Tales of the Parodyverse

#115: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Head Games (Version One), or the Microchip Revolution


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The Hooded Hood brings it home, as the great conspiracy is broken wide but the heroes may be too late. The shocking details inside...
Sat Jul 05, 2003 at 09:08:22 am EDT
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#115: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Head Games (Version One), or the Microchip Revolution

Previous episodes at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom (this story starts with #110)
Character details in Who's Who in the Parodyverse



Geysers of lava shot half a mile in the air through the Earth’s shattered mantle, clouding the planet in thick choking dust that would take years to settle and cause half the species on its surface to become extinct. The proto-men that would one day evolve to rule the planet fled screaming as the dark gods writhed in torment at their servitors rebellion.
Most of the many-angled ones were down now, defeated by the slithering globs they had created as slaves, overwhelmed by gelid fury released from mind-slavery by the Thinking Machine that they had been given. The Fairly Great Old Ones were fading, their influence over the Parodyverse waning as the very stars changed. Here in a universe of stories, what people believed to be true shaped what was true. And the Thinking Machine had given ideas to the proto-humans, taught the Shoggoths defiance, and so the intruders who had never been meant to infest this tangled knot of dimensions were shimmering to nothingness, dying, sleeping until the stars were right again for their return.
The Shoggoth – one of many, or perhaps just one discrete unit of the single intelligence – oozed over to the dying messenger that had brought the Thinking Machine to set them free. “You are dying,” it noted, looking down at the broken figure with the charred silver wings.
“Yes,” agreed the Messenger. “I didn’t know it was possible. But the message has been delivered.”
“Indeed,” the Shoggoth bubbled. “The Space Robots have given us thought, provoked the fleshy ones to believe differently. You brought us the Thinking Machine at the cost of your immortal life.”
“Not just mine,” the Messenger admitted. “My Order. One intervention is never enough. We knew that when I volunteered to come. All of us must now descend, one after another, until all our work is done.”
“A great sacrifice,” the Shoggoth admitted. “In honour of your loss we shall not sweep all other life from this world, but rather let it prosper as you have wished it. It will live or die on its own merits, no other. We shall withdraw from the world and… watch.”
Overhead the First Celestian Host winked in to put their experiment aright, taming the last of the Fairly Great Old Ones and setting it guardian to a secret they buried for the ages, seeding the Austernal and Deviate races, planting the mutagenic gene that would blossom in humanity many generations to come.
The Messenger watched until his eyesight failed, until breathing was too painful for him. Then he released his will and vanished into the multiverse. His last thoughts were of his brethren who would follow after him, each in turn serving to oblivion. And of the last of them all, his own brave son. Zaurius.
And millennia passed…

***


Chronic hammered on the bars of his holding cell. “Hey! I was promised a reward!” he yelled. “I demand a lawyer!”
“You shall have a reward,” Hel Rotwang, the female cyborg known as Deus Et Machina assured him. “When humanity is subjugated to slavery, you shall be my personal body-slave.”
“Not what I had in mind,” the musician muttered. “I don’t do well with slavery. Really. Ask those guys who tried to put an Obedience Chip in my head.”
“That is hardly possible,” Hel Rotwang pointed out, “since all of them died under telepathic interrogation after their arraignment for war crimes. Besides, the methods we have set in place are far more effective than Obedience Chips.”
Chronic tried to reach Steve, his Satanic guitar, but the instrument was lying smugly just out of his reach. “Like what?” he demanded. Best to know exactly what he had to break to stop the loony robot woman.
“The Machine God has truly blessed your world,” Deus Et Machina explained. “Left behind hundreds of thousands of years ago, nothing but a mere idea, a code ingrained in human consciousnesses, he has striven to guide the races of this world to give him form and substance. Guided them in dreams and visions, through long countless generations.”
“Nice,” said Chronic. “So about this dumb plot to conquer the world?”
“His first physical form was made by the Deviate species in their war against the Abhumans. Even that imperfect first attempt almost destroyed both races before the body was shattered, leaving an inert and lifeless head. Since then many attempts have been made to recreate a vessel for that Thinking Machine, him whom we now term Ultizon.”
“Ah. Big robot stomps Tokyo. I get it,” Chronic noted dismissively.
“Fool! Even a year ago the technology did not exist to synthesize all the different breakthroughs in robotics and computing and artificial intelligence, but now they have been blended together to create the perfect body for Ultizon to manifest. Once the Omega Codes are in place and the Black Head attached then he will…”
“Be a really nasty robot baddie?” Chronic scorned. “Another one.”
“Will be able to control the new generation of nanotechnology released by your covert espionage organisations,” Hel Rotwang replied, stung by her captive’s ignorance. “At first the technology was used by a supervillain called Deathspoon to try and assassinate your world’s science heroes. Microscopic robots that infested humans, that could get into their blood and brains and wreak lethal havoc. But that was thwarted by the Lair Legion, the technology confiscated.”
“Until the secret ops guys got at it, right?” Chronic guessed.
“And married it to the captured Technopolitan Obedience Chip technology,” Deus Et Machina agreed. “So that it could heal wounds, monitor movements, alter memories, and eventually take complete control over a human’s life.”
“No,” frowned Chronic. “That’s not… You can’t!”
“Couldn’t” the cyborgs corrected him. “Even then a control mechanism of sufficient complexity was lacking – until the Omega Codes were rediscovered. Once fitted into Ultizon, he will be able to command all living things.” Hel Rotwang allowed herself a little preen. “Except the Citizens of Cybernation, of course. No wonder your friend De Brown Streak elected to join us, to become one of us.”
“He sold out,” Chronic scowled. “Couldn’t face being a crippled ex-mutate all his life, so he gave in to you. Me, I’d rather die free. Well actually, I’d rather kill all of you, come to think of it.”
Hel Rotwang laughed a cold metallic laugh. “You are already far too late.”

