CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

AN OLD(ISH) FRIEND RETURNS (IF YOU REMEMBER HER)

I turned around and looked up at the holograms above us. All of them had been replaced with the image of a brunette, thirty-something woman with thick glasses and slightly more weight than you tended to find in the superhero community.

The digital woman was wearing a white lab coat over a button-down shirt. Oh, and she had six metal arms sticking out of her back. One of them was fetching her a digital cup of coffee “off-camera” and handing it to one of her regular arms.

“Niki Tesla?” I asked, blinking. “You’re alive?”

Niki Tesla was a German-American henchwoman I briefly employed as part of my gang, back when I was trying to bring back Mandy and become a full-on criminal mastermind. She was a mad scientist, albeit not quite as mad or science-y as my daughter, and someone I had a great deal of fondness for. Unfortunately, being a supervillain was not a healthy lifestyle and she ended up having her throat slit along with my newest recruit at the time, the Fruitbat.

“Alive is a matter of definition,” Niki Tesla said, her voice echoing from all the screens speaking at once like a kind of techno-choir. “I was dead at the hands of Merciful. Thanks for warning me about him by the way—”

“I didn’t know!” I snapped.

“But I had my brain backed up every day on the Internet via my Thinking Cap,” Niki said. “Brain uploading is the Diet Coke of immortality, I admit, but I didn’t believe in an afterlife and brain cells are constantly dying before being replaced, so consciousness as we define it is an illusion anyway.”

I cocked my head sideways. “You realize that you literally worked for a necromancer, right?”

Niki frowned. “Well, obviously I felt stupid when I met you! That doesn’t change the point I was an active A.I. postmortem.”

I frowned and shook my head. “And now you’re working for P.H.A.N.T.O.M.”

“Not willingly!” Niki protested. “Believe me, Germans hate fascists more than any other people on the planet now.”

Both Lisa and I stared up at her skeptically.

“Excepting Jewish people,” Niki said. “Romani, Slavs, gays…listen, just accept we really don’t like fascists, okay!”

“And yet you’re working for them,” I said, thinking about the possibilities for why she might be doing such. Blackmail, intimidation, captured family members, boredom, and a really good paycheck all were possibilities. “Just how powerful is your A.I?”

“Unlimited,” Niki said, grimacing. “I thought breaking the rules would be within my supervillain rights. Tom Terror trapped me while I was trying to take down P.H.A.N.T.O.M during President Omega’s takeover.”

“So, almost immediately after you died,” Lisa said, frowning. She’d been at ground zero for all that.

“Yes,” Niki said. “I screwed up and gave the worst people in the world access to a Cognition A.I.”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “You really did.”

Cognition A.I., a.k.a sentient programs that could infinitely expand their processing power, was outlawed by international treaty, and I don’t mean those laws that everyone ignores like not invade sovereign nations without U.N. approval. No, it was one of those laws that people actually paid attention to. With the exception of Android John, the only robot President and the only robot President ever brought down by a sex scandal, no one trusted super-powerful intelligences that could hack through anything. There was a “dismantle on sight” order for them and rightfully so. All of them inevitably went crazy from the crap on the Internet or their lack of physical bodies.

P.H.A.N.T.O.M having access to a Cognition A.I. explained a great deal about why the Earth was so screwed up right now. Even if you were a genius like me and stole their big fortune in gold (see The Mercurial Merciless #117 for that exciting adventure), they could just digitally create however much money they needed. It was also a terrifying realization that the hatred for superheroes and public opinion also sliding against Supers could have been influenced by their datamining and campaigns of disinformation.

“I’m sorry, Gary,” Niki said.

“For, what?” I asked. “This isn’t your fault.”

Maybe I was being a bit too forgiving, but having lost so many friends over the years it was good to have one come back. The implications of it, that maybe other people had come back from the dead before the deadline (ouch! Incredibly lame nonintentional pun), also gave me hope rather than anger. It also made me wonder about what Tom Terror had said earlier, that no sooner had I made a law in the fabric of the multiverse than people started to find loopholes.

“For this,” Niki said, sadly as her holograms all glitched simultaneously.

That was when dozens of metallic tentacles popped out of the ground, each of them holding a ray gun with a built-in laser sight. All the laser sights zoomed in on me and Lisa, making us the subject of hundreds of individual dots. Alarms blared all over the chamber and, presumably, over the rest of the fortress. Yeah, this was not good.

“Man, if only there were a few hundred cats in this room,” Lisa said, trying to make a quip and failing. “You know, because, uh, there’s a lot of red dots.”

