Part VI: Desperation
It was a long, cold night. The ruins of Old New York were like a gigantic cave; the temperature was always a cool fifty degrees, and the air was permeated with a dampness that never seemed to quite go away. When he'd been moving around, it had seemed almost pleasant to Fry, but after a couple of hours of laying on his side on the concrete floor he could feel the heat leaching out of his body. In the end though, his discomfort wasn't enough to stave off sleep
He awoke to the sensation that a small truck had parked on his stomach. Fry tried to scream, but all that came out was a dull wheeze. He couldn't breathe! One of his arms was pinned under the massive chunk of what must have been debris that had fallen from the ceiling, but, in a state of panic, he clawed desperately at it with his other. The debris, for its part, didn't approve.
"Hey, what's the big idea?" Bender demanded as he rolled off of the delivery boy's stomach.
"Bender?" Fry wheezed. "What... the hell...?"
The robot crossed his arms and gave Fry his best simulation of an offended look. "Sure, two humans share a little body heat and its perfectly fine, but when the robot tries to join in, he gets his eyes scratched out." With one hand, Bender unscrewed one of the tubes that functioned as his eyes and held it out for his other eye to inspect. After muttering something unintelligible, he placed the eye back in its socket.
"Body heat? Wha-?" But there was Amy right next to him, only half awake, blinking at the robot like he'd grown a second head.
Amy must have come over to lay next to me sometime last night to stay warm. Fry realized. "But Bender, you're a robot. you don't have any body heat."
This, of course, set off a whole new round of offended noises from the bending unit, who had no doubt intended for things to play out this way from the very beginning just so he could be the center of attention for a few minutes.
Unfortunately for Bender, Leela had been sitting at the other end of the room all night long, cold, sore, and wide awake. Any last trace of patience that she might have otherwise had for the robot's little games had vanished about the time Amy had stopped shivering and muttering under her breath and had gone to nestle next to Fry. It wasn't like she was jealous or anything. Somehow, she just felt that, if she had to sit there and freeze while she kept watch, then someone else should have to also. She'd spent a good chunk of the pre-dawn hours muttering words to pretty much just that effect while absently fidgeting with the safety mechanism of her rifle. But, in any case, rather than just waiting for Bender to get bored with his little game and shut himself up, she rose to her feet, grabbed her antimatter rifle, and walloped him over the head with it.
Fry and Amy both grimaced at the loud clang the rifle made when it hit Bender's skull. They could all clearly hear muffled voices coming from somewhere down the hall- no doubt from Tura setting their plan in motion- and getting caught in this room now would not be in any way pleasant.
Sure enough, there was a knock at the door a moment later. The three humans looked at each other nervously, and Leela leveled her weapon. Bender made a meek whimpering noise and tried to hide behind Fry.
The door opened a crack and an arm appeared, followed by Tura's father's familiar voice. "It's me." He whispered. "I'm going to come in, now. Nobody's going to shoot me, right?" There was a slight pause. "Right, Leela?"
Leela rolled her eye when Morris finally decided it was safe enough to take a cautious glance around the edge of the door. Not that an inch-thick imitation-wood door from a millennium earlier would have been much protection.
"Oh come on, dad. It's not like I'd shoot you. Anyway, I left the safety on-" She squeezed the trigger to demonstrate, and a pencil-thin ray of violet flashed from the weapon and buried itself in the wall with a puff of vaporized concrete. Everyone jumped about a foot into the air.
"Ohh, what do you know, this is the safety over here." Leela said sheepishly
The first phase of the plan that Leela and Tura had devised had been put into action late the night before. Aimee had called Kif and arranged for a DOOP surveillance drone to park itself over the street near the entrance to the mutants' hideout. She didn't tell him why the drone was needed, only that it would "answer a few questions".
Phase two had been a little trickier. When most of the mutants had awoken, Tura had wandered over to Vyolet and made the comment that she didn't like the ruin that they were hiding in.
"There's only one way in and out." Tura explained. "If the DOOP finds us, we're stuck."
Vyolet didn't give Tura the response that she'd hoped for. At least, not right away. Vy had already burned through her stash of cigarettes and was feeling the first twinges of withdrawal. The craving was distracting, and she wasn't really listening to what Tura was saying.
Tura wasn't about to give up. She'd been practicing this conversation all night long, and Vyolet was going to play the part that Tura had written for her in her head, whether she liked it or not. "If only there was a back door or something, so we could sneak away if we had to."
