Aberdeen Tyrannus skulked about in the back of the conference room, giving his colleagues a wide berth as he reviewed the report they had all been given a copy of at the meeting’s opening. This once-a-month gathering of the members of the conservatory group often lasted an entire six-hour day, which, for scientists of each member’s caliber, was hardly an effort. Most of the members of the group spent ten to fourteen hours a day working on various calculations and experiments in order to further their research; the meetings were merely an excuse, most times, to blow off of work a little early for a change. Not that they had set schedules.
This worked just fine for Aberdeen, who often went by simply Abe. At seventy-eight years of age, he’d been free of the constraints of a regimented schedule for fifty-seven years, since receiving his Master’s Degree in Physics. His decades spent in his professional career had never been weighed down by answering to someone else’s business demands. Working in his retirement years for the Holland Group gave him a similar freedom, though their aims and goals were far different than his own private enterprises had been.
The Holland Group scientists wanted to use their knowledge and skills to better the world. Abe had, for nearly fifty years, been trying to conquer it. Of course, only a handful of government officials and members of various law enforcement agencies knew that. The mad scientist who had once terrorized the free world under the title of Dr. Tyrant was now considered little if any sort of threat, but he knew that members of the secretive Hero Action Committee (HAC) still had agents in place to keep a watch on him.
He’d been good, though, for fifteen years now. Aberdeen Tyrannus had been a ‘guest’ of the Federal Department of Corrections for three years before being released upon his granting of various copyrights and patents to the United States Department of Defense. The conditions he’d been forced to agree to in conjunction with giving over some of his favorite inventions had, at first, seemed somewhat harsh. He could not purchase any chemicals without express clearance from an authorized FBI agent for starters. Secondly, he could not drive or purchase a vehicle of any sort. After his second incarceration and release, Abe had used some of the seed money he’d squirreled away to purchase a sedan. To most, this would have been a harmless and innocuous purchase. Days after he’d purchased the car, however, he had stripped essential systems and parts, modifying them and ultimately creating a sub-atomic blaster with the parts of the car and a few odds and ends he’d kept in a hidden vault.
With the blaster in hand, he’d swiftly gone about robbing several banks and financing the construction of a new hidden lair. When he’d finally been apprehended again two years later, FBI and HAC agents had questioned him with regards to how he’d gotten started again on his campaign of domination. “It was simple,” he’d said. “I bought an American sedan.”
But those days were long done and gone now, fifteen years in his past. His final scheme had been half-hearted, and when his arch-enemy finally broke into his secret island lab in the southern Pacific, the good Dr. Tyrant had simply shut down all of the critical systems, and set the facility into a sleep mode from his throne console. Stepping down from the dais upon which it sat, he’d simply put his hands behind his back, and his foe led him away in cuffs to an awaiting Navy Seals assault boat.
Abe wondered what that hero was up to these days as he reviewed the reports. Captain Righteous, he thought. Are you as wrinkled and sore as I am, now? Are you even still a hero in the field? Or have they replaced you with someone younger, more in line with the needs of a modern-day HAC? Abe didn’t know, and truth be told, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Heroes, he’d found, never received their due in their lifetime. At least, not the ones worth making note of. It was sad in its way. He remembered The Magnet Man, a HAC hero agent who, in 1988, suffered an unfortunate mental breakdown after his wife left him. The hero had gone on a rampage through his neighborhood in his grief, and despite his long years of service to his country and to the HAC agency, a team of eight Army Rangers had been dispatched with specialized plastic-based weapons to his location. Upon arriving on the scene, all eight Rangers had opened fire on the hero, killing him in seconds.
So much for heroes.
Abe would have gone on reminiscing as he looked over the reports, as he often did, if not for the data on the fifth report. Assembled by one of the few colleagues he respected, Dr. Raymond Hoff, Abe looked over the numbers and summary observations the man had put together in the last thirty days. Hoff ran several labs around the world, all of them dedicated to atmospheric and environmental shift patterns. While Hoff was a brilliant man, however, his clean, crisp, clinical report conveyed a startling lack of follow-through, if Abe was reading the numbers correctly.
