by Mia Archer
I didn’t want her to know she’d surprised me. No, I figured the longer I acted like a cool customer when she was doing her big reveals the more she’d think she wasn't actually getting one over on me.
Even if she did just get one over on me. I looked up, and of course there was another robot staring down at me. A robot that was giant even by the standards of Starlight City.
And it looked like she’d opened up yet another door. The giant robot straddled what looked like the sides of a stadium. Damn it.
Was this whole thing built under the football stadium? If it was then there was going to be hell to pay when the university figured out she'd appropriated their precious football field to create a giant door.
Usually they wanted that sort of thing installed on the roof of a stadium and not on the playing field. At least it was early enough in the morning and on a weekday so it wasn't likely there was anyone up there playing.
The university chancellors were going to be pissed. They might overlook Dr. Lana trying and failing to take over the world, possibly, but they certainly weren't going to overlook somebody fucking with the football program.
That was as true at Starlight City University as it was at any other school in this country. Even if the football team wasn't all that great here.
Did it ever matter that the football team wasn't all that great? If only I could figure out a way to inspire that kind of fanatical devotion to yours truly without putting on a monkey suit and taking on a bunch of oversized athletes every weekend.
"I thought you might want to stick around for the main event," Dr. Lana said.
I arched an eyebrow at her. She was on her feet now. Whatever the hell was going on to get her up on her feet so quickly? I wanted to have what she was having. The ability to survive a blow like that without a technology assist would be wonderful.
Not that I would’ve enjoyed the pain involved in taking that kind of blow which was still a distinct advantage in the technology column.
"Do you seriously think an opening roof is going to impress me or something?" I asked. "Because they've been doing that at stadiums the taxpayers were stupid enough to fund for years now. What the hell are you…"
Something hit and shook the world around me. It wasn't like an earthquake. For a moment my eyes flicked to the seismometer that was a part of my heads-up display. It was amazing what you could figure out in Starlight City by having a network of seismometers set up at convenient locations all around the city, and I'm not talking about using them for geology research.
Sure enough there was a quake, and it was localized to the stadium. Localized seismic activity usually meant something big was causing that localized earthquake and not a fault slip.
Besides, it’s not like we were on the west coast where natural processes could explain a quake like that. No, in Starlight City there was only one explanation for mobile localized earthquakes, and it didn’t have anything to do with seismology.
Something blotted out the sun over me. I looked up and put my hands on my hips. I could tell it was pissing Dr. Lana off that I’d focused on the opening stadium floor and not the giant robot she had waiting for me on the other side of the opening stadium floor.
I let out a disgusted noise.
"Really?" I asked. "A bigger giant robot is the best you could come up with?"
"What are you talking about?" Dr. Lana asked. "Your last attack on the city was a giant robot!"
I held up an accusatory finger.
“First off, that wasn't me sending that giant robot to attack the city. You'll notice I was out there with Fialux trying to stop the damned thing," I said. "You will never ever associate that hunk of junk with me.’
"You designed the thing and built it," Dr. Lana started, but I stopped her again with a chopping motion.
This conversation served two purposes. On the one hand it was nice to know she’d shut up when I made a chopping motion at her. That meant she thought, on some level at least, that I was in command of the situation.
I was never above a little bit of psychological manipulation, after all. A firm grasp of psychology and how to use it to manipulate and terrify people had been one of the cornerstones of my villainous career, after all.
But there was a more practical reason why I was trying to get Dr. Lana to talk. She seemed more than happy to keep the giant robot straddling the stadium from attacking me as long as we were having this little chitchat. Which meant the longer I kept her talking the more I could get information from the scanning suite I had running up and down the robot trying to figure out what made it tick.
The better I knew what made the damned thing tick, the easier it was going to be to take it out.
"That entire thing that was my maniacal supercomputer’s idea," I said. "I never wanted to use the thing, and I knew it had severe design flaws that would mean it could never stand up to Fialux, which turns out to be a damned good thing for yours truly once he decided to turn on me. But the point is at no step of the planning, design, or launching phase of that stupid piece of junk was I actually planning on using the thing in an attempt to take over the world. It was a stupid side project I did to keep my computer happy, and I was never happier to destroy one of my projects than when I dropped that…"
I stopped. Shut the fuck up. There’d been plenty of speculation as to exactly how I’d managed to destroy the giant robot. One of the nice side effects of my matter dispersal bomb was it dispersed its own matter too when it went off which meant there was nothing left behind. No telltale explosive residue or casing for the authorities to examine after the fact.
Another convenient side effect of that matter dispersal bomb was it didn't leave any of the insides of the giant death robot available for, say, the government or the military or Dr. Lana to examine after the fact and reverse engineer into their toys to use on whatever ill-advised foreign intervention they were going off on this week.
The point is I hadn't told anyone about the matter dispersal bomb. Except for the Surviving A Heroic Intervention class I threatened with the thing, but none of them were talking.
