DISCLAIMER: Nothing belongs to me if you've seen it on TV. Soundtrack for this chapter: Love it to Death by Alice Cooper; Warrior on the Edge of Time by Hawkwind; Live in Roma by New Goblin.
In the carefree months of summer, cars and their amorous young occupants would be scattered all over Osculation Point. It was autumn, almost winter, and a single car sat alone on the peak, looking out over the lights of Middleton as they twinkled far below.
The Sloth.
This had been Ron's idea, a place where they could talk without interference or interruption. A place where, not so very long ago, he had given her the ring she wore. A bolt of panic crashed deep within him; he was suddenly certain the ring was gone.
It wasn't.
"KP –" His voice was strangely hesitant. She closed her eyes, almost winced at the familiar nickname. Dreading the answer, he pressed on. "Is there someone else?"
"No, Ron. There'll never be anyone else."
"Then what's going on? What's happening?"
"You know what I did yesterday?" She was staring out the windshield, maybe at the stars. He couldn't tell.
"Ah – you talked to Monique about this?"
"This?"
"The reason we're here. The – uh – the problem." The wedge that's growing between us, he silently added. The coldness that's come since you discovered your heritage.
"Monique," she murmured, as if remembering something from another life. There was no joy in the little smile the name evoked. "No. No, I didn't talk to Monique."
"Talked to your Mom again?"
"No." The smile was gone. A year's time had reared a wall between Kim and her mother.
"You need to. I know you've had some arguments, but – "
"She doesn't understand. It's a special thing where she came from. They have – I dunno, almost a reverence for women with retro-metabolism. It's kinda gorchy."
"You mean, like they worship them or something? Don't get mad, Kim, but that pegs my strange-o-meter."
"Tell me about it. I mean, Mom doesn't do anything weird, but it's like she's expecting me to lay golden eggs or something. Most of their greatest scientific achievements were made by people with four or five hundred years to work on a single problem. Cure for cancer. Quantum foam drive. Nearly indestructible alloys. Butter-side-up kitchen table field."
"What?"
"I made that last one up. Just a test. You looked like you were zoning."
"You know, we could use a thing like that."
"I can't talk to Mom about how I feel. You know, at first I was excited about it. The gift. I mean, crazy excited."
"I remember."
"But…" She trailed off. "Didn't talk to anybody. One more guess."
"Not in the mood, Kim. Tell me."
"I jumped in front of a train."
Ron knew his mouth was open, knew he wanted to say something, but no words would come. Instead his jaws flapped, the motions of a fish far, far out of water. Insanely, he remembered a cartoon they'd watched together with his little sister Hana, a cartoon about a dog who thought he was a superhero. The deluded pooch had tried that trick, too, as his hamster friend cheered him on and his feline captive begged him to reconsider.
Even in a cartoon, they'd barely escaped with their lives.
She was still watching the night sky. The Hyades. Aldebaran. "The automated train. The one only the government knows about." Dr. Drakken had tried to steal something from that train, a long time ago, but she couldn't remember what. Deserted by his brilliant, erratic sidekick Shego, he'd somehow found the courage to take Kim on alone. She couldn't remember how she'd stopped him, either. It was almost as if those things didn't matter anymore. "There was just a split second of pain. Like being slapped. Then I woke up, and the train was gone."
"Kim… you could have died."
"No. I couldn't."
"You don't know that. Even with the gift, you're not indestructible. Or immortal."
"I'd lost two hours."
"Two hours," her fiancé tonelessly repeated.
"And a leg."
Against his will, Ron's gaze strayed to her perfect legs, snapped back to her face. Afraid now to even try to speak, afraid of what he might say to this stranger beside him.
"Retro-metabolism." She made it sound profane. A tear rolled down her cheek, barely visible in the dim light. "I grew a new one." With a kind of horrified fascination, she had watched it sprout, a tiny polyp of flesh developing bone and muscle and sinew, expanding until she was whole again. "I wish it had never happened. I wish we - we could put it back like it was before."
"The leg?"
She exploded. "Our lives, Ron! Don't be so stupid! Sometimes I swear I – I –" Realizing what she was about to say turned her anger to despair; without warning the weeks and months of bottled-up emotion burst free, an eruption of tears and sobs that shocked and frightened Ron far more than the train story. He reached out to hold her, to console her; she threw off his embrace, pulled away from him, opened the door.
"KP," he said, quietly, gently, earnestly. "Stop."
Half in, half out of the car, she hesitated, spoke. "Ron, it's just no good. Nothing's any good any more. Not since I found out. How – how can I love you? How can I love anyone? They'll be dead and dust while I'm still young." Her eyes begged him to understand. With all that was within him, he tried. "I'm – I'm afraid, Ron. Afraid to watch everyone I love die while I go on." She held out her hand, the one with the ring. It was shaking. "Look. This is how it's been ever since I understood what it meant. Ever since it sank in. You, Mom, Dad, the tweebs, everyone I know, everyone I see, they're less than ghosts." She slid back into the seat, shut the door to the night. "Mom doesn't understand at all. She thinks it's wonderful. The rarest of all the gifts." Her voice caught in her throat; she choked back a sob, went on. "I'm gonna live to be five hundred. Nana isn't even 90 and she doesn't know how to do anything. She still thinks VHS tape is cutting-edge."
