You Believe Her

by Richard Roberts

  The Expert’s jaw tightened in disgust at that idea. “No. That would have been a bad idea.”

  Snapping his fingers twice, Expert said, “Come, child,” and set off across the mall.

  I followed his long-legged stride. We headed across the mall, up the stairs, and into one of the empty shops, stripped of their merchandise every weekend, and presumably refilled sometime tonight to be ready for Monday morning. No sign of that, yet. Instead, the Expert slipped a key into the lock of a back room, and opened the door into a laboratory too big to fit into mall.

  Not that it was huge, but the white-paneled room was bigger than the shop, and the walls of the mall didn’t have room to contain that. While stepping inside, I checked the lintel. Dull brown metal gave way to shiny white metal on an exactly straight line.

  The Expert noticed my interest. “In exchange for the technical work turning a collection of random inventions into a moon base, Spider granted me access to portals that allow easy access to my facilities.”

  “Runtime on the Orb of the Heavens? That’s quite a payment.”

  “It was quite a bit of work, which very few with or without super powers could perform. Brainy was not available.” He waved his hand at a chair. “Sit.”

  I sat. It gave me time to examine the room. The Expert liked tidiness. White tile walls, floor, ceiling. Shiny metal counters. Nearly arranged complex machines, all blinking lights and clear plastic cylinders. The place looked like my Dad’s workshop, where he subjected mad science devices to every test imaginable to non-mad science in the hopes they could be reproduced by regular people. Lots of monitor screens, a big computer, rows of jars with printed labels on the shelves, that sort of thing. The chair, right out in the open, was fastened firmly in place and obviously there so that larger machines could be rolled up to the occupant. The padding on the seat, back, and armrests was also white, and thick enough to be comfortable.

  As he puttered around behind me, tapping on keys and making things clink, the Expert said, “The obvious problem here is that most methods of adding hair would require removing your scalp. Not an option to us, even temporarily.”

  “… but you have a solution, or we wouldn’t be here.”

  I couldn’t see him back there, but he sounded a little bit smug. “I do. A couple of pieces of technology I’ve kept around, without ever being quite sure what I would do with them. Remember that lesson, Bad Penny. Mad scientists should be packrats.”

  His footsteps signaled him stepping up behind me. Fingers poked at the top of my head, massaging the stiff dome, for all the good that would do. For a moment the pressure increased, and then let up, followed by a thoughtful hmmm. “You react to the touch. I take it you have full tactile sensitivity.”

  I bobbed my head in a series of pleased nods, although not being able to shrug spoiled that a bit. “If I had to get stuck in a robot body, this one is pretty good.”

  His voice took a turn for the serious. “The downside of this superior technology is that the first stage, where the bonding element repairs your follicles so that new hair can be attached, will hurt. I suggest you deactivate while I work.”

  Not really thrilled by that idea. “I’ll be fine. Having my arm reattached hurt, and I handled it.”

  “It will hurt a lot,” he stressed. A whole lot of passion and grim warning went into that sentence.

  “Ugh. Fine, fine!” I waved a hand, and reached up behind my neck.

  The Expert assured me, in strained tone of someone not used to giving comfort, “Sixty seconds will be enough. That will get you through the first stage.”

  Sixty seconds. Okay. I pushed the button.

  Awake! This sleep was so short, I didn’t actually feel like I slept. The world merely blinked, and I found myself with my head lolled forward. Not far forward, because a collar kept it fastened to the back of the chair.

  Tesla’s Government Fiasco, really? Okay, yes, some kind of trickery with payment, that I expected from the Expert, but kidnapping?

  Kidnapping it was, or at least imprisonment. Not just my neck, but my wrists and ankles were fastened to the chair as well. Together, that locked me in place pretty thoroughly. My body didn’t compress or bend like the old one.

  The cold pressure of my teleport bracers remained on my upper arms. I tapped a foot on the floor. Without being able to move my body in the process, the bracers didn’t activate.

  You know what pressure I didn’t feel? The Machine. He’d removed my precious Machine!

