Neutrinoman & Lightningirl: A Love Story, Season 1 (Episodes 1 - 3)

by Robert J. McCarter

  Tom nodded. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this. That we wouldn’t have to resort to…” he trailed off.

  I hate to admit it, but it got my attention. His big dramatic pause. “What?” I asked.

  “There is one more thing we can offer you,” Byte said, her face compassionate.

  “What?” I asked, louder this time. This drama crap was starting to drive me a little nuts.

  “We can tell you how to get her back,” Tom said.

  “Even though it means you won’t be joining us,” Byte added. “Because, let’s face it. If she was in the picture, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

  I hate to say it, but I am sure my face showed everything that was going through my head right then. A bit of surprise, followed by the memory of Licia’s lips, and then the pain of her being done with me. “How?” I asked, the urgency in my voice unmistakable. It seemed like someone else was speaking. “How do I get her back?”

  “First the diamonds,” Tom said. “Then we’ll tell you.”

  “No casualties,” I said in way of agreement.

  Byte nodded. “Let me go over the details with you. There shouldn’t be any.”

  ~~~

  The plan was pretty simple. We would board the train in Flagstaff, grab the diamonds, and jump the train before Winslow where Tom would pick us up in the helicopter. Dr. Cheese was preparing an “enzymatic concoction” that would render the physical guards unconscious, while Byte would disable the rest of the electronic security. Once in, I would get us through the vault. Chaosboy was there to make sure everything flowed smoothly.

  She showed me the simulations she had created and the probabilities of success. It seemed so simple. And the prize on the other side was a way back to Licia.

  It was just Byte and me standing in the main cave surrounded by all her computers and monitors. She was looking at me expectantly. I knew she wanted me to tell her that I would do it. That they had followed all the right steps laid out by their simulations and I was now on board. It was strange. I was starting to recognize that expectant look.

  “Why are you with him?” I asked instead.

  She looked surprised briefly, but then got this faraway look and smiled.

  “Tom is…” she began. “Well, Tom is, if nothing else, a huge supporter of q-morph rights. He found me. He helped me before I really understood what was happening to me.”

  “Found you?” I asked.

  She looked at me briefly and then looked away. “When it happened, I was not okay. I was a programmer at Google working at their Kirkland, Washington, campus. I was a search algorithm specialist, programming the guts of their search engine. I loved it. And then the accident happened.

  “I was back in the server room gallivanting.” She looked away. “Actually, at Google, the server rooms are more like warehouses. It’s not hard to find a bit of privacy. My boyfriend at the time was a hardware engineer.” Her cheeks flushed red and she looked down. “I don’t know, it was exciting. I liked being close to all that data and I liked him.

  “It was that day of the cosmic rays. Things got a little out of control, and I ended up naked with my back pressed against some open wiring. It was a rather complicated and expensive router that had much of Google’s Internet traffic going through it. The cover was off—it was in the process of being repaired.

  “So I had all this electricity going through my skin. Not high voltage, but lots of it. And it wasn’t just current, it was information. Too much information. Somehow, because of those cosmic rays, it was almost as if I had ten thousand conversations going through my head at once.

  “Well, I was off my trolley then. I ran out of there naked and babbling and ended up getting locked away.”

  I looked at her. She was lost in her memory, staring at her hands. “And Tom?” I asked.

  “He found me. He knew what had happened. He helped me through it.”

  I nodded. “So, loyalty. That’s it then.”

  “He saved my life,” she said. “And now he is trying to save the planet.”

  I was really having trouble reconciling the Tom I had encountered here, and the Toxicwasteman that had run amok before Lightningirl had taken him down. The Tom that so gleefully manipulated me in our encounter with the aliens.

  “I don’t trust him,” I said. “I don’t trust his motives. I don’t like how he gets things done.”

