Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “I’m sorry to call you in here on such short notice,” Synergy replies.

  “I’m sorry you’re sorry.”

  “It’s about your mother.”

  Suspicion confirmed, I swear. While I look at the view, Synergy drops a manila folder that spills crime scene photographs I really don’t want to have to see.

  “Where are you keeping her?”

  “The body? Rikers.”

  “Rikers?”

  Synergy has my attention again. She spreads her fingers in apology like a woman performing an invisible card trick.

  “Policy. We got pretty strong trace elements for parahuman genetic material. That would be right, wouldn’t it?”

  I sigh. It sounds like the noise a very tired person would make at the end of the world. And I shuffle across and pick up the deck of photographs and stare unmoving for nine or ten seconds looking at the blackened husk twisted into the familiar crouched position common to fire death victims.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I tell no-one in particular. “She controlled fire.”

  I lift my gaze, aware of a certain degree of gumminess around the inside of my mask.

  “She was Catchfire,” I say.

  “Really? Shit.”

  Synergy catches herself in a moment’s unprofessionalism and straightens her posture.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “You understand what I mean though, don’t you?”

  “Super powers work in unusual ways, and she was getting on in years.”

  “Maybe,” I concede and gesture obliquely at the photograph. “This is like any number of corpses you people might see after a house fire. The extreme heat causes the muscles to contract, resulting in the fetal position you see here.”

  “Death by immolation is the most likely outcome from the post mortem,” Synergy says.

  “That’s what I’d expect to see at an ordinary crime scene,” I tell her. “You must get dozens of these. The death of Catchfire though? I’d expect something a little more out of the ordinary than this.”

  “If you’re thinking this isn’t your mother or something, Zephyr, I’m very sorry. Forensics tested positive to augmented genetic material and the tests are exhaustive. Are you sure you’re not just wishing so bad this wasn’t happening?”

  “You don’t know the half of it, lady.”

  I flick through the next few images. Photos of the house in various angles of decline. They move on from the corpse to show how fire damage to the house exposed the safe room. The last few pics are the superhero memorabilia in the garden shed. Turns out the Aston Martin is Titanium Girl’s old rig. God knows what it was doing there. Undamaged still, the thing must be worth a fortune, but I am uncharacteristically distracted by the lure of filthy lucre by the sudden brain fart that hits me as I stare at the images, superimposed as they are by my own childhood memories.

  If my half-brother Julian is the Crimson Cowl and the Cowl killed Titanium Girl’s own child more than twenty-five years ago, how the hell is that possible? By Julian’s own admission he was crippled by the Doomsday Man less than a decade back. Presumably he only invented the Crimson Cowl then. Either that or he’s lying. Or he’s got a time machine.

  Or, of course, both.

  *

  AFTER LETTING ME get my shit together for ten minutes, Synergy returns to the room with two steaming mugs of coffee. I take mine, and once relieved, she places her hand over mine and gives me such a look of controlled empathy that I feel vaguely nauseous. It’s about the least sexy look I could imagine on those fine features and frankly I like my ladies to stay their best and not get too wrapped up in trying to be human beings. If I want to vent, this is why God invented Internet forums.

  “I get it,” I say, pulling away and taking my coffee to the far side of the room.

  “For a veteran like you, I am still surprised you don’t give us more grief about exposing your secret identity,” Synergy says with an ongoing smile.

  “What’s the point?” I shrug. “You’ve got files on everyone. Registration Act demands it. You know I never fought the government on that one. Not much need to. Everyone knew it’d be one thing to establish the Act and quite another to enforce it. I mean, you guys couldn’t even catch the dude who killed JFK.”

  “Still, we have detailed files. And this will only add more to yours.”

  I shake my head and laugh like the supers community grandpa that I am.

  “Don’t go getting too ahead of yourself, Agent Synergy. It’s one thing to have a big shiny database full of top secret info. It’s another to do something with it. You know the saying: bullshit in, bullshit out.”

