The one time you want a sniper team to pick you off, and the SWAT team get cold feet and call in a costume negotiator. Christ. When you pictured how the day might end, it wasn’t hiding in a dumpster, that’s for damn sure.
Rehab was going pretty well, too. You were turning up to counselling sessions, you’d turned in the aphasia gas stockpile and the third-hand junker deathray; started talking to the shrink about your Dad, even.
The day they officially downgraded you to “Inactive Supervillain”, Claire took you out to dinner, and you remembered not to tell her any interesting plutonium facts or call the waiter “minion” even once, and she kissed you goodnight on her doorstep for, oh, about forever? So it a bit of a shock when you called her earlier and she was breathless and aroused and there was somebebody else trying not to be heard in the background.
You hung up and called the shrink, so you wouldn’t be tempted to take it out on a major population centre. It’s a sign of your enormous progress that your first thought was to get your mandatory psych to talk you down.
Your relapse hit like a freight train when your shrink answered and you could hear Claire in the background of that call. The rest is stroboscoped insanity and villainous laughter: ram-raiding a hardware store in a hotwired pickup, cackling hysterically with a welding torch in either hand, the pickup rolling slowly through a crowded town centre with you standing atop the roof, wreathed in pulsing red light.
A moment of total power and peace, arms flung out in a sickly Evangelical biscuit-tin white goatee bro Jesus T-pose for the screaming herd. the machine in the back whirling and howling, all lights and countdown clocks. Anyone can see it’s a doomsday device, even without your amplified voice promising to show them, show them all! Posed, daring the cops to shoot you down; Christ, what’s keeping them? They have your file and they know you’re not bulletproof, it’s procedure.
The machine looks menacing as hell, for something with the only function of whirling and howling and counting down. Pure Hollywood magic; most real doomsday gizmos look like a boring undergrad research setup. A prop. Hyperreal. All you have is misery and madness, and they can put you out of both.
But the yellow bastards don’t shoot, and then the superheroes are there with their serious, sincere faces and fucking stupid clothes, and the ingrained fear of a life spent running chokes out any sense you had left.
Smoke bombs and fleeing and hiding, going to ground; and what kind of dumbass hides in a dumpster?
Your eyes hurt like hell. Probably played fast and loose with a welding torch and no eyewear.
Christ.
Worst New Year’s ever.
You know people who know people, so you get by.
It’s a fucking wretched existence, keeping out of sight of cops and costumes, always on the move.
It’s what you know.
You’re spooning unheated soup from a can and watching the news in a grimy motel room when you get the knock on the door. There’s a half-stripped plasma generator all over the bed, and it’s a sign of your state of mind that you don’t do shit to hide it before opening up.
“Splendid!” says Gentleman Peril, and just like that you’re back on the scene.
You could have said no to Peril, but he was towing along a dangerous blonde. She’d kill you as soon as look at you — that kind of insane, not a maladjusted brainiac — but one frosty look from behind her black-rimmed designer glasses and you’re wet and ready to lick her Italian leather boots.
She can read you like a 72-point headline; you can practically hear her ticking off recruitment criteria. Harmless (to her); dangerous (to her enemies, i.e. everybody); pathetically, pathologically easy to control. But you didn’t get here by sensible decision making, yeah?
The base is underwater, which you haven’t done before. Given a choice, you won’t do it again. There are drips and leaks and puddles and everything’s always damp. You develop a persistent cold, and the salt air wreaks havoc on the mechanicals.
That’s why they need you. Fuckin’ A.
Her name is Judith, or Bitch Queen of the Universe when she’s not listening, or Overlady when it’s mad cackling time. You do your best to stay out of her way, but like any good manager, she’s terrifying and keeping tabs on you. Every few days she’ll come striding down into the bowels of the base, heels striking on the steel deck like weapons fire. Whatever cramped conduit or flooded shaft you’re hiding in, she finds you and interrogates a status report out of you, leaving you wrung out, fluttering with lust, and convinced you’re on her “Kill at Earliest Convenience” list.
She’s a big-picture girl, not one of the ones who can only see as far as “take over the world!” She knows what she’s going to do with it afterwards. She probably has a Powerpoint presentation to give to the UN just before she has them all flung in a shark tank. That’s how evil she is: unironic Powerpoint.
Nobody — not you or Peril or anyone — seems to know what the big picture is. that means you’re all a stepping stone, part of Part One, where Part Two starts “kill all surviving personnel from Part One.”
People ask how evil manages to hire so many minions. The answer, obviously, is that you’re all weak, thirsty, self-hating submissives, scruples evaporating in the face of the first firm-voiced lunatic with cute hair. Plus, of course, freelance evil gets lonely, and you can tell the eventual tribunal that none of it was your idea.
You wouldn’t know about the tribunal thing. Strictly small fry. But the longer you’re here, the worse the feeling gets that Judith’s upgraded your pond, and there might be a kraken in the bottom of it.
Okay. The worst thing about the seabed base is all the watery metaphors it brings to mind, but maybe that’s just you.
The authorities depth charge the base, which finally gets you some respect for overhauling the engines on the escape sub. Judith is livid, but it’s such a relief to be somewhere you can take a breath of fresh air.
