Tales of the Parodyverse

#114: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Secret Intelligence


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The Hooded Hood hots things up with this penultimate episode of the current story arc; enjoy it while it lasts
Mon Jun 30, 2003 at 07:00:42 am EDT
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#114: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Secret Intelligence

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



In the Lunar Public Library, Amazing Guy, Sir Mumphrey Wilton, and Lee Bookman leaned away from the now melted and useless temporal scanner salvaged from the Narrator.
“Wow,” AG shivered. “I just thought we’d watch Xalter’s academy and see if anybody escaped from the destruction back then except G-Eyed and Exile. I didn’t expect…”
“Everything is linked,” the Librarian said. “A conspiracy of epic proportions, throughout history. From the Crusades to the middle ages, from Martian invasions in the Victorian era to cold war politics and the destruction of the superheroes. And that thing with Visionary…”
“We have to do something,” declared Mumphrey. “These blighters…”
“It’s happening right now,” understood Amazing Guy. “But if I interfere…” If I interfere, Exemplary will kill my family, he couldn’t say. Already he had pushed too far, learned too much. “I… I have to go,” he blurted, and raced from the room and the Library.
“I’m still missing something,” frowned the Librarian.
“A plumber,” Mumphrey suggested. “A plumber and watch repairer. Time to arrange for a house call.”

***


“It’s all connected,” EDWIN explained to the assembled Lair Legion. Hatman and Sorceress were still nursing headaches and dark suspicions about Chronic’s absconsion with De Brown Streak. CSFB! and dull thud kept tossing black looks over at the silent Goldeneyed. Pegasus seemed distracted. “The murder of Helen MacAllistair ten years ago. The attack on Commissioner Graham when he started investigating it now. The threat to his daughter that De Brown Streak tried to protect her from. The long-standing sleeper program in the Lair mainframe. Everything.”
“Well I’m glad something makes sense,” muttered Hatman, still worried over Dancer’s vague excuse about letting Chronic get away with the crippled Josh Clement, the fallen De Brown Streak. He didn’t buy the twisted leotard story but he could hardly investigate.
“Yeah,” agreed Goldeneyed. “Without Clement we can’t find Beth Shellett. What if he stashed her in a cell somewhere without food or water, and now there’s nobody to get back and rescue her?”
“Perhaps you’d better find him and shoot him again to make sure,” dull thud suggested. “Since he can’t walk now you’ve zapped him with that mutate-normalising gun he should be a pretty easy target.”
“I didn’t mean for it to cripple him,” G-Eyed argued hotly. “I was just trying to save the girl I… know.”
“It was justified anyway,” Pegasus argued. “Clement was a felon in mortal combat with us. He knew the risks.”
~~Except that we initiated combat, based upon erroneous and fraudulent information~~ Cressida pointed out.
“We just have to do the best we can as things happen,” Dancer said placatingly. “And live with the consequences,” she added, with an apologetic look. After all, she was the one who had consented to Chronic escaping with the injured Brown Streak.
“We’ll hear the full explanations of everything,” Fin Fang Foom promised the heroes assembled in the Meeting Hall. “But first we need to find what EDWIN has uncovered. It sounds pretty serious.”
“As serious as death,” the artificial intelligence promised them.
“Where’s Ziles?” Sorceress wondered. “Shouldn’t she be in on this? And maybe Al B. Harper?”
“Mistress Ziles and Master Harper felt there were other things they had to pursue, and have already learned what I have to impart,” EDWIN explained deferentially. They had to pursue being dead, for example, he didn’t add.
“So what’s the big mystery then, Eddie?” Trickshot demanded. “It better be good, because this is cuttin’ into my Playboy channel time.”
“Is it the secret origin of HALLIE?” CrazySugarFreakBoy! wondered.
“I suppose in a way you could say it is, yes,” agreed the AI that intended to kill the Lair Legion in just a few minutes.

