by Paul Tobin
“Nice! And . . . this?” I pointed to one of the wristwatches, which was simply hovering in place, with silver and gold needles circling it, the way gnats fly around a rotten piece of fruit.
“That interrupts the flow of time by adhering antimatter hooks to the subatomic—”
“Too complicated,” I said, waving him off. “How about these?” I nodded to the weirdly modified microwave ovens and the video game console.
“One of the microwave ovens is for a radiation spray that sends quantumly attuned nano-bots on . . . uh . . . oh. You’re making the face you make when I get too complicated.” Nate was absolutely correct. I was indeed making that face.
“The other microwave is for making popcorn,” he said. “Would you like some?” I began making a different face. It was my well-known “I Would Like Some Popcorn” face.
“Bosper is the corn popper!” Bosper yelled, grabbing a big packet of microwave popcorn, leaping atop the microwave, pawing the door open, and then putting the bag inside. In the brief time Bosper held the bag in his mouth, he’d managed to soak it in drool. I customarily prefer butter and salt on my popcorn, as opposed to dog drool, but decided it would make Bosper feel bad if I said anything, and we all make sacrifices for the sake of our friends.
“We better get to work,” Nate said as we waited for the popcorn.
“How do I run this thing?” I asked. There didn’t seem to be any control system. No steering wheel. No gloves to put my hands into, so that the robot would mimic my movements. There was no gas pedal, and no giant button labeled “Destroy All Enemies.” Just . . . nothing. I wasn’t sure how to make the robot step forward, for instance, and—
The robot stepped forward.
“Oh,” I said.
I thought about moving my arm, and the robot moved its arm.
“Neat,” I said.
I thought about jumping.
The robot jumped.
I thought about running in place.
The robot ran in place.
I thought about flying into the air and firing laser beams and shooting a flurry of concussive explosions and pounding my chest the way gorillas do . . . and all of the time I was thinking these things the robot was doing exactly what I was envisioning, so that there were simply lasers and force blasts everywhere, with me swooping around like a fighter jet firing all of its rockets and . . .
. . . it . . .
. . . was . . .
. . . awesome.
“Whoa!” Nate was yelling. “Delphine! Calm down!”
“Poppity pop corn popping,” Bosper whispered, staring into the microwave, watching the bag of popcorn spinning around.
“Why should I calm down?” I asked Nate.
“Hmm. Good question. Maybe you shouldn’t, but the first thing we need to do is open the door and get the Red Death Tea Society members out of this room. Once the crystals really start vibrating, they won’t be able to survive.”
“Where do we put them?” I asked, scooping up the unconscious assassins in my giant robot hands, trying to be gentle, but not trying to be too gentle, because we were in a hurry and I think they probably deserved a few bruises anyway, on account of how they were trying to destroy an entire city.
I spun around, looking for any doorway I could go through, or a closet where I could stash them. There wasn’t anything.
“We need the code,” Nate said. “Or else we can’t escape the room.”
“Fine. Get the code. Do you have the code? We need that code.” My sudden barrage of code-related questions was linked to how the crystals were now glowing suddenly brighter, and the weird hum in the room was now a weird roar.
“Check their wallets,” Nate said, gesturing to the men I was holding in my rubber robot hands.
“Seriously? You’re the world’s smartest genius and ‘checking their wallets’ is the best you can do?”
“I believe it’s the best of our two options,” Nate said.
“What’s the other option?” I asked. It had to be better than rifling through wallets when the fate of the entire city was at stake.
Nate said, “Well, since these assassins are normally stationed in this room, the scanners must be set to read them whenever they come or go, meaning that the codes need to be tattooed on them somewhere, and I calculate a 99.43 percent chance that the tattoos will be partnered with their Red Death Tea Society tea-leaf tattoos.”
“You mean the ones on their butts?”
“I mean the ones on their butts.”
“So you’re saying that I either check through these guys’ wallets, or else I pants them?”
“Yeah.”
“I vote on the wallets.”
“I predicted that,” Nate said.
So . . . in case anybody is wondering, using giant robot hands is not the best way to search through somebody’s wallet. The robot was made for awesome destruction, not intricate work, so I dropped the wallets a few times, and dropped the people a few more times, which might normally be categorized as rude, but I think the intricacies of social etiquette are put on hold when giant robots and Earthquake Caverns come into play.
“Nothing here,” I told Nate, searching the first wallet.
“Check the next one,” he said.
I did.
“Still nothing,” I said. The walls were vibrating so hard that the floor was jiggling. Even through the rubber robot body, it was starting to make me feel weird.
“Keep checking!” Nate said. “And hurry!”
I did.
“There’s nothing in these wallets!” I said. “No codes!”
Nate just looked at me.
I sighed.
“I really have to do this?” I asked.
He shrugged.
So that’s how I found myself inside a giant robot, in an Earthquake Cavern, clutching a half-pantsed assassin in my big rubber hands, holding him up to the scanners, with Nate trying not to laugh.
“Popcorn’s ready!” Bosper yelled.
The popcorn was one of Nate’s recipes.
It was entirely delicious.
I tried not to think about the dog drool.
