Glimpses

by Vincent Trigili

  I pulled away from Spectra and looked back to see an older Knight on one knee behind me. Around the room there were Dark Knights tending to each other’s wounds. “Wow, Spectra, you did quite the number on them,” I said in awe.

  “It was not all me. You beat back a few yourself,” she said with a mischievous grin.

  I looked around but could not find Flame or Shadow. “Wait, I vaguely remember hitting Flame! Is she okay?”

  “It was quite the blow too,” said the Knight with some pride. “Shadow took her to see Shea, but she will be fine.”

  “I can’t believe I did that,” I said.

  “Master Dusty, you and your wife are among the most powerful magi in our realm, and as spiritualists, you play in realms of darkness. Today was just a dam breaking. If you are not careful, more and worse will come,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Dusty, it’s my fault. I am so sorry,” said Spectra. “I should have never exposed you to the Spirit Realm like I did.”

  “Master, that may have slightly sped things up, but it did not change anything,” said the Knight.

  “But I am not that beast. I don’t rage like that,” I said. I curled up my knees and rocked there quietly.

  “How do I help him?” asked Spectra.

  They talked for a while. I leaned back into Spectra and just focused on her scent. I was too drained by the whole experience and could not really form any thoughts.

  THE NULL

  EVENING, DAY ONE: ASSIGNMENT

  THEY SAT ME in a chair and fitted restraints around my arms to keep me there. I could see the fear on their faces as they approached me, could smell the sweat soaking their clothes. To them, I represented an enigma, an emptiness their minds couldn’t reach. In an age where everyone had telepathic implants, where everyone was connected to everyone else one hundred percent of the time, my sealed mind was a fearsome thing.

  “What do you want with me?” I demanded.

  Agent Mikian sat across from me, his eyes fixed on my forehead. I could tell by his expression he was trying to probe my mind with his telepathic implant. I took advantage of his distracted state to slip out of my restraints. “Trying that again? You know that won’t work. You’re going to have to speak up.”

  “Careful with your attitude, bounty hunter. We still have your family,” he said.

  “Agent Mikian, the only reason you’re still alive right now is because I’ve decided to allow it.”

  “One move against me and your daughter is dead,” he said. “Now, we can trade threats back and forth, or we can get to the point.”

  “Then get to the point.”

  “Samuel escaped.”

  “Ah, I see. That is quite a problem for you.” Samuel was one of a very limited number of natural telepaths. He was also the most dangerous criminal mastermind ever to plague society.

  He leaned in close. “You think you’re safe from him? You think your family is safe?”

  “Of course we are. We have government agents like you to protect us, don’t we? What could ever go wrong?” I tried hard not to choke on these words. I had more reason to hate these agents than any criminal did.

  “Very funny.” He leaned back in his chair and looked me over. I could tell he was nervous around me. I didn’t need to be a telepath to know that. The beads of sweat across his forehead, the fidgeting of his hands, his closed posture… they told me volumes. “I’ll make this simple for you. Capture him and bring him back to us, dead or alive, and your family goes free. Fail, and they will suffer for your crimes.”

  “Tell me, Agent Mikian: why should I trust you?” I asked.

  “Let’s not play games. There’s no trust in our relationship. If I had my way, you’d be dead, and I’m sure that feeling is mutual right now.” He slid a datapad over to me. “On this pad is everything we have on him. It’ll give you a place to start.”

  I smiled, because I knew it worried him to see me smile. “What makes you think I can’t kill you where you sit?” I stood up then, allowing the restraints to fall to the floor. “Did you really think those could hold me?”

  He attempted to jump out of his seat, but I pushed him back down and leaned in real close. “Do you feel that?” I slowly let some of my power into his mind. “That is what nothingness feels like, Agent Mikian. Your mind can’t comprehend it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and that is all you will get from me.”

  I picked up the datapad, leaned in even closer to him, and whispered, “If anything happens to my family, I will come for you.”

  I stood and walked toward the door. As I opened it and walked out, a voice yelled, “Guards!”

  Men and women poured into the corridor with weapons drawn. I paused, waiting.

  “Let him go,” said Agent Mikian from behind me.

  The security forces kept their guns trained on me, but I strode right past them. I knew that one blast from any of those weapons would scatter my molecules across the room, but I also knew that they were afraid their guns wouldn’t work. I was that rare oddity in their world of complete knowledge‌—‌a mystery‌—‌and they had long ago lost the ability to deal with the unknown.

  I exited the building and headed for my speed-cycle, then turned and cheerfully waved to the guards before climbing in. Immediately I was surrounded by inertia-dampening gel. I sighed with pleasure as I punched the throttle to the max and took off with reckless abandon. There’s nothing quite like the feel of raw speed. The knowledge that a tiny error will spell death, combined with the scenery rushing by almost too fast to see, is euphoric.

