The Machinist Part One: Malevolence (4 page)

There were f
our sets of active power outlets and a cable TV socket, but no wire and no set.  No electronic devices at all, in fact.  There was nothing else there.

He walked over to the mattress and picked up the plain gr
ay tee shirt and black sweatpants lying on top of it.  A little piece of paper fell to the floor.

It had one word written on it: “Wait.”

He stripped out of his tight suit, put on the new clothes, and sat down on the mattress.

Half a
n hour passed before he laid down on his back.

Another
dozen minutes went by before his vision faded into darkness.

Chapter Three

BZZZZZZ
!

McHenry floated in the air
, his ears ringing.  He felt a weight in his hands and looked down: He was holding a bulky, futuristic gun.  It glowed with power.

His vision drifted down further,
but stayed focused on himself.  He was wearing armor.  His armor.  Green-trimmed, black ballistic plates covered him from his neck to his toes.  He could feel the familiar ache where nodes connected the armor’s circuitry to his nerves.  He flexed the three digits of his cybernetic hand, testing it to make sure of its functionality.  He stroked the weapon’s trigger with the leather-gloved fingers of his good hand.  Wind whipped between the buildings, causing his thick black cloak to flutter and tug on his shoulders.

He was young again. 
But he wasn’t just Nicholas McHenry anymore, he was the Machinist.

His drones cried out in his mind for instruction.  They were like dogs—desperate to please him
, constantly seeking direction.  He looked around him and saw his three little robots hovering next to him, bolts of flame ejecting from the large feet attached to spindly legs.  The lenses of their blocky faces focused on him, and the little laser arrays they had in place of arms twitched.

Looking around, he realized he was in the city, hovering over Times Square.  Panicked civilians shoved each other roughly, screaming as they tried to flee inside the shops lining the street.

“You insects!  You morons!”  He heard himself yell.  “I was never good enough for you!”

He blasted a stalled-out yellow cab without aiming, destroying it.

“Well, what do you think of me now? 
What do you think of me now?!
”

The
Machinist started laughing and shooting without taking sight.  His drones took part as well, zapping people and creating little black piles of dirt where they’d stood.

“You kicked me out of the institute!  You tried to
suppress my work!”

He saw his scarred, pale face appear in close up on that stupid, stupid jumbotron, and screamed.  It shattered.

“I just wanted to be recognized!”  He blasted wildly, demolishing more vehicles.  “I just wanted you to say I was smart!”

People started peeking their heads out from behind burned-out trashcans.  One of them, a woman, started yelling: “But you are smart!  You just never applied yourself!”

She looked like his mother, when she was younger.  He sneered, took aim with the gun, and disintegrated her.

An old man stepped forward, “We just wanted you to stop daydreaming and create something practical!”

It was his first boss, Professor Eisenstein from the institute.  Disintegrated.

Just as McHenry
was taking aim at a young woman that looked like his first high-school crush, another man’s voice—a familiar one--bellowed out something inane:

“Stop right there, evildoer!”

McHenry sent a mental command to his rocket boots to turn him around to face the interloper, and his jaw dropped when he saw who it was.

His nemesis.

Night Owl.

McHenry felt himself fill with rage.  He couldn’t remember why, but he knew he hated
Night Owl with every fiber of his being.

“You
motherfucker!
” The Machinist bellowed, taking aim with the gun and firing off three bolts of energy.  Night Owl evaded them, the rockets on his spread-wing shaped backpack blasting in little spurts.

His nemesis reached a hand into a pouch on that ridiculous yellow belt
he wore—The hero clearly had never heard of the color wheel, because his belt didn’t match his  dark brown and gray armor—and pitched something at McHenry.  The hero’s toy buzzed as it flew past McHenry’s head, missing him.

“Missed me, moron.”  McHenry couldn’t help but gloat.  He just felt so good, so god damn powerful
again.

B
elow, a crowd had gathered to watch the melee.  McHenry glanced at their faces.  Krudoff was among them.  So was the magnetic kid.  They all cheered him on.