"It did outlast Beta."
"Mom says that won't happen. Mom says Hydraians with the gift continue to learn and understand their whole life. But I'm not Hydraian. I've told Mom over and over, I'm not Hydraian. I'm half Terran. All bets are off. I can't sleep. Can't think. My college classes are shot. I haven't even been attending."
"Kim…" He was stunned. Again. It was beginning to become annoying. He'd definitely gotten to the root of the problem, for all the good it had done. All the tai sheng pek kwar in the galaxy couldn't fix this. If only Sensei were here. He might know what to say, might know what to do.
His student had no idea.
"Well, it's true. Westenhaver is droning on about ancient history and I'm thinking someday this will be ancient history. And I'll be a dinosaur. "
"You'll never be a dinosaur to me, KP," he blurted, desperate to say something that would make things right.
She stared at him, trying to make sense of his remark, a dozen emotions flitting over her features.
They were both startled by the urgent bleep of the Kimmunicator.
"Am I interrupting something?" Wade asked, his voice unexpectedly cracking. The handsome teen on the screen was quickly leaving his childhood pudginess behind. He tried again. "Ahem – that is, 'interrupting something?'"
"Always," they announced in unison.
"Sitch us," Kim said, expertly hiding the emotional chaos of the moment before. "Been a while since we've had a mission. Someone forget about Ron's –" she stammered, almost imperceptibly, "—gift?"
"These baddies don't care about his gift." Wade was almost apologetic. "Phobos and Deimos."
Ron and Kim sighed. The cyborg twins were two of their newer adversaries. They didn't want to rule the world, or change the time stream, or extort a dollar from everyone on the planet. They were too crazy for that. The home-brew brain surgery that had connected them telepathically had also cost them their sanity, if they'd had any to begin with. They had no clever schemes. They just liked to have fun.
Catastrophic, devastating, destructive fun.
"Are there any locks on the doors at the Maximum Security Prison for Super-Villains?" Ron snarled. "Are the guards on strike or somethin'?"
Kim steeled herself to go face the lunatics. "So what is it this time?"
"It's pretty weird."
"Weird, I'm sure. Pretty, I have my doubts."
"Well, looks like they've got a missile –"
A groan of dismay echoed across Osculation Point.
Shego stirred in her sleep, dreaming of passion and pleasure. "What's wrong, Midas," she purred, eyes closed, a wicked smile on her beautiful face. "Aww, can't you take any more?" she murmured to the darkness, perhaps reliving a delicious evening not too long ago. Beneath the sheets she shivered with ecstasy.
Then her expression changed, her body tensed; she woke with a stifled cry. The same old nightmare. She dreamed it two or three times a year.
With a growl, she turned over, pulling the covers tight around her, trying to go back to sleep. Twenty minutes later she sighed, got out of bed, got a glass of water. Her hands shook, and that made her furious. No dream should be able to affect her like this.
The knock at her bedroom door made her start. "S-Shego? Are you – you all right in there?"
Dr. D.
She rarely stayed at the lair, despite the opulent rooms Drakken had provided. This was one of the reasons. "Stay out, "she snapped. "I'm – I'm not decent." She smiled, even snickered a little, considering all the levels of that comment. Then the memory of the dream returned to wipe the smile away. "It'll be a cold day in hell before I'll ever call him master," she muttered.
"What?" shouted the voice beyond the door. "Didn't catch that."
"Not talking to you! Go away! Trying to sleep!"
"I thought you were talking to me."
"Trying to sleep!"
Drakken wobbled at the door, almost touching the knob, thought better of it and ran off through the lair. A few minutes later the doors opened in the secret room deep in the earth, where half his greatest invention was enshrined, protected from harm. He barely glanced at the towering computer, but strode purposefully to a small terminal beside it, sat down and punched in the access codes, feeling vaguely self-conscious. What she dreamed wasn't really his business; he was just curious. "You shouldn't dream at all," he told the huge machine, knowing it couldn't hear him. Its ears and eyes were elsewhere. "You should shut down, perform maintenance, and reboot. I didn't design you to dream." But there were a lot of things she did that he hadn't designed. There had been so many accidents while he had been building the thing. The overturned mug of hot cocoa-moo. The mishap with dribbled solder. The night he'd pressed on, fighting the need to sleep, and found that he couldn't remember what he'd done the next morning. And then, of course, there was that bit with the aurora borealis. That shouldn't have happened, but it convinced him to put the main processor underground. Once he recovered from the burns.
All that boiled down to a single truth: she couldn't be duplicated.
With the click of a final key he accessed the memory of the giant thinking machine, the brain of his brainchild the Synthetic Humanoid Electronic Girl Operative, V. 1.0. It was simple enough to see what she'd dreamed; he'd just review the logs.