  Should I panic? I could panic. No. Bad Penny preferred sarcasm. “Sixty seconds, huh?”

  Blithely, the Expert answered, “I do intend to fix your hair. I will probably even let you go, but I would be a fool to let technology like this escape without thorough investigation.”

  “So, you do this to all the robot girls.”

  It was hard to tell if my acid voice stung him or not, but his voice did heat up with passion. “You have no idea what you’re wearing, Bad Penny. I saw those photos. Your circuitry is not merely advanced, it follows the same design as an Upgrade.”

  Part of me needed time to come up with an escape plan. The other part of me wanted to know more. I satisfied both by snarking, “You’re not the first person who’s said that.”

  He responded with a contemptuous growl. “I keep forgetting your mother’s mad and futile desire to make you grow up a normal child. Do you remember the First Horseman?”

  “Like of the Apocalypse?” I asked, trying not to let my suspicions slide together before the Expert filled me in.

  My obvious ignorance goaded him into doing just that. “In 1992, the First, Second, and Third Horsemen appeared in Los Angeles, on an incoherent mission to kill as many superhumans as they could. If civilians died in droves, so much the better. In response, the community coalesced to kill them quickly and with extreme thoroughness. Most of it. The First Horseman knew a cybernetic technique that allowed him to massively increase other people’s powers. It is called an Upgrade, and as far as I am concerned, it is technology more valuable than the Conqueror Orbs, because it can be copied. Someone deciphered how it works, and gave Upgrades to Rage and Ruin. I want that secret. If disassembling you will let me decipher it, that is what I will do. Fortunately, I expect that removing a finger will teach me everything that can be learned. If my examination is successful, I may even be able to reattach it.”

  “But it’s Spider everyone warned me not to trust,” I observed, pouring on a whole bucket of sarcasm.

  The Expert leaned around in front of me, and I got to see his smirk as he examined my forehead. “Of course. If you’d spoken to her, she would have told you not to let yourself fall into my clutches. You are a prize the entire mad science community will be slavering for, and you would lose your value to her if one of us took you apart.”

  Something clinked behind me. The Expert’s hand closed on my neck, his thumb reaching for the button back there. “But first, I’m going to actually fix your hair.”

  Ten seconds. He pressed it.

  Ten seconds later, I woke up. This time I lay there. It was easy enough. My eyes hadn’t closed, and my head lolled forward, but that was all.

  It got a little harder when the Expert massaged some gunk onto my scalp. He was not kidding about it hurting. Exaggerating, yes, but woo, what a burn! If I wasn’t clamped down and my shoulders unable to twitch anyway, I’d have given myself away. Plus, I could hold my breath indefinitely.

  Burning paste gave way to what felt like that special dentist toothbrush, something that vibrated my head and scratched its way over my lost hairline.

  While he did that, I tried to figure out an avenue of escape. I might be stronger than him. Would he be incautious enough to release an arm to get at my finger? Was the chair fastened to the floor? If I could tilt it forward, that might be enough to let me use my bracers. My eyes scanned the room, looking for anything that might help or inspire.

  I found help in the least expected place. The Expert might be a du
plicitous jackanape, but he at least was a geek. I approved of the computer game boxes stacked neatly in cupboards, and the line of superhero figurines in a row down the lowest shelf. Mostly superheroines, but that was how the figurine industry went. He even had a little statuette of my mother, whose sculptor had accurately captured her stiff gray suit, but had posed her in a flirty, hip-tilted stance Mom had probably never adopted in her life.

  Mom’s statue caught my eye because the one next to her moved. The tiny heroine, with fluffy hair, a crazy poufy dress, and an even crazier grin, climbed down to the counter top, picked up my Machine lying there alone, and twisted him around.

  His legs moved. The statuette had activated him.

  Its task complete, the figurine pulled herself back up to where she’d started, and became motionless again.

  Well. Ain’t that a thing.

