A Normil Day

Rick Normil

Damon Robb's apartment had been unfurnished. He hadn't improved much on that. The only furniture in the living room was his desk, his office chair, and a long table covered with odds and ends and scratch paper.

Beside the desk, there was a bulletin board overflowing with newspaper clippings. I looked at them.

They were Guardian stories. It looked like a serial killer's wall from some movie. I was willing to bet it was, at the very least, a symptom of obsession. I looked at one of the clippings and noticed that someone had pasted ordinary typing paper over some of the words. It was an interview with Guardian—one of Jenna's, as it happened—and the pasted-over bits were Guardian's responses. When she asked him what his goals were, Robb had pasted in, "To serve the cause of justice and spread American values throughout the world." When she asked about the whole Tomorrow's Child thing, he had written, "I was sent backwards through time to save humanity from itself. So in a very real sense, I'm not just representative of humanity's future. I'm its savior."

Neither of those were things that Guardian would ever actually say. If you just took a casual glance at the wall, you'd think that Robb worshipped Guardian. But at the same time, he was—I don't know, editing him.

Badly.

I leafed through more articles, noting a headline: -------- Confirmed Dead in Bridge Collapse; Guardian Assists Rescuers. I seemed to remember that the death toll had been fourteen; I remembered taking pictures of the site. But I couldn't be sure, because Robb had pasted, "Zero," on top of the original number.

I took my time. Unprofessional of me, maybe, but then I didn't aspire to professional burglary. I needed to build up an impression of this Robb guy, and I was slowly getting one. He wanted Guardian to live up to his imagination. All that editing was to create a better Guardian. (For his own psycho definition of better. I noticed that he'd changed one or two headlines to include Guardian killing supervillains, something that he would never do.) It made a sort of sense, I supposed. If Guardian persisted in not being the man-god Robb wanted him to be, well, he'd have to take over and do the job himself, wouldn't he?

For a psycho creeper with an unhealthy obsession, he did keep decent notes. In about half an hour, I had a pretty good idea of what everything on the big table was supposed to do, and a firm desire to smash most of them to bits. He'd made mood projectors. Paranoia projectors. Depression projectors. He'd tested the latter on the woman next door, keeping meticulous notes on when she left the apartment and what she looked like when she did, with gleeful comments about unkempt hair and haggard expressions. I resisted the impulse to flee to his bathroom and wash my hands.

There was something I could potentially use, though: a sleep projector. Knocked people out within a ten-foot radius, made them sleepy further out. It had a timer on it. That wasn't just something he could have sold to the military, or the police; insomniacs across the world would offer him their firstborn. He could have been a billionaire, and I don't think it ever registered on him. It wasn't about Guardian; it wasn't important.

By the time I was done, I had good news and bad news.

The good news was that I'd found the prototype mind projector, the thing that allowed Robb to hijack peoples' brains. I even had the instructions. I knew how it worked.

The bad news was that it wasn't a ray. It was a squirrelly collection of wires attached to a metal box. To use it, you had to be hooked up to it, by means of six electrodes. And you also had to put six electrodes on the target's head.

Sometimes the bad news completely screws up the good news.

About five hours later, I was seriously wishing that I'd been able to find the noodle strainer of invisibility, or something like it.