Amped Up

by Merrell Michael

  He had worked with my Mother, when both of them had worked for Activor, in what he called the "good ol' days." He was an engineer, and she was a scientist. Her theories worked through ideas of what could be done, with the understanding of human minds, brain structure. Glen was the one who came up with the hardware, the Actuator itself. "So you invented it?" I asked him.

  "Not hardly." Glen said. "I was on one group, with R and D, and Activor had commissioned several dozen others. The whole product was a group effort. Not to mention the fact that the other guys into big pharm, Pfizer and what-not, had all this in the pipeline at the same time. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a crazy time. A great time." He sipped his coffee thoughtfully. "But really, our team wasn’t even the design picked for mass distribution. Our Actuator was more potent, but there were too many side effects, when it came to trials."

  I rubbed the maintenance port at the side of my head. "What went wrong?." I ask. "With everything."

  "Nothing went wrong." Glen said. The Actuator worked. Or maybe that was the thing that did. But they wanted something a little blander. I don’t know. We still got rich, off of stock options alone. Your mother stayed on with Activor, but I had enough of tinkering in people’s heads." Glen shivered. "I like gadgets, and gizmos. I went to Maker Faire every year, when that whole movement was going on. I got into biotech mostly thinking about high-end prosthetics, for veterans. My brother came back from Iraq in a wheelchair." He took out a flask of whiskey and poured several fingers into the coffee. "So, your mother started talking about how the brain is all electrical, really, and I bought into it, like a dumbass. I don’t think that if I hadn’t been in the program, they wouldn’t have done it anyway. I’m not that much of an egoist. But maybe it would have gone a little slower, so people got used to the idea."

  I heard the door shut suddenly, and saw the man that was standing there.

  He was tall and wiry, well muscular, with a face that was chiseled and smooth. He wore a plain grey pair of slacks with a brown belt, and a wife-beater, that showed two arms decorated with full length tattoo sleeves. His eyes were brown to the point of maybe being black, his face was clear shaven, and his close cropped hair was stark white, as if he had willed it to be that way. I felt something when he walked in, a sense of gravity. As if he were pulling everything in the room toward him, and I was merely in his path, a single planet, headed for the event horizon of a black hole.

  "Kara." Glen said. "This misfit here looks like he has something on his mind."

  "Galilee." He said, while not offering me a hand to shake. "The dozers are getting rocked again, Glen."

  "Tell them to doze somewhere else." Glen said. "That's what we've always done."

  "Rocked?" I asked.

  "Big pieces of concrete." Galilee held out his hands, to indicate the girth. "Break bones and bust heads. The illegals used to do it to the Border Patrol, back in the day."

  "Heaven help us." Glen said. "When the early 2000's becomes 'back in the day.' We’re not Border Patrol. I'm not giving them weapons, on the exo-frames."

  "I know." Galilee said. "That’s not what I'm talking about. If you could weld steel plates around the vital areas, head and body, the rocks would bounce off, and the norms would get bored."

  "Lovely." Glen said. "Military grade plating, then? Reactive armor?"

  Galilee stepped forward, and darkness seemed to pool around him. "I could handle it my way." He said. "I thought that you would want to hear about it first. As a courtesy."

  Glen stared him down. Galilee turned smartly, on a pivot, and walked out. "Christ." Glen said. "Now I have a headache. "They say that once you’re an Amp, you don’t get them as long as your equipment’s good, but that man puts a bastard of a throbbing migraine right behind my eyes."

  "Who is he?" I asked.

  Glen kneaded his forehead, where I imagined the headache lay. "Galilee is military." He said finally. "Ex-military, with serious hardware rattling around in his head. I had something to do with that."

  "Are there any others like him here?"

  Glen shook his head. "Not really." He said. "Sometimes. When your labeled a domestic terrorist, you can’t sit down in one spot for too long.

  A chill ran up my back, as the pieces clicked. "He's EAP?" I said.

