Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Felicity’s elbow comes out of the same region of nowhere as the golem. She hurls herself into it, a feral whirlwind of flailing arms. The pair sprawl, tussle, tumble. Only Felicity comes up. “Don’t make me make a habit of that.” And she kisses me.

  I stare, slightly bewildered, trying to get my bearings.

  Kayla doesn’t have time for that. “Here.” She shoves Mercurio at me. “You watch his feckin’ treacherous arse.” She grabs her sword in both hands and starts hacking harder.

  The door is only a few feet away. I have my arm around Mercurio’s throat, parrying past his body. My slashes are increasingly lazy, increasingly ineffective. We’re nearly out of here, but the golems have almost overwhelmed us.

  “Here we are again,” Mercurio says in Clyde’s voice. “Back in the thick of it again.”

  “Shut up,” I tell him. Tell it. “Just shut up.”

  A foot to the door. Just a few golems between us and the dash to freedom.

  We burst forward, crash into a startlingly empty lab. The equipment all lies smashed on the floor. There is the stink of rotting vegetable matter. Trampled lettuce leaves line the floor. This is where he was keeping them. Mercurio. Clyde 2.0. He jammed this place with them.

  There’s a door at the far end of the lab. We surge toward it. More golems are on our heels, streaming after us.

  Kayla smashes against the far door, but it refuses to budge. She curses with vehemence, smashes against it repeatedly. The door starts to buckle, but far too slowly. I scan the room, desperate.

  “Window!” I yell.

  We break left, toward the square of light and freedom. I shove Mercurio at Felicity, and Kayla and I form a rear-guard. Behind me, someone smashes the window. Freezing wind howls through.

  One golem goes down. Another. But three more are circling round to the left. I turn and slice, an aching two-handed movement.

  “Tabitha clear!” Gran yells behind me.

  My blade gets stuck in a pineapple and for a moment I lack the strength to yank it free.

  Behind us I can still hear Winston screaming. “I’ll feed you all to fucking rabbits!” But there’s no chance to go back for him, no way to get him out of the arboretum. And he’ll be OK. He has to be OK. We’ll come back. We’ll send in the reinforcements.

  “Mercurio clear!” Gran yells.

  Kayla leans over me, splits an oncoming golem in two, which lets me keep my brains inside my head for a little longer.

  “Felicity clear!”

  I see the golem coming at Kayla a split second before she does. It’s snuck past us, circling. It raises a massive lumpy gourd of a fist.

  I slam my blade forward, lunging underneath Kayla, catching the thing in the gut, and ripping sideways, eviscerating it.

  The golem tumbles.

  “Dudes, come on!” Gran bellows.

  Kayla looks at me. “Ta,” she says. And she’s smiling again. I’m almost too tired, but I manage to flash one back. Then she’s gone, out the window, into the cold and the wind.

  “Come on!”

  I stagger back. Up onto a bench, Gran grabbing me from through the window, heaving me out. I land in a heap. A golem lunges at the open window. Mad and scrabbling to get to me.

  This is what Clyde left for us. This is what he wanted us to find. This is all he has for us. This mindless, spasming frenzy.

  Is that it? Is that the why? Has he lost his mind? Is this golem a metaphor for what is going on with him?

  Kayla’s sword snaps out and decapitates the thing.

  “Come the feck on,” she says, and pulls me toward Agent Gran’s van.

  19

  ONCE THE BLOOD HAS DRIED

  The Area 51 infirmary is a narrow rectangular room, staffed entirely by robots. Or synthetic people. Or class fives. Or whatever the hell I’m supposed to call them. There seem to be too many varieties of life form these days. What happened to good old-fashioned bad folk?

  A woman with slightly shiny, rubbery skin applies a fresh ice pack to my head. Felicity sits next to me with a mannequin man stitching up the right side of her head. The servos in his arm squeak every time he pulls the thread out. He has apologized for it twice. Somehow that makes it feel even weirder than it did before.

  He apologized for that too.

