Evil Genius Read online

  “Miles, we have a security breach,” Aileen announced, and for once her voice was clipped and urgent rather than lazily seductive.

  “Just a prank call, hmmm?” Norma growled at me.

  “Just a… prank visit, then,” I grumbled. “Maybe the two aren’t even related. Could be anyone really. I have a lot of overzealous fans, you know. A lot of jealous wannabes. A lot of corporate types clamoring to make pitches. A lot of lovesick admirers.”

  Norma pointed at one of the screens mounted on the faintly glowing white walls of The Cellar. The security feed of the main entrance, which I had intentionally constructed as the most vulnerable entry point of my house to encourage would-be intruders to stick with the obvious choice, was showing eight men. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous or friendly looking. They were wearing dark tactical clothing and animal masks. However, they had no visible weapons whatsoever, which was interesting. One of them appeared to be searching for a call button.

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “What’s excellent?” Norma asked. “The fact that they have no weapons?”

  “No,” I said. “This is a team of volunteer testers for our latest security installation.”

  “Oh,” Norma said as she turned a little pale, probably at her recollection of what had become of the crash test dummy.

  “Aileen?” I called out. “Put them on the intercom.”

  “You’re live,” my robot assistant replied cheerfully.

  I spoke into the microspeaker clipped to my lapel, which was usually inactive. “Good evening, gentlemen,” I said with brimming enthusiasm. “How may I assist you?”

  “You have five seconds to open this fucking door,” yelled one of them that was wearing a tiger mask as he stepped forward. I supposed he was the leader of the group, and I wondered what his voice would sound like when he screamed.

  “Or what?” I asked as I tried to make my voice sound extremely bored.

  The tiger-masked leader held up one of his hands, and flames spontaneously leapt from it and bathed the entire hand.

  Ah. Supervillains. As I had suspected based on the lack of conventional weaponry.

  That would make the results of my home security test even more valuable.

  “Aw, you wanna put on a free little pyro demo for me?” I asked. “Be my guest.”

  I reached over to a console and pressed a fingerprint-sensitive button that caused my stately oaken doors to swing inward invitingly.

  The masked crew exchanged uncertain glances. Suddenly none of them wanted to be the first to enter. They’d have to be unbelievably moronic to not realize that they’d be walking into some kind of booby trap.

  Yet here we all were.

  “Is the blade activated?” I asked Norma after I gestured for her to cut the audio.

  “Yes.” Her eyes were glued to the security feed as the tiger-masked leader gestured insistently to one of his crew members who was wearing a pig mask.

  Perhaps a guinea pig mask would have been more appropriate.

  “This will be exciting,” I chuckled. “Are you ready?”

  “Uhhh, yeah.” She had set aside her files and produced a tablet which she unlocked and then kept her hand hovering over.

  “Set it to manual, and let that first guy pass,” I ordered. “From the look of these guys, I don’t know that they’d keep trying that hard to get in if one of them immediately got sliced and diced. They’d probably just turn tail, and then I’d have to go to the trouble of hunting them down. So wait for the last one, or two or three if they’re clumped up close enough that you can drill through all of them at once. I don’t want any of them to escape.”

  “Got it,” Norma squeaked as the masked crew started trickling warily into my beautifully furnished parlor. They didn’t move as methodically as a trained military unit would, weren’t covering every angle, and weren’t maintaining suitable dispersion. I didn’t know what their individual superpowers were yet, but I didn’t care. Their timidity made it evident that none of them had a superpower that was rendering them somehow invulnerable to attack, and that being the case, they had to be dumb as fuck to be putting themselves in the position that they were in right now.

  “Aileen,” I called for my non-human assistant, “fetch us that bourbon from the cart, would you?”

  There was a moment of hesitation. “My body is not complete yet,” she objected.

