Before Tomorrowland (10 page)

He accessed a new data file. This time, it was one of his choosing:

He found the truth one night after another recharging session brought its typical unwanted memories. He’d done terrible things, and he didn’t want to remember anymore. None of it.
Rotwang had to do something for him; rewire his brain, install a neural circuit breaker, anything to make him forget. Rotwang kept telling him he was trying, but the work was going slow. The
attempt to obtain a Plus Ultra super-computer three years earlier had failed. Rotwang thought a risky alliance with German military science would give them what they needed, but so far, it
hadn’t.

“Believe me,” Rotwang had said, “I want nothing more than to put your mind at ease. Please. Trust me.”

Henry did what he did whenever his ordeal was too much to bear. He exercised. He didn’t need it, although activity did help him develop mastery over his faculties. It was really just
busywork to distract him from his thoughts. He sprinted around the perimeter of Lohman’s jungle compound, navigated the obstacle course built for the soldiers, pounded his fists through the
punching bags and cinder blocks provided just for him. Basic training for the war with Plus Ultra that loomed ahead.

He was regenerating the synthetic skin on his hand when his sensors picked up Rotwang’s voice. He was away from his lab, in Lohman’s quarters, engaged in heated conversation with the
old man. They were talking about the latest intelligence provided by the doctor’s spy inside Plus Ultra. He wasn’t supposed to know about the spy, but he did, just like he wasn’t
supposed to know about the safe in the lab. Still, Henry had believed Rotwang when he told him repeatedly that he was keeping him informed of everything he truly needed to know. He was wrong to
believe.

“This is the last of the algorithms we need, Herr Lohman. You’ll be inside the machine within a week.”

Last of the algorithms?
Rotwang told him they had none of the algorithms.
Putting Lohman inside a machine?
He could only imagine what that meant, and the prospect triggered again
all the memories he wished to forget.
What was going on?
He knew where he could find the answers.

He ran to the lab, broke into the safe, and found the file. What he read broke him.

Rotwang wasn’t trying to help him. He was trying to rip him out of his shell. He wanted to claim Henry’s horrible, unfeeling body for his own use. Rotwang wasn’t against the
“dehumanizing” man-machine mission of Plus Ultra: he was selling it to the Nazis. He was even corresponding with “a friend” inside the secret society to extract data about
all the outrageous, ominous things he was supposed to be against: atomic bombs; giant, world-changing machines; pro-robotics propaganda.

Fury took hold. Henry began tearing and thrashing at everything. The papers. Rotwang’s desk. Rotwang’s lab. He did all this, screaming, wanting to cry, but couldn’t, not having
been built with the means to do so. That made him rage even harder. Six of Lohman’s soldiers sprinted into the room, and seeing them triggered in Henry a terrible but irresistible desire.
Within a minute, the soldiers were writhing on the ground, broken, bleeding, or burning. A second after that, Henry was knocking down doors, leaping over the compound’s walls, and
disappearing into the German night…

Henry cursed himself. He had accessed the memory to retrieve a single piece of data; he had gotten lost in it instead.

Focus.

Henry quickly searched the file and found what he was looking for: the image of a flyer, text printed on blue paper against the graphic of a sleek saucer-shaped spacecraft soaring over the
Manhattan skyline. It read:

Caravan Hall. He cross-referenced an address on the flyer with the memo detailing Plus Ultra’s real estate holdings. It was a match.

A science fiction convention
. Another one of Plus Ultra’s silly schemes to capture the public’s imagination for the future it intended to force on the world. A future that
hinged on a new machine. Rotwang’s papers had contained a number of blueprints for the device, massive in scale. The most telling thing was a note from the mole, scrawled across the
bottom:

NOT SURE
,
MAJOR EVENT TO REVEAL SOME TECHNOLOGY
.
LEADERSHIP TO BE PRESENT
,
SUPPOSED TO BE A BIG STEP FOR PLUS ULTRA
.

If the Plus Ultra leaders were there, that’s where Henry needed to be.

