The ultra high-pitch of it made Atomic Vapor veritably wince. This sound wasn’t anything like the dry run tests he remembered. He was all the way out in Firebase Zulu when the alarm was raised. Implanted subcutaneously upon becoming a member of Apotheosis, the Super Group Red Alert Mechanism, SGRAM, had never been used before. Something had gone horribly wrong.
All the portals en route denied him access and he wondered if he was the first ever hero to seek entry to his own base through the sewers by way of a once contiguous concrete floor. By the time AV reached the secret base, pushing aside snapped rebar and rubble, he couldn’t believe his eyes. There’d been some sort of explosion. Emergency lighting was active, but strobing painfully staccato images across a darkened lair, a lagged slideshow of destruction and doom. Atomic Vapor had heard about rival leagues of arch-villains gaining the power to call down a nuclear attack from space, but surely this had not happened here. Apotheosis anonymity could never be compromised and the pulverized remains of whatever had taken place looked far from nuclear fallout or even a Rikti bomb.
The generator was strewn about the back end of the enclosure in hunks and shards, none larger than a volley ball, some embedded deeply in the cracked walls like buckshot. The inspiration collector had gone dreadfully dark and silent, all of its precious contents evacuated to thin air. Charred walls crumbled to black dust in starburst patterns well into the upended lounge. The thirteen ton vault door lay blasted from its hinges askew and precariously breasted over the corner of that same scorched room, rare salvage spilt and broken in piles where they’d chaotically come to rest. Trophy cases shattered, ceiling sections hanging chadlike from threads of once solid construction, more than one transporter bleeding caustic, viscous fluid which ate away the floor beneath them; it was as if the proverbial seventh seal had been opened. Still, items can be replaced, and nothing so trivial as the loss of a few big ticket appliances could stir this level of fear in the hero. No, the dread of the scene instead mounted in a tally of flesh and blood.
Super heroes pushed to the brink in battle often tap into unseen drive, a final burst of motivation that suspends combat strategy and pits pure good against pure evil to even ultimate demise. Since WWII and the first Rikti invasion, Paragon City had stacked the odds in favor of its super heroes with its HRS, Hospital Reclaimator System, ripping power-drained bodies away in the nick of that time when those paladins themselves refused to quit the fight of their lives. Sadly, going so often to the gaping maw of suicide by counter-threat, it’s easy to forget that even super heroes have limitations.
Orleans was unconscious and not breathing. Draped across Mantlet’s two arms like a tranquilized giant boa, it was obvious the HRS was off-line, at least here. Defiantly, energy seeped from Orleans’ hands, popping off secondary explosions and forcing Mantlet, dizzy though he was, to keep a tanker’s eye on the changing backdrop as he moved. Friendly fire could only make things worse. The tank was scurrying to find an alternate exit in all the smoke, peaked with frustration as his tainted armor helmet could not be removed to administer mouth to mouth.
Fjordbotten, abraised and bleeding blue, frantically tried to lockdown afterblasts at multiple workstations, electrics arching and semi-conductors melting down all around him. The air grew thin, but what little was left in his lungs would be no good to Orleans either, this blaster once having attempted CPR in the far wilds of Croatoa, only to freeze an innocent young girl’s lungs instantaneously.
Rickey Jackson had a similar dilemma. Blood from his head wounds streaming in helix patterns over the creases between his strained muscles, all extricated from his uniform, he’d slung Marzipan Fritter and Steel Blossom each over a shoulder in a double dead-man’s carry. Cut off from the portal lobby, no way of knowing it had been buried in an avalanche of cement, the transporters powered down, damaged, and now leaning like dominoes, he hoisted the two comatose bodies from fire and had worn the skin off of his knuckles pounding straight through a wall attempting liberation.