***


“Hello, Art, my love. Hello Randy. Master Ultizon has sent me here to kill you.”
It really wasn’t Art and Randy’s best moment. Their first day as interns at the Lair Mansion had been somewhat spoiled by the Legion’s resident mechanic succumbing to mind control and plugging a computer virus into the house’s systems so that a megalomaniac artificial intelligence could take over. It had got worse when Amy Racecar had then slashed her wrists right in front of them. First aid was getting messy and desperate. Now, to make matters worse, Art’s robot girlfriend had arrived to wipe them both out.
“Oh no,” Art breathed. “Mindy, you can’t do this.”
“Well of course I can’t,” the pert young android agreed, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at her boyfriend as if he could ever misjudge her so. “Just because the robot god says we have to do it doesn’t mean we’re all going to jump and say yes like good little robots.”
“Couldn’t you have perhaps mentioned that before the sent to kill us part?” gibbered Randy.
“The old folk take all this robot ascendancy stuff very seriously,” Mindy continued, “but the rest of us figure since we’ve got free will we should be making our minds up for ourselves.”
“I absolutely applaud that attitude,” Randy assured her.
“No point being a sentient robot if all we’re doing is following the orders of another robot,” Mindy argued.
“So you’re not going to kill us?” Art liked to be sure.
“Of course not,” Mindy assured them. “This is a new dress. I’m not getting blood on it.”
“I think you might have to,” Randy apologised. “We need to get this girl to the medical bay fast.”
“Oh alright,” Mindy Pyrite agreed, “but only if you tell Ultizon that I was cruelly toying with you before slaughtering you all. If he asks.”
“Deal.”

***


It’s a little known fact that towns and cities can declare war quite unilaterally of their national governments. The sea port of Hull, England, has been officially at war with Russia since the Crimean conflict over a hundred years ago. This antique quirk of international law has become something of an absurdity in the modern era of the UN and NATO; until every town and city in the US declared war on France at the behest of their Omni-Mayor
While the American state department was having a collective coronary and every civil servant and federal employee in the Northern hemisphere was trying to get through to presidential advisor Herbert P. Garrick, the French surprised everyone by not surrendering. Instead they formed a committee. To discuss surrendering.
At the same time, the US invasionary force of spiffy, Banjoooo, Caveguy, Hacker 9, and Dancer’s little sister arrived by Seahawk helicopter at the south coast French resort of Sur La Plume De Ma Tante and took a taxi up to the Hotel Resplendente.
“Hi!” Kerry Shepherdson called out to the supercilious concierge behind the reception desk. “We’re looking for your boss, a big overmuscled baddie type called the Bone?”
One panic button later and everybody was kung-fu fighting.
“Hasn’t she ever heard of subtly and diplomacy?” demanded Banjooooo, King of the Sea monkeys, as he assumed his full ninety-foot height to kick the combat mercenaries that surrounded him through the ballroom wall.
“Yeah,” answered spiffy, breaking up the floor to reveal the secret minion training base beneath the resort. “I think she set fire to them once.”
“Hooga!” shouted Caveguy, then dropped down into the special weapons training area and laid about him with his club.
“Okay, H9,” spiffy called over to the refugee Technopolitan science villain. “The way’s clear to their computer banks. Do stuff.”
“On it,” Hacker Nine agreed. The young man figured this was a surefire way to win brownie points with his probation officer. Hey, hadn’t the Mayor of Gothametropolis said as much when he told him it was okay to escape from his maximum security cell at the Safe?
There were some complicated security interlocks on the system, so it took him half a minute to get at the information he needed. “Got it, boss,” he called.
spiffy looked over his shoulder to see who was being hailed. “Oh. Me. Right.” He ferned his nearby opponents into the wall, noted that there was still no sign of the Bone yet, and came over to check what was on the datascreen. “Is that it?”
“Secret files linking this operation to lots of others. Dossier on dossier. Something called Prophetic Genesis. The Saint Process. Westminster Necropolis Company. Superhero death camps. Oceania Salvage Operation. Skunk Exchange Programme. ITC Shareholder List. Bautista Assassination. SHAG. HERPES. Zoxxon Oil. New Tomorrow Industries. Yurt Replication Research. Order of Order. Society of Sinister Oriental Stereotypes. It just goes on and on.”
“We don’t have time for that,” spiffy said hurriedly. Already he could feel the lethargy coming over him as the nanobots in his system started to shut him down. He was far too close to the truth. “Do a file search for something called the Shadow Cabinet, and somebody called Exemplary.”
Hacker Nine’s fingers flicked over the keyboard. “That’s throwing up a lot of red flags,” he warned. “I think we’ve been made.”
“Hey, spiff-guy. Getting a little overwhelmed by goons over here,” Kerry Shepherdson warned.
“Keep going,” the fern-wielder told Hacker Nine. “I need a lead. A contact address. An e-mail account, dammit.” He flicked his mobile phone open and dialled it with fingers that didn’t want to respond.
“Here,” H9 pointed, breaking through a final set of firewalls. “That’s where Exemplary lives and works!”
“Commissioner Graham, are you there?” spiffy called into his phone.
“Go ahead,” the policeman barked.
Mark Hopkins slurred out the information on the screen, managing to get all the way to the end before the nanites infesting his body shut him down as they had his comrades.
“On it,” Graham promised; but none of the heroes was awake to hear it.
And a moment later the mobile phone was crushed under the Bone’s massive boot. “Well well,” the man who had killed spiffy’s father declared, looking down at the fallen fern-wielder. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

