by Jeremy Scott
“Okay, Bentley, give us a rundown on the cameras,” I said, getting us back in gear.
“All right, gentlemen,” he began, opening his laptop. “Through the miracle of modern wireless technology along with a dash of my own creativity, we can use this laptop to access any camera’s feed.” He clicked a button on the computer, and a grid came up showing small video boxes. There were about a dozen or so on the screen. One showed a view of Freepoint Circle, and we could see people from town walking about, enjoying a Friday evening. “Now, it’s a little impractical at this point, at least in terms of knowing where to look. I can only fit twelve feeds on screen at once, and with over a thousand, well, you can see the massive amounts of data we’ll be trying to sift through.”
Bentley was an egghead. Nothing got him talking more excitedly than his own inventions and creations, and it was fun to watch.
“But,” he continued, “I have compensated for that by grouping them together by their location.” He flipped through the various grids on screen showing how the camera feeds were arranged in geographical order.
I thought I heard a noise coming from the hallway, which is something I was always hyper-alert for on these sleepovers since I definitely didn’t want to see how angry Dad got if I spilled the beans to Patrick about his super powers. “Keep going, Bentley,” I said quietly as I got up and excused myself.
I crept down the hallway. Patrick’s door was shut, so he definitely couldn’t have been eavesdropping. I stopped by his door and put my acute hearing to work, listening for any sign that he was up to mischief, but there was nothing. He probably was just lying on his back staring at the ceiling, practicing his snotty face.
Since I was nearby, I popped into the bathroom really quick to relieve myself. In the process, a funny thought occurred to me … one that kept me giggling to myself all the way back into the living room.
“What’s so funny?” Henry asked, the way a prosecutor asks a murder suspect what they were doing on the night of the murder.
“I just had the strangest experience,” I said, still smiling. “I went down to make sure Patrick was still in his room, and then I went to the bathroom. And … I’m standing there in the bathroom, you know … doing my business … and while I’m doing that, I’m still getting Henry’s pictures and audio of him looking at Bentley’s cameras. It’s like I don’t have to miss out on anything, even if I’m gone, as long as good old Henry’s around. I saw you zooming in and out on the bank camera while I was washing my hands,” I said, probably a bit too amused and impressed.
No one else seemed amused except for Bentley, who chuckled. But his smile quickly turned to a frown. It was one of those good frowns, where his brain was mere seconds away from putting something together. “Wait a second,” he said. “Philip, you just gave me an idea.”
All the heads in the room turned to face him, waiting for his next nugget of brilliance. He stared at the computer, deep in his thoughts, clearly trying to work through something in his mind. He looked up at me, then at Henry, and then at the computer screen. “Philip, I think you might be a genius,” he finally declared. “Hang on one minute and I’ll show you what I mean. James … give me a quick lift home?”
“Why, sure,” James chirped. He placed his hand on Bentley’s shoulder, and a second later …
Ooph!
They were gone.
And that’s when I heard my brother Patrick say his first phrase involving a swear word, one slow syllable at a time. “Ho. Lee. Shit.”
Indeed.
***
I completely forgot about Bentley and his grand idea because I immediately lost myself in the verbal flogging of my little brother. It was an instinctive reaction. I just launched into him for having snuck out of bed, ignoring the fact that Dad and I had been hiding the facts from him. “What are you doing?! You’re not supposed to be out here!!” But as soon as I started shouting, he hightailed it back to his bedroom and slammed the door.
I stomped right after him, but reality kicked in by the time I reached his door, and I knew it was pointless to be mad at him. The damage had been done. I collected my thoughts, took a deep breath, and walked into Patrick’s room.
“Patrick, I’m sorry I yelled—“
Patrick cut me off, rambling incoherently and quite excitedly. “What in the heck just happened, Phillip? I mean, did you see that? That was unbelievable!” He was speaking at an incredible rate of speed. “B-b-b-Bentley just up and disappeared! And James, too! What the heck is going on? Are they aliens? Are they magicians? This is amazing! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me your friends were aliens. Or superheroes!” His eyes managed to get even wider. “Oh my God, like on the news!!”
