Evil Genius

by Logan Jacobs

  “It’s in the parking lot.” I snapped my fingers, and a black mini-van parked on the other side of the lot sharply reversed itself out of its space, turned around the column of other cars I had planted to make it look like an ordinary warehouse, and skidded to a stop right in front of the four of us. Then the trunk popped open and a ramp unfolded itself for Aileen.

  “Looks like a soccer-mom car,” Dynamo said, but then she must have noticed the rows of computer screens and the mounted light machine gun anchored to the space near the door, and her mouth closed with a loud snap.

  “It works,” I said as my AI partner rolled in. Then Norma went over to the passenger side, and I walked over to the driver’s seat as the ramp folded itself back up and the trunk closed.

  “I guess I’ll follow you,” Dynamo said right before my door closed, and then I stomped on the gas and careened out of the parking lot without saying another word.

  After about thirty seconds on the road, her red sports car appeared in my rearview mirror, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  “You didn’t think she was going to follow us?” Norma asked.

  “I’m trying to play it cool,” I explained.

  “Hard to play it cool when you are drooling over her,” my assistant sighed.

  “To be fair, she would turn gay men straight and straight women gay.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Norma muttered.

  “You are gay?” I asked. “I didn--”

  “No!” she cleared her throat aggressively. “I’m, uhhh, just, whatever.”

  “You don’t need to be jealous,” I said.

  “I’m not jealous,” Norma sighed.

  “Well, whatever you are calling the existential crisis you are having right now about Dynamo, then,” I groaned. “I don’t care. I just need you to do your job, Norma. Are you going to do your job?”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied promptly as she sat up in her chair.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, good thinking with asking her to come back to my mansion. I’ll be able to seduce her much easier there.”

  “I know how you work,” Norma laughed, and she did smile slightly, so I guessed that she was done pouting about Dynamo.

  “Don’t they teach these guys anything about stealth in Warden school?” I sighed as I pulled a sharp turn that no conventionally built minivan would ever have been able to take without toppling over. “That car screams attention.”

  “Maybe not, but it looks like they do teach them some things about driving,” Norma replied admiringly as she craned her head around to watch Dynamo effortlessly whip around the same turn.

  When we got home to my mansion, I led her to my underground parking garage, so that her car, which was probably one of a kind, branded, and specifically identifiable as hers to all the millions of fans who followed her career, not to mention her Warden employers, wouldn’t be left out in plain sight of any news drone or helicopter.

  Then we took an elevator up to my parlor.

  It had been immaculately sterilized since The Chief had sent me those first few uninvited guests, and the blade above the door was fully retracted in the ceiling, so I didn’t think there were any sketchy details to get Dynamo’s hackles up. Just Brazilian rosewood cabinets, paintings by lesser known Renaissance artists, and my diamond chandelier. In The Cellar, the aesthetic was modernist and minimalist. Upstairs, I indulged a bit more in the classics.

  And now I had a powerful superhero in my midst.

  And if I fucked up my pitch to her, and didn’t seduce her to my cause, I could end up going to jail for a very long time.

  Or, I’d just have to kill her.

  Miles Chapter Eleven

  “Nice place.” Elizabeth looked around the foyer of my mansion, and I could practically sense her urge to sniff the air.

  “Make yourself at home,” I replied.

  “I don’t need to,” she scoffed. “This will be quick. Just show me what you want to show me, and--”

  “Would you like something to drink, Elizabeth?” I asked as I moved over to one of my conveniently placed liquor carts. “I have some Macallan 50 that is quite exquisite.”

  “Isn’t that thirty grand a bottle,” Dynamo asked as she raised a perfect dark eyebrow.

  “It’s a bit of a secret, but I’m rich.” I gestured to the interior of my mansion and then reached for the bottle.

  “I’m not allowed to drink on the jo--” she started to say.

  “They probably wouldn’t want you to even be here,” I said as I handed her a crystal tumbler with a small pour of the expensive brass liquid. “Yet, here you are.”

