“Then I talk to Simon Stranko.”
“Like shit you will. Take your chances, Milo. Then it’s a truce.”
No fucking way. But risk came with the occupation of pursuing knowledge. And he was counting on the same mentality on the other side. He closed Martian Justice, produced a hologram of Milo Spector.
Dr. Playground looked down at him. “Hello again, Milo. Been a while. Compare notes you said?”
“Exactly what do you make of it?”
“Just two scientists having a confab in the rain, is that it?”
“Why not?”
“My theory is Brutalia is a virus and the Kid is a carrier.”
“Viral space? Not bad.”
“You have a theory?”
“The city can be stretched. The way space and time are bended by deformation.”
“Not bad.”
“Why the Kid?”
“Haven’t found out.”
“Any abnormalities?”
“Unlike the Unidentified Flying Behemoth, zero. He’s a normal boy. He’s in the normal range in all categories. He is fifteen, in perfect physical condition. Apart from the norm in that his IQ is 170. He is homosexual. His parents are dead. Music makes him fly.”
“What music?”
“The songs on his playlist. He’s an eclectic boy.”
“We have to figure him out.”
Dr. Playground: “Me first.”
“If he’s normal then anyone can use the key.”
“Then why can’t they? Anyone can do math but not everyone is a savant. Is that it?”
“Let’s say it is,” Spector said. “A savant does not know he is a savant. And he processes without effort.”
“True.”
“What is the Kid a savant at?”
“Processing and calculation.”
“What is the Kid processing?”
“This is like old times, Milo. The Kid is processing data we all receive.”
“Have you tested him for memory retention?”
“Now I’m embarrassed to say not.”
“Don’t be surprised if he tests superior.”
The rain picked up a shade heavier. Spector took out his pipe, lit it. Somehow the rain avoided the flame. Somehow being around Simon Stranko stimulated his brain like in the old days at KM. He felt it where his memory used to be.
He said, “Let’s start with the city. What is it? Is it a creation of KM labs? Was it created for the Pentagon in the ‘70s? Or was it built by aliens?”
“First let’s look at the superpower factor.”
“Okay.”
Dr. Playground: “This is a city of Spider Men bitten by a radioactive spider. The accidental superhero. Everything is in relation to the city. What if the city is the radioactive spider and we are the Spider Man? Both spider and Spider Man are transformed entities. If the city is the spider then it was transformed by the radioactivity. What is that radioactivity? Or what if the city is the radioactivity? Then what is the spider? The spider is what transforms the Spider Man. The city would be the radioactivity the spider transmits.”
“Say KM is the spider.”
“Say KM is the radioactivity.”
Spector: “If KM created the city, what created KM?”
“The radioactivity. This makes KM the spider.”
“Transmitting the radioactivity.”
Dr. Playground: “Did you know there’s a Brutalia in mainland China?”
“What?”
“Guess the OSD is closer with the State Department than AXIS. Yeah, it exists. The knowledge is blacked-out by China and the U.S.”
“New theory,” Spector said. “The cities are extra-terrestrial. The cities are created by extra-terrestrial beings.”
“Not a new theory, Milo.”
“What if the cities are the beings?”
“That’s a new one.”
“They replicate us. Imperfectly.”
“There would be a lot they don’t understand.”
“It’s lost in translation.”
“Why the superpowers?”
“They speak in our archetypes. Superheroes. If they arrived two thousand years ago it would be gods throwing bolts of lightning. One thousand years ago, prophets who talked to God.”
“Yet these are not green men from a flying saucer who speak English. They are so alien to be beyond our understanding. Or frame of reference or logic. Language, we couldn’t interpret their shortest phoneme.”
Spector: “They would be as music is to water.”
“Not bad. Remind me to mull that over a martini later. It has been stimulating, Doctor.”
“Likewise, Doctor. Release the Kid.”
“Maybe when he’s forty.”
“Evil is not a social order. The OGD will fail.”
“There is no social order. The world is shit.”
“So you shit on the world.”
“I want to be a pedophile. But what I should become is religious. Devoutly so. Then I’d have evil down. I’ll talk to Xoir about that. What are you, the good guy?”
“The truth? I was built that way. If I don’t make it I lose everything.”
“Meanwhile we are standing in a city that only exists because the Kid is here. With superpowers we only have because the Kid is here. Like the guns in my hands.”
Spector: “You’re dying to kill me.”
“Is the truce over yet?”
Cutting it short Spector terminated the hologram, opened Martian Justice, raised his guns.
Dr. Playground and Man Mafia raised their guns.
They backed from each other firing. They started blasting Martian Justice. They were firing disruption cores that blew holes in him.
AXIS was slipping in the arms race. Martian Justice was getting hit with another generation of weapons tech, his surface a light show of laser channels. He was bleeding freely, the green pool at his feet splashed by rainfall. He kept backing from them. They came toward him guns firing, blue laser channels taking him apart. The three hearts of Martian Justice went dark. The dead body became a statue of Martian science.
Dr. Playground laughed. Then his head swiveled, eyes turning to the bare street where the OSD Gulfstream had been.
