"It's not a superpower. It's a curse, and I can't control it!" Leo grunted, a sense of deep disappointment coming over him. "I can't call upon it at will. When it does come, I can't stop it. It's probably the reason the Council wanted to study me in the first place. It's caused a lot more trouble than it's helped. It's killed a lot of I've killed a lot of people...
Leo's felt the weight of his past press down on him as memories of pointless death flooded into his mind. Many, many people had died because he couldn't control the demon that lived within him. He slammed his fist down on the table, causing his empty beer mug to rattle against it, and was glad when something arrived to distract him.
Their second round of drinks, delivered by the server robot, appeared at the side of their table, giving Leo a moment of respite from his nightmarish memories.
"Last round was on me; this round's on you," Annabelle announced.
Leo nodded in reply and placed his left hand on the serving tray.
As they drank, they continued their conversation, and Leo became increasingly impressed with the genuine care, curiosity, and kindness with which Annabelle spoke.
"It seemed like you had control over your... Curse... In the bar," she reasoned. "First, you prevented the drunk from killing the bartender, then you kept him from killing you, and more importantly, everyone else in the bar. You kept a lot of people from dying there, so your 'curse' isn't all bad. It can kill people, but it can save people too."
Leo appreciated her words. He wouldn't have expected anyone to be as generous as she was. "I guess you're right, but I didn't truly want to save those people. The truth is that, if I could have, I would've left the drunk alone, left that bar, got on my ship, and flown away from here, but I didn't have control over any of it."
Annabelle suddenly laughed, as if in the realization of some profound truth, and it was music to Leo's ears.
"See, its a good thing you don't have control over it!" she revealed. "If you had control over it, all those people would have died!"
Leo hurriedly tried to explain himself. "I mean, I did want to help those people, but I didn't know how. There wasn't any way for me to stop him. He would have killed me if I had run at him or thrown a chair at him. The... The thing inside of me just took over. It could have killed everyone... I just... I didn't have any other options..."
Annabelle thought about that for a moment, then spoke carefully. "The other times you've been able to do this, did you have any other options then?"
Leo considered her question and took a long drink of his fourth beer before thoughtfully answering.
"When I escaped from the Council research facility, I knew they only had one real purpose for me. They wanted me to kill for the Council. They wanted me to become their weapon. But, I didn't want that, so I knew I had to escape. If I had stayed and refused them, they would have eventually found a way to control me..."
Leo took a deep breath, a sense of unexpected relief coming over him, then continued.
"When I escaped, I killed seventy-five people... Each of them was... Deleted, for lack of a better term. They were there in one moment, then gone in the next, and I was free to run..."
Annabelle sipped her wine in expectant silence as Leo continued.
"Eight years ago, after years, and years, and years of trying, they finally caught me again. An operative found me with my guard down and took me captive. She brought me to a Council ship and held me there. It was in orbit around Callisto. The war was raging there, and the ship they held me on was involved in the battle. When I learned that the ship was a bio-warfare ship, and it was attacking Callisto, something terrible happened. I blacked out, and when I came to, the ship was crumbling around me. It was only by sheer luck that I was able to escape alive. I guess it was just simple math then, either destroy the ship and kill several thousand Council troops, or allow millions of people to be killed on Callisto."
"No. I didn't have any other options. Not any I could live with," Leo grunted as he finished his troubling story.
"You've got a good heart, Leo," Annabelle declared after a few seconds of reflective silence. "And if it's your heart that guides your strange abilities, and only when the need is dire, then I don't think it's a curse. I think it's a gift!"
Leo felt tears of relief welling in his eyes. He hadn't expected to allow himself to be so vulnerable. For as long as he had been self-aware, he had thought that if anyone knew the truth about him, they would curse him, kill him, and drive him away.
He had been right to trust Annabelle, he realized. With gratitude, he extended his right hand across the table and grasped Annabelle's within it.
Then, a loud explosion rocked the club. Leo instantly snapped his eyes toward the roaring sound and saw a cloud of gas spewing forth in the middle of the dance floor.
It was a gas grenade, he quickly realized. Most of the clubgoers were quickly running wildly in different directions, while those closest to the blast had already passed out on the floor.
Leo's survival instincts instantly took hold. "Annabelle, we need to move! Out the back!"
Before sitting down, Leo had walked the entirety of the club and mapped its layout in his mind. There was a service entrance near the restrooms in the back, and they would be able to use it to make a quick exit.
Together, they threw themselves out of their booth seats and took off as fast as they could manage. They headed towards the back of the club, roughly pushing through the crowds of fearful clubgoers headed in the opposite direction.
Leo's eyes darted around wildly as he moved. The front entrance to the club was already clogged with people trying to escape through it, and people were passing out all around him.
Using steady, purposeful movements, Leo led Annabelle through the club, hurrying past its long bar toward the small corridor that led to the bathrooms. Behind them, the gas cloud was rapidly expanding, and many more people were falling roughly to the ground as the gas hit them.
"We have to move faster!" Leo yelled as he shoved past a man with a pink mohawk.
