It's hard to say what the worst part of Dad's death was. I mean, the dying part was pretty bad, and I still miss him to this day. It’s still a dull ache, but back then, I thought I was going to break in half and my heart would just crash onto the concrete.
I think it wouldn't have been so hard if my mother didn't seem to care so little that he was gone. She took her one prescribed unpaid grievance day for the funeral, but I caught her replying to messages on her DAC during the viewing.
I was alone. There was nobody left, nobody that cared anyway. And then I felt guilty, because how selfish is that? My Dad's dead and all I can think of is how it affects me? I think that’s what gave shape to my power.
I was afraid of being alone.
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March 21, 2064
I ate dinner about an hour after I got home, and then half an hour after that, Mom announced that she needed to head back into the office to take care of something. I wished I could say I was surprised, but since Dad died, drowning herself in work had been her default.
I sat on my bed, a cup of cheap vending machine concentrate tea on the nightstand next to me, and listened to the whir of the Line Rider’s motor starting up and the tires crunching over the gravel as she backed out of the driveway. If the last month was any indication, she wouldn’t be back before I fell asleep.
Whatever she was working on apparently had a tight deadline and her whole department was in a hard crunch trying to complete it. The surprising part was that she bothered to come home at all.
I picked up the cup to take a drink, then glanced down when hot tea splashed out onto my hand. It was shaking so bad that I had to use both hands just to keep it steady enough to sip. Grimacing, I set the cup back down. The concentrate was supposed to come with aspartame mixed in, but either they’d gotten the ratios wrong, or somebody had terrible taste in tea. I made a mental note to try another brand.
Then I sighed and stood up. “Stop putting it off, Cherish."
The voices never truly went away. There were so many-- at least twenty that I’d counted--and each and every one of them was unique. They all had a different ‘feel’ to them. Maybe that wasn’t the right word, but I didn’t know how else to describe it. Powers could be funny that way.
Some of them were male, others female. A few fell into some other category, strange or just plain inhuman. There was one that beeped like an appliance, which honestly was one of the more disturbing ones. It wasn’t that the beeps were unfriendly or anything, it was just… who ever heard of having a voice in your head that beeps at you like an angry microwave?
That was one aspect of my power, voices in my head. I wasn’t crazy. I knew that. But then, if I was, would I know? Answering that question had consumed more than a few hours, and unfortunately, the general consensus on various net forums had been to find the nearest psychiatrist and ask them.
I needed some help figuring all this out, but I wasn’t ready to admit to anyone that I’d triggered. Corpos got interested in Empowered, or as they were more commonly known, masks. They divided that part of society into two elements, masks who worked for them, and rogue agents. It wasn’t legal to have a power without declaring it, but there was no such thing as a mask who’d come forward to the government and didn’t work for one corpo or the other. Once they found out someone had powers, it was very much a ‘with us or against us’ scenario.
So it was on me to figure this out, unless I wanted to get myself locked up in a corpo testing lab until they figured out what my power did and how best to profit from it. Whether that was good for me would be entirely incidental, and I’d read more than one conspiracy theory about an Empowered who had triggered and been deemed detrimental to society and been made to quietly disappear.
I walked into the bathroom, my eyes on my toes the whole way, and stood in front of the sink. I turned the water on and absently washed my hands, cleaning away the tea, but that was just a way to procrastinate. If I looked into the mirror…
Slowly, I traced my way up the faucet, then to the wall. I forced my vision up by counting each tile, one by one, until I reached twelve. Then the tiles ended and the mirror started. I froze and my breath caught. “Do it,” I muttered to myself. “Just do it.”
I clutched the edge of the counter hard, trying to make my hands stop shaking. I needed to figure out what my power was before it drove me crazy. For two months, I’d been making excuses to not look in the mirror, two months of hiding and crying at night while the voices kept me awake.
It had to end.
Before I could reconsider and find a new reason to put it off again, my eyes flicked up to my reflection. It was like looking into an old LCD TV, back before they went fully holographic. I could see myself there, yes, but there was something else in the mirror too. This time it was the face of a guy in his late-20s or so with short, messy black hair and a crooked smirk. A thick pair of glasses were perched on his nose, right above a chunk that was missing as part of a long, thin scar that ran under both eyes. He didn’t look mean or angry or anything, not like some of the faces I’d seen, but… it wasn’t my face.
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“Hello?” I said tentatively. I’d never tried talking to the people in the mirror before.
“Hey there,” the man said back. I didn’t hear it out loud, but in my head like all the other voices. Those two words were the clearest I’d ever heard any of them. Usually the voices were a quiet, background murmur, with one or two occasionally cutting across the noise.