  And before I could ask the question, I knew what thing. That statue moved with the same careful grace I’d seen in another line of statues, on a shelf in Chinatown. It had been carved, or infected, or however his powers worked, by Gothic, a man with a clear motivation for saving helpless robots from being dismantled.

  The Expert stepped away from my chair. I felt hair lying against the back of my neck, and a few strands hung in front of my eyes. Time to go, then.

  “Machine, eat my restraints,” I ordered.

  The Expert’s feet thumped. He walked back up to me, and pressed the button in the back of my neck.

  Two seconds.

  I didn’t even notice that delay. It wasn’t even enough time to miss the Expert stepping into view, picking up the Machine, and dropping him in a can.

  Crunch crunch crunch. He ate his way out immediately, and resumed crawling across the counter towards me.

  Taking a solid steel box down from a shelf, the Expert dropped my Machine in that. More crunching, and after a couple of seconds, my wonderful creation crawled through a hole he’d chewed through the side.

  Frowning, not angry but analytical, my gray-haired captor carried the wriggling Machine across the room, opened up a wall safe, and sealed him in.

  I had to say, that safe looked secure. Shiny metal, high-tech lock, thick door with visible layering of all kinds of no-doubt exotic materials.

  Why, it took my baby nearly thirty seconds to eat his way out. He’d gained a fair amount of weight by now. Instead of lifting him, the Expert went and fetched a cube made of plastic struts along the edges, and no actual walls. I took considerable satisfaction that he went and fetched this new cage before my Machine escaped the wall safe. This once-proud mad scientist already knew he’d lost this battle.

  As my pudgy millipede-shaped contraption emerged from the wall vault and dropped onto the table, the Expert set the plastic cube down over it. Walls of twinkling purple appeared, filling every gap.

  They went out when the Machine crawled through the nearest, and his patient crawl became a scurry, accompanied by a loud bang when he jumped off the counter onto the floor.

  Scowling, still more thoughtful than angry, the Expert stepped past my baby and pushed him back with one foot. The Machine took a chunk out of the mad scientist’s shoe for his pains, but it did give the old man time to unhook my left ankle, then my right. Solemnly, he said, “I know that you’re awake. It would be interesting to continue these experiments, but the outcome would be the same, and I have no desire to waste your time further. There.”

  The last lock around my neck opened, I stood up, and the Machine stopped. I had no more restraints for him to eat, after all. Picking him up in both hands, I cradled him to my chest and stroked his back.

  Despite, or maybe in response to, my accusing stare, the Expert lifted a bread-box sized machine off a table at the back of the laboratory. When I saw the skinny, dangling mechanical arms, I recognized it. How and why had this guy ever gotten his hands on one of my dad’s automatic hair braiding machines?

  Regardless, he held it out to me, and I tucked it on top of my Machine. He finished with a little bow. “I agreed to fix your hair, and it will not be finished until it is braided. Under the circumstances, I could not ask you to do that here.”

  Not willing to give him the dignity of a response, I walked out the door. It opened onto a back street I didn’t recognize.

  I was tempted to return to Chinatown and talk to Spider just out of spite, but I had an obligation to take care of. Gothic and Raggedy had given me their business card way back when, and I owed them a thank you!

  blipped across the city, building by building, trying to read my phone’s map without accidentally teleporting onto it. That whole weird ‘stare at the spot you want to arrive at’ control scheme.

  On a handy sidewalk, I paused to let my badly abused GPS catch up. Yes, this was the place. One shake confirmed that my beautiful new braids still flopped correctly, and let me look around. Of all places, Gothic and Raggedy made their lair in the heart of South Central, one of the most persistently ‘bad part of town’ areas, despite the superhero infestation I had to avoid along the way. Still, in this particular neighborhood the endless low houses were no worse than dusty. Shiny white vans with uniformed workers certainly did not radiate terror of crime.

  Ah, there was the address. It took me a moment because, rather than the usual front door, the entrance to my benefactor’s base slunk a half-floor down, at the bottom of a flight of cement steps. Not exactly common, and it hid the building number.

