Alycia Chin did not have the capacity to deal with Jenny Byrne. She certainly did not want her around Jason. That means Jenny has been assigned to the pairing of Alex and John.
“Do not let her out of your sight,” Alycia had instructed them quietly. “SNOWMAN. You in particular will be able to apprehend her if she flees. Comrade X, you will look for signs of signaling from her to the opposition.”
The pair had understood the assignment: keep an eye on a dangerous unknown, who may or may not be the head of a powerful mercenary organization. Neither of them had anticipated her personality.
Once the others are out of sight, Jenny glomps onto John, tracing circles with a fingertip on his chest. “Wirra wirra, it’s me in a city full of clones and robots and Russian agents. But you’re so strong and fast, aren’t you. An android, yes? You’ll protect me.”
“They’re clones like you and Russians like you,” John says flatly. “Touch me with that finger one more time and I’ll break it off.”
Jenny withdraws the finger, but still clings to John’s arm. “Now, now. Surely you can’t fault a girl for wishing to stay safe.”
Alex is running short on patience. “You’re probably safer here than anywhere else in the world. Maybe find your off switch before my buddy here tries some percussive maintenance.”
“None of the robots here seem very interesting,” Jenny demurs. “Besides, isn’t this young man a duplicate of Mr. Jason Quill’s biggest rival on the Menagerie team? Isn’t he so charming, and handsome, and daring? Don’t you find that just as intriguing as I do?”
Alex rolls their eyes. “John, if she gets roughed up and Alycia bawls you out for letting it happen, I got your back. We’ll cook up an airtight alibi.”
“Perhaps we should find a place to relax and recuperate,” Jenny suggests. She’s finally taking the hint, it seems.
The trio pick one of the many identical apartment complexes. John easily forces the lock with robot strength, and they walk door to door until Alex points one out. “There’s no name here.”
They enter the apartment, only to find nothing at all - no furniture, no utility hookups, nothing.
Alex sighs in realization. “Of course. They aren’t renting to newcomers. They know everyone in the city, and they’d only stock the apartments that would be in use.”
Jenny’s tone is teasing. “You who chided me for invading someone’s personal space? You’re now going to break into someone else’s apartment? My my.”
Alex loses all patience. They whirl on Jenny. “Listen. I don’t know if this is your like, counter-agent programming, or if you’re just really committed to this bit, but it gets old fast. We are tired and scared.”
Jenny begins to speak. “Such a temper. I just–”
John Black abruptly kicks an apartment door off its hinges, revealing a frightened grandmother and two children inside.
The sudden violence seems to finally get Jenny’s attention. “It’s a tactic, for assessing people,” she admits, in a more neutral tone of voice. “I’m scared too. You’re as much of an unknown to me as I am to you.”
Alex, meanwhile, has stepped across the fallen door and is holding up hands in reassurance. “Just a routine activity,” they tell the inhabitants in Russian. “The building superintendant will repair your door soon. In the meantime, we wish to use your bathroom and kitchen.”
The grandmother wordlessly points left, toward a hallway.
Inside the kitchen, John and Jenny are working on food prep. Alex is showering.
“Robots,” John remarks out of nowhere. “A city for clones to train against robots. Overseen by soulless state apparatchiks or whatever. Not a god damn shred of humanity anywhere in the program.”
Jenny works beside him, but doesn’t seem ready to talk. John shrugs a little, and goes on.
“My dad put me through something like this. A place like this. Tried to brainwash me into becoming general for an army of robots. Now look at me.”
He turns to look at Jenny. “There’s some people whose constant fuckery pushes them past the point of redemption. There’s people who talk so much shit, it just becomes impossible to trust them any longer. I don’t know where your loyalties lie, or what your plan really is. One minute, you’re giving us directions here, knowing we’ll try to shut it down. The next, you’re putting your act back on. To me, you’re just like these robots, because I don’t see you doing what I did. Fighting the programming.”
“You don’t know me!” Jenny protests. “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
John turns to look at her. “Yeah. And your constant ongoing bullshit is convincing me that doing so will never be worthwhile.”
The sound of the shower is still running, but they see Alex in the hallway, clothes still slightly damp and hair up in a towel. “The hot water takes a billion years to ramp up if I turn it off,” they say quietly. “One of you better go next.”
Jenny disappears down the hall, and Alex takes over her position in the food prep pipeline.
“How long were you spying?” John asks calmly.
