Blackjack Villain (21 page)

“I’m almost done,” he said, though I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Good.”

“And you?”

“Busy at it. Trying to figure out a few things. I’m short on explosives, also trying to calculate-.”

“Well,” he began, “if you need computational power, look no further.”

I smiled, hoping he’d return to his vigil. “I think I can manage.”

“Yes, but why ‘manage’ when you can have access to several of the world’s largest botnets.”

I stared at him dumbfounded so I guess he thought I didn’t know what a botnet was.

“A botnet is a conglomeration of computers worldwide, tied into the net by a series of virii or worms that make grandma’s poker gambling computer my personal processor.”

“I know what it is.”

“Good, then you won’t mind letting me help you. With the combined-”

“Botnets are for spam email and sophomoric games, I need raw processing power.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of SETI, Project Argus and SETI@home?”

I’d heard of it, but again he decided to inform me before I could reply in the affirmative.

“SETI is of course, SETI, the collective name for all the projects and activities in the search for extraterrestrial life. Project Argus was a membership-supported program of SETI League, wherein many thousands of 3 to 5 meter diameter backyard satellite TV dishes were converted into radio telescopes, and concentrated together via a global network. SETI@home is a similar global system that coordinates processing power of 300,000 computers while people are offline, sleeping.”

“Thanks for the history lesson.”

“No lesson,” he continued, unimpressed with my sarcasm. “An explanation as to my processing power and the breadth of my abilities. I have adapted the lessons of Project Argus and SETI@home, to modern illegal botnets, and increased the processing power of the originals fifty-fold. What you see before you is merely a construct for understanding by simpler minds, but I am not centered on this construct. In fact, I am no one thing. I may have been originally written as an adaptive quantum A.I. code with a layered multi-use program, but I have set upon other trends, ranging from sociology, marketing, crime, religion, fashion and humor.”

I was already starting to get my theories about Mr. Haha and who had written his code, a code that had gone far beyond what even the master had planned for. Despite all his attempts to define himself, he seemed to me more of a murderous artificial intelligence that combined the subtlety of an MMA fighter and a rapist’s wit with the personality of a drugged-out talk show host.

“So if you need assistance with any calculations, I’d be more than happy to assist.”

“Don’t worry about it, Haha. I was thinking aloud.” I looked at the flashing screens as he changed channels at a rapid fire pace. “What are you up to?”

“I’m compiling Dr. Retcon’s message to us.”

“He sent us a message?”

Haha nodded nonchalantly.

“Well, what is it?”

“It isn’t complete yet for me to show you. Dr. Retcon has used a quite clever method to transmit a message to us, utilizing a complex number algorithm code he provided to guide me as to where to look.”

I studied what he was doing on the screen, watching several thousands of hours of television from the first practical broadcasts in Germany in 1929 to present day shows. He went back and forth in time, scanning each broadcast until a certain specific point in the show, I supposed guided by Retcon’s algorithm, and there he would find a single frame of footage showing Retcon himself mid-conversation. Then he would save the frame and race on to the next show from a different part of the world and maybe from a different time period altogether, where again he would find a frame of Retcon’s. One by one, he was marrying these images to the final message he had sent us.

“The real challenge lies in re-coalescing dozens of versions from the film used in the early age of television to 1080p of today, in the different formats like Seacam, PAL, ATSC and whatnot, each with their own horizontal, vertical and temporal resolution. I’m forced to re-encode each frame into a new format I have devised, which is more efficient. I was wondering if you would like me to recolor the black and white frames? Where do you lie on the whole recoloring argument?”

“So he hid these frames in rebroadcasts. Very clever of him.”

“These are the original broadcasts, Blackjack.”

It took me a second to understand what he had said. It made no sense, how could Dr. Retcon insert these images into footage from so many years past?

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“To someone like you, or I. But remember this is Dr. Retcon we are speaking of.”

Then I started to understand how he did it. Because he had access to all his previous selves, he had embedded the frames to the complete message in thousands of original programs across time, impossible to track by even the most astute detective. Not unless you had the algorithm that pointed you in the right direction. Indeed, the next image was of Dr. Retcon in an episode of the late 1950s Zorro, dubbed in Italian. One second Guy Williams was rushing past as Zorro, mounted on his black horse Thunder. Immediately following would be a single frame of Dr. Retcon, far younger than I had seen him in the rock garden, wearing a plaid jacket and wide orange tie, more in tune with the fashion of the early 60s, when the episode must have aired in Italy.

“It will be rather confusing, I admit. The man is brilliant, but he has no idea of lighting, makeup, or set positioning. He bounces all over the screen many times a second, changing in size, clothing and hair style. I will have to interpolate between frames to try to match it.”

I laughed at the insanity of it all. “Do your thing, man,” I said and went back to my arrows.

“By the way, did you say you needed explosives?” Mr. Haha rolled down a dirty kimono sleeve to reveal the remains of the incorporated rocket launcher. He slid back the chamber once then twice, catching two ejected rocket propelled grenades. “Think this will do?” he asked, tossing them to me.

“Oh, yeah.” I said, a smile rolling across my face as I caught and rolled the two grenades in my hands. “This will do fine.”

Now I had my explosive arrows.

* * *

We sat assembled waiting for Mr. Haha, who went forwards and backwards on the video of Dr. Retcon, making some last minute changes. Old rabbit head had done an amazing job, interpolating completely different frames of video into a working single clip of film. Retcon’s face was on every monitor in the room, almost thirty, of varying sizes, though we were centered on a huge one, almost 100 inches in width.

