Tales of the Parodyverse

#110: Untold Tales of Paradopolis: There Are Five Million Stories in the Big City, or The Mystery of the Skeleton in the Superheroes’ Closet


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It's a long time since the last weekly Untold Tales was pushed off the bottom of the board before the next one arrived, but the Hooded Hood's not complaining.
Sun Jun 01, 2003 at 02:59:44 pm EST
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#110: Untold Tales of Paradopolis: There Are Five Million Stories in the Big City, or The Mystery of the Skeleton in the Superheroes’ Closet

Author’s Comment: One of the nice things about writing in the Parodyverse is that the genre allows for a whole range of story types, from humorous dialogue to horror to romance. One of the styles I’ve flirted with but never really gone all-out to do is the sort of conspiracy / secret history paranoia-type yarns, so I thought it was time to get on with it.

One reason I’ve been putting off doing this is that it takes so much plotting and research. I’ve tried to make each chapter of the story stand on its own without a lot of required background reading or knowledge of Parodyverse history. This kind of tale necessarily must have deep roots, but I hope folks don’t feel choked by them. There are optional footnotes at the end for the baffled. However, because this is an ongoing series I have assumed that readers are generally familiar with the ongoing cast of regular Parodyverse characters and the events of recent Untold Tales. If you’re not, check on the Who's Who in the Parodyverse for a quick thumbnail on the cast, and read the summary paragraph offered here.

What has gone before (edited highlights): The first adventure of the Lair Legion’s new line-up had them dealing with the consequences of the recent apparent death of the archvillainous Hooded Hood. In the Hood’s absence, the pretender Kumari auctioned off some of his contingency plots, retcons that created the nation-state of Candia, thath brought the Starseed to the solar system, and which released the murderous Onslaughter. To further her own agenda she used other Hood plans to neutralise the Chronicler of Stories, guardian of the narrative stands of the Parodyverse, but was thwarted at the last by our heroes and suffered the wrath of the restored Chronicler. He noted the involvement of other forces in Kumari’s actions, especially the Parody Master and the shadowy King of Tales.

Meanwhile, the grey-suited Exemplary has been ruthlessly seeking out information about the Hooded Hood from ManMan who stabbed the Hood while under outside control and from spiffy who was once the Hood’s son before being retconned. He also acted to prevent Visionary from reaching Xander the Improbable to seek the current location of the Hood (although Yo got there and found out, of which more later), and to force Amazing Guy into turning down future assistance requests from the Lair Legion should they ever search for the missing cowled crime-czar. We don’t yet know why Exemplary and the Shadow Cabinet he claims to represent are so interested in the Hooded Hood.

A little time has passed since the last Untold Tales, allowing for some of the other recent stories from the board to have taken place (such as Dancer's interminable but excellent Round Robin and Nats' Tales of the Lair Legion, for example).