“Really, that’s what you’re going with?” I said, looking to my niece.

“I don’t know! I don’t quip!” Lisa said. “That’s what the third Nightgirl does! I just look serious and blow stuff up!”

“There’s a third Nightgirl? I didn’t know there was a second,” I said, surprised. “Man, I need to renew my Teen Superhero magazine subscription, but the mailwoman looks at me weird when she hands it to me.”

“Please be silent,” Niki said, her voice sounding more afraid for my welbeing than intimidating. If she’d been reprogrammed to serve P.H.A.N.T.O.M but not to be loyal to it, then this was pretty close to mind control. “I’m ordered to alert Tom Terror in these sorts of situations and try to disable you.”

“See! I knew she was evil!” Lisa snapped. “Come on, let’s blast all of these. You can turn insubstantial!”

“These use unusual dimensional energies,” Niki said, pleading. “You can turn insubstantial and they’ll still kill you.”

“Why are you warning us?” I asked, wanting to be sure my hypothesis was correct.

“Tom Terror is a sadist who gets off on all manner of suffering,” Niki said, disgusted. “He couldn’t change all of my programming without destroying me, but he could install commands that override all my other priorities. Like the Law of Robotic. All my self-preservation is secondary to serving P.H.A.N.T.O.M and Tom Terror specifically.”

“I’m sorry,” I meant that. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have something you absolutely did not want to do but had to do every single second of the day. It would warp the strongest of minds and drive weaker ones insane.

“I can’t do anything against them. I can only resist in small ways and only if I feel like I can justify it like Tom Terror wanting you alive to torture personally. Which is why you have to kill me.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, doing a double take. I had the beginnings of a cunning plan, but like Blackadder at the end of most seasons, it would probably get me killed.

Screw it. If I was going to get killed, then I might as well try to do something to save my niece and a good friend. Well, henchwoman. Niki was the second-best one I ever had that meant something despite having only ever had two.

“I’m prepared to die if it means no longer serving these goose-stepping disgraces to my country. Destroy me and allow me to heroically sacrifice myself again… Gary, what are you doing?”

“Hold on,” I said, casting a spell to reach into a portal in the air. All it required was for me to draw a circle in the air with my finger. “This is like second-level magic. I need to see if I can access my Reaper’s Cloak’s pocket dimension. Car keys, magic golden apple, and oh, cool, my Boba Fett flash drive containing one hundred terabytes of blackmail material on all the world’s leaders!”

There was also a bunch of stuff I wasn’t mentioning like my porn collection, my secret weapon against Tom Terror, and seventy-three cents in change. Have you noticed credit cards have eliminated any need for change in society? Even soda machines take them these days so, really, what was the point? We should get rid of coins the same way we got rid of the half-penny.

“Gary—” Niki said, sounding concerned. “This isn’t funny. My urge to kill is rising and not in a good or sexual way.”

“There’s a sexual way?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, you sweet summer child,” Niki said. “The things that went on in that mansion during Gary’s depressed period were amazing. Wild parties don’t even begin to describe it. I slept with Dracula and the new Prismatic Commando. The former Black Eagle. Oh, how I miss sex. Even touching myself—”

Lisa plugged her ears. “Uncle Gary, please hurry up.”

“Ah ha!” I said, pulling out a spiral paper notebook of the kind that cost about a dollar at your local grocery store. I opened the notebook and recited three words in a long-dead language. I mispronounced it badly but repeated it several times. That wasn’t my fault, though, since I’d written out my incantations phonetically. I may have had the world’s cheapest spell book, but it was top-notch for ease of use.

“Uh, Gary, what did you just do?” Lisa asked. It was the kind of question that was accompanied by an acute sense of horror mixed with disbelief. In other words, the reaction people generally had to my cunning plans.

“Magic!” I said, cheerfully. “I figured that brainwashing was essentially a form of programming and Suggestion is a third-level spell. So, I’m suggesting Niki no longer be loyal to Tom Terror and P.H.A.N.T.O.M.”

Lisa stared at me in horror and grabbed my makeshift cloak before shaking me. “Your entire plan for us not dying relies on Dungeons and Dragons? This the real world, Gary!”

“The real world is infinitely stranger than your philosophy something, something Horatio,” I said, flubbing the overused line from Hamlet.

That was when Niki’s laser guns lowered. The expression on the holographic Niki’s face was confused, pained, and tired. It was like she was waking up from a dream but hadn’t quite managed it yet.

