by Stan Lee
This is what the old man—the Inventor—took from her. This is what she cannot forgive . . . and why she cannot forgive herself. She was his keeper; she should have known, should have sensed the treachery beneath his promises. He said he would elevate them. Instead, he destroyed them.
The scars that cover her body cannot compare to the hideous void where her people used to be. She can still hear the screaming inside her head, the harmony replaced by cries of confusion and anguish that were in turn replaced by nothingness. The destruction was devastating; all their work undone, lost in the terrible silence of their unlinked minds, the connection broken forever. It can never be rebuilt, not like it was. She knows that, even if the elders don’t. It’s why she left the ruins behind and came to this nowhere place. It’s why she’s been waiting so long. Waiting . . .
For this.
Xal is wide awake now, her body alive with blazing energy—not her own, but his. The electromagnetic signature of her enemy’s work is unmistakable. Every cell in her body hums in tune with it, a signal that races like electricity through the network of scars burned into her skin.
This is her secret. This is her gift. And this will be the Inventor’s undoing, because his weapon didn’t just scar her; it changed her. Its energy lights her up from the inside out, like the voices of her people once did. It calls to her. He can flee to the farthest ends of the cosmos, but he will never hide from her.
The signal lasts only a moment, but it’s long enough.
Within minutes, the location trace is complete—and if she had a voice, Xal would laugh at what it reveals. Of all the places the Inventor could have tried to hide, he’s chosen the filthiest backwater in the known universe. Perhaps he thought that nobody would think to look for him there; certainly, the ruling species on the planet is far too stupid ever to realize that there’s an intruder in their midst. Well, fine. She hopes he’s enjoyed his time in exile. In fact, she hopes he feels so secure, so safe, that he’s forgotten to be cautious. It’ll make it that much sweeter when she finds him: to watch his confidence melt away, to see the horror creep over his face. The more settled and joyful he is in his fugitive life, the more pleasure it will give her to rip it away.
She sets her coordinates and settles back, relishing the purposeful jolt as the ship drops out of the ether and into transit. A swallow taking flight through the stars, with Xal sitting safely in its belly. She knows this is just the beginning, and that the journey will be circuitous and difficult. Dozens of interdimensional jumps await her, and with them, pain. Without the strength of her people to tap into, without any enhancements to shield her, her battered body will be taking the full brunt of every leap.
But pain is fleeting. Pain is nothing. Vengeance will be hers, and truth be told, she’s in no hurry.
The longer it takes to reach her destination, the more colorfully she can imagine, over and over, how the old man will look as he dies.
6
What Ever Happened to Cameron Ackerson?
It’s a perfect late-spring afternoon, blazingly bright and unseasonably hot. On the west side of Walker Row, Shawn and Jerome Coleman are riding their bikes back and forth, hopping the curb, testing how long they can hold a balance on just the back wheel. Each time they near the end of the street, they stop and linger in front of number 32, the faded brick house with the yellow front door.
“I dare you to knock,” says Jerome.
“No way,” says Shawn.
“C’mon. It’s not like he’ll answer.”
“Oh yeah? You knock, then.”
The taller boy grimaces. “Nah. No way.”
Instead, they stare at the house, which seems to stare back at them. And maybe it is. Maybe he is. The curtains are always drawn, but they know he’s in there.
Everyone knows he’s in there.
The kid from YouTube who was struck by lightning out on the lake, and who came back . . . different.
* * *
Cameron doesn’t care about the boys outside. He knows they’re there—the little one with an old iPod in his pocket, and the bigger one who sometimes hangs out on his porch two houses down, playing one of those handheld kiddie arcade games. But their presence is just background noise, faint and easy enough to ignore. It’s why he likes it down here in the basement, where there’s no sound but the whir of his hard drives and no light but the glow from his screens. If he concentrates, he can pretend that the outside world doesn’t exist at all—that he’s sitting at the center of a concrete-walled universe that extends only a dozen feet in any direction.
“Cam? Honey?” His mother’s voice is muffled. At the top of the stairs behind him, a door creaks open and the room grows lighter by half a shade, illuminating the bank of computers in front of him and a long tabletop littered with the busted-up remains of his navigation visor and his Steadicam. Like Cameron himself, his gear survived the shipwreck, but with serious damage. It’ll never be the same.
