Speaking of whom, might as well check my spy recordings. Meatbag Penny still hadn’t figured out I had her bugged, but until Claire’s Mom spilled the beans, that had been an alien world to me.
…I had a hit. One of the search terms in the recording was ‘Mech.’ Yikes.
Nothing for it. I clicked the play button.
“I can’t believe you’re going to do this for me, Mech.” That was my double’s voice, sounding as awed as I would be. Mech himself on the case?
Mech spoke next, with a warm and personal friendliness that probably made Other Me’s knees weak. “For you? Of course. Your parents were my idols growing up, and they’ve raised an amazing daughter. I won’t ever forget you breaking into my lair, and I mean that in the good way. As soon as I heard, I started looking.”
“Do you think you can get to them before she does?” My double sounded sincerely worried. We were both starting to think about the consequences of losing.
Criminy, I could hear him patting her head. Not literally, just in that affectionate adult tone of voice. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ve asked all my contacts. I even traded in a favor Spider owes me. Even rumors of tech that would switch a robot and a human’s minds are so rare, it would take her a month to sort through them. The only even decent possibility is that there might be something left in old Puppetman’s loot. I know where all his equipment was stashed, and I will search it personally.”
“I…” Other Me fumbled for words.
“Don’t worry about it. I owe it to Brian to take care of his little girl. I’d give my life to protect the Audit’s daughter. And I’m counting the days to see the heroine you’ll become when you grow up, Penelope. Mech is not going to let that crazy robot lay a finger on you.” He sounded so emphatic about it. I had no idea I’d impressed him so much, or that Mech was such a big fan of my parents.
Meatbag Penny was probably swooning. Me, I was intimidated. Mech did not goof around, like most heroes. Plus, he had a genius for overriding and shutting down robots. He was the guy who defeated the Conquerer invasion by taking control of the Orb of the Heavens, after all.
My Evil (Good?) Twin gave me a little hope by saying, “All I need is to get the mind switching technology out of the way. This is personal, Mech, in the non-official sense. Bad Penny and I will fight each other.”
“Sorry, Miss Akk, didn’t hear you. Too busy flying away to protect you no matter what. I guess I’ll have to risk you being mad at me, if that’s what it takes to keep you safe.” Well, so much for that. Other Me tried. His jets fwooshed before he even finished saying it, so she didn’t get a chance to even try to change his mind.
Now I’d have to go through Mech to get to her.
Fine. To get my body and my parents and my best friends back? I’d do it.
For the moment, I headed up the stairs to check on my teammates.
They checked on me, first. I was halfway up when Ampexia appeared in the doorway, leaning way over to the side rather than just standing in it. She gave me a searching look, with no attempt to hide it. “You finally up and about?”
My mouth twitched up on one side. “From you, that’s a weird question.”
Now she stepped fully into view, although she still gave me plenty of room to pass out the stairway door. Hands spread, she said, “Hey, I get to be concerned too, you know. You’ve been carrying this whole thing on your shoulders without me, and then you come back to the lair and lock yourself up.”
“If that worries you, I have good news. A little more waiting, and this is going to explode. I’ll need you then. Right now, I’m stuck inside.”
“Which is not like you,” she pointed out.
Heh. I pointed out the front windows, or the ones that weren’t covered by cardboard and plywood due to Gerty Incidents. “No help for it. Meatbag Penny’s gone proactive, and if the hero community find the evil murder-bot’s lair, they’ll form a line to invade and destroy me.”
“Harsh. Well, it sounds like you won’t need to worry for long. Might as well make the best of it. C’mere.” She jerked her head towards the rest of the mansion.
I followed Ampexia through the stupidly big building to find Gerty in the jacuzzi room. Sitting specifically in the dry jacuzzi, in fact, with a scrub brush frozen halfway to scrubbing her own back. Her eyes were shut. My partner must have picked up how to shut her off from me.
She still didn’t truly ‘get’ Gerty, which is why she waved a hand between me and the animatronic goat, asking, “Can you convince this thing to play bartender?”
