mythago
Hero
Jacque clapped his hands and squealed at the airplane that bounced up out of the artificial surf. - “Cee, it’s darling! Did you really give it a puppy brain for an AI? Oh, look, it’s splashing me!”[1]
Criminal Procedure sighed. Jacque was less tiresome than many of the beautiful idiots he’d kept as arm candy, but that just meant he’d kept his interest longer than average. Or maybe that was just a side effect of having your secret underground hideaway directly beneath Las Vegas; you got used to constantly being tempted with brighter and gaudier things, until you ended up with the attention span of a fruit fly.
“Cee?”
“Yes, Jacque, I did, superimposed over the AI it already had. That’s the plane I took off Mister Right.”
Jacque gaped. “That was *you*? When he was battling Viragor over the Caspian Sea and that big vortex opened and he vanished into another dimension?”
“That was me,” Criminal Procedure agreed. “He didn’t really go into another dimension, though. He’s in the Hung Gardens. But I kept the plane. I had to overwrite all that truth-and-justice crap he’d programmed in, and I had this puppy that wouldn’t stop pissing on the Tabriz rug in the command center, so–“
“You need to get rid of the sharks, honey,” Jacque said, peering at the underside of the airplane. “They’re starting to rip up the paint.”
Criminal Procedure eyed the couple sunbathing on the artificial beach. Jacque’s immediate predecessors in his bedroom, they’d been a matched set, but lately seemed far more interested in perfecting their tans in performing for him.
“Maybe they’re just hungry,” he said. “Bring me a gaff, would you? And a stun pistol.”
#
Five miles up, the Chippendale Boys did their best to blend in with the scenery. [2]
“I’m not sure whether to be happy nobody is giving us a second look, or annoyed that nobody is giving us a second look,” Geoff said.
Brian shrugged. “We’re in Las Vegas, Geoff. You’re practically wearing a burqa by local standards.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t wear our costumes. I hate civvies.”
“I don’t particularly like them either, but are we trying to be inconspicuous or not? Do you think we’re going to find Criminal Procedure if he gets word that we’re traipsing around town?”
“I think we’d definitely find him,” Geoff said. “I just don’t think we’d walk away.”
They stood in silence for few moments, remembering Mister Right.
“Okay,” Brian said. “I want to get this mofo as much as you do. All we know is that he’s somewhere in Vegas, and he’s got some kind of garden that doesn’t match any of the attractions in Vegas. All we have is half a photo and nobody’s been able to map it.”
“Not even the one in that Japanese restaurant at the Wynn?”
“Okada?”
“That one.”
“What is it that you can never remember the name of that restaurant?
“Who cares about the damn restaurant?!” Geoff shouted. “We’re looking for Mister Right and all you can do is talk about a restaurant?” A few tourists paused and looked at him, as if they expected him and Brian to be starting some kind of impromptu theater. Brian took him by one well-formed arm and steered him around the side of a faux Italian pillar.
“Geoff,” he said quietly, “you know there’s only one way to do this. You’re going to have to feel the love. Are we close enough?”
Geoff bit his lip. “I think so. We might have to wander around to find something in range. But I was hoping we wouldn’t have to....you know how wasted it makes me. I’ll be a dishrag for days.”
“You’re worried about a hangover at a time like this?”
“No. I’m worried that we’re going to show up in Criminal Procedure’s lap and I’ll be useless to you.”
Brian stood on tiptoe to kiss Geoff on the forehead. He still had to pull Geoff’s head down to reach him.
“The guy may be a criminal mastermind, but he’s got a solar plexus and a pair of ‘nads like everyone else,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
Geoff tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Brian watched in awe. They both loved Mister Right, of course, but only Geoff had the power to feel the love, to reach someone he cared for so deeply that he could, literally, move heaven and earth out of the way and open a door to wherever they were.
As the dimensional gap unfolded, showing a hint of green beyond, Brian had two fleeting thoughts: that only in Vegas could you open a door in the space-time continuum without anybody particularly noticing, and that it was a really good thing Geoff wasn’t the stalker type.
