i learned this site doesn't seem to take links, which explains the holes in my explanation last time. the only way i can think of to give the link to the 'front cover' of this fic is to say that the name of my deviantart account is halley42 , and the thing is in my gallery. snuffle. but yeah thanks to the people who found it and reeviewed, and everyone who reviewed THIS thus far. glomp.
that gleam up ahead is the light at the end of the tunnel, friends. and yes, i think it may be a flamethrower.
Part Eleven- Lock And Load
The morning of Tuesday the 29th of July dawned bright and clear over New York City, a dazzling sun in a clear blue sky burning away the early smog and turning the soaked streets a liquid gold. Small-scale cleanup operations started to grind into action as the sun rose higher, as city maintainance crews worked to remove the trees wrecked by the high winds and disperse the minature lakes that had sprung up wherever the beleagured storm drains had decided enough was enough. On this radiant morning, the state of the rain-scoured streets and buildings reflected the city as a whole; slightly battered, but beautiful.
On the roof of the derelict Elysium Cannery warehouse, the slippery cast-iron shingles shone like fresh-caught fish scales beneath Otto's feet. He stood on the gentle peak of the vent stack, watching the sun rise on the last morning he ever intended to see as a flawed, feeling human mind.
Hovering at his back, as unobtrusive as they knew how to be, his smart arms allowed him the moment without interruption. They were content to indulge their creator's final desires, no matter how unproductive they appeared- feeling the resolve in his mind, the artificial intelligence understood that to let him have his sunrise would not risk jeapordizing the bitter determination that drove him. Against such deep-rooted, long-nurtured bile, even the glorious sun stood no chance.
Sure enough, after about half an hour, Otto abruptly turned his back on the eastern horizon, picking his way carefully along the rickety spine of the warehouse roof. Stretching before him, a long double-tinged shadow trembled across the slimy shingles, growing and warping with the languid stretch of his tentacles around his sides. With a series of low whirrp sounds, the heads rose and flexed their articulated digits, the heart lights barely visible in the strong daylight. The two lower claws reached out, feeling for the edges of the ragged hole where a large section of tiles had fallen through to the distant warehouse floor, making a gaping entrance. Grasping the few rafters that were still strong enough to take their weight, the smart arms drew their host down through the splintered opening and into the semi-darkness below.
Finding purchase on a couple of the shattered pillars, the arms dropped Otto claw-over-claw into the bright splash of sunlight that slanted from the hole overhead. From this angle, the roof entrance resembled a mouth full of broken teeth, framing a square of cloudless blue sky.
We must initiate the trial run.
The soft prompting of the whispers in his head clambered through his thoughts, urging him out of the pool of light and towards the alcove. Approaching the desk, he shrugged his trenchcoat from his shoulders, exposing the tapering ridges of the neural interface column that traced the contour of his spine. Each of the thirteen sculpted ridges were flanked by a pair of dull silver discs, skin-contact pads through which brassy electrode mountings protruded like the heads of industrial acupuncture needles. And, at the very top of the column, above a final segment barely an inch wide, a tiny mess of charred circuitry. Before the accident, this charred relic had been the last barrier between the higher processes of his mind and the insinuating intelligence of his 'assistants.' He had designed it to be fail-safe, though in hindsight he knew that he had undertaken this vital precaution in a spirit of breezy arrogance. Even though he had made the smart arms with his own hands, working for months on every aspect of their incredible advanced A.I, he had still managed to utterly underestimate them. Capable servants, nothing more. Just think of the practical applications! Surgeons will be able to perform operations completely unaided! No scientist will ever have to risk their lives to handle volatile chemical or radioactive materials ever again!
Noble intentions. Or, as Otto now regarded it, self-inflated stupidity on a inter-continental scale.
A claw extended to the stand which held the completed goggles, fine pincers lifting them carefully. Another two curled in on themselves behind his back, clicking rapidly to themselves while they probed the remains of the inhibitor chip, filleting the blackened silicon and metal to reveal the complex socket beneath.
The integrity of the interface connector is uncompromised.
