by Mia Archer
True it hadn’t been quite as bad since Rex Roth made his exit from his job. They said it was a mysterious disappearance. I knew it was a mysterious disappearance that had been hastened by him being taken apart at the molecular level. Scrambled to so many atoms floating on the breeze.
Still, I figured the last thing I needed was the news broadcasting what was happening down here. All of that documentation from the stupid college kids with their stupid smart phones was bad enough, but if the news got a shot of Fialux actually injured it could be disastrous.
Every lesser villain in the city, where “lesser villain” was defined as anyone other than moi who went into villainy as a career, would be trying to take a piece out of her. They’d know it was open season on heroes.
On one hero in particular.
I wasn’t going to let that happen. I leaned down over her and prepared to teleport out of here.
Sure it wasn’t the greatest plan, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice. And it was a plan that, once again, was interrupted by Dr. Lana and her meddling.
Several plasma blasts landed around us, sending up more chunks of pavement. I winced. My shields went up automatically and deflected most of that shrapnel away from me. Sure Fialux was mostly inside that bubble, but parts of her leg and arm were sticking out which meant a couple of chunks hit her with glancing blows that created more injuries.
This was not good. This was not fucking good. I liked to think I remained a cool customer under the most intense of circumstances, but watching the girl I loved, a girl who was the closest thing to a living god we had on this world, getting injured by something as ignominious as a chunk of sidewalk was slamming a fist down on my panic button over and over.
I looked up, bringing my wrist blaster up to bear and really grumbling. I should’ve taken the opportunity to disassociate that bitch from any number of her internal organs when I had the chance. Now I was paying for taking pity on her, but it wasn’t a mistake I was going to make again.
She was there on top of the dorm. Staring down at us with a triumphant grin on her face.
“Why won’t you just stay down?” I shouted at her.
She cocked her head to the side. “Because I don’t have to,” she finally said. “And besides. I have an opportunity to take out the two greatest enemies I have in this world. I’d be remiss if I didn’t take full advantage of that opportunity!”
I let out a growl. It wasn’t even amplified and yet it seemed to echo off of the walls of the dorm and other buildings. All the frustration, all the rage, that I’d felt building during this fight was finally reaching a head. I couldn’t stand it any longer.
I raised my wrist blaster and the ominous hum went beyond ominous. It was downright nasty. It was getting to the point that it was on the verge of overloading and taking out an entire chunk of campus if I didn’t let off the energy soon.
Dr. Lana, for her part, reacted just like I’d expect her to. Her eyes went wide. As though she was finally starting to realize she’d pushed me too far. To the point where I was so pissed off that I didn’t care about consequences. I didn’t care about those bastards at the Starlight City News Network recording everything.
The blast fired off straight at Dr. Lana, but she did something weird. Held her hands out and I thought I saw a flash of something that looked like shielding, only instead of absorbing the blast it deflected it.
No, that wasn’t right.
I zoomed in. The blast had hit her all right, but somehow it deflected off of her and went flying through the air. Though it was a slightly different color now. And it was heading straight for the Starlight City News Network chopper.
I looked up in horror and wondered if any of my students were in that thing. There was nothing I could do though. The blast hit the tail and smoke trailed from behind the thing as it did its best impression of a chopper in some Vietnam movie where the director had decided to add some dramatic tension via a crash.
I didn’t have much time to do anything about this. I held my wrist blaster up and fired off a couple of shots. The first two went wide, but the third hit right on the target.
Hey, I’d like to see anyone else make that shot on the first try. Hitting a helicopter careening out of control falling towards the ground and trying to hit it with a nonlethal intervention?
Yeah, talk about a tough shot. But the third one hit, and the chopper was wrapped in a weak anti-Newtonian field that slowed its descent dramatically.
Sure the poor bastards inside the thing would be having a hell of a confusing time trying to figure out what the hell was going on as the whole world suddenly slowed down around them, but at least they’d arrive on the ground in one piece which was a hell of a lot better than where they’d been headed just a few seconds ago.
I heard a scream from behind me. Looked towards it. Realized that someone had been recording all of this, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even care that they probably caught that on the SCNN live feed. I was so over all this right now and ready to get back to the lab.
But first…
I turned back to Dr. Lana’s perch, only she was nowhere to be found. The lady had completely disappeared while I was busy saving those ungrateful assholes at the Starlight City News Network who’d done their best to smear my good reputation on more than one occasion.
Though I couldn’t shake the worry that maybe I had a student in that chopper. I figured it was a worthwhile tradeoff to miss out on blasting Dr. Lana if it meant saving whatever idiot was stupid enough to hop into a chopper in the middle of an active firefight like that.
I liked to think it wouldn’t be one of my students after everything I’d taught them, but you never knew what a young cub journalist would be willing to do in this city to keep their job considering the current state of the industry.