#
The garden was an orderly progression of topiary trees and hand-cut stone. [3] Geoff expressed his appreciation by dropping to his knees and heaving.
Brian helped him over to a strip of grass between walkways. “I didn’t think it would hit you this fast,” he said.
Geoff rubbed his face on the grass and rolled onto his back. “It didn’t,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Mister Right’s here, but....”
“Show me.”
Geoff slung an arm around his shoulders and they staggered across the garden. Geoff thrust one arm out like a drunk trying to get his hands around a doorknob. He pulled them past one of the oddly-angled topiary trees, then another, until they reached the last in line. He threw his arms around the slant of the trunk and sagged.
“Here?” Brian asked, but Geoff only moaned in reply.
Brian inspected the tree carefully. Who would get a tree to grow like that? The trunk was shaped strangely, its top parting like a pair of legs, a huge knob at the bottom about the size of a–
“Human head,” he whispered. “Geoff. He’s the tree, isn’t he? What did that bastard do to him?”
“Nothing I wouldn’t do to you, eventually,” a voice called from across the garden. Brian whipped around, moving his body between Criminal Procedure and the incapacitated Geoff. He’d expected the villain to be decked out in some new super-science armor and wielding a death ray, but instead he wore a perfectly ordinary pair of board shorts. The only thing in his hand appeared to be a mojito. He stared at Brian.
“Are you cruising me?” Brian demanded. “You really put the ‘ch’ in ‘chutzpah,’ you know that?”
“You and your friend came barging into my underground fortress wearing tuxedo collars and matching Speedos,” Criminal Procedure pointed out. “Can you blame me?”
“You killed Mister Right!”
“Not killed, exactly. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘transmogrified’. He’s quite alive there, just in a slightly different form. Hm, maybe ‘re-engineered’ is a better term? I used an intelligent micro-lifeform to do the work; I’m still trying to figure a catchy term for it.”
Brian cracked his knuckles menacingly. It wasn’t really necessary–of the many schools of martial arts he’d mastered, he preferred muy thai–but it was important to keep up the look of the thing. “You can let him go,” he said, “or we can do this the hard way. And if you make a double entendre out of that I swear I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t you want me to give a monologue about my next grand scheme to take over the world?”
“I assume it has something to do with that micro-lifeform you told me about. At a guess, I’d say you plan to introduce it into the water supply or some other delivery system, infect the entire population of the world, turn a few into hideous monsters to make a point, then demand they obey your every whim or else. Am I missing anything?”
Criminal Procedure sighed theatrically. “Nothing significant. You take a lot of the drama out of this, you know? So let me skip ahead to the part relevant to you: if you surrender now, you can have a short, but exciting, career as my bedwarmer. If you don’t, I’ll kill you and your skinny friend, and chop down Mister Right to make firewood.”
“I was actually thinking that you’d surrender and face a fair trial in the criminal courts, or resist and I’ll have to twist your head off your neck.”
“Looks like we’re at an impasse here,” Criminal Procedure said. “Say, do you remember that prop plane Mister Right liked to fly? The one with a computer brain?”
“The Friendly Skies?”
“That’s the one.” He reached into a side pocket of his shorts and pulled out a small metal box with a few buttons. He pressed one.
There was a whine that spun into a deafening roar behind him. Brian threw himself flat as the Friendly Skies shot over the wall behind him, tearing leaves from the trees in the topiary garden. It zoomed past, raining seawater. That’s hell on the paint. Mister Right is going to have a fit, he thought, and then some instinct told him to grab Geoff and get behind one of the trees.
“I reloaded the forward guns!” Criminal Procedure shouted. Behind him, the Friendly Skies banked, bumping into the artificial sky a few times as it came back around.
Brian tried to think of whether there were any security overrides, any codes that Criminal Procedure might have overlooked or forgotten to close off in the Friendly Skies’s mind. Probably not. Was it tracking him by sight, or heat signature? It would have to have some way of locking on him as a target; it was unlikely that Criminal Procedure would have had time to program his image in specifically.
At worst, he needed cover.