  “But now there’s a major connection between our file for Catchfire and the one for you,” Synergy smiles.

  She still wants to make her point.

  “Well for a starter, Catchfire’s dead. That’s the point of this meeting, right?”

  The lady pales.

  “Second thing,” I say, and I can feel myself only warming up. “You want to know why they brought in Registration?”

  “The explosion of costumed identities in the 1970s –”

  “Baloney. I’ll tell you what it was: tax dollars.”

  “Tax dollars?”

  “And Micro Man. Remember him?”

  “Well sure,” Synergy replies. “He was, like, everywhere when I was a kid.”

  “The six million dollar man, that’s what they used to call him. Started out working the Bronx and wound up the face of Yves Saint Laurent, Cartier watches, Citroen – the fucking guy had a record deal in France that sold twenty-five million units. There weren’t twenty-five million people even in France at the time.”

  “Okay, so what’s your point?”

  “The secret identity allowed Micro Man to reasonably claim his life and the life of his loved ones would be in danger if he filed a tax return on his earnings in costumed life.”

  “Well, I see where you’re going with this, but I hardly think –”

  “Hey, believe it.”

  “Zephyr.”

  “Think about it, Synergy. You could let that slide. But what about Chancellor, Paragon, Mantas . . . Twilight?”

  “Between you and me, I don’t think a lot of Twilight’s income gets declared to the IRS,” Synergy says with a professional smirk. “Actually, we’re aware of an increase in your revenue stream of late, Zephyr. You’re going up in the world. Finally.”

  “So you see what I mean.”

  “Maybe you have a point, Zephyr. But then most conspiracy theorists do.”

  I harrumph and I sense the female agent almost audibly change tack.

  “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  “If that’s my mother.”

  There’s a beat, then she comes in with the kicker.

  “We’ll need you to identify the body.”

  My hand flies nervously to my chin. I stare, partly horrified, at the woman and wonder that I don’t look like a madman. Nonetheless, if any of my paranoid fears are to be borne true, this is a step I cannot avoid. I nod.

  “Book me in.”

  Zephyr 5.9 “A Small Role”

  FROM DOWNTOWN, I turn myself south, flitting across the city amid a profusion of helicopters, F-16s on their safety mission high in the air above, blimps coming in from Germania, the UK and LA. A work crew is installing the most fuck-off enormous visual array on the roof of the Pantha Building and I’m just in time to catch one of the workers as they fall. After that and a half-dozen autographs, I slam across town and arrive at the postmodern offices of Hallory O’Hagan and associates.

  “I need a lawyer,” I explain within five minutes to the red-hot redhead herself.

  “Zephyr, you’ve already got a lawyer. We’ve got a . . . host of lawyers. Or whatever the group noun for lawyers is.”

  “A debt,” I reply with mild authority. “But I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about my, you know, secret identity.”

  “Oh shit,” Hall
ory says in this cute kind of drawn-out way and she slides into a chair beside me with an expression of baseless sympathy on her face. “What have you done?”

  “Lady, I haven’t done anything,” I snap in reply. “It’s a family thing. My, uh, my other guy is getting divorced.”

  “You mean you’re married?”

  I shrug like you do when you’re also juggling at the same time, which figuratively I am. Her look is slightly aghast, but I do not know exactly what she expected I was signing up to when we shared a euphoric post-launch snog just a few days prior.

  “It’s my other guy. He’s married,” I explain. “Or he was. It’s messy. There’s a child involved.”

  “Jeez, Zephyr,” my publicist-in-chief replies. “This does sound messy. I wouldn’t recommend mixing your professional agency and your private life. It could compromise your identity, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, but I’m gonna need a hefty whack of this year’s royalties if I’m gonna do this thing.”

  “Oh, by the way,” Hallory says as if it’s unrelated. “Did you sign those latest release forms?”

