Villains Don't Save Heroes!

by Mia Archer

  That seemed wildly improbable from a comparative anatomy point of view, but I just didn’t know. I did know that leaving her here unconscious in this dummy lab surrounded by a bunch of killing machines that might decide to take a swipe at her no matter what I told them wasn’t going to work long term.

  Whatever. I had to try. I walked over to an elevator that opened. I stepped inside and hit a long combination of numbers that had seemed like a clever idea at the time to keep anyone I didn’t want to from using this elevator for its intended purpose, but now as I stood here with Fialux slung over my shoulder I couldn’t help but think that it was a huge waste of time.

  A huge waste of time and a potential risk. It’d been so long since I put in this combination that I was having trouble remembering what the combination even was in the first place.

  Yeah, nice pro tip for any aspiring villains out there? If you’re going to put in a code that could potentially result in a failsafe being activated that scrambles all your molecules and teleports them all around the world and into deep space if you get it wrong? Maybe rehearse that number once in awhile so you don’t forget it.

  Hitting the proper combination on the elevator activated the true purpose of the thing. There was only one floor to the dummy lab, after all, and it was buried deep beneath the city on the complete opposite end of the city from where my lab was located.

  If the right number combination was entered then the elevator would immediately activate a site-to-site teleportation to a mirror teleporter in my real lab.

  If the wrong combination was entered? Well it would still teleport someone out of the dummy lab, but their molecules would do the aforementioned scattering to the wind and deep space rather than being reconstituted at the right location.

  Needless to say I’d entered that number time and time again and memorized it several times over. And I was discovering now that no amount of memorizing at the time helped if I didn’t reinforce it, so I was sweating a little as I put it in even though there was no going back now.

  This was the one step of the whole chain where I could really screw myself over by not remembering the proper way to enter, because the teleporter booth didn’t care who I was.

  If I entered the wrong combination I’d be just as dead as anyone else who did the same.

  So imagine my relief when I reappeared inside my real lab. I stepped out of the teleporter and breathed a sigh of relief. I knew I had the right number, but it was one of those situations where I’d never used the thing before and there was a moment of worry where I wondered if I was doing everything the right way.

  You tend to have moments of nervous introspection like that when you’re about to potentially be killed by a mix of your own hubris, forgetfulness, and stupidity.

  We’d survived though. That’s what mattered. That or I’d been sent on to my eternal reward and it looked a lot like my lab, which was sort of my idea of heaven on earth.

  And if it was heaven on earth then I had work to do.

  “Computer, prepare a medical bay for Fialux. We need to have a look at her and see how extensive the damages are.”

  20

  Dangerous Treatment

  “Medical bay 1 is already prepped for her,” the computer said.

  “Right. Thanks,” I muttered. “At least you can do something right.”

  Of course the computer would think of prepping the medbay but it wouldn’t think of disabling all the nasty surprises I had waiting for Fialux in my dummy lab. There were times when I really missed CORVAC and his ability to look at a situation and use some of that good old fashioned machine learning to extrapolate what he should be doing in the here and now based on past experience.

  There was no use crying over sapient supercomputers who’d developed a taste for overthrowing their masters though. No, he’d made it abundantly clear that I needed to stay the hell away from computers who were getting too smart.

  Even if it did mean the occasional frustration as I dealt with a computer that endangered my life because it was too stupid and not because it was too smart.

  Medical bay 1 slid open as I stepped into the room. It was really more of a huge tank, think more Star Wars than the beds you see in Star Trek, but it used some of my antigrav tech to keep the injured party floating rather than some sort of fantastical magical healing medical liquid.

  I held her up and the antigrav took over. She floated in, her head lolling to the side before the antigrav stepped in and moved her upright. There she was hanging like an angel with her hair floating up as the glass tube came up around her and the computer ran its analysis.

  At least I could rest assured that the medical side of things would go as planned. The diagnostics in the medbay were completely separate routines from the regular computer.

  What can I say? This was one area where I’d kept even CORVAC completely separate. There was something about the idea of giving him access to me while I was potentially unconscious and unable to do anything to defend myself in a medical bay that could just as easily kill as it healed by healing in the wrong way that gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies well before CORVAC showed any inclination towards turning on me.

  “What are you seeing?” I asked, looking up at the monitor next to the medbay and watching the medical system take over.

  It was almost a relief to be working with the medical system. At least it hadn’t changed so I could rely on it to work like it always did. It even spoke in the soothing but always slightly sarcastic and condescending tone of Robert Picardo.

  That was my own little Star Trek in-joke tossed into my computer systems.

  “Running a diagnostic scan,” the computer said. “Human nominal with…”

  “No,” I snapped.

  I took back everything good I just thought about the medical computer. Stupid fucking computer with its lack of AI. Stupid fucking CORVAC with his stupid fucking betrayal that left me unable to trust a computer to do anything right even if the medical computer had saved me countless times before.

