Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect

by Michael Bailey

  I am not impressed by this. Honestly. Truth be told, it’s a little unsettling that anyone can shovel that much BS and make it look so effortless.

  That’s why I have to doubt Edison when he tells my parents, “Despite this unfortunate turn of events, I do hope it hasn’t soured Carrie on my offer to work for me. She’s an exceptionally bright young woman, very independent-minded, driven, focused...well,” he chuckles, “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “Oh, no. We are both very well aware of Carrie’s personal qualities,” Mom says, placing patronizing emphasis on personal qualities. Thanks, Mom. That wound needed a little salt anyway.

  Edison turns to me. “What do you say, Carrie?”

  The urge to punch Edison in his smug face rises like bile in my throat. This is all a show, a smokescreen, and this alleged job offer is at best a lame attempt to atone for his colossal screw-up, and at worst the master illusionist’s final trick of the evening, the big, bold, flashy show-stopper that sends everyone home convinced that what they saw was real and not part of an expert deception.

  Screw him.

  “I’ll pass,” I say icily.

  “Carrie, honey, this is an amazing opportunity,” Mom says. “Working for Bose Industries, even if it’s only an internship — that would be such a great addition to your college applications.”

  I stare right at Edison. “I’m afraid my experiences tonight have indeed soured me on the notion of working for you,” I say, enunciating every tiny little syllable, throwing each word like a poisoned dart, “and I’d appreciate it greatly if you respected my answer.”

  Edison, after a pause, nods. He turns back to my parents, shakes their hands, apologizes again, and says, “Carrie, if you wouldn’t mind walking me back to my car? I’d like to have a word with you in private, please.”

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  He doesn’t say anything until we reach his car. Edison folds his arms, leans against the trunk, and says, “I meant what I said back there. I want you to come work for me.”

  “And I meant what I said.” Edison scrunches his face, opens his mouth to speak, and that’s when the dam bursts. “You’re not even going to apologize to me, are you? You have me arrested and thrown in prison for something I didn’t do because you’re such a damned control freak who doesn’t respect me enough to talk to me like a human being and then you throw me a job offer like that’s going to make everything okay and you can’t even apologize for completely ruining my birthday?!”

  Edison lets out a low whistle. “That was impressive. Have you been taking lessons from Missy?”

  The punch that’s been building inside me all night, the one I’ve held in check because I am a mature young lady, and mature young ladies don’t punch people in anger — it breaks loose, and this mature young lady swings wide and clocks Edison right on the point of the chin. It doesn’t hurt him so much as shock the bejesus out of him. He stares at me in wide-eyed astonishment for a moment, then straightens up and does the very last thing I ever expect him to do.

  “I deserved that,” he says. “And you deserve better treatment from me. And you do deserve an apology. I screwed up, badly, and I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say. “After that performance you gave my parents, I don’t believe a single word coming out of your mouth.”

  “Then let me prove it. I’ll make this up to you. I’ll make it right, I swear.”

  I hold out my hand. “Then give me back my transponder. Reinstate me as a flyer. Un-ground the Squad.” I see the hesitation in his eyes. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do? Really?”

  “No, and I don’t care, because you’re not going to explain yourself to me anyway. You never do. You always act like you have a reason for treating us the way you do but you never tell us what it is. You just expect us take you at your word.” I lean in to him. “Your word is worthless.”

  To hell with this. I could stand here all night talking in circles, but Edison Bose has stolen away enough of my life. He gets no more.

  “Good night, Mr. Bose,” I say, turning on my heel.

  “Carrie. Wait.”

  I stop. I don’t know why but I do. I turn back to Edison, who proceeds to tell me a story:

  The Secret Origin of Concorde.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Edison Nicholas Bose was born to Taylor and Marnie Bose, a simple couple from a middle-class background who, through some quirk of fate, managed to produce one of the most brilliant minds of the 21st Century.

