A mad scientist conquers a planet, but not everyone is happy with her beneficent new rule.
GUEST STORY by Zyzzyva
tags: silver age
Doctor Sara Timonel, mad cybernetician and, as of five minutes ago, absolute godqueen of the planet Cefalu, laughed maniacally.
She was sitting atop an enormous throne built out of whatever had been lying around the main square when she arrived. It was lumpy and painfully jagged, even to her shapely metal butt, but the sight of her subverted construction drones mashing together streetcars did an excellent job of putting fear in the hearts of the humans and intelligent robots around her—which is to say, of course, her new subjects.
“What’s going on!?” one of the milling ants beneath her asked in confusion. Dr. Timonel laughed again.
“I’m conquering your world!” she declared. “In fifty years you will tell your grandchildren that you were there when your glorious empress’ reign began.” Honestly, it was for the best. If their entire automated drone network could be taken over by the first mad scientist to come along and break the laws of informational physics just a teensy tiny bit, conquering them was practically a favor.
“What?” said the man. Well, the first thing she’d have to do with her new planet was improve the educational system. People should be able to recognize a mad genius when they saw one. Second. Second thing, after constructing an enormous statue of herself, large enough to be seen from every city on the main continent. She’d have to decide whether the secondary continent would get its own statue or have mandatory tourism to visit the one on the main continent. Running a planet had so many fiddly details, but of course for a mad genius like her—
“I was on vacation, you know,” said a voice, right by her ear.
“What?” said Dr. Timonel, in confusion. There was a woman right beside her atop the throne, having apparently just climbed up the side.
“I was on vacation here,” said the woman, who was wearing a broad-brimmed sunhat and an oversized t-shirt that declared I ❤ Cefalu. ” Just spend some time on a nice, quiet planet, no wars or alien invasions or evil space-gangsters or anything. Nobody knows who I am, nobody cares. Now you show up and I’m going to have to beat you up and run off before the local authorities figure out who I am. I probably won’t even be able to finish my lunch.”
“So,” said Dr. Timonel, who still didn’t know who the woman was but had figured out the gist, “you intend to challenge my benevolent rule? Very well, then, GUARDS!”
Two former construction drones, now Dr. Timonel’s personal bodyguards, rushed up the side of the throne, their heavy robot feet crumpling metal beneath them. With surprising agility the woman sprang over the shapeless head of the first just as it approached the peak of the throne and kicked the second off entirely. It slammed heavily into the square below, cracking flagstones in a shower of sparks.
“Damnit!” cursed Dr. Timonel. The robots should have had laser guns and buzzsaw hands (or possibly buzzsaw guns and laser hands) but she’d only taken them over minutes before, at the start of her reign, and hadn’t had time to improve them into proper guards. She mentally inserted “robot guards with vaporizing laser eyes” ahead of the education system. Still behind the statue.
The woman was still darting around the first robot, but even as Dr. Timonel watched she somehow got behind it and kicked it neatly over the side, onto its comrade, smashing the latter flat. Dr. Timonel snarled and ordered every robot in the city to converge on her and tear this interloper limb from limb.
“How are you controlling all the robots?” asked the woman.
“It was child’s play,” declared Dr. Timonel. “I simply broadcast a signal that redirected the allegiance of every unintelligent machine in the city to me. Even the coffeemakers serve only me now, although of course they will serve coffee in general. As long as you’re not a rebel, of course. Fourth on the list: install loyalty-recognition circuits into all coffeemakers, to ensure that they only—”
“Right, mad science. But it’s giant radio tower kind of mad science, not evil computer chip on the back of the neck kind of mad science. Giant radio tower like… that.” The woman pointed at Dr. Timonel’s brilliant trans-etheric robo-subordinator transmission coil, which she had carefully mounted at the back of the throne.
“What? No! Stop!” shouted Dr. Timonel immediately. The whole point of ruling a planet was to get other people to do the boring things for you, like blowing up rebels or refusing to serve them coffee, but this was an emergency and the nearest drones were still too far off. The woman pulled some kind of gun out of her pants pocket, pointed it at the coil, and Dr. Timonel tackled her off the throne.
In the moment before they hit the hard stone of the plaza like the robots before them, the woman somehow rolled in midair, got Dr. Timonel beneath her, and kicked of her chest at the moment of impact. Dr. Timonel—whose handcrafted body was not merely gorgeous (of course) but much tougher than a mere industrial construction robot – got back up immediately, just in time to see the woman land gracefully and shoot the coil with her gun.
The whole top of the throne exploded, although that was probably less her gun and more the pico-blackhole Dr. Timonel had installed as a power source. “You-! You-!” she shouted, incoherent with rage. Her eyes glowed actual red as her combat mode unfolded.
Dr. Timonel had been a very shy, very horny mad graduate student when she’d finished converting herself to cybernetic perfection, which is why her body was the sexiest and most beautiful cyborg woman imaginable. Ask any of the robots she’d just taken over—they’d tell you that Dr. Timonel was the sexiest and most beautiful cyborg woman imaginable. Well, the ones that could talk. Fifth on the list, just behind coffeemaker identification, install voiceboxes in all drones to ensure they can properly answer questions about her beauty. But the point was, she looked like a woman of gleaming metal, all long alloy legs and long alloy nails and hard alloy abs, and that put her at a bit of a disadvantage against this woman, who was also pretty hot but armed. But Dr. Timonel had some contingencies up her sleeve, and she could go back to her regal ruler-of-a-planet look when she was done with this impertinent insect.
Besides, she knew, power was the sexiest look of all.
