Subject: “Mister Monocle”
Known Abilities: technological, damaging artificial optics.
Physical Characteristics: Ht__5”7___ Wt__200lbs___
Identity: Known Unknown
If Known: Montay “Monty” Petronia
Affiliations: Italian-American community, New York City. Cadre of Crime
Current Ideological Orientations:
America: Pro [mildly] Anti Unknown
Law/Order: Pro Anti Unknown
Threat/Influence Assessment:
Mister Monocle’s/Petronia’s advances in aggressive / offensive optic technology currently do not pose a threat to the United States government or its interests. This may change if he decides to sell his technology to the Russians or other enemies of the USA.
Petronia has proven to be a surprisingly adept technological persona in his group, though one with delusions of personal grandeur. In coining the name for his group [the ’Cadre of Crime’] that virtually no one but himself will use publicly, or attempting to market the use of his monocle eyebeam technology to the U.S. Military, Petronia displays a willingness to suspend belief in facts with respect to his own abilities and achievements.
Consistent with his background, Petronia appears, like many ‘villains’ in the MH/SAI community, to have been an outsider in the community he was raised in. Displaying significantly high levels of intelligence, his teachers reported noting Petronia consistently was isolated and rejected by his peers due to his inability to effectively hide his intelligence from his academic peergroup from first grade onwards.
In terms of strategy, Petronia likely suffers still from unresolved conflicts in his childhood and adolescence, believing himself to have been withheld from his ‘due’ in terms of social interaction and position among his peers. He likely feels his higher I.Q. and technological achievements leave himself more suited to be leader of his group than Cobb, who by all accounts has a poor-to-nonexistent academic record yet leads the group with no apparent need for official votes or other process. Those like Petronia who see themselves excluded from the mainstream due to intangible forces such as innate leadership abilities often grow frustrated by their inability to reproduce said effects of popularity in their own lives.
Attempts to splinter this group and reduce its effectiveness would most easily succeed by beginning with Petronia, turning him against Cobb by encouraging him to more aggressively seek the leadership position within the group, even as we manipulate subject ‘SNOWMAN’ to usurp Petronia for position of technological master.
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MONTY
I arrived at my desk at the usual time. That is, about five minutes before the start of my shift. Julie had already packed and been ready, as she always was: Sitting primly at the lobby door waiting for me, with her thermos between her knees and a smile on her chubby, bespectacled face.
She was a good child in many ways. Perhaps a bit of an underachiever, if you’d ask me. She looked relatively presentable in a security guard’s uniform. But then everyone did, provided they didn’t tip over 300 pounds, the way Sherman from day-shift did.
She handed off the keys to me with a perfunctory ‘good night,’ and headed out to wherever her car was. I went in, trying not to limp even though my knee was acting up again.
I took a few seconds once I arrived at the desk. The entire factory was in darkness, save for the lone fluorescent light over the security guard desk. I walked ponderously up the three steps and gently placed my large gym bag on the ledge that ran a good dozen feet in a semi-circle around me.
I sighed once, picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. After two rings a familiar voice piped up on the other line.
“Paladin Security,” it said. “Station Forty-Four.”
“Pittstan Manufacturing. Security Officer Montressor Petronia calling in at eleven-fifty-five p.m.”
I’d already dipped my right hand into my now-open bag while holding the phone with my left. Before I’d finished the sentence I’d used the routine I’d availed myself of many times before to scoop out a half-dozen vacuum tubes and arrange them according to the number of electrodes they sported.
“Happy Birthday, Monty.”
“How’d you know?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I just wanted to see how much the nice fellow on the other end of the line actually knew about his own system while I dipped my hand into the bag a second time to extricate my specialized box of tools.
“Eh, it’s that new computer system they got in here. They got them all hooked up to each other- lotta places are doing that now. Mine’s got its fingers in the personnel files. Pops up when it’s your birthday. Along with how many times you’re late.”
He wasn’t a complete fool. But not up to my level. Not that I ever expected him to be. Not to sound snobby, but the last time I’d found someone who actually peaked my interest in terms of intellectual pursuits, we had a cripple in the White House and I was using my right eye as a glorified dentist’s drill.
“Well, I’m glad to be zero on that score.”
“Makes sense. You do anything cool today, Monty?”
I looked at my setup for the evening: a half-dozen vacuum tubes. A leather quarter-cowl with no facial features save a hole where the right eye could look out. An open toolkit with a half-dozen small screwdrivers, wrenches and a modestly-sized soldering iron. Several valves, focus-rings and small, spy-camera sized gadgets which had already half-filled the desk with more appearing by the second as my hand kept dipping into my bag over and over again.
“Not really. I am going to sail gracefully out of middle age and into my golden years without any great fanfare. Just myself and my toys.”
“Toys?”
“I’m a hobbyist with electronics, Forty-Four. If you ever did want to buy me a present, a gift certificate to the local Radio Shack would be in order.”
“Heh. Monty, I work for Paladin Security in a blue state. I’m lucky if I have enough after taxes to buy my daughter the latest Calamity Jane doll, you know?”
“Not really, as I’ve never had the pleasure of reproducing. Still, hope springs eternal.”
“You got that right. Have a good one!”
“And to you as well.”
Over the next hour, I slowly filled every available space on the long table with equipment from the duffle bag. A test tube holder held vacuum tubes of various sizes. Thick cables wound up and down and through the counter, finishing at a relatively small contraption with a transparent dish half the size of the palm of my hand.
“Not bad,” I said, placing an apple at the end of the counter, and then a sturdy piece of white ceramic behind it that had multiple burn marks scorched across its surface. Behind the lens, and against the small wall of his guard station’s cubicle, I taped a laminated picture of an older man dressed in a monk’s robe with a halo over his head.
“Saint Albert, guide me,” I mumbled after he made a few more adjustments. “Aaaaannd, now,” I said, clicking a switch set into a small black box. The lens flashed, and the apple disappeared in a small wisp of smoke. The stem of the apple dropped quickly with a soft clatter against the counter.
“Well, now,” I said, pulling out a black spiral notebook and jotting down several pieces of relevant observations in my characteristically neat, slanted cursive writing.
Over the next two hours I repeated my experiments with an orange, three blocks of wood with varying degrees of thickness, colors and grains, and a ceramic teacup. The teacup almost vaporized as well, but did not completely disappear.
Satisfied, I methodically dismantled my setup, returning each piece back to its place in the large bag. My next action (it was by now nearing four a.m.- in another two hours the few workaholics in the company would begin arriving) was to pull out the Wang word processor and begin typing.
Dear Mr. Hansel, I began, as per my last communication to you, I have continued my testing and procedures with my latest modifications. The tests have proven thus far to be universally successful. Once again, the applications on a practical level of a laser capable of vaporizing large quantities of matter are not strictly limited to those affiliated with the military . . .
The printer began to chatter, its dot-matrix chewing up the paper as it stippled small letters, line by line.
I looked quietly at the printer, then back to the small 64k computer at my workstation.
I hadn’t called the local BBS; the computer wasn’t hooked into any kind of network. What was happening?
Normally I would have given a quick push on the floor and wheeled over to the printer, or anywhere else at the workstation. But today. . .
“Like . . . looking at an accident . . .” I said, halfway in a dream. I stood up and walked slowly over to the printer, which was still spinning the paper through the holes in the fringe.
After a few seconds it was done.
HELLO, MR. MONOCLE it yelled silently in large, stylized capital letters. CALL UP L.I.S. I HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Oh, Saint Albert,” I said, looking over at the computer. Its screen was blank, like a shut eye.
He sat back down in the chair, and flicked the little black switch at the side of the beige plastic box with the rounded corners.
**** COMMODORE BASIC V2 **** the screen proclaimed in blue letters after a few seconds.
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY
The little blinking square beneath was, as always for me, full of promise. I smiled. This was traditionally my second phase of the night; talking to others on the Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs for those of you not in the know. A few keystrokes and the dark-blue on -light-blue lettering was changed to a much more dynamic black screen with red trim and white lettering. He inserted a disk into the floppy drive, added a few more keystrokes, and then dialed on the phoneline that was never used from 6pm until morning at his workstation. The little box he’d long attached the phone cord to said ‘Vicmodem,’ and when the phone’s ringing became a bizarre scratching and whining of static he flicked a switch
The screen began to fill with text at an easy pace. 300 Baud, I thought. There were 14 year old kids who had modems faster, but I didn’t mind. I was here to read and talk, not move quickly.
And tonight, I was here to see just what had managed to remotely start his work printer chattering away at him.
I dialed a very specific number, and when the cursor started blinking again it had written the following on the screen:
LOST IN SPACE BBS
Sysop: King Cobra
LOGIN:
PASSWORD:
I sighed and waited for a moment. I’d had pranks played on me before, but this would have been more elaborate than those would have been. Why not?
LOGIN: MR. MONOCLE
PASSWORD: EYEBALL
There. The white cursor square blinked with a friendly regularity, until I began typing.
1. I. S. the screen said in 1970s -era tech font.
Type to travel:
1. Chain Stories
2. Quizzes
3. Message Board (War!)
4. Files
I typed a ‘3’. Within thirty seconds, words began spinning across the screen
FROM: DIAL TONE
TO: SIG 3 (WAR!)
DATE: 3/22/85
TIME: 0423 HRS
SUBJECT: WAR! MR. MOMMY-COLE!
Hey, Mommy-cole! I hacked your printer, loser! Is calling out my grammar the best you can do, loser? Go home, eat goatshit and get retarded, loser! Oh, sorry, you already are! Look, dimfis-breath, the kind of guy who’d name himself after a loser of a super-villain who had a sucky power anyway isn’t worth my time. As far as I’m concerned, theres only three things that you can do: eat shit and die!
Just get lost, burnout. Take your lame-ass excuses and shove ‘em up your ass! And you’d better not answer this message with another bunch of $10 words unless you’ve got the balls to back them up! I gave you my address last time,
I inhaled twice, cracked my knuckles and began my response.
FROM: MR. MONOCLE
TO: SIG 3 (WAR!)
DATE: 3/23/85
TIME: 0331 HRS
SUBJ: WAR- REALLY?
My dear young fool, at what point do you plan to obtain a dictionary, a thesaurus, or any of the other more notable tools that grammatically and verbally challenged young idiots like yourself can so benefit from?
Indeed, you truly believe that I am unable to “back up” my words with action? You even claim that my nom-de-guerre (look it up, cretin) is that of a substandard villain?
How predictably pitiful.
If you actually read something besides the first-grade, Mister-Mugs readers that gave you such pause in Middle School, you would have known that Mister Monocle was the undisputed technological mastermind villain of the golden-age of comic books. Without his optic-based weaponry and inventions, the team popularly known as the Cadre of Crime would never have managed to rob a blind newsstand owner, much less any of the National Banks.
I have noticed that virtually all of your messages to this Special Interest Group are posted just after 4pm, soon after the final schoolbell has sent the children home from the classrooms. I further suspect given your abysmal level of vocabulary and sentence structure that you send your twaddle soon after you have eaten a tasty bowl of cocoa - choco - puffballs and milk, and gotten bored of your cartoons.
I, on the other hand, have a job of significant stature and responsibility. I pay my own bills, and have not lived in my parent’s basement for a number of decades. If indeed you are feeling brave and can sneak out of your house after your bedtime, I invite you to drop by my workplace here at Soltech-Circuitry's eminent subcontractor of Pittstan Manufacturing on the tech-strip and see just how far your kind of asinine conversational level will get you.
I await your response with anticipation...
__ __ __ __ _
| \/ |_ __ | \/ | ___ _ __ ___ ___| | ___
| | \/| | '__ | | |\/| |/ _ \| '_ \ / _ \ / __| | / _ \
| | | | |_ | | | | (_) | | | | (_) | (__| | __/
|_| |_|_(_) |_| |_|\___/|_| |_|\___/ \___|_|\___|
...I left my Moniker, a stylized form of ‘Mr. Monocle’ written in ASCII graphics. Something I knew that the attention-challenged little miscreants would likely never match without graph paper and a great deal of spare time.
P.S. : ‘Hacked’ my printer? I’ve told you before where I worked, numbskull. The company’s BBS is public domain knowledge, and the password is so simple a ten-year old could ‘hack’ it.
But then, as a ten-year old yourself, you already knew that, didn’t you?
Ta-ta . . .
I chuckled. Their little tete-a-tete had been going on for several weeks now, and as of yet there’d been no serious threats to my person. I’d warned the powers-that-be multiple times about the ease with which an even semi-dedicated hacker could obtain access to their computer network. But, of course, what did I know? My reports were supposed to be confined to threats posed by teenagers using the parking lot for a place to try to copulate, or perhaps raccoons looking for easy meals in the nearby dumpster.
Sad, really. I wasn’t actually trying to have the company’s computer security breached, of course. But if that little miscreant were caught doing something, three things would happen:
1. The little twit would be caught, and severely dealt with. I would gain a good laugh at the expense of the little teenage know-it-all, and thus a little bit of the grime of bad-attitude and disrespect would be carved away from the culture.
2. My predictions to management would come true, and thus my reports and expertise would be given more credence. Perhaps I might even entertain the possibility of a raise past the usual ceiling of $5.50 an hour afforded unarmed Security Professionals like myself.
3. I, now having an ‘in’ with management, would be in a good position to pitch my latest generation of monocle-wonder technology to the bosses of the firm. Perhaps they would agree to produce my works, or find me a Department of Defense contact that would aid me in getting the recognition I’ve sought for so many years.
...There was only one potential hazard: if the little brat were caught, would he and/or their exchanges implicate me as a willing participant in the tete-a-tete we’d been having? Unlikely. But still, best to find a way to close that loop before . . .
I was caught completely by surprise when the window exploded behind me.
The plate glass shattered inward. I whipped around; the front grille of a battered car stared at me like a mouth full of sharpened teeth. The little building had no gate, only a driveway. The car must have been going at a ridiculous speed to have made it this close without me noticing; nothing in my experience as a security guard had prepared me for this! Nothing had . . .
The car door opened. The singing, off-key voices of several teenage boys blasted into the night and the front lobby. One of the boys strutted out and forward, the long hair of his mullet nearly tangling in the rusty, screeching car door as he pushed it open.
“HEYYYYYYY!” he screamed, louder than the door, “LOOK WHO IT IS, GUYS! Issat Mister . . . mistah . . ."
“Monoclit!” one the boys in the back sang out, his speech also slurred by whatever intoxicants they’d been imbibing this evening. Five boys in total stumbled out of the car, carefully picking over the broken glass and navigating past the sharp corners of the broken front window.
I carefully, subtly pushed the panic button underneath the desk by the computer monitor. God only knew if it’d work and actually call the police. To my knowledge it had never been pushed the entire time the building had stood. My fingertips could feel the dust on it, and-
The young tough, no more than fifteen or sixteen, had staggered up to me and grabbed me by my tie, breathing beer and vomit into my face.
“So, y’say my li’l brother’s an idiot, huh? Call ‘im a . . . creeton?”
I stayed still. Absolutely still. The other four boys, all wearing jeanjackets and t-shirts with various heavy-metal bands emblazoned on them, surrounded me, giggling as if they were looking at a hidden girlie magazine.
“You got an answer, asshole?” the boy yelled, getting closer, now an inch from my face. “You got one, huh? Fuckin’ piece o’ shit.” He leaned back and smacked me across the head with his open palm, the boy’s open hand making a ‘doiche!’ sound as it connected with my ear.
Just like when Papa hit me, I thought, a long-dusty memory connecting in my head from childhood, when he hit me, for spilling milk on his playing cards just before his friends came over to play briscola. . . called me a worthless mangiacake, a bookworm, and a filthy son of a. . .
No. No more. My father was over forty years dead now. And these little miscreants were all in a semi-circular ring around me, giggling like the bullies did at Saint Thomas Aquinas school, where they’d beat me up at recess for knowing the answers in Math. Or English. Or anything else.
The button hadn’t done anything. Nearly a minute, and nothing. No police.
The box was right near me. The on switch in reach of my hand. If I could get the boys distracted, maybe I could do something.
“Officer!” I yelled looking past them.
They all turned.
I grabbed the eyebeam, and twisted it wildly while flicking the switch.
There was a flash, and when things cleared the truck was largely gone, wisps of smoke wafting up without any hurry from the four tires and the remains of the chassis.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!?” yelled the leader of the toughs, striding back towards me.
I flicked the switch again.
The vacuum tube popped and broke. No beam shot forth this time.
I didn’t panic, but realized my only hope now laid in the police showing up.
I reached for the phone, and got the receiver up before the first angry child grabbed me from behind.
I had no real idea or especially clear memory exactly how things progressed after that, only that after a few seconds I was on the ground. Punches became kicks, kicks became harder kicks. Soon I felt bruises become breaks.
I am in trouble, thought a rational part of my brain. Serious trouble. Then I felt one of my ribs crack, and the rational part of my brain stopped. I became a screaming, begging child, trying to hide under the lip of my workstation.
“Callin’ my brother names, old man?” I heard the leader above me. “Think you’re cool? Trash-talkin’ my family? Huh?”
The blows had worked their way from my stomach up to my head. I vaguely perceived being grabbed by the collar and dragged out from under the shelf and into the open floor of the entranceway. “Gonna finish the job,” the leader mumbled under his breath, “an’ get back to havin’ fun tonight.”
I could barely registered what was happening. When a loud whomf! noise sounded in the room and a plume of white fog bellowed out and enveloped them all, I only had a dim gladness that the blows had stopped.
A tall, dark figure with a long white judge’s wig swept through the room and the young men yelled in surprise. I had a sense of relief mixed with fear and puzzlement. Just how old are you now, Judge? I thought.
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TO BE CONTINUED...