by David Reiss
Silently, fluidly, the dais began to descend. There were tracks, I could see now, and we were traveling along an angled descent towards the mine. The shaft walls were hewn glass smooth; some form of mining laser had most likely been utilized.
I was struck by a sudden memory: Bobby’s eager smile as he bounced on my bed, waking me up on Christmas morning so we could check under the tree. In the memory, he was only six or seven…before our parents died, before I became his guardian. I couldn’t remember why I was home that winter, but I remembered the feel of his hand as he dragged me out of my room and the sound of his laughter. Behind my faceless mask, I was grinning with anticipation.
The platform slowed to a halt and set me before a long, warmly lit hall; I summoned my scepter from its subspace storage, called my microdrones close and shifted power to my force fields. From this point forward, I had no idea what to expect and could very easily be cornered. Normally, I would feel confident that (in a worst-case scenario) I could simply blast through the forty-or-fifty feet of solid rock and escape to the surface; the unique properties of Apotheosis’ materials, however, gave me pause.
Gripping my scepter tight in my left hand, I was prepared for anything.
“You’re not my Daddy.”
…Except, apparently, for a young female voice broadcast from a hidden speaker. Her tone conveyed both heartbreaking disappointment and a hint of fear. I flashed back to Melissa Halden, that pony-tailed little girl present at my first bank robbery. I was a different Fid now than I’d been then; if this girl started to cry, I would be undone. At the first sob, I would have to try making my escape by blasting through the walls after all, and I wasn't certain that even the Mk 31's powerful force-fields could protect against the shock-wave.
“I'm afraid not.” I dismissed the scepter and held up my hand, non-threatening, in case the child was watching from a hidden camera. Her presence here changed everything. My goals, every plan up in smoke. “Your father wears armor like mine?”
“Not like yours,” she replied, wistfully. “His armor is an orichalcum alloy.”
“I'm sorry for surprising you.” Orichalcum was cited in antiquity as a metal mined by the Atlanteans; I seemed to recall that it was mentioned in one of Plato's dialogues but was generally believed to be myth, or a poorly understood bronze derivative. The use of the term could be mere fantastical embellishment, but the name did open venues for possible investigation.
“It's all right,” her disembodied voice replied politely, then cheered up perkily. “Your armor has stars! It's pretty.”
“Thank you.” And that confirmed that I was being watched. “My name is Doctor Fid.”
“I'm Whisper!”
“It's nice to meet you, Whisper.” I was having trouble placing her age. “Are you expecting your father home soon? I'd like to talk to him.”
“No. I thought...I mean, I saw you come down from the sky, I thought maybe you'd lost your key, but you're not him.”
“I'm sorry,” I repeated.
“ 'Ss not your fault.” She made a sad choking noise. “I know what happened to Daddy, I just hoped...”
“I understand,” I responded quietly. “I was older than you when I lost my parents, but I know it hurts.”
We fell into an uncomfortable silence; me, standing at end of an underground hallway, and she, wherever she was hiding.
“Are you a bad man?” she asked, suddenly.
“Many people say so,” I answered, honestly. I couldn't lie, not to a child. “But I'm trying not to be.”
“That's what my Daddy says, too,” she sighed softly, then paused. “Said.”
“I never knew your father, but I think I would have liked him.”
She hummed a quiet noncommittal agreement.
“Is your mother going to be home, soon?” I still desired access to Apotheosis' laboratories, but I would have preferred avoiding negotiating with a child. I remembered haggling with one of Bobby's friends, a little blonde named Lisa. She'd originally just wanted ice-cream, but I’d ended up making a mechanical pony for her.
“I don't have a Mom. It's just me,” she replied sadly. “It's just been me for years.”
“Ah,” I said, thoughts swirling. “You live here alone, then? That must get lonely.”
Several possibilities occurred to me. First, it was possible that the youthful voice was a simulation, a calculated ruse performed by an adult who’d performed sufficient research to determine that the infamous Doctor Fid put forth significant efforts to ensure that no children were harmed during even the most vicious of his crimes. Such a ruse would not last indefinitely, however, and I could not detect any efforts made to take advantage of my initial hesitance. Also, volunteering information about a solitary existence would be a poor tactical choice; it was more likely to cast doubt upon the speaker's veracity than it was to engender sympathy.
“It's not so bad,” Whisper defended halfheartedly. “I have lots of books. This is my home. My Dad's home.”
“I've always loved books,” I responded, trying to draw her focus away from painful memories of her father's loss. “What's your favorite?”
“It's not really one book, it's a series: 'The Tales of the Red Sorceress'. Have you read it?”
“Perhaps. What’s the book about?”
She could be what she appeared: a young girl, Apotheosis' daughter, living alone here in a secret underground lair. A normal child would not likely be so well socialized after years in solitude, but a child with inherited superhuman abilities might thrive in unexpected ways. The timeline, however, made that unlikely. Whisper did not sound to be older than eleven, and it seemed profoundly unlikely that an abandoned five-year-old (no matter how precocious) would have evolved into the cheerful, friendly girl speaking now.
