On/Off

Bernard Bonner pushed himself back from the desk indignantly, pounding an angry fist into the middle of the keyboard three times with more and more force on each successive blow. The computer beeped in protest as it tried to make sense of the commands ‘Hy6U7JM B5gtVF4r m<87ukji’. Bernard dropped his fist to his side before he could smash it through the monitor.

“Easy, there, brother,” Blythe Bonner said from across the room. She did not look up from the handheld electronic device in her grasp, denuded of its plastic casing. She touched a pen-sized soldering wand to a relay inside the device.

“There’s nothing good out there, sis,” Bernard said sulkily. He scratched his stomach, which was bare, although his legs were clad in high-tech armor of circuit-board green, his feet shod in purple metal boots; the upper half of the high-tech battle armor leaned against a sagging bookshelf on the other side of the apartment, just below a window that showed the uninspired skyline of East Orange, New Jersey. “Totally scorched earth. Every system is either fortified against attack or has been hacked so many times that one more raid wouldn’t earn us any cred at all.”

Blythe shrugged wordlessly, rearranging her body, which was dressed in pale blue flannel pajamas; her own silver and cerulean battle armor was resting, in its entirety, in her bedroom closet. From a cross-legged position she lowered one foot to the floor while bracing the opposite heel on the seat of her chair, pulling her knee almost up to her shoulder. She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on the table, and her long platinum blonde hair spilled over one shoulder. She never looked away from the device she tinkered with.

“Don’t you even care?” Bernard demanded. “Do you actually want to spend the rest of your life living in some crappy apartment, stealing utilities and trying not to draw attention to it? Dumpster diving behind the A&P for expired microwave dinners? Because if we don’t find a job to pull, something big and flashy enough to be our ticket out, this is where we’re gonna stay!”

Blythe set the electronic device aside with a sigh. She knew she shouldn’t be surprised. Even many ears ago, when the electrical accident in their parents’ garage had first conferred powers on herself and her brother, the personality traits that distinguished them had been all too apparent. She had been the level-headed one, while Bernard had been the complainer, always pointing out problems, if not causing them outright. And as they had progressed inevitably toward becoming supervillains – their powers developing, the mother abandoning them, their father to blame in their minds, their own personalities warping towards personae assumed for violent retribution – Blythe had rechristened herself Byte, a rational building block of the computer age. Bernard had taken the sobriquet of Bug, ever the troublemaker. And no matter how much time passed, the basics never changed.

“Let me guess,” Blythe said, looking directly at her sibling. “You’ve been looking at the highest of high-profile markets. New York City, Metropolis, Gotham …”

“I didn’t look at Gotham, I’m not that crazy,” Bernard insisted. “But I did look at Opal City and Los Angeles. And Vegas.”

“Fine,” Blythe nodded. “New York, Metropolis, Opal City, LA and Las Vegas. Five areas, and then you gave up, right? Did it ever occur to you that there might be very promising targets worth hacking into in other places? That the places you thought of first are the same places every pimple-faced kid with a passing interest in writing the next Klez would think of first, too?”

Bernard scowled and scratched his neck, but did not argue with his sister.

“Keep looking,” Blythe advised. “Just stop looking in the obvious places.”

She picked up the device and returned to her work redrawing its circuitry. Bernard resumed his typing and clicking at the computer, slowly and grudgingly at first, but with more energy and enthusiasm over time. After several moments he crooned, “Oh, now we’re talking!”

Blythe recognized the tone in her brother’s voice, and stood up to make her way over to his computer desk. She approached behind him and looked over his shoulder at the monitor. “Not bad,” she nodded.

“Not bad at all,” Bernard agreed with a grin. “Guess we’re headed south.”

In the Riverboat, the members of Bad Blood sat around an oval wooden table that looked as though it had been salvaged from an antebellum estate sale, except for the glossy black cube that rose from the center, and the cables trailing from the underside. Pierce sat at the curved head of the table; Karnival, Hangfire and Sojourn occupied chairs on his left, while Ember, More and Valence ranged along the right side of the table.

On the four vertical faces of the remote display in the middle of the table, the CLOTI avatar floated with an air of electronic impatience. The icon was a large drop of blood dominated by a face consisting only of eyes and a mouth, with small white hands floating on either side. The hands were propped on the meniscus swells on either side, fingers drumming steadily. The eyes seemed to stare off into space, occasionally darting from side to side and then resuming a more vacant, put-upon expression. A small cigar stub dangled from the corner of the avatar’s mouth, twitching whenever the avatar clenched its virtual teeth.

