by Ben Bequer
“Can you stop it with that shit?” Cool Hand flared. “What does that even mean, anyway?”
“It means, my dear Cool Hand that I intend to fight to the bitter end. This is merely a new challenge.”
“Are you nuts? Influx is dead! Blackjack is all fucked up! I’M fucked up! This isn’t a challenge, this is fucking retarded. I’m not in this for the cause, bro. I was in it for the green, ok? No amount of coin is worth going up against those assholes. And by the way, that dude you killed at the Bank Tower, Pulsewave?” Cool pointed at me. “He was one of The Revolution, with Apogee and Mirage. Don’t think they won’t come looking for blood. This is crazy, man. Dr. Retcon can fight his own fights for the bits of dusty shit he wants.”
“This is hardly a ‘bit of shit’,” Haha interjected, pulling out the Tesla book from the folds of his kimono. It was dry and unharmed.
“What do I care what it is? It could be the fucking first bible Jesus had, when he was a kid, autographed and everything. If I’m dead, I can’t spend the bank I’m supposed to make.”
“Oh, I doubt they would kill you.” Haha put away the book. “Blackjack perhaps. Myself, they would take apart, equivalent to destruction I suppose, but the surprise would be on them.”
“I have no interest in jail,” Zundergrub said definitively. “If they intend to arrest me, they will find me unwilling to cooperate.”
“Blackjack and the good Doctor, then,” Haha amended.
“Fine! You guys be all cool and shit. I’m done with this game.”
“You can’t drop out, Cool.” I figured I’d chime in at this point. The medbot was spraying some sort of solution on my midsection that looked like dark gray concrete that despite drying fast was quite malleable, allowing me freedom of movement. It felt soothing and the pain was soon gone, so I did nothing to stop it.
“Oh, fuck yes. I can.”
“You can’t betray Dr. Retcon, Cool. You’re not going to get away from him.”
“Bullshit,” Cool said.
Zundergrub seemed to agree, nodding severely.
“I can be gone with the wind, man. Dude won’t know where to look for me.”
“Maybe for a while, sure you could disappear. But Retcon’s the guy that moved the moon out of orbit in the 60s, almost destroyed the earth half a dozen more times. He near took over the world in the 90s with that space station laser thing.”
“Yeah, the guy fails a lot.”
“He’s the guy that killed Valiant.”
I paused a second, to let it sink in.
“For fifty years Retcon’s been the world’s foremost Super villain. Maybe not now, maybe not next year, but soon, he’d come looking for you. And he’d find you.”
Cool said nothing, processing the reality of his situation.
* * *
That night I slept and missed much of the reporting on the new super team. I also missed the rocket takeoff, which Cool Hand later described over and over as, “awesome.” When I awoke, the rocket was silent, the lights were dimmed. Everything was still.
My stomach felt like someone had put a flexible slab of concrete on it, but I could move without much pain, and it felt much better. Every breath was labored as I walked through the rocket’s underbelly, seeing its interior fully for the first time. Unlike Retcon’s lair, the rocket had a single design, like something out of the 60s British Thunderbirds series. It was all red and white with silver trim, and a lot of glass, including a two story single piece of plate-glass that acted as a viewport outside. I stood on the second floor balcony of the observation lounge looking back at the planet Earth, as we orbited high above. We were so high in orbit that the planet didn’t even fill the viewport.
I roamed a bit, seeing the passenger cabins (Dr. Zundergrub’s locked, Cool Hand’s wide open) then taking the stairs down to the lounge and a computer lab. Mr. Haha was plugged into the computer suite, which was more Forbidden Planet than IBM. The floor was an open grid, giving me a good view of the engines below, which were almost as tall as the whole rocket. I tried to keep from staring down to avoid the feeling of vertigo.
Haha turned his rabbit head and watched me come in and sit at the console.
“You look ready for battle,” he said.
I smiled, fighting back the nausea at the twenty story drop below me.
