I wanted to tear my hair out, smash my head into a wall until I bled, and beat someone to a pulp.
Once again, despite just trying to build up a situation in which I was a useful team auxiliary, I was finding myself thrust into the role of either the action hero or, in this case, Lois Lane. My plans had been changing, but right about now, I was starting to rethink abandoning my original plan of just finding a job at a trucking company.
Honestly, the free education wasn’t worth it. I mean, sure, with great power comes great power bills, I was more than happy to try and help with Kaiju attacks if I could, but this was the second time I’d been kidnapped, and this time, whoever did it apparently knew how to counter my tricks.
Once again, I decayed myself and tried to get through the wall, but whatever the hell it was made of resisted, pushing me back until I had to restore my blueprint. Apporting without movement quickly drained my ability to maintain the dispersion, and unless I wanted to restore myself as a thin red slime, I couldn’t maintain it for more than a few seconds while I was forced to remain in the small room.
I couldn’t even get between the cracks. The walls were painted with a cheerful scene, rolling hills and mountains curving around like a giant scene in 3 dimensions, with a starry sky. The floor was fitted stone that I couldn’t get through, and in the middle was a small tree, sort of a bonsai with little blue flowers, and it resisted everything I could try, from just yanking it out to disintegrating it.
And, of course, no Sabrina. Not only had I gotten kidnapped again, but I’d let my team down. The painted sky and stars were shedding light into the ten-foot-wide chamber, and there were tatami mats rolled up against the walls.
I’d tried to decompose the walls themselves, but whatever they were made of seemed to ignore my abilities. Even making a blowtorch or trying to freeze them to absolute zero had resulted in just more failures, and whatever my kidnappers had dressed me in, some sort of kung-fu gi and pants with my feet bare, were similarly immune to my abilities. Even the air seemed to somewhat resist my manipulation, which was driving me crazy.
There was a single door, locked, of course, and like the rest, it seemed to resist everything I could throw at it. I still seemed to be able to control the energy flowing through me, but outside of my direct aura, everything seemed to ignore whatever I tried. I hated feeling powerless, and even trying to pick or break the lock netted me no results whatsoever, even forming a protein-based carbon lattice lockpick out of my own flesh and bones simply wound up with me breaking it against the impervious lock.
I wasn’t strong on the level of other strength-based supers, but if I had to I could probably pick up a sedan and throw it a short distance… I might as well be a child for all the good it did, so I finally just unrolled one of the mats, and sat down to meditate. My energy was capped right now, and I wasn’t sure how to progress past that cap, the liquid energy cresting and breaking within me even though I was still slowly expanding the borders of the small sea inside of me, it was not enough to do whatever came next on my journey of empowerment.
After almost a day of meditation and slight naps, the door opened.
I was on my feet instantly, dashing across the room, and a very large individual, probably a super strong alpha, entered as I dashed, easily tossing me back against the wall where my mat rested, as if I was a normal baseline. Like the rest of the room he was… untouchable, and he walked in and stood to one side while another, slimmer individual walked into the room after him.
“Mister Doyle, that’s hardly polite.” The man said. He was around six feet tall and would have been utterly forgettable save for the carefully styled goatee and sideburns leading up to his windblown brown hair.
I shrugged and slid down to sit back down on the mat. “And kidnapping, beating me unconscious, and trapping me in...whatever this place is counts as the most marvelous courtesy possible?” I asked, snarkily.
He shook his head, “Of course not, but I have sent you four letters requesting a meeting, and you ignored all of them. Even when I sent people to invite you to a meeting politely, you avoided and evaded them. What else can I do?”
“You could fuck yourself, Mister Maxwell,” I replied, crossing my arms over my knees. “And that is precisely the reply you are going to receive every single time. Go fuck yourself. I have no interest in the Maxwell consortium, I will not work for you, and I reject you and everything you stand for.”
“I could do that, but unfortunately that would lead to my being neglectful of your needs. Unfortunately, leaving you alone would quickly result in you perishing.”
I shook my head, “I doubt that, but you do you, and I will do me. See you in a week, and I can guarantee that my answer to whatever you desire will be the same as now. Go fuck yourself.”
