Foresight Central Station was a marvel of engineering, design, and architecture. One of the first buildings constructed with superpowers as part of the labour force, they'd been granted free reign to go wild with the project.
The famous golden arches would have bankrupted a small country and probably crashed the gold market if they hadn’t been spawned by a man with a transmutation power who promptly sold his services to a particular raw materials company to the tune of billions. The paintings flowing across the ceilings and walls moved like giant projected videos, figures from famous works of art casually mingling and chatting with one another. Ten-metre tall robotic automatons stood guard at every corner, their dispassionate emerald eyes always watchful for troublemakers; even at the height of superpowered tensions, no supervillain attack had ever succeeded here.
It was awesome. It was magical. It was widely regarded as one of the wonders of the post-superpower world.
It was comfortably my least favourite building in the entire city. You see, a site as wondrous and beautiful as this meant one thing.
Crowds.
There was an endless din of conversation echoing through the cavernous rooms, a head-splitting buzz. Throngs of people flooded through the place, more a single living mass than a crowd of thousands. Millions upon millions passed through here every day, and as Ashika and I tried to push our way through the mayhem to get off our train, I couldn’t help wondering if every single one of those millions was here right now.
The amount of signals here was dizzying. They blended together into a hissing white noise, a confusing fusion of resonance that felt like one massive signal, individual signatures impossible to distinguish. Technically, it was illegal to use powers here, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was impossible to enforce, and people knew it. The authorities probably figured the automatons would deal with anything that posed actual danger.
Ashika frowned at me over her shoulder, then snatched my wrist in an unyielding grip and started pulling me along. “I know you don’t like crowds, Emmett, but come on,” she said.
“This is the worst place in the world,” I said with a grimace.
“Poor baby,” Ashika drawled.
“This many people shouldn’t be allowed to gather in one place.”
“It’s not so bad. You weren’t so bothered back on the day of the test.”
“I knew a shortcut to avoid it all!”
“Well, we don’t need a shortcut here,” Ashika said with a grin, then marched forwards, dragging me along with her in spite of my protests.
As the main travel hub of the city, Central Station boasted forty platforms for regular trains that could take one anywhere in the city, and there were ten more for high speed rail covering the other cities that had popped up within a few hundred miles. Even so, it shouldn’t have taken us the better part of half an hour to get out of the labyrinthine building, and I inwardly cursed the city planners for allowing corporations to tack on dozens of department stores and other buildings onto the station, which had been built shortly after Foresight Tower itself.
There was some attempt at maintaining order with white lines on the ground to guide people and there were plenty of staff about to hurry people along, but the crowds moved slowly.
We were forced to follow the flow of the crowd, inching along the platform, then through the automated ticket gates, beneath the high arches that led to the crowded central atrium without pausing to gawk at the giant superhero statues taking up the centre of the floor, before following a winding path through the teeming masses and down a maze of corridors until signs marked ‘exit’ mercifully came into view.
Ashika pulled me along the whole way, shamelessly shouldering through the crowd and shrugging off the glares and curses directed her way. She made a good battering ram even in her base state; she did have to be careful not to let her power charge though, so she stuttered to a stop every now and then.
We made it out into the city centre of Foresight, which was just as disgustingly packed as the station, and its giant neon art installations shining from the sides of towering buildings were dazzling to the eyes. The noise hit us like a physical force, the din of voices, music playing from brightly coloured stores, and the thunder of countless footsteps.
A huge LED screen covered the front of the tall building directly across the street from this exit, depicting the ‘core’ Olympians in full costume, all confident grins and heroic poses. Though they were a worldwide team, many people considered them to be Foresight’s hometown group, and that was reflected in the giant advertising boards depicting their likenesses while holding up various products.
And the superheroes on view weren’t just faces on a screen; there were a few flying around overhead. I hadn’t been keeping up as closely with cape news recently, more focused on superpower research, otherwise I definitely would’ve known that the Waywardens were making an appearance. They were standing on a translucent floating platform, and their presence went a long way to explaining the roar of the crowd. Ash was giving a speech, but I reluctantly tuned it out. Couldn’t stick around, sadly.