Now read on…

***


The Journal of Paradopolis Police Commissioner Donald Graham
October 1st

Another stirring day in the big city.
Today’s excitement started with battle between dull thud, one of the new generation of badly-dressed crimefighters from the grungier side of Paradopolis, now apparently an associate of the Lair Legion, and Savagetooth, formerly of the Purveyors of Peril. The fight strayed into Sheldon and when Savagetooth tried to drop a building upon thud, the hero’s symbiotic internal telepathic tapeworm used her ability to transmute matter into other matter which rhymes to turn the mortar of the support beams into water, thus collapsing the whole structure on Savagetooth and ending the fight.
SPUD arrived to do the clean-up as expected, but operations came to a halt when they discovered the body, and that’s when headquarters got the call.
I’ve set standing orders that any superhero incident resulting in a fatality should be notified to me right away, so before my breakfast had time to settle down to worrying my ulcers I was on Eisner and 12th looking at a former Bautista Enterprises alarm clock factory. At least it hadn’t exploded.
By the time I got there thud was long gone, but Lee O’Hannaghan had arrived and was doing all that stuff that forensics people do to try and look as good as they do on TV. She’d had a chance to examine the body, and she had a few surprises for me.
“First off, this person didn’t die today,” she began, pointing down at the bare skeleton that had been assembled from under the rubble. “I’ll have to check this, but I’d put time of death at anything from two to ten years back. She’s female, probably twenties. In life she’d have been quite tall, maybe five ten. It’s looking like she was inside one of the concrete shafts that Cressida transmuted.”
Cressida, the newest Legionnaire, is dull thud’s internal psionic tapeworm, the one with the poetical matter-reshaping abilities. I try not to think about it. Anyway, she’s the more presentable of the duo.
“I can’t help but notice that her skull appears to be missing,” I commented, looking down at the remains.
“Everybody’s an expert,” Lee snorted. “Yeah, that’s another little mystery. The spinal column’s been sliced clean through on the fourth vertebrae. I mean really smooth. There might be variations if I look at the slice through a microscope, but at the moment I’m tipping that this was done by some kind of weapon that can cut at a molecular level. A very precise laser, maybe.”
Offhand I could think of a few things that might be able to do that. An Avasword, for example, or that talking knife that goes around with Elvis-Guy or whatever he’s called. Maybe a well-placed Razor Letter? A Mark III B.A.L.D. Disintegrator pistol on maximum setting. Suicide Blonde, and perhaps Goldeneyed. And that’s just for starters.
“Beheading was probably the cause of death,” admitted Lee, “but not definitely. She’s got seven broken ribs, a fractured arm, a shattered collarbone, and at least a dozen other injuries consistent with impact shock trauma. First guess, somebody beat on her with a sledgehammer.”
“Or super-strength,” I noted.
“We have some vestigial clothing, and a probable ID,” Lee went on. “Tweed two-piece under a white lab coat. Name tag reads Dr Helen MacAllistair. There’s also some kind of magnetic key card.”
“Thanks,” I told O’Callahan. “It’s somewhere to start. I guess we can rule out Cressida at least.”
“Why?”
“Because this factory has been here for coming up to ten years, so unless something very exotic involving teleportation or matter phasing has happened we’re looking back that far. And at that point dull thud would probably be worrying about those hairs he was sprouting and Cressida was probably an amoeba or something. Let’s proceed from the assumption that Dr MacAllistair or somebody in her lab coat was dumped here mob style in the old-fashioned way and investigate from there.”
Then it started raining. It was going to be another bitch of a day.

***


The missing persons report on Helen MacAllistair was still on file. I was strangely pleased to see it was still on paper in a battered manila folder, dating back to the times before we had to put all our stuff on those pesky modern computers. I threw everybody out of my office, lit my one cigarette for the day – blasted doctors – and spread the file out across my desk.
My coffee went cold.
Helen Caroline MacAllistair was a brilliant mathematician and computer programmer, one of the pioneers of the field. Graduated right here from Paradopolis U. Interned and did her masters with Dr Day-Vincent. Won the Wrichards Prize for Incomprehensible Physics or whatever it was. Was tipped to go all the way to the top – before she vanished, a little under ten years back. The dates coincide nicely with the cement pouring for the foundations of the Bautista plant.
Police at the time suspected foul play. MacAllistair didn’t suffer fools gladly and she didn’t always play well with others. In particular there’d been some acrimonious rows with a couple of her fellow students, both of whom were interviewed at the time of her disappearance. Apparently Al. B. Harper’s fiancée blamed MacAllistair for their break-up. Harper denied ever sleeping with the woman. Miss Framlicker claimed differently. Neither could authenticate their actions on the night MacAllistair vanished. Harper claimed to have been working in the lab on a transphasic resonance simulator, and nobody could understand what he was doing enough to verify this. Framlicker asserted that she had been in a parallel universe at the time it happened.
There was also an FBI investigation at the time, presumably because MacAllistair had a security clearance and had worked on contract for SPUD and some other agencies that we don’t name. I tried to track down the agents who supposedly worked the case, but the FBI’s denying they ever had operatives called Skullder And Mully.
Seems there were plenty of other suspects too. MacAllistair had turned down job offers from the munitions firm Red Right Hand, from ZOXXON Oil, and allegedly from an Argentinian consortium rumoured to be a front for a certain notorious German nobleman. But in the end there wasn’t a body, and the department had a lot of other cases to chase, and MacAllistair had no close relatives making a fuss, so the case was left pending on somebody’s desk, and finally put quietly to bed in the unsolved cases shelves of the archives department.
Until now.

