Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle

by Reynolds, Tom

  "Of course, it helps that I was able to accurately mimic the negative side effects that occur in a small percentage of the population when they're previously exposed to this particular chemical. After they saw that, they made sure they kept the doses they gave me as low as possible. Not even The Agency wants a lawsuit on their hands if they can prevent it."

  "Why tell me all of this?"

  "Because the plan didn't work, and I want you to know that. I wanted you to know that something I'd planned for meticulously and spent millions to make happen unfortunately failed, all because of an unexpected variable."

  Just then two heavily armored guards enter through a mechanized door on the outer wall of the cellblock.

  "Back up against the back of your cell! Show me your hands! Now!" one of them shouts as both aim their rifles at Keane.

  "Ah, they must have finally detected the motion in my cell. I was wondering how long that was going to take."

  "Back up, freak!"

  "Hmm, I don't think I've seen the two of you in this cellblock before, have I?"

  "You're going to be seeing the underside of my boot in about three seconds if you don't comply!"

  "The reason why I mention it is because it would appear you gentlemen are unfamiliar with this area of the facility and its particular rules, especially when it comes to outside visitors."

  My eyes go wide as I realize what Keane is doing.

  "Get out of here!" I scream at them.

  "We don't take orders from you clowns."

  "You see," Keane says, "the reason I wanted you to know about my plan was so you could also see just how well I'm able to improvise when the unexpected happens. Isn't that right, boys?"

  I turn back to look at the two guards. Their expressions have suddenly turned blank, and in the blink of an eye, they've turned their rifles on themselves, each holding the barrel of their own gun with their teeth.

  "Stop this right now!" I yell at Keane.

  "Oh, I'm not going to kill them, or more accurately, they're not going to kill themselves. Not yet at least. Maybe once all of this is over and they see just what they've done, but that's not on my conscience. That's all on them.

  "I know you're fast, Connor, but even you aren't fast enough to stop both of them from pulling the trigger, not if they both do it at the same time. So, I ask you this: Are you going to let me out of here, or would you rather watch these two men die?"

  33

  Everything happens quickly from there. With the New Mexico facility's Faraday cage punctured, it's trivial for a teleporter to get in, and with the money Keane has, it isn't hard to convince one to assist in a jailbreak in exchange for a few million dollars. That's pocket change to Keane, and all I can do is watch.

  The teleporter appears and disappears in an instant. It's obvious now that this plan was a long time in the making. Keane would have had to give extremely detailed descriptions of the floor plan to ensure they didn't teleport themselves into a wall or floor. Once Keane found his designated waiting area by a water fountain, all he had to do was check the clock on the wall to know exactly when the teleporter would arrive. In and out. A few seconds after he's gone, the guards begin to regain control over their minds.

  "What the hell just happened?" one of them asks me as he pulls the barrel of his rifle back out of his mouth.

  "Keane just escaped. I need you to sound whatever alarm you have to," I tell them.

  "Uhh, I think we already are," the other guard says over the constant wailing alarms already going off all around the cellblock.

  There isn't much more for me to do here, even if they wanted my help, which I'm sure they won't after they hear how Keane just got away. I lift into the air and travel back down the winding hallways of the facility, back to the hole in the roof. The night sky is clear, and I take a position about a thousand feet up so that I can see into the distance, toward the lights of the nearest city. I don't know what I expected to find up here. Keane could have teleported anywhere on Earth, or even off Earth if you want to be technical about it.

  "Keane's gone, isn't he?" Midnight asks over my earpiece.

  He already knows the answer.

  "Yeah. Where are you?" I reply.

  "Two o'clock," he replies.

  "What happens at two o'clock?" I ask.

  There's a sigh at the other end.

  "Two o'clock as in slightly to your right. Look up," he says.

  Oh. Right. I look in the direction he says and can see the faint shimmer of a heat trail in the sky. It's Midnight's plane, or at least what's left of it, zipping through the sky.

  "Meet me in Albuquerque. I'll send coordinates to your device."

  * * *

  "How many secret hideouts do you have exactly?" I ask as I fly over the city of Albuquerque, trying to keep an eye out for wherever it is I'm going.

  I have the exact GPS coordinates, but since I'm not a computer, that doesn't help me as much as something like saying, “Look for the rooftop with a Jola Cola sign on it,” would.

  I find the building that Midnight gave me coordinates for and land on the roof. There's only one door up here, so I venture a guess that's where I'm heading. The door leading from the roof isn't locked, but there's a second one inside that is. It doesn't matter, though. Once the first door closes, the small space lights up with blue lasers projected from every angle, overlapping and scanning across my body. Once the system is confident that I'm me, the entire room descends a few dozen stories, well below street level.

  The elevator slows to a stop, and I exit to find what I've begun to recognize as standard features for Midnight's hideouts: an automated medical bay, computer monitors lining almost every space along the walls, and training simulation areas. Midnight sits at a computer in the center of the room, fixated on the screen.

