The Superpower Project

by Paul Bristow

“And we’ll know what he’s up to!” said John.

  “I do not want to help them,” said the robot, sounding as near to annoyed as it was possible for him to be.

  “You won’t be,” said Megan. “They will just think you are. You can be a decoy. A double agent!”

  “Will that help to fix things?” asked TJ.

  “My gran used to say that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” Megan smiled and hugged the robot. “Though to be fair, she actually did break quite a lot of stuff.”

  “But what if Mr Finn finds out… what if it goes wrong again?” said TJ.

  “You’re forgetting something else TJ,” said Megan, opening TJ’s chest plate to access the Goozberri Five now installed inside. “We’ve been reprogramming.”

  John smiled. “Ok then, sounds like we have the advantage. Let’s finish this. Better late than never.”

  Chapter 37.

  Tooth and Claw

  It was an unusually glorious winter day at the Sugar Sheds. Mr Finn took a moment to survey the sunshine, and smiled. He couldn’t care less about the sun of course, but the good weather meant that more people than expected had turned up to see the fifth and final sculpture unveiled. There were lots of parents and teachers accompanying hordes of uninterested children. The local press were out in force too – the unveiling was now big news, thanks to the high-profile damage to the other sculptures.

  “Probably hoping some monkeys and bears turn up to push it over,” thought Mr Finn, not totally sure himself that they wouldn’t.

  The statue was draped in a gigantic blue flag with the wavy Waterworx logo printed across it. Mr Finn didn’t like blue, but the board wouldn’t let him change the Waterworx colours to black and red. “Too sinister,” they said, entirely missing his point.

  These were the exact same people who had refused his suggestions for electric fences and desk-mounted flamethrowers to ensure office security. If they had just let him dig that big pit full of spikes or fit the Autostomper into the ceiling, maybe the office wouldn’t have been burgled. Or if it had been burgled, it would be full of crispy, squashed burglars.

  Mr Finn tried not to think about the waste of all his hard work finding the sigils, and did his best to smile.

  He looked like a skeleton with stomach cramps.

  Kevin, who had won the school design competition, was waiting to pull the cord and unveil his creation. And of course get his grubby little paws on a free Playstation.

  All Mr Finn hoped was that this sculpture would be terrifying enough to deter superpowered vandals and burglars. And if some babies and old ladies in the crowd got a fright and started crying too, that would be a bonus. He stepped up to the microphone and showed his teeth.

  “Thank you very much for coming along to support us today,” he said. “I know we’ve been unlucky with our lovely sculptures in the last few months, but I’m certain this one could hold its own in a fight.”

  There was some nervous laughter in the crowd, but not much. Clearly none of these idiots had a sense of humour. Mr Finn pushed on.

  “And a special thank you to Kevin here, who designed this wonderful creation. Kevin, would you like to do the honours?” He pointed at the cord.

  Kevin pulled, dragging the Waterworx flag away to reveal a majestic sea serpent coiled around a fountain. Each metal-plated scale shone in the sun.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, meet Destiny!”

  The sculpture’s teeth and claws sparkled most of all.

  There was some genuine applause this time, which caught Mr Finn a little offguard, so he pushed Kevin forward to the microphone. “Tell them where you got the idea from,” he hissed.

  “The sculpture is based on a monster from one of Sarah Stone’s books,” said Kevin. “A friendly river serpent who lived in the Firth of Clyde.”

  “Yes,” said Mr Finn, snatching the microphone back from Kevin. “We were all saddened by the death of local author Sarah Stone last year. This is our way of paying tribute. Although, this is obviously a much less friendly serpent; it would likely have your hand off.”

  Mr Finn glared at the crowd severely, just in case any more wannabe superheroes happened to be hiding in there, considering causing trouble or stealing things from his offices.

  “So, thank you one and all for coming along today,” said Mr Finn. “A small selection of reasonably priced refreshments are available from the snack van across the street. Enjoy.”

