“So that’s it? Gruyère is defeated?” I asked.
“I’m absolutely confident that this is the end of the matter,” beamed Max.
His smile was disrupted by a sigh from Conrad. “Sorry to disappoint. We‘ve more work to do,” he interrupted on the headset.
“We have?” said Max crestfallen.
“North America is safe, but we have reports coming from Europe, India, China…”
“Cyborgs?”
“Big ones. Even bigger than these two. They haven’t all closed down.”
We all groaned..
“I guess Gruyère developed separate domains and erected firewalls to protect itself from such attacks…”
“So what do we need to do?” asked Karmen.
“Get inside the firewall!” announced Max.
Max-3 and Conrad (joined by Max-1 over the comms network) started babbling about technicalities.
It was nearly 2am on Valentine’s Day.
While this chatter over the Su-U channels continued, I sidled up to Teri and, in great pain from my broken arm, I pulled out the envelope from beneath my armour and presented it to her.
“Happy Valentine’s,” I whispered.
Terri smiled. She took out the card and scanned the poem. “Ahh,” she said sympathetically not really reading it at all.
I was unsure whether this had met her expectations. She had given me only until today to impress her.
Max interrupted us.
“Did you hear that?” asked Max.
“No, what?” said Terri haughtily.
“We’re off this afternoon, to complete the mission.”
“Today? Where? I have a broken arm!”
“We can fix that. We need to get back, get some sleep and prepare for blasting off to Europe. We can fix your arm on the way.”
“Europe?”
“Yes. Paris, to be precise.”
I did the double-raised eyebrows gesture and Terri smirked. Then I made a sort of musical conductor’s bow, as-if I was taking credit for the trip.
Terri smiled.
I felt good. Broken arm? No problem. Giant Cyborgs? Bring them on. I was full of confidence. I already felt I was an Olympic gold medal winner; if there was event for tumbling down rocky slopes, then I would be on the podium.
***
Chapter 2 European Tour
Thursday, February 14, 2123, morning.
Terri took a jet pack back to the apartment while Conrad took me to the Mad-Sci-Soc club house to work on my arm with a broken-bone home-repair kit. I finally crawled into bed at 4am. Terri was fast asleep.
She had left the apartment by the time I woke at 10am. I was feeling hung-over from the anesthetic drugs. I did not get a Valentine’s Card from her but the one I gave her was standing on the breakfast bar which I took to be a good sign.
I made myself a cup of tea and finally decided to switch on my G-Phone messages. OMJ, there were hundreds. They all seemed to be diverts from my Su-U account. So many messages, congratulations, questions, questionnaires and endorsement enquiries. I had gone mainstream overnight!
Sad to say, I quickly thought about how I could monetise my new found fame.
***
Thursday, February 14, 2123, afternoon.
There we were, five superheroes behind a press conference table, with our official Su-U names on plaques in front us. Conrad was wearing his full Captain K suit, with Terri and I standing on his right, and Max and Karmen on his left. People and drones and a lot of noise filled the room.
Just before the conference started, we were pounced upon by Gillard, the Broadcast Exec we had rendered unconscious the previous night. He was matter-of-fact as he told us, “I have my lawyers going through recordings last night to prove you assaulted me last night.”
Max replied haughtily. “Good luck with that. In the meantime, we’re about to have a global live press conference. You know, a presentation on how we saved New York. Do you want us to delay that conference and mention how you fainted? How you couldn’t stand the pressure?”
Blood drained from Gillard’s face. He knew that it was a lie but it could mean he would be moved from his job; precautionary health and safety reasons. He loved his job and even temporary leave could mean he may lose it. “You wouldn’t,” he hissed.
“It’s your call. Or you could work with us and take credit for moving our slot.”
“You make an interesting counter-proposal,” he stuttered.