“Too many open ends of too many weird situations floating around right now,” Pierce said without preamble. “Somebody pick one to start with.”

“There’s Minotaur’s conviction,” Valence offered. “I know we all expected craziness to go down at his trial, and that’s why we were there, but after those freaks attacked the courthouse, there weren’t any other interruptions. And now Minotaur’s sitting in a cell in Belle Reve.”

“Which is actually one less thing to worry about for once, right?” Sojourn asked.

“Not necessarily,” Karnival countered. “We were lucky we were there to deal with the chaos, but it wasn’t exactly the kind we were expecting. So did we underestimate LocoForce? Or did we scare them off? Or did they have something else in mind all along?”

“I don’t think we can underestimate those particular sociopaths … or Minotaur in particular, for that matter,” Hangfire said. “Something’s coming. Hell if I know what, though.”

“Agreed that LocoForce had nothing to do with the freaks that broke through the courthouse floor?” Pierce asked, looking around the table.

“Not their style, in more ways than one,” Ember pointed out. The rest of the team concurred and nodded.

“Clotty …” Pierce started.

“Huh, somebody remembered I was here,” the artificial intelligence program grumbled.

The erstwhile Checkmate Knight ignored the sarcasm. “Do some data mining. As far and as deep as you can. Anything that comes close to LocoForce, Walter Reinhart, Benjamin Kellogg. Anything or anyone they looked at. Anything or anyone that looked at them.”

“Both ways?” More asked.

“Might be able to find out what LocoForce has planned for Minotaur,” Pierce answered. “Might find out the reason why Minotaur is on hold. LocoForce are professional mercenaries, and Kellogg trusts Reinhart enough to understand that a job could come first.”

“And they still could be sending us a message,” Karnival mused. “By not grabbing Minotaur at the trial, letting him go off to Belle Reve, it’s like Headhunter and the rest are saying, ‘We can get him any time we want.’”

“So Clotty looks into what else could be on LocoForce’s dance card, though I doubt he’ll find anything,” Ember said.

“Not my fault. If I can’t find it, it ain’t out there,” Clotty rejoined.

“Right,” Ember rolled his eyes. “Meanwhile, we just assume that the freaks attacking the courthouse while Minotaur happened to be on trial was just a coincidence?”

“No such thing as coincidences, where we’re concerned,” Hangfire observed. “But the cause and effect doesn’t run towards LocoForce in this case.”

“So who does it run to?” Valence asked. “Who traffics in deformed mindless servants?”

“Sadly, that really does cover an awful lot of ground,” Karnival said.

“Hey, wait a second, I just realized something,” More broke in. “I mean, I know they didn’t look anything alike, but that’s kind of what the Manticores were, right? Deformed mindless servants?”

“Kind of …” Karnival replied. “I’ll grant you the mindless part. The deformities are at opposite ends of the spectrum, though. With the Manticores, everything is designed to make them into killing machines.”

“A military project,” Hangfire added.

“Exactly,” Karnival agreed. “But the freaks at the courthouse, they seemed almost … hobbled. Like they had been specifically deformed to be dependent on their master. They couldn’t survive long on their own, unlike the Manticores, who had no trouble going feral in Houston.”

“I think the differences went even deeper than that,” Sojourn volunteered. “The Manticores were science experiments, but those other things left bad juju all over the courthouse.”

“How bad juju are we talking about?” More asked.

“When I went to check it out that night, I was actually glad I had been at school for the actual fight,” Sojourn confessed. “Real bad.”

“So … magic experiments? That’s your theory?” Ember asked.

“Yeah,” Sojourn affirmed. She looked down at her hands, fidgeting on the surface of the table. Karnival watched her carefully, but she gave every appearance of not noticing.

“We really do need to look into those Manticores a little more closely,” Valence said. “I mean, I don’t think they spontaneously generated in an abandoned lab. We should probably find out who left them there, before whoever it was comes looking for us.”

“Courthouse incident takes priority,” Pierce countered. “Assume the freaks weren’t there for Minotaur. Only logical conclusion left is that they were there for us. Whoever’s responsible for the Manticores isn’t on to us yet, but somebody else is.”