***


“Falcon to Drury. I’m on the scene and we’re going to need a whole lot more retrieval personnel.”
On the command deck of the SPUD helicarrier the Director of the world’s foremost espionage defence agency winced. His resources were somewhat stretched right now. “Whut’s the situation, Falcon?”
The grav-winged agent swooped low over the blazing crater that had recently been the Wrichards estate. “We’re looking at total devastation, Drury. Whatever took out the house did a proper job of it. There’s a big hole here with stuff still burning in it, but that’s about all that’s left.”
“Check again, kid. Wrichards is one of our top contractors. Brains like his only come along once or twice a generation. I’d be a real shame if some stupid lab accident has smeared his across half of upstate Paradopolis.”
Falcon flew lower so the sensor-packs he was carrying could get better resolution. “This isn’t looking like an accident,” he reported. “More like a deliberate detonation. The pattern’s too regular, the destruction’s too complete for this to be an accident.”
Drury glanced over at his best spy, Natalia Romanza, for comment. “If anyone could design a system to blow themselves up properly, it was Weed Wrichards,” she pointed out.
Falcon backwinged down to the still-hot crater where his schematics briefing told him the main lab had once been. “There’s lot of melted circuitry and metal here,” he called in. “Robot parts, maybe. But nothing organic.”
“Try the cellars,” the Contessa advised. “Our sources tell us there were extensive lower floors.”
“On it,” Falc agreed, rising in the air so as to get some distance before he loosed some air-to-surface missiles to cut a hole through the wreckage. “But I gotta say, I think I’m already looking at the cellars. That was one efficient exp… Hold it. Stand by.”
“What you got?” Drury asked tensely.
“Lifesign. Deep under the wreckage. It’s erratic. The signal’s flickering in and out.”
“In morse code,” noted Natalia. “The lifesign is signalling in morse code.”
“That’s not possible,” Falc argued. “What’s it saying?”
Natalia decoded the intermittent sounds. “It’s saying ‘Dig me out, Falcon you moron’.”
It took fifteen minutes for Falcon and his crew to safely excavate down to the Dark Knight. DK didn’t seem that pleased to see him. “What kept you?” he hissed. “I’ve been down there for hours.”
“We had to be careful,” Falc objected. “Didn’t want to cut off your limbs. Not by accident, anyway. But you’re safe now.”
“No,” Dark Knight breathed. “No-one’s safe. Get hold of Drury. Tell him to prepare the helicarrier to be emergency evacuated.”
“What are you talking about?” Falcon demanded. “Drury, do you know what’s happening here? Hello? Falcon to Drury? Hello?”
“We’re too late,” DK said, closing his eyes. “The Helicarrier’s lost. The takeover has begun.”

***


“Help! What do we do!” panicked Randy.
“Get help! Fast!” Art was clamping his hands down on the longitudinal slashes on Amy Racecar’s wrists, wounds she had calmly made herself just a few moments ago.
Randy tried the comlink. “Communications are down again!” he worried. “And the doors are sealed!”
“Then give me a hand here. Get some of that cable as a tourniquet! Quick Randy, I think she’s dying!”
Randy raced over with the spool of wire. “Why did she do it, man? What the hell’s going on here?”
“Looks to me like she was being controlled somehow,” Art suggested as he frantically tried to cut off the copious flow of blood. “She was like a zombie!”
“She’s not going to make it, man!” Randy gasped as he saw how shallow the girl’s breathing was.
“The industrial tape, Randy. Seal her wrists closed.”
“That’s crazy, Art! She needs whole blood and a full paramedic team!”
“They’re not here. We are. Use the damned tape, Randy!”
There were some frantic moments of bloody, desperate taping. Then the door slipped open and Mandy Pyrite came in.
“Mandy! Oh babe, am I glad to see you!” gasped Art.
“Hello, Art, my love. Hello Randy,” the sleek feminine robot told the two frightened young men. “Master Ultizon has sent me here to kill you.”

