by Ben Bequer
“You also forget I don’t quit, you stupid robot.”
Now that I knew what the origin of the power was, I understood how it was affecting me; I could almost feel the vibrations turning the balance center in my inner ear into mush as Blackjack 2.0 crossed the distance between us.
“I’m counting on it, Blackjack,” Haha went on.
“You needed to bring a bigger army against me, Haha. And a bigger man than this joke you’re using.”
Haha giggled in glee – reveling in the banter more than in seeing his minion pound me to a pulp – and my doppelganger paused a moment.
“The joke’s on you, Blackjack. I mean, you should see your face. You don’t look so good, buddy. But don’t worry, we’re pacing ourselves. We’re waiting until Bloodstrike kills Apogee, then I expect you to lose it – like you’re used to doing.”
“Come on, you bastard,” I said, flashing a quick look over at Apogee who was just a blur surrounding the blood queen. “Quit talking and start fighting.”
I moved in and threw as powerful a blow as I could, catching Blackjack 2.0 across the jaw and throwing him off his feet.
He took it like a champ and came to his feet.
“Anything you can do, I can do better,” Haha said, and his boy threw the same exact punch, knocking me back twenty feet along the mud. I got up, covered in the stuff and wiped my face, playing that last move back in my head. He reacted to my punch with a move that wasn’t similar, it wasn’t a replicate – it was the exact same thing.
“The suit,” I said as he powered his boots and landed beside me. “The suit is what’s running Blackjack.”
“You’re thinking too much,” Haha said, cackling. “Remember, you’re Blackjack.”
“You…you’re mimicking me. That’s why he shoots arrows like I do, that’s why-” I managed, but Blackjack dove in with a powerful straight kick that I avoided by diving aside.
“This thing you’ve made, Haha. What is it?” I said, ducking under a spinning kick but unable to dodge the follow-up sidekick that caught me in the shoulder and sent me sprawling.
I managed to keep my feet but he was relentless, diving in the air and bringing down a brutal heel that would cave in my skull. I slapped the blow aside and threw a punch that caught him in the chest. Despite my sapped strength, it hurt him, knocking him to his knees.
“It’s the suit,” I said. “You’ve built a suit around some dude that looks like me, haven’t you? And you’re in it?”
“Very clever, Blackjack. Very clever. I salute you.”
I looked at my nemesis in a different light, finally understanding. There was some schlep inside a skin-tight power suit – so state of the art Superdynamic would drool just to take a look at it. The suit could emulate my moves, so in addition to having a guy that looked like me, he could also move like me, fire arrows and throw punches like me, except Haha had programmed him with additional commands, fighting combinations he determined would work on me. The last move, the combination of kicks, I’d seen the other guy use them in Amsterdam. It was all in the suit, and Haha was controlling it.
“But you’re here now, Haha,” I said. “Remember how dangerous it was for you to be downloaded in one place?”
Haha’s laughter resounded, this time coming from the speakers of my own castle.
“You mean your little trap, Blackjack?” he said, barely able to contain his laughter. It was strange to hear the voice coming from Blackjack 2.0, yet the man in the suit wasn’t moving at all. “I know about your trap and I have broken through.”
Bubu’s voice filled the room, projecting through all of the speakers. “Bro, he’s taken over the servers.”
“That’s right, Blackjack,” Haha continued. “I’ve taken over your little castle and all the drones. This place and everything in it belongs to me.”
I stepped back, breathing heavily, looking past him at Apogee, who took a strong blow from Bloodstrike and dropped to the floor again. Epic had crawled out of the crater and was engaged with Silverback, who had survived his own crash into the marsh. The gorilla was pounding at Epic’s chest, each massive fist the size of a canned ham.
“In a moment, your lovely damsel in distress is going to be a puddle of goo,” Haha said. “And soon after, you’re going to join her, Blackjack. You’re going to die here, and then you won’t be in my way. Then I’ll have the show I want, with a more willing participant.”
