in strategic locations all around the prison, hook them up to a remote trigger that I would keep with me, and then wait until all the escaped supervillains were back in their cells. Then… boom.
Grayville would become just a little bit safer.
I also intended to rig the system once I was inside so that it would look like a malfunction from Slade Industries had caused the explosion. Anyone who investigated the cause would find faulty code, and all the blame would fall on Dan Slade and his company for not including any kind of a failsafe.
This would have the added benefit of showering his company with bad press, but it would also make the prison explosion look like an accident to the uninformed. I didn’t expect it to fool some of the more competent villains of Grayville, or even Dan Slade himself, but it was sure to cause Slade Industries’ stock prices to drop once the investors got wind of it.
So it really didn’t matter what sort of state-of-the-art technology Slade was installing into the new prison systems. Sure, I would go take a look at what he’d come up with and keep the guards’ eyes on me while my omni-average assistant set up the explosives, but I didn’t actually intend to add too much of my own tech. It would be too much of a shame to watch it all go up in flames when we set off the bombs.
I was giddy just thinking about it, and I couldn’t wait to see the look on the Shadow Knight’s stupid face once he realized what I’d done.
“Miles?” Norma asked.
“Hm?” I grinned as I came back to the present.
“You seem excited,” Norma said, but she was also grinning.
“I don’t think I’m the only one,” I laughed. “It’s alright to look forward to it.”
“Well,” she said with a little blush, “it is going to be spectacular, after all.”
“You’re right about that,” I sighed and took another sip of my coffee. “I just keep thinking about the Shadow Knight’s face once he sees our handiwork. Maybe it’ll be enough of a shock that he’ll drop his throat-cancer voice.”
“He might also just try to kill you,” Norma said.
“I doubt it.” I shrugged. “He’ll be mad, but if we’ve learned anything about him during this little endeavor, it’s that not even the worst of the worst are able to push him to kill.”
“That’s fair,” my mousy assistant said.
“Have you had enough coffee?” I asked her.
“I suppose for now,” Norma sighed. “Ready to go?”
“Let’s do it,” I said. “Aileen, if you could--”
“I will return to the basement, Creator,” Aileen said, “even though I would rather go with you.”
After my AI system shuffled back into the basement, Norma and I got back into my van and drove toward the overflow prison. It was located on the outskirts of Grayville, so it was pretty close to my mansion. It wasn’t quite close enough that we’d be able to see the explosion in the distance whenever we set off the bombs, but I guess I couldn’t win them all.
Just most of them.
“Aileen, send me a program that I can put into their systems to rig the speakers,” I directed
as we sped down the road. “And calculate the safest location for the workers there to be out of the blast zone. Oh, and make sure communications are disabled. We don’t want them calling for the Shadow Knight to try to stop it at the last minute. Besides, I want it to be a surprise for him.”
“Understood,” Aileen confirmed through the car’s speakers.
“Devious,” Norma giggled from the passenger seat. “I wonder if he suspects anything.”
“Again, I doubt it,” I snickered. “He did seem pretty skeptical when I agreed to our deal, but since I only killed one supervillain so far in self-defense, I think he’s starting to trust me. It’ll be a shame to lose that trust, but oh, well.”
We drove up to the prison gate and were waved through the moment I said my name. As we passed through the prison’s secure entrance, I could see various prison vans as they idled around the parking lot, and I gave a wave to a driver I recognized as the one that had picked up the tank we’d drained Morpho into several hours ago.
“I guess Slade was telling the truth,” Norma said.
“Looks like it,” I replied.
I was pretty sure that Slade had bugged the prison and would listen in on anything we said, but honestly, it didn’t even matter if he went over the security footage to catch what we were about to do. I intended to set off the bombs as soon as the last supervillain was captured, so Slade wouldn’t have a chance to know what we were up to before it was too late.
But just for fun, I looked up at one of the security cameras and winked.
Once we had parked the van, we headed into the lobby of the prison. It was about as gray and dreary as the Shadow Knight himself, but we didn’t have to wait there long before a stout man in a security uniform approached us from the front desk.
“Are you Miles Nelson?” the security guard asked.
“That’s me,” I replied.
“Then if you’ll just--”
“This is my assistant Norma,” I interrupted the man.
“Hello,” the security guard said, but he barely even looked at her.
Norma’s ability to be completely average meant that she could go almost entirely unnoticed, even if I did draw attention to her. I knew it was the kind of thing that usually bothered her, but right now, it would be our best bet for her to plant the bombs around the prison.
She had no idea how powerful she really was.
“Hi,” Norma said in a timid voice.
“This way, please,” the man said before he turned sharply on his heels.
As we headed down the hallway into the prison itself, we walked past rows of steel doors with barred-off windows. When I glanced through one of the doors, I spotted a glimpse of Bonnie from the Bonnie and Clyde duo. Her coiffed hair looked like bees had made a nest in it, and her thick makeup ran down her face like mud.
“Miles,” Norma said as she clutched her tablet to her chest, “you wanted me to run some inspections on the locks and stuff, right?”
“Yup,” I said, and then addressed the security guard. “Is that alright? It was part of what Slade and I agreed on.”
“Oh, uh, sure,” he said after a quick glance at Norma.
To be fair, my mousy assistant looked so cute and innocent that even I might have been fooled by her, but I knew what she was here to do. And since I was positive that Slade had only told the security guards to keep an eye on me, my assistant would be free to explore the prison all on her own. We already had an idea of where to plant the bombs, so I expected her to be able to complete her task pretty easily and without any disruptions.
