“Wow,” I scoff, shouting to be heard over the deafening whirring rumble coming from within the downed saucer. “You built a UFO arena just to get your ass kicked in?”
“Oh, my dear Charlie boy,” he booms, his normal shitty voice projecting through the mask now, “how much you still have to learn! Where did you think zero point energy came from?”
“T-Telecom?”
“Hah! They don’t even understand it, there’s no way they could create it. Do you know what you’d find if you looked under the Telecom Tower in Ocean View proper? You’d find something exactly like this, whirring away as it has been for decades and decades.”
“Please don’t tell me you expect me to believe something as stupid as ‘it came from outer space.’”
“I’d thought you of all people would be open minded enough to, ah, grasp the reality. I worked for Telecom before they were Telecom, right after they failed to break up the monopoly in 1984. I was there when they bailed out the US Government in exchange for full control, thirty years later. And--I was there when they took control of CIA assets, purchased SINSTITUTE, and forwarded all recovered extradimensional crafts to their own R&D divisions. We still can’t build these reactors or explain how they work, precisely--we just figured out how to reproduce cores to harness the energy these transmit up to a certain relative distance, and spaced these out along Telecom districts. Of course, this one is all mine--a smaller craft, much less powerful and forgotten under the sea, but it’s more than enough for my little undersea metropolis. Come, see for yourself.”
I cautiously approach the craft, ascending the long ramp that’s been installed for access. Kilroy beckons me inside and I’m struck immediately by the fact that this craft is at least ten times larger inside than outside--and by the fact that, as soon as I step inside, what I see through the open entrance is no longer the world I stepped in from, but a spiraling mess of dark purple and blue overlaid on a faintly glowing spinning grid of sorts. Putting my head even the slightest bit through the entrance, though, instantly changes my view back to the outside of the actual craft. What the fuck!?
“You’d be wrong if you thought that Telecom simply co-opted this technology with no outside assistance. Finding the crafts was the easy part. Communicating with their owners, well--that proved significantly more difficult, but one woman was able to mindshift enough to interface with their vibrational frequencies. We dated for a bit, several female bodies of mine back. Her name was something Topaz or other...”
“So, how does this part work, with this whole vision changing thingy--”
“No idea. I’ve never spoken to the ‘Council.’ All I know is that they relayed to her what she needed to know to make ZPE work, her husband is mysteriously dead now, she’s the CEO in his stead, and they wouldn’t have assisted her without being offered something in return. I have a feeling that’s all somehow related to this recent Telecom fascination with testing limiters on humans, but beyond that--well, this is irrelevant now. This isn’t time for that, Charles! This is time for our story.” He guides me deeper inside, the Flexiglass interior barely echoing with each footstep: must be where they got that tech from, too.
I walk for several minutes in stunned silence as the ground I’m walking on seems to randomly shift uphill at 45 degree intervals, gravity and orientation shifting each time so that we’re always walking upright. ZPE screens in arcane languages cover every inch of the outer walls at strange angles giving it a plated look. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the actual shape of this thing! The screens randomly flicker, revealing pathways to other rooms and sealing off others just as quickly. Kilroy leads me down the main hall to a large screen labeled with a series of nine unintelligible symbols, recites something I couldn’t begin to comprehend or pronounce, and with a rain of ZPE particles, a giant door opens before us at an inexplicable angle above. After stepping through, everything shifts again and the door itself now appears to be suspended in midair high, hiiiiiigh above us.
This room is different. Intricate Flexiglass mesh forming gigantic double helix patterns stretch in a circle around the room, looping up over my head and down and around behind me like a stunt loop for a biker. It feels somehow like I’m standing on the ceiling, but I get the sinking feeling I’d feel the same standing where the ‘floor’ should be. In the center of the loop, hovering in place by an unseen counter-gravity technology, a pulsating, glowing red glob violently twitches, beating like a heart. I’d expected something crystalline, maybe, but this is just terrifying.