I just let him go for a bit until he was done since my attempts to interrupt him were unsuccessful anyway. Finally, he began to get tired and sat down on the edge of the bed and flopped on his back.
“Okay, Patrick,” I began, having never planned any kind of speech for this moment. “First things first. You cannot tell Dad, okay? You cannot tell anyone in the entire world that you know about this. No one can know that you know, do you understand?”
He didn’t respond, and I didn’t wait for him to.
“I don’t have time to tell you everything tonight. I won’t have time to tell you everything for a long time because we’re only going to be able to talk about it when nobody’s around, okay?”
Again, I required no input from him.
“Freepoint is a town almost entirely populated by superheroes. Dad and Mom are both superheroes. Every kid in that room,” I pointed toward the living room, “has a super power. Bentley has a super-advanced brain. Henry can read minds. James can teleport to anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye. Chad can turn invisible. And Patrick … I can move things with my brain. I have telekinesis.”
At this, Patrick burst out laughing, as though all of it were possible in his mind except for his brother having a cool power. That part was apparently ridiculous.
“After what you just saw, are you really trying to tell me you don’t believe me?” I asked wearily.
“You can move things with your brain, right,” he said dismissively. “You can’t even see, Phillip!”
“I can still use my power,” I said flatly, “but I also get to see things around me because of Henry’s power.”
Patrick folded his arms in defiance and merely said, “Prove it.” It was the quintessential challenge from a little brother. And one I didn’t waste any time accepting.
“Yo, Henry!” I yelled into the living room. “Henry, can you come here?”
Patrick and I remained silent, each with crossed arms, staring each other down in a game of knowledge-based chicken while we waited.
“Hello?” Henry said as he pushed the door open with his hand. “Um, did you call me?” I could tell Henry didn’t really want to get involved, but it was too late for all of that.
“Yes. Thanks. Okay, Patrick, I want you to hold up your fingers, however many you want. Because I’m blind, I won’t be able to see, right?”
I waited a moment. Through Henry’s vision, I was able to see Patrick think long and hard before finally holding up two fingers on his left hand and the thumb of his right hand.
“Two fingers and a thumb. Try again.”
Patrick looked at Henry, then back at me, then bit his lip in determination, and held up two closed fists.
“That’s no fingers. Zero fingers. I can see you, Patrick: what do I have to do to prove it to you?”
“But that’s impossible,” he said in disbelief. “You’re blind.”
“I am, but Henry’s mind-reading ability works in both directions, so it lets him share what he sees with my brain. So whenever he’s around, I can see just fine … sort of. It’s a work in progress.” In my mind, the lesson was over. We were already short on practice time, and I wanted to get this over with as soon as possible so I could begin strategizing on how to best keep it secret from Dad. “Now, I believe you
also scoffed when I told you what my ability was, correct? Please name something in this room … something that you don’t think I can move with my brain.”
Patrick glanced around the room, his eyes still wide as his mind continued to process an enormous amount of inconceivable information. Finally he said, “My football.” Back in New York, Patrick had been quite a Jets fan. He still was, actually. He’d even gone to games with his best friend’s family a few times. And his prized possession in all the world was an official NFL football signed by the entire team. It sat in the far corner of the room on a little shelf my Dad had made as a present during his woodworking phase. And within about 1.2 seconds of him saying the word “football,” it was in my hands.
And that’s when Patrick fainted, which is something I definitely did not see coming—pardon the pun.
***
My brother woke back up within ten seconds of passing out. And after several more minutes of him peppering Henry and me with questions, he finally seemed to be accepting this new reality that had been thrust upon him earlier than anticipated. He nearly fainted again when I told him that he, too, would develop a super power. And he got downright giddy when I told him it was super speed.
We worked out the terms of our pact of silence: Patrick would keep his mouth shut about knowing any of this, or I would kill him. In exchange, I had to promise to answer questions and give him more information any time we had the opportunity to be alone. Oh, and I had to let him sit and watch the rest of the evening’s SuperSim planning session.
He didn’t realize it yet, but he had all the power in this situation. He could squeal on me to Dad, telling him everything he knew, and Patrick himself wouldn’t face any discipline. I, however, would either be grounded for a century or sold at auction to the highest bidder.
