Blackjack Villain

by Ben Bequer

  “What I’ve put you boys through,” he said, releasing me, still watching my shattered form. “But now you see, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Dr. Nutcase, they used to call me,” he continued, hopping back on the box with a spring in his step. Retcon turned back to the mirror and the tailor robots started their work after the pause.

  “And now we’re on the cusp of humanity’s greatest moment.”

  I didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted to leave, that I didn’t belong anymore. My arguments to Apogee why I became a villain rang more hollow now than they ever had.

  “Dr. Retcon,” I started, but couldn’t continue. I couldn’t even match his gaze through the mirror.

  “I know,” he said. “This hasn’t been easy for you. And it’s not going to get any easier, I reckon.”

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I admitted.

  Retcon turned, to the protest of the tailor droids and regarded me for a moment.

  “I need you,” he said plainly.

  “I’m muscle. There are a hundred guys that could-”

  “No there’s not. And no you’re not,” he snapped. “I chose you, Dale, because you’re not one of those hundred guys we could have called. You got something up here,” he pointed at his head. “And something here,” he patted his chest.

  I shook my head, “I don’t know if I’m the guy you think I am.”

  He chuckled, “I think you’re exactly what I thought you’d be. This whole thing with the girl shows it, Blackjack.”

  Looking out the window, watching the rolling seas float by, I thought of her, wondered if she was safe.

  “I need you because at the end of everything, there’s going to have to be at least one decent person with me that I can trust.”

  “But all I’ve ever done is fuck everything up,” I said, suddenly overcome with emotion, fighting back tears of failure. “I mean my whole life-”

  “Has led you to this,” he said with a tone of finality putting his hands on my shoulders. “Blackjack, I need you. What we’re going to do today has such grand implications that I may lose myself, I may get lost in the whole thing. Hell’s Bells, man, these aliens are trying to destroy our whole planet. You’re telling me you don’t want a chance to put them in their place? Show them we have some fight left in us? That’s why I wanted you to see everything, so you would know what’s at stake.”

  “I missed the trip to Jupiter,” I started, “but I’ve seen the aliens up close.”

  “You did?” he said, surprised.

  I nodded and told him of our ordeal, and our brief meeting with the angel/alien.

  “They revealed themselves to you. How interesting,” Retcon turned back to the mirror and motioned for his droids to continue.

  “They mean to add our world to their menagerie,” I said declaratively.

  Retcon pursed his lips and shook his head slowly.

  “And it’s all my fault, you know.”

  I walked closer, and around his stand so I was standing beside him, making it easier for us to talk.

  “We were working on a lost book of Nikola’s. You saw the second part, which Shivver’s kept after the accident. He was part of it too, at first, before he went mad. But that was much later.”

  He paused and looked at me, a smile crawling across his face.

  “Sorry. I tend to ramble when it comes to the past. It’s all I’ve had for the past few years. But it all came down to the original experiment, following Tesla’s work in spatial dynamics. We were studying something called a Bok globule. You know what that is?”

  I shrugged, “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s basically a region of space that doesn’t really follow a lot of the rules of space. It’s a lot colder, for starters, and quite dense. We know a hell of a lot about them now, to be sure. But back then we didn’t know diddly. It’s much like an insect’s cocoon, you see. But it also might be a precursor to the formation of new stars or star clusters. It’s very dense and surrounded by a dark cloud that veils everything within.”

  The robot that worked on his suit had a lot of trouble staying with Retcon as he gesticulated and moved around, excited in recounting the story.

  “So we were designing new machinery that would allow us to penetrate that sheen and see within. You have to understand that radio telescopes were in their infancy at the time. We couldn’t see a goddamned thing.”

  “But the Tesla device that we built,” I started, surprised that I had taken ownership for the machine. “I can’t see how you would have thought that it would allow you to penetrate the sheen, as you call it.”

  “Well, I had this stupid idea...” He trailed off, a mischievous smile flashing on his face. “If we could penetrate the sheen utilizing a wormhole, why not take visible light readings through the wormhole. Turn it into the biggest telescope in history, as it were.”

  “Interesting,” I said, and a brilliant theory, though a dozen problems immediately popped up in my head, and I imagined there were thousands I couldn’t instantly think of. But he continued:

  “So I turned to the writings of my old friend Nikola, and discovered his work on the device. In essence, a particle accelerator, but it’s more than that. It operates by generating a powerful negative-mass cosmic string while at the same time attracting exotic matter with negative energy density...” he paused, suddenly serious.

  “Know what any of that stuff is?”

  “Some,” I admitted, though I understood the basic principle.

  “I could bore you all day with the particulars of the thing, but suffice it to say,” he continued, “That this crazy old man the whole world wants to put away, discovered the secret to traversable wormholes.”

  He giggled like a little kid, beaming at his accomplishment.

  “Our calculations showed it would be something microscopic. Bloody tiny, tinier than a possum’s pecker and it would only last micro-seconds. But in that time our readings would provide a wealth of information. Hell’s Bells, Blackjack, doing it successfully was one of the greatest achievements in human history.”

  “But you didn’t know that the wormhole would transport you there.”