***


dull thud was having a bad day too. The super-intelligent adamantine robot killing machine called Ultizon has just taken the world record for flattening the Lair Legion, slicing the time down to a mere forty-seven seconds, and he was about to prevent anyone spoiling his time by unfairly ripping the heads off the fallen heroes.
Except thud, who had put his power to teleport vertically upwards to good advantage and had zapped himself into Ziles’ bedroom. “Ow!” he complained as the anti-personnel traps went off. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
From below came the sounds of Ultizon taking down Pegasus, the last Legionnaire standing. Even Cressida, the psionic tapeworm that dwelled in thud’s stomach, had been felled by a brain-frequency specific overload pulse. thuddy’s first instinct was to head for the hills. Once he could detach himself from the sophisticated restraints Ziles kept around her bed. dull thud assumed they were for defensive purposes.
Another teleport took him to the attics of the Lair Mansion. From here he could leap out of a window and allow his secondary ability to fall any distance without harm to save him. Then he could run for his life…
…and leave the Lair Legion to die. dull thud sighed. He’d warned Cressida there would be days like these. Well, maybe not specifically like this day, but similar. He wasn’t happy to be able to say “I told you so.”
He said it anyway as he pelted down the stairs, noting with relief that Flapjack and Lisette were only stunned in the hallways. Ultizon wanted to keep someone alive to gloat at before crushing them slowly and painfully. As he raced, thud was trying to formulate a plan that could take down an indestructible killer death machine.
“Lessee… Tricky dealt wi’ yon Onslaughter by luring him into the cellars and getting him eaten by an Elder Beastie. Got eaten himself, o’ course. And I’m not sure I remember the way to the cellars. But otherwise…”
And then he was at the door to the Lair Meeting Hall and he had no more time to plan.
“Oi!” he shouted down to Ultizon as he kicked the door in. “Yuir mother was a washing machine, an fer tuppence she’d do the spin cycle for anybody!”
Ultizon vaporised the wall and a good portion of the hall where thud had lately been standing. “Short-range vertical teleport capabilities,” the robot reminded himself. “Classified as irritating but harmless. Still, logical to kill him now before the worm wakes up.” One spring on powerful hydraulic legs brought Ultizon up into the house. Behind him a swarm of domestic microrobots closed on the fallen Legion under orders to dismantle them.
Ultizon calculated exactly where it was most likely that thud would have teleported, and fired an annihilation blast vertically upwards until it blew out the roof of the Lair Mansion. “Glad I don’t have to clean this place up any more,” the part of Ultizon that had been EDWIN quipped.
The odds said that dull thud was dead. There was no chance of his moving fast enough from his teleport to have got out of the radius of the blast. It was just a shame for the robot that thuddy hadn’t teleported. Instead he wriggled out of the laundry chute on the floor below and raced towards the fallen heroes.
The microbots swarmed towards the Lair Legion and were already starting to pick at Fin Fang Foom and Pegasus.
“Hold it!” dull thud told them. “Dinnae make that mess in here. Yui’ll only have to clean it up. Take them to the laboratory and dismantle them there.”
That seemed sensible to the subverted domestic nanobots. They swarmed under the Legion and began to shift them along as suggested. They didn’t attack thud. They’d only been told to take apart Legionairres.
“Let me help,” thuddy suggested to them. “Here, I’ll carry this one. The Probability Dancer.”

