TWO COURSES IN ONE WEEK? OH, I REALLY SHOULDN'T......"The bridge was that way, Miss Lane!" Jimmy shouted, holding onto Lois's waist for dear life as they darted back and forth on her moped through the gridlock of stopped and abandoned cars clogging up the streets of the Upper East Side.
"I know where I'm going, Jimmy!" she shouted back, wincing as a bug splatted against her forehead. For a moment, she found herself wishing she'd taken the extra time to go inside to get her helmet and goggles. Then, another thunderous
boom let her know she was close, and she couldn't hold back an eager smile.
She had originally come to Metropolis to cover big-city corruption, graft in the private and public sectors, overlap between prominent citizens and organized crime. It was dangerous work, sure, but it involved careful navigation of complex social machinery. While she was proud of being able to blow the lid on Mayor Glenmorgan without getting herself shot in the face, it was a far cry from her globetrotting years embedded with the troops, interviewing terrorist leaders, or dodging bullets in a civil war.
Now, though, there were explosions overhead. There was debris scattered over the ground, and shrapnel flying through the air. There was panic, danger, and chaos all around, and somewhere in all this mess was the truth, waiting to be dug up.
Lois Lane had never felt more at home.
"Hang on, I think we--" Jimmy began to speak up again, before being cut off by the sound of breaking glass above them. Erupting from one of the upper floors of an office building on the corner of Cameron and Simonson was a tangle of red and chrome. Lois skidded to a halt, the moped fish-tailing to one side, and Jimmy began fumbling for the controls to his drone.
Two of the attacker robots were trying to wrest control of Superman, who managed to swat one away long enough to grab the other by its leg. Swinging it overhead like a man splitting wood with an axe, he flung the robot down to an empty patch of pavement as hard as he could, the leg snapping off in his hands, the rest of the drone shattering into pieces.
As the other robot charged towards him, Superman took the severed leg and hurled it like a javelin, impaling the mechanical monster through its torso. The resulting explosion sent the caped hero tumbling to the ground, stopping a few yards short of Lois and Jimmy.
"....holy crap," Jimmy whispered to himself.
"No kidding," Lois agreed.
Lois always felt a bit of dissonance when she saw him. Her head knew, knew for a
fact that Superman was Clark Kent-- hell, she was the one who gave him the 'Superman' name-- but her gut could never quite gel with the idea that the man who could bend steel with his bare hands and the sweet but hopeless goof from the office were one and the same. Honestly, she didn't blame Jimmy for not being able to put two and two together. Intellectually, all you had to do was ask Kent to take off his glasses and the whole jig would be up.
But seeing Superman in action, was just....unreal. It was like watching a force of nature in human form, an immovable mountain, an unstoppable hurricane, a bolt of lightning, all packed into a 6'2" frame in a T-shirt and jeans.
Picking himself up, Superman dusted off his T-shirt, which had gotten ripped and tattered during the fray-- exposing a physique that, Lois had to admit, was nothing short of spectacular. As more of the killer robots loomed in the skies above, ready to swoop down on him, the Man of Steel clenched his jaw, balled up his fists in a stance like a prize-fighter....
....then turned back to Lois like he'd just noticed her, and winked.
A second later, he leapt back into the action, throwing fists that hit like bunker-busters and shrugging off blasts that could shear through a skyscraper.
"....Jimmy?" Lois asked.
"....yeah?"".....tell me you got a shot of that."".....erm....""Jimmy?!""I got it, I got it!""Good, because that was....*whew!*" Lois had to take a moment to compose herself. Had she lived in the South, she might have been accused of 'catching the vapors.'
"Uploading the pictures to the Planet now," he said, his confidence returning.
"It's front-page material for sure. Should we keep going?""There's still a story to finish, isn't there?" said Lois, climbing back on her moped and revving the electric engine.
"Then we keep going."The spectacle and the danger was intense and exciting....in a few ways, if Lois was being completely honest. But there was more to this than just an army of killer robots. Someone had to have built those things, and someone had to be controlling them.
She was starting to think that even after Superman's work had finished here, Lois Lane's job was only just beginning.
Mission Command Center
Peterson Air Force Base
Colorado Spring, CO"Glad you could make it, Doctor," General Calvin Swanwick greeted the man being marched into the command center by armed guards, as rows of monitors and satellite displays showed the chaos on the East Coast.