Cacaphony lay supine on the floor near the defunct reclaimator, thrashing wildly as if in the throes of a grand mal seizure. He could muster no sound from his implants, not even a simple “help me,” and the situation saw to it then that the few pounds and taps his helmet made against the cold, harsh floor were buried in the bedlam clamor of sparks, breaks, and crashes throughout the base. Inside his helmet, a graver story. Being naturally deaf, the subcutaneous SGRAM would not have been an option for Cacaphony, his, instead, attuned technologically to the implants that had made of him a hero and an artificial ear. All his superstandard gizmos knocked off-line, only the back-up powered emergency SGRAM kept whining at ten-fold it’s intended volume, skull-crackingly shrill and all encased in Cacaphony’s own head, a torture for him and him alone.
Cosmic Voodoo was pinned beneath a toppled set of reinforced shelves usually used to hold Flambeau’s endless community stock. Getting pinned was embarrassment enough for a gravity controller who could normally will the shelves to fly across the room, but that insult had only been added to severe injury. At best Voodoo was too stunned to manifest powers, but at worst he thought he could feel a small chink in his pate, bleeding out. Flambeau Noir, one leg broken, tried in desperation to urge the obstruction up off of his teammate using a single shoulder and everything he could do to tamp down his area effects so as not to fry a trapped Voodoo alive. This tank, however, as heroic by all measures as the others, had a longer history of wounds and pain. The matters his mind would have most easily thwarted, weighed heavier on the happenstance physicality of his body. His good leg didn’t want to cooperate and his back swelled into an arched position rocking up like clay in a kiln. As Flambeau’s bones creaked and popped, the adrenaline pumping through him sent most everything into spasm. The best he could accomplish without help was a motionless tableau, the shelf half-perched upon him, half squeezing the life out of Voodoo, midway from his goal but just enough to allow Voodoo to breathe. Flambeau hollered for help just before the emergency lights gave out altogether.
Those very few who could, wasted no time in blazing out random heals. It was disorienting, and of little use. Barely finding compatriots amidst the pitch and the toxic hazes, scattered as they were, the greenish glow of heals would veritably snow blind the heroes making each pause in their rescue efforts. The injured were too spaced apart for any concentrated fix, some cut off completely, and each pause was precious time that could not now be squandered. Heals, scarce though they were, did more harm than good.
Others en route, not yet aware of the accidental sewer entrance, Atomic Vapor was the only fully able body poised to mount a true rescue. His head on a quick swivel, his mind’s eye triaging the shrouded casualties around him, he came to a crossroads that every hero dreads. Who was the priority? What was the priority? How do you pick between friends, between heroes? Flashes of tragic permutation swept blank his normally keen mind. One, a picture of him lowering Voodoo into the ground alongside the famed but elusive Caste Iron’s grave. Another showed him frozen in a block of ice as the master villain Endotherm laughed over Fjordbotten’s dwarfed casket. Yet another vision centralized him in everlasting solo battle against the enraged ghosts of Apotheosis as they poured from a spirit ship in Talos Island. It was enough to make a hero numb in his tracks. There was no way to choose.
A few clicks and bleeps situated themselves in the explosive rumblings as Atomic took action. He’d pulled a trinket from its familiar hiding place on his costume and in no time an Ouroboros portal opened before him. The squared serpent was obscured to a nightlight glow beneath all the thick vapors, but it was enough for Atomic to step through in a flash. Flambeau caught a brief glimpse of AV leaving and allowed doubt to enter in. Purged of all inspiration, the shelves pressed on Noir crushingly, forcing him down to a knee. It was unlike any member of Apotheosis to take exception to a colleague’s methods, but to Flambeau, it simply seemed like AV had left them to fend alone. Mysteriously, it seemed to him the second such glimpse of an AV retreat. Thusly, Flambeau birthed a personal demon.
