Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain (10 page)

“Obviously,” said the mesmersaurus.

“And since we’re dealing with anti-time here, of course we’re using Quorg’s Theorem on parallel universe convergence.”

“An interesting choice.”

“Granted, Quorg didn’t take into account the hyper-time paradox proposed by Rusk, but in a situation like this, it’s easier to just ignore that detail and trust it will work itself out on its own.”

The Brain failed to completely cover the confused look on his host’s face. He must have been woefully mystified to manage that with a dinosaur’s limited powers of expression. He should’ve been, considering that Rusk’s paradox had been resolved over a century ago. Trans-quantum physics humor always put a smile on my face.

The island shuddered as I turned one last dial. Then the anomaly became invisible again. The volcano went silent. The clouds drifted apart.

“That should do it,” I said. “All I had to do was reverse the polarity. That fixes ninety percent of most superscience problems.”

“Yes, a very fine job, Emperor.”

I dropped the tools, leaving the robots to pick them up. “So now that I’ve prevented you from destroying the universe, would you tell me what you’ve learned about the future?”

“Surely, you can’t expect me to reveal all my secrets.”

“Why not? If you have knowledge of the future, if you were able to manipulate me to arrive at this time and place at the exact moment of your choosing, then what possible danger could I pose?”

The Brain waved his arm. “Well, that knowledge isn’t absolute yet. You understand the nature of the process requires a sophisticated filtration and enhancement process to clarify it. This is an addition to my own coding measures to ensure that the messages would not be easily deciphered on the very unlikely event that someone with their own receiver intercepted the messages.”

“A bit paranoid, but a wise precaution. So how much have you unscrambled?”

“Enough to get you here to repair the device. And a few more bits here and there. Things that would indeed intrigue you, Emperor, and no doubt soon will. But since I am the master of time, you have to admit that any resistance on your part would be pointless. Nothing can surprise me. No plan, no matter how clever you might think it is, can catch me off—”

The fearsome battle cry of Kreegah the Merciless split the air, and Old Broot, the mighty hecteratops, burst through the jungle. Zala sat atop his back, firing her weapon into the robots. Kreegah vaulted through the air, springing like a giant red cricket to crush more drones beneath his feet. Snarg and the primadons followed up the rear, finishing off any other robots not pounded to scrap by the lead.

Old Broot charged the Brain, who, despite his earlier claims of infallibility, appeared very surprised. He brought his hypnotic stare down upon Broot. The entranced juggernaut slowed to a stop, his five horns inches from piercing the mesmersaurus’s belly.

Kreegah pounced on the mesmersaurus’s head. Zala, with six bounding steps across Broot’s back, had her sword unsheathed and leapt. The clumsy dinosaur moved just in time to avoid being stabbed in the throat. Zala’s scimitar sliced only a few inches from the dino’s jugular vein. The mesmersaurus retreated while Zala destroyed robots.

I sighed.

Snarg skittered beside me and snipped the heads off the robots on either side of me. She cooed and chirped until I patted her between the antennae.

“Thanks, I suppose.”

The mesmersaurus’s thrashing sent Kreegah hurtling into the underbrush and knocked Zala to the ground. He locked eyes with her, and she could only lie prone, helpless, as he moved to crush her underfoot.

I pushed a button on my portable weather machine. Several lightning bolts struck from the sky, pushing the Brain back. Zala jumped to her feet, ready to continue the battle. I adjusted a dial on my machine, and strong wind kicked up. Miniature tornadoes whipped around us. Exact control was impossible, and the tornadoes ricocheted around in random patterns. One swept up Zala and threw her to the ground. Another button press and a larger tornado rushed forward, hurling the mesmersaurus into the distance.

“Why did you make me do that?” I asked as I helped Zala to her feet.

“Make you? I was saving you! How did you get ahead of us, Emperor?”

“Long story.”