“Not if I have something to say about it,” I was about to say, but my duplicate, Haha’s puppet led with another straight kick, exactly like the last combination he had used. I side-stepped the kick just as Apogee had taught me, and once in range, kicked him. It wasn’t technically perfect, I had done better in practice, but I put my Asskicker right into his stomach. Even with the strength dampeners, the kick doubled him over, and I rolled behind him looping an arm under and around him, locking him in a full nelson.
I reared back, lifting him from the ground and fought against his efforts to break free. He hitched and bucked, but couldn’t get escape my grasp. Then it hit me, the dampener wasn’t affecting me. It wasn’t a full radius effect, only something he could direct in front of him. That’s why the others in this room were unaffected. The madness of the battle prevented me from noticing the brief moments when it wasn’t aimed at me – for example, when I was flying through the air.
I released one hand and dug down across his chest, feeling the ridges of his armor. He scratched and clawed at me, but I had him under control and with my full strength, Blackjack 2.0 couldn’t go anywhere. I found a rounded device that could easily be the emitter and grabbed it, ripping the thing away from the suit along with a trailing stream of sputtering wires.
Letting go of my nemesis, I threw the device on the ground and stepped on it, crushing it under my boot. He turned to face me, but the chilly feeling, the nausea, the weakness were absent.
“Oops,” I said. “Think I fucked up Pinocchio.”
Blackjack 2.0 didn’t react, which was strange, ignoring the dangling cables at his chest, diving in with a series of kicks I easily batted away. He was strong as hell, fast and powerful, but I was myself, and this guy was nothing to me.
I put my hands on him, picking him and throwing him into one of the cragged holes on the walls - one of my previous impact craters. He flew from my hands like a round from of a howitzer, embedding into the rock.
My boots brought me to him in an instant, and I lifted him again, this time using him as a missile against his teammate, Bloodstrike. Blackjack 2.0 slammed into her with a rewarding crack and for a moment, both of them were invisible. Apogee rolled onto her knees and gave me a little nod, her face pale and exhausted. She was spent and bloodied, but otherwise alright.
“What now, Haha?” I said, moving toward Silverback. The big beast was bloodied to a pulp, his face reminiscent of ground beef. He breathed heavily, fur matted with sweat, blood and rubble, drooling with froth. Epic had a little trail of blood on his nose, and his costume was torn in places, but he looked strong as ever.
“You think this is over,” Haha responded, but Silverback lacked his master’s bravado. He saw me approaching and lifted one massive paw pleading for mercy, using the other to support his bulk as he slumped over, exhausted.
“Are you alright,” Epic said, his swollen knuckles oozing with mingled blood and froth. None of it looked to be his.
“This is par for the course,” I said, and a second later, something crashed into me and lifted me off the ground. Blackjack 2.0 was full throttle on his boots, dragging me across the ground, not giving me a chance to recover. I threw an elbow into his face that separated us, and we both crashed into the shoreline. I stood as he approached again.
“This isn’t over, Blackjack,” Haha went on. “This is only the beginning. Remember, I have your beloved castle under my control and there’s nothing your little friend can do except monitor me. I’ve taken over the drones, and the…”
Haha paused and when he did, Blackjack
stopped mid-step, as if someone had pulled the plug. I toppled him to the ground, landing on him in a straddle. I tore at his face mask and ripped it off…
…and I saw my own face.
He didn’t look like me – some tall dude with thick black hair and eyebrows. No, he was me. Haha hadn’t chosen a guy with similar features that he could conceal with the facemask and the hooded cloak, he’d found a guy that was my exact duplicate, and as Blackjack and I stared at each other, a horrible realization began to set in.
“What did you do,” I whispered, and as if on cue the lights of the place modulated much brighter – so much that some of the luminescent bulbs shattered from the increase in voltage. Despite of the exploding fixtures, the room was bathed in a white cold incandescence. Haha was in full control of the moment, having written the script that led to this moment, and now he wanted to capture it in full, for the whole world to see.
