“And that was the second time Mass Driver got crabs,” Perry said.

“Awesome,” Matador said, taking another puff of his modified cigar. It was difficult to find cigars modified to affect robots, but they could be found.

Probably highly toxic for humans though, judging by the acrid odor surrounding the two of them. Perry would have to check himself for tumors later.

They were sitting on the top of the train, legs dangling over the edge, hundreds of miles of track sprawling out in front of them from their vantage point above the treetops.

“This is a restricted area,” Chemestro said, flying up beside them. “Conductor Walthers-”

“As the head of security I give myself permission to be up here,” Matador interrupted, before eyeballing the Catalyst. “Chemestro, one of Neuron’s pet projects. Sweeper level Catalyst, and surprisingly well-adjusted sociopath.”

“Matador,” Chemestro said, landing beside them. “I’ve read your file.”

“I’ve read your search history,” Matador said.

“So?” Chemestro asked.

“For starters, ’How to tell if a girl is flirting with me’.” Matador said, dramatically motioning with his hands in front of himself.

Perry snorted, but Chemestro didn’t seem embarrassed.

“Judging by your reaction I’m supposed to have some sort of negative response to this, but I’m not sure why. It was necessary information.”

Matador frowned, his shiny steel face deforming in thought. “Huh. I thought I was the robot.”

“Oh damn!” Perry chuckled, glad to see someone take a bit of wind out of the nihilistic robot’s sails, and envious it hadn’t been him.

Chemestro glanced at Perry, frowning. “Matador may have free reign to do as he pleases, but I’m fairly sure you’re not on the train’s official guard detail, so being up here is-“

“Laaaame!” Perry heckled.

“BOOO!” Matador joined in. “Things were too hectic last time, let’s have a guy’s night on the train. Come take a seat, I’ll pour you a drink while I wait for death.”

Matador’s billowing gaseous cape reached out and created a swirling subspace, from which emerged a crystal goblet filled with pure ethanol.

“You still got fifty-six years,” Perry retorted, although it felt a bit hollow with his current Death ETA being five times that.

“Year less than last time,” Matador muttered, taking a deep hit on his cigar before dipping it in the fumes swirling above his own drink, lighting it on fire a moment before he downed it like a shot.

“For someone who doesn’t care about dying, you sure bring it up a lot,” Perry said.

“Eh,” Matador shrugged. “Not much else going on but to talk about death, is there? It’s the only thing we all have in common.”

Chemestro frowned and approached, setting the drink aside and sitting down on the other side of the seven-foot robot.

“What’s your philosophy on death?” He asked.

“Eh. There’s no afterlife, and no temporal perception while dead, so from the time you die until the end of the universe, it’s just a blip until you’re either reconstructed by an alien race studying your ancient civilization, or another universe summoning you to save them from the demon king, or any of an infinite number of things between.”

“Is that likely?” Chemestro asked.

“There’s literally infinite time after death, so yes, within infinity, anything can happen. All of it WILL happen. Including me wanting something.” Matador said wistfully. “Someday.”

“Huh.” Chemestro grunted thoughtfully. “That’s terrifying.”

“You strike me as a ‘glass half empty’ type,” Matador said, tapping the side of his booze. “Sure, after death, an infinite amount of hellscapes await your reconstructed form, but an equally infinite amount of blissful adventures await you. It’s just a roll of the dice which world that particular reconstructed consciousness will wake up to.”

“I mean…this could even be one of them,” Matador motioned to the landscape sliding by them on either side. “How would you know?”

Perry opened his mouth, then shrugged. “I know someone who works customer service in one of the afterlives,” Perry said. “Pretty sure an afterlife exists where people’s souls go.”

“I don’t think the soul exists, as you define it,” Matador said.

“I can literally see souls now,” Perry said.

“Ah, but are you seeing a ‘soul’, or just the imprint a person leaves on the fifth dimension as they move through it?”

