Six-year-olds show various states of emotion when being told that they're invited to an amusement park. Most of the reactions are joyous, some are phobic of vertigo. Some want to bring their friends (rarely imaginary, by that age) along. Some are just scared of crowds, or of coasters.
However, one thing normals will generally not hear is this:
"This fucking sucks! Fucking secrecy bullshit!"
His half-brother didn't quite understand Quad's anger. It was obvious that if normals were coming along, nobody could know of Quad's extra appendages. And it wasn't like the pouch in the sweater that held Quad's lower arms was confining or anything. All Quad had to do was keep them folded and it'd make him look like an ordinary, slightly pudgy, kid. Stan was more worried about the hair dye, which comes out on a certain chemical application. But what if it wouldn't come out? Or what if something similar to the chemical got on his head before he was ready? What if normals found out he had pink hair, teased him about it, and he fucking killed them all and got in trouble for it? These were not, however, fears he would let show in front of Quad. "Quad, what are you bitching about? It's the only way in for you!" Sometimes when Quad was discussing his arms, Stan would talk entirely in echo, both to alleviate his own jealousy (the concept was starting to feel wrong, now, just like the word did) and to remind Quad that he hadn't won everything in the genetic lottery.
"No it's not! Why don't we just wait and take it over later like Dad did?" More than half a decade ago, the Dominator had taken his friends to an amusement park, with unexpectedly violent results.
"We can't take it over, it's already run by an Illuminatus!" (The obvious logical mistake would be realized later, to great lamentation.) "And this is The Grand Opening! So are you coming or not? I'm going without you."
That last sentence clinched it. "Fine! But next time I'm going to tie up half your fucking arms and see how you like it! We'll call you Stanley, the One-Armed Cripple!"
"Whatever you say, Quincy!" Of all the retarded cover names. Quad chased Stan down the hall, the rubber of their normal shoes going slap-slap-slap all the way from their abode clear to the tram that would take them to the hangar, Quad jumping in as if the doors would shut the moment he dived through.
"I am going to get you if this turns out to be gay." Quad used mostly Latin in that, not caring about the grammar mixture.
"Hey, you decided to go, so if it turns out to be gay it's not my fault." This was entirely in Latin. The boys, still in the middle of the tram, found adjacent seats as it started to trundle. Snowy day, probably below -20 Celsius the way the snow stuck to the tracks before the heating system melted it away. It'd be about 10 degrees Celsius and overcast where they were going, which was fine by Quad. If he had to wear a sweater when it was hot outside, he'd say fuckit and declare the End of Secrecy right there.
"You'd be by yourself! And you'd tell me it was awesome even if it sucked! You'd tell that to all of us!"
"I would not! I wouldn't lie!"
"Yeah you would, you'd go 'I bet you wish you would have gone, Quad, I went on this jet-like roller coaster' even if all you got on was the spinning round thing because you were too short!" The boys had done fifteen minutes of Internet searching on the subject of amusement parks and loathed the idea of height requirements. Having to calculate inches to centimeters just added more insult; what, Americans still weren't using the fucking metric system?
"That's bullshit! There aren't even any height restrictions in this place anyway."
"How do you know?"
"Because I asked, Quincy! The guy owns it! It's a normal private park, not some loser public place."
"Don't call me that until we're in tard land! You could call me Quint if I had five arms." Quad's upper arms became animated as he talked, and his lowers squirmed irritably in their pouch. "I hate this fucking thing!"
"Then go without it and say you're fucked-up Siamese twins!", Stan snapped back. Quad was actually tempted.
The waiting vehicle was a standard Illuminati jet-helicopter, with the typical secrecy modifications. "I think our parents are in there," Stan said. Quad knew they'd be fake from tone and context; if the Duumvirate, Sarah, and Carlie had been coming along, all the kids would have probably known about it.
"Wait, parents? You've got to be fucking kidding me!!" One more straw; which would be the last?
"Like they'd let us in the normal world without them, quit being a baby! You know this shit!" Quad frowned but said nothing. "It'll be a couple of servants, we can just ditch them," Stan said as he climbed into the flyer, Quad following reluctantly, figuring that something else would terminally piss him off when it was too late to go back, possibly Stan.
"Actually," a voice from inside said, "I'm fourth level. And you can ditch me the moment you get in the door as far as I'm concerned."
Quad hurried into the jet with curiosity. The man looked to be about forty years old- solid face, muscle visible under sweatshirt, piercing eyes. "William Blakesworth," he said, offering each of the boys a hand to shake. Ah, the guy who had invited them. Quad used his left upper and felt his lowers protest that they didn't get a chance. So fucking annoying! The man's presumable wife was there too, almost certainly a servant, looking very much the part of a worried mother. She looked fat under frumpy clothes, which naturally meant (and even the six-year-olds knew this) plenty of concealed weapons and/or serious gear.
"So where's the others?" Quad asked, looking around for other kids. Maybe they were in different vehicles, with pretend-parents of their own?
"Actually, you two were the only ones who showed interest." So much for engineered unity. The brothers had talked to each other and assumed that everyone else would be up for it. Sure, they knew a couple girls weren't going, and yeah, even Tetrina didn't want to come, and Steve was kinda not interested, and Skyler, having had a few false starts, would be permanently gone in two weeks and really didn't give a shit, but...
"What about 'Shell and Chop and Mike-n-Ral and.. I can't believe that!" Stan shouted.
"It's true," Blakesworth replied. "Surprised me too." Quad didn't think the man was lying or hiding something from him, but he felt uneasy, as if maybe his other friends knew something he didn't. Stan didn't share the unease, just befuddlement. "I'm going to get this out of the way right now," Blakesworth said, as he flew the vehicle out of the hangar. Quad didn't offer to fly it, because he'd have to reach under the shirt and he was method-acting, learning to play the role of a normal kid. Which transcendentally pissed him off. Maybe that's why none of the others wanted to come. "I'm a spy. I'm indirectly working for your mother, Quad. I'm going to be-"
Method acting ends now. "Save it for someone who doesn't know what spies do," Quad snapped. "Tell me what he's doing instead."
The man was startled but quickly recovered. "We don't know. Sarah says it could be anything. He's just ordered a whole lot of different stuff that we never saw used, and it was all delivered to the same place, here on the amusement park."
