by Archer, Mia
She looked at me with an expectant look. The sort of look I got from Natalie when she was quoting one of her geeky movies. There were times when it was downright eerie how similar the two women were.
“I have no idea what movie you’re talking about,” I said. “At least I’m assuming it’s a movie you’re quoting at me right now.”
“Well duh,” she said. “Back to the Future is like one of the best movies that’s ever been created. It’s just a shame time travel isn’t a real thing.”
“Natalie said the same thing,” I said. “Though she couldn’t seem to decide whether or not it was a good thing or a bad thing that time travel couldn’t be invented. It really depended on how much she wanted to use time travel to solve a problem and how much time she had to figure out the possible unintended consequences of solving a problem through time travel.”
“Yup. Funny how that works,” Sabine said. “On the one hand you want the ability to go back and fix some of the mistakes you’ve made. On the other hand you don’t want to give someone the ability to send a robot back in time to kill you or your parents or something before you have a chance to really get a start on your career.”
“Okay, I know which one that is,” I said.
“You do?” Sabine said. “Never would’ve figured you for the geeky movie type.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Just a big admirer of Arnold.”
“Natalie was the same way. Always hanging out in the gym. Annoying, but it made her ass look good in those tight outfits she liked,” she said.
“You’ll get no disagreement from me on that,” I said.
We both stared off into space for a moment. Clearly our minds were both in a place where we were thinking of a particular set of curves in a tight villain catsuit.
Finally Sabine shook her head. “Well let’s get a look at my map which is totally one hundred percent accurate, thank you very much. I was only saying that for the sake of a quote.”
“But it’s not accurate,” I said. “Clearly you’re not going off of a live view of the city because you don’t have any of the damage on any of those buildings.”
“Oh,” she said, looking her 3D holographic map over again. “Well I guess when you put it that way you’re right, but it’s not like that’s my fault. You’re the one who went full villain and destroyed big chunks of the city.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said, looking over the hologram. “I didn’t go full villain out there today.”
“You’re a stranger from another world with powers that make you a living goddess. You’re able to take out giant irradiated lizards with a single punch. You’ve come here and decided to embark on a plan that’s going to completely upset the way things work on this world…”
“And we’ve already established that the reason I’m upsetting the apple cart on this planet is because the place is a post apocalyptic hellscape where the bad guys have won. Defeating the bad guys doesn’t make you a bad guy. It makes you the hero,” I said, patiently explaining this for what felt like the thousandth time.
Unfortunately there were no giant irradiated lizards this time around to grab her and help prove my point. She was still willing to help me out, to a point, but she was also obviously going to give me a lot of lip while she was at it.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night lady,” Sabine said. “Now if you look here you’ll see their fusion plant. If you go in and drop strategic charges here, here, and here then it will cause a feedback in the system that will result in a resonance cascade and…”
She stopped explaining everything with words. Because there was no need to go explaining everything with words when the holographic display she had going did all the explaining for her.
I watched in slowly dawning horror as a massive explosion started at the fusion plant and rolled out over the city, taking everything with it. Clearly this display was set up to show battle damage. It just didn’t reflect the most recent battle damage from our fight with the giant lizards.
“Can you pause this or something?” I asked.
“Well yeah,” she said. “But isn’t this really awesome?”
There was something about the gleam in her eye that unsettled me. I didn’t like anyone who took pleasure in the indiscriminate destruction of an entire city.
Even Natalie had never contemplated something like that in all the time she’d spent trying to take over the city. She was always clear that in order to take over the city she had to leave something behind to take over.
“We are not blowing up the city,” I said. “What the heck are you thinking coming up with a crazy plan like that?”
“What?” she said. “You’re the one who said you wanted to get rid of the alien worms once and for all. If we destroy the city then technically there are no more worms, no more cats mind controlling the people, and no more people to be mind controlled.”
“I’m sorry, but what part of our interactions together made you think I would ever go along with something like this?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You told me you wanted a way to rid the city of the worms. This is a way you rid the city of the worms.”
I slammed my fist down on the holograph projection table. It wasn’t long for the world after I slammed my fist down though. The thing cracked down the middle and split in two.
Oops. I guess I’d hit the thing a little harder than I intended. I was still getting used to having my old strength back.
Sabine stared down at it with a neutral but obviously ticked off glare.
“Um. So it was pretty hard to get all the pieces to make something like that work on this planet, so thanks for that,” she said.
“Your model was out of date anyway,” I said. “And if the best you can come up with is eliminating a good chunk of the city then maybe you don’t deserve to have nice toys. I said I wanted to save the city, not that I wanted to kill all the worms.”
“Well I thought that went without saying so…”
“So nothing,” I said. “We’re saving these aliens, and that doesn’t involve killing everyone in this city so we can say we technically liberated them!”
