Chapter 169: Gardening* lessons with Gramma

***David Manchin***

“How the hell did you get in here!? Bill said you backed off!“

“Bill was lying. Open the cabinet under the sink.”

He did so, allowing a single beam of light to spill into the cabinet, revealing Bill Grove stuffed violently into the space, displacing the harsh cleaning agents soaking into his skin. Bill’s breathing was shallow and labored, the skin of his lips and wrists stuck together with some kind of clear adhesive.

“If you do anything, your baby is dead!” David spat, recovering his calm as he closed the cabinet and held the expensive Jalosh cutlery in front of himself with a shaking hand.

“Yeah…I don’t care,” Paradox said, slowly standing up and tapping his skull. “I turned that off. I’m sure I’ll care a lot later, but for right now…It’s just you and me.”

David’s heart froze in his chest as the void-black armor stalked towards him.

“You know, my eighth great grandfather ate his enemies. I always thought it was a weird thing to do, but after really thinking about it tonight, I realized there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in dehumanizing your enemies to the point that they become a literal side-dish. As far as power moves go, it’s pretty effective. If I recall correctly, no one ever crossed him again.”

Paradox stopped right in front of the frozen David, pinching the meat of his cheek. “And androids can’t give people prion disease.”

His heart slammed in his chest, lungs burned from hyperventilating, and his knees shook with unused energy. David hadn’t had this much adrenaline flooding his body since he was a teen.

It made him think he could still move like one.

David ducked away from the upraised arm and weaved around Paradox, scrambling to leap around the table and make a break for the door.

David’s wrist didn’t have the strength he expected and he didn’t bounce up as fast as he was expecting, slamming his shoulder painfully into the huge ivory dinner table made from a megafauna.

“Gah!”

“What are you running for? I never said I was going to eat you.” Paradox said, turning to regard David from the kitchen as he struggled to his feet, having made it less than ten feet away in his escape.

“What?” David asked, frowning.

Click.Scrape.

The distinctive sound of a silver fork on a china plate made David’s hair stand on end. It was coming from the staircase to the second floor. Where his family’s bedrooms were.

Click. Scrape.

Despite the sound, David clouldn’t look away from Paradox as the monster slowly approached him.

“Mm,” A young man’s voice groaned, close enough behind him that David thought he might be whispering in his ear, causing him to jump in place, rattling the crystal salt and pepper shakers on the dining table.

Click. Scrape.

David finally turned away from the approaching armor and saw the puppetmaster, standing in the archway that led to the stairs, his body partially cloaked in shadow.

In his hand was a plate of…something. It was too dark to see, but David smelled blood.

“What did you do!?” David demanded. “Where’s my family!? What is that!?”

“This?” Paradox asked, holding up a forkful of…something. It was still too damn dark.

“I swear to god, if you’ve hurt my family-“

“I think we both know you don’t care enough about your family to risk your life. Let’s stick to threats I know you’ll back up with action. And this?”

Paradox regarded the shadowy forkful of food.

“This is your son…’s birthday cake.”

A tidal wave of relief struck David’s body at once, weakening his limbs.

“If you leave now-“

“I’m not that gross.” Paradox interrupted. “They’re just dead.”

“You!” David tried to leap at Paradox, but the void black armor grabbed his shoulder in an iron grip, turned him around and slammed his back down onto the dining table.

The arms of the suit grabbed his wrists, then detached from the main body, the individual arms swinging around underneath the table and reattaching to each other, effectively acting as restraints, holding him tight to the table.

“Now, I’m not hardcore enough to eat people to prove a point…” Paradox glanced off to the side, frowning. “…Except that one time.”

Paradox pulled out one of the hardwood chairs and sat down above David, dangling the fork dirty with icing from his son’s birthday cake directly above his eyes.

“No, I’ll just settle for crippling you and taking away everything you love,” Paradox said, his voice tinged with madness as the fork swung like a pendulum across David’s vision.