So far the survival rate for the graduated and gainfully employed cohort from that class was one hundred percent. Survival rate was something they actually tracked in the journalism department like other departments tracked job placement numbers because journalist mortality was such a problem in this city.
Yeah, they were so grateful to Professor Terror that they’d keep their mouths shut even if someone was smart enough to ask those questions, which so far no one had been. We were talking journalism students, after all.
The point is the last thing I needed to be doing right about now was blabbing my trade secrets in front of Dr. Lana. Not when she was likely to take the trade secrets and use them against me. She was nothing if not consistent in her ability to steal ideas from her betters and turn around and come up with a shittier version of that idea to use against those betters.
"You almost got me there," I said.
Her look was pure innocence. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't," I said. "Now if you'll excuse me. I'm going to go destroy your robot.”
"Your funeral," Dr. Lana said.
"We'll see about that.”
10
Round One
I flew up and hit the robot with one hell of an uppercut. I made sure to put in every extra ounce of power I could into that physical blow.
I was irritated enough that I felt like beating the shit out of something. I was going to do this the old fashioned way. No fancy plasma blasts or energy weapons or antigrav homing missiles.
I mean sure the old fashioned way involved a reinforced suit that could hit with enough power that I’d even been able to go toe-to-toe with Fialux, but I figured that was a technicality.
The point is I was pissed off. I was letting off steam. I was going to make this robot my bitch, and the satisfying clang it made as my fist made contact and the inertial dampeners that kept eve
ry bone in my arm from breaking at that hit kicked into high gear.
The robot’s head flew back and it stumbled back into some of the bleachers. I would’ve winced if I was the football kind of person, but seeing as how I sort of resented the football program for taking away money from more important things I felt a sense of smug satisfaction as it caused what had to be a few hundred thousand dollars of damage.
Oh yeah. The thing was just like the smaller robots Dr. Lana had designed. It had two arms, two legs, a head on top, and one hell of a glass chin even though it looked like the whole thing was made of some futuristic space-age metal.
Which meant it’d be easy enough to beat the shit out of the thing considering space age technology was about seventy years out of date at this point.
I wondered if she was even stupid enough to actually put the brain in the head rather than in the chest area where it could be more easily protected.
That was the problem with humanoid robots. They came with all the same structural tradeoffs that regular humans had, which made them that much easier to destroy because everyone and their mother already knew what those weaknesses were since humans had been destroying human-shaped things on a smaller scale for thousands of years.
It made no sense to use a human shape if you were trying to design a proper world dominating robot when there were so many better and more efficient designs.
I never understood why, for example, Skynet didn't just send an atomic bomb back to ‘80s LA. Sure there was the whole “you have to send living tissue through the time machine so mechanical stuff doesn’t work,” but why not encase a nuke in some of that living tissue it was so fond of putting on its killing machines to take out Sarah Connor?
It would've been a hell of a lot more efficient than trying to kill her with a humanoid robot that had to actually go to the trouble of trying to find her instead of destroying everything. If the time machine could send a futuristic cyborg designed in the far future back through time encased in living tissue then it sure as fuck could’ve sent back an atomic bomb that was basically operating on ancient technology invented in the ‘40s and perfected in the ‘50s.
That was in a fictional world, though, and this was very much real life. I figured I’d be able to easily defeat the thing, but if Dr. Lana was going to make it easier for me to easily defeat her toys then I wasn't going to complain.
The robot came at me with one hell of a right hook. And it moved surprisingly fast.
That was another misconception that anyone who didn't live in Starlight City had as a result of watching far too many movies. They always assumed big things moved slower. It was an illusion moviemakers put in to make big things seem more realistic. The human mind didn’t want to accept big things that could move fast.
The plain fact of the matter was a thing’s size didn't have anything to do with its speed, and this robot was able to move damn fast. I swooped under its fist and came around, blasting a couple of times at the elbow joint in the hopes she hadn't bothered to reinforce the armor there.
Okay, so maybe I was irritated enough to use my big guns. So sue me. If the thing wasn’t going to play fair and move slow like a big motherfucker should then I wasn’t going to play fair and use my weapons.
Fair play and a sense of honor is for villains rotting in jail or the grave.
The charged plasma glanced off of the thing without so much as leaving a scorch mark. Damn. I suppose that was too much to hope.
"Come on," I said. "You have to have a weakness somewhere."
The robot turned. It scowled at me. She’d actually installed eyebrow shutters on the thing so it would be able to scowl and use other human facial expressions. Damn. That was just like that stupid eyelid CORVAC insisted I install on the giant robot chassis he used to try and destroy downtown Starlight City.
So I’ll admit it had been a little intimidating when that eyestalk turned and scowled at me in the middle of a fight. CORVAC had totally been right about the intimidation factor and I could appreciate a maniacal supercomputer with a good sense of theatricality.
