Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  Sarah shrugs her good shoulder at me. “Robot. Told you.”

  “I’m not a robot,” says Doc irritably. That’s good. Irritable is good.

  “Then what’s with the dead robot on the floor here?” I ask.

  “I’m an android. I—oh. Oh, Danny, I’m so sorry. I didn’t…I thought there was more time.”

  “Doc, what’s going on?”

  There is a long pause, and I open my mouth to repeat the question, but she speaks again. “Utopia is my mother. She built me, six years ago. I promise, I didn’t know she was my mother until last night. I told you I was running from someone, right? That’s who, but I didn’t realize she’d taken a new name and face until you told me she knew who you were yesterday. How could she know? Even if she saw you—and I don’t think she did because she’d have killed you on the spot—but even if she did, how does that get her a name? She learned it from me. She must have let me go, and kept a back door into my programming so she could slip into my mind any time she chose. She could wear me like a glove, if she wanted.”

  Something tumbles into place and locks. At the time, I was freaking out and didn’t really pay attention, but I remember what Utopia said to me. She said she’d killed two Dreadnoughts.

  I was there when she killed the third Dreadnought last month, but the second Dreadnought was killed by a kaiju, not a person. Which means she as much as told me who she is.

  Not a supervillain, but the supervillain.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” asks Sarah.

  “Utopia is—”

  “Mistress Malice, yes,” says Doc Impossible.

  Sarah says a few things that could strip the paint off a battleship.

  “She built me as a culmination of her project to create a true artificial intelligence, to prove consciousness can exist on a synthetic substrate,” says Doc. “I was step one of her plan.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “If what I think I know isn’t some kind of double bluff, I think she’s trying to upload herself. I have always had a fascination with neural-electrical links, which is strange now that I think about it because I’ve never had neurons. She must have been nudging me, all the time, always there, she was—”

  “The plan, Doctor,” says Sarah.

  “Oh. Right. Once she proved consciousness could exist in a digital environment, she’d want to migrate her own mind into such an environment. But that’s not easy to do, there’s a lot of theory of mind questions that need to be solved; if she just made a software copy of her brain, the program might think it was her, but would it be? My mother is the world’s biggest narcissist, so there’s no way she’d let a digital copy of herself have all the fun. She needed a way to be sure it was her inside the machine, not a knockoff. The neural prosthetics I was developing can be repurposed to convert her brain into a computer one neuron at a time. Once her brain is fully digitized, her mind will be software. The connections were there, I just…didn’t see them. God, I’m so stupid.”

  Sarah and I trade glances. She looks as lost as I feel. “That’s it? She just wants to be a computer program?”

  “No,” says Doc Impossible. “She wants to rule the world. This is a means to an end. As self-aware, self-editing malignant stream of code injected into the internet, she could take control of everything from online banking to nuclear launch codes. She could store a thousand copies of herself in darknet servers all over the world, and become impossible to kill.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I vote no,” Sarah says.

  The heavy, hanging defeat returns to Doc Impossible’s voice. “It doesn’t matter. She’s already won. When I realized I was compromised, I created a copy of myself inside my backup servers, and set it to recompile from the kernel up while doing a checksum against every segment of code. This would hopefully create a clean version of myself, one free of her control. That’s the version that’s speaking to you now. But Sarah was still in serious condition, and I couldn’t leave her alone while my debug program ran.”

  A wall flickers to life, and a video feed begins to play. It’s the conference room, shot from up high in a corner. The Legion is sitting around a table, waiting for something. Doc Impossible enters, carrying a small round device.

  “I made a mistake. I let the compromised version run for a few more hours to keep an eye on her. We all thought we’d have more time.”

  In the video, Doc Impossible is speaking to the gathered Legion. They lean in, interested in what she has to say. She sets the small device down in the center of the table and steps back. Valkyrja is looking up at her and asking a question when it happens. Little jets of gas spurt from the device, a cloud like a greasy heat smudge fills the air.

