Breakout 6

Busy busy busy
Busybusybusybusy bootylicious biz-AY!

I’ve been busy.

First off, let me tell you folks, you are in LUCK. I had an inspiring inspiration. It was all inspirational and shit. It’s like everything I remember about my old world collides with all the shit I forgot to remember and squeezes itself though the lens of this primitive dimension and suddenly I see things I didn’t see before. I’d been hoping this would happen. I’ve seen things not yet put together from their most difficult moments. You can’t get there from A to B. No no no no no no no no no no no.

That got away from me, yes. You can’t get there from A to B because that’s a line. Some things only exist outside lines. They only make sense outside that path. You don’t clearly see the forest from on the path, little red riding hood. I’m off in the woods. All the better to smell you.

Times like this, Max gets scared. The girls got scared too. I think Max wanted to tell me he was done helping. That’s fine. Max is fine. I don’t need his help. I had a great idea. They’ll love it! It’ll be a big joke on the whole city and they’ll laugh and laugh and snort and choke and cry tears and collapse and oh they’ll remember it.

I think so much more clearly like this. This focusing for you, this writing, it holds me back to think put it clearly for you reader people. But you came here for a story and you deserve a story.

So I had my idea and I worked on my idea and then Max didn’t want to help me. That’s ok. Max is ok. I didn’t use his stuff for this so he can go hide now because hiding inside is what they always do in the end. All those people living their lives afraid to be who they are. Are you afraid to show people who you are? Do you only do this for someone who already knows you? How does anyone get to know you for who you aren’t? Honey has an antibacterial affect. Diseases have grown more resistant to other antibiotics. Bees are disappearing and people pretend not to know why. People trick themselves into killing themselves every day because what things aren’t is easier to live with. Even though I lie to people with every hologram, I do so because I am a liar. I mess with the world and the world changes to accommodate me. There’s room in the world to accommodate you too, no matter how different.

Trying to focus and clarify for you all. I worked on my idea, my new bomb. It isn’t ready yet, but I can get it there in short order. It will be ready. It wasn’t part of how I wanted things to go originally, but now it will be. Problem is, I needed it to be ready for what I did today. It wasn’t, but that’s ok.

I visited the Long Life tower today. I didn’t go in armor. I had my coat with me, but I entered disguised as a delivery man there to drop off some baked goods. I know what you’re thinking, boys and girls, but this cake was not a lie, and neither were those tasty treats hanging off one hand of mine in a plastic bag. The front desk wanted to hold me up, but the elevator was packed full and besides, cake. Who wants to be the bastard that holds up the arrival of cake?

One man wanted a peak at the warm, moist treat within. I warned him it was someone’s birthday cake. He got his face right up in it, though, looking down at the candles and the fluffy frosting. “I wish it was my birthday,” he said. So I pushed a button on the base of the cake box and the candles lit. Their flames shot out a few feet, catching the man’s lapel and hair on fire as he screamed, fire scorching his tongue and his mouth and his throat. He tried to drop and roll, but there was no room, even with his scared coworkers pressing against the sides of the elevator.

“Anybody else want to make a wish? Hehehe ha ha! Hey, hey, go ahead and blow him out if you want to try.”

There was a melody running through my head. I call it a melody because I’m not trained in music and I know fuck all what to call it. It was a sound that made me feel whole. Feel happy. Whatever you call it. A tune? A harmony? Chorus? “Chorus? I can’t even pare us off!” Oh, they were too scared to get the joke, of course, but that didn’t matter so much once I brought the knife out of the bottom of the cake’s box.

We had a screaming fun time in that elevator and the cake lasted. Believe me, everybody got a slice. And all the while the tune stayed with me. I felt complete again.

The alarms didn’t really sound until I got off at Research and Development. I know what you’re thinking, that I got off at R&D, but I assure you, I’m not that much of a technophile.

The man at the security desk tried to end the party, but he got a knife upside his face for his trouble. You may not have noticed, but there’s a reason I generally use knives that explode? The fact that the handle bonked him in the face should be a good indication, but I didn’t let it worry me.

Poor guard. Working 9 to 5, being kept down by the man, stuck guarding the scientists, and then a supervillain walks in and hits him in the face with a knife. The icing on the cake was, well, the icing on the cake. He was too blinded by it to notice me slip out my newest laser potato peeler and jam it into his gut. Every once in a blue moon I’m jealous of potatoes, you know. At least they get to hang out with their buds.

I didn’t spend forever on the guy. I just carved up the cake with his face still on it thanks to my newly-retrieved knife.

