by Logan Jacobs
I waved down a waiter to request the bill.
As he went to fetch it Dynamo said, “Well, the sooner we do that, the sooner we get to go home.”
I knew she was referring to Pinnacle City more broadly, but still, I wondered if when she said “home” she was still picturing her own penthouse apartment that she’d bought after landing her Warden contract, or if by this point she was starting to think of my classically decorated yet deceptively teched out mansion as her home.
Then I realized that for the first time in my life, I hoped that a woman wanted to refer to my home as her home.
Chapter Three
Once we got back to the rental mansion, Norma showed Aileen a photo of herself by the giant umbrella.
“This is one of the sites we visited,” she said. “Do you think you could edit this for me? If you could just brighten my skin tone, and maybe edit out that stomach bulge, and if my eyes didn’t look so squinty here… ”
Aileen responded by opening a laptop and pulling up another photo of Norma clearly taken within the same time frame from a different, more flattering angle.
“How did you do that?” I demanded.
“I got bored and managed to hack into a few of the security systems in the areas where I knew you three would be,” Aileen replied coyly.
“Send that to me, it’s so much better than mine!” Norma exclaimed.
Aileen obliged her.
“We have a supervillain to go after,” I reminded my human assistant.
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said with a grin.
Then, Norma, Dynamo, and I armored up in our supersuits. Well, Norma’s wasn’t a supersuit strictly speaking, since it didn’t enhance her abilities in any way, since her ability by definition seemed to defy enhancement. If Norma wore footwear with extra bounce designed to make you run faster, she found herself pumping her legs slower than usual so that her overall pace remained the same. If she wore gloves like mine with force amplifying fibers to enable a normal human to punch through bricks, her arms suddenly became so weak that the overall force of her strikes remained completely average. But it was a protective suit. It wasn’t as skin tight as Dynamo’s suit, but it sure looked a hell of a lot better on Norma than the outfits that she chose on her own. And best of all, just wearing the suit seemed to remind Norma that she was in fact technically a superhuman, and made her feel more confident and powerful.
Once we’d checked our gear, we piled into one of our new cars and drove out of the city limits toward the warehouse that the tracker had pinpointed as the last known location of the nanobot container.
“This feels like a trap,” Dynamo said. “Remember when we drove The Virus out to a remote warehouse?”
“Remember how that went for him?” I scoffed.
“Yup, but unlike The Virus, we’re the ones driving ourselves there, we’re in control, and we’re fully aware that it might be a trap,” Norma giggled sadistically as she recalled the elaborately booby trapped warehouse which we had subjected The Virus and two of his henchmen to. It had involved spiked stairs and electrocution via a kiddie pool, among other things.
“We won’t enter the warehouse unless we determine that it’s probably safe to do so,” I continued. “If it is some kind of ambush or rigged with booby traps like ours was, then that will tell us more about how our enemy operates.”
“We’ve got these in case they want to use the kind of gas that we like to use,” Norma added as she tapped the gas mask that was hanging around her neck, just like the ones Dynamo and I had.
“And best of all, we have Aileen,” I concluded.
Aileen was built to be practically indestructible. Her metal body could withstand almost any blast short of a nuclear bomb. But even if it somehow got destroyed, that wouldn’t really mean anything beyond a major inconvenience. I still had all the plans for it and could reconstruct it if necessary, and her body didn’t house her mind. Her mind was a program that was stored in the servers of The Cellar and backed up across various clouds. That wasn’t going anywhere.
Honestly, Aileen would probably outlive me, Norma, and Dynamo. The only thing that could potentially end her existence was a superior computer program that for some reason decided to eradicate her, and I’d never yet met a programmer that I thought could write one.
“I will be your eyes and ears within the warehouse,” Aileen murmured in agreement.
“Cut the headlights, we’re getting close,” Dynamo said. “It’s about half a mile away according to this map.”
I not only cut the headlights, I pulled off the road to park out of sight, and then I turned off the car and got out. After my three teammates all got out as well, we closed the doors, I locked the car, and then we walked the rest of the way in the pitch black. Well, it wasn’t quite pitch black, since our night vision contact lenses could adjust to a change in lighting in either direction within a millisecond, so we were able to see perfectly.
When we got within sight of a row of stark concrete buildings Dynamo pointed at one in the middle. “It’s that one, right Aileen?”
“Yes,” Aileen confirmed. “I will go in. You three stay here. I will route the feed from my eyes to your phone, Miles.”
I nodded, and the three of us crouched in a grove of trees while my beautiful silver robot continued toward the warehouse that was the last known location of my stolen medical nanobot shipment. As I watched the gleam of her metallic curves, I wished she were a little less reflective. Skin would help solve that problem once I had time to develop some that worked a bit better than the component I had used for her face.
Aileen reached the warehouse without being confronted or stopped by anyone, and then I watched through her eyes on my phone as she reconfigured her human hands, which had a total of eight options at this point, into lock picks and gained entrance that way.
