Blackjack Villain

by Ben Bequer

  * * *

  I dreaded even the thought of working on the device. I knew what was involved and with rudimentary tools it would not only be a challenge, it would be the most arduous pain in fucking history. I longed for my lab and my tools. Hell, some Craftsman crap would have made me happy. Haha, on the other hand, was enthusiastic, leading me through the chaotic village until we found a nice open space to work. Nearby was a large stone that I hefted and brought over to use as a chair.

  “Ok,” I started, watching Haha clean the area with a broom that appeared out of his arms. “First we need to build a forge.”

  He stopped and looked at me curiously.

  “What for?”

  “Because, my rabbit friend, we need a forge to smelt the metals we need to build the contraption.”

  Haha nodded.

  “After we make the forge,” I continued, “we’ll need to smelt enough raw steel to make an anvil. We’ll need iron, carbon, copper, cadmium...”

  The robot’s ear twitched.

  “Are you getting this?”

  “I’m still wondering what we need all those things for.”

  I laughed, “You want to build the Tesla machine, right?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “Then we need a forge and an anvil to make the parts. This is a hell of a project Haha. We’re gonna be here a few weeks on this.”

  “Perhaps,” Haha said, absorbing the broom into his body and creating a leaf blower out of one hand with which he cleared out the dust from the area.

  “Hey this was your idea,” I said, picking up a small rock and tossing it into the distance. “You even think this through?”

  This was going to take forever. The stupid robot was a nuisance with a higher opinion of me that was actually warranted. Even if we had the original schematics, the process to make everything would be hundreds of hours in manufacturing and constructing, and still I had no idea how to use it.

  I hadn’t realized until then, that I may have had a good idea of how the machine worked, but I had no clue what it was for. I could replicate the device and we would still be nowhere, because I couldn’t necessarily duplicate its purpose.

  Closing my eyes, I tried to study the machine’s every line, angle and rivet. When I had stuck my head inside of the device I had noticed a few interesting things like a secondary generator powered by the Tesla uniform generator. This second generator produced a signal that it sent through a primary coil, a miniature Tesla coil within the machine then off to the larger two coils beside it.

  But that’s where I had problems making sense of it. The signal or power surge would then circle the main coils, almost indefinitely, but to what end? In theory, if the surge continued unabated, the power levels could get quite dangerous. Standing next to the machine could be tantamount to being next to the splitting of an atom.

  More importantly, what was the purpose of having such a device where the power surged endlessly around the coils unless it was a weapon of some sort? And why dual coils piggy backed upon each other?

  I tried to recall what happened when the machine engaged, but all I could remember was the flash of light and an instant later we were castaways marooned atop the floating island. It had all happened so fast, I could barely remember anything.

  It made no sense. For the device to produce enough power through the coil surge, I figured the machine had to be engaged for quite some time. A few minutes at least, but the flash was instantaneous. The machine was on and fully functional in a fraction of a second. So that ruled out a power surge through the coils. But what else could it be? A generator tied to a coil system that sent something through a mini coil and then into the main coils into a suspended loop?

  I picked up another rock and threw it even farther.

  “There,” Haha said, finishing his task of clearing out some space to work and turning the leaf blower into a regular mannequin hand. “Now what do we do?”

  I shook my head, “No damned idea,” I said.

  “Perhaps I can be of assistance,” Haha offered.

  “Not unless you know what the machine did.”

  “I wasn’t able to determine that, other than the obvious,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Well,” he explained. “The device is obviously a teleportation device.”

  “No such thing,” I spat, rising to my feet.

  “How can you say that, Blackjack? The device transported us here. That much is certain.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

  “It simply teleported us,” the rabbit insisted.

  “I’m telling you there’s no such thing. To teleport us, the machine had to read our entire molecular code, remember where every cell is, then transport that information through some sort of signal-”

  I stopped, starting to realize how Tesla and Retcon’s device had worked.

  “The signal teleported us, right?” Haha said, trying to contribute to the brain storming session.

  “No, no. Hang a second. A signal. That’s the key. See, the machine wasn’t a teleportation device, Haha.”

  “Then how did it work?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said, standing off the rock and pacing. “See, once we understand the purpose of the machine, we’ll know how to build it. And it wasn’t the machine that transported us, I can guarantee you that.”

  “So what did the machine do?”

  Then it hit me, there was only one object in known or hypothetical physics that could explain what happened to us.

  “A wormhole,” I said, pausing.

  Haha stopped next to me.

  “I see,” he said. “So the device created a wormhole that allowed us to pass through.”

  “No,” I said, the gaps slowly filling in as we spoke. “It didn’t create one, it utilized one. The machine doesn’t make the trip possible so much as it engages a nearby Lorentzian traversable wormhole.”

  I looked at Haha, half-expecting Apogee’s negative sarcasm, but he nodded.

  “See, the machine is like a boarding pass. It allows us to make the voyage. And it does it by activating a wormhole. Don’t you wish you had paid attention in Physics class?”

