You Believe Her

by Richard Roberts

  With as much mechanical stiffness as I could fake, I turned my head up to look at him, and just… stared. After several seconds, he cringed, and crept back to his seat between the other two.

  Ha!

  “HA! AH HA HA HA HA!”

  Wait, that wasn’t me. I didn’t have a second voice speaker I didn’t know about, did I?

  A thump on the roof of the car confirmed that I was not the source of this round of maniacal laughter. A woman’s voice, rich and velvety and mocking, called out, “Your determination is simply adorable, boys, but you must give it up. Your plans are foiled, and Gallus gallus once again rules the day!”

  Thanks to the train itself being in the way, I had no view of our mystery woman, whether she was a hero or a villain, and who she was running from. She did have a proper dramatic flair, and kept her voice loud enough to be heard over the rumble of train and traffic as she asked, “Victory assured—let’s check if our services are needed here, shall we, darlings?”

  And then…

  Okay, I don’t know what I was expecting after that, but it wasn’t a chicken wearing suction cup shoes walking down the window opposite me. A chicken I got, however, its head tilting this way and that curiously as it peered at the occupants through tiny metal goggles.

  At least the chicken didn’t talk. The woman’s voice still came from above us as she proclaimed, “Oh, my! Aren’t you stylish. I can’t do anything about the arm, but once you’re fixed, if you need a good tailor to help you mend that magnificent steampunk costume, just ask for Diamond Pullet. Thanks to you, this public conveyance passes minimum fabulousness standards. It could still do with a few chickens, but for now, away, my pets!”

  The chicken, flapping its wings in the wind—and wearing a small but dapper pinstriped vest—climbed back up onto the roof. Presumably its owner left. I heard nothing else unusual for the rest of the trip. The kids across from me took a lot of photos out through the window, but I was betting more out of hope than because there was anything to see.

  Oh, Los Angeles. If anything could cheer me up, it was the reminder that all around me, other super-powered people were having equally weird adventures.

  Eventually, I got off at Slauson. This was a busy traffic area, not the kind of place I expected junkyards—but right there across the street I saw the sign of an auto junk lot. Not the one I was looking for, even, which the map said was a couple of blocks down.

  So, I crossed the street and walked those couple of blocks. I immediately passed yet another junkyard right across the street from the first one. Neither looked anything like I expected. One at least had a neat stack of brightly-colored cars with the wheels taken off. Other than that, no… well, junk.

  I was almost at the corner I had to turn when a guy passing me looked up from his phone, saw a one-armed robot in front of him, and jumped a good three inches in the air. He could not be an LA native.

  Or maybe he was, because when he recovered from his surprise he didn’t look amazed. He leaned over me, frowning in concern. “Hey, are you okay? I mean, obviously you’re not okay, but do you need help?”

  “You want to help me?”

  My own surprise must have sounded skeptical, because he winced, and rubbed his shaggy brown hair. “I know I’m probably asking for super-powered trouble, but I can’t let a kid with her arm broken off fend for herself.”

  D’aw. I gave him a big, grateful grin. “Thanks, Mister, but I’m going to get the help I need now.”

  He sighed in relief, but didn’t actually look much less anxious. “Okay. But if you need anything, you can have my number. Robot or not, a kid your age shouldn’t have to go it alone.”

  Tell me about it, but… “I’m not. People are falling all over themselves to help me since this happened. It’s doing wonders for my faith in humanity. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You sure?” He gave me a searching look, a little scared, but meaning that question.

  “I’m sure,” I answered with a nod.

  Another sigh, and he flapped a hand weakly. “Good luck, little girl. Seriously.”

  He started walking, and I started walking, and I left the random good Samaritan behind. Just as well—I had reason to believe I’d reached my destination. Instead of a building, at the street corner I passed a tall, chain-link fence with a green tarp behind it, and a not-quite-flat coil of barbed wire across the top. When I actually did turn the corner, the fence went on for quite a ways until it reached a gate, much bigger than the other junkyards. It kept going after the gate, too. This place was the size of a shopping center.