I staggered off my duplicate, dropping the mangled mask into the ankle deep mud. He also tried to get up, but I had hurt him. His upper torso twitched as if beginning to convulse. He vomited and coughed, almost gagging on the stuff.
“What did you do, Haha,” I bellowed, Apogee, Epic and Silverback sloshing in the swamp as they came closer.
“Oh my God,” Apogee said.
“I made another you, Blackjack,” Haha said, talking out of the room’s speakers instead of my doppelganger’s damaged suit. “A better you – more focused for the task at hand, if you get my meaning.”
Blackjack 2.0 rolled away from me in a slow, deliberate motion and that’s when I got a clear view of the back of his head. It was shaved and covered with wiring and circuitry that dug into his scalp and neck and working down into the back panel of the suit.
“I’ve perfected you, Blackjack,” Haha said. “Your problem was you couldn’t keep your eyes off the ladies. I saw it when you first met Influx. You couldn’t keep your mind in the game, buddy and it only got worse with Apogee. I understand, you see, it’s in your nature, part of how you’re wired. Humanity, that is. Sex is always foremost on your mind, especially an immature man-child like yourself. Well, I’ve solved that problem. I rewired you.”
“What did you do?” The question burbled out of me, on the verge of tears, already knowing the answer. I looked my doppelganger in the eye, and in those lifeless, blue pools, I knew what he had done. The mad robot had removed the parts of his brain that were unnecessary in some half-assed lobotomy. He had carved out useless parts, like a majority of the cerebellum and cerebrum, and wired in directly to the sensory, pain and nerve centers of the body, so he could control him directly as a puppeteer would a marionette.
“I’m sorry about arriving so late, Blackjack,” Haha said. “I realize now what you had planned for us, and I have to say, after studying the schematics and all this code you wrote – impressive, a real work of art.”
“What is it then,” Apogee said, kneeling next to me.
I pointed at it, “It’s a clone, Maddie.”
“God,” Epic said in disgust. “That explains everything.”
My gaze never wavered from my double, expecting him to attack. A moment ago I had wanted to cause him as much pain as he had caused me, to break every bone in his body, one painful crack for every time he had committed a crime in my name. A broken bone for each of those guys on the plane, but faced with the horrifying truth of my doppelganger, I almost felt sorry for him.
“Haha,” I said. “How could you?”
But he was off talking about the castle, praising the construction and the speed of the work. He was in now, accessing all the documents stored on the server, all my schematics and plans, all my work documents.
Everything.
“It’s funny,” he said. “If you turned all of this into a business enterprise, a legitimate business, you wouldn’t have to struggle another day. You’d be richer than rich. This technology could revolutionize construction worldwide, and you could be sitting pretty atop the empire built on the effort of your little drones. But no, you’ve wasted this all in an effort to lure me in. Well, I’m here and now all of this is mine. It’s the same for everything, Blackjack. You’re always distracted. You don’t see the end game.”
“Enough, Haha,” Epic shouted. “Your team is beaten. This poor guy is…” he paused and looked at me.
I nodded, knowing when I tore the suit’s systems; I broke the relay that allowed Haha to control my doppelganger. Blackjack 2.0 was no more.
“You’re beaten. Now do the right thing and surrender.”
Haha laughed, “Why would I do that? I have control of the castle, Epic. See, Blackjack, in all his wisdom, put a command key in the root directory. The key is a simple document with what seems like gibberish – only I figured it out, Blackjack. I figured out that the command key is the same number of characters as the server’s password. Its many hundreds of thousands of characters, but you forgot, didn’t you? You forgot my mind doesn’t see that kind of complexity. Numbers for me are simple. It was clever, very clever, but didn’t you think I would notice? Well, I did and I have you where I want you.”
I half expected Bubu to chime in during the monologue, but he didn’t. My Romanian partner just sat and watched, and waited.
“I have you where I…”
Haha stopped mid-sentence and said nothing for almost ten seconds.
Epic turned to me, “What is it?”