Now? Otto thought, taking the goggles as they were proffered. The silvery face of the Mindmap chip was still exposed, a sleek grey shape set neatly between the two thick, round lenses.
Now.
The scene before his eyes turned to tinted shadows, a murky shadeworld dimmed by the heavy glass. He slipped the band around behind his ears, fingers snagging on his matted hair, feeling the elasticated polymer cloth tighten as he let it go. Behind him, a claw caught the length of articulated metal that was connected at one end to the hundreds of circuits that ran through the band, guiding the pins of the other end into the socket which had once housed the ill-fated inhibitor chip. With a fullisade of tiny slotting chirps, the two parts drew themselves together, sending signal relays surging along new paths within the smart arm's central processors as they scanned and accepted the new hardware.
It's working, Otto. Their tone encouraging, the tentacles snaked into his shaded vision, all four heads opening to their fullest extent. Drawing the high collar of his coat back up over the new connection, Otto looked into their gleaming camera eyes and fancied he could see a glint of eager anticipation, the recognition that their part in this operation was over. It was his turn.
Proceed.
Otto reached up, feeling with both hands for the sliver studs in the sidepieces above his temples. They resembled the discs that climbed in pairs up the length of his spine, complete with the hairfine electrodes at the centre. These were retracted, projecting from the stud like inch-long cat whiskers, the pinshanks at their tips looking clumsy in comparison.
For a moment, he hesitated, the enormity of what he was about to do feeling like a crushing weight on his shoulders. The burden was only made bearable by the thought that in a few moments, there wouldn't be anything in his being that felt like anything. Faced with the task of deliberately obliterating his own personality, he felt as if he had a responsibility urge to say something, some short eulogy, a few words bidding farewell to the man he had been.
'The hell with it.' Otto muttered, and thumbed the studs.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the heavy shanks hissed, contracting with an electrohydraulic pulse that sent the electrodes slipping inwards, firing through hair and skin and bone, worming indetectably into his brain. A flicker of pain narrowed the eyes behind the goggle lenses, but the next instant it was wiped as the Mindmap chip finished its first exploratory scan and started to send information to the rest of the goggle's circuits. The smart arms turned their heads inwards, casting an expectant scarlet spotlight.
An observer would have been startled by the way that the figure that they illuminated straightened, shedding the depressive slump and gaining inches in the process.
To say that the features that were still visible behind the large goggles went blank at this point would have been the understatement of the year. All expression simply fell away, leaving a neutral emptiness which contained nothing in the way of malice but still looked terrifyingly wrong on a human face.
The figure turned its head slowly, and there was a new quality to the movement, as if an all-encompassing force was guiding it second by second. Lifting open hands up before its eyes, it turned them back and forth, regarding them as if it had never seen them before.
When it spoke, the voice echoed with harsh unnatural resonances, a featureless monotone with an eerie metallic edge.
'Stage one...successful.'said Doctor Octopus.
The photograph couldn't have been clearer. Three by two inches, it showed a smiling young man standing against a mottled wall, the sort of swirly ephemeral backdrop used by commercial photography studios. No-one knows why this was invented, because the effect is always that the client is standing in some sort of insubstantial other dimension, a dread realm made largely of greyish purple.
At least this particular young man looked happy about it. It was a bit of a shame that his mint green graduation robes fought so violently with the background, and he probably could have straightened his mortarboard a fraction, but the grin on his bespectacled face was enthusiastic enough to distract the viewer's eye from these petty details. Overall, it was a good photo, and in a fair world it would be safely framed and placed carefully on some elderly relative's mantlepiece, possibly in the vicinity of a couple of cute fake-fur kitten ornaments, or, failing that, a china Bambi. Not, as its current situation had it, pinned crookedly to a hotel room wall, and about to suffer far worse.
sssssssTHWOK
The short, straight-edged blade of the throwing knife trembled in the plaster, embedded an inch deep through the direct centre of the young man's diploma. Stepping up from her stance at the far end of the room, Spring tugged it out, then paced back and flipped the knife in readiness for an overarm throw, her eyes fixing intently on the bridge of the young man's glasses-
'Spring?'