Gillard started the press conference appearing even more brash than usual. “Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I’m Reginald Gillard, TrueCrime-9+ Super Hero Reality Show Director. I was in charge of casting and direction last night,” he beamed. “The Channel TrueCrime-9+ Su-U Team was lead by veteran hero, Captain Kittoffery and he will deliver some opening remarks, and introduce the rest of our team. We will be very happy to take your questions. I am sure you have been warned, but could everyone turn off audio settings on personal communication devices, thanks. And when you ask your question if you could please identify yourself and your news organization. Captain, over to you.”
Conrad looked managerial. “Thank you, Mr Gillard, and thank you, everyone, for being present at this press conference. As you may know, I’ve been out of active duty for some time now, training our Su-U Division’s new heroes. I’d just like to introduce the team and then let them describe the action they took last night. Before questions, I’d also like to outline the continuing global threat caused by the agent controlling the robots and outline our approach to overcome it. Since we are not out of danger some of our responses will not be complete in order not to supply our enemy with any extra advantages.”
Murmur-murmur, murmur-murmur.
“I first want to introduce you to Improbileon and Psychic Kid, whose earlier scouting work on the Robot that rampaged through Queens several weeks ago allowed us to develop a strategy to defeat these latest larger, and more dangerous, entities that we encountered last night. Secondly I’d like to thank a recently re-activated super hero, Cloudera, who has been critical in the planning of our mission and in rescuing several civilians in last night’s battle. Finally, a big thank you to our lead hero last night, Majestro who, after painstaking research, developed the weapons that enabled us to prevail in last night’s encounter.”
Conrad didn’t get much further with his introductions. Questions just shouted out and all notions of press conference etiquette went out the window.
“Weapons, what weapons did you use?” came the question from multiple sources.
Gillard tried to act as coordinator and keep some order.
Max spoke when the room had quietened down. “Our opponents last night were of a size and scale that no-one has encountered since the Robot Wars. We were already aware of the resilience of our foe and so I, er… we, were determined that two types of weapons would be required. One to capture the cyborgs and the second to inject a er… poison into the creatures.”
This raised even more questions. “Cyborg? Creatures?”
“Yes,” replied Max. “The enemy is strong, resourceful and intelligent but the machines we saw last night were not robots. They are not governed by any laws of robotics. We have not reached the singularity, nor, in my opinion, will that ever occur with current computer technology. No this is an organic life-form, merely making use of a robotic outer shell…”
“Aliens?” came gasps.
“No, not an alien. I would suggest that it is er… a man-made organism, a research project that has gone wrong, er… perhaps.”
Uproar.
Max continued nervously over the noise, “Well obviously this is speculation based on a probability model… however, we do have lots of evidence that its origins are terrestrial and not alien.”
More questions and noise. Finally Gillard had everyone quiet again, “What is the ongoing threat?” was the gist of the questions.
Conrad took control when the room quietened, “We are traveling today to def
eat this creature in Europe. Thereafter we aim to recruit teams to defeat it worldwide.”
“What is it? What do we even call it?”
Max was about to utter Gruyère but thought twice, “Gr… no, um, the Big G.”
“Big G?”
“No,” said Max changing his mind. “The Big C!”
***
Thursday, February 14, 2123, early evening.
Max Three had planned on hacking the airline ticket reservation system in order to secure our flight to Europe but there was no need. The military issued a warrant for our passage on the six o’clock shuttle. However we could not let the two Maxes go off alone due to our residual paranoia about their intentions and so SHUMSS split up. Conrad went with Max-3 incognito while Max One, Terri, Karmen and myself would ride the red carpet and take the first class shuttle tickets. We would land early afternoon, around 2pm (due to time zone difference).
Since we had been given a waiver for all our equipment and only needed our Su-U authorisation hologram as an identity check. We experienced the ultimate in elite travel: no security controls!
Journo’s and well-wishers waved to us as the rocket doors closed at the airport. Thirty minutes later we landed in Europe.