Vyolet nodded in irritation.
Still Tura pressed on. "Have you seen any other ways that we might be able to get out of here, you know, in an emergency?"
"How about that hidden back door were using yesterday?" Vyolet snapped back. The moment the words came out it was obvious by her slightly shocked expression that Vyolet hadn't meant to say them that way, but she didn't apologize.
Bingo. Tura thought. "What are you talking about?" And, right on cue, Phil came sauntering up to join in the conversation.
"Yeah, what back door?" The delivery boy asked a little too eagerly. "Because we didn't find any back door yesterday that we could, like-" His voice cut out with a yelp as Tura stepped down hard on his foot.
"Wait, yes you did." Vyolet responded. Tura had finally managed to catch her full attention. "You and Phil came back from looking for supplies, but you left again later with Aimee and the robot. Remember? You came back through the front door a second time and asked me for your gun back? Dwayne and I were confused because we didn't know how you got back outside?"
Tura forced herself to speak a little more loudly. She wanted to make sure everyone heard what she was going to say next. "But Vy, that couldn't have happened. I never left the building after the first time I went out looking for supplies."
"Yeah, me neither." Phil added.
"W- what?" Vyolet stuttered. "Yes, you did. You both did. The first time you went out through the front door and you were carrying your big rifle, then you went back inside a few hours later. But then, a few hours after that, you came in through the front door again, and the second time you didn't have your gun with you."
"Wait a minute, Vy. That doesn't make sense. I would never have gone outside without something to defend myself. Especially not if I had three other people with me."
"But, but you did." the poor mutant insisted. "Didn't they, Dwayne?"
By now everyone in the crowded room was listening in on the conversation, including Dwayne. "Yes, that's how I remember it-" he said.
Inwardly, Tura was about to explode under the tension. Laser battles she could handle, but manipulating people was something that she just wasn't hardwired to be good at. It was too damned slow! Keep it together. She ordered herself.
Tura made a big show of stopping to think. "Tell me-" she said at length. "Did I seem nervous the second time you saw me?"
Vyolet considered that. "Yeah. Actually, you kinda did." The mutant paused before continuing. "And, you never actually said what you were doing out there the second time, or why all four of you went that time, or why you needed that gun when you came back."
"Ok, Vy. This is really important." Tura tried to put as much worry into her voice as she could muster. "Was anything different about me, or about Phil or the others? Anything at all?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Nothing was different? How about the hair? Or maybe the clothes?" Come on, Vy, remember the clothes.
"No, I really don't- wait. Yes, yes there was something different. All of you were covered in wet sewage, like you'd just come down from the sewers."
"But Vyolet, if I was only gone for a few hours, how could I have gotten to the sewers and back?"
Vyolet clearly had no answer to that. "How about anybody else? Has anyone else seen me, Phil, Aimee, or Bender in a place that didn't make sense?"
That was Morris's cue. "I thought I heard Bender's voice in the hallway in front of me last night, but he was standing right beside me."
A few whispers started up around the room.
"I thought I saw Aimee walk by the door way this morning, but she was asleep in her cot." Raoul added.
"I haven't left this room yet today." Aimee assured everyone.
The whispers became a steady undercurrent of concern. A few worried glances were made in the direction of the door.
Munda cleared her throat to get everyone's attention. "Yesterday, I saw Phil go use the shower." That alone produced some gasps, but Tura's mother wasn't finished. "Twice."
The room erupted into noise as everyone started to talk at once. A small undercurrent of fear started to mingle with the stench of too many bodies packed too close together.
Looks like it's time. Tura thought. She nodded to her father who, without a word, got up and quietly left the room without being noticed.
Tura's plan now was to buy as much time as possible, to put the breaks on what she had tried so hard to start. Arguments started to spring up around the room. Some thought maybe the ruin was haunted. Others claimed that all of the strange occurrences could be explained away as too much stress coupled with not enough sleep.
At least two or three minutes passed. Morris reappeared and took his seat. He nodded to Tura. Everything was ready.
Someone shouted over the racket "What's going on, Leela?" Of course, the question was addressed to Tura.
"Clones." Tura replied, firmly. The room fell silent at the sound of her voice. "The DOOP must have found some human DNA and robot RNA that belongs to me and my crew and used it to make clones of us, and now I'll bet they're using those clones to spy on us."
There was stunned silence. "That's ridiculous!" Someone yelled.
Someone else asked "Can they really do that?"