  Retcon looked out the window of his moving building, almost enrapt with himself. But then his features saddened, and he almost came to tears.

  “No. And I never thought it would come to this,” he said softly.

  “The Lightbringers.”

  He nodded.

  “See, it’s my theory the Lightbringers are a trans-dimensional species. They exist in a separate pocket of the space-time continuum, and our machine transported us there and made the Lightbringers aware of our existence. That’s why they’re watching us from Jupiter,” he added.

  “Waiting for the right moment to add us to their zoo,” I said.

  “Yep. But we’re going to show them something spectacular. We’re not a feeble species they can toy with. It’s Nikola we have to thank for that. If not for him, I wouldn’t have this great opportunity to make amends.”

  “His book made no mention of a particle accelerator, or a wormhole jump. It dealt with something else, something called Teleforce.”

  He smiled, seeing me catch on.

  “I used it to extrapolate his thinking upon the machine on Nostromo’s moon base, but yes, it was unrelated.” Retcon continued excitedly, back in ‘teacher’ mode. “It goes back to everything that Nikola was working on. Towards the end, that is. Teleforce is something he developed in the last decade of his life. I was an assistant of his, but he was secretive, and frankly off-kilter, if you know what I mean,” he giggled.

  “Teleforce was a response to the threat of airpower in the 30s and 40s. An answer to the fear of planes flying overhead dropping bombs with impunity. Something that, of course, came to pass in the war in the most horrible fashion. I’m sure you’re familiar with the bombings of London, Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”

  “Well,” I butted in. “Those last two we
re nuclear attacks.”

  “For certain, but still airborne. Nikola developed a device to protect from that very form of attack, regardless of how strong the weapon was.”

  “Is this what they called his ‘death ray’?” I wondered aloud, my mind putting together fragments of what I had read about Tesla.

  He scoffed.

  “Death Ray! No such thing! That was propaganda from J. Edgar Hoover, and other fools, who didn’t see the potential of the Teleforce principle. They were upset he went to the Brits and French with the idea once they passed on it.”

  “But what is it?”

  Retcon flinched, as one of the robots was too careless with the needle around his leg.

  “Easy there,” he menaced and turned back to me. “Teleforce, my dear Blackjack, is the final derivation of everything that Nikola Tesla had worked on his whole life!”

  He raised his fist as he said that, slamming it into and open hand, striking a typical super villain pose. He then realized how ridiculous the whole thing was, and started laughing.

  “Teleforce is, in essence, a shield. It’s a macroscopic charged particle beam accelerator that creates a focused dome of energy so powerful that nothing can pass. All forms of matter or energy are destroyed or deflected upon contact. So you see, regardless of the size or type of the bomb, a Teleforce shield makes it pointless.”

  He got grand again, he couldn’t help it.

  “And now that we have Nikola’s complete notes on the matter, and the prototype that he hid for us in the New Yorker Hotel - the prototype that you found, Blackjack - we can build a grand device, larger even than he ever imagined. A big’un,” he laughed.

  “Instead of protecting a small city or country, we’ll create a Teleforce shield around the entire planet. Utilizing the D and E layers of the Ionosphere as a conduit, we’ll blanket the whole planet with this energy. The alien on Jupiter will attack us then, it’ll have no other alternative, and if the shield is complete, we will withstand anything it can throw at us.”

  Retcon looked at me, suddenly severe, “You would recognize one when you saw it, because you, my friend, built one.”

  He paused, a big smile on his face.

  “Oh, that device was tiny compared to what we’re going to build, and the focusing chamber is also different, and...well, a lot of it is different. But configuration, power throughput, details!”

  “What about the focusing gem?” I asked, my mind racing through the calculations. At such an increased scale, the size of the gem would be far larger than anything I has seen on Shard World.

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. I’m the gem,” he beamed

  “Okay, but I don’t know where I fit in to all that,” I admitted, feeling now, more than ever a stranger to the whole process.

  “Oh, come on, Blackjack. Now’s no time to get gun-shy. You see what we’re up against here.”

  “Yeah, but what do you need me for? I’m useless against that thing. And don’t tell me you need my help building that device when you can pop out a thousand Retcon time clones and build it in five minutes.”

  “Help building it?” he chuckled. “Hell, it’s all done and built, Blackjack. Ready to go. We have to find the right spot for it and let ‘er rip!”

  Retcon laughed again, overwhelmed by his own humor.

  “So we agree I’m useless here,” I continued. “And so is the girl. She doesn’t realize what she’s gotten into-”

  “Apogee?”

  I nodded.

  “But she’s perfect, don’t you see?”

  He paused, but I didn’t.

  “When all this starts up,” Retcon waved his arms wildly about, as if the machine were mid-construction right where we were standing. “Well, they’ll know I’m up to something. And they’re all gonna come stop the crazy old man. Lord knows what he’s up to this time. Well, that’s where you come in. I need you to lead the team, give me as much time as you can. I need you out there, Blackjack.”

  “Your white knight,” I said.

  He smiled and nodded.

  “And your friend? Well, who will speak to what we tried to do here? They’re not going to believe me. Or you. She will stand as a testament to what happened here, for good or bad.”

