by Jay Phillips
For a few seconds, there was nothing but silence until she finally spoke again. “I knew. Pammy accidentally told me a few years ago; I caught her thinking about it when she didn’t know I was around. She explained the rest. I found out, but I never wanted him to know.”
“Why not?” The Detective asked in a confused tone. “Didn’t he have the right to? I would want to.”
“You didn’t know him the way I did. I didn’t want him to have to live with that moment. Sometimes a happy lie is better than the painful truth. I never wanted him to blame himself for all of that. It wasn’t his fault. He never asked for any of that.”
“It came out anyways; things like that always do.”
“Like that thing that happened to you with the two waitresses in Vancouver,” she said in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
He smiled. “What I did on my days off was my business.”
“But the handcuffs, wasn’t that a bit cliché?”
“When you’re a cop, they’re always laying around somewhere. Besides, I warned you about going too deep into my thoughts. You never know what you might find in there.”
“You are not kidding,” she added with the slightest of laughs.
He wanted to ask if she had known that it was Adam in The Iron Knight suit that morning when her sister was attacked, if she had known when the two of them had talked at the hospital, but he figured it was all moot at this point, none of it really mattered. If she had known, what could she have told him? What information would have made him do things different? Would he have even done things differently if he had known? Probably not, he thought to himself, even as he noticed that she hadn’t chimed into his internal monologue yet. He figured this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have, so he did what he knew she wanted him to do: he let it go.
The Detective continued to drive the truck through the storm; he could see The Agent’s massive white tower in the distance, brooding ominously over the city. The tallest building in Metro City, standing at an even one hundred floors, it had become Rogers’ home and base of operations since The Seven won the war. Rumors said that no one other than The Agent himself had entered the living quarters on the top floor in years; supposedly, he lived in there alone, standing guard over the country alongside his thousands of television monitors, each connected to the millions of surveillance cameras scattered throughout the land. It was told he had immediate access to any of the cameras, showing him instantly what was happening on any street corner, any hallway, every house, and every apartment in the country.
The Agent had become a hermit in his building, nothing more than a disembodied voice giving orders and commanding his troops to do his bidding, his dirty work, while he sits there, alone, contemplating the machinations that kept the country under his thumb.
The Detective wondered if The Agent had the cliché long beard and overgrown toenails that despots in self-exile usually developed. The Detective hoped so, if for nothing else, just for the comedy factor alone. He loved a good joke.
“Would you really laugh at him?” Emily asked. “To his face?”
“Probably,” The Detective answered. “I’d laugh as hard as I could, right before he killed me, at least.”
“You’re quite optimistic about your chances of success.”
He smiled. “Just being realistic. Without a weapon that can work against him, some kind of a trick, an escape plan, something, I’m kind of walking in to a no-win situation here.”
As if on cue, the phone in the glove box began ringing. The Detective reached over, opened the box, and took out the phone.
“You’re not going to answer it again, are you?” Emily scolded him from his thoughts.
“Why not?” he said in return, flipping the phone open and preparing to hit the button marked send. “It’s probably just that guy you mentioned earlier, just wanting to know why I stole his truck.”
She laughed from beneath her breath. “I knew you stole it. You can’t borrow if you have no plans to bring it back.”
“How do you know I wasn’t planning on taking it back? Maybe I had planned on a grand return trip where I scoured the country to find the one true owner of this truck. I mean, it’s highly unlikely, but it is possible.” He hit the button to talk and placed the phone next to his ear. “Hello,” he said as calmly and normally as he could.
“Hello, Detective,” said an electronic, computerized voice from the other end of the phone.
_______________________________________________
“Well, hello Adam,” The Detective said in return. “If it isn’t my favorite disembodied, robot, mass murdering, killing machine. Are you wanting to just say hi or is this a business call?” He could hear Emily gasp from his thoughts. He did everything he could to block her out of the conversation; some things she didn’t need to hear. The digitized voice of her dead best friend was probably one of those.
“I’ve been tracking you, Detective,” the mechanical voice answered. “There is a tracer in one of your interior coat pockets; it has allowed me to follow your every movement.”
The Detective reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny piece of metal surrounded by circuitry. He held it up in front of his face and turned it from side-to-side, giving it a good once over. “You sneaky bastard. You put that in there after you knocked me out.” He crumpled the tracer in his hand, rolling the metal into a ball. He rolled the driver side window down a smidge and tossed the ball onto the wet street.
“Destroying my tracer won’t do you much good now, Detective. I know where you are and where you’re going. The question now is why, why are you heading to The Agent’s tower? Whose side do you stand?”
“Look,” The Detective said in return, beginning to feel the slightest bit of anger over having his motives questioned. “I found your journal, and I read through it. I completely understand your reasoning for hating The Seven; I have my own set of reasons to want to see this regime brought down, but, and let me say this as clearly as I can so we both understand my meaning: I’m not on any side in this little one-man war of yours. I am where I have always been, the odd-man out looking in.”