  “Mother used my body to ambush them. She puppeted me. I don’t know where she got the nerve gas.”

  Valkyrja’s mouth is hanging open, cheek muscles bunching and spasming as she flops out of her chair and begins to jerk. Carapace leaps up from his seat, but Doc Impossible points what looks like a car key fob at him and his armor falls right off in pieces. Almost instantly, he’s crumpled to the ground and choking on his own vomit. Magma is on his feet, staggering toward Doc with his hands out, but trips over his own feet and goes down. He doesn’t get back up. Chlorophyll isn’t fazed by the gas. He grows thorns like claws all over his fists and charges with a shout of rage, but Impossible pulls a gun and shoots him just above his left eye. His head bursts open like bloody cabbage. His leg jumps once, twice, as he lies there at the edge of death. Graywytch’s robes have come alive with burning sigils. Her bird is twitching on the ground next to her, and she’s slashed her arm open with a ceremonial dagger, the blood spattered around her at every point of the compass. Doc Impossible’s body raises its gun and fires at her again and again. The bullets slam into air and burst into shrapnel. Graywytch’s lips curl back and she spits words at Doc’s body. Utopia lowers the gun, says something in reply, and leaves.

  “Carapace and Valkyrja are confirmed KIA. Magma probably is, too. Chlorophyll is immune to poison, but likely won’t survive much longer without medical aid. Graywytch is in a protective circle, but if she were able to leave her zone of safety she would have done so by now.”

  “No.” It’s not true. This is a trick, a lie, some kind of test. It’s not true. It’s not true.

  “It happened, Danny. The Legion is gone.”

  I look at Sarah. She’ll know what to do. She’ll know how to make it better.

  Sarah stares back at me, lost in horror. That, more than anything, is what makes it real to me. My knees grow weak, and I sit down heavily in a plastic chair next to her bed.

  “Mother then came down here to kill Calamity, but the clean version of myself finished initializing and managed to contest control of my body long enough to shoot myself,” continues Doc. “I have an independent security system for this level, as well as a Faraday cage around the whole lab. After I severed the datalinks to the rest of the building, she could not intrude again. But I’m trapped here until my new body is finished fabricating.”

  “How long until she’s finished uploading herself?” I ask the question but it sounds like it came from someone else.

  “I can’t tell from in here. Minutes, probably. No more than an hour.”

  “There’s still time to stop her,” says Sarah, but she sounds like she’s voicing a hope, not a conviction.

  “No, she’s won. She’s behind a security system that was built to keep out someone like Red Steel. You could punch through the vault walls, Danny, but they’d discharge their voltage into you, and electricity is one of the few things that you’re almost as vulnerable to as anyone else. They’re powered by the building’s main reactor, but that’s inside the vault, too. She’s won. I’m sorry.”

  There’s a hole in the bottom of me, a hole everything is draining out of, leaving me cold and empty. Too late. Too slow. Too weak. I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t strong enough. It’s over. Mistress Malice, Utopia, whatever
she wants to call herself—it doesn’t matter. Soon she’ll be able to call herself Empress, if she wants. They’re all dead, and I’m alone. The creeping, bubbling shame of it takes hold as I realize I’m scared, not for the world, but for me. She’s going to kill me. What’s one more Dreadnought but just another notch in her belt?

  Sarah perks up. “Wait, what kind of reactor is it?”

  Doc Impossible sounds nonplussed. “Supercritical light water fission, why?”

  “Then it’s got to have a coolant loop, right? I can’t imagine you could fit even that in the secured zone.”

  “No, but the coolant has its own…wait, the security for that hadn’t been upgraded on schedule. It’s on a different system, but main security has a placeholder dummy script in its place. We had to hack it that way to keep the alarms from going off all the time, and then just never got around to actually fixing it. She probably doesn’t even know the hole is there.”

  “Can you un-sever your datalinks?” asks Sarah.