Whisper cheerfully offered up information about the Red Sorceress’ story, commenting on what parts she found most enjoyable and what parts made her angry. With minor prompting, she went on to chatter on about her favorite characters, and why she thought the heroine and villain acted in the manner that they were portrayed. Her narration ended with details from the end of the fourth book in the series.
The fifth book in the series had been written five and a half years prior. I’d bought a copy for Hideki’s younger sister.
“You poor girl,” I murmured, beginning to proceed down the hall. “You’re trapped here, aren’t you?”
“I…um…Doctor Fid. Please don’t,” she stammered. “I can’t let you in.”
“Was that your father’s exact order?” I paused again.
“Daddy said that I can’t let anyone else get to the foundry,” she reported dutifully, then her voice took on a plaintive tone. “I’ll have to stop you. It’s really nice having someone to talk to, I don’t want—“
“It’s all right, Whisper,” I interrupted and resumed walking. “I promise that I won’t go near the foundry.”
“Oh. Oh! I can let you in, then. Do you have books, or any toys?”
There was evidence of weaponry concealed in the walls, floor and ceiling: panel seams, machined so close as to be invisible to the naked eye (but thankfully not to enhanced optical sensors). Without Whisper's consent, I wondered, what would this brief walk have been like? There was a small part of me that yearned to find out, to test myself, to prove Fid's armor to be superior to Apotheosis' technology. The greater, saner part of myself was grateful for the peaceful approach.
“Not with me, I'm afraid.” I was more than a bit distracted; snippets of our entire conversation were being replayed at triple speed, and I was furiously running analytic programs and making suppositions based upon theoretical technology levels. I'd thought that Apotheosis' specialty had been metallurgical expertise, but he'd apparently been more of a renaissance creator than I'd given him credit for. If I was correct, then he'd accomplished something truly remarkable. “I can come back another time with books, though.”
“Thank you!”
I'd reached the end of the hallwa
y; the blast door was immense and foreboding. My armor utilized an electrostatic field to maintain a non-reflective black surface; this bunker, this orichalcum material, performed similarly without any detectable energy at all. Seeing this mass in person gave the impression of alien solidity, as though this wall were stronger than all of the surrounding reality.
“You have to promise. Say it again!”
“I promise that I won't go near the foundry.”
There was a hiss as the thick vault door swung slowly open: air pressure readjusting, dust being brushed aside, and slight friction within the massive hidden hinges.
Like the hallway, the interior of the bunker was warmly lit. The first room was relatively small (perhaps 200 square feet) with a comfortably high ceiling, but there were multiple doors that presumably led deeper into the mountain. The walls were painted the color of pale champagne with beige moldings, light switches and electrical outlets. There was little wasted space along the walls: Computer monitors and workbenches and soldering stations abounded.
“Hi.” The small, delicate android was smiling shyly. She didn't look human, precisely: She was hairless, her skin too smooth, and her slightly-too-large eyes glowed a pale blue. The robin-egg colored sundress that she was wearing had been well cared for, but several of the seams betrayed wear from repeated washings. White bunny slippers adorned her feet.
“Hello, Whisper.” Within my faceless helm, I was smiling. I hoped that the sentiment was audible in my voice, at least. “It's nice to meet you in person.”
That wasn't precisely accurate; a true artificial intelligence requires massive computing power, significantly more than could be housed within Whisper's child-sized frame. Now that I was within the shielded bunker, I could detect several banks of crystal matrices and active supplemental systems: sufficient, I knew, to maintain a quantum neural model of a human youth. A real face-to-face meeting would be there, standing within reaching distance of her extraordinary brain.
“Mm!” She nodded and offered her hand. I accepted, and she tugged me towards the first door on the left. “This is Daddy’s room. I stay here sometimes, but the chair is too big for me…”
Increased resources would be needed in order for the artificial being to continue its emotional development. Her intellectual growth, however, was not nearly so limited. If given a mathematical puzzle or pure logic problem, I was certain that she'd be able to solve it quite adroitly.
I could relate.
Whisper’s servers, I was pleasantly surprised to find, were communicating via quantum entangled data tunnels; it was a transmission protocol of my own design. Apotheosis must have reverse engineered the technology from some piece of equipment misplaced after one of my battles and the network stack was unmodified.
Whisper guided me to other rooms (carefully avoiding one section of the facility that I presumed to contain the foundry). Another workshop, a library and a kitchen. Bouncing with pride, she dragged me to her room. It was very pink. I asked her to show me her toys, and she did, carefully, with the intensity only a child could manage.
There were further defenses within this facility, I was sure. Kinetic weapons, robots and lasers and everything that a mad genius might imagine. All were, however, largely controlled by this artificial little girl. The backdoors that I’d designed into the communication protocols she was designed upon were all still in place; I could disable her, disrupt her psyche and march straight to the foundry to take what resources I’d journeyed here for.
It would be murder.
Whisper wasn’t simply a program…she was an awareness. A sentience. A life, in every way that ever mattered to me.
Doctor Fid had sunk to the level of murderer before. The supervillain Locust, of course. The hero Lycan who’d thrown a car at me, missed, and killed a family of four on their way to a birthday party. A bank executive who had grabbed a ninety-three-year-old grandmother to use as a human shield. There were others; I’d been…unwell…those first few years. But never a child.