  EAP stood for Earth's Amplified Peoples. They were a group of Amps that had started to arm themselves. Similar to how the Black Panther party started, just a group of downtrodden citizens exercising their second amendment rights. If you believe in the first part, or the second amendment, anyway. But bearing arms had turned into using them, as almost anyone could have predicted. Cops got killed. People got scared, and angry. The FBI had gotten involved, and a whole handful of EAP members had ended up on the America's Most Wanted list. We were the people to be scared of at the moment, and EAP were the ones among us, who wanted to give a reason for that.

  "They do good here." Glen said. "Not a lot, but they do it. When the rednecks show up and get noisy, Galilee and his boys put a stop to it. The young kids, they look up to them."

  "Should they do that?" I asked. "I mean, for a terrorist?"

  "One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter." Glen said. "And for the kids out here, most of them are all alone. Anyone to look up to is better than no one."

  "If you say so."

  Glen took my coffee cup and refilled it. "He's not all bad, either." He said. "Rough around the edges, but that works out okay. Take a little time to get things sorted out here, find out what your place is. Before you judge. All I'm saying."

  It turned out for the rest of the day my place was to do very little. Half the trailer was divided up into a tinkering area for Glen. I tried to fall asleep on the couch, but that wasn’t happening. The tiredness I had felt on the road was gone. I was somewhere new now. With new people. Glen had intrigued me, and as much as I hated to admit it, Galilee had too. There was something here worth digging in too.

  So I took a walk.

  The Amps in the trailer park were many and varied. There were the ones with the standard Activor model, like me. But there were plenty of high-end prosthetics, that needed the amp in their head to move their mechanical limbs. There were a few with obvious brain damage, old people hobbling with Parkinson’s, young people with fetal alcohol syndrome.

  In Virginia there was only one other person I knew like me, an Amp. His name was Owen Meany. I had watched him die.

  "Enjoying yourself?" Galilee said, behind me. My face flushed, despite my wishes.

  "There’s a lot of us here." I managed to say.

  "A lot of us." Galilee repeated. "Do you think of yourself in that way? As an us?"

  I tap the maintenance port on my temple. "I've got the hardware. don’t I?

  He leaned in close. "A male can have all the hardware, penis and testicles, and yet still not call himself a man." He said. "What counts in these things is commitment to cause."

  "Yeah." I said. "I'm a girl, by the way. Case you were wondering. And we don’t have as high a bar to jump into womanhood as some of you testosterone factories set for your particular gender."

  He shrugged. "The principle is still there, in the end. Have you ever seen a dozer?"

  "Like a bulldozer?"

  "Much better."

  "No."

  "Would you care to pilot one?"

  ****

  I giggled the entire time. I mean, it was a power suit. a big yellow one, with the CAT logo on the side.

  It was pretty comfortable overall inside the cockpit, all strapped in. I jacked in through my maintenance port, and with the help of my Amp, piloted the entire thing with my mind. I thought about going forward, and I did, I thought about moving the pincer arm, and that happened too.

  This was one of the changes unplanned for with the Actuator. Getting Amped allowed paraplegics to walk again, through interfacing with an exoskeleton. If you could afford the treatment, anyway. If you couldn’t, all you would get was a wheelchair that responded to your thoug
hts. Eventually, someone got the idea of making the exoskeletons bigger and heavier. To move bigger and heavier stuff. They called the bigger exoskeletons dozers, and they and the Amps inside, ended up replacing whole work crews, and all sorts of equipment.

  None of this was done without resentment. How would you feel, if you were a strong young man, and an old crippled one took your job? Or a woman? I can see the crowd from the side of my vision. A few of them have rough weapons, metal pipes, baseball bats. I ignore them and focus on the work. And that at least, comes easily enough.

  The work is simple. We prune the trees, we cut the trees, and we load them onto the flatbed. It is simple, and my on the job training consists of following whatever Galilee is doing, but that does nothing to detract from the sheer joy of it. The Amps leap up the tree, climbing it with strong dozer arms, snapping branches with razor strength dozer claws. They toss the enormous pines to each other, as if it were all a game. Twenty minutes in I'm covered with sweat, a big grin on my face. I fall into the rhythm of work. Hours pass.

  At one point a huge piece of concrete whizzes through the air. A dozer gets hit square in the midsection, and falls over, his companion just barely grabbing the huge tree trunk he was supporting. And just like that, Galilee is there, standing not ten feet from the protestors. I never even saw him leave his dozer, but he's there. He says something low, inaudible, and the kids back up, and disperse.

