When we materialized I didn't see the familiar comforting confines of my lab all around me. I didn't even see the cafe we'd teleported to last time.

"What the hell?"

"Emergency teleportation protocol activated," my non-CORVAC computer said.

It was a comforting voice. Female. Roughly middle aged. Sort of like the computer you might hear on Star Trek, but I wasn't willing to pay the licensing fees the Roddenberry estate wanted for using Majel Barrett's digital pipes.

And I wasn't about to steal Lwaxana Troi's voice. I might be a supervillain, but there were lines even I refused to cross.

"What the…"

I was surrounded by a dingy abandoned factory. An abandoned factory had seemed like a safe enough place to transport to back before I knew CORVAC and Rex Roth had set up a lair in the Starlight City industrial zone. I hadn't bothered to change the randomized locations since then because I'd been so preoccupied with Fialux.

Not that I had long to think about that before the teleporter kicked in again.

Somewhere between point A and point B, turns out you could totally maintain conscious thought while being teleported which should've been impossible but I figured I was in the business of the impossible and went with it, it hit me exactly what an idiot I'd been. I was so caught up in the moment, so worried about saving Fialux and taking care of Dr. Lana while trying to figure out exactly what the hell her plan was, that I'd forgotten all about the emergency protocol that kicked in when multiple systems took serious damage.

I'd added that one in after the third or fourth time Fialux kicked my ass and took me to a prison or a police station. Though funnily enough, I hadn't gotten to use it because we let bygones be bygones via some heavy making out shortly after I put the thing in place.

"Thank you computer," I said with a sigh as I rematerialized for a moment on top of a building and then dematerialized.

I hadn't even come up with a name for the new computer system yet. I figured that would be going down a dangerous path. The last time I'd named a computer, though to be fair I'd used the name he already had, things ended poorly.

Never again.

I barely had time to register my surroundings, an office with surprised drones turning from their cubicles, before the teleporter went off yet again, flinging me across the city at random to one of several predetermined destinations.

We materialized in the middle of an abandoned subway station. Thankfully we hadn't been in the office long enough for anyone to get a good look at us or, even worse, pull out their phones and snap a picture.

The last thing I needed was a bunch of office drones sharing pictures of Fialux in her current state.

The only people in the abandoned subway station were a couple of bums, but it looked like they were already so deep in the sauce, even this early in the morning, that they didn't notice us materializing. Then the subway station was gone and I was in the middle of a hair salon.

This time around several people screamed. A lady who'd been working on some old rich looking lady who didn't seem at all perturbed by a couple of women teleporting into the salon accidentally cut off a big chunk of said rich lady's hair. Which did perturb her to the point she joined the screaming. Then we were gone again.

The computer sent me jumping around the city to several spots I'd scouted out for their emptiness. The order I teleported was at random. Though it would seem I needed to revisit a couple of locations since the abandoned office suite had been filled, and what had been the dingy remains of a bar in the dodgy part of Starlight City had become a high end salon.

Damn gentrification ruining my escape plan.

It was all designed to protect me from somebody who had the potential to track my teleporting. Dr. Lana had figured out how to reverse engineer or outright steal my stuff often enough that she certainly fit the bill of somebody who was capable of tracking a teleporter signal.

Another flash and finally I was back a the lab, but it wasn't my lab. However much it looked like home. The thing was a fake. This was the last and cleverest part of my deception.

At least I'd thought it was clever. After what happened this morning? I was starting to wonder if anything I did was really as clever as I thought it was.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The hope was if somebody did manage to trace the many jumps I made then they'd end up in this fake lab which was wired with a bunch of unpleasant surprises for any asshole who wasn't on my approved visitor list.

Anyone who was stupid enough to follow me would be reduced to their component parts, and I'm not talking a pleasant and painless death. There was no vaporization ray coming out of nowhere to ruin someone's day fast enough that their nervous system couldn't send pain signals before ceasing to exist.

No, I had cutting lasers and bullets and all sorts of other fun and potentially nasty toys that would really ruin someone's day by chopping them into tiny little parts before the automated systems got around to vaporizing the intruder to make their bits easier to teleport to the local dump.

Several of those systems seemed to be spooling up as we materialized in the lab. I couldn't have the emergency protocol working under the assumption that somebody who was being teleported into this place was friend rather than foe.