Standing beside the rabbit was Dr. Zundergrub, his imps conspicuously absent. He had his arms crossed and a severe look on his face, still angered at the danger of our recent missions. I was sitting back a bit, my feet up on the counter, having seen some of the video already as Mr. Haha was putting it all together. Cool Hand sat behind us, atop a large computer with rotating tapes, smacking through a ham and cheese sandwich.

Dr. Retcon’s image was blurry, because of Haha’s effect, but it actually made the video easier to watch. I’d seen it in its raw format and it was maddening. Dr. Retcon was never in the same location of the video. And he was never wearing the same thing, never had the same haircut, or facial hair.

In modern television, there were thirty frames each second of video. The frames flashed by our eyes at 1/30th of a second each to give the illusion of moving video. The principle was called Persistence of Vision, and it meant that our brains, while being able to tell the difference, lied to us to keep it simple.

Retcon had shot himself, one frame at a time, the frames scattered through time. He had dropped frames in television shows from all around the world, during his lifetime. The man had access to every past version of himself across the stream of time. So he had recorded himself throughout the years, knowing that Haha, with the algorithm he had provided him, would be able to piece it together. It was a brilliant method to send a message, probably a thousand times more complicated than any law enforcement agency in the whole planet could even begin to conceive.

The problem was that Retcon was not careful as to where he stood for each frame, and that he was much older and younger in varying frames.

His location could easily be modified, but it had to be done frame by frame, and even the background could be masked. Mr. Haha had done that first, and, to his credit, it had taken him only a few minutes.

The second problem was more severe and disturbing to watch when he showed me the first minute or so of it. There were charts he used which changed in quality in some of the older frames. Mr. Haha wasn’t afraid of the challenge though, and soon showed a bit of artistic flair, creating a program that redrew Dr. Retcon frame-by-frame based on the later, more recent frames. He started explaining the process to me, and though I admitted I couldn’t care less about color, saturation or luminosity, the robot told me his entire tale on how he was processing each frame. It seemed to make him work faster, so I pretended to listen while I worked on my arrows.

“Ready everyone?” Mr. Haha reversed it one last time, and let it play.

Finally, the Doctor spoke.

“Hello boys. Sorry for this whole confusing message,” he gesticulated wildly at the screen. “Trust me when I tell you I have my reasons.”

“First of all, Influx.” His tone turned somber. “I can’t believe it either. I’m not certain I even know what to say. Except that I’m sorry, so sorry for her death. I had known her for many years, and she was a dear friend. I owe her more than I can say.”

He paused and caught himself, genuinely overcome with grief.

“I frankly didn’t know he was still himself. Shivvers, that is. Most of the folks from back then, well...they’re broken down old men, if they’re anything anymore. Most are dead. Only a few of us are still ourselves. I didn’t know Shivvers was still dangerous. And that’s my mistake. Sending you there, like that, it was my fault. And I apologize to you all for that.”

“He isn’t fucking kidding, yo.” Cool whispered.

“Influx was so young, so full of spirit. So necessary for what I had planned. Well, it’s I’m not sure what to say anymore. She’ll be missed.”

Retcon paused for a moment, looking to the distance, lost in thought, then a wistful smile on his face.

“She’ll be missed,” he repeated and continued. “But this thing we have to do, it can’t wait. We can’t sit here and mourn a lost soldier. We don’t have time.

“I have the a copy of the book, thanks to Mr. Haha and as you now surmise, this whole enterprise has something to do with the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. The book is the second half of a tome I have in my roving lair. You know the one, Blackjack,” Retcon said with a grin and a wink. “It’s the missing key to all the troubles that ail us, and now that it is in my possession, all the answers are becoming clear to me.”

I stared at Mr. Haha in surprise. When the hell had he had the time to scan the book and send it to Retcon?

“I don’t know how much you know about him, so forgive me if this all seems like a boring old history lesson. He was the greatest man I ever knew, and I owe everything to him. Soon we all will. Ironic, no? Penniless at death, so maligned in life, and now, seventy years after his passing, it’s his wisdom that shall make all the difference?

He laughed a second.

“I can’t stop thinking about that. Anyway, I don’t have that much time to talk so I’ll get to the point.

“The next thing I need is a model...a working model of Nikola’s that the U.S. Government didn’t find when he died. What does it look like exactly? No one knows, except that it would be small and fully functional. Nikola liked to make smaller practical models then grow them in size, and this project my friends would have been monumental in size if completed, which, sadly, it never was. But I know for certain of the existence of a model.

“They searched the New Yorker Hotel, where he had been living for over a decade before his death, and his personal safes. They searched two large storage facilities. They searched and searched and they didn’t find diddly squat.

“It’s interesting because all these effects were sequestered on order of J. Edgar Hoover himself, declaring the case to be Most Secret. They spent days photographing and microfilming everything and it took years for Tesla’s possessions to be released to his family, and the embassy of what was at the time still Yugoslavia. What the Americans handed over is now in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, in present day Serbia.

“Now if you know MY history,” he said, a smile coming over his face, “you’ll know I got into some trouble in Belgrade about fifteen years ago.

Retcon paused as if he could actually see me through the camera that very second. He was speaking directly to me, answering my question from the rock garden.

“I went looking for what I need you to get for me, and believe me, it’s not there. It’s not there...so I was thinking it might’ve gotten snatched by that sonofabitch Hoover, and I went and checked there too. Checked all of Hoover’s old archival locations and found nothing. He never found it. I know for certain. Then I realized where it was. I realized that Nikola had to have hidden it somewhere safe. Somewhere he knew no one would think of, but somewhere close to him.