  “Yes,” she admitted as she took the glass from me. “And I’m ready to leave as soon as you piss me off.”

  The raven-haired beauty cautiously lifted the tumbler to her lips, and then she let a bit of the whisky touch her full red lips.

  “Well?” I asked as I watched her tongue briefly flick out to lick her lips.

  “It’s… okay,” she said.

  “Okay?” I scoffed as I took a generous sip from my own glass.

  “Fine,” she sighed as she lifted her tumbler to her lips. “It’s excellent. The best whisky I think I’ve ever had. Happy now?”

  “Quite,” I laughed lightly. “See how easy it can be if you just trust me?”

  “Yes,” she agreed as her aqua eyes hardened. “The spoiled billionaire playboy knows his expensive drinks. Perhaps I would be dismayed if you didn’t?”

  “That’s a fair statement, Elizabeth,” I laughed again, and she actually did smile a bit.

  “Shall we go down to The Cellar?” Norma suggested, and I blinked when I realized that she was standing next to us. I’d completely forgotten about her, and would almost have felt bad, but then I passed her the rest of my drink and gave her a smile.

  “Good idea, Norma. This is why you are so valuable to me.”

  “Uhhh, thanks,” she muttered as she shot a shy glance to the beautiful superheroine wearing the skimpy red outfit standing ten feet from us.

  “Let’s go,” I said as I gestured for the two women to follow me. This was going to be the real test of Dynamo’s reaction. Of course, it did occur to me that she could just be coming here to pick up information on me that she could then report back to The Wardens so they could decide to prosecute me or worse, but then again, my gut was telling me that she was walking the razor’s edge of indecision.

  And she just needed a gentle nudge to be mine.

  Dynamo wasn’t totally indoctrinated in The Wardens’ senseless ways of doing things yet, and I knew she was still open to the possibility that there might be more effective ways of fighting evil.

  Of course, it was possible that my judgment was just being distorted by her completely impractical, absurd, fucking stupid, sexy as hell bright red supersuit, and all the features that it accentuated. And her suspicious turquoise eyes. And her demonstrated prowess in combat.

  But I liked to think I was more rational than that.

  Or at least, I was rational enough to realize that I was making irrational decisions based around how much I wanted to fuck her. Perhaps that was okay, too.

  “What is…The cellar?” Elizabeth asked as she followed me. She sounded understandably unenthused by the prospect. In fact, she looked like she might be gearing up to fight her way out, a prospect by which I myself was completely unenthused.

  “My workspace,” I explained quickly. “Where my inventions are.”

  The elevator doors at the end of the gallery of statues slid open with a friendly ding. I walked over, flanked by Norma and Aileen. Elizabeth followed.

  When we arrived in The Cellar and stepped out into its luminous whiteness, into the dizzying array of screens and panels, the glint of silver and the reflective sheen of black, the superhero let out a tiny, but audible, gasp.

  I appreciated that gasp immensely.

  Then she said, “It’s like a… museum of the future in here.”

  “Nah,” I said with a shrug. “
It’s the present, actually. Most people just don’t realize that yet.”

  “I thought The Wardens had the latest tech, though,” Dynamo said as she leaned over one of my power bikes and sipped her whisky.

  “Feel free to explore,” I said as I moved to the liquor cabinet down here to get myself another sip of something relaxing. I didn’t guide Dynamo anywhere, I just waited to see what in the room would attract her attention first.

  As it turned out, it was the C.D.S.

  “What’s this?” she asked as she stared at the flickering, shifting array of red lights. “What are you mapping here? … Is this your much-touted surveillance system?”

  “Got it on the first guess,” I said.

  “‘A revolution in crime-fighting,’” she muttered to herself as she leaned over the keyboard. “So how do I… ”

  “You can use your fingers to zoom in or press a dot,” I said as I let my eyes stray down the curve of her bent back and linger on the pale skin of her hips where her suit didn’t cover her.

