“Mine’s an Earl Grey, milk, one sugar, please.” She tried to ignore the jump leads connected to the body on the slab. There was no point worrying: anyway, it was probably a shop dummy. Most of Prof’s workplace was just set dressing.
“They called me—milk, one sugar—a madman, but I showed them!” Prof scooped dark powder into an Erlenmeyer flask full of liquid, then swirled it over a Bunsen burner, gripping it with a pair of tongs. She couldn’t help noticing that the hand tremors had gotten worse. Leaping gaslight flared reflections off his wire-rimmed spectacles. “And I make a mean tube of tea while I do it, if I say so myself.”
“Prof. Prof.” Wendy found herself smiling despite herself. “How long have you been liv—uh, working here?”
“You know, I couldn’t say,” he said vaguely. The flask of tea was beginning to boil from the bottom up. He lifted it out of the flame and placed it on a heatproof tile to steep. “The lease was up on the castle, and the villagers kept threatening me, so I sent Igor out to find a new lair, and he brought me here.” Igor chirred emphatically from under the operating table. Wendy took a cautious step backwards. Igor was a construct Prof had manifested, much like Wendy’s baton; but while she was limited to simple mechanical tools, Prof could make minions. Igor resembled a giant robotic scorpion with hands instead of claws, forking into ever tinier hands at each fingertip, branching endlessly down into a rainbow fuzz of light-diffracting nanoscale digits. Igor wasn’t aggressive or evil, but Igor was dangerous the way a badly programmed industrial robot was dangerous—or a construct animated by a transhuman with the Mad Science delusion who had come into his powers at the same time the Metahuman-Associated Dementia took hold. (And don’t even start on the transhuman/metahuman terminology wars: more than one lexicographer had been driven to a nervous breakdown by the flame wars over what to call the people the public still insisted on referring to as caped freaks.)
Wendy accepted Prof’s offering of tea and sipped it in silence, considering her options. She allowed her telescoping baton to dissolve back into the shadows. She used to visit Prof regularly as part of her caseload back when she was with the Old Bill, along with a handful of other transhumans who required an occasional steady hand. This was the third time he’d wandered away from a care home or forgotten his way back, or been turned out on the street. The causes might vary but the progression was always the same. Prof inevitably told Igor to find him a lab, and Igor would do exactly as he was told. So Prof would hole up somewhere wildly inappropriate (a shuttered petrol station, a house scheduled for demolition), and settle into a life of genteel squalor and mad science. Igor raided the bins behind supermarkets and fast food outlets to feed the master, while Prof whipped up gizmos for his lair—a turbogenerator powered by the water mains to provide electricity, the grow-lamps from an urban cannabis farm repurposed as a mind-control laser. Or, on one memorable occasion (thank fuck Prof had been working in a cellar at the time), a working muon-catalyzed cold fusion reactor.
Prof and Igor were mostly harmless, really more a danger to themselves than others—Prof’s instinct to retreat into a mad science lair when disturbed meant that he tended to avoid situations where he might frighten his neighbors into forming a pitchfork-wielding mob—but he was still not safe on his own. If a stroke left him paralyzed Igor would go in search of help, which might mean dismantling and stealing an air ambulance. Or it might progress to kidnapping a trainee nurse and demanding brain surgery through the medium of interpretative dance. That was the problem with mad scientists who succumbed to MAD: as they went downhill the constructs they animated became dangerously unpredictable, not to say prone to episodes of gratuitous bugfuckery. And for some reason, if he was going to turn up on anybody’s doorstep, it would be Wendy’s. She had this to look forward to if she overused her own ability: it was almost enough to make her swear off crime fighting for life.
“Do you remember who you were staying with?” She tried again, between sips of tea. “What the home was called?”
“I’m not quite sure.” For a moment Prof looked puzzled. “The Golden Farm Residential Care Community, perhaps?” He scratched his head. Privately, Wendy despaired. Golden Farm Residential had kicked Prof out two years ago when the private equity firm that had purchased the care home chain finished looting their pension scheme and forced them into bankruptcy. But as he raised his arm Wendy saw a band looped around his scrawny wrist: a Tyvek label with a bar code and some writing on it. “Itches,” he said indistinctly, worrying at it with his teeth.
“Let me help you with that?” she offered, and slowly leaned in close. PROF. ARTHUR P. MACANDLESS, ST. BRIDE’S CATHOLIC CARE HOME, it read. CONTACT PHONE … Gotcha, she thought. Before the New Management, about 80 percent of modern police work had been indistinguishable from social work: domestic violence mediation, getting drunks home safely on a Saturday night, rounding up dementia patients who’d wandered away with only their lab coats and killer robots to look after them. “I’ll just take this down to the kitchen and wash it,” she said, showing him the empty Erlenmeyer flask. Then she sidled out of the doorway and trotted down the stairs to make a quiet phone call without agitating the patient. While the New Management had cranked all the judicial penalties up to 11, the law still operated much the same as previously—and as