After we activated the security scanner, a door opened at the base of the nearest wall. I pushed the unconscious assassins out through it, using my giant robot leg to nudge them along, feeling like I was sweeping them beneath the rug.
“There,” I said. “Now what?”
In answer, Nate pointed to the crystal walls with their eerily unsettling glow.
“Destroy,” he said. Then, “I’ll get us some lemonade.”
I did, indeed, destroy.
I punched at the crystals with my giant robot fists, and the crystals cracked and broke and shattered.
I used a laser beam that melted the crystals into goop.
I used a force blast that brought a rain of crystals bursting out from the walls with explosive power.
I used a disintegrator ray on the ceiling above us, causing a barreling rush of water to come crashing into the cavern, an enormous torrent of lake water surging inward with unimaginable force. The laser-heated crystals were screeching and shattering on contact with the water, the burning crystals so hot that they were still on fire even beneath the water, with the water and flames fighting against each other. The boiling water was billowing steam throughout the room, a sizzling cauldron of ongoing destruction, and I was still firing force blasts, and the room was vibrating not only with the hum of the crystals but also with the inconceivable power I was unleashing, the sheer magnitude of Nate’s genius being unleashed, the chaos and the destruction raining everywhere, with electrical bolts far more destructive than any crack of lightning, with the raw power I was releasing causing the very air to explode, to burst into flames, the roar of science and nature colliding, as if the very atoms from which all matter is formed were being ripped apart in an awe-inspiring display of nearly cosmic-level devastation.
Also . . . the lemonade was so good.
Leaving the annih
ilated Earthquake Cavern, we ventured out into a hallway sinking ever deeper into the earth. There were rows of lights and a series of speakers blasting propaganda about Maculte’s supremacy, making me glad for the roar of the rushing water drowning out most of what was being said about Maculte’s supposedly impressive accomplishments, which I might add were not at all impressive to me, because if you’re not nice to other people then you’re not accomplishing much in your life.
Oh, forgot to mention something. That “rushing water” was because we were flooding the Red Death Tea Society’s headquarters.
It was easy enough to do. We’d left the door to the Earthquake Cavern open, and water was bursting outward, and whenever I passed a door I would use my robot force blasts to make a hole, or my robot laser beam to cut openings, or my robot microwave oven to make more popcorn, because it really was quite tasty.
Bosper floated by.
“The dog is surfing?” he asked. He’d ventured outside the robot because there were no “poo facilities” inside, and was now being washed down the hallway, standing atop a serving tray from the Red Death Tea Society cafeteria.
“Bosper,” I said. “Quit surfing.”
“The dog will bite the water,” he said. He leaned over and bit the water.
“This has not helped,” he said.
I went sloshing along after him, hurrying to catch up before he was washed away, but he was moving too fast. The current was too strong, and the hallway was too small for me to move efficiently.
“Do we have a tractor beam?” I asked Nate.
“Like, in science fiction movies?” Nate scoffed. “The ones where spaceships grab objects with beams of light?”
“Don’t make it sound weird,” I said. “It was a perfectly reasonable question.”
“Well, I guess I have been experimenting with biaxial birefringent media,” Nate admitted, or at least I think he was admitting something, but as so often I was not quite sure what he was talking about. I had no time to ask, either, because the flood was washing Bosper around a corner. So I leaped forward and started to fly, but I went too fast and slammed through the wall at the end of the hallway, scattering cement blocks everywhere and tumbling into a barracks where row after row of Red Death Tea Society assassins were sleeping in their suits, which was a bit gross. Didn’t they have pajamas?
Anyway, they all woke up for some reason that was probably related to having a giant robot crash through their wall, or possibly the immediate flooding.
“Sorry!” I said, giving a cheerful wave. “Go back to sleep!”
They did not go back to sleep.
What they did instead was arm themselves with a wide variety of weapons and begin firing at us, which was rude, although I suppose that since I’d crashed through their bedroom wall when they were sleeping I was hardly in a position to talk. I was, however, in a giant robot.
“We safe in here?” I asked Nate.
“Pretty much,” he said.
“Meaning?” I asked, kicking a couple of beds to send them sliding along the floor, knocking down a few assassins like bowling pins, but the room was huge and there were hundreds more of them swarming around.
Nate said, “Most of their weapons can’t hurt us, but if they use an atomic rearranger, we could be in trouble.”
“What’s an atomic rearranger, and what’s the chance of them having one?”
The intercom system clicked on.
“Attention,” Maculte’s voice said. “Use the atomic rearranger.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Hmm,” Nate said.
The nearest woman held up a weapon that looked like a combination of a laptop computer and a sniper rifle.
“Hmm,” Nate said.
“Preparing to fire!” the woman yelled to the other members of the Red Death Tea Society, all of whom immediately took cover, which did not bode well.
“Un-prepare to fire!” I told the woman, but she did not take my suggestion. Her finger was tightening on the trigger.
“Hmm,” Nate said.
“Quit saying that!” I told him, and I rushed forward to try to grab the weapon from the woman’s hands, but, just before I could reach her . . . she fired.
There was a sudden burst of light.