  Elizabeth hovered her hand across the screen with her fingers wiggling uncertainty, and then she finally selected a random dot and pressed it.

  The abstract map was replaced by a live feed of a screaming, struggling woman on the pedestrian walkway of a highway overpass being picked up by a huge man and forced over the guardrail.

  “I have to go help her!” Dynamo gasped, and she actually turned away from the monitor and took a step toward the elevator.

  I reflexively caught her by the arm, and then quickly released her and held my hands up in the universal signal of no harm meant when I saw her expression.

  “You can’t help her,” I said. “You’d never get there in time. Even if you had superspeed, which I don’t think is your power. That’s fifteen miles away.”

  Dynamo seemed to recognize the truth of this, and she sort of wilted. “But how can I just--”

  “Watch,” I told her. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Either the woman was or wasn’t going to die. Either way, I was going to find a way to spin the incident into a thread of the narrative that would convince Dynamo she could do more good working with me than working for The Wardens.

  Elizabeth didn’t really have any better option, so she watched the screen while Norma and I each sipped our whiskeys. Aileen was there watching the screen as well, but my AI assistant usually only spoke when spoken to anyway, and my human assistant was uncharacteristically quiet, even for her.

  It seemed that she was a little starstruck by the statuesque superhero.

  The woman on the screen tumbled over the side of the bridge, but she managed to grab onto the base of the guardrail and dangled there while continuing to scream for help silently.

  The huge man responsible for her plight, when he saw that his victim hadn’t fallen all the way off the bridge into oncoming traffic fifty feet below, attempted to stomp on her fingers and break her grip.

  “No!” Elizabeth cried out, but then an athletic-looking man in a baseball cap tackled him from the side.

  While the two of them grappled, a middle-aged couple rushed over to the dangling woman and helped pull her back over the guardrail to safety. Other passersby pulled over their cars when they saw what was going on too, and I could see several of them pull out phones presumably to call police. Meanwhile, the first guy had managed to overcome the perp, and he and some other bystanders guarded him to make sure he couldn’t run off, while others comforted the sobbing woman.

  “Did you… know that was going to happen?” Dynamo asked me.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “This is in real time. How could I know? But, do you see why your first impulse was irrational?”

  “Wanting to save a helpless person from getting thrown off a bridge is irrational?” Dynamo asked coldly.

  “No, but thinking you can do it from fifteen miles away at the moment when it’s already happening is,” I replied as I began to piece together my pitch to her. “My point is, even a superhero can’t be everywhere at once. Even a superhero can’t always get there in time. And that was just one dot. Look at all these thousands of dots. Some victims might get lucky, like that woman did. But other stories won’t have such happy endings.”

  “I should be out there,” Dynamo said. “I should be out there right now. This is unbelievable. I do want this system implemented, you know. I’ll be glad to endorse it. I wanted to talk to you about it at the Gala, but--”

  “I knew you would appreciate it,” I interrupted. “As you can probably tell from this map, there aren’t enough hours in the day for every law enforcement officer and every superhero in Pinnacle City working around the clock to be on hand to save every potential victim of a crime.”

  “So you’re saying that we need more manpower?” Dynamo asked. “People like you? Unlicensed wannabe superheroes?”

  “No,” I said. “We need fewer criminals. Fewer crimes. Fewer victims.”

  “By killing off the criminals?” Dynamo asked as her eyes narrowed. “More will just arise. And criminals aren’t a separate species. Any person can be driven by circumstances to commit a crime. And having committed a crime once doesn’t mean that a person is necessarily going to continue committing more crimes. They should be given an appropriate sentence and given the chance to reintegrate into society.”

  “That might be true of certain petty crimes,” I said. “But I’m not talking about shoplifting here. I’m sure you remember our conversation on the phone. I’m really only concerned with supervillains and atrocities on their level. Scheming to kill people by the busload, by the plane-load, by the building-full… that indicates that something is fundamentally fucked-up about you, and society is going to be much better off without your existence. Besides, if supervillains actually start getting killed off, then sure, some new ones will rise up in their place. But other potential ones might get scared off.”