His eyebrow raised slightly, and he glanced outside of the door. In a moment, a guy that looked exactly like the one that planted me on my ass shifted a chair into the room, which he sat down on and looked at me, while the second clone carefully closed the door. “Unfortunately, gently allowing time to resolve my issues is not an option. I require your assistance.”
I laughed, “Oh, you must be desperate in order to tell me I have some sort of negotiation powers over you. Is this the part where you monologue like a second-rate supervillain or try to tell me about your terrible spoiled childhood where your mother beat you and your father raped you to evoke sympathy? I have more than enough information to realize that I want no part in your little superhuman army.”
“So what do you want, mister Doyle?” he asked, frowning slightly. Well-dressed man that he was, wearing pressed slacks, a decent open-collar white shirt, and a pair of what looked like two-thousand dollar shoes, I just thought he looked like a bad stereotype of a mob boss.
I smiled, “I want you to go away and never come back so I never have to look at you again until I decide to have my team come out and crush your little block party like an overripe watermelon.”
He thought about that for a moment. “What brought you to the conclusion that my request would be so utterly immoral?”
I smiled slightly, crossing my legs, and said, “When your little teamsters decided that murdering a road full of innocent people was an acceptable price for keeping my disappearance quiet. Up until that point, I might have even forgiven the kidnapping incident, since you chose not to murder any of the guards, but after that, I realized that anyone who employed people willing to go to those lengths was someone I had no interest in dealing with in any way.”
“What do you mean? What lengths?”
I looked at him, baffled. He didn’t seem to be lying, but then again, I wasn’t exactly a master of detecting deception.”Magazine, Baelfire. I distinctly heard them discussing exactly how to deal with any witnesses, wall guards, or casual bystanders. Is Baelfire really capable of burning anything in a half-mile radius?”
He narrowed his eyes, “Baelfire was. She isn’t anymore, and neither is Magazine.”
I was a little shocked, “You killed them?”
He shrugged, “Not Baelfire. She’s potentially useful but has to be carefully controlled. Magazine, however, was in charge of the mission and failed not just spectacularly, but in a way that ensured that you would never willingly cooperate. He was a poorly chosen mercenary, I confess, but at the time we only had a fraction of our knowledge about your skillset that we do now. It was his job to ensure that we gained more knowledge, not alienate you.”
“So you killed him.”
He shrugged, “he was an assassin. What else was I supposed to do? Give him a bonus and cut him loose? He would have killed half my employees to make a point. Baelfire, however, is in exactly the same position as you.”
I raised an eyebrow, “Oh?”
He nodded, “Yes. Locked down. Someone with a similar power to yours, who is able to prevent molecular manipulation in a large area. Once we realized that quantum disabling was unable to work on your abilities, since you could adjust your own molecular structure rapidly, we found another option. If you like, I could have you meet her to assure yourself of her health.”
“What about Sabrina?”
He shrugged, “We took you. She ran. She is a clever girl, raised on a planet even more dangerous than this one. She did her unintended job, which was to lure you out of the academy’s lockdown. It’s amazing how predictable you hero types can be. She requires materials to use her abilities effectively, and you just went out of your way and out of safety to help provide them.”
I smiled slightly, “I knew I could get you monologuing. Typical supervillain. So what is it you are so desperate for? I am certain you already have someone poking and prodding at my armor, good luck with that.”
He shrugged, “It’s tinker tech. I doubt very much we could reproduce it, and our best researchers have used what they have learned from it to formulate a reasonable hypothesis as to how your power works.”
I shrugged, so far he had given away a lot of secrets. “What did they discover?”
He grinned, “More than you would like, probably. You are a molecular assembler, able to create and modify micro-machinery to perform a huge variety of tasks, including strengthening your own body and molecular system, disassembling and reassembling your body, and repairing damage on a molecular scale… as well as creating some sort of self-replicating power supply to break the power limitations most tinkers possess. Brilliant, really, which is why I am loath to dispose of you or attempt to break your mind. Even now, I am relatively certain you have packed your own body with machinery capable of activating a broad variety of practical effects, from producing fire and cold to teleportation.”
Not a bad guess. Subtly wrong, but clearly they had witnessed my attempts to escape. “So what is it you want? Super-armor? Things that mimic superpowers in baselines?”
He shook his head, “Actually it is quite simple. I want you to do what heroes do, I want you to save my father’s life.”