  My tactical sensors lit up, warning me that local police forces were being dispatched to my location, but they quickly broke off. I suspected that Agent Mikian had called them off. Once I was out of secure airspace, I slowed down and merged with the normal traffic flow.

  I thought I had left this life behind. I’d married a beautiful woman and had a wonderful child. We had a nice ranch in the mountains away from society and were happy. That was until the government troops raided my home while I was out hunting and kidnapped my wife and child.

  “How in the world did Samuel escape?” I wondered out loud. He was supposed to have been kept in cryogenic sleep until a means of dealing with his powers could be discovered. Some idiotic government employee must have woken him. But why?

  Samuel’s natural abilities meant that he didn’t need implants, which made him untraceable and put him outside the control of the government. I suspected it was that inability to control him that they feared, more than anything he could actually do.

  As I approached my house, I saw a pillar of smoke. I broke out of traffic and accelerated to maximum velocity. As I executed a flyby of my property, I saw the city fire suppression teams rushing to respond, but it was too late. There was nothing left of my house save a blackened crater.

  Cursing vehemently, I landed and rushed to see if anything was left. Two firemen moved to intercept me.

  “Let me through!”

  “Sir, please,” said one. “You can’t go up there. It’s not safe.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t go up there? That was my house!” I said.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but toxic fallout levels are too high. No one can approach.”

  I started to reach out to strike him down, but instead I forced myself to take a deep breath. I had to tell myself several times that he wasn’t the bad guy before I could get it to stick. “What happened?” I demanded.

  “We don’t know yet. Please, sir, just head over there and someone will be right with you.”

  I looked again at the crater. There was truly nothing left. Everything I had built, every memory I had created with my family was gone. I would never again come home to my daughter running out to hug me, through the door I had built with my own two hands. My wife would never again sit in front of my mother’s mirror brushing out her hair. My daughter’s trophies, my wife’s art, everything we had built together‌—‌it was all gone.

  I returned
to my speed-cycle and sent a picture of the ruins to Agent Mikian, demanding an explanation, knowing it was unlikely he would have one for me.

  “We’re sending agents to investigate,” came the response.

  “Great!” Because that would make everything so much better.

  I started to climb into my cycle when a police officer approached. “Sir, I need you to stay for questioning.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said and continued to climb into my cycle.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” The officer drew his weapon. “I do.”

  I had had enough. I looked down the barrel of the officer’s gun and lashed out with my mental power. I forced into his mind the concept of nothingness; I drove all higher thoughts out of his mind, pushing him into a helpless trance. I had to force myself to break off before I drove even his lower thoughts from his mind, which would have shut down all of his body functions completely.

  The officer’s eyes glazed over and he fell to the ground. Eventually his mind would reboot, and in a day or two he would be fine. But for now, he was safely incapacitated. Two other officers ran to assist, but before they could arrive I finished my preflight and took off. I sent a message to Agent Mikian telling him to deal with the police, and I headed to my old hideout.

  MORNING, DAY TWO: BACK FROM THE DEAD

  The next morning, I woke early and sat at my terminal. It hadn’t been turned on in years. In fact, I had thought it would never be turned on again, and I hesitated to do it now. I had killed the old me for a reason, and the thought of his return scared me more than Samuel ever could.

  My comm beeped insistently, telling me there was a message. It was a message left to the new me: the middle-class husband and father, the coach and teacher who lived a peaceful life in the mountains with his family.

  I gave in to the comm’s persistence and played the message. “It’s a shame about your house, but at least your family wasn’t there. It would be a real pity if something happened to them. You should mind your own business if you want to prevent a tragedy.”

  I recognized the voice. Samuel. A man I had once called friend and confidant. It was his voice, but there was something wrong with the words.

  I called Agent Mikian, and before he could even get a greeting out, I asked, “Are they safe?” There was silence on the other end of the line. “They’re not, then.”

  “Yes, they are,” he said. “But Samuel is on the move and has already destroyed a safe house where we’d planted a decoy.”

  I cursed and said, “If they’re harmed, it’s on you!”

  “The only way to ensure their safety now is for you to take down Samuel,” Mikian said quietly.

  A rage burned inside me. “You intentionally let it leak that I was assigned to the case.” The government had complete control of the information that flowed through everyone’s implants. The only way information like this could get out is if someone deliberately allowed it.

  “Of course not!” he insisted.

  I knew he was lying. “After Samuel, you’re next.” I disconnected the channel.

  I fired up my terminal and entered in the access codes necessary to wake the life I’d left behind. I took the datapad that Agent Mikian had given me and uploaded all its data into my system.

  “Computer, search for maximum security prison breaks or related events in the last month,” I said.

  “One record found,” responded the computer.

  The news report showed the smoldering remains of the prison in the background as an attractive brunette reported, “It is not yet known what caused the explosion, but authorities believe that no one survived. The entire area has been quarantined due to the toxic levels of psionic fallout.”

  “No, I think there was at least one survivor,” I said to the news reporter. I clicked off the report and started a search for similar explosions in the past month. Only two others matched: my house and a seemingly random house across town.