  Gran, Tabitha, and Kayla are here. Gran is receiving the ice pack therapy and playing with his smartphone. Tabitha lies in a genuine hospital bed with a bandage around her head. She seems much more concerned with her laptop’s injuries than her own. She’s been poking at the machine with a multi-tool since she regained consciousness, parts of its anatomy are spread on the pristine sheets around her.

  Kayla is a little scraped but has threatened bodily harm on the next robot that approaches her.

  Gran looks up from his phone. “All right, dudes,” he says. “That’s it. Wireless network in Area 51 is officially down.”

  “Good.” Tabitha doesn’t look up from her repair work.

  “Rest of the US will be all taken care of and hunky-dory in twenty-four hours. Well, you know, apart from all the rabid corporate dudes all pissed and stuff about, you know, work.” This seems to strike Gran as a slightly absurd concern.

  Still, I have to give Area 51 credit. Dismantling the wireless network of an entire nation, against everyone’s will, inside of twenty-four hours is an impressive feat. “What will you tell everyone?” I ask. “A solar flare?” I remember the British government’s cover story for cutting all power to London. The city is still recovering from eight hours of darkness.

  “No, man.” Gran shakes his head. “Environmental stuff never flies so well here as with you guys. Total shame and everything. But we always wind up saying it’s some terrorist thing or doodad, or something. National security ups compliance by, like, I don’t know, a shitload.”

  “Oh.” I nod. “OK.” Brutal but efficient, I suppose. Maybe that’s the CIA for you.

  “That mean I can take off this stupid feckin’ hat then?” Kayla asks. Possibly not the highest priority question, but a favorite for the home crowd.

  All eyes go to Tabitha. She works a screwdriver attachment deep into the circuitry of the laptop and flips something smoking across the room. It bounces off a mannequin man’s head. He blinks but makes no other comment. Neither does Tabitha.

  “Feck it then,” says Kayla, yanks her trucker hat off and tosses it into a corner.

  When Tabitha doesn’t start screaming, I pull mine off too. It joins Kayla’s in the corner. Felicity slings the bonnet aside with a sigh of relief. She has the worst hat hair. It is rather adorable looking.

  There is silence for a moment. We seem to no longer be able to avoid the subject, but no one wants to broach it.

  I take a breath, then dive in.

  “So then,” I say, “what are we doing with Mercurio?”

  Gran looks at Tabitha for a long time before answering. She doesn’t look back.

  “Under, like, sedation,” he says. “We’re running a whole bunch of scans. MRI, EEG, all that mad science stuff. Tweaking the dials, man. Then we’ll have some psych guys come in. Head shrinking dudes. They’ll do some awesome talking stuff. We’ll totally get you the transcripts. Video too if you want. But, I’m assuming…” he trails off. “Then…” He trails off again.

  Then what?

  He looks at Tabitha again, but I don’t know why. And then to Felicity. In turn her gaze meets his then travels to Tabitha. It is the eyeball equivalent of a Rube-Goldberg machine.

  “Are you up to it?” Felicity asks Tabitha.

  Tabitha takes the bent and twisted base of her laptop. And then with a savagery that I have seen lurking before, but never seen unleashed, she twists the metal. There is a crack and a violent pop. She shakes the sheet. It is remarkably flat. She looks up and meets Felicity’s eyes dead on.

  “No need for it to be conscious,” she says, avoiding the personal pronoun. “Keep it quiet. I’ll debug its brain.”

  Debug… And then I remember. Fro
m the funeral service. Chatting with the versions. One of them had gone onto Tabitha’s server and found out she was figuring out how to fix the mind of someone overwritten by Clyde. It had seemed so paranoid then. An innocent age.

  Well… an innocent week or something.

  “Will there be anything left?” I ask. “Of the original Mercurio, I mean. Or is that all…” I hesitate because it’s a horrible thought. “… gone?”

  She looks at me. A stare as emotionally dead as the one the robot stitching up Felicity is giving her.

  “Don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. Better that than…” And despite the emotional deadening she still can’t complete that sentence. Maybe that’s a good sign.

