Chapter 3
Back to the Past
Leo woke up, standing on a cement walkway in front of a door. The sky was blue; he hadn't seen a blue sky in decades. The doorknob was inches higher than it should have been. No. He was shorter. His arms and hands were young again. Arms no longer extended to his ankles, hands and fingers no longer inhumanly long with fingernails strong enough to claw the bark off trees. The scars and calluses from a lifetime of fighting had vanished. He reached for his face and head and felt hair. His teeth were smaller and human. He was twelve again and he was where he'd been standing when he'd put his implant on his left wrist and absorbed it into his body.
Fifty years ago, twelve-year-old Leo had carried groceries up to an old man's apartment. The old man had given him an implant as a gift and he'd put it on. It was that exact moment Leo found himself reliving in front of that apartment door. One minute passed. Then another.
Hallucination. Had to be. He waited to wake up in a Demigod Boss's mouth.
***
Leo remembered...
Twelve-year-old Leo had been about to walk past the quavery old man standing in front of the Food Mart parking lot with five bags of groceries. He had nothing against old people, but he didn't know this guy. For all he knew, the old man's place could be filled with bodies of kids who'd fallen for the old man's “please help me with my groceries” routine.
Then he saw Brick and Brick's two friends hanging out at the nearby park, and worse, they saw him.
The week before at school, Leo had accidentally bumped into Brick spilling soda on the older, much larger, boy's shirt. Brick's real name was Bernard but nobody called him that if they wanted to live. He wasn't the kind to forgive and forget or listen to reason. In fact, Brick had anger management issues.
Suddenly, the thought of being killed by a crazy old man wasn't such a big deal.
“Hey. Let me help,” he'd said, picking up three bags of what felt like fifty pounds of groceries.
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“I-I really can't pay you much,” the quavery old man said.
“Don't worry about it, I don't mind,” Leo said. He followed the old man down the block towards the large rundown apartment complex where the old man obviously lived. Not even Brick was crazy enough to come after him when he was with an adult. He noticed the larger kid and his friends following him, though.
Leo followed the old man up ten flights of stairs zigzagging up the outside of the apartment complex, feeling like his arms were about to fall off, into a surprisingly normal apartment smelling of dust and old people. A couple of fishing magazines sat awkwardly on a coffee table. Pictures of what he assumed were family members rested on the faded blue walls (no bodies in sight). Exhausted and out of breath, Leo dumped the bags of groceries on a wooden kitchen table.
“I can see you are a kindhearted individual. I can't pay you anything, but I can give you this.” The old man held out what looked like a flat silver metallic strip, half an inch wide, and six inches long. He let it go. It floated in the air, slowly settling on the wooden table next to the groceries.
Leo backed away. “A Demon implant? Are you crazy? Those are illegal. And they cause brain damage.” He recognized the object from cautionary online videos. Nobody knew where these implants had come from, but everyone knew they caused brain damage and homicidal rages.
“Lies,” the old man said. “The implant's competitor, Bio-Blessed Inc, spreads false stories to make this implant look bad.” He held up his left arm, showing him what looked like a violet bracelet glowing under his skin. “I've owned this Brain Augmenting Device, or B.A.D. all my life, and never had a problem. It's a learning aid. That's it. With this implant, if you want to learn tennis, or basketball, you can practice for a couple weeks, and it will be like you practiced for six months or more without it.”
Leo ignored the obvious fallacy of how an old man could possibly have worn the implant all his life. Nobody knew who created the device, but to the best of his knowledge, implants hadn't existed before last year. Two years at the most. Maybe the old man was exaggerating? Or brain damaged?
“Would it help me learn how to fight?” Leo asked, remembering Brick waiting for him.
“Of course,” the old man said. “If you trained for a month in martial arts, it would be like you trained for years without it. You could become the next Bruce Lee if you wanted.”
“Who's Bruce Lee?” Leo asked. “Uh... Never mind that.” Old people were always spouting names he'd never heard of. “You're sure it's safe? I've seen a bunch of videos claiming it turns people into vegetables.”
“Bio-Blessed Inc. spent a lot of money to create those videos. You never see anything about the dangers of the genetic enhancer Bio-Blessed.”
“Wait. Bio-Blessed is dangerous?” Leo asked.
“Exactly. Never touch that shit, kid. That stuff will make you worse than dead. Just put the implant on your left wrist. It will make you a new man.” The old man put the strip of metal in Leo's hand and pushed him out the door.
It had been at this moment in Leo's life that he put on the implant given to him by an old man he didn't know, in the hope that it would help him fight Brick and his cronies.