  Byte took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “I get that, I really do. But I think we may have a better shot than the military at defeating these aliens.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Don’t they have a trillion-dollar budget? Don’t they have the best weapons and technologies? Not to mention quite a few q-morphs on their side.”

  “Afghanistan,” she said. “Iraq. We’ve been over there for two years now, with no end in sight. Missing money. Bureaucratic boondoggles. That’s whose hands you want to put the fate of the world in?”

  “And you want me to trust Toxicwasteman?” I asked. “An unstable psychopath. Someone who would be happy to win, if winning meant half the planet dying. The man that revels in being a villain. The guy that will do and say anything to get what he wants. That guy? Really?” My voice had gotten loud. The rest of the conversations in the cave had gone silent as they listened to me rant.

  I felt Byte’s hand on mine and smelled her rose scent. “Just do this job, Nik. Please. We can help you get your Licia back.”

  And that was the thing, right? For what ends would I accept the means? If the prize was Licia, would I be willing to be a thief instead of a Boy Scout? For the woman I loved would I compromise my morals? Actually, this was just their promise that they knew how. So the question was: what would I do for just a chance?

  I stared at her and she met my gaze unblinking. “How good is this information?” I asked.

  “My simulations give you a 98 percent chance of getting her back with this information. A 28 percent chance without.”

  “What is your margin of error?” I asked.

  Her eyebrow raised, I didn’t think she was expecting that. My latest pre-superhero job was as a janitor, but I wasn’t a dummy. I had a business degree. And when I had that thought, I had to wonder. Didn’t she know that? Was she expecting the question? Was the eyebrow raise part of what her simulations told her to do? The whole “we simulate everything” was starting to drive me absolutely batty.

  “Plus or minus 10 percent,” she said.

  “I don’t want to know her deepest darkest secrets,” I said. “I don’t want to know about her psych profile. I don’t want to know those kinds of things until she is ready to tell me.”

  She smiled. “She’s a lucky girl, you know. But, you don’t have anything to worry about. What we have is a general strategy. One that is very you, and you might stumble on it yourself. But if you use it, your odds go way up.”

  The look on her face was one of victory. She had hooked me and reeled me in, and she knew it.

  Chapter 9

  Collateral Damage

  Late Winter 2005, East of Flagstaff, Arizona

  As the heist went down, it had every appearance of being easy. Too easy, really. It was the Chaosboy effect. He had this distant, check-out look on his youthful face most of the time. He was bending probabilities to our advantage. We boarded the Amtrak train at the red-bricked train station in Flagstaff.

  I don’t know if you’ve been to Flagstaff, but it’s a beautiful little city. The downtown area, where the train station is, caters to tourists and is full of historic brick buildings. Flagstaff itself is at a seven-thousand-foot elevation, but it is dwarfed by the nearby San Francisco Peaks rising behind the city to the north. At 12,600 feet, the mountain is the tallest point in Arizona. Flagstaff is dry, but not what you think of when you think desert. With the mountain and all the towering ponderosa pine trees, it doesn’t look like a desert at all.

  It was cold, and there were the remnants of the last snowstorm on the ground. We entered the train quickly and mad
e our way to our seats. We were all silent. I sat there thinking of Licia. This was her home. I watched out the window at people driving by on Route 66 or walking in their hats and heavy coats and looked for her. It was silly, I know. I should have been focusing on what I was doing. I should have been keeping an eye on my companions. But I didn’t. I just sat there hoping to catch a glimpse of a girl.

  Byte was in charge. No one ever said it to me, but it was clear to everyone. Once we had cleared Flagstaff and started making our way towards Winslow, Byte got up and we all followed her. Outside the train, the pine trees had been replaced with scraggly pinon trees as we went down in elevation.

  We made our slow way through the passenger cars to the back of the train, the click-clack of the train on the tracks beating out a rhythm. The end of the train held a dining car, a bar car, and then the final car, which was our destination. It was an armored train car. Kind of like those Wells Fargo armored trucks you see picking up bags of money from banks.

