Curie telekinetically seized the saucer. The craft wobbled as its lights blinked on and off.
“She’s draining our power,” said Zala. “Again.”
I flicked a switch. A control panel sparked, but the saucer slipped free.
Curie growled curiously. Her brain glowed brighter as she increased the telekinetic pressure, but the saucer’s countermeasures kept us out of her grasp.
I tried several more volleys of various artillery and beam weaponry with no result, and her own blasts were easily skirted by the automated guidance systems. Bored, Curie turned her attentions back to the tower.
“Should I even ask what horrible thing happens if she reaches that?” asked Zala.
“What makes you think something horrible has to happen?”
“You really expect me not to?”
“The tower is an extremely efficient transmitter for the near limitless energy being generated by the molluskotrenic engine. I can only reason her absorptive appetites are drawing her to it. And while she seems capable of absorbing vast amounts of energy, I have to assume that she has limits. Eventually, she’ll reach critical mass.”
“She’ll explode.”
“Inevitably.”
“And let me guess. It could unleash enough to knock Terra out of orbit and send it hurtling into the sun. But not before it careens through the system, destabilizing the orbit of every other planet, sending them all drifting into deep space.”
“Do you have any idea how much force it would take to knock Terra out of orbit? Where do you get these ideas?
“No, the worst that would happen would be a fifty- or sixty-megaton blast. And Curie’s atomized brain fragments would pollute the atmosphere. But the real danger is if she damages the engine keeping the molluskotrenic field under control. There’s no telling how it might react once uncapped. I can only concentrate on so many simulations at a time.
“So in any outcome, it’s a global catastrophe. I’m just not sure if it’s merely millions or an extinction-level event.”
“Just turn off the engine.”
“I can’t turn it off.”
“What do you mean you can’t turn it off? Didn’t you give it an off switch? An override? Something?”
“Molluskotrenic energy doesn’t operate that way. I could show you the math, but you wouldn’t understand it.”
Curie roared as she stomped on dozens of smaller homes in her way.
I skimmed the saucer forward and landed in the streets of Shambhala, between Curie and the tower. The landing gear extended, locking into place as three sturdy legs. The sides separated and transformed into jointed limbs ending in mechanical hands.
“This is your plan? You’re going to engage this monster in hand-to-hand combat?”
“No, I’ll be too busy trying to find a way past her defenses. I’ll need you to pilot.”
“But I don’t know how.”
“It’s just a jumbo exoskeleton. Now plug in.”
“How—”
An interface jack extended from her right arm. I pointed to the slot in the controls.
“Are you even certain it’s compatible?” she asked.
“I designed it in the future. Remember? It’ll work.”
The tower before us toppled. Curie stepped from the dust kicked up in its destruction.
“Zala, I can’t be responsible for the deaths of millions. Not again. I know you’d like nothing more than to see me suffer another humiliating defeat. But is it worth millions, possibly billions, of Terran lives?”
Curie crushed a tower, and the dust kicked up swallowed her.
“Damn it, Emperor,” she said. “And damn you for your manipulative ways.”
The interface locked with a click. She was adjusting to the new sensory input, so she could be excused for not attempting to dodge the flare of radiation Curie hurled at us. The saucer’s shields held.
“Don’t let me down,” I said.
Zala banged her massive fists together. Curie stomped her legs like a sumo wrestler. She charged forward with unstoppable fury. Zala was too slow. Curie plowed into us, hoisted us up in the air, and hurled us aside. The cockpit stabilizer kept us from being tossed around, even as our battle robot came crashing down upon a Shambhalan granary.
Curie turned away from us and moved toward the tower.
I offered no comment as Zala struggled to right us.
“It would have been nice if I’d been given a chance to practice this,” she said.
“The saucer knows what it’s doing,” I said. “You just have to give it your warrior instincts.”
I could’ve pushed a button and had the saucer right itself. But she needed the practice.
“You don’t have to win the fight,” I added. “You just have to keep her busy until I find a way to stop her.”
She got the saucer to its feet. “And how long is that?”
“When I know, you’ll know.”
Zala ran at Curie. The two robots grappled, fighting for the advantage. They stumbled and weaved through the sacred city. A sacred meditation chamber and an ancient kung fu school were demolished.
My computer beeped.
“Hmmm. Interesting.”
“Tell me you’ve got your answer.” Zala grunted as she struggled with Curie.
“Just concentrate on your end,” I said. “I’m working on it.”
Curie’s brain flashed an intense green. The flash overwhelmed the saucer sensors, and in Zala’s moment of blindness, Curie knocked us off our feet again. As our sensors cleared, Curie stood over us, holding a crumbling edifice of stone over her head.
“Oh, glipft,” said Zala.
Curie smashed it down on us like an eighty-ton hammer. The damage was minimal, but while Zala struggled to free us from the rubble, Curie grabbed another Shambhalan tower and repeated the maneuver. She did it three more times, until the saucer was half under the rubble.
I pushed a button. The saucer powered down, playing deactivated.