“I don’t have a suit. Don’t have any of my special arrows. I feel like if I sneeze my intestines will fly out. Don’t know how useful I’d be in a fight.”
“Get better fast, then.”
“Right, the Super Seven.”
“Superb, you mean.”
“Yeah, whatever. Anything new on that?”
The screen in front of me flashed a combination of images, in fast staccato-style, divided into fourths; with so much in each quadrant I couldn’t even keep track of the images.
“Slow it down.”
The images became more leisurely and I saw Apogee and Mirage standing side by side at the White House press conference from the day before. They were the former partners of Pulsewave, and likely to come after me first in a fight.
“How can I get specific information on the members?”
I could almost swear the rabbit head smiled. “You ask.”
“Ok. Let me see the files on Apogee and Mirage.”
The screen wasn’t that big, but Mr. Haha did his best, putting them both at once.
Mirage was quite powerful with his name-sake ability to project illusions of terrain, and to create quantum constructs of partial mass. Otherwise, though, he was your typical steroid/spandex monkey, with more muscles than brains. He would use his abilities to put us all ill at ease while his partners moved in to finish us off.
And to that end, Apogee was a speedster with Class-A physical abilities. She could also generate plasma explosions, specifically using it when hitting people, at the exact moment of impact, to accentuate her blows. Apogee had dropped the duo of Steeltoe and Matchstick, former Revolution teammates gone villain, all by herself. She had gone toe to toe with Brickhouse in what must have been a catfight for the ages. They all were now serving 25 years in Utopia prison, as were dozens of high-profile, powerful super villains who had crossed her path.
These guys were heavy hitters for sure. I could expect Apogee in my face the instant a fight started and I had no arrows to replenish my empty quiver.
Despite the threat, I found myself beguiled by her. She was a sight, with a body like a statue, tall and voluptuous, with light brown hair parted to the middle and layered to her strong shoulders and a face like an angel. Apogee was like a legendary screen siren, a stunning green-eyed goddess, and she knew how to carry herself.
I looked over at Haha, who was staring at me, or so I thought, and realized I was leaning forward to get a good look at her on the small screen.
“Apogee wants to kill you,” Haha said, more aware than I realized.
“It’d be easy for her.” I turned off the monitor and leaned back.
“You’re stronger than her. Less experienced, though, and she’s much faster.” He thought for a bit. “Yes, it will be easy for her.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, to which he joined.
“As Cool would say,” He added, “OWN YOUR ASS.”
There was a lot of machinery on this floor, scattered equipment of all sorts, with more blinking lights than a horde of scientists would know to decipher. It wasn’t my lab, with all my gear, and my near obsessive-compulsive organization, but I needed arrows, even weak ones from salvaged gear, if I intended to survive the Superb Seven.
“Think I can scrounge some materials from the junk lying around?”
“If you mean from my parts, I have a Cool Hand quote for that as well.”
“No,” I said exasperated. “Not the ambulating junk, the boxes of useless shit lying around.”
“As I’m not the owner, I’d say be my guest.”
That was all the permission I needed.
* * *
I got to business im
mediately turning an empty table I found into a rudimentary field lab. I only had my multi-tool at first, but soon I discovered an overheating generator within an old computer console that reminded me of ENIAC. With some small modifications to the resistance, I could probably increase the output and use it as a heater. It would melt it out in a few hours, but it would give me time to construct a suitable replacement.
What I did first was make a few tools, including a carbon-seared heat lance to cut the raw pieces I needed, and a tubular centrifuge to spin out the arrow shafts. I was using bulky materials, raw metals from the chassis and support beams of the computer boxes themselves, and cutting them down for the parts I needed.
Haha continued scanning television signals, occasionally looking over at me.
