In the space over an electronics store in downtown Nebula City, the woman known as Rhyme crouched over a child’s crystal radio set. A Gordian jumble of wires connected it to a Frankensteinian agglomeration made out of a home computer from the 1980s, a cutting-edge smart phone, an ancient microwave oven complete with an analog timer, and a 90s-era handheld game system.
It was an insane patchwork of a communication device… designed appropriately enough… for communication between the insane woman and a fleet of patchwork devices.
She spoke into a novelty karaoke microphone patched into the handheld system.
“Test? Test? Is this thing on? Check one, two… sibilance. Sibilance,” she said, the assemblage translating her words into an alien language, converting them to trinary tones, and then encoding that into discrete capsules for broadcast. “I know you little gear gnomes use this block of airwaves for short-range packet data, so I’m going to take a moment to point out how stupid you all are. If you ever want another chance to phone home, you’re going to have to make it happen. You spend all your time stealing technology when you could be stealing technologists… there are only a handful of people capable of making the breakthroughs you’re waiting for, and right now, none of them are working in the area of interstellar portals.”
For the next bit, she picked up the computer keyboard and started hitting keys. This was the tricky bit… the substance she was describing was impossible according to the laws of chemistry, but the probes wouldn’t be able to make any sense of her alchemical formulae. They were, however, perfectly capable of following directions if she broke it down into small enough steps.
Her message concluded, Rhyme turned the dial on the microwave up as far as it would go and took her leave of the cluttered apartment. She had been sprung from her tedious confinement in Dunwich Asylum for a purpose, and now she would have to pay the piper, but that little project wouldn’t take too terribly long, and then she could get back to pursuing her own agenda… whatever that ended up being, this time around.
She could always try to kill her cousin or half-sisters again, but that was getting boring. On the other hand, it had been ages since she’d driven an entire city mad… but maybe that was still thinking too small. There was a little idea she’d been kicking around for a while, a little side project she’d started and then abandoned… could it be time to dust it off and put it into operation? Possibly, she decided.
She wondered if it would be considered terribly gauche of her to destroy the world immediately after helping somebody else conquer it. Probably… but caveat emptor, after all. There was only an outside chance that the silly little puppet scheme would work, anyway.
Meanwhile, the sound of the explosion behind her meant that her device had destroyed itself without a trace. She was confident that nobody except the intended recipients would be able to decipher her message. Only two people had ever cracked the portalien language and communication protocols before, and they had been working together… the wisest woman and the smartest man, and Rhyme was the true heiress to both of their gifts.
Even on the off chance that their work survived and her little one-way conversation had been overheard by some 4B listening station or those grasping fools at DELPHI, it would do nothing more than leave them scratching their heads at her latest act of irrationality.
The list of people hypothetically capable of reproducing the portal tech was indeed very short, and it consisted almost entirely of double Darkwells like Rhyme herself… in essence, she had just painted a bullseye on her own head.
The bulk of the sliding security door on Rhyme’s cell fell inward, leaving the rest standing like a doorframe within the doorframe. All along the edges, the last traces of her impossible acid hissed away into inert components as it reacted with the air.
Rhyme stood with her hands behind her back, looking down at the little robots armed with pressure-driven plastic squirt guns. She wondered how many generations they’d gone through before they figured out that the concoction she’d detailed would eat through anything but plastic.
“Finally,” she said. “What took you hosers so long?” She laughed. “Get it? ‘Hosers’? Because you squirt liquid? Ah, forget it. It isn’t funny if I have to explain it and the audience has no sense of humor.”
The probes had ushered Rhyme away after commandeering a van from Dunwich Asylum’s own fleet. It was equipped with a GPS tracking system, but that device became the brain of a “newborn” portalien minion long before it had a chance to reveal where the rogue robots were taking their prize.
The van, its interior now thoroughly remade and integrated with the probes’ networked intelligence, pulled up outside an automated waste treatment facility on the edge of Nebula City, and the woman called Rhyme was ushered inside, into a warehouse-sized space bristling with the toy-like artificial beings in every shape and size.
“So… you little misandroids took my suggestion… and predictably enough, you’ve started with the most brilliant mind that happened to be confined to a forty-two square foot area in the immediate vicinity of one of your major centers of operations,” Rhyme said, looking down upon the masses from the catwalk. “A judicious application of Rhyme’s Nigh-Unto-Universal Solvent to defeat the clinic’s security measures, and now here I am, standing before you in all my glory. It’s really a brilliant plan: phase one, kidnap a super-scientist… phase three, get them to open a portal to your homeworld. Can you spot the one teeny, tiny little flaw in it?”
The mass of bots stared up at her with a variety of unblinking “eyes” as her captors crowded in closer around her. None of them gave the slightest sign that they understood or cared about her words.
“You forgot phase two,” she said. With one foot, she kicked the watergun “head” off of an acid-spewing bot and caught the weapon. It was already pumped and primed, and she spun around and sprayed it downwards in a semicircle around her. The probes who’d had her boxed in were bisected by the stream of hissing liquid, and the section of catwalk they all stood on groaned and lurched under their combined weight.
Rhyme sprang lightly from the damaged platform a moment before it went tumbling down into the robotic throng below, taking the badly damaged bots and their own reservoirs of acid with it. She didn’t have time to stick around and savor the resulting destruction, though. As the saying went, she might have been crazy but she wasn’t stupid… she knew when she was outnumbered.
It took a moment for the mass of probes to react… not because they were slow to process but because they had not planned for this contingency and it took them some time to calculate a response and then coordinate it among the networked throng. The plan they conceived, as it happened, was exceedingly simple: pursue. Getting several hundred robots with locomotion provided by disparately sized legs, wheels, treads, and jets up to ground level from the pit-like room and out through the few unsealed doors was another matter altogether.
Despite her captivity, Rhyme was in peak physical shape… her regenerating body couldn’t help being anything but perfect. By the time the ‘taliens began streaming out after her, she had reached the fence at the perimeter of the facility. The co-opted van’s lights turned on and it rumbled to life, a pair of webcams on its dashboard keeping it after her. Rhyme knew that she need not fear permanent harm from a collision, but she knew that the amorphous mind directing the pursuit would know that as well. A direct hit at speed would immobilize her long enough for the bots to gather her up.
As the van gained speed, she spun around, skidding to a stop facing it.
“We who are about to dive salute you!” she barked at the oncoming vehicle, then fell on her face between the front wheels.
The van veered wildly from side to side, trying to pulp her body with its rear tires, but there was no impact. It wheeled around, shining its headlights on the area in which Rhyme had gone under it, but she was nowhere to be seen.
The van was, of course, an ordinary vehicle with robotics grafted to it. Lacking the sensory capabilities of even the simplest living things, it knew only what engine information was contained in its onboard computer and what its artificial brain could glean from the cameras and the network link.
It could not feel the supervillain clinging to its underside.
As one of the fastest and least obtrusive of the constructs, the van was sent out in a wide circle to try to catch the twice-escaped prisoner while the rest of the probes stayed close to ground zero, in order to not attract unwanted attention to their lair. They understood the consequences of sticking their makeshift heads up above the ground anywhere, especially in Nebula City.
It was no trouble at all for Rhyme to ditch her ride once they were too far for smaller, more agile bots to spot her or come to its aid. She simply let go, rolled into a ditch, and ran up the other side. She tried to taunt the big dumb thing, but deaf and lacking sadly in peripheral vision, it didn’t even try to give chase.
To make up for the missed opportunity for gloating, she took the time to rebuild her communications array.
“Word to the wise!” she said in her next broadcast to the little bots. “The next time you kidnap a great big brain, pick somebody who has something to lose… make sure it’s somebody you can actually apply some kind of leverage to!”
Most people would have questioned the wisdom of giving practical advice to a bunch of earth-conquering automata, but as far as Rhyme was concerned, the earth didn’t deserve the reprieve it had been given the last time the portaliens had invaded. She wasn’t about to turn the humanity over to the alien conquerors… they shared responsibility for her father’s death, after all… but she tried to look on the bright side.
If there was another portal war, the two races just might destroy each other. It was a bit of a long shot, especially considering that Rhyme intended to destroy the world long before that.
On the subject of long shots, though, old business came before new. While her Get Out Of Bedlam Free card had paid off, it had only been a freak one-in-a-million occurrence that had put her back in Dunwich in the first place. In order to make sure that same one-in-a-million occurrence didn’t happen again, she would have to take care of the woman who had brought it about.
“Officer Karen Seven,” Rhyme said, to her very good friend nobody in particular, “this is so not your lucky day.”
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