Chapter 3: I, Killbot
"I need some kind of weapon!" Fry blurted as he strode into the meeting room of Planet Express with Bender in tow.
"Hu-whaaa?" The Professor looked up from his ruminations and adjusted his thick glasses.
"A weapon," Fry repeated.
"Oh! Well then…" Professor Farnsworth got up and slowly padded over to the wall where he pressed a concealed button. The entire section of steel panelling slid down into the floor and revealed racks upon racks of handguns, rifles and guided projectile launchers in all manner of bizarre shapes and sizes.
"Holy momma!" Bender whistled in appreciation.
"Professor…" Fry began, his eyes boggling… "Why the heck do you have all these?"
"In case some drunken Frat boy tries to have his way with me at the back of the movie theatre," the Professor muttered. "Men! They're all the same – only want one thing." He shook his head disgustedly.
"Euuugh!" Bender stepped a few paces back from the senile inventor.
"Are… all of these lethal?" Fry asked.
"Most of them," Farnsworth replied. "But I do keep a few pansy-waste non-lethal sonic pulse and microwave immobilizers for any limp-wristed liberal nancy-boys who aren't man enough to brazenly slaughter human beings."
"I'll take one of those," Fry said, raising a hand.
The professor selected a gun the size and shape of a hairdryer with a large concave aperture at its business end, and handed it to Fry.
"Aren't you… going to ask what I need it for?" Fry asked, tucking the weapon under his belt and covering it with his T-shirt.
"Need what for?" the Professor asked distantly.
On their way out, Bender kicked an owl in the hallway and muttered something.
"What?" Fry glanced at the robot.
"I said, you're being stupid, meatbag," Bender said.
"I didn't ask you to come," Fry grumbled, striding ahead.
"You think you can take on Mom's security forces with that little leaf-blower?" Bender demanded, following along behind.
"I gotta get Nibbler back, and find out what Mom wants with him, and me, and him… but especially me! There's something weird going on here… it's a feeling I have in the back of my mind… almost like a memory I can't quite rememoryberize…"
"Granted, I guess," Bender muttered. "But don't you think you'd have done better to get a bigger gun… or a few surface-to-air missiles?"
"I'm not out to start a war."
"Why not?" Bender spread his hands imploringly. "War's a boon for the economy. Anyone who doesn't enjoy a good war is just plain un-American!"
They walked on for a moment, then both paused and glanced questioningly behind them at Doctor Zoidberg who was following expectantly.
"I overheard!" the Decapodian replied to the unspoken question. "Another thrilling escapade with friends Fry and the robut. I shall accompany you on this exciting adventure, why not?"
Fry and Bender glanced at each other, and Fry shrugged. "What's the harm?"
"Hooray!" Zoidberg jumped up and down, clacking his pincers together. "I'm setting out on a bold enterprise with friends!"
Leela walked with slumped shoulders through the Branson Academy on Mars, having just completed a full morning's worth of exams and simulations under the tutelage of the flight instructors. The Starship Licence Certification course, which she had thought of as little more than an annoyance, was proving to be a bewildering trial by fire – so many obscure facts and unlikely scenarios being forced into her brain left her disoriented and resentful.
Proceedings had broken for a short lunch, and Leela remembered an instruction she'd failed to give Fry. If he fed Nibbler any of Bender's cooking, the creature's digestion could be affected, causing dangerously quantum singularities in its dark matter excrement. Locating a vidphone, she dialled the Earth number and waited.
When the image finally resolved, it wasn't who she thought she'd see.
"What the…? Do I have the wrong…?" It wasn't the wrong number, of that she was sure – Fry's contact details were etched into her brain. But why were police officers Smitty and URL in his apartment? A sudden tightness formed in the pit of her stomach.
"Are you looking for one of the residents of this property, Ma'am?" URL asked smoothly.
"I… yes," Leela stammered. "Is… has there been a problem?"
"We're here investigating the death of a man who fell from the window of this apartment," Smitty interjected. "Is there anything you can tell us?"
Leela gaped in horror, suddenly unable to form words.
"N…not…" she struggled eventually. "Not Fry?"