He commanded his pets to fire at the idiot in that stupid mask, then reached his mechanical hand forward, claws outstretched.  In microseconds the computer in his brain plotted a trajectory that would put his arm through the hero’s heart, and he sent the mental command
to his rocket boots to enact that plan.  While Night Owl was distracted by a swarm of tiny heat-seeker missiles, he’d strike.  He rocketed towards Night Owl, who deftly deflected the lethal blow. They collided and plummeted to the ground.

The hero’s armored helmet fell off as they bounced off of destroyed vehicles.  It was shaped to resemble an owl’s head, with yellow goggles and two swept points over the ears.  It sparked as it clattered on the pavement
.  The Machinist punched the idiot right in the jaw with his good hand, tearing into his leather cowl and ripping it off.

He stared for a second at the unconscious Owl, he took in every detail of the face—one described by women’s magazines as “ruggedly handsome.”  He hated it.  Even knocked out, the bastard still looked smug.

The Machinist held Night Owl by the throat with his good hand, and began to lift him off the ground.  He felt the servos in his armor strain, but didn’t care. 
This was his chance.

McHenry struck his nemesis with his incredibly powerful robotic hand.  Once.  Twice.  Again.

Again.

He felt his smile grow
with each strike.  As hot blood sprayed onto his cheeks and forehead, as flesh turned to meaty pulp, he felt more and more content.  And when there was nothing left of Night Owl’s face to destroy, he released his grip on his opponent’s throat.

The body dropped to the
pavement with a splash of blood and splintered bone.

McHenry turned to face the crowd, which cheer
ed wildly.  He raised his arms in victory, and fireworks exploded in the sky above.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

The sound vibrated the entirety of the Square.  Cars and newspaper boxes shimmied, and trash cans toppled over.

“I’m sorry, folks!”  Boomed a man’s cheerful voice--it sounded like a game
show host. “But that’s
not
how it happened!”

The assembled crowd let out a defeated, “Aww.”

From behind a wrecked box truck, a man in a tuxedo stepped out.  He held a wired microphone in one hand.  He had the head of a dog—an Elkhound—and McHenry realized it was his childhood pet, Max.

“Wh—what do you mean?”  McHenry stammered.  “I beat him!  I finally—”

Max the announcer dog interrupted McHenry, saying, “Well folks, that’s all we’ve got time for tonight, so good night!”

And then that damn
ed buzzing sound shook the world again, more violently than before.

***

BZZZT! BZZZT! BZZZT!

The buzzer above the apartment’s door would not stop going off.
  Nicholas McHenry opened his eyes.  His back ached from lying on the incredibly uncomfortable mattress, and his sweats were adhered to him by a thin film of perspiration.  He felt his brain try, but fail, to recall his dream as his eyes unblurred themselves.

He got up and stumbled in the dark over to the door, remembering too late that he could simply have changed his eyes to night vision.  He was out of practice.

He swung the door open to reveal a man in a suit standing there.  At least, he thought it was a man, from the build of the person’s body.  But then he looked up and saw that there was just blank, stretched skin where a face should have been. A pair of red lights glowed dimly under the skin where the thing’s eye sockets should’ve been.  The figure had no hair.  After handing McHenry a large black and orange toolbox, the faceless thing gestured towards the hallway.  McHenry put the toolbox on the floor and followed the bizarre humanoid.

The hall was filled with crates.  Some of them were clean, stainless steel boxes with labels imprinted on them that read, “Department of Defense – Classified,” about three feet long.  There were a few other, larger black crates that
were scuffed up and dusty.  The faceless man opened a black crate, then a stainless one.

McHenry
looked inside.  The steel boxes contained multiple disassembled laser cannons, plasma launchers, and rocket assemblies.  The black ones contained jumbles of circuit boards, wires, and power capacitors.