Dr. Playground and Man Mafia looked up.
The OSD Gulfstream fell on them.
Milo Spector trod sand toward the fallen jet, larger and heavier than a Delta 88, nothing moving under it. Beyond it was sand and coastline. A lagoon. He was looking at a smashed jet that was on a lagoon on an atoll off Nova Scotia. There was no rain, the night sky dry and frigid.
Duff ran up to him.
Duff said, “I found somewhere to put the jet.”
Spector looked at him, said, “That was really really good cape.”
“Where’s the city?”
“The city is gone. Dr. Playground is dead. The Kid is off the atoll.”
Duff said, “The girls are that good.”
“The girls do very good cape.”
“You look okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are?”
“I’m awesome.”
“I get that. Me too.”
On the beach behind the fallen jet stood five twelve year-old girls, Xoir, an old white man in a track suit. Vincent Gama. He looked for The Kid in the Picture. No Kid no Gingiri. No one was moving a muscle. They were all staring at the fallen jet.
Spector pulled a handgun, shot Vincent Gama in the forehead.
49
Nude, Milo Spector followed the music of violins and the whirring sound of a film projector into the darkened next room, a large black room with grey trim. Inside the suite, the film screen was a large square of displaced time and space in tones of blue and green. On the sofa Xoir watched nude with a glass of champagne. She poured him a glass. They watched the film.
There were shots of a string quartet in the background. Shots of two nude teens coupling in stylized masks of black lace, a teenage Kate Birkin gazing up at th
e boy, then closing her eyes, her face closed in sensation mixed with trepidation mixed with discomfort.
Xoir said, “This was shot in 1947 by my mother, the artist Francesca Birkin. I was fifteen. This was my first time. She made it one of her art works.”
Spector sat beside her. “That’s…original.”
“She was ahead of her time. She saw reality as an art form. Ten years later she filmed her own slow death.”
“Do you remember this?”
“I don’t have to, do I? It remembers me.”
“But do you?”
“None of it. But I kept a diary.”
“You can’t get away from your past,” he said.
“He was an incredibly beautiful boy Francesca found in Malta. She interviewed six boys for that role. I never saw him again. Francesca thought that would be like art taking on a life of its own. She had contradictions.”
“Lot of pressure for your first time.”
“Any first time is a lot of pressure,” she said.
“What happened after?”
“I had to make my own art. I lost my virginity three times. Twice on my terms.”
The screen went blank.
With a remote, she rewound, restarted the film.
They watched the five minute film. It was an expanse of time across which Spector watched himself watching it, watched Xoir watching it. The music was not lush and romantic, not sensuous, it was spare and adversarial, atonal. The boy humped between her thighs. Then he stopped. They finished coupling and the camera stayed on the bed as they awkwardly uncoupled. The string quartet stopped abruptly. The two looked spent and unhappy. There was a brief final kiss. Their thin pale naked bodies left the bed, walked out of frame. The camera stayed on the shot for three minutes after they left the frame, until he was watching himself watching the bed with its wrinkled deep blue sheets until he was counting the wrinkles. Then Xoir picked up the remote, stopped the projector. Xoir said nothing. That meant he had to say something. Coming up with something to say was work that won the Pulitzer. But it had to be soon enough there would be no awkward pause. It had to be soon enough not to be taken off the hook by her. It had to seem effortless. And he couldn’t look at her until he had it.
Spector turned to her, said, “So you were always this beautiful.”
Xoir put her lips on his. It lasted.
“Holosynthesis is this real,” she said. “But this is more dramatic.”
“Mine is Mona Spector.”
“Always?”
“Yes.”
“Obsession.”
“Frame of reference.”
“I have something for you, Milo. A little more of your history.”
“Neuropedix?”
“Yes.”
“Holding back?”
“Confirming.”
“Tell me.”
“KM made science and technology, created a medical center and also had a line of comic books. Only in the Space Age, I suppose. You were a comic book fanatic who came to Brutalia in your teens to be a writer for KM Comics. Instead you became a scientific prodigy. KM recruited you. We worked together in Research and Development, you, me, and Simon.”
He said, “We met President Nixon. We talked KM science. Did that actually happen?”
“You were seventeen. The outcome of that I haven’t retrieved.”
“Did I have a wife?”
“No.”
“Who was Mona Spector?”
“Mona came with you to Brutalia. You two were very close. She was your twin sister.”
Spector didn’t speak. His brain was whirring like an overworked PC uploading a planet. Mass updates were downloading and disk space was expanding. It was as though she had revealed to him what had already been an innate source of revelation, the illumination for his dreams, greenhouse lighting at once light and dark. It made more sense than sense itself.
Finally he said, “Somebody needs a new hobby.”
“That’s all of my findings so far, I swear on an eighty-story stack of Bibles.”
“Add one more Bible.”
“Eighty-one.”
“Okay. I believe you.”
Xoir was gazing at him with the sacred terror of a scientist seeing the face of God. Then finding it irresistible. He saw it all. Then the terror receding as he watched her scientist brain find its way back to lean forward, close one eye to analyze the phenomenon under her microscope.