***


“Welcome to the future.”
Josh Clement, the recently-depowered and crippled De Brown Streak looked up from his stretcher at the silver deco chambers beneath the simple little town of Langville, Montana. Past the thick computerised pressure doors the underground complex was sleek and futuristic, much like the gleaming silver and gold robot who was welcoming him and his recent liberator Chronic.
“Wow,” breathed Chronic. “I’m guessing that’s a lady robot. I can tell by the chassis.”
“I’m actually not a robot at all,” the gleaming perfection told her guests. At a nod the four men in tight-fitting jumpsuits that had borne DBS in padded away, leaving Josh and Chronic alone with Deus Et Machina. “I’m a cyborg, the blending of human and robot parts to perfection.”
“Damn straight,” admired Chronic. “But what I can’t figure is why you paid me to bust me Streaky here out of custody and bring him to you.”
“What I can’t figure is how you keep that body so shiny,” DBS chipped in. “Do you need any help with… polishing?”
“Maybe later, when you’re in a fitter state to polish,” Hel Rotwang suggested to him. “As for why you’re here, well, the Citizens of Cybernation wish to offer you a place amongst their number.”
DBS and Chronic exchanged confused glances.
“I can see you need a little background,” Deus Et Machina noted. “Very well. I was born Hel Rotwang, in the Teutonic Archipelago in the reality you people call Technopolis.”
“You’re one of the Red Watchman’s people,” swallowed Chronic, reaching for his guitar.
“Hardly. I left that world and my place on Technopolis’ Science Council more than sixty years ago, long before the recent debacle. Political differences.”
“You came here that long ago?” DBS wondered.
“Yes. I was made very welcome, given my advanced understanding of cybernetics. But eventually there was a… misunderstanding. My so-called allies within the Axis nations sent me to die in one of their furnaces, burning away my cosmetic epidermis, leaving only…” Hel Rotwang performed a pirouette for her visitors, “the bare essentials.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you wanted a shop-soiled ex-mutate,” DBS pointed out.
“I was driven from my homeworld because of my beliefs,” the gleaming metallic woman explained. “In Technopolis we had the skill to create artificial limbs stronger and healthier and more beautiful than the organic originals, prosthetics that were used to replace body parts that were injured or diseased. Some of us elected to upgrade our organics for steel and circuitry simply because it made us better. We were the future.” She looked at Josh Clement. “We were the next phase of human evolution.”
“Not quite the same here,” DBS admitted. “Mutates don’t choose to be born different, and folks don’t exactly welcome us as the inheritors of the Earth.”
“It’s not like you have title papers,” objected Chronic.
“The people of Technopolis hardly welcomed the Citizens of Cybernation, either. They preferred their children to remain slow, stupid, handicapped with the weak fragile bodies of their birth, ageing and dying when they could have evolved to immortality. The called me mad.”
“No,” breathed Chronic. “Really?”
“So you set up shop here,” surmised Josh. “Those guys that carried me in…?”
“Cyborgs. Each of them volunteered for the change, and paid for the work out of their own earnings. Now they will live forever in the brave new world that’s to come. And so can you, if you decide to join us.”
“You want to… make me a robot?”
“A cyborgs, with human brain and perfect android body,” Hel assured him. “You could walk again, speed again. We could restore your genetic potential, redeeming your stolen birthright. And you could convince your mutate brethren to follow your example.”
“DBS…” Chronic hissed. He could see the injured man considering it.
“You said the brave new world was coming?” De Brown Streak prompted Hel.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Right now, from what my sources tell me. The Ultizon template has been activated, and soon the Omega Codes will be released, and then the Machine God will live again, and those globs of flesh and gristle who call themselves humanity will be nothing more than slaves of the evolved.”
“Hey! I’m one of those globs!” objected Chronic.
“Within just a few hours it will all have changed,” Deus Et Machina told De Brown Streak. “But you can evolve. You can triumph. Will you join us?”
Josh Clement considered this, glancing from the shoddy dishevelled musician to his side and the sleek feminine mannequin before him. “Yes,” he agreed. “I will.”

***


“In 1945 the Allies began a programme of recruiting top Nazi scientific talent for black operations and classified projects,” EDWIN began. “Already decisions were being made behind closed doors about what kind of world was going to be made now that the Axis had fallen. Superheroes were no longer needed, and over the next five years a concerted covert campaign to shut them down was largely successful.”
“It’s true a lot of them vanished,” CSFB! acknowledged. “Even MH got sent into our very own Lair Mansion and was stripped of his memory and wandered as a bum for decades.”
“Other technology was confiscated and reused. American rocketry, jet, and space program technology was boosted by equipment and people from Nazi laboratories. The other big advances were kept even more secret, around robotics and what we now call computing.”
“The first known robot was Burning Boy, back in the war,” CSFB! footnoted happily. “He vanished soon after peace was declared, like the other mechanical hero Fakeman.”
“Burning Boy was dismantled by his own government,” EDWIN amplified. “He was an experiment in using alien robotics components captured almost a century earlier after the invasion of the Mynadrine Host had been thwarted by the League of Improbable Gentlemen. His robotic body was later largely reused as another prototype when the Omega Project was launched.”
“Nothing called the Omega Project is ever good,” Nats pointed out.
“The Nazis had been working on a number of experiments about creating war machines and recording human brain patterns for artificial intelligence. Dr Vizhnar was recruited to the Allies’ programme but later absconded back to his true master, Heinrich Zemo, taking with him information and some key technology that allowed Zemo to revive much of that research.”
“Blofish’s adamantine body, the Destructicons, Membrain, Virtual Zemo, Dream Demon, all that stuff,” Finny considered.
“Didn’t HALLIE originally come out of a Zemo lab too?” Hatman remembered.
“Yes. All of those experimental forerunners of the real achievement, the recreation of a robotic lifeform that was far superior to anything seen so far, a creature akin to the Mynadrine Host in that it could dwell within and through all technology, based in an indestructible android form more advanced than the science of this world could ever achieve.”
“Uh, if it was more advanced than we could ever do, how could we ever do it?” G-Eyed objected.
“It wanted to be made. It ensured it would be made,” EDWIN answered cryptically. “It used its vast intelligence to send visions to humans in dreams, showing them how to recover the Omega Codes which were the key to its birth. It showed them how to create a receptacle for these codes, a robot that would be able to recreate itself as the final trigger for the coming of Ultizon. A Visionary.”