“Somebody with a more mystical bent, apparently,” Hangfire noted.

“What about those nasty little baby vampires that came crawling out of the Magna?” Sojourn asked.

“Right, what did Vic call them … Ohyn,” Valence nodded.

“Think there’s a connection between them and the nasties at the courthouse?” she pressed.

“Could be,” Ember shrugged. “Or it could just be our bad luck to have two different magical masters sending hit squads after us.”

“Add that to the data mining list, Clotty,” Pierce ordered. “Mystics, servants with the characteristics we’ve seen. Separate from the LocoForce search.” He paused a moment then added, “Actually, cross-referenced as well. Understood?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Clotty growled from the four display terminals at mid-table.

“What else?” Pierce asked, looking around the table.

“There’s the Ultra-Humanite,” More said. “Not that he necessarily has anything to do with LocoForce or bad juju or orange cybernetic killing machines …”

“I wouldn’t necessarily rule out that last one,” Hangfire interjected.

“Well, anyway, just something to look out for,” More concluded. “Ultra-Humanite’s probably as mad at us as at Wildcat now, if not madder.”

“Though we’re all a notch below Sportsmaster,” Karnival commented.

“Fair enough,” Pierce assented. “Could be helpful to know more about the Ultra-Humanite if he sets his sights on us.”

“And that, at least, is something Clotty can look into,” Valence suggested. “Ultra-Humanite’s gotta be fairly well-documented. Right, little buddy?”

“Oh, you did not just call me that,” Clotty retorted.

“One more thing,” Karnival said. “Let’s not forget about Zyl’yrag.”

“The Controller who tried to harvest us for a metahuman army?” Hangfire scoffed. “Not somebody I’m liable to forget, trust me.”

“But he could be anywhere in the universe by now,” Ember said. “And somehow we managed to get about two-thirds of the superheroes on Earth to lay the smackdown on him, so wherever he’s gone, what makes you think he’d come back?” He stopped, furrowed his brow, and turned to Valence. “Do you think he’d come back?”

“How should I know?” Valence shot back.

“Out of all of us you have the most history with the Controllers,” Ember explained. “Like, any. But, hey, if you don’t want to talk about your childhood, I guess we won’t pry.”

“Oh, man, that’s big of you, you won’t pry,” Valence laughed humorlessly.

“What?” Ember demanded. “You think it’s unreasonable that any of us might want you to clue us in about things that could potentially affect us all?”

“I … I … if I keep things to myself …” Valence shook his head. “It’s not like I’m Pierce!”

“Oh, God, not again,” Sojourn groaned.

“Guys, come on,” More spread his arms wide in supplication.

“Enough,” Karnival said in a tone leaving no room for argument. “I know running through a list of people who intend to do us harm makes everyone edgy and paranoid, but I refuse to let this team devour itself. Everyone in the world has secrets. It’s human nature. We have to be able to trust each other without expecting everyone to recount every thing they’ve ever done every second of their lives. If Valence knew something about the Controllers that was relevant, or Pierce knew something from Checkmate about the Manticores, or Sojourn knew anything about the creatures at the courthouse, they’d tell us. If we can’t just accept that, we might as well give up now.”

The rest of Bad Blood remained silent for several long seconds. Finally, Valence spoke. “Sorry. But you’re right, it is hard to run down everything going on right now. A cosmically powerful would-be planet conqueror, a mad scientist brain-swapper, and a mostly-at-large team of brutal killers for hire on one side, and we have no idea what any of them are currently up to or even where they are. Then, on the other side, Manticores being bred in Houston, freaks attacking the New Orleans courthouse, Ohyn snuck into our coffee table … and no idea who’s behind any of that or what it all means. Some days it feels like we’re not accomplishing anything. It pisses me off.”

“People were getting brutally murdered in Houston,” Hangfire said. “Now they’re not. People might have gotten killed at the courthouse, but we made sure they didn’t. And it might make us nervous because it seemed too easy, but Minotaur is behind bars. Big players like Zyl’yrag and Ultra-Humanite, they might still be out there, but we handed them setbacks.”

“And the most important thing is we’re all still alive,” More stated. He grinned, then rubbed his bald head sheepishly. “I mean, not to sound egotistical or anything. But every day we make it through is another day we can try to get stuff accomplished. You know what I mean.”