***
It turned out that his father was a victim of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was currently on life support and had been for over a year, and had recently lost his ability to even communicate effectively.
The causes of ALS had been determined years before, a genetic proclivity plus certain heavy metal exposure exacerbated it. His father had been in the military before the crash, and afterward, had started collecting land and the alphas needed to protect it, creating the Maxwell collective. Unfortunately, in his opinion, extreme pragmatism was required to keep it functional and prevent it from being nationalized by the remains of what had once been New York City, the pragmatism that included the occasional bribery, murder, or kidnapping.
“So what is it you are hoping I can accomplish?” I asked him. I doubted very much that he was planning on letting me go if I helped him, but the more freedom I had, the more options. To be fair, I had zero worries whatsoever about whether or not his farmland got nationalized. I didn’t think it would be better or worse, but I had problems with this particular monster’s opinions.
“I need his list of contacts, which means I need for him to be able to talk. Neither he nor I am alphas, but It would cost billions for me to rebuild the list of carefully cultivated connections and their debts to the collective. He’s never trusted me, which I cannot blame him for, but now that he’s incoherent, half of our power is simply gone. Not to mention, trust or not, I want my father back... I am not ready to run the collective.”
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“Of course, while I would love to have a fleet of armored guardsmen that could meaningfully challenge most alphas, as well as a communications network that could pierce the crash interference, that would be a completely separate issue. In exchange, I could offer you vast amounts of wealth and a seat at the table, but I doubt your superhero mentality, a mentality I will never understand, would settle for that sort of offering.”
I chuckled, “What’s to understand? I like Earth very much, I live here, and right now, Alphas seem to be the only thing keeping it intact and not overrun by overpowered monstrosities. Something you don’t seem to care about.”
He raised an eyebrow, “What makes you think I don’t care? I live here too.”
I shrugged, “When was the last time you sent your hand-picked alpha killers to help out a Kaiju invasion?”
He looked at me directly. “This morning.”
“Huh?”
He laughed, “You really have no clue, do you? The coastal kaiju are an absolute abomination, and terrifying, if rare. The interior, however, is also packed with energy-enhanced monstrosities. The Maxwell consortium operates over two million acres of active farmland… We have nearly half a million employees, and hundreds of alphas as well as high-impact technological combat units.”
“We have nearly twice as many class four and above alphas working constantly to keep areas outside of the city safe from predatory enhanced animals as the cities themselves, as well as sponsoring twelve straight-up superteams that help the surrounding territories deal with both the occasional eruption and the psychotic random supervillain.”
He sighed and shook his head, “The one thing that you city folks have absolutely right, though, is that it’s not a democracy. It cannot be a democracy. We have plenty of unincorporated businesses and non-citizens, but we also absolutely have slavery, or at least, those who choose to violate our rules and endanger our citizens and non-citizen workers are offered the option of paying off their debt to the consortium with labor or death. We also have prisons and police departments, and I like to think that the towns within the consortium’s bailiwick are friendly and peaceful places with plenty of opportunities for growth, but no, we don’t cotton to the concept of democracy.”
“The non-alphas help support the alphas, the protectors, and the consortium. We have taxes, and people can choose to elect representatives to bring their concerns to the consortium leadership, but in the end, how useful is the vote of an unemployed drunk, ideological warrior, or someone who cares so little about the community that they aren’t even willing to pay taxes or become a citizen? If they don’t like it, they are welcome to leave. I understand that the cities welcome anyone, or they can try their luck in the unincorporated territories, at least until something eats them. I hear Manitoba’s nice and dangerous this time of year.”
“So tell me, what makes someone like you a superhero? Besides ignorance, of course.”
I laughed, “What makes you think I am a superhero?”
He raised an eyebrow, “So far, your demeanor and moral inflexibility have both suggested it, as has your attendance at Kellar Academy.”
I shook my head, “I’m not. However, like I said, I do value lives and this planet. I attend Kellar because it puts me in touch with people doing a job that I like, specifically fighting monsters, and I get some pretty decent training in how to support and help those people. If I have to go personally fight off monsters and killers, I will, but that’s not out of some kind of ‘with great power’ hero complex.”
“So what is it you want? I mean, everyone wants something.”
