Have you ever listened to a millennial bitching about prostheses? Some of them are insane. I'm talking fire and brimstone ranting, your soul damned to Hell for 'mutilating the perfect body God gave you,' protestors forming picket lines around chop shops and clinics. Well, not so much that last one anymore.
I’ve seen some of them stand up to corpo-SWAT teams before, their zeal is that strong. Or it was until the tear gas started to spread.
----------------------------------------
March 21, 2064
“This isn’t me,” Steve said.
“It’s not? Are you sure?”
“Definitely. See here where it says I’m survived by my parents, Braxton and Kayleigh Tunner? Those aren’t my parents’ names. And it says I got married in 2058, but I actually got married in 2056. Divorced in 2060 though. Some of the details are right, but a lot of stuff is wrong.” He frowned and read the obit again. “So many things are close, but at the same time, that’s way too many mistakes to just be a simple reporting error.”
“Why does the internet think you’re dead?” I asked. It seemed to me like the most likely reason was that the man in front of me wasn’t really Steve. The big question was whether he knew that or not.
“Well, I have some theories, but nothing I can prove. Yet. My best guess is that this Steve in the obituary isn’t the same Steve as me. Perhaps your power created me wholesale off this person’s identity, but you didn’t remember the details correctly?”
“I don’t know anyone like you, Steve,” I objected.
“But you could have read this obituary in passing,” Steve said. He paused and scratched at his chin again. “Although that doesn’t account for all the memories I have that aren’t mentioned in the article.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this obit before today,” I said. “I don’t really spend a lot of time reading about people who died. The only obit I’ve ever read was my dad’s.”
“Did you know that powers are a favorite topic of study among the scientific community?” Steve asked suddenly. “I mean, that’s obvious. They defy rationality, spit in the face of what we know. We’re all endlessly testing and probing, trying to find the patterns, to learn the rules. That’s how we got disciplines like physics and chemistry. That’s why math is described as a language. It’s all mankind’s attempt to push the boundaries, to learn the unknowable.
“But the thing about powers is… so often they defy all our knowledge of the natural world completely. People can fly, but not in a way that physics supports. Or they generate fire, but without any fuel. What creates the exothermic reaction? We don’t know, and even if we figure it out for one mask, the next one who seems to have the exact same power is really doing something completely different that just coincidentally has a similar end result.”
I leaned back a little. Steve was being serious, but he was also growing more excited as he spoke. He was one of those people who gestured a lot when he talked. “So what you’re trying to say is that my power whipped up a person with a lifetime’s worth of memories just based on random things I heard or read about at some point in my life?” I asked. Never mind that I was relatively certain I hadn’t read this obituary. “And you’re the factoid smoothie that came out once the mixer got turned off?”
Steve laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but perhaps. Maybe I’m not Steve, but just a facsimile of him that your mind created.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened.”
“Well, I’d hope not. I don’t love the idea of just being your imaginary friend, but it is a possibility, and a scientist doesn’t discount possibilities just because they don’t point towards the result he wants. There is certainly some evidence to suggest that I am not actually Steve Tunner.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t think the pieces all fit together right. Either way, I didn’t have a better idea and we had other things to talk about. Mom probably wouldn’t be back for another few hours, but there was no guarantee, and I wasn’t ready to tell her I’d triggered. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Mom would see it as an opportunity to advance. She’d insist that I register with Secutek immediately so we could both be bumped up to a higher citizenship class. And if I refused, well… It was hard to refuse Mom, and she’d tell them herself if I didn’t. As much as it hurt to even think about it, I couldn’t trust her to give me a choice about what I wanted to do with my powers.
Maybe that was why it had taken me months to work up the courage to explore them. Tonight was an admission that I was Empowered, and that nothing could ever go back to the way it was. Dad wasn’t coming back. Mom’s top priority was always going to be her job. I was either going to be a living weapon for one corporation or another, or I was going to be a rogue mask that was hunted by all of them.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The only other option left to me was avoiding all mirrors and pretending I didn’t have a whole busload of voices in my head. I’d tried that already, and it didn’t work.
“Okay, what do we know about my power?” I asked. “I hear voices and see faces, but different ones every time. I wanted someone to help me figure stuff out, and the person my power showed me was a scientist. And an engineer. So… I guess my power helps me do stuff by showing me someone who is an expert at whatever I’m trying to do?”
“That seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Let’s do some testing!” He jumped to his feet, a massive, goofy smile on.
“What kind of testing?” I asked, the tone of his voice making me hesitant.