I wouldn’t be able to get fancy, so I decided to go for raw power over subtlety. I didn’t know where I was going to get Semtex or C-4, but I planned for it, making a dozen explosive arrows. The payload would have to wait, but I made proper delivery arrows, with impact and timer detonators. If I had a chemistry lab, I could make my derivation of C-4, which was almost twice as effective at the same weight, but I couldn’t expect to stop by L.A. any time soon. Hopefully, Cool Hand would know someone to get what I needed.
I found a strong electromagnet and decided to spend some time trying to find some Ianthanoid elements to try to make a super strong magnet arrow. I searched the whole lab and found a safe that I ripped open and inside, there was the mother lode. Dozens of vials of materials, most of them useless to my experiment, but enough manganese, vanadium, nickel and cobalt, that with some of the iron I had lying around, I could contemplate making a magnet of unearthly strength. It would require an onboard coolant on the arrow, which with the materials I had was more than a challenge, but once I got my mind on something, I was like a bull.
The idea was to create a molecular magnet, albeit one that would only exist for a fraction of a second. But it would be a devastating weapon against FTL, the only member of Superb Seven who wore a suit of armor. If I could figure out a few dozen potential problems with the magnet arrow, and I could hit him with it, it would turn his suit into a super-magnet with amazing attractive forces, maybe even a gravity well. Superdynamic wore a metal helmet and I think his skin-tight suit was at least partially metallic. Gamma Demon got his powers from those gamma-ray drenched bracelets he wore, which were probably a metal of some sort. In that split second, the attracting forces would be so great that the three of them would be neutralized. The varying formulae for magnetic attraction were going through my head as I put it all together when Mr. Haha interrupted me.
“I’m almost done,” he said, though I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Good.”
“And you?”
“Busy at it. Trying to figure out a few things. I’m short on explosives, also trying to calculate-.”
“Well,” he began, “if you need computational power, look no further.”
I smiled, hoping he’d return to his vigil. “I think I can manage.”
“Yes, but why ‘manage’ when you can have access to several of the world’s largest botnets.”
I stared at him dumbfounded so I guess he thought I didn’t know what a botnet was.
“A botnet is a conglomeration of computers worldwide, tied into the net by a series of virii or worms that make grandma’s poker gambling computer my personal processor.”
“I know what it is.”
“Good, then you won’t mind letting me help you. With the combined-”
“Botnets are for spam email and sophomoric games, I need raw processing power.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of SETI, Project Argus and SETI@home?”
I’d heard of it, but again he decided to inform me before I could reply in the affirmative.
“SETI is of course, SETI, the collective name for all the projects and activities in the search for extraterrestrial life. Project Argus was a membership-supported program of SETI League, wherein many thousands of 3 to 5 meter diameter backyard satellite TV dishes were converted into radio telescopes, and concentrated together via a global network. SETI@home is a similar global system that coordinates processing power of 300,000 computers while people are offline, sleeping.”
“Thanks for the history lesson.”
“No lesson,” he continued, unimpressed with my sarcasm. “An explanation as to my processing power and the breadth of my abilities. I have adapted the lessons of Project Argus and SETI@home, to modern illegal botnets, and increased the processing power of the originals fifty-fold. What you see before you is merely a construct for understanding by simpler minds, but I am not centered on this construct. In fact, I am no one thing. I may have been originally written as an adaptive quantum A.I. code with a layered multi-use program, but I have set upon other trends, ranging from sociology, marketing, crime, religion, fashion and humor.”
I was already starting to get my theories about Mr. Haha and who had written his code, a code that had gone far beyond what even the master had planned for. Despite all his attempts to define himself, he seemed to me more of a murderous artificial intelligence that combined the subtlety of an MMA fighter and a rapist’s wit with the personality of a drugged-out talk show host.
“So if you need assistance with any calculations, I’d be more than happy to assist.”
“Don’t worry about it, Haha. I was thinking aloud.” I looked at the flashing screens as he changed channels at a rapid fire pace. “What are you up to?”
“I’m compiling Dr. Retcon’s message to us.”
“He sent us a message?”
Haha nodded nonchalantly.
“Well, what is it?”