I looked at him, “Okay, I am going to try being polite. I still think you are absolute scum, but I can sort of understand where you are coming from. I want a planet like it was before the crash. A world where people can live free from fear, and where I can settle down to a rewarding job, a beautiful wife, and fat babies. To be honest, I’d happily trade away my alpha powers if it meant all the rest were gone too.”
He laughed, “Oh, you sweet, naive, ignorant child.”
I glared at him.
“What do you think caused the crash?”
“It’s pretty well documented. Q-bombs from the Russian empire.”
He shook his head, grinning, “Yeah, to the victor goes the truth. No. Q-bombs were invented by OUR researchers. An offshoot of nuclear research. Only one Q-bomb, in fact. After the end of the Kaiser’s war, Eastern Europe and Germany started getting antsy and trying to out-empire each other. The why of it was unimportant, but our researchers started trying to figure out a way to create the ultimate weapon because everyone was trying to make the ultimate weapon to win a world war.”
“We succeeded, but so did several others. Suddenly, you had bombs that could split the atom and unleash unimaginable damage, bombs that could alter the fabric of reality in unimaginable ways, and bombs that could unleash quantum hell… and on a beautiful day in 1938, well, someone decided to use them. An unimportant little country named China decided that it was a good time to punish Japan for a bunch of historical injuries, and dropped a bomb on a little island called Kyushu in response to a number of conventional bombing raids. Not an unreasonable response, considering the provocation.”
“It wasn’t a very big bomb and it killed less than ten thousand people, most of them from radiation sickness, but in response, everyone started lobbing their own superweapons around, which led to the crash. Next thing you know, monsters and people started popping up that could do things no one understood, and it’s simply gotten worse since then. There’s a good argument that the American Q-bomb dropped on Czechoslovakia was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but for whatever reason, a big push in Normandy got eaten by a giant fire-breathing boar, and after that, the new Cold War developed…”
“Before that, humanity was constant warfare. Almost no one lived in peace and prosperity like you wish for, if anything now that humanity has a common enemy, things are more peaceful than ever in history.”
“What happened to power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely?” I asked.
He shrugged, “The desire for power corrupts. Ironically enough, because awakenings are so random, simply desiring power is not enough to obtain the power of your average alpha. Sure, there are a few absolute sickos that wind up with disgusting levels of power, but compared to how it was before the crash? I’d much rather have things the way they are now… most people in the consortium wind up living relatively peaceful lives, and even your cities are a thousand times less crime-riddled and deadly than they were before the crash.”
He grinned, “Monsters, kaiju, and enhanced animals are terrifying, but the most dangerous animal always has been and always will be humans. The rise of the interweb has simply allowed propaganda to be controlled more easily. Think about who designs your information networks and educational programs, and what their motivations might be.”
I scowled. “Fine. I will… try to heal your father.” Not that I believed him, but he had given me food for thought, and I could do my own research if I could get back out of here. “Assuming, of course, you will let me go afterward. I won’t be joining your army, no matter what sort of story you spin for me.”
He nodded, “Fair enough, but I will expect to be given at least a chance to make my case in the future. As will the Maclelland consortium, The inter-Ohio farmsteads, and the Atlantic command. They are my competition, but not my enemy, and none of them want the city to annex them with millions of supersoldiers wearing magical suits that make them all the equivalent of class-four alphas.”
“Don’t send murderers and threats.”
He nodded, “And what is your price?”
“Huh?”
He spun on his wooden chair slightly, “What is your price? For any of it? Healing, if you can do it, the armor if you can make it work, the communicators, if you can make enough of them. What are your prices?”
I ran my hands through my hair. “I am not really motivated by greed. The healing, I have already given you my price for. No more kidnappings, no more threats of killing everyone in a half-mile radius, and you let me go.”
“That’s it?” he asked in surprise. “You said you weren’t a superhero. That’s pretty heroic.”
I shook my head, “I said I wasn’t a hero and I mean it. But I absolutely support superheroes, because they do a stupidly dangerous job. Some of them are kind of corrupted by the money and fame, but they are still out there fighting kaiju and monsters, and as long as they aren’t slaughtering and raping people, I don’t really care about whatever twisted shit they get up to.”
“What happened to the 'with great power' thing?"