Alex sighs. “I’m offended that you’d accuse me of such a blah blah blah about two minutes,” they deadpan.
“How come you aren’t making sure she doesn’t escape?” John asks, gesturing with a kitchen knife toward the bathroom.
“You’d have to be half an Olsen Twin to get through the window, and she’s not, by a country mile,” Alex points out. “Of course you don’t notice these things, being the stern brooding figure you are.”
“No, I don’t,” John says gruffly. But he softens after a moment. “I’m still carrying a torch for someone who’s moved on. On the plus side, that means there’s no chance she’s going to turn my head and use me to get away.”
“Well that’s a relief.” Alex’s voice isn’t super sarcastic, but there’s undercurrents. “She’s like if Irish Spring bath soap and Spanish Fly had a child.”
“She’s gotta be a lot like me, actually,” John says thoughtfully, and Alex raises a surprised eyebrow as he explains. “Made to be a weapon. Launched, fired - and missed, right? She was targeting Jason Quill. But he’s still alive, and so is she. So she’s gotta figure out, like, what to do next, where to go next. Waters gave me a whole buffet of families to learn normal life from. All she’s got is this horned-up redhead personality I assume they gave her, and whatever she can build from what little she’s seen of regular people.”
Alex shrugs slightly. “Or she’s decided to take out her frustration on the world and leads the Grasscutters in a vendetta against heroes and villains alike, because all she knows is to undermine and destroy.”
The hacker looks at John sideways. “You wish you could trust her, you’re sympathetic but scared, because there’s someone who clearly could use your help but their antics keep you at a distance.”
“About the size of it,” John admits.
“Funny.” Alex smiles strangely. “That’s you and me, isn’t it.”
It’s finally John’s turn for the shower. He may be a robot, he explains, but his sweat is still organic coolant carrying contaminants out of his components and a shower still helps.
“Too much information,” Alex announces, and shoos him off.
Once he’s gone, they turn to Jenny. “So. The old lady and the kids are robots.”
“Yep.” Jenny is chopping the sandwiches into neat diagonals, and not looking anywhere else.
Alex gestures around them. “But there’s edible food in the kitchen.”
“Soy substitutes, for the most part,” Jenny explains. “You noticed how everything was vacuum-sealed and refrigerated?”
“Yeah…” Alex sighs. “As long as this isn’t some weird Soylent Green thing.”
“I don’t understand the reference,” Jenny says brightly. “But I promise you. These people, who have figured out how to force-grow a human clone in months, will have no trouble accelerating soybean production.”
Alex’s tone is still conversational, but they’re watching Jenny like a hawk. “And that’s what you are. A human soybean. You can be flavored for anything.”
“That’s correct.”
“And you built this Poppet System so you could pick your own flavor.”
Jenny finally looks up at Alex. Her smile has changed. “Self-determination. I could have new use to the people that made me. And I could choose what to be.”
“And the Grasscutters? What choice did you give them?”
The smile darkens. “They were miners, police, drifters - anyone on the fringes of society. Anyone who stumbled across a Pyrrhus operation would get taken in and fitted with a system. Then they stumble into the light, with no idea how to proceed.”
The girl straightens up, takes a breath, and grows more confrontational. “Listen. I did help some of them. How many of them joined the Grasscutters, and how many stayed behind to rebuild their lives?”
“About a third,” Alex says carefully. “I’ll give you that much. Or, that’s how many you could recruit. How can we know for sure?”
Jenny has no answer for that. Alex switches to another angle. “Do you hate Jason Quill? I can’t imagine you being able to love your target. And that’s what he was, wasn’t he. A target.”
Jenny stuffs a wedge of sandwich into her mouth and washes it down with a glass of water. “You love your favorite foods, don’t you. You’d put out effort to have them. You enjoy the experience. But at the end of the day, you eat them, and they’re delicious, and that’s that,” she says with a quiet smile.
“Jenny Byrne, Russian cities, hostile robots,” Jason remarks conversationally. He and Emma are walking through the streets of the Winter Cradle, and he nods politely to the occasional passerby.
Emma flashes smirk #37 from her extensive collection. “So, like, are you an actual cartoon character brought to life, or what?”
Jason’s smile is crooked, but warm in a way. “I’m a failed science experiment. Can a father whose coping skills and self-deception make him think he’s perfectly normal raise a son to be just like him? Early data was encouraging, but it looks like I’m going to be nothing like him after all.”