“He’s figuring it out,” I said. “Bubu?”
“Got him,” he said, his voice loud in the room’s speakers. “Want me to shut off the audio feed?”
“Not yet.”
“How did you…?” Haha said, once he returned. His bravado had faded, all that was left was the desperation of a small child who had been caught red handed. “Oh, my, Blackjack…”
I stood, “It was all a trap, Haha. You don’t have us. When you used the command key just then, you activated two protocols. One, you shut down all access out of here. This castle is now a closed server and when you took control of it, you closed your last road out. Second - and this happened a split second before everything went down - you also downloaded a Trojan virus into your botnet. You didn’t notice it because you were probably so pleased with yourself about figuring out the command key trick.”
“Blackjack, wait,” Haha said.
“Your core systems are now in my network,” I went on. “And your external databases are now going through a wiper program, deleting the hard drive of every computer in your botnet.”
I looked over at Epic and saw him smiling. Apogee was grinning too as she handed me a sash and gestured that I should use it to wipe the blood on my face. I had taken a pounding over the course of the last hour or so and everything hurt, in particular my face. Defending the castle, beating Epic’s team and catching Haha had come with a price. I doubt I looked much better than poor Silverback.
“Okay, okay,” Haha said, electronically breathless. “I get it. I understand, Blackjack.”
“All that’s left of you is what’s on the servers, Haha,” I said. “And when I give the command, my partner will shut down the servers and you’ll be wiped.”
“Ready when you are, bro,” Bubu said.
“No, no, no, no. Don’t. Wait. Please, Blackjack, wait.”
My double looked at me with a sense of confusion, as if his senses were starting to kick in. But in his child-like mind, he was unaware of what he was experiencing. If he was a genetic match, then Haha had stolen Retcon’s accelerated cloning system and been hard at work making copies of me since our last conversation on the tower. This one, the one in Amsterdam, maybe even the one who attacked the plane. Who knew how many? Maybe they were all the same? All a few months old, with the equivalent level of maturity.
“Why should I wait, Haha? You’ve given me nothing but heartache and pain. I think it’s time we put your little ‘show’ to an end,” I said.
“Bro!” Bubu said. “The drones. He’s blowing the-“
I winced in pain as the r
adio connection was severed in a loud squawk that thinned out to a needling feedback until the speakers overloaded and blew out. Sparks rained down on us as the room plunged into silence, all external communication silenced.
“What’s the hell was that,” Apogee asked, seeing the worry in my face.
“Fuck, I did it,” I said.
“What,” Epic said.
“Monologuing…I got caught doing the villain’s monologue. Goddammit! And now he’s blowing all the support beams.”
“And if they all go, it all comes down?” Epic said.
I nodded.
Apogee looked around nervously, “Is there a way out?”
“For you there is,” I said, taking her shoulders. “Go. Get out of here.”
“No,” she said, “I’m not leaving-“
“You have to go,” I said, squeezing her arm, frantic. “Go, Madelyne. You’re fast enough. You can make it out.”
Another series of explosions went off, this time closer, as the whole mountain shook. The remaining lights exploded one by one, and dust filtered down from the roof.
“I can’t,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I can’t.”
I reached in and held her tight, “You have to.”
She pushed me back, shaking her head.
“Save yourself, woman,” Silverback shouted. “You’re the only one of us fast enough to-“
Another explosion rocked the room, the ground beneath our feet shifting. We all struggled to keep our feet, as a wide crack opened over the marsh, water draining into the chambers below.
“Please, baby,” I said. “Go.”
Apogee looked over at Epic, who nodded, then back at me – and was gone.
“A doomsday device,” Silverback said, hunching low as the roof dislodged and large pieces of rock began to fall on us.
“No,” I said, looking around, and fell to my knees as the ground shrieked in its own agony. I didn’t have time to explain to either of them that Haha had taken control of the drones when he co-opted the Castle’s servers, nor to tell them that the drones were taking out the support beams that were the foundation of all I had built.