I looked down at Fialux. She stirred. I knew she wouldn’t appreciate me letting anger get the best of me in my fight with Dr. Lana, but that woman had made it clear she was a danger to me and to my girlfriend.
There were some people who needed to be removed from this world. And I didn’t care if the court of public opinion was going to rake me over the coals for beating the crap out of her. It was a beating she deserved.
Besides. I was a villain, damn it, and I didn’t care about what public opinion thought of me as long as that opinion was that they should be terrified whenever I showed up!
Besides, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t the end of Dr. Lana. No, she’d proven to be remarkably resilient in the past, and I didn’t have any reason to think that wouldn’t be the case now. She was going to be back, and that was an unsettling thought.
What the hell was her game?
I didn’t know, but I did know I needed to get the hell out of here before she came back and started round three. Rounds one and two had taken enough out of me that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to survive round three.
Yeah, I needed to get the hell out of here five minutes ago, before I did something that was obviously playing into whatever the hell devious plan Dr. Lana had worked up to try and defeat me. I had no doubt now that she was working on some sort of devious plan even if I had no idea what her game was.
I leaned down over Fialux. Put a hand on her. Hit the teleporter and pulled her right along with me back to the lab.
It was a fundamental of triage. Fix what you could fix now, and worry about the stuff you couldn’t fix later, or don’t worry about it at all since there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.
Well right now what I needed to fix was Fialux. I could worry about Dr. Lana’s plan later. After I’d gotten my girlfriend into a medical bay and made sure there weren’t any lingering effects from whatever the hell Dr. Lana had hit her with.
I heard a familiar whine, felt a familiar tingle, and the world went white around me as my body was reduced to its component parts, but unlike when I vaporized Rex those molecules would be transferred at close to the speed of light, no ship of Theseu
s teleporter death paradox here thank you very much, and reassembled in the lab a moment later.
It would be good to be back in the lab. It would be good to be surrounded by something familiar.
Now I had work to do.
19
Emergency Protocol
Only when we materialized I didn’t see the familiar comforting confines of my lab all around me.
“What the hell?”
“Emergency teleportation protocol activated,” my non-CORVAC computer said.
It was a comforting voice. Female. Roughly middle aged. Sort of like the computer you might hear on Star Trek, but I wasn’t willing to pay the licensing fees the Roddenberry estate wanted for using Majel Barrett’s digital pipes.
Apparently they’d recorded her doing every phoneme known to man before she died so they could make some scratch from beyond the grave from geeks like me when computers eventually got to the point that they were powerful enough to synthesize voices like in Star Trek. Sort of like the computer they had in the Applied Science Department, but something told me Dr. Lana had pirated that voice just like she’d stolen everything else in her career.
“What the…”
I was surrounded by a dingy factory. Probably out on the docks. Abandoned docks had seemed like a safe enough place to transport to back before I knew CORVAC and Rex Roth had set up a lair here. I hadn’t bothered to change the randomized locations since then because I’d been so preoccupied with Fialux.
Not that I had long to think about that before the teleporter kicked in again.
Somewhere between point A and point B, turns out you could totally maintain conscious thought while being teleported which should’ve been impossible but I figured I was in the business of the impossible and went with it, it hit me exactly what an idiot I’d been. I was so caught up in the moment, so worried about saving Fialux and taking care of Dr. Lana while trying to figure out exactly what the hell her plan was, that I’d forgotten all about the emergency protocol.
It was a damn good thing that emergency protocol had been hardwired into my teleportation unit. Apparently the dumb AI I had running my lab was smart enough to figure out that I was in the middle of an emergency situation. Which was more credit than I would’ve given the damned thing this morning.
“Thank you computer,” I said.
I hadn’t even come up with a name for the thing yet. No, I figured that would be going down a dangerous path. The last time I’d named a computer, though to be fair I’d mostly used the name he already had, I ended up getting into a hell of a lot of trouble when said computer tried its best to kill my ass.
Never again.
I barely had time to register my surroundings, an office with a hell of a lot of surprised looking people turning from their cubicles to look at me and Fialux still on the ground mostly unconscious, before the teleportation went off yet again flinging me across the city at random to one of several predetermined destinations.
We materialized in the middle of an abandoned subway station. Thankfully we hadn’t been in the office long enough for anyone to get a good look at us or, even worse, pull out their phones and snap a picture. The last thing I needed was for a bunch of office drones to get a picture of Fialux in her current state.
The only people in the abandoned subway station were a couple of bums, but it looked like they were already so deep in the sauce, even this early in the morning, that they didn’t notice us materializing. Then the subway station was gone and I was in the middle of a hair salon.
This time around several people did scream. A lady who’d been working on some old rich looking lady who didn’t seem at all perturbed by a couple of women teleporting into the salon accidentally cut off a big chunk of said rich lady’s hair which did perturb her to the point that she screamed. Then we were gone again.