  “No, mistress?” the computer asked.

  “Don’t call me mistress,” I snapped again. That reminded me too much of CORVAC. “And you need to run the xenodiagnostic protocol on her. We’re dealing with someone who’s potentially from another world here, and I don’t want to accidentally kill her because you’re trying to medicate her the same as you would a regular human.”

  “Understood,” the medical computer said.

  Not for the first time I seriously considered flying out to that warehouse where I’d vaporized Rex Roth. Digging deep and getting CORVAC out of mothballs. Sure I’d fried him with an EMP, but I figured with enough elbow grease I’d have no problem putting Humpty-Murdery back together again.

  The real bitch was I wasn’t sure if I wanted to resurrect him so I could kill him all over again, preferably slow enough that he would feel every microchip I destroyed with a baseball bat this time around, or if I wanted to put him to work for me again.

  All it would take was a few kill switches in the right location. Maybe a couple of Kirk faults so I could destroy him with a logic bomb that only I knew about. Yeah, I could make him better. More pliable. More vulnerable to…

  As I always did when that thought occurred to me I stomped down on it viciously until it was well and truly out of my mind. The last time I thought I could control that asshole, after all, he’d ended up going on a rampage through downtown that had ended with billions of dollars in damage and a few fatalities because it turns out a megalomaniacal supercomputer doesn’t have the same concerns about collateral damage that I do.

  Yeah, the only thing that stopped me from getting my ass sued off after that incident was that nobody knew my true identity. That or the courts didn’t want to bother letting anyone sue me since they knew I’d just steal any money needed to pay off the lawsuit.

  “Are you getting anything from the scan?” I asked. “Come on. There has to be something from the teleporter log!”

  “The tele
porter log shows human normal,” the medical computer said.

  I stared at Fialux. This was the first time I’d been able to teleport her when I had a computer that could track what was going on. The last and first time I’d teleported her had been when I was getting her out of my lab so we could fight CORVAC.

  Unfortunately back then my computer had just left the building in a giant death robot which meant there was no way to go back and access those records and see what it was that made Fialux tick.

  Every time since then she’d insisted on flying herself because with her super speed she could be there almost as quickly as my teleporter could work. At least within the Starlight City limits. Plus I had a sneaking suspicion there was a bit of vanity involved in her never using the teleporter.

  It was a hell of a lot more impressive to come barreling in with that sonic boom she always did that bounced off the skyscrape walls in downtown Starlight City and played hell with the local bird population, after all.

  Impressive, but it was frustrating that I’d never been able to get a good read on what made her tick at a molecular level.

  Hey, she might be my girlfriend, but that didn’t mean I’d lost my scientific curiosity about what it was that made her so powerful. Even if I had been able to do some far more direct anatomical studies in the months we’d been together.

  Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “A ray like that wouldn’t turn her human. She has to be alien. Two hearts. Green blood. Unusually thick facial hair and brown makeup. There has to be something that makes her different from humans!”

  “Simply reporting results found,” the computer said, and for a moment I wondered if it was getting testy with me or if it was merely a vestigial feeling from all my times interacting with CORVAC.

  That bastard could be downright sassy when he wanted to, and it wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience even if I did find myself missing the experience more often than not.

  “Run the scan again,” I said. “There has to be something wrong if she’s showing up as human normal. There’s no way she can have human anatomy and still be able to pull off the stuff she pulled off.”

  Maybe the medical computer was looking at my teleportation log. As buggy as my AI had proven to be lately I can’t say I’d be all that surprised if it turned out that was the case with the medical computer along with every other stupid computer in my life.

  “I’ve already run the scan five times to be certain,” the computer said. “Would you like me to run it again?”

  I stared at Fialux hanging in the light of the medical bay. It was impossible. She shouldn’t be human. She couldn’t be human. Rays of light did not change someone’s entire anatomical structure like that.

  Though hadn’t I seen some equally impossible things already today? Hadn’t I seen Dr. Lana’s body being manipulated and changing as she healed from the sort of injury that should’ve immediately killed her?

  Hell, didn’t I regularly scramble my molecules, transport them over long distances in defiance of the laws of physics, and reconstitute them at huge distances with a transmission tech that wasn’t that far removed from light?

  Wasn’t I the same person on both ends of that in defiance of all those philosophy majors who had nothing better to do but sit up late at night debating online with other philosophy majors about at which point a ship ceased to be the original ship? I knew my teleporting around the city gave them no end of frustration, I’d seen some of the lively online debates, but I figured it was a charity on my part to give them a way to use their major before they started their shift at the coffee shop.

  I suppose next to all that impossible shit I regularly got up to the idea of a ray that somehow rearranged Fialux’s internal structure so she was more human didn’t seem all that farfetched after all. Maybe that was the trick I’d never thought of before and Dr. Lana was the one who finally figured it out.