There’s a tentative shuffle. She’s thinking about coming down. He hopes she won’t. Every time she comes near him, she brings a wave of emotional baggage with her: guilt and worry and pity and fear, so thick and heavy that Cameron feels like he’ll suffocate under it all. The shuffling stops just inside the door. His mother’s voice is clearer now, but softer.
“Cameron? I made soup. I’m off to work now, so I’ll just . . . well. You can heat it up if you want some.” He can feel her up there, peering at the back of his head. He doesn’t move. There’s another shuffle—Please go, he thinks—and then with a sigh, she does. The door closes, the room falls back into shadow, and he’s alone again.
Cameron sinks deeper into the sagging sofa and watches the screens in front of him come to life. Each one is running a different game, three different gun-toting avatars blasting their way through three different landscapes simultaneously. His eyes grow glassy as he focuses, letting the colors and textures wash over him, riding the waves of code deep into digital warfare. Uninterrupted, he’ll be here for hours, crusading through each realm like a god. In here, he’s in total control. In here, he can run, fly, blast apart obstacles and enemies as easily as he’d flick away a speck of lint. And in here, nobody ever stares at his scars or asks him about the accident; they don’t even know his name, only his handle. He calls himself Lord Respawn.
That’s what he likes best about the games: in here, Cameron Ackerson doesn’t exist.
* * *
The irony isn’t lost on him. The day he went out on Lake Erie, a mere three weeks ago, all Cameron wanted—all he’d ever wanted—was for the world to know his name. Now it does, and he’s so sick of himself that he’d rather die than ever record another video. His last YouTube upload is up to two million views. He gets comments every day begging for new content. Archer Philips keeps sending him emails asking if he wants to collaborate on a joint prank; the old Cameron would’ve cackled with glee at that, but now it’s just one more reminder that the old Cameron is gone forever.
The footage of the lightning strike was an instant viral sensation; by the time he regained consciousness in the hospital, it had made the international news and sent his follower count through the roof. A dozen celebrities tweeted get-well-soon messages while he was recovering, and one of the Real Housewives—he couldn’t remember which, or where from—started a crowdfund to pay his medical bills and replace the destroyed Sunfish, although they didn’t end up needing it. Cameron’s mother, who was savvier about social media and branding than he’d ever given her credit for, negotiated the exclusive rights to his first and only interview about the accident for a sum in the high six figures. He’d done it from his hospital bed, so stoned on painkillers that he could barely remember a word of what was said.
He doesn’t care. He hasn’t watched it. He doesn’t want to be famous anymore. He doesn’t want to live-tweet his high school graduation for three thousand bucks per post, or throw an influencer swag party for all the classmates who barely spoke to him for four years but now suddenly claim
to be his best friends. He doesn’t want to take selfies or exchange numbers with random girls who saw him nearly drown, no matter how many times Juaquo points out that his fifteen minutes of fame will eventually run out and he should take advantage of his groupies while they’re still there to be taken advantage of. He’s sick of seeing his own stupid face on screen—or anywhere else, for that matter.
That’s the other nice thing about the basement: it’s not just dark, but also entirely free of reflective surfaces.
The scar is what he sees first when he does look in the mirror. The spot where the lightning entered his body is marked by a wound in the shape of a fractal tree; the trunk wraps over his shoulder and winds up behind his ear, its branches cupping the curves of his neck and skull like a hundred spidery fingers. The longest and last of them ends in a wormy squiggle near the corner of his right eye, which everyone says he was lucky not to lose completely. It looks a little like a signature, the lightning taking credit for its work.