At the head of the table, Pierce rose from his seat. “As good a time as any to break,” he announced.

“What do you mean, break?” Ember asked.

“Go our separate ways,” he answered, immediately holding up a gauntleted hand to forestall objections. “Temporarily, and with every intent of meeting back here. But there are things that need to be looked into. Some things about what we’re up against, that Clotty won’t find in any computer system. Some things in our heads, that need sorting out. Everyone take a week. Meet back here in seven days. What you do in the interim is up to you.”

Slowly, the rest of his teammates stood up to comply. Clotty turned up the volume of the speakers embedded in the monitor cube to be heard over the clatter of chairs against the wood flooring and said, “What the hell am I supposed to do while you’re all gone?”

“Finish the data mining and analyze it,” Pierce said.

“And then do whatever it is you normally do to amuse your computerized brain,” Valence said. “Which, for the record, I don’t want to know about.”

With that, the members of Bad Blood filed out of the room, and within a few minutes the Riverboat was empty. The corridors and rooms of the base were silent except for the low hum of power cables behind the walls, and the wind blowing through the swamp outside.

From Clotty’s perspective, within the computer network running throughout the Riverboat’s many levels, both above the dark, stagnant water and below the sandbar on which the vessel canted, there was noise and motion. Packets of data streamed in, were scanned, indexed, collected. Simple MIDI tones of varying pitches and lengths signaled progress and statuses in ways that the artificial intelligence program was able to process in the background. Despite the tendencies exhibited when interfacing with human operators, and despite what those operators might suspect, Clotty did not talk to himself while he worked. He simply maintained routine threads and executed required tasks, his red teardrop form floating across an abstract plane filled with oscillating light and encoded twittering noises like electronic birdsong in a cyber-forest.

Thus, a voice sounding across that plane – saying “Now that is an ugly avatar!” – was startling enough to disrupt a cache transfer as Clotty abruptly shifted into system assessment mode.

A human form had solidified after leaking out of one of the incoming data streams. It was a male in battle armor of metallic purple and circuit-board green, with a helmet that included large, faceted eye lenses and which exposed the lower half of the man’s face. Three thick, dark cables undulated in the air, rooted to the armor’s flared shoulders and the crown of the helmet. A second, slightly taller human form was coalescing beside the first, this one in the form of a woman in silver and cerulean. Her entire face was hidden by a mask set into a sapphire helmet which was decorated with platinum hair. The woman’s armor was more streamlined than the man’s, elegant and sleek.

“I’m Bug,” the male said. “She’s Byte. And you’ve got some impressive defenses on this network. But we’ve hacked into better.”

“You ain’t seen all the defenses yet,” Clotty said angrily.

“Really?” Bug snorted.

“Last line of defense is me,” Clotty boasted.

“I believe it,” Bug nodded, with a grinning leer. “In fact, I expected it. ‘Cause we didn’t come here to see if we could get in. The defenses are top-notch, but mostly industry standard. Unlike you, little buddy.”

“Seriously, everyone better stop calling me that,” Clotty seethed.

Bug ignored the interruption. “You’re a unique little AI program, aren’t you? Nothing else like you on anyone else’s systems. But we’re betting there’s a lot of people who would pay good money to have a copy of you.”

“Not interested in breeding, sorry,” Clotty snarled.

“And we don’t care whether you’re interested or not,” Bug said. “So I guess that makes us even. But one way or another, we’re not leaving without you.”

Clotty held both of his free-floating hands palm up and flicked his fingers beckoningly. “Bring it on!” Bug laughed, as the cables writhing around his head dove and sunk their free ends into the ground. The MIDI tones echoing across the plane suddenly became painfully loud and distorted shrieks. At the same time, Byte calmly raised her hands over her head. An electrical vortex began to swirl above her head, throwing lightning bolts in all directions, setting off explosions with every impact.

Clotty’s jaw dropped open, and his cigar fell to the iridescent floor.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

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It has been a long, long while since I got any Bad Blood feedback e-mail, which either means I’m doing everything right and no one has any complaints, or no one is paying attention. Either way, it beats getting flamed I guess. Still, feel free to share your thoughts - e-mails are always welcome!

NEXT ISSUE: With the members of Bad Blood scattered across the country, Clotty stands alone against Bug and Byte! By the time the team regroups, will they find their trusty AI in any form that they recognize?