Chapter 11: That Hideous Strength
"With a firm reliance in a Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." –Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence
"Okay, just where are you taking me?"
Spidey glared at her. "To my house up in Queens, of course."
"Your house?" Octavia repeated faintly. How would his wife, his children, like the idea of his archenemy's mutated clone sleeping over?
"It's the only way, Octavia. By now, when they get to the Nicholas residence, they'll know you're gone. They'll be searching the Gatsby home, and the Jackson home, even the apartment of your ex-boyfriend. You still don't quite know how these government people think, Octavia. Everyone you've ever known—and their families—will come under scrutiny. Comprende, amiga? It is because you are the clone of my enemy that they'll never think you're at my house."
Octavia, long resigned to the relentless surprises of fate, shrugged. He was, unlike her progenitor, a superhero—presumably more trustworthy.
At the Nicholas residence, Anthony, the Nicholas patriarch, was torn from the arms of Morpheus by his daughter's keening shriek.
"Daddy! Octavia is gone!"
Anthony stumbled out of bed, slipping feet into slippers with one hand in underwear, scratching his ass and mumbling, "This damned chip…!"
"Forget your freaking butt chip!" Jordan screamed. Not noticing any discernable response from her father other than discontented grumbling, she yelled again, "Did you hear me, Dad? The forces of the Illuminati have Octavia!"
That woke Anthony up proper, just in time to hear the insistent pounding on his door. "Anthony James Nicholas!" the voice on the other side called. "This is Agent Cindy Cypher of the Central Intelligence Agency! You know what we want, bring it out!"
"Jordan, get out of here now!" Anthony hissed.
"Daddy—"
"I said get outta here now and call your mother and brother!"
"Daddy—" Jordan repeated. "I love you." Having said that, she hurriedly climbed out of the bedroom window.
In the Parker residence, Mary Jane, nursing infant May, pensively watched the television news. "Several supercomputers from Stark International have disappeared today, along with several million dollars worth of classified scientific equipment," the anchor placidly announced. "The chief suspect in the thefts is the mad scientist Dr. Otto Octavius, alias Doctor Octopus, who had stolen similar equipment from the Baxter Building earlier this week, which has since been recovered. The superhero Spider-Man, his proclaimed archenemy, is apparently missing in action—there have been no sightings of him for two weeks…"
Mary Jane sighed. "Well, Daddy hasn't been here, that's for sure. Do you miss Daddy, May?"
"Our guest today is J. Jonah Jameson, editor of the Daily Bugle, the leader in New York paranormal news…"
Mary Jane hastily changed the channel. She knew just what he would say. In fact, it was pretty much the same thing he had been saying for the past five years. Why, Spider-Man's been in cahoots with Doc Ock all along! We need to pass a law demanding public knowledge of "superhero" secret identities, just to sort the good guys from the rotten apples…
Then she heard the turning of the key in the door. Peter ran towards his wife. "Important business—" he panted. Web-slinging at that speed was tough enough, and doing it while carrying a big girl like Octavia and her 60 pounds of metal only made it even harder. "Octavia Jones, this is my lovely wife, Mary Jane Watson-Parker. MJ, this is Octavia Jones, our temporary houseguest."
"Peter—?" Mary Jane was puzzled.
"Her life is in danger. I'll explain it all to you, come in the kitchen."
Anthony Nicholas opened the door to see a tall brunette attired in sunglasses and a jet-black business suit. A Woman in Black, he bemusedly thought.
"Where is the clone called Octavia Jones?"
"Heh heh. Well, Agent Cypher, I was wondering that myself. I thought you had her."
"You think you're funny, don't you?" Cypher smirked. "You know, I've got ample evidence to detain you for sedition, leaking classified information, and a whole grab bag of related charges." She gestured to a backup agent. "Take his computers, both his desktop and his laptop, and search his desk for any evidence relating to Project Octopus."
"Oh no you don't!" Anthony barked. "Go back and read the Constitution! The Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights to protect people from the government doing shit like this! Benjamin Franklin said, 'Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety'…"
"Jefferson and Franklin never saw the possibility of a terrorist attack on the nation, Nicholas," Cypher coolly replied. "These days, the government protects the people by any means necessary. If you don't want to see another September 11th, we expect a little sacrifice from our charges."
"'Amendment I: Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech—'" Anthony quoted again.
This pissed Cypher off even more. She tackled him, pushed him to the ground. She rolled on top of him, handcuffing him. "While we're quoting, Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 'Freedom of speech does not give the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater.' Nicholas, with freedom comes responsibility. You can't endanger our national security, you can't give away government secrets, you can't put all kinds of shit on the internet and then claim First Amendment." She roughly stood him back again, ordering the backup agent to "Frisk him, just to see if he's exercising his Second Amendment rights as well as his First."
Anthony then yelped to the agent carrying his computers. "Hey! Do you at least have a warrant—"
"We don't need one—not a regular one, anyway. Ours was granted by a National Security emergency secret tribunal. You are now detained as a seditionist and a national security threat. You do not have the right to remain silent, you do not have the right to an attorney, and everything you say sure as hell will be used against you. Let's see how you do in Guantanamo with all the ragheads—"
"Chief, do we really need this guy?" one of the backup agents asked Cypher. "I was just thinking that we set out to net an Octopus and now we're going after a minnow—"
"I don't expect you to think, Brannon, I expect you to obey!" Cypher shouted. "Load up the computers. This little minnow has been living in the Octopus' den and he knows where she is. I'll question him myself if I have to!"
Unfortunately for them, they forgot to take Anthony's web cam.