Dynamo and Norma both pressed up against either side of me to peer at my phone screen and watched with bated breath while Aileen methodically proceeded down each empty aisleway of the warehouse. The shelving was still there. The forklifts were there. The stairs and ladders were there. But whatever merchandise the warehouse had recently contained was completely absent. It was eerily deserted.
There was absolutely no sign of the nanobots anywhere, nor of any lurking supervillains or their henchmen.
Then, Aileen’s voice said in my earpiece, “Hmm. I detect the presence of chemical compounds with explosive potential below this section of the floor.”
“Okay, get out before it blows then,” I said. The nanobots didn’t seem to be there, and there wasn’t any point in her risking damage, even if the risk was minimal.
“Wait,” Aileen said. “I think I see something.”
She stepped around the corner, and her eyes panned across the last wall of the warehouse. There was some kind of message scrawled across it in large sloppy letters that dripped dark red.
As I attempted to read it, a blinding orange flash of billowing flames overtook the screen. The whooshing and booming sounds filled our ears too. I had a weird moment of disorientation from not being sure which signs of the explosion I was processing through the video and audio feeds and which signs I was processing in real life. It was like questioning whether I was just inside some kind of vast simulation.
But when we looked up at the warehouse a few hundred yards away, the explosion was clearly real, and the entire building was engulfed in flames that no human could have survived.
“Aileen?” I asked nervously into my microspeaker.
There was no response.
A minute later, her curvaceous silhouette materialized from the burning warehouse and she strode toward our position like a supermodel on a runway. I knew that nothing had really happened to her, but it looked like some kind of dramatic rebirth, and the humanity of her face and hair had all melted off her and left her just a gleaming silver essence.
I kept an eye on the warehouse behind her and the surrounding buildings for any sign of movement, of
anyone following or watching her, but I didn’t see anything. As far as I could tell, the bomb had just been left there unattended for anyone who came by seeking the nanobots. I guess they had probably found the tracker then and separated it from the goods to lure pursuers to this warehouse on purpose.
Once Aileen reached us we started heading back to the car while keeping an eye out for anyone who might be sneaking up on us. But, again, there didn’t seem to have been any supervillains lurking around the warehouse in person. They had just rigged it to blow and left it there.
“Can you infer about the identity of the thief based on what you saw in that warehouse?” I asked Aileen.
“Let’s return to the security of the house where I can show you an enhanced image of the message on the wall I recorded, and then my explanation will make more sense to you,” Aileen replied.
“Okay,” I agreed and absentmindedly started to place a hand on her shoulder. Then I immediately yanked it back with a sharp intake of breath when I realized that she was scalding hot to the touch.
“You are hot,” I snickered.
“In more ways than one,” she said, and then her chrome face twisted into a smile that probably would have looked terribly unsettling to anyone but me.
But I was happy that she had made a somewhat successful joke.
We drove with our car lights off for a while and took a circuitous route back to the mansion to ensure that we weren’t being followed, and then we all went into the kitchen and Norma put some tea on to boil while Aileen got a laptop and transmitted an image of the warehouse wall.
She zoomed in on the message written in what was clearly either blood or a substance designed to imitate blood, and Elizabeth and I squinted at it.
It was kind of hard to read due to the drippiness of the writing substance and the sloppiness of the penmanship, but the letters appeared to spell out,
The world is going mad. I’m just here to lend a helping hand. Mwahaha.
“… Mwahaha?” Elizabeth inquired.
“Perhaps it said something extremely clever and eloquent originally, but then the liquid just dripped the wrong way,” I suggested dryly.
“Let’s kill him,” Dynamo said. “Put him out of his misery.”
I looked over at her in surprise.
“Just kidding.” She grinned and winked one of her turquoise eyes at me. “But what a moron.”
“Well, we don’t know yet who the moron is, but we’ve killed supervillains before, and we might have to--” I began.
“I know, I know,” the brunette interrupted. “I don’t think that was unwarranted, with The Chief and his henchmen. But I’d need to know that this thief was a murderer himself, first. Not just someone trying to make a quick buck off selling your nanobots on the black market.”
“Well, what about the blood?” Norma asked.
“We don’t know that that’s human blood,” Elizabeth pointed out. “It just looks the part. Could be animal blood from a butcher shop. Could be lab generated from non-organic components. No way to know without testing it.”
“Aileen?” I asked. “You’ve done some research. What does the cast of supervillains look like, here in Grayville?”
“Uninspiring,” Aileen replied.
“That’s your professional analysis?”
“There are approximately fifty active supervillains in Grayville currently,” Aileen continued. “Only about half of them actually have superpowers. Others are just criminal masterminds with minions, money, connections, and or a penchant for violence who are operating on a high enough level to be classified as supervillains. Based on the nature of the theft in this instance, I can eliminate most of the candidates, because they would not have had the technological sophistication to track down and intercept the shipment or any interest in or ability to utilize nanobots in their schemes. There are a few others that I can eliminate due to having been otherwise engaged in locations well outside of Grayville at the time. And, the sentiment expressed in this message on the wall most closely reflects the ideology of two particular supervillains based in Grayville.”
“So lay them on us,” I said.
