by Greg Logan
The bartender said, “You’re the one with the broken hand. Now get out of here before I call the cops.”
Rick and his buddy stormed out of the bar. The rest of the patrons, maybe fifty of them, mostly at tables but some at the bar, all college-age, broke out into applause.
Jake said, “God, I hate this.”
Scott clapped a hand to Jake’s shoulder. “You’re a hero, buddy.”
“I’m a freak, is what I am.”
The girl said, “So, you going to buy me a drink?”
Jake shrugged. “Why not?” He looked to the bartender. “Whatever she wants.”
“On the house, man,” he said. “For all three of you. That was outright cool. Never seen anything like that, before.”
“Hopefully you’ll never have to again.”
The girl ordered a vodka martini.
“Jake, you know what you need?” Scott said, his face ready to burst with the laugh he was trying to suppress. “What you really need is a costume. I’m serious. I mean, a cape, tights, the whole nine yards.”
Jake shook his head. “I wish I could just ignore you,” and he tipped his mug of beer for a chug.
Scott continued. “I mean, think about it, man. Here you are, the most powerful human who ever walked the Earth. Whether you like it or not, the newspapers are pinning the label superhero on you. Seems a shame to disappoint your fans.”
Jake slammed his beer mug down on the bar, slopping suds up and over the side. “Will you stop it? I mean, can’t we just go out for some beers without you having to make a jackass out of yourself?”
“Oh, come on, Jake,” Scott said.. “All the superheroes have their emblem on their chest. You should have a big stylized S, in a triangle. Right in the middle of your chest. And a big red cape...”
“What you should have is a big strip of duct tape right over your mouth. It would make the world a better place.”
They were each twenty-five, sitting in a bar in Boston. Scott was studying for his doctorate – actually, he was flying through the courses, often instructing his instructors. Jake was serving as his lab assistant and Man Friday.
Jake stood at an even six feet. He had an athletic build, because he had been an athlete before the accident that turned him into a meta-human. Soccer. Baseball. He no longer competed because it wasn’t fair to do so against non-powered humans, but he continued to keep himself in shape.
“You know,” Scott said, “you look kind’a like Christopher Reeve. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Not if they want to live long, they don’t.” It seemed like it was starting to get a little dark in here, Jake thought. Were the lights dimming a bit? No, it must just be his foul mood.
Scott was laughing. And laughing. The way a guy will when he has been consuming too much beer. He got control of himself long enough to tip the mug and down a few more mouthfuls of beer, then continued laughing, wiping the foam from his mouth with his sleeve.
The girl said to Jake, “Is he always like this?”
Jake said, “Only when he’s drunk. When he’s not, he’s worse.”
Scott said, “Oh, stop sulking, will you? You’re just mad because you lost your buzz. Power-down and have some more beer.”
“Forget it. I’m not in the mood, now.”
“Is that true?” the girl asked. “”Your power is not, like, always on? You have to turn it on and off? Like a light switch?”
Jake reluctantly nodded. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
Scott said, “Actually, it’s more like a volume switch. I theor..theorize,” he was stumbling over the word because of all the beer, “theorize, that it’s always on to an infintis..inf..small degree. But he can increase the volume, which increases his physical strength and seems to increase his stamina and his tolerance to injury. We’ve observed that when he’s significantly powered-up he doesn’t get hungry and doesn’t even need to breathe. Though, of course, he can’t speak without exhaling, but he doesn’t seem to need oxygen. As such, I theorize—there we go—that he might be able to sustain long-term exposure to outer space without a protective suit.”
Jake had buried his face in one hand. “Do we have to do this now?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m Mandy Waid.”
She extended her hand and he shook it. More politely than enthusiastically. He said, wearily, “Jake Calder.”
“Yeah.” She said with a smile. “I know who you are.”
“So,” Jake said. “You seem like you have at least half a brain. What were you doing with that loser?”
“Oh, Rick? I was just trying to land an interview. I’m a journalism major and I write for the campus paper. It’s not like I’m dating him, or anything.” The vodka martini was now in front of her, and she took a sip. “Well, just once. But what-the-hell, you know?”
Jake shook his head. The longer this night lasted, the more he found he just wanted to be left alone.
She carried a small purse that seemed to match her skirt, and from it she pulled a note pad and pen, and began quickly jotting stuff down. She looked over to Scott. “And you are?”
“Scott Tempest,” Scott replied.
“Scott Tempest.” She knew the name. “Wow. Both of you, sitting right here in this bar.”
Jake nodded. “The smartest frigging man on the planet, three sheets to the wind.”
“Look,” she said, once again directing her attention to Jake. “Why don’t we get out of here? Go someplace a little more private?”
He turned his dark gaze toward her. “You lose the interview with the jock, so you want to make up for it with the superhero?”
“No,” she said, putting her pad and pen away. “Nothing like that. This’ll be totally off the record. What do you say?”
Scott said, “It’ll do you good, Jake. You don’t get out enough.”
Jake turned from Mandy to his drunk friend. “And whose fault is that?”
