The Unstoppable Wasp

by Sam Maggs

  “I only respond to commands from my primary user,” VERA responded. “If Nadia would like—”

  “You’re fine, VERA.” Nadia waved at the gold block. “VERA’s helping me figure this out so that I can get back to work on our project,” Nadia explained to the other G.I.R.L.s. “Can you think of any other search queries—”

  “VERA,” Taina repeated, “I’d really like for you to turn yourself off.”

  “Awaiting verification from Nadia.”

  Nadia stared at Taina. She should be able to command VERA to turn herself off. Her eyes flicked to the device. It wasn’t a big deal; she could get back to work on her quantum connection after this issue with her eyes was handled. It probably wouldn’t even take that long.

  But why deactivate VERA when she could likely help with the issue? If only Nadia’s project had already been online; VERA could connect with local neuroscientists or doctors to answer Nadia’s query instantaneously. Maybe the real answer was just connecting VERA to the quantum realm first and then using her new connections to solve this current problem instead of the other way around—

  “Okay, that’s what I thought.” Taina’s no-nonsense voice interrupted Nadia’s reverie. “Ying?”

  “Yeah,” said Ying, stepping forward. Before Nadia knew what was happening, Ying swiped VERA off the desk and lobbed it straight out of the room. She aimed a fist at it. It was only then that Nadia noticed Ying was wearing a glove from one of Nadia’s Wasp suits.

  A glove with the Wasp’s Sting reservoir built in.

  “Wait—” Nadia leapt off the bed and toward Ying, but she was too late; Ying was always faster than her anyway, even in the Krasnaya Komnata. Nadia was a better shot, but Ying was stealthier. It was part of what made them such a strong pair.

  In this moment, though, Nadia found that a lot more difficult to appreciate.

  Ying closed her fist and squeezed. The Sting erupted from her knuckles, the blast shooting through the air and landing square in the middle of the gold block Nadia had come to depend on. With a sound like a gunshot, VERA exploded, the proximity and power of the Sting overloading VERA’s core and shattering the device into oblivion. The broken remains were flung across the lab.

  “We’ll be finding pieces of that thing for weeks,” groaned Priya.

  Nadia’s brain screamed. Nails raked through her cranium. A headache bloomed behind her eyes.

  “Style points, though,” said Shay appreciatively. “I liked it.”

  “What did you do?!” demanded Nadia, clutching her temples. Taina stepped out of her way as Nadia ran out into the lab. There was nothing of VERA left for her to salvage. Her personal assistant was gone, disintegrated by her own Sting. She had to get another one. She could call Maragret; Margaret would understand. It hadn’t been long since she’d left the lab; she might still be awake. Nadia patted her pockets; where was her phone?

  “Phone’s hidden,” said Ying. “VERA’s gone. Your water boiled; I’m going to make you a chamomile.” And with that, Ying walked back to the lab’s kitchen.

  Nadia stood outside her bedroom door in shock. She was utterly frozen. Her whole head was on fire. There was something wrong with her; VERA was supposed to help her figure it out. VERA was the only person who had been there for her in weeks, the only person who understood her project, the only person who…

  The only person who…

  Person?

  Hologram.

  Computer.

  Machine.

  Something hot pressed into Nadia’s hands. Her tea.

  “Here,” said Ying. “Let’s sit.”

  Nadia felt the weight of the mug, the heat radiating through the porcelain and almost burning her palms. She let it. It felt real; it kept her here and out of her head.

  That was probably a good thing.

  “Could someone please talk to me for a minute,” said Nadia, sitting down next to the scratched formica table in the kitchen. The rest of the G.I.R.L.s took chairs around the table. “About anything. At all.”

  “Alexis is trying to get a hold of the olds,” Taina updated the group.

  “I am trying to get my biceps to look like Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator Two: Judgment Day,” Ying said very seriously. “She can do so many pull-ups.”