  We went to the bar. Byte ordered us all lite beers, and we waited. I refused to talk to Dr. Cheese (still dressed in his lab coat, by the way), and Byte and Chaosboy both had these spacy looks on their faces. She was hacking into the electronic security; he was making sure things went our way.

  Dr. Cheese downed his beer and then asked for another and then another. This was part of the plan. He wasn’t in danger of getting drunk—his body could metabolize the beer in such a way that he didn’t get inebriated. Part of that enzymatic superpower thing. He just made sure his stomach was full of enzymes that neutralized the alcohol.

  There were about three other patrons in the car and the bartender. He was an affable-looking young man, with a clean white shirt and short black hair. He gave me a strange look when we came in, but I didn’t think anything of it. I considered slipping him a note, telling him to get the patrons out of here. But that wouldn’t have helped. I worried about what would happen when we went into the armored train car.

  After about thirty minutes, Byte nodded to Dr. Cheese. He stumbled back through the car, looking like a bad actor pretending to be drunk. Byte gave me a pointed look, so I played my part.

  I shook my head in disgust and said, “I’ll go get him.”

  When I caught up with him he was in that narrow area between cars, his hand covering the little glass window of the door to the armored car.

  I peered in and saw three big guards on the ground, a white mist in the air. He had dissolved a hole in the glass and pushed through his little knock-out bomb.

  “Did they see you?” I asked.

  “No,” he chuckled. “They were all too focused on their card game. That little redheaded kid can really make the impossible happen.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “The gas will neutralize in another thirty seconds,” he said.

  I watched as the gas floated to the ground and then disappeared. He got this intense look on his face as he pushed on the glass. Soon there was a hole in the glass in the shape of his hand. He reached through and unlocked the door.

  We moved into the car. It was utilitarian with a few seats, steel cabinets, and a big safe. This was what I was here for. Dr. Cheese could get through metal, but not quickly.

  I went to the safe and noticed one of the guards. He was twitching with white foam coming out of his mouth. “Shit,” I said as I leaned down. I looked up at Dr. Cheese. “What’s wrong with him?”

  He leaned down, checked his pulse, and pulled his eyelids back. “He’s having a bad reaction to my formula.”

  “I thought you said it was safe?”

  “It is. Only one in a million would have this kind of reaction,” he said.

  I looked at the guard and back to Dr. Cheese. “So what do we do?”

  He shrugged, looking at the safe. “We do our jobs.”

  This was it. This moment. In that train car with Dr. Cheese. My reaction compared to Dr. Cheese’s is what made us different. I won’t say that mine made me a hero, and his made him a villain—I don’t have that big of an ego. But that look of dismissal on his face, how easily he was willing to discard a human life, it did something to me.

  I pulled him down by his lab coat and said, “What’s it going to take to save him?”

  His eyes were wide. I think he was expecting me to act just like him. He looked down at the twitching guard again and said, “He’s in anaphylactic shock. He needs a shot of epinephrine. That might do it.”

  I grabbed under the guard’s armpits and started dragging him out of the car. As I pulled him something occurred to me. Why Chaosboy is called Chaosboy. Our ease at getting into the train car with the guards was a million to one in our favor. The odds of this guard getting sick from the gas was a million to one too.

  So while Choasboy was creating things favorable to us, he was trailing a wake of bad luck for others. It made sense. The order of things have to stay in balance. While he creates positive outcomes for us, that has to be balanced by negative outcomes for others.

  I squatted down and put the guard over my shoulder. He was bald and about two hundred pounds. I grunted as I stood and started forward.

  “Where are you going?” Dr. Cheese asked. “We need to open this vault.”

  I didn’t answer him. There were shouts when I entered the bar car. “He’s having an allergic reaction. Does anyone have an EpiPen?”

  No one answered. Byte looked shocked and Chaosboy came out of his trance, a look of surprise on his face.

  “You did this,” I growled at the redhead. “You are going to fix it.”