There was an abnormal stir in Ouroboros. Sure people came and went by portal as the norm, but it was rare any one would burst through in a display of sparks and smoke discharging just behind. This entrance foretold of crucial needs and visitors all stepped back from crystals, growing concerned and quiet. The interchange between Atomic Vapor and Mender Lazarus was brief. Lazarus wasn’t buying the story. Crystals would not be attuned to every Tom, Dick, and Hero that came through unannounced. Time travel was the stuff of greater “good” and not personal gain. Lazarus’ mission was clear and he dared not divert from it, that is, until Atomic Vapor breeched the professional strictures of herodom and slammed Lazarus’ face down in the pool like he was trying to drown a bag of cats. Ill affording the scene, Mender Lazarus attuned a new crystal and sent Atomic, hastily, back in time.
Matters of minutes proved matters of menace. Atomic Vapor had bought himself only the tiniest slice of leeway into the past. As best he could tell, he was in the Apotheosis base mere moments prior to the blast. That meant that not only was the clock ticking, but that if he didn’t come up with a solution, he too would be caught in the blast and negate his solo status as uninjured deliverer.
The base was loud and already vibrating. AV was right. There were no Rikti bombs in sight, no nuclear attack sirens filling the air. There was a bustle of hero activity in every room, but it was the workshop that was of particular note. On a widescreen mounted above rolled a 3D display mapping honeycombed models labeled with Mantlet’s unmistakable constitutional wit. The ones AV could see were marked as Victory, Liberty, Champion, Protector, and Triumph and all stemmed from a dodecahedron marked in larger letters for which Mantlet had chosen the name Freedom. Heroes were yelling above the tumult, half with soldier-like professionalism, half with the sporadic humor that fends off PTSD.
Fjordbotten was the first voice to rise above the ruckus. “I don’t know, Brother. Protector seems the eighth no-go and I don’t know how much longer we can power this experiment!”
Mantlet responded, “I’m telling you, I’ve got one on the Triumph block. It’s faint, but if we don’t make contact now we might never get another chance at this!”
Orleans loudly interjected, “Sounds like a bad time, then, to ask him if the Saints won the Super Bowl in there!”
AV could make out what looked like the severed outlines of an Ouroboros ingress pulsing spasmodically over a cross-hatching of bent Rikti portals. Force of habit twitched AV’s head around and over each shoulder scanning for an extra terrestrial Communications Officer or band of monkeys. None were in sight.
Fjordbotten, ever the scientist, remained in a countdown style mode of hollering. “4000 megajoules and climbing!”
Orleans flipped his assigned switches, but countered Fjord’s tone. “Uh Mant, I’d rather not be in two city-wide disasters in one lifetime. What’s say we wrap this up and have a parade?!”
Mantlet tuned them out. “Gus! His name is Gus!”
Fjord urged, “4500 megajoules, tacking!”
Orleans again, “Okay, tell Gus we said ‘hey’ and that we got a big ol’ megajoule problem on this side and he should maybe take a step or two back from the light!”
Mantlet still on his keyboard typing furiously, “He’s trying to step through. I’m telling him to stop and explaining as fast as I can type! Damned fingers!”
Flambeau reassured, “Mantlet, we should close now! I have the salvage! We can do this again!”
Orleans smiled, “What kind of a super hero name is Gus, anyway?!”
Marzipan Fritter peeped his head from around the corner. “My master, Dokkalfar says there is a hero that awaits everyone when the veil of life has been drawn back and the power of the other side revealed!”
Mantlet now sounded frightened. “Rickey, Steel, please take that kid in the other room!”
Atomic Vapor couldn’t wait any longer. “What on Earth is it?!”
Fjordbotten continued, “Paradimensional portal, beta test one, for the next ten seconds anyway! Mantlet, send, send, send!”
Atomic had never heard of a paradimensional portal. To be honest, he’d missed a few Super Group meetings. In another instance there might have been time for regret, but this one allowed for only a single mental certainty. Not knowing what it was, meant not knowing how to shut it down before the cursed thing would explode. Mantlet, magical to the end, seemed casually uninterested in the scientific advice flying about him, but duly enthralled with text messages popping up on his monitor from this Gus Faustian, this fellow that Atomic had no way of knowing was from an alternate reality King’s Row. Atomic Vapor felt a ticking clock pacing down to zero hour as if top dead center above his head. Inevitability has that heir about it. The actions taking place around him seemed evermore random and fruitless. Voodoo perused the community stock. Cacaphony popped into the base reclaimator from the heat of the warzone. No one seemed concerned that this questionable experiment might not end well.