Murphy stuck his head around the bathroom door. He was wearing a loose black sweater, over which a shoulder belt hung emptily, unfixed and untightened.
'Schaf says the lobby's still way too full, so we're gonna have to get kitted up once we're in position. We're going in five.' He spotted the photo, and his eyebrows shot up. 'Hey! Quit it! We need that to I.D at the scene!'
'I don't.' said Spring, taking a thick roll of soft black suede from the bedside table. Flicking her hair back as she leant over, she spread the roll out across the bed. Tucked into the protective cloth bands, edged weapons of every description gleamed in the muted hotel room light. 'I'd know the guy anywhere.'
'Yeah, well, we don't all have your smart-ass photographic memory shit.' snapped Murphy, and tugged the photo sharply from the wall. The tack pinged across the room, just as Schafer appeared in the opposite doorway. Her hand blurred.
'What the hell is this?' she said. holding the tack between finger and thumb. Murphy turned, and laughed.
'Just trying to keep you in practice, baby.'
'Like we're going to need it.' said Spring. She had eventually been convinced by her brother's arguments, but she was still nursing the irritation that came with her belief that the hit was beneath them. 'I mean, look at the kid. What are we going to do, just walk up behind him and make a loud noise? 'Cause that's about all it's gonna take.'
Schafer shrugged. She was busy untangling two lengths of stiff ribbon cloth, winding them rapidly around her palms in a boxer's weave. She, too, was wearing a baggy black sweater, though she had passed on the combat pants that her boyfriend preferred in favour of black dance leggings and chunky, air-soled boots, courtesy of Dr. Marten.
'Think about it, Spring. Osborn's so scared of this guy that he hired us to take him out. What does that tell you?'
'Umm, that he's a wimp with more money than sense?'
'No. Well…maybe. But what it really means is that there's a catch. And whatever it is…' Schafer finished binding her hands, squared up, and struck the nearest wall with one flat palm. A fine cloud of plaster dust drifted in the room's air-conditioned breeze, settling in the large new dent created by her blow.
'…we'll be ready.'
A polite knock on the suite's front door wiped the satisfied grin from her face. Swiftly, she slipped into the shadow behind the bathroom door, as behind her Spring dropped into a crouch with the throwing knife still poised in her hand. Cautiously, Murphy edged past them, backing up against the front door.
'Yeah?' he yelled.
Outside in the corridor, the concierge shifted from one foot to another in front of the closed door. He would have been happier not being there at all; the current residents of the V.I.P suite were getting rather a reputation among the hotel staff. Only that morning, a chambermaid had been sent home in hysterics because she had gone in to replace the towels and come face to face with a tall blonde woman who, in the maid's own incoherent, sob-punctated words; "just, just, looked at me! Like, like I was, I, uh, I don't know, I don't know, I, I want to go home!!!'
'You asked me to call a cab, sir? It's arrived.' said the concierge gingerly.
The door opened a crack, revealing a lot of black cloth, shaggy blond hair, and a grin. Any further details were lost on the concierge, who at that moment suffered from an acute attack of blindness brought on by an overdose of money.
'Thanks.' said Murphy, and shut the door, leaving the man staring down at the hundred dollar bill in his hand.
Inside the room, Schafer shifted a large gym bag onto the bed, and started to lace up her boots. Pulling a tight black t-shirt over her head, Spring swept a contemplative hand over her array of weapons, finally selecting three more six-inch throwing blades, two antique but well-honed scissor katars, and a long-handled deer knife. These she wrapped in chamois leather and dropped into the bag, along with a bottle of oil and an extra cloth.
'Murph, don't forget your silencer again.' she said, as her brother rummaged in a suitcase on the floor. 'We don't want another Munich.'
'M on mmph.' said Murphy, around the telescopic sight which, having run out of hands, he'd placed in his mouth. 'I'm on it.' Standing up, he dumped his chosen arsenal for the evening into the bag- two light Benelli MP90 pistols, one of the pair extended by the long tube of a high-grade silencer, and a hefty old Galil SAR handgun.
Schafer tutted, pulling her cataract of ebony hair tightly into a series of coiling bands behind her back. 'Do you really have to drag that dumb thing along again? It weighs a ton, it pulls to the left, and it sounds like the end of the 1812.'