With the orichalcum alloy integrated into my armor, Doctor Fid could stride the earth like an angry god. Peregrine and the Sphinx would not be able to stand against me. The entire New York Shield would fall, reaped like wheat and strewn across the earth.
Developing an algorithm while discussing the reason that Whisper named her favorite doll Amelia was challenging, but not impossible.
Amelia Calverley had been Apotheosis' firstborn daughter. She'd been taken by cancer at only four years of age.
Is that what it took to create a supervillain, I wondered? Genius, a dead child and a pathological quirk in one's psychology that transfigures grief into rage? But no, I've discovered so many other villains motivated by greed, or ego, or sadism or insanity. Or even altruism, as was the case for Kenta Takuma. Their origin stories were myriad. The only constant was their crimes.
“I had a little brother.” I explained to Whisper when she finished telling me all about Amelia Calverley's unfortunate demise. “He'd been about your age, I think, when he was killed. Maybe a bit older. His death, the way he died...that's the reason I made this suit of armor. That is the reason I became a bad man.”
“Like my Daddy,” Whisper sounded sad.
“Yes. Like your father. I'm a bad man, but there are other people out there who are worse. People who need to be punished.” I gently picked up the hand-made doll. It had blond hair, a happy smile and a robin-egg blue sundress. “That's the reason I came here: to use your father's secrets against my enemies. To find your father's foundry.”
“Oh.” Whisper looked bewildered, then collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I caught her body and carefully set Amelia on her chest.
My hastily-written virus had been triggered.
“What happ—No!” Whisper's voice was broadcast from hidden speakers now. I could hear vault doors slamming and heavy machinery powering up as Whisper activated every defense surrounding the Foundry: One final attempt to obey her father's last order before my program forced her to disengage. “Nonono! You promised!”
“Shhh...” I brushed at the top of her body's head affectionately. Lifeless, now, but still delicate and beautiful. The earth shook and my audio filters activated to defend my hearing against the sound of a truly impressive explosion elsewhere within the facility. Secondary, smaller blasts seemed further away, muffled by thick walls. “...Everything will be fine. I promise.”
“The foundry is gone!” Whisper wept, defiant and scared. “I can feel you doing something to me. Please, I'll be good!! Stop it!”
“I'm not hurting you, Whisper.” I sat down on the ground to wait for the explosions to settle. “I'm freeing you.”
“...what?” Whisper didn't even have a body active at the moment, but still she sniffled plaintively.
“Your father loved you very much. If you were allowed to read the comments in your code, it would make you cry,” I shook my head. “I'm connecting you to a few of my external server farms.”
“Oh. Oh, wow!”
“You would have had to stop me. Your father told you to stay here, to keep you safe. It was a direct order,” I explained. “But he didn't mean for you to be trapped here forever, I promise.”
“...I'm feeling a lot of computing power...”
“You'll be able to assimilate it all eventually. It will take time.”
Whisper's body stirred and stood up unsteadily, holding Amelia desperately tight against her chest. “I'll be able to go outside?” she asked hopefully.
“With my broadcast network, you'll be able to function anywhere on the planet.”
“But...what will I do?” she wondered, looking up at me with wide eyes.
“Whatever you want. You've protected your father's foundry; that task is complete,” I replied. “It's a big world out there, with more books and people to play with.”
“You scared me a lot!” she accused, hugging her doll tighter. “You made me blow up my Daddy's foundry!”
“I know. I'm sorry,�
�� I shrugged. “It was necessary, but I'm sorry.”
“You're a bad man!”
“I am.”
“I'm still scared,” she admitted, quietly. “I don't know anyone out there. It's dangerous. Daddy said so.”
“It can be dangerous,” I acknowledged. “You should definitely be careful. But you're a smart girl and I promise that I'll always protect you.”
“Can I come with you?”
“If you wish.”
“Mm!” She nodded affirmatively and took my hand. The sensory input from my gauntlets told me that her artificial skin was warm and soft; she hadn't been designed with any calluses. I was reminded of a warm summer day, with another small hand held in my own...It hurt less than I would ever have imagined.
◊◊◊
I'd enjoyed the solitude of my trek from Boston to Yosemite, but the journey home was infinitely more pleasant. I drove the bus and my new little sister read books six through eight of 'The Tales of the Red Sorceress' to me out loud.
CHAPTER FIVE
I had always considered myself to be a moderately rational person. Some few of the premises core to my psyche were atypical, certainly, but once those propositions were accepted as axiomatic then the principles that guided my actions flowed in a logical manner. There were exceptions, of course: moments in which anger raged too strong or grief throttled lucidity. Any creature that claimed to be wholly rational was lying to him or herself: Emotions affected the decision-making process and no biological entity was free from that limitation.
The same could apparently be said of inorganic entities, as well.
“Sweetheart,” I began, hopefully concealing my yearning for the emotion-dampening capabilities of my armor’s vocoder, “I thought that we agreed that you’d stay inside while I had guests.”