  To call young Edison precocious or a prodigy would be a gross understatement. While his peers were still grappling with basic addition and subtraction, five-year-old Edison was making short work of basic geometry. His final book report as a first grader was on Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. He received an A-plus, but only after his teacher held a lengthy conference with his parents to verify they had no hand in writing the report. His second grade science fair project was a modified Lionel model train set. The fully functional maglev train, his first serious foray into the field of magnetic levitation and propulsion technology, boasted a scale top speed of two hundred miles per hour. The project handily won the competition.

  His parents skipped Edison ahead several grades after that.

  At age thirteen, as a high school senior, Edison revisited maglev technology for his science fair project, but took it to an unprecedented new level: He fashioned out of a riding lawnmower chassis a maglev hovercraft capable of holding a single passenger. What made this creation so radical and innovative was that the hovercraft did not need to repel off a base. The few maglev trains in operation at the time, commercially and on test tracks, required a magnetic base with an opposing polarity as the train’s drive system, but Edison’s creation rode the Earth’s magnetic field itself.

  The invention immediately caught the attention of Simon Edward Leeds, the head of Leeds Innovative Technologies and the fair’s special guest judge. Later that week, Leeds and the Boses met for dinner in Boston to discuss Edison’s bright future.

  That future took a dark turn when the Boses returned home to interrupt a burglary in progress. Taylor died instantly after taking a point-blank blast from his own shotgun, which he kept hidden but unsecured in his bedroom closet. Marnie bled out from a gut shot while waiting for an ambulance. Edison escaped unscathed — physically.

  The Boses’ killer was never caught.

  Leeds, who had also lost his parents at a young age, felt Edison’s pain deeply, personally. Leeds took the boy in, raised him, did everything within his power to help him heal, and to nurture his gift. In that latter effort Leeds succeeded, although Edison’s accelerated development was as much due to his own obsessive behavior; he spent his every waking hour working, researching, tinkering — keeping his mind occupied so he had no time or energy to dwell on his loss. Advances in maglev technology that might have otherwise taken years occurred within the space of a few months.

  Edison’s sole interest outside of his work was the super-hero known as Hardwire, a mysterious vigilante who fought crime with a dazzling array of high-tech gadgets. In Hardwire, Edison saw someone who coupled his greatest passion with his greatest desire: To see the innocent protected and the guilty brought to justice.

  In this idolization, Leeds saw a chance to finally break through the wall Edison had erected around himself. He made the fateful decision to reveal his secret to the boy: he was the hero Hardwire.

  The gambit worked. Edison, long distant and disconnected, came alive again.

  Eager to impress his hero, Edison crafted his own alter-ego, Technokid, and built an arsenal of non-lethal weapons that rivaled and eventually surpassed that of his mentor. Side by side, they fought the good fight for four years.

  Hardwire’s fight ended when Simon Leeds died — not in the line of duty, but in an insultingly mundane manner, at the hands of a drunk driver.

  Days after losing
the man who had become his second father, Edison lost Leeds’ company. A rival corporation, sensing blood in the water, swooped in and acquired Leeds Innovative Technologies in a leveraged buyout.

  The loss was not total, however; Edison’s many patents remained his, and his groundbreaking work in maglev technology was more than sufficient to leverage enough venture capital to found his own company. Bose Industries was born soon after Edison’s nineteenth birthday.

  As part of this transitional period in his life, Edison retired Technokid and reinvented himself, trading his arsenal of gadgets for a sleek suit that utilized his maglev technology in a manner he has, to this day, yet to duplicate for the purpose of mass consumption. Concorde was his alone.

  In time, Edison Bose the industrialist and Concorde the super-hero grew their respective reputations to become leaders, idols, role models. In some ways, Edison preferred his life in the Concorde suit to his life in a business suit. Concorde had no past, no tragedies to haunt him. He was a clean slate.

  That would not last.