Proof either that she truly did or truly did not understand Gerty. At those words, the deactivated robot’s eyes snapped open, her head swiveled, and Gerty’s mouth flapped. “Diggity hot dogs! A bartender?”
Ampexia took an alarmed step backwards, then gritted her teeth and went still. It was, after all, too late. Gerty sprung to her feet, grabbed the two of us, and tucked us under her arms as she ran to the second dining room, the less formal one. Did I mention this was a billion-dollar mansion?
She did so well, avoiding all the walls until the last one. Maybe she just detected which would damage the precious charges she carried, because when we crashed into the room, we sprayed only plaster dust around. Ampexia and I were deposited on formerly shiny stools in front of a marble counter.
At no point in this process did Gerty pause in her chatter. “I always wanted to be an old fashioned innkeep. Forsooth, beloved traveler! Get ye to a comfortable nook in front of the fire, and wrap thyself in the chatter of the villagers, who come here every night for my delicious cooking and a stein of,” a more computerized voice interrupted, “frothy water,” before Gerty continued, “in an atmosphere of camaraderie. My beds are clean, and all the bedbugs and plague fleas eliminated with lasers. Forsooth! Did I say forsooth already? Avast! Oh boy, this will be so much fun.”
Behind the counter, Gerty wreaked havoc in the smaller kitchen, the one not designed for a team of professional chefs. She scattered metal cookware around as she rummaged through cupboards, many of which she opened first.
A grin forced its way onto my face as I watched, but I at least tried to talk seriously with Ampexia. “Sorry I haven’t been much of a partner. I went to all the trouble of recruiting you, and then left you standing on the sidelines.”
She leaned back, an elbow on the counter. “I still think they’re creepy, but you based your whole strategy around the bugs I stole for you. In return, I got to live in a mansion, being fed by a robot chef. I’m good. It’s that weirdo Lucyfar who didn’t pan out.”
“Ah ha!” shouted Gerty. Pulling a tub of ice cream and a bottle of milk out of a refrigerator that had been empty five seconds ago, she held her prizes up in the air. “Malted milkshakes, anachronism of champions! Oh, wow! I know the word ‘anachronism!’ Pops would be so proud.”
I propped my own elbow on the counter, so I could rest my chin on my hand and watch the show. “If Ray and Claire were here, one of them would be telling me who Pops is, and what his powers were. The other would be trying to figure out if we could go back in time to meet him.”
“You miss them a lot,” said Ampexia, in that statement-that-implies-a-question-only-to-encourage-more-detail way.
Gerty scooped, poured, sprinkled, and splatted ingredients into a chilled metal bucket. A drawer in her chest sprung open, and she pulled out her big wooden spoon. Raised aloft, it made a cachink noise as dozens of little glowy red triangles like teeth sprung out of the sides. A grinding whir signaled the triangles spinning into a blur around the head of the spoon, until all I could see was a field of intimidating red light. Gerty stared at it for a second, blinked, and sounded suddenly apologetic. “Whoopsy doodle. I forgot this one does that.”
A laser chainspoon. All she needed were… no, she had rocket fists. Yep, Gerty was truly the complete package.
While she rummaged around in her drawer and produced a bewildering variety of death-dealing utensils, I tried to focus on the conversation.
“Big time. You’re cool, but forming a supervillain team isn’t as easy as adults pretend. Just liking each other isn’t enough. You need to mesh. We’re…”
“…too different. I feel the same. I’m still going to be there until this is over, even if it’s just to cheer from the sidelines.” Even she was watching Gerty now, and failing to hold back a smile.
It was hard not to enjoy the show. Gerty found her egg beater in a telescoping spike on her wrist, and now danced as she mixed the ingredients. Her kicking legs crunched every time they dropped back to the floor. The no doubt expensive and exotic wood paneling would be sawdust before this was over. As she mixed, she sang, “There was a jerk who made soda and maltodextrines were his secret ingredient, oh! M! I! L K Shakes!”
“You’re big into loyalty, huh?” I asked Ampexia.