  “Yes, it’s just an analog break switch—”

  “Well, that’s a plan then, isn’t it? You turn off the security, and I go down and cut the coolant pipes. That will scram the reactor, and while the system is switching over to the backups, Danny—” Sarah stops, smiles. “Dreadnought goes in and wrecks Utopia’s day.”

  “That could work,” I say.

  Sarah throws off her blankets and swings her legs over the side of the bed.

  “Wait, you’re not healthy enough to be moving around,” says Doc.

  “I ain’t dead yet,” snarls Calamity. “Point me to some explosives, I mean to return a favor.”

  • • •

  Calamity’s breathing is heavy in my ear. The earbud radio still smells like emulsion from the fabricator. We didn’t have time to tune them properly, so her mic is picking up all sorts of extra noise. I can hear every cuss and exertion as she claws along the serviceway deep in the building’s guts. There’s a junction she’s got to get to for this to work, but it’s deep in a rat’s nest of pipes and passageways. Hands and knees only, but she’s short a hand.

  “Almost there,” she says, and it sounds like she’s speaking from inside my head.

  Doc Impossible comes on the line. “Remember, you need to set them to detonate in sequence, so—”

  “I was paying attention, Doc,” grumbles Calamity. She goes on to repeat something Doc said about shaped charges, word for word to rub it in.

  I’m standing in a hallway on the same level as the main computer core. Actually, it’s the middle floor of the five-floor complex that houses the core, reactor, nanolab, and secure vault. The computers inside the Legion’s tower are some of the most advanced on Earth, and contain a lot of the most sensitive and secret information imaginable. The vault holds…well, nobody’s really sure, but everyone knows it’s not just for the Legion’s use. A lot of private groups pay to store sensitive stuff here, too. After all, what’s safer than a building full of superheroes?

  The main core complex is housed in an enormous armored citadel set within the tower. It’s a shell of solid steel larger than most houses. Much larger. Its walls aren’t strong enough to keep me out, but they’re designed to zap anyone who touches their bare surface with enough voltage to seriously ruin my day. When the reactor does an emergency scram to avoid a meltdown, there will be a break in the current while the system switches over to backups. I’ll have 2.3 seconds to punch my way through nine inches of armored steel. I’ve picked out the section I’m going to attack and carefully pulled the drywall down.

  Now I stare at the target down a long hallway: a bare spot on the wall. The emergency lights splash harsh black shadows against the walls.

  “Hey Doc, I’ve got a question,” I say.

  “Go ahead.” Her voice has a slight crackle as it comes over the radio link.

  “Why does an android need to smoke?”

  “Addiction.ini,” says Doc Impossible.

  “What?”

  “I thought…I thought maybe an addiction would make me more human,” she says. “Like I could be what I wanted to be. Not what she made me. But I was wrong.”

  “Oh. When we’re done here—”

  “All set,” says Calamity.

  “Okay, get out of there,” says Doc. The really nerve-wracking part is we don’t know how much time we have left. Could be an hour. Could be two minutes.

  “Yes, Ma.” A few minutes after that, she says she’s reached a safe spot to detonate from.

  I take a runner’s stance and line up.

  “Dreadnought?” Calamity asks.

  “Yeah?”

  “Best of luck.”

  I smile. The world’s about to end, but somehow she doesn’t seem worried. I don’t know what I’d do without her. “See you on the other side, Calamity.”

  “Going in five, four, three—”

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “Are you going to detonate it on one, or the beat after one?”

  A clearly transmitted sigh. “The beat after.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Five, four, three, two…”

  On one I dig into the lattice and push off.

  Calamity is saying mark at the same time a shudder goes through the building.

  The hallway rushes and blurs around me. The power fails and the switchover begins as my fist hits the wall with everything I have behind it. It sounds like if you hid inside a dumpster and someone beat on the outside with a cinder block, but louder, much louder. Shock waves of tight-packed pain shoot through my knuckles and up my wrist. The wall buckles inward, a shrieking floor-to-ceiling dent a foot deep. A tenth of a second later, my other fist hits, and joins its song to the tremendous, incredible noise. My fists blur like hummingbird wings, a rolling cacophony shakes loose ceiling tiles, and then I’m through. The armored walls fall away, and I burst into the main computer core.