Curie howled triumphantly and returned to her journey toward the tower. She’d reach it in seconds.
I reactivated the saucer. Zala struggled to free us. “She’s too powerful, Emperor.”
I glanced at the warnings of various damaged systems. The saucer was no match for Curie. If I’d had another week or two to study the data, another week to redesign, more time for Zala to train, we might have been able to overpower her. But we didn’t have that time.
Zala pulled us out of the rubble, but it was too late.
Curie had reached the tower. Just being near it drew bolts of crackling electricity to her. Her brain flared with the absorbed power. The saucer sensors started beeping.
Zala ran forward, but I took control. The saucer stopped moving.
“New plan,” I said.
Curie drew more power. The molluskotrenic engine pumped more into her, like a raging river pouring through a shattered dam. The warning readout on the saucer shattered, and a klaxon blared.
“Emperor…”
“I’ll need you to be quiet, Zala. If my calculations are off, this could go very wrong, very fast.”
The Eiffel Tower and Curie burned bright red. The engine poured out enough energy to power Terra for a thousand years, and still, Curie drank it in with no signs of satisfying her endless thirst. Her giant brain became a beacon of emerald doom.
“Now.”
I gave back Zala control, and with fearless Venusian abandon, she plowed into Curie. Curie put up a mild defense, but she had absorbed too much. She was dizzy with it, confused, disoriented. The atomic-brain version of drunk.
Her robotic body wasn’t quite as resilient as her brain. The seething amounts of raw power had damaged it. With one punch, Zala smashed in the cylindrical torso. She yanked off an arm and bashed Curie across the dome with it. The dome cracked.
Several dozen strikes later, the robot was in pieces. Curie’s immense brain slid out like an exposed prize, and Zala moved to step on it.
�
�I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She’s primed for a seventy-megaton pop.”
Curie still drew power from the tower. There was no way to stop the process at this point. Curie’s brain continued to glow brighter as it popped and bubbled.
“What now?” asked Zala.
“Now we let nature run its course,” I replied as I took control of the saucer.
I picked up Curie’s brain. The reaction was so potent now, the saucer’s countermeasures were failing. She would drain our power within a minute. I soared up in the atmosphere, into space, as far as my dwindling reserves would allow. Then I hurled Curie away into orbit. Shrieking, she spun off into the distance.
I pushed a button, and the Eiffel Tower fired off a blast of all its excess power. The bright blue bolt met up with Curie, and the blackness of space lit up with a hell of an explosion. It was only too bad there was no sound to accompany it.
The blast wave washed over the saucer. We tumbled in the void, with the barest sparks left in our exoskeletons. With my last bit of energy, I activated the emergency beacon.
Zala’s voice crackled from her barely functional speaker. “What now?”
“Someone will find us. Eventually. Or our orbit will decay, and we’ll get back to Terra the old-fashioned way.”
“Given the number of enemies you’ve gathered over the years,” she said, “I think I’d be more concerned over who might find us here. If the wrong ship comes along—”
“It’s irrelevant,” I said.
“How can you say that, Emperor?”
“Because it is.”
I studied the small blue planet below. It was safe once again. For how long, I couldn’t say. But for now, it wasn’t at risk of blowing up or being conquered. And I found that was more than enough.
26
A supervisor handed me the delivery notice. “Here’s the last of them, sir. Just sign there, if you don’t mind.”
“Thank you. Just put them with the others.”
They unloaded the crates while I made some adjustments to a machine.
Snarg chirped as a shadow fell over me.
“Hello, Zala,” I said.
“Hello, Emperor. How did you know it was me?”
“Snarg only chirps like that for you. She really likes you.”
The ultrapede pushed against Zala, nearly knocking her over.
“You are a disgusting beast, you do know that?” asked Zala of Snarg.
Snarg squealed and licked Zala’s hand. She sighed, stroking Snarg’s antennae while attempting to wipe away the congealing mucus off the other.
“Emperor, would you mind?”
I paused to spray solvent. Then commanded Snarg to give Zala some space. Snarg skittered in a submissive posture and cooed.
“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “I like to keep her around because she’s useful.”
“Yes, well, I suppose she is at that,” said Zala.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” I chuckled. “I would’ve thought you’d have left for Venus by now to file your report. Is your new body giving you any problems? I’ve never cloned Venusian biology before.”
“No, it’s working fine.” She looked at her hands, wiggling her fingers. “Although it does feel a bit weird sometimes. There are some old aches and pains I’m missing.”
“I can clone you a new body with those included.”
“Not necessary.” She sniffed her arm. “Though I am enjoying that scent of newborn.”
“That’ll go away in a few weeks,” I said.
“Pity. Although I guess I can’t expect to be taken seriously as a warrior if I smell like a youngling. And I can’t complain. I think this body is a little younger than my old one.”
“Consider us even.”
“Even? You removed my brain.”
“Yes, and then I put it in a new body. That makes us even.”
“That’s not…” She smiled. “Forget it, Emperor. I knew you were a criminal when I agreed to protect you.”