It probably helped that we’d arrived so late at night, when there weren’t many personnel around to ask any questions.
Norma parted ways with us as the guard led me into the main systems room for the prison. There was another guard already in the room, and as he flipped through the surveillance screens, I caught a glimpse of just how many supervillains were still in this prison. Only about a third of them had escaped, so it wasn’t all of them, but it was still a pretty decent amount.
Other than the surveillance desk, there was a large computer with a panel of buttons in front of it. Most of them were for a variety of prison functions other than security, so I didn’t need to bother figuring out how they worked. All I really needed was the keyboard and the access code so I could go through Dan Slade’s new security system.
“I can take it from here,” the guard at the desk told the other one.
The two of them exchanged a glance and then gave me a look that I couldn’t quite decipher, but I didn’t really care. In all honesty, I was basically just here to waste time for Norma. The fact that I would get to snoop through Slade’s systems was just a bonus.
The first guard shrugged and left me alone with the man at the desk, and he reluctantly rolled his chair to the side so I could take a seat beside him at the controls.
“Okay, no one is following me,” Norma spoke through our connected earpieces.
She was right on schedule. She knew I wouldn’t be able to reply since the security team had been told to keep a close watch on me, so I didn’t have to react when she spoke. All I needed to do was just look busy, not raise any suspicion, and listen to her updates as she went through the prison to plant the bombs.
Now that I was seated at the controls, I entered the access code that Slade had given me to allow me to make adjustments to his security system, and I rolled my eyes even as I typed it in: CROWSEYES.
I was sure that he thought it was very clever of him to use his access code to remind me that he had his eyes on me, but all I could think was what a weak password it was. It was a lucky thing for him that I didn’t intend to do anything to fuck up his systems.
Not right now, anyway.
“I’m in position for number one,” Norma whispered. “I’ll let you know when it’s in place, and then I’ll move on to the next one.”
In total, we had four high-powered bombs that we were going to set up in all four corners of the prison for one massive implosion. I had to trust in Norma’s average skills in demolitions to get the job done, because even though I was a genius, I had no idea how to properly and safely demolish a building, especially not when we wanted to control the size of the blast zone to keep the security personnel from getting blown to pieces, too. I was already putting them out of a job, and I definitely didn’t want to kill any of them, so I’d reluctantly allowed Norma to craft a smaller explosion.
But it was still going to be pretty huge.
I browsed through the parts of the security program that Slade allowed me to see, and I made an occasional tweak here and there. For the most part, it was decently coded, at least for a completely basic and boring system that was only meant to keep prisoners incarcerated. It lacked any fun destructive methods to keep undesirables out, but there were no glaring errors that I could see, and it was pretty solid, even if it was a little basic.
Slade Technologies might not be on my level, but it was still a decent company, and Dan Slade had a pretty good head on his shoulders when it came to technology. After all, he wouldn’t have made it as far as he had with the Shadow Knight if he was prone to technological errors. But then again, it wasn’t his technology that made him unbearable as a superhero.
It was his damned self-righteous morality complex.
Of course, there were still a few things in his system that were in need of improvement. I had time to kill, so I figured that I might as well fix it up, even though this prison wouldn’t need a security system for much longer.
“Number one successfully installed,” Norma told me through the earpiece. “On to the next location. No problems so far. No one has even looked twice at me, actually.”
Poor Norma. One day my plan for her would work, and she’d see how absurdly useful her powers could be once she stopped feeling so insecure about them.
Since my assistant still had three more bombs to plant, I knew I would have time to upload my program for the prison’s speaker system, so I pull
ed out my flash drive, plugged it into one of the slots for the system’s computer, and silently thanked Aileen for uploading it to the flash drive for me in the first place.
“Hey, what’s that?” the guard demanded as he eyed the flash drive.
“Program updates,” I said with a shrug. “I had some things pre-made so I could just integrate them into what’s already here. Takes less time that way.”
“Oh, uh, okay,” he said. “Carry on, then.”
“I will,” I replied.
I knew that Slade had warned the security personnel to keep a close watch on me, but I would have thought he might have at least tried to train the guards a bit in the tech department. If the cluelessness of this guard was any indication, Slade clearly hadn’t bothered to tell them what exactly they should watch me for.
It was also pretty funny that once again, Slade had underestimated Norma-- or ‘Nora’ as he usually called her-- and it would be that underestimation that would blow up the overflow prison instead of anything I did. In fact, I was technically saving the guards’ lives by implementing the program from my flash drive.
I continued to type at the keyboard to integrate Aileen’s program seamlessly into Slade’s security system. It was pretty easy to merge it in because there wasn’t much involved with the way the speakers were set up, so there wasn’t anything too complicated to overwrite. Since Slade favored simple but effective programs anyway, it wouldn’t have been difficult for me to overwrite anything in his system, but it was still easier than I’d expected.
It did make me wonder how bad his old security must have been, and that also made me pause now that I’d gotten a good look at how his systems worked. Had it really been his faulty security system that had caused the prison break?
Or had it been something else?
“Sorry, I didn’t mention, but I got to the second location and I’m finishing up now,” Norma’s voice crackled through my earpiece. “Heading over to the third. Still haven’t been questioned.”
I pulled my hands away from the keyboard and read through the lines of code on the screen. I knew that this was his updated system and not the one that the prisoners had escaped from, but it was still a little strange to me.
