Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “The thalamus,” I cut him off.

  Gran chuckles.

  “Oh right, yes,” the Clyde version says. “Well, originating there, we have some burn damage. Looks like Evil-Me came in a little hot and zapped Mercurio. Burned out some nerve bundles. A bunch of them lead from the thalamus to the hippocampus, which is sort of a subrouting station for the whole memory thing. If we’re still all aboard on the whole train metaphor. Pardon the pun. God, I love puns. Did we ever discuss that when I still had legs?”

  “Not so much.”

  And did he love puns when he was alive? Is that true? Or is… No. I have to stop this.

  “Shut up,” Tabitha says, without turning to the monitor.

  “Oh sorry,” says Clyde. “Wrapping up. Anyway Tabby and I were just discussing where best to get started with our coding. Origin point or main site of injury. Professionals at work.”

  “Professional,” Tabitha corrects. “And software.”

  “Totally.” The Clyde version nods vigorously. “Whatever you say, love. Oh damn, I didn’t mean that. Being professional. Oh wait, I’m the software. Totally being software. Zero, one, one, one, and all that.”

  Tabitha growls in frustration.

  Gran leans over. “You know, dude,” he murmurs, “with your team’s, you know, track record and stuff, I always just figured you guys would be… I don’t know…” He searches for a diplomatic word.

  “Functional?” I suggest.

  “I guess so.”

  “Me too.” I nod.

  We share a smile. Then I notice Clyde looking over. He doesn’t exactly scowl—that’s not in his nature—but he does not look exactly pleased.

  Should I be scared of that? Of what evil might lurk in him?

  On the bench, Mercurio twitches.

  “The fuck?” Tabitha snaps. She finally turns to face the monitor, dark eyes flashing.

  I smell danger and am almost grateful for the excuse to stand up. “What’s going on?”

  “Mercurio. Fried by him.” Tabitha stabs a finger at Clyde’s monitor. “Almost,” she allows.

  I go to Mercurio’s side. One of the side effects of my job is that I have developed an unhealthy habit of walking toward danger.

  “It was a minor miscalculation in the amplitude,” Clyde protests. “Totally minor. And I corrected it. I did.”

  “You’re a machine,” Tabitha says. “Math, not a problem you can have. Call bullshit.”

  I massage my forehead. I have to make Tabitha’s relationship with the versions functional when I can’t even manage that myself.

  “Look,” I say, “let’s just calm down and work on this.”

  Tabitha seems momentarily unsure whether to send her spiteful looks in my direction or the version’s. She settles on the version.

  “Fuck up and I fry you,” she states, leaning back over the body.

  I came here because I thought I might learn something, but so far we’re just probing at the edges of how uncomfortable one man can be made to feel. “Perhaps we should leave,” I suggest to Gran.

  Tabitha shrugs as if she couldn’t care less about anything in the world. Then, “Gran could stay,” she says. “Maybe.”

  I wish I knew if she was doing this out of some genuine, albeit improbable sense of connection with Gran, or if she was just doing it to spite the Clyde versions.

  “Actually I’d prefer it if Arthur remained too,” says Clyde. Possibly to counter Tabitha’s move, or possibly just to spite me for siding with Gran.

  I suppress a groan, and settle in for the long haul.

  THREE AGONIZINGLY DYSFUNCTIONAL HOURS LATER

  I finally manage to escape the room. I make it about three paces beyond the door before I just have to stand there rubbing my temples and hoping that’s more effective than beating my head repeatedly against a wall.

  I’m so absorbed in the activity that I don’t even notice Kayla until she taps me on the arm and scares the shit out of me.

  “Sword lesson,” she says.

  I am so not in the mood. I just want to lie down and rinse my brain with some jazz and trashy action movies for about four weeks.

  “Come on, you big Jess.” She proceeds to drag me, apparently without any real effort. “Be cathartic.”

  She has my sword waiting for me back in the large gymnasium. I seem to remember leaving it in my room. I worry there will be a fist-shaped hole in the door.

  She comes at me a few times. Slowly enough. I parry.