As the plane dipped toward them, Brian dashed forward and tackled Criminal Procedure. The mojito flew from his hand and shattered on the pavement. He threw the villain over one shoulder and dashed through the topiary trees, weaving back and forth, making it difficult for the Friendly Skies to get an accurate shot at him. He also hoped it knew not to shoot Criminal Procedure.
The curved walkway gave way to a short beach that lapped at some kind of indoor ocean, bounded by a framework on the far side. Brian pounded along the beach. He slowed once to reach over his shoulder and punch Criminal Procedure in the face to keep him from struggling. The plane circled overhead, propellers beating.
I need some way to control that thing, he thought, and then kicked himself for being an idiot. He reached back again and rummaged in Criminal Procedure’s shorts for the remote control. His hand closed around a sleek box the size of a very expensive mobile phone. He looked at the complicated array of buttons. There was one labeled HERE BOY.
Brian pressed the button. The Friendly Skies pulled out of its turn and aimed its nose straight at him. He could swear it sounded eager.
He waited until his legs stopped listening to him, dropped Criminal Procedure in the sand and ran faster than he’d ever run in his life. He made it almost all the way to the topiary garden before the plane met the beach in a sound he’d never be able to forget, no matter how many drinks he poured over it.
#
“I know it’s an intelligent micro-lifeform with the power to do terrible evil,” Geoff said, “and I don’t care, I still say it’s adorable. Look at it scoot around. ” On the display screen in Criminal Procedure’s secret laboratory, the thing turned its tiny red orb back and forth as it wriggled. [4]
“I don’t really care if it’s adorable,” Brian said, “I care that we can use it to undo whatever he did to Mister Right.”
Geoff put his arm around Brian’s shoulders. “I care too. Look, neither of us has the science background to do this. Who do you think we can ask to take a look?”
“Captain Curie?”
“I’m not sure she’s forgiven him for that spat at the Embassy.”
“Maybe not, but do you think that she’d pass up an opportunity to get her hands on this fabulous laboratory? It’s got all the equipment she’d ever dream of....”
“And it’s in Vegas,” they said in unison. The Chippendale Boys clinked their mojitos together in a toast.
--------------
[1] plane
[2] boys
[3] trees
[4] microscopic lifeform
Criminal Procedure sighed. Jacque was less tiresome than many of the beautiful idiots he’d kept as arm candy, but that just meant he’d kept his interest longer than average. Or maybe that was just a side effect of having your secret underground hideaway directly beneath Las Vegas; you got used to constantly being tempted with brighter and gaudier things, until you ended up with the attention span of a fruit fly.
“Cee?”
“Yes, Jacque, I did, superimposed over the AI it already had. That’s the plane I took off Mister Right.”
Jacque gaped. “That was *you*? When he was battling Viragor over the Caspian Sea and that big vortex opened and he vanished into another dimension?”
“That was me,” Criminal Procedure agreed. “He didn’t really go into another dimension, though. He’s in the Hung Gardens. But I kept the plane. I had to overwrite all that truth-and-justice crap he’d programmed in, and I had this puppy that wouldn’t stop pissing on the Tabriz rug in the command center, so–“
“You need to get rid of the sharks, honey,” Jacque said, peering at the underside of the airplane. “They’re starting to rip up the paint.”
Criminal Procedure eyed the couple sunbathing on the artificial beach. Jacque’s immediate predecessors in his bedroom, they’d been a matched set, but lately seemed far more interested in perfecting their tans in performing for him.
“Maybe they’re just hungry,” he said. “Bring me a gaff, would you? And a stun pistol.”
#
Five miles up, the Chippendale Boys did their best to blend in with the scenery. [2]
“I’m not sure whether to be happy nobody is giving us a second look, or annoyed that nobody is giving us a second look,” Geoff said.
Brian shrugged. “We’re in Las Vegas, Geoff. You’re practically wearing a burqa by local standards.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t wear our costumes. I hate civvies.”
“I don’t particularly like them either, but are we trying to be inconspicuous or not? Do you think we’re going to find Criminal Procedure if he gets word that we’re traipsing around town?”
“I think we’d definitely find him,” Geoff said. “I just don’t think we’d walk away.”
