Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 12: People are Complicated

Professor Replica was one of the most dangerous Supers to ever exist, a man who could create self-replicating drones out of a sheet of paper. His creations threatened to cover the planet with his sick facsimiles of life.

Even after his defeat by Solaris, his more advanced automatons continue to replicate, hunting for resources to make more of themselves, making travel outside the confines of a mega-city extremely dangerous.

He wasn’t always a madman bent on sheathing the planet in steel:

He was originally Professor John Stevens, a junior member of a team of the world’s best astronomers, dedicated to unraveling what exactly caused The Tide. Early in their task, one of the older, weaker astronomers died from an aneurysm. It was assumed at the time that the cause of death was natural.

More of the team suffered extreme damage to their minds, gradually losing touch with reality as they came closer to uncovering the truth. One by one, each member of John’s team was hospitalized until he was the only one remaining who dared work on the issue.

April 21st, 1972, John Stevens locks himself in the Hayfield Observatory with a week’s supply of food and water. October 13, 1972, Professor Replica emerged, the first Omni class Tinker. He seemed to be able to dictate the laws of physics in regards to his creations to an extent greater than any super before him.

He immediately began a campaign to replace humanity with robots, forcing all of the supers of the day to band together to engage in a fifteen-year war that laid waste to much of the United States before he was stopped.

Professor Replica is widely believed to have known more about the cause of The Tide than any other human, alive or dead. Whatever knowledge he had died with him.

Astronomy has since soared up the charts to become the fifth most dangerous job in the world, but absolutely necessary to our survival:

Astronomers are the canary in the coal-mine.

***Edward Taver***

Eddie was doing his job.

His job, the same one he’d been doing for the last five years, was to sit in a chair and try not to get bored.

Currently he was simulating a prehistoric tableau on his desk, complete with dinosaurs and palm trees. In Eddie’s imagination, his desk was an alien vessel that was slowly being reclaimed by the relentless force of nature.

A red light began blinking, distracting Eddie from his antics.

“…Oh, crap.”

Okay, you can do this, Eddie thought, taking a deep breath, clearing his desk off and flipping on the tracking monitor.

The world outside his office began to fade as he began unraveling The Tide’s movement.

Eddie followed the wobbling line representing The Tide’s distance, applying the math he’d been taught…

The gravitational force that had been holding relatively steady for the last twelve years was beginning to get stronger.

Without thinking, Eddie applied his accurate model of the solar system that had been drilled into his head since college, figuring out the general position…

Eddie winced as his head began to throb. It felt like there was something, at the very edge of his perception. Some thought that if only he could think it, would solve everything. It was at the tip of his brain. Eddie stumbled toward his calculator.

If he could figure out exactly where it was, then he could more accurately predict…

Ice water flooded Eddie’s veins as he pulled himself away from his calculator. That’s enough!

Eddie shook off the strange feeling, and bolted for the door. He didn’t bother switching off his screen. The graph on his monitor wasn’t dangerous to anyone who didn’t understand it, and there were precious few who did anymore.

When Eddie opened the door to the Nexus hallway, he sighed in relief, before running towards the conference room, grabbing Janet’s box of tissues from her cubicle as he ran past, stuffing a couple tissues up his gushing nose.

“Hey!” Janet’s expression paled when Eddie glanced back at her.

Eddie, with temerity he never could’ve imagined had the situation been different, stormed into the conference room where the Nexus’s top supers were located, interrupting Solaris mid-anecdote.

“Aahahah!” Hexen, Guile, Safros, and Quake were slapping their thighs and guffawing.

“I shit you not, your kid was wearing cardboard, head to toe, as –” Solaris’s smile faded as he recognized Nexus’s resident astronomer.

“Umm….” Eddie pointed over his shoulder lamely as the collection of superhuman powerhouses stared at him. “Tide’s coming in.”

“How much time?”

“Umm…” Eddie winced as the headache got worse.

He glanced down at the paper in his hand, in his own handwriting, with no memory of writing it. A spatter of blood fell from his face, nearly covering the numbers.