“I call her Sheila,” Kilroy laughs. “I don’t know if she’s alive, but she eats anything organic you drop into her by disintegrating it into nothing in an instant. She looks like a heart, but a heart for what? Nothing else organic is on this ship--and she gives off no heat, on the contrary, she gives off a frosty aura. Isn’t she beautiful? She’s little compared to the ones Telecom use, and draws her power from their main one against their will or knowledge. I like her spirit.” He walks up the mesh and soon he’s directly above me on the floor (ceiling?), gravity is still holding him in place somehow. My head’s aching trying to comprehend how anything here fucking functions, but I’m here, I’m awake, and it’s real. Maldita mierda.
“Is this why you called me here? To show off your weird floating red heartbeat testicle ice thing?”
“No, Blake… I called you here for our final battle!” He blurts a different alien command very quickly, and faster than my mind can comprehend, the Flexiglass loop flattens out into a single horizontal bridge across a deep chasm with Sheila directly underneath. “I like this configuration best. It’s just like the carbon freeze chamber Vader fought Luke in, right down to the fact it’s from space!” He reaches for his belt and pulls out a hilt, which… with the push of a button… turns into–
“Are you fucking kidding me!? That’s impossible, physics don’t--”
“Zero Point Energy relativity, my dear Blake. Like how your Tela can be in a desk but the particles are beamed to a different quantum position to make her materialize outside--each particle of plasma is generated relative to the hilt, so each is always the same distance from the hilt--it’s very simple ZPE science, Blake. The rest is just replicating the physics in real time and programming it to adjust the projections accordingly.”
You built a fucking ZPE lightsaber!?”
“No, Detective. I built a fucking ZPE non-copyright-infringing beam katana.”
“You already said Vader and Luke; that ship sailed.”
“Yeah, but we can call that a, uh, parody if this becomes a movie. Pretty sure using a real lightsaber on screen would be bad news. It’s a beam katana.” He chants something else and through a small door on the wall (I think it’s a wall!?) a bizarre contraption falls at my feet. I put it on my good hand and grip the handle deep inside, wearing it like a sleeve. It looks like there’s a hole where something should go at the end, but it’s empty.
“How is this a weapon!?”
He tosses me a packet. “Rapture Blue,” he chuckles. “Take it.” Fuck it; I do. “Zero point energy works on the same form of vibrations as Rapture Blue’s abilities grant--telepathy, telekinesis, astral travel: ZPE is the most easily manipulatable form of energy for honing these abilities. Focus on the front of that contraption. It looks kind of like a chainsaw, right? Where should the blade be?”
I look down at the clunky thing strapped to the top of my left hand. I don’t see shit.
“Envision the motion. Close your eyes and imagine how you want it to work.”
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and--HOLY SHIT! I open them to the sight of a glowing red chainsaw spinning frantically, sharp ZPE keys whirring around the edges. “I did that?!”
“No, I just wanted to make you look stupid; I turned it on with this remote, you dumbass! HAH! But you can definitely manipulate it further if you know what you’re doing. It’s a conduit of pure ZPE--at high enough velocity and frequency, it’s no longer harmless, it’s the equivalent of being cut with the most powerful laser known to man. Use that to your advantage, if you live long enough to.”
“Why did you let me live this long to begin with!? Are you just playing with your food? You could’ve killed me ten times by now, and yet…” I look at the whirring blue chainsaw of arcane energy that’s now an extension of my arm. This could actually win a battle; this could beat Kilroy–so why?
“Oh, Detective, you don’t know how many decades I’ve waited to have a final battle on top of an arcane energy reactor with my archnemesis in a beam katana duel. Of course I wouldn’t end you so unceremoniously, you silly billy! Every Moriarty needs a Holmes, my dear, it’s what makes life worth living. Immortality is so boring without another to spar with; and what a sparring partner you’ve turned out to be, Charles Blake. In the end, we’re both just two crazy comic book characters that both think we’re taking the right steps to save the world. Where we--”
“Cut the formalities!” I spit, pointing the Zerosaw (my name--pretty rad eh?) at him. “This is going one of two ways and you know it-- my body disintegrates in the core or you’re fucked up bad enough that I drag you back with me and throw you in prison forever, where your cycle of rebirth ends and your reign of terror with it.”