"Philip Fry?" Smitty repeated, consulting a paperscreen. "He's the human resident – we have him on file."
"Philip Fry has orange hair," URL said. "Correct?"
Leela could only nod.
"It's not him."
The relief was immense, and Leela almost shed a tear. "Thank God…" She straightened and narrowed her eye. "Then who is it?" she asked, puzzled now.
"We don't know yet," Smitty replied. "We'd like to question Mr. Fry and his robot associate, but have been unable to locate them. Do you know where they might be?"
"No," Leela said. "I'll… let you know if I find out." She quickly terminated the link and sat back, deep in thought. Something odd was afoot – a man had fallen to his death from Fry's apartment and now Fry was missing… this went beyond his usual idiocy.
Puzzled and disturbed, Leela hurried back to the examination hall and sought out the head instructor. When she found the willowy older woman, she did her best to look sincere and humble.
"I'm really sorry, but I have to leave," Leela said. "Something's come up on Earth, and a friend of mine might be in greater danger than he's usually in – he always dies when I'm not around to save him."
The instructor eyed her speculatively and sniffed. "No," she said.
"What?"
"No, I'm not returning the keys to your ship until you're properly qualified to fly it."
"But I've been flying it for years!" Leela protested. "And besides – there's an emergency!"
"Sure," the instructor said, folding her arms. "You're flagging in the sims and finding the examinations overwhelming so you've cooked up a convenient life-and-death situation. Ms. Turanga, running away from your problems won't solve them in the long…"
"Oh for the love of Lennon!" Leela glared in frustration. "Listen to me – either you give me back the keys to my ship, or violence will ensue!"
"Threatening me, won't make me any less inclined to fail you if you don't satisfactorily complete the course requirements."
Leela was aware of the other Captaincy candidates filtering back into the hall, and the curious looks directed at the little altercation. She didn't care.
"Listen to me, you pompous banner-waving cow," Leela said through gritted teeth. "I couldn't give half a Neptunian Cane Toad's bile gland about your stupid course – you can go jump in a…"
Leela's rant was interrupted when a large section of the domed ceiling blasted inward with an avalanche of dust and masonry, collapsing down and pinning a number of candidates. Partially obscured by smoke and dust, an object descended through the hole, hovering on ion thrusters.
"What is that?" the head instructor gasped in terror above the screams that echoed around the hall.
"Whatever it is, it's not friendly," Leela said, stepping forward and balling her fists in readiness. "Everybody run!"
Robot 1-X Ultima scanned the immediate vicinity, allocating target designators to each of the infrared contacts and placing them within its virtual battlefield layout as it searched for the primary target. A large number of humanoids were arrayed before it, some motionless, others running in different directions. Ultima arbitrarily selected sensory overload ordinance from its weapons carousels and fired from its main gun arms.
Leela watched the four-armed war drone fly in through the smoke and fire subsonic projectiles from its two upper limbs. The SO shells detonated above groups of fleeing people, and Leela was forced to squeeze her eye shut and clamp hands over her ears as the resulting roar and incandescent flares made sight and sound unbearable. When she finally opened her eye, scores of unconscious bodies lay motionless on the floor, and many others crawled pitifully.
"By the sacred ghost of Jim Carrey," the head instructor whimpered, stumbling backwards. "Why is this happening to us?"
Leela said nothing. The killbot swung toward her and she narrowed her eye, stepping instinctively into an Arcturan Kung-Fu stance. It was after her, she realized angrily – something big was going on.
Ultima's facial recognition software immediately identified the prime target it had been tracking from Earth. Oddly, the target didn't appear to be running like the other humanoids – instead she stood her ground. A fragment of the warlike attitude emulation program that had been loaded into Ultima at the time of its conversion to military standard now activated when it realized the target actually intended to fight back. The mission looked like it was going to be fun. Ultima wanted to play.
Even thought she was expecting it, Leela was almost unable to react in time to avoid the attack. One of the three-clawed pincers on the robots lower limbs shot out of its mounting like a grappling hook, trailing diamond filament. She jumped back, and the claw embedded itself in the timber flooring.
