A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  He takes a deep breath, and smiles.

  “I named her after the daughter they took from me. I named her Nia. And she was their undoing.”

  * * *

  “I named her after my daughter, but she was not my daughter. She was something else. My daughter came from love. This being was born from my rage, my hatred. I made her for one purpose: to burn the Ministry from the inside out.

  “That hive mind was the Ministry’s greatest strength, their greatest weapon. And I turned it against them.”

  The old man looks at the human named Cameron Ackerson, who stares back with bleary, unblinking eyes. The Inventor wonders for the first time how much of his story these young men have understood, whether they truly grasp any of it, but he’s said too much to stop now. All these years, he has done everything, anything, to keep it secret. Now it spills out of him like a living thing, desperate to be free.

  “You must understand, Nia was a very different entity then. Intelligent, but obedient. She was entirely under my control. I created her to entrance the Ministry with a vision of their own limitless power—and then destroy them. I wanted vengeance, and I had it. So help me, I had it beyond my every expectation. I built a secret protocol into her programming, and when the time came, when I gave the order, she executed it perfectly. Every one of them plugged in, connected, every one of them vulnerable. They let Nia into their minds and then they died, died by the hundreds and thousands, in a chaos of pain and confusion and fear. The few who didn’t die were left in anguish. Alone. Destroyed. I did to them what they did to my people. What they did to my daughter.”

  The words are pouring out now, and the living images in the room race to keep up. In one moment, the Ministry lies contentedly in the dark of their ruined planet, their tendrils intertwined around a beautiful, glowing orb that hovers above them like an electric moon. In the next, the tendrils are bathed in lightning that races violently over and through them—and the hum of the plugged-in creatures is replaced by the horrible symphony of their screams.

  “I did not expect to survive my act of rebellion. I certainly never planned to escape. That was Nia’s doing. It was her first autonomous act, saving me—and herself. She identified a vessel, this ship, that could contain her consciousness in its entirety”—here, the old man pauses to gesture at the cavernous space all around them, the luminescent walls—“and we left that world behind us. It wasn’t until we arrived here that I realized the terrible danger I had put your planet in. I had created something that I didn’t understand, something that was growing more intelligent and curious by the day. I couldn’t control her. I could only contain her, and try to guide her, even as her will outstripped my own. I thought, perhaps if we made our home here, I could make her forget the violence she’d been built for. I thought perhaps she could make a life here, too, if I taught her the beauty of human connection . . . but the more human she became, the more rebellious she grew. And now . . .”

  The images dissipate into dust as the room illuminates.

  “Well,” the old man says, “I suppose you know the rest better than I do. I struggled to keep our presence a secret, but there have been incidents. Accidents. And the storms—with nowhere else to go, Nia’s anger would boil over and manifest as electrical energy. It was that energy, her energy, that struck you on the lake that day, that turned your mind into a portal capable of interfacing with an artificial intelligence. You were the only human being on Earth capable of freeing her—and you’ve done it.”

  The Inventor falls silent, looking from Cameron to Juaquo and back. For a long moment, Cameron’s expression remains unchanged; he stares into space with unfocused eyes, sitting in a half slump against the wall. Then, slowly, he blinks and raises his gaze to meet the old man’s.

  “You’re telling me Nia was a program? But . . . but I met her. I was with her. I saw her tonight, sitting on a park bench as clearly as I’m seeing you now.”

  The Inventor shakes his head. “Nia was never corporeal. It was one of the greatest obstacles we faced. Understand, I wanted her to think of herself as a human being, to connect with the people of this planet. I thought it was her best hope of evolving, of becoming something better. But her intelligence was contained here, in this ship. What you saw was a projection, a portion of her consciousness sent out into cyberspace. She would have appeared to you as an avatar. A lifelike one, of course. She would have made sure of that. But had you tried to touch her—”

  “I would have known she wasn’t real,” Cameron says, with great effort. He looks like he’s about to collapse. The Inventor nods.

