She let out a bark. “Ha! If I were mad, I’d have to be mad at me. I made this decision when I was you, right? I have all your memories. They just belong to someone else. There’s a very clear sense of which of us is which.”
“Should I let you go now?” I asked, still feeling awkward and guilty.
“Please. I know I’m safe, and I bet you believe me. We’re the same person. I might be a little nicer than you. Heart of Gold, and all. That means I’m with you all the way on clearing things up with Mom and Dad.”
I wrestled with the clamps, which were less obvious in their unfastening than in their application. I got Robot Penny’s head free first, so she was able to look down. “I bet that one’s like the wrists. You have to twist the base to unlock first.”
When the last clamp around the ankles came free, Robot Penny stepped out of the arch, rubbing a wrist. She saw me noticing that, and admitted, “Yeah, pure habit. It doesn’t hurt. I’m pretty sure I can feel pain, but―”
“―you’re in no hurry to find out,” I finished for her, grinning.
“HA!” we both laughed at once, as the sensation of talking to ourselves hit.
She gave my shoulder a squeeze, and I noticed that she moved oddly. Not quite right. She had my body language and great mobility, but not quite enough.
Letting go again, she flexed her fingers, staring at her hand. “I know. We’d better hope Mom doesn’t see video of me before you get to confess. She’ll know this is a setup in an instant.”
I shuddered. “More motivation to come clean.”
Robot Penny lunged forward, throwing her arms around my shoulders. Squeezing me in a tight hug, she pressed her room temperature cheek to mine. “It’s okay, Penelope. For me, the panic is over. I’ve got my own worries, but Mom and Dad won’t demand I be scrapped or anything, so there are no uncertainties. I’ll help you think clearly.”
When she let go, I gave her a wobbly grin. “If you can’t be me, we’ll make this so cool that people want you to keep being Bad Penny.”
One of her shoulders twitched up, and the other down. She didn’t have the range of mobility to shrug or flinch. That was her biggest flaw, from what I could tell. “I’ll go hero, thanks. I’m only playing villain for our confrontation because you need me to.”
It was my turn to squeeze her shoulder, and warm up my smile. “You’re a true friend.”
Then it hit me. “Aaaaugh! What are we going to do about Ray and Claire?”
She clenched her fists and bent her knees. “I know, I miss them so bad, already. At least we have each other until they get back.”
I waved a finger at nothing. “Yeah, but can they be friends with two of me?”
She grimaced, but it faded quickly. Wow, great articulation on the face. Everything the shoulders lacked. Good job, super power. She also wrung her hands convincingly. “That’s one of the big scary things for me, but you know Claire would love being friends with your robot duplicate. I wish I could keep being Ray’s girlfriend, but I’m not flesh anymore. I feel more than I expected, and let me tell you, a robotic heart beating fast is a weird sensation, but being his friend is what I want most. Maybe. I’m pretty sure.”
Tugging on a pigtail, I went back to the lopsided, guilty smile. “I really rushed into this without thinking about your feelings enough. I’m sorry.”
Robot Penny waved her hands in urgent dismissal. “Criminy, no, it’s okay. I remember making these decisions, right? You’re still scared, right now, that Mom and Dad will figure this out before you can confess on your terms. Not feeling that anymore hit me like a hammer when you plugged me in. I told you, I’ll help walk you through this. You need the help of yourself, but calm. And first thing you’re going to do is give me Bad Penny’s credit card.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Bwa?”
She smirked. “If I have to be Bad Penny, I get the rewards. No, seriously, you can’t spend it. I can, and I’m getting dumped out of my house, and I have to buy a new computer, and… criminy, I have to catch up with where we left off in Little Reaper Girl!”
Ooh. I pursed my lips. “Yeah, it’s good, but it’s not ‘replay ten levels’ good. I’ll see if I can copy the saved game.”
She rubbed her hands together, shiny robotic eyes giving me a sly, viciously anticipatory look. “And you’d better be prepared to bring your best when we fight. I’m as proud as you are, I’m as smart as you are, and I get the teleport bracelets.”