Not that it had done him any good, and not that a cosmetic add-on was going to do this robot any good either. I knew it was merely cosmetic, and the thing wasn't going to intimidate me with the mechanical equivalent of parlor tricks.
If it was using parlor tricks then I had a full on Vegas magic show spectacular hidden up my sleeve, thank you very much. I’d been doing villain performance since before this thing’s circuit diagrams were an itch in one of the electrochemical gradients in Dr. Lana’s brain.
A second shadow passing across the robot was the only indication I had that something was wrong. A proximity alarm sounded warning me of something coming in way too fast for comfort and I went into an automatic dive.
I was really glad I’d put all those extra sensors on my suit. Hey, I figured if they could make cars that let out an annoying beep and took control when it was obvious the person behind the wheel wasn’t paying enough attention then the least I could do was put some of those same safeguards into my suit.
When I wheeled around I saw a a second humanoid robot about to swat me from the sky. And the fact that it was swatting was a relief. I figured if they were going for a low tech swat from the sky maybe there was a chance they weren’t armed with real weapons.
These things were already proving to be tough enough to get a hit on without adding things like explosives and missiles and crap like that into the mix. On their side, that is. I was about to add a hell of a lot of that shit into this fight on my end, thank you very much.
One of the hardest things about defeating CORVAC in his giant death robot chassis had been trying to take out that damned robotic body when I had to worry about antigravity missiles, good old-fashioned kinetic weapons, laser blasts, and charged plasma weapons flashing through the air trying their best to fry the ever loving shit out of me.
“Is that the best you've got?" I shouted at the robot, not entirely certain whether or not it even knew what I was saying.
If I were Dr. Lana I wouldn’t have given any of these monstrosities anything approaching intelligence. Then again I wasn’t Dr. Lana and she hadn’t had the bad experience I had with artificial intelligence.
Not to mention robots like that were always walking the line between being intelligent enough to do the job without being intelligent enough to turn on their masters. It was a knife’s edge that was difficult to walk, and I didn’t expect Lana to walk that line without cutting her feet to hell and back.
A flash of green behind me got my attention. It was reflected off of the metallic hull of the robot in front of me, and I felt a chill.
But when I turned around there was nothing there. That was the same green motif CORVAC always loved to use. He was particularly fond of having a green light that traveled back and forth like a Cylon from the ancient Battlestar Galactica series. I’m not talking the one with Edward James Olmos.
You’d think a supercomputer with access to the sum total of all of mankind’s creative accomplishment via the Internet would find something of more recent vintage to obsess over, but no. He’d decided to tap into an ancient TV antenna that came with my house in the ‘burbs to watch a cheesy scifi show that would’ve been nothing more than a footnote in scifi history if those Star Trek dudes hadn’t knocked it out of the park for the first two seasons or so of the remake.
But that weird green glow wasn’t there when I turned around. That was enough to make me wonder if I was seriously starting to go crazy.
I’d never heard of villains or heroes dealing with posttraumatic stress, although normals dealing with PTSD in the wake of attacks on the city was something of a health crisis in Starlight City.
It was a problem I felt guilty enough about that I quietly funneled a portion of any proceeds I stole to mental health clinics in the city, but this was different.
I could’ve sworn I’d seen CORVAC’s trademark green. There was no mistaking that color. Not when I’d seen it so many
times before. It was the color of an ancient monochrome monitor, like the one I’d played with as a young kid when my dad always insisted on having the latest and greatest.
I hated CORVAC for turning that particular color of green on black from a fond memory of playing with early computers with my dad to a terrifying reminder of the time my computer decided to turn on me, and I’m not talking about the terrifying childhood occasions when the A drive would make a groaning noise and tell me it couldn’t read the 5.25” floppy disk that contained my favorite game and would I like to Abort, Retry, or Fail?
Also? It was totally enough to distract me just long enough for the robot behind me to smack me down. So much for my alarm systems. I was going to have to go back to the drawing board on those and make them a little more automatic.
I flew through the air towards the ground and just barely righted myself before I slammed into the pavement. Either way that really fucking hurt.
That was going to leave a mark, is what I’m getting at. My safeties kicked in and redlined as they compensated for one hell of a smack. I pulled myself up and looked up just in time to see the robot’s foot about to come down on me.
Well then. It looked like I was going to get smashed into the pavement after all. This wasn’t going to be fun.
Then I heard it. A flash and a sonic boom off in the distance that was getting closer faster than any technological marvel ever created by man could ever hope to travel.
I grinned. It looked like this giant robot fight had just turned into my favorite kind of date night. Even if it was in the middle of the day.
11
Hot Date
That flash and the accompanying sonic boom, a sound that had been terrifying to me once upon a time but was like a sweet symphony to my ears now, resolved into a blur that moved right through the middle of one of the giant robots I’d been having so much trouble trying to fight off.
