My copy opens his eyes. He looks first at the Boneman, then turns to me and smiles. I reach for the feeling in my head again, and this time I untie the knot.
Milo 8
My creator explodes into light, his form dissolved by the halo of power. I blink with my fresh eyes, and turn back towards the Boneman.
‘So that’s me,’ I shrug. ‘Give or take.’
Apparently he’s done talking, because he lunges for me, and as he does so his arm reforms itself into a blade. I’ve seen his main trick now, his superpower, if you like, but it’s a pretty decent one. As he swings, the spines extend outwards from his hand like small spears. I can’t just duck and weave, I have to stay away from that hand like it’s a naked flame capable of leaping suddenly to a fireball. So I do the next best thing, tumbling like a felled tree. As I fall, my Glock slides from its holster and fires, and the bullet glances off the bone armor like nothing happened. He stumbles like someone just belted him, but recovers into another attack.
Well, only one thing for it, then.
A bone-armored boot stomps towards my face, but I’m dust before it hits me.
Milo 9
I’m born at Boneman’s side, and the knife jars my elbow as the butt slams hard into his cranium. Seems a little like I tried the same trick twice, huh? But Boneman staggers, because here’s the thing: armor arrests an impact, but the kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and it’s not like bone offers much in the way of padding. He goes hard to the floor, his brain bouncing off the walls of his skull, hopefully softening that tissue towards concussion. A bark from my Glock reinforces the injury, the recoil telling me roughly how much percussive damage I just dealt to his brain.
Harsh, I know. I’m not naturally wrathful, but I could never join the League of Goody Two Shoes, either. Someone tries to kill me, I get all manner of ill feelings towards him. I know, I know. Call it a flaw.
‘This is trending toward the long side,’ I announce to the warehouse. There’s nothing left of the assorted thugs except battered bodies, and I rest my foot on Boneman’s side as he writhes on the ground. I level my Glock with a flourish, aiming it carefully at his eye socket. ‘So what say we strike a deal?’
I’m listening, says a little voice.
Ventriloquism is bread-and-butter to an illusionist. It was worth a try, though.
‘Let me walk out of here with your toy,’ I reply. ‘And this fossil.’
I roll Boneman onto his back. He’s out cold now. Whether he’ll survive or not is up to Foolsfire, I suppose. There’s probably a concussion boiling away in his head right now, and you can never tell what the outcome of one of those will be.
‘On the plus side,’ I add. ‘I won’t chase you. Just get out of here now, while you can.’
The Bureau won’t like it, but I’m sticking to the instructions, and they don’t pay me commission. Frankly, there are better things I can do with my time than waste it on some Brainpain wannabe.
Deal.
I can’t help but glance around the room, but there’s nothing to see. Foolsfire probably left the building the moment he saw Boneman get his osteodermis handed to him. Surprised he’d leave the COG, though. Those things aren’t easy to come by, he must’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to acquire it.
Ah well, mission complete. I call it in to the Bureau, and it’s only a few minutes before Bureau operatives arrive. They’re no slouches themselves, each being a special forces vet of many years, some of them practically superheroes in their own right, but they give me sideways glances as they secure the area and begin to bundle the piece of machinery into the unassuming but heavily-armored truck. They’ve heard the whispers, know the urban legends, but the rational part of them is saying that no single operative could’ve disabled this many targets and completed the objective with nothing to his name but a pistol and a few knives.
The world can’t make much sense to people without powers. All those unexplained mysteries, all the curious happenings and occurrences that just don’t quite add up. It must boggle the mind.
For instance, they had no idea what it was they were loading onto that van. In a way, neither did I. All anyone really knows is that pieces of the COG can be found in most major cities of the world, and that they’re vital to keeping society as we know it running.
I’ve learned a few things about the COG over the years. Secrets were my line of work, after all. It’s kind of an open secret that sometimes superhumans just up and disappear without a trace. Not murdered, not kidnapped, but untraceable by psychics, life-sniffers, trackers, everyone who could possibly seek them out. All that’s left is a strange feeling of energy, like static, at their last known location, noticeable to superhumans but not to normals.
The COG network eats people, basically. Let’s not pretend any more on that mystery, because we all know it to be true. How it finds us, how it chooses us, why it needs us, we might never know. No one even knows who built the network, who decided to start breaking our kind down in a way that released their energy over time like a battery into the world’s systems. We tolerate it because we don’t know how to do anything about it. I suppose you’d expect us to be paranoid of being vanished at any moment, and in my case you might be right. Most of us could be killed at any moment anyway, but not me – the COG is one of the few things I suspect might be capable of truly killing me. Randomly. Without warning.
Couldn’t dwell on it, though. They didn’t pay me to do that, and in the end, what could I even do about it? I don’t know what Foolsfire wanted with this piece of the COG or what he’d even do with it. That was for the Bureau to determine when they took Boneman in for questioning.
I glanced out of the window.
