Blackjack Villain (47 page)

I saw a cross of a leopard with a man, much like a mythical centaur, but with a cat-like body. It was a fierce beast, powerful and large but it strolled peacefully amongst smaller creatures one would imagine were his prey. Another was much like a hummingbird, but reptilian. Large, and full bodied, it saluted me by lowering its large maw and continued onward. A blob animal, ambling atop a pool of slime with three independent eyes on stalks watching in every direction at once was conversing with a mote of dancing lights in a gurgling language that caused its whole body to vibrate gently.

There was also trade and bustle, as a group of small humanoids, lacking legs and instead moving by bouncing about, trotted behind and atop a wooden wagon pulled by two large insects, similar to beetles save for a prickly coat of bristles much like a caterpillar would have. Each was as tall as I was at the shoulder, weighing probably a few tons each, yet they were as domesticated as a cow or oxen back on earth.

A small furry creature stood next to me, the only thing in the village that had taken serious notice of me. It was like a cute, overgrown anime teddy bear, about three and a half feet-tall, with a wide, smiling mouth, and small darling eyes, and thin, dainty arms that it had crossed over its chest. A long tail flowed back, of the same red/white fur as the rest of the body.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, hunching to its level and it started purring, its tail flashing to and fro. “You’re kind of cute,” I said, reaching out to pet the animal’s head.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Mr. Haha said, having snuck up behind me.

I recoiled from the furry cute animal as it spread its lips wide, displaying rows upon rows of three inch-long teeth, like the gaping mouth of a great white shark. The purr grew into a growl and that was enough to get me to step away from the creature.

It continued onward, as if nothing had ever happened. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I had stood in the guy’s way and it stopped, waiting for me to stand aside, unable to go around me, like an ant following a marked trail.

“How did you know?” I asked Mr. Haha once the dangerous creature had moved on.

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”

He laughed and patted me on the shoulder.

“Where are we?” I asked, getting a good look at the panorama. My hut was atop a hill and the village formed around it as far as the eye could see. From our vantage point we could see the far valley and the river that wound through it emptying into lake.

“As we approached the village,” Haha started, “Zundergrub and I postulated this was a war camp, and those warriors we fought their army or police force. But we have come to realize our mistake. This, Blackjack, is the equivalent of a concentration camp. The creatures here are prisoners, kept in place to some nefarious end which we have as of yet to determine.”

That explained why so many different species were gathered in one place. Some of the aliens, like that cheetah/centaur thing looked predatory, yet they didn’t attack others that seemed more like their prey. Those that came here had bigger monsters to fear.

“What happened to my leg? I remember some things crawling over-”

“You don’t want to know,” Haha interrupted. “Besides, now that you’re doing better, we have work to do.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, my dear Blackjack. We have a machine to build!” the robot said slapping my shoulder again.

* * *

I dreaded even the thought of working on the device. I knew what was involved and with rudimentary tools it would not only be a challenge, it would be the most arduous pain in fucking history. I longed for my lab and my tools. Hell, some Craftsman crap would have made me happy. Haha, on the other hand, was enthusiastic, leading me through the chaotic village until we found a nice open space to work. Nearby was a large stone that I hefted and brought over to use as a chair.

“Ok,” I started, watching Haha clean the area with a broom that appeared out of his arms. “First we need to build a forge.”

He stopped and looked at me curiously.

“What for?”

“Because, my rabbit friend, we need a forge to smelt the metals we need to build the contraption.”

Haha nodded.

“After we make the forge,” I continued, “we’ll need to smelt enough raw steel to make an anvil. We’ll need iron, carbon, copper, cadmium...”

The robot’s ear twitched.

“Are you getting this?”

“I’m still wondering what we need all those things for.”

I laughed, “You want to build the Tesla machine, right?”

“Yes, but-”

“Then we need a forge and an anvil to make the parts. This is a hell of a project Haha. We’re gonna be here a few weeks on this.”

“Perhaps,” Haha said, absorbing the broom into his body and creating a leaf blower out of one hand with which he cleared out the dust from the area.

“Hey this was your idea,” I said, picking up a small rock and tossing it into the distance. “You even think this through?”

This was going to take forever. The stupid robot was a nuisance with a higher opinion of me that was actually warranted. Even if we had the original schematics, the process to make everything would be hundreds of hours in manufacturing and constructing, and still I had no idea how to use it.

I hadn’t realized until then, that I may have had a good idea of how the machine worked, but I had no clue what it was for. I could replicate the device and we would still be nowhere, because I couldn’t necessarily duplicate its purpose.

Closing my eyes, I tried to study the machine’s every line, angle and rivet. When I had stuck my head inside of the device I had noticed a few interesting things like a secondary generator powered by the Tesla uniform generator. This second generator produced a signal that it sent through a primary coil, a miniature Tesla coil within the machine then off to the larger two coils beside it.

But that’s where I had problems making sense of it. The signal or power surge would then circle the main coils, almost indefinitely, but to what end? In theory, if the surge continued unabated, the power levels could get quite dangerous. Standing next to the machine could be tantamount to being next to the splitting of an atom.

More importantly, what was the purpose of having such a device where the power surged endlessly around the coils unless it was a weapon of some sort? And why dual coils piggy backed upon each other?

I tried to recall what happened when the machine engaged, but all I could remember was the flash of light and an instant later we were castaways marooned atop the floating island. It had all happened so fast, I could barely remember anything.

It made no sense. For the device to produce enough power through the coil surge, I figured the machine had to be engaged for quite some time. A few minutes at least, but the flash was instantaneous. The machine was on and fully functional in a fraction of a second. So that ruled out a power surge through the coils. But what else could it be? A generator tied to a coil system that sent something through a mini coil and then into the main coils into a suspended loop?

I picked up another rock and threw it even farther.

“There,” Haha said, finishing his task of clearing out some space to work and turning the leaf blower into a regular mannequin hand. “Now what do we do?”

I shook my head, “No damned idea,” I said.

“Perhaps I can be of assistance,” Haha offered.

“Not unless you know what the machine did.”

“I wasn’t able to determine that, other than the obvious,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Well,” he explained. “The device is obviously a teleportation device.”

“No such thing,” I spat, rising to my feet.

“How can you say that, Blackjack? The device transported us here. That much is certain.”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

“It simply teleported us,” the rabbit insisted.

“I’m telling you there’s no such thing. To teleport us, the machine had to read our entire molecular code, remember where every cell is, then transport that information through some sort of signal-”

I stopped, starting to realize how Tesla and Retcon’s device had worked.

“The signal teleported us, right?” Haha said, trying to contribute to the brain storming session.

“No, no. Hang a second. A signal. That’s the key. See, the machine wasn’t a teleportation device, Haha.”

“Then how did it work?”

“I’m thinking,” I said, standing off the rock and pacing. “See, once we understand the purpose of the machine, we’ll know how to build it. And it wasn’t the machine that transported us, I can guarantee you that.”

“So what did the machine do?”

Then it hit me, there was only one object in known or hypothetical physics that could explain what happened to us.

“A wormhole,” I said, pausing.

Haha stopped next to me.

“I see,” he said. “So the device created a wormhole that allowed us to pass through.”

“No,” I said, the gaps slowly filling in as we spoke. “It didn’t create one, it utilized one. The machine doesn’t make the trip possible so much as it engages a nearby Lorentzian traversable wormhole.”

I looked at Haha, half-expecting Apogee’s negative sarcasm, but he nodded.

“See, the machine is like a boarding pass. It allows us to make the voyage. And it does it by activating a wormhole. Don’t you wish you had paid attention in Physics class?”

“I’ve actually read most, if not all, the relevant articles and publications on the subject. Unfortunately, I don’t have much of that information uploaded onboard at present. Being offline from my core systems has meant-“

I shot my hand up suddenly, silencing Haha, as an idea came to me. I ran up to the rock I had used as a chair, and using a small pebble, I wrote on the big stone.

“ds²=-c²dt²+dl²+(k²+l²)(dθ+sin²θdφ²)”

Haha cocked his head as I scratched on the rock.

“The formula for a traversable wormhole metric,” he said, surprising me. “Not bad from memory, Blackjack.”

I beamed as he quirked his head while looking at it.

“Looks terribly complicated,” Haha said. “Again, I wish I had remote access to my core systems.”

Indeed the formula was complex, but something about it made me laugh because it was simpler than either of us had imagined. The machine was so simple I couldn’t help but laugh harder, almost doubling over in pain. The purpose of the device was obvious, and the double coil surge, which would allow us to hurl something at the speed of light could mean only one thing.

“What’s so funny?” Haha said and I slapped the back of his shoulder, raising a cloud of dust from his dirty kimono.

“I know what the machine is,” I said. “I know what it does.”

I wiped the formula because it was useless now, I had figured it out. I had figured the whole thing out.

Haha watched me, waiting for the revelation.

“We’re going to build a particle accelerator.”

* * *

With a now more defined idea of what we had to accomplish, Mr. Haha and I set out to build the machine. But I was wrong about how long it was going to take, and what Mr. Haha’s full capabilities were.

I looked at the open space Haha had chosen and found a nice spot for our forge. I marked it on the ground, along with a good place for the anvil right next to it. The weather was slightly chilled and there was no sun overhead, the strange illumination from the dying planet and the vortex around it, so we could work in the open air.

“Let’s put the forge here and the anvil here,” I said.

Haha shook his head.

“No forge,” he announced.

“And why the hell not?”

“Tell me what you need.”

“I need a forge,” I snapped. “Here would be nice.”

He crossed the field to me and scratched the mark I had made on the dirt.

“I am your forge,” he announced, tapping his chest. “Now, what do you need?”

I laughed, “you’re going to pull the pieces I need out of your chest?”

Haha nodded.

“Ok, so let’s start with a support bracket. A piece of aluminum or copper about twenty-four inches long, seven inches wide at the wide end, two at the narrow.”

“What grade?”

“Thick. Quarter inch.”

A bright light burned inside the robot, revealing itself through the kimono and every gap in his frame, and quickly faded out. Haha reached into his chest cavity and withdrew a piece of red-hot copper to the exact specifications.

“Not bad for a bucket of bolts. Three more and we’re in business.”

He lit up again, this time taking three times as long, and when complete, he pulled three more pieces of copper from his chest and tossed them onto the floor.

“Now I don’t suppose you have a soldering iron somewhere in there, do you?”

Haha’s head cocked to the side and he raised his left arm, which rotated between weapons, hands, blades, etc., until he created a modified version of the plasma weapon stolen from the German government. He graduated the tip of the transfigured weapon until the blue-hot edge dripped plasmaic energy.