  Hid the building number so well, in fact, that I only spotted it when cadaverous Gothic opened his front door, looked across and down the street at me, and waved at me in scooping motions. They looked urgent, not friendly.

  I teleported to the top of the steps to find out why. This made the normally severe and reserved old man grimace in dismay. His hoarse whisper carried up the steps to me. “What are you doing? Evade! Escape! The capture squad is right behind you!”

  The what now?

  I looked around, but this time actually paid attention to the people on the street. All of them wore dress shirts of colors so pale they wouldn’t hide the bright yellow smiling sun logo. Many of them held guns and cannons of unorthodox size and shape. Confusion reigned, with lots of pointing at me and arguing.

  Their vans also bore smiley suns and the name Happy Days Toys For Children.

  Criminy. These were henchmen, and I hadn’t noticed.

  Now I knew what the problem was with all this teleporting. Tunnel vision. Eyes darting from spot to spot as you caught up with each jump had a hypnotic effect.

  One of the goons worked out how to use his cannon, pulling a lever and firing a net at me. Bad for me or not, I certainly was not going to abandon my best protection, and I teleported across the street. Another pointed a bulky flat-surfaced gun in my general direction, and when she pulled the trigger it threw a badly aimed fountain of ice.

  Should I steal that? An ice gun could be useful. Although not one that also froze in a block around its owners hand, like this did.

  So far, I was less than impressed. When the henchman with the clipboard pulled out a handheld detonator, I saw no sign of any bombs. I stepped out into the middle of the street, just to be sure.

  He pressed the button.

  Eight hours later, I woke up sitting on a pedestal in a room full of robots. The neat row of pedestals, fluorescent lights, and white walls and floor had an institutional look. A smiling sun painted on that wall and the message ‘We Promise Not To Automate You*’ made it pretty clear which institution.

  A different worker with a clipboard shrieked when I looked up, and threw that clipboard to the ceiling.

  This unarmed yahoo certainly wasn’t a threat. I teleported to the door.

  Hmmm. Thick, vault-like, with a little plastic window that blocked my bracers. With the diagonal yellow stripes obscuring the view, I wasn’t sure why the door had a window at all. What the door tellingly lacked was a handle. Instead, a box with a slot suggested a key card reader.

  Well, in a room for housing kidnapped
robots, that made sense. I would just have to take the card from the minion.

  I turned back to find the poor guy pounding his fist against a box with ‘In Case Of Robot Uprising Break Glass’ printed on it. When he saw me look at him, he scooped up his clipboard again, and banged at the box with that.

  The glass cracked. A sign popped out of the top of the box reading ‘The cost of this glass will be deducted from your paycheck.’

  Could I just take the key card off his belt? I didn’t see where he kept it.

  While I scanned his pockets, the minion finally wedged his clipboard into the crack running around the edge of the box, and levered it open. Whimpering, he punched the candy-striped button inside.

  Eight hours later, I woke up again, sitting on my pedestal. Alone, this time, at least.

  Thank goodness for West Lee’s sleep failsafe. I was already tired of robot deactivation signals. Granted, humans had to deal with mind control.

  Okay, Penny. Time to shake off the tunnel vision. First, take a deep breath.

  I was not taking any breaths at all.

  Of course I wasn’t. Robots don’t.

  “… forget that!” My voice echoed in the empty room, a reminder that whatever body I might be stuck in, I was definitely human!

  First step. Breathe. The first couple of breaths were just making noises and moving my chest, but after that, I started to feel it again. The beating of my heart helped, even if that heart was made of steel and technically contained me, with the rest of the body just a plug-in.

  So. That was the real negative of teleporting. It focused me, slowed down my reflexes and thinking, and most importantly made me less human. I’d have to go easy on them, but no way could I give up my second most effective invention ever.

  “Which I’m not wearing,” I said aloud. No bracers on my arms. Panicky henchmen must have removed them after my first unplanned awakening.

  Also missing were my clothes. Oh, criminy!

  But forget being embarrassed. My Machine. They’d taken my Machine off my wrist!