  “I’ve actually read most, if not all, the relevant articles and publications on the subject. Unfortunately, I don’t have much of that information uploaded onboard at present. Being offline from my core systems has meant-“

  I shot my hand up suddenly, silencing Haha, as an idea came to me. I ran up to the rock I had used as a chair, and using a small pebble, I wrote on the big stone.

  “ds²=-c²dt²+dl²+(k²+l²)(dθ+sin²θdφ²)”

  Haha cocked his head as I scratched on the rock.

  “The formula for a traversable wormhole metric,” he said, surprising me. “Not bad from memory, Blackjack.”

  I beamed as he quirked his head while looking at it.

  “Looks terribly complicated,” Haha said. “Again, I wish I had remote access to my core systems.”

  Indeed the formula was complex, but something about it made me laugh because it was simpler than either of us had imagined. The machine was so simple I couldn’t help but laugh harder, almost doubling over in pain. The purpose of the device was obvious, and the double coil surge, which would allow us to hurl something at the speed of light could mean only one thing.

  “What’s so funny?” Haha said and I slapped the back of his shoulder, raising a cloud of dust from his dirty kimono.

  “I know what the machine is,” I said. “I know what it does.”

  I wiped the formula because it was useless now, I had figured it out. I had figured the whole thing out.

  Haha watched me, waiting for the revelation.

  “We’re going to build a particle accelerator.”

  * * *

  With a now more defined idea of what we had to accomplish, Mr. Haha and I set out to build the machine. But I was wrong about how long it was going to take, and what Mr. Haha’s full capabilities were.

  I lo
oked at the open space Haha had chosen and found a nice spot for our forge. I marked it on the ground, along with a good place for the anvil right next to it. The weather was slightly chilled and there was no sun overhead, the strange illumination from the dying planet and the vortex around it, so we could work in the open air.

  “Let’s put the forge here and the anvil here,” I said.

  Haha shook his head.

  “No forge,” he announced.

  “And why the hell not?”

  “Tell me what you need.”

  “I need a forge,” I snapped. “Here would be nice.”

  He crossed the field to me and scratched the mark I had made on the dirt.

  “I am your forge,” he announced, tapping his chest. “Now, what do you need?”

  I laughed, “you’re going to pull the pieces I need out of your chest?”

  Haha nodded.

  “Ok, so let’s start with a support bracket. A piece of aluminum or copper about twenty-four inches long, seven inches wide at the wide end, two at the narrow.”

  “What grade?”

  “Thick. Quarter inch.”

  A bright light burned inside the robot, revealing itself through the kimono and every gap in his frame, and quickly faded out. Haha reached into his chest cavity and withdrew a piece of red-hot copper to the exact specifications.

  “Not bad for a bucket of bolts. Three more and we’re in business.”

  He lit up again, this time taking three times as long, and when complete, he pulled three more pieces of copper from his chest and tossed them onto the floor.

  “Now I don’t suppose you have a soldering iron somewhere in there, do you?”

  Haha’s head cocked to the side and he raised his left arm, which rotated between weapons, hands, blades, etc., until he created a modified version of the plasma weapon stolen from the German government. He graduated the tip of the transfigured weapon until the blue-hot edge dripped plasmaic energy.

  “This should do,” he said. “And we shouldn’t even need the flux.”

  As the plasma cooled, it would replicate the binding action of the flux, soldering the two pieces of copper together.

  “Nice,” I said. “Very nice. Now what about a riveter?”

  He made one with his left hand, a multi-purpose riveter that could both open the hole and place a rivet at the same time.

  And that’s how we made the machine. I read out the parts list, and he produced them within an internal forge (and glass blower for the coil parts), and once the parts were done, he put the whole thing together, per my instructions, faster than a dozen Teslas or Retcons.

  Other than the few times Haha had to harvest more materials, we worked unabated to build the particle accelerator. I supervised, but was more like the assistant, holding the parts while Haha riveted or soldered them together with incredible speed and precision. During the main construction, I actually slowed him down so he waved me off and produced a pair of vestigial arms that held the parts to the frame faster and more efficiently than I could.

  While he did that, I took my quiver and emptied it out on the floor. Haha’s abilities were farther than anything I could have imagined, and the speed he worked at simply amazing, but there were some components I had premade, in some of my arrows, and it would save time to use them instead of making new ones.

  Parts-wise, my arrow heads had almost nothing to offer. My impact explosive arrows, the sonic boom, and a few others were simple and functioned on a mechanical basis. Those I tossed back into my arrow bag. Others, like the sticky foam and the heat seeking arrows had valuable components that I had already spent a lot of time constructing and could harvest. In any case, I could easily build more arrows if we made it back. I screwed off the arrow heads from the aluminum shafts and replaced the heads with simple broad heads. Those I tossed into the bag as well.

  There was one arrow left on the floor. The Nuke. I picked it up and studied the large arrow head, aerodynamic, but bulbous and fat nonetheless. I doubted I would have a practical use for this arrow. If I was desperate enough to fire the Nuke, it meant I didn’t care that I was about to die. It was a heavy arrowhead, and fly like a pig tied to an arrow. I wasn’t sure I could fire it farther than the explosive radius.