  People stared dutifully at the statue for a few seconds more, making all the sorts of sounds and noises you are supposed to make, while Mr Finn waited. He was not going to leave his beautiful new sculpture alone until everyone had gone. To encourage them along, he decided to make another announcement: “Please do not let children sit on the statue as it is razor sharp. It would be awful if anyone ended up horribly injured.”

  That seemed to do the trick.

  ***

  Mr Finn had not been in the best of moods since the Waterworx office break-in. Even firing all his employees hadn’t cheered him up. Neither had inventing gelignite marshmallows. It helped a bit to unveil the huge killer robot today, but he was still feeling glum. So his plan for the night was to go back to the office, do a little more tedious investigating of Watt’s old documents, then go home to his lab. He wanted to trial some of Destiny’s remote-control systems, possibly smash some stuff up too. With any luck, that would help him figure out what was going wrong with his attempts to control the Tin Jimmy.

  Every time he sent his father’s master control signal, he received a burst of complete gibberish back. For a while he’d thought it was coded messages, but he couldn’t decipher a thing.

  He was beginning to wonder if he had misunderstood his father’s notes.

  His fingers were black with newsprint ink, his eyes ached from straining to read. So many months of digging through boxes, scanning old newspapers, cross-referencing the notes his father had left, ransacking abandoned buildings and stalking children to find every scrap of information about Tin Jimmy or the guardians or the river. He was sure he was missing something.

  And it turned out he had been.

  ***

  As I approach my final days, I think often of my robot guardian and of the system I devised to lock away the secret power: only all five sigils applied together are able to unlock the shield beneath the river. I continue to hope that the four other guardians keep their sigils hidden and safe, however, I ensured a final failsafe to protect the power. The fifth sigil is a disguised key, and no one except myself and my robot know its location…

  It is the robot itself. He is the final piece, his hand is the key. Each of the other four sigils must be slotted into place first to allow his hand to unlock the shield beneath the river.

  If he is lost, no one will ever be able to unlock the power. As long as he functions he will continue to protect the town: an eternal guardian programmed to obey only myself, the four others, and our descendants for evermore.

  This will be my final diary entry. My work is done.

  Mr Finn almost jumped up and down with glee when he read this. But then he remembered he was supposed to be a serious villain, so he just nodded, stroked his chin and did an evil laugh in front of his mirror. It wasn’t very convincing, so he practised it a few more times until it sounded right.

  The robot was the last sigil. It all made sense now. Finn had never fully understood why the robot had been such an important part of his father’s plan. Hacking in and taking the place of James Watt as his master, creating the control signal, setting a trap for the guardians: it was all in order to gather the sigils. His father was much smarter than he had given him credit for. Although that didn’t stop him being a rubbish dad.

  Mr Finn now had all the pieces in place too. And, unlike his dad, he had five gigantic robots to help him open the shield and unlock the power for himself.

  Now Mr Finn’s laugh sounded exactly right, but it was interrupted by a beeping from the other side of the room. It was the Morse-code
machine. Mr Finn went over to check, expecting nothing more than the random selection of letters and numbers he usually received. This time, however, there was something much more interesting in the code:

  Chapter 38.

  Sugar and Spice

  Megan woke up early the next Saturday, feeling as if it were Christmas, only instead of elves and presents, there were going to be giant robots and explosions.

  She reached for her phone to text Cam, but it beeped just as she picked it up.

  Everything had been planned and arranged. All they had to do was wait for the pieces to fall into place. Sure enough, as soon as Tin Jimmy had sent that message to Mr Finn last night, he received instructions to come to the Gaelic church today at noon. That was the starting pistol.

  They met up with John earlier than usual to go over the plan.

  “This is perfect. Finn won’t be expecting us to look for another sigil while TJ is occupied elsewhere,” said John.

  “I will stall Mr Finn for as long as possible and tell him I know where you have hidden the sigils,” said TJ, “and offer to take him there.”

  “While in fact I will have all the sigils,” said Megan. “And we will be sneaking past Destiny at the Sugar Sheds to get the next sigil.”