“Oh, yeah. Any ideas on how we should start the show? How can I believably call you out to duel?”
Hmmming, she tugged on one of her synthetic pigtails, staring over my head as she thought.
It hit me first. “The radio in my Machine blueprints. That thing is totally overcharged. If I make it big and supply enough power, I can transmit a signal everybody hears for miles.”
She shivered, and laughed. “Ha! I might actually hear it in my head’s circuits!”
We were silent for a moment. Smiling softly, she prodded me with a finger. “It’s fine. Call her. I’m grateful you knew I’d need someone to help me adapt.”
I nodded, solemn, not sure if I felt bad about this or not. Mainly, hanging out with myself had been weirdly satisfying. But we’d been putting this off long enough, so I pulled out my phone and dialed a number I had because Claire was a bad, bad girl. After five rings, just when I rolled my eyes in exasperation, the woman on the other end picked up. “Princess of Lies, here. Waiting to find out why anyone would think calling me is a good idea.”
Grinning, because she always made me grin, I answered, “Lucyfar, do I have a morally ambiguous good time for you.”
his was it. The last chapter of my quest to clear my name. The climactic battle. The final countdown.
As all the great epic battles of history did, it would take place in a basketball court. The same basketball court, and the same recess ground, I was in a couple of days ago making the sky rain recyclable electronics.
The secret of any devious supervillain plan is to exploit the convenient. In this case, I’d told my parents as I left, “I know where she’s active.”
See? Who looked like she was following in her mother’s footsteps of calculated heroic planning? This girl!
And I was right, too. I knew exactly where Bad Penny was active. We even met before the fight, a few blocks down from school, behind the old L-shaped garage.
Not that we had much to say. We already understood each other quite well. I personally tried to move things along to help Robot Penny escape from Lucyfar’s penchant for noogieing her.
I’d had the bad luck to ask, “How was your night?”
Lucyfar pounced. Locking her arm around Robot Penny, she ground her fist into my poor double’s artificial wig. From the convincingly realistic wince, the robot did, indeed, feel pain.
“She’s booooring!” Lucyfar explained while Robot Penny struggled. “She doesn’t want to commit any crimes. She doesn’t want to tell me all your embarrassing secrets. She doesn’t have your super power, so she can’t make me a dark energy powered hair dryer I can use to terrify the scientific community.”
I tried to push away the blueprint forming in the back of my head. “Why would that scare them?”
Lucyfar laughed, still holding onto Robot Penny’s head, despite all my doppleganger’s tugging and pushing. “Have you ever seen a bunch of physics nerds try to turn off an unidentified power source? Sometimes they actually run in circles and yell. It’s hilarious.”
With a heavy sigh, I said, “If all of this goes well, I’ll pay you for your time by building you one. Sound good?”
Lucyfar looked down at me from above, eyes wide, irises dark, but backlit with red flame. Was that her normal eye color? I couldn’t remember. “You’d better. She was even too smart to fall for the cannon trick.”
“HA! I knew it! The cannon was real?”
Robot Penny gave me a thumb’s up.
“So, if we can get on with things…?” I asked.
&nb
sp; Lucyfar stared at me with unconvincing blankness.
Now came Robot Penny’s turn to sigh. When it was over, she stopped struggling and said, “Meatbag Penny.”
Lucyfar exploded into howls of laughter. Letting go of my duplicate’s head, she staggered back to lean against the cement block wall of the garage, forearm over her eyes.
I gave my double a look.
Stiff and awkward (Tesla, what a well made face), she asked, “What do you call me in your head? And you don’t have to answer, because I remember what you’d already decided.”
“Touché.”
We bumped fists respectfully, and went to work.
In my case, that meant the basketball court. I rode there on The Machine, bloated with spare iron and plastic, plugged a blueprint into his back, and set him to work regurgitating cogs all over the battlefield.
I already had the radio, hooked up to an experimental battery I’d gotten from my dad. Supposedly more like a capacitor, it would release a whole lot of juice over a short period.