Stan and Quad looked at each other with smiles. A secret base? Now that was an adventure worth having.
"What kind of stuff?" Stan asked.
"Electronics, mostly," Blakesworth answered, anticipating the question. "Some parts. Some stuff that might be for the amusement park, motors, gears, belts. Some normal paints, some Illuminated prefab stuff. Most of it was such raw materials that it could be used for anything. My guess is that he's building a factory- not the same kind we have, but something to crank out seemingly normal products with Illuminated designs. And that's what worries me." That wasn't the only thing that worried him, actually. His own son, three years old, was taking a nap after a brief meeting with dear old Dad. The boy had known only rudimentary English- Blakesworth found himself translating through an Enforcer to less rudimentary Latin- but he couldn't believe how much the boy understood, considerably more mature acting than the kids he had seen only a few years ago, visiting Northberg when considering whether or not to have children. The relative genetic advancement in that time had been slight; the learning speed was Xavier's doing.
And in a mere three years, his son- the little boy he had chosen to have- would be one of the minature (Hitlers? Napoleons? Stalins?) masters sitting behind him.
'My God, what have I done?' But he thought that every couple of weeks or so. Controlling international intelligence was just like that. He put it into the mental pocket he reserved for the rest of his moral qualms, a place known to UNIX geeks as /dev/null. After all, he was leading the sons of the Dominator into a situation where he might have to use them as influential capital. It wasn't as if he was going to try to use them as hostages- no one was that stupid- but simply being in their company could convince Bruce Joseph of his power if not his good intentions, and stay his hand if Blakesworth got caught.
Fortunately for him, the kids were too young to figure this out. "Do you know what you're getting us into?" Quad muttered to Stan very softly. The phrase was a favorite of Xavier's, minus the 'us'.
"I know exactly what I'm getting us into," Stan replied softly, but with absolute confidence. He knew normals, he knew Illuminati, he knew secrecy. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the piloting, for starters. Blakesworth was flying it himself. "You fly like a fucking buffalo," Quad said. The turbulence was not helping his mood.
Blakesworth turned, almost said something he knew would get him annihilated and held his temper to say "It's a windy day."
"Then turn on the autopilot."
He did so, gritting his teeth. He hated the concept almost as much as he hated being ordered around by anyone, let alone a six year old. "All right. It's on."
Quad waited about fifteen seconds, before growling, "It's not sufficient. Get out of the chair." Blakesworth entered the instantaneous deep thought that had led to his becoming an Illuminatus, and considered his options. He could say no, which might lead to humiliation or death. He could ask if Quad really knew how to fly, which could lead to humiliation or death. He could attempt to give them some quasi-parental homily, which would lead instantly to a humiliating death. Or he could get out of the pilot's seat, and take his chances. He chose the latter.
"No, I want it," Stan said when Quad moved forward, and Blakesworth had a brief, fleeting vision of the two boys arguing over who got to fly while they went down to a kinetic, fiery doom.
"Then take it," Quad said. The headphones wouldn't fit around Stan's head so he hung them around his neck, re-adjusting the chair as close as he could to suit someone almost three and a half feet tall.
"Secrecy. Ceiling is 4500 meters, top speed is two-fifty kilometers an hour, no course deviations, transformations or jet until we're twenty kilometers from land," Blakesworth's servant said in the usual half-casual operative's tone.
'No wings?!' But Stan had enough of bitching about secrecy, and killed the autopilot. There was a brief shake-up as the currents buffeted the craft, but those gradually turned into a rocking motion. Stan smiled a bit. He had only gotten to fly in reality just once before, and it had been windy then, too. He did not fight the air as Blakesworth and the autopilot did; he simply rode the wind, moving up and down until he found a height where the wind gave the craft a subtle rocking motion, actually moving it more than it had before, but the vibrations becoming stable and comforting. To Blakesworth it was a feat that ten years of experience, with more than a thousand logged hours, could not match. To Stan it was just another video game. Quad nodded in satisfaction, snorted softly in Blakesworth's direction, and began to doze off.
When he awoke it was to the thrummm of jet engines, and he nodded and dozed off again.
"Entering normal territory." woke him up a second time. Stan reluctantly switched seats with Blakesworth, feeling a pang of an emotion he did not recognize. They landed southwest of Goose Island, on a tiny paved island which barely had room to park the myriad aircraft coming. Since they came in jet mode, Blakesworth had to manage the tricky landing, cheating only slightly with the superior wheel brakes, trying to shake off the embarrassing idea that it'd be better if one of the kids did it. Had he known it would be like this, he would have gotten the seaplane modification.
A ferry would take them from the island to the amusement park; the boys entered and faced the glances of a dozen normal kids and recognized the operator as an Enforcer. A quick survey of subtle cues revealed no Northberg graduates in the bunch, who would have probably recognized them on sight. They moved past them first to the bathroom for a same-bowl same-time pissing contest, and then a few steps away to seats in the back.
Blakesworth sat next to them, plate tectonics on his mind. This was relatively close to Dominator territory, roughly 150 miles away. The same volcanic ridge that had produced the twins' island had also produced the tiny islands they were visiting. The whole ridge didn't even exist on any official maps. All of this area was, as far as normal governments were concerned, an out-of-bounds military-restricted area just like the Dominator's island was. The secrecy implications were concerning. What was Bruce Joseph going to do? Try to just play it off if someone started looking for it, as a simple inconsistency? Say the military recently sold the island and he was the highest bidder? That could be credible if done right, but he should have done that long before he had visitors. It only increased Blakesworth's suspicions, and made him glad he came in person. He, like his Dominator, wanted things done right.
And... they waited.
"When do we leave?" Stan asked.
"Probably when everybody gets here," Blakesworth answered.
"What time is it now?" Stan replied, eager.
"8:40." Blakesworth suddenly felt some regret at anger with the engineereds. He had come from a large family, of which he was the second oldest. Any long wait was always, always interspersed with a fair amount of whining, for ice cream or attention or anything else, at what always felt like the worst possible times, with his father snapping at the children and then his mother snapping at his father, his father defending himself, his mother saying something sarcastic, one of the younger children sobbing, his mother scolding the child, his father now insulting his mother for it... all of it exacerbating the problem. He judged smug superiority and the ever-present threat of instantaneous death to be less of an irritant.