Eddie dabbed the corners of his eyes, the tissue coming away soaked scarlet.

“Two weeks to High Tide.”

“Take a vacation, Eddie.” Solaris said. “Your job’s done.”

***Perry***

“Here you are: One cubic meter of cardboard batteries,” Perry said, patting the ream of paper he’d converted.

Hardcase’s dad walked through the living-room, scratching his beer belly. He glanced over at Perry and his daughter, both wearing helmets over their civvies, and shook his head with a snort, wandering off to the kitchen.

“Thanks a bunch!” Hardcase said, handing him a thousand-dollar chit with the nexus logo in the center.

“Some things to keep in mind,” Perry said. “They’re tougher than ordinary cardboard by a lot, but they’re only bullet resistant. The big stuff gets through pretty easy. They’ve got good structural integrity, somewhere in the ballpark of hardwood. They’re also filled with pressurized acid. The acid is diluted, but still there, so make sure you don’t get any on your skin.”

“I’ve been thinking about it a bunch. I’m going to use them to make some attack drones. I’ve been looking for ways to increase my utility after getting my butt kicked so bad last time.”

“Tell me about it,” Perry said, rolling his eyes. “I sucked.”

“W-what? You did awesome!”

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Perry said, “But I almost broke my neck and lost an arm. Plus I couldn’t even win a three-on-one,” Perry waxed a little sarcastic there towards the end.

People generally don’t win three-on-one.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll do better next time?”

“Next time I fight you?” Perry asked.

“Yeah,” Hardcase sighed. “I realized as soon as I said it.”

“Anyway, let’s go see if these things require me to help out.” Perry said, patting the stack of batteries.

They did indeed require him to help out. Once Hardcase made major changes to one of the sheets of cardboard, it reverted to regular cardboard and the pressurized gas popped out of it.

It wasn’t unexpected. Tinker powers often didn’t play well with each other, and his didn’t tolerate major modifications. At least other people could use them as intended. There were a few Tinkers out there whose inventions could only be used by themselves.

The solution was that Perry flipped the switch on Hardcase’s cutting machine which cut the shapes his batteries would take in her inventions. That’s all it took. The rules of superpowers were strange.

While Perry was waiting, he couldn’t help but express a bit of jealousy at how much nicer her lair was than his own. I guess it’s not a lair if you’re a cape. Then why do I think of mine as a lair? Weird.

I really should clean my lair a bit more often, though, Perry thought a moment before a tiny robot scooted out of a hole in the wall and grabbed a piece of cardboard off the ground and vanished into the distance.

Or make robot cleaners.

Once their business was done, Perry rode his bike back to his place, pleased with his profit for the day, and looking forward to finishing his homework, eating dinner and hiding in his lair for a good four hours.

“Sooo…How was your date the other weekend?” Mom asked from across the dinner table, a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. A glimmer that Perry didn’t like or trust one bit.

“Fine, I guess. Didn’t we already talk about that?” Perry asked.

“I think your mother was referring to the fight with the prawn.”

Perry froze.

“You guys knew about that?”

“You think I don’t surveil you? Git gud, son,” The Mechanaut chortled into his soup.

“Solaris can see through anything that’s not lined with lead,” Hexen said with a wince.

He called Heather ‘Young Lady’! Perry thought, eyes widening. Heather’s suit was unisex and her voice had been modulated.

“Well, shoot,” Perry muttered, slumping over in his seat. Now that he had no ‘secret’ to keep about last weekend, he unleashed a tirade of pent-up frustration. “You know what? It went terribly, and it was amazing, and we kicked some serious ass, but the very next day, Heather wouldn’t even talk to me. She’s been giving me the silent treatment for a week now.”

“Oh.” Dad sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“So, like, what did I do wrong? Is she pissed because I upstaged her or something? She doesn’t have HP, or stats or anything. If she’d done half the things I did, she’d be missing an arm or plain dead.”

Dad took a sip of his soup. “Did she look like she was happy at the end of the night?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you considered that perhaps things happen to Heather while you’re not there?” Dad asked.

“Then why would she take it out on me?” Perry asked.

