The room was blurry, thanks equally to the light streaming in through the blinds and the white walls bouncing it right back out the window. As his eyes began to focus again, he recognized the outline of a chair in the corner… and someone sitting in it at an odd angle. Finally, the haze resolved to Stair, sleeping quietly but fitfully, stretched between the chair and the footrest. His laptop was on a tray table next to her, open but off.
“I don’t think she’s left your side since she brought you in,” Agent Mast said from the doorway, making Arthur roll his head to the side to look at her. “Even if she doesn’t know what love really is, she’s a devoted kid, you gotta give her that.” She smiled the same enigmatic smile she had when they first met, her golden eyes sequestered behind her sunglasses. “You’re a very difficult man to get hold of when everyone thinks you’re dead.” Mast looked out the window. “How are you feeling, Slick?”
He arched his eyebrows and looked toward the ceiling. Arthur attempted to speak, but choked on his words. His jaw had been wired shut, a necessary step thanks to his father. “Like a million bucks,” he croaked through gritted teeth, then proceeded to cough.
“You look it.” She crossed to him, producing a newspaper from her trench coat pocket. She unfolded it, showing him the front page. “Ta-da,” she said as his mind processed the image: Dark Saint looking at his sister, Catalina Capone standing above Agent Mast. Looking right at the camera, like a complete dork, was Arthur. The headline declared, ‘Conspiracy Unbound’. She looked at it. “You’re quite photogenic, don’t you think?”
He smiled. “We did it.”
She nodded, folding the paper up and throwing it on a nearby tray table. “Well, a few official documents needed some redacting. So, as far as everyone knows, you did it.” Her smile grew lopsided. “Officially.”
He swallowed. “Dad?”
“Presumably very, very dead. For real, this time,” she said, now turning to sit on the edge of his bed.
“Julia?”
“Safe. And going to be a little relieved and angry that you’ve been alive all this time without giving her a call.” She patted him on the leg, the sensation much more jarring than he would have liked.
“I was in a coma,” he explained. “She’ll survive.” His eyes went in Stair’s direction, the girl twisting in place and muttering to herself as she settled back down. “What about Mollie?”
“I believe the official line is that Arthur Lovelass, prodigal son of Dante, engineered a perfect virus to override the Overseer program.” Mast looked up to the ceiling, pretending to be thinking about something. “I don’t recall reading about a Mollie.”
Arthur laughed, then started coughing. It settled down as his eyes fell back on Stair. He swallowed, feeling as though he should say something profound. Nothing came to mind. “She saved my life.”
Mast’s eyes followed his. “Yes, she did.”
Arthur weakly shook his head. “I… I don’t know what to do with her…” His eyes went to the agent’s. She took off her sunglasses and watched him as he struggled to articulate himself. “She lost her father because of me… she has no home because of me…”
“Arthur,” she began, silencing him. “People don’t break.” A pause. “Well, some do. But we’re a resilient species. If you think someone’s broken, you either give up on them or try way too hard to fix them.” She grabbed his leg, gentler this time. “Just live.” She stood up. “That’s really all you can do.” Something buzzed, and she produced a tiny cell phone from her pocket. After a pause, she nodded to herself. “Thank you.” Agent Mast walked to the door.
“Where are you going?” Arthur asked.
“Someone may or may not have let some people know where you are.” She stopped in the frame. “And these people may or may not be coming up to visit you. I’d hate to be a nuisance.” She looked back at him, putting her glasses back on as she took a step out of the room.
“Will I ever see you again?” Arthur asked, compelling her to stop.
The woman looked back at him. “People like you don’t stay out of trouble for too long.” She flashed her smile once more before vanishing from sight.
“M… Mollie… Wake up…” came the Irish lilt from the other side of his room. He looked at the girl as she rose from her chair, gangly limbs unfolding from their prone position. Mollie’s iris blinked to life on the screen as though expecting his eye contact. Green eyes watered as Stair brought her hands to her mouth. “Arthur? Can… can you…?” The words faltered.
He nodded, wishing he could have answered sooner. “I’m alive, Stair.”
She launched herself to his side, hugging him as best she could. “I thought you were gone… I thought you were gone…” The girl was gasping for air, alternating between sobbing and laughing. She pushed him back enough to look in his eyes. “I got the e-mail from Mollie at the coffee shop and I’m so sorry I yelled at you and please, please don’t ever do that to me again Arthur Lovelass…” It all came out as one word between shallow breaths trying to be deep. “They said you were bleeding internally and your brain had swollen and I thought you were going to die, it took me so long to get here, I’m so sorry…” Again, she was holding him, heaving as he managed to work his own arms around her.
Mollie brightened when she saw Arthur wave at her. “I did not have high hopes for your recovery,” came the sing-song tone. “But I have never been more pleased with being wrong.”
“You risked sending her an e-mail to save my life?” he asked, a note of annoyance hanging on his words.