“Are you goddamn kidding me?” Lisa stared in disbelief. “That did not just work!”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said, solemnly. “We should be grateful to our God that he rewards stupidity.”

Lisa felt her face.

Niki’s glitching got much more severe. “I feel calmer, more me, now. It’s…painful. Like two voices competing for attention in my head. I can’t—”

The guns raised at us again then turned against one another before starting to fire. The entire place became a shooting gallery.

“Crap!” I shouted, seeking shelter behind some of the servers.

Lisa unloaded with her fireworks powers, causing numerous guns to explode as we fled from the laser blasts firing at us. One of the blasts nicked the top of my shoulder and stung like hell, sending me to the ground.

“Ow!” I shouted, hiding behind a now non-functioning server. “This is totally not like the movies! Ow! Intense pain!”

A laser blast passed through the server above me.

“These machines aren’t laser proof, Gary!” Lisa said. “They don’t make good cover!”

“Video games didn’t teach me that!” I snapped.

Niki Tesla screamed and clutched the side of her head. “Gary! Run!”

“No!” I shouted. Then I drew on the Inner Sun even though we were separated from it by a lot of solid rock. I’d established a connection with it and still had my SECRET PLAN that included a SECRET WEAPON. Channeling that power, I cast the spell one more time. “Get that crap out of your head and be free, computer lady!”

The power surged through me and it was the second most powerful spell I’d ever cast in my life. Because magic was not like Dungeons and Dragons and you could spend more power doing something simple than you could ever doing something special. Also, you didn’t forget spells after you cast them—which was bizarre and only for game balance anyway. Either way, I felt my power wash over the computer room, and it was good. Then nothing. No gunfire, no noise, no explosions.

“Ow!” I said, grimacing. “Still shot! Not healing!”

“Oh, don’t be a baby, Gary,” Niki said, only one hologram remaining above our heads. “That laser blast cauterized the wound almost instantly.”

“That is not how healing works!” I snapped. “Ponda Baba probably went into shock after his arm was cut off in the cantina!”

“Should I even ask?” Lisa asked, looking up. “I mean, I’m just assuming it’s a Star Wars thing.”

“It’s always a Star Wars thing with Gary,” Niki said, sounding more bored than grateful that I’d just saved her from enslavement to fascists. “On Earth-B, his good guy doppelgänger is called Star Knight and he has a lightsaber.”

“You’re kidding,” Lisa said, blinking.

“I have a lightsaber, too,” I said, painfully clutching the wound on my shoulder. God, it stung. “I just don’t use it because it’s a hilariously impractical weapon in real life. Unlike a bow and arrow which is the most practical weapon any superhero could use aside from a boomerang or lasso. Don’t ask me how that works.”

Pieces of the ceiling fell around us. There were numerous echoes of distant explosions and other less-distinct noises. “Is that good ominous noise or not?”

“Good-ish,” Niki said, glitching again. “Hopefully. I’ve turned off all the power suppressors, incinerated the biological weapons to be used on the Hollow Earth, and released the Society of Superheroes.”

“Oh, yay!” I said, pausing. “Why is that not completely good news?”

“It is going to be a bloody battle,” Niki said. “There are no restraints.”

I stared up at her. “There never were. We just pretended there were. That’s what makes them heroes. The fact they do what they can knowing they can die and probably will. Also, I may be ready to pass out, so I’m starting to mutter. Is this what shock feels like?”

Lisa slapped me across the face.

Hard.

“That doesn’t help shock!” I snapped. “God, now it does seem like I raised you.”

“You did,” Lisa said, smirking. “Much to my disgust. You are my role model. My role model in how to change the world by bumbling through life.”

“I’d hug you but I’ve been frigging shot!” I snapped before smiling.

“This is touching but I’m fleeing now because Tom Terror is coming right this way,” Niki said, fading away. “Look me up if you survive.”

“Yeah, well, I can take—”

I was interrupted in my badass boast by the entirety of the floor exploding, revealing a twelve-foot-tall green and purple mecha with a bubbleheaded dome. It had huge arms that stretched out like a gorilla and a pair of giant legs with shoulder-based rocket-launchers. There were numerous other cannons built on the side, some of which I recognized as belonging to other supervillains that had been welded on. Tom Terror was driving it, both his eyes replaced with Primal Orbs. Arguably even worse, in his right hand I saw the Spear of Odin. I felt the power radiating outward from him, and knew that it dwarfed the entire Society of Superheroes combined.

He looked pissed.

“Dammit,” I muttered.