A triangular craft, one of my own designs, passed overhead. It paused over where the mesmersaurus had landed. A tractor ray beamed the Brain from the mesmersaurus and drew him aboard. Before we could react, the craft blasted into the horizon, gone in a flash.

The primadons howled and screeched as they continued to demolish thoroughly broken robots.

“You can tell them to stop, Kreegah,” I said.

The jungle lord grunted, and his tribe fell into place.

“What did you think you were doing?” I asked.

Zala glared. “We saved you.”

“It’s almost endearing that you think that,” I said. “It’d be more endearing if your hastily planned and gratuitously violent
rescue
wasn’t, in actuality, a triumph over harmless utility robots.”

“But we thought—”

“You didn’t think. You just charged in, every bit the headstrong warrior who lets her weaponry substitute for her intellect.”

“But the army of robots. And the dinosaur.”

“Do these robots look armed? And I was talking to the dinosaur. Were you worried he would discuss me to death?”

I pushed aside my annoyance. There was no point in worrying about what had already happened.

“It’s not your fault, Zala. Your training hasn’t equipped you for subtlety. And I appreciate what you were trying to do, misguided as your intentions might have been. But thanks to your headstrong rush to stab and shoot something, our enemy escaped.

“All you managed was to destroy a borrowed body. Like smashing one of my exos, except instead of an exo, the mesmersaurus was an irreplaceable specimen. So that’s something worth recording in your mission report. Might even earn you a promotion.”

She protested, halfheartedly, but I cut her off.

“This is why I work alone.”

I passed the next half hour double-checking the stabilizer. I rarely doubted my genius, but given the stakes, a little doubt was prudent. I’d have hated to implode the Sol System because of a dropped integer or loose screw. I needn’t have worried. Everything was in working order, and while improvements on the makeshift device would be necessary at some point, there were more pressing concerns.

I used a remote signal to open a secret door in the volcano.

Zala readied her weapon.

“You can put that away,” I said as I entered. She and Kreegah followed me down a short hall illuminated by soft white light.

“How did you know that was there?” she asked.

“I put it there. This is my facility.”

“The same facility that has been compromised?”

“The very same.”

We approached a set of sliding doors. Zala grabbed me by the arm. “And now you’re just leading us into another ambush or some sort of booby trap?”

“There won’t be any ambush.”

The doors slid open, and Zala leveled her gun at whatever threat she imagined waited for us. But it was only the entryway, a room I’d modeled after the Silver Palaces of the dukes of Mars. The Second Symphony of Gugugugug Roost, Mercury’s greatest composer, gently wafted from the speakers.

Gugugugug had always been a favorite of mine, and the Mercurial use of living creatures for instruments gave their music an edge. Gugugugug had died a noble artist’s death when he’d been mauled by a viviphonork, the Mercurial equivalent of a tuba but with a lot more teeth and a taste for blood. The mauling had been an accident, but the critics agreed that Gugugugug’s dying shrieks had elevated the piece to heights of genius. It remained Mercurial tradition to feed a baritone to a viviphonork at the third crescendo, and while it was a barbaric practice, it was hard to argue with the visceral appeal of the composition.

A utility robot approached. “Hello, Lord Mollusk.”

I blasted the robot. It collapsed into a pile of scrap.

“Why did you do that?” asked Zala.

“The compound has been compromised. All the robots will have to be dismantled, inspected, and repaired.” I blasted another robot. “I don’t have time for a subtler method.”

“I thought you said everything would be fine.”

“I also thought storing my most dangerous technology on a dimensionally unstable island full of mutant dinosaurs would be safe. Much as it pains me to admit it, I do make my share of mistakes.”

I instructed the forty-two remaining robots to assemble and gave Snarg an order to destroy them. She gleefully carried out the command, devouring the robots. She loved exotic alloys though they did sometimes give her indigestion. I left one robot functional and by my side for the moment.