Atomic took another turn, “Mantlet, you’ve got to abort! Get out of that hard tanking head of yours and shut this monster down!”
It was too late. All Atomic remembered was a split second of eye contact with Flambeau followed immediately by a quick flash of expanding, fiery light as his jaunt through time came to an abrupt end. He was ejected from the crystal’s aura, forcefully, flying back into the pool behind him, just as the explosion ripped through Apotheosis’ hideout. His unceremonious reentry drew in gasps from onlookers and a deceptively crooked smile from Mender Lazarus who peered down with an “I told you so” expression. The failure of heroes is often absent from the consciousness of everyday Paragon citizens, but among other heroes baring witness, there is no mistaking it. Crouched in the pool, charred and out of breath, hero failure looked just like this. What was worse, the time Atomic had spent in the past might have been better spent in this present, helping to oust his compatriots from their predicament. Whatever the situation in the base now, it was the situation they were stuck with. AV could only pray everyone had gotten out alive. A creepy, almost divine voice emanated down from the oddest Ouroboros buttress, announcing to all, “MISSION FAILED.” Lazarus might as well have hung a banner in giant red letters.
The waiting room at the hospital was like a scene from a Halloween festival. A very sexy cowgirl calling herself Boots was arguing with the stoic receptionist to let her in. She’d brought with her a band of rogue healers in every manner of dress who were under specific instructions to fan out and aid every member of her alma mater SG no matter what the cost. ER beds full, Rickey Jackson was getting his knuckles bandaged by a gaggle of nurses right there in the lobby. Atomic saw Mantlet wrenching his gloved hands in the now bent, plastic seat nearest the coffee maker. He made his way over and sat alongside.
In a frightened tone, AV braved the conversation. “How many made it here? How many did you get out?”
Mantlet nearly whispered, “All of them, I think. Everybody who had a switch to throw at least. They’ll be alright, I guess. We’ve got members in every ward this hospital has to offer, but they’ll be alright. It’s a sad day for justice.”
Atomic glanced back at the front desk. The famed hero, Silver-Suit was now causing a distraction while Boots’ clan dispersed like fireflies through elevators, air vents, and outdoor windows in a classic sweep and clear pattern. He turned his attention back to Mantlet whose chest cavity showed early signs of hyperventilating beneath his armor.
Mantlet shared, “It’s my fault, you know. I should have shut the thing down. I just had to get those instructions through.” He went on for a bit explaining how the signal to Triumph was the only one that had worked, that he never figured on contacting a non-hero. It wouldn’t make sense that a civilian could harness the power necessary for a portal of that magnitude and Mantlet had not accounted for the possibility. The very best he could hope was that the damage on the Triumph end was not as bad as here in Freedom. Heroes can take a punch. This blue-collar Gus and his magic book, though, deserved better than obliteration. “Had I not been writing my memoirs, had I not had those instructions handy, I would have shut it down much sooner.”
Mantlet shed as much of the guilt as he could and started naming off room numbers to AV. Flambeau was in 212, Marzipan in 617B. Steel, Orleans, and Voodoo were completely blocking out the attending schedules in surgery and the ICU. The list seemed endless. But, end it did and then all the helpless heroes could do was wait.
“Wait!” Atomic Vapor broke the silence. “Cacaphony, where’s Caca?!” It came to the blaster that Cacaphony had not been mentioned on that long list of fallen brethren.
Mantlet didn’t understand. His buddy defender had been off in the warzone and wasn’t on the roster for base operations. As far as he knew, Caca was still off bubbling tanks and knocking back Mesmerists over sandbags and barbed wire at Little Round Top.