“We need to find your limits,” Steve said. “How long can I stay here? Can you summon another person out of the mirror at the same time? Will I remember any of this once I go back? If I’m injured, will I still be hurt when you summon me again? If I die, does my voice disappear from your head completely? We... need to write this down, otherwise it’s not science.”
“Whoa! Hold up. Let me write some of these down,” I said. My DAC opened a new memo file for me and I started filling it with questions as fast as I could. After a minute, I said, “Okay, all caught up. What else?”
“Can I take anything back with me when I disappear? How far away from you can I get? Will that make it harder for you to keep me here in your world, or will I just hit an arbitrary distance and disappear? Can I leave my arc cannon behind when I go? Can you unsummon me at will? If you can, do we have to be right next to each other to do it? Can you still hear my voice in your head while I’m here? Can I take things from your world with me when I go?”
Steve rattled the questions off one after another, so fast that I would have had a hard time keeping up if Mom hadn’t gotten me an upgrade to my DAC with part of Dad’s life insurance money. She’d sprung for the best processor she could, and even then, the surgery to install it had been more than half the price, according to her many, many complaining sessions about it. She’d just talked right over me when I’d tried to tell her it was okay to not get the upgrade.
“Okay, got it,” I said as my DAC recorded the last question. “I think we can test some of these things right now. Like, here, take this wrapper and walk into the other room. I’ll try to unsummon you. If I can, then we know that you don’t have to be right next to me and we can confirm if you can leave stuff behind and take anything with you.”
Steve stood up and walked into the living room. “Okay,” he said.
“Starting now,” I told him. “Uh… how do I start?”
He poked his head back through the door and said, “Maybe just do the opposite of what you did when you summoned me?”
“I don’t know how I did that! You were in the mirror and… and then you weren’t.”
“What were you thinking when I appeared? What were you doing?”
I thought back, trying to remember exactly what had been going through my head. There was the fear, bordering on a full-blown panic attack, but not quite there. Still under control. That had receded, but it was surging back to the front of my mind now. What if I couldn’t unsummon Steve? What if this was permanent? How was I going to explain that to Mom? ‘Hey, Mom. This is my imaginary friend. Mind if he sleeps on the couch for a while?’
“Hey. Hey, Cherish. Stop. Take a breath. Now let it out. You’re alright. We’ll figure this out,” Steve said in a soothing voice. “Another breath. Good. Keep focusing on breathing. Let me know when you’re ready, but take as long as you need.”
I nodded jerkily and tried to breathe like he’d told me. In. Out. In. Out. Everything was fine. We had plenty of time to figure this out. Mom didn’t even get home until after I’d gone to bed most nights anyway. There was no reason to panic.
A few minutes later, I said, “Okay, I’m ready to try.”
“Great,” Steve said. He smiled at me and said, “Now, tell me what you were thinking when you summoned me.”
“That I needed help,” I said immediately. “That this was too big for me to figure out on my own. That I wasn’t sure if I was Empowered or just going crazy anymore, but that I had to find out. And then you said you could help, and I wanted you to.”
“A lot of powers operate on wants and needs,” Steve told me. “There are hundreds of masks who’ve gone on record describing how they activate their powers as just ‘wanting to do it, so I do.’ It sounds like yours works the same way. You wanted me to be here, so I was. Maybe you just need to decide that you don’t need me to be here right now, and I’ll go.”
“That makes sense,” I said. It sounded easy enough. Just like hanging up a phone call. I was done talking to Steve, so it was time to hit the big red button with the weird upside-down U shape. “I’m ready to try.”
“Good. I’m going to go back around the corner. Whenever you’re ready, just go ahead.”
I pictured it in my mind, that big red button. “End call,” I whispered to myself. I could do this. Just… push the button with my power. Do it!
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Uh… no,” Steve called back.
“I’ll try again.”
Before I could start, I heard Mom pulling back into the driveway and the engine of her Line Rider turning off. Oh no. Why now? Of all the nights for her to come home early!
Frantically, I rebuilt that mental image of the end call button. For a moment, my concentration wavered and that picture from the obit took his place, but I forced it out of my mind. “Okay, end the call. End it with Steve specifically.”
Silence.
“Steve?”
Just then, the sound of the lock disengaging came from the door. Either I’d successfully unsummoned him, or I was going to have to do some real fast talking to explain why a strange man ten years older than me with fully auged prosthetic arms was in our house.
Mom walked through the door, then paused when she saw me standing next to the kitchen table staring at her. “Cherish? What are you doing? Are you alright? You look faint.”
“I’m… I’m fine,” I said.
I hoped it wasn’t a lie.
***