Her humaniform body unfolded, new limbs and equipment emerging as her seamless skintoned exterior sheathing split in perfect straight lines. Her delicate hands turned into multijointed rending claws, her arms lengthening and gaining reach as the additional pairs emerged from what had been her torso. Her legs split and her feet shifted into razor sharp spikes, stabbing easily through the stone beneath her. Lifted high on her eight new movement limbs, she extended higher still as her spine telescoped outwards into a serpentine coil, meters tall. Where once she’d had a lovely body, designed to look well-muscled and enticing with a nice rack, her central section was now spit open, revealing power plants and signal transmitters and 360 awareness sensors and shield emitters and pod after pod of rockets.
“Now,” Dr. Timonel purred. (Her head was mostly unchanged but her voice was lower and more sibilant in this mode. It had just seemed like the right thing to do.) “Let’s show you the error of your ways.”
The woman was dodging already as Dr. Timonel rushed forward, her bladed tarsi ripping the square apart and accelerating her inhumanly fast. She deked under Dr. Timonel’s left arms, over her legs, and fired into her back. The shields caught the shot but it was surprisingly powerful. This person had a seriously souped-up firearm here. “Nice try,” hissed Dr. Timonel, and fired a dozen rockets back at her.
The woman dodged most of them—how was she so agile?—but one managed to hit her. Dr. Timonel laughed for a moment, before realizing the woman had a shield too. Even her stupid tourist hat had been covered. “Nice try,” said the woman.
Dr. Timonel snarled, her upper body smoothly rotating around as her radially symmetric lower half instantly reversed direction. She unloaded another dozen rockets, more to keep her attention than in the hopes of getting through her shield, and rushed her again. The woman dodged again but got caught on one of Dr. Timonel’s legs. Finally, she thought, the woman was too fast. Dr. Timonel, genius cybernetician and designer of the most advanced custom body ever built, could be that fast; it was unfair for someone else to be this agile.
No matter. She wouldn’t be for long. She spun in place again and grabbed the woman with two of her arms and picked her up off the ground. The woman struggled deliciously in her grip as Dr. Timonel raised her slowly to her eye level.
“Now you see how foolish it was to challenge me,” she declared, licking her lips. (Her tongue was longer and razor-sharp in this mode. It had just seemed like the right thing to do.)
“Please,” said the woman, rolling her eyes. “I’ve got a spare EM grenade. What have you got?”
“What?” said Dr. Timonel, as something in the woman’s pocket went wumph and both sets of shields flickered out. She started trying to decide if she should fire the missiles now point blank or throw her into the air first while the woman shot her in the power plant with her stupid overpowered gun.
Dr. Timonel was a genius. She could absolutely rebuild herself. They fact that the explosion had sawn her in half, messily, with a tangle of fused slag in the middle, was barely an inconvenience. She still had tooling and equipment in her upper half. She could be back to functionality in ten minutes without a problem, gorgeous cybernetic perfection in half an hour.
No, the problem was that with her lower half collapsed lifelessly on the ground next to her, she didn’t have much in the way of mobility, and the woman was still up and going. The blast had burned off her t-shirt (and eyebrows), revealing a skintight jumpsuit that Dr. Timonel was in no mood to appreciate.
She methodically shot off each of Dr. Timonel’s arms at the elbow. This was fine. She could rebuild herself with her prehensile tongue if she had to, it would take a little longer but she was a genius. She just needed to stop this woman first. Somehow.
The woman sighed. “Sorry about this, but you did ruin my vacation. Gonna have to run before the local news finds me.” She fiddled with her gun for a moment. “I’ve put it on stun so you’ll just wake up with a headache in a day or so. Locals’ll be annoyed with you, I suspect, but that part’s really on you. Anyways, bye, hope to never see you again.” She leveled the muzzle of the gun at Dr. Timonel’s face.
“Uh oh,” said Dr. Timonel, fuzzily.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Doctor Sara Timonel, mad cybernetician and, as of five minutes ago, a robotic larva about ten centimeters long and three centimeters around, squirmed desperately through the storm drains.
She was grateful for the foresight to have installed the emergency escape body, and it had taken less than a second at the end of the fight to flash her mind into it and eject. They’d figure out she was no longer in her previous body soon enough – the voice loop she’d left on autoplay declaring that the fools would never find the real her would probably clue them in—but she could stay low and make it to the spaceport before then. She’d hide on a cargo ship, nest down in some isolated corner, and begin consuming the ship to enhance her tiny larval body, growing and evolving until she was a gorgeous, powerful cyborg woman again. Long before that point she’d have infiltrated and subverted all the ship’s robots and central systems and taken the ship to some isolated moon or the like to be her new secret lair. Any human crew would bow before her magnificence and glory or else, of course.
And then—she wouldn’t try to take over a planet again. Not because she couldn’t or because she didn’t deserve it, of course, but because she had a new driving force in her life. She would find this mysterious woman and make her pay for what she’d done. She didn’t know much about her and it sounded like the woman didn’t want to be found. But no matter. She was a genius, and she burned with the need for vengeance.
Oh yes, thought Dr. Timonel, her tiny segmented metal form inching along the side of the sewer. She would have her revenge.
Author’s Note: This story is practically fanfic of inspired by the wonderful comic relief villain Dr. Karla Botz from the excellent Casseopeia Quinn webcomic. She tries to take over planets singlehandedly, just like this; she loses via comically harmless massive cyborg body damage, just like this; and she has a badass vaguely spidery combat form that pops out of her regular body. I love her so much. The ending scene takes its inspiration more from the Niadra mission of Starcraft 2, where a little zerg larva eats its way through a Protoss ship, growing and evolving and spreading and infesting. Between this and Infiltrator, I apparently have a thing for writing hot, badass women who are secretly inhuman grubs. I don’t know what to make of that. It’s not sexy. It’s just… cool? 