“All right, all right. Everything’s my fault.”
“Well, it really is. Can you get home okay?”
“Can I get home okay? Can I get home okay? I’m the smartest man on the planet, remember?”
“The smartest man on the planet who can’t remember to do his laundry or gas up his car.”
Jake looked to the bartender, who said, “I’ll call him a cab.”
“Thanks, man.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Serving as assistant to Scott Tempest meant a good many things. Body guard, which Jake was quite good at. He was also called upon to offer muscle when it came to one of Scott’s bizarre experiments and some heavy lifting was required. It also meant accompanying Scott when he went into the field. All of this was monitored strictly by the United States government, and most of it was listed as classified.
Scott Tempest was indeed pursuing a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, in fact four of them simultaneously. But even more importantly, the school was serving as a cover for his activities. Activities that were funded by the government.
For instance, when Scott theorized time travel might be feasible if he only had the materials to construct the necessary devices, the government took him seriously enough to offer wads of cash so he could get the materials he needed for further research.
Teleportation, the process of breaking down an object to its molecular level, sending those molecules along on a laser beam, and then reassembling the object in another location with every molecule in its proper spot like reassembling a puzzle, was also theoretically possible.
“You’re nuts,” Jake had said, when Scott first mentioned this to him.
“Undoubtedly. But it is theoretically possible.”
Scott presented his theory regarding teleportation, along with his six-hundred page proposal, to the Secretary of Technological Development, a member of the President’s cabinet whose very existence was classified. For his trouble, Scott was presented with a check for half a billion to begin initial research and development.
Scott Tempest was what t
he government referred to as a meta-human. His synapses fired at more than eight times the speed of the average human. By his own somewhat modest estimation, he was probably the smartest human to have ever walked the face of the Earth. And since humans had more raw intelligence than any other creature to evolve on this planet, that made him simply the most intelligent living being ever.
“Kind of makes you stop and think,” he said once, over a beer.
“Kind of makes you get a little nauseous,” Jake said.
Scott had reached the reading level of the average adult by age three. He was doing calculus at age five. He completed his first doctorate at eleven. And all of this without really trying. Comic books took up as much of his time as with any kid his age, and he wasted many hours in front of the television and playing video games.
It was for his thesis when he went for his first of many doctorates that he discovered the existence of the meta gene, or the genesis gene as he called it. Or sometimes, the genesis six. The gene that, when triggered, causes what he referred to as a flash-forward in evolution.
There was no guarantee it would affect every human the same way, though with him, it caused his mutated intelligence level. Despite his super-intelligence, however, he had never been able to determine what made the genesis gene become active.
Scott tried to publish his thesis, and that was when he first got the attention of the Secretary of Technological Development. The Secretary strongly encouraged him not to publish it, because certain knowledge might become dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. This sounded a little like melodramatic paranoia to Scott, so the Secretary reworded it.
“Imagine the chaos,” he said, “if this genesis gene theory was released to the general public. Crackpots trying to find ways to trigger their own gene, so they could turn into some sort of super-humans. Imagine the harm they could do to themselves. No, such things should be carefully monitored.”
And so the University of Massachusetts became the place from which Scott pursued his study of science. Scott was to focus mainly on projects that benefited society, with funding and gentle guidance from the government.
Scott decided, however, he also needed a social life. So at age twenty-one, despite the Secretary’s disapproval, he took a job making pizzas and moved into a local house shared by four other college kids. One of them an engineering major by the name of Jake Calder.
Jake relayed all of this to Mandy Waid as they walked along the streets of Boston. The pavement was damp from a light rain that had fallen earlier in the evening. There was minimal traffic, and occasionally a young couple out on the town would stroll by them.
“So,” she said, “I get why he calls it the genesis gene. A flash forward in evolution. Sort of a new beginning, I guess. But why genesis six?”
“Something about it being on the sixth bonded pair of the X chromosome.” Jake shrugged. “It’s all Greek to me. I don’t know. When he starts going on with that technobabble it gives me a headache. And he can go on for hours.”
“You know, I would never walk these streets at this time of night alone, but I suppose with you I am about as safe as a girl might be.”
He shrugged. Had his mood been a little lighter, he might have made some sort of flirtatious comment, like, I hope not too safe. But he was still down because of the incident at the bar.
He wore a jean jacket, and he walked with his hands in his pockets. She held onto the loop of one arm as they walked.
“I would think,” she said, “that if I had your kind of power, I would be the happiest girl in the world. Literally nothing can hurt you. You can live life truly on the edge, on an edge that can barely even be imagined by the rest of us.”
“I would rather just be a regular guy,” he said. “Leading a normal life.”
He was twenty-five years old, he explained to her. His intentions had been to have a master’s in engineering by now, and to be beginning work for one of the top technological corporations in the country. Instead, he was working at U-Mass, employed by the U.S. Government to, essentially, baby-sit the world’s most incredible genius.
Jake had been helping out in the lab two years earlier when the accident happened. At that point, he was just helping a friend. Scott had developed a reactor that ran on what he called zeta energy. Why zeta? Jake had asked him.