  “I don’t want to see her hurt,” I said, watching my tone more than I had with his daughter.

  “You have my word,” he said.

  I shook my head, sitting on a bench nearby, “us four against everyone who’ll be coming...this is a suicide mission, huh?”

  “Maybe,” he said, looking past me to the stairs leading down to the room. “But we’ll have some help.”

  As he said that, Nostromo walked out of the dark stairway, quite different than I had last seen him. He was in full uniform, fit, shaven and ready.

  He was magnificent.

  “A little help?” I asked, but he giggled playfully and turned back to the mirror to the attention of his tailor droids.

  * * *

  After meeting with Retcon, I wandered around, at first lost, but after a while I was adrift in my thoughts. I managed to find the elevator, and not knowing how it worked, I ended up on some floor I hadn’t seen before.

  The lift took me up, to an observation level that reminded me of the architecture of the top of the Chrysler building in Manhattan. We had a dome above, taller than anything you’d expect would fit into the building, but there it was nonetheless. The dome rose about two hundred feet into the air, and in the middle of the large, bluish-lit chamber was an enormous structure, almost a hundred feet tall, covered in tarps, surrounded by Dr. Walsh’s droid army.

  The droids spotted me, and rallied inside the tarps like black worker ants hiding from encroaching red ants, until Dr. Walsh herself came outside of the enclosure, and walked to me.

  “A bit lost?” she said playfully.

  “Completely.”

  She smiled.

  “Is that what all the trouble’s about” I asked, motioning to the construction.

  “That’s it,” she acknowledged. “Dad built it in about an hour. We’re putting the finishing touches on it.”

  At each of the four cardinal points of the dome were large archways, each the size of the Teleforce structure, flanked by thick stone doors, perhaps ten feet of solid rock. The building itself was as formidable, as if built to be a bunker against a nuclear explosion. Outside, I could see the sea moving past at high speed. We floated ten stories above water, as Retcon’s building moved on long stilt legs.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “We’ll be arriving at our final destination rather soon,” she looked at her watch. “I’d say within the next fifteen minutes.”

  “Why do you people always have to talk in cipher? Why be so cryptic?”

  She laughed, “It’s a bad habit, I’m sorry. To tell the truth, there’s no reason to be secretive any longer. We’re at the final stage of the whole operation.”

  “Your father will get credit, or blame, for everything that’s going to happen,” I started, “But it looks pretty clear to me that he wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.”

  Dr. Walsh blushed, a smile crossing her face.

  “We’ve been preparing for this for quite some time. More than a decade. Since dad went to jail last.”

  “So what’s next?”

  She looked out one of the huge doors and motioned me to follow. We walked together outside, where an observation deck overlooked the fast moving ocean.

  “Next is Hashima Island,” she said, and from my expression she could tell I had no idea what that was. “It’s also been called ‘Battleship Island’,” Dr. Walsh filled me in. “A long abandoned vestige from Japan’s 19th century obsession with coal that died in the 1970s. Hashima Island is something of a tourist attraction these days.”

  “Battleship?”

  “They call it that because it looks like a World War Two battleship when seen at a distance. You’ll see,” she grinned. “Once we get there, we’l
l park the sanctum there, and I suppose everything will go real fast after that. As soon as we activate the device, it won’t take long for them to know where we are.”

  “I guess the whole world’s looking for us now,” I admitted.

  She nodded.

  “You’ll do fine,” she said, leaning against the veranda.

  “Yeah,” I said, but I couldn’t really believe that the four of us, with or without Nostromo would be able to stop the world’s greatest heroes. They would come in waves, dozens and perhaps hundreds of them, called in by all the world’s countries, to stop the mad Dr. Retcon from destroying the planet.

  Little did they know that this time we were trying to save them.

  But that didn’t matter when my prospects were to be splattered on the pavement, waiting for Braxton and his boys to come scrape me off and throw me in a cell for forty years.

  “You won’t be alone,” Walsh said, almost as if reading my mind.

  “I know. Cool Hand, Haha, and-”

  “Oh no,” she interrupted, breaking into laughter. “We’ve called in every favor owed to us. It won’t be what you call an army, but...It’ll suffice.”

  “I saw Nostromo.”

  She nodded.

  “All of dad’s old friends, we’ll, those that are still with us.”

  “Apostle?” I asked, wondering if the desert nomad would make a showing. He was on par with Valiant, perhaps second only to Ed Powers in raw ability.

  She nodded, that smile creeping back to her face, as it did whenever she knew something you didn’t.

  “Lady Jayne?”

  She gave me another nod.

  “What about Ed?”

  “Ed is gone,” she said wistfully. “He let go.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes,” she said, though not sadly. “Ed wanted to be with Teresa his whole life. I guess he’s with her again.”

  I wanted to ask more, find out what had happened, but it was obvious that Ed was a friend to her, as he was to her father. I was left to guess how he had ended his life. Probably, and ironically, using his powers for the one and only time.

  “We’re almost there,” she said, looking in the distance. I followed her gaze and saw a tiny island coming closer and closer. “I figure another ten minutes and we’ll be there.”