And in the back of all these were
a few boxes that seemed out of place.  There was one long, coffin-sized wooden crate, and three boxy wooden crates, each about four feet tall.  They had the acronym “NYPD” pattern-painted on them.  He got closer to read their labels, and smiled as he read what they said.

Suspect: McHenry, N.
Evidence for Fed. Case AA.4282-12
Do not remove.

“My gear?” He asked, already knowing the answer.
“My ’bots?”

The faceless man nodded before reaching into the breast pocket of its suit to pull out a two-inch
-thick wad of cash.  It separated about a quarter of the bills, stuffed them back into its pocket, and handed McHenry the rest.  It walked away and vanished into the shadows of the far hallway.

McHenry dragged the boxes and crates in
to the room with the mattress.  He spent the rest of the night unpacking, tuning up the systems and mechanicals of his bots, reinstalling his cybernetics, and calibrating his battle armor.  The next morning, he walked back to the shop and bought a coffee from some girl without asking anything about the Network or Ivan.  He didn’t want to risk losing their assistance.

Coffee in hand, he took a cab uptown a
few blocks and bought a black leather jacket two sizes too big.  If he was going to wear it over the cyber suit, he needed to account for the added bulk of his armor.  Moths had gotten into the NYPD storage vault where his equipment was held, and destroyed his cloak—besides, it was a new decade. 
Why not update the look a little bit?

Once he’d returned to the derelict building the Network had
set him up with, McHenry took a short nap, then turned his attentions towards some final equipment checks.  His plasma rifle was acting up so he scrounged through one of the crates he hadn’t gone through yet.  He found a box with three small handguns, and sighed.  Guns were not his style.

McHenry
disassembled one of the pistols, soldered components of the plasma gun to it, and took a test shot.  It blew a small, scorched hole through his east wall and into another—thankfully unoccupied—apartment.  He activated the magnetic holster on his right hip and attached the little gun to it.  At least he had some kind of armament.

By two a.m., he was fully suited up and hovering a few inches off of the creaking roof of the building, his rocket boots
tracing thin burn lines on it.  Two of his robots were fully functional, and hovered next to him.  The third one, which could only move one arm, tried to do the same but sputtered and landed again with a clunk.  He commanded it to return to the apartment and shut down.

H
e took to the air.  He stayed high enough to be unseen by the few drunks and social dropouts who were on the street at that time—only tourists ever looked up, and it was far too late for them to be around.  But he also stayed below the city skyline to avoid being spotted by heroes brooding on gargoyles or flying against the moon dramatically.

He kicked himself as he got out of the city lines, remembering only then that the suit had a light-bending function that would have rendered him nearly invisible.  To be fair though, he had only just installed it the night before he was arrested.

Not off to a great start, Mac,
McHenry scolded himself as he activated the system.  He turned into what looked like a human-shaped blob of water flying through the air.

McHenry
had decided that his first task as a supervillain renewed would be a simple smash-and-grab.  He remembered an old bank on Church Street in Hoboken, and headed there to raid the vault.  He just wanted to see if he could pull it off: He would disable the security, burn his way through the heavy metal door, grab a backpack’s worth of large bills and head back home.

Within minutes, McHenry was floating ten feet off the ground in front of the bank’s front doors; he could move at an incredible pace when he was flying.  He deactivated the stealth system and landed.  The robots moved towards the doorway, then waited for instruction.  He stepped forward and punched the security keypad with his robotic arm, exposing wires and circuitry.  He opened a panel on the cybernetic gauntlet and uncoiled a cable of his own, connecting the ends of it to the sparking wires coming from where the keypad hung.  In his mind, he made the right packet connections, and began decrypting the building’s security.  The lights inside flickered, then went dark.  He switched to night vision, disconnected from the interface, and pushed the doors open.  No alarms went off, no lights flashed.
  There wasn’t even a security guard in the building.  He was in.

The robots followed him to
wards the vault and started burning a series of concentric circles into its door with their lasers.  Five minutes later, a giant chunk of it fell to the floor with a loud clang.  He smiled and stepped inside.