Henry reflected on his mission. He was making mistakes, and that bothered him. He shouldn’t have blown up the junkyard, just as he shouldn’t have sunk the
Watt
and turned it
into a death trap for the Nazis on his tail. Plus Ultra must have been on high alert. Fortunately, they had no idea what he looked like. He’d been trapped in the same horrible
stranger’s face for seven years, and it was a face Plus Ultra had never seen. He had run straight for the desert after coming back to life, and there Rotwang had found him. Still, he’d
been careless. He hated everything Plus Ultra represented, but if he wanted to stop them, he would have to exert more discipline over the impulsive remains of his humanity. Even his hate.

He could do it. He had to.

An hour later, Henry, healed and charged, stepped outside. His internal clock read nine in the morning, and he registered the heat at eighty-nine degrees. If there were Plus
Ultra elite where he was going, he’d probably detect their bacteria signatures before he even saw them. Scientific visionaries stank the same as normal men.

A cab took him north into Manhattan to Fifty-Ninth Street. Henry paid the man and stepped out onto the asphalt and into a wash of churning sound. There were too many voices to get an accurate
signature outside of forty to fifty feet. If anyone immediately nearby was Plus Ultra, they weren’t in his files.

There was a sign out in front of the red brick building:
WELCOME
:
WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION
. And what a fiction it was. Three men in front of the building wore
garish costumes, probably inspired by publications Plus Ultra funded. Henry had files on dozens of magazines, book editors, and press agents, all operating under Plus Ultra’s thumb. Hugo
Gernsback, the editor/publisher of
Amazing Stories
, was one such honorary member of Plus Ultra, who used his magazines to plant ideas in culture and even, on occasion, recruit innocents.

Henry had been one of those innocents, dreaming of Mars and the moon on the carpeted floor in his mother’s house in Los Angeles, long before his dreams crumbled. Plus Ultra’s vision
had crumbled, too. Now the genres they fostered had expanded and branched in ways the group hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t control. The field had evolved, or devolved, into mere escapist
pulp with sex, violence, and retrograde values, supported by a subculture of competing enthusiasts obsessed with ridiculous, meaningless details. Plus Ultra had hoped to create a chosen people that
would help lead the world to a promised land. Instead, Henry saw three men in ridiculous costumes, surrounded by a sea of fools.

He took a final scan of the crowd. His facial recognition program recognized no one, but there was a low frequency digital signal coming from behind the building. He focused on the
signature.

It was robotic.

He tracked the signal to its source, an alley behind Caravan Hall. Just around the alley’s corner, there were two voices arguing, and one of them had a warm, lilting tone he knew well.

“I pursued, with vigor, all who met our criteria,” said Faustus, in his gentle voice.

“Vigor? You call
this
vigor?”

Henry peeked around the corner. The robot was dressed in a gray suit. He and his flesh-and-blood companion loaded cardboard boxes into a covered truck. The short, disgruntled man was tallying
something on a device Henry recognized as a Plus Ultra MFD, standard issue. Henry zoomed in on the man’s writing and filed the last words he wrote based on the motion of his hand, filling in
what he couldn’t make out with his best estimate. “My selections are sound and defensible, Mr. Purvis,” said Faustus. “As for the limited numbers, I take Mr. Tesla’s
orders very seriously.”

The short man shoved a box as hard as he could onto the truck bed. He spoke to the ground through clenched teeth. “It was supposed to be hundreds of people. We prepped this crap for
months…years if you count all the seed material, and what do we have? Five—no, what’d you say?
Four
civilians? For a twenty-billion-dollar dress rehearsal happening in two
days, it’s
insane
!” He shook his head, aggravated. “They tell you anything?”

“I only know there’s a security concern in our sector and that they wish to convene an emergency conclave. If I had more details, I doubt I would be allowed to share them.”

They were shutting down their event because of his attack. He weighed his options quickly, though the correct choice was clear. If he didn’t act on this lead, he might not get a second
chance.

Henry executed a quick wireless hack of the agent’s MFD, blocking its ability to transmit over the air. Then he set his system to quick-charge, which began to sap power from all the
electrical machines around him at a rapid pace, including Faustus. The four-eyed robot staggered and sunk to its knees. Purvis reached out to try and catch him. “What’s the
matter?” he said.