"If it doesn't move by 9:30, we're going home," Quad said out of the side of his mouth.
"Sorry, can't do that," Blakesworth's servant said, shaking her head. Oh. Right. The adults were on a mission, and if normals saw two kids getting into an empty plane by themselves and it flying off, there would be questions. Quad's lower fists clenched at the ignominy and his own foolishness at not seeing it.
Okay. Stan had gotten them there early. So what? He'd waited before. His usual response was to doze off, but he'd already done that. He couldn't talk to Stan- not in usual voices about real things, at any rate. Would normals notice if they whispered in ultraquiet tones? Were they watching? Would they see it as suspicious? Fuck it. Secrecy was secrecy. Operatives had to deal with this shit all the time. Best to just shut up and daydream or something. It could be even more fun if the thing never moved, because then there might be some normal-world chaos, which he'd never seen in person.
Stan followed Quad's lead. He'd always been more patient than his half-brother. If he couldn't keep it up now, he was a loser.
What the boys didn't realize was that two young children not fidgeting and talking- like every other kid on this trip- was much more suspicious than almost anything else and a few of their neighbors wondered who had brought along the religious nutjobs.
"Okay! All right! We're not waiting for anyone else. Do you guys want to get there slow, or fast?" the Enforcer asked, in the tone of a cheerful normal, listening to the obvious and inevitable: kids screaming "Fast! Fast!" in a way that Quad found embarrassing and ridiculous. He found himself wishing he had a pouch for his upper arms as well, right along with his head. And to top it off, Stan was screaming with the rest of them, yelling "Go REALLY fast!" What the fuck, Stan?
And they did go really fast, kids screeching at the acceleration. Blakesworth reacted to it, reaching into a pocket before looking around and calming down. Quad felt himself pressed into the seat at first, and saw Stan giggling. Stan leaned over to his ear and whispered, very softly, "He read my lips, 'Enforcer'. Normal ones obey better if you do that." Stan had heard that second hand and had finally gotten the chance to test it. Then Quad giggled as well, despite himself. Being able to do that might make this visit a bit more enjoyable.
As they arrived- parked expertly next to a bright yellow pier- the other kids, and many of the adults, looked up at the tall coaster loops with awe and excitement. The boys, who had flown for real, were more amazed by the color scheme of everything from the bright orange asphalt paths to the deep blue pennants flying on everything for no good reason. It looked like what happened when you gave a two-year-old six rainbow crayons and a coloring book and told him to go nuts. Bruce Joseph was dressed to match, his face painted white with red cheeks. The only thing that wasn't painted was the faux-woodland at the edges of the island, and even that had its lawn mowed.
"Wow, it's all so.," Quad started and couldn't finish, lacking an adequate adjective. Stan was just amazed that anyone would dress up like a clown when not making a movie or something.
"The word you want is 'garish'," Blakesworth informed him. "Or maybe 'ostentatious'." What a paradox of secrecy. To roleplay the rich eccentric he was trying to be, Bruce had to be as obvious as possible. But a lot of this seemed excessive. This was supposed to be a private getaway, not the work of someone fired from the set design of normal children's films for being too crazy.
Bruce's mannerisms didn't help much, either. In cheery, eager tones, he told "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" to follow him inside, and to remember that he wanted everyone at the main entrance at noon for a presentation. He didn't look at Stan and Quad, which they found strange- after all, he was the only one there who was qualified to know who they were. Did he not care, did he not know, or was he just pretending for secrecy? The fact that he didn't specially greet Blakesworth was reassuring, but he didn't even give him a second glance. It was as if he honestly didn't give a shit who his invitees were.
And now was singing something weird off-key and dancing, walking backwards half the time to look at the crowd following him. What was with this guy? The boys heard some normal say to his wife, "He's like Willy Wonka." That might have been helpful if either engineered knew who that was. He led them into the park, a wide entrance the only hole in an effective-looking fence topped with razor wire. Tents were all over, flying meaningless colored pennants, some weak-looking kiddie rides and only one particularly tall coaster in the distance, the entrance area surrounded by statues of clowns. Eventually Bruce bowed to the crowd, who walked around him as if in some ritual. Whatever. Quad crammed his upper fists into his pockets and wondered the real reason Stan had dragged him out here.
But since he didn't ask, Stan didn't tell him the answer: Superheroes.
Stan had acquired a number of normal-world comic books. Although he skipped through the ridiculous, unintelligible plots with disdain, one thing constantly struck him as a continuing theme: Secrecy of a sort. Stan knew that older engineereds (like Quad's real mom) pretended to be normal for missions, but that wasn't quite the same. Why would a superhero, who goes out in public to worldwide acclaim, be a normal for any length of time?
Stan constantly asked himself this as he tried to pretend his perception and speed were that of a normal's. He forced himself to look at things five times longer than necessary, and ran in what was to him a slow-motion gait, on the upper bounds of normal kids' speed, occasionally looking back at Quad, who wasn't pretending. A sullen walk was the same everywhere, and Quad kept his eyes affixed to the ground.
The answer, Stan realized, was that there is no reason. The comics were bullshit. Superman would never have spent time as Clark Kent, adoptive parents be damned. He could be out rearranging asteroids for fun, or tossing Lex Luthor into the Phantom Zone if he didn't really want to kill him, or any of a million other exciting and maybe useful things. Stan reluctantly realized that he'd seriously have to apologize to Quad for this. Later. He'd apologize when it was over. If he felt like he really had to.
He turned around again, about to yell at Quad to hurry up and stop sulking, but he saw the woman and her three daughters approach Quad, who intentionally didn't react.
"What's with the frowny face? The day's what you make it, so cheer-" Why do some adults think they approach random kids like this?
Quad turned fast- a bit too fast, but the normals didn't notice- and interrupted her with, "When the time is right, I will kill you personally," glad for the first time in his life that he didn't inherit the echo effect as Stan did, as he would have broken secrecy with it. The woman had no way of knowing he was being serious. But then he stared at her, and she saw his eyes. The boys couldn't tolerate contacts and the plan was to make up some rare disease to explain it. Not too big of a deal- Dominator William had been out as a normal for the first ten years of his life after all, and he didn't even dye his hair.