Emma rolls her eyes. “God. Do any of you superheroes have a good relationship with their parents?”
Jason laughs at that. “We talked about that a few times within the Menagerie. But yeah, there are some.”
“Gonna make a new cartoon?” Emma’s voice is teasing.
Jason laughs again, as amusement lands sharp and hard in his soul. “It’d have to include Charade, and she’d never give permission for that to happen.”
Emma holds up her hands and grimaces. “She’s got no sense of humor. So how about this amusement park? Who d’you suppose dreamed all this up?”
“I don’t know.” Jason shakes his head. “I do think it’s working. I saw a few familiar faces. Not anyone I know personally, aside from the uh, the family earlier - well, that was pretty weird, I admit. But Federal prosecutors. Politicians. People who’ve been wrapped up in scandals recently, back in the States and elsewhere.”
A thought comes to him. “Say, you still call yourself a villain, right? Hot Mess?”
“It’s Firebrand now,” Emma says. “But yes.”
“That’s not bad. But alright. The scuttlebutt is that you teamed up with Kid Kelvin to go after corrupt corporations, organizations, and the like. You’d break into their warehouse, Kid Kelvin would show up, you’d have a big knock-down drag-out brawl that would conveniently expose some kind of damning evidence, and when the police came, all would be revealed, etc.”
Emma sniffs. “Maybe. Let’s accept this as a hypothetical and go on.”
“What makes him a hero and you a villain?”
Emma is absolutely ready for this question. “The boss taught me that villains do what they want, that villainy is a label people impose on you. And heroes are the people who yoke themselves to the state, instead of doing what they really want.”
Jason nods. “Okay. What makes that hero-villain team-up work is that even for big corporations, there’s a government above them who will enforce the law with guns and bombs and so on. The government may do awful things, but it still has to do the right thing most of the time.”
Jason gestures around him. “Places like this exist because, well, there’s nothing above governments doing the same thing. If the US airdropped troops in here and said, ‘hey Russia, what the fuck’, the Russians would just shrug and rebuild elsewhere.”
Emma is with it. “Right. There’s just impotent shit like the UN and the Hague, and the US prosecuting Nazis but not getting prosecuted for their own war crimes.”
Jason nods. “But even so, not every nation sinks to the same lows. There’s brutal, ends-justify-means, practicality-first programs the US has engaged in. But I don’t think they’ll ever beat the Russians for sadism or callousness, nor the Chinese for the sheer efficiency of dominating a population. I don’t think that excuses the US’s actions. But more often, people like me are gonna come to places like this, where the worst of it can be found. There’s not a missile gap like in the Cold War, where US military planners worried how many birds were in the silos in Kansas.”
Something tugs Jason’s head downward, some weight of thought. “What we got here is a cruelty gap. And people will try to close it.”
He smiles back at Emma. “Whoever runs this place, we can’t let them win. Because if they do, if you care about others, if you try to do the right thing, that’ll be enough for people to brand you a villain.”
They find an apartment, furnished but unoccupied, after a few trials.
Emma has no problem using her powers to accelerate the heating process for the water, and before long is yelling down the hallway at Jason. “No peeking. I know you got a supervillain fetish.”
“I’m thoroughly spoken for,” Jason calls back. “And so are you.”
He and Emma swap places, and by the time he’s cleaned up and dressed again, he finds she’s figured out a stir-fry from the sealed meal packs in the apartment. “I couldn’t figure out the controls on the stove, so I just used pyrokinesis,” she explains.
They eat in silence for a time.
Emma finally speaks up. “I don’t know how you do it. I’m scared outta my wits being in a place like this. It’s just - it’s so much bigger than I’m used to handling.”
Jason collects dishes for the sink. “A lifetime of practice. But if it helps, I’m scared too.”
“We should get back to the others,” Emma suggests.
Five people return to the prearranged meeting site, adjacent to a park and within sight of a clock tower. They exchange the prearranged passwords to ensure - well, encourage - that nobody has been taken over or replaced.
Emma, Jason, Alex, John, and Jenny look at each other.
The question of who has seen Alycia and/or Nono comes up. Nobody has.
“They might be delayed,” Alex suggests.
“Could Charade have run off?” John asks.
Jason thinks about it. “It’s within the bounds of possibility. She’s under intense pressure. She’s accustomed to working solo. But then where is Agent R?”
That question has no good answers.