***


When I got back from the coffee machine my seventh floor office window was an inch open. “What do you want this time, Dark Knight?” I growled.
“Answers,” the guy says in my ear, making me spill coffee down my pants. And I knew he was around dammit, but he still scared the hell out of me. “You sent an enquiry to the Lair Legion about known superhumans from ten years back capable of leaving smooth shears through bone.”
“A phone call back would have been quite sufficient,” I told tall, dark, and broody. “I even have e-mail now.”
“More than we do,” snarled the urban legend. “As soon as we plugged your enquiry into our system the entire mainframe crashed, taking our AI EDWIN with it. And when we called in HALLIE to fix it she went down too. NTU-150 is still trying to figure out how a trojan got that deep into our system.”
EDWIN is the new and irritating personality hologram the Lair Legion have given to their mainframe. HALLIE’s a feminine computer sentience the Lair Legion once rescued from the Scourge. She used to live in the LL mainframe but moved on. NTU-150 is…
“NTU-150. He works for Bautista Enterprises, doesn’t he?” I remembered. “That armoured engineer is the Bautista corporation’s poster boy, known to be very tight with CEO Jamie Bautista himself. And it was a Bautista building that MacAllistair was buried in. And Bautista supplies the Legion computer banks and has NTU-150 maintain them.”
“Yes,” agreed the Dark Knight – darkly. “I’m having Ziles watch him.”
“So can you help me assemble a list of people who might have the power to do something like what happened to Helen MacAllistair?” I asked. “Hello? Dark Knight?”

***


I spent the afternoon interviewing geniuses. We pulled in Framlicker for questioning, but she got that damned Lisa Waltz to represent her and we ended up apologising and sending her home in a limo. Framlicker claimed that she didn’t like MacAllistair but she’d never have set up a bi-dimensional unipolar transfer field to lop her head off, although it would be fascinating to calculate the vectors one day. Lisa’s cat ate my sandwiches and left something I don’t want to think about in my waste basket.
I had to drive all the way to upstate Gothametropolis to find Harper. When we were finally able to detach him from some massive device that pumped out black energy spots he didn’t seem able to remember much about MacAllistair herself, although he was able to describe some of her theories about superstring data, and artificial intelligence, and n-spacial geometry with crystal precision. We told him not to leave the state. He told us he had no plans to leave his cabin until the tinned tuna ran out.
Spoke with Bautista, who pointed out that ten years ago it was his father who was running the company, before the old guy’s mysterious death. Bautista inherited the lot and became one of the richest guys on the planet. He claimed to have known MacAllistair only by reputation. Said he wished he had got to know her personally, since she seemed to have a fascinating mind. Then he showed me out, claiming he had to help his friend NTU-150 repair HALLIE and EDWIN.
Fed up of all these people with IQs double mine I trailed over the Englehart Bridge into Dullard’s Corner and interviewed Visionary. That brought the brains average right back to standard.
“What have I done now?” the possibly fake man asked as he answered the door of his somewhat sunken condo.
“I’m more interested in what happened ten years back,” I told him. “I figure you know as many superheroes as anybody. You’ve been around since the start of the Lair Legion, and some of your exploits date back before that.”
“I wasn’t responsible for that thing with the combine harvester. That was spiffy.”
“What was?”
“Anything.”
Either Visionary is the biggest fool alive or a genius of deception. Before I could decide which we were attacked by half a dozen twelve-foot high combat robots.