But at that moment, Quad's voice and eyes were enough to convince the woman that something was very wrong with this kid.
"Let's.. play over on the merry ground now, okay?" she asked her brood, actually saying 'merry ground', and they quickly got away, the woman imagining vampires who could tolerate sunlight, the girls saying something about "ad-a-rall" and "ay-dee-dee", whatever the hell that was. He'd made a mistake, Quad realized, although he knew he'd never be called on it. That was too close to a real secrecy breach.
Stan ran back over to Quad. "This isn't working, dude." 'Dude' was not a word he'd ever heard spoken, and he pronounced it a bit like "doody".
"No shit it's not," Quad said, his eyes affixing on Stan.
"Sorry. I didn't know it would be this bad. The big coaster has to be worth something." The last echoed word was emphasized but very quiet.
Quad sighed and headed in that direction, preventing himself from making high moon-jumps as he ran in slow-mo, Stan at his side, getting on the coaster's first run with a husband, wife, and a boy and girl years older than the boys but far less mature.
The operators were Enforcers, and Quad felt the coaster's restrained power. Behind the echoing of steel there was something he was familiar with, a device not operating at its maximum. If someone were to ask him, he wouldn't be able to explain how he'd know an engine he'd never heard before, but.. it sounded like it. Maybe he'd just figured it out- an Illuminatus had made it, it was moving at normal speeds, so it was by definition not operating at maximum. But he knew it could go faster.
And something else was wrong here, something really, deeply wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on what.
Coasters are supposed to be scary, but for other reasons entirely, and both boys played the part of screaming normal kids quite convincingly.
Stan and Quad had done the intuitive thing for kids: Jump on the biggest coaster first. Why only a few of the normals had done the same was puzzling. At least they could ask the Enforcer directly. "Enforcer, what is wrong with this thing?" Quad asked quietly once the handful of normals were out of earshot, using the most general terms possible.
"Nothing," it said. Too quickly. Like it had been told to say that.
Okay. Well, yeah, something was fishy, that's why they had a spy with them. "Dual use," Quad said. Stan looked at him. "It does what it looks like, and it also does something else. Maybe it transforms."
"That.. would be awesome," Stan said. "But in front of all these normals? I don't think so."
"Maybe William- Blakesworth, I mean- will figure it out and we'll watch it transform later," Quad suggested.
"Maybe while people are on it," Stan suggested, knowing it was silly.
"Especially if it becomes something completely different," Quad replied, giggling. They shut up, then; a lot of the other kids and parents had formed something of a group, and were coming to the coaster as one unit. They knew each other, then. What if someone asked Quad and Stan how they got invited here? Oh, right, their youth; they weren't expected to really know anything. Like nescient servants. They made a point of staying away from as many normals as they could and just going on the rides, most of which weren't really all that much fun. And going on the same ride more than once, now with a bunch of normals on it? Fuck that. Maybe coming here was a mistake.
They didn't want to eat, either. It wasn't like they weren't hungry after three hours, but all the food smelled somewhere between normal-inferior and horribly wrong. Did normals really eat this crap? Stan double-sniffed once at something that he swore he smelled in the medical wing before. Fuck that, too. No question: this little adventure was definitely a big mistake.
So, for lack of better things to do, they explored. Almost everything that wasn't a ride was inside a carnival tent, some of them exhibitions of art, some knick-knacks that normals might find appealing. They noticed that the whole place was fenced off with no other entrances than the south one, and that became a concern- why have a fence here? It's an island! What could they possibly be trying to keep out? Neither one of them could guess. They also realized there was an area that they couldn't get to without passing close between tents. The boys vaguely understood normal concepts of demarcated space; this is a path so you walk here, that's not a path so it's off limits. But there was no path to go to a small tent hidden in the far northwest corner, a semi-maze of other tents making a perimeter around it.
So they made sure no one was watching before they slipped in. There was a clearing and another tent, this one somewhat dug into the ground, nestled against the corner fences, the tents around it obscuring it from even the tall coaster. The entrance had a clown-robot to the side, which repeatedly waved its left arm up and down. The boys looked at the legs under the loose fabric, the arms, the articulation in the head, the subtle weight distribution of the body as its arm moved up and down. This thing wasn't bolted to the ground nor was it running off the local power generators. And it looked just like the statues at the park entrance- which probably meant they weren't statues at all. He had Enforcers, what the fuck did he need fully operable humanoid bots for?
They peered inside. From what they could see it was full of a variety of fun-looking games that they've never seen before: "Die Trying", "Bullet Hell", and a light-gun game called "Escape from Death Park", all with stepping stools in front so kids could see the screen better. If these were meant for normals then it'd be relaxing, maybe even boring.
But... they didn't want to go in there. Stan started backing away from the tent entrance and that creepy bot and talked in a very faint, nearly unintelligible combination of English and Latin, using hand signals, butchering grammar, and mispronouncing words. If they were overheard it'd take a professional linguist or another Northberg kid to decipher it. "Quad, fuck this, let's just.. go near the exit, wait until Blakesworth is done, and then let's get the fuck out of here. We're only kids to these people, it won't look too suspicious."
"I agree. Let's retrace our steps and go back the way we came," Quad replied, mangling his speech even worse and using more quick gestures. They stayed very close together as they retreated. Maybe- maybe- they were worried about nothing, and they were just being childishly paranoid about things they didn't need to worry much about. At six years old, the line between 'reality' and 'play' was still somewhat blurry, and a small portion of Stan's mind and an even smaller portion of Quad's told them that they were just being pretend-scared and that this was normal land after all, nothing could really hurt them here, and they'd be going home soon enough. But hot fucking damn, were they glad they had each other right then. If either one of them was by himself, he'd really be scared out of his shit, maybe even scared out of his wits which they so desperately struggled to keep. Quad was also glad he hadn't convinced Tetrina after all; she'd be crying right about now, and that might attract attention from whatever was in this place.