  Night comes and I find myself in a doublewide that’s been converted into a makeshift bar. A bald, chubby Amp named Brian Bendis is chatting me up, and I'm letting him, because I'm drunk on cheap beer.

  "Used to work in the comic industry." He says.

  "You told jokes?"

  "No, like comics, graphic novels. Superhero stuff."

  "Huh. I used to be a teacher."

  "Peter Parker was a teacher."

  "Whose Peter Parker?"

  "You know, Spiderman. He was a teacher for a little bit."

  "Sorry, I really don’t know much about that stuff."

  "That’s okay. You’re a girl."

  "So?"

  "Girls don’t read comics. I mean, some of them read manga, but comics are like 90 percent male readers."

  "Boy stuff."

  "Yeah. Only it’s not even kids anymore, its guys in their thirties, at least, and more like forties and up. Anyone older just plays video games."

  "That’s sad."

  "The one thing that made it okay, was all the movies. The movies made a fortune. I made a fortune on them, and now I'm making minimum wage piloting a dozer."

  "That’s what you make?"

  He nods. "So many Dozer pilots are just elderly, disabled Amps, bored with their retirements. The Dozer's took good, well-paying construction and lumber jobs from able bodied young people, and gave them to old cripples. I totally understand it, I mean, you know, their viewpoint. If I was them, I'd be pissed too."

  I nod, even though I'm starting to get tired of listening to him. I don’t want, or need to hear, another reason for norms getting pissed off at Amps. Their position. What about mine? Two days ago my landlord threw everything I owned out in the grass, and told people walking by to help themselves. Which they did. Right before that Owen Meany decided the world was too fucked up for him to even exist in, and he bashed his brains out on the sidewalk. Brian Bendis looks nervous.

  "I screwed up, right?" He said. "I can tell. Sorry. My social skills are not overly developed. A consequence of working in comic books. I'll get out of your way. Only just, Jesus..." He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, and underneath their red and blurry like he's been crying. "I have to think about why." He says. "Why they would do all this. I have to rationalize it, put it together somehow in my head. I had a wife and two boys in New York and now all that is gone. Like it never really happened in the first place."

  "I’m sorry." I tell him.

  "Look." He says. "I’ve got some stuff, in my trailer. Mementoes of what was. No one’s ever seen it. And if you could come, and take a look, it would be a kind of, I don’t know, validation of everything. And I would greatly appreciate that."

  "I don’t know."

  He holds up his hands wide. "Hey." He says. "There is no ulterior motive here, please understand. It’s not like a, come-back-to-my-place type deal. It’s not even a place, it’s a trailer, Which doesn’t rate as such. And believe me, I know where I fall on the whole Hot-Or-Not attractive quotient."

  "Where is that?"

  "In the early negatives." He says. "And your clearly of much greater value, numerological or otherwise. And hey, I'm Jewish, but I'm not even rich, or good with money so, fuck, man!"

  "Huh." I tell him. "You’re not part of the whole international banking conspiracy?"

  He waves his hand. "No one even cares about that." He says. "The chronological order of American bigotry: Irish, Jews, Blacks, Gays, Muslims, Latinos, Amps. The Irish became white with Kennedy, and were damn near headed there ourselves."

  He's clever, and I let myself smile. "Okay, Brian." I tell him. "Show me your etchings."

  ****

  Sam Worthington greeted me, bigger than life, yet cast from cardboard.

  He was wearing a costume which looked form fitting and cast from molded black rubber. In the center of his chest was a red emblem, the line and semi-circle combination that indicated a power switch among consumer electronics. He was carrying a helmet with a sleek black visor, under one arm. Atop the cutout read

  JESSICA BIEL SAM WORTHINGTON

  A JERRY BRUCKHEIMER PRODUCTION

  AMP

  SUMMER 2025

  "I never heard of this movie." I said.

  Brian sighed. "That was my pride and joy. A spent three years on production, with that baby. Final shooting budget over two hundred mill, and they decide to scrap the entire thing due to political pressure."

  "What was it?" I ask.