“Because, it sounds a little like theta energy. I always liked the old Adam Strange comics when I was a kid. Of course, zeta was a term used in early nuclear fission research, but who cares, right?”
Jake had made the mistake of asking just how the zeta energy reactor worked. Without going into the mathematics of it, which might have taken all night, Scott explained he had tapped into a multi-dimensional energy source. He didn’t fully understand it himself, but it should be able to create clean energy with no waste to pollute the air and produce no radioactive core to cause an environmental disaster when it came time for disposal.
Of course, the whole thing blew up and Jake was caught in the explosion. Ground level. Should have been vaporized, and Scott couldn’tt explain why he wasn’t. Jake was found in the wreckage, unconscious but not visibly harmed.
He was unconscious for four days. During this time, his body temperature fluctuated from eighty degrees to over one hundred, and finally settled on the normal ninety-eight point something on day four, when he finally woke up.
Scott didn’t tell anyone he was secretly monitoring Jake for zeta radiation emissions. Much of what he did he kept on the proverbial down-low, telling the Secretary only what he thought the Secretary needed to know. He found there seemed to be a continual reading, low but steady, and it seemed Jake was now generating the stuff. At one time, on day two, a nurse had attempted to draw some blood from Jake and broke three needles trying to get them into his arm. During that time, the zeta radiation was spiking. Later, when it returned to its normal low, she was able to get the blood easily.
When Jake awoke, he seemed fine. He didn’t climb to consciousness slowly, like someone who had been comatose for four days. He just opened his eyes, yawned and stretched as though he had merely been asleep and it was time to start the day.
It was shortly afterward that he discovered his ability to increase his output of zeta energy just by desiring to do so. Powering-up, he called it, because the higher the emission of energy, the stronger he seemed to become. His tolerance for pain rose dramatically, and he seemed to heal more quickly.
Scott set up some equipment in one of his labs, and they began a series of tests to measure the fluctuations in Jake’s strength and toleration of pain in comparison to the levels of energy he was emitting.
Scott called it super strength, and he used terms like healing factor and invulnerability. Terms Scott took from comic books, Jake explained to Mandy.“
He really reads comic books?” Mandy asked, as they walked along.
Despite his mood, Jake couldn’t help but crack a grin. “Yes. The smartest man in the world reads comics. And I’ve found out the hard way when your life starts resembling a comic book, you know you’ve done something wrong.”
She gave a short laugh. “Oh, it can’t be all that bad.”
“No, I suppose not. Not for the most part, at least. When it gets bad is on nights like this, when I would like to go out like a normal human being. Have some beers like a normal guy.”
She shrugged. “Well, you had some beers. Got into a fight. And now you’re walking a girl home. Not bad, I would say.”
He had to smile at that. He looked into her laughing eyes. “I suppose you’re right.”
“So,” she said. “Doctor Tempest was trying to measure your maximum power limits.”
“Yeah.”
“What were the results?”
“The results were everything seemed to be off any scale he could concoct. Hell, he even theorizes I could survive in space.”
“Yeah, he said that earlier. Did he mean, like, without a space suit, or anything?”
Jake nodded. “Yeah. O
f course, all of this is classified. I really shouldn’t be talking about it at all.”
She traced an X over her chest. “Off the record. Cross my heart.”
They walked a bit further, and she asked, “So, can you fly? And do you have X-ray vision, and all of that?”
Jake chuckled, and shook his head. “No, nothing like that. X-ray vision can’t really happen, at least according to Scott. Physiologically impossible. And flying can’t happen unless you can somehow control the gravitational field. So, Superman couldn’t really exist.”
“Aw,” she said, with mock disappointment. “Don’t burst my bubble. I am glad about the X-ray vision, though.”
“Oh?” His mood was beginning to lighten considerably. “And why is that?”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “A girl likes to keep a little suspense.”
They eventually reached her apartment. Mandy fit her key into the lock, and said, “So, would you like to come in for a glass of wine? Maybe you can power-down and let yourself enjoy it.”
He smiled. “Sure. That sounds great.”
She lived in an efficiency. One big room, essentially. A double bed against one wall, a kitchenette against the other. She found space for a small stand that held a television and a DVD player. On her kitchen table was a laptop.
She said, “It’s not much, but I call it home. And I manage to make enough money to pay for it myself, so I don’t need a roommate. I don’t know where I’d put a roommate, anyway. There’s barely enough room for me.”
She gestured toward a wicker rocker on the uneven wooden floor next to the bed. “Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable.”
He pulled off his jacket and let it drop to the bed. Then he lowered himself into the rocker, powering-down more. There were times when he simply did not know his own strength, and thought the wicker looked a little fragile.
He asked, “What do you do for a job? I mean, writing for the school paper and attending school full-time can’t leave you much time for a job.”
She had pulled the fridge open and was now inserting a cork screw into a wine bottle. “Want to know a secret? I moonlight by selling articles freelance to the Boston Press Herald.”