We checked on the archives, a room full of filing cabinets. Zala opened a drawer, flipped through the files.

“Seems a bit inconvenient,” said Zala.

“That’s precisely the point. Electronic files are more easily copied and stolen,” I explained. “I keep the more radical research stored in hard copy form to prevent that.”

“Nothing looks disturbed,” she said.

“Why would it? If the Brain had control of my utility drones, he could get anything he wanted without having to look for it.”

I requested a schedule of archive maintenance. I flipped through a report handed to me by the robot. The anti-time radio, the jelligantic, the earthquakerator, the 501 models of death ray, the atomic cappuccino machine, the xylophonic mutantifier, the positronic terrarium. All these and every other file had been scanned and uploaded. Most were only in the theoretical stages, and others were half-finished ideas. But they were the foundations of dangerous superscience.

Despite the stoic nature of a Neptunon’s face, Zala must have noticed something.

“What’s wrong, Emperor?”

“I just armed a megalomaniac with the tools to conquer and/or destroy the system.”

As mistakes went, it was a big one.

“The Brain has everything it needed.”

“But you’re still alive.”

“I was never in any real danger. No one was ever trying to kill me.”

“Then why did they hire mercenaries? Or the jellyfish monster? Or lure you into an ambush on this island?”

“All a calculated manipulation meant to get me here at just the right time to stabilize the anomaly.”

“That’s absurd,” she said. “It’s impossible to control everything so perfectly. Those mercenaries weren’t holding back. The jelligantic could’ve easily squashed you by accident. And this island is full of beasts that could’ve killed you at any moment. No mastermind could arrange everything so perfectly. There are too many variables.”

“Under normal circumstances, you’d be right. But the Brain has one advantage. He’s been getting instructions from the future. It’s much easier to control chaos when you know the end results as you set things in motion.”

“You mean to tell me our enemy knows how everything will end before even starting it?”

“Theoretically.”

“You had access to such a device and didn’t use it?” she asked skeptically.

“I designed it mostly for the scientific challenge. As I neared completion, I realized that the radio, coupled with my intellect, would render conquest of the system, even the universe itself, a foregone conclusion. What’s the point in that?”

“If you were as smart as you think you are, you would’ve destroyed the research.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Like it just has.”

“Destroy knowledge?” I said. “The only point of existence, if there is one at all, is in the accumulation of the collective intelligence of the sentient beings of the universe.”

“Even dangerous intelligence?”

“Intelligence is neutral. Application is everything.”

She sighed. “Says the evil genius.”

“
Evil
is a relative term.”

“Exactly what I would expect an evil genius to say. So if the Brain has used this radio of yours to gain knowledge of the future then what is the point of any of this?”

“We can only hope he has made a mistake. He appeared genuinely surprised by your frivolous
rescue
. The nature of the communication means there may be holes in what he knows. And then there’s the question of whether or not the flow of time is stable or can be altered by the mere act of transmitting information to the past.”

“It’s worked to his advantage so far,” she said.

“So it would appear,” I agreed. “But all it takes is one seemingly tiny miscalculation to change everything. It’s unlikely he has considered all the possibilities of anti-time transmission.”

“But you have,” Zala said. “Did it occur to you that the Brain is every bit as intelligent as you are? He discovered your island, stole your technology. And if I understand this anti-time radio of yours correctly, he did those things without any knowledge of the future at that point.”

“You understand it correctly. And I’ll grant that the Brain is a formidable opponent. But aside from finding Dinosaur Island, something he might have done by accident, he hasn’t displayed any true creativity. He understands the science he’s stolen, but his application is uninspired.”

“Having seen the damage you’ve been able to do with your science in the past, I don’t find that comforting. And let’s assume that he is as intelligent as you are. For the moment, let’s assume he is
more
intelligent.”

“Very well. Let’s assume that. I admit it’s an intriguing possibility.”

“What does it mean?”

I shrugged.

“It means we lose.”