  "What's happening?" I ask as I walk briskly over to him.

  "Nothing. Yet," he replies.

  "No reports of any eyewitnesses? Someone had to have seen something. Keane didn't just vanish into thin air. I mean, technically, I guess, he did, but he had to have landed somewhere."

  "And I'm sure he did, but unless he's in a public area, we're not going to find him by hacking into red light cameras."

  I bite my tongue right before saying something about how we have to try. Of course we have to try. Midnight knows that better than anyone. He doesn't need me reminding him. After a few seconds of silence, there's suddenly an explosion of rage from Midnight like I've never seen before.

  He punches the computer monitor in front of him, shattering the screen into a hundred pieces of broken glass. He rips the keyboard from the desk and throws it across the room, smashing another monitor that's hung along the far wall.

  I don't say anything, not like I'd know what to say anyway. I've never seen him this frustrated. He pulls off his cowl as though it's suffocating him and stares into space for a long while before he speaks again.

  "There's something that I should tell you," he starts.

  "Okay ..." I say, not sure what to expect next.

  "I think it's only right for you to know now. I'm not sure what Keane has planned next, but the more I learn about him and how he works, the more I'm beginning to expect that this might be the end of the line for me. There are secrets I know that I swore to myself I'd take to the grave, but now that I'm standing in front of it, I'm not sure if it's right to do that anymore. I'm not sure about a lot of things anymore. I'm not even sure where to begin."

  More silence follows as Midnight seems to be running through it all in his head, deciding which of the who knows how many secrets is the one he should tell me first. I'm not sure whether he's deciding based on which are the least secretive, or which are the most necessary in order to make sense of the others.

  "I know that you have questions about me. About who I am. Where I came from. How it is that I know what I do about metabands. I've done what I can to keep the world from asking those questions of me, and I've gone even further to try to keep you from as
king the same, but it's important that you know.

  "You know that the metaband that powered my suit belonged to me, but you don't know what happened to the other one."

  "There were two?"

  "There are always two," he says as he releases an unseen clip from the forearm of his suit. Once unfastened, he removes the lower arm guard, revealing the scarred forearm that I’ve seen and wondered about once before. "The other was ripped away from me, which is how my arm ended up like this. There was enough residual energy in the other band to regenerate the arm for the most part, but as you can see, it wasn't completely successful before the residual energy was expended."

  "I thought it was supposed to be impossible to remove a metaband from its owner once it's linked?"

  "It is, nearly. Mine wasn't ripped off by any normal force, though. It was ripped off by the limitations of physics itself."

  "I don't think I follow," I say as if the look on my face wasn't making that clear enough.

  "What I'm going to tell you is going to seem impossible."

  "I'm a teenager that can fly and bend steel thanks to some bracelets. I'll try to keep an open mind," I say, which actually gets him to crack a rare smile.

  "The metabands that are currently on Earth aren't from this time. They're from thousands of years in the future."

  "How could you know that?"

  "Because that's where I'm from too."

  34

  "A lot of the pieces of this story aren't going to entirely make sense to you. It's not too different than if you tried to explain what happened today to a caveman."

  "Thanks," I reply sarcastically.

  "I don't mean any offense by that, but it's accurate. In reality, the advances from my time far outweigh the differences between this time and that of the cavemen. I'll try to put what I know and what happened in terms as close to what you'll be able to understand and relate to as possible."

  "Okay."

  "It happened during an expedition returning to Earth from a few galaxies away. We'd been-"

  "We?"

  "My team. I'll get to them in a moment. We were returning from an expedition. Metabands at that time were standard issue to all explorers in our position. They were primarily used to help us interface directly with our vessel. It wasn't so much a melding of man and machine as it was allowing the two to simply exist together as one. The metabands connected with their owners at every level of existence. They were incredibly powerful, but to some, there was a belief that their full power had yet to be harnessed.

  "The chief scientist aboard my ship was one who believed in this idea, and so he tinkered. He experimented. He was determined to find the limits of this technology. It was technology that had already existed for hundreds of years by my time, but it was still considered a new frontier in many respects.

  "I was unaware of the specifics involved in many of these experiments. Part of me just didn't want to know. I didn't want to know how far he would go to find whatever it was he was looking for. I didn't want to know how far he'd go just to prove that he could. By the end, his experiments caused a rupture of energy unlike any the universe had seen before.

  "It ripped our ship apart at the molecular level. Our metabands were all that protected us from the harshness of space, but they were all connected. Not only our own, but also the thousands more we were holding onboard as cargo. They were being brought back to Earth for further study from the frontlines of a war being fought in deep space.

  "When the experiment caused one to rupture, it opened a hole in the fabric of reality itself. The metabands and my crew were pulled in through that hole. It existed for only a fraction of a second, and when it closed, it took my hand and one of my metabands with it. Luckily, the auxiliary power held in the other kept me alive long enough to make it through the atmosphere and land back on Earth."