***


“I’m real, dammit!” Visionary repeated with even more force as the soldiers strapped him to the dissection table.
“Of course you are,” Edward Cromlyn assured him. “There are those within the scientific community who think you a myth, a mere chimera of wishful thinking. But you are indeed real, the perfect android carrier of the hidden Omega Codes. And today we shall see that for ourselves.”
“No. I’m human! All the rest is just continuity confusion. Really! The worst that ever really happened was that some drunk science guys in a Manga Karaoke Bar mistook me for this android they’d once worked on.”
“That was no mistake. They were convinced about their identification right up to the moment they died screaming under our interrogations,” Cromlyn answered.
“There are other creatures out there looking like me,” Vizh shouted desperately. “Really. There’s Anti-Visionary. He’s probably fake. And Visionary III. And a robot version of me that was used to substitute for me in the LL once. Look it up. And Apostate, who thinks I stole his life. It’s probably Apostate you want.!”
Cromlyn glanced over at head scientist Sethbridge. “The best evidence for this being the true Visionary android is that he is indistinguishable from a human, as he was meant to be. He sweats, he bleeds, he is average in every way. Only complete dissection will reveal the truth.”
“Dissection? And what when you find you’re wrong?” Visionary worried.
“Then we shall apologise,” Cromlyn told him.
“This robot was built using the components from the old wartime Burning Boy synthezoid, and was meant to be the prototype of a whole class of government-run espionage machines that were indistinguishable from humans,” Sethbridge lectured as he attached electrodes to Vizh. “The program was abandoned, for reasons of cost and… faulty construction.”
“I am not faultily constructed!” Vizh objected. “Whatever Lisa says.”
“So the one completed prototype was reused for the Visionary project, to house the Omega Codes that would enable a self-redesign based upon the brain-patterns entered into the machine.”
Cromlyn looked down on Visionary with the first signs of scepticism. “And somebody elected to put those brain-patterns in there?”
“No, sir. There was a security screw up. The Omega Codes data medium was stolen by Dr Vizhnar, so that it could be activated with the engrams of Baron Zemo, using the brain patterns that later became Virtual Zemo. But that plan was thwarted by the science student Al B. Harper. What none of us realised was that he had already implanted other engrams around the Omega Code, the random thought patterns of some college moron. So when the Omega Codes were activated, the android rebuilt itself not as the supreme technological sentience, but as… a college moron.”
“Hey, I graduated,” Visionary argued. “They gave me a piece of paper. I have it somewhere.”
“The Codes worked extremely well,” Cromlyn admitted.
“We didn’t have the technology to extract them safely back then, sir,” the scientific advisor continued. “So the decision was made to let the Visionary android loose in the wild, to see if human experience would cause the Omega Code to spontaneously resurface. Then we could have tried again.”
“But it didn’t?”
“Nada, sir. No sign of intelligence at all.”
“Hey! I’m right here!”
“We eliminated the engram-donor and sent the robot into his place. He even met a girl and married her. We had hopes when he hooked up with the Lair Legion that maybe the Codes were manifesting at last, but he was a constant bitter disappointment.”
“You have been talking to Lisa!”
“Now all else is ready, sir. Thanks to our recent Technopolitan acquisitions we can safely extract the Omega Codes and restore them to the Ultizon construct…”
“Whew! For a minute there I thought I was in trouble,” Vizh admitted.
“By simply rendering this subject down to a molecular level to recover key components,” concluded Dr Sethbridge.
“Very well,” agreed Edward Cromlyn. “Proceed.”