Octavia, sitting on the couch, could hear whispers in the kitchen. The Parkers were obviously trying to keep their argument from her. Still, she could hear snatches, not at all pleasant.
"Peter! Are you telling me this girl is Doc Ock's clone? The one who attacked you last months ago?"
"Yes, Mary Jane. She didn't want to, Ock put her up to it—" Peter rubbed his wrists. They would never be quite the same; his web-slinging was only slowed down a few seconds, but he knew those few seconds could someday mean the difference between victory and disaster.
"So why is she here?"
"Her life is in danger, MJ. The government agency that created her wants to recapture her—or kill her."
"Just what government agency are we talking about? FBI? CIA? NSA?"
"No, it's even lower on the radar. You ever heard of the SDSI? The Subdivision of Scientific Intelligence?"
"Look, Peter, I can't take this girl in, knowing who—and what—she is and what she did to you. Not with our children—"
Octavia turned away. She didn't think she could take it anymore, until Mary Jane walked in and said, "It's okay, Octavia. I've got the guest room set up."
But she still wouldn't look Octavia in the eyes.
Jordan had been pedaling her bicycle hard for half an hour. It was time to give Daisy Gatsby a wake-up call.
Meanwhile, at the Breedlove residence in Brooklyn, Melissa Breedlove was fumbling with her jacket and shaking her son Morgan out of bed, after responding to her daughter's urgent call.
Dr. Otto Octavius sat stock-still on his bed at Pier 56. Although the mad scientist had many hidden laboratory lairs across the New York area, he favored this one; it was his first. He opened his eyes. It was much easier if he thought of it as similar to his control over his tentacles.
Move, now!
The metal desk rose into the air, hovered for a moment, then rose in the air until it almost halfway to the ceiling. He lowered it again. Lift it, lower it. Lift it, lower it. Mental calisthenics, training his mind for the big fight. Now the bed, complete with his weight. Lift it, lower it. Just like an elevator. Elevator go up, elevator go down.
He was hardly tired at all. Well, okay, a little bit. But not much. This strange new ability, lost for years, was now in full flower. It had progressed at a speed which was, frankly, almost frightening, if he still had enough humanity left in him to be frightened.
His large, long-lashed brown eyes had closed to slits and the veins throbbed in his temples and along his neck. The scientist in him had been most interested in what his body was doing; the scientist in him had graphed it, concluded it made no rational sense. His respiration had fallen to a bare sixteen breaths a minute. Heart rate up to 150, body temperature down to 94.5 degrees. The encephalogram he had hooked himself to during the first practice showed alpha waves that were no longer waves, but great jagged spikes akin to a lie detector signal from someone giving a big whopper. He was, in short, burning energy that came from nowhere and went nowhere. He finally set the bed down, gasping for breath.
Being a scientist, the first thing he wanted to know was the origin of this power. His mind filled with hypotheses. Perhaps it was intimately linked to the way he controlled his arms. Perhaps it was the radiation he had been exposed to in the accident that created Doctor Octopus. Perhaps he was merely a low-grade mutant all along, a natural telekinetic like the hapless prom queen of a certain Stephen King novel and the accident had merely shaken it loose. Perhaps the explanation was even more esoteric.
Also being a supervillain, the next thing he wanted to know was how to use this power for his own benefit, and how to use it against his archenemy, Spider-Man, and anyone else foolish enough to get in his way.
At the headquarters of the SDSI in Manhattan, Dr. Nancy Melitta was starting to get worried. The whereabouts of the clone had been traced to the Nicholas residence. Agent Cypher had just come back with the formulae for the Oz formula, but Oscorp stock had dipped after rumors of Norman's "illness" had gone around. Cypher had now been dispatched to the Nicholas residence to sanction the clone and question Anthony Nicholas, as well as delete that infernal weblog of his. Cypher's personality under the living armor had steadily been changing, and not entirely for the better.
When Nancy got nervous or stressed, she read, or reread, a novel. She had loved to read since she was a child, so entranced by science fiction fantasies that she entertained dreams of becoming a scientist herself. Her dream fulfilled, her extensive science-fiction collection filled a bookshelf in her private office.
All the classics were there, all the greatest authors were represented. H.G. Wells, Octavia Butler, Lovecraft, and many more. The Frankenstein series of Dean Koontz sat next to Mary Shelley's original classic. Victor Helios, she thought, was a pioneer, albeit a fictional one. Build a race of supermen and superwomen, strictly materialist and secular, free of what Marx called the 'opiate of the masses,' and move humanity into the next stage of evolution by weeding out all weaklings, both of the intellectual and physical variety. You see, in nature, the weak hen in the pecking order is not tenderly lifted out of the dust by the other birds; it is quickly dispatched without mercy. Humanity needed to be freed from the ludicrous notions of helping one's fellow man and the equality of all humans (regardless of ability) and taken back towards the way nature intended life to be.
She even owned C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. She hadn't read it in a long time; the man was admittedly a brilliant storyteller, but he was a devout Christian and it showed with all the ridiculous talk about planetary angels, demon possession, and the God he called Maleldil in his Space Trilogy and Aslan in his Narnia Chronicles.
The only reason the Space Trilogy came to mind was because she recalled the plot of Perelandra, where the hero had to fight a demon-possessed scientist—an Un-man, as Lewis referred to the villain. In that part of Nancy's mind that still loved science fiction, even that from C.S. Lewis, Cypher was starting to look like an Un-woman, and if she found the clone and it came down to a fight, Nancy was rooting for the clone—the lesser of two evils. Always have to watch your own ass around here, she thought.