“Arigato Wells-Dono”
I gave an exhausted look at the clock on my office wall after the meeting concluded.
1:00am blinked in red LED back at me.
I created the appropriate magnetic fields around the metal plates in my shoes and belt and flew out the window home bound. You need a license to do this technically but there were no odds any radar on earth would see me, and the supes that normally enforce sky rules know better than to do a stop on a flyer at this time of night. I landed on the roof of the brownstone in a nicer part of the rez district. I walked into my apartment and immediately sensed a presence on the couch in the living room around the corner, with the lights off and it wasn’t my brother. I strolled into the kitchen attached to the living room and put down my briefcase and grabbed a bottle of wine off the rack.
“ To what do I owe the presence of a foreign head of state?”
Sitting on my couch in a pencil skirt and blouse, blonde hair done up in a neat tight bun above a very attractive face was none other than The Doctor Malevolent.
Child of the celebrated nobel prize laureates Dr. and Dr. Malevolent, Ironically joint holders of a peace prize among others, and genius in her own right. She went rogue at the tender age of 10 and took over a small eastern european nation with an army of robots. The threat of which, and the meteoric climb in the quality of life in said nation, largely mitigated reprisal. Interestingly the ‘Dr.Malevolent’ I was currently speaking to was an incredibly life like android. Without my extra sense or an MRI I wouldn’t be able to tell at all. I still ‘saw’ the interesting choice of a bioenergy processor, where a stomach would be, so I trusted that the odds were good I was on track with the wine.
“ Well, Mr Wells” her light scandinavian accent rolling through the syllables” I would like to know why none of my bots have been able to get within three hundred meters of you, your commute, or your workplace. It puzzled me for some time.” as I approached I grabbed two wine glasses from the cabinet and sat in the chair across the table. I poured and offered her a glass.
“ would you say this is a sweet red?” she asked. I looked at the label, what are the odds I would have a sweet red in hand.
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“ I would call it that, yes”
she took the offered glass and we clinked glasses in a light cheers. She continued
“ You see I noticed erratic behavior in a number of bots over the course of a fight with the BBB yesterday and out of curiosity mapped them. I then compared city surveillance along side my own drones sensory data. Surprise of surprises I find that the pattern follows one man. I want to know how.”
I looked her in the eye, a dark, clear, blue in appearance and a high quality powerful telescopic lens in reality.
“ You‘d be surprised what mid range electrokinesis is capable of achieving.”
She gave me a deadpan stare.
“ so what, you are claiming that you use your ability to move electrons to effortlessly change the programing of my drones, do so actively full time, and carry on your normal day all the while. Do you take me for a fool Mr. Wells?”
“Hardly, but you are missing a part of the puzzle. You use my processors.”
She leaned forward with a glint in her eyes,
“you wish me to belive that your companies processors in my bots allows you to do that?”
“ Frankly if you belive it or not is less of a concern. But if you must know, they are my processors. I’ve hand developed them silicon to casing. I can program in assembly and machine code is easy from there. I change the GPS data in most systems to ignore my location and some others. “
That was utter bullshit. Not on the what was happening, if she goes and checks it will match up, but the how. It was believable enough in a world of supers that I could get away with it. She turned her head a fraction the same time I felt a familiar presence approach the front door.
“Bro you would not belive the horse shit I had to deal with at the Hall today”
Barry walked in and saw the two of us in the living room. Malevolent poised in a clearly threatening manner.
“Oh hell no you bitch, the city is one thing but you can’t have my brother”
His eyes began glowing a violent Cherenkov radiation blue.
“ Barry please no vaporizing houseguests, and the house upholstery.”
His eyes lost their glow and the skin around them lost its cobalt sheen as he looked at me with a confused look.
“ She’s Doctor Malevolent, the Mave Malevolent, Odd. My archnemesis, my greatest foe?”
“ Oh this is both quite rich and very unfortunate” Malevolents quiet commentary caused Barry to refocus on her. She continued “ Bartholomew Benson, the world renowned nuclear engineer, is the BBB. Do you know how much of my reactor technology is based on your research into hyper stable energy extraction from radioactive isotopes?”
Seeing the direction this was going I left them to go to bed. Barry meanwhile was reaching for the bottle on the table, his favorite wine by chance, and launching a hyper technical discussion related to his studies.