With an impressive whoosh, the Whatsit suddenly let out a huge cloud of chalk dust, and then zipped out of existence. Wil felt a lump in his pocket, and found the Whatsit back where it had started the evening.
“So that’s how it works,” he muttered, genuinely impressed. He looked at the head of the Air-Max 4000, impressed. I’m keeping this, he thought.
Inside the broadcast area, Marcus James was having a pretty extraordinary coughing fit. “SARA!” shouted Lucy, urgently. “We have to get out of here! Which way do we go?”
“Greetings,” said SARA, innocently pretending to be waking up from a nap. “Would you like me to look up ‘which way am I supposed to go’ on the Internet?”
“Yes!” yelled Lucy and Wil in unison.
“It’s about time,” said SARA. And with that, her entire screen lit up. “Please proceed to the highlighted route. In ten yards, turn left.”
“You can’t be serious!” protested Lucy.
“Just do as she says,” responded Wil. “I think we owe her that much!”
Blinded by chalk dust, Wil and Lucy raced forward, unable to see exactly where they were going. Wil was vaguely aware of the recovering smaller ninja-bots now converging on his and Lucy’s position. After exactly ten yards, he turned left and found himself leading Lucy through a small corridor filled with red flashing lights and chalk dust.
“At the next junction, turn left,” instructed SARA. Wil and Lucy duly obliged, only to be met with a second wall of angry, buzzing ninja-bots, this time armed with smaller blowtorches. “At the first opportunity, make a legal U-turn!”
“Quick! Back the way we came!” yelled Lucy above the din as the wall of bots bore down.
“We can’t go back! There’s a hundred more of them following us!”
“Just go!”
Wil and Lucy doubled back, quickly. “In three feet, jump abruptly to the right,” said SARA in her metallic matter-of-fact manner. Wil and Lucy immediately jumped to the right and found themselves inside an open storage closet just as the two converging legions of ninja-bots bore down on their position. In the resulting confusion, the two armies began to attack each other in the hallway, while Wil and Lucy looked on from their hidey-hole, confused beyond measure.
“At the earliest opportunity, please step out across the smoldering piles of slag in the hallway and move east,” said SARA.
“Shouldn’t we let them finish first?” said Wil.
“Time is of the essence,” replied SARA. “Please proceed to the highlighted route.”
Wil checked the screen. The highlighted route would take he and Lucy up across the rooftops, down a drainpipe, and through a thirtieth-story window. It would culminate in a madcap dash across seventeen more floors before calling for them to squeeze through a series of air ducts while, presumably, taking a few bullets to the shoulder.
“Are you serious?” Wil cried. “We’ll never make it that way!”
“Can’t we use the elevator again?” asked Lucy.
“Recalculating…,” said SARA. On the screen of the smartphone, her navigation widget revolved for a few moments while she pondered the problem. And as the commotion in the hallway began to die down, she found a solution. “Please proceed directly to the elevators, which have been rerouted. Do not initiate conversation, and try to avoid stepping on that green thing. Temporal paradox in T-minus seventy-three seconds.”
“Uh, okay. Are you sure?”
“Affirmative.”
“What green thing? And for that matter, what temporal paradox?”
The screen of the smartphone simply glowed. SARA was no longer in the mood to be forthcoming.
“I think we might have overloaded her inputs,” said Lucy. “She’s gone completely off the deep end.”
“I think we were already past that stage,” replied Wil, grimly. “Come on.”
Wil and Lucy stepped out into the hallway, where the remnants of a ninja-bot war smoldered. Farther along, a single ninja-bot groaned as it tried and failed to pull itself back to wherever some kind stranger might repair it. With their choices limited, Wil and Lucy began to pick their way through the debris and head toward the elevators.
“Temporal paradox in T-minus twenty seconds,” SARA reminded them, though she remained unclear on the nature of the approaching countdown.
“What on Earth is she talking about?” asked Lucy. “Is something going to happen?”