The elderly once-supervillain, peering around the smoke-filled room in which the conference was being held, spotted Hoff seated at the head of one of the three long mahogany tables dominating most of the room. He shuffled through a concentrated clutch of biologists, noting the way that Dr. Lesik’s hair looked like she’d come to the conference straight from her bed. He wondered, momentarily, how he must look by comparison. A ring of tufted gray hair around the sides and back of his head, liver spots on his empty pate, worry and frown-lines creasing a once-handsome face. Oh, who am I kidding, he thought to himself, shaking his head slightly. I’ve looked like Emperor Palpatine in a lab coat since I was thirty.
He undid the middle button on his beige suit coat as he came around to Hoff’s left side, setting his copy of the report down on the table. He tapped one of the charts in the upper-left corner of the second page of Hoff’s piece. “Raymond, are these numbers accurate?”
“Of course they are, Aberdeen,” Hoff said as he took a chuff of a cigar. Hoff was only a couple of years younger than the former Dr. Tyrant, but he looked at least ten years younger. Abe had seen photos of the environmentalist from years past, and Raymond Hoff had always been a classy fellow full of intellect, charm, and the kind of good looks that had been idolized in the 1940’s and 50’s. He’d retained that style of dress and etiquette for the entire of his life, and aside from having a cigar twice a month, the man had never been possessed of the sort of vices that prematurely aged a person. Hoff offered a smile up at Abe. “Something about them concern you?”
“Well, not really, I just thought your last readings were far lower than these,” Abe said. It was his hope that by pointing out the sharp incline in the man’s readings, he would call attention to precisely what they might mean. He was, sadly, disappointed on that score.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, Abe. I haven’t taken the time to compare them. I usually just file these things at the office. Would you care for a cigar?” Aberdeen waved the offer aside casually, his aging nerves frayed. He had suspicions about the meaning of the numbers before him, what they could potentially mean. He would have to wait until this god-forsaken meeting was at an end, however, before he could hurry back to his home and make certain.
In the meantime, Abe tried to be as sociable as he could be, within the confines of his own patience. At his age, his interest in these meetings was far more for academic purposes than for any sense of fellowship. Another report within the files brought him around to Calvin Rogers, a computer scientist who had once been the primary engineer of Dr. Tyrant’s secret facilities. Though Rogers had never even been questioned by authorities in connection to the mad scientist’s escapades, he had been under close surveillance several times as a result of some of his signature programs and devices winding up on Abe’s mainframes.
But Abe knew how to reward such loyalties and talents through the years. He’d taken the wrap for stealing all of that technology, and in return, Rogers had always been willing to hold a few programs and patents back for the good Doctor, as well as hold onto money and valuables that would be used, invariably, to get Dr. Tyrant back up and running. As he came around to Rogers, Abe was struck by just how large a gap in age was between the two men. He’d used Rogers’ s technologies from around ’77 to ’95, eighteen years without a single major system error or failure that had not come as the direct result of sabotage.
In short, he had every reason to want to give the man’s latest program suite a try. Abe approached the late-middle-aged engineer and computer programmer, standing quietly over by the doors into and out of the conference room. “Calvin, I see you’ve got another set of programs out now. Any chance you’ve got the opportunity to come by and take a look at my home systems, see if they could benefit from your updated stuff?”
Rogers offered a wry grin, the glint of suspicion in his eyes. “That shouldn’t be any problem, Abe. Or should I be saying, Doctor?”
“No, no, nothing like that, Rogers,” the elderly once-villain said quietly, putting one arm around the other man’s shoulders. “I’ve got some simulations to run with Hoff’s numbers here, and I want to make absolutely certain that there are no errors in calculation. This could be, well, significant on a scale we haven’t thought of in a long, long time.” Rogers raised one eyebrow as he turned his head slightly to look Abe in the eyes, but he asked no more questions, merely nodding.