  The day came when an indiscretion from Technokid’s past came home to roost in the form of Nick Azubuike — the son Edison never knew he had, a son born of a tryst with a fellow teenage adventurer known as Valkyrie Red. The thrill of battle, the intimacy forged among comrades facing death together, the rush of victory, the smoldering fire of teenage lust — it was perhaps inevitable they would commemorate their successful team-up with a night of passion.

  Why Valkyrie Red — real name Helena Azubuike — kept their child a secret from him, Edison never learned. He never got an opportunity to ask; Helena’s death due to advanced pancreatic cancer saw to that.

  The attorney who introduced Edison to his son indicated that Helena wished father and son to be reunited following her passing. Edison took the boy in without question, and was soon struck with a profound sense of déjà vu as he attempted and failed to reach out to Nick. The boy, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his father, harbored the same simmering resentment Edison once felt toward the world, alternated between stretches of grim silence and fits of white-hot rage the way Edison did as a newly minted orphan. He often felt as though he were viewing his own childhood through Leeds’ eyes.

  When Edison learned that Nick admired the high-flying hero Concorde, he knew exactly what to do. He revealed his identity to the boy and sure enough, the divide separating them vanished.

  Later, Edison learned that Nick decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and became a teen hero in his own right. To achieve this, Nick appropriated several pieces of Edison’s Technokid equipment, which he’d held onto for sentimental reasons, fashioned for himself a crude costume, and set out to make his name in the world.

  Edison never learned what Nick called himself, nor did he ever uncover the exact circumstances that led to the boy’s violent death.

  He had Manticore to thank for that.

  We stand there in silence, neither of us looking at the other. I take a few minutes to soak it all in, and I glance up at Edison when he clears his throat. His mouth is set in a hard line, his eyes are bright with impending tears, and I’m struck by the feeling that I’m the first person to hear that story in ages, maybe ever. That realization settles onto my chest like a physical weight.

  Edison takes his wallet out of his pocket, opens it, and removes a small photo. He looks at it, his lips quivering as though deciding whether to smile, and turns it so I can see. Edison is wearing a Red Sox cap and a toothy grin (two things I’ve never seen on him). So is the young boy at his side — a boy who, at first glance, reminds me a lot of Matt: He’s on the skinny side, has unruly dark hair, and his smile is more of a cocky smirk. The weight on my chest increases.

  Talk about a moment of clarity. In the space of fifteen minutes, every question I’ve ever had about Concorde has been answered. I understand him perfectly. His anger, his attitude toward us, his attempts to dissuade us from a life of super-heroing — it all makes perfect, painful sense.

  One question remains: Does it change anything?

  The silence becomes too much for me. “I’m sorry about your son,” I say in a whisper. “Parents shouldn’t outlive their kids.”

  “No. They shouldn’t,” he says. “Your parents shouldn’t outlive you.” Edison reaches into his jacket and presents me with my headset. Somehow, I’m not surprised he had it on him. “Your transponder is active again. If you want this back I’ll give it to you, but I want you to think hard about your decision, because if you go back to the job and you’re killed in the line of duty, it won’t be just you who suffers the consequences.”

  The impulse to snatch back my headset falters. I’ve always known dying was a possibility. I knew that even before I had a couple of back-to-back near-death experiences, but I’ve rarely thought about it past myself. I never considered what my death would do to my parents or my friends.

  “Carrie,” Edison says. “I am begging you to step down as Lightstorm. For your family.”

  For my family, huh?

  “When you realized you had a son, when you took him in, did you step down as Concorde?” I say. Edison looks at me, his face a blank. “That would be a no, then.”

  Edison cradles the headset in his hand, looks at it, looks at me. He hands it over.

  “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it right,” he says. “We’ll sit down and figure out a training schedule, we’re going to set firm parameters for your involvement in any given scenario —”

  “No.” Edison blinks at me. “You’re doing it again: you’re not asking me what I want, you’re telling me. You’re telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it, and I’m done letting you dictate my life to me.”