“Then kiss me,” she said.
They kissed. Spector considered the nature of kissing and its origins. Whether it began as a way to worship a face that loved, to meet it in an exchange of sensations, or a sacrificial bestowment of the most intimate part of his own face. They kissed each other’s mouths in small bursts of passion, infinity blooming between them. Then they had sex again, on the sofa, him again with more information this time living out his teenage dream with Dr. Kate Birkin, a brilliant aristocratically stunning older white woman, feeling her passion for the fresh boy prodigy he had been, a narrow thin virginal black kid with glasses and a comic book collection kept in a tin milk box from when milk boxes had become extinct, received her passion now for the superhero the boy had become. Were these the two loves of his life, what life he had been allowed to spend, this woman and his twin sister?
50
It was strange being in the OSD Building, sleeping with its new leader, showering with OSD soap then drying off with an OSD bath towel. With Dr. Playground dead it was just a skyscraper, a tower of frozen OSD assets. Freezing OSD assets sounded good. Seeing the Doctor’s crushed and mangled and incredibly dead body was inspiring. He was thinking less like Milo Spector now. He dressed. Now he was the Carousel. Now she was in her black OSD Gestapo queen uniform. They had champagne before a towering view of downtown Brutalia.
The Carousel: “Make it official.”
Xoir: “I am now head of the OSD.”
“You could merge with AXIS.”
“No I couldn’t.”
“Why not? Are you pro-evil?”
“I work alone,” she said. “I accept no leaders. Or partners.”
“Now what?”
“I convert OSD holdings to my new organization. I am not pro-genocide. I am for global domination, my version of it. It will be benign and to the benefit of mankind. It will advance my work in the reversal of human aging. But it will be enforced with brutal efficiency.”
“That is if you find the key,” the Carousel said. “And the Kid is with AXIS. Still want to work alone?”
“There’s the UFB.”
“You’ll have to find him before AXIS finds him.”
“Then I will.”
The Carousel gave that a left-sided smile. Even now he wanted to kiss her. But now it would be kissing the enemy. Then the smile ended.
He said, “I don’t want to ask this but how dead is he?”
“As in cloning?” Xoir said.
“Full disclosure. I have a cloning protocol. I keep a spare on backup.”
“As do I. At full duplication?”
“Even AXIS can’t hold a full dupe long term.”
“How true. Man Mafia Primary had instant cloning capability until that was somewhat cold-bloodedly killed with him. His clones are still in operation, aspects of Vincent Gama out there, the worst of them with their own exoframes. Dr. Playground had a cloning protocol even I had no access to. It was so hidden I had to hack it from OSD to learn it existed. Same as your cloning protocol no doubt, I estimate at the current KM cloning tech it will take one year for him to reach full duplication. Then he will return to reclaim his place at the top of evil’s food chain. He will have to rebuild his holdings and his power. He will do that with brutal efficiency and genocidal talent. And he will be out to destroy us both. Next year will be interesting.”
51
The Kid in the Picture made like Superman the Movie, soared arms-first into the sky above the KM Building. He kept rising, becoming a dark speck among silvery, black, white clouds. The Carouse
l watched him blend with a rain cloud, vanish.
The Carousel lit a cigarette knowing it was an odd combo with the mask but he had to quit again. There were moments when he felt a near-sensual attraction to the Kid, to the having, all his to himself. The Kid was a scientist’s dream. The Kid was what glowed inside the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. The Kid was the Lost Ark of the Covenant, the Crystal Skull, the stuff they wanted to mine in Avatar. The Kid was The Door and AXIS had to find The Key.
The speck returned falling feet-first. He came down toward the rooftop, plunging, arms at sides, feet together. As the speck grew, it slowed. Above the rooftop he slowed to a gentle landing on his toes. He pulled down the headphones.
“I have speed control. I have directional control. I could do it on my back.”
“What was the music?”
“La Valse, a ballet by Ravel.”
“What’s your playlist at?”
“Forty.”
“Headphones only or acoustic?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Anything you can’t fly to?”
“Most music. Country never. Metal. Polka.”
“The music is the source?”
The Kid in the Picture made little fists. “The music…yes…it…it merges with me…my psyche…and I can fly. I feel my way there. It’s exactly like a dream where you can fly and it makes sense that you can fly. If you have the will and the force to fly you can fly. Like there’s no line between dream and reality. But the music makes it happen. It has to inspire me in that sweet spot. It has to be magic.”
“We’ve got to get you a better costume.”
“Why?”
“This one is kind of soft.”
The Kid looked at his black-tighted legs. “This is preppie fusion. Schoolboy power.”
“You look like a cross-dresser.”
“I am a cross-dresser. Have you seen my YouTube channel? I took it down last year. But I’m hot.”
The Carousel gave up. “Besides flight what other superpowers do you have?”
“I can see myself from any angle. Yours too. And see myself from a long shot or close-up, like a camera.”
“Do you specialize in a martial art?”
“No.”
“Do you have weapons?”
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