  As for the gate, well, it was solid metal, had spikes along the top, a chain and padlock over the handles, and a sign.

  CLOSED, Come Back Tomorrow

  Nothing indicated actual opening hours. The sign looked reversible, so I slid it out of its display box, and read the back.

  Don’t Be A Smart Aleck, Kid.

  Oh, yeah. This was the place.

  How to get in? A small hole I could see through would be enough to teleport, but with my control problems I’d land on my face, possibly behind me across the street.

  Eh. I’d take the easy route. Might as well get some use out of my condition.

  Tucking my broken arm into my pouch belt, I jumped up and grabbed the top of the fence. The barbed wire probably poked through my leather gloves, but couldn’t do anything to my artificial fingers. The stuff making up my ‘skin’ was more like hardened brick than porcelain. Much stronger and much lighter than I was used to, I easily pulled the rest of me up, and vaulted over the top into the yard itself.

  Oh, yeah. This was the stuff. What a mess. Bits of car everywhere. Doors, steering wheels, mufflers, axles, engines. Not just cars, but all kinds of appliances. I spotted the front half and the back half of a washing machine across from each other in different piles. Not only did rusty metal layer the ground, it was built up in big heaps.

  A tidy blue building in the back of the lot sported a logo in blue letters: ‘Junkment Day.’

  This was as far as my directions took me. Somewhere in this graveyard of technology, a mad scientist was hiding.

  Besides me, I mean.

  The actual building was the obvious place to start, and also the least likely. Whoever lived here took being an eccentric seriously. Still, I hiked across the lot, picking my way through the uneven footing, and peeked in one of the big glass windows.

  Empty. Seriously empty. Stripped, but not abandoned. The interior wasn’t dusty, and lacked the holes in the walls or sections of uneven paint that suggested refurbishment or disuse. It just contained nothing. Aside from a few (empty) shelves in the big auto-mechanic room, this building contained not a stick of furniture. No tools. No trash or litter. No decorations. Just white walls and gray floor. And yet, shadows in the light fixtures on the ceiling suggested they still held bulbs. The lifting jacks embedded in the floor shone, ready for service. A giant compressor lined one wall, radiating danger. The owner might have seen me coming, stuffed everything into a bag, and hidden under the floor.

  I put that as the third likeliest possibility, right behind there being a secret door inside, but more likely than the contents being invisible.

  Best odds said that the whole building was a decoy, and possibly a trap. Some of the junk piles could easily hide a bus, and the smallest could hide the hatch for an elevator. I went poking around.

  One thing became instantly clear: When I got my superpower back, I would buy this lot and build my own lab on it. So. Much. Raw material. Scrap electronics. Pumps. Things with lenses. Huge chunks of steel in the form of car parts, some conveniently shaped into pistons and axles, ready to be used.

  Hello. A mad scientist had been here already. Those heavy, pinching clamps ten feet away didn’t belong to any piece of standard technology I could imagine. Too goofy. On the other hand, they could easily have been torn off of a low grade robot. And what was that thing with the lenses and the wires? Telescopes didn’t need that much electronic
s. Cameras wouldn’t be tube shaped. Was that a robotic eye? Or the barrel of a beam weapon?

  A much bigger cylinder stuck out of a nearby heap. Inside, I could just make out the blades of a fan. Fan, or turbine? Yeah, that was a jet engine.

  While scanning the detritus for more treats, I spotted the door. At first, it looked like an upright slab, but pulling away the lawn mower, muffler, and folding table stacked in front of it confirmed: Door. Nicely arched, and set into walls that disappeared back into the heap. I had no clue what the gray-brown stuff it was made of could be, either. Super-smooth stone? Metal with an odd color and wavy, mottled patterns?

  And of course, slabs generally did not have keyholes. This door sported three, all big and clunky and positioned as part of the decorations.

