Chapter 3: Department X
“Two weeks of detention!” Johnny cried for what must have been the millionth time. Nancy rolled her eyes as she had to hear about it again.
“Do you know how long that will take to serve?” Johnny asked.
“Two weeks?” Nancy replied.
“Hardly!” Johnny paced away from her in the small cramped confines of the steel elevator they were in.
Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, he walked back over and started up again.
“They might say it’s two weeks,” Johnny continued, “but every day feels like a year. And since I have to serve ten school days of detention, it will feel like ten years of time!”
“But it will still be over in two weeks,” Nancy offered.
Johnny squinted his eyes and gave her a look.
“Weren’t you listening?” he asked.
“I was trying not to.”
“It was all thanks to you,” he declared.
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“Believe me, I won’t!” he yelled.
Johnny’s yell reverberated off the walls of the quickly descending elevator. They were traveling down, deep into the Earth, where Johnny’s secret spy group, Department X, had one of its main operations centers.
Nancy was quite impressed already, but she tried to appear nonchalant about the whole thing. Johnny had taken her to a garbage dump. And in the garbage dump was a cast off shipping container. There had been a lock on the container that looked too expensive for it to be there. Johnny had entered a code and they had stepped inside the container. The next thing Nancy knew she was in a super sonic elevator traveling at high speeds.
A screen came up on the elevator wall with Ackers’ face on it. Nancy was a little taken aback upon seeing all the pimples all over his face, but she did her best to hide her reaction. Ackers was watching her closely; he hated when people looked at his pimples.
“What are you looking at?” Ackers jumped right to the point. Nancy looked away, trying to appear casual, before acting surprised that the question was directed at her.
Johnny knew exactly what was going on.
“Whatever you do, don’t say anything about the pimples,” he whispered to her. “Or I’ll be in even more trouble.”
“What did you say?” Ackers asked Johnny.
“Nothing,” Johnny also looked around the elevator, trying to look casual. The two of them made an odd couple, with both Johnny and Nancy looking everywhere but at the large wall sized screen with a close up on Ackers’ face.
Ackers wasn’t very good at social interaction. He looked back and forth between them, trying to figure out what was going on when it should have been obvious. Part of him must have been acting subconsciously, trying to provoke them into responding. Why else would he have projected such a large image of himself?
“How far does this elevator go?” Nancy finally had to ask.
“Far,” Agent Ackers responded from the screen. “It wouldn’t be much of a secret base if anyone could dig a small hole in the ground and find it, now would it?”
Ackers turned his attention to Johnny.
“And I told you not to bring her down here. It’s supposed to be a secret base. Secret, as in we don’t introduce everyone we meet to it, as in we do our best to keep people from finding out about it, as in we don’t let people in! I don’t suppose I’m being clear?”
“Very clear,” Johnny said, biting back remarks that would only lead to having to listen to Ackers talk more.
Ackers was always very condescending. Using his exceptional brilliance, which unfortunately everyone had to admit he had or they would hear about it for days, Ackers tended to put on an air of entitlement. It made him hard to get along with most of the time.
After what seemed like an eternity of silence, mostly because Ackers was scrutinizing them from the view screen, the elevator finally came to a stop with a sudden lurch.
Nancy lost her balance and Johnny caught her. They held that pose for a moment before she broke free and Johnny started coughing to hide his embarrassment.
“I didn’t need any help,” she said, looking anywhere but at Johnny or Ackers.
“Of course not,” he agreed, trying to get past the moment as quickly as possible.
The doors of the elevator opened to show Agent Ackers standing before them. He was skinny and tall, easily a head above both of them, and he had even more pimples in person than he had on the view screen.
As he spoke, the large image on the wall of the elevator continued to broadcast his image even though he was standing right in front of them. The effect was more than a little unsettling.
“Welcome to Department X,” Ackers said.
Nancy mouthed the words without saying them out loud.
“A dreadful name, I know,” Ackers confided. “I petitioned to get them to change it. I tried going for Department Z, that’s the last letter in the alphabet, and I also tried Department A, but so far I haven’t heard back from anyone. Let’s face it, if you can’t be the first or the last what’s the point of being anything in the middle?”
Johnny could see that Nancy was about to ask a question.
“No, don’t do it,” Johnny warned.
“Do what?” Nancy played innocent.
“Don’t make fun of him, or ask any legitimate questions you might have. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s just not worth it.”
Nancy punched Johnny’s arm.
“Ow,” he said, looking at her warily.
“That was worth it,” Nancy smiled.
“Well, what a fine couple you both make. I suppose you’ll end up playing this silly game for a while before realizing you like each other. And then the games will get even more embarrassing. It’s common practice among your species,” Ackers said all in one breath, implying that he somehow did not belong to the human race.
“We don’t like each other,” Nancy stated defiantly.