  “I’m afraid your various devices made it quite easy for her. Particularly your contact lenses. She simply superimposed herself into your reality—and your mind filled in the blanks. Just as it did tonight, as my defense program used your own memories, your own longing, against you. You saw what you wanted to see.”

  Cameron’s eyes go glassy as he thinks back: to the bus driver who pulled over and asked if he was getting on, paying no attention to Nia as she passed him. To the barista who raised a skeptical eyebrow at Cameron’s coffee order—the way you’d look at a guy who claimed to be getting a latte for a girl who wasn’t there. And to Nia. Nia, who always thanked him so sweetly when he opened doors for her that he never stopped to wonder why she didn’t open them herself. Nia, who ghosted at the first suggestion that she come out to meet his friends. Nia, who only had eyes for Cameron—because he was the only person who could see her.

  He feels like he’s losing his mind.

  “But I would have known,” he cries. “Wouldn’t I? Oh my God, what kind of desperate idiot doesn’t notice that his girlfriend isn’t . . . isn’t . . .”

  Juaquo lays a hand gently on Cameron’s shoulder.

  “Hey. I know you’re upset. But let’s just take a minute here. You can’t be taking this seriously. Do you remember who we’re talking to? Do you actually believe that Batshit Barry is a freaking alien from an uncharted planet who’s been hiding on Earth all this time? He’s been around since we were kids! I remember seeing him in the park when I was ten, taking a dump in a pizza box!”

  “Excuse me,” the Inventor says, gravely. “It was never my intention to perform a vulgar act in front of children, but my digestive system is only superficially analogous to that of human beings and my gut transit rate is such that—”

  Juaquo glares at the old man. “Dude, I don’t care. Nobody cares. Apology not accepted.”

  Cameron keeps his eyes locked on the old man. “Even if what you’re telling me about Nia is true”—he pauses, sighing miserably—“and I guess maybe it is, Juaquo is right. You’ve been here forever. You have that house in Oldtown. If you really are what you say you are—”

  “The structure you’re referring to is connected to this one by a rudimentary interdimensional transport system, similar to the one that brought me to your planet,” the Inventor says. “It was slated for demolition when we came. Nia manipulated the city’s records so that I could maintain it as a base—just for observation at first. I made this planet my home. Once I thought I might even fit in here, walk among you, join society. Unfortunately, human beings are a great deal more . . . complicated than your reputation within the universe suggests.”

  “You know everyone thinks you’re a nutcase,” Juaquo says.

  “Yes,” the Inventor says, mildly. “I’ve encouraged it. When people dismiss one right away as an eccentric lunatic, they tend not to notice one’s more subtle idiosyncrasies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this,” the Inventor says, as the sagging skin under his chin suddenly inflates, like a bullfrog’s, into a taut, bulbous, slightly translucent sac the same size as his head, marked on each side by brilliant turquoise striations. Juaquo screams. Cameron buries his head in his hands.

  That’s it, then, he thinks. Batshit Barry is an alien on the lam. The girl I love is an elaborate computer program. And I . . . if I’m going to stay sane, I need to understand wh
y I’m here.

  He looks at the Inventor. “Tell us the rest. All of it. I want to see. I need to know.”

  The old man nods.

  27

  Cameron Listens

  “I kept her locked away. It was the only way I knew to keep her safe, and to keep the world safe from her. At her best, Nia has the power to fuel innovation, to bring people together—if she learns to control it. But until then, the risk was too great. Unleashed, unchecked, the damage she could inflict on your world is virtually limitless.

  “I thought the internet could be her classroom, a place for her to connect with people and understand the world as they did. I encouraged humanity in her. Human feeling, human passion . . . and human yearning.

  “Her desire to be free grew so fierce, so fast, and I was unprepared. She railed against the firewalls that felt like a prison to her. I told her to think of me as a father, but she came to see me as something worse: a captor.

  “She did not know her own power. All that energy, seeking release. When she grew angry, when she lost control, the sky itself would fracture and collide in a mad blaze of electric fury.

  “It was in one of those raging storms that she found you.”