Leela leapt onto the diamond filament and ran up it like a tightrope walker. The robot's other claw made a grab at her, but she ducked under it, punched something metal, and then surged upward to hammer her boot against the android's blank sensory visor with a high-pitched "Hiiii-yaaa!"
She might as well have kicked the hull of an icebreaker.
A barrel in one of the robot's upper limbs shot a pulse of electricity that lanced into Leela's body and sent her spinning through the air. She landed hard, coughed a small cloud of smoke, and rolled back to her feet as the robot retracted its claw and began to circle her. A spark of static electricity spat from Leela's hand, and she balled it back into a fist, leaping forward once again.
She rained a few ineffectual blows against the robot's armour-plated flanks before it swatted her away like a rag-doll. It occurred to her as she tasted blood and probed a loosened tooth with her tongue, that the machine could have killed her at any time – she'd noted antiphoton beams, lasers, and railguns clustered in its weapon pods. For whatever reason, it wanted her alive – and for what little it was worth, that gave her a slight edge.
A steel beam dislodged from the ceiling lay nearby. Leela snatched it up and swung it like a club as the robot drew closer.
"Yaaaaa!" Leela shouted, cracking the beam against the android's dark casing once, twice, three times – causing it to flinch back, and small sections of reactive armour to detonate protectively outwards. On the fourth swing, the robot caught the end of the beam in one of its manipulator claws and pulled back hard, yanking Leela off the ground with her improvised weapon and flinging her bodily through the air. She twisted gracefully in flight and struck the wall feet first, tucking her legs under her to absorb the impact.
Leela seemed to hang poised for a timeless moment, crouched horizontally against the wall, then she launched off it with her legs, propelling herself down at the robot like a small purple-tailed comet. She struck the machine with both her fists, her full weight bearing down on it and causing it to overbalance and topple off its ion thrusters before internal gyroscopes could compensate. It crashed down on the floor, and Leela rolled away, panting and sweating.
"Have you had enough yet?" she asked the robot breathlessly. "'Cause I got plenty more where that came from." That was a lie – she already felt like her entire body was one giant bruise.
Apparently undamaged, the robot shot back into the air and turned to face her.
"At least tell me what this is about before I turn you into scrap metal," Leela said.
The weapon barrels revolved, and Leela tried to leap aside, but was unable to avoid the sonic pulse that rippled through the air and knocked her senseless.
When she came to, she saw the refuelling tankers and taxying aprons of the academy's spaceport drifting past beneath her dangling feet. Hard steel claws were wrapped around her torso just beneath her breasts – the robot was carrying her to a ship so she could be taken… where? Earth, she assumed – though there was no way she would allow herself to return as a prisoner.
"Aren't you… supposed to… buy me a drink… first?" she gasped, struggling to free herself from the vice-like grip. It was futile. Struck with sudden inspiration, Leela hurriedly activated a control in her wrist thingy, bringing the unit's surgical laser online. The little beam could do little to the robot's heavily-armoured main body, but perhaps…
She aimed the ruby beam into the segmented joint of one of the gripping claws, catching the scent of scorched ceramal and rubber as it cut through electronics and servomotors. The claw suddenly went dead, and Leela was able to slip from the robot's grasp, dropping down to land on the roof of a hangar below.
As the war drone circled around, burning a plasma booster to come back for her fast, Leela cast about desperately for some defensive ground. She was weakened, and wouldn't be able to put up a fight for much longer. She jumped feet-first through a skylight and fell down into the hangar, landing in a heap beside some ground crew who gave shouts of surprise at her unexpected arrival.
"Are you alright, lady?" one asked. "Oh my God! You've lost an eye! Hold still while I get a bandage."
"Get out of here!" Leela shouted at them, climbing unsteadily to her feet. "It isn't safe here!"
"'Course it isn't," another maintenance worker said, gently taking her arm. "That's why we get paid the good money, now you just…"
"I said you have to go!"
The roof of the hangar suddenly vaporized into a cloud of superheated plasma as an antiphoton lance sheared through it. The ground crew wasted no more time arguing, and fled as fast as they could, leaving Leela to dodge the flaming radioactive embers. She rolled underneath a bulky chunk of machinery, which she realized was part of a large fusion drive – obviously stripped from a starship for routine servicing. Glancing both ways along the tangled mass of hardware, she noted that while the compression nozzles were missing, the unit was still attached to three tokamaks, and so technically functional.