“Yeah,” was all that Johnny could add.
Ackers raised an eyebrow at his one word response.
Johnny just shrugged, too tired to argue with Ackers.
“Just show us to the debrief area,” Johnny said with a tired voice.
Nancy couldn’t help it. She kept staring at the pimples on Ackers’ face. He noticed her staring out of the corner of his eye and looked directly at her, at which point she looked away. He nodded knowingly.
“I suppose you don’t recognize me. I’m the guy from the monitor,” Ackers pointed unnecessarily at the view screen where they had been looking at him as the elevator traveled down, and which was still showing a large image of his face as he spoke.
“I was employing a graphical enhancer to subtly alter my face and hide my identity. You never know when you might need to remain anonymous and conceal yourself right in the open so that no one recognizes you in the field,” he continued.
It wasn’t much of a graphical enhancer because Ackers looked almost exactly the same as he did on the screen except for a few subtle shifts here and there on his face there wasn’t much that was different.
Nancy saw the look from Johnny and immediately played along.
“Right, I didn’t recognize you. That’s a great trick,” she managed to say.
“I know,” Ackers smugly responded.
“Are you going to stand in the elevator all day? We have important things to discuss,” Ackers chastised them, and then, without waiting for their response, he turned and started walking down the hall.
Johnny and Nancy had to hurry to keep up.
They walked down an all white hallway, with white walls, ceilings and floors. It felt like they were in a hospital, except everything around them seemed to be more futuristic and advanced somehow. Even the lights that were in the ceiling didn’t look like they were coming from regular light bulbs.
Ackers caught Nancy studying the ceiling as they walked.
“Super sensitive, digital interference probes shoot out of the light. The probes swirl ar
ound you, mapping a three dimensional computer representation of you as you walk. That representation is then stored in our computers and cross referenced whenever we need to find out where you are in the world,” Ackers said as he walked, never slowing his pace.
Nancy could tell that he enjoyed showing off, he liked trying to appear smarter than everyone else, even if it meant putting them down and making people feel bad.
“Actually, I was wondering why everything is white,” she replied, trying to throw Ackers off.
“It’s because Ackers has no creativity,” Johnny responded.
“I designed this place,” Ackers jumped in as soon as he could. “I oversaw almost all aspects of its creation and construction. There was a limited budget and time constraints, and too many variables to meld together an effective color scheme.”
“In other words,” it was Nancy’s turn to interrupt, “you didn’t have time to paint.”
Ackers lifted an eyebrow at her.
“There are far more important things to worry about than painting,” he replied.
As they walked down the white, sterile hallway, the three started to pass rooms on either side with reinforced, plastic windows that allowed you to look in. There were a variety of training exercises and technology testing sites in the different rooms.
Nancy looked in and saw a man standing in front of a large cannon. The cannon erupted a steady stream of fire that completely engulfed the man. Nancy couldn’t see him through the flames, but when the cannon was turned off, the man was looking unharmed and vastly relieved.
“We invented sun tan lotion as a byproduct of our fire protection technology,” Ackers explained. “We released to the public a much milder dose, of course. Our lotion protects everything from hair to skin; it’s the ultimate in fire safety.”
Ackers gave her a smug smile that suggested he didn’t know how to smile very well. For his extreme intelligence, there seemed to be a lot Ackers didn’t know about social interactions.
The next room they passed was completely empty. There was nothing in it at all. As Nancy stopped to watch, water started pouring down like heavy rain from the ceiling. Soon a humanoid shape started to appear in the middle of the rain, with arcs of electricity dancing around it until it finally took shape in the form of a man.
“Invisibility,” Ackers said. “Still haven’t found a way to make it waterproof. The United Order has a model that works in a similar way, but their model has such a drain on power resources that they can only use it for a small amount of time.”
Ackers continued walking, not even waiting to see if they would follow.
“Where are we going?” Nancy had to ask.
“To my office,” Ackers explained as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“We need to figure out how to account for the both of you blundering the last mission and allowing the Super Chip to get away.”
“We didn’t blunder it away,” Johnny started to argue.
“There were more of them than us. Plus, I had to save him,” Nancy nudged Johnny.
Ackers gave Johnny a hard, long look.
“I would have known all about it if I wasn’t stuck in radio silence land,” he pouted with a completely straight face, something that only Ackers could do.
“We’re not going to bring that up again, are we?” Johnny asked.
“How can I bring it up again? I wasn’t finished bringing it up the first time,” Ackers argued. “I have one big complaint with you, as opposed to a grouping of smaller ones, that just never gets resolved.”
And with that Ackers marched on ahead, leaving Nancy and Johnny to watch him walk alone up the hall to his office.
“At least he wasn’t mad,” said Johnny.
“I’d hate to see him when he’s mad,” Nancy replied.
“Yes, you would,” Johnny agreed.