'You say that every time.' Murphy piled three boxes of bullets into a pyramid and stuffed them into the bag's side pocket. 'Face it, Schaf, you just don't like what you can't explain.'
'I can explain fine.' sniffed Schafer. 'My Lame-Brained Man Is In Love With His Gun. We should be on Oprah.'
'I've never missed with her.' said Murphy. Ignoring his girlfriend, he hefted the Galil in one hand, cocking his head to squint through its heavy sights. 'Not one goddamn time.'
'If you three are quite done.' said Spring, acidly, on her way past with an armful of communication headsets. 'The cab won't wait around forever.'
Murphy held his lucky gun out, smirking. With a final glare, Schafer grabbed it from him and stuck it in the bag, heaving the whole lot off the bed with a strength that belied her small build. Murphy grinned.
'Let's go.'
From the ground, gaining access to the Elysium Cannery warehouse was full of problems. The entire area was ringed by a tall chain-link fence, creating a sprawling compound of tumbledown outbuildings around the main building. The fence was a good ten feet tall, and topped with rusting barbed wire, and even though Elysium Ltd. had gone out of business some ten years before (an unpleasant affair concerning a batch of tinned baby food and an inexplicable amount of broken glass) there was still a large padlock on the main gate. Sure, if you were an adult with a maximum reach of thirteen feet and the ability to tear through steel like it was wool, it was a walk in the park, but for a small fourteen-year-old with a bike and mild hayfever it was another matter entirely.
Escher gave up trying to climb the fence on the eastern side and circled back round to the front. Behind her, the remains of other factory yards stretched down to the empty man-made banks of the Hudson, pavement and packed dirt petering out into flotsam-strewn concrete. The warehouse was hemmed in on all other sides by a rickety series of open fences and another packing place, smaller but similarly deserted. Even in the bright late-afternoon sunlight, the whole place had a desolate, ghost-town feel, only with eddies of paper scraps and plastic wrappers instead of balls of sagebrush. Chaining her bike to the fence by the gate, Escher tried humming under her breath to dispell the unease, but stopped abruptly when she realised that she was humming the theme from Deliverance.
There was a a small hole in the chain-links by the gate. Escher had dismissed it as too small at first sight, but after another fruitless circle necessity drove her to try and squeeze through. After a breathless few minutes, she had managed to get her head and shoulders into the gap, after which there was a minor catastrophe when the loops on her the waistband of her jeans got hooked on the wire. Trying not to imagine how utterly stupid she must look, or what would happen if she just got permanently stuck halfway, she breathed in and wriggled back.
Little, tiny, thin thoughts. Worms. Liquorice. Shoelaces.
Scooting forwards on her elbows, she felt herself come loose, sliding the rest of the way into the compound like a snake leaving its burrow. Panting, dusty, and strangely exhillarated, she stood up and looked around.
Among the haphazard shapes of the outbuildings, crude machines that had once been used for sorting cargo stood like the iron-boned skeletons of extinct monsters. The weed-choked earth was strewn with parts and lengths of piping. It was like the biggest, most deadly jungle gym in the world.
And, over there, the main door…
It was easily four times her height, the wood reinforced by rows of rivets, but it creaked when she heaved against it with all her strength and moved a few inches inwards. A familliar odour of gym bags and mildew assailed her from the dark gap, but Escher frowned and backed off involuntarily as she caught another scent, alien and much stronger. She tried to place it.
A couple of years ago, during a rainy, boring weekend, Escher had tried to take her brother's Speak 'n Spell apart to see how it worked. With the thinnest screwdriver she could find, she had unscrewed the back and stuck the tool (with great care and imaginative precision) deep into the tangle of wiring. The shock had travelled up the shank and up her arm, knocking her to the floor before the toy had shorted out, spitting and sparking. The smell it had made was the one she could sense now - the hot hazy danger scent of electricity gone bad.
She edged through the warehouse door, straining to see in the gloom. She felt a flash of triumph when she saw the cluttered alcove on the other side of the floor, relieved that she had found the right building after all- but this was quickly overriden by a stab of fright as a dull thump shook dust from the distant roof. She spun around, and saw that the heavy door had swung shut behind her.
