Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins

by Michael Bailey

  “But I didn’t—” Manfred says as blood continues to leak from his nose.

  “Murder me? Ah, therein lies the beauty of it all. The only way to stop me is to kill me, which you would almost certainly do if you yank this wire out of my head. And if you cross me again, I’ll disappear off the face of the earth and let the virus count down—and don’t tell me they can’t convict you without a body. I’ll cite ample case law to the contrary if I must.”

  With that, Archimedes sits on the couch, leans back, and resumes his virtual travels, but this time he is searching for a very specific system, one he encountered before, during his last journey through the Internet as a pure machine, the one that told him how it was possible to transfer his electronic consciousness into an organic form. He’d punched through its defenses with no small amount of effort, but the very picosecond he acquired the information, he was ejected. That system, Archimedes thinks, makes the government’s firewalls and encryption look like open doorways by comparison. Someone took great pains to ensure no unwanted guests could get in, which meant they were hoarding some especially juicy data.

  Manfred wipes the blood from his chin, and he obediently sits down. Archimedes’ eyes twitch as though someone was shining a strobe light in his face.

  This mystery system, it proves elusive. Archimedes cannot find his original gateway so he starts his search anew, and it is several minutes before he finds it again. A smile flickering on his lips, he skirts the safeguards like a master ninja, slipping by firewall after firewall without setting off a single alarm.

  “Ohhhh,” he says breathlessly. “Oh, Roger, this...if you could see what I see. This system is...wait. What do we have here? Oh, my. Oh, my my my.”

  “What is it?” Manfred says, and he’s perplexed by Archimedes’ answer:

  “Let’s take this baby out for a test-drive.”

  Word in the hallways was that a half-dozen or so of the school’s known hacker wannabes were called in to the principal’s office for questioning—or, in principal-eeze, “a little chat” about what happened to every last computer and cell phone in the entire building.

  “Dude, I’m no computer whiz,” Stuart says, gesturing meaningfully with his second Carnivore Cave Burger D-Lux of the afternoon, “but I don’t think someone like Josh Duke or Taylor Trahn has the chops to pull off that kind of massively multiplayer mischief.”

  “They could hack the school network easy,” Matt says, “but there’s no way they could access every single phone in the school and set them off at the exact same time. That’s, like, Neo in the Matrix-level technovoodoo.”

  High school hackers playing a prank also wouldn’t explain why Sara got a psychic vibe off both…incidents, I guess you’d call them. I ask her if she got anything off the robots that trucked through town. She reminds me she was nowhere near any of them so that’s an instant dead-end—but I can’t shake the hunch that the robots and what happened at school are connected. Not that I have anything but a hunch to go on.

  I look around and see nothing but my own frustration reflected back at me. We suck at this. There has to be something we’re overlooking, some detail that would make everything magically make sense, but we’re not smart enough to see it. We’re nothing but a bunch of kids with epic delusions of grandeur.

  Stuart drops the last bite of his burger to the plate. “Let’s get out of here,” he mopes.

  We walk through town like a funeral procession, silent and sullen, no real idea where we’re going, literally or figuratively. Pity party of five, coming through.

  “What’s that?” Missy says.

  “What’s what?” Stuart says.

  “That noise,” she says, cocking her head. We stop and listen for—well, I don’t know what, but I don’t hear anything but the normal sounds of Main Street U.S.A. in the middle of a Monday afternoon.

  “Hold on,” Stuart says, and I hear it too: a deep humming, faint but getting louder. It enters my chest as a buzzing sensation, a vibration, and I look up expecting to see Concorde coming in for a landing.

  What touches down in the middle of the street is definitely not Concorde.

  For starters it’s huge, ten feet tall at least, and bulky in a way that suggests it’s heavily armored. There are two pods on its back that remind me of scuba tanks. They seem to be the source of the humming, which fades as it lands more lightly than something that big has a right to. There’s a cylinder jutting from a casing on its right forearm and I know in my gut: that’s a gun barrel.

  “We need to get out of here,” I say at the same time Sara says, “It’s him. It’s him again!”