“Don’t pretend you aren’t living for this, Detective!” he laughs. “You’re as sick as me, you live for the game, for the thrill, for the rush, for the life or death coin flip you take every time you take on the odds! While you know I'd rather us be a hero team against the ultimate villain that is Telecom…you need a villain right now to be able to be a hero, Blake. And I am that villain who can defeat you, who can arouse and stimulate your mind and your soul like nobody has since Old West, and like even he failed to do to this extent. Admit it--you’re alive again right now because of me!”
“Why, Kilroy? Who are you really, originally, what’s your connection to me that makes you so obsessed with fucking with me like this!? What do you want from me!?”
“Don’t worry so much, Charlie. You know who I am--I’m Kilroy, that’s all that matters now. My only connection to you was in reading your first book and seeing a kindred spirit and a potential rival. I want from you what you want from me--a nemesis that can challenge you again, make you reconsider your worldview, threaten your existence in a way that is nearly impossible against a genius such as myself or you. We both live for this game, Blake, and this particular game has reached its climax--fight me! Let us resolve this not in words, but with OUR resolve in a fair battle. The survivor will be victorious!”
“You sick fuck, you call this fair!? I’m missing a hand, my only weapon’s on my only hand and you’re in a goddamned--whatever kind of suit that is--”
“It’s a bubblegum suit,” he proudly replies.
“A what!?”
“You know, like those form-fitting mechsuits in Bubblegum Crisis. I loved that when it came out.”
“Those are called HARDSUITS, ya dumbfuck--”
“Yeah, okay, well, uh, when you invent the world’s most versatile form-fitting nanotech mechsuit, you can name it whatever you want. Mine’s called a bubblegum suit–deal with it.”
“You’re just proving my point about how unfair this is--”
“Says the man who single-handedly took out the Wild West Syndicate by himself? You apparently count for 100 men–that’s what the inner sleeve of your book says, right? Give me a good show before I tear you into chunks and feed you to the core, Blake--it’s on!” With that, he points his fully working fucking lightsaber at me and charges. My heart is in my stomach, my head is spinning with adrenaline and the delicious rush of danger from a strategic deathmatch.
It’s clear from his first swing that I’m far outmatched here. He almost knocks the Zerosaw off my hand with a sudden thrust and my parry is barely existent--beating No More Heroes with my left hand is NOT the same as successfully chain-sword-fighting with it.
“You’re pretty brave, Blake,” he laughs. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you the left hand feels like a stranger?”
Joke’s on him; I’m amphibious. I ignore him and start throwing horizontal slashes at him, furiously adjusting my angle and approach with each new swing but he blocks each hit like a true Jedi master. “I’ve had over a dozen lives to practice this, Blakey! You’re in over your head.” I step in closer and cut at his legs but he reads me, jumps, and kicks me in the face. For the first time in a straight fight I’m totally outmatched and terrified. Kilroy could have sicced an army of mechs on me here, he could have shot rockets from his fingers, but no, he’s actually just fighting like a real man and he’s still crushing my ass!
I swing my torso around to slap him with my bum arm like a whip, smacking his helmet enough to shake him off balance. My anger and panic rising, I can feel a deep vibrational energy building inside me: the saw glows even brighter and extends several feet elastically as I swing quickly diagonally across him; he goes to block too late and I manage to slash a small piece of his mask off. I follow up with a vertical slash at his head but he ducks under my whirring plasma blade, slides to me in one fluid motion and knees me in the crotch. I double over in pain and he helmetbuts me accordingly, knocking me back and hurting my coconut as badly as he hurt my testicular nuts. The world spins. I can feel my balance slipping away.