  “The other issue is that The Wardens’ restrictions exist partially to protect Wardens,” Elizabeth said hesitantly as she began to run her fingers through her long dark hair. The fact that she had brought up a new point instead of responding directly to my latest argument gave me hope, because it suggested that she didn’t strongly disagree with any of its content.

  “Oh?” I prompted, even though I knew where she was going. I just wanted her to say what.

  “We try not to kill them,” she continued. “and in return, they try not to kill us. I mean, sure, they might be a little more… flexible about that policy than we are, but all in all, they focus on just disabling or distracting any interfering superheroes enough to accomplish their objectives. We’re pretty damn hard to kill, and in most cases it would be more trouble than it was worth. So there’s sort of a… tacit agreement between the two sides.”

  “You mean a conspiracy?” I asked dryly.

  “There’s no need to make it sound like some sort of villainous scheme for two warring factions to do each other the professional courtesy of not trying to kill each other,” she said.

  “Professional courtesy?” I repeated. “Listen to yourself. It’s like you’re in business with the supervillains. The entertainment business. This policy of not using lethal force on each other, never mind all the bystander casualties, allows your war between good and evil for the fate of Pinnacle City to be all fun and games for the supers. It allows it to continue indefinitely with no one winning or losing permanently. It allows you to keep taking photos and filming videos and giving interviews. It keeps everyone in suspense and it keeps all the ordinary citizens reliant on being rescued by superheroes and obsessed with following your exploits. It’s fucking good for business. The entertainment and sponsorship business.”

  “It’s not like that!” Dynamo’s face and body had tensed up. “That’s not why I do what I do. It’s not about the glory, the sponsorships… you know me. I mean, no, you don’t know me. But if you did, then you’d know that I don’t give a fuck about that. I just want to help people.”

  “I believe you
,” I said. “But do you think the same is true for your coworkers? For Optimo? For the Killer Kitten?”

  She bit her lip, glanced back at the red dots on the screen, and did not answer the question. Then she took a small sip of her whisky and sighed.

  “Do you think there has ever been a time when, by declining to finish off a supervillain when they had the chance, coworkers of yours allowed supervillains to cause civilian deaths that could have been averted?” I persisted.

  Dynamo raised her glass again to her plump pouty lips and took a sip. Then she replied, “But what if a superhero started killing and found that he or she liked it? What if they got drunk on the power of deciding who lived and who died?”

  I shrugged. “Then I guess Pinnacle City would just gain one more supervillain.”

  “But how would the superhero himself know?” Dynamo asked. “If he abandoned the guiding principles of The Wardens… then how would he know when he was crossing the line and becoming a supervillain himself? How would he know when to stop?”

  “I guess when he was doing more harm than good,” I said. “Taking more lives than he was saving. I don’t know. Just because someone doesn’t follow the Warden rules doesn’t have to mean that they don’t follow any rules. What rules do you think separate heroes from villains?”

  “I guess… they care about the common people, and they’re genuinely trying to help them and keep them safe,” Dynamo said as her turquoise eyes finally met mine. “I guess that’s not a rule, it’s just a motivation. I think all good superhero rules have to come from that. Superheroes are supposed to be noble and fighting for others, not for their personal gain.”

  “That sounds fair,” I said. “Hey, let me show you something.”

  I led her over to the corner of the room where I had a 3D holographic mockup of what I wanted my supersuit with all the protective capabilities of a space suit to look like once it was completed. It had self-repairing carbon fiber nano-tube exoskeleton components, reflex boosters, inbuilt weaponry, and telemetry units. It was black and dark gray and looked pretty badass in my humble opinion. I pressed a button on the display and the 3D projection shimmered and reconfigured itself to project the same features, but on a suit tailored to a female body and cut the way Dynamo’s was: high on the hips and tight around every part of her.