  “And where will you take Finn, TJ?” asked John.

  “To the bomb-shelter tunnels in Port Glasgow, very slowly,” said TJ. “And by the time we’re back from the Sugar Sheds,” said Megan, “we will trap Mr Finn and any sculptures that have followed us in the tunnels.”

  “There are lots of confined spaces to get stuck in,” said John. “We just have to block the entrance.”

  “Easy. What can possibly go wrong?” said Cam, sarcastically. He had already gone through all the things he was pretty sure were going to go wrong. The list started with I fall in the freezing river and finished with Waterworx have an army of flying monkey clowns and they’re hungry.

  “I still wish we knew if the other guardians are out there somewhere,” said Megan. “Maybe they could help.”

  “Maybe,” said John, “or maybe they’d get hurt because they haven’t had weeks of training.”

  Megan wondered if they would feel it – the fizzing in their chests that she and Cam felt now – dragging them like magnets towards the fight.

  “Good luck everybody,” said John.

  Megan gave TJ a hug.

  ***

  Despite their rather cute name, the Sugar Sheds were not made out of candy bricks and peppermint cobbles, they were gigantic red-brick monoliths left over from the once-booming sugar trade. There were five interconnected sheds in total: two had been cleaned up and turned into offices; the other three were stuffed with junk.

  “There’s Destiny,” said Cam, pointing. “Looks… scarier than the others.”

  “Well, you helped to design it,” said Megan. “Well done.”

  The three of them clambered over the rear wall beside the boats, then slipped along the back of the massive building, out of the robot’s sight. However, Destiny’s eyes briefly flashed red and green.

  “I don’t think the sigil is actually in the sheds,” said Cam. “The number on the map is on the docks in front.”

  “There’s an underwater walkway,” said John. “My dad was a docker. He said there were a few tunnels that served as shortcuts between the sheds and the docks.”

  “That sounds like the sort of dark, dank place we’ve come to know and love,” said Cam.

  “Let’s take a shed each and look around,” said John. “We’re probably after a trapdoor or something.”

  Cam sighed, already fairly sure he was going to find the trapdoor first, just as soon as he’d fallen through it.

  Inside the sheds, there was a stickiness to the air, and to the floor – a faint smell of candy apples and molasses mixed with petrol and damp.

  “This is lovely,” said Megan. She brushed against a wall and got covered in bird poo and brick dust. “I think Sugar Sheds may be too nice a name for these.”

  Scaffolding and rickety rusted-steel stairs hung from every wall, daring the unwary to climb. Megan was wary though, so the scaffolding was wasting its time.

  “Over here,” hissed John, his whisper echoing around the empty sheds. He had lifted a steel hatch on the ground, revealing a set of steps that plunged sharply downwards.

  “Yeah, that looks about right,” said Cam, as he came over, his nose wrinkling at the stale air that rushed out of the hatch. “And it smells right too.”

  Megan and Cam began treading down the stairs, occasionally steadying themselves against the wet walls.

  “I’ll stay here,” said John. “I don’t want us all down there if the hatch shuts.”

  Cam whimpered a bit. “Can I have the big torch then?” he said. “For once I actually miss TJ with his big light bulb eyes.”

  John tossed the torch to him. “Be careful,” he said, “and be quick.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, the walkway stretched off into the dark, far enough that even the big torch couldn’t find the end. Little puddles were dotted before them, moisture splashing gently down from the ceiling.

  “Ok,” said Cam, “I think we should just run over to the other end really fast with the torches on full beam, then quickly work back.”

  “Agreed,” said Megan.

  Together they splished and skiddled through the damp dark, torchlight throwing strange shadow shapes on the walls as they ran. When they reached what had looked like the end of the tunnel, they were disappointed to find that it was a junction, with two equally damp and dark tunnels stretching off to the left and right.

  “We should split up,” said Cam. “You take left and I’ll take right.”

  “What, really?”

  “No! Are you mental?”