  Bas-relief carvings covered the arched… uh, stone. I’d go with stone, for now. Divided into quarters, each one depicted a figure, three with their own keyhole. Top left, a guy with the broadest shoulders ever stood with both hands on the hilt of a wide two-handed sword. Okay, technically a suit of armor holding a sword, but presumably someone would wear that armor. Somehow. It wasn’t just wide, but sported thick shoulder, elbow, and knee pads, and spikes jutted out… everywhere. For bonus points, the armor had a bazooka-style weapon strapped to its back, and… yes, the sword blade had jagged edges. A chainsaw two-handed sword. Nice. The keyhole fitted in where the hilt joined the blade.

  The upper-right quarter boasted some kind of ghoul. Hunched, clawed hands, stringy hair, skin stretched over a skeleton and not much more. A loincloth protected my virtuous eyes from what would be the grossest nudity ever. Unlike the suit of armor, this character didn’t sport much detail or decoration —a few bugs, which would make zombie-style sense if they were flies. Instead they looked like grasshoppers. The keyhole took up almost the entirety of the ghoul’s shrunken belly.

  Lower left I liked. A person of indeterminate gender in what might be a suit of leather armor, wearing a hooded cape and a mask with a huge, pointy raven beak. Between outstretched hands hovered a biohazard symbol, with the keyhole in the center.

  Finally, lower right. The Reaper. In case I’d missed that the first three were War, Famine, and Pestilence, this could not be anything but Death, in a robe and carrying a traditional curved scythe. Admittedly, an awfully squat Death. Wearing sneakers. And the robe was kinda more a dress, ending just below the knees, with non-skeletal calves. Death as a little girl.

  I knew this one. Whoever carved this door had chosen the super-powered terror Psychopomp to represent Death. Penelope Akk Full Disclosure: I only recognized her because I’d finished a computer game based on her excessively murderous story a few days ago.

  She did not get a keyhole, no doubt for some deeply symbolic reason, or maybe because this was an actual person, or maybe the keyhole would appear once the others were unlocked. The whole thing could not more obviously be a puzzle. The War, Famine, Pestilence, Death theme were clues that would lead me to uncover keys in the junkyard to unlock this door.

  Fortunately, I didn’t need to do any of that. Thanks to Alexander the Great and his Gordian Knot, I knew the solution to this puzzle already. Scraping my Machine off my wrist with the broken lawnmower, I swung him around until his legs began to wave, set him against the door, and said, “Eat.”

  He did just that. Ha! So much for the hard sciences. Those who study history are able to repeat it!

  “Just the door,” I told my wonderful little creation when he reached the frame it had been set into. The six-inch-thick door. By the time he finished, my Machine had grown into a pony-sized pillbug. So, I sat on his back, and pointed down the hallway just revealed. “Hyah, mule!”

  He hya’d, scuttling on dozens of little metal legs down a featureless arched corridor of the same mystery substance. It must be metal, because the only not-really-features decorating the length were occasional ridges with bolts set in.

  As for ‘length’… Tesla’s Unexplained Distortions. The hallway went well past the length of the heap of junk, without angling down. Glancing back, I made sure we were actually making progress. Yeah.

  Wow. You heard about ‘bigger on the inside than the outside’ tech, but I’d never seen it, or heard of any actual examples. Or we might have just passed through a teleportation gate so neatly set across the corridor that I couldn’t spot it. Either way, it was time to revise my opinion of the owner of this lot way, way upward. This person had access to hardcore mad science.

  The hallway didn’t stretch on forever, or anything. Just long enough to make it clear we had left normal considerations of space behind. That point made, when we reached the doorway at the end, what lay on the other side didn’t surprise me much.

  Fitting neatly into the arched doorway normal to such a building, the hall emptied into a church, of the old-fashioned Gothic cathedral kind. A multi-story empty space rose to complicatedly vaulted ceilings, with walls of gray stone bricks. The cross shape of the building suggested Christianity, but the giant statues lining the nave did not look particularly biblical. Of course, the only one that wasn’t broken off somewhere depicted the big armored chainsaw two-handed sword guy.