Nate and I were bathed in it.
And then our big rubber robot was atomically rearranged into a pile of sand.
“Piffle,” I said, because standing in a pile of sand in front of hundreds of well-armed minions of the Red Death Tea Society is the sort of thing that can really make you nostalgic for your giant robot. Everyone in the room was getting back to their feet, and also getting back to pointing weapons at us. Meanwhile, the rushing flood was carrying all of the sand away, so that Nate and I didn’t have any cover at all, unless you count “frantically making a time-out signal” as cover.
“Do you have a section on your training course where you practice running?” Nate asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. Start running. I’ll inflate their clothes.”
“What?” I asked, because it sounded like he’d said he was going to inflate their clothes, which is absurd.
“They’re wearing synthetic suits,” Nate said, tapping on his phone again. “I have the atomic structures for all synthetic materials on file, and all I have to do is encourage quarks.”
“Are they difficult to encourage?” I asked.
“Not when you know how. Quarks are elementary particles that make up composite particles, like protons and neutrons.”
“That’s nice of them,” I said, noticing that a large number of assassins were about to open fire on us, which Nate seemed to be prioritizing after explaining about quarks.
“They are nice!” he said. “And they’re also applicable to our current purposes, because they make up atomic nuclei, which means that if I can encourage the quarks to relax a bit, then they’ll spread out, take up more space, and—”
It was at that moment that there was a collective booming noise, like, guh-GLORK, and every suit in the room abruptly expanded into huge balloon shapes. This proved to be wholly unexpected to the members of the Red Death Tea Society, who said things like “What?” and “Hey!” and “I truly did not expect our suits to inflate!” . . . with all of these things spoken as the raging current washed the now bubble-shaped assassins along with the flood, with several of them bunching up near the door, accumulating like leaves and soda cans at a sewer grate during a heavy rain.
“C’mon!” Nate said, grabbing my hand. “We have to find Bosper!”
So we went wading out into the hall, and then we waded through a fair number of rooms and a few more hallways, and I have to say that the wading was tiring and getting more difficult all the time . . . because the water level was rising, and rising, and seriously rising, and while that had seemed keen when I was inside a giant rubber robot, it was no longer entirely wonderful that the headquarters were filling up with water.
But . . . we kept going.
We saw shooting ranges. We saw weight rooms. We saw swimming pools, which we had to swim across so that we could get back to wading. We saw a computer room filled with monitors displaying live feeds from all over the world. We saw an amazing number of rooms, but we didn’t see Bosper.
“Uh-oh,” Nate said.
I punched him.
“Oww!” he said, stepping back as if he was afraid I was going to punch him again, even though we’ve long since established that I’m not supposed to punch him more than once every five minutes, a rule we negotiated after Nate suggested that I not punch him at all, which was ludicrous.
“I punched you because—” I said, beginning to explain that I’d punched him because it makes me nervous when he says “uh-oh,” but I was interrupted by how . . . when Nate took a step back . . . he slipped and fell under the water, with the current carrying him away from me.
He surged along with the water, smacked into a wall, and was knocked entirely unconscious.
Of course.
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The churning waters swept Nate away. I was hurrying after, careful not to be swept away myself, because I wasn’t just struggling against the current, I was also fighting against everything else that was being washed along in the rush of the waters. There was furniture, disintegrator pistols, and a toaster. There were an amazing number of teacups, an occasional member of the Red Death Tea Society, and a wide range of fish that had been sucked down from the lake and swept inside the rapidly flooding headquarters.
The water in the halls was already up to my waist, and steadily rising.
“Nate!” I yelled out. Nobody answered.
“Bosper!” I shouted. Nobody answered.
I was getting ready to call out again, but . . .
“Delphine!” I heard, which is my name, but it was called out by Maculte’s voice, so I didn’t answer, because a man who tries to destroy all your friends and your entire city is not the best of company in trying times, or during any times at all.
I ducked beneath the water.
Luckily, the upgraded nano-bots in my system could still provide a couple more hours of underwater breathing, and hopefully in two hours I would no longer need to be breathing underwater, and would instead be eating celebratory cake after defeating the Red Death Tea Society. And all I had to do to earn that cake was stay out of sight of Maculte, find Nate, find Bosper, defeat a few hundred members of a nefarious gang of genius-level assassins, put an end to the ongoing earthquakes, and find some way to stop Chester Humes from running himself into the grave, because he was presumably up there . . . above the water . . . still dashing around.
First things first. I needed to find Nate, so I kept moving below the surface of the water, searching for him, hoping to see him, and occasionally swearing. The fish all gave me curious looks, because even a reasonably intelligent fish could look at me and correctly deduce, “That creature is not aquatic.”
But I had to be aquatic for a while, and I had to do it quietly, because I could hear Maculte calling my name, and I could hear Luria calling my name, and I could hear a wide range of people who sounded very much like assassins for the Red Death Tea Society calling out my name. Their voices sounded as greasy as oil and as sharp as broken glass, and they felt wrong . . . just wrong . . . in that way you feel when you find a spider crawling on your arm, and for hours afterward you can just feel other spiders crawling all over you.