“All right. I’ll swing over tonight with my gear,” Rogers said. Abe thanked him for the time, and then the old man settled in for the last painful stretch of forced socialization he would have to endure among his colleagues. Quite often his mind faded back into the land of Ago before the meeting concluded, but this was normal for him. Of all of Aberdeen Tyrannus’s years, this was actually one of the only things that could be said to come close to ‘normal’.
Against the wall that one could see when first entering the living room of Aberdeen Tyrannus were four tall, solid legal bookcases, complete with the clear glass-fronted doors that flipped up and slid back on oiled rails. Made of solid oak, glass and with railings made of stainless steel that he had replaced once a year, Abe could proudly boast that he had one of the most finely kept legal libraries in a private residence in all of the United States.
It would be a boast that was not entirely true, however. Seated a few yards away and off to one side in a solid black leather recliner, Abe took a small silver knife and spread a dollop of cream cheese, covered in chives, atop a pair of round crackers from a paper plate. The plate, the crackers and container of cream cheese all sat on a small rounded end table on the right side of the chair, where he kept all of his afternoon snacks and disposables, including a silver ashtray and an expunged cigarette.
He didn’t look at the bookcase, though if he had chosen to, his eyes, milky at times behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, might have fallen on one particular unit among the bookcases, the second one from the left end of the wall. This unit alone would have told any visitor that his potential boast would be false with regards to the legal library claim, for none of the tomes or volumes within those shelves belonged in such a repository. Fiction, each and every book in that case, ranging from classics such as a collected works of Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare, all the way to modern works from Dean Koontz and Chuck Palahniuk.
As a knock came at the front door of his humble home, his eyes locked momentarily on one book in the case, on the third shelf down; Lewis Carrol’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’. He smirked, then got up and ambled towards the front door of the house. A one-floor rambler that Abe could easily traverse from one end to the other, it was the perfect home for a man of his age and general state of health.
Abe opened the door, and there stood Calvin Rogers on his front porch, a heavy black case in his right hand, a large backpack slung over his shoulders. A Paul Bunyan look-alike, according to many of his contemporaries, yet despite his rugged, older outdoorsman appearance, Rogers would rather cut his own hand off than be caught anywhere without at least some sort of gadget or gizmo to make his life easier.
“Abe, good to see you,” Calvin said with a smile.
“Come along inside, my good man. Would you care for a beer? I don’t keep a great deal of it around, but I make sure to recycle my stock, in case I ever have company.”
“Well, since it isn’t scurggy, yeah, I’ll take a beer.”
“It’s in the fridge,” said Abe, pointing off towards the kitchen as he backed into the entryway to let Rogers into the house. “Mind you, it’s that green swill from Germany, but it’ll do in a pinch, yes?”
“What, no Guinness?”
“That’s not beer,” said Abe, folding his hands behind his back and heading down the hallway towards the living room. “It’s alcoholic mud in a can.” Rogers chuckled at this jibe, ducked into the kitchen, and followed Abe into the living room as the older man pulled the door open to the shelf upon which rested ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Abe pulled the heavy, hand-crafted special edition off of the shelf, revealing a small red button set into the wood paneling behind the book. He pressed the button and stepped back; a thunk, several clicks, and then a deep boom as several gears, plates and counterweights began shifting in the wall and floor.
The bookshelf swung slowly inward, and a twisting set of steps leading to an uncharted underground level of the home of Aberdeen Tyrannus revealed itself in a dark recess behind the wall. Rogers popped the cap off of his Heineken, grabbed a cracker with a thick dollop of cream cheese on it, and followed Abe down the twisting steps. As they descended, motion-sensor activated lights turned on, illuminating the stairwell and then the narrow, steel-paneled corridor at the bottom of the steps. This hallway terminated in a solid blast door, next to which was set a keypad and scanner panel. Abe took his glasses off, tapped in his pass code, and pressed his forehead against a placement panel that would allow a retina scanner to pass over his eyes.
The red light swept over, and there came a whoosh of air as the blast door decompressed and swung open. Abe smiled over at Rogers momentarily, and indicated that the technician should follow him through the steel doorway. A gust of cold air blasted over him from every direction as soon as he stepped through, a decontamination mist that kept everything within the main lab itself free of debris and germs. He didn’t want any of his equipment failing as a result of lack of maintenance.