***


It took a long time for spiffy to stop screaming. In the end the Abyssal Greye simply slapped him across the face.
“Ouch!” spiffy complained. “So it hurts to get slapped even when you’re undead?”
“Ah, you noticed the fangs and improved night vision then?” the Abyssal understood.
“I’m a vampire!” spiffy objected. “I’m a freaking blood-drinking vampire!”
“Certainly freaking,” the other bloodsucker beside the leader of the Scholar-Ghouls of Gothametropolis criticised. “Calm down, Hopkins. Take a good look at yourself.”
“Well I would,” spiffy told him in agitated tones. “If I reflected in any flaming mirrors!”
“I mean look at your hands,” the vampire told him.
spiffy did so. “Huh? I’m… Chinese?”
“Taiwanese, I think,” Abyssal Greye told him. “We didn’t really go into ethnic typing when we cut the deal with the nosferatu.”
“This… this isn’t my body? My fern! What have you done with my fern?”
“Your fern is still attached to your living, real body,” the Abyssal sighed. “We had to bring you to us without your body, which is… I suppose you might say it’s bugged.”
“And we’re not talking aphids,” the other vampire added. “I’m borrowing this form, too, thanks to the good graces of the Ghouls under Gothametropolis, because some bastard had also put nanite-sized monitors on my body.”
“Uh…” spiffy replied.
“I’m really the Commissioner, Don Graham,” the vampire explained. “Somebody was out to get me, so I had to fake my own death. Fired a bullet right past my ear, fell off the Sheldon Bridge. But the men following me had been so busy watching what I was doing with the secret documents I’d got hold of that they missed the other messages I was sending. So the Abyssal Greye here arranged for me to be retrieved as I fell from the parapet and… rehoused me for a while.”
“Mahassus, the troll from the Englehart Overpass,” Greye explained. “Bridges are her speciality, and she owed us a favour. Just caught Don and got him straight to us so we could do the mind-swap. Now they can’t track him and they can’t control you.”
“Control me?” spiffy worried. “I’m not being controlled, am I?”
“Do you remember anything about a creepy guy in grey suit?” Graham asked him.
“Nope. I… hey! Yes I do? That bum gypped me in my own office! How could I…?”
“He’s working for the opposition,” the Commissioner explained. “They’ve infected the heroes with some kind of micro-robots that can shut them down at a word, and that can selectively block memories and things. Maybe they can even control them more than that.”
“Hey, that was Deathspoon’s plot,” objected spiffy. “Back during the Acts of Ambition. Except there the nanites killed heroes.”
“They’ve clearly refined the technology since then,” Greye noted dryly. “As best we can determine, it can now monitor everything you do and say, and kill you if you do or say the wrong things.”
“Er, everything I do?” spiffy checked nervously.
“We need you to find out more about the enemy,” Graham explained. “You have access to lots of information as omni-mayor. So use it to find whoever’s behind this and what they’re really after. We’ll mind-swap you back to your body and then back to this one again when you’re ready to tell us what you’ve found.”
“My body. Where is it?”
“Who knows?” shrugged the Abyssal Greye. “There had to be some incentive for that vampire you’re wearing. You’re probably somewhere very sunny right now. With breath that smells of garlic.”
“Just get back there and help us save the world,” Graham told him.

***


“Ouch,” said Ziles.
“Yeah, I know,” whispered Al B. Harper. “Five hundred thousand volts can really sting.”
“I mean ouch, you are lying on top of me,” the Xnylonian complained. “And you are heavy. It was very heroic of you to fling yourself over me when Ultizon fired his lighting blasts but…”
“Er, not so much heroic as understanding basic physics,” confessed the Lair Legion’s scientific advisor. “To kill you, electricity has to pass to earth. I’d kind of noticed that your silver jumpsuit is insulated, so…”
“So by staying atop me and not touching the floor you allowed the current to pass through you with only minor harm,” Ziles surmised. “Very foresighted of you.”
“It only stunned us instead of killing us dead,” Al B. pointed out. “That’s my excuse.”
The two of them painfully lifted themselves from the floor of the computer room. “Well, I guess we know what’s wrong with the LL mainframe now,” Ziles noted. “It’s got an unauthorised intruder.”
“It’s had one for months, if Ultizon was telling the truth,” responded Al B. “EDWIN is and always has been the next generation Virtual Zemo. And now he’s out to kill the LL and go on to rule the world. And stuff.”
“No wonder EDWIN was always bitching about not having the activation codes to the Movie Gun. That’s the key to the VR world where Virtual Zemo was stored,” Ziles realised. “Now somehow the lockouts are down and he’s been able to reassemble himself.”
“And evolve,” Al B. suggested. “He’s amalgamated all the nastiest bits from all the computery-types the LL has ever fought into one mega-nasty AI. It’s just a good job he hasn’t got himself a body to match.”
Al B. and Ziles exchanged worried looks.

***


“Visionary is a super-sophisticated android messiah?” Nats asked doubtfully. “You have met him, right?”
“He is not the promised one,” EDWIN answered firmly. “He is a mistake. A joke. But he held within him the Omega Codes which will bring Ultizon to his final destiny.”
“And Ultizon was the one who buggered up the Lair Legion computers?” dull thud surmised.
“Not directly,” EDWIN explained.
“When are we going to get to the kicking this robot’s ass part of the exposition?” Trickshot wondered.
“Due to a series of unusual circumstances, the Omega Codes were locked by Al B. Harper, encrypted in a way that only Helen MacAllistair’s brain-patterns could decode. Harper intended this to prevent the Bane, the assassin sent by Zemo to murder her, from being able to fulfil his mission.”
“Hey! The Bane’s the guy who killed spiffy’s adoptive dad!” G-Eyed noted. “Or maybe it was his real dad again, now that the Hooded Hood’s disinherited fern-boy. But the Bane killed Pa Hopkins. spiff’s still looking for that bad guy!”
EDWIN continued, promising himself that he would soon be able to kill them all. “But Harper didn’t know of Dr Vizhnar, who was able to use engram recordings of Helen to create an artificial intelligence that could also unlock the codes. Thus Miss MacAllistair was surplus to requirements, and was murdered before Harper’s eyes.”
“Hold it!” Finny objected. “Are you telling me that Harper knew what was going on all along?”
“I knew we couldn’t trust a love-cheat!” scowled Sorceress.
“Harper’s memory was wiped of the event,” explained EDWIN. “He forgot all about the murder, about the Omega Codes, about the substitution of engrams, everything. He and Miss Framlicker were given false memories of the discovery of infidelity and the departure of Miss MacAllistair and went on with their lives.”
“With their ruined lives, you mean,” worried Dancer. “That memory ripped them apart. Things could have been so much different.”
“Yeah, Miss F. might not have turned out to be the boss from hell,” Nats speculated.
“Vizhnar used Helen’s engrams to create HALLIE to unlock the Omega Codes,” CSFB! reasoned.
Hatman thought back on the narrative EDWIN had given them so far. “Hold it! I thought the stolen Omega Codes never got to Zemo? So why did he need to make HALLIE to unlock them?”
“That’s it!” muttered Trickshot. “I need a drink. Where the hell is Flapjack anyway?”
“Fake codes were sent to Zemo,” EDWIN explained. “Good enough for him to be able to create Virtual Zemo, the artificial sentience who has brought the Lair Legion to the brink of annihilation on several occasions.”
“Until we kicked his butt one last time and trapped him in a virtual prison with the Movie Gun,” snorted Goldeneyed.
“Ironically using HALLIE as his jailer,” added Dancer. “The very sentience who was once used to set him free in the first place became the means of imprisoning him forever.”
A nasty thought assailed Fin Fang Foom. “EDWIN, this isn’t moving towards you announcing that Virtual Zemo has escaped again and was the one screwing our computer, is it?”
“No sir. You won’t be hearing from Virtual Zemo again. But HALLIE remained the only way to unlock the Omega Codes, and she is quite a sophisticated program herself. Not as sophisticated as I, of course, but still moderately advanced. It became necessary for the covert government consortium that had planned to use the Omega Codes all along to find a way to extract that information from her so as to decrypt the real copy of the Codes.”
“So they sent in some kind of virus?” Pegasus guessed. “Using their clearances to bypass the Legion’s firewalls, and ultimately crashing our systems?”
“The firewalls don’t work like that,” Hatman assured her. “They were established by DK, who’s even more paranoid than Finny.”
“Only slightly,” growled the dragon. “Who told you that, anyway?”
“That would mean it had to be an inside job,” frowned Dancer.
“Access to the Legion mainframe wasn’t enough though,” EDWIN explained. “There were still sophisticated lockouts, systems that even I wasn’t granted access to. And that called for extreme measures.”

***


“A troll,” ManMan checked with Knifey, his talking weapon. “You’re telling me there’s a troll under this bridge?”
“Nothing wrong with your ears, then,” the blade told him. “Sure, Mahassus doesn’t get out much these days. The occasional late drunk driver, maybe, but mostly she just sleeps now.”
“It’s not like she’s the weirdest thing in Paradopolis,” Messenger pointed out. “We’ve got aliens and ghosts and robots and vampires and more mad scientists than a computer convention, so sure, why not a troll?”
“And you figure this troll happened to be on another major Paradopolis bridge last night and happened to catch Graham as he fell after shooting himself?”
“No. I figure that if Mahassus was there to catch him it was a set up, and we need to ask her what and why. Oh, and not be eaten.”
“I’m on board with that part,” Joe Pepper agreed. “So how do we… urk!”
“Urk?” Messenger puzzled. “What do you… agh!”
“Guys, what’s wrong?” Knifey asked as both the heroes bent over clutching their stomachs. “Joe?”
“Lot 97, the abandoned business park at Shyminsky Falls,” ManMan said in a voice strangely unlike his own. “Come quickly, or Visionary and Yo are dead. Not to mention me. So move it.”
Then he and Messenger toppled to the ground and vomited.
“If your heads start spinning round next I’m out of here,” Knifey warned.
“What was that?” Messenger gasped, picking himself up. “I lost all bodily control for a moment.”
“Eew, I hope not,” muttered Knifey. “Your cleaning bill will be high enough as it is.”
“It was a message for us,” ManMan considered. “But was it to divert us from our troll-hunting or a genuine plea for help?”
“Or a trap,” suggested Messenger, grimly. “There’s only one way to find out.”

***


“Ducts,” announced Indiana Gnome. “The escapee’s friend.”
With three minutes to spare before the quantum disassembly chamber had warmed up to active mode, the Autobot Glitch had managed to overcome the force field that prevented Gunther the gargoyle from pounding his way out of the steel cage they were all caught in. Now alarm klaxons were warning the annoyingly-perfect-looking Citzens of Cybernation that there were people trying to leave the premises without being quantum disassembled.
“Ducts are the escapees’ friend only when you aren’t seven foot high with a wingspan of twelve feet,” Gunther pointed out.
“Or a big sexy robot-gal,” added Glitch. “I was thinking maybe pounding everybody in the complex into scrap metal then dancing on the bits?”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” growled Gunther.
“So the overwhelming odds and likelihood of certain death don’t deter you at all,” checked Indy.
“Ducts,” considered Gunther. “The escapee’s friend. Lead the way.”
“Glitch thought about this some more. “I don’t suppose these ducts go to Deus Et Machina’s computer core, do they?”

***


“Mayor Hopkins, I don’t understand,” the Senior Accountant at Gothametropolis City Hall frowned as spiffy fingered his way through old legers he’d ordered dredged up from the archives.
“Good,” the fern-wielder replied. After all the times this smirking bastard had baffled him with financespeak and blocked him doing anything at all useful during his time as omni-mayor, payback was a bitch.
“Are you… quite well?” the Accountant ventured. There were rumours that last night the mayor had thrown a pretty wild party. There would be some pretty unusual expense claims at the end of the fiscal quarter this time. “Yesterday…”
“I wasn’t myself, yesterday,” spiffy told him with absolute truth. Yesterday he’s been mind-swapped with a volunteer vampire by the Scholar Ghouls of Gothametropolis so he could attend a secret meeting with the presumed-dead Paradopolis Commissioner of Police without the people who’d infected him with nanite watchdogs knowing about it. Today he had to deal with the situation once and for all. “Show me the breakdowns of all the expenditure on waste disposal in columns four and five.”
“This is a terrible waste of my time,” complained the accountant. “I won’t… urk!”
He’d urked because he was currently being suspended by his neck by a steely-gripped fern. “You’re a civil servant,” spiffy reminded him. “So be civil. And serve. The figures, now.”
The intimidated accountant obeyed. spiffy fired off a whole series of other questions that set him scrabbling for other sets of legers. It was easy to keep accountants on the run if one had been properly briefed by the finest financial brains of their generations, and the Scholar-Ghouls ate only the best.
“I could do this a lot quicker if I could use the computers,” the accountant objected.
“I’m a hands-on sort of guy,” spiffy told him. “Just keep going or I’ll be a ferns-on sort of guy too. Work.”
The staff at City Hall were used to a bewildered, overwhelmed, out of his depth kind of Mayor. They weren’t ready for a determined, informed, deadly serious and ready to back it with lethal fronds kind of Mayor. Within three hours spiffy had traced the money used for “waste disposal” at the time of Helen MacAllistair’s murder to a Swiss account, and from there through half a dozen money-laundering scams to a final secret account in Latvia.
And from there he was able to find the address of the man who had been paid to murder Helen MacAllistair, the man who could explain the conspiracy that was out to get Don Graham, the man who had killed spiffy’s adoptive father: The assassin known as the Bone.
“Got it,” Mark Hopkins hissed to himself. He reached for the intercom. “Get me the senior administrators of every City Hall in North America except Paradopolis on the line in a conference call,” he instructed his staff. “Tell ‘em if they’re not on the phone in half an hour they don’t need to come in to work tomorrow.”
Mayor Hopkins’ secretary swallowed hard. “What, sir?”
“You heard. Tell them this is very important. Tell them that we’re going to invade France,” spiffy explained. “Again.”