Sabine sighed. “I worried you might say something like that.”
“Come on. You’re not under the control of these worms. You have to have something that’s keeping you from doing their bidding,” I said.
“Well yeah,” she said, suddenly hesitating. “But it’s not like that’s something that I can mass produce.”
“Seriously?” I said. “You’ve got a bunch of tech that looks like the kind of stuff Natalie had.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I can put together something that protects people from mind control overnight. She was working on the theoretical stuff, but it must’ve been something she invented after Dr. Lana shoved me through that portal and left me to sleep with the mind controlling worms.”
I sighed. I was about to do something that felt very stupid, but at the same time I figured it was the only way I was going to save these people. Sometimes to do the right thing you had to take some risks.
I reached into my ear. Pulled out the earbud that’d been trapped there since I arrived on this planet. An earbud that hadn’t lost its battery power despite all the time I’d spent on this world. Talk about impressive.
I held it out to Sabine. She stared with her mouth open and her eyes twinkling with equal parts awe and avarice.
“Is that…”
“Exactly what it looks like,” I said. “I was worried about sharing this with you, but if we’re going to work together on this then we’re going to have to trust each other.”
She looked at me and licked her lips. Then down to the earbud. It didn’t look like much. A tiny earbud designed to fit into the ear canal and block out all sounds that went above a certain decibel level.
Not that I needed that these days. No, my eardrums were just as impervious to damage as the rest of my body now, but this had come in handy when I was flying around withou
t those powers.
“I might be able to do something with this,” she said. “Maybe. We’re going to have to raid my stores though. It’s been awhile since I’ve had to invent something new and fabricate it.”
I nodded. “Well let’s get to it. And I’m going to need that thing back before we go into the city again. I’m not in the mood to suddenly find myself under the control of a bunch of crazy cats being controlled by worms.”
“Right,” she said, plucking the earbud out of my hand. She held it up and looked at the small bit of tech as though she was examining a priceless jewel.
I suppose on this world that’s exactly what it was. It was priceless because it held the key to helping the people of this world finally get the freedom they probably didn’t even realize they wanted.
I smiled. I felt like we were finally getting somewhere with this whole plot. I just hoped the somewhere we were getting didn’t end with me enslaved because I gave up the goods with that earbud.
19
Science!
“I just don’t get it,” I said.
“What’s not to get?” Sabine asked.
I looked around at the junk she was rummaging through. It mostly looked like cast off bits of technology that had the same aesthetic as everything else I’d seen since arriving on this planet.
Which is to say it was totally alien while at the same time looking weirdly familiar. I held up something that looked like a flip phone with added fiddly bits on the side.
“Natalie was always going on about how they invented cell phones that flipped open because of some ancient TV show,” I said, looking at the thing. “So why the heck would they invent something like that on this planet?”
“Turns out earth isn’t the only planet that develops cheesy science fiction programming staring a Shatner lookalike when they enter the space age,” Sabine said, popping up from a pile of junk she’d been tossing around.
“Huh,” I said. “So you’re saying there’s, like, infinite Shatners in infinite combinations or something?”
She hit me with a flat stare and arched an eyebrow.
“What?” I asked.
“Come on. You can’t tell me you didn’t do that on purpose,” she said.
“Do what on purpose?” I asked.
She made a noise that sounded half disgusted and half amused. Then she dove back into the pile of alien technology. I still wasn’t sure what the heck I’d done, but if I didn’t miss my guess it probably had something to do with some stupid cheesy ‘60s scifi I’d inadvertently stumbled into quoting.
“Seriously,” I said, looking around at all the discarded dust laden crap. “What’s the point of having a volcano lair like this if you don’t have any cool stuff to play with?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, popping up from another part of the room.
“Are you tunneling through this stuff or something? And what it’s supposed to mean is you have an evil villain lair thing going for you complete with lava and advanced technology they clearly don’t have on this planet…”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Everything I use here is stuff I’ve stolen from them. Except for the suit. That’s a Natalie original.”
“The shields?” I asked.
“Totally something they have here. They just have to have a huge reactor to power the stuff. I plugged it into the reactor Natalie put on the safety suit she tossed me into though, and it’s the only thing that’s saved me from dying of radiation poisoning since I got here.”
I frowned. That sort of made sense. She’d been on this world for a long time and yet she wasn’t dead. Sure I’d been on this world without dying too, but I figured that was because I sort of had the whole invulnerability thing going for me again.
There was no reason why she should still be alive. Like presumably it would take time for her to figure out how to plug shielding into that reactor on her suit, and the radiation would’ve been doing its thing that entire time. Her survival and continued existence on this planet didn’t make sense when you got down to it, but whatever. Natalie was the science type. I tended to deal with the world as I saw it.