  She shrugs. “Thinking too much,” she says. “Still.”

  I flick the sword at her, irritated. “It’s in my nature.”

  She smiles. Another friendly smile. And it’s not so scary this time. “So think,” she says, “but about something else.”

  I stare at her. “You’re attacking me with a sword. What am I meant to think about? How sweet the hereafter will be?”

  Another shrug. “You’re the talky bastard. Talk. About something. Gets boring, I’ll decapitate you.”

  I think that was what passes for a joke with Kayla. Which does beg one question.

  Jab, parry, thrust.

  “Why are you being nice to me?”

  “This, a-feckin’-gain?”

  Harder jab, more desperate parry, thrust batted away.

  “No,” I say, beating a retreat. “I mean, we’ve never been on the best of terms. This seems a little… out of character.”

  Kayla twirls around me, graceful in a brutal sort of way. I twist, manage to meet her blade, but stagger back under the ensuing onslaught. She smashes her sword toward me. I fumble up a block, but she bears weight down. My blade is forced dangerously close to my face. I can feel the heat of it, almost searing my skin.

  “You did save the world last week,” she says. “Fairly impressive. Plus, like you said to Tabitha and the versions, we’re stuck with each other. Can do this hard or easy.”

  I would nod, but that would take the tip of my nose off.

  “By the way,” Kayla mentions, “you should be kicking my feet out from under me about now.”

  Her leg smashes into mine, and I tumble to the floor. My sword spins away.

  “Not in your sword manual?” Kayla taps the side of her head.

  I lie panting on the ground, waiting for my tailbone to stop yelling so loudly at me.

  She gives me a hand up. But she’s got me thinking about the number Clyde did on my own brain as she starts to come at me again. Three quick blows later and I’m on the ground again.

  “Distracting yourself too hard now,” she tells me. “Talk.”

  I get my sword up. Kayla circles me. Predatory. And I start talking just to keep the fear at bay. Intellectually, I may know Kayla and I are on polite terms now, but my subconscious only accepts these things in writing and has a four week backlog.

  “It’s Mercurio,” I finally admit.

  “Poor feck,” Kayla says.

  She lunges fast and hard, and I am not entirely sure how I survive.

  Feint and thrust. Parry and block.

  “We just came from… We were taking Clyde out of him. Or the evil version. Version 2.0. But what about Version 2.0 himself? What if we could debug him? Take the evil out somehow. Turn him back into…”

  I just about get my sword in the way of a blow that would have made me a foot shorter.

  “We’ve got three of him al-feckin’-ready.” Kayla’s swipes are vicious. “That’s no enough for you?”

  And… No. No it’s not. And I’m ashamed to admit it, but they’re not Clyde. Somehow, as messed up as it is, Mercurio is more Clyde to me than they are.

  “You want my opinion?” she asks me. “We skewer the feckin’ a-hole.”

  “He’s a computer program,” I point out.

  “Then we skewer his feckin’ hard drive in its feckin’ a-hole. You want to do the heroic thing? You make him feckin’ gone. Rid the world of evil. It’s feckin’ simple.”

  Kayla comes at me then, fast and hard and for a moment I can’t t
alk, can’t think about anything. I am just my swordblade moving back and forth.

  Finally I manage to launch an offensive strike of my own. “But don’t heroes save people too?”

  “Are you feckin’ stupid?” Kayla curls her lip, smashing my sword aside. “He’s not people. Just said it yourself, he’s a feckin’ program.”

  “What about hope?” I ask. “We just abandon him even if there’s a long shot chance?” I’m getting heated now. Kayla smashes my sword aside but I go with the motion, pivot on my foot, and duck, stabbing under my arm as my back goes to her. There is the clash of steel but Kayla grunts.

  Then she stops. No movement. Holy shit, did I?

  I glance over my shoulder. Kayla has my sword caught between her palms. It is less than an inch from her neck. My sword spits fire against the skin of her hand. She pushes me away. Hard.

  “Oh crap,” I say, “I’m—”

  But she nods, shaking off the scorched palm. “Good,” she says. “You weren’t thinking. Just fighting.”