***


Falcon doesn’t get a lot of press. He isn’t always in the public eye, I suppose because he either operates on a vary local or else an international scale and because he hasn’t done much to annoy newspaper magnate J. Jonah Jerkson. Or maybe because he takes a different codename every two weeks. But he has a good rep in the Slumtown district and he’s one of the few super-types to bother getting a badge to go with his anti-grav flight suit and advanced weapons harness.
In any case, his arrival over Visionary’s lawn as we were being surrounded by twenty-odd tons of killing machine was very timely. He swooped down and ripped the head off the first robot even before the four air-to-surface missiles he’d peeled off on his approach arrived to take out more of the attackers.
Visionary leapt into action too. “Don’t damage the lawn!” she shouted very loudly. “Cheryl will kill me!”
Things got a bit confused then. Yo and Dancer came from inside the house and engaged the other robots, and before I had time to cope with my tobacco coughing fit they’d reduced the attackers to so much scrap metal.
“Well this is suggestive,” frowned Falcon, glaring at the wreckage. “Looks like somebody doesn’t want this case investigating even after all this time.”
Over Cheryl’s coffee, Falcon explained why he was looking out for me. “You know I work for SPUD, the Super-Menace Principal Undercover Division, right? Well my boss Dan Drury asked me to keep an eye out when he heard you were opening up the MacAllistair case again. I guess you hadn’t realised about the rest?”
“The rest of what?” Dancer asked, handing round the java.
Falcon had a dossier he wasn’t supposed to have and I wasn’t supposed to see. I’ve got the file here now. It’s handwritten, which is pretty unusual even for a decade ago, and especially for SPUD where they have electronic gadgets for everything. Never go to the lavatory in a SPUD facility. The file documents the mysterious deaths of no less than seventeen scientists and researchers at Bautista, Turrets, Red Right Hand, New Tomorrow, ZOXXON, Daedelus Developments, and Icarus Innovations, all within five months of each other. None of them had anything in common except that the victims were leading figures in the realms of IT and robotics. A car accident, a fire in the home, lung cancer, food poisoning, skiing accident, a suicide… Ms MacAllistair was the last. She just vanished.
And somebody accidentally set a dozen sophisticated combat robots onto me this afternoon as well.

***


The Falcon accompanied me home. It’s not much since Judy went but I need somewhere to keep my spare shirts. I tried not to look embarrassed at having a guy dressed like a bright red raptor padding along beside me as I went into the house. Goodness knows what the neighbours think.
The place had been searched. Not messy toss-the-contents-of-the-drawers-over-the-floor searching. This was smart put-everything-exactly-as-you-left-it stuff, the sort that only a real pro can manage. If it hadn’t been for the hairs I’d left laid across some of the cupboards I’d never have known.
“Something wrong?” asked Falcon, checking round the darkened room.
“Maybe,” I answered, wondering if the place was wired. And I suddenly wondered how safe it was to be bodyguarded by someone from the world’s biggest spy-show. How much do we really know about SPUD? Wouldn’t they have a motive to off or abduct weapons geniuses?
“What do you mean, maybe? If there’s a problem tell me and I’ll…”
And Falcon shut up just like that in mid sentence and toppled to the floor unconscious.
I fumbled for my gun but the guy in the grey business suit took it off me and crumpled it into scrap. “Careful, pops,” he told me. “I’d hate for you to get hurt accidentally.”
The newcomer was about six-two, two hundred pounds and none of it fat, with cold grey eyes in a cold grey face. He had the look I’ve seen before on stone cold killers being walked to the chair.
“From the people who sent the killer robots, I presume,” I asked him, studying his face, trying to match him to any of the thousands of mug shots I’ve stared at over the years. I looked down at the sprawled bodyguard on the floor. “What did you do to him?”
“Neural over-ride conditioning,” the intruder answered. “We’re gradually introducing it into all the metahumans, just in case.”
“How foresighted out you. Who the hell are you?”
The intruder shook his head. “You don’t get to ask the questions, Graham. It’s asking questions that drew our attention to you. You wouldn’t like us to look more closely.”
Something about the way he said that made me shudder. “I’m a cop. Asking questions is part of the job.”
“Not this job,” the intruder advised. “This is one case you just mark closed. Lack of evidence. No further action.”
“I presume there’s a threat to do along with that?”
“If you want one,” he shrugged. He handed over a brown envelope. I noted his hands were gloved. “Take a look at the end of your career, Commissioner.”
Inside the file were glossy 8x10 photos apparently showing me having sex with three children. The oldest couldn’t have been above ten. “What the… but I never…”
“We can bring them to the stand any time we want,” the grey man smirked. “We can produce photos, tapes, and the kiddies themselves. And I guarantee that they will believe you did that to them, despite the truth of the matter.” He smiled unpleasantly. “I wonder what they’ll do to a child molester cop in the Big House?” Then he looked over to the mantelpiece. “You have a grown up daughter as well, don’t you?”
“Alright, I get the point. You can get at me past any hero guarding me, and you have the resources to frame me good and proper if I get in your way. And for some reason you don’t want the murder of Helen MacAllistair investigated.”
He patted my cheek. “Right. Good boy. Remember that and we won’t need to get involved with you again.” He nudged Falcon with his toe. “You’d better wake up feather-butt here and explain about his fainting fit. But first you can give me the file he brought to you. Then our business here is done.”
I reached into my pocket and handed over a floppy disk.
“Smart,” the intruder told me. “You can keep the photos.”
He left then, leaving me to have an attack of shivers and cold sweats, and to wonder what would happen when he found I’d given him the Police Department Parking Ticket Lists, keeping the handwritten folder hidden in my jacket.

