Boy Satan is one of the most absurd
Spanner villains that I haven't yet put into a script. Every year he goes a-grinchin' as "Satan Claus", trying to ruin everybody's holiday, at least online. And every year he becomes an irresistible target for Spanner, the mischievous Angel of Chaos, who uses everything from BFGs to tactical nukes in her quest to assassinate him.
Shira Thomas, the heroine of
Spanner, tells the tale. One of her taller ones, to be sure. But in virtual reality, anything is possible...
The Assassination of Satan Claus:
A Yule-Wrecking Supervillain Story
The spy looks, talks, and acts like any other spy. If he didn't, he'd lose his job. The United Corporations don't like puny humans putting their grubby hands on their holy holy holy patents. And they patent everything. Normally they send the usual Keystone Gestapo to hunt down any and all violators. But this guy isn't EuroSec. He's from the Ministry of Intelligence. These guys hunt down suspected foreign agents. If he's one of their cyberenhanced elite superspies, I've got a special trick just for him.
He rattles off my name, rank, serial number, all that command and control crap. The Synarchy have a hierarchy fetish that drives us civilians up the wall. He takes his sweet old time before he starts trying to grill me, just to unnerve me. He fails: I keep my calm.
He intones in the typical spyboy monotone, "It seems you have come into possession of something very important that just happens to be ours."
"What, did I steal your boss's mistress? I hear she's got a thing for jailbait supersluts."
"Enough with the stupid jokes, Miss Clayton-Wilder." The Cartel lords may play nasty pranks on mere humans, but their agents are uniformly humorless. "This is a matter of National Security. The penalty for selling our secrets to the enemy is much worse than death."
"Yeah, yeah, I know all your penalties by heart, right down to the legalese detail. Thing is, they won't work. You can fine me, but your funny money's worthless. You can try putting me in one of your quote-unquote 'inescapable' superprisons, but there's no way you can hold an angel of chaos."
"Our prison technology is advanced enough to hold even Satan. But if you have stolen our most classified secrets as we strongly suspect, our revenge against you shall make it look like Satan got off easy."
"Au contraire, mon frère. I stole your precious thingie from Triad couriers your agents whacked.
Your secrets? You swiped 'em all from the Chinks. Once again you're claiming something that's not yours. Just Corporatism acting like the troll on the bridge yet again. If you punish anybody, just try to punish the Chinese government you stole it from in the first place. Me, I got deniability, and you people know it."
"We can revoke your—" I interrupt him with a big kiss. He stands there stupidly. Prude.
"Sorry, massa, but I'm losing points right now, so I'm outta here yesterday." I throw a self-destructing one-way portal between us and slip through it. And I'm gone.
Stupid agent. Robots are more effective. Someday I'll use some of their own bots against them. Little do I know he's slipped a HyperTracer™ on me.
But I'm not concerned with that right now. Satan Claus is out grinching again. He's on a search and destroy mission to find any holiday party online and wreck it, leaving a lot of people out mucho moolah. He's hunting down and terminating every Santabot, elfbot, and angelbot he can find. One of my avatars just happens to be a Super Sexy Santabot. I switch to it.
The article: Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data (Sebastian Anthony, ExtremeTech)