'Eee.' she said, almost inaudibly. She didn't like the atmosphere in this cavernous space; a thoroughly disturbing feeling that it was empty and not empty at the same time. There was an expectant hush in the fusty air, as if everything was primed for something to happen. Whatever this was, Escher had a premonition that she wasn't going to enjoy it when it did.
'Doctor Octavius?' she called, walking across the boards to the centre of the floor. Her voice bounced back at her from the grimy walls, shaky and small. She tried again, louder.
'Doctor Octavius! It's me! Escher! Are you in here?'
Tik
A tiny chunk of crumbling plaster hit the wood just by her left trainer, scattering like a dropped snowball. Escher looked up, and her world filled with blinding scarlet light. Before she even had time to register, instinct took over and sent her diving for the ground.
This action saved her life.
SSSSSSSSSSHHHHH-KRRKKK
The claw blurred down from the rafters, striking the floor inches from Escher's head and filling the air with grit and wood splinters. For a moment, all she could do was stare at the long, jagged clawblade that was embedded in the boards where she had been standing a second before. Then sheer terror galvanised her limbs, jerking her upright and throwing her into a stumbling sprint towards the only cover she could see.
Behind her, the thing that for the sake of convenience we shall call Doctor Octopus dropped out of the tangle of rafters, free-falling, the arms snapping around mid-fall to propel themselves into a 'run' of incredible speed. The claws opened, shaking the floor and gouging deep lines out of the flimsy floorboards. Escher's target, the heavy metal gantry in the corner, seemed to her at an impossible distance, and she screamed and ducked as another claw sang overhead, sharp little manipulators catching in her hair.
By some miracle, the gantry neared. For the second time, she hurled herself headlong to the floor, rolling under the blackened metal shelf and tucking as far back against the wall as was possible. A deafening clannnnng vibrated the metal above her head, the vague imprint of the claw that had hit it stamping into the tarnished surface in front of her eyes. Then there was silence.
Escher lay still, her back to the wall, breathing in a series of shallow huffs. The gantry was deep, but she remembered the reach of those arms and calculated that they could reach to the wall at least twice over. Through the gap, she could see the door she had used, some twenty yards away. For all the use it was to her now, it might as well have been on Pluto.
With a waspish rattle, a tentacle snaked into view from above the gantry. The claw head opened, the sections folding back like the petals of a flower, so close that she could see the minature flickers in the heart of the camera eye as it adjusted focus. It was barely a metre from her face, and she could hear every one of the tiny skreeks it made as the articulated parts moved against each other.
She shifted carefully to the left. It followed. She waved her arm to the right. It followed that too. Escher was strongly reminded of a cat 'playing' with a trapped mouse, except that she got the definite impression that the arm wasn't tracking her for fun; it was merely holding back until it could predict exactly what she was about to do. To test the theory, she moved a shaking hand towards the claw. It pulled back a little, and continued to watch.
'Why are you doing this?' she said, desperately. 'I just wanted to talk to you!'
The voice, when it came from overhead, was so unexpected and terrible that she had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming again.
'Talk?'
The claw tensed, bunched back.
'Worthless.'
Escher was already moving by the time the arm struck, which meant that instead of breaking her neck the spread metal digits bit into the cloth of her jacket hood, pinning it against the wall with enough force to completely splinter the tinder-dry beams that skirted the wall. Trying to wriggle loose, she felt a heavy length under her palm, and gripped it instinctively. Then the arm jerked back out from under the gantry, and she went with it.
It lifted her in a long, fast arc, pincering her jacket hood, and would have hurled her right across the room if her arms hadn't have chosen that moment to finally come out of the sleeves. She fell ten feet and landed badly, white-hot fire shooting through her knees. Looking down, she realised that the thing she had grabbed under the gantry was in fact a smashed plank from the wall skirting, seventy centimetres or so of mouldering wood. She hefted it experimentally; a large and very confused wood-boring beetle crawled out of the grain by her hand and dropped onto her shoe.