Her ponytail bounced with the thuds of Gerty hitting the floor, but by now she’d gotten used to that. Pointing a finger at me, she said, “We’re super criminals, doofus. We’re outside the people who are outside the law. Loyalty is all we’ve got.”
Even my robot face must have shown all the weird feelings that prompted. Ampexia lowered her voice, turning uncharacteristically gentle. “You miss your folks real bad, too.”
“Pretty much.”
She nodded. “I can tell by how you don’t talk about it. You write those little letter things, right? Put it all down there. It will help.”
I went back to watching my favorite robot entertainer prepare a milkshake I would treasure even though I couldn’t drink it, and thought about what to write.
Hello Mother,
Hello Father,
Greetings from supervillain camp.
I’ve made it. In a few days, this will be over. Even the good times, all I could really think about was how much I miss you. For all that I ran around being a supervillain behind your back, even on the moons of Jupiter it was all fine because you were there to go back to.
Despite the odds, camp has been a great success. I’m good at being a supervillain—way better than the Penny you know as a hero. We both want to be good, but our genius is being bad. Maybe that’s why I’ve got a shot.
Whatever happens, you’ll love me, even if I get stuck in a toaster or something. I know that. Thinking about it makes me feel better.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t give this my all. As I write this, the clock is ticking. When I get what I need to take my body back, all the heroes in LA will go crazy trying to protect what they think is the real Penny. They’re trying to be good people, but so help me, I will go through them if that’s what it takes to be your daughter again.
There’s so much I want to tell you about in person. Mom, you’ll be proud of my schemes. Dad, you’ll love Gerty. Don’t blame me if I disappear for a couple of days just to enjoy having my computer back, first!
Save up lots of hugs, and buy pancake fixings, and set aside a lot of money for the Pumpkin and Princess jars.
Your Real Daughter,
Penelope Akk
PS – The other one is also real.
o the surprise of no one, I found it hard to sleep after that. Not in the regular sense, since physically all I had to do was press a button. I was terrified I would lose my chance. I’d sleep for an hour, get up, check my spy logs, and go back to bed.
Right up until I got a hit.
“Mech?” asked Other Me’s voice.
I couldn’t hear his reply. The bug caught his voice, but too faint to make anything out. She was on the phone, in a car, and I’d lucked out that she wasn’t inside our house where my bugs don’t work when the call came through.
“Just one?” She sounded suspicious and relieved. ‘Like I would have been,’ a description I was getting a lot of mileage out of.
More unintelligible murmurs.
“Okay, two o’clock.”
And there we had it.
“I’d say you’ve fulfilled all your evil partner obligations just by driving me around for two hours.”
I said it quietly, and from under the cover of a neighbor’s condo, which had an overhanging roof on one side some architect thought was brilliant long ago. Nearly two o’clock, and Meatbag Penny remained stubbornly inside our house. Would I have to ambush Mech literally on our front porch?
Not quite! There she went, out the kitchen door and down to the sidewalk. Dressed in our official white lab jumpsuit, but not visibly armed. She watched the sky, pulling on and twisting a braided pigtail around her hand.
Here came Mech, soaring along at an easy car’s pace. I switched from the tracking app to the listening app on my phone, set it to speaker mode, and handed it to Ampexia.
Mech’s current suit of armor was less sleek than the one I’d destroyed back in December. Flat top on the helmet, more cylinders and less sculpted fake muscles. The material gleamed silvery in the sunlight, but only because anything gray would look like that on this bright afternoon. His current propulsion system had no obvious rockets or turbines. Smart move, if you could get the tech. No way to know exactly what to attack to force him onto the ground.
This time he landed willingly, holding what from this distance looked like a shoebox-sized letter X out for my double to inspect. His voice came through my phone. “I told you I’d take care of you, Penelope.”
“This is it?” she asked, poking the X with a cautious finger.
Boy, did he sound confident. “I searched every scrap of old Puppetman’s creations, and searched every inch of his old laboratory, including using Echo’s sonar scanner to look for secret compartments in the walls. That’s how I found this, lost and forgotten in a heating vent. There is no other device capable of switching a human and a robot’s brains in North America, I guarantee it. If one exists elsewhere in the world, Bad Penny will never find it. You’re safe.”