“So you’re saying you haven’t invented anything on your own?” I asked. “What about floating around and flying? That was something only Natalie figured out back on earth.”
“Yup,” she said. “That must be a neat trick that makes her look pretty awesome to the rubes back on the pale blue dot, but I took all of my levitation stuff from the blue locals. You’ll note they fly around in flying saucers most of the time. Again they need bigger generators to get their hovering thing going, but the one thing I’ve been able to bring to the tech on this planet is miniaturization.”
“That is odd,” I said. “Do you think they’ve visited earth before and that’s where all the reports of flying saucers come from?”
“Doubt it,” Sabine said, her voice muffled as she crashed around somewhere in the storage room. “Probably just an example of separate civilizations coming up with different versions of the same technology. Only they actually implemented it while on earth it’s mostly the kind of technology that shows up in the drunken dreams of ET chasers.”
I shrugged. She had a point. The fact that I’d changed in what was basically a phone booth when I was fighting off those giant lizards was proof enough that these aliens had a sort of earthlike design philosophy when it came to a lot of their stuff.
Though if there really were a bunch of technological civilizations out there that were coming up with the same technology then I guess it probably wasn’t earthlike at all.
“Come on,” I said. “This is boring. Don’t you at least have video games or something?”
“I do, but they’re all pretty boring,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“No Internet gaming on this planet. They do all their multiplayer via the hive mind. No point in networked gaming when you have a biological network that’s already good to go,” she said.
“You’re telling me there’s no Internet on this planet?” I asked, my voice tinged with horror.
“Afraid not,” Natalie said.
“But how do they share pictures of cats or hook up or anything like that?” I asked.
“Oh don’t worry about that,” Sabine said, her head popping up from one of the junk piles. “They have entire media channels dedicated to sharing pictures of their cat overlords. Like it’s the kind of stuff that would make an ancient Egyptian tell them they need to dial it back just a little.”
“Oh,” I said. “What about hooking up?”
“The less said about that the better,” she said. “Suffice it to say the hive mind decides who gets to mate based on qualities the worms want to propagate through the population.”
“Huh,” I said. “So basically you’re saying we’ve got arranged marriages on steroids?”
“More like arranged fucking,” she said. “There’s no marriage on this world. I think they had a custom like that once upon a time, but there’s no need for that now that they’re all part of a mind controlled network that they interface with through their cats.”
“This planet is really screwed up,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Sabine said.
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at something. She dove into the pile of junk and came up with a gleaming bit of technology that shone in the meager light of the overhead lamp illuminating the storage area.
“Here we are!” she said. “A good old fashioned jammer!”
“Huh,” I said. “I’m surprised you couldn’t find that thing earlier considering how shiny and new it is compared to everything else in here.”
“Yeah, well you try finding something buried in all the junk here,” she said. “I should be able to use the technology in that little earbud you brought with you to modify this thing to interrupt whatever the heck is going on to connect those cats to their blue aliens.”
“Good,” I said. “The soon
er we take care of this stuff and get off this planet the better.”
Sabine hit me with a funny look. “Why would you want to get off this world once you’ve freed them? You’ll be hailed as a savior. They’ll give you the key to the city and everything. The person who saves them from the cats is going to be able to run the show in this city!”
I shook my head. “Once we’ve freed them from oppression we’re going to use their gratitude to take control of that power plant you were talking about and punch a hole back to good old fashioned earth.”
“I figured you’d say something like that,” Sabine said.
“Yes, and you’re going to go along with it. I think being trapped on this planet has made you a little stir crazy,” I said.
It’d made her a little crazy, pure and simple, but I wasn’t going to say anything about that. Not until we were back on earth and I felt more secure telling her she needed to dial back that crazy just a bit.
“Maybe it has,” she said. “Or maybe I like the idea of taking over a city and running it for a little while.”
I floated over and snatched the shiny bit of technology from her hands. She hit me with a dirty look and stuck her tongue out, but she also floated after me.
“Sorry,” I said. “But the fact that you want to replace one sort of oppression with another is a good enough reason to head back to earth where you can’t get into as much trouble.”
“Whatever,” she muttered.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “We’re freeing these people. Not taking over. Remember that, because I’m going to make you regret it if you try to turn this rescue into a hostile takeover.”
“Whatever,” she muttered again, sounding even more sullen than before.
I figured that was going to lead to problems at some point. If she was anything like any other villain I’d ever known, Natalie aside, then there was a good chance she was going to try for a hostile takeover or a doublecross.
At least I could take comfort in the knowledge that she hadn’t actually invented any of the stuff she was using on this world. I figured that meant she was a lot less likely to come up with something she could use against me. She definitely wasn’t going to be able to pull a Dr. Lana and rob me of my powers.