It was all overwhelming, too much stimulation for me. Out here I knew the way though, so at least the crowds weren’t so much of a concern. Ashika stayed close on my heels as I picked a path to our destination, lamenting once again that it just had to be in the city centre. Visiting Foresight Tower itself was always awesome in a way, but over the years I’d decided that it wasn’t really worth the stress of getting there unless I had a very good reason.
Ashika was going for power testing. I was going there to badger the brightest minds in the field of superpower research. Important enough reasons for a trip, I’d felt. I was trying not to regret it now.
The ziggurat-shaped building towered over even the tallest skyscrapers, and that was without taking into account the obelisk that speared out of its peak. Its construction was a mystery, utilising techniques far beyond human understanding even with superpowers at our disposal. Great glass panels that shouldn’t have been able to hold the weight, staying standing despite no visible support, held enclosed decreasing tiers of platforms that floated in the air—also without support.
It wasn’t the greatest example of power frenzy anymore, but there was something to be said for being the first. It was iconic, a world wonder. Space elevators and interplanetary portals couldn't compare.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
With a floorspace spanning hundreds of miles, the ziggurat was large enough for hundreds of different organisations to make it their base of operations without even mentioning the tower above it, and among them was Superverse’s power research laboratories. They took up the majority of the 122nd floor, which was only a few below the staircase that took one from the ziggurat to the tower. Their equipment was second to none, specialised in testing every little detail of a superpower one could think of. Ashika had been going monthly since her first test had ranked her signal’s output at C. They even paid her for it.
Blessedly, the route to the elevators was a familiar one, so the crowds here weren’t as much of a bother as the station. The ziggurat didn’t actually rest on the ground, but instead on giant metal supports that speared down into the Earth—they’d never been able to reach the bottom of the round metal rods, leading to some people believing they descended right into the planet’s core. Given the sheer weight they must’ve been supporting for nearly two decades, it was an easy conspiracy to believe.
The basement level of the ziggurat was an open area that anyone could walk through, with escalators reaching down from holes drilled in the outer edges of the ziggurat’s base and staircases spiralling around the giant support rods to bear people up to its lowest, widest floor. The rest of the basement was mostly a giant, multipurpose market I’d never been much interested in. Too easy to get lost.
In turn, the ‘ground’ floor of the building was devoted primarily to the transparent tubes that bore people to higher floors of the ziggurat, where the bulk of the arcology’s inhabited areas lay. Black cylinders were constantly zipping through the tubes, making the place look like a giant old-school mail room. There were stalls set up here and there, as if the markets from the basement had overflowed into the ziggurat proper.
Ashika and I picked our way to one corner of the ground floor—which was a considerable walk from the staircase we’d walked up—where the tubes leading to restricted areas stood. These were watched by security and required permission to use. Ashika flashed a badge at a security guard with a dark power sign around his eyes, and he waved us through. The two of us stepped inside one of the cylinders, and were soon enshrouded in darkness.
“122nd floor,” Ashika said, and a large number appeared hovering in the air above us. It started ticking up rapidly, reaching 20 in a second and climbing, but we felt no motion. There wasn’t even any sound. It was like stepping into an isolation chamber, and it was always a little unnerving.
It cut off the buzz of signals from outside though, which was nice. Now Ashika’s was the only one I was dealing with, and hers was so familiar it was actually comforting.
“So, how badly are the eggheads gonna want to kill you at the end of today?” Ashika asked, crossing her arms and leaning against the curved black wall. Her signal settled to a low simmer; she was tapping a finger on her elbow.
“I’m usually pretty good at not being too annoying,” I said.
Ashika snorted. “Well, I guess they’d just refuse to let you come along if they didn’t want you there.”
“They do that because they want you to keep coming, to be fair.”
“Well, I want you along, so they’re gonna have to put up with you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Ashika said. She eyed me for a moment, oddly hesitant.
“What?” I asked.