  Megan smiled. “Let’s try left first.”

  At the far end of the tunnel was an old ladder leading to a steel door in the ceiling, which had been welded shut.

  “It was a brick in the crypt, so maybe it’s a brick in here too,” said Megan. “Let’s check the walls for anything unusual.” She shone the torch onto the wall – the entire tunnel was built of red bricks.

  “We can’t check every single one, there’s thousands of them!” said Cam. “Also, if you pull bricks out of an underwater tunnel… doesn’t water get in?”

  “I suppose,” said Megan. “Ok, let’s try the other one.”

  Down the right-hand tunnel was a massive steel door, badly rusted and firmly shut.

  “Do you think it’s behind here?” said Megan, pushing at the door. “Because I’m not sure how we can get this open.”

  “What if we both charge at it?” said Cam. “If I go gorilla and you go back down the tunnel, take a run-up, then fly at it, full speed.”

  “We might bring the whole place down,” said Megan.

  “Well, if that happens,” said Cam, “you’d better be ready to fly back out carrying a gorilla.”

  Megan disappeared back along the corridor, as gorilla-Cam began to push. With a whoosh and a smash Megan flew into the door. It crumpled and gave way in a shower of brown dust, and they tumbled together into the next section of tunnel. They held their breath as a single solitary drop of river water dripped down from the ceiling above.

  In the space behind the door was another ladder leading up to another welded door.

  “This is useless,” said Cam, shaking dust from his hair after he had changed back into human form.

  Megan was staring at a rusted sign which had been screwed onto the wall behind the ladder. It said ‘In Case of Emergency’. She turned to her friend and whispered, “Cam, help me get this sign off the wall.”

  It didn’t take much effort to loosen the sign; it slipped down on one side, hanging by a single persistent screw and revealing a loose brick in the wall. A brick stamped ‘IV’. Megan reached over and pulled it from the wall.

  Megan took the sigil coin out. “Four–nil,” she said, smiling. She threw the brick to Cam.
r />   “Four. Wait a minute,” he said. “Four! IV is roman numerals for four.” He turned the brick so Megan could see.

  “Oh yeah, that’s clever.”

  “No. Don’t you see? It really is! Each sigil has been marked with roman numerals! The brick in the crypt didn’t say ‘ill’, it said three – roman three. III.”

  Megan suddenly understood. “Five is V,” she said, hopping on the spot. “That Morse-code message! U.R.V. You are five!”

  Cam’s mouth dropped open. “TJ isn’t just the fifth guardian, he’s the fifth sigil! You are five!”

  There was a distant clang, the terrifying but un-mistakable sound of a steel hatch slamming shut. Then, from above and echoing all around them, they heard an awful metallic squeal like something rusted being forced open.

  “Cam?” said Megan, knowing something was badly wrong, but not yet sure what.

  And then water blasted into the tunnel from the river above.

  Chapter 39.

  Look and Learn

  The Tin Jimmy moved carefully: quick then slow, always along back roads and in shadows, or under the ground in forgotten sewers and aqueducts.

  Mr Finn followed at a discreet distance, just in case it was a trap. “Secure the fifth sigil,” he repeated to himself under his breath, over and over again.

  He felt confident. There were Waterworx security guards in the old Gaelic church waiting to capture the robot. Once the fifth sigil was properly under their control, getting the others would just be a matter of time. And Mr Finn was a patient man.

  The Gaelic church was just ahead, as abandoned as all the old buildings in this horrible little town. It was being used by Waterworx as an ‘art workshop’ to restore and repair the Phoenix sculpture, since Mr Finn’s house was getting pretty full.

  The robot entered the church. Mr Finn gave it a few moments, then casually wandered in behind it.

  Inside, the Tin Jimmy lay on the floor, twitching and sparking under the electric net that had just been dropped on top of it.

  “Tin Jimmy! Oh I’ve been wanting to meet you for ages,” said Mr Finn. “I would have arranged a chat sooner, but you haven’t been taking my calls.”