“What do you mean?”
Atomic stood up. “I saw him! I saw him stream in by reclaimator just before the blast! He was there, I’m telling you! He was there!”
In less than a second, there were massive holes in the revolving glass hospital doors where Mantlet and Atomic Vapor had blasted through, supersonic.
Fjordbotten, still taming the base, saw the two come in. “It’s worse than we thought. I’ve got all stations either shut down or stabilized. The generator is no more, but emergency power is looking at 18% being systems nominal for the moment. We’ve got a new problem though.”
Mantlet interrupted, “No time for that, Doc. We need a hard target search. Cacaphony’s MIA. Atomic says the base reclaimator grabbed him just before the blast.”
Atomic was already turning over crates and barrels. Fjord welled up a bright starburst beneath his speedy feet and shot straight to where the reclaimator had been toppled. Mantlet swooped in as the search became more certain. There, jumbled amidst rubble and slag was Cacaphony, still flailing violently. His arms and legs thrashed and whipped around as if they’d no bones left in them at all. His back kept arching and releasing as if a bow being plucked. The floor about him was potted and marked up with harsh streaks of red and yellow, signs that he’d been scraping his costume in this catywampus manner non-stop since the blast nearly an hour ago.
Mantlet cracked the seal on Caca’s helmet and ripped it off leaving stripped wires and the brittle edges of computer audio cards protruding from the neckline. Tufts of tangled, sweaty red hair and beard burst from beneath the helmet and Atomic could see that so much blood had coursed through Caca’s dark skin that his face looked almost purple. Caca’s pupils were fully dilated, his neck swollen, and the remainder of his body only came to sudden rest in a highly reluctant fashion. Cacaphony let out a long, soft sigh and simply went to sleep. Atomic laid a hand on Caca’s forehead as he listened to Mant’s next orders.
“I want to know what. I want to know how.”
Fjordbotten, already running a diagnostic on the helmet, was on the case. “Well, this is part of it. His entire operating system is gone, just gone. Before you cracked the seal I’d say that everything else was in working order, but somehow the OS has disappeared.”
“What, you mean erased?”
“No, I mean gone. To delete master files like that, one simply drops the first code character from each file so that it is skipped by the booting process. The rest of the file remains there until overwritten or formatted.”
“Someone’s hacked the HRS?”
“No, that didn’t happen here. His software files are still present. Nothing’s been formatted, nothing added. It’s like his operating system was just lifted away. There’s no timing code structure, no log, nothing. SGRAM’s wailing away, but that’s it!”
Atomic chimed in, “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Mantlet lifted Cacaphony and carried him to what was once the lounge. Atomic turned a sofa rightside-up and the defender was laid out to much needed slumber in the peace and quiet of his God-given ears. Though Cacaphony would not have heard them, Fjord, Mantlet, and Atomic Vapor did catch themselves tiptoeing around as they moved past the couch. There were even unwarranted whispers. Respect is a funny animal.
Once back in the workshop, the three took a moment. Mantlet again lead the conversation. “Any ideas?”
Fjord offered, “Yes. One shucking off all coincidence as a matter of fact. Remember I said we had another problem? Have a look at this. Now, that file you sent through to the Triumph block, it was this one, correct?”
Mantlet nodded.
“The Complete and Unedited Instructions on Becoming a Magic Super Hero, a .pdf, no encryption?”
Mantlet nodded again, “Pretty much. You’re the scientist, Doc. I’ve got what I came on board with and what I’ve learned while fighting crime. Most of that is informed by the magical curse on this armor, not a schematic. Mainstream tech is a staple for me.”
Atomic keyed in, “So what? The guy likes Acrobat and Firefox. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in Warburg?”
“Well, look. This file is about 40 MB, tops, right? No graphics to speak of. Add that to how many texts, maybe ten or eleven, each less than a sentence or two in length? Well, that’s no more than 50 MB if we’re lucky.” Fjord paused.