“The first thing you love is being seen as virile. Masculine. Powerful. Potent. I saw the cigars, the shoulder pads, the ridiculously expensive furniture.”

“…Did you know humans are wired to disregard people with no teeth?” Paradox asked around another bite of cake. “It makes you less of a man. An invalid. It’s baked into our language, like when an argument ‘has no teeth’, or if something’s potent it’s ‘got bite’.

David was starting to calm down. This was a show. He’d lied about eating his family, he was lying about this. Paradox was just softening David up to barter for his child’s life. I know how this song and dance goes. I just need to act scared and wait for the-

Between one second and the next, Paradox’s hand snaked into David’s mouth, seizing one of his upper front teeth.

Crack!

The taste and smell of blood invaded David’s senses as pain exploded through his mouth.

Paradox flicked aside the bloody tooth with one hand, clamping an inhumanly strong palm over David’s mouth, muffling his scream.

“You looked like you were relaxing. I hope you don’t think you’re getting out of this somehow.” Paradox whispered, his piercing green eyes burning with rage.

“NNGG!” David screamed against the iron grip, forced to swallow his own blood to avoid breathing it.

“Now, about the other thing you love:” Paradox said, reaching for David’s mouth.

“No, Noo NNN!” David tried to turn his head away, but Paradox’s grip was inhuman and unrelenting.

Paradox easily pried David’s mouth open with his fingers and yanked out his other front tooth.

POP.

“The other thing you love, other than the appearance of power, is your actual power.” Paradox said, said, flicking aside the tooth before resting his cheek on a bloody palm, staring down at David’s weeping face.

“What do you want?” David moaned, his voice sounding pathetic and strange to his own ears, slightly slurred by the lost teeth and swelling. “I’ll call ‘em off. Your baby’ll live,”

“But I want to hurt you,” Paradox said. “The whole…baby thing, is kind of beside the point.”

“Now, let’s do a hypothetical. The leader of a city got a bit too big for his britches, and now you’ve decided to do something about it.”

Paradox went back to waggling the fork above David’s eyeballs, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut and turn away.

But Paradox’s voice still entered his ears.

“But what do you do? Naturally you shouldn’t destroy the city. That’s an overreaction, and harms a lot of people who weren’t directly involved.”

“Kill everyone directly involved?” Paradox’s voice asked a moment before David felt the fork brush against his cheek, forcing a tremor through his entire body.

“Well, that’s not an overreaction, but it has a ripple effect. You remove the leadership of a city and there’s a good chance a lot of people suffer from the resulting power vacuum. I’m a super-hero, after all.”

“The logical choice then, is to stage a coup. That way the Minders don’t revolt and make this place their personal playground, the lights stay on, people get paid, nobody starves, Tide doesn’t destroy the city…and everyone who needs to suffer…suffers. Everyone wins.”

“Now, I don’t have any interest in running a city. That sounds like a pain in the ass reserved for people who are power-hungry or have some kind of cause.”

“But!”

A hand wrenched David’s head around while another plucked out an incisor.

POP.

“NNGGG!”

“I do understand how a coup works. It’s a lot like grafting a tree. You don’t destroy all the roots: the people who administer and control the infrastructure of the city, Like Bill Grove over there. Instead you cut off the top of the plant:”

Paradox punctuated the statement by dragging the cold metal utensil across David’s neck.

“Naturally you have to graft on something from the same family,” Paradox said. “Can’t graft an orange onto an apple. The roots will reject it.”

“You’re…not an android,” David slurred. His empire was made for and by androids. Paradox couldn’t control it, with the prevalence of Minders in the government.

“Indeed. Where will I find a politically active android with the charisma and experience to step into your shoes and keep the city happy with the status quo so you can vacation in my basement?”

Paradox froze for a moment, seemingly thinking to himself, his gaze flickering back and forth like he was reading.

“One moment. Don’t go anywhere.”