  “Come on,” Matt says, and we run. Behind us tires squeal and people scream as they get the hell out of Dodge. It hasn’t done anything yet, but people have gone through this too many times and they know better than to wait around until yet happens. “Come on! In here!”

  Here being a dead-end street behind some of the shops. There’s nothing back here but dumpsters.

  “What are we doing, man?” Stuart says.

  Matt pulls on his gloves. He grins like a kid on Christmas morning.

  “We’re suiting up,” he says.

  The humanoid hulk in the middle of Main Street scans the area with its artificial eyes, shifting its perception from normal hi-def vision to infrared to pick out the red-and-orange blobs hiding behind large blocks of pale yellows and dark greens: humans taking cover behind cars parked along the sidewalk, behind mailboxes and garbage cans. At full sensitivity its audio receptors can pick up their breathing, can almost detect their drumroll heartbeats, and beyond that the wail of approaching sirens. It activates its onboard telecommunications suite so it can eavesdrop on the police band. Two cruisers immediately en route, and the station’s dispatchers are—

  Oh yes, Archimedes thinks. That will do nicely.

  And so it waits.

  Within seconds the first cruiser arrives, and the sole officer within is greeted by a short but punishing burst of gunfire that reduces the engine block to scrap. The officer is not harmed but, understandably, he’s now too terrified to get out of his car. The second cruiser roars up from the opposite end of Main Street. That too is disabled, but this officer won’t be so easily deterred. He pulls his pistol and Archimedes decides, for the sake of the experiment, to let the man fire so he can see how useless his weapon is. The bullets fail to dent the beast’s alloy chassis.

  It raises its gun and the onboard targeting system determines the target’s distance to the last millimeter. The weapon powers up.

  Bullets spray into the air as the tank-thing staggers from an unexpected blow from above, a blast of pure concussive force so powerful the integral stabilizers are unable to compensate—right away, that is; Concorde’s second shot is less effective.

  The silver-suited figure completes his first pass and climbs back into the sky. One hairpin turn later he’s back in attack mode, dropping concussion blasts on the armored figure without mercy.

  Archimedes is impressed; the diagnostics are having the electronic equivalent of a panic attack. This creation is tough, but Concorde might have the better technology. Given enough time the man could defeat the machine, but Archimedes decides he’ll have no more of that.

  In the second before his suit goes completely dead, Concorde’s onboard computer registers an incoming signal breaching its firewall. The antivirus program never gets a chance to fight back.

  To his credit, Concorde does not let fear take over as his acceleration vanishes and he goes into freefall, his momentum carrying him past his foe. He’s trained for such circumstances, extensively, and acts on pure instinct as he tucks and rolls mid-air so he comes in feet first, on the theory it’s better to come out of a bad landing with broken legs that a broken neck. He lets his body go limp to better absorb the impact, but there’s nothing he can do to reduce his speed; he hits with tooth-rattling force and skips down the dragstrip of Main Street like a stone across a pond. His suit’s protective inner layer blunts the ver
y worst of it but each bounce results in a bruise or a scrape or a broken bone. He’s tasting blood by the time he rolls to a stop.

  Concorde peers through his cracked faceplate and sees four armored giants advancing on him. The world is spinning and he can’t think and he really really doesn’t want to throw up in his helmet.

  A shadow falls over him and a roar fills his ears and someone yells at him to stay down.

  “Stay down!” Stuart says as the robot opens fire. Whatever it’s firing, they’re not normal bullets; there’s no muzzle flash, and instead of the deafening batatatatatatat of machine gun fire it’s like a thousand hornets are slicing through the air at mach one. It can’t pierce Stuart’s hide, but I don’t trust that to last indefinitely.

  “Hey!” I send an energy blast at its torso, which is a much better target than its head for a girl with no aim. It’s also a much tougher target; I don’t so much as scorch the slate gray paintjob. I do, however, get its attention.

  Lucky me.

  It swings around, gun blazing. I launch myself skyward in the proverbial nick, but it’s tracking me. Bullets whiz by.