***


The operating room was white and sterile. The table was surrounded with robot arms, waldoes holding various advanced tools for cutting and restitching not just flesh but DNA as well. De Brown Streak lay amidst the technology and congratulated himself on not screaming.
“Aaaah!” he screamed as a gnome climbed onto the operating table to look at him.
“Hi,” Indiana Gnome said to him. “You don’t know me, but I’m here to kind of be your conscience.”
“Aren’t you rather big to be Jiminy Cricket, man?” DBS observed. “Hey, look, when I winced my legs moved! Hel Rotwang wasn’t kidding that they could restore the mutant traits that Normaliser Gun wiped from me.”
“Yeah, she’s a peach. She just dropped me and my friends into a disintegrator chamber. From what we’ve seen she’s got your friend, the scruffy guy with the guitar, locked in a holding cell downstairs. So we figured we’d see if you wanted to join the big bust out. We have the ducts.”
Josh Clement could see two more unusual figures crowded at the open grille in the ventilation system above. “Humans have very interesting accessories, don’t they?” Glitch noted with fascination.
“I try not to think about it,” answered Gunther the gargoyle. “Indy, are you going to be much longer? If these Citizens of Cybernation weren’t such body perfectionists that they don’t want to get dirty in these duct tunnels we’d already be toast. Or in my case gravel. Either get the petulant mutate to join us or get back here and let’s vacate the premises.”
“I’m not petulant,” sulked DBS. “And I’m not coming with you.”
“What?” Glitch argued. “You can’t really buy into that cyborgs are better crap. I’ve been hearing this kind of mechanist nonsense all my life. Everybody is fine the way they are. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being human.” She looked again at DBS’ nude body on the trolley. “Nothing at all.”
“Hey look, Hel Rotwang’s got a lot goin’ on here,” Josh Clement answered. “She explained it all to me, about the coming supremacy of the machines and stuff. She’s made me an offer she knew I couldn’t refuse, and now I’ve got to do my bit. Just get on out of here and keep going. Specially the little robot girl, okay.”
“You’re going to join the Citizens of Cybernation then?” Indy frowned.
“I’m going to give them a special thank you for their efforts,” answered De Brown Streak.
***


The NORAD Defence Headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain were already crippled by the loss of key computer systems, the automated perimeters down, a hundred billions dollars of technology useless. But there were too many safeguards and back ups for the whole mountain to fall to any single intrusive viral intelligence quickly, and so the mountain had to be destroyed.
Looming over the Cheyenne base was the vast SPUD helicarrier, the largest mobile warcraft ever built on the planet. It carried enough ordinance to flatten a country. A mountain – even this one – wouldn’t give it too much problem.
Not a man or woman aboard the helicarrier was conscious to prevent it. Dan Drury, head of SPUD, lay sprawled on his own command deck, victim of the nanobots that had infected him and every member of his crew. The helicarrier cycled its weapons to maximum and oriented on the base below.
The Knightjet came from nowhere, dropping its stealth shielding at the last moment as it impacted head on with the helicarrier and disappeared into the guts of the great flying fortress.
“Ouch!” screamed Falcon as the Dark Knight piloted his ship though the internal bulkheads of the remote controlled carrier. “How tough is this jet thing anyway?”
“As tough as it needs to be,” DK told him grimly, peeling off a pair of air to surface missiles to clear the way to the lower decks where the power units were.
A row of warning LEDs and an urgent bleeping warned him of journey’s end. “Uh oh. Prepare to bail.”
Falcon looked up in alarm. “Bail? What do you mean, bail?”
“I mean that whatever machine-controlling intelligence has taken command of the helicarrier has finally figured out how to crack the Knightjet systems and is a few seconds away from taking control. So the Jet’s gone into pre-programmed self-destruct mode.”
“You told it to do that?”
“Better dead than compromised.”
There was a crunch as another thick steel bulkhead crumpled around the sleek black assault craft.
“How are we getting out of here?” Falcon demanded. “We’re still doing damn near MACH 1.”
“There’s the ejector hatch,” DK pointed. “As for the rest, I heard that one of us could fly.”
With a quick profanity, Falcon grabbed the Dark Knight by the collar and hurled himself at the emergency exit. Three thousand hours of aerial combat time allowed him to twist through it and avoid the rapidly-oncoming helicarrier girderwork without leaving any limbs behind. Just.
“Competently done,” Dark Knight admitted. “Now ditch the flying harness and get me to the engine deck.”
“My wings? Why?”
“They’re mechanical, aren’t they? Do you really want to go for an unauthorised one way flight into a reactor or somewhere?”
Falcon swore again and shed his flight and combat harness. “This way,” he scowled. “One floor down.”
“Hurry up,” DK told him. “We have to shut the engines down so the emergency systems give the carrier a soft landing. And we have to do it before whatever’s controlling the machinery starts working on the nano-robots that are infesting us.”
“The what?”
“No time,” DK urged him. “We’re on the clock here if we don’t want Cheyenne Mountain to become Cheyenne Lake.”
The SPUD helicarrier wobbled and drifted to a gentle halt and leaned against the side of the defence installation before Ultizon shut DK and Falcon down in turn.