My culinary crusade wasn’t not yet over, however, as I hefted the two pie boxes out of the bag I had with me. The next two guards to rush out at me got pied. I know, I gave two guys a taste of my pie. You want to know what flavor of pie a guy has? Boys-enberry. I hear it’s a popular recipe with Catholics.

Ah, but I should have freshened up. I don’t always freshen up for potential suitors as the hissing reminded me. Their faces bubbling even where they weren’t embedded in pies, the guards dropped their guns and nightsticks and collapsed to the floor.

The good thing about an entrance like that is smart people, like those working in R&D realize pretty quickly not to stop you when you go dumpster diving through their computer systems. There was a researcher or something that tried to stop me from taking back the nanite synthesizer. With a few twists and then a violent snap, I promoted him to project head. Oh snap!

There were loud alarms at this point. It threw me off my humming. Shame, that was a good song. The noise put me in the mood for a more violent sound, but first I had to check out how their handling of the nanites was going. You know, you’d be surprised what a very minor change to the code can do, especially when it’s to the program copied onto each and every one they make from now on. Oh, I didn’t want to destroy them. No, I have something in mind that counts on them doing exactly what they want to do. They’ll make a lot of these and they’ll sell the crap out of them. Ship a million of those things? They’ll ship them out a whole new door.

The researchers were sadly unwilling to join me in an impromptu mosh pit but the guards at my next stop, that switchover floor, were all too ready to get moshed the fuck out. I set aside my synthesizer for the moment and jumped through a nearby glass divider into a conference room. I grabbed a chair, swung, and tossed it through the breaking wall and into the guard’s fire. That chair, sadly, did not make it. The next chair did, knocking him on his ass. I was on him before he could bring the gun up and signed my name in his throat with a piece of glass. Psycho Gecko was here. Then I turned him over on his back, yanked down his pants, and signed one ass cheek.

His friends showed up soon after. No helicopter this time, though. That’s a shame. I guess they left it be-Hind.

The other guards filled the air with bullets and pellets. Their friend provided a minor shield, but the human body is notoriously not bullet proof. Neither is just about anything you find in an office, in fact. I chucked the body at one of the teams of two and got in close, jamming broken glass into the lead guard’s eye. His buddy couldn’t fire around him well enough, but I could get my head past the first guard enough to rip out the second guard’s throat with my teeth. Hey, I didn’t get to have any cake earlier.

Three bodies were fairly bulletproof, that’s for sure. I propped up the bodies against a desk and dove over it to land next to a man hiding underneath, praying. I pocketed his stapler and post-its. They came in handy.

I crouched and moved past a wood wall backing up a larger desk between my position and the gunmen. Finally they realized I wasn’t behind their dead comrades and turned their attention elsewhere. One of them did check behind them. He was blinded. Blinded I tell you! Blinded…by post-it notes over his eyes. He went to fire but I grabbed the barrel and jammed it under his chin. He took the front half of his own face off.

His partner turned and had me dead to rights but for taking a stapler to the face. His hesitation and inability to follow me proved useful. I rolled toward him, grabbed the stapler where it fell, and stapled his nuts to his thigh. I held the gun barrel well clear of myself as I stood and used the stapler like a pair of chopsticks. His tongue was the rice. I only got it halfway clear before I lost my grip too, but he was in no mood to fight back at that rate.

They made me do this, too. They stole my stuff. Stuff like the nanite synthesizer I left near the elevator to the ground floor. If only they hadn’t taken it, I could have snuck past and made my way up. But no. They wanted my things and that means I couldn’t just leave it and go. When will they stop killing themselves with myself as their instrument? Why must they make me want to do this?!

They had an override on the elevator up. I overcame it easily overall with a press of my hand to the security controls and an over active imagination. I’m practically overkill to their machines, frying them so bad you’d think they were over easy. Next stop, penthouse floor. That’s the floor over 9,000. And that was terrible.

I strode out to where I figured Forcelight must live, my rightful property in hand, and found…nothing. Her stuff was there. Computers. Documents. Mail. A bed that’s barely been slept on. There was an open window as well. She’d be back soon, then, I knew. Unless they had to go out on a mission between when I walked in the door and when I got up here, she’s off seeing to what happened below.

New company policy. That’s how the email started. CC: everybody. Forcelight, come alone. Send.

You know what’s funny? All this plotting and planning, all this taking advantage of her father’s setup, and the board wanted someone else in control. Apparently it’s expensive trying to save the world. That’s a phrase that tells you a lot about humanity.