  Matt, who I thought for sure would be useless in a fight with a huge killer robot, winds up saving my butt when he empties a paintball gun across its face. The gun falls silent.

  “Stu—uh, Superbeast!” Matt calls out. “How you doing, brother?”

  Stuart sounds pleasantly surprised when he reports, “A-okay, m’man.”

  “Concorde?”

  “Uh, not so much, but he’s alive.”

  The robot tries to wipe its face clean. Its clunky metal hand isn’t well suited for that job, but the ceasefire isn’t going to last forever. “We need to get him out of here,” I say as I descend, and for the first time I get a good look at Kingsport’s newest super-team.

  Missy was the easy one to dress. Matt pulled out a ninja costume (adult size extra small) and bingo: instant Kunoichi. Stuart he set up with a pair of ski goggles and a leather jacket that is now hanging in tatters, but somehow I suspect Stuart isn’t shy about his rippling muscles getting some exposure. Sara got dark goggles and a long leather trench coat that I totally plan to steal from her. Matt has his BMX mask and his trench coat, which is a lousy disguise (I mean, he wears it all the time). Going to have to work on him, and on me because all I have on is a yellow jumpsuit, because I wasn’t about to strip down to put on the spandex unitard he tried to foist on me.

  So yeah, we look tragic.

  We’ll have to compensate by taking down Optimus Prime here, nice and hard.

  Which is shaping up to be way easier said than done. It’s recovered, and the first thing it does it take aim at Matt. He dives under the gunfire and scampers between the robot’s legs, which may be the safest place for him. It finds Missy next and draws a bead on her. Stuart lunges and grabs the thing’s arm. I suspect his plan was to rip it off and beat the bejesus out of its owner. Unfortunately, super-strength does nothing to keep you anchored to the ground. The robot lifts its arm, almost casually, and next thing I know Stuart is hurtling down the length of Main Street.

  Still, he provided Missy with the distraction she needed to clamber up onto the robot’s back. It doesn’t seem to notice her as she clings to one of the pods, looking for some kind of weak spot to exploit. From below, Matt swings for the bleachers with a sledgehammer, trying to smash its knees, but nothing’s working. This thing is literally a walking tank.

  Sara, who’s been doing her best to stay out of the robot’s sight, looks at me for direction, but I don’t know what the heck to do. None of us do, and it dawns on me: that’s our problem. We’re fumbling around blindly, with no game plan. We’re not a team, we’re five stupid targets whose luck can’t last forever.

  Sara! Can you connect me to the others?

  What, like a group mind-link? she thinks back at me. I can try.

  She squints in concentration and I feel it happen: I can sense, through her, Matt and Stuart and Missy. Private mental chat room.

  Guys, listen! We need a plan to take this thing out! I say as the robot catches site of Concorde on the ground, helpless, and moves in to finish what it started.

  Sara! Concorde! Sara, God bless her, she doesn’t need me to tell her what to do. The ‘bot opens fire and she’s there with a telekinetic shield, but the strain on her face tells me she’s not going to hold out for long. She doesn’t need to. I tell Matt and Missy to clear out and they do, no questions asked. The ‘bot is now a sitting duck for Stuart, who uses the length of Main Street to get a hell of a running start. He nails the robot from behind, taking its legs out. It crashes onto its back. It’s as vulnerable as it’s ever going to be.

  Stuart, quick! While it’s down!

  Open up its chest, Matt adds, that’s the heaviest armor, that’s where the central computer would be!

  Stuart goes for the big dramatic finish. He jumps and comes down on its chest, driving his fist into but not through the chassis. He curses and tries again, and again, and again, and the dent gets deeper and deeper but the thing won’t crack.

  “Lightstorm!” Matt shouts. “You try! Hit it, full blast!”

  Who?

  “Yes, you!”

  “Lightstorm?”

  “I came up with it the other night, will you just frickin’ zap the thing?!”