  If you couldn’t defeat someone because they were invulnerable to most physical attacks then instead you hit them with some sort of ray that rearranges their insides to make them human and then take them out at your leisure because humans have a hell of a lot more practice taking out other humans than they do taking out gods, or goddesses, from another world.

  It was devious, but I had to admit that it had worked. It galled me that it had worked. I hated that Dr. Lana had been able to come up with something that worked better than any of the plans I’d come up with to try and take Fialux out.

  Back when I was in the business of taking Fialux out, that is.

  I hesitated for a long moment. I knew it was a long moment that Fialux didn’t have, but I also didn’t have much choice. I was going to have to make a judgment call here, and I hated making judgment calls when I’d built countless automated systems to keep me from having to make those calls.

  “You’re absolutely certain there’s one hundred percent human anatomy in there?” I asked. “Like if we start poking around in there using the human algorithms you’re positive there’s not some secret extra super power organ or something floating around that’s going to blow up and take us all with it?”

  “Affirmative. Confirm human normal. Multiple injuries registering including internal bleeding, ruptured kidney, several broken ribs, swelling in the…”

  I waved a hand and the computer shut up. Good. There was nothing more annoying than a computer that didn’t know when to shut the hell up. I had ample unfortunate experience with AI that refused to shut the hell up when they were told. The last one refused to shut the hell up until I hit his central processing unit with an EMP that would’ve taken out most of the electronics on the Eastern Seaboard if I’d been high enough and set it to wide dispersal when it went off.

  “How long does she have?” I asked.

  “Repairs need to start immediately for a chance of recovery,” the computer said.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that,” I muttered.

  21

  Fixer Upper

  There was a moment of hesitation from the medical computer. Which spoke volumes since that moment of hesitation on the part of a computer was pretty much an eternity for a mortal human whose thoughts ran at the speed of human thought.

  Computers considered that to be one hell of a speed limit. I’d tried not to be too insulted whenever CORVAC brought that up. Or when he hit me with backhanded compliments about how I was the one human he’d ever worked with who could almost keep up with him.

  I’d shown him. Thinking about blowing up one computer wasn’t going to help me in dealing with my current medical computer problem though. That hesitation indicated the AI could sense I was in a foul mood, and I’d griped about what I’d done to CORVAC often enough in front of the thing that it had to be wondering if it was next right about now.

  “Do you wish to hold off on treatment?” the medical computer finally asked.

  I looked up at Fialux floating in the med bay. She looked like shit. As though she took every single fucking hit that got her while she was out there fighting today.

  Which made sense. After all, Dr. Lana had been hitting her with that beam for who knew how long. Not only would that mean slow response time, but considering the way her fighting style mostly involved wading into the middle of a fight and taking a beating she could take while dealing out a beating her opponents couldn’t take it was no wonder she’d taken a beating that was really fucking with her now.

  That was sort of her whole fighting style. No finesse.

  I sighed. There was really no other alternative. It was entirely possible I was ordering her death by having the computer start repairs, but it’s not like I could take her to any of the hospitals in the city or anything.

  No, that would be the same as advertising to the world that Fialux was no longer the invulnerable heroine the world thought she was.

  The moment that happened would be the moment every cut rate second-string JV villain in this city decided to take a shot at the quee
n. Heck, maybe every cut rate second-string JV villain in the world, for that matter.

  Which meant it would be nothing but work for me because I’d be obligated to reduce any idiot who decided to come at Fialux to their component atomic parts. Which I was totally down for doing if it became necessary, but once people started coming at you it was nothing but work all day long until enough people got vaporized that everyone else got the message, and I wasn’t looking forward to that when I had a big old distraction like Dr. Lana lurking out there.

  “Do what you have to do to save her,” I said.

  There was another worry lurking in the back of my mind as I watched the medical computer go to work. There was always the risk that by saving her right now I could do something that would make it impossible to reverse whatever it was that Dr. Lana had done to her with that strange purple ray.

  Of course if she was dead it’s not like there’d be much of a chance to reverse what Dr. Lana had done, so it was really one of those situations where you were damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

  I figured the option where I could save her now and potentially rob her permanently of her powers was the better of two options. Even if she might not ever forgive me for doing that to her.

  Damn it. And things had finally been going so well too.

  “Starting the repair process,” the computer said.

  Boy did it start the repair process. I’d never seen this from the outside because the only times I’d ever needed to use this thing was when I needed to use it on myself.

  No one was allowed into the lab where I did my personal repairs. I didn’t even let the other computers in my lab come near the medical computer, for that matter.

  I had quietly shared the patent to some of the med bay technology so it would be freely available to anyone who wanted to riff on the idea. I probably could’ve made a fortune on the thing, but I figured this was one invention that would be better off out there in the world if someone could ever figure out how to make it work outside my lab.