Atomic again raised a brow. “I’m not following.”
“Now take a look at this back-up log. Mantlet you may have only sent through a few neat catch phrases on that really weak signal, but something else piggy-backed over. The log may be a shambles, ACSII here, corruption there, but look at the size of it. At the exact same time index of your 40 megabyte file, nearly 95 terabytes went through. I couldn’t even figure how that was possible.”
Atomic noted, “I don’t even think we have that much data in the computer core.”
Mantlet started in again, “We don’t. Our data is broken up to several independent servers over at Freedom Phalanx, refreshed on the half-hour. It’s so the Rikti could never steal one incriminating data block in a single attack.”
Fjordbotten came to his conclusion. “Mantlet’s right. I developed the system myself. Even the transporter pattern buffers are independent from the main computer core. We couldn’t reach 95 centralized and accessible terabytes of information in the half hour if we tried. But look, Caca’s operating system. It’s all stored on advanced flash memory compressed into squarish blocks, layered. Sure he’s sup’ed up, but his OS is finite, maybe a couple gigs worth of drivers, executables, and macros. The rest is all virtual memory.”
“Two gigs verses 95 TB. What’s the coincidence?”
“His storage capacity. In his tech’ memory blocks alone, 94.88 TB flat! Something was lifted out of his servos and sent for a ride to Triumph, taking his OS with it.”
Mantlet’s concern grew. “But you said, no hacking in the HRS. I assumed that meant no hacking at all.”
Fjord finished, “You assumed correctly. Nobody hacked a thing, good Brother. It would do no one any good to hack essentially blanked virtual memory, no good at all. Whatever left Cacaphony’s implants system…decided to go. It’s sentient. Your experiment provided it with its first means of escape and it chose to leverage that opportunity.”
Atomic Vapor’s head dropped. It wasn’t often that heroes found out they were dealing with a new threat, but when they did it was cause for quick reflection. He knew that if whatever this mass of memory could be was on the side of righteousness, it would have stayed around, made contact. It wouldn’t have taken an electronic leap that left a level 50 hero tortured on the floor. This thing, this ghost in the machine, would prove in all ways wrong.
Mantlet’s evil armor started pulsing. It was as if his interlocking plates sensed a new companion evil, taking physical glee in the idea that this threat was out of Mantlet’s goody-goody reach. Mantlet himself needed no reassurance that it was true. His armor told him all he needed to know. “What next then?”
Fjordbotten answered, “I don’t know there is anything we can do. We’ll get the base in shape. I’ll conference in the Alpine devs and reinstall Caca’s OS. With a little work I am reasonably assured the massive data burst will prove the culprit for the explosion, not our generator giving out. We all know where the gift shop is in the hospital. Hey, as horrible as it sounds, if we’re lucky, there would have been a similar explosion on the other end. Your new friend Gus may have paid a morbid price, but Caca’s monster would most certainly be destroyed in the process. Otherwise, something completely new would have been unleashed on the quantum personages of Triumph. Heaven help them if that happened.”
--------------------------------------------
“Mushi, mushi.”
Grammy Weist had dialed the wrong number. The assisted living facility she now treated as home was no stranger to its more Alzheimer’s skewed patients calling Guam or Haiti when ordering a vegetarian pizza. Much of that was the phone company’s fault. They never did take into consideration how changes in area codes impact the elderly. Grammy, however, was instead the repeated victim of a roommate who used the community telephone to dial partial numbers, Murray Hill 70844 and the like. Sometimes Grammy would pick up the wireless headset, not realizing a few digits were already keyed in, and accidentally finish it off with the modern area code she’d use to start dialing her nephew. She’d made acquaintances in Nepal and Luxembourg and today would be her first experience with Osaka, Japan.
It was 2 a.m. in Osaka and the power plant foreman didn’t take kindly to his staffers receiving personal calls that interrupted his never-ending high seas stories. He picked up the receiver, uttered a quick greeting, and when nobody answered in the two seconds he’d allotted for a story time pause, he hung up again and grumbled as if he could ever lose his place in the oration.