Christ knows how Judith’s got a Norwegian fortress. You don’t plan on asking, particularly not while she’s ticked off and demanding robot sentries.
Thanks to the power of Open Source, motion tracking is the easy part; and Judith has a cache of useful stuff in one of the sublevels, including a pair of anti-aircraft railguns, classified US Army Gauss chainguns, and a couple of crates of plasma-burst launchers. You keep busy, tapping power off the uninterruptible grid, pouring quickset fibrecrete, bedding in the motorised mounts and calibrating the cameras. Sleep and food vanish into the haze of Mad Science, the heavy weaponry needs to be shifted into the open and bolted down, the threat classifiers tweaked until they stop flagging butterflies.
Eventually, there’s less left to do, and things start to leak back into your awareness — hunger, tiredness. You hurt half a dozen different ways. You could ignore most of it, but now you’ve noticed that you’re tired, it keeps looming up and fuzzing your thinking.
There’s no help for it. You wrap things up at the next natural break in your workflow and switch the system over to live-fire. You lie down near the computers, pillow your head on your oilstained overalls, and drop instantly to sleep.
“Oh yes,” Peril says gleefully, “Judith tried to get you to stop working to give a progress report.”
You huddle over your coffee, and wipe uselessly at your runny nose. Full-blown fits of Mad Sci are ruinously tough on your health; Peril says you didn’t sleep for four full days while you set up the perimeter defences. Feels like you fucked up something in your back, too.
“She says that if she ever hears the words Bitch and Queen to her face again, somebody gets maimed.”
It’s her fault for yelling at you to do something; you were, and you were already stressed, and it’s worth repeating that you are, by definition, not sane. Still, you go pale so suddenly it makes you dizzy.
“No, no, chin up,” Peril says hastily. “The big gun nailed a tourist in a sports car a couple of miles away; all is forgiven.”
You mutter something incoherent about checking the network cables and slink off to hide good.
You manage to find spaces under the floors, deep and awkward enough that Judith can’t find you. In hindsight, that’s probably going to make her madder before she calms down, but that just means you need to hide for longer.
You work on the aircon while you’re down here.
She still hasn’t tracked you down when the authorities do. You’re taking a break for coffee, and sunlight, before your immune system collapses; scaled up one of the ducts to the roof to sit around in the open, and a butterfly comes to sit on the edge of your laptop’s raised lid.
It takes a couple of minutes to realise there’s something odd about it, something you should be looking at instead of posting memes to alt.madsci, and then you knock your coffee over.
They obviously trust your ability to keep them out, and obviously, they’ve had directional mics on you since hour zero. The butterfly’s misting your laptop screen with the vent from a chemical micromotor, dark wings spun fullerenes. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant.
It means you’re fucked, because if they got someone to design bespoke tech like that on short notice specifically to get round you, they’re taking Judith very, very seriously.
You slide your eyes sideways to the nearest of your big guns, standing silent. Sure enough, it’s plastered in carbon-black wings, surrounded by a cloud of them. The simplest possible way of stopping the turrets shooting anyone: completely fill their line of sight with things they’ve been ordered not to.
There’s a network service to set off the intruder alarms. It’s a one-liner; and then you spend a couple of minutes watching the butterfly on your laptop, wondering if it’s out of fuel yet. It’ll probably be a bitch to catch, if not; but Christ, it could be an Eimacher, maybe Kallisti? You can’t buy things like that; it’s a once-a-lifetime thing.
Finally you make a grab. It twitches in your hand, but it’s nearly out of juice. You try to wrestle yourself back into the duct without letting it go or dropping your laptop; no contest, if it comes to a painful choice, the laptop is at least replaceable.
The superheroes are already in the building.
You’re pretty sure you see a glimpse of Peril on the floor under a scrum of punching. Judith is probably halfway to Japan in a secret escape gyrocopter or some shit. It’s every mook for themself.
You burst into a corridor, right into the face of one of the costume brigade. You shove a device into her arms, and say wildly, “I don’t want you to have to find out what that is!” and she follows the training and freezes.
You take a deep, steadying breath. “I’m walking out of here unmolested,” you anounce, with less confidence than terrifying instability. Work it, girl. “Don’t put that down. Don’t jostle it.”
She looks momentarily like she might try something. You snatch the adjustable wrench out of your back pocket, raise it as if you might bring it down on the smallish, squarish box in her arms, plugged into the end of the mains reel you were trailing for it.
“I’ll do it!” you yell hysterically. “I’ll regret it more than anyone! Don’t push me, I’m crazy!”
She lets you walk all the agonising way to the end of the corridor and into the elevator. At a walk. Power move. Sell it.
“I can smell burning,” she says in a panicky little voice, as you turn at the end, punch the close doors button. As they start to slide shut, she jumps and screams as the toaster she’s clutching pops up two smouldering bagel halves.
You flip her twin deadpan middle fingers just before the elevator takes you away, and then you run like hell into a maze of unlit (and mined) maintenance corridors at the very bottom of the complex, and hop out the other end of the memorised safe route, onto a snowmobile, and away into the fucking sunset.