The insane Tinker patted him on the cheek then disappeared into David’s house, followed by some scraping and clattering.

A moment later Paradox re-emerged with one of David’s flat screen TVs, sticking it to the ceiling above the dining table somehow before turning it on, shining it’s light straight down into his eyes.

The telltale insignia of Washington News Media came up on the bottom of the feed, but what it was reporting was not state sanctioned. The sight sent a chill across David’s skin.

“What we’re seeing here is a breach of trust at the highest level,” The talking head said, standing in front of the dregs of combat between the androids and government forces.

“These civilians are being relocated by heavily armed government forces, a complete abuse of power…”

The camera focused on a little girl in torn pants and a T-shirt, leading a last-ditch charge against the people trying to force women and children onto a bus. It wasn’t a good look for the state.

The talking head then gushed about how heroic she was…how noble her sacrifice as her last ditch effort was easily dismantled by the Washington military….then the heroic charge was replayed over and over again, ad infinitum, along with her name…on PUBLIC TELEVISION!

Who the hell is at the helm down there!? David demanded internally. This is a goddamn nightmare.

“Would you look at that…She’ll do.” Paradox said, leaning on his palm to watch the TV with David. “Lucky me, am I right?”

“Her!? What Experience!?” David demanded, blood bubbling from his swollen lips at the outrage.

“More than you know,” Paradox said, his voice ice cold for a moment before going back to the casual tone. “Now, the next step in our coup/graft metaphor.”

“The last thing you do is trim off a few of the rotten older roots, so more nutrients flow up to the new graft. To do this, you have the remaining old roots demonstrate their loyalty to the new graft by executing the rotten ones publicly…It’s an imperfect metaphor.”

Paradox hefted the fork he’d been teasing David with, and David saw his grip tightening, preparing to strike.

“Who knew gardening with my grandma when I was five would be so informative, Amiright?”

David’s breath came fast and hard. He couldn’t bring himself to look away from Paradox as the Tinker prepared to gouge out his eyes.

“…Hold on a sec.” Paradox said with a frown, setting aside the fork and fishing a phone out of his pocket.

The psychotic Tinker winked at him as he dialed a number, holding the phone to his ear.

David could make out the dial tone, followed by what sounded like the lilting voice of a high-class old woman answering the phone.

“What the hell, Gramma? Did you set me up?”

The sound of laughter echoed from the phone.

“No, that’s not funny, I almost stabbed a guy’s eyes out with a fork.” Paradox said,

There was a quiet sentence that David couldn’t make out, but Paradox glanced over his shoulder at David with an expression that nearly stopped his heart.

“Oh?”

More indistinct words.

“Well, I was monologuing prior to cutting his eyes out, and I mentioned you, which got me thinking about it, and I realized there was no freaking way you wouldn’t have stopped your great grandchild from being kidnapped, or failing that, contacted me.”

“Yeah,” Paradox said, pacing.

Indistinct whispers.

“A coup, obviously. I’m not a monster. No, not me, someone I know who fits the bill better. Yeah, they’re amenable, I’m pretty sure. Yeah. Twelve. Sure, I’ll give her your phone number…but I don’t think you’re going to have as easy a time manipulating her as you think. I’m still gonna get you back for this, by the way. Love you too, Gramma. Buh-bye.”

Paradox put the phone away, and heaved a long sigh of relief before glancing back at David, his expression going murderously neutral.

“So, good news and bad news,” Paradox said, pulling out a chair and sitting above David’s restrained form.

“Good news: Your guy who was supposed to kidnap our baby-momma was caught before he got within a couple blocks of her, and my gramma used it as an opportunity to play a practical joke on me.”

“Because of that, I’m not going to kill your family,” Paradox said, clasping his hands together. “They’re at your wife’s parent’s.”

David heaved a sigh of relief.

“The bad news:” Paradox picked up the fork. “You targeted my baby, so we’re not done here.”