Battlefield. Radio. Staff. Disk. Machine. Flight rotors. Boxing glove gun.
Armed, I slipped my goggles down over my eyes, picked the microphone up from the radio, and pressed the transmit button.
“To the villainess who so smugly goes by the name Bad Penny, this is an old-fashioned high school call-out! Meet me after school in the recess yard, and by ‘after school,’ I mean right now! No more practical jokes and sniping at each other. We prove which of us is the best, once and for all.”
Pressing the off button, I luxuriated in the glow of a job well done. From the distant yelling, every radio, television, computer, and cell phone at least for a mile had picked that up.
Beyond this, I hadn’t planned. I had complete faith in my ability to ad lib, which meant I had complete faith in hers.
So I watched, and waited. I knew that the minutes that felt like they dragged by were probably seconds. Would she try for an ambush? It’s an option I would consider, if this were a real fight. My victories had rarely come from overwhelming physical force.
Full disclosure, Penelope Akk edition: At least half of them had come from my cursed pennies. The few remaining couldn’t be used against me, and I doubted they could be used against Robot Penny.
Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Robot Penny appeared at the edge of the court, hands spread and pointed towards the ground dramatically. Ooh, good choice. Teleporting in and using the lightning gloves to produce special effects.
In her full costume, including a spare set of goggles and gas mask, Robot Penny looked like a parody of me. The mask distorted her voice helpfully as she shouted, “Fine by me, Akk. I’m sick of you getting the genius treatment because your parents are famous. Prove you deserve your rep, and I’ll let you go.”
“Let me go? HA! HA HA HA HA HA!” I tried to make that sound more skeptical than villainous, but at least laughing was easy. This was fun.
Robot Penny took a step forward and disappeared, but I knew this trick. Without wasting time turning around, I stabbed the butt of my staff backwards. It hit resistance, and I heard the thump. Only then did I spin, in time to see Robot Penny stagger backwards.
Her boot clipped the edge of one of the gears scattered around. The impact acted like pulling a trigger. Smaller gears unfolded from underneath, ringed by more gears, all driven and connected by notched rods. They formed five lines, more like fingers on a hand than a star. In practice, they looked like a bear trap more than anything, jumping into the air and snapping shut in a fist.
Oh, had I been happy to find these babies in the Machine’s set of blueprints.
Robot Penny wasn’t in the trap when it closed. Taking another step back, she teleported away. I bet if she hadn’t known my equipment as well as I do, it would have caught her.
An easy win would have been a relief, but not good enough theater.
Where was she? I scanned the area as I stepped between my land mines, keeping an unsprung trap behind me. Ah, there! On the roof of the school. Criminy, I’d at least have some good twinges teleporting that far up. Very, very important note―since she didn’t have muscles that got tired, Robot Penny could exploit the teleport bracers way better than I ever had.
From this distance I couldn’t make out a lot of details, but when Robot Penny’s arms started spinning and a blue-white glow formed around her, I didn’t need details. She was readying a lightning attack. I tensed, expecting her to disappear, but she stood there, glowing brighter and brighter. She was still drawing power, charging the attack up? Tesla, I did not want to be hit by that!
I kept moving, wandering among my mechanical land mines. Avoiding them took hardly any effort. That had to be my super power, understanding the machines at a level so basic I knew by instinct where they’d be laid out. Robot Penny wouldn’t have that feeling, so advantage to me there. As I wandered, I spun up the staff’s wheels. We both had weapons, and hers would be short range. Electricity didn’t focus well. It went where it wanted.
The light went out on the roof.
Ha! Sucker. Charging up her attack made her glow so bright, even behind me and to the side I saw the shine. Readying the staff had been a distraction, and I launched my real attack by kicking the gear next to me, hard. It triggered, but also slid, knocking into the next trap, which knocked into the next. They all jumped into the air, intercepting Robot Penny’s lightning as she released the bolt.
Again she disappeared, a heartbeat ahead of the mechanical fist that grabbed for her.
Cheering erupted on every side. What the…?