On good days, he imagines he’ll eventually get used to the scar. Mom says it won’t be so noticeable when the singed part of his hair grows back, and when Juaquo had visited in the hospital, he even claimed that Cameron looked better now—“like the villain in a James Bond movie”—spending ten minutes trying to explain to a furious Raquelle Ackerson that he meant it as a compliment. Cameron isn’t so sure about that, but it was a relief to realize that it doesn’t bother him, not really. It’s not like he was ever going to be a teen model to begin with, and Juaquo has a point: he certainly looks more interesting now. But it’s not only his face that’s changed. The place where the electricity burned its way out sustained the worst of the damage, and there’s nothing cool about that: a cavity in the thickest part of his heel, the necrotic flesh carefully cut away and then grafted over by surgeons. He has twenty percent less foot than he used to, and nerve damage in the part that’s left. He walks with a limp, and walking hurts. Even if they let him graduate next month—just another perk of suddenly being the school’s most famous student—the idea of clumping across the stage in front of everyone to get his diploma fills him with horror. Someone would video it and put it online, and then what? He’d go viral again. Inspiration porn. Just thinking about it makes him angry.
His shrink says that anger is just part of the process. Cameron’s mom set that up, too; he meets with Dr. Nadia Kapur every week. She even does sessions by video chat, which he has to grudgingly admit is a clever way of making sure he never has an excuse to miss his appointments. And Kapur isn’t so bad. She’s smart and funny and talks to him like a normal person, and she’s never asked him to do anything dumb like draw a picture of his feelings. But when she tells him that his life has changed and he’ll have to mourn the loss of the person he was before the accident the same way he’d mourn a real death, he wants to tell her that she really doesn’t get it. Cameron’s problem isn’t coping with what he lost. It’s about accepting what he gained.
He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want this.
* * *
At first, he hadn’t known what to make of it—and neither did his doctors, who threw out every possible diagnosis from tinnitus to brain damage. The noise inside his head would overwhelm him every time he regained consciousness; for the first week, he couldn’t be awake for more than five minutes at a time before he was clutching his head and screaming, the staff running to sedate him. Eventually they decided that the lightning strike was still affecting the activity in Cameron’s brain, which would explain everything from the seizures to the strange results on his EEGs. But that was only a guess, an explanation that made enough sense for the doctors to feel like they’d done their job. And by then Cameron knew they were wrong.
He hadn’t been damaged. He’d been enhanced.
As he got well, got stronger, he gained more control; the onslaught of information that bombarded him every time he came awake went from an unstoppable tsunami to a steady stream. He could narrow it down if he concentrated, though never silence it entirely. But it wasn’t until the day he came home from the hospital that he really understood what it meant. He waited until his mom left to buy groceries. Then he headed straight for the basement—where it was dark, and quiet, and the only machine in the room was his dad’s old desktop, gathering dust but still functional. As a kid, Cameron had enjoyed playing games on it; now he needed it to test a hypothesis that any rational person would dismiss immediately as completely impossible. Even entertaining the idea made him feel like he was losing his mind. Maybe he was. Maybe this was all a delusion, and when this experiment didn’t work, he’d walk straight upstairs and tell Mom that he was sorry, but the lightning had definitely made scrambled eggs of his brain, and she wouldn’t mind if he just gave up and lived in her basement forever, right?
The computer had a screen saver that kicked in automatically if you left it sitting too long, and Cameron turned it on and waited, watching as the screen went dark and a school of colorful bitmap fish began swimming from one side to the other. He turned his focus inward as the fish cruised by, listening in the darkness of his mind. Filtering down that noise, little by little, until all he heard was a single voice speaking a strange language that he’d never learned but somehow understood.
Cameron concentrated, and spoke back.
On the screen, the fish hiccupped and began swimming faster. Swimming in circles. Swimming into each other and exploding in all directions. Multiplying, fin to fin and tail to tail, forming an elaborate kaleidoscopic pattern that began expanding outward like a mandala. A flower made of fish. It froze in place as he stepped forward, hand extended, to touch the screen. The heat radiating from the computer’s guts was intense enough to startle him; he jumped back, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, dropping his end of the conversation that had been happening in his head. On the screen, the bitmap fish scattered and resumed their lackadaisical swimming. Cameron watched them with glassy eyes, and thought, Holy shit.
It wasn’t brain damage. He wasn’t delusional.
There was a word for what he’d just done.
For what he’d become.
Cyberkinetic.
* * *
On Monday, he glares at his phone and furrows his brow: he can hear its coded chatter in his head, but communicating both ways is . . . difficult. The software, far more advanced than the screen saver on his dad’s old desktop, requires more focus, more finesse. He concentrates, staring at his own reflection in the black mirror of the screen, and thinks, Respond.