And to top it off, they had to go to the bathroom again, fear loosening their bladders and adding a new fear that they might piss themselves in front of normals. Somehow the concept of finding and using a toilet in this place didn't seem like the best of ideas. They couldn't even quite articulate what they were scared of, but by mutual assent they went between two tents to urinate. If Bruce saw piss on his tents and got mad, well, fuck him, it was his own fault for making everything so fucking creepy.
What they really wanted to do was hide, in a good enough spot where Quad could stretch his confined lower arms. But they didn't want to be in anywhere. They didn't want to be within this fence, for that matter, and they whispered suspicions that it wasn't meant to keep anything out. But they decided that walking out the wide-open front entrance wouldn't just look suspicious, it'd be suspicious, and the last thing they wanted to do was call attention to themselves. Normal kids, they understood, fluctuated in emotions like engineered two- and three-year-olds. So they'd just hang out near the entrance, visible to everyone (particularly Blakesworth, where was that guy) and pretend to be really bored of the place if anyone asked.
No one did. It wasn't long before they became really bored in truth. What time was it? Neither had brought a screen, and normal kids their age usually didn't carry the equivalent; a normal cellphone wouldn't get reception here anyway. That tower with the circle on top, the long things had moved, maybe they could use that as a clock? No, Stan remembered it from the comic books, that was a clock. Oh, so if one of those meant the hour, the other meant the minute, then it was.. well the hour one was between, but since Bruce hadn't given his speech or whatever, it was probably 11, the other hand was at the 3.. no, it must mean it's a quarter of the way around, so they calculated 11:15. They judged that way of telling time to be as screwed-up as anything else in this place.
They hated waiting, and they hated waiting here, and they hated that damn clock because now they just stared at it, wondering how many more times those hands would turn before they were finally out of here. Kids didn't get bored in Northberg. There was too much to do and far, far too much to learn for either of them to actually experience real boredom. Stan had heard somewhere- probably another comic book- that 99% of war was a cross between boredom and paranoia, with 1% pure terror and chaos. Standing here was the former.
The woman with the two daughters came around the main area. For a moment, Stan's stomach dropped- he thought that Bruce might have forgotten to get Enforcers with the correct normal-interaction routines. Then it replied and he relaxed; it was acting like a normal employee, answering questions in a very normal tone, having premade answers for the inane questions she was throwing at it: "How much is he paying you", "Is this just for today", and such. She asked it where the bathroom was, it told her, and she thanked it. You might as well have thanked your toaster, you stupid bitch. He really didn't want to deal with her again, or worse, have Quad deal with her, but she didn't notice them.
The crowd started filling in around 11:50. A few glances were thrown in the boys' direction, but no one asked where their parents were. Within minutes they were all absorbed in their own little worlds, yakking about how good they thought the food and the coasters were, their constant babble grating to the engineereds' ears. Didn't normals ever talk about anything real?
Bruce Joseph was right on time, the two hands of the clock pointing skyward, a pair of Enforcers carrying a miniature pedestal for him to stand on. "We're not all here, but that's perfectly all right," he said to the assembled crowd. He sounded happy, but something was very wrong with the way he was talking. "I'm so glad you all could make it here. I've got a very special surprise for you all. You kids want to see the surprise, right?"
No, Stan and Quad really, really did not want to see the surprise. Not at all. They wanted to be very unsurprised. They were quite bored, but given the choice, they wanted to stay that way.
But of course the gaggle of normal children screamed "Yeah, show us!" like a bunch of fucking idiots, and although Stan and Quad knew it'd be basically a secrecy breach to go 'No you dumb fuckers, you don't know what he really is and you don't know what you're asking for', it was practically on their lips.
"You sure, you all wanna see the surprise?" Some of the adults were encouraging their spawn to shout louder, which they did, to the engineereds' silent consternation. Speaking of adults, where the fuck was Blakesworth?
"Oooookay! Here's the surprise!"
The engineered boys watched it happen, motion by motion: This man was normal. Here he is, pulling out a revolver. Why doesn't anyone do something? Forgot, normals are slow. He's about to shoot someone, who? It looks like he's going to shoot himself. Is he? He's hesitating. Never mind, he's got pressure on the trigger- BANG! Which is exactly what the little flag on the other side of his skull said.
No less than three of the normals immediately reached for their cellphones. Two of them managed to open theirs, receiving zero bars. The same woman who had approached Quad earlier fumbled with her purse and dropped it, lipstick and coins rattling to the cobblestones, before she erupted in a high, hysterical shriek, as did a few of the other women and more than one of the men. Some of them started laughing, convinced this was a hoax. A few of the normals cautiously approached the body, but the boys stayed back, silent, looking at each other.
Some of the kids and their parents had lost track of time or decided they didn't need to listen to the old guy give a speech, so they had gone to the roller coaster. Instead of slowing down at the top of a hill, it continued to accelerate, right off the top, before crashing down in a cloud of dust and twisted metal, sending debris flying.
Stan and Quad gave each other another, more frantic, look- We could have been on that. Stan had war at 100% completion now.
And that was when the Enforcers and robots came to life and began advancing on the crowd, taking slow, methodical steps. Quad and Stan were able to keep their distance, jumping back a few steps as the sentries to their sides moved forwards.
At least they weren't bored anymore.
One man attempted to flee out the turnstile exit. A powerful motor hummed and forced the turnstile sharply backwards, grinding his body into- and ultimately through- the one-way protector in a splatter of crushed bone and mangled flesh, squeezing crushed organs between flaps of muscle. A small sign lifted up and showed the word "No" right above "Exit". Another man, leaving his wife and kids to die, rushed for the entrance gate. An oversized pit trap opened up beneath his feet and he fell, screaming, to a fate the boys did not see. The words 'To Hell' were displayed below "Entrance". A woman, seeing their fates, tried to climb the fence and was immediately fried by a long chain of electricity melting her shoes to the ground the moment she grabbed hold of the chain link.
That was when the screaming in abject terror started, right before the Enforcers and robots started killing people.
That was the point, Quad knew, it was scary, it was obviously being done intentionally, he couldn't let himself get sucked into it or he was dead just like the normals. Step back, treat it like it's a game, remember the overcoming-fear stuff they ran you all through at age four and the advice the viewscreen gave you, that you have to be the most calculating when you want to be the most emotional. Bruce hadn't been expecting engineereds. ('This is death for normals. This won't work on me and Stan. We can survive this.') But he would never pretend to be normal, ever, ever again. He tore the concealing shirt from him, exposing his arms and chest and not feeling the slightest bit of chill.