“Then why did you return to the city?” Adam’s voice asked from the phone. “You had every opportunity to leave the situation, to remove yourself from this, as you say, one-man war.”
“Oh robot-boy, I have so many reasons: revenge, kicks and giggles, overwhelming sadomasochistic tendencies, the list goes on and on. Which reason do you want?”
“The reason that would cause you to give up a sure chance at escape to return to a certain death.”
The Detective cleared his throat, making sure what he was about to say came across loud and clear as it possibly could. “Emily.”
“What?”
“Emily,” The Detective said again. “The Agent has her, and I came back to keep him from killing her.” The Detective decided to leave out all of the details concerning any lie she may have told to get him to make that decision, not that it would have changed his mind or affected his choice. Either way, he would be on this same path, hell bent to get to that tower, determined to rescue her from The Agent’s hold. “He’s using her to lure me into a trap. He needs me at his tower, not sure of the why’s or the what’s, but I know that part of his master plan is getting me into that building. And he will kill her if I don’t show up; I have no doubt on the subject.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone before the robotic voice spoke again. “Then, I guess I am in your debt, Detective.”
“My turn to ask the questions,” The Detective said in return, ignoring Adam’s last comment. The last thing he needed was a homicidal killing machine owing him a favor. “Do you have a plan here or are you just making all of this up as you go along?”
“I have a plan.”
“Care to share?”
“I am going to kill The Agent and make him pay for all of the atrocities he has committed.”
“Sounds great. You got s
ome kind of a magic bullet, or are you just planning on showing up unannounced, sneaking up on him, saying boo, and hoping for a heart attack to kick in?”
“I have a method in place.”
The Detective sighed. “Goddamn mass murdering robots being controlled by disembodied dead people. They never give you a fucking straight answer. Seriously. Speaking of which, is there a reason you’re just getting around to going after Rogers. Hell, it’s been hours since you left me for dead in that damn field. Seems to me, you’ve had plenty of time to go fire your magic bullet and end this whole damn thing. What, did you get cold feet or something? I guess theoretically a robot would always have cold feet, being made of metal and all, but you get my meaning.”
“When I was still alive, Detective, I probably would have found you to be quite amusing.”
“Yep, I am a funny, funny man,” he replied. “I get it. Let’s all laugh at the man with the jokes. That doesn’t answer my question though.”
“After our last encounter, I had to enter into an extended repair sequence to repair both internal and external structural damage.”
The Detective remembered firing a bullet into the machine’s arm after Ice had frozen it solid. Not a pretty sight. “Yeah, sorry about that. My bad.”
Adam ignored his comment. “After the repair sequence finished, I had to procure the device that I will use to administer The Agent’s demise.”
“Sounds complicated and time consuming,” The Detective responded. “The questions is, will it work?”
“It will.”
The Detective took a deep breath, gearing himself up to ask the one question he always hated to ask in situations like this, the one question which always seemed to get him into trouble. “What do you need me to do?”
“Detective,” answered the robotic voice from the other end of the phone, “I need you to rescue Emily, protect her, make sure she comes through all of this safe and alive.”
“That’s it?”
“That is it, Detective. Emily safe and The Agent dead are the only things left in this life that I desire. I am hoping that your rescue will provide me with a distraction and an opportunity to face my adopted father without interference.”
“So that’s all you need from me? A rescue and a distraction?”
“Yes.”
The Detective smiled to himself. “I can do that.”
“This will be the last time we speak, Detective. I wish you well upon your task.”
The Detective started to say “you too,” but the call ended before he had a chance to get the words out. Not that it would have mattered; Robot Adam wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest conversationalist. The Detective figured that was probably the only answers he was going to get from him.
He felt a stirring in his mind, the feeling of another presence within his thoughts; it was a strange yet now familiar sensation. Emily was there, inside of his mind, waiting for him to speak, knowing that he probably had dozens of useful questions. The joke was on her; he had questions, though he doubted any of them were useful.
“So, he began to ask, “was your bestie always so, forgive my wording, robotic in his speech, or is that something new?”
“It’s new,” she answered from his thoughts. “He always described the process of speaking with machines as a form of telepathy, like he was leaving his own body and entering into the mind of the machine itself. I guess this time he took the whole process as far as he could.” She paused before speaking again. “Detective, tell me this, is he really gone for good? Is there any way he could be brought back? Is there any way he could be saved?”
The Detective paused, not exactly sure how to answer. For the past twenty-four hours, since he had been released from his holding cell in The Hole, since he met Ice, his entire time in this fucked up situation, he had continually thought of the killer robot as something that needed to be stopped, yet now, he found himself on the same side as the machine and the man whose essence remained inside of it, both gearing up for one final confrontation. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if he was going to make it out of all of this alive; if he couldn’t save himself, what chance did he have to save the man who had already sacrificed himself to kill the rest of The Seven.