As Leo and Annabelle abandoned all pretense of calm, they muscled their way through the crowd of people and quickly made it to the back corridor. When they reached it, Leo saw that the passage was bathed in an ominous purple light and was crowded with several fearful people.
Leo and Annabelle had to slow down as they pushed past the people crowding the corridor. They got a few dirty looks, and a few of the people halfheartedly protested as they shoved past, but no one stopped them.
When they reached the end of the corridor, they walked right into a panicked conversation between the people closest to the exit.
"Can't do anything, it won't open..." a fearful looking young man shouted as he frantically pushed buttons on the control panel to the right of the door.
The young woman standing next to him shrugged. "Who cares? It's not gonna kill us, just knock us out for a while... Might even be a good high..."
Leo interrupted them by grabbing the man by his shoulder and forcing him aside. "Move! I'll take care of it," he commanded.
Leo ignored the man's indignant look, closed his eyes, and placed his right hand near the door's control panel. Then, he used his hacking implant to broadcast an interface signal to the remote control transponder in the panel. After several attempts, he was able to access the transponder and gain control over the door's lock and unlock functions.
A smile crossed his lips as he broadcasted a command to unlock the door, then he opened his eyes and pushed the green button on the control panel. Leo grunted with satisfaction, and the occupants of the long corridor gasped with relief as the door slid open, revealing a narrow, dimly lit service passage behind the club.
"Let's go," Leo shouted as he turned around to face Annabelle, but she was gone.
"Fine, probably safer..." he said to himself as he realized she had probably activated her cloaking device.
Leo stepped cautiously out of the club and turned right, walking quickly along with several
other Club 111 escapees. He hoped Annabelle was following him, but she she was utterly undetectable.
After walking a few hundred meters, the clubgoers who had left with him had dispersed down different passages that connected to the service corridor.
When he was finally alone, Leo began looking for a place to hide. Perhaps he could gain entrance to another club, he thought, or some other business through another service passage.
If he could find somewhere to hide, he could pause and assess his next move. Hopefully, Annabelle would reveal herself when he found a safe place. Hopefully, she hadn't abandoned him...
Leo evaluated the different service entrances as he passed by them, reading the business name listed above each one. Meyer's Dry Goods, Pinnacle Bio-Tech, Cheri's... None of them looked like options for a place to wait and hide, and so he continued down the corridor.
As Leo continued walking, he glanced back and realized he was being followed. Two men and one woman were trailing him. He surreptitiously assessed his pursuers through the ocular implant on his hand, allowing him to scope them out without turning his head.
But then, a small explosion boomed in front of him, and a rapidly expanding cloud of gas surged around him. He immediately stopped and turned, intending to run in the opposite direction, but saw that the three people who had followed him had drawn weapons and were leering at him creepily.
"We found you!" they taunted in a unison, sing-song voice.
Leo quickly dodged to his left, but as he made his move, the trio fired their weapons. When he heard the telltale hiss of gas-operated pistols firing, Leo expected to feel metal projectiles ripping through his body. Instead, he felt the lesser pain of three small darts penetrating the skin on his chest, and he quickly felt his head swim in a sea of dizziness.
A tranquilizer, or poison, he thought, as he quickly lost control of his muscles and crumpled to the floor. He had a few seconds to consider his situation, but the darts worked fast, and his vision quickly went dark.
The last thing he saw was the trio. They walked up to his fallen body and pulled up their black shirts to expose their chests. Leo took in the image of a green snake, tattooed on each of their breasts as the darkness enveloped him.
Chapter 8
"Here it is," Captain Kona informed Alice. "This is where the incident in question occurred."
Alice nodded and followed her past the neon sign of O'Hearn's and through the entry door. As she entered, Alice looked around the small, ramshackle bar. It looked like any average dive bar one might come across on a station like Osiris.
Captain Kona extended her right hand toward Alice. "I'll provide you the preliminary file on the incident."
Alice clasped Kona's hand within hers and received the coded request to transfer information and accepted. Then, she closed her eyes as the data flowed through her mind's eye.
Incident 19837-1239, as the station authorities had logged it, had occurred a little over an hour before. After quickly reading the long and tortuously written file, Alice opened her eyes. The patron who had intervened could be her target.
Alice spoke Idi's name in her mind.
"Yes, Alice?" Idi asked.
"Okay, Idi," Alice thought. "Scan the area for signs of the anomaly. I want to pinpoint exactly where it happened. Also, generate an image of our target based on the information in the file I just read."
"Yes, Alice. Scanning now," Idi responded. A second later, she continued. "Transmitting a simulated image of our target based on his description in the incident files."
Alice took careful note of the image that slowly came into her vision. Her target looked like a completely average person, and nothing exceptional marked his appearance. He had long blonde hair, and a weathered, middle-aged face. He looked fairly innocuous, but Alice knew that he was much more dangerous than he appeared.
"Alice, I've pinpointed the location of the anomaly," Idi revealed. "In actuality, there are two distinct locations, and two distinct, though closely linked anomalies. I've sent the data to your ocular implant so you can visualize the scan results."
