...wimper

Time passed slowly in the vaults, but I had lots of reading material to keep me occupied. I went through the entire Marvel comic book catalogue starting from the heroic posturing of the golden age up through the melodrama of the sliver age to the so-called "iron" age with it's more socially realistic plot lines and artwork. I was just about to re-read the entire run of the Mighty Micronaughts for the second time when the absurdity of my situation overcame me.

It was well known that Maskatron's prime directive, apart from protecting Spirella and Xister, was to aid them in the complete destruction of the Fakiegrind empire. This being the case, if I, Flatlander, were actually the arch assassin-bot and master of disguise, then why would I not have simply hit the "delete blog" button months ago and been done with the whole business? Why, in fact, would I have started the blog in the first place? The more I reflected upon it, the more outlandish did seem the whole scenario outlined by Overseer Q.

Then I started to get hungry.

But android assassin-bots don't really need to eat. Everyone knows that the more advanced models only do so to fool their human victims. I tore at the circuitry that covered my face—the visage presented by Dr. Flavour that had so disturbed me in the lab. Wires and diodes came off in my hands. My robot face was actually itself a mask. A Maskatron mask! I had been set up. But by whom? Something devious was certainly going on, and I had to get to the bottom of it.

Luckily, the vaults contain a wide assortment of vintage breakfast cereals. They're almost priceless on today's collector market, but I had to make a sacrifice of a few boxes of them to nurse myself back to full strength. Once I had been suitably nourished, I made my move (the sugar rush would only last so long, so I had to act fast).

I emerged from the secret door leading to the Vaults expecting a fight, only to find the executive reading room strangely empty. Even at the oddest hours there was normally at least one person sitting in one of the plush chairs, flipping through some obscure journal or other. Now it was vacant. But there were magazines, empty chip bags, candy wrappers, and drained beer bottles strewn everywhere, as if a party had been raging there for several days, but had since moved on.

Entering a corridor, I heard what I thought were voices, then the dull thumping base of loud dance music. I followed the sounds, which grew louder as I approached the Fakiegrind Central Command Centre. The door was open, so I charged into the room, and was taken aback by the scene I discovered. The room was packed with Agents and personelle in various stages of drunkenness and disarray. Some were passed out in office chairs, others were dancing on the command counsels to the vapid dance music that blared out of the communications system. On the various monitor screens that papered the command centre walls were music videos, bad action flicks and porn. Never in all my time as blog administrator had I seen such a disgrace.

Nobody seemed to pay any attention to me as I entered the room. Then, Overseer Q staggered up to me, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and another, unlit between the fingers of one of his hands. His breath was heady with the smell of cheap wine.

"Flatlander! Where'd you go, buddy? You're missing the party!"

"What, in the name of oldness, is going on here? Who authorized this debauchery?"

Q looked puzzled for a minute, then his face broke into a grin. "You card! Don't play ignorant. You authorized it! To celebrate our ferreting out that impostor Maskatron. Boy did he have us fooled!"

"But I....What?"

Just then the revolving captain's chair in the centre of the room spun about, and I found myself face to face with...myself!

"It's true, in a manner. You (or something that looks like you) did authorize this little shindig, but it is rather the death of the blog than the death of Maskatron that we shall now celebrate."

"Say what?" Q rubbed his eyes with his palms. "I think I'm seeing double."

"Maskatron!" I said. "He fooled you into thinking I was him!"

"A mistake you won't live to make twice!" The robot, who still looked like me, raised a mechanical arm, the human-seeming hand of which launched off, revealing a radar dish-shaped laser gun. A sharp blast from this cannon and Q was undone.

Dropping his assumed Flatlander voicecode, Maskatron's sharp, robotic drawl sounded out above the insidious dance music.

OVERSEER Q IS DEAD. YOUR HOPELESSLY DRUNK AGENTS WILL SOON JOIN HIM. THERE REMAINS ONLY THE BUSINESS OF THE DELETION OF YOUR BLOG, THE ACCESS CODES TO WHICH YOU WILL NOW SUPPLY ME.

"No!" I protested, "the blog can't end this way! It just isn't right."


WELL. YOU COULD ALWAYS INSTALL A LOOPING CODE, BUT YOU'D BETTER TO IT FAST, BECAUSE I'M ABOUT TO EXECUTE MY PRIME DIRECTIVE AND PULL THE PLUG....