“It isn’t complete yet for me to show you. Dr. Retcon has used a quite clever method to transmit a message to us, utilizing a complex number algorithm code he provided to guide me as to where to look.”
I studied what he was doing on the screen, watching several thousands of hours of television from the first practical broadcasts in Germany in 1929 to present day shows. He went back and forth in time, scanning each broadcast until a certain specific point in the show, I supposed guided by Retcon’s algorithm, and there he would find a single frame of footage showing Retcon himself mid-conversation. Then he would save the frame and race on to the next show from a different part of the world and maybe from a different time period altogether, where again he would find a frame of Retcon’s. One by one, he was marrying these images to the final message he had sent us.
“The real challenge lies in re-coalescing dozens of versions from the film used in the early age of television to 1080p of today, in the different formats like Seacam, PAL, ATSC and whatnot, each with their own horizontal, vertical and temporal resolution. I’m forced to re-encode each frame into a new format I have devised, which is more efficient. I was wondering if you would like me to recolor the black and white frames? Where do you lie on the whole recoloring argument?”
“So he hid these frames in rebroadcasts. Very clever of him.”
“These are the original broadcasts, Blackjack.”
It took me a second to understand what he had said. It made no sense, how could Dr. Retcon insert these images into footage from so many years past?
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“To someone like you, or I. But remember this is Dr. Retcon we are speaking of.”
Then I started to understand how he did it. Because he had access to all his previous selves, he had embedded the frames to the complete message in thousands of original programs across time, impossible to track by even the most astute detective. Not unless you had the algorithm that pointed you in the right direction. Indeed, the next image was of Dr. Retcon in an episode of the late 1950s Zorro, dubbed in Italian. One second Guy Williams was rushing past as Zorro, mounted on his black horse Thunder. Immediately following would be a single frame of Dr. Retcon, far younger than I had seen him in the rock garden, wearing a plaid jacket and wide orange tie,
more in tune with the fashion of the early 60s, when the episode must have aired in Italy.
“It will be rather confusing, I admit. The man is brilliant, but he has no idea of lighting, makeup, or set positioning. He bounces all over the screen many times a second, changing in size, clothing and hair style. I will have to interpolate between frames to try to match it.”
I laughed at the insanity of it all. “Do your thing, man,” I said and went back to my arrows.
“By the way, did you say you needed explosives?” Mr. Haha rolled down a dirty kimono sleeve to reveal the remains of the incorporated rocket launcher. He slid back the chamber once then twice, catching two ejected rocket propelled grenades. “Think this will do?” he asked, tossing them to me.
“Oh, yeah.” I said, a smile rolling across my face as I caught and rolled the two grenades in my hands. “This will do fine.”
Now I had my explosive arrows.
* * *
We sat assembled waiting for Mr. Haha, who went forwards and backwards on the video of Dr. Retcon, making some last minute changes. Old rabbit head had done an amazing job, interpolating completely different frames of video into a working single clip of film. Retcon’s face was on every monitor in the room, almost thirty, of varying sizes, though we were centered on a huge one, almost 100 inches in width.
Standing beside the rabbit was Dr. Zundergrub, his imps conspicuously absent. He had his arms crossed and a severe look on his face, still angered at the danger of our recent missions. I was sitting back a bit, my feet up on the counter, having seen some of the video already as Mr. Haha was putting it all together. Cool Hand sat behind us, atop a large computer with rotating tapes, smacking through a ham and cheese sandwich.
Dr. Retcon’s image was blurry, because of Haha’s effect, but it actually made the video easier to watch. I’d seen it in its raw format and it was maddening. Dr. Retcon was never in the same location of the video. And he was never wearing the same thing, never had the same haircut, or facial hair.
In modern television, there were thirty frames each second of video. The frames flashed by our eyes at 1/30th of a second each to give the illusion of moving video. The principle was called Persistence of Vision, and it meant that our brains, while being able to tell the difference, lied to us to keep it simple.