Rogers hadn’t been inside of the current laboratory in almost seven months, and a handful of the inventions that now filled the right half of the lab space made his eyes nearly bulge out his face. He pointed to one of the larger machines, lips trembling. “What, what is that, Dr. T?”
“Oh, that,” said Abe, flapping a hand at the device as if to dismiss its very existence. “It’s a Phase-Spacer. Open it up, put whatever you want to store inside, and hit the switch. It compresses the material into a pocket of space in a parallel dimension which is then stored inside of a small capsule. You want your stuff back, you crack the capsule and toss it on the ground, and then poof! Your stuff is there.”
“Does it work?”
“For the most part,” said Abe, walking away from Rogers to the central set of terminals and keyboard banks. He eased himself into a motorized chair situated near the central console and tapped several buttons, then swiveled around to face Rogers, who was staring at the device still. “There’s been one minor problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Calvin, do you see that,” Abe asked. He pointed at a rolling tool tray, upon which rested a machine of the sort he had only been forced to use a handful of times in all of his life; a .44 Korth automatic pistol. “I’m a very lucky man to always have that on hand down here. When I did a beta test of the Phase-Spacer, it stored a few shirts and shoes of mine just fine. But when I popped the capsule down, there was, well, something amongst my belongings.”
“Wait, what? What do you mean, something,” Rogers asked, immediately skittering away from the machine, eyes wide as he looked to Abe.
“I mean just that, my friend,” the old villain said, shaking his head slightly. “I’ve got what’s left of it in a container right there,” he said, indicating a large silver tube a few yards away from the engineer. Rogers stepped over to the tube, staring wide-eyed through the green glass front.
“It looks like some kind of giant cockroach,” Rogers said, unable to tear his eyes away. “With hands.”
“Precisely why I shot the damned thing seven times on sight. Well, shot at it seven times.”
“There’s only three bullet wounds.”
“I’m almost eighty, what the hell do you want from me? Life’s not a movie, and I’m no John Wayne.”
“I never associated John Wayne with sharpshooting.”
“What did you associate him with then, Rogers?”
“Drinking whiskey and pretending to be the toughest guy in town. Sort of like my father, that way.” Rogers turned away from the tube and finally joined Abe before the central console. He knelt down, bringing his backpack around in front of him and undoing several buckles, loosening a drawstring so he could reach inside for a thick CD book/binder. He hefted it up onto a clear space on the console countertop, undid the zipper along the top and side, and flipped it open to the last page with discs. “These two right here are the newest programs I’ve got for compiling financial data,” he said with a grin. “Plugged in some numbers a couple of weeks back, made my broker think I was some kind of genius.”
“Works on algorithms or something, does it?”
“Sort of. It compiles reports and information from a handful of websites, runs the NASDAQ and Dow figures as they come and go, and extrapolates likely outcomes based on an AI I designed for the think-tanks in Washington last year. I’d make a few more tries with it if I didn’t think I’d lose all of my money on dumb bad luck.” Abe brought up a command menu on the main central screen and leaned back in his seat. Rogers folded his arms over his chest and cocked his head to one side. “I don’t recognize this setup.”
“Among other things, it’s new. I didn’t want this Microsoft shit, but I haven’t a clue how to get any of my old command systems to work with the new software.”
“That’s because it can’t handle the new software,” said Rogers matter-of-factly. “I thought this might become a problem at some point,” he continued, rummaging through his backpack once more, and handing a sleek, silvery metal block to Abe. “I assume you know what this is?”
“It’s my old system updated and filtered through some programming voodoo of yours, I imagine,” Aberdeen said with a lopsided grin. “It isn’t one of those cheap USB plug-in units, is it?”
“No, antennae hard-line into the back of your primary mainframe hub,” Rogers said. “Usual place?” Abe grasped the control stick on the right armrest and rolled himself out of the way. Rogers crawled down under the jutting console, opened a push-release panel, and snapped the conversion device into place. Every screen in the room jumped and twitched momentarily, dozens of schematics, lines of data, images, live video feeds and technological experiment playbacks fading into white noise and static.