  A monitor beside me suddenly blinks to life. A Clyde version smiles happily at everyone from the screen. “Could I help?” it asks. “Couldn’t help but overhear. Well… in all truth I could have helped, but I was busy working out the interface for the intercom program. Plus this place is bugged just about everywhere. These Area 51 people have no privacy. But maybe that’s how they like it.”

  “The hell is he doing there?” Tabitha asks, jabbing her multi-tool at the screen. “Restricted to conference room.” The multi-tool swivels threateningly to Gran. “You promised.”

  “Dudette,” Gran says, “totally not my call. Kensington and his whole seniority thing. He gave your versions access to our full domestic server. I was all, ‘psychological sensitivity.’ And he was all, ‘yadda yadda,’ and, ‘I don’t give a pompous shit.’ Dude has some serious issues with mellow-ness. But, yeah. They’re, like, about and stuff on the premises now.”

  “No.” Tabitha repeats it again. “No discussion. No debate. Just no. No versions.”

  One thing you have to credit Tabitha with—she is really in touch with her negative emotions.

  In many ways, I think she’s right. A man whose mind was overwritten by, well, by someone almost identical to these things, these versions… he just tried to kill us.

  But… am I really looking at this rationally? What if I divorce emotion from reason. These versions are not the one who tried to kill us. They took a different path. They make me uncomfortable but to ignore their basic utilitarian usefulness is idiotic.

  I take a deep breath. “Actually,” I say, “we do need them. Or we need someone. We almost had our arses handed to us. We had to send in a back-up squad to rescue Winston. And having our own trio of Clydes could tip the edge in our favor. There might be some insight they have. I mean, Jesus, the more people we have on this the better, right?”

  For a moment everyone is very still and very quiet as they wait to see if Tabitha is going to murder me.

  “Thank you, Arthur,” the Clyde version breaks the silence. “May not actually physically have a back now, but it is nice to know that you have it metaphorically.”

  Tabitha flicks a pointed glance at Felicity. Who shrugs. “He’s got a good point,” she says.

  “Fine.” Tabitha flings back her sheets, gathers up the remnants of her laptop. “Fucking fine. In the field. Saw who you two are really interested in protecting.” She gets out of the bed, and while a little unsteady on her feet, she manages a pretty convincing stalk toward the room’s exit.

  As she passes the monitor, the Clyde version says, “Tabby…”

  She plunges the multi-tool into the monitor. It detonates with a hiss of cracks and sparks. She doesn’t spare it or us a glance as she exits the room.

  20

  LATER

  The CIA has apparently deemed it unsafe for us to return to our hotel prior to the deactivation of the nation’s wireless networks. Instead they provide board in the form of a small square room made of the same molded plastic as the rest of Area 51. The place also has the same slightly antiseptic feel as the rest of Area 51. Felicity tells me to stop moaning and help her unpack.

  She has plucked a pair of my underwear from the suitcase, and is folding them in half when I ask her, “Do you think Tabitha was right?”

  “About what?”

  “About us in the field. About me being too concerned with your safety.” I’m at a small desk where I just finished connecting our laptops to the Area 51 wired network.

  She smiles. “I thought it was rather sweet that you came to my rescue. Very knight in shining armor of you. Though I do seem to remember me saving your delightful derrière a couple of times as well.” She reaches back for another pair of my underwear.

  She is being slightly coy. And she is not letting me fully in.

  “That was much appreciated,” I say. Because it really was. It’s nice to not be a corpse right now. “But you didn’t abandon our teammates to accomplish it.” I lean forward in the desk chair. “I mean, did you need me? Would you have been OK if I hadn’t come for you?”

  She shrugs, and puts the underwear down. “I don’t know, Arthur. I think, honestly, it’s a minor issue. We were in a fight with a former co-worker. Things were bound to get weird. I know I certainly wasn’t at my A game.” She shrugs. “I think the important thing to focus on is that, despite it all, nothing bad did happen. We all got out alive.” She smiles, sympathetic. “Are you OK? You’re not normally this worried about your performance.”

  I go to say I’m fine, and then I hesitate. I am more confident than this usually. Felicity herself has chewed me out for things, and I’ve been fine with them. What is it this time?

  But I know. Of course I do.