“Probably!” shouted Wil over the noise of the alarms. “She doesn’t like to be specific!”
“Wait a second! I think I know what it is! Pass her to me!”
As they rushed toward a rapidly building clattering sound coming from the direction they were headed, Lucy examined the smartphone’s screen to discover the telephone function had been activated. “SARA!” she cried, “Please call Mr. Dinsdale at the Curioddity Museum!”
“Dialing…,” said SARA, knowingly. “Paradox complete.” At the other end of the line, Mr. Dinsdale’s garbled voice could barely be heard over the sound of the chaos in the upper levels. “You have reached the Museum of Curioddity,” said his recorded voice across the ether. “If you wish to leave a message … uhm … leave a message. Boop.”
“Wil!” shouted Lucy in the direction of some point in the not-too-distant past. “We’re inside Marcus James’s offices! There’s no time to explain! Whatever you do, make sure you bring SARA’s charging cord so that you can plug her in. You’ll understand this later.” She cut off the call abruptly, and handed the phone back to Wil with a smug grin. “There you go. I think that about wraps that up.” And with a wink, she jumped over the closest piece of debris and made her way toward the central lobby.
At the end of the hallway, they finally cleared the debris field. Wil looked out into a larger corridor to make sure the coast was clear. The blue lights now seemed to be dimming, and the batteries on the shrill alarm systems had weakened dramatically. The alarm now sounded more like a tired goat. Seeing no one in the corridor, Wil and Lucy stepped out. Suddenly, a small, greenish individual rounded the far corner. Wil had to jump back to avoid stepping on the little creature. The alien raised a clipboard over its eyes and let out an unintelligible squeak before bolting in the direction of the accounting offices. Wil and Lucy watched the “camera operator” rush off with bemused looks on their faces.
“That must’ve been the green thing SARA was talking about,” said Lucy. “Where d’you think it’s going?”
“With any luck? Back where it came from.”
“Attention!” came a voice from the weakening loudspeaker system. “All personnel: please attach trumpets bleating five nations!” Wil and Lucy glanced at each other. “Correction: all personnel, please abandon life markers plenty chop station!”
“I don’t think English is their strong suit,” said Wil.
“I kinda like it,” replied Lucy. “Makes running away sound less formal.”
* * *
LUCY KEPT her back to the wall and peered frequently behind them so that she could keep a lookout for errant ninja-bots. Despite the decreasingly frantic nature of the alarm systems, the upper levels were still in a state of chaos. On a large screen above the upper atrium, Marcus James’s looped infomercial for rubberized gutter protectant was now playing for the third time in a row. The man himself was nowhere to be seen.
As Wil and Lucy rounded the corner to the elevator doors, they were surprised to find the secretary they’d met earlier standing at the elevator call buttons. With no apparent understanding of the situation, the secretary was simply waiting for the elevator to arrive, as opposed to finding an escape route or a panic room somewhere. To all intents and purposes, the girl simply seemed to feel that this was business as usual; in fact, she was more startled by Wil and Lucy’s disheveled appearance than by the chaotic scenes unfolding in the building around her.
Lucy raised her eyebrows to acknowledge the girl, and together the three of them waited in uncomfortable silence for the elevators to arrive. Much to Wil??
?s dismay, the elevator seemed to be stopping at every single floor on the way up. As they waited, trying to avoid making eye contact, a couple of the producers rushed by, making unintelligible noises. A single machine cog rolled past, covered with burning oil. Still no response from the secretary, who had found solace in her hairdressing magazine and was doing everything in her power not to make small talk. Despite the escalating danger, Lucy seemed to be encouraged by the comedic possibilities of the moment. Wil glared at her to be silent.
The girl finally looked up, annoyed that the elevator was taking so long. “So,” said Lucy, gleefully. “Busy day?”
“Kinda,” said the girl, not wishing to talk about it.
Lucy tried her best to let the moment die. Her best was not good enough. “Anything interesting happen at work today?” she asked, innocently.