Come on.
TURN THE HELL ON, ASSHOLE!
The screen stays black and lifeless.
Then suddenly it chimes in his hand.
“Sorry,” says the pleasant voice of the phone’s digital assistant. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
Cameron smiles.
* * *
On Tuesday, he sets the phone on his desk, walks across the room, and mentally instructs it to take his picture. It obeys immediately; Cameron can feel the photo spring into existence as the digital shutter clicks. He shuts his eyes and concentrates; fifteen feet away, the phone flashes open to an editing app and follows his commands. When he walks back across the room, the finished product is displayed on screen: Cameron’s bedroom has disappeared from the picture, replaced by the pedestrian bridge on the Death Star, with Cameron himself flashing a peace sign from behind Darth Vader. Superimposed over his head is a flashing text gif. It says, I AM THE DROID YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
Cameron busts out laughing, then startles at the sound of his mother’s voice close behind him.
“Cam? Everything okay?”
He turns, prepared to stammer some kind of explanation, then realizes that he doesn’t have to. Instead, he turns the phone to show her the picture—a picture that’s not unusual at all, unless you happened to know that he made it with his mind.
“Cute,” Mom says. “Is that what they call a meme?”
* * *
On Wednesday, he uses his powers to
open the front-facing camera on his next-door neighbor’s phone, and snaps a horrifying selfie that will make her shriek out loud when she sees it.
On Thursday, he reprograms the DVR at number 42 Walker Row, three lots down, to wipe its contents and replace every recording with an episode from the Animal Planet marathon of My Cat from Hell.
On Friday, he reaches farther down the street—all the way to the corner, where Mr. Papadapolous, the dickhead neighbor who confiscates any ball or Frisbee that accidentally sails into his yard and who once tried to shoot Cameron’s cat with a BB gun, has left his laptop open while he goes outside to have a cigarette. Cameron takes control of the machine, directs the browser to Amazon, and orders seventeen jumbo-size tubes of hemorrhoid cream to be delivered to the man’s office. Gift-wrapped.
On Saturday Cameron thinks back on the cat-and-BB-gun incident—and hacks back into Papadapolous’s hard drive, where he selects a curated handful of the man’s many, many nude selfies, and emails them to Papadapolous’s mother.
Poor Captain Stickypaws has long since passed, but it’s the principle of the thing.
* * *
At first, it’s a delight to explore his new abilities. The buzzing in Cameron’s head—that deafening cacophony, like a microphone plunged into a busy hive—has become a comforting hum. Every device, from his phone to the digital thermostat, responds to his thoughts with a pleasant, pliant invitation: What can I do for you? But it doesn’t take long for him to realize that having a psychic window into other people’s digital lives isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes, it’s downright horrifying. If you have a secret online identity, it’s not a secret from Cameron. He can’t help knowing, even when he wishes he didn’t . . . and the truth is, he almost always wishes he didn’t. It was bad enough realizing that Mrs. Clark, the nice old lady next door, spends her evenings catfishing guys on OkCupid using pictures of her own daughter, or that his guidance counselor stays up all night trying to convince strangers on the internet that the moon landing was fake. But worse is what’s hiding inside the devices of people he cares about. The first time Juaquo stopped by after the accident, Cameron caught a cyberkinetic peek at his friend’s phone—and immediately regretted it. It was the most depressing digital landscape he’d ever entered: no new contacts, no active message threads, no tags or chats or comments or snaps. His mom’s death had been like a nuclear blast that reduced Juaquo’s social life to a cold pile of rubble. There was no sign in there of the guy Cameron knew, gregarious and popular and always up to something. Instead, Juaquo’s phone belonged to a person who kept in touch with no one, who wasn’t dating or going to restaurants or tinkering with the classic lowrider that he and his mom used to bring down to a car club in Cincy on weekends. Instead, Juaquo’s GPS logs showed him driving from home to work and back again, day after day . . . except on Fridays, when he’d detour through the worst part of town on his way home, always after withdrawing a couple hundred dollars from an ATM. That last one still makes Cameron uneasy. He doesn’t know what Juaquo is doing in that neighborhood, but he does know that the last time he went there, he spent an hour on his phone afterward, looking at guns.