  “Just wait till you see Mackenzie Davis’s arms in Terminator: Dark Fate,” Shay teased. “Seriously, though, we’ve watched so many nineties movies that all I can think about are high-waisted jeans and how to build an actual Stargate,” she went on, groaning. “For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure if we account for the stellar drift it’s not, like, entirely impossible—”

  “I think I’ve been talking to plants more than humans and it’s starting to make me feel weird,” blurted Priya. “Is it totally weird if I also start to see your therapist? She knows about powered people, right?”

  Nadia held the steaming mug between her hands, tight, and looked at each girl seated around the table. Priya, scared to become her own kind of Super Hero. Shay and Ying, happy and also maybe a little bit tired of seeing only each other. And Taina, who always wanted the best for her friends but didn’t always know how to express it. She loved them all. So, so much. More than anything else in the entire world.

  So…why hadn’t she wanted to talk to them about her project? She hadn’t felt the overwhelming, all-consuming intensity she had last time she threw herself into her work in the midst of a manic episode. She had just been certain that she was on the right path; so absolutely, unequivocally certain that she didn’t feel the need to seek out any other opinions.

  And why had she been so positive that it was a good idea, anyway?

  The screaming was subsiding. Her eyes were throbbing, but less. It was good. Almost.

  “Hey.” Taina nudged Nadia’s calf with one of her crutches. “Check the mirror again.”

  Nadia steeled herself. She left her tea behind on the table and walked slowly back over to the cabinet. When she looked at herself in the mirror once more, she saw Nadia.

  Just Nadia. Her eyes were back to normal.

  Nadia spun. “How did you know…?”

  “Taina figured it out,” said Ying.

  “We would have figured it out, too,” Priya added, a little defensively.

  “Except…” Shay looked down at her hands. “We weren’t really here.”

  Ying nodded. “Any of us.”

  Priya sighed. “We weren’t. And we’re sorry. All of us.”

  “I mean, I was clearly the best friend of all of us—” Taina was interrupted by shouts from the other girls.

  “Excuse me—!”

  “I mean—”

  “Listen—”

  “Well, I was!” Taina said loudly.

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Nadia. “I was so busy watching myself for the things I knew about that I didn’t watch myself for the things I didn’t know about. If that makes sense. I don’t think it did. Basically I should have just called you guys. Or listened to Taina.”

  “Agreed. You absolutely should’ve listened to me.” Taina grinned. “I want that in writing later.”

  Nadia smiled, so relieved to be back in a place where they could make jokes.

  “You were just too obsessed with the wrong things,” Taina explained. “It’s not that it’s weird that you were obsessed, that’s completely normal.” Nadia tilted her head. She had to give Taina that one. “It’s that normal Nadia would have been obsessed with the A.I.M. break-in and bringing Bee-Boi up to functional and getting us all together in the lab to work on Maria’s list. Instead you decide to hook an AI we know nothing about up to the quantum realm without telling anyone? Nah.” Taina shook her head.

  “But to what end?” asked Nadia. She took a sip of her tea—still too hot. “Are you suggesting this is some sort of Ultron situation? VERAs gone rogue? Or…” She hated to even bring it up, to even consider it, but she had no choice. “Or do you think it’s Margaret, and she’s trying to…” Nadia wracked her brain for the most deviou
s plan she could possibly come up with on short notice. “Make a…really small VERA?”

  “Seems like we’d need to study a VERA for that,” Priya said dryly.

  Ying crossed her arms. “Oh, did you have a better idea for disabling the thing without disintegrating it?”

  “I could have…wrapped it in a…plant…?” Priya suggested awkwardly.

  “I love your whole plant vibe,” Shay said gently, “but I just don’t think that would have cut it.”

  Nadia blew on her tea. “Could we just buy another one?” She was feeling more clearheaded than she had in weeks. It was amazing.

  “Sold out across the state.” Taina shook her head. “I checked this morning.”

  “But did you check with your older sister?” Alexis walked into the lab, gold high-tops glinting under the fluorescent lights. They matched the white-and-gold box in her hands.