“Nah,” said the secretary, and returned to her magazine.
By now, the elevator was just a few floors down, and Wil had lost all semblance of control. “Come on … come on…,” he muttered, impatiently. “What’s the holdup?”
“Where’s Marcus?” hissed Lucy. “I don’t like it. It’s too quiet.”
Wil was inclined to agree; surely, the little TV pitchman would not go this quietly, would he? On a whim, he retrieved the Civil War periscope that had been slung across his back, and extended it upward. The secretary tried and failed to contain her annoyance.
“What are you doing?” hissed Lucy again. “You’re going to give us away.”
“I think that particular ship has sailed,” admitted Wil. “I’m just being careful.” The periscope’s weight caused him to stagger slightly.
“How careful can you be holding a hundred pounds of metal over your head in the middle of a penthouse lobby with a bunch of robots trying to kill you?”
“Not very! Just bear with me!”
Wil peered into the periscope to look at the floors below. Nothing doing but for a few frantic little gnome creatures piling into the back of a forklift truck, and the occasional errant ninja-bot rushing past in flames. Wil swiveled the periscope until it alighted on the elevator shaft. The elevator moved up to the floor directly below them. And standing in it was a very smug looking (not to mention nefarious) Marcus James. Next to him stood a heretofore-unseen ninja-bot armed with a military-grade machine-gun cannon. Wil gasped.
“What is it?”
“It’s Marcus! He’s in the elevator!” Wil tried not to look self-conscious as the secretary scowled at him. “He’s in the elevator with another one of those robots, and this one doesn’t look at all pleasant,” he hissed.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
Just at that moment, the Whatsit beeped inside Wil’s pocket.
* * *
TO SAY that Marcus James never knew what hit him as the elevator doors slowly opened was somewhat of an understatement. He was only briefly aware of the distinctive hollow thwack of an Air-Max 4000, and a short beeping sound flying directly toward his face. Moments later, his world (and legacy) would change in an incredibly dramatic fashion.
In those same moments, the weapons-grade ninja-bot would also endure a reorganization of its intended function. As it emerged from the elevator with its machine-gun cannons firing at full blast, its robotic sensors were rather confused to discover that instead of discharging hollow-point cannon shells capable of ripping human flesh to shreds, it had suddenly begun to shoot bright red tulips instead. The tulips seemed less of the “flesh shredding” variety and more of a benign and fragrant variety as they fell harmlessly to the floor, carpeting the place with vibrant color.
The ninja-bot looked around the upstairs lobby, confused, as three human flesh targets made their polite excuses and stepped past it into the elevator shaft. It tried valiantly to pepper them with heat-seeking thermo-grenades and was startled to find itself lobbing small orchids in their direction. As the doors to the elevator closed, the poor, confused machine set off down the hallway in search of someone who might be willing to reprogram it.
Had it looked up at one of the two huge HD screens dominating the lobby, it would have been perplexed to find its master key holder, Marcus James, standing completely naked in the middle of his broadcast studio amid a pile of discarded clipboards, with a single tulip in one hand, a small orchid in the other, and a very sheepish grin on his face indeed.
* * *
AND HAD Marcus been aware at that very moment that Wil and Lucy had made their way out of the Castle Towers and were now staring up at events unfolding above in the penthouse, flushed with success, his grin would have been of the upside-down variety.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DURING WHAT Lucy described as the “car ride” back to the museum (but which Wil would later describe as a “series of terror-filled near-accidents in the passenger seat of a rusted death trap driven by a crazy woman”), Wil allowed himself a brief moment of self-congratulation in between longer moments of sheer panic.
Genghis screeched away from the Castle Towers, leaving behind a pillar of rubberized smoke. Wil gripped the sides of his passenger seat with both hands, resolving never to go back to his former office building. This put him in a better mood than he might have expected. As he looked up into the night sky, he was astounded to see the upper levels of the building flashing intermittently with virtually every color of the rainbow. Wil could only imagine how many Air-Max 4000 golf clubs were being broken over someone’s knee right at that very moment.