“I don’t know,” he said, giving her the only answer he could come up with at the moment. “My only concern now is finding a way to save you, and hopefully, getting the two of us out of this with both of our heads still attached to our shoulders.”
“I have faith in you, Detective.”
“Well, that makes a grand total of one, so that’s one better than normal.”
He could feel her smile from his thoughts. “Give me something good to think about,” she said. “What are we going to do if we make it through this?”
He stared at the giant white tower through the falling rain; it inched closer and closer with every passing second. “I am going to take you on a date.”
“A proper one?” she asked with a small laugh. “I’ve been in your thoughts. I’ve seen your idea of a date. Coffee and a taco from a food cart won’t cut it this time.”
“A proper date,” he answered. “Dinner, a show, we’ll get dressed up. I’ll pick you up in my new truck I just got. I‘ll even wear a tie.”
“You always wear a tie.”
“I’ll wear a nice tie, just to shake things up.”
“Can I wear something low cut and revealing?”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t consider it a date if you didn’t.”
He could feel a swell of happiness from his mind, as if a ball of sunshine and rainbows had erupted from his thoughts. Her happiness engulfed him; it felt nice.
He slowed the truck down and moved towards the curb on his right, stopping in a nice parking spot just in front of another car.
“Why are you stopping?” she asked.
He looked out at the hundred story building less than a block away from where he had stopped, standing in the distance like a giant sentinel, as if it was just waiting on his arrival. “I’m here,” he answered as he reached down and picked up the journal before placing it inside of his coat.
“Then what are you waiting for,” she said from within his thoughts, his own mind filled to brim with the excitement she was feeling. “Come and get me.”
“Why the hell not.” He gripped the handle, opened the door, and stepped out into the still pouring rain.
_______________________________________________
He watched the wall of monitors, so much happening, so little time left for it to all unfold. He had just watched his son decimate all of the soldiers stationed at the Fort Xorn depository; over two hundred soldiers killed without giving Adam’s armor even the slightest of scratches. He couldn’t help but be impressed. Despite everything, this was still his son, tearing through the country, killing the most powerful governing body in the world. How many had tried to kill The Seven over the years? How many had failed? All of them. Until now, until his son, alone, completely by himself, had done that which all the others couldn’t have conceived of doing.
The show at the depository had been quite the spectacle, but he knew it was all for naught. Adam had the right plan, but he had thought of every eventuality, every contingency. There would be no surprises tonight.
He looked at the bottom corner on his wall of monitors. Emily continued to sit in her cell, her nose still bleeding ever so slightly from her previous over exertion. He knew that she had been helping The Detective during his fight with his special children. Not that it mattered. It was his desire that The Detective stay alive, so therefore, The Detective was still alive. When he needed The Detective to be dead, he would make sure the dog on two legs was dead. When and how was his choice, and no one else would make that decision for him.
He looked up at a monitor near the top: The Detective drove through the storm, hell bent on arriving here to rescue his fair maiden. He wondered if The Detective would have tried so hard to get here if it was Ice in the cell instead of Emily. He d
oubted it. Besides, Ice wouldn’t have waited to be rescued; she would have already fought her way out. He was still surprised that Ice would have picked one like The Detective over him, choosing one so weak over one so strong. Such a shame.
He picked up the phone and placed it to his ear.
“Yes, Chancellor,” the voice on the other end said in answer.
“The Detective is almost here; have Peterson prepare the welcoming committee. When The Detective arrives, he is to come straight to me. No detours. And once he arrives, no one comes up until I give the all clear code, and then, I will need at least three clean-up crews brought up. Are we clear?”
“Yes sir,” the voice replied.
He bent down and pushed a button on the console. Without waiting for a voice to answer, he spoke into the receiver: “Do not make your presence known until my son arrives. And then, you are free to do with The Detective whatever you wish.”
He lowered the phone and returned it to its resting place on the console. He looked at the wall of monitors and the many different views of his city. So many different places, so many different players in his little game, yet there was only one way it could all end.
_______________________________________________
The Detective walked through the rain, all the while continually staring at the giant white tower standing before him. He was still a block away, but the hundred story building dominated the darkened skyline. He realized he should have been annoyed at having to, yet again, take a long stroll through the rain; after all, he was still drenched from his last exposure. But everything still maintained that sense of finality he had felt from earlier. In his mind, this felt like his last walk in the rain, his last time staring into a dark sky, his final time wishing he could see the moon and the stars.
If this was it, somewhere deep inside, buried well beyond everything he felt on the surface, he knew this was worth it. Emily, in the end, was an innocent in all of this. It wasn’t her fault that she happened to have a sister who was one of The Seven; it wasn’t her fault that she had encountered him earlier that day; it wasn’t her fault The Agent was using her as a pawn to lure The Detective to this place, this building, this imminent finale.
