Rubberta Origins Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Inventors

Randi pulls to a stop in a parking space of a deserted lot of an abandoned grocery store. The cement pillars out front supporting the overhang are cracked with small pieces missing. Faded letters of the former store’s name highlight the final three there. The “LA” and “B” are separate, but with the care given them, it is clear that this is a lab.

She crosschecks the address on the paper with what is left on the building. “I guess this is where Tracey works. She turns the ignition key off and pockets them. The old vehicle idles for a few seconds longer before stalling into silence.

CreeeEEEEEEEeeeak! The metal joints on the door protest as she steps out of the car. Upon taking her first step, her foot slides forward on the tar coated gravel of eroded blacktop. As she approaches the entrance she steps over line after line of faded white paint and tall weeds growing in the cracks. Cement cylinder pillars striped with lightning bolt shaped fissures with chunks missing makes her second guess her approach of the automated double door entrance.

Just out of range of the sensors for the automatic doors, she stops. Biting the side of her lower lip, she tucks her stray hair behind her ears. “What am I doing? Should I dare to hope?”

Images of flying over the city, cape rippling behind are followed by swinging between buildings from webs and then the green and white Mel standing triumphant on the blindingly yellow, prone form Doctor Calamity. “Yes. This is a dream come true. It would be silly to turn back now.”

One final picture enters her mind, a thinner, taller, stronger, bigger-chested Randi standing atop a pile of rubble with a breeze blowing back her unbound, brown hair wherever she looks. To finish the pose, she places her fists on her hips and steps up onto the very top of the pile.

Fwoooooosh! And Randi returns to reality. The automatic doors, sensing her upraised foot, part like the Red Sea. Randi, on the other hand, is now balancing on one leg which is not a good position for her overweight body to be standing.

She falls forward onto her face.

Her meager attempts to slow her landing do nothing to decrease her momentum. Randi just lays there with pain arcing through her body like lightning. Her raw hands protest her feeble attempts to push her aching upper torso off the ground.

Sensing no moment, the doors try to close and bounce off her belly flopped legs.

There before her are empty check stands. Well, not empty exactly. Each has a tangle of cords, plugs, and tools hanging from the ceiling. Mechanical devices of various shapes and sizes sit on most of them. Their function Randi can’t even fathom.

The automatic doors bonk her legs and retreat again.

Randi brushes her brown bangs out of her eyes and the rest of the former store appears. Aisle after aisle, shelf above shelf of devices of all shapes and varieties, it boggles her mind. “Where did –? How –? Who made all these?” She asks to no one. Most are off, but the ones that are on have lights blinking in complex patterns as if the unthinking machines were replying.

Off in the distance on the far end of the store, the familiar figure of her red headed friend glides from aisle to aisle like a slow, old fashioned moving picture.

“Tracey?” She stops for a moment to think about what she just said. “No, Tracey didn’t build all these … did she?” With her target in sight, Randi hops up as much as her out of shape body allows her. All of her body disagrees with that movement. The pain is less but still there as it begins to fade.

Randi’s hobble turns to a hurried walk as the automatic doors close behind her with a satisfied wooosh. “Tracey was headed to my right, so if I head to that open area in the middle I might be able to get her attention.”

Upon reaching her goal, she does catch sight of her friend. However, the two elevated platforms, which were probably the frozen food section and produce area, and the mechanization thereon stop her dead. There are two video cameras on tripods. The one near the back of the store faces the back and the one in the front turned toward the front. Tracey steps up the stairs onto the back platform and suddenly takes the stairs down the front down to check stand #6.

“Hey Randi. Good to see you. Ready?” Tracey turns toward her friend while reaching for the invention on the counter top. Randi, dumbstruck at how fast Tracey crossed the store, watches her friend slide a mug under and push the only button visible on the machine. A hunk of black liquid drops into the mug instantly filling it. Without looking she scoops up the cup and waits.