“Soul.” Perry said. “An altered imprint wouldn’t have feedback felt in the real world. Since change can go both ways, the connection is deeper than that.”

“Well, then isn’t the soul simply an organ that science hasn’t discovered yet? Not a ‘soul’, per se.”

“What’s the problem with just calling it a soul?” Perry asked.

“The implication of the divine that’s carried with the word. The baggage associated with the word has caused you apes to go to war with each other since time immemorial.”

“You’re just getting pedantic now that you’re losing,” Perry pointed out.

“Well, what happens after your afterlife? Eh? Infinite time still means infinite possibilities, including the end of the afterlife, followed by everything that infinity can throw at you afterwards.”

“Does this account for closed-end realities that might loop back in on themselves to prevent exactly that?” Perry asked. “Seems like you would need something like that to create a stable afterlife anyway.”

“As long as not all the variables are controlled, sooner or later, entropy will take its due.” Matador said.

“EH. I’m probably not going to have to worry about it anytime soon,” Perry muttered, considering his outlandish theoretical lifespan.

“You already are. Do you think there’s not a perfect copy of you writhing in agony in some nightmarish hellscape right now? who said infinity had to wait until after you were dead?”

Perry paused for a moment and sighed. “I’m starting to remember why you’re tough to talk to.”

Chemestro looked like he was about to say something when Matador pointed ahead of them with a shiny finger.

“Ambush.”

As far as ambushes went, it wasn’t the best Perry had ever seen. Maybe fifty men wearing the signature paramilitary garb, dead robot badges and and face masks had cut down several tons of trees and stacked them in front of the track to act as a blockade, about twenty feet high.

Perry leaned forward and gawked at the people hiding in foxholes, clearly visible from the top of the train.

“These guys seem to be determined to make my job as easy as possible,” he said as they approached.

The train’s megafauna catcher was fifty feet high, with another thirty feet of cabin above that, dwarfing their ‘little’ blockade. The conductor must’ve noticed the same thing, because the train shoved the wooden obstacle aside and continued onward without even slowing, leaving the headhunters to scatter as the wood came tumbling down over their hidey-holes.

“Well…nobody ever said that a bunch of guys who start a club dedicated to hating the same thing would be the brightest bulbs.” Perry said as he craned his neck to watch them as they passed by. A moment later, small arms fire started peppering the side of the train, accomplishing nothing but leaving little smudges of lead on the thick steel.

“Do we still plan on having Sin-eater torment them with shades made of their most shameful sexual fantasies?” Chemestro asked. “I’m still not sure how that would effectively make them look stupid, but Sin-Eater seems to agree with you.”

“Eh, nah. While this outcome is plain, it’s so terrifically obvious that they did it to themselves, that it’s more shameful as a whole.”

Perry reached out and tapped Chemestro on the shoulder.

“Go check the passenger car to make sure the stupid out there wasn’t an attractive distractor.”

Chemestro nodded and flew down.

After Chemestro gave them the all clear, Matador glanced over at Perry.

“Wanna spar?”

***David Manchin, Mayor of Washington City***

“Who’d Solaris send with the payload?” David asked his assistant, rocking idly in his chair as he lit a cigar. Now that he knew he couldn’t get cancer, he’d redoubled his smoking habit.

Best of both worlds.

“Our informants gave us the names Chemestro, Sin-Eater, and Paradox,” Elise said, putting three manilla folders on his desk, each bearing exhaustive studies of their super career.

“Children? He’s sending kids? They can’t be older than twenty. This isn’t some Japanese anime where eighteen year olds are consistently outsmarting adults.” David muttered around his cigar, dropping ashes on the expensive leather of his armrest.

“Chemestro is a major power, capable of holding a section of wall by himself. Something Franklin quantifies as a ‘sweeper’.” Elise said, pointing to the super’s picture. “However, he’s got a terrifically fragile mental state due to an overly strict upbringing. He’ll be priority number one for the Minders.”

“Gotcha, and the goth chick?” David asked, stabbing a thick finger down on the next super’s picture, a buxom girl.