His lips moved as he spoke, even if the words weren’t audible. Was this my power, then, to communicate with my imaginary friends living in the mirror? Or maybe they were real people, but I certainly didn’t recognize any of them. There was only one way to find out. I’d already come this far; it was too late to run away now.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Name’s Steve. What’s yours?”
“Cherish,” I said. “Um, Steve. Why… Why do I see you in the mirror?”
“Not a clue,” he said. “We could try to figure it out?”
“How are we going to do that?”
The man in the mirror shrugged. “No idea, yet. Ask some more questions, I suppose. Run some tests. That’s usually how these things go.”
“You, uh, you know a lot about that?” I said faintly.
“Kind of my job to figure out the answers to tough questions. Bit of a mystery, this one. Empowered thing, right? Those are always the trickiest, but I can help, if you want.” He shrugged. It was wrong to see my own not-reflection move in a way that I didn’t want it to.
“Yes! Yes, I want help,” I said.
Steve disappeared from the mirror, and there was a soft thump behind me. I spun in place and found him standing in the bathroom not two meters away. He was a lot bigger than I’d given him credit for back when he was a face in the mirror. Well over six feet tall.
Both of his arms had been replaced with augs, white chrome that gleamed in the bathroom’s light. He was wearing some sort of chest plate that looked like it was made of hard plastic, and had what looked like a rocket launcher, also made of white plastic, slung over his shoulder on a strap. His coat looked like it had been a labcoat once, before someone cut off parts of the sleeves and trimmed it. Otherwise, Steve was just... wearing a normal button-up shirt and a nice tie, like any other office worker.
“Um, hello again,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied. I felt a little dizzy, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if I should try to crawl back away from him, or scream, or just give in and panic.
The silence between us stretched for a few long seconds. “Well, this is awkward. Maybe we should… you know, go somewhere that’s not the bathroom,” Steve said.
“Right. Right! Yes, let’s go to the kitchen. I can, uh… I can make tea for you?” Tea was good. Not my tea, that tea was crap, but... yeah, I could give a guest something to drink and hope for the best from there. Even if the guest had come out of my head.
Steve followed me through the house and gingerly sat down at one of the chairs after he looked them over. It creaked when he put weight on it, but held. “Always got to be careful,” he explained. “Metal arms are heavier than you’d think, plus all the supporting cybernetics built into my back and spine.”
I’d never much looked into augs. Even black market hack jobs done in back alley chop shops were far, far outside of my budget. I had no idea what kind Steve’s were, but they looked expensive. Either he came from money, or he was highly placed in a corpo that was willing to spend time on him.
“So, you’re my power?” I asked as I got out another pack of tea concentrate.
This whole thing was so bizarre. Sitting in the kitchen, serving tea to someone that was maybe my power. This was some fairy-tale stuff.
Steve blinked at me, then rubbed his chin as he thought. “This is weird. I don’t really remember how I got here, or what I was doing before that.”
He took his glasses off, breathed on the lenses, then buffed them on the exposed part of his shirt near his waist before replacing them back on his nose.
“I guess the easiest explanation is that I’m part of your power. Maybe. Or something went truly wrong with one of my experiments. Like, catastrophically wrong in a very bizarre way...”
“Okay, but like… who are you?” I asked.
“I’m a scientist.”
My eyes slid down to the portable cannon sitting on the floor next to his feet. “A scientist?” I asked, my voice laced with suspicion.
“Well, battle engineer, if you want to be specific. My job is… hmmm. How do I explain this? I do R&D on technology with applied combat specifications, and sometimes I am deployed to hot zones to provide on-site engineering solutions.”
That was corpo-speak. I’d recognize it anywhere. It wasn’t an accent, it was about picking words that said one thing while meaning another.
“That’s… specific. You are a real person then?”
“Why wouldn’t I be real?” Steve huffed, looking almost insulted.
“I’m sorry! I just, you know, didn’t know if my power made you up.”
“I’m real. I have a home in L.A. I work for Gorilla Ops. I was married, once upon a time. Had two brothers growing up. I remember all of that. Steve Tunner, senior developer in the battle engineer department.”
I had my DAC run a quick search for Steve and, to my surprise, turned up a hit immediately. An image popped up of a man who might have been Steve’s brother, except a bit fatter, with a better hair cut and no scar. It could have just been an old picture of him, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was an obituary.
“According to this, Steve Tunner died eight years ago,” I said, forwarding the link to him.
Steve’s eyes widened as he scanned the obit. His lips moved silently as he went through each line. “Well, that’s unusual. What year is it?”
“Twenty-sixty-four,” I said.
“Well, I still remember stuff from... well, after I died. Years after." We stared at each other in silence, again. Seconds ticked by, and he said, “Well, this is awkward.”
“You said that already,” I pointed out.
“It’s still true.”