Milo 10
Blue light left me a block from where I was standing. Less expensive than running a car, and much more pleasant than taking the bus. Turns out superpowers are convenient. Who knew?
I started walking towards the park, where I was supposed to be meeting a Bureau contact to take me to my debriefing. I only got two paces when someone gripped me suddenly from behind, arms around my chest, and I got a curious sensation like…hm, you know when your body explodes into atoms? Kinda like that.
By my own standards I suppose it’s no different than copying myself. My atoms were reformed on the roof of a building nearby, nearly instantaneously, and the grip released. I turned, smiling.
Ash stood in front of me, grinning like someone just offered her a cake at half price. Can’t help it, her smile gets me every time. It never worked out between us, but I’m always glad to see her.
‘You’re a moron,’ I told her, by way of expressing that. Her smile disappeared, and she raised an eyebrow.
‘Hi yourself,’ she said, playing like she was annoyed.
‘Seriously, jumping for the hell of it in your condition?’
‘One jump doesn’t make a difference,’ she said flatly, and I could tell she was annoyed for real. Ten seconds in her company and I’d turned her icy already. Probably a new record. She shrugged it off anyway, and her smile came back. ‘Besides,’ she said. ‘I had to get the drop on you so I could give you the lecture.’
‘Lecture for what?’ I asked. ‘This time, I mean.’
‘For going alone.’ She turned from me and looked out over the city, in the rough direction of the Loop. ‘I jumped into the Bureau after you left. I know this wasn’t a one-man op.’
‘I’m not one man, Ash,’ I replied. ‘You know that as well as I do.’
‘Don’t give me that.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘You’ve only got one brain, and sometimes I’m not even sure about that. You can still screw up, you need someone to have your back.’
‘You want to have that discussion again?’ It was an old one, maybe as old as our friendship.
‘Hey, I didn’t mean me,’ she said, suddenly defensive. ‘I just meant someone.’
‘We’re not partners, Ash, not any more,’ I said, and I don’t think I kept the regret out of my
voice. ‘You know you can’t-‘
She cut me off. ‘I can still help, alright?’
‘How many jumps now?’ I said. Straight to the point.
Her eyes found the floor. ‘I’m down to five,’ she said.
‘So, five jumps a minute before you start feeling the burn. That’s nothing, Ash. In a firefight, that’s nothing. You and I both know that.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. We’d been over this before. ‘Just wanted you to know I’ve still got your back, that’s all. The Bureau keeps me healthy, but even they don’t keep me on the sidelines. Why should you?’
‘I’ve got my back. I don’t need you risking yourself for me. I don’t want it.’
She shrugged. ‘Tough.’
‘Remember that time I got the Bureau to lock you up?’ I said, grinning. ‘Don’t make me do it again.’
She grinned right back at me. It was the old days again, her and me against anything they could throw at us. ‘I’d like to see you try,’ she said.
I reached forward, just to see what she’d do, and then recoiled as her light blinded me, as her whole body burned up like the sun just came to life inside of her. By the time I’d even raised my hand she was gone, the light had vanished, and there was nothing left of her but a cloud of black dust in the space she’d been. I lowered my hand, and looked out over the city. Then something grabbed me around the chest again.
The next second I was in the Bureau, in Cy’s office. A last little joke by Ash at my expense. The office was empty at that moment. The Bureau offices are in the Loop, I can tell you that much, but let’s not go into specifics. Cy was my handler, in espionage terms, though I always tried to give the workings of the Bureau a wide berth. I let them send me where they needed me, picked up my pay, and stayed away from the building as much as possible. Cy’s office was like a museum, back then. All along the walls were cabinets containing weird weapons and artifacts, bits of armor and the like. Some of it I recognized: the pride of the collection was the Crown of Serendipity, which probably hasn’t been worn for maybe twenty five years now. Doctor Skin’s first exosuit was in the tallest cabinet, displayed on a mannequin. Carved on its pedestal was the Doc’s motto: ‘This is the March of Progress’. The Harbinger’s spear was there as well, along with Ravager’s entire left arm, sheared off somewhere just above the elbow.
Cy came back as I was about to open the cabinet, so probably at just the right moment. He greeted me with a raised eyebrow.
‘Looking for something?’ he said. Cy was a tall guy, very stout, the kind of guy who just seems to fill the room by being there. His beard was magnificent. He was a superhuman, and a blink by trade. Guess you won’t know what that means, huh? Well, a blink is a kind of psychic who makes it his job to let other people see through the Nevermind’s facade. They tend to approach the rich, paranoid or powerful (sometimes all three) and show them the truth. In the case of governments, that leads to a sudden panic when they realize they’re dealing with an outside context threat, just as surely as if an alien invasion had descended or a zombie horde had arisen.
