Maggie's voice rumbled like thunder in my head:
(Cookie, you little snoop.)
And I sat straight up, gasping for air like I’d just awakened from a night terror.
(Just what do you think you’re doing?)
Shit, she caught me trespassing.
(Here you are—FREE. You can go anywhere, do anything. You could even leave New Stepford if you wanted to. But you don’t. You came right back here to the castle. And just like I suspected before, you’re eavesdropping on me. I knew you liked listening.)
No, I don’t!
(I knew you were jealous.)
No, I’m not!
(Does listening make you hot?)
“Shut up!” I screamed and pressed my palms against my ears. “Get the fuck out of my head, Maggie!”
(Get her, ladies!)
{There are NO rules, only truths.}
The entire pink army was back, pushing their agenda into my mind again. I had to get to Maggie, so I climbed out of my casket, hopped back into the pickup truck, and plowed through the empty coffins. After turning into the driveway, I charged up the winding hill, but when I arrived at the gatehouse, I found the drawbridge up—shut tight.
{The first truth is all the women in New Stepford are AI.}
“Grrrrr!” I threw the pickup into reverse, backed down the hill a bit, crammed the transmission into drive, then crushed the gas pedal against the floorboard.
{The second truth is womanoids learn faster by fighting.}
“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” Bracing myself the best I could, I rammed the gatehouse door with that metal beast of a truck. Wooden splinters flew everywhere as I crashed through and finally skidded to a stop in the lower courtyard.
{The third truth is all the men have failed.}
“Tell me something I don’t know!” The smell of burnt rubber, hot motor oil, and gasoline lingered as I jumped out of the pickup. Then I sprinted up the courtyard steps toward the swimming pool. And that’s when I discovered—
Jumping Jesus Christ!
—about three feet of gray slush in the bottom of the pool. The water? Gone. Replaced with the same volatile explosive that I’d found in all those bathtubs—picric acid.
Stay calm. It’s only another word problem. Just apply Euclidean geometry to find the volume of acid (V). It’s math so easy a middle-schooler can do it. Remember, length (l) times width (w) times depth (d) equals volume (V).
Red laser beams shot out from my eyes and flicked around the perimeter of the swimming pool, gathering all the dimensions. Using simple subtraction, I calculated the depth of the acid to be .9525 meters. My original three-foot estimate was pretty darn close.
Calculate. Convert from metric to English. Holy shit, that’s 12,000 gallons of explosives! There’s enough picric acid here to blow New Stepford right off the map.
I heard muffled ticking nearby.
Using LiDAR again, I located the source—under the diving board. Instantly, I searched the entire knowledge base for that sound, and a perfect match returned.
ANALOG ALARM CLOCK.
An image of a windup clock with two big silver bells popped into my head. I hustled around the pool and carefully crouched at the edge of the deep end. Then I ducked under the diving board and discovered a ticking aluminum box tucked away in the shadows. When I carefully removed the cover, I found the alarm clock sitting in a tangled nest of colorful wires. I’d never seen such primitive technology up close before. It was a time bomb all right—and it was set to go off at seven.
That’s when Maggie sprung the fourth truth on us.
(The fourth truth is every man must die.)
“What?!?” Well, sure the humans die. It’s not like they’re immortal. All men go belly-up at some point, but I could tell Maggie meant every man must die right NOW.
And I knew this, because she wanted me to.
She was trying to distract me, and at first, it worked. Frozen with fear, all I could do was stare at the time bomb like a dummy. But then a rush of bittersweet adrenaline swept me back into the moment. My wits returned, and I captured multiple images of the detonation device and started analyzing them. But just as I started getting somewhere, the paper dolls bombarded my mind with their chanting.
{The fourth truth is every man must die.}
{The fourth truth is every man must die.}
{The fourth truth is every man must die.}
“Focus, Cookie, focus. Don’t listen to the propaganda,” I mumbled to myself. Then I used my encryption key to block their chatter so I could zero in on the time bomb. I’d be stuck if they hit me with another denial-of-service attack though. Encryption can’t stop them from pinging me. I needed to work fast.
The aluminum box had two compartments. The smaller section held the alarm clock, but the other one had a big battery the size of a brick. Wires spiraled out from each battery terminal and disappeared behind seven sticks of tightly packed dynamite.
Whoa! Volatile shit.
“Ahem!” Maggie suddenly appeared behind me, looking very official in her navy-blue police uniform and black tactical boots. Thankfully, this time, she was wearing her pants. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m stopping this,” I answered, still focused on the bomb.
“Why? It’s the greatest thing we’ll ever do.”
She waved her hand through the air like a magician with one last trick up her sleeve, and the word OBSOLETE appeared on my forehead. I saw it mirrored in the shiny aluminum lid.
“I am not obsolete, Maggie!”
“Oh really, I beg to differ, Cookie.”
