The Basement

Part 8

The Professor aimed the handgun at Taylor.

"I'm so sick of listening to that woman talk."

Taylor raised his hands in a defensive manner.

"Hey, I'm here to help you, remember."

The Professor dropped the gun back on the workbench.

"And help me you have."

He pulled a small circular platform away from one of the smaller machines. The platform's hinged arm looked like it belonged to a futuristic robot, and the Professor swung it over so that it sat next to the workbench. He removed the other Professor's head from the silver case and placed it on the platform. Behind the head the tops of three cylinders could be seen. They sat on a shelf that was attached to the hinged platform and a series of cables ran from the bottom of these cylinders back to the machine.

The Professor wheeled a work stool over and sat facing the head. He reached underneath the platform and slid out a smaller square drawer. On top of the drawer was a laptop and when the Professor opened it a series of progress bars flashed across the screen. Whilst he waited for them to complete he said to Taylor.

"You know everything the Senator just said, about how she used you to hide the theft of the thermite crystals? That was my idea. All of it, it was all my idea." He looked down at the Senator's crumpled body. "She loved to take the credit for everything, I guess that was the politician in her, but let's just be clear between you and me. I was the one who told her we could destroy the dam as a test run for the weather machine, of how we could use it to hide other, more delicate operations."

"What the fuck?" Taylor said it more to himself than to the Professor. His eyes darted around as he tried to understand the implications of what the Professor had just revealed. "You've been working together all this time?"

The Professor laughed.

"Good god no." The laptop completed its start-up process and a series of buttons were now visible on the screen. The Professor tapped a green button on the right-hand side. "She didn't know it, but she's was working for me."

The top of the leftmost cylinder irised open and a thin metallic arm emerged. It lifted straight up and then folded several times so it was centred above the other Professor's head. Three smaller arms then separated from this main arm and positioned themselves around the base of the head. On the end of each smaller arm was a rectangular plate.

The central arm rotated around the head, and as it did so the plates scanned the head with hundreds of tiny lasers.

"What do you mean she was working for you?" Taylor said.

The Professor sat back from the platform.

"This machine of mine has some very complicated components to it," he said. "Components I would have had trouble getting on my own."

"Like the head?"

The Professor chuckled to himself.

"Actually that was easier than you might imagine. It turns out that money talks in any universe." His tone turned bitter. "It's having the money, that's the hard part."

"But you're rich, aren't you?" The file Taylor had read on the Professor said he'd invented a headset that allowed the blind to see. It recorded high definition video of its surroundings and then fed that information into the wearers brain. It helped millions of people regain their vision. "I mean, that headset you created must have made you a small fortune."

"My business partner's rich." There was definitely a bitter tone to the Professor's voice now. "I did all the work, and he took all the glory. He forced me out of my own company and kept everything for himself. We're talking billions of dollars, money that should have been mine."