She gave a sigh. “What’ll you do if there’s no improvement to your rank?”
I let out a sigh of my own, though mine was of relief. I’d been worried for a second at her uncharacteristic uncertainty; this was something I’d considered extensively over the past 24 hours.
“Nag them until they run more tests,” I said.
Ashika blinked. “Seriously?”
“There has to be a reason my signal is acting this way. They’ve never cared about me in the past, because someone anomalously weak apparently isn’t of interest to them, but there must be something among their billions of dollars of specialised equipment that can explain what’s wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Ashika said immediately, frowning. “You’re awesome.”
“Thanks for believing in me,” I said sincerely with a wry smile, “but you know what I mean. There’s some kind of malfunction here, and today’s the day I find out what. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
Ashika nodded as the number above us ticked over to 122. She spoke as the blackness parted like a curtain, revealing a white corridor with ‘Superverse’ written along one wall in blocky red letters. “I’ll tell them I won’t take any more tests until they’ve done yours.”
At the end of the corridor was a male secretary in a crisp suit behind a white desk, and he smiled politely as Ashika approached. “Good morning, Miss Sharma,” he said, his voice deep and smooth. There was a faint powersign discoloration around his eyes that makeup and shiny glasses couldn’t quite conceal.
“Yo, Jean,” Ashika said with a lazy wave. “Dr Klein ready yet?”
Jean typed away at a laser-projected keyboard for a moment, looking at a screen that I at first thought was just invisible from our angle before I noticed the faint images moving on his glasses. Augmented reality tech. “Dr Klein will be with you shortly,” he said after a moment, still smiling. “Would your friend like to wait for you in the waiting room while you carry out your tests? There’s plenty of entertainment on offer.”
“Nah, he’s coming with me,” Ashika said.
Jean the Secretary just nodded, conceding to her demand immediately. To be fair to him, Superverse paid a lot of money to poke and prod at Ashika every month, taking readings from her power. Superpower research was an arms race, and there was a hell of a lot of money and political power in it for anyone who could provide new insights to the various governments of the world, quite apart from the obvious advantages of knowing more about powers for themselves.
Superverse, of course, had ulterior motives on top of that, seeing as they had so much invested in the superpowered entertainment business. Honestly, I suspected at least half of their interest in Ashika was to butter her up for appearing on one of their shows, some day. People were so sure of her eventual rise to S-rank, there’d been a bidding war for rights to study her; so far, no S-rank had been interested in playing the corpo game, and they probably had hopes of grooming her into being amenable. More fool them, Ashika was as into becoming a hero as I was.
Moments after Ashika finished speaking, a rectangular space on the wall behind the desk brightened and then vanished, revealing a blond, bespectacled man in scrubs and a lab coat. Dr Klein’s blue eyes brightened as he took in Ashika, and he strode forward with his hand held out. “Miss Sharma! Lovely to see you,” he said as she shook his hand. A faint signal emanated from him, but he had no powersign active.
“Yeah,” Ashika muttered. She’d always hated the reverence these guys gave her, and said it felt fake. I wasn’t so sure. If I was a researcher, I’d be equally enthusiastic to work with her. Hell, I was enthusiastic to work with her.
Dr Klein noticed me and, despite knowing exactly who I was and what my problems with my powers were, his smile didn’t slip an inch. He didn’t bother with a handshake though, I couldn’t help but notice. “And Mister Shaw! It’s been a while since I’ve seen you at one of these.”
“I was hoping I could borrow some of your equipment for a bit,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster.
“That sounds wonderful,” Dr Klein said. If he was bothered about this situation, he didn’t show it. In a way, that kind of strengthened my theory about their motives and Ashika's feeling about their sincerity or lack thereof. If studying Ashika’s power was their primary objective, he would’ve been pissed. He was no Dr Shimada, but he was a well-known researcher and his brain was in demand. He gestured to the door. “If you’d both step this way?”
Ashika arched an eyebrow at me, and I took the offered lead. It was time to find out, once and for all, what the hell was wrong with my powers.
... I hope.