Next door to the Castle Towers, the Swiss clock was undergoing a transformation: the laser beam springing from the top of the building was growing in intensity, so much so that it had plowed a huge hole through the angry clouds above. The beam glowed with an unnatural blue light as red pulses upward flew along its length and into empty space above. No doubt, Marcus James’s producers—acting in accordance with their kind—were rapidly deserting the failing production below. The pulses grew stronger and stronger until with a final flourish they lit up the night sky like an errant nuclear detonation … and then there was simply silence, and the black of the night sky. Wil listened intently for any concussive episode that might follow and was amused to hear instead the resonant (and satisfying) sound of the Swiss clock’s KLONNG, as if the awful edifice were saying a final goodbye.
Suddenly, the top of the Castle Towers erupted in a flash of brilliant colors, ranging from a glowing magenta to a deep neon green. Orange fireworks seemed to blow out every window on the top floor, and a giant blue ball popped out of the roof and hurtled into the night sky. Despite his understandable terror, Wil couldn’t help but be impressed by the pyrotechnics—this was just the sort of effect he’d always been going for when any of his childhood experiments had arbitrarily exploded.
His amazement was to be short-lived, however (though his terror would increase exponentially just to even things out). The giant blue ball described a huge, impressive arc against the pitch-black night and—despite Genghis the Pinto’s own series of exotic maneuvers—began to grow bigger in size as it reached its apex and plummeted toward the ground.
“Lucy,” said Wil, rather meekly. His fight-or-flight response mechanism was making a mental toss-up between interacting with his temporarily deranged girlfriend or the rapidly enlarging giant blue ball. “Lucy!” he repeated, a little more forcefully.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” yelled Lucy in response as her demonic possession took full hold. As if to emphasize her annoyance, she swerved across a sidewalk and dislodged a fire hydrant that had previously been minding its own business. “I’m trying to escape here!”
“Up in the sky! Imminent death! Step on it!” screamed Wil, pointing to the rapidly descending giant blue ball.
Seeing the instrument of her impending demise hurtling toward her at a very high rate of speed, Lucy let out a half gargle/half sneer and swerved to the right, scraping the side of an innocent parked car. “Hold tight!” she screamed, clearly unaware that Wil was already holding very tight
ly indeed. Lucy aimed Genghis for a pile of discarded dirt that some unfortunate street workers had handily left earlier, and with an engine roar that sounded roughly as powerful as, say, an electric screwdriver, the Ford Pinto caught four feet of air and slammed into the main drag of the one-way system. The massive blue ball missed them by inches. It crashed into the workers’ pile of dirt and bounced a couple of times, sending a shower of impressive blue sparks in every direction. The strange mass careened into a parked truck, which exploded in a manner suitable for a Hollywood action flick, and then set off across the street like a silver pinball, where it made a beeline for an advertising billboard for Gleemodent toothpaste. Wil watched with great satisfaction as the huge ball crashed through Marcus James’s impossibly white teeth and embedded itself in the side of a concrete wall behind the billboard.
Leaving only destruction in its wake, the mighty Genghis careened around the one-way system and off into the night, narrowly missing Pan’s extended farewell on the driver’s side of the Pinto. Wil was vaguely aware of a mass of flashing blue lights headed in the opposite direction, some of which now converged at the base of the Castle Towers and some of which headed toward the still-sparking blue ball, like worker ants rushing to the aid of their queen. Despite Wil’s utter dread, he allowed himself a smile at the notion that the arriving police and emergency vehicles might have been better occupied following Genghis and his insane mistress, as opposed to bringing Marcus James to the minimal justice he would no doubt endure. The rusted Pinto barreled across three lanes and scraped the side of a barrier before righting itself and jetting off toward the Curioddity Museum in an attempt to set a world land speed record.