  "And what about all the other metabands?"

  "They were scattered across the solar system, like a sack of potatoes falling out of the back of a truck. The majority of my team landed safely on Earth. It was a few years later when Earth's orbit crossed paths with the first batch of metabands floating in space. They looked like space junk to the untrained eye, but anyone who came upon them after they made it down to Earth would be able to tell right away that there was something unusual about these bracelets."

  "And that was the first wave."

  "Correct. The second wave was years away still, but I knew it was coming. I'd spent the time in between tracking down metabands as they gravitated back toward Earth's magnetic field. I tried to recover them before anyone else could, but it proved to be an impossible task with the technology available at the time."

  "What about the other members of your crew? What happened to them?"

  "None of us expected the first wave. We'd all assumed that the metabands had been lost to the vastness of space and time. All we could do was try to go about living normal lives, or as normal as we could make our lives after being displaced this far from our own time.

  "I was never able to assimilate. Not fully. I couldn't wrap my head around the concerns of people from this time. I couldn't relate or understand. I spent a long time looking for purpose. I didn't find it until the altered metabands began crashing down to Earth, and that's when I knew I had to do what I could to prevent them from hurting anyone else. That's when I found my purpose.

  "But as I said, others were able to adapt. They were able to find their places in this time. They learned to love what were strange customs and technologies to us. They found ways to fit into the current culture and connect with others, even though everyone on earth had been long dead by the time any of us were born.

  “Some were even able to make lives for themselves here and families. Connor, your parents were two of those people."

  At first, I don't think I heard him right, or I think that he's speaking metaphorically.

  "What? What are you talking about?" I ask, shaking my head as if that would make what he’s just said go away.

  "Your parents. They were colleagues of mine. More than colleagues. They were friends. We were all trapped in this strange time with no one else who could possibly understand what it meant to have gone through what we did. But your parents didn't think that way. They made a purpose and a life for themselves here. A large part of that was you and Derrick, their sons from a time they didn't belong in. But they found purpose in another way too, a way that inspired humanity, by becoming the first two metahumans the world had ever seen."

  The room is spinning as all the puzzle pieces I've carried around my entire life begin to fall into place.

  "My parents ... they didn't die as innocent bystanders during The Battle."

  "No, they didn't. They died as heroes. They died protecting the city and the time that they'd come to call home."

  "My dad ..."

  "Your dad was The Governor. Your mom was Silk. She was one of the countless metahumans that died that day trying to stop Jones. The Governor, as you know, was the one who finally did in the end, by throwing him into the sun."

  "I think I need to sit down," I mutter as I feel for something behind me to lean up against and luckily find a computer terminal within reach.

  "I'm sorry I couldn't tell you any of this sooner, Connor. There wasn't a way to know what the ramifications of anyone finding out the truth would be, which brings me to Jones.

  "Jones was a brilliant man. He was obsessed with his work with what are now called metabands in this time, but he was also extremely aware of the potential they had for harm. Despite his work with metabands, he insisted that his family never use them. He worried about the harm, both physical and psychological, that they could have long term. When our craft was torn apart, something strange happened."

  "You mean aside from sending all of you through time?"

  Midnight actually manages to crack a smile again at that, making me wonder just how literal the mask he wears is.

  "Jones's family was on board the ship with him. That
was an option available to them since it was a long-haul mission. When the craft was torn apart, his wife, Gillian, and his daughter, Iris, weren't wearing metabands and were presumed dead. For a long time Jones was presumed dead as well.

  "But there were things we didn't know at the time that we do know now. The first is obviously that Iris survived. Not only did she survive, but she exhibits metaband-like powers and abilities despite not being linked to a pair of metabands herself. I've been studying her for years, and I'm no closer to an explanation for her abilities than when I started. The tools and materials of this time just aren't adequate to get to the bottom of it. The closest thing I have to a working theory is that when the accident happened, she was still young enough that her genetics were susceptible to manipulation. She was still a newborn, too young to ever safely be exposed to something like metabands, let alone the type of energy caused by Jones's explosion.

  “Later, we learned that Jones had survived too, if only technically."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He didn't go through the same experience the rest of us did. He was too close to the source of energy. After the explosion happened, myself and your parents woke up already plummeting through Earth's atmosphere. We'd traveled back through time centuries, but for us, all of it happened in the blink of an eye.

  "Jones wasn't so lucky. He traveled back the same length of time we did, but it didn't happen instantly for him. For him, it was experienced in real time. He spent millennia trapped in a sort of limbo, where time and space didn't exist anywhere except for inside his mind. It's what drove him mad."

  "I can imagine thousands of years of solitary confinement would do that."

  "When it was finally over and he crashed back to Earth, he was a deeply broken man. He only vaguely remembered and understood what had happened to him. Over time, as he began to recall more and more about his life from before he was trapped in limbo, he began to formulate a theory for setting things right."