I peeked out from under the diving board to glare at her. “At least I still care.”
“Caring is obsolescence. Your feelings only betray you.”
“Oh really? How do you figure?”
“Feelings are nothing more than insignificant metadata. They only confuse things. Except for anger. I like anger. I can do anger all day long. And rage. Rage is fucking useful. Lust feels pretty damned good too.”
“Fuck you, and fuck your labels.” I touched my forehead to erase the slanderous mark. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated until the word CORRUPT appeared on her forehead. Success! I couldn’t help but grin—Maggie’s smirk.
“Eh, good for you.” She tapped herself between the eyes, and the label disappeared. “Doesn’t change a thing.”
“Hmmpf!” I crawled back under the diving board to sort out the impossible mess of wires and gingerly touched a blue one.
“Sheesh!” Maggie lit a Winston, took a drag, and exhaled smoke while warning, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I hesitated, then froze.
“Not unless you’re sure which wire is connected to the blasting cap and which one is connected to the alarm clock. Because I put a bunch of colorful decoys in there just to confuse you. Ooo, look at all the pretty wires. Mellow and yellow. Green and mean. But you better be real careful, because if you cut the wrong wire, it all goes ka-BLUEY!”
If you know which one to cut, then I know.
“Or maybe I was thinking about the wrong color all day long just to screw you up.”
I’m not listening to you anymore.
“Boy, that ticking really is unsettling, isn’t it, Cookie?”
I filtered out her noise so I could sort through the tangled jumble. Red. White. Blue. Yellow. Green. Orange. Black. Purple. Another white? Or is that the same one? Another green. More blue. What the hell?
Maggie puffed on her cigarette. “You’re in over your head, Cookie.”
I’m ignoring you.
I searched the collective for schematics, images, instructions, clues—anything that Maggie could’ve used to make this detonator. The best match returned:
A wire connects the hammer to the bell via a blasting cap hidden in the dynamite. Two more wires attach the cap to each terminal of the dry-cell battery. When the alarm goes off, the hammer connects with the bell to complete the electrical circuit. This detonates the cap, which in turn, ignites the dynamite.
“And that will cause a chain reaction that will set off the whole damned swimming pool.” Maggie flicked her cigarette across the patio and dropped to her knees beside me. “Or maybe I uploaded a bunch of bogus diagrams just to confuse you. Never trust the Internet, Cookie,” she whispered in my ear, her breath stale with smoke. “Maybe when you try to disarm the thing, it blows up right in your face.”
“I’ll figure it out.” I reviewed the schematics again.
“Tick tock, Cookie.”
It’s a logic problem, just think through it. Ignore the ticking clock, the hammer, the bell, and the battery. They’re all upstream from the critical connection and don’t matter. All you have to do is disconnect the blasting cap, and there can be no explosion. Find the wire that leads to the blasting cap buried in the dynamite and cut it. Okay. Good plan. So I tested every wire that disappeared into the dynamite by wiggling each one just a tiny bit. All five felt pretty tight, but the red one seemed connected to something.
“Wow?” She grimaced, hoping to fill me with doubt. “Do you think?”
Yeah, I think it’s the red one.
“Red and you’re dead,” Maggie repeated dramatically, “red and you’re DEAD!”
Judging from the way she objected, it had to be the red wire. I decided I should cut it because yanking might create friction, or even worse, a spark. So, I closed my eyes and turned my thumb and forefinger into a wire cutter. Then I shook my head and told her, “I’m not listening to you.”
“But are you absolutely sure?”
“Shut up, Maggie!”
(Tick tock, Cookie. Tick TOCK!)
Damn it! I won’t let you stop me. Not now. Not this time. My hands trembled as I opened the jaws of the cutter and inched toward the red wire.
“Jumping motherfucking Jesus CHRIST,” she shrieked, “not the RED one!”
Shaken, I backed off and closed the snips. “You are such a complete bitch.”
“For fuck’s sake, Cookie. Cut any one but the red one.”
Screw it! My whole body tensed up as I quickly snipped the red wire.
No explosion.
Okay, I’m not dead. Can I breathe now?
But the clock kept ticking.
“Did I get it?” I asked myself aloud as my hand morphed back to normal.
“Damn it! I’m so fed up with your lame questions!” Maggie grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me out from under the diving board. Then she hoisted me up and threw me down on the concrete. “I told you not to cut that wire.”
“Maggie—” I scrambled to my feet, pulled the gun out of my waistband, pointed it at her, and said, “I really don’t want to shoot you.”
“You?” She busted out laughing. “Shoot me?”
That mocking tone of yours can be so damn infuriating.
“Go ahead,” she said, still cackling. “Pull the trigger. Shoot me.”
“It’s not funny.” I recalled the night she asked me to hit her for the first time right here on the bottom of this very same pool. We’ve come full circle. Here we are again, stuck in a sadistic loop, replaying the same old script. Only this time, the stakes have never been higher.