  And she’s right. I wasn’t thinking about the sword at all. It was like that moment in the arboretum of Mercurio’s lab when I was fighting to get to Felicity. Simple.

  “Wait,” I say, “were you just baiting me?”

  She looks at me like I’m the one who almost received a serious blow. “Are you fecked in the head?” she asks. “More Clyde? Shoot the bastard and be done.”

  Which is an awkward moment for Clyde’s digital figure to suddenly appear, peering up from the floor below us.

  Seriously, is nothing in this place not a monitor?

  “Hello chaps. Chap and chapess. Chapette? Is that how that unpleasant little CIA man frames it? Odd thing to say. Sort of underhand and philandering if you ask me. Which you didn’t, of course. But for future reference if you ever do want to ask me.”

  “Why the feck are you here?” Kayla doesn’t even need a sword to cut to the point.

  “Oh.” Clyde places palm to forehead. “Yes. Sorry. Version 2.3 and I were just helping Felicity go through Mercurio’s computer equipment and we found Evil-Me and we need to go kill him. Almost forgot to say. Good thing my head is digitally coded onto my shoulders really. But she wants to do the whole briefing thing. Come on.”

  And with that he’s gone.

  Kayla looks at me, pointedly. “More of him?” she asks. “Fecked in the head, you are. Seriously fecked in the head.”

  21

  We stand in the Area 51 conference room and stare up at the three Clyde versions. They are all looking slightly too pleased with themselves. There’s the crackle of anticipation in the air. Even Tabitha seems to have wiped some of the antagonism off her face for this one. Though there’s a chance that’s because she is standing remarkably close to Gran.

  “So,” Felicity says, “where is he?”

  Him. We’re going to confront him. Clyde. Version 2.0.

  And then we’re probably going to kill him.

  God…

  “Well it wasn’t an easy task, let me tell you,” says the first version. “I mean, one doesn’t want to pat oneself on the back—”

  “Especially if one doesn’t have a back,” points out another.

  “Well, it’s a metaphorical back,” says the first.

  “Totally following along with the logic here,” says the third, “and I don’t want to derail things. Think you guys are off to a totally blazing start. But I don’t think we should question our anthropomorphism in public.” He gives a nod in our direction. “Doesn’t set a good precedent. Just a thought of course.”

  “A good thought, though,” says the first.

  “Fabulous thought,” says the second, clapping the third, apparently without irony, on the back.

  “I asked, where is he?” Felicity repeats the question, this time with force.

  “Well, on the surface of Mercurio’s files there wasn’t much apart from his research. Weaponizing vegetation, with a strong focus on the golems we fought. But also stuff about massive growth spurts, and deadly fungus attacks, and all that delightful mad science stuff, which, I have to say, really reaffirms my faith in the American nation. Someone has to be sponsoring mad science, and it’s good to see the world’s super-power taking charge in the field. But anyway, that’s essentially all chaff, and flotsam, and other words for unwanted stuff we don’t need to care about. But anyway, below that was a whole second layer of files, but you know what was really fascinating?”

  I suspect I will regret this but I grudgingly ask, “What?”

  “It was more chaff, flotsam, and the other word!” shouts the third Clyde, rather excitedly. One of the other ones gives me a thumbs-up.

  “But,” says another Clyde, “then we found the third layer.”

  “Where the feck is this Version 2.0 feck?” Kayla suddenly shouts.

  “Oh, wait,” says a Clyde. “I thought we started off with that.”

  “No,” Kayla breathes, “you feckin’ didn’t.”

  All three Clydes gulp.

  “Well then,” one of them says, “long story short, we found the IP addresses he’d been bouncing the email off, and tracked them down to the point of origin.”

  “Which is feckin’ where?” Kayla has actually drawn her sword.

  “Here.” Clyde’s face disappears off the screen and a map of the world appears. It revolves slowly, the camera beginning a slow zoom. Continents resolve into countries. The gross anatomy of our world spinning past, rivers, mountain ranges, rain forests.