"Absolutely." Actually, the whole idea was so cliche that she was having a hard time preventing herself from wincing. She'd gotten the idea from an old episode of "All My Circuits", where Calculon's evil half-brother replaced Calculon's best friend with a duplicitous, moustached clone. It hadn't seemed quite as ridiculous last night when she and Leela had been fleshing out the plan.
Luckily, the mutants didn't seem to have watched that episode, or to know that, in reality, growing a set of clones took years. You couldn't just take a hunk of DNA and create a mature clone in a couple of days. That's why Cubert, who was a clone of the Professor, was just a kid.
"What do we do?" asked the a mutant with an extra foot growing out of the top of his head. The question was repeated half a dozen times from all around the room.
"Uh, well, the first thing we have to do is-" Someone screamed loud enough to make Tura's ears ring. Someone had just noticed that, shortly after Morris had returned, a second Amy had wandered into the room.
Fry, Leela, and Bender were standing in the decaying remains of the Freedom Tower's old lobby when the screaming started. The plan was to let the mutants see the second Amy after Tura had filled their heads with this 'evil clone' nonsense, and then let themselves be chased from the building in full view of the DOOP surveillance drone that was just down the block.
Judging by the muffled cries of 'get the clone!', things were actually going the way they were supposed to. That made Leela a bit nervous. Things always had a tendency to spiral out of control at precisely the moment when it occurred to her that they were going well. I just hope dad was able to block the doorway for a moment like he planned and give Amy a bit of a head start.
No sooner had she processed the thought than Amy came barreling headlong down the hallway. Fry, the moron, asked her how it had gone, but all he got in return was a long, doppler-shifted "Aaiiiiii!" as the intern went flying past. Leela was impressed. She hadn't known Amy could run that fast.
A loud yell echoed down the hallway as someone spotted her. A wave of mutants- bathed in torchlight- was rushing down on her. She caught the glint of steel reflecting off of the orange light.
Where the hell did they find pitchforks and torches?
Tura was out front of the mob, trying simultaneously to look like she was leading it while actually slowing it down. She wasn't doing either of those things very well, as she was practically being propelled down the hallway by the mutants behind her. She looked terrified.
"Umm Leela?" Fry said pointedly.
Oh right, should probably be running now.
Far away, in a velour-lined compartment aboard the great ship Nimbus, Captain Zapp Brannigan slept hard and fast when the intercom chirped.
"Captain, sir, sorry to interrupt, but you're needed on the bridge."
Brannigan cringed and pulled the chintz covers over his head. "What is it, Kif?" he demanded, making it clear by his tone what the consequences would be if it wasn't something important.
"Well, uhh, sir, it's just that, you see..."
Brannigan rolled over and sat up. The image of his first officer looked back at him from a wall screen on the other side of the room. "Kif," the Captain began in a patronizing voice, "I've told you time and again not to disturb me unless there is an emergency, or unless some hot alien babe needs to be rescued somewhere." He hesitated for a moment. "That's not it, right? There's no busty alien hottie in distress?" He reached for his comb.
Kif sighed in disgust. "Actually sir, one of the surveillance drones in sector 7G found something you're going to want to see."
The lieutenant's long-suffering face dissolved into an image of a rubble-strewn street corner flanked by rows of decaying old buildings. Zapp didn't know what sector 7G was- only a weak mind listened to mission briefings- but, wherever the place was, it was a dump.
After a few moments, four small figures appeared out of a yawning hole in a particularly big building about half a block away from the nearest intersection and began running in the direction of the drone's camera. They were immediately followed by a large mob.
When the a little closer to the camera, Zapp felt a twinge of recognition, as well as twinges in other places. The leading figure was Kif's girlfriend. Poor Kif still didn't realize that the only reason a girl like that would date a meek little weakling like him was as a ruse to get close to the real man, Zapp Brannigan. Now what had he been thinking about, again? Ah, yes, the camera. Behind the girl- Ashley, or Stacey, or something- were that obnoxious robot and red-headed kid that he was supposed to be chasing, and taking up the rear was none other than the lovely Turanga Leela.
But if that was Leela, then who was the purple-haired, pistol-wielding figure chasing her down the street, flanked by a horde of angry-looking mutants? Zapp ordered the computer to pause the recording and to zoom in. The figure had one eye.
Two Leelas? Brannigan shut off the recording and Kif's face reappeared.
"Lieutenant, ready my shuttle, and make sure its hot top is set to 'bubbly' instead of 'kill'. One of my sexy dreams has just become a reality."