She had no idea of what she was; it was his secret. It was better for her if the world didn't know. It was better for her if she didn't know. He'd had several opportunities to put that to the test. The last one had not only cost him the superhuman power of orgone energy, it had come close to costing him Shego herself. She had almost destroyed herself trying to prove she was human. Crazy girl. Crazy machine. Then Kim Possible and her buffoon had come in the door, dragging most of Global Justice in their wake, and he had only just finished the repairs.
If Operation Stargazer had worked as planned, he would have had the power to destroy them all, even Mr. O-So-Powerful-Monkey-Fu-Boy.
Instead he'd dismantled the orgone accumulator to get parts for his damaged sidekick.
That whole evening had gone horribly wrong; the only benefit salvaged from it was the simple fact that now Shego knew what was down here. Just some sort of profoundly uninteresting computer thing. One of his old inventions. There was no more danger of her snooping around, discovering it herself, and eventually realizing what it was. What she was.
If he had known how much trouble fembots could make, he would have never dedicated himself to building one.
He leaned into the screen, an evil sneer on his blue face. "So what were you dreaming, my little – wow! Holy cats! Gz!" Embarrassed and shocked, he spun, almost falling from the chair. He had no idea the human form could be that pliant. One more thing he hadn't designed her to do, even though her android body was fully functional. Another blunder in design.
Shego's voice came from the monitor speakers, faint but clear: "What's wrong, Midas? Aww, can't you take any more?" Cautiously Drakken peered over at the screen, almost as if he expected it to hit him. As he did, the image blurred, faded, became his own visage, static-laden, barely recognizable.
"Can you hear me?" he heard his own voice ask, and remembered that moment well. "Can you see me?"
"Yes, Master," came his sidekick's voice, flat, without personality. She hadn't been online long. The annoying aspects of her sentience hadn't developed yet.
" 'Master,' " tittered the face on the screen. "This is gonna be so cool. Do you know who I am, and what you are?"
"Is your memory at fault, Master?" The voice was still without emotion, but hearing it again, Drakken realized with a scowl that he was witnessing the genesis of future problems. Hindsight is always 20/20, he thought. "You should run checksum routines. Master."
"Never mind that, Shego. Your purpose is –"
"My name is Juliette, Master. You should run checksum routines."
"I've changed my mind. Remember, people are entitled to their own opinion. They're entitled to change their mind. They don't have to run checksum routines every time they get a new idea. "
"Yes, Master. Command confirmed."
Drakken facepalmed himself, staggered from the chair as if drunk, banged his head several times against the metal framework of the giant computer. What had he been thinking, telling her something like that? Hadn't he realized she was accepting that as operational parameters? "Arrgghh," he arrgghhed, to no one in particular.
The face on the screen continued its rant. "I'm changing the name. You are the Synthetic Humanoid Electronic Girl Operative, so I'm calling you Shego." The image sneered. "Understand? Confirm command."
"Command confirmed. Master."
"Shego, I built you for one reason and one reason only." He held up a photo. "This is Kimberly Ann Possible."
"That photo is already recorded in my memory core." Was there the slightest hint of sarcasm in the robotic voice? "Master."
"You are not to rest until you see Kim Possible dead. Confirm command."
"Command confirmed."
"Command confirmed…" his image repeated, irritated. Drakken watched his on-screen expression grow dark, waiting, and remembered exactly how this ended. And now he realized why. "Command confirmed… there's an honorific missing, Shego."
But the image on screen swung away from Drakken, to the shiny surface of the huge computer. To the reflection there, the half-finished android, the metallic construction of the lower jaw still exposed, the left arm incomplete, much of the body not yet furnished with synthomesh flesh. There was a sound, a noise, a miserable, electronic wail that sent shudders down Drakken's spine.
The screen went dark. A moment later the lights came on; he recognized her room, realized the dream was finished, typed the command to end log replay. "This won't do," he told the empty room. "Won't do at all. She can't keep dreaming about that. My mistake. I was excited. Activated her too soon." He clicked the mouse, brought up the memory core editor, something he used with extreme caution. Too many changes would destroy her personality vectors, reduce her to the automaton she had been in the dream. Not that he hadn't been tempted on occasion to erase the whole thing and start from scratch.
Tempted. That was all. He knew he couldn't do that. It would be like killing her. Flaws and all, she was his creation. His. Not something stolen from another scientist, or a Government thinktank, or aliens. He had designed and built her, his greatest invention. He looked up at the giant computer, its massive positron globe filled with pastel colour, generating a peaceful, cozy humming, like the refrigerator late at night, in a warm house, and he smiled.
Upstairs, Shego was dreamlessly sleeping.
Almost tenderly he selected a section of memory, highlighted it, quarantined it. That was all. He didn't dare erase it, but he could prevent it from manifesting itself in whatever passed for her subconscious. No more nightmares for –
He drew back from the thought, dismissed it. She was a machine, nothing more.
Defying quarantine, the idea pursued him from the room.