“I’unno.” Dad shrugged.

“People are complicated,” Mom said.

“Well, what about you guys?” Perry asked. “How are you still married? How come Dad isn’t in prison or drafted?”

“It’s a delicate balancing act, but basically it boils down to money. Everything always seems to be about money in the end,” Dad said. “Long story short, I arranged it so that it costs Nexus significantly more to imprison me than it does to pay people’s super insurance.”

“So why are you and mom always fighting? Can’t they send someone else to do it?”

“Appearances, mostly. What was it, twenty two years ago?” Dad said. “It was the High Tide before last, and I was just a young punk getting my start with some awful power armor. Your mom was a literal magical princess. We were fighting prawns, and I got crushed by one.”

Dad pointed his finger at Perry. “And I mean that literally. My organs were being perforated by my ribs. I was about to get eaten by this huge bastard, looming over me as my vision faded to black.”

“And then mom showed up,” Perry finished, rolling his eyes. He’d heard this part before.

“And then your mom showed up!” Dad shouted. “Flung that monster right off me, healed me, and I swore to myself right then and there that I would do right by that woman!”

Hexen blushed, stirring her soup as she concealed her face with her other hand.

“So anyway, didn’t take long for High Command to figure out I took a dive whenever they sent your mom after me. Spent a lot of time in and out of the Nexus Workshop. That’s Tinker-prison, by the way.”

This part Perry had never heard before, and he perked up, hearing about some of the more interesting parts of his dad’s career.

“Tinker prison is a crazy place. Anyway, I figured out what I wanted, did the math, then spent a decade buying property, expanding my wealth, influence, and production output of defensive bots supplied to the wall until I was basically too influential for them to throw in prison. Once that happened, I convinced your mom to marry me.”

Perry lifted a brow.

“Basically as long as I keep the damage to infrastructure, I’ve got a permanent get out of jail free card.”

“So the Nexus is…corrupt?”

“I would say they weighed the pros and cons.” Dad said.

“So let me get this straight,” Perry said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m eighteen.”

“Yeah.”

“You guys met twenty-two years ago.”

“Yeah.”

“You spent a decade plotting, before you got married.”

“Yeah?”

“Twenty-two minus eighteen is four.”

“So?”

“I was born four years into your decade-long evil plan, and spent six years as a bastard?”

“Well…” Dad scratched the back of his neck while Mom blushed. “I was in prison, holding the city hostage with a bomb that would turn everyone into hamsters unless they let me out. High command figured I had a soft spot for your mom, so they sent her in to interrogate me and-“

“That’s plenty!” Perry said, holding up his hands. “I don’t wanna hear about being conceived in a maximum security prison!”

“Think about it this way, son,” Dad said. “If it wasn’t for you, everyone would be hamsters right now. You saved Franklin City.”

Hexen was covering her face with both hands, now, her spoon forgotten.

“I said I don’t wanna hear about it! I don’t even wanna think about it!”

Perry finished dinner as fast as he could, did the dishes at full speed, then retreated to the safety of his lair, where he wouldn’t have to hear stories about his parent’s adventures.

As he was fabricating his new suit, something his dad said kept nagging at him.

Everything always seems to be about money in the end.

He hadn’t seen any sign that Heather had spent any of her twelve thousand. No rewarding herself with real food at the cafeteria, new clothes, or accessories.

Even Perry had blown most of his free cash on decent pizza at least. He paused and leaned against the wall of the storage unit, really thinking about it.

If Solaris, Hexen, and the Mechanaut all knew what they were up to last, weekend, what were the odds that Karnos had found out somehow? Pretty good. Successful villains had to have good intel.

Perry could easily imagine Heather being pissed if she caught hell from her dad, lost her cash, while Perry walked away scott-free.

The entire situation around his debut illustrated a couple things.

Perry needed better control over his own information, and he needed an information network of his own.

All the big-name players had their own feelers out there, and if Perry wanted to be one of them, he had to view the game as a whole, like his dad did, making himself indispensable to the city.

I need to buy some lead sheets now, too…and talk to Heather.