***


I’ve been threatened before, but never quite so comprehensively as by my visitor in grey. If he could get to the heroes and he could twist people’s memories to provide the perfect frame then my badge wasn’t going to be much protection. After Falcon had got up and gone on his way I sat down with a large Scotch to figure out my next move.
Okay, phase one, review the evidence. We have a scary grey suit working with high-tech robots. We have a systems failure in the LL computers. We have a leak within SPUD that could find out that Drury and Falcon were leaking info in turn. We have some decade-old deaths of defence industry scientists that might have been a bunch of cunningly-disguised murders. We have one last disappearance that’s atypical because it wasn’t made to look like accident or suicide.
We have a ruthless killer who knows I have a daughter out there.
It was time to make some arrangements. First I had to call Lee O’Hannaghan, get her off the case before they decided she was too good at her job. I ignored the phone on my desk, grabbed my coat and keys, and went off to pick a random neighbourhood payphone.
“Sorry Commissioner,” the voice on the other end of the line told me, “Lee rang in sick today.”
I fumbled for some more coins, trying to remember her home number. The payphone rang. The tone seemed strangely distorted. “She’s not there,” the same voice told me when I lifted the receiver. “Give it up.”

***


The Zero Street Mission always reminds me of the Alamo. It stands besieged in the toughest part of Hell’s Bathroom, somehow trying to reach out to people who don’t even want to be pulled out of the slime of their lives. Mostly it’s a waste of time. But occasionally it works. I’d like to think it worked for a scabby kid called Don forty years ago.
And its funny that no matter how far I’ve travelled and how much I’ve changed, when I’m worried or hurt or just scared stiff this is where I run back to.
“Dan?” Mac Fleetwood called as he saw me enter the gloomy church.
“Mac,” I said to the pastor. Fleetwood and I grew up together. There’s not many people I’d absolutely trust with my life, but he’s the top of a real short list. “I need help.”
“So I gather. There’s a lady waiting to see you.”
I guess anyone with access to my dossier could figure where I would run. Going there was sloppy of me. Mind you, the lady who found me was world-class at doing this kind of stuff. “Contessa,” I acknowledged.
Contessa Natalia Petrovna Marie Tatianova Romanza is about the best damned spy this side of James Bond. I wasn’t sure if that was the good news or the bad news. She works for SPUD nowadays.
“Commissioner,” she nodded to me. “It is good that you have come here. Colonel Drury was worried for your safety.”
“Yeah, well he’s already loaned me Falcon as a bodyguard. What more could I want?” I asked her.
She smiled a little. “Don’t be sore because Sam Wilson fell over when Exemplary used his neural over-ride codes,” she told me. “Falcon volunteered for the mission. If he wasn’t lying unconscious on the floor with his comm-channels on tight beam scrambled broadcast we’d never have got our target to come that far out into the open.”
“You knew about the sleeper program?”
The Contessa moued. “We’re not completely stupid, whatever the opposition might think, Commissioner Graham.
“Who is this Exemplary?” Rev. Fleetwood wondered.
“He is a government operative,” the spy told him. “But which government? That is the question.”
“He may work for a foreign power?”
“Oh no. But which ruling force behind this nation does he serve?” Natalia Romanza wondered. “This is a very dangerous question to ask.”
“And what does it have to do with a decade-old murder?” I challenged.
The Contessa frowned. “This we do not know. That is why you must go on with your investigation. You may have discovered a flaw in our enemy’s defences that has never been found before.”
I thought about what the grey suit – Exemplary – had said to me. About the threats he had made. About Bethany.
And I thought about a murderer getting away free and laughing at justice because he was powerful and connected.
And I thought about that badge I’d worn for thirty years, and what it meant.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s nail the bastards. But Mac, I’m going to need a favour. I need someone to look after Beth.”
“You think they might go after her?” the Rev worried.
“Certainly,” agreed the Contessa.
“She needs protection, from someone the buggers can’t have fiddled with yet,” I told him. “Mac, do you know how to get a hold of De Brown Streak?”