  “Well, you have locomotive ability and the ability to grip shot glasses, sooo… ” I detected a certain lack of enthusiasm in the atmosphere and changed tack. “You look great, Aileen! Not as drop-dead gorgeous as you’re going to be, of course, but getting there. Come on over so Norma and I can admire you. And don’t forget to bring the bourbon.”

  Aileen sighed. “Just keep looking at the screens like you’re doing, both of you,” she said. Then I heard the telltale faint squeaking as she wheeled herself out from an unobtrusive corner and toward the liquor cart.

  “What about the rest of them?” Norma asked as the last few masked villains approached the entrance.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Looks like they’re all coming in.”

  “I mean, what are we going to do about the rest of them, that the blade system doesn’t… erm… take care of?” Norma asked anxiously with her finger poised to activate the blade system.

  “You’ll see,” I chuckled. I had briefed her on some of the house’s security features, but not all of them. If I had done so immediately after hiring her, then she probably would have concluded, not without reason, that I was a psychopath and fled back to Ohio no matter how many expensive gifts I lavished on her. Now, many months later, she was acclimated to my lifestyle and proclivities, and she was accustomed to the many diverse responsibilities I assigned her.

  “Now?” she whispered, and I saw her finger tremble over the screen of her device.

  “Wait, dear Norma,” I rumbled. “The anticipation is the best part. Don’t you agree.”

  “Yes, Miles,” she whispered as her shoulders began to shake.

  I almost wondered what was going through my assistant's mind. Did she want to kill these men? Probably not. But did she want to please me? Most definitely. I guessed that she also wanted to see her engineering at work, but again, not as much as she wanted to hear me give her kudos for a job well done.

  “Now,” I ordered, and Norma reflexively jabbed down with her finger.

  A section of the ceiling retracted and a whirring propeller blade that looked like it had been taken directly from the turbine of an airplane dropped down. It was spinning rapidly, and the force of the wind that it generated practically knocked over five of my guests as the three last ones to cross the threshold got promptly sliced and diced. Two probably never saw it coming. One tried to get clear, but got sucked in by the ankle, and more of his body got gradually dragged into the propeller counterclockwise until the screaming stopped.

  Blood, guts, bone, and brain matter splattered the entire entrance corridor, covered the five intruders who remained alive, and painted the ceiling. I dialed down one of the intercom settings to reduce the ear splitting screams of agony and panic blasting through The Cellar to a tinny background noise, and then I focused on the camera that was set on the blades. The mechanism sputtered to a stop when it got too clogged up with body parts, and now it was retracting back toward the bloody ceiling.

  “Stop it,” I said to Norma, and the blade froze where it was, in a halfway position where it blocked most of my front doors. It was coated with strangely beautiful pinwheel patterns of blood, and some shredded fabric twisted around it here, a severed arm dangled off it there. “Ah, bravo, Norma, you’re an artist.”

  “Thanks,” croaked my white-faced assistant, who was staring at the video feed with a mixture of horror, revulsion, and… fascination.

  “Now, does it have some kind of self-cleaning mechanism?” I asked. “I don’t know, an aerosol or something? A steam chamber that’s properly insulated from the rest of the structure of the
house?”

  “N-no,” Norma stammered. “I d-didn’t think of that.”

  “Oh well,” I sighed. “I’ll hire a cleaner tomorrow. Unless, of course, you do something to upset me, in which case that will become your job.”

  “I don’t think the supermodels would like seeing that still there when they walked in,” Norma said with a shaky grin.

  “Eh, I could just tell them it was an avante garde art installation,” I said. “They’re not really famous for their intelligence. And they’ve probably never seen a dead body before.”

  “Neither have I,” Norma whispered.

  “You are looking at three right now,” I said.

  “It’s on screen, and there really isn’t a whole corpse to look at,” she pointed out.

  “Ahh, well, pretty soon you’ll get your chance!” I smiled. “Eight chances, actually. Now where are our drinks?”