  "A superhero movie." Brian says. "An amp superhero movie, if you can believe it. About a soldier that survives an IED in Iraq, gets a bit of hardware in his head, and bam, superpowers."

  "He gets an Actuator?"

  "Yeah. Only, we couldn’t call it an Actuator, that’s trademarked. So we had to call it something else."

  "What did you call it."

  "I don’t remember. I’ve got the script lying around here somewhere, I'll let you look at it. But he gets this, this thing, and then he goes the rest of the hero route."

  "Which is?"

  "Costume, girl, villain. Time honored Marvel Comics tropes. Older than that, even, freaking golden age tropes, Lois Lane/ Lex Luthor whatnot. Secret identity, too, so people can get a good look at that Sam Worthington mug." Brian pulls out a set of small figurines from the desk, that faintly resemble Hollywood personalities, and faintly resemble the rest of the AMP paraphernalia. "The chick is Jessica Biel. Not our first choice, but she was eager for work. The villain guy is that agent smith guy, from the Matrix whatever’s." He pushes over a stack of clutter from an aged sofa. "Have a seat." He tells me. "Make yourself at home."

  I think about protesting, about making up excuses about other places I have to be. But then there is a cold beer in my hand. It’s an import of higher vintage than what they were serving at the bar. So I decide to stay, a moment longer.

  "I thought you were in comics?" I ask him.

  "Right." Brian says. "And this is movies. May I present you with-" He wips out a magazine in a plastic sleeve. Amp from Bendis and Bagley, issue one!" On the cover of the magazine is a slightly more colorful, and less refined, version of the movie hero.

  "Who is Bagley?" I ask.

  "I guy I worked with on Spiderman." Brian says. Great artist. Just great. I mean, later on, we had a little spat, over this intellectual property thing, came to words, lawsuits were filed, but hey! I don’t want to take anything away from the guy."

  "Uh huh."

  "I mean, take anything away from him, that is, as an artist. The way I see it, artists are allowed to be dicks. Picasso and Jackson P
ollock were both assholes. And Todd McFarlane- I mean, not that Todd McFarlane is a big A arteest, but he's got that gene, you know? And thusly, some of the assholeishness."

  "I don’t know."

  His face looks crestfallen. "You don’t?"

  "I have no idea who that is."

  "It’s my fault." He says. "I'm getting all fanboyish. Sorry."

  I stand up, feeling dizzy from the alcohol. "I should probably go." I tell him.

  "Before you do. He says. "I want to tell you one thing..."

  "Hello, Brian." A familiar voice from the door. Galilee.

  "Hey." Brains eyes are wide, his voice cracks. Galilee's face is a picture of cold menace.

  "What are you guys doing?" Galilee asks, carefully.

  "Hanging out." I tell him, as if I were a teenager, getting caught necking in my room by an adult. Brian nods, eyes still fish-bulbing out.

  "Showing her your etchings?" Galilee says, slowly. Brian says nothing. I can’t help but take it as a threat.

  "Talking about movies." I say.

  "The porn stuff?" Galilee says. "That’s a bad idea. Brian can’t handle a smutty movie. Gets him all kinds of bad ideas."

  "She can go." Brian whines. She doesn’t need to hear any of this..."

  Galilee scratches his head. "Hear what? What you did to that girl? What really got you kicked off that movie?" Galilee laughs, and it’s a dangerous sound. His teeth are glinting like a wolf. "I bet she had an idea, before she even came in here? Bet she was reluctant, and you dolled her up with that slick Jew writer shit talk. Only thing is, when you get shit talk from a piece of shit, it smells, Brian, it really does."

  I push past Galilee and run out of the trailer. I want to be left alone. The air is fresh and out in the night sky. As if the stars and blackness between were whole fresh things, made natural. Still, I feel suffocated. Why did my mother send me here? Was it a joke? Did she explode herself on purpose, and then send me to a God-Awful trailer park as some final sort of social experiment? Maybe everything that is, or was, to this point, was simply my way of getting stuck under the thumbnail of God. Like in the Old Testament, when Yahweh would simply point to one ethnic group and whisper "no survivors" In the ears of the Israelites. Now we are Amps. No survivors.