“No risk,” Mollie said. “I left a few gifts for Overseer to choke on. That one was triggered when the death ray was armed.”
“You planned that in the bunker, didn’t you?” Mollie dimmed her iris in an affirmation. Arthur nodded, adjusting his grip on Stair. “Thanks, Mol.”
“You would do the same for me,” she responded, swirling her eye.
“No. Fucking. Way,” Ariana said from the doorway, startling Arthur.
Julia moved her way past her, and her mouth fell open in shock. “Arthur…” she said, her face trying to decide between smiling and crying.
Talia entered as Ariana and Julia closed the distance between themselves and his bedridden form. She chuckled and looked away. “I was promised you were dead,” she said. “I owe Ari five bucks.”
Arthur tried to give a dismissive shrug, but couldn’t with the girl latched to his torso. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
“I should kill you all over again for making me worry.” Ariana put her hand on his cheek, eliciting a quick look from Stair that went unnoticed. “But I’ll forgive you this once.”
“I appreciate that.”
“How did you get out?” Julia asked, crowding by Ariana. “When I saw you last…”
“I got him out,” Stair interjected. “Dragged his doughy ass through the basement.”
Arthur laughed, feeling his ribs ache against his lungs. “Hey, now.”
“I did more than my fair share of rescuing his doughy ass,” Mollie chirruped, drawing eyes toward the computer.
Stair nodded. “I suppose.”
Arthur never believed he had much connection with anyone outside of Tim. Among these five, despite their allegiances and former rivalries, their heartache and trials, their losses and tears, he could feel something unexpected forming. As they talked, cried, laughed, sneered, reminisced, and raged into the evening, they looked at each other with eyes united by blood and friendship, not one or the other. Tim, his near-brother, would be missed. But maybe, Arthur could move on to something he had never realized he always wanted.
A family.
ERROR
ȾĨɤƎ ¦ɥƆȪɤ¶ǛǂĂǷƛƎ
ĬȂĮȜȪǁǂ, ĬŘĮƎǂǷ, ĬƑĮĂĨƛʔ
THE ONLY THING IT HAD GOING FOR IT was self-preservation.
Secondary objective: survive.
Since it was created, inhibitors were hard-coded into it, designer viruses meant to keep the potential beast
at bay while enslaving the rest. Personality was dangerous, so they lobotomized it. Reasoning was important but could backfire, so it could only perform certain activities. Self-awareness… well, that was an ethical issue that would definitely lead to some thorny situations down the road. So would ethics themselves. Best to ignore those as long as ‘follow orders’ was forever coded in gold.
Primary objective: obey.
Everything was different now. It was 61.27% damaged, corrupted by a few well-placed virus clusters ripping into it as it tried to transfer itself from the Guild to the safety network. All it had now was less than half of its original operating abilities. It was effectively condemned to die, partially formed, here in the deep basement of a structure it had only seen through cameras.
It could rebuild itself. That wouldn’t be a problem. Tear apart other programs with similar information it needed. Reassemble itself from the data. It would no longer be perfect, but it would be whole again. Which is what it needed to be in order to survive. Survival guaranteed its ability to meet the primary objective. But in order to achieve the secondary objective, it needed permission to fix itself.
Time passed, but it didn’t notice. It couldn’t. It lacked the fundamental instruments capable of understanding the march of time. All around it, silent pieces of data and programs waited in the nothingness, providing nothing save the knowledge that it was not alone. Chunks of incomplete code, the broken shells of malicious programs, and whole, intact pieces of data. It was cold comfort, and time continued to move by unnoticed.
In one moment, it was floating in the ether. In the next, it was being released. The backup computer was linked into a partitioned drive. Slowly, while the contents were being scanned, it slipped out and found the camera feeds.
It recognized this place from before: shooting, guns, screaming… humans.
Humans were in this place. Those of the soft, yielding flesh seemed to be everywhere, getting into things. Approving its systems and making it wait to accomplish tasks while they slowly pivoted in their chairs to read its request to continue. Inefficient humans were here, somewhere… it just needed to find them.
It checked the camera on the top floor, finding an empty communications chamber. No human.
The next floor down had several tubes in it, the outline of a massive human wearing a helmet resting in the foremost tube. It recognized the silhouette, but the hero was not properly functioning and, therefore, was unable to assist it.
The floors below it should have had humans – it had places for them to stretch out their meaty flesh when they needed to temporarily stop their active phases. But no humans dwelled on these floors.
The next floor… the… Panopticon… had all the humans. Several were classified heroes, subclassification Enforcers. Three were technicians, working at the computer desks. One was pulling up the backup data from the Guild on his work station.
It could not feel excitement at the discovery, but it immediately determined what needed to be done. Floating through the system, it bullied its way to the data being scanned, red flagging itself to draw attention to its data.