They stood in silence for few moments, remembering Mister Right.
“Okay,” Brian said. “I want to get this mofo as much as you do. All we know is that he’s somewhere in Vegas, and he’s got some kind of garden that doesn’t match any of the attractions in Vegas. All we have is half a photo and nobody’s been able to map it.”
“Not even the one in that Japanese restaurant at the Wynn?”
“Okada?”
“That one.”
“What is it that you can never remember the name of that restaurant?
“Who cares about the damn restaurant?!” Geoff shouted. “We’re looking for Mister Right and all you can do is talk about a restaurant?” A few tourists paused and looked at him, as if they expected him and Brian to be starting some kind of impromptu theater. Brian took him by one well-formed arm and steered him around the side of a faux Italian pillar.
“Geoff,” he said quietly, “you know there’s only one way to do this. You’re going to have to feel the love. Are we close enough?”
Geoff bit his lip. “I think so. We might have to wander around to find something in range. But I was hoping we wouldn’t have to....you know how wasted it makes me. I’ll be a dishrag for days.”
“You’re worried about a hangover at a time like this?”
“No. I’m worried that we’re going to show up in Criminal Procedure’s lap and I’ll be useless to you.”
Brian stood on tiptoe to kiss Geoff on the forehead. He still had to pull Geoff’s head down to reach him.
“The guy may be a criminal mastermind, but he’s got a solar plexus and a pair of ‘nads like everyone else,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
Geoff tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Brian watched in awe. They both loved Mister Right, of course, but only Geoff had the power to feel the love, to reach someone he cared for so deeply that he could, literally, move heaven and earth out of the way and open a door to wherever they were.
As the dimensional gap unfolded, showing a hint of green beyond, Brian had two fleeting thoughts: that only in Vegas could you open a door in the space-time continuum without anybody particularly noticing, and that it was a really good thing Geoff wasn’t the stalker type.
#
The garden was an orderly progression of topiary trees and hand-cut stone. [3] Geoff expressed his appreciation by dropping to his knees and heaving.
Brian helped him over to a strip of grass between walkways. “I didn’t think it would hit you this fast,” he said.
Geoff rubbed his face on the grass and rolled onto his back. “It didn’t,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Mister Right’s here, but....”
“Show me.”
Geoff slung an arm around his shoulders and they staggered across the garden. Geoff thrust one arm out like a drunk trying to get his hands around a doorknob. He pulled them past one of the oddly-angled topiary trees, then another, until they reached the last in line. He threw his arms around the slant of the trunk and sagged.
“Here?” Brian asked, but Geoff only moaned in reply.
Brian inspected the tree carefully. Who would get a tree to grow like that? The trunk was shaped strangely, its top parting like a pair of legs, a huge knob at the bottom about the size of a–
“Human head,” he whispered. “Geoff. He’s the tree, isn’t he? What did that bastard do to him?”
“Nothing I wouldn’t do to you, eventually,” a voice called from across the garden. Brian whipped around, moving his body between Criminal Procedure and the incapacitated Geoff. He’d expected the villain to be decked out in some new super-science armor and wielding a death ray, but instead he wore a perfectly ordinary pair of board shorts. The only thing in his hand appeared to be a mojito. He stared at Brian.
“Are you cruising me?” Brian demanded. “You really put the ‘ch’ in ‘chutzpah,’ you know that?”
“You and your friend came barging into my underground fortress wearing tuxedo collars and matching Speedos,” Criminal Procedure pointed out. “Can you blame me?”
“You killed Mister Right!”
“Not killed, exactly. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘transmogrified’. He’s quite alive there, just in a slightly different form. Hm, maybe ‘re-engineered’ is a better term? I used an intelligent micro-lifeform to do the work; I’m still trying to figure a catchy term for it.”
Brian cracked his knuckles menacingly. It wasn’t really necessary–of the many schools of martial arts he’d mastered, he preferred muy thai–but it was important to keep up the look of the thing. “You can let him go,” he said, “or we can do this the hard way. And if you make a double entendre out of that I swear I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t you want me to give a monologue about my next grand scheme to take over the world?”