Before him, two trainees were all ears, bored to tears but daring not to let on as that could mean their jobs. Another three workers clacked away at keyboards and hardly wondered if Hirokoson would ever grow aware that they weren’t working at all. Toru was sending Kanji chat to some young Devo fan he’d been stringing along for months. Under their breath, Takei and Mioshu debated lame gaming builds as Mioshu used corporate bandwidth and a high security clearance to play one of his fourteen MMOs. With Hirokoson fixed on the trainees, and not yet even to the chapter in his tale whereby he claims to have seen a sea nymph, the three could watch cartoon porn and get away with it.
Takei looked straight ahead at his monitor while debating. He would tip his hand for nobody. “I am telling you. Those gremlin thingies, those machine ghosts or whatever they are cannot be mutants. The very fact that they are made of electricity means they are somehow technology or science based. Mutation is a twisted biology.”
Takei referred of course, to the view Mioshu had up in his game, a turn of the century release that loosely translated to Village of Villains. Mioshu had zoomed the camera angle onto a red entity of some sort that lived below a transformer and looked vaguely to be composed of arcing electrons. Mioshu, however, was of a different opinion.
“You can’t say that definitively. If electric bolts were somehow alive, they too would have an evolutionary process and that would mean mutation, not technology. I can make a mutant alt if I want and I’ll make him out of chemical solvent or fire or whatever the hell I please, thank you very much.”
Takei still kept his eyes forward. “Always thick headed. Look, my elf will be an elf, my dragon a dragon and if I need to throw in some flair, I have nothing against making a night elf or a gnome bard. Mutation based in lab science or tech’ is simply a bastardization of the fiction’s intent. You’ll be laughed out of your guild. And another thing…what’s with all the American servers? There are plenty of servers to log in to with near zero population this time of night and no lag right down the street.”
Mioshu remained undaunted. “Gaming is global. Get used to it. I don’t mind the local options, but whenever I exclude continental versions of the game, I am always relegated to my toons looking like children’s anime. I don’t know about you, but I think part of the whole experience is the different artistic take on villains worldwide. I mean, take this character for instance.”
Mioshu pointed out a toon he had up on screen. Takei could see in his peripheral vision that it looked heavily anime influenced and above its head he saw that Mioshu had named him something in English characters that read Wolvensense. The toon was obviously a ninja, black clothes, stealthy, face covered. It had a standard ninja blade from the movies and few features to distinguish it as anything else. The name had come from Mioshu’s hacker beginnings, a screen name he’d stumbled across while attempting credit card scams in his troubled youth. It was a plain-Jane ninja in austere, having climbed the gaming ladder to level 50 quickly without much time for frills or costume revamps. Mioshu hoped a name that defied translation would jazz the character into fuller meaning. Takei briefly pondered bringing to his lips a “so what” with the quick justification that anything ninja was going to be at least distantly anime influenced when the unmistakable jet engine-like roar of turbines shutting down shook the foundation of the entire plant.
Screens went blank. Red emergency lights spun to life and alarms of all kinds spilled into earshot as far away as the Chinese coast. Toru’s chair vibrated away from his station while Mioshu and Takei sprang to their feet and tried to once again get control of their stations. The trainees ran to the interior window trying to see what exactly was going wrong.
Hirokoson remained calm. “Okay, Takei, I want you to switch to auxiliary power and then secondary controls. I hope you have your keystroke sequences memorized because it doesn’t look like those monitors are coming back any time soon. Mioshu, reroute power through junctions 14, 237, and 612. Shunt the excess according to procedure. I don’t want any surges. Toru, get on the horn and scramble a specialists crew to the main turbines. Have emergency vehicles standing by at every exit to the building. I’m going down to assess and troubleshoot locally. Get it done, gentlemen. There are 17 million people showing up for work in the morning and they’ll have power if I have anything to do with it.”