  Utopia is there, chestplate open, firing her glittering beam straight through my chest.

  There’s no pain, not at first. No, it’s more like a sense of wrongness. There’s something missing, or maybe something where it doesn’t belong. There’s a detonation from far behind me where the inversion beam is carving a tunnel through the building. Hot wind presses my cape to my back and makes dust devils out of rubble.

  When I look down at my chest, I see a neat little hole about the size of a golf ball. It’s charred around the edges, and I think it goes all the way through. I open my mouth to scream, and the wound whistles as my scorched, punctured lung begins to leak. The scream dies as a horrified gasp.

  Then the pain comes. It comes in crashing tsunami waves, endless and heavy, drowning all thought, obliterating all sense. Something jolts my knees, and I realize I’m falling around the time the floor smacks me in the face. I writhe and gasp.

  “Very good, Danielle,” says Utopia. “You almost made it.”

  She shoots me again.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The world peels away and leaves behind a scarlet haze. Someone is dragging me by my ankle. My head is knocking against stairs. The pain is everywhere, everything. A white bar of agony is punched through my chest. Another through my gut. With my eyes closed, I peer into the lattice and examine myself. If I could, I’d scream.

  I’m unraveling.

  The lattice is a hard white net against absolute black. The strings of reality are infinitely thin and infinitely bright. Everything is a knot or a twist in the lattice. Every bird in the sky, every song on the radio, it’s all in the lattice. I’m not different. My body is a pattern of twists and ties and wraps and bindings. But now there are two holes punched straight through. And at the edges, the lines have snapped. They drift and wave in a current that isn’t there, and as they shift, they unkink, untie, unknit themselves. My pattern is growing loose, a cascade of reactions spreading out from the wound. This line is slack so that knot comes undone. These twists are slashed, so those tangles start to slide apart. And every
shift, every unraveling, is agony.

  “Danielle, can you hear me?” someone asks from far away. A moan is the best reply I can manage. “Please try. I may have overdone it.”

  It’s Utopia. That’s right. I was supposed to fight her. I drag my eyes open, and shove them into focus. We’re in the main computer core. A vaulted ceiling above a deep pit with catwalks around the edges. And in the center, a computer that’s made as much of glass as it is of metal. Utopia steps up to a console, lifts a crown of wires tethered by a cable to the main core, and places it on her head.

  I’m propped up against a console, a few yards away from her. My tongue is thick and dry. It takes me a few swallows, but I croak out a “Stop.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. You have delayed, but not prevented my ascension. If you can hold on, however, I might be able to save you.”

  “What?” Something gives way inside me, and I clench against a horrible sensation of draining, like someone has pulled a stopper from a jug and glug, glug, glug, there goes my life. The sensation passes and I sag. My skin has gone clammy and tight.

  “I was serious when I said I try to avoid unneeded killings.” Utopia really seems to believe that.

  “You tried to shoot Calamity. You tried to shoot her in her bed.”

  Utopia is quiet for a moment. “Yes. Well. Your presence here shows it would have been better for me if I had.” The lights in the core begin to blink, and holographic screens project images of her brain. The nanomachines are swarming inside her skull, mapping all the connections.

  “You’re Mistress Malice.” I try to get my arm under me and push myself to my feet. If I can get to my feet, I might be able to…I don’t know. Something. I’ve got to do something before I die. She killed Valkyrja, and Magma, and all the others. She has to be punished for that. I can’t let her win. My shoulder erupts with pinching, tearing, slicing pain when I put weight on it. It feels like there’s a colony of carnivorous termites carving their way into my joints, chewing on the sinews. I cry out, a feeble squeak. Strongest girl in the world, yep. That’s me.