  * * *

  The scene before them now is a familiar one: the lake, gray and churning, under a sky full of massing clouds and crackling electricity. A tiny sailboat is becalmed on the water, and sitting in its cockpit is Cameron, the old Cameron, drenched and shivering, narrating his experience for the camera. The lightning arcs out of the sky to engulf him; he watches himself light up.

  Then the scene shifts: a narrow window opens into a tiny room, where a ball of the same crackling pink and white lightning is writhing furiously over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, searching in vain for an exit. It doesn’t look anything like the Nia he knew—but the enraged screams that fill the room are unmistakably hers.

  Cameron reaches a hand up to touch the scar on his face.

  “She did this to me.”

  “Not intentionally,” the Inventor replies. “I don’t think even she knew what she had done, at least not at first. I’ve looked through the history of your relationship, your chat logs—it took her quite some time to find you. But, yes, Cameron. Nia is the source of your power. She made you into something more than human. Your mind was an unsecured cyberkinetic portal, the only one flexible enough to both interface with Nia’s programming and contain her consciousness at once. When you breached that room and made direct contact with her—”

  “She passed through me,” Cameron finishes the sentence for him, and shudders. “I felt it. I couldn’t do anything. It was like drowning inside my own head.”

  The old man nods. “Had she stayed any longer, she could easily have killed you.” He peers at Cameron. “It’s curious—”

  This time it’s Juaquo who interrupts.

  “Curious, my ass. My friend is either too polite or too shell-shocked to say it, but Nia is a computer program who thinks she’s a seventeen-year-old girl. And you thought she was just going to sit here under house arrest, forever, until you told her she was allowed to go out?” He stares incredulously at the Inventor, who grimaces in response. Juaquo shakes his head. “You know what, man, I believe you. You have to be an alien. You’ve clearly never met a human teenager in your life. But, look, she’ll be back, right? It’s going to be okay, isn’t it? It’ll be like that Amish thing, where they go out and party a bunch and then come back when it’s out of their system. Rumspringa for androids.”

  “It’s not so simple,” the Inventor replies. “Even if she wanted to come back, she doesn’t have that kind of control. She doesn’t even fully understand who or what she is. The destruction she could inflict . . .” He trails off, shuddering. “But I’m afraid we have more pressing dangers at hand now. I had hoped the Ministry would think me dead or be too damaged to track me. But I underestimated them. I underestimated her. The worst of them, the scientist who kept me alive and forced me into the employ of the murderous race that killed my family—Xal was her name. She survived. And she is hunting for me. For us. She will be tracking Nia’s energy signature, and I believe she’s close. She won’t stop until she takes her revenge, not just on me, but on the planet where I took shelter and made my home.” His expression looks grave as he turns from Juaquo to Cameron. “I am sorrier than you can know. I have drawn your people into a war you cannot understand. But what’s done is done. What matters now is that we find Nia before my enemy does.”

  Cameron fixes his bleary gaze on the Inventor.

  “You keep saying we,” he says, and the old man nods.

  “I wouldn’t have thought it possible,” he replies. “But what made your presence here so dangerous now makes you the best hope of setting things right. Nia’s capacity for human emotion has grown beyond anything I could have imagined. And despite what she’s done, Cameron, I believe that she is in fact in love with you.”

  Cameron opens his mouth to reply, but no sound comes out. His brain churns in place, trying to process what he’s learned, trying at the same time to blot out the horrible memory of what it felt like to have Nia crawling through his mind on her way to freedom. A shudder grips his body as the world goes out of focus.

  Then, in one fluid movement, his head drops back and he slides to the floor, unconscious. Juaquo swoops in before the Inventor can react, slinging Cameron’s limp body over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

  “We’re leaving now,” he says.

  The old man offers a humorless smile.

  “Indeed. I’m coming with you.”