And yet, strangely, despite all that, I didn’t really care that he knew. I was so tired of keeping the secret that it felt good to let it out and finally be myself around my brother. In a way, I welcomed it.
When we returned to the living room, Bentley and James were back, and they’d brought some more of Bentley’s equipment with them. A lot of it, actually, including some tools. Bentley was holding some kind of plastic contraption in his hand, and I couldn’t quite make it out. It was black and shiny, and he seemed to be holding it with a lot of pressure—as though he’d just glued it back together and was waiting for it to set. Which is exactly what had taken place.
“Here, Phillip,” he said, not skipping a beat from his earlier epiphany. “Put these on.” He held out his hand with the palm up, revealing a pair of bulky black sunglasses.
I used my telekinetic abilities and pulled the glasses into my hand.
“I’m never going to get tired of seeing you do that,” Bentley said, shaking his head in wonder.
“You aren’t kidding,” Patrick said from his position on the couch.
I looked the object over. There was a small black cylinder, about the size of a tube of lipstick, crudely attached to the arm of the sunglasses that hook over the wearer’s right ear. I was looking at the glasses from Henry’s perspective, of course, which made it tough to see the exact tight angles I wanted.
“Put ‘em on,” Bentley urged.
I decided to go with the flow and opened the glasses, placing them on my face. It was the first time I’d ever worn any kind of glasses except for dark sunglasses, and I hated those things so much I barely wore them. They felt weird on my face, and Bentley’s glasses did as well.
“Okay, Henry, you come sit over here.” Bentley was getting excited again. “Okay, now. Phillip, reach up with your right hand, and flip the little switch on the outside of the glasses.”
I felt along the lipstick tube until I came to a switch. When I flipped it, it made a little clicking noise.
“Henry, stop sending Phillip what your eyes are seeing.” Henry did so, and my “vision” disappeared. Bentley continued, “Now look here.” A pause. “And now send Phillip your vision again.”
And suddenly, I was looking at the most accurate “first-person” perspective I’d ever seen from Henry’s images.
It was obvious right away what Bentley had done. The lipstick tube was a camera which was sending its images to the laptop, which is what Henry was looking at. Instead of seeing Henry’s perspective of my surroundings, which, frankly, sometimes made it difficult to gauge depth and distance, I was looking at what the camera on my glasses was recording. And that was almost exactly in line with the perspective my eyes would give me had they functioned like everyone else’s.
The inventor explained his creation. “The camera on the glasses records your first-person view and sends it to the computer, which is light and portable, so Henry can take it with him—actually, remind me to mount that thing to your wheelchair arm before tomorrow’s event … we’ll put it on a nice sturdy swivel arm. So now, Phillip, you can see what … you know … you should be able to see, if you could see. Got it?”
“Do I ever,” I marveled. “Bentley, this is incredible! You’re a freaking Einstein,” I gushed.
“You’re the one who figured it out with your little trip to the bathroom. All I had to do was put it all together.”
“How far will the signal reach?” I asked hopefully.
Bentley grinned. “One hundred yards on that camera, and I can probably get a camera off the Internet that’ll reach even farther. This is just a prototype, obviously. We don’t have time to make a proper version before the Sim, but we can definitely improve on this moving forward. For now, though, it should allow you to see a more accurate version of what a sighted person would see in terms of perspective, which should, in turn, give you greater control with your powers. And it also frees you up from having to have Henry and his wheelchair at your side in order to see.
“How far will Henry’s ability reach, though?” I wondered aloud. The camera could send its feed one hundred yards away from the laptop, but we’d yet to test the distance limits on Henry’s little vision-sharing trick.
Bentley smiled again. “I think maybe now is a good time to find out. Who’s up for a field test?”
Patrick’s hand was the first one up.
Chapter 21: The Book
Bentley played right into Finch’s hands. He was simply too eager to soak up any new knowledge that he could. And he had a particular weakness for learning about historical custodian-related information. He’d gone headfirst on his dive into researching Finch’s creepy prophecy book, and he finally had some theories to share.
We gathered at Jack’s, taking up residence in the back corner booth between the row of arcade games and the hallway to the restroom. Books were strