SUPERHEROES ANONYMOUS: NOW WITH MORE JAWAS

12/19/2014 02:18:00 PM Lexie Dunne 2 Comments

SUPERHEROES ANONYMOUS: NOW WITH MORE JAWAS

Pretty much what it says on the tin, honestly. You brought this on yourself, Max.

When I woke again, it was because something very insistent was prodding my left elbow. Mostly I awoke to tell whoever it was to knock it the hell off so that I could back to sleep.

Only to find myself staring into the face of my captor, yet again. Oh, joy.

“Is Blaze dead?” Dr. Mobius moved his face into my line of sight. The halitosis alone was enough to knock away the last vestiges of sleep.

“What?”

“Blaze—is he dead? I knew he was going to bite it in some stupidly heroic way before I could pull this off. How’d he go? Saving a busful of orphans? Kittens?” Mobius stroked his chin while he gave the matter some thought. “Puppies?”

“Blaze isn’t dead. He’s in Miami. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you did this to get his attention.” In an attempt to get away from his foul breath—had he just been feasting on roadkill?—I leaned as far away as I could. Why did I feel so strange? What was going on?

“What!” The walls seemed to shake from the rage in Dr. Mobius’s voice. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

“I don’t communicate well when unconscious. Never was great at multitasking.” I closed my eyes. “Tell you what, you let me go, and I won’t even tell the police. I’ll just go back to my life and let you live yours. We can forget that the past few hours ever happened.”

“Few hours? I’ve had you here twelve days.”

My eyes shot open. “Tw-twelve days? You’ve kept me here twelve days? What are you, nuts? I’ve got work!”

Mobius paused and gave me a peculiar look. Belatedly, I realized my priorities might be a little out of line, but I hunched my shoulders and tried not to throw up. “What?”

Dr. Mobius moved away to pace back and forth across the lab. With every footfall he made, things on the shelf beside him tottered. “So Blaze has decamped for sunnier climes. That does put a wrinkle in my plans.”

“A wrinkle? You? That must be a new one,” I said, glaring at his lined face.

He snorted, unimpressed with my rather lame insult. “You had better hope Blaze discovers that you’re missing soon. Or else I might be tempted not to…give you your upgrades.”

Upgrades? That got my full attention. “You turned me into a robot?”

“Don’t be foolish, Girl. Do you feel like a robot?”

“How would I know?” I said. “I’ve never been a robot before.”

“Well, now you are.”

Wait—what? “What?” I asked. My voice came out three octaves higher than normal. And now that I thought about it, what was that beeping? Why did it sound so close?

I looked down and received the shock of my life: my torso had been replaced. I hadn’t always been the biggest fan of my body, since I’d carried a little more pudge than I liked. But a sharp sense of horror filled me to discover that that pudge was completely gone. As was the rest of me. My head had apparently been attached to a blocky central processing unit. The arms and legs that protruded from either side all looked like that hose that hooks into the back of your dryer and there was a panel that blinked and beeped right in the center of my chest. Warily, I lifted my arms as far as they would go in the restraints. Metal clamps glistened at the ends of the hose-arms.

“Oh my god,” I said, and I discovered that robots apparently could not hyperventilate. “What the hell?”

Dr. Mobius moved away to putter at a desk in the corner. “Relax. I’ve taken precautions to protect myself should you use the clamps.”

He wouldn’t be if I could snap out of these damn shackles. “Yeah, because I was so worried about that. Why am I suddenly a robot?”

“Well, why wouldn’t you be? I am of course a leading expert on Force manipulation and robotics, so the surgery wasn’t even strenuous for me. You don’t recall? You were awake for it.”

My memories produced nothing but a blank. I remembered the coffee shop and some fever dreams, but that was it. “What are you talking about?”

“I distinctly remember that you were lucid,” Mobius said, turning away from the desk. He did not, thankfully, have a syringe in his hand (I’ve been suspicious of people who keep their backs to me in secret laboratories ever since the incident with Nurse Wretched). The clipboard he held didn’t much reassure me. Of course, nothing really would, not when I was a human head attached to a robot head.

…Wait, did I still have a human head? Now would have been a really good time to hyperventilate.

Mobius peered at the clipboard. “I’ll have to check my records to be sure, but—hmm. Oh, yes. Yes, you were most definitely conscious and cognizant. I noted several colorful adjectives you chose to employ in the use of describing a certain part of my anatomy.”

That sounded like me, but I still didn’t remember anything.

“Why?” I said. “What kind of sick game are you playing here?”

“Sick game?” Mobius looked affronted. Or as much as somebody with a face appropriate for the Halloween aisle of a department store could. “My dear Girl—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“—this is no game.” Mobius sighed to himself. “The plan was simple: I turn you into a robot. And then I give you to them.”

“To who?” And I realized with a horrible sinking in my emotional processing chip that we were not alone in the basement after all.

I don’t know how I’d missed them—maybe my sensors weren’t up to snuff yet, which told me my robot-maker was not the expert in robotics he claimed to be—but standing against the wall opposite were four very short people in brown robes. I couldn’t see if they were women or men because their faces were obscured by darkness. Their eyes glowed gold.

“Oh, crap,” I said, and one made chittering noises at his/her friend. “That’s really not good.”

“You fetched an acceptable price,” Dr. Mobius said, gesturing at his companions. He paused to consider it. “Well, with some bargaining, of course. But that’s the nature of Jawas. You may take her now.” The last bit was addressed to the little creatures—the Jawas.

One bobbed its head and all four of them approached me. I tried to struggle. I’d been up excrement creek without a paddle before (as the polite saying goes), but this blew every near save to pieces. My only hope of getting out of here alive was in Miami. I’d been turned into a frickin’ robot. The only way I was going to walk out of here was if I broke through the shackles myself, or if I convinced Dr. Mobius just to let me go. And the likelihood of either of those happening—I’d better just start gnawing on a metal limb if I wanted to escape.

I tried to scream as the creatures began to wheel my table toward the door, but one of them reached up and touched something on my neck. Immediately, my entire body locked up—like I’d been switched off. Only my eye sensors worked, so I had a front-row show to watch them wheel me out of what looked like a typical house in the suburbs (really?) and out to a giant trapezoid-looking brown vehicle in the street. Trapped by my own existence, I was wheeled up a giant ramp into the belly of the trapezoid, which appeared to be dusty and looked like it smelled really bad.

One good thing about being a robot? It looked like Dr. Mobius had removed my scent-processing chip.

More chittering erupted around me as Jawas appeared. One stepped forward, his voice slightly louder than the others, which was answered by angry chattering from the four wheeling me. For a second, it looked like a tiny argument was about to break out. But before anything else could happen, the Jawa nearest my head touched my neck again, and this time darkness overtook me.

At least I discovered the answer to one pressing question: no, robots did not dream of electric sheep.