  “What?” he asked.

  I set the guard down and grabbed Chaosboy by the shirt. “Use your power. We need to find someone with an EpiPen. We need to inject this guy now. He needs to survive. Got it?”

  He slowly nodded. I let go of him and watched as his face went blank. I looked at the bartender and said, “Go, find us someone with an EpiPen. There must be someone with allergies that carries one on this train.”

  He nodded and ran off.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Byte whispered to me. I smiled at her and turned my attention to the guard. His twitching had increased. His skin was blotching and his face was clearly swelling. His breath was becoming labored. I squatted down and checked his pulse which was weak.

  I considered going after the bartender, but didn’t. I worried that my companions would abandon him. Time was passing with agonizing slowness. I felt helpless. I resolved to get some first aid training so I would at least have a clue what to do.

  I looked around, Dr. Cheese had stayed in the other car, and everyone else in the bar car was avoiding me and the guard.

  I was about to go looking for an EpiPen myself when the bartender rushed back. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “I found someone with one, only two cars up.”

  I stared at the directions—I had never done anything like this. It was, fortunately, very simple. I opened the tube, pulled out the injector, and jammed it into the guard’s leg, the needle going through the pants as I held it there.

  “I’m a doctor,” I heard a woman say. I looked up and saw a middle-aged woman, carrying a small bag. “What happened?”

  “I found him this way,” I said. “He’s having some sort of allergic reaction.”

  She looked from me to the EpiPen that I was still holding to his leg. “It’s okay,” she said gently. “You did the right thing.” She took the EpiPen and leaned down, putting her ear to his chest. “I think he’s going to be okay.”

  I nodded, feeling dazed. Yeah, I know, I have taken on aliens and earth-killing meteors. But this was up close and personal. This was so far out of my depth. I looked around and saw that Byte and Chaosboy were gone.

  “Can you…” I began. “Can you handle this? I’ve got to do a thing.”

  She nodded, smiling, but the smile soon left her face as her mouth opened. “You’re… Aren’t you…” she began.

  My heart leapt. I had been so caught up in what I was doing that I forg
ot that my identity had been revealed last night.

  “Yeah,” the bartender said. “I knew you looked familiar. You’re that Neutrinoman, aren’t you?” He was speaking rather loudly, and the few other patrons in the car heard and started talking among themselves.

  I mumbled something and I felt my face flush red. I surged to my feet and walked back to the armored train car. Time to finish this damn robbery.

  Chapter 10

  An Unexpected Visitor

  Late Winter 2005, East of Flagstaff, Arizona

  “Out of my way,” I growled. Dr. Cheese was concentrating, his hand against the safe’s metal hinges. Chaosboy had his zoned�out look and Byte was looking on, her arms crossed.

  I slapped Choasboy on the head. “Stop that. Don’t make us lucky unless we really need it. I don’t want you putting someone else’s life on the line.” He blinked and slowly nodded.

  I pulled my right sleeve back and turned my right hand and forearm neutrino and pressed it against the hinge. I was full of adrenaline and emotion, from both the guard’s medical emergency and being recognized. I was embarrassed, scared, and angry. I took all that energy and funneled it into what I was doing. The metal slowly melted under the pressure of my neutrino hand.

  No one spoke to me, for which I was grateful. It was clear from their body language that I was not one of them now. And that suited me fine. The sooner I could be done with this, the better.

  The safe was not that complex. I had seen plans of it back in the LoVE hideout. All I needed to do was cut through the two hinges, and the bolt, and the door would open.

  It took about five minutes, and worked well enough. Soon the door was open. Byte swooped in and took a small black bag out of the safe, and we were done.

  ~~~

  How do you jump from a moving train and land without any major injuries? Well, you are either in an action movie, or Chaosboy is doing his thing. We went out the back end of the armored train car, and they jumped. First Dr. Cheese, and then Byte, and then Chaosboy. One by one I saw them execute graceful leaps and roles as if they were trained stunt men. I saw them stand up and brush themselves off.