  Aileen wheeled up between us with both of our shots of bourbon. Her lower body just consisted of the wheels so far, since I hadn’t yet constructed her legs, rudimentary pincers served as her arms and hands for now, and her skin was chrome and her head was bald, so the illusion of her humanity was far from complete. Her torso, however, was gloriously proportioned, with a tiny waist, rippling abdominal muscles, and gravity-defying breasts that no human woman’s could match for both size and pertness, without surgical augmentation, anyway. Her face was also impeccably proportioned and almost creepily symmetrical, with bright blue eyes and cherry red lips that would never smudge.

  I took both glasses of whiskey and then handed one to Norma. “Cheers to that.”

  As I tipped my shot back, the tiger-masked leader stared wildly around, it seemed like he was either looking for a camera to stare directly into to confront me, or just trying to detect more such potential sources of sudden destruction. He appeared to be checking particularly for seams in the ceiling which he wasn’t going to find. Meanwhile, he and his entire entourage, which seemed half-deranged with fear after witnessing the fate of their three crew members, were gradually proceeding into a gallery lined with marble statues. Some of them had been obtained overseas and had necessitated large bribes in order to circumvent certain nations’ antiquities export laws. Others were just top-notch replicas and featured certain… historically inaccurate modifications.

  The tiger-masked leader paused in his tracks, and flames surged up to envelope his entire body as he shouted up to the ceiling, so I gestured for Norma to raise the feed volume.

  “... You have no idea who you’re fucking with, motherfucker! I can burn this whole place down any time I want! You will die screaming!”

  Actually, it would’ve taken the equivalent of a nuclear blast to penetrate The Cellar itself, so I wasn’t concerned. As for the rest of my mansion, there were certainly parts that were flammable, but the insurance payout would be more than enough to console me for any potential damage, since I didn’t really believe in the concept of sentimental value. And as for the rest of the tiger’s crew? I was pretty sure they were just as flammable as my house, so unless he was a far more ruthless bastard than I gave him credit for, my mansion was probably safe from his power.

  After all five surviving members of this supervillain crew had filed into the gallery between the two rows of statues, I selected the appropriate room on the interactive diagram of my house, pressed the icon over several of the statues, and then pressed a button.

  Red lasers shot out from the statues’ eyes at various angles and criss crossed through the air and sliced through four of the men. This time there was no mess whatsoever. Just sizzling and instantly cauterized holes that sliced into the group of men. Three of them immediately tumbled to the ground. One of the casualties was the tiger-masked leader, and his body twitched violently as he stumbled to his knees.

  I couldn’t tell from the camera angle where one of the three downed men had been hit, but one I was pretty sure had a hole through his heart, and the other definitely had a hole right between the eyes. One was still very much alive and screaming as he clutched his hand which now had a perfectly round hole right through the center of the palm. There was another subtle visual detail that had changed about him, too. The addition of a dark shadow where there hadn’t been one before, a shadow that I guessed was completely unrelated to whatever his superpower was.

  “Er… did he just piss his pants?” Norma asked.

  “Yup.” I reached over and turned the intercom back on. I also entered a security code that caused an alcove at the end of the galley to split open and reveal a waiting elevator. My voice boomed through the gallery to the two panicking survivors, “Hope you’re enjoying your visit so far. Why don’t you come down and have a drink with me and my lovely assistants?”

  The two of them exchanged glances. The one with dry pants scoffed, “Fuck nah,” and bolted. There wasn’t anywhere for him to go, though, since he would soon figure out that all the exits were sealed. The one with the urine-soaked pants, however, possibly seeking some kind of redemption, zipped into the elevator. When I say zipped, I mean that it looked like the video feed had been fast-forwarded even though it was in real time. It was pretty evident that his superpower had something to do with speed, but he didn’t move with any faster than normal when he pressed the single downward button that would bring him face-to-face with me in The Cellar, so I guessed that his speed might have only applied to running.