  “Hell with it,” I said, and disengaged the arrow head, screwing it off the shaft and tossing it my pocket. I placed the head-less arrow shaft into my bag and looked over at Haha, who was done building the frame, and was waiting for my next instruction.

  “Ok, let’s do this.”

  * * *

  It took us about an hour to put the finishing touches on the frame, but that was mostly my fault because I was having problems remembering the lower parts of the device. It was the actual hard framing, what held the device up, but sometimes I get weird about things being right. The good thing about having a robot without emotions as my assistant, was not having to hear him complain at my perfectionism.

  By the time we had the basic frame and the two Tesla coils completed, Haha needed a break to go get more materials. Even at this pace, it was going to take forever.

  I figured I’d stretch my legs and walk with Haha, maybe think through some of the more difficult calculations, and found myself having the strangest conversation of my life.

  “Pheromones, Blackjack,” he said suddenly. It was like the header to his dissertation, and our conversation was probably pre-outlined already. I kept silent, hoping he’d get to the point, but as the silence wore on, it was clear he required a question from me to continue.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They explain her attraction to you,” he said, kneeling to scoop a handful of dirt which he stuffed into his chest cavity.

  “And here I thought it was the whole tall, dark and handsome thing I have going for me,” I joked, not knowing what he had planned for discussion.

  “That’s part, for certain,” he continued, matter-of-factly. “There are certain traits, primary and secondary sexual characteristics that you possess that she is apparently predisposed to. You have traditionally masculine traits with a wide jaw, broad cheekbones and heavy eyebrows, which are associated with increased testosterone. You are tall and have broad shoulders and muscular legs and buttocks. These are indicator of good health and dominance, and particularly attracting to a heterosexual ovulating woman, like Apogee, or homosexual men.”

  “Good stuff,” I said, hoping he’d switch subjects.

  “You must be curious as to why she’s so interested, no? The actual bio-evolutionary arousal responses when she is in your presence. You must wonder why her nipples and labia engorge, why her vulva and vagina become lubricated, and several internal changes to her cervix, uterus and vaginal walls occur. Her pupillary response, and change in breathing and heart beat patterns alone should give you plenty of indication. ”

  I laughed. “Haha, you don’t ask why, you thank the gods that they do.”

  He knelt for more materials, regarding me curiously.

  “It’s much more complicated than that. Pheromones dictate a great deal of things in the interactions between men and women. For example, females can detect the antibodies of a potential mate from pheromones alone. Subconsciously, of course, but they do this unwittingly, and decide on a mate, in part, according to this paradigm. Females of the human species choose males whose antibodies best correspond to their own, in particular during ovulation.”

  “And she’s ovulating now?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “We don’t work that way, Haha. It’s not automatic.”

  He laughed, though at what I couldn’t tell. “Of course not, this all operates subconsciously. But it’s my estimation that if you’re aware of the process, you might be more inclined to exert some sense of control over the matter.”

  “As I’m clearly not?”

  “You’re like a school child with a crush on his teacher, Blackjack.”

  I shook my head, “She’s attractive, sure-“


  “She is at the prime of fecundity, with neotenic and youthful-appearing features. Her breasts are high and firm, and optimally sized, which is a good indicator of fertility. Her hair is lustrous, and her lips red, an obvious secondary characteristic evolutionarily designed to resemble her vagina.”

  “Haha-“ I started but he continued.

  “Her height ratio to yours is within standard deviation, and her facial features bear a prototypical physical shape that is generally judged to be attractive. If you don’t believe me, I can show you multiple polls I’ve made available on my forums, Facebook, and blog where 95% of respondents would prefer to see Apogee and you come together than-“

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted, grabbing the robot and turning him to face me. “Have you been putting that stuff online?”

  I had gotten so used to Haha’s buzzing secondary droids like satellites rotating around their planet that I had forgotten what he told us when we first met him.

  “Of course not,” he said, unthreatened by my hand restraining him. “Since we’ve come to this world, I’m offline. They don’t have good Wi-Fi here, Blackjack,” Haha laughed.

  “And before?”

  He shrugged and I let him go. By now we were almost finishing up our long rounded arc around the edge of the village that was quickly bringing us back to where we had originally started.

  “I don’t answer to Influx, or Dr. Retcon, or anyone else. Nor do I pass judgment. I merely watch and record.”

  Haha and I walked back to our working area and his midsection lit up, forging the last piece I had asked for when he had run out of materials.

  “No wonder we have so much heat on us, Haha. God damn it! You were supposed to work with us on that.”

  He cocked his head, spitting out some support cross beams from his chest.

  “I’m sure things were more complicated,” he admitted. “But part of our mission is to draw attention away from Retcon, and I am merely doing my part.”

  “If Cool Hand finds out, he’s going to be pissed.”

  Mr. Haha rotated his hands, showing me the plasma weapon that had torn my midsection apart. “I have nothing to fear as long as I have this,” he said, confident that the plasma weapon would protect him from Cool’s temporal powers. I searched his mannequin eyes for some implied threat, but found none. Haha didn’t work like that. He weighed options and took the one that seemed most logical at the moment. I would’ve preferred the posturing; it would’ve meant there was something human in there.