She leaned forward to peer at it closely, which you had to do in mad scientist goggles, especially with my body’s terrible vision. “It looks like two arrows stuck together.”
“It is. Puppetman’s transfer cables were unidirectional, so he’d use a pair for swaps. Don’t touch it. I don’t know if it would work through my armor, and I’m not eager to find out.”
Well, that was all the information I needed. Time to attack.
The hard part of sneaking into my neighborhood had been getting Gerty here quietly. It helped that the nearer you were to downtown, the more jaded people were about super powers, and everybody knew a lot of heroes lived in and around Los Feliz. Ducking past her waving, searching arms, I unfastened the blindfold from her head. As she blinked at the sudden light, I stepped out onto the sidewalk, pointed at Mech, and shouted, “Look, Gerty! A walking can of pickled olives!”
“I’ll make my world-famous Independently Mobile Tapenade!” She couldn’t smile any more than her face already did, but her jaw hung open excitedly. Arms still outstretched, she lumbered out onto the street and galloped towards Mech.
Mech stared at the oncoming ovine juggernaut for several seconds, the only appropriate interaction. Loud enough to be heard without the microphone, he cried out, “Gerty!?”
The goat-bot skidded to a halt, arms wide. “Shiny Britches! Who’s a Gerty Boy?”
And as Tesla is my witness, Mech himself, the most respected hero in Los Angeles, shouted, “I’m a Gerty Gerty Boy!” and leaped into her arms for a hug.
“What.” My double’s voice came through my phone perfectly in sync with my own.
She rallied quickly. Faster than me, frankly. “How do you know Gerty?”
Metal creaked as the seven-foot-tall animatronic finally found someone she could hug with all her strength. As she rocked him from side to side, he answered, “Are you kidding? Penelope, the only mad scientists in this city who didn’t love going to Gerty Goat’s Family Farm as a kid are the ones older than the franchise. They love going as adults.”
“Not my dad.” She sounded… not lost, exactly. This all made a terrible sense we should have seen coming.
“Brian tries
too hard to shield his little girl from mad scientist obsessions. I bet he never argued against going.”
Okay, he had us there.
Rubbing the carpet fuzz between Gerty’s waggling ears, Mech went on, “Gerty here has been wandering Los Angeles for nearly six months. One of us will find her and take her home and try to upgrade her until she disappears again. I installed a modular attachment system so she could better store the enhancements already built into her, and one of my old forcefield devices.”
Gerty crowed happily, “My frying pans have the non-stickiest surface!”
She finally set him down, but he still looked up at her. I knew from experience that admiring fascination of a dream come to life. The happiness made him gush. “I don’t know why I bothered with the shields. What I’d really like to know is who made her indestructible. Once you attach an upgrade, that’s it. It’s not coming off.”
She patted him in return, her oversized metal hand clonking as it hit the top of his helmet. “Shiny Britches is a good boy. We were together for a full week, including encores, but other children needed me more.”
My double tilted her head to the side. “So, wait. How many mad scientists have worked on her?”
Mech was really enjoying telling her all this. You could hear it in his voice. “By now? Just about all of us. Quantum Engineer spent more than a million dollars of his own money taking her around to supermarkets and buying up all the produce and cooking ingredients to pour into an extra-spacial refrigerator only he and Brian understand.”
Quantum Engineer was one of Dad’s friends. Prematurely gray hair, thick glasses, laughed a lot, and when he and Dad hung out, the conversation got so technical I understood absolutely nothing. Condescendingly affectionate, which I guess someone with that kind of expertise had earned.
Criminy. Gerty had successfully distracted Mech, yes, but there was no way she would be useful in this fight. I had to face it: she was a weapon of mass friendship, not a war-bot. Maybe the clueless or people with no sense of humor couldn’t deal with her, but combat was the opposite of her purpose.
You Believe Her Page 33