The systems warming up around me, the click of railguns spinning up, and the ominous hum of plasma rifles charging, was familiar and not good given the circumstances.

It'd been awhile since I'd put this emergency protocol in place. See all the places that had been unoccupied when I came up with this thing that had since become occupied.

Yeah, the last time I'd revisited my emergency escape a lot of things had been different. Like, for example, I hadn't even heard of Fialux, let alone had her briefly become my archnemesis and then my girlfriend.

The practical upshot of all that was Fialux was in very real danger materializing in the middle of my dummy lab because she wasn't on the safe list. Which meant the automated systems would try to take her out, and might even catch me in the crossfire since this dummy lab was a rare instance of me using weapons that tended to cause some collateral damage.

And in her current state? There was a very real possibility all those deadly emergency backups would actually be deadly.

Fuck.

"Stop!" I shouted.

Several cutting lasers that had been telescoping out on nasty looking arms stopped. They turned towards my voice, and it had the eerie effect of making it look like the damned things were looking at me.

I figured I should make everything here look menacing since the point was to make people contemplate the huge mistake they'd made trying to track me down just before they were ended.

"My companion is a friend," I said. "I would've thought the computer would've already figured that out and added her to the approved list."

The second part was muttered under my breath, but I was pretty sure the computer could hear it regardless. I'd intended for the new computer system to hear it.

After all, this was a learning opportunity. The new computer had been smart enough to activate the emergency protocol, but obviously not quite smart enough to include Fialux in the friends list.

Computers without true AI. Computers with AI, for that matter. It was a crapshoot. Make it smart enough and it tries to kill you and take over the world. Make it dumb enough and it potentially kills some of your friends because it's not smart enough to know not to kill your friends unless you tell it not to kill your friends.

I picked Fialux up and hefted her over my shoulder. I really hoped she hadn't broken anything terribly necessary to her continued survival when she took those hits. I just didn't know enough about how that ray Dr. Lana used had worked on her, or about her alien anatomy, assuming she had alien anatomy, to know whether or not I was doing harm.

That was the real bitch about trying to do first responder care for someone who was presumably from another world while improbably having a body that looked like something straight out of central casting at a modeling agency.

I couldn't be sure I wasn't hurting her by accidentally moving a part of her that wasn't all that critical on humans but could be very critical on whatever species she represented. What if she kept the equivalent of her spine in her left knee or something and I accidentally knocked it the wrong way?

Improbable, but I just didn't know. I did know leaving her here unconscious in this dummy lab surrounded by a bunch of killing machines that might decide to take a swipe at her no matter what I told them wasn't going to work long term.

I walked over to an elevator. I stepped inside and hit a long combination of numbers that had seemed like a clever idea at the time. I figured it'd keep anyone I didn't want around from using this elevator for its intended purpose, but now as I stood here with Fialux slung over my shoulder, I couldn't help but think it was a huge waste of time.

A huge waste of time and a potential risk. It'd been so long since I put in this combination that I was having trouble remembering the whole thing.

Pro tip for any aspiring villains out there. If you're going to put in a code that could potentially result in a failsafe being activated that scrambles all your molecules and teleports them all around the world and into deep space if you get it wrong? Maybe rehearse that number once in a while so you don't forget it.

Hitting the proper combination on the elevator activated the only real escape from this place. There was only one floor to the dummy lab, and it was buried deep beneath the city on the complete opposite from the suburb where my lab was located. It also had several teleportation jammers that spooled up as soon as someone teleported in and didn't turn off until I entered the password.

If the right combination was entered then the elevator would immediately activate a site-to-site teleportation to a mirror teleporter in my real lab.

If the wrong combination was entered? Well it would still teleport someone out of the dummy lab, but their molecules would do the aforementioned scattering to the wind and deep space rather than being reconstituted at the right location.

Needless to say I'd entered that number time and time again and memorized it several times over. And I was discovering now that no amount of memorizing at the time helped if I didn't reinforce it, so I was sweating a little.

Imagine my relief when the world glowed one final time and I reappeared inside my real lab.

We'd survived. That or I'd been sent on to my eternal reward and it looked a lot like my lab, which was sort of my idea of heaven on earth.

And if it was heaven on earth then I had work to do.

"Computer, prepare a medical bay for Fialux. We need to have a look at her and see how extensive the damage is."

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