In our case, they responded by paying Cy a lot of money to keep the feds on the Loop…well, in the loop when it comes to superhuman activity. Inconvenient paranoia isn’t so bad as you think – once a blink clears the Nevermind’s cobwebs from your head, you realize you were dreaming all along. Near as I can tell, the facade works by scrambling the connections between facts, and adjusting any visual of superhumans down to just below the level of an uninteresting person. Our names, faces, and actions are all there in your head, but you can never run them together to equal truth, like an equation missing its symbols, and if we walked past you on the street in full costume, you wouldn’t spare us a glance. If you saw us set a building ablaze, you’d remember there were some bystanders and then the building went up, but you wouldn’t be able to pick us out in a lineup. Blinks never have a problem getting people to believe they are what they claim to be because as soon as they wipe away the facade, everything just makes sense. Besides, if a powerful psychic just put images in your head, how difficult is it to believe there might be others like him?
Anyway, where was I?
Ah yeah, so Cy walked into the room and asked me what I was looking for.
‘You,’ I replied, truthfully. ‘Ash just dumped me here, but I was on my way. Was going to just take the L like a normal person, but you know how she is.’
‘And how is our favorite invalid?’ Cy asked.
‘You have a death wish?’ I replied. It baffles me how someone with next to no powers can be so casual about the rest of us.
Cy smiled. ‘I’m not scared of Ash,’ he said. ‘And watch your tone. You’re technically an employee, you know.’
I thought maybe it was jealousy. Ash can cross the world on foot in a day, and vanish in a blaze of light like an angel. Cy can make people believe in ghost stories. He was imposing physically, but beyond that he was nothing. Even his position in the Bureau wasn’t exactly important. He could be replaced, and only enjoyed a few more comforts than most.
In reply to his threat, I grabbed a seat at his desk.
‘Let’s just get the debriefing over with,’ I said.
‘Before we do that,’ Cy said. ‘It may interest you to know your twin’s in town.’
Would’ve sounded like a bad joke to an observer, but I knew Cy meant my actual twin. My flesh-and-blood brother. Once, long ago, he’d been my best friend. My power changed that.
‘Eli’s here?’ I asked, trying to sound casual. ‘What’s he up to?’ I was equal parts wary and excited. That was just the kind of feeling I got when I heard he was around.
Cy pulled up his chair. ‘Funny story,’ he said, and took a seat.
Act II
You want the rest of it, too? What, you starting to believe me or something? Alright, fine. Have it your way.
When we left off, I was telling you about meeting Cy, how he said my brother was in town. Like I told you, that left me feeling some weird mix of excited and worried. Nervous, I guess you’d say. Eli’s the thinker of the pair of us. He’s always spouting something philosophical, some nonsense about the way the universe works, or human nature, all that kind of stuff. Me? I just do whatever, go with the flow mostly. Eli always did what he thought was best. You know, the kind to always rock the boat, the one who just doesn’t understand that you go along to get along. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Milo 1
So, it’s the next morning after I upended Foolsfire’s little scheme and handed Boneman over to the tender care of the Bureau. I was in my apartment, lounging on the couch, feet up, eating my eighth piece of toast from the plate on my chest and thinking how wrong Eli is. He has this whole thing about how superhumans are a different species, something bigger than humans are. He says we’re not restricted to the human condition, that we’re not just stronger, faster, harder to kill by nature, but that our powers allow us to cheat the things that make humans what they are. I’m his textbook example: I don’t worry about dying in some freak accident. I don’t worry about getting hurt. I’m not insecure about who I am, because there’s always going to be someone around who utterly accepts everything about me. Does wonders for your self image, I’ll give him that. But does it make me anything other than human? I’m sprawled on the couch stuffing my face full of toast, and I can smell my feet from here. I think I’m human.
But then, I’ve always had the gift. There’s a feeling in my brain I match with it, and that feeling’s always been there. When I was about five they used to leave the room and come back to find me with hunks of meat or shards of bone in my hands, me all covered in blood. The first few times they screamed and cried until they realised I hadn’t hurt myself, that really there was nothing wrong me. As I got older, learning what to do and what not to do, it stopped happening. I realised it was a part of me I was never supposed to show anyone, never supposed to use. But it wanted out. The feeling was too insistent, and my curiosity too strong for me
to just shut it away and pretend I was just like anyone else. When I was maybe ten I had a dream about having a twin brother, like me in every way. That morning I had an idea about what I should do. It came to me pretty natural, in the end. I went out to an empty field behind my dad’s house, focused on that feeling, and then it started. The bone came first, and then the muscle and veins and arteries. Next came the skin, and that was that. A living duplicate of myself. You can’t believe how surreal it was to be stood there in broad daylight in front of a naked copy of yourself. I can still picture him in my mind, that naked ten-year-old, looking for all the world like he’d always been there. There was no confusion in his eyes, no fear or anything like that. He just said ‘hi!’ and then we talked for hours and hours, sat in the warm sun. He told me that his creation had hurt.
The Millions of Me Page 2