  “Before I even came up,” I say. “What were they for, anyway?”

  “Oh, just some projects in consideration. . . .” Hallory deftly dips into her Vivica Watson purse and I catch a glimpse of business card hell before she extracts a gold-colored card and passes it to me. It has a lawyer’s name on it, though I am reminded of the Azzurro card possibly still stuck in the wallspace of my former digs.

  “Try this guy. Pete Liebenthal? He’s the best.”

  “That sounds like the voice of experience.”

  Hallory smiles.

  “Just a stalker. Nothing major.”

  “Hey, if you’ve got stalker problems you don’t need a lawyer. You’ve got me, right?”

  Hallory smiles, but there’s a coldness to her blue-grey eyes.

  “So how many children have you got exactly? And do they have any powers?” she asks. “We could do a whole line in mini-Zephyrs.”

  I figure I better not tell her about my father’s proclivity for single-handedly trying to breed an entire generation of superbeings. The marketing people would die of conniptions.

  *

  BACK AT MONASTIC Central, I manage to squeeze in some valuable table time while Brasseye, Seeker and Vulcana are off at a tenement fire and Mastodon’s apparently in Paris for the latest Tarantino movie. It’s opening night. Apparently he had a small role.

  As I stare at the geek fantasy in smoked glass, invisible technology connects my unconscious thoughts with a data feed from ten thousand possible universes. Images, news print, YouTube videos and surveillance cams sprout like the fevered imaginings of some leprous Andy Warhol-inspired revamp of the whole Christ franchise. If ever there was a clearer indication my own thoughts were in chaos, it’s there on the flat expanse as car bombings and plagues and religious assassinations and mothers clutching their mangled children and streets awash with sewage and dismemberment gush in a vitreous array trapped just beneath the surface of the impossibly advanced table. I try a few deep breaths and focus my thoughts, muttering under my breath sort of as the monks told me so I don’t feel like some reject from a Star Trek episode addressing the computer like it’s the Oracle of Delphi.

  “Access the GPS co-ordinates contained on my cell and give me everything you can show in this parallel on the island nicknamed Krakatoa,” I say.

  The transition is seamless. The urbane chaos fades away in the cosmic dark of the table’s depths and a satellite photo of an island in the Gulf of Thailand crispens into view. At my interest, the view zooms and the artistic details become surprisingly photo-realistic at a low altitude. The image shakes and blossoms into a dozen video streams: the deck footage from ocean-bound tankers, geological survey cameras from drone gliders, secretive Vietnamese Navy footage, three or four American honeymoon diving trips which mostly end without homicide, promotional clips for a Thai investment firm, an oil company, an adventure sports franchise, and a lure for international models, as well as shaky-handed footage from origins unknown.

  Few of the clips or the accompanying articles that bloom along the dexter quadrant of the glass give any real insight into the place. A 1996 documentary cleverly translated for my benefit mentions the nearby archipelago as a former playground for the rich and famous, and apart from the obviously well-known tourist islands like Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Samui, these even lesser specks are flippantly mentioned as under private ownership by any number of European identities, investment banks, underworld money-laundering operations, etcetera.

  None of them mention John Lennon aka The Preacher Man aka The Doomsday Man. Nonetheless, the co-ordinates identify the place perfectly and the remarkable information system pulls invoices from a dozen companies contracted to do work there during the past five decades. From there, it’s a small matter to retrieve blueprints and schematics for the island’s few structures, including a curiously bomb resistant-looking bunker complex built over the course of two years by the Siam Pha Thom Concrete Company registered to Trat, southern Thailand, in the mid-70s. I am damned if I know how you print from this thing so I simply give a good eyeball to the maps and the outline data streaming past, and then, reflecting my clearing mood, the datastreams begin to wink out of existence one by one.

  It looks like a trip to Thailand is on the cards.

  *

  ALL THE SIGNIFIERS are broiling away inside my skull and I stare hard at the dormant glass table long enough that new images begin to take shape and form.