When the system finished its adjustments, which took only about fifteen seconds (incredible to most programmers, but not so much for Calvin Rogers), Abe turned to look at his systems, returned to a setup and order with which he was familiar and thus confident. “And now, if you want to have that beer Calvin, you’re free to just pull up a seat here next to me and let me run some figures through my system.”
“Something pique your interest from the conference?”
“Figures from Hoff’s reports this time around have me more than a little worried. Unlike him, I don’t just file these things away and forget about them.”
“You think there’s trouble coming,” Calvin said, not a question, but a flat statement as he settled into another rolling chair next to his comrade.
“Yes indeed, my friend.” Aberdeen began inputting the data, stopped for a moment and popped open a small panel set into the countertop. He flicked a switch, spun a yellow dial half a turn, and flicked a second switch. After closing the panel, a thin metal armature came silently down from the ceiling, a three-fingered claw holding onto a small, white ceramic mug. Steaming, foamy coffee swirled still from being stirred by the metal arm, which had retracted as soon as the mug was in Abe’s hands.
He punched in the last sets of numbers from Hoff’s report, and finally settled back in his chair without worrying about what his system was going to do with the information. Abe couldn’t abide by Microsoft, Linux, or any other system that he hadn’t procured from a third-party expert. “Too easily compromised and watched by the sort of people I was always trying to keep out of the custody of,” he’d once told Rogers.
The two scientists shared a bit of light banter back and forth, Rogers telling Abe about his grandson’s most recent achievements (a baseball player, of all things), and Abe returning the favor by sharing the most recent letter he’d received from his second ex-wife. The message could easily have been recreated by randomly jotting down every insult known to modern man, along with a few less-than-creative threats of violence if Abe didn’t finally come and get his robot dog, Charms, out of her house. ‘It’s an affront to Jesus, Aberdeen, and if I wasn’t afraid that it would melt my eyes with some kind of laser beam, I’d throw it in the car and drive it straight into your living room,’ rounded out the letter nicely.
When the former Dr. Tyrant tucked the letter back into his right lab coat pocket, a loud ‘beep’ brought his attention back to the central screen. He adjusted his glasses, reading the data in a quick sweep. His left hand, holding his coffee mug, trembled, slopping several drops onto the otherwise pristine floor. “Oh, mighty Hawking in his chair,” Abe groaned.
“What’s wrong?”
“I want to run these one more time,” Aberdeen Tyrannus said, punching in the numbers once again and letting the system operate. Immediately, he rolled himself over to the left sweep of controls, which curved in slightly towards the entrance of the lab. He utilized the newly-installed converter that Calvin had been kind enough to ready and install for him, and prepared a simulation program to run when he tied it into the program running on the main console.
Rolling back over to Rogers, he saw that the computer engineer had figured out the armature panel and used it to retrieve himself a second Heineken. He took a long draught on the bottle and looked at Abe with eyes filling slowly with apprehension. “It’s something catastrophic, isn’t it?”
“I won’t say yes, but I won’t say no, either, Calvin. I respect you too much to try and comfort you.” Abe took his thick glasses off for a moment, wiped them on the faded maroon shirt under his lab coat, and put them back on, pushing them up the bridge of his long nose. “If the same results come back from the numbers, I will show you on that simulation panel what they mean, within a certain margin of error, of course.”
“What sort of margin?”
“Point-three percent error margin,” Abe said flatly. While it took tremendous effort, he kept his panic at bay, for the time being. It might have been even worse, if he had no solution to the threat he’d discovered. He did, however, have a solution. Well, he didn’t have possession of it himself. It currently resided in some bunker or armory under the care and protection of the United States Department of Defense.
As the results popped up on the central screen once more, Aberdeen Tyrannus hissed air in through clenched teeth, and thought back to the days when he might have himself tried to produce such grave world-wide implications with the use of his villainous schemes. Thought back, yes, and found himself in the land of Ago.