“Just…feeling a little low, all of a sudden, Mr. Purvis. I’m sure it’s nothing…”

Henry stepped into the alley. Purvis saw him approach, but thought nothing of him. His heart rate remained steady. He wasn’t on the defensive. Yet.

Faustus, slouched on the ground, heard him approach and labored to raise his head to see him. “Please excuse me, sir, I’m indisposed at the moment,” said the robot. “Did
we meet at the convention today?”

Henry remembered that plucky attitude well. Every Faustus robot was a perfect copy of another, operating through a shared mind to do its masters’ every bidding. It was nothing less than
the smiling face of evil.

He advanced, focusing on the energy drain, sapping all the strength out of Faustus, disrupting its connection to the rest of its kind. Purvis showed him his hand. “Give us a little space,
please?” The agent bent his knees and put a hand on Faustus’s back. “Don’t worry about talking, we’ll get you somewhere you can rest—”

Henry grabbed Purvis by his sport vest and knocked his head hard against the right brake light of the truck. The little man collapsed like a rag doll. Faustus was too lethargic. All he could
muster was: “Oh, dear.”

Henry crouched beside the robot and held his head up by the chin to face him. “I have questions. Where’s the new machine? What’s the dress rehearsal? What is happening on the
fourth? Is that when the Plus Ultra conclave convenes? Or something else?”

Faustus gave him a weak grin. “‘Conclave convenes.’ Try saying that three times fast.”

Henry backhanded the robot’s face. “No jokes. Tell me what’s happening.”

Faustus didn’t change his smile, but his head jerked involuntarily as he spouted code: “
OneTwoFour.
Does it bother you that I have a sense of humor and you
don’t?”

“Shut up,” Henry snarled. He stood and reached across the tailgate for the corner of the nearest book box, pulling it toward him so the cover was right-side up. The image startled
him. It was a yellow plane flying through some kind of portal in the sky. The portal divided the picture into two halves; on the left, the earth, and on the right, where the plane was flying, an
alien planet. “What are you doing with these books?”

Somehow Faustus mustered the energy to reach one hand up to the stack of comics, tapping them gently. “These aren’t for you.
FiveSixSeven.
Reading funny books doesn’t
make you funny, you know.”

“This is the last time—” Before Henry could finish the threat, the books burst into flame under Faustus’s hand, and the flames spread from box to box as if they were all
connected by a fuse. Henry waved his arms over the fire, but it was too late. The paper glowed white-hot and vaporized in seconds, leaving behind only the husks of the book boxes and a snaking pile
of ash.

Faustus kept grinning, kept spouting nonsense numbers. “
EightFifteenTwenty-Seven
.”

Henry snapped. The robot’s head sparked as he grabbed it and twisted it and let go. Faustus dropped as dead weight to the asphalt. But the smile remained…

Focus
.

He surveyed the mess. One unconscious agent, probably dying; a wrecked Faustus; and a useless pile of ash. He’d have to clean up after himself, and quickly.

Henry snatched the agent’s MFD off the ground and turned its wireless back on. He pulled up the mail function and searched recent correspondence. There was nothing in the mail archive
older than ten minutes, likely for security, but he saw what Purvis had written a few minutes ago. It was a message to “Command”:
ONLY 5 COMICS OUT
.
1 FOUND IN TRASH
.
LOADING TRUCK NOW
.

One found in trash
. There was large metal dumpster nearby, and Henry checked it, just in case. There was no comic inside, but it gave him another idea.

He dropped the robot’s body in the dumpster, followed by the limp agent and the remaining box scraps. He slammed the lid and created a seal by crimping it around the edges, careful to not
break the skin on his hands. The ash on the truck bed, he scattered.

Taking the MFD again, he emulated the agent’s handwriting as best he could, and typed in another message:
Faustus malfunctioning. Trying to sort it out.
He hit SEND, then switched
off the MFD and tucked it in his pocket. He didn’t want to risk sending out a radio signal they could track, but the device might prove useful later.