***


Case Notes of Operation #AH82264DJ9, from the files of the Dark Knight
October 2nd

Who do you call when you have a computer problem and the world’s best computer experts are the suspects? Somebody had breached LL security and managed to royally bugger up our systems so badly that even HALLIE couldn’t operate in there. Extreme measures were indicated.
“Try anything clever and I’ll wipe you myself,” I told the Supreme Interference, the collective brain-patterns of the Skree Star Empire compacted into one artificial intelligence. After his last attempt at transforming our world into the new Skree Homeland he’s been imprisoned in a top-secret base at an unnamed Antipodal location. “Just go in, find what’s wrong, and then get out again. The Knightcave computers are monitoring your every move. If I even suspect you’re trying anything else but a simple diagnostic I’ll EMP nuke the whole building and you know I’m not bluffing.”
“Er, that’s a bit extreme,” Andy worried in his draconic Fin Fang Foom guise beside me. I sometimes worry that Andy might be going a little soft.
“I am a bit extreme,” I answered.
I couldn’t tell Andy why I was so uptight. Andy doesn’t know I’m still financing and equipping Messenger, and that the info about the defence contractor deaths had come via that little secret cabal he’s working for now. It’s better Andy doesn’t know. He’s got enough on his mind trying to lead that bunch of no-hope sociopaths who call themselves Legionnaires.
The Supreme Interference channelled a fraction of that massive sentience into the monitored uplink to the Lair computers.
“Well?” I demanded. “Who’s been buggering our systems?”
“Fascinating,” the Interference gurgled in its bio-tank. “Absolutely fascinating. It looks as if your own little AI is responsible.”
“EDWIN? And I just thought it was his personality program that had problems.”
“Not EDWIN. The other one.”
“HALLIE?” Andy argued. “But HALLIE was scrambled by the systems breakdown too.”
“Yes. I think it’s the equivalent of a teenager rushing upstairs and locking herself in her bedroom.”
Foom’s com-link bleeped just then. It was Goldeneyed. “Uh, I think you’d better get back here, guys. We, um, well, we appear to have a dead woman visiting.”

***


The Journal of Paradopolis Police Commissioner Donald Graham
October 2nd

I think I’m in trouble. As I left Mac’s place his phone started ringing and wouldn’t stop, even after it was ripped from the wall. Somebody followed me all the way home, but whenever I turned round all I saw were wisps of cigarette smoke. When I got to the house I paused and wondered if I had anywhere else to go instead.
But where? Why should I bring death on my friends or family? Somebody linked to the MacAllistair murder has their fingers in the police department, in SPUD, in the superhero community. They know things they couldn’t possibly know, they can play with minds and manufacture evidence enough to damn a man, and I’ve denied them, kept the papers they wanted, resisted them to my own destruction.
I found a late night drug store that has a cheap photostat machine and made five copies of the papers. I bought a dozen envelopes and addressed them to twelve organisations or people that might find the documents interesting - The Daily Trombone, Bautista Enterprises, ITC, the Wakandybar Embassy, Sir Mumphrey Wilton, the Municipal Library, Con Johnstantine, a few others. I randomly and blindly stuffed three of the copies in three of the packages so that even I didn’t know which held the real thing and which were padded with blanks. I kept one set on my person. And I left a set on the copier, with two fifty dollar bills and a business card I dragged out of my pocket without even looking at it.
I walked through the darkened city, randomly dropping the letters into mailboxes, even wandering into a couple of hotels and depositing in their private mail sacks. I don’t expect any of the letters to reach their destinations.
I called in at HQ about 3am. The guys on desk weren’t that surprised, which is depressing when you think about it. I checked a few facts, staying away from all our new modern IT and sticking with the plain old paper records mouldering in the basement. I’m starting to distrust all technology, and the smarter it is the less I like it. I’m starting to wonder who is really in charge of the machines.
I don’t think I was alone down in the file morgue.
I went off down 4th Avenue, on foot, fifteen blocks to the river. I always like the river at night, especially on nights like this when the fog rolls in off the bay and the Sheldon Bridge disappears off into nothingness. I passed a few bucks to an old bum at the waterfront and stepped out onto the pedestrian walkway.
A little way behind me somebody was moving in the fog.
They weren’t going to let me go. They weren’t going to give me long enough to work out the riddles, to ask the right questions, to shine light where things had been hidden for too long. They had too many levers, too many ways of silencing me, including a very obvious one right here, now, on the bridge.
“You bastards like a mystery, don’t you?” I shouted back at the shadow in the mist. “Well, figure this!”
Then I climbed up onto the parapet, pulled my service revolver from its shoulder-holster, pointed it at my head, and pulled the trigger. My body jerked backwards off the Sheldon Bridge and vanished down into the roiling fog below.
Sometimes there is only one escape.

***


Case Notes of Operation #AH82264DJ9, from the files of the Dark Knight
October 2nd – Continued

Ignoring the low-grade keening from Marie Murcheson, the Lair Mansion’s resident banshee, we focused our attention on the worried young woman who was unmistakably Helen MacAllistair.
“She’s not a ghost,” Sorceress told us puzzledly. “In fact she seems to have no supernatural component about her whatsoever.”
“I’m getting a full set of human bio-signs,” Ziles reported. “In fact she’s a perfectly normal woman in her mid twenties.”
“Which is how old she was when she died ten years ago,” Hatman added in frustration. Jay likes things to be tidy and orderly.
“She could be a clone,” CSFB! worried. “Or perhaps the Helen that died was a cunning actress?”
“I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” the young woman bleated. “I don’t know how I arrived in your kitchen. Who are you?”
“I’m the guy what’s missing his lunch because I found a strange dame by the microwave,” complained Trickshot. “So ‘fess up sister and let’s get on with the day.”
It was pretty clear what was going on, of course. “Scan for photonic energy, Ziles,” I ordered. I wasn’t at all distracted by that tight silver jumpsuit she wears. Not one bit.
“Photonic energy?” She checked and found it, of course.
“So what is it?” Nats demanded. He hates being the one who has to ask for the explanations. That’s why we always make him do it.
“She’s a VR image,” I explained. “A virtual reality projection. Made by that Movie Gun that creates realistic simulacra of video footage.”
“I thought we’d disabled that thing,” complained Nats, guiltily. We all remember what happened last time he messed around with the device, although the ending was a bit unclear.
“There’s a small-scale test model still around in Enty’s lab,” Hatman remembered. “Someone must be tapping that.”
“Yes,” I sighed. “HALLIE. She was the one who shut down the systems during her little emotional breakdown. She’s the only one that can operate the short-range Movie Gun now. She’s the one who is dredging up this VR version of a murdered woman.”
“Huh? But Hallie wasn’t even made ten years ago,” Goldeneyed objected. “Where’s she getting the video material from?”
“What are you people talking about?” Helen MacAllistair demanded. Then she rose to her feet and peered over her shoulder at a blank bit of wall. “Oh! Oh no!”
“What?” Sorceress puzzled. “What can she see?”
“Something she saw while she was still alive,” Andy surmised.
“You can’t do this. You need me to… No! Get away!” Helen screamed, and crumpled back as if his by a huge fist. As we watched, wounds blossomed over her body. We could hear the breaking of her bones. Then all of us saw the neat energy-slice take off her head, sealing the wound so that there wasn’t even a discharge of blood. The murdered woman scattered into a spray or random pixels and was gone.
The banshee howled.
“That was the spookiest thing I’ve ever seen,” swallowed Trickshot. “I don’t get why HALLIE should show us this.”
“I think HALLIE’s a few operating systems short of a mainframe,” pointed out CSFB!
“Well I have no idea what’s going on now,” admitted Nats. He is such a neospiffy.

We interrupt this story for a little reader challenge. As they used to say in the old 60’s funnybooks, “The Dark Knight has solved this mystery. How about YOU?” If you think you know who Helen MacAllistar really is, and why she’s linked with the Lair Legion, go and answer this posting now – but don’t give anything away in the subject line.

Then you can read on…

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It seemed clear to me. We never did discover whose brain engrams Dr Vizhnar used as a template back when the Heuristic Artificial Learning Life Intelligence Entity was first created. And Helen MacAllistair shortens very neatly to the well known acronym HALLIE.

***


Next issue: There are some loose ends to be tied up. The Lair Legion must be diverted from investigating the murder of Helen MacAllistair. Commissioner Graham’s daughter must be eliminated, even though Beth Shellett is a close friend of the superhero Goldeneyed. And for the first time in the history of the Parodyverse, Visionary knows too much. But fear not, because the Shadow Cabinet (if such a thing exists) holds all the cards, and has prepared long and well for the day it has to take down the superheroes. Join us and see how simple it is in our next exciting episode.

***


Notes:

* Lee O’ Hannaghan and Her Analysis: Lee is the poster character of sometime-board member Crazy Penguin Lady, and she specialises in weird forensic cases. Her comments regarding the body of Helen MacAllistair prompt Commissioner Graham to consider murder weapons such as an Avasword, used by the Parody Master’s Avatar Warriors; Knifey, ManMan’s sentient and talkative knife; one of messenger’s razor-letters; or a disintegrator manufactured by evil science outfit B.A.L.D. He also speculates on the use of Suicide Blonde’s matter transmutation powers, or the teleport abilities of her cousin Goldeneyed.

* Helen MacAllistair’s academic credentials and job offers: Dr Day-Vincent and Dr Wrichards are the most brilliant of the older generation of Parodyverse scientists. Miss Framlicker and Al B. Harper represent the up-and-coming genius squad. Red Right Hand and ZOXXON Oil are villainous corporations which have caused trouble for our heroes before. The Argentinean Corporation was NeoReich Futures. Bautista Enterprises is now owned by billionaire industrialist inventor Jaime Baustista, who is secretly the non-active legionnaire NTU-150. Daedelus Developments and Icarus Innovations are both subsidiary companies owned by CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s mentor and secret archenemy Gideon Book.

* EDWIN is the Lair Legion’s somewhat surly next-generation Artificial Intelligence, based upon the earlier HALLIE AI who now tends to hang out at Visionary’s Condo with the League of Regulars or inside her own virtual world.

* Reverend Mac Fleetwood and the Zero Street Mission: In the worst part of Slumtown, the area folks call Hell’s Bathroom, stands the besieged and battered old mission church run by Reverend Fleetwood and his dedicated volunteers. Down by the docks Fleetwood also runs the soup kitchen for Homeless Seamen (with help from volunteers such as Sarah (Dancer) Shepherdson). The Reverend also occasionally offers sanctuary to hunted mutates such as De Brown Streak and those rescued by him.

* SPUD: The Super-menace Principal Undercover Directorate is the Parodyverse’s best-known secret organisation. The UN sponsored group is run by tough talking ex-soldier Colonel Dan Drury, and its most prominent field agents are Sam (Falcon) Wilson and Contessa Natalia Romanza, the widow of this reality’s version of Trickshot (the Trickshot in the LL is from another, destroyed, reality). Even Messenger has worked for them on occasion. And of course there are lots of secret cabals and hidden factions and plots to overthrow the current leadership and so on.

* The Supreme Interference: was the repository of composite brain-patterns of all the finest brains of the Skree Star Empire, before it arranged for the Skree Homeworld to be destroyed by the star-eating Galactivac, the Living Death that Sucks, in an attempt to jump-start Skree evolution once more. Since the Interference’s attempts to rewrite human genetic codes as next-generation Skree were thwarted by the Legion, the computer has been imprisoned and isolated here on Earth.

* Graham’s Mailing List: The Daily Trombone is Paradopolis’ highest selling newspaper. ITC is the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation, the company for which Nats and Miss Framlicker work. Wakanadybar is a technologically advanced African nation-state ruled by the Black Pantzer. Sir Mumphrey Wilton is an eccentric English gentleman with a talent for interfering. Con Johnstantine, is also English but is no kind of gentleman at all, and has an absolute genius for interfering.

* Other information from:

The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Where's Where in the Parodyverse

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.


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