We didn’t see much of Paris. We were put onto a train and propelled at 300kph towards the Swiss border where there were widespread reports of giant robots causing destruction on the Swiss/French border. Apparently there was a 100 square kilometer area of total destruction, not even trees were left standing. All that could, had fled. Many people were missing, presumed dead.
Conrad and Max-3 would use our Plan A to meet up with us. Max-3 hacked the airline reservation system and prepared to converge with us in the War Zone.
At least there was time to hear Max’s side of the story from Max One.
***
Thursday, February 15, 2123, morning
Time, it seems, is an illusion. Space-time, doubly-so. It turns out we are not even on the original time line. On the original “canvas” (think of space-time as a blank sheet of paper with everyone etching with their own crayon over its surface), Terri and I might not have ever met. Terri may not have been in the park when I base-jumped and broke my leg. The leg may have not received the rehabilitation treatment that Terri paid for and I might have ended up operating a surrogate for the rest of my life.
That was the original canvas. A canvas I cannot see.
This is because a time traveller is like another layer of paint over the top. Some of the original picture may remain but it could all be different. No-one except the original time traveller knows what has changed on the canvas or could speculate on the ripple effects of timeline changes. Argh, the canvas metaphor has already fallen apart!
Max One had the same memories as Max Zero up until he was “forked”; this was the word Max used to describe the copying experience that left him with knowledge of the original canvas before he started to deface it. He, and he alone, knows the difference between the original canvas and the new one. This is what is meant by time travel only makes sense to the time traveller.
This is Max One’s story of the original timeline.
In 2118, Max Zero found Terri crying in street after she had run out on Dameon. She had had a bad experience. Dameon’s seduction had over-stepped the mark. Not being able to find a way out of the mirrored bedroom, she threw objects and made quite a mess. There was a huge shouting match about all the broken glass and the means exiting the apartment; fire safety was mentioned! In the fight, Terri’s was seperated from her G-phone, which was usually firmly strapped to her wrist, and so she lost her means of paying for taxis, communicating and navigating her way about the three dimensional city of New York. (The city had long lost the attribute of being navigable by a simple two dimensional map).
Max consoled her, hailed a cab and took her back to the University.
Max was completely smitten with Terri, with romantic dreams beginning even as she left the auto-taxi.
Max was so kind and reassuring to Terri that she said as she left, “I wished I’d met you before I met that fracker!”
With no phone, they failed to exchange contact details, it was months before Max next saw her again on campus. By that time, she was dating another guy, a geeky guy, no better looking than himself! His chance had gone.
Max entered a phase, familiar to many, of “If-Only” regression. If only he had obtained Terri’s contact details, or had been there before the fight with Dameon. Unlike most people with “If-Only” whines, Max became creative. He thought that perhaps if he went into suspended animation, he could go into the future to find time-travel-to-the-past (so called “T4P”) and go back and change events. And just for good measure, become unbearably rich in the process. This was the standard common-as-coke day dream. But he, unlike anybody else on the planet, could make it happen. He was, after all, a mad scientist and already building the Entangle-Scan. A scanner that could detect and measure every atom within an object or person. If he could scan every atom of himself and re-create himself in a future time where T4P had been developed, then it was achievable: the girl and the gold.
Within a year he had created a machine that could copy every atom in his body and store his data inside the supercomputer. After a huge dispute with University directors on the snaffling of the majority of the computer’s memory banks, and another year finding a way of storing the data offline, he was back on track! But that was just the start of his research. It took Max another 50 years to build the machine to decode the data and create a new Max.
“So that’s you?” I asked breaking up the story-telling.
“No, that’s not me. That would be Max A. I’m the first Max to travel back through time. There were multiple Maxes made by Max Zero, let’s call them A, B, C and so on, that continued Max Zero’s work. As you may be aware the problem is not the hardware but the software. There were multiple physical copies of me with scrabbled eggs for brains until Max Zero worked out the prototype ‘Holding Matrix’ using newfangled organic computer systems. Max A was the first qualified success, but even he was confined to a wheel chair. Max had achieved copying memories and thought processes, many, many brain functions but not all the motor controls transferred successfully.”