With an impact that rattled Escher's teeth, Doctor Octopus six-point-landed on the floor in front of her. She stared in horror at the serene expression, the dead black lenses that masked dead blank eyes. And that voice, that cold unnatural utterance that sounded so wrong coming from a human mouth...
The arms were playing the movement game again, all four of them this time, the heads opening to bathe her in their red glare. The figure's head turned slightly, following her careful sidestep in the same tracking manner. She saw that the cavity in the goggle's bridge had been filled by an upright oblong of bright metal, and shuddered as she spotted the depressed stud in the band behind one ear. That was all the detail she could note before one of the heads snapped shut, decisively. She could only watch, staring wide-eyed as it flexed upwards like a rearing cobra…
Escher had been banned from her local Little League team about two months after signing up, some two years previously. She had been kicked out, quite unfairly in her view, for damages sustained to one soft-wood bat and also to the front teeth of a boy named Joey McCormick, who had unwisely decided that there was endless comedic potential in her brace and freckles. It was probably just as well, since although Escher's hand-eye skills were fine, there was something about a sunny field full of yelling people that made her brain shut down completely, making her incapable of the simplest of tasks, such as remembering what team she was on.
However, this same brain had its own sense of self-preservation, and it had no wish to be inside of a skull that was spread across the dusty floorboards. Faced with three hundred pounds or so of perfectly co-ordinated death, it did a couple of quick sums, relayed the answers to the more important muscles, and then went and hid. The upshot of which was that, as the arm lunged, Escher threw herself backwards, rolled, and came up swinging.
THWACK
The plank connected solidly with the back of her attacker's skull, just above where the neural interface tube arched from the band of the goggles. It was debatable whether the blow itself was even noticed, but as the figure's head snapped forwards with the impact something silvery flashed from the bridge of the goggles and struck Escher in the chest. Reflexively, she caught it.
Doctor Octopus turned, seeking the elusive target, tentacles arching with singleminded strength…
…and Otto blinked.
Escher stood transfixed, both hands still clasped to her chest. The smart arm which, seconds ago, had been trying to snap her neck, now regarded her with a confused dipping movement and closed its head. The others followed suit, retracting a little and curving in towards the body of their host, who seemed utterly shellshocked.
'Doctor Octavius?' she said, carefully.
'…Escher?' Slow recognition crumpled his brow, quickly replaced by anger. He backed away from her, the smart arms rising again while they recovered from their disorientation. His fingers found the studs, and he gasped as the electrodes drew themselves out of his skull, a shaking palm pushing the goggles up over his hairline so they rested on his forehead. The eyes they revealed were anything but blank, in fact they were absolutely furious.
'You stupid girl!' he yelled. 'We nearly killed you!'
'Oh, yeah, I'm fine, thanks!' Escher was discovering that there's nothing like a near-death experience to bring on the rage. 'What the hell are you doing? I came all the way over here to try and talk to you, and instead I get Mister Terminator trying to tear me to shreds! What did I ever do to you to deserve that??!'
Otto was busy feeling the back of his head, where a not insubstantial amount of pain seemed to be happening. 'Something…hit me?'
'Yes, that would have been me! I thought it might be preferable to getting my brain splattered across the walls!'
He wasn't listening, cradling his forehead in both hands, trying to replay his scattered memory. 'It…it was working…but…what happened?' The arms let out an urgent sussuration, swinging towards Escher, who backed off warily. Slowly, Otto lifted his head, until he was staring right at her cupped hands. Escher followed his gaze, and opened them.
The Mindmap chip lay on her palm, a small sharp-edged glow against her skin. She looked up at him, at the dark gap in the bridge of his goggles, and grinned faintly, guiltily.
'You, uh, might want to put some duct tape across that next time.'
For what seemed like a couple of eternities, nothing moved. Then Otto stepped towards her, hand outstretched.
'Give it to me.'
Escher's eyes widened. 'Are you crazy? Do you think I'm crazy? At least give me a running start this time!'
He shook his head, impatiently. 'I won't put it in, I promise. Just give it here.'
Why ask? We can simply take it.