I channel all my fury and pain and scream a glorious war cry, my organic and ART eyes both glowing red now with power, and charge at the immortal asshole! I extend the saw like a whip with all my psychic energy, throwing swing after desperate swing at Kilroy from every possible angle and velocity, but even this very impressive, non-dominant-hand display of aggression is totally pointless. He’s adapted already and blocks each whip, cut, and slash with his beam katana like a pro. As I wind up to go again, he takes a swipe at my head that I just duck under in time, the sickening scent of freshly singed human hair briefly tainting the air. I stumble back to my stable neutral position but he immediately kicks me in the face, bloodying my lip and sending me falling backwards onto my back. I look down around me in panic, sweat dripping off my ashen skin and sizzling on the core beneath me as I desperately try to think of one final possible ass-pull, any deus ex machina that can get me out of this…
…
…
GOD DAMN IT! The whirr of the beam katana edges closer, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that it’s just a matter of time until I lose this battle. I’m outmatched, outclassed, outplayed. At least I made amends with everyone before this--I guess if this really is the end, when I die here, I still did what I set out to do, right? I still saved all those people--that order already went through. That’s not a bad way to be remembered. I smile, a tear running down my cheek.
“I know you like I know every combo in Street Fighter 2, Blake. Which is to say, better than you know yourself. You’re not getting out of this one!”
“Or am I!?”
“No, Blake, you aren’t.”
“I still have my secret weapon,” I grin, menacingly raising the stump left from where Veronica chopped off my hand. There’s no chans or weapons or explosives or anything there, of course; it’s just a bloody fucking stump, but Kilroy doesn’t know that.
The following telepathic conversation took place insanely quickly:
(“TELA!”)
(“H-here, Blake-chan~!”)
(“Tela, do you still have those hacking manuals handy I told you to grab?”)
(“Of course! Tela is an excellent hacker, and ready to go!”)
(“I need you to get into something via ZPE connection hacking. I’m hopped up on Rapture Blue and you’re in my mind; my awareness of this stuff is heightened so it should be almost like mind reading. It’s vibrations, frequencies.”)
(“Are you going for the suit?”)
(“No, that would be too expected: he’ll plan for that. Go for what he’s not expecting: his mechanical, nanobot-made-up right arm I know that’s separate, he has it on him when he’s not even Kilroy.”)
(“O-okay, Blake, I’ll try--”)
(“But don’t do anything to it, not yet, just infiltrate it and get admin access to the nanobots, and neural link it passively with me and my ZPE signature so I can take over entirely when I need to, alright?”)
(“O-o-okay… Done, Detective~!”)
“Secret weapon…? Hah! Hahaha! Go ahead, just try some of your hackjob tech, Defective, I have SEMP grenades in my arm–not that it’ll matter when you‘re dead! Game Over, Blake! Game Over!” Right on cue, Kilroy jumps with the force of his nanobot mechsuit behind him (faster than I can react or even process, he assumes) and comes at my immobile right arm, slashing it off at the shoulder with a single spinning motion. He’s clearly assuming I’ll be in so much pain and shock that I’ll freeze up or fall to my knees or such but I was prepared for this: I baited him into it, for fuck’s sake. I steel myself against the pain and fight against the primal reactions from watching my fucking limb fall off and go bloodily bouncing into Sheila where it explodes into a glorious splash of bloody sparks and vanishes and wow, that actually is very unsettling. I make my own move, spinning my left hand around at the same time he approaches: I successfully chop off his mechanical right arm, still clenching his own weapon, right at the shoulder, in one quick spin of my Zerosaw.
He thought he’d taken me off guard--he thought he’d destroyed me in one swift move, but this mere mortal human, without a mechsuit, with half a functioning body, with a battered, bandaged, bloodied body and no right arm, has baited him in and taken out his superpowered, nano-bot cyborg arm AND sword. I can practically see his eyes bug out behind his mask, and I can almost taste the horror as he realizes he’s been overthrown--that he fell into my trap this time, baby.
(“NOW, TELA!”)