  “I abandoned three teammates for the sake of just one, today.” That’s a shitty truth, right there. “But it was you. So of course I abandoned them. But that could have been disastrous. Except I don’t know how else I could have done it.”

  Felicity steps forward, pushes a hand through my hair, sweeping it back from my forehead.

  “What do you want me to say, Arthur? That this will get easier?” She looks at me, firm and sharp. “It won’t. This is going to be awful.”

  For a moment, there is a slightly haunted look in her eyes, and for a moment I see a visual echo of the face that told me about the time she watched as agents shot her sister.

  “You will regret things, Arthur. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is. You will make sacrifices.” She swallows hard. “But they’ll be necessary. That’s why you’ll make them. That’s how you’ll learn to live with them.” She flicks her wrist at the corner of one eye.

  I close my eyes, try to get myself under control. I am being selfish. I know the sacrifices Felicity has made. The one I made today should barely even register. And yet there’s still a knot in my gut. Maybe honesty is the best policy.

  “You said…” I start and then hesitate. It’s not an easy thing to say, either to Felicity or myself. “You said heroes are defined by sacrifice.”

  “I did.” There’s something about her face that is both firm and soft. I don’t know how she does it, only that it melts my heart.

  “But… I…” I shake my head. “I don’t think I could sacrifice you.”

  For a moment I think she’s going to say something, but then either she doesn’t trust herself or me. I honestly couldn’t say which.

  “And the thing is,” I manage to continue, “I don’t think you would ever really be able to forgive me if I saved you at the expense of the greater good.”

  She tries to smile but it falters. She leans in, presses her head against mine. “You’ll make the right call, Arthur,” she says quietly. “In the moment, that’s what you’ll do.”

  She puts her lips to my forehead, kisses me. A benediction perhaps. “I have faith in you, Arthur,” she says. “Please have some in me. I can take care of myself.”

  I hold her, tight and close. Hold her and feel her real, and solid, and warm. She squeezes me back tight.

  But she didn’t answer me. Not really. And maybe that’s confirmation in itself.

  ONE LONG NIGHT LATER

  “Full of shit. You are.”

  At the beginning of my relationship with Felicity, she assured me that it was possible for exes to
have a healthy working relationship. Apparently, Tabitha and Clyde did not get that memo.

  “Well,” says a Clyde version, “while I do appreciate the anthropomorphism, which is really very sweet of you, and I do certainly want you to know that you’re entitled to your point of view, and in many ways I do see where you’re coming from, and I am in fact even considering agreeing, I think completely ignoring the thalamic entrypoint is perhaps a little hasty.”

  I suspect that was meant to make sense somewhere, but the version lost me at, “I do appreciate the anthropomorphism.”

  We just have one Clyde version with us for this operation. The other two are mining the servers we rescued from Mercurio’s labs. This one speaks out of a monitor that hangs from the ceiling on a jointed arm. It is angled to face down on a slight angle. It affords the version a better view of Mercurio’s body.

  The good doctor lies unconscious and bound on the operating table beneath him. His head has been shaved and the white hair replaced with a thick layer of electrodes. One of the infirmary’s walls is doubling as another massive monitor; numerous windows give life to the electrodes’ measurements.

  Tabitha stands with her back to the man and the monitor—both versions of her old boyfriend. It’s probably the most mentally healthy way to face them. She scans the screens with an acid expression. Gran and I have taken up our spectator position at a respectful and hopefully safe distance.

  “What are you seeing?” I ask. Wading into this fight is probably less potentially lethal than going up against the golems yesterday, but I’m still glad I’m wearing my pistol.

  “Certain amount of neurological damage,” the Clyde version says, attempting to peer at me from his screen. “It looks like Evil-Me came in through the thalamus, which is sort of a routing center for the brain,” continues the version. “It’s sort of like the brain’s King’s Cross just without all the bad shops and hookers after midnight. Not that I’m judging the way in which anyone makes money. Except, well, there is the whole legality issue, so well, maybe judging it a little bit. Personally I’d always thought selling a kidney would be my plan for dealing with long-term financial disaster. Less of an option for me these days, but money is also less of a concern, so—”