"I swear I am not going anywhere without a weapon again," Quad said in clear Latin.
"Secundo," Stan replied. I second [this]. No more normal pretense for him either, and he would ritually burn those shitty comic books.
"I am Quadrus Dominus!" Quad called to the screaming, dying normals, flexing his limbs, feeling an island of joy in the ability to show what he was. "If you want to survive, come with me!" And he ran, away from the death, taking a single glance back. No adults had followed, but three normal kids had run, screaming, away from their parents; one had tried to catch the kid, only to be caught himself by a passing robot, who lifted him above its head.. and tore him in half at the spine.
The kid started screaming, naturally. "Shut up and run and cry later!" Stan shouted back and ran, away from the carnage, hopefully out of the line of fire. Clearly there was no sensible strategy for rounding all the people up, as there was no sense to any of this...
"There, we can turn them off!" one of the kids shouted from behind them, rushing for a tent with a sign marked "Control Room". Quad and Stan had seen that, but knew it was crap, especially after the other signs...
"It's not gonna fucking have Control Room on it!!" Quad shouted back. Weak or not, powerless or not, this kid was going to commit suicide before Quad had the chance to properly berate him. Quad and Stan rushed, but the kid had already stepped inside, and there was a loud crunching sound.
Quad felt the girl move to hug him and stepped away from her- he wasn't going to let anyone near him at this point. "I'm staying with you!" she shouted. He relaxed. She was still sane, and had good preservation instincts to boot.
There was a metallic clank-clank-clank sound coming from inside the tent, and a small robot, all gears and struts and wires, with the boy's head perched atop its neck, stepped out.
"FUCKING MONKEYS!" Stan screamed in absolute horror. It's a game, Stan, treat it like it's a game..., Quad mouthed. He couldn't lose his brother to this shit...
"I'm happy," it stated at a hundred decibels in a parody of a child's voice, the boy's mouth obscenely moving up and down like a ventriloquist's dummy as blood poured from it. "Are you happy? I'm happy. Let's be happy together."
"Let's be happy together," a whole lot of Enforcers and robots said at once.
While the girl screamed and babbled and the boy with the torn apart father started repeating "this is a dream" to himself, Stan and Quad cursed themselves for letting it signal the others. With simultaneous kicks- tearing a large gash across the bottom of one of Stan's shoes- they sent the thing flying. It crumpled in a heap, inert. The head stayed on. Stan and Quad ran twenty feet before Stan realized their onetime companions weren't running with them.
"Wait, what about them?" Stan asked, slowing a bit, still running far faster than any normal kid.
"Fuck them!" Quad shouted, knowing full well the Enforcers would catch up to the normals, and Stan rushed forward to avoid losing ground. He sure as shit was not going to let Quad get ahead of him here!
"NO!!! I'm staying with YOU!!" the girl screamed.
"Then keep the fuck up!" Quad shouted back, his shoes literally kicking up dust, before a clown Enforcer stepped in his path. Quad zipped between its legs and Stan simply ran around it with a terror-fueled burst of adrenaline; it didn't turn or give chase. It waited for the other girl, who tried to run around it as Stan had, and picked her up.
"Let's be happy together," it said, as it hugged her as tightly as it could. Blood sprayed from her mouth as her diaphragm collapsed and her spine was shattered, floating ribs jamming into her lungs. Stan and Quad heard a crack-tear-crunch and the other boy's screams. They didn't slow down, although they quietly lamented their would-be friends. That girl had real potential. It's just a shame they couldn't keep her alive long enough to have a chance at using it.. They turned several corners, looking quickly, trying to lose pursuit.
Stan looked around back and forth- did anything see them right now?- before taking the chance to roll under the canopy of a hot-food tent, followed shortly by his half-brother. Nothing moved except the red franks left rotating endlessly inside their miniature oven. They've passed this place before, but the smell was even worse now, obviously toxic. Poison- had to be. Normals likely would have no idea. Did the Enforcers actually get around to serving any of these deadly hot dogs, or was it just an oversight?
Quad wildly remembered that he had made a promise to kill a certain fat woman personally. It was certainly impossible to keep, now.
Movement outside the tent. Fuck- wait, it stopped? The boys froze, seeing the shadow of an Enforcer on the side of the tent wall, then more shadows, and more movement on the sides.
"Fucking shit. We are surrounded," Stan said, almost conversationally, realizing that trying to hide in a place like this was stupid. He'd been taught so many times that one serious mistake could mean death. Here he was, and here he had made one.
"Shame we don't still have that fat kid, we could use him as a decoy," Quad said. Wait. There was a way around this, these were normal fabrics, and there was a heat source... "Fuck it... burn!" he shouted, yanking on the edge of the tablecloth and pulling the machines down, sending poisoned sausages flying. He crammed part of the greasy linen into the heating elements and it started smoking before erupting into flame, with the smell of frying polluted fat. He pushed it against the side of the tent- fuck a duck, the robots were starting to enter, through the tent's entrance no less- and the thin canvas walls started to crackle and smoke. No time! Lift up the side of the tent, fuck, the Enforcers are making grabs, he somersaulted over that, fuck that was close, come on Stan... Stan completely freaked out, screaming. He jumped onto the outstretched hands of the Enforcers- they grabbed, their hands slipped, he just kept running, they took a step... and, with a flash of inspiration, Stan called back as fast as he could, "Come on, Tommy, let's get out of here!" And that actually worked, the Enforcers continued to stand there, as the fire grew, flames lapping up the top of the tent. "Come on, Tommy, get out of the tent!" Stan kept calling back, hysterically, as the boys ran and ran. This place wasn't that big, they had to find a way out at some point or be cornered... their hopes were immediately bolstered when they found themselves passing shredded robots and Enforcer corpses.
In seconds they found the cause: an anti-Enforcer weapon.
But it was in its holster, which meant they felt safe from it.
A large, strong man in black wearing sunglasses was its owner, kneeling and holding a fair-skinned woman. It looked like a love scene, with one arm was around her waist.. but the other was around her head because her neck was broken. "This wasn't supposed to happen," he told her limp corpse. "None of this was. God.. why couldn't it have worked out?"