  Then we start to zoom in. North America. Central America. Mexico. The camera keeps on zooming, the focus tightening. Cities start to spawn on the map, like bacteria on an agar plate. One growing larger and larger, rushing up to us. Mexico City.

  Clyde. We’re going to see Clyde. And I killed him once before.

  No matter what Kayla says, no matter how things went with Mercurio, I don’t want to repeat that moment. Clyde will have his reasons. We will be able to reason with him.

  Streets and thoroughfares fill the screen. But we rush toward the city’s outskirts. Toward the breaking down of urban order. A twisted, tumor-like growth of houses. And then beyond, a great spreading pustule of desolate land.

  “Bordo Poniente Landfill,” the Clyde version intones. “Officially closed in 2011 but still filling up.”

  “He’s there?” I ask. I try to understand it. Clyde is a computer program. How the hell can he be hiding in a massive landfill site?

  “Trap,” Tabitha intones.

  “You just say that,” I say, attempting to lighten the atmosphere a little.

  “I point out the fucking obvious,” she says.

  But I actually genuinely disagree. “No,” I say. “It makes no sense for him to be there. That’s why it makes sense.”

  “Not, like, totally sure I’m following your logic.” Gran looks like I may have broken his brain.

  “Look at it,” I say. “It’s nothing. There’s nowhere for him to be. He can’t be there. So he has to be. It’s camouflage. He’s hiding.”

  And this is the part, I realize, where I should smile, and clap my hands and be down to business, but it is only with great sadness that I can say, “We’ve got him.”

  22

  FLYING SOUTH

  Apparently Agent Gran is not messing around this time.

  Squatting before our cramped uncomfortable net seats in the back of a huge transport plane are two massive mecha. They are armed so heavily they must be approaching the density of a black hole.

  “Oh,” breathes Kayla. It is the first time I think I have ever seen her look even vaguely impressed. “I have to get me one of those.”

  Two CIA pilots look down at us from the enhanced height of the mecha. The man is small and wiry with thick-rimmed glasses. Not that I notice that as much as the fists the size of office chairs, and the four-inch thick sheets of steel covering his body. He stands about seven feet tall in the suit. And he’s dwarfed by his partner.

  She’s a tall woman, and
looks like she starts the day by bench-pressing Hulk Hogan. Her mecha is broader, heavier, and covered in way more machine guns. Three barrels poke over her right shoulder. The smallest one appears to shoot bullets with the same diameter as my palm.

  I’m pretty sure what’s on her left shoulder is a missile launcher.

  All in all, the Area 51 boys and girls do have some pretty impressive toys. Patriotism has its time and place, but these guys do seem way better equipped to deal with Clyde than we do.

  Gran stands before the two pilots, doing his own unique version of a brief. “Collected dudes,” he starts, immediately hitting completely the wrong tone.

  The woman grits her teeth. “Just tell us what the hell we’re dealing with, Gran.” She sounds efficient to the point of coldness.

  “Oh, nomenclature,” Gran says. “Groovy. Erm… disembodied class five threat.”

  Class five, which means they’re treating Version 2.0 like a robot. Which sort of makes sense given the whole being on a computer thing.

  “Threat level?” asks the woman. The CIA do seem to love their jargon.

  “Erm…” Gran counts his fingers, then looks up brightly. “Unspecified,” he says.

  “You shitting me, granola-boy?”

  “Gina, dudette, would I do that to you?”

  I’m not entirely sure I would be so flippant with this woman, Gina. She has that same I-would-really-love-to-rip-out-your-colon-and-strangle-you-with-it look that Kayla has perfected. And with the suit on she looks equally capable of pulling off the feat. Though possibly the hands are too large for the really fine motor movements required for a proper colon-strangling.

  Funny the things stress makes you think about…

  The bespectacled CIA man works something around in his mouth and then spits out a long brown streak of tobacco. “You ball park us?” he asks.

  “There’s been no, like, totally direct engagement. Proxy warfare and all that ungroovy shit. But could potentially be a category three.” The woman looks dubious. “You fucking with me, Gran,” she says, “and I swear I’m going to come back here, shove my hand up your ass, and wear you like a puppet.”