"Now that you're here, maybe you wouldn't mind telling us what the hell is going on."Doctor John Henry Irons gave him a cold glare.
"I was hoping you could tell me.""Those are your drones tearing up Downtown Metropolis, Doctor," the General cut to the chase.
"My drones, yes," Dr. Irons nodded,
"that you and your superiors commissioned as a failsafe in the event that Superman or other metahumans became hostile and needed to be apprehended. I don't recall seeing anything in the news about Superman doing something worth calling in a mass air-strike.""Those drones," Swanwick stated, his poker-face unchanged,
"you coded their behavior patterns, wrote their programming....and, I presume, included a killswitch command if necessary."Dr. Irons considered the statement, trying to get a read on the General's expression, before a wave of realization came over him.
"My God," he said,
"you're not in control of them, are you? That....that shouldn't be possible. Who's--""Can you disable them, Doctor Irons?" Swanwick demanded.
Irons' gaze darted from the rows of computer consoles, to the technicians and crew futilely attempting to regain control of the situation, to the monitors showing Superman being dragged across the concrete facade of a building, and finally back to Swanwick.
"....yes," he answered.
"As long as I can get a signal sent to the rogue units, then yes, I can disable them.""Good," the General said, his curt tone masking a wave of relief,
"Then get to it. Gorman! Get this man up to speed, then get him to a work station.""Sir, yes sir!" responded Lieutenant Gus Gorman from Cyber Security as he hopped up from his own terminal.
"This way, Doctor Irons." HEY, THERE'S A DEEP CUT FOR YA!John Henry looked at the room full of soldiers and specialists, men and women who had spent years training to protect their country from all manner of threats, and the looks on their faces told him they were all out of their depth on this. He had to admit, he wasn't entirely sure he could succeed where they were faltering, but he had to try.
"Just for the sake of curiosity," he asked Gorman,
"How are my babies doing out there?""Well, when the line was commissioned, based on what Superman could do three months ago, the estimates were that a squad of five would be able to incapacitate him in under ninety seconds," Gorman answered.
"It's been nearly six minutes, and he's taken out twenty-two of them."Irons winced a bit. His company had never been in the business of weapons manufacturing; Steelworks had primarily developed cybernetic prosthetics, robots for assembly-line work, exo-skeletons for construction or rescue operations. He'd always found the military's drone programs to be....questionable, ethically speaking. But when the Superman arrived on the scene and serious questions about his potential status as a threat to national security were raised, he had to admit he preferred the idea of sending unmanned units into a potential conflict rather than flesh-and-blood soldiers. Drones, after all, could be replaced.
Still, they were the most involved, the most advanced-- and by far the most expensive-- pieces of equipment to come out of Steelworks. Seeing his finest work being smashed apart wasn't easy to watch, even if their expendability was the point.
"Oof, make that twenty-three" Gorman corrected himself as the monitors showed Superman pull a drone's arm off and swing the limb at its head like a baseball bat.
Arriving at the work station, John Henry sat down and opened the control program. Unsuprisingly, he was locked out just like everyone else, no response to any of his commands. Fortunately, he had included a backdoor into the controls-- complete administrative access only he could obtain in the event that his conscience ever outweighed his sense of patriotic duty.
"All right," he said to himself as he keyed in his credentials,
"Let's put a stop to this before someone gets--"His screen went black.
"....what the hell....."A few seconds later, every screen in the mission command room went black as well.
"Irons!" Swanwick snarled.
"What did you do?!""....that....wasn't me...." Irons answered as he attempted to get the computer to respond.
As he typed commands in vain, a message appeared on every screen.
H E L L O D O C T O R I R O N S
John Henry froze solid as he read it.
Y O U M A D E S U C H G R E A T T O Y S
B U T Y O U D O N ' T P L A Y W I T H T H E M
Pictures began flashing across the rows of monitors.
The combat robots in Metropolis.
Aerial drones in the Middle East.
Satellites in high orbit.
ICBMs sitting in their silos.
Y O U H A V E A L L T H E B E S T T O Y S
The images of military hardware cut away, and in their place was the image of a crude wooden marionette.
P L A Y T I M E H A S J U S T B E G U N
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