  A brand-new VERA.

  “¡Guau, Alexis!” Taina pushed herself to her feet on her crutches. “How?!”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said, slamming the box down on the kitchen table. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Janet and Bobbi didn’t answer my texts after I got off the phone with you, so I drove straight to Stark Tower. Aunt Pepper had a whole closet of these things, I swear. And by that I mean three. But when the entirety of New York State is trying to get their hands on one of these, three is, like, a lot.

  “They were next to the composting-powered solar cells in her lab. She hadn’t even opened them. I think F.R.I.D.A.Y. kind of hates the idea of VERA. I think that because F.R.I.D.A.Y. told me so as I was running out of the building. Which she let me do. And now I’m here.” Alexis finally took a breath. “So, what are you nerds gonna do about it?”

  The G.I.R.L.s looked at the box and looked back at each other.

  Nadia took another sip of her tea. Ice-cold. Of course.

  NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!

  Tea will always be too hot and then you will forget about it and then it will be too cold. This isn’t really science. This is just a fact.

  But it didn’t matter. They knew what they had to do.

  It was time to science.

  This.

  This was what Nadia had missed most this fall.

  She’d been too caught up with her to-do list and Maria’s list and all the other complicated things going on in her life to realize that the solution to her problems might have actually been to stop thinking about her problems and to start spending time with her friends. To talk to Shay and Ying about their relationship so they didn’t feel like they had to isolate themselves. To talk to Priya about her new powers so she didn’t feel like she had to handle that alone, either.

  She’d been so busy trying to get to know her mother that she’d neglected the people who were still in her life. In trying to reconcile with the past and put it behind her, she’d somehow gotten trapped in it. And if they had all just been a little better at communicating, maybe it wouldn’t have been so long before one of them realized that Nadia was relying a little too closely on that little gold device.

  The same device that now lay in pieces all over the lab floor. This time intentionally.

  But, while VERA might have R.I.P.’d in pieces, the other pieces of Nadia’s life were finally falling back into place. She’d felt so alone this fall and she hadn’t even realized it. Relying on VERA wasn’t the same as having her real friends around. A hologram could never make her laugh like Shay, could never find a weird new obsession like Ying, could never show her exactly how to prune a houseplant like Priya, or deliver a burn as scathing as one of Tai’s. She’d made do, sure, and trusted too much in something about which she knew too little. But there was no comparison to the real thing. To her real friends.

  Build a family, Maria had written. The tug in Nadia’s chest told her that she’d already completed the most important item on the list. That her family was right here.

  Priya had helped break the thing apart, safely—her vines exerting just the right amount of pressure in the right places to pop the top off of a gold box that definitely had no tiny toothpick hole for maintenance. Shay and Taina were examining VERA’s guts, getting an idea of her physical functionality. Ying was running tests on what exactly the thing was made of.

  And Nadia had connected VERA to her personal computer in order to interface with it—and, hopefully, learn its secrets. And Nadia deeply hoped that they were VERA’s secrets alone. There was no question the AI had done something to her—and to the people in Times Square, and at the financial services building. There were VERAs in each of those locations and inside the office building. She must have even tapped into the massive billboards in Times Square, broadcasting her signal to everyone within range—that’s why they’d all turned gold. Everyone there had strangely dilated pupils; they’d all been behaving in strange ways. Nadia hadn’t exactly caused any property damage like most of the people they’d seen, but she had almost caused some damage to her closest relationships. In some ways, that was so much worse.

  But Nadia hoped—really hoped—that’s where this all ended. AIs had a nasty habit of turning evil. Everyone knew that, even people who grew up in spy-training facilities and had to catch up on pop culture a few decades later than everyone else. She had an evil AI relative, right alongside the good AI relatives. It was a totally reasonable theory.

  Much more reasonable, Nadia thought, than her mentor, latest personal hero, and new friend Margaret being the actual evil here.