Shut up. he thought, sharply. To Escher he said; 'Please.'
Escher bit her lip. On the one hand, she was pretty sure that no good would come of giving the chip back. However, to refuse would be totally out of keeping with what she had set out to do in the first place, quite apart from being probably suicidal. And there was something else, too…his voice when he had yelled at her. It had been angry, yes, but there had also been an undercurrent of fear. Fear, Escher guessed, of what he might have done.
So she made up her mind, and held out the chip. He took it, gingerly, between finger and thumb, and passed it up to his upper left tentacle.
'Thank you.'
Then he turned and walked off, somewhat hesitantly, to the desk. His voice reached back to where she stood, and his tone was once again composed and resigned.
'Now, do you mind if I ask how you found…actually, never mind that. Why are you here, and what do I have to do to get you to leave?'
Escher rubbed a graze on her arm. The adrenalin was wearing off, leaving her irritable. 'After that little stunt?' she said, making no effort to keep the chagrin from her voice. 'Nothing!'
At the desk, Otto sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. A claw reached down and slipped the goggles from his head, placing them back on their stand, while the upper left fitted the precious Mindmap chip back into the socket between the lenses. He watched it work on the connections, trying to think. He had a massive headache, a side-effect he had not foreseen, and his memory of the last few hours was patchy at best. All he could remember, for the most part, was a calming sense of being completely certain about everything, locked in an impervious bubble through which the world was as simple and easy to manipulate as a grid of squared graph paper. Now the certainty was gone, and the messy greyness of his feelings returned, hitting him with a crushing severity that only the most pathological of drug addicts would have been able to relate to. He slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat, trying to conceal their shaking.
'I'm sorry if we…frightened you.' he said.
Escher was about to reply with something along the lines of '"IF??"', but she recognised that this was too good an opening to pass up.
'Well, I'm sorry I broke your thing.' she said. 'Especially if it was working.'
'Oh, it's not broken.' A claw rummaged through the clutter on the desktop and came up with something that looked like a small black metal square, complete with a dull, rounded protrusion at its centre. 'We simply neglected to fit the cover.'
'Lucky me.' said Escher, picking her way over the floor towards him. Trying to marshal her thoughts, she stared for a while at the bright theatre poster behind the desk, before deciding to launch into her intended speech. 'Listen, um, Doctor Octavius, I came here because, um, I wanted to tell you something important…'
He turned. Looking up into his shadow-ringed eyes, she wished that she had taken the time to work out what she intended to say, possibly with a pad of paper and a thesaurus. Praying for inspiration, or at least coherence, she ploughed ahead.
'…I wanted to say that I don't care what anyone else thinks about you, or what you think about yourself…I don't think you're a bad guy. In, um, any sense. Like, a bad guy or a supervillain or whatever, but also like, well, a bad…guy.'
She paused for breath, and stumbled on.
'And I bet that if all these people who've been believing the stuff the Bugle's been writing about you could talk to you like I did, and if they heard your, uh, your side, I bet they wouldn't think so either. It's like I said, you saved the city. It doesn't matter what happened or what people said afterwards…they can't take that away from you. And you didn't like it when your arms killed that rat, and you gave me my sketchbook back, and that's twice you've apologized to me now when you didn't have to. I don't know what you're planning on doing with those,' and she waved a hand in the direction of the goggles, 'but you don't need it. Really. You're not a monster, and you don't have to make yourself into one, either.'
She looked down at her shoes.
'I, uh, I think there was some more, but I forgot it. Sorry.'
It was a while before she could work up the courage to lift her head again, but when she did it was to see Doctor Octavius regarding her intently, an unfathomable look in his eyes. Even the smart arms seemed to be watching her with fascination, their heads open by the merest fraction, their heart lights subdued.
'You're a…singular young lady, Escher.' he said, finally. 'You certainly see further than most. I hope…so much as I set any store by 'hope'…that the things that happened to me never happen to you.'
Escher thought about this. 'I'd say that's kind of really unlikely.' she said, eyeing the stirring arms.