What Hirokoson had not figured on was his heroic monologue extending too far into the emergency to be of use. Almost rashly, blast doors dropped one at a time throughout the plant cutting off sub-sections and forcing open the emergency shaft above the night shift operations team at their terminals. Hirokoson tried to smash through the glass with a chair making little headway. These men had an exit. The ones out on the floor did not. The overwhelmed trainees scurried up the tubed ladder without even attempting to normalize the turmoil behind them. Hirokoson found himself trying to holler orders through the glass for all personnel to diagnose and lock down if they could, to take cover if they could not. Toru gestured that the red line was down as Mioshu pushed back from his keyboard. At room’s center, sizzling up from between Mioshu’s keys like popcorn overflowing, were thousands of white beads of light, purple strings arcing between them, and a swarm of yellowed sparks blasting volcanically from the top of it all. Attention turned away from the glass and in on the phenomenon as grown men recoiled from the sight. It rose, popping off function keys and cracking the keyboard in the process. Higher it went, spilling over the edges of the counter and melting computer casings in a one meter radius. Toru bolted for the blast door, ripping off two of his fingernails trying to lift the slab manually. Hirokoson’s eyes widened as he went silent for the first time in months. Mioshu and Takei just froze; this wasn’t in the protocol handbook. The mass congealed, sizzling even more as it did. It was at once almost magnetic to flesh and antithetical to reason. Larger blast doors slid down over the glass. Whites of eyes seared in the simple act of looking on. Osaka Alternative Fuels would be front page news by daybreak.
Creases in the white, luminescent spume ignited thick shadows that bled and pulsed beneath its arcing, voltaic rind with glinting kernels maneuvering from the mound’s pith into cannonade eruptions high and low. Its electrified jots and tittles crackling, sputtering, fusing one on another and all to wrench the birthright of form. Mioshu’s jaw dropped. It was Wolvensense, brighter, enlivened, more stylish and apparisive, all the beckoning things his in-game ninja should have been. Its contours winced incessantly, still scalding the air around, as it drew from its nebulous core a solid steel Sarasin’s blade. The notch at Mioshu’s throat, it spoke English, “Where…is…Robert?”
Mioshu’s English was rusty, and that cost him a deep slice to the jugular. Toward Takei the monster tilted, “Where…is…Robert?”
Takei hadn’t taken a second language and for that choice his head was dispatched from his body. Localized thunderclaps still giving out all around it, the ghost from the machine poised in ninjitsu stance, trained next on Hirokoson. The foreman was quivering. Under his navy trained breaths he kept sputtering only the word “mononoke, mononoke,” seagoing folklore for demons. Toru tried to tune to Hirokoson’s frail whispers, but as fear would have it, he instead thought he heard “obake, obake” a similar mythological construct better fitting this horrifying bloodbath. Hirokoson mustered soldieresque courage before the question was even posed and charged the radical, black-eyed beast empty-handed. One could have hung a medal over the protrusions from the manner in which he got run through.
Ornamented with increasing detail and figure, tracer combustibles ever rocketing about it, the mutant ninja stalker purposed his blade last upon Toru. The poor loner attempted to refute the question thricely before it had even been asked.
“There are heroes here to stop you, you know? Your world was created in our image.”
“What do you want? Truly! What is this Robert to you?”
“Have you no heart?! Honor you no code?! ”
The hilt of the blade formed into an ornate grip. The aberration’s malformed outline took on fleshlike textures as fountains of grayed light pulled from its victim’s corpses into its contorted polestar. Its dark glare beamed into Toru’s weeping eyes. “Where…is…Robert?”
Toru, struck with the sudden flashes of wisdom reputed to immediately precede an intrepid demise, slowly raised a finger and pointed directly at the obake. The finger shook in terror as Toru’s sightline clicked back on the disheveled keyboard from whence the obake had travailed. His lips parted to answer and that was the last thing they did.
More >>