  Taina wasn’t wrong, of course; Margaret was white and wealthy and privileged and used that privilege to launch her business. She was granted a sought-after internship at Pym Labs, no doubt over plenty of equally-if-not-more-gifted girls like Taina, who didn’t have the financial or circumstantial advantages.

  Margaret was certainly driven, but Nadia just didn’t want to believe that she was doing all of this in service of some broadly evil goal. It just didn’t make sense. Margaret talked at length about making the world a better place; surely she hadn’t meant it in the same way as Monica Rappaccini. Monica was just looking out for herself. Margaret was looking out for the people who lacked her privilege. Nadia had to believe that. She had to.

  So Nadia kept her headphones on to block out the outside world as she raced through lines of code, searching for anything that looked out of the ordinary.

  Of course, this was a state-of-the-art AI. Everything looked just a little bit out of the ordinary.

  Search parameters. Internet connection. There was the code Nadia had injected earlier, teaching all the VERAs how to self-repair. Voice recognition. Image generation.

  And…

  “There!” Nadia whipped off her orange cat-ear headphones with one hand and pointed to her screen with the other. Her friends, all deeply into their own work, dropped what they were doing to crowd around behind Nadia, staring at her screen.

  “What are we looking at?” Priya asked, echoing what the group was thinking.

  “This section.” Nadia highlighted the code in question. “It’s genius. It’s incredible. It’s…subliminal.”

  NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!

  We all have two parts of our mind: the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind is the one that is aware of stuff (“I really want a bagel”). The subconscious mind is the one that isn’t aware of stuff, but still influences your awareness (you saw an ad for a bagel three hours ago and your brain has been secretly and quietly obsessed with it ever since). In order to stay under our awareness radar, “subliminal messaging” is designed specifically to target our subconscious minds (placing bagel ads in subway stops, arguably). Basically, it uses signals that we see or hear that we’re aware of, even if we’re not aware of how they may be influencing us.

  The science behind subliminal messaging is highly contested, but a key component of the idea behind subliminal influence is priming, a phenomenon in which people are influenced to react in specific ways to specific stimuli. Playing ads featuring music from one�
�s childhood might trigger an emotional response that leads to the purchase of a product. Playing French music in a grocery store can have an impact on shoppers’ desires to purchase French wine. (Like the bagel ads, the background music is an example of a supraliminal—as opposed to subliminal—stimulus, something that is technically above the threshold of consciousness though we still might not be actively attuned to it.) Humans are easily influenced creatures, and both supra- and subliminal stimuli can influence us, especially if we already have an affinity for the thing being pushed at us anyway.

  Like, say you really like working, and something tells you to do more work, but of a particular kind. You could be easily pushed into working, in this case.

  Just a hypothetical. Moving on.

  “So VERA’s been…telling you what to do? Without you even knowing it?” Shay asked, shocked. “Could this be why Ying won’t stop talking about Titanic?”

  “I was never around VERA,” Ying corrected her. “And, to be fair, the physics does support that Rose could have fit more than one person on that door—”

  “VERA’s been telling me what to do,” Nadia said firmly. “It’s been affecting my brain the same way being high would—I’ve been addicted to doing whatever VERA wanted me to do. In this case, it seems like she wanted me to connect her to the quantum realm at the expense of everything else.”

  “I knew you would never have bought those white tennis shoes without outside influence.” Priya nodded sagely. “Way too on-trend.”

  Nadia looked down at her feet. They were on-trend. Ugh.

  “Why?” asked Ying. “Is there some cabal of dastardly VERAs trying to take over a very small universe?”

  Nadia shook her head. “I don’t know. But it gets worse.” She highlighted a second portion of the code. “This here? This is a countdown. The code is recycling itself over and over again, the numbers getting smaller every time. And it looks like it’s going to terminate at midnight. Tonight.”

  Shay gasped. “Just like Independence Day!”

  “What happens when it Terminators?” asked Ying.