  Samuel was dangerous, but there was no way he could have blown up that prison without help. He would have had no access to that kind of weapon in there, even if he’d somehow miraculously woken up by himself. No, there was only one person I knew who had access to those kinds of weapons‌—‌and too little sense to refuse to sell them.

  I headed to the back of my hideout and opened a closet that I had sworn I would never open again. In the back was a safe. I started to place my hand on the biometric-secured latch, then hesitated. A chill ran down my spine as I remembered the horrors I had witnessed in my past life.

  I might have turned back then, but for my wife and daughter. “You can do this,” I said to myself. “You have to, for them.”

  I activated the latch; the safe’s door slid up with a swoosh. Inside hung a pure black set of body armor, so black that all the light in the closet seemed to fall into it and get trapped. Hanging next to it was a backpack containing various tools of my former trade. Above it hung a set of pulse pistols and an assault rifle.

  “You can do this,” I said to myself again. “Just one more time.” I knew I was lying, but it didn’t matter. I had no choice. I was the only one that could stop Samuel, and everyone knew it. The only question was, who could stop the monster I would become again?

  I suited up in my armor and grabbed my equipment. Before heading out I looked at myself in the mirror, struggling again to see myself as others would. My military-issue armor was encoded with a special telepathic identification code, one that would instruct normal civilian implants to replace the image of the armor and weapons with something more benign. Something from their own memories, something fitting for the situation. Like Samuel, I had no implants, so I couldn’t see this camouflage effect, which meant I would never know if the camouflage ever failed.

  I slid aside a fake panel in the side wall of the closet and walked through to an underground garage. Waiting for me was a high-performance military assault cycle. It was illegal for civilians to own, but the law no longer mattered. My family’s lives were at stake. I climbed into the cycle and launched off into the rising sun.

  ***

  It took an hour to reach the warehouse district where the less-than-respectable members of society conducted their business. It was in this district that I had once shopped for the kinds of supplies that gave me an edge over the competing bounty hunters, most of whom were unwilling to take the risks I took.

  I landed my cycle near an abandoned-looking alleyway and swept the area with my visor for heat signatures. “Five of you? Really? I would have expected more.” They didn’t respond, but I hadn’t really expected them to.

  Ignoring them, I walked up to a partly hidden door and kicked it in. Two men with pistols rushed forward to intercept me, but I had the jump on them and blasted the guns out of their hands. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to get the new password. Now, where’s Tony?”

  They looked at each other and then lunged toward me. Before they could take two steps, I had fired both guns. Their momentum carried their now-dead bodies past me and into the wall. “Fools.”

  I wanted to feel remorse, but it wasn’t in my nature. Inside me was only coldness.

  “Fine. I’ll just look around, then,” I said.

  I headed toward the back, where Tony normally conducted business, and more men moved to intercept me. “Really?”

  “How about you turn around and drop your weapons?” one of them said.

  I stared him down. He was attempting to read my mind with his puny implants. That gave me enough time to focus on using my own powers.

  “How about a taste of nothingness?”

  I slowly eased some nothingness into his mind. His face went blank and he fell to the ground, limp.

  “Anyone else?”

  The others dropped their guns and fell back as I continued to build the nothingness around me. Their telepathic implants would pick it up and transmit it directly into their minds.

  “It’s the Null!” shouted one.

  “Run!” called out another.

/>   They tripped and stumbled over each other as the fear overwhelmed them. I waited until the path to the door was clear, then I slowly relaxed my powers and retracted my field of power back into myself.

  I heard scrambling sounds coming from behind the door as I approached. I kicked the door open and saw Tony making a break for a window.

  I fired a blast from my pistols into the wall over his head. “Not so fast.”

  Tony turned to face me, all the color drained from his face. His body was physically shaking as I approached. “But‌—‌but‌—‌you’re dead!”

  I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and lifted him up. He was a small man, easily handled. “Now, Tony… after all the business we’ve done, is that any way to greet me?”

  “Sorry‌—‌” he stammered. “Had you called ahead‌—‌”

  “You would have skipped town,” I said, and tossed him into a chair. “Now talk to me. Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “You sold the dirty bombs that were used to free Samuel,” I said.

  “No! I didn’t know! I swear!” he said.

  “Samuel tried to use one on my wife. Did you know that?”

  “I tell you, I didn’t know!” His bald head was covered in sweat, and he was struggling to control his breathing enough to speak. “Please, you have to believe me!”

  I leaned in real close. “Who did you sell them to?”

  “I didn’t get his name. I don’t keep records‌—‌you know that!”

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten your last taste of nothingness?” I asked.

  “Please, don’t. All I know is a man came in claiming to be an agent of the government. Told me he’d shut me down if I didn’t give him my entire stockpile. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Your entire stockpile?”

  “Well, I only gave him some of it. He didn’t seem to know how much I really had,” he said.