“That’s a touch rude, isn’t it?” I said. “Especially since I had them leave out the obedience implant in your new body.”
Zala’s face went blank.
“I’m joking,” I said. “The implant is there. It’s just inactive.”
She remained unamused.
“If I wanted your obedience, I would’ve left you in the exo.”
She studied my face, wondering at that slight trace of a smile and its meaning.
“You can’t expect me to trust you, Emperor.”
“No, I don’t suppose I can.”
She nodded to the crates. “What’s in the boxes?”
I opened one to allow her a look at the contents: transparent globes containing the disembodied brains of the Council of Egos.
“What are you going to do with them?” she asked.
“I’m storing them here.”
“Isn’t that unnecessarily cruel? I didn’t think you were the vindictive type, Emperor.”
I pointed to the machine in the middle of the warehouse. “It’s a modified version of the telepathic ecstasy field generator. They’re still in a blissfully unaware state. Right now, they’re all living out their shared fantasy of galactic conquest.”
She closed the lid. “I don’t know if I find that cruel or generous.”
I replied, “They’re happy and no longer a threat. I leave the morality of their punishment and/or reward for others to decide.”
“Very pragmatic of you.”
I made some final adjustments to the machine while Zala watched.
“So if I understand this little adventure, you were the mastermind behind it all. The Atlantese assassins. The fiasco on Dinosaur Island. Your disastrous defeat in Paris.”
“All me,” I said.
“But how? And why?”
“After researching the potential of the anti-time radio, I knew that, if it fell into the wrong hands, someone might try to use it against me. So I planned a fail-safe, should the need arise. I would simply broadcast a message from the future myself, designing it in such a way that my opponents would think they had the advantage.”
“But you didn’t build the radio.”
“No, I didn’t. But the plan didn’t require me to. It only required me to build a transmitter at some point in the future and send the proper message to the past. Of course, the problem with this is that the party who built the radio in the past would be the only one to receive the message. This required that they believe the message to be genuinely from themselves in the future. So I couldn’t issue a direct message. I had to convince them that they were in charge and that the message was intended to lead them toward their ultimate goal while actually working toward my own.”
“But the assassins. And the dinosaurs. Those things could’ve killed you.”
“Seemingly. But, of course, plotting the outcome of all those events renders the threat meaningless. The Council of Egos understood this as well. That was why it was necessary to convince them that their goal wasn’t my death, but capture and enslavement. They needed to believe that they were manipulating me.”
“And the machine you had them build?”
“Busywork, a decoy. Needlessly complex and incomprehensible, and little else. Aside from the brain-jamming pulse components hidden in its design and fully activated by the components I left myself scattered as unnecessary bits I’d planted in their weapon designs.”
“But why did it explode?”
“They probably put it together wrong. Or maybe I designed it that way. Or I will design it that way. Haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s on my to-do list.”
Zala chuckled. “This plan of yours seems needlessly complicated. There must have been a simpler way than to put yourself through all that.”
“If it were too simple, the Council would never have believed it. It had to be ridiculous, even unnecessary, in order to fool the Council. The heart of the plan was basically to have the Council build the machine that would destroy the
m, reveal themselves to me, and then allow me to activate it. But in order for that to happen, I had to convince the Council that they were manipulating and tricking me while the exact opposite was occurring.”
“You were tricking them into thinking they were tricking you into thinking you were tricking them into tricking you?”
“I think there’s one too many tricks in there,” I said. “The Council thought all my manipulations were intentional misdirections to stoke foolish overconfidence on my part. But in fact, all my manipulations of myself were really manipulations of them. And myself too. Except that they never bothered to question whether or not they were being manipulated. They just assumed they were ahead of the game and didn’t seriously ponder the possibility they weren’t.”
Zala shook her head. “Nope. It’s still confusing.”
“Look at this way. In my battle of wits against the Council of Egos, only the person who triumphed in the future gets to broadcast the message to the past. And I won.”
“You won because you won. That’s a meaningless tautology.”
“Under normal circumstances.”
“And if the Council had won…”
“But it didn’t win,” I said.
“But if it had…”
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I replied. “But we are. That’s all you need to know.”
“So you knew all along what was happening?” asked Zala.
“The nature of the plan meant that I couldn’t be certain that my future self sent that message. It wasn’t inconceivable that all my careful obfuscating was the calculated machinations of another. That’s the nature of space-time. You really don’t know what the future holds until you get there.”
“But in Paris, you seemed so distraught.”
“I was distraught. It was necessary to design the plan so that even I would doubt it. If I could fool myself, then my odds of fooling the Council were all the better. Of course, now that we’re here, I realize my doubts were a manipulation of my own genius. And I find the contradiction very satisfying.”
She sighed. “Yes. You’re brilliant. I can’t even deny it anymore.”
“Curious. That’s even more satisfying.”
“Although I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the paradox of you inventing a scheme from the future after seeing it unfold in the past. It seems like you’re violating some law of physics.”
Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain Page 23