  Edison sighs, nods. “All right, so you tell me: What do you want?”

  I want you to treat me like an equal. I know I’m young. I know I’m inexperienced. That’s not an excuse to dismiss me or ignore me or boss me around.

  That’s what I want to say, but I have a more pressing need than my ego. “I want your help tracking down Buzzkill Joy.”

  I bring Edison up to speed on the Buzzkill Joy situation and, because I’m in a foul mood, I make damn sure he knows that we’ve been trying to contact him about this for several days, but couldn’t because he shut us out so thoroughly. Yes it’s petty of me, but Edison has a lot of Humble Pie left to eat and I’m going to shove it down his throat with a funnel and a plunger.

  “I have some friends within the defense department, if that’s what you’re driving at,” Edison says, “though I can’t guarantee they’ll be in much of a sharing mood. And I can’t guarantee I can get to that anytime soon.”

  “Joy escaped on your watch,” I say. More pie, Edison? “What’s more important than hunting down a dangerous fugitive?”

  “Trying to find whoever’s been sneaking my nuclear micro-cells onto the black market.”

  “Are you serious? Since when is your business more important than hunting down a murderous lunatic?”

  Edison holds up a finger. “Here’s your first lesson, Carrie: As a team leader, you need to know how to prioritize. Joy is dangerous, yes, but she’s a low-level threat.”

  “Tell that to Missy and her dad.”

  “I’m looking at this objectively. Yes, Joy is dangerous, and yes, she’s our responsibility, but she’s one person; her damage potential is low, whereas a single micro-cell, even an unstable one, could power something as devastating as an EMP bomb.”

  Yeah, okay, that would be bad.

  Wait, what? “Unstable?” I say. “Like, it could go boom unstable?”

  “Nothing so dramatic,” Edison says. “The micro-cell manufacturing process is like any other. Sometimes the end product is imperfect, and flawed micro-cells tend to deplete much more rapidly, produce significantly less energy, produce excessive heat, et cetera.”

  “So, the micro-cells I recovered are, what, factory seconds?”

  “Basically, and our normal process is to destr
oy them.”

  “But if the micro-cells hitting the black market are the junk ones, doesn’t that mean they’re not being destroyed?”

  “Except that they are being destroyed. I scoured every last company file and record, and everything’s perfectly in order.”

  “Uh-huh. And in a scientific complex stuffed full of uber-geniuses, there’s absolutely no one there who’s at least smart enough to falsify those records?”

  On the occasion I outsmart an adult (which, I say immodestly, happens fairly often), I find myself on the receiving end of this particular look: a sour frown that expresses extreme annoyance. I’m never sure whether they’re irked at me for figuring out something they couldn’t, or at themselves for missing something so obvious. Either way, I absolutely bask in that expression, and Edison’s irk-face is soooooo gratifying.

  “How about this: You call your contacts,” I say, “and if you learn anything useful, let me know. The Hero Squad will take care of Buzzkill Joy, and you can focus on fixing your problems.”

  After a long, thoughtful pause, Edison nods.

  “Deal,” he says. We shake on it, and before he gets back into his car, before he drives away, he says to me, as one super-hero to another, “Good luck, Lightstorm.”

  I manage a small smile. “Thank you, Concorde.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  It’s late, I’m exhausted on a level I’ve never known before, and I really, really do not feel like eating, but when Dad suggests we grab a late dinner so my birthday isn’t a complete bust — how can I say no to that?

  Junk Food is open late, so we plant ourselves in a corner booth, split a pu-pu platter and some pork fried rice, and use the time for a long-overdue catch-up chat. Dad’s been busy despite the weather — construction on Cape Cod slows to a crawl once winter hits in earnest — and he’s been getting out more. He has his bar trivia team, he’s taken up bowling (he sucks at it, but he has fun), and he’s made some more minor renovations to the old house to make it more his own (translation: He’s purging any detail that reminds him of his failed marriage and his absent daughter).