With a determined grimace, Leela surged upright, ignoring the falling embers, and located the fusion drive's control panel. Starting it cold would create a dangerous unstable toroid, but that didn't concern her. Hammering the start-up control, she ran to the rear end of the engine and stood near the large, burnished silver aperture that had already begun to crackle with electromagnetism.
"All right, I give up!" she yelled through the smoke and the increasing whine from the fusion drive. "Come on – come and get me – I can't fight you anymore!"
Down through the dispersing smog the military robot came, zeroing in on Leela. It descended with all weapons aimed at her, and she raised her hands compliantly…
…Until the machine was just a few feet away, and then she flipped backwards onto her palms and drove both boots up into the robot's chest, shoving it backwards into the mouth of the fusion drive. An explosion of sparks resulted as tendrils of crackling, questing energy lashed out to cover the robot's body. It was held in thrall, unable to move, as ravenous ribbons of power licked across it.
Leela backed away, watching an ominous glow begin to issue from around the struggling android, and the ghostly outline of an unstable toroid start to form. She turned and fled, sprinting as fast as her legs could carry her as a deep bass hum began issuing from the laboured fusion drive.
The hangar vanished in brilliant white light that bulged upwards, becoming orange at its extremities, and rolling into a mushroom cloud. The surrounding buildings were flattened by the blastwave, and Leela found herself tumbling head-over-heels.
She landed flat on her back and decided to blissfully pass out for a short time. When she awoke, a group of shaken onlookers had gathered, with the head instructor crouching at Leela's side.
"Are you alright, child?" the woman asked, wide-eyed.
Leela reached up and grabbed the woman by the collar and dragged her face closer.
"I need to leave now," she said simply.
Looking very pale, the instructor produced the keys to the Planet Express ship and handed them to Leela.
"Thanks," Leela said through clenched teeth.
As the PE ship blasted away, a charred chunk of metal shifted in the rubble. Robot 1-X Ultima hauled itself out of the debris and assessed the damage. Over 70 of its armour was now fragmented and useless. Antiphoton cannon inoperative. One railgun out of alignment. An atomic pile had been shattered, resulting in a 20 power loss.
There was more… the energy discharge had caused some overwriting and scattering of data in its etched atom processor. Memory and programming was disjointed.
Ultima realized that the blast had left it slightly insane. One thought remained clear though – a directive – a target. It fixed on the face of the female cyclops human as a singular purpose; the one vestige of direction and sanity it could recall with its damaged CPU. With the robotic equivalent of a low growl, it ignited its fusion booster and launched up through the atmosphere in pursuit.
Onespawn analysed the ruined ship's system, and realized that it would need to remain enthroned inside the SS Brezhnev as long as it wanted to control the great ship. That was fine, as Onespawn had no great desire to leave the silent protective confines just yet – not while there were still so many improvements he wanted to make to himself.
The nanomachines substructure Onespawn had bent to its own will sent filaments into the connections, and down the optic cables and ducts that spread out from the confinement chamber where the Brainspawn lay in slumber, to control the disparate elements of the Brezhnev left isolated by the stubborn AI's suicide burn.
It would take time to regain full control, and while Onespawn focused on thickening the nano-growths for the transfer of information and materials, the creature pondered the morality of what it was doing. The Brainspawn race had remained unchanged since the dawn of the Universe, and any attempt to alter the base structure through genetics or cybernetics had always been condemned by the collective as heretical.
Of course, there was no longer a collective. Only Onespawn. One against the Universe… so the equation had changed.
As more and more growths of human-derived nanomachines extended from Onespawn's cryo-tank, thick ligneous growths formed around it like the roots of an ancient oak. Onespawn struggled to worm its way into the hard-wired systems that still remained in place throughout the ship, while changes in itself began to take effect.
Soon it would be all-powerful. And the single entity in the entire Universe who could pose a threat would be destroyed utterly.