“The Maniac, and Mayhem,” she answered. “I would predict that the culprit is either one of those two, or another of three candidates who may have been attempting to frame one of those two. But we should start with The Maniac and Mayhem.”
“I’ve never heard of Mayhem, but I know that The Maniac is the Shadow Knight’s archenemy,” Elizabeth sighed. “And he’s supposed to be brilliant, although warped by insanity. Always five steps ahead of law enforcement, three steps ahead of the superheroes. Impossible to predict. Basically a god of bloody chaos. He’s a mass murderer, a psychopath, and… well, if there was anyone who deserved your brand of justice, it’s him.”
Aileen brought up a headshot of a man who was nearly handsome at first glance, but the closer you looked, the more disturbing his face became. Everything was just a little too pointy and elongated; his forehead and chin, his nose, his faintly tufted eyebrows. Even his eyes had a very slight upward slant, even though he wasn’t Asian. His mouth was a thin line that looked like a smirk permanently engraved on his face. He had a bit of a widow’s peak that somehow accentuated his faintly creepy features, and his skin tone had an unhealthy pallor. Altogether he looked faintly vampiric.
“He is, in some ways, the purest form of a supervillain,” Aileen said.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“I mean he doesn’t seem to have any consistent overarching motive that drives him to commit heinous crimes, the heinous crimes themselves are the point for him,” my AI assistant replied. “He just likes to harm people. As many people as possible, in the most gruesome ways he possibly can.”
“What kinds of things has he done?” Dynamo asked.
“All kinds of things,” Aileen said. “Armed robbery is the most minor of his crimes. But he doesn’t seem particularly interested in money, given that the robberies occur only sporadically, which implies that they are simply a means to finance his primary operations. Murder, rape, and torture are his specialties. He has crucified people. He has peeled their skin off. He demonstrates a medieval level of brutality, facilitated by modern technology. What makes him terrible is his irrational, limitless cruelty.”
“What’s his superpower?” I asked. I really wasn’t liking the sound of this guy. I definitely wanted to take him out, but I didn’t know if the team was ready for him yet.
“It is unknown,” Aileen replied.
“How can no one know his superpower?” I asked as I gestured at the screen. “Look at how much shit this guy has done.”
“There is nothing documented,” Aileen explained. “There are discussions of course, and perhaps the Shadow Knight knows, but most people seem to think he has some sort of ‘escape’ power.”
“Explain,” I prompted.
“He seems to be very good at wiggling out of combat and jail. Watch this.”
The monitor Aileen controlled began to play a video. It looked like it was filmed from a helicopter, or maybe a drone. The footage showed a single car driving down the city streets during the nighttime. I guessed it had to be late since there weren’t any other cars out, just a horde of police vehicles following them.
The single car being followed drove a bit erratically, and swerved from side to side as if the driver was drunk, but suddenly it screeched to a halt in the middle of the street. The camera panned out to reveal a black painted tank-looking vehicle turn the corner from about six blocks away.
“Woah, what is that?” I asked.
“That’s Shadow Knight’s car,” Elizabeth explained.
“Looks badass,” I said, even though I couldn’t quite make out all the details from the camera footage. “I’m guessing Maniac is in the other?”
“Yes, Miles,” Aileen said, but as the words left her mouth, the car on screen flipped around and began to drive right back toward the line of police cars.
I w
ould have thought that would have been the end of things, but the guy driving the single car seemed to increase his speed as he drove toward the police. I couldn’t quite figure out what his plan was, since each police car had a plow on the front, and Maniac’s car just looked like a ten-year-old sedan.
Then they all crashed into each other with a shower of sparks, and somehow, Maniac’s car kind of popped up over the first police car, drove over the top of two others, and then bounced onto the street on the other side.
“Huh,” I mused as we all watched the sedan skip across the street. Parts of the fender and bumper scraped across the ground, and it looked like one tire was flat, but the car was still going, and now the police were all facing the wrong direction and in the way of Shadow Knight’s tank-car.
“He escaped that time,” Aileen explained, “but he was caught the next day by the Shadow Knight and taken to prison. However, he escaped the week after that. I have more footage that I can share. This one is very interesting.”
The screen flashed again, but the perspective was the same, so I figured the video was shot from another helicopter. It looked like the rooftop of some swanky building, but then I realized it was the same building we had eaten dinner at earlier in the evening.
The camera zoomed in, and I saw twenty people dressed in nice outfits were crouched on the roof with their hands over their heads. There were a dozen or so men holding AK-47’s standing around the group, and these men wore police-looking body armor that was spray painted and splattered with a variety of neon colors like a Jackson Pollock painting. The prisoners and armed men were all looking at one man in the center of the group who was waving around a pistol in his left hand and a rocket launcher in the other.
The man was wearing a cowboy hat with a large pink carnation flower in the band. He wore a white pleated tuxedo shirt, orange bow tie, red tuxedo jacket with long tails, but instead of normal pants that would have matched the outfit, he wore the “parachute” style pants that were popular with 90s era rappers. The pants had a Hawaiian print pattern, and flip-flop beach sandals were on his feet.