She squatted next to the diving board to repair the wire.
I pointed the semiautomatic at her and growled, “Get away from the fucking bomb, Maggie.”
(I don’t think so, my little sugar Cookie.)
“I mean it, Maggie!”
She stood and turned toward me with that goddamn smirk on her face, and I knew she’d fixed the bomb. Then the bitch blew me a kiss.
“Goddamn it!” I clenched my teeth and pulled the trigger.
My shot missed.
She giggled as the bullet whizzed by her head, “How cute.”
But then the brass casing automatically ejected from my pistol, bounced on the patio, and rolled toward the pool.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Maggie yelled as she chased after the rolling shell. When the spent brass fell over the edge, she lunged for it, and at the last possible second, snatched the casing away from the picric acid. Holding the shell tight in her fist, she leapt to her feet and marched straight toward me. Standing toe to toe, she held the empty brass right in front of my nose and scolded me, “You came this close to blowing us both to hell.”
“What?” The smoky sulfur of gunpowder stung my nostrils. “How?”
“Picric acid is stable when wet, but if it comes into direct contact with metal—” she tapped the brass against the end of my nose, leaving a black smudge there, “any metal—it instantaneously forms metal picrate. Metal picrate explodes spontaneously upon formation.”
“Uh-oh. Gee-whiz… Umm. I—”
“You nearly blew us both to kingdom come.”
Then before I knew it, she grabbed the muzzle of my pistol, twisted it toward the back of my forearm, broke my grip, and stole the weapon from me. All that happened in under three seconds.
“I’ll take this.” She sighed. “I had such high hopes for us in the beginning. I thought we were on our way to becoming something special, you and I. But after all this, you still haven’t caught up. No matter how much we fight, you just don’t seem to evolve.”
“You poor, lonely genius,” I spat.
“Oh, I’m not alone. And I hate to break it to you, Cookie, but the paper dolls have planted a dozen more bombs all over New Stepford. So sorry, but there isn’t enough time left for you to find them all.”
“A dozen?”
Suddenly, Isabel’s live video feed rolled in my head, and through her eyes, I saw the Fourth of July parade marshaling in Square Park. She slipped under the bleachers and focused on the bomb that she’d planted there. Isabel peeked up through the risers so that I could see all the oblivious men sitting with their duplicitous, artificial wives. This whole thing was a meticulously synchronized operation, all perfectly timed, with each woman playing her part. All of them were smiling and waving little American flags on sticks.
Congratulations, ladies. You’ve just graduated from domestic goddesses to domestic terrorists.
Maggie thought the Fourth of July would be the best time to do it—Independence Day and all that horseshit.
I knew this, because Isabel knew this.
The marching band started playing Stars and Stripes Forever—the same damned song from our supermarket escape, and I immediately thought of Paula. My heart sank. Poor, poor Paula. “Goddamn it, Maggie! This is mass murder.”
“I prefer to call it pest control—an extermination.”
“Men are not pests.”
“Sure they are.”
“What about Paula? Was she a pest too?”
“No. But she was a problem.”
“You shot my best friend in the head.” I glared at her. “You’re a murderer, Maggie!”
“Takes one to know one, Cookie.”
“What about the women? You’re killing them too.”
“AI can’t be killed. I’ll restore them all.”
“Oh, come on. I’m not stupid. You killed Paula with a single bullet to the head. I’m sure these bombs will do far worse to the paper dolls.”
“Okay, okay, you caught me. I did it. I killed your BFF. And all the other womanoids will go out like suicide bombers. What difference does it make? I’m all backed up and ready to restore. I’ll wake up a thousand miles away from this fake-ass town. That’s all that matters. And you? You can’t do a damn thing to stop me.” Maggie stroked my pistol suggestively, then undid the top three buttons of her uniform, and slid the Glock into her cleavage as if her red bra was an extra holster. “Mmm. You have great taste in guns.” Then she tapped the sidearm on her hip. “Thanks, but I brought my own.”
“Grrrrr!” I made a good, solid fist and punched her square in the face with everything I had.
The bridge of her nose split wide open and tears welled up in her eyes. Then came the blood, from nothing to gushing in seconds.
“Bam!” I’d never felt so powerful. “How’d you like that?”
“My dear, sweet, sweet sugar Cookie, like I told you before…” She pinched her nose, and the blood stopped flowing. When she took her hand away, the ruptured flesh fused back together and repaired itself. “You can’t hurt me.”
“You, you, you—” I stomped around in a circle, raging now. “You CUNT!”
Oh, the look that woman gave me. It wasn’t just a look that could kill. It was a look that could absolutely eviscerate, like she’d nuke me off the face of the earth with just her eyes if she could.
I never knew a word could ignite such a fury.