Alice's vision changed slightly, and two blue forms appeared at the far end of the bar. She quickly walked towards the odd, wispy shapes. They looked like etherial spiderwebs floating in the air. The first hovered directly above the bar and was very small, about the size of an apple. The second was a few feet to the right and at least a meter across.
"What are these, exactly, Idi?" Alice asked, entirely entranced by the strange phenomena before her.
"It is difficult to describe the anomaly in simple language," Idi replied. "An accurate, though incomplete description would be that what you are seeing is a scar from a tear in the space-time continuum. I can attempt to visualize the phenomena in more detail if you prefer."
"Yes. Do it."
Alice's vision suddenly went black, then slowly brightened until all she could see was a grey mass. Gradually, the black began to separate from the white, but not in any way she could have described. The two remained one but flowed away from another, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until a void appeared between them.
The void was utterly indescribable to Alice, and she could feel it more than she could see it. It pulled at her, and called to her. She could almost sense some broad, possibly omnipotent intelligence within it. It wanted her to join it..
Instinctually, Alice pulled away. "No!"
In an instant, Alice's vision returned to normal. As the material world reappeared, a wave of nausea grew in her stomach, and she lost her balance. With a clumsy stumble, she managed to avoid falling, but a strange feeling of dizziness and illness lingered within her.
"What the hell was that? I could feel it... Oh my god. You were only supposed to do a visualization, Idi. That was way too much..." Alice grunted as she quelled the urge to vomit.
"It was only a visualization, Alice. You should not have felt anything. If you are experiencing other unexpected sensory phenomena, I would recommend a thorough medical evaluation when you return to the Epiphany."
"What?" Alice gasped. "Oh, okay, sure, I guess..."
"I would remind you that all the data we possess on this phenomenon is present in your mission briefing files," Idi reminded her, and Alice thought there was a tinge of irritation in the A.I.'s voice. "I recommend you review it in its entirety to better understand the anomaly. I would also remind you that our mission is to find our target, not study the anomaly. Time is of the essence!"
"I know, Idi. Thanks for the reminder..." Alice replied with embarrassment. "It's just difficult for me to understand... You hear about something and then see it for yourself, it's just different. It shouldn't be possible..."
"It is no easier for me to understand," Idi revealed. "Though it is, undoubtedly, possible. This phenomenon has been recorded several times in Council history, each documented and verified beyond all doubt."
Alice stared at the anomalies before her. She wanted to reach out and touch one and see what would happent. She began to reach towards the larger of the two, but her better judgment prevailed. After a few seconds, she pulled her hand back and stepped away from them.
With a deep breath, she decided to forget about the anomalies for the moment and focus on finding her target. She hurriedly queried her information reference implant for all the information she had on her target and requested that Idi help process the data.
He was wanted for several crimes, including 6,742 counts of murder, destruction of Council assets, and escape from a volunteer research facility. She was particularly interested in his escape because, according to the files, he had also created an anomaly during it.
She saw the paperwork he had signed, saw the consent verification files that had committed him to a life of service to the Origin Council. She saw that he had undergone experimental treatments under the direction of then Origin Council Director of Defense Research, Exony Margolesh...
Unfortunately, the details of those experiments had been redacted from Alice's b
riefing file. Apparently, the Council wasn't willing to share everything they knew about her target.
There were many other files in the archive, including reports on numerous murders of Council Operatives, destruction of Council ships, and cases of identity fraud and illegal implantation.
What his name was now, Alice didn't know. Among the thousands of briefing files, that information was nowhere to be seen. Oh well, she thought. She would soon find out.
"Quickly, Idi. Is there data related to how these anomalies are created in the briefing files?" Alice hurriedly inquired.
"No, Alice, that information is not in the briefing files."
"I wonder if Exony knows how he does it..." Alice thought to herself.
Idi enlightened her. "It is likely that Exony understands the anomaly better than we do. It was probably she who directed engineered the mutations that spawned the unique ability. After the Council learned of the possible ramifications of Exony's experiments, they directed her to cease them immediately. This phenomenon on a large scale could destroy all of humanity, and as such, it cannot be allowed."
"Makes sense..." Alice thought as her interest finally faded, and she remembered her primary purpose.
She needed to find her target. Then they could learn more about the anomaly. She needed to find Arcturus and convince him to help her. Hopefully, the prospect of saving billions of people would sway him.
Even if it didn't, she reasoned, there was always money, and the amnesty the Council was prepared to offer him. He had been running and fighting for a long time, and the prospect of not having to run any longer would surely be enough to convince him to help.
"If I may, Alice," Idi interrupted. "It may be helpful for you to know that our target is suspected to be an alcoholic. Many of our records indicate that he frequents bars and other establishments that serve alcohol."
So, he's an alcoholic, Alice thought. Great. Maybe they could find common ground over that.
Alice gathered her resolve. "The Incident report states that the bystander that intervened exited the bar after the incident and ran north towards the Grand Promenade. Can we track him?"
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