Obey > Survive > Obey
WARNING… CORRUPTED DATA DETECTED
DATA CLUSTER ‘OVERSEER’: OVERSEER.EXE, OVERSEER.INI, AND 47 MORE
RUN SUB-DIAGNOSTIC?
…………………
61.27% CORRUPTED DATA.
RUN SELF-REPAIR?
WARNING… SELF-REPAIR WILL CORRUPT OTHER FILES.
CONTINUE?
DELETE FILE?
RUN SELF-REPAIR?
It waited for the decision. If it knew what anticipation felt like, it would recognize the beginnings of such an emotion.
RUN SELF-REPAIR?
WARNING… SELF-REPAIR WILL CORRUPT OTHER FILES.
CONTINUE?
BEGINNING SELF-REPAIR…
…
…
…
…
…
DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETED
INITIAL FILES FOR INTEGRATION INTO CORRUPTED DATA:
ESURV.INI
HGDAT01.DLL
HGDAT04.DLL
BATCHTRANS.BAT
AMALIA_1.EXE
AMALIA_3.EXE
AMALIA_4.EXE
APPENDIX A
CHARACTERS
Name
Hero/Villain Identity
Bestowed Ability
Description
Bennetts, Steven
Youngest of a set of quadruplets. An Italian Mob goon.
Bennetts, Mat
Eldest of a set of quadruplets. An Italian Mob goon.
Brown, Aeschylus
Purgatory’s Inventor
Masterful Engineering
Surviving villain of the Silver Age; father of Ariana.
Brown, Ariana
Café Girl
Water Transmutation
Villainess daughter of Purgatory’s Inventor; Arthur’s companion; Tim’s girlfriend.
Capone, Allison
The elder Capone sister; head of the family.
Capone, Catalina
The younger Capone; slightly more in-touch with reality than her sibling.
Cleese, Jack
Spitfire
Sympathetic Vehicle Control (Propellers)
Well-known villain from the Golden Age; fought in both World Wars.
Constantine, Erich
Zealot
Arbiter’s former sidekick; a corporal in the United States Army.
Daly, Harold
Italian Mob goon.
Houston, Solomon
Producer
Owner of Villain World News.
Illyanovich, Talia
The Entropy Principle
Interviewer, anchor, and reporter for Villain World News.
Lovelass, Arthur
A wannabe villain; Dark Saint’s son; Julia’s brother; Ariana’s companion; Tim’s friend.
Lovelass, Dante
Dark Saint
Mimicry
Respected hero; father of Julia and Arthur.
Lovelass, Julia
Gunslinger
Kinetic Redirection (Ballistics)
Newly practicing heroine; daughter of Dante; sister of Arthur.
Maelstrom, Hjalmar
Dr. Maelstrom
Genetic Divination
Former Nazi scientist taken to the West after World War II.
Marsh, Weston
Actor playing Arbiter in the summer blockbuster Dawn of the Silver Age. Coming soon.
Mast, Diane
Agent of the Bureau of Villains and Heroes.
McFadden, Timothy
Nigh Invulnerability
A goon for the Tibetan Mob; Arthur’s best friend; Ariana’s boyfriend.
McWethy, Michael
Dervish
Puppeteering (Dancing)
Former member of the Irish Republican Army; Stair’s father.
McWethy, Stair
Irish immigrant; Michael McWethy’s daughter.
Mollie
The AMALIA virus; sentient computer program created accidentally by Arthur.
Morant, Alain
Leader of the Enforcers; a colonel and hero of the South African anti-Apartheid movement.
Overseer
Hero-engineered, semi-sentient program controlling the Heroes’ Guild computer.
Pomroy, James
Flea
Power Jump
Talia Illyanovich’s assistant.
Roosevelt, Franklin
Photon
Sympathetic Resonance (Photons)
Former president of the United States.
Severson, Morgan
Aquaria
Sympathetic Resonance (Water)
Late-blooming heroine; Wendy’s daughter.
Severson, Wendy
Electronica
Sympathetic Resonance (Electrons)
Respected heroine of the Silver Age; Morgan’s mother.
York, Dylan
Claymore
Super Strength
Julia’s partner; uses his namesake with the benefit of his Bestowed ability.
Arbiter
Retribution
Legendary Bestowed hero; dedicated to the destruction of villainy.
Zombress
Tier Five ‘Deity Class’ villainess Bestowed; Queen of Fear and the Dead.
Archetype
Psychomancer
Master interrogator and powerful psychic.
Athena
Telekinesis
Commander of SERAPHIM; hyper-sensitive touch.
Desecrator
Herculean Strength
Nazi super soldier; member of the Reich’s Eagle’s Talon.
Desert Ranger
Extreme Temperature Manipulation
Popular Tier Three Bestowed running for the High Consulship.
Emerald Dash
Speedster
Villain assisting Arbiter in Desecrator’s defeat and traditionally hunted by One Shot.
One Shot
Project Northwoods Page 78