“I assume it has something to do with that micro-lifeform you told me about. At a guess, I’d say you plan to introduce it into the water supply or some other delivery system, infect the entire population of the world, turn a few into hideous monsters to make a point, then demand they obey your every whim or else. Am I missing anything?”
Criminal Procedure sighed theatrically. “Nothing significant. You take a lot of the drama out of this, you know? So let me skip ahead to the part relevant to you: if you surrender now, you can have a short, but exciting, career as my bedwarmer. If you don’t, I’ll kill you and your skinny friend, and chop down Mister Right to make firewood.”
“I was actually thinking that you’d surrender and face a fair trial in the criminal courts, or resist and I’ll have to twist your head off your neck.”
“Looks like we’re at an impasse here,” Criminal Procedure said. “Say, do you remember that prop plane Mister Right liked to fly? The one with a computer brain?”
“The Friendly Skies?”
“That’s the one.” He reached into a side pocket of his shorts and pulled out a small metal box with a few buttons. He pressed one.
There was a whine that spun into a deafening roar behind him. Brian threw himself flat as the Friendly Skies shot over the wall behind him, tearing leaves from the trees in the topiary garden. It zoomed past, raining seawater. That’s hell on the paint. Mister Right is going to have a fit, he thought, and then some instinct told him to grab Geoff and get behind one of the trees.
“I reloaded the forward guns!” Criminal Procedure shouted. Behind him, the Friendly Skies banked, bumping into the artificial sky a few times as it came back around.
Brian tried to think of whether there were any security overrides, any codes that Criminal Procedure might have overlooked or forgotten to close off in the Friendly Skies’s mind. Probably not. Was it tracking him by sight, or heat signature? It would have to have some way of locking on him as a target; it was unlikely that Criminal Procedure would have had time to program his image in specifically.
At worst, he needed cover.
As the plane dipped toward them, Brian dashed forward and tackled Criminal Procedure. The mojito flew from his hand and shattered on the pavement. He threw the villain over one shoulder and dashed through the topiary trees, weaving back and forth, making it difficult for the Friendly Skies to get an accurate shot at him. He also hoped it knew not to shoot Criminal Procedure.
The curved walkway gave way to a short beach that lapped at some kind of indoor ocean, bounded by a framework on the far side. Brian pounded along the beach. He slowed once to reach over his shoulder and punch Criminal Procedure in the face to keep him from struggling. The plane circled overhead, propellers beating.
I need some way to control that thing, he thought, and then kicked himself for being an idiot. He reached back again and rummaged in Criminal Procedure’s shorts for the remote control. His hand closed around a sleek box the size of a very expensive mobile phone. He looked at the complicated array of buttons. There was one labeled HERE BOY.
Brian pressed the button. The Friendly Skies pulled out of its turn and aimed its nose straight at him. He could swear it sounded eager.
He waited until his legs stopped listening to him, dropped Criminal Procedure in the sand and ran faster than he’d ever run in his life. He made it almost all the way to the topiary garden before the plane met the beach in a sound he’d never be able to forget, no matter how many drinks he poured over it.
#
“I know it’s an intelligent micro-lifeform with the power to do terrible evil,” Geoff said, “and I don’t care, I still say it’s adorable. Look at it scoot around. ” On the display screen in Criminal Procedure’s secret laboratory, the thing turned its tiny red orb back and forth as it wriggled. [4]
“I don’t really care if it’s adorable,” Brian said, “I care that we can use it to undo whatever he did to Mister Right.”
Geoff put his arm around Brian’s shoulders. “I care too. Look, neither of us has the science background to do this. Who do you think we can ask to take a look?”
“Captain Curie?”
“I’m not sure she’s forgiven him for that spat at the Embassy.”
“Maybe not, but do you think that she’d pass up an opportunity to get her hands on this fabulous laboratory? It’s got all the equipment she’d ever dream of....”
“And it’s in Vegas,” they said in unison. The Chippendale Boys clinked their mojitos together in a toast.
--------------
[1] plane
[2] boys
[3] trees
[4] microscopic lifeform