"Because your master was a fucking nutcase?" Stan asked, louder than necessary, and the man turned to look, setting the dead woman on the ground, face weather-beaten and screwed up, black hair faintly specked with someone or something's blood. Fucking hell, did he kill her too?
"Oh.. I didn't mean this," he said, taking a few steps towards them, looking at Quad's arms as if he'd never heard of the boy, limping with his right leg. Not a recent wound either, which made Stan frown in puzzlement. Normals could take permanent damage without medical treatment, yes, but with Northberg around, why would any servant be a gimp? "We have to get out of here... the only way out is through." The way he said the last part, it was a statement of philosophy.
A false one. "Fuck that bullshit," Quad said, looking around for more enemies.
"I'm sorry. We don't have time to argue." And with that, he moved with startling speed, hands outstretched, at Quad, certain that there was no way the kid could be as strong as an adult.
He was correct; Quad's small, moderately-muscled body had only one-seventh the arm strength of the man he would one day become- if he survived that long- and his little fingers could only hope to wrap around a single one of the stranger's. Quad danced back and his four hands blurred across the man's two, starting with the thumbs, grabbing, twisting, and wrenching, dislocating what he couldn't break. By the time the man started to jerk his hands back in surprise, his pinky fingers were firmly in Quad's crushing grip, bent at horrible angles. At that instant Stan silently gave Quad a permanent battlefield promotion from Brother and Best Friend to Awesome Brother and Best Possible Friend Ever, jealousy evaporating as if it were never there. He was so happy for Quad having those arms now, even if he didn't.
Both Quad and his opponent pulled as hard as they could and so they compromised. The man was able to bring his mangled hands back to his chest, spurting blood as Quad kept his pinkies. And then suddenly the stranger noticed something at his holster- a situation he had been thoroughly trained for- but by the time he could bring his mangled appendage to it and twist away, it was already empty, Stan pointing the weapon at his face.
"You're right," Stan agreed. "We don't have time to argue." BLAM. The gimp's head and neck were blown to bits and his body did a backflip, sort-of bouncing and skidding to a bloody stop five meters away.
It was the very first time either of them had intentionally harmed a living thing. The only training either of them had was the know-how to see an opportunity and act on it.
"Owned," Quad commented, tossing the severed digits aside. Good. Triumph, he needed some fucking triumph right now, because intentional or not, this place was really starting to get to him...
"Fence?" Stan asked, gesturing to the weapon.
"Fence," Quad agreed. A few of the enemies had heard the shot, and from afar their running was heard as a strange sort of cadence, slow robot thuds with faster Enforcer taps, with the rapid slap-slap-slap of engineered feet in normal shoes completely discordant.
"Penetrate, motherfucker," Stan begged it, pointing the muzzle inches from the chain link, then realizing his mistake (too small of a hole) and held it back a few feet.
The flechettes would have even penetrated if it was Illuminated steel; the chain link and electrified wire were of basically normal make and it flew to tiny slivers. Stan rushed into the hole first, firing blasts at a large swath of ground in front of him. "Why are you doing that?" Quad asked.
"Land mines!" Stan replied. Quad had never heard of land mines but got the concept of hidden traps, following Stan across a seemingly bare patch of ground fifty meters wide into trees.
"Don't think these are trapped?" Quad asked, scrambling up the trunk and its brachiated limbs with his four arms, ignoring the pain of climbing rough bark with bare hands (and digging into it with the nails on his lowers, for once accepting their use), noticing the brownish leaves scattered in his wake.
"Who the fuck else is going to get up here?" Stan replied, as they looked down to see what their pursuers would do. If the Enforcers and robots had projectile weapons they would already be using them. Stan did use his, knocking out about five with each shot. Blam! Blam! Blam! Click. "Oh fucking bullshit, it only had eight shots?" Weak sauce! Okay, okay, how many left? Three Enforcers, four robots. But that wasn't how many left, that was how many were coming after them at that moment... Stan, in a mindbending blend of annoyance and fear, tossed the weapon as hard as he could at the nearest Enforcer's head. It caught it and threw it back, hard enough to have broken Stan's leg if he hadn't lifted it out of the way.
Jumping from tree branch to tree branch, climbing upwards, agility the only thing between them and crushing death. An Enforcer was able to grab a tree branch in lieu of Quad's ankle; both boys stomped with screaming force, but couldn't break the hold; the other hand reached up, but the tree branch cracked, the Enforcer moved to another one, and by then both of them had managed to skitter upwards.
The robots.. the robots just walked under them, and stood there, hands outstretched upwards, infinitely patient.
Enforcers too heavy to get to their height, robots can't climb. Unless those fuckers started cutting trees down... Fuck, one of them was trying to climb the trunk itself, quickly and rhythmically making its way past branches. Quad looked around for branches he could use as weapons to cut open muscle, nerve, bone, maybe jam something into an eyeball, but this wood almost definitely would not do the trick, and suddenly there was a large KRAKA-BOOM of lightning less than three feet from their heads, a sudden smell of burning wood and burning brains, and that Enforcer was falling to the ground; another explosion of superheated air, a third followed by a deeper, longer boo-o-o-om, the roaring jet slowing from supersonic speed to hovering over them. They figured it out: this is what 'the cavalry' actually meant.
Quad noticed the strangest thing- the jet's VTOL thrusters did not point directly downwards. Instead, they pointed at an angle, and he knew why a second later: so the fast-roping figure coming down from it, blasting high-caliber pistol fire a foot from the boys, wouldn't get roasted.
"Hi, Mom," Quad said, with a mix of relief and dismay. Sure, it was great to be rescued from a horrible death and all, but really.. saved by his mother?
Stan cheered with echo, having no problem with that.
"Climb on." They did, both of them jumping and grabbing onto her like baby monkeys, and she pressed a button to pull them back up into the jet's bottom. Ruby flew directly over the amusement park and hovered there, eyes wide open for anti-air threats.