“The Holding Matrix? He solved that problem to make you?” asked Conrad. “Then why all this fuss with the cheese?”
“Using future technology, it is easier to create organic computers. But here, now? Not so easy. It’s like going back to the... Vikings,” he said winking at Norse-goddess-clad, Karmen. “And asking them to build a space ship from their long boats!”
“We’re in the Viking era?” squeaked our resident Valkyrie.
“In terms of organic computing? Yes.”
Max continued to describe that backward time travel, T4P, had not been developed until 2240, by a guy called Hawk Stevenson, who was able to build on a moon of Jupiter, a cluster of mini-black holes, held within a higgs-boson field that provided a tunnel into the past. His first attempt at regressive time travel revealed some pitfalls but fortunately, he was able to go back a second time to correct his first near-solar-system-killing mistake. Thereafter by trial and error, T4P was successively tweaked and improved.
Max One was not the first time traveller to the Twenty Second Century to use T4P but he was the first Max to return to this time zone and one of the last unlicensed time travellers…
“Unlicensed? They license time travel?” I ask.
“The government licenses everything. There’s good reason to license time travellers, they can do a lot of damage...”
Terri had sat apart from Karmen and myself, silently grinding her teeth, as she listened to Max’s story.
***
Friday, February 15, dusk
The sun was setting. We were still dozens of kilometers outside the destruction zone when the train came to an emergency stop. We prised ourselves from the train compartment wall to find out that we were all ok but the next event disturbed
us more. The G-Phones had lost signal. We were off the net!
We exchanged worried stares.
We checked the carriages and since people don’t usually travel to a war zones, there were only a few other passengers. They didn’t have network connection either.
“I thought this might happen,” Karmen sighed.
It was an hour before a dozen or so French officials arrived. They had journeyed alongside the tracks, in several different all-terrain vehicles to rendezvous with the train. They had come out specifically to meet us.
So much for my supposed superpower of omnilingualism, as there was no network to allow multi-lingual communication, so that super power failed. None of us knew more French than “Bonjour” and “ca va”. However there was little need for communication besides pointing to our wrists, shrugging and smiling. They knew who we were and what we were supposed to do. They guided us onto an old automatic bus driven by a multi-purpose mannequin-style robot. The robot design had typical French flare; brushed aluminum, obviously robotic with minimalist features, yet exceptional with its overtly exaggerated balletic movements and impeccable poise.
It did not speak English either.
“Je me appelle Gallo. Je ai un numéro de série, mais je préfère ne pas le répéter. Ce est une chose de robot,” said the robot with a shrug.
“Anybody?” asked Max.
“He’s called Gallo, I think. I didn’t catch the rest,” I said trying to recall my school french.
“Oui, Gallo,” it nodded.
“What now?”
The French Officials gratefully kissed our cheeks and shook our hands eagerly before returning to their vehicles leaving just one large tall vehicle and the robot. After we waved goodbye, Gallo offered up the seats in the bus. The bus was designed for hiking tours, with bench seats that folded into beds or folded into the floor with drop-down disco lights to create a dance floor. Neat. There was plenty of space for the four of us.
“Pas besoin de vous sangle, mes amis. Ce bus est conçu pour rouler à travers la campagne lentement et dans le style,” it chirped happily.
It was our turn to shrug.
The robot closed the door and took hold of the holographic steering wheel while we stood looking around. The bus moved beautifully smoothly and quietly.
We could see in the dusky light, walls and hedge rows in our path and so we found seats expecting some bumps. But there was only the slightest rise and fall going over such obstacles. The machine maintained a leisurely and quiet 30 kph. This was truly a luxury all terrain vehicle.
Mad-Sci-Soc Page 23