  Ono.

  There have been only candid snaps of the Japanese woman over the years. For a long time she stayed in the background due to her lover’s popularity and her own comparative dislike for celebrity. In the grainy old pre-digital images, she’s little more than a medieval woodcut, all cheekbones and shadowed eyes, that lustrous black hair I have seen come alive like a Medusa’s nightmare, in the dot matrix print of yesteryear it all seems innocuous enough.

  “How would I find her?”

  The words break free of my lips without anything but the suggestion of conscious thought. Immediately, the vision on the screen departs like a scroll when it is rolled together. In its place, like a time lapse of pimples on a teenager’s face, tiny images appear at random on the black space, each slowly growing, cohering as the system accumulates the data I desire.

  The images represent a timeline as well as a network of social connections. I can’t even pretend to think what sort of means the machine has available to it that it can put together such information so immediately, but it seems to aggregate recurring references to people, places and organizations so that an image emerges of Ono’s habits and associations, places she has been known to frequent on a more than casual basis, important people who have played significant roles in her life, and social institutions in which she has been more or less directly involved in during her seventy-something years.

  Seventy? The number doesn’t collate with the image I have in my mind. Her hard, angular face as she emerged like the most dreadful of black-winged butterflies from the husk of my second mother’s identity was that of a woman not over the age of forty. A well-maintained forty. A forty good enough to kick some serious ass, I’m willing to bet.

  Again, like the unreliable cameras they are, my eyes play over the information the god-box provides and I commit to memory what I can. I have names, dates, places, routines. Good enough to begin.

  Zephyr 5.10 “Stage Fright”

  THERE ISN’T MUCH left to the corpse and I am unable to really confirm it is my mother lying there on the surgical white slab. An awkward-looking mortician and three agents – Synergy, Annie Black, and a black guy in a brown suit called Tempo – ring around me as I stare at the grisly remains like a stage fright-struck performance poet. I feel a pressure to emote, to feel something, yet between the confluence of data still fresh in my brain and the quest for truth in which I’m currently entangled, nothing’s forthcoming. I look from one en
d of the table to the other and random memories, perhaps even the quasi-sensual memories of breastfeeding and baby snuggling, my first bath, all the residual goo-ing and gah-ing war at me from within. And I am damned glad I’m not near the Wallachians’ table now for fear of what images it might provide.

  “Zephyr?” Synergy asks because it’s been a while.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to say.”

  “If there is anything about the . . . deceased . . . that you could recognize?” the black guy asks.

  “That could be anyone. I’m sorry.”

  There’s a touch of iron in Synergy’s voice as she says, “We told you, the genetic markers indicate parahuman abilities.”

  “But what sort?” I turn to her and ask.

  Synergy glances at the guy in the lab coat.

  “It will take time to get any sort of idea of her domain,” the guy says and obviously feels like a chimp.

  I feel sorry for him, so I nod and shrug and glance back at the husk. It is so abstract that it doesn’t even feel like a human being, let alone the woman who brought me into the world. Yet there is nothing to indicate otherwise. And Occam’s razor delineates the reality, that this must be my mother. My birth mother, lying there immolated in what’s either some ironic reversal or a grand mystery, a fire-controller burnt to death. Rather than ask why I feel so little – shock, a small voice tells me, is a good explanation for anything – I wonder instead why there are so many unanswered questions. If this is my mother dead, then fine. But what happened to Maxine? Was there ever a Granny Max? Was it Ono in some weird complicated and impassioned lie the whole time? Was it my father’s one-time mistress who coddled and cuddled and cozied up to me through my entire youth?

  “Fuck.”

  For a moment, I’m not aware that I’ve spoken aloud, but the agents and the lab rat look willing to indulge me. Synergy wants to see that I am human and so I grant her that, clutching my fists and giving a nervous expulsion of breath and then storming from the room. She follows me into the hall, she alone.