Randi’s mind finishes processing the instant coffee and teleportation and realizes an answer is expected of her. “Oh, uhhhhh,” a quick image of hanging burglars to a lamppost with webbing causes her to smile. “Sure!” Tracey begins to retrace her steps, so Randi quickly adds, “But I’ll go the long way.”

In three steps Tracey is at the far side of the room. “Great! I’ve got him all buttered up for you.”

Randi jogs alongside the first platform but stops after a few steps, winded. “Buttered up? You mean you haven’t asked him yet?”

Head to one side, Tracey looks at her feet. “Well, not exactly. I asked him if I could use more of his old stuff and if he’d help me with a problem. That’s good, right?”

“That’s not the same as promising me that I’ll be a superhero.”

“It’ll be fine. I’ve got it mostly worked out in my head. If he doesn’t help, I’m sure I’ll be able to get the last of it myself. I mean, how hard can it be to turn your body to rubber?” Tracey pauses for a moment and looks at her friend out of the corner of her eye. “Are you sure you don’t want to be a cat girl? ‘Cuz a cat girl has an excuse to lounge around and sleep all day.”

“Oh no. I would shed everywhere.”

“What about a slime girl? A slime girl can eat whatever she wants and still keep her shape.”

“Ugggg! Tracey! Knock it off! You know this is what I want.”

Tracey turns fully and smirks as they start walking side by side. “You want to be a slime girl? I can arrange that as soon as I figure out how to turn your body into slime.”

Despite her friend’s joviality, with each sentence coming from Tracey’s mouth, another heroic image shatters and crumbles into a tiny pile. Randi stops and desperately holds onto the final dream protected by the hope. Tracey never lies to me.

Sensing that her friend isn’t keeping up, Tracey glances back to see Randi crumpled in on herself as much as one can standing up. “Randi, what’s wrong?”

The chubby one wipes a tear from her eyes, “You promised.”

Tracey straightens Randi’s shoulders and lifts her chin so they are looking eye to eye, “Randi, I’m your friend. I would do anything in the world for you including this. Don’t worry. I got this.”

Tracey’s words and smile are infectious. Randi finds herself smiling all the way to frowning old man.

“Impossible!” The blond haired man with several streaks of gray takes a sip of coffee before continuing, “If we make your body completely out of rubber, how would you think or move? You couldn’t. Your brain would be rubber which does not conduct electricity.”

“What if we put –”

“Put a brain in a rubber body,” he finishes, “It would die without blood.”

“What about –”

“Putting a heart and blood vessel in there? That could work as long as she doesn’t stretch or compress. Those would throw off the heart beat or cause it to stop. Not only that, how would you move the human shaped hunk of material without muscles that require blood? And how would the blood get oxygen without lungs?”

With each argument the old inventor makes, Randi’s spirits sinks a little lower. The opposite is true for her friend. Tracey begins pacing and thinking with a fierce determination in her eyes.

“So, as you can see, it’s impossible like I stated at the beginning.”

Tracey stops. Randi watches as her friend’s eyes look beyond her and dart back and forth. Tracey begins to speak as the new idea begins to form. “Whaaaaaaaaat aboooooout your positronic brain?”

“My what?”

“Your brain that you made by copying what Isaac Asimov had. You no longer use it as you made your own that you use now.” The mentor looks surprised at the crack in his absolute. “May I play with it since you don’t use it anymore?” Tracey pours on as much charm as she can muster in her tomboy body.

“Uh right. Permission granted on the condition you come up with the rest of the solution. Where are you going to get a body?”

“From the material maker thing? I have no idea why you created that. Were you trying to make your own clothes?”

He dodges the question. “That only makes a single layer of –”

Now it is her turn to interrupt, “Or two. I upgraded it. I’m pretty sure I can make an empty human shaped shell to put the brain in.”

“Okay, you have a smart, flattened shell. How will it move?”

“Nanobots. The brain will coordinate the little robots to shape and move the body.”

The room is silent for a moment as the inventor considers all this. Randi’s spirits are buoyed by this turn and Tracey stands triumphant.

Finally his pondering comes to an end. “If your friend is supposed to control that, how are you going to get her brain in there?”