  “Fuck,” I said. “I was hoping we could interrogate both of them and compare their stories, but we don’t have a good way to subdue this one if we can’t catch him. If I had known in advance, I would have rigged something. A net maybe. Guess we’ll just have to hope the other one has a more manageable power, and loose lips.”

  “Then what exactly do we do with this one?” Norma asked nervously as the elevator indicator moved from two to one, The Cellar being represented by zero.

  Norma could fight, kind of, and that had been my plan for if this guy’s superpower hadn’t made it impractical. She had an average knowledge of every form of martial arts ever invented. Krav maga, muay thai, kung fu, boxing, jiu jitsu, you name it. Of course, her muscular and cardiovascular fitness were average too, so she wouldn’t be as powerful as someone more athletic who actually trained in one of those disciplines, and an untrained guy who was big and strong enough might still be able to overpower her depending on the situation. But for equally physically average, unarmed blokes like this chipmunk-masked pants-pisser currently descending toward us, Norma’s extensive repertoire of grappling techniques and submission holds could come as a very unpleasant surprise.

  If not for his superspeed.

  His superspeed meant that whatever devious maneuver Norma whipped out, he’d be able to see it coming from a mile away in slow motion.

  “Eliminate him,” I sighed. “Aileen? Get in position and set your nipples on hyperburst.”

  Norma rolled her eyes.

  Aileen wheeled in front of the elevator and her chrome curves gleamed with the reflected light from the floor number indicators. I had compromised a bit on the anatomical accuracy of her nipples in order to design them as the barrels of functioning assault rifles that were integrated into her torso.

  “Fire the second-- no, the millisecond that the doors open,” I said. “If you miss, he can probably take out both Norma and me before we have time to blink.”

  The elevator chime rang out and the doors opened.

  Aileen’s nipples sprayed the unfortunate supervillain at an eighteen hundred rounds per minute rate of fire until she had emptied both magazines. He never had time to take more than a step outside the elevator before the bullets halted his inhuman momentum and he crumpled onto the floor.

  The recoil had spun Aileen’s wheels back by a couple inches, and then she ejected the empty magazines from her stomach and slammed home fresh ones. I could hear the metallic click-clangs of the charging handles being racked inside of her. Then she started spitting the shell casings out of her cherry-red mouth.

&nbs
p; “Set your nipples on safe,” I said.

  “She knows what to do, you just enjoy saying that,” Norma accused me, and I couldn’t really deny it.

  “Hmm, good thing his speed power was lower tier,” I said. “I know that some heroes and villains have been faster than the speed of light. Not much we could’ve done then.”

  “But how does that even work?” Norma asked. “If they were still made of flesh and bone, then wouldn’t they just disintegrate?”

  I shrugged. “Supers are made of different stuff than you and I. Well, I mean, you are a super, of course, but not of that category.”

  “Yeah, I have just about the most boring superpower in existence,” Norma sighed.

  “No, you have just about the most useful superpower in existence,” I corrected her.

  “Am I a super?” Aileen inquired.

  “Well, I don’t know, that’s an interesting question,” I said. “I think you kind of have to be human, or maybe not human, but an organic entity, or at least an originally organic entity even if you have bionic features, to be defined that way. But that’s just semantics. I’d call firing rounds out of your nipples a superpower. And that’s just barely the start. You’re going to have all kinds of inhuman powers by the time I’m done building you, in addition to your super human intelligence. So as far as I’m concerned, you’re definitely a super.”

  “Thank you, Miles,” Aileen purred. “Your praise brings me joy.”

  “Okay, now you two go fetch that last guy and bring him back here for interrogation,” I told my two assistants. Then I scanned the security feeds until I found him on one of the screens. “Looks like he’s on his way toward the library from the north corridor, wearing a rabbit mask.”

  “I can track him with my thermal sensors,” Aileen said.

  “I need him alive,” I reminded her sternly as my gaze fell on the bullet-riddled body of his crewmate, which was lying half in and half out of the elevator and preventing the doors from closing.