I focus all of my energy and intention on the falling arm; it slows its descent into the core just in time. Launches nanobot tendrils up towards me from the severed end, releasing the chunks of gory Kilroy-flesh raining down into Sheila and connecting to my own bleeding stump as I pull the arm up with one last push of psychic energy. It connects automatically and quickly to my own nerves with my mind and ZPE signature as its new master. I can hardly believe that it worked, but I test it with a quick finger flex and sword-spin: it’s just like my old hand and arm, only waaaay cooler.
Kilroy falls back onto his ass, trembling, unable to comprehend the fact that he was so simply outwitted, gush after gush of blood jettisoning from his stump as he primally screeches in seething pain himself for the first time in this journey. “Looks like I... disarmed you,” I say, crossing the beam katana and Zerosaw blades on his throat so close that I can see the swarms of nanobots in the neck of his suit start popping like bugs in a bonfire. If I close in even another millimeter, there’ll be blood. I feel like the coolest dude in the world right now--probably because I am.
He pauses for a moment, then breaks out into a desperate, maniacal laughter. “You idiot! Have you seriously forgotten!? Go ahead, kill me, I’ll just be reborn! In fact--” he starts to launch himself off the edge to a suicidal respawning death, but before he can, I toss his beam katana to the ground behind me and launch a SEMP grenade out of his own former arm’s palm at him. It explodes on the chest of his fancy nanobot hardsuit, sending a cloud of frazzled nanobots into its core and disabling his fancy form-fitting Hubba Bubba bullshit. His suit slumps over backwards, his body stuck inside as he lies down immobilized at the edge of the bridge, his right shoulder gushing blood, the light in his glowing red mask-eyes literally extinguished. The criminal mastermind madman who almost killed 20 million people just got owned by a mangled half-mangled asshole, and it was HACKIN’ AS FUCK!
“Game, set, and match, Kilroy!” I smirk. “Thanks for the arm. It’s a lot cooler than my last one.” I have Tela send our location to Nat and call her in to arrest him.
“You did it, Blake. You really fucking did it.” I’m expecting salt from Kilroy, but he honestly sounds… happy? “You had all the odds against you, up against a multi-billion dollar corporation, a cult of thousands, and a cyborg in a state of the art mech-suit who was your mental equal, if not superior, and yet here you are--standing over my battered body while I’m pinned to this bridge by the weight of my own technological advantage and gushing blood. You did it, Blake.” He shakes his head and his mask pops off in pieces--I guess there was some kind of manual analog override inside. His face doesn’t look angry, but thrilled with a tinge of disappointment, tears streaming down his face past a sadistic smile.
“After over a dozen lives, I finally met my match, Blake--I’ve finally been defeated! Do you have any idea how lonely it is to truly be invincible!? I’ve not just been thwarted, I’ve been personally sliced and diced and immobilized… It's an amazing feeling, Blake, to lose. Like a fighting game prodigy who never loses, gets bored, hangs up his fightstick, and then... suddenly! He goes against the top player from another country and gets his ass whooped and finally has a drive in life again. You’ve given me that, Blake. And I couldn’t be happier!” He laughs a wheezing, hysterical, cackling laugh before coughing up blood from the impact of the SEMP and then laughing some more.
“You’re insane, Kilroy.”
“Maybe so, Blake. But you’re as insane as I am and you proved it tonight. I was outplayed, out-willed, and outdone tonight. You did it, Blake… you saved 20 million people, and you caught me within the deadline. I couldn’t be prouder of you… but time will tell who was on the right side of history.”
“Probably the one who isn’t a genocidal terrorist,” I sigh.
Natasha rushes in, having navigated the ship with surprising ease, and tases Kilroy through the hole in his suit. He finally falls unconsciously silent and is carried off by a Pneumat.
“I’m sorry I held your thing with Chad against you,” I say, sniffling. “If you’d ever told me the truth—”
“Yeah,” she sniffles. “I just… you still mean so much to me, Charles.” We embrace, and I feel any remaining malice melt into the ether.
I did it. I actually fucking did it… and it feels amazing. After everything I’d been through, I’m standing here sober over the mangled body of my nemesis, going against literally impossible odds and sacrificing everything, including half of my body, to do so. This is what I lived for... and what I’m ready to live for again.