“Sin-eater has some minor Minder-like powers, but technically qualifies as a wild-card. It’s assumed that she’s able to read thoughts and feelings to an extent as she pulls them out of people and weaponizes them. While she is dangerous, her upbringing was traditional middle class, making her civilian mentality easy to exploit.”

“And this kid?” David asked, pointing to the black-haired brat with the smug grin.

“Quite possibly the biggest problem,” Elise said. “Paradox is some kind of mage tinker hybrid, and his suit puts him on par with Chemestro. The biggest problem is his upbringing as the heir apparent of the Manitian royalty. He may be on the lookout for back-stabbing.”

“Pfft, he looks like a pushover,” David muttered as he studied the kid’s picture as he absorbed the information contained within.

All he really needed to do was ensure the princeling made it back to his family of spellslingers without too much damage.

“Can he be brought under control?” he asked, glancing up at Elise. He didn’t need Solaris’s dogs catching the scent of blood before Washington city had the advantage.

“Yes, he was here during last High Tide, marked as a disruptive influence and assigned Chase Currant as his handler.” She said, searching the name on her datapad and showing David. “He said the boy was ‘highly susceptible to Minder influence’ and reported the mission went off without a hitch.”

Hmm..Chase isn’t our best and brightest. He was basically a middling civilian-level Minder with a sordid history, and a reputation for pushing his boundaries. If the Minder was any stronger, he’d have long since been chipped.

The real good Minders they kept on short leashes, available to be deployed at a moment’s notice, for situations exactly like this.

Ever since his dad had figured it out twenty-odd years ago, it was assumed that the reason Biomaster’s designer babies were immune to Minder influence was because they were genetically superior…not because their brains were made of Comp-gel.

David scratched his scalp, thinking of his own inhuman brain thinking about itself. He still felt human. Or did humans not think like he did? Weird.

While it only made sense to put people immune to Minders in positions of power to reduce the chance of some random Minder taking over the government…it had led to using Minders to keep the rabble in line. Every Minder above a certain level of power was implanted with a kill-switch and an android handler to keep them in line, along with their family. It was a lovely irony controlling a Minder through blackmail.

Revealing that David and his echelon of society weren’t human didn’t really change much. Maybe a slight reshifting in priorities, but it was always ‘us’ Vs. ‘Them’. Now the lines in the sand were a little more clear.

Why did Washington city agree to take on thousands of android refugees at great personal expense to themselves?

To kill them, obviously.

Washington couldn’t afford to allow Franklin city to develop a natural resistance to Washington’s greatest asset. The rich androids needed to remain the only androids. They already had power over the city’s laws and people. They did not need to dilute their stranglehold over the city’s Minders by allowing these refugees to live.

And I have the perfect place to send them.

Washington had a straight path to Chicago, where information from his informants had come to him of an entire city of androids stuck in the late seventies. Millions of them.

All he had to do was generously send their androids to Chicago with everything they would need to integrate into the city…

Then order Blast Zone to blow it all up. Preferably without nuclear fission, so Washington could swoop in and reclaim the land out west recently abandoned by the Replicators. By all accounts, Chicago didn’t have any supers, so they would have to go, having committed the crime of not being able to defend themselves.

Oh sure, tears would be shed, teeth would gnash in anguish, and many a public statement would be made in sorrow, mourning the loss of these fine ‘people’, rendering David and his kind near-extinct.

But they’d get over it. Maybe they’d even make a holiday of it.

David’s lips twitched in amusement as he imagined himself grilling in his backyard on the anniversary of the terrorist attack that took so many innocent lives.

“Sir?” Elise asked.

“Pull out our three best Minders and assign them to these three. Give them a happy little fantasy about what went down here, then send them home.” David said. ‘In the meantime, make up a believable story about why we’re sending the androids to Chicago, prep the logistics, and get me Blast Zone and Big City on the horn.

“Yessir,” Elise said, nodding and leaving him.