I laughed. “If you were especially tall, and became a basketball player, would you feel obligated to spend every moment you weren’t playing and every dime you made on the needy? Some people would feel like they had to, but I don’t. With great power comes great opportunities, but responsibilities come from your own mind and morality, or your connection to god or the deity of your choice. I will happily help people, but that is my choice, not the inevitable consequence and burden of having a gift.”
He chuckled, “Then we may be able to work together.”
I shook my head, “No we won’t. Not you personally. You are still on my fuck-off list for what you did, hiring killers and assassins to deal with me. Even if you are right, you broke the rules… but that doesn’t mean that you can’t send someone who has an actual moral compass to do business. I also want my armor back. You can’t use it, and it’s incomplete anyway, I am still trying to make it work correctly. You also can’t reproduce it.”
“How do you know? I have my own tinkers, some of whom should be able to replicate it.”
I grinned, “Because I am not a tinker.”
“So what are you?”
I shrugged, “complicated.”
***
This dude was messed up. On giving my word not to run, they had removed the restriction Lockdown had placed on my environment, but looking at the senior Maxwell, the guy was an absolute basket case. He was strapped down with machines that regulated his oxygen, blood flow, nutrition, liquid intake, and a dozen other things… I hadn’t even been aware that the level of technology involved in this kind of life support even existed.
“How much neural damage does he have?” I asked, looking at him closely. It probably didn’t help that he was in his seventies, as well. I was able to detect all the flaws in his system, but I was unsure about how much I could blueprint.
“He was beginning to have extreme senile dementia before his system started to shut down, but from what we can determine, it didn’t seem to propagate to his gray matter… It was entirely nervous system damage, but as a result, his nervous system was almost entirely shot. Demilination, and his autonomic system shut down nearly a month ago. Right now, we have a suspension alpha coming in every day to lock him down for about eighteen hours, which is how we’ve kept him alive so long, as well as a nerve controller, but she can’t keep it up continuously.”
I nodded, “How is she locking him down?”
“Time compression. Technically he’s almost a year younger than his actual age because of it, but if she tries to keep it up longer, she passes out from energy loss, and the projection speedster from the monster hunters is even harder to… ask for assistance than you were.”
“No one else could help?”
The doctor shrugged, his flyaway white hair wiggling slightly from the motion. “There was a healer from the Atlantic command that tried, but she said that she couldn’t affect genetic damage. She did what she could, which is probably why he’s still alive, sort of, but he’s in even worse shape than he was, albeit still alive.”
I nodded and checked his skin. The cells were extensively degraded from replication, which was normal for a 70-year-old, but that should be reasonably fixable… I was just worried about what would happen if I fixed him.
“I am willing to try, but I need you to do something.”
“What that?”
“Lockdown. I need proof she’s hundreds of miles away. I refuse to work if I don’t have some kind of assurance that I am not going to get locked in a cage if this works. I also am going to need your suspension alpha available to keep him suspended while we unhook him from the artificial nervous system.”
The doctor shrugged, “I am sure you won’t take my word for it, but Mister Maxwell is well-known for keeping his word.”
I nodded, “Yes, but he’s also utterly pragmatic. I don’t want him deciding that it’s worthwhile to keep me around permanently, or worth more than his own reliability. I think I can do it, but afterward, I am gone. He needs something again, he has to go through channels to get it. I am not a slave, and I won’t let him make me one.”
“We are going to the Voice Hotel on 18th Street. Make sure that your alpha is fresh, unhook this guy completely, and we will go there. I will do my best to wake him up, but anything artificial could completely screw things up. I can detect alphas, and if I detect any alpha but the staff, certain guests, and the cloning brick he has protecting him, I am gone.”
“If I don’t have my armor, I am gone. If I detect any artificial modifications to my armor, such as a tracker or alpha-tinkered tracer, or even a magic spell attached to me or my armor, I am gone. I cannot detect magic, but I can smell the traces a magical alpha leaves behind with the magic. I know what Lockdown’s powers taste like… if I detect her anywhere within a block of the hotel, I am gone.”
“What’s to keep you from just leaving?”
I shrugged, “My word. I will do this but on my terms. I am tired of getting pushed around by bullies. Adrian was right about one thing… corrupt people are attracted to power, and he’s one of the worst of them. Word or no word, I trust him about as far as I can throw him with both hands tied behind my back.”
“Are we clear?”
The doctor slowly nodded, and one of the bodyguard clones left to go inform Maxwell of my decision.