  Broken statue rubble filled some of the space, but emptiness filled a lot of the space. Workbenches held small, but obviously high-tech pieces of inventing equipment. One resembling a plastic blender looked suspiciously like a bioengineering device I had known and very thoroughly vaporized. No red alien cloning goo, though. Nowhere did I see a bed, or a kitchen, or anything that wasn’t mad science related. Presumably, there were other rooms. Whether we were under or above-ground, I couldn’t tell. Light shone through abstract, stained glass windows from all directions.

  A thin, fit, but heavily-lined old man stood waiting for me, holding a ball-pein hammer that did not look appropriate for the delicate instruments on display. He wore overalls and a flannel shirt, both clean but worn. Short, white hair stuck out in all directions with the wildness of long-endured cowlicks.

  He had quite a scowl on him, too, glaring down on me as I rode in on my own piece of mad science.

  “Go away, machine,” he said, nose wrinkled in angry disgust.

  It took me a second to realize ‘machine’ meant me. I didn’t let that stop me, although I did try to look and sound respectful as I bowed my head. “I need your help.”

  He gave me a sneer, not proud, just disgusted. “Why should I help you?”

  “Because I passed your test.”

  If anything, he glared harder. “Eating my door doesn’t count.”

  Keeping a straight face was getting really, really hard. My synthesized voice definitely sounded a bit amused to me. “Anyone who makes kids take a test to get in appreciates an original answer.”

  “Robots aren’t kids. Maybe I was just trying to keep you out.” He was way better at hiding that this was a game.

  But a game it was, and verbal banter might be my favorite. My smile had to be breaking through as I struggled to sound serious and intimidated. “You’d have used a different door. Don’t try to tell me that you don’t have better ways to hide your lab ready.”

  I won that round. His scowl settled to merely irritable, and he gave me a long stare before asking with guarded caution, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Not a clue, but you helped Rage and Ruin.” Technically a lie, but correct in spirit. I was positive somebody had mentioned who gave Rage and Ruin their Upgrades once, but the name wasn’t coming to me now. It would just be a name, anyway.

  And this guy definitely gave them their Upgrades. As I mentioned their names, the same thin, silver circuitry tattoos appeared on his skin. A few seconds later, they disappeared, as if receding under the surface, only to be replaced by a different pattern of thicker lines. That kept happening. Whatever he’d given them, he’d given it to himself, squared.

  He’d been great at pretending to be angry. He was lousy at pretending to not care. “How are they?”

  “Enjoying life,” I promised him. Not a lo
t of people enjoyed life more than those two villainesses.

  “Cassie?” He did keep his tone flat and emotionless. Maybe it was only growing up with my mom that made that wave giant red flags about how how important those three were to him.

  Trying for my own entry in the totally not embarrassed or bothered competition, I answered, “Got a crush on me. Don’t ask, it’s too weird.”

  He grunted, a tiny little noise in the back of his throat. Then he grabbed my head.

  Like Pong, he didn’t lunge. He took my cheeks in both hands with smooth confidence, then gripped my chin. Just exactly like Pong, he tilted it from side to side, then waved a finger in front of my eyes.

  Maintaining the minimum frustration in my voice, I asked, “Okay, why do people keep doing that?”

  He’d watched my face carefully while he did it, but his focus drifted, and he sounded thoughtful, almost like a teacher giving a lecture. “It’s a test. It shows me that you’re human.”

  I hoisted an eyebrow. “What, because I can track motion with my eyes?”

  And, finally, he let go of my head and smirked. “No. You reacted to me invading your space. As a human, you care about being touched, and you know you’re supposed to watch my finger. An artificial intelligence has no reason to have emotions about something like that.”

  That sounded like the backhanded way psych tests worked. And more importantly… “So you believe I’m human? Will you help me?”

  Instead of answering, he said, “You really don’t know who I am?” We had exactly the same disbelieving tone and stare.

  Feeling irrationally apologetic, I spread my hands. “I don’t keep track of retired supervillains. I’m only guessing you’re even a villain.”

  His scowl and gruffness came back in a snap. “Maybe you should. They’ll keep track of you. Not even many heroes care that there’s a human mind in a piece of technology as temptingly advanced as this.”

  Had I actually touched a black and withered old heart, here? Seizing that momentum, I asked, “So, you’ll help me?”