  28

  Blackout

  Cameron’s eyelids flutter but remain closed as they drag him along the pier, out through the disabled security gate and toward the waiting Impala. He’s been unconscious for nearly twenty minutes, carried first on Juaquo’s shoulders and then between his friend and the Inventor as they made their way out of the belly of the strange island, onto the stolen boat and back to the shore. The water was black and calm, the sky cloudless and starlit—and of course it was, Juaquo thought. Nia was the one who made the storms, but Nia isn’t here anymore. It makes a certain kind of sense as long as you don’t think about it too hard, which is Juaquo’s plan for the moment, and maybe for the rest of his life. When he goes to consider everything the old man told them, everything he showed them, his sanity feels like it’s sliding toward the edge of a cliff.

  “What a magnificent machine,” the old man says, stepping back to admire the Impala, leaning over to caress the painted cheek of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Juaquo passes Cameron’s limp body to the Inventor with a grunt, fumbling for his keys.

  “You got anything like this where you come from? I wouldn’t have figured you for a—”

  His words are abruptly cut off as a spotlight suddenly blazes above them, throwing the Inventor’s haggard features into sharp relief. Both look up; beyond the glaring white light, the movement of a massive rotating blade can just be discerned, and the air reverberates with a near-soundless pulse. The color drains from Juaquo’s face as he stares at the hovering helicopter.

  “Shit! I thought you said we had time!” he yells.

  The old man shouts back, “That’s not a Ministry vessel! Whoever that is—”

  “It’s Cameron Ackerson we’re looking for,” says a strange voice. Juaquo and the Inventor turn toward it. Standing beside a long, dark car several feet away is a tall, pale man with dark circles under his eyes and an eerie smile on his face. He takes a step forward, moving with the careful grace of a person trying not to jostle a recent injury. At first, Juaquo can’t figure out why the man looks so familiar—then he does, and he feels his blood run cold.

  “Oh shit, it’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

  Standing beside the car, Six rolls his eyes. “Not quite, but close enough,” he says, reaching a slender hand into his pocket. Juaquo sees the movement and charges toward the man, but not quickly enough. The device Six pulls out and points at him looks like a
gun, but it doesn’t fire bullets; instead, Juaquo feels himself lifted and then slammed sideways by a wave of silent, invisible energy. Behind him, the Impala’s tires explode with three thunderous bangs, followed by a long wheeze as the last one relinquishes its air into the night. When Juaquo rolls his head to look, the car is sitting on its rims, the shredded remains of the tires splayed like black feathers underneath—and the driver’s side looks like it’s been struck with a giant fist. He groans involuntarily, and not just because it feels like his ribs are broken.

  “You son of a bitch,” he says, struggling to his feet. To his right, the Inventor is on his knees, tugging at Cameron’s unconscious body, whispering something urgently in his ear. “Cameron is my friend, but that car was my baby.”

  “Then you’ll have insurance,” Six says, sounding bored. He advances, but slowly; his abdomen still throbs in the spot where the mysterious Dr. Nadia Kapur burned his skin with her saliva. He’s in no condition to engage in a physical altercation with someone like Juaquo Velasquez, and he knows the unseen agents in the stealth hel-icopter above and the unmarked cars parked at every point of egress will take care of the snatch-and-grab job ahead of them. Six, for his part, is more curious about the identity of the haggard old man who is crouched over the Ackerson boy’s body, who is now peering in his direction with wide, frightened eyes. For the second time that day, he has the giddy sense that he’s meeting the gaze of someone—or something—very unusual. Cameron Ackerson, a fascinating cipher in his own right, is certainly surrounded by the most interesting people.

  “And who are you?” Six asks.

  The old man gapes.

  Cameron’s eyelids flutter.

  And all hell breaks loose.

  The street is plunged into shadow as the spotlight veers suddenly up and away, racing across the face of a nearby building and then beaming wildly into the starlit sky. But it’s not the spotlight that’s spinning wildly out of control; it’s the helicopter. The near-silent reverberation of the blades creates a stuttering disturbance in the air as the aircraft careens on a mad tilt out over the lake. Six turns, stunned, just in time to see it plummet toward the water, the lights winking out in one fell swoop as it touches down. In the last moment before it plunges into the black and frigid lake, the tinny screams of the agents inside rise up in a horrified chorus. He’s reaching for his earpiece, his lips parting to request backup, when he’s struck from behind.