The ding of the elevator marked her arrival. Her costume was white and black in hard, jagged angles. She was beautiful, you know? It was a very stern and angry beauty, most definitely linked to the eye of this beholder. She didn’t attack right off.

“Good! Glad you didn’t want to come up here shooting or do anything stupid like sneak up behind me through that open window. And if anybody is there, I would advise them to back off.”

Forcelight shook her head. “Nobody else is up here. I’m more than enough for you, you know.”

“Yes, I remember from last time, when you arrested your daddy.”

“He isn’t. You’re keeping up your friends’ message, but it’s a lie.”

“Ah, so you think. I’d suggest a DNA test, but you’re built out of so many dead people’s parts, who knows who it would say you are?”

“You’re behind everything in the news about me lately too.”

“I’ll have you know that every bit of information they have found was not planted. Double check it if you like, if you dare.”

“Why shouldn’t I take you down right now?”

“Oooh, you guessed I had something in mind! Damn, I like being underestimated. Fine, spoilsport. I have a bomb ready to blow right in the middle of your fair city, one of nigh-nuclear proportions. I’m very proud of it, too.”

“You have friends here!”

“Friends? Your little campaign to isolate me was cute, but I don’t exactly have friends. Just people I’m not killing yet.”

“What do you want? Why come here?”

“I just wanted to get my stuff and make sure I got out nice and safely. You know me. I have a dozen different way set off a bomb even if you think you have me. Now, mostly I was here to get a little something back,” I lifted up the big canister. “This was only part of it. I believe you have a certain statue of mine?”

“You said you didn’t have friends.”

“I don’t, but I want my pet rock back. Got it? Good. The other thingy I wanted to talk to you about was to let you know that Doc, or Good Doctor as you know him, is trying to change. He had a good reason for everything he’s done, too.”

“What reason?”

“That’s his to tell. You shouldn’t be out fighting the likes of me. Look at you. Who are you? You own most of a corporation, you’ve been experimented on, your dad clearly loves you. You can’t deal with all that and fight me at every turn too.”

“I think I can. Not everything has to be dealt with.”

“Have you even been under the covers of that bed for an entire night’s sleep since you started all this?”

“Don’t talk to me about my sleeping habits.”

“I’m not talking about joining you in there. I’m just offering some very healthy advice. Get out of this before I do much worse than ensure my escape with a few bombs.”

“You can’t kill me, you know.”

“True at the moment. You’ll survive, surrounded by a city of dead. The question is, do you want to make me kill them?”

“You’re a bastard.”

“Bitch, please. PLEASE tell me this exchange ends with us grabbing each other and kissing.”

That’s the point where she punched me out the window. I kept my nanite maker too. No need to meet my maker though. Forcelight flew after me and caught me. That’s when I sent off the signal to detonate. The cake, left forgotten as it was, activated and took out the entire R&D floor. Fire rolled out through breaking glass as it blew. Chances are good that their servers weren’t on that floor.

Forcelight wanted to drop me at that point, but I looked her right in her glowing white eyes. “I’m sorry, do I look like I want to bluff with a bomb? How many people die because of you today?”

She was decent enough to set me on the ground at that point and get the cops to clear off as I waited in front of everyone. I was completely unmolested there, though I noted the flights of birds being chased by choppers, and the occasional explosion as one of the micro munitions went off. Still trying to trace my signals. They were more than a little worried when that sight prompted laughter from me.

Finally, they brought out my Moai, completely free of cement. I gave him a biiiiiig hug. I think he was happy to see me, but he’s got a hell of a poker face. Never seen him crack a smile. We took off down the city streets, proud and out in the open. To quote Teddy Roosevelt from when he time traveled to the Cold War, “Talk softly and carry a large arsenal.” Cue jokes about the size of his arse-enal and then a dead State Department official. Just because there’s a toy bear named after him doesn’t mean he’d gone soft.

How many more people died that day? No more by my hand. Hell, the city wasn’t at risk. As I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, the bomb wasn’t complete when I got it in my head to do all this. Isn’t it a shame that a fellow can’t get proper service without threatening to kill everyone around? I still had to blow some fuckers up!

I’m hardly all that off-kilter though. They’re the ones doing the murdering. How many more people do I get to pick out of my teeth with a knife because they want to stop me?

Oh say it’s plenty. Say it’s plenty. They keep making me and I’m nothing if not what I’ve been made. Now then, all this has made me hungry. To the Minstrel cycle, my minion! Tonight I feast on the dreams of frightened children and the eggs of Waffle House!

 

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