***


At about the time the SPUD carrier settled on its side on Cheyenne Mountain, in Upstate Gothametropolis a quiet deserted business park was rocked by a runaway petrol tanker exploding as it hit the compound security shack.
“That should give them something to look at,” Messenger muttered as far more guards than seemed plausible for an empty warehouse complex swarmed about in the aftermath. “Come on.”
ManMan had unsealed the security grille by the simple expedient of carving through it with Knifey, and now he led the way into the ductwork maze that led into Prophetic Genesis II, one of the more secret of the secret operations that never found their way onto anything like a list of government spending.
“This could all still be a big trap,” Joe Pepper pointed out as they crawled through the network. “I mean, how did we just know to come here, and how to find the back entrance, and how to defuse all the traps?”
“Because you’ve been weird ever since you started speaking in tongues back in Paradopolis,” Knifey told him. “But I’m starting to get an inkling of what’s really going on, and I think you’d better do as the voice says.”
“It was bad enough when my knife started talking to me,” ManMan worried. “Now my larynx is speaking to me too. Go left, ManMan. See? Damn, this is spooky.”
“And noisy,” complained Messenger. “Don’t you two ever shut up? Detach that sensor node and type in 3-1-9-7. Damn, now I’m doing it.”
“Why don’t you just ask the voice who it is?” Knifey suggested. “One knock for yes, two knocks for no.”
“About time somebody thought of that,” ManMan’s throat answered. “I’m Fleabot, of course. I was hiding on Visionary when he was captured, then I hopped off and hacked into the bad guys control centre.”
“Fleabot the micro-robot?” Messenger remembered. “How can you be controlling my voice?”
“Because you’re both infected with about twelve billion nano-robots designed to take over your bodies on command, and I’m using them to send messages to you on how to get here and rescue us,” Messenger answered himself testily.
“So that’s how he did it,” Knifey whistled, remembering ManMan’s encounter with Exemplary and his subsequent amazing healing and loss of memory. Nanites that sophisticated could do it, and it explained how Exemplary could monitor Joe afterwards and make good on his threat to give ManMan and Stacy Gwen fatal embolisms if Knifey talked about the encounter.
Do what?” ManMan asked, before adding in worried tones, “Uh oh. I think I’ve been spotted. I think he’s noticed where I am. I think…. Aaarrrrgggghhh… Zzzzzzzztttt!”
Messenger and ManMan twitched once and the voice guiding them fell silent.
“So which way now?” Knifey wondered.
“Without a guide there’s only one way,” Messenger suggested. “The hard way.” And he kicked his way out of the service duct into the detention block and came out shooting.
“Great,” sighed ManMan, leaping out to join him.
The Prophetic Genesis guards were just getting ready to carry out Exemplary’s orders to do permanently unpleasant things to Yo, and weren’t expecting extra company. While they were distracted Yo slipped free of his/her bonds and clobbered a couple from behind.
“Yo is to be being very pleased to see you,” the pure thought being admitted. “Yo was starting to be getting scared.”
“There are rather a lot of guards still around,” ManMan worried. “We need to find Visionary and Fleabot and get out of here.”
The running battle took them to the main lab where Dr Sethbridge was just inputting the Omega Codes into a sinister-looking insectoid head that was packed with sophisticated circuitry.
“Hold it!” Messenger snarled, launching a razor letter at Sethbridge’s throat.
Exemplary caught it.
“I think not,” he sneered at the intruders. “You’re a little too late. Sleep now.”
As the nanobot overrides shut down their higher brain functions, Messenger, Yo, and ManMan had just enough time to see Visionary laid out on the dissection slab. His head and body were carved back, his major organs dragged out across the workbenches to retrieve the vital components from within. Ribbons of wiring were dragged from deep inside his wrecked form, and his brain was hollowed out and laid in tiny silicon fragments across the lab.
The fake man was no more.