"Stay in the jet," Sarah told them, in that standard operative's voice that somehow would brook no dissent, and jumped back out. She had been suspicious of the whole damn thing from hour one, ordered a servant to satellite-spy the whole place through the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and the jet was off the ground within ten seconds of the servant's frantic call. In other words, she was the engineered equivalent of a mother hen. She would, of course, never tell them about this. It wasn't dignified. She couldn't have warned them off, either, not without something real to go on. Those kids' ethic, their structure, relied on them being above danger and fear, and above danger and fear they would remain, come hell, high water, or robot-wielding lunatics.
Quad and Stan were sort of miffed to be kept out of the action, they had just escaped the fucking thing after all- wait. No. She had said 'Stay in the jet', not 'Don't help her out.'
"Servant, stay over her," Stan commanded Ruby, who made no move to disagree. The boys sat back at the consoles, found that control-W meant weapons in less than a second, and played a brief, fulfilling version of 'Don't let the enemies get near the friend', high-intensity microwaves enforcing their edict.
"Careful with the robots," Ruby reminded them. She knew this was coming and loved the efficiency of it. Jack Thompson, eat your heart out.
"I know. I've played this before," Quad replied reflexively, the words leaving his mouth before he realized this wasn't quite a game. But someone was having fun; why was Sarah chuckling to herself down there, among the blood and the wreckage? What could she possibly be laughing about?
'Boys,' she thought to herself, watching the jet's lasers blow apart targets that weren't much of a threat to begin with, the silliness making her laugh in spite of it all. 'Six years old, and already with the overkill.' She came to the main building, blasted the doors permanently open, tossed a floodlight-globe in, tested for explosives residue (a gesture, that; even if the ground was packed solid with RDX, there probably wouldn't be a molecule outside), then carefully crept in and ended their fun.
Great. Just what would help her figure out what had happened here: Wreckage, of a sort of giant robot-clown-thing, and corpses, two of which were familiar. After she acquired Ruby she'd seen the need for electrical-override trap-springers; she threw several into the walls and was disappointed when nothing happened there. There was a computer, halfway through something, a blue bar going across the screen, apparently running the Illuminated operating system ACNOS. She didn't touch it. Blatant trap was blatant.
She tossed another anti-trap down the hallway and a weird dog-like thing, all steel and claws and protrusions, turned a corner and spat needles at her; she dodged with some contempt and blew it away with one shot, the bullet going down its throat. Yeah, this guy had issues. It reminded her of Gritzl slightly, and Sarah half-snarled, half-smiled. Did they know each other? Did he send his plans to the turkey who ran this place? At least the questions were there to be asked, now, when she could no longer take "he's already dead" for an answer.
Wait. No. It reminded her of something else. What? 'Come on, now is not the time to forget crucial shit, or you should just have nuked this place from a distance like you did with those dolls..' That's right. The dolls, six years ago or so. That was a dungeon she had no intention of testing herself against. But.. what? That guy was long since.. no. Even he could have a clone. Just fucking great. The corpses in this room were going to stay dead, why couldn't the enemies?
Echolocator showed no underground pillars of destruction, motion detector showed nothing, another antitrap in the vague direction of the computer set it off- electricity, arcing from the computer to the chair- while prerecorded clown-laughter went off. "Area's half-secure, need perimeter and cleanup crew," she radioed back to Ruby. "Check for stragglers, land and exit."
There were no detectable stragglers. She landed and the children followed her out. Sarah made a mental note that kids that age listened in a what-I-want style like rebellious implanted servants. Not that she could really command them operationally anyway. Fuck, why had they even come here, they were Northberg kids in the 21st century, what was so great about an amusement park? When Sarah was six she didn't go to an amusement park. (She did, however, go to a small carnival when she was nine. A man had a heart attack on one of the rides, with his wife and kids next to him and this big guy with his sweet little girl right behind him. And after that, there was the amusement park she went to with the twins...) She shook her head and began gathering up anti-traps, keeping an eye on the hall the dog had come out of.
The kids were whooping with exhilaration, Quad ignoring the chill wind on his bare skin. Victory! Oh, the stories they could tell! Everyone would be going "Wow, how'd you feel?" and Quad would say "It was pretty fun, can we do it again?" and they'd all have a big laugh. Maybe he and his half-brother could get matching "I survived the Amusement Park of Death and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt"s, with his having no less, never any less, than four armholes. (That had been a running joke in Northberg, too, with the kids inventing improbable scenarios: "I got thrown into the sun, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!" "I fell into a jet engine, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!" "I killed fifteen spiders twice as big as me, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!")
They walked into the building and stopped cheering.
Blakesworth was very dead. Whatever had killed him- the giant, probably- had splattered the walls with his guts, torn his right arm off at the middle of the bicep, and severed his head, which lay on its side, one eye half-closed, the other staring wide. Grotesque, but Stan had seen things just as bad and even done it himself today, and forcibly reminded himself of it to avoid turning aside. Quad turned, ostensibly to look at something else. They had treated Blakesworth like a bitch, and he had probably deserved it, but how were they to know they were doing that on his last day on earth? The treat-it-like-it's-a-game shield started cracking, and he saw a splotch of red, a familiar face, was she still alive--
No. Blakesworth's servant was dead about twenty feet away, two bullet holes in her chest, one directly through her heart.
"But I liked her," Quad said in protest. He was the prince of domination and annihilation! Shouldn't he get a veto in these things?
Reality did not bend for him.
The T-Shirt thing really didn't seem like a good idea anymore.
He reached to her face and pulled her eyelids down. Now it looked like she was sleeping. His lower left fist clenched. He had been worried about waiting for less than an hour, just this morning. And they had been worried about having to act like normals for a day, after they knew it was coming. And they had been alert enough to be suspicious, but had not seen. And they had escaped, but had not preserved the Illuminatus they had come with nor his lovely, competent servant, whose name they had never learned. Could they have prevented this? Probably not. But they would never know for certain.
Speaking of things he didn't know... no, the hell with that, he didn't want to ask any questions. Not about what she was looking for, not about Bruce Joseph, not about that weird gimp. Northberg kids generally didn't think it as a rule, but fuck this, let the adults handle it, he wanted nothing to do with it, and he was getting the hell out of here. His half-brother apparently thought the same.
"We'll wait until you're done, Mom," Quad said, walking out into the wind and the cold, and Stan followed him without a word.