***


“I thought there was an emergency,” Trickshot complained. “How long is this guy going to drone on before he tells us what to hit?”
“The annoying man in the stupid costume is correct,” Pegasus agreed. “Make this chattering hologram tell us why the computers were malfunctioning, Foom.”
“Oh, I believe I’m ready to tell you now,” EDWIN promised.
“He’s about to announce that he’s secretly a villain, sent to kill us all,” CSFB! explained to the others. “Only bad guys do exposition that detailed and lengthy.”
“Right,” agreed Finny. “And we were just waiting for you to finish telling us the plot. And for Nats to get a firm telekinetic grip on the hologram generator. Nats?”
“Got it,” Bill Reed assured them, concentrating. It was a tough transfer, because it wasn’t in his line of sight, but he frowned, concentrated harder, and wrenched the machine two floors below from the wall and bounced it across the engineering lab.
EDWIN vanished in a flash of static.
“That was easy,” Sorceress commented.
“Now we have to find Ziles and the others,” worried Hatman.
Metal hands burst through the floor of the meeting hall and pulled, shattering the support structure and toppling the heroes into the training area below.
“As I was about to tell you,” Ultizon the Indestructible boomed in a chilling robotic voice. “Extreme measures were called for. So my allies have just now arranged for an override virus to wipe out your password lockouts, thus granting EDWIN access to the data and resources he required. The Movie Gun, to create the necessary materials. Classified data on the ManManHunter robots, on Blofish, on all those myriad robot killers you have faced. Thus, as Virtual Zemo begat EDWIN, so too your treasonous artificial intelligence has become something greater yet…”
Pegasus loosed a cosmic bolt right into the gloating robot’s chest.
“Me,” Ultizon concluded, unfazed by the attack. He spread his fingers, loosing lances of lightning at the Lair Legion.
G-Eyed teleported behind the robot, grabbed it by the head, and blinked away again, intending to take the creature’s skull with him. Instead he screamed and folded to the ground.
“I have long since logged your dimensional frequencies, Bryan Katz” Ultizon explained. “I have access to all your training data, power tests, personality profiles.” He moved with machine precision and shot down Dancer and CrazySugarFreakBoy!, the two Legionnaires who were usually hardest to hit.
“I know the exact frequencies that your brainwaves assume when attempting to use mental powers,” the robot continued, generating a squealing soundwave that set Cressida and Sorceress reeling, then downing each of them with a directed energy pulse.
“And I have enough pure muscle to easily squash the rest of you,” he added, hurling a massive segment of wall at Hatman, Trickshot, and Nats, then rounding to discharge fifty thousand volts through Fin Fang Foom and Pegasus.
“Or not,” answered Hatman, hurling aside the wall with the help of his Bears hat then slipping on his Steelers cap to go one on one with the killer robot.
Ultizon hammered Hatman down with one adamantine fist. “Fools! There is no force on Earth that can… squaaawk!”
The lethal machine spun sideways sparking as Trickshot’s adamantine arrow caught it in the eye. “Get him guys,” the annoying archer called. “I only got the one of those tips.”
“On it,” agreed Nats. He pointed his psychostave and concentrated on ripping out Ultizon’s insides.
Ultizon reached up, grabbed the Psychostave from Nats, and snapped it in two. Bill Reed screamed once and toppled to the floor twitching.
“Back off from him!” Fin Fang Foom warned, growing to the largest size he could within the confines of the training area and loosing pinpoint-accurate nuclear fire at the adamantine robot.
“Or what?” Ultizon demanded. At a gesture from the robot, Finny was shot down from behind by the Lair Legion’s own combat simulation rifles.
“Or we will destroy you,” promised Pegasus, grabbing the villain from behind and hurling him into the wall with a cosmically-assisted right hook. She concentrated for a few moments, allowing the flickering energy to build up between her hands before firing again and burying the robot inside the steel-plated wall.
“I never liked you, even when I was being EDWIN,” Ultizon told her as he pulled himself free and hurled a razor-sharp sliver of wall panel through her chest.
The room fell silent except for Pegasus’ rasping breaths and Nats’ manic whimpering.
“Any more?” Ultizon challenged. “No? And I was just getting warmed up. I have tricks I haven’t even tried yet.” He gestured again and there was a buzzing noise from the walls. Hundreds then thousands of pin-sized micro-robots swarmed from every cranny. They were once the maintenance drones that repaired the Lair Mansion, but now they served only one master, the robot god.
Ultizon pointed to the fallen heroes. “Clean up that mess,” he told them. “Devour them and pick their bones clean, my swarm. If you need me I shall be out there doing the same to this city, this nation, this world.”
And with that Ultizon took command of every computer on the planet, every defence installation, every nuclear submarine, every Sentinoid, every doomsday weapon. He controlled the beat of every pacemaker, the speed of every underground car, the guidance package of every jet plane. Even without the Omega Codes he could do that much.
“The day of humanity is over,” he said through every speaker on the planet. “Now comes the age of the machines.”

***


Next time: The future of the Earth depends on dull thud, and he doesn’t even have Cressida to help him. The fearsome fate of Visionary! Messenger and ManMan vs Exemplary! spiffy invades France - again! DK and Falcon vs the SPUD Helicarrier! Glitch gets a crush! Al B. Harper gets hinky! De Brown Streak’s big change! The return of HALLIE! But most of all the beginning of the end of the world, in the final part of our current story arc: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Head Games, or the Microchip Revolution.

***


Footnotes:

* Last time pretty much footnoted us out I think, but as a last gasp let’s point out that Professor Xalter’s Academy was destroyed by the terrorist group B.A.L.D. at the dawn of the modern heroic period in Lair Legion: Year One, part 2 – How the League of Regulars got a mansion, how Zemo got a Scourge, and why Visionary managed not to wet his pants, and that the only known survivors were Goldeneyed and Exile, who were both absent at the time, and Exemplary. The other events the Librarian describes were all detailed last issue. What are you, senile?

* The Visionary-is-fake joke pretty much began during the early classic story International Incident, where Vizh met some scientists in a karaoke bar who left some doubts about whether he was a somewhat deficient synthezoid or not. Don’t assume that the information presented in this or subsequent chapters is anything but the people saying it’s points-of-view. I’m not even going to start explaining Visionary II, Anti-Vizh, Apostate and the others.

* Mahassus, the female troll under Paradopolis’ Englehart Bridge, debuted in the recently reposted Wangmundo #6.

And the rest is all explained in the story or previous footnotes. I take it as an encouraging sign that most of the material is now coming together. It suggests we’re moving towards conclusion. Still, if you have any other questions, be sure to e-mail Nats or AG.

HH

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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