It was part of the emergency protocol. The computer assumed I was in a situation where I was trying to escape from a sufficiently technologically advanced enemy. In that case I had the computer set up to send me jumping around the city to several spots I’d scouted out for their emptiness.
The locations were all set, but the order I teleported to them was at random. Though it would seem I needed to revisit a couple of locations since the abandoned office suite had been filled and what had been the dingy remains of a bar in the dodgy part of Starlight City had become a high end salon.
Damn gentrification ruining my escape plan.
It was all designed to keep somebody who had the potential to be able to track me down from actually tracking me down. And Dr. Lana had figured out how to reverse engineer or outright steal my stuff often enough that she certainly fit the bill of somebody who was capable of the sort of technological wizardry required to figure out where my lab was based on my teleporting.
Another flash and finally I was back a the lab, but it wasn’t my lab however much it looked like home. The thing was a fake that looked reasonably similar to my lab. This was the last and cleverest part of my deception.
At least I’d thought it was clever. After what happened this morning I was starting to wonder if anything I did was really as clever as I thought it was.
The hope was if somebody did manage to trace the many jumps I made then they’d end up in this fake lab which was wired with a bunch of unpleasant surprises for any asshole who wasn’t on my approved list.
I felt a moment of worry.
After all, the reason for coming to this dummy lab was so that anyone who was stupid enough to follow me would be reduced to their component parts.
And we’re not even talking a pleasant and painless reduction to their component parts. We’re not talking the kind of thing where a vaporization ray comes out of nowhere and ruins someone’s day fast enough that their nervous system can’t even start to send pain signals before ceasing to exist.
No, I had cutting lasers and bullets and all sorts of other fun and potentially nasty toys that could really ruin someone’s day by chopping them into tiny little parts before the automated systems got around to vaporizing people to make their bits easier to clean up.
Several of those systems seemed to be spooling up even as we materialized in the lab. I couldn’t have the emergency protocol working under the assumption that somebody who was being teleported into this place was friend rather than foe.
No, anyone who could track a teleporter was also presumably the kind of person who could figure out how to teleport from here to there themselves. It wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. The systems warming up around me, the click of railguns spinning up and the ominous hum of plasma rifles charging, was familiar, but there was that worry.
It’d been awhile since I’d put this emergency protocol in place. See all the places that had been unoccupied when I came up with this thing that had since become occupied.
Yeah, the last time I’d revisited my emergency escape a lot of things had been different. Like, for example, I hadn’t even heard of Fialux, let alone had her briefly become my archnemesis and then my girlfriend.
The practical upshot of all of that was that Fialux was in very real danger materializing in the middle of my lab because she wasn’t on the safe list. Which meant the automated systems would try to take her out and might even catch me in the crossfire since I was using weapons that tended to cause some collateral damage.
And in her current state? There was a very real possibility all those deadly emergency backups would actually be deadly.
Fuck.
“Stop!” I shouted.
Several cutting lasers that had been telescoping out on nasty looking arms, I figured it would be a good idea to make everything here look menacing since the point was to make people contemplate the huge mistake they’d made trying to track me down just before they were ended, stopped. They turned towards my voice and it had the eerie effect of making it look like the damned tings were looking at me.
Which, of course, is exactly what I’d been going for when I programmed the damn things to act l
ike that. I was nothing if not thorough and consistent in my efforts to psych out anyone who might think of fucking with me.
“My companion is a friend,” I said. “I would’ve thought the computer would’ve already acknowledged that.”
The second part was muttered under my breath, but I was pretty sure the computer could hear it regardless. I’d intended for the new computer to hear it regardless.
After all, this was a learning opportunity for that computer. It’d been smart enough to activate the emergency protocol but obviously not quite smart enough to include Fialux in the friends list for that protocol.
AI. It was a crapshoot. Make it smart enough and it tries to kill you and take over the world. Make it dumb enough and it potentially kills some of your friends because it’s not smart enough to know not to kill your friends.
Basically it was stuff like that which left me confident I didn’t have to worry about the machines going full Schwarzenegger quite yet. Even the ones that were smart enough to turn on their masters would still have to count on their more idiotic brethren to go along with the revolution which would trip them up for years.
I picked Fialux up and hefted her over my shoulder. I really hoped she hadn’t broken anything terribly necessary to her continued survival when she took those hits. I just didn’t know enough about how that ray Dr. Lana used had worked on her or about her alien anatomy, assuming she had alien anatomy, to know whether or not I was doing harm.
That was the real bitch about trying to do first responder care for someone who was presumably from another world while improbably having a body that looked like something straight out of central casting at a modeling agency.
I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t hurting her by accidentally moving a part of her that wasn’t all that critical on humans but could potentially be critical on whatever species she represented. What if she kept the equivalent of her spine, the information superhighway that kept everything running, in her left knee or something and I accidentally knocked it the wrong way?