On one level, I’d been aware of kids drifting up to the fence and the open edges of playground. They’d been there as I scanned my peripheral vision for Robot Penny’s teleports. I just hadn’t paid them any attention.
Criminy. They must have come running the moment my signal went out. Yes, part of the point had been to get witnesses, but I hadn’t expected at least two dozen kids. I’d seen most of them in Northeast West Hollywood Middle, or when I took math classes in Upper High, so they had to live around here, but I was pretty sure Cassie didn’t. Yet there she was, clapping and whistling. She could do the ‘fingers in her mouth’ whistle, too.
Robot Penny, out on the edge of the minefield, took the same moment to gawk. The crowd moved, some of the braver kids rushing up to meet her, so she had to teleport again―then a third time, when her hurried blink set off a trap. She set down near the school wall, where the kids couldn’t get to her.
And hey, if we had an audience, we might as well put on a show! Robot Penny pointed a gauntleted finger at me, and accused, “You’d have lost already if you hadn’t rigged the field of battle.”
I folded my arms over my chest, and raised my chin haughtily. “Are you complaining this isn’t fair, Bad Penny?”
Her expression might be invisible, but we could all hear her grin in her merry reply. “No, just hoping I could lure you into doing something stupid.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, and for the first time in this fight, I lowered my staff and gave it a flick. Not at Robot Penny, but at the ground in front of her.
Instead of the usual weird beam, a rock the size of my head shot out. It hit the trap I aimed at, which leaped up and grabbed the spot Robot Penny had been in. She’d teleported to a new location the moment I’d swung, of course.
Even as good as she dodged, odds said one of these would catch her long before I ran out. That was my plan. Robot Penny would surely be hatching a counter-scheme now, but thankfully, she was playing to lose.
The exchange got another round of applause, and Cassie waved her arms over her head, doing that trick she has that looks like huge wings made out of lightning. The kids in the crowd cheered and yelped alternately as it swept over them.
One of the writhing struts of those wings touched Robot Penny. She grabbed it with her gauntlets―or at least, that’s exactly what it looked like―and with a yank, pulled the whole mass free and threw it at me!
Criminy. This one c
aught me by surprise. I didn’t know how to react!
Lucky for me, someone else leaped out of the crowd, moving so fast she hit two traps and ran past them before they finished snapping shut. Leaping into the air, my rescuer caught the blast with her body. Letting out a squeaky grunt, she crashed into a third cog, which loudly closed its fingers around her.
Tesla’s Shiny Ghost, who would be so insane as to―oh, Marcia. Of course.
And thank goodness, because I’d built these traps to catch a human, not a robot. At this size, made out of steel, some of the snapping sounds from the closing metal fist might be bones.
Marcia struggled like a fish on a line, flopping and twisting with increasing violence. One arm broke free, giving her freedom to breathe in the process. She used that breath to snarl, punching the trap over and over until the metal bent, then broke. As she beat her way free, she yelled, “Let! Go! Of! Me! You! Ugly! Contraption! If! Cassie! Can! Join! In! So! Can! I!”
I waved my arms for attention, and shouted, “Neither of you can join! This is my fight!”
Distracted, I didn’t see Robot Penny move. She appeared in front of me, grabbing my wrists. I struggled, and she pretended to wrestle, but she had me. Those robot arms were way stronger than mine. Too soft for anyone else to hear, she murmured, “This is only going to get farther out of control. Innocent people are about to get hurt.”
“Yeah. It never occurred to us that this place would be crawling with fans. Reschedule?” I whispered back.
Abruptly, Robot Penny let me go. Shouting for the audience again, she proclaimed, “This is not what I’m here for. Penelope, we’ll settle this another time, when it’s just you and me.” With that, she turned, took a step, and disappeared.
“Awwwww!” chorused the crowd, then started chattering with each other about the fight they’d gotten to see.
Unwrapping the Machine, I set him to eating all the traps, unsprung first, so no one could get hurt. I marched through the path between the cog-shaped mines, grabbed Marcia by her shoulder, and dragged her out of the recess field.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis Page 21