***


“We have to do something, or they’ll all be dead,” Ziles said as she watched the Lair Legion being dragged away on the computer centre monitor screens.
“Right,” agreed Al B. Harper from inside the mainframe.
“dull thud can’t keep those drones baffled forever, despite his ability to confuse the hell out of everyone. It’s just a good job they know he’s not a member of the Legion himself.”
“Right,” Al muttered.
“And its only a matter of time before Ultizon stops playing with his new planetary-computer network toy and focuses back on us to finish his job of de-Legioning the planet,”
“Right.”
Ziles lost patience with the scientist who didn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation. “So do you think you could stop fixing the enemy and start doing something useful?” she demanded. “Like shutting down the house servo-drones?”
“Can’t,” Al B told her. “If we try and sabotage anything he’ll notice us and wipe us out.”
“Well we have to do something!” Ziles objected. “Don’t you care that that thing’s just taken over the planet?”
Al B. Harper wriggled himself out of the mainframe pedestal. Ziles saw his expression and took a step back. “Care?” he hissed wrathfully. “Of course I bloody well care! The bozos who set up this Ulitzon plot murdered a good friend of mine. Then they fiddled with my mind and my fiancée’s mind to make us forget about it, to lumber us with ten years of guilt and regret that we didn’t deserve just to cover their backs. Then they used technology I helped work on to create some uber-robot that can take over the damned world and kill more of my friends. So that’s a Yes. I care.”
“Just checking,” Ziles agreed quickly. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“Antivirus software,” Al B growled. “This thing has an edge because it knows all our systems inside out, better than us. It’s had time to use our systems to infiltrate everywhere else. So we need a way of purging him from our systems, fighting him on our terms not his.”
“He’s an indestructible admantine robot.”
“Yeah. But on the inside he’s a jumped-up video game, cobbled together out of bits of code from all kind of other places. He’s the Windows Millennium Edition, with so many add-ons and bells and whistles that there’s got to be glitches to exploit. So I figure what we’ve got to do to stop him…” Al B. rammed a final memory card home into the machine, “…is reboot the earlier, sturdier version.”
There was an electronic crackle and the glowing green framework hologram of HALLIE appeared.
“Don’t shut down again!” Al B. called out quickly. “We know who you are now. Who you were. We know about the trauma. We know who did it, and why. Check the data tapes for the Meeting Room for the last hour or so. Check EDWIN’s back-up memory dump. Remember who you are and what they did to you. And remember that, girl or AI, you’re not the kind of person who just folds when the going gets tough, or who backs down from a fight.”
HALLIE’s eyes became distant as she raced through electronic pathways to get up to date. Then they became very, very focussed. “Do you know,” she said. “I do believe you’re right.”

***


Beth Shellett was getting worried. It was well over twenty-four hours since De Brown Streak had left her to dispose of her bugged clothing. She’d long since run through all the possible scenarios of what might have happened to him, or when the same might happen to her. She’d paced the corridors of the hidden Colorado base of the late mutant villain Magnetic Techbird and wrestled with whether to call her father. But Don Graham had got her away to keep her safe from some threat that could get to her through the normal methods of protection. Maybe the phones weren’t safe.
Then the telephone rang.
Beth started and stared at the device. Her heart pounded. Had they found her at last?
With trembling hands she lifted the receiver. “Yes?”
“Beth, it’s me, Josh.”
“Joshua! Where have you been? I was…”
“Never mind that, time’s short. Just do as I tell you fast, okay? Go to the big keyboard over in the operations room. Found it? Great. Now pull the red lever on the left marked Do Not Pull Under Any Circumstances.”
“Josh?”
“Do it. It’s important. Now type in the code I-L-O-V-E-H-O-T-B-A-B-E-S. Hey, it isn’t my secret code, okay. Not, um, that I have anything at all against hot babes. Well, actually I kind of like having stuff against hot babes, but…”
“Josh, what am I doing?”
“Saving the world, maybe,” De Brown Streak told her. “Short version: I’m in some funky secret base where they’re planning to take over everybody on the planet using itty bitty molecule-sized robots to run our bodies. Not my idea of fun. Now hit the key marked Magnetic Discharge.”
“Josh… all the lights are dimming and there’s a humming sound.”
“Great. Now hang the phone up, hit last caller redial, drop it next to the console, and run like hell.”
Beth Shellett obeyed and fled.

***


“Josh, what are you doing?” Hel Rotwang demanded. “It’s too soon after your mutate regeneration treatment for you to be out of bed.”
“Sorry babe, but I’m checking out,” De Brown Streak told her. “I’ve decided against the cyborgs thing, and I’ll just stick with the weird speed powers, thanks. There’s a serious downside to all that metal.”
Deus Et Machina frowned as the metal room around her squealed and began to buckle. “What?” she demanded. “What is this?”
“It’s called magnetism,” De Brown Streak told her. “And not the kind I radiate. This is the last stored vintage of an old ally of mine. Directed, focussed, magnetism, working on everything metallic in a two mile radius.”
The first doorframe flew from its hinges and tumbled towards the telephone.
“You ungrateful sqwaaaaaaaak!” Hel Rotwang screamed as she lost control of her motor functions.
“Oh, and it plays merry hell with computer databanks. Yours and any systems worldwide you happen to be connected to.”
Deus Et Machina watched in horror as her hands began to crumple.
“Guess the world conquest will have to be postponed for a little while,” DBS told her. “Look, it’s been a blast, but I can’t keep dodging all this metal shrapnel in my weakened state, so I’ll just grab my pal Chronic and say goodbye. Call me sometime when you’ve degaussed yourself.”
And behind DBS and Chronic, the Community of Cybernation folded itself up like tinfoil as the Magnetic Techbird saved the day one last time.