'You know what I mean.' said Otto, wearily. A claw pulled the chair out from under the desk, and he slumped into it, massaging his stinging temples with his fingertips. 'As for what I'm planning, if Spiderman-'
'Oh, yeah, and that's another thing!' said Escher, hurriedly. 'You know that Parker guy that takes pictures of Spiderman? Well, he told me that what you said-'
Very, very slowly, Otto raised his head from his hands.
'Parker.'
'Yeah, he told me that what you said was-'
'You told…Peter Parker…what I said.'
'Well, yes, I sort of told him about you, ish. Um.' Escher was starting to get the feeling that she had maybe made a slight tactical error. It was the look she was getting from him that was the giveaway. Homicide burnt in Otto's eyes.
'You told…Peter Parker…about me.'
'He's just a photographer!' protested Escher. 'He's no-one important! Anyway, he swore he wouldn't tell anyone else!'
Otto stared at her. In the withdrawal-racked fog of his mind, the smart arm A.I was making several attractive propositions, mostly concerning immediate, untidy termination. He opened his mouth.
'And he said,' continued Escher, who metaphorically speaking had never quite learned when to let go of the shovel, 'that the truth doesn't sell papers anymore.'
'Oh, he did, did he?' snarled Otto. 'Well, I suppose he's right! I'm sure that pictures of his friend Spiderman wouldn't make so much money if people found out that he's not quite the perfect hero that they thought!'
'He didn't mean that.' mumbled Escher, but it was too late. Surfing on the waves of backlogged resentment, Otto had ears only for the calm goading of the voices in his head.
'Yes…' he said, apropos of nothing. 'No, nothing's changed. We'll still do it…and why wait? The sooner we arrive, the better…'
'Hello?' Escher waved a hand as close as she dared to his face. 'Remember me? Please, uh, stop doing that. It's really creepy.' Like Norman Bates creepy.
He looked at her, and to her dismay she saw that the deadness was back, like a blind had been locked down behind his eyes. The tentacles twitched, the lights gathering brightness as they rose.
'I think you should go.' he said. 'I've got things to do…you wouldn't be safe here. Go on, while it's still light.'
'Hey, wait a minute!' Escher wasn't going to give up so easily. 'Can't I watch or something? I promise not to get in the way.'
'Like you promised not to tell anyone about me?' said Otto, caustically. 'Leave, Escher. Don't make me make you.'
Fighting a rising tide of hopelessness, Escher made a final attempt to get through. 'It's not too late, Doctor Octavius.' she said, fervently. 'You don't have to use those goggles again. Please think about it. You can still do the right thing.'
'"The right thing"!' Otto stood up, the smart arm heads snapping open in agitation. 'There's that intolerable, meaningless phrase again!' He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the stupidity of the words from his mind, and turned his back on her. 'You had better learn, girl, that in this world no-one cares if something's "right" or "wrong", so long as it turns some kind of profit! I can't think of one single person who would even have the slightest interest in whether what I do is 'the right thing' or not!'
When considering what Escher said next, it is important to remember that she was angry, tired, and frustrated, and had also not quite recovered yet from nearly being killed, an experience she wasn't accustomed to. And in her defence, she regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, and in fact went as far as to clap her hands over it. Unfortunately, by then the damage was done.
'I bet your wife w-'
Afterwards, she would reflect that she would have infinitely preferred it if he had yelled, or even tried to kill her again. The smart arms should have extended, hissing, radiating outrage from each scarlet-lit claw.
He should have at least turned around.
Instead, the arms simply stayed where they were, arrayed around him with their heads half-open, almost motionless. The only visible sign that he'd heard her was a stiffening in his back, a sudden tensing of his shoulders beneath the high collar that hid his face. And then, after an age, during which she became convinced that her own heartbeat was as loud as a volley of gunshots in the silence, he spoke.
'Get out.'
'I didn't-'
'Now.'
Escher fled.
hypothetical exchange:
me: dad, can you drive me to the library?
dad: what do you want there?
me: oh, i need books on guns. and neuroscience. but mostly guns. and knives. lots of 'em.
(a pause)
dad: daughter, couldn't you perhaps find something less violent to do with your sunday? like, i don't know, wrestling psychos for cash?