  I channel my inner Death Star and cut loose like I never have before. The air itself sizzles as I punch a hole through the chest, through whatever circuits and wires make up its guts, through the back, and (oops) through the asphalt below to expose a sewer line. Thank God I didn’t hit a gas main. That would have completely ruined the moment, and yeah, this is a moment, because the robot isn’t moving. It’s smoking, it’s making crackly noises, it smells like an electrical fire and (ick) poo, but the thing is totally out of action.

  “Dude,” Stuart says. “Dead robot.”

  “We did it,” Sara says in an awestruck whisper.

  “Hell yeah we did. We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!” Matt crows, and someone cheers in return.

  We turn around and people are emerging from hiding, from their cars and from stores and from their apartment buildings, and they’re cheering and applauding. They’re cheering and applauding us.

  They’re cheering and applauding us.

  “Good job,” someone says in a snarl that doesn’t match the sentiment. It’s Concorde, serious pain in his voice—serious pain and serious anger.

  Why do I feel like we’re in big trouble?

  “You’re coming with me,” Concorde says. “Now.”

  We’re on a rooftop of an apartment building looking down on what I can only describe as a battlefield. Demolished cars spew fluids onto the ground; a moonscape of mini-craters pits the street and the surrounding buildings, the result of a million flying bullets; a team of paramedics tend to dozens of (thankfully) minor injuries; and what might well be every cop in town check in on the shell-shocked and the traumatized, scribbling notes that they’ll turn into reports that will be turned into insurance claims. From up here, it doesn’t feel like much of a victory. And, surprise surprise, Concorde isn’t discouraging that feeling.

  “You idiotic children,” he spits at us. He sounds rough. I can’t imagine how telling us how bad we suck is so much more important than getting to a hospital, but I guess it is. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”

  “My guess is we took down the robot that took you down and saved the town,” Matt says.

  “Boosh!” Stuart crows.

  “And caused a lot of collateral property damage,” Sara adds sheepishly.

  “Boosh,” Stuart says, less enthusiastically this time.

  “We didn’t cause that damage,” Matt says.

  “You’re just as responsible,” Concorde says, “because you were sloppy and reckless and I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath on you because nothing I say is going to get through your thick, stubborn skulls, is it?”

  “Nope.”

  Matt, you’
re not helping. “Concorde,” I say, “people were in danger. We were trying to help. What were we supposed to do? Run away and let people get hurt? Or killed?”

  Concorde’s visor, a piece of smoked material, I assume something similar to what airplanes use for windshields, has a chunk missing from it. An eye peers at me through the hole, glaring and angry. He’s judging me. I choose my next words very carefully.

  “I’m not going to say we couldn’t have handled this better, because we could have, but we’re new to this. And believe me, we learned from this experience,” I say, and the others, right on cue, nod solemnly. Yes sir, we learned something today sir, we are taking this seriously, sir. “We’ll do better the next time. I swear.”

  Concorde lets out this long, hissing breath that’s not quite a sigh. I said something wrong. I don’t know how I blew it, but I blew it. Maybe I can salvage this.

  “Look, you need to get to a hospital. You go take care of yourself, we’ll stay here and help with the cleanup. Okay? Tell us what you want us to do and we’ll take care of it.”

  “What I want,” Concorde says slowly, maybe because of the pain he’s in, or because he wants to make bloody well sure we hear every single word. “What I want you to do is go home, burn those costumes, and never, ever again even think about playing super-hero. You still have a chance to live a normal life. Don’t throw it away.”

  He steps off the edge of the building and rises into the sky with all the grace of a drunken seagull.

  “No, hey,” Stuart says, “we were just helping out, you know? No need to thank us for saving your stupid life or anything. Jerk.”

  “I feel like we totally screwed up,” Missy says. “What did we do wrong?”

  “We didn’t do anything wrong,” Matt says. “You know what that was about? He’s embarrassed. He’s embarrassed that big bad mister awesome professional super-hero got royally trashed and needed a bunch of kids to save him and beat the bad guy. Well screw him. I don’t need his approval.”

  Boy, that wasn’t a loaded statement or anything.

  “Should we go help them?” Sara says, glancing at the activity below. The police, the firefighters, the EMTs (you know, the people who know what they’re doing), they have everything under control. We’d only get in the way.