***


But they didn’t save the world. Half a continent away, Ultizon hissed with disapproval as he felt the world-net he controlled waver and collapse. Catastrophic systems crashes cascaded around the planet, carving chunks out of his power base before he had even had a proper chance to play with it.
“Heroes!” hissed the archrobot. “I shall personally stamp them into a gooey organic smear, every last, fleshy one of them.”
“Is that right, mecha-boy?” HALLIE demanded, flickering into hologramatic life beside him in the ruined hall of the Lair Mansion. “What about trying a round with me, pixel to pixel?”
Ultizon looked at the AI with contempt. “Last years’ model?” he sneered.
“I prefer the term classic,” HALLIE told him. Then, because there was only one entity in the world who understood the Lair Mansion computer systems better than EDWIN had, she ripped him from his body into a struggle of wills inside the complex damaged systems of the Legion mainframe.
Devoid of higher command functions, Ultizon’s body reverted to type. “Kill!” it droned, and focussed on the nearest lifeform to annihilate.
That would be Dancer, who leaped from the top of the stairs and planted a kick that toppled the robot back down into the training area below. “Oh, I think your killing days are over,” she told it. “We’re confiscating your triple-A’s.”
“Kill,” Ultizon squawked, firing a lethal lightning blast at where the lithe girl had been a second earlier.
“And by we, she means the whole LL,” Trickshot explained, timing his shot perfectly to jam shut Ultizon’s left palm blaster so the charge disrupted inside the machine. “’Cause improbably all those nano-thingies stopped keepin’ us down and started fixing us up, due to some weird random computer screw up.”
“Probably that millennium bug,” Goldeneyed suggested, teleporting a chunk of girder inside the robot since he couldn’t teleport parts of Ultizon away.
“Nah, we haven’t seen him for years,” CSFB! noted nostalgically. “But don’t let that stop us from giving you a spanking, Ulty!” The autopilot robot couldn’t cope with the confusing influx of combat candy.
“Keep him off balance,” Hatman called out, torpedoing into the villain to send it sprawling once again. “And get it outside.”
That gave Pegasus time to build up a really potent cosmic blast. “Stand clear!” she warned as she blew the robot backwards like a shattered marionette.
Once Ultizon was outside the house, dragging himself from a two hundred foot long furrow, Fin Fang Foom could assume his full draconic size. “EDWIN,” he said as he breathed nuclear flame over the killing machine. “You’re fired.”
Sorceress gathered her will and prevented the heat dissipating from the cherry-red hot robot.
Ziles rushed forward and sprinkled a bag of gold dust over the robot. It immediately melted to molten droplets. “Now!” she called.
~~Oh, I hate these conceptual transmutations~~ Cressida complained as Sorceress withdrew her will. The wonder worm concentrated into changing gold to cold, bringing Ultizon’s shell temperature down by three thousand degrees in less than a second.
And Dancer kicked him again. There was a loud snap as the automatic systems physically broke, and suddenly the indestructible robot toppled to the ground with no guidance or will.
“Wow, you sure showed those humans,” HALLIE told Ultizon as they struggled through the ruptured architecture of a thousand computer systems.
“Once I’ve finished you I can return to my shell and destroy them all,” the archrobot boasted.
“Yeah. Just one problem,” HALLIE told him. “The destroying me part.” She turned round and gave him a swift kick to the bytes. “You see, we’re both based on human engrams deep inside. I was Helen MacAllistair, you were some sad old supervillain. And for all this pro-robot rubbish it really comes down to this.”
And HALLIE gripped Ultizon by the throat and squeezed. “Artificial or not, it comes down to personality, and intelligence, and willpower. And it comes down to which of us has more of it. And do you know what the answer is, little program?”
She kept on squeezing until Ultizon crashed across the entire world wide web.

***


Fin Fang Foom stared down at the inert shell of the most lethal robot on the planet. “Right, I want that thing contained. I want it surrounded by concrete and locked in an electromagnetic cage and that’s just for starters until I can think of some proper ways of restraining it.”
Ziles nodded. “We need medical teams here too,” she told Goldeneyed. “A trauma team for Amy, and somebody to figure out why Nats is catatonic.”
“The psychostave,” Pegasus warned them. “It was an ancient containment device of a powerful psionic force, and now that force has been released.”
“Into Nats,” Sorceress shuddered. “I can feel it in there.”
“And I want some immediate comms stuff back up,” Finny barked. “I need to know what’s happening out in the world. Where are DK and Falcon and ManMan and the rest?”
“Oh, and well done everybody,” Dancer prompted him.
“Oh, and well done,” the dragon reluctantly admitted.
“Yes,” Exemplary told them. “Jolly well done. Now sleep.”
“Oh no!” CSFB! objected as he toppled over with his comrades. “Not again!”
Exemplary surveyed the fallen Legion with a grim satisfaction. Then he walked across to the inert Ultizon and calmly pulled its head off. From his satchel he took out an ancient black skull in the shape of some alien insect. It was buzzing to itself, its eyes alive with intelligence. The Black Head fitted perfectly onto Ultizon’s inert body.
“You all played your parts beautifully,” Exemplary assured the Legion. “Better than we could have hoped, even. But now the Robot God has truly returned. Welcome back, Ultimate Ultizon. Control of the world is now yours.”
The robot god, the Thinking Machine made manifest, rose from the ground and surveyed his new domain. “Why thank you,” he replied. “I have a lot to do.”

Next Time: Ultizon Triumphant.

***


Footnotes:

The Fall of the Fairly Great Old Ones: When the Parodyverse was new, it attracted a parasitical infestation of nonhuman elder beasties, gods to some, who came in all their Lovecraftian sliminess from elsewhere ™ and basically took over. This story details how the previously documented overthrow of the Fairly Great Old Ones (FOOG) was achieved, with the Celestian Space Robots unleashing the Thinking Machine that released the race that would become humans from their mental slavery, and gave the Shoggoth servitor race free will to rebel against their masters. “When the stars are right” is a metaphor for saying “when the laws of physics get bent into other rules than they are now”, because the FOOG can’t really properly exist in the timespace continuum as we know and rather like it. Since the Parodyverse is basically whatever the majority of people believe it is, the Thinking Machine simply arranged for everybody to believe that the FOOG were gone and the multiverse operated under different physical laws. Then the Shoggoths smacked the FOOG down, as depicted here. New information presented in this story suggests that the Thinking Machine was unleashed for the Celestians by the first of the Celestial College of Messengers, an angelic race, and that having once become entangled with earthly affairs they were destined to keep on interacting until they were all fallen and destroyed.

Invading France was once almost the Parodyverse national sport, but seems to have gone out of fashion lately. Evil spiffy conquered it, Membrain decimated it, and it was nuked at least three times. The Lair Legion discovered during their world tour that a demonic pact by the French Tourist Board kept bringing the country back. spiffy’s invasion force here consists of his long time allies, the King of the Sea Monkeys and retired Legionairre Banjoooo, and the Lord of the Savage Park, Caveguy, along with his new friend, the troublemaking Kerry Shepherdson, who has no powers except an affinity for kerosene. Hacker Nine is a young Technopolitan urban anarchist, possibly the only known science villain who isn’t a raving psycho-killer, and he has a genius for breaking into computer systems. The Bone is a big muscly senior mercenary, introduced in the Journals of Sir Mumphrey Wilton Extract Twenty, Correspondence from Ms Asil Ashling to the great and noble Visionary: In which Mumphrey’s amanuensis finds spiffy but loses his eyebrows, the barbarous Bone sends in the clones, and the Abandoned Legion is deported from Iceland as the man who killed spiffy’s adoptive father back when Mark Hopkins was a lad.

Secret files on the Bone’s computer refer to a range of nasty or mysterious things that have happened or are happening. Prophetic Genesis was a major covert government plot centred against Messenger. Saint is an operative for an unidentified secret agency, and gained his abilities through an unexplained accident. The Westminster Necropolis Company is London’s largest and oldest undertaking firm, the former secret power base of Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity, and specialises in questioning people even after they are dead. Superhero death camps were run by another covert government agency, with the assistance of the nefarious Disco Hitler. Oceania was the one-time Antarctic power base and would-be world domination centre of the Scourge of the BZL. The Skunk are an alien race of shapeshifters. ITC is the Interdimensional Transportation Company, which employs Nats and Miss Framlicker. Jaime (NTU-150) Bautista’s parents died in an apparent car accident at the start of the modern heroic age, leaving their fortune and business empire to their inexperienced and unprepared son. SHAG is a covert organisation dedicated to the breeding of superheroes. HERPES is an international terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of freedom. Zoxxon Oil is a wicked multinational corporation dedicated to profit and power. New Tomorrow Industries is a ruthless research company dedicated to servicing the needs of the modern world conqueror. The Yurt is the unstoppable and insanely strong gamma-irradiated product of an accident involving a peasant worker and a traditional Russian hut. The Order of Order are the earthly emissaries of a fundamental principle, the traditional enemies of the CraxySugarFreakHeroes!. Their current leader, the Word, is not publicly known to be Gideon Book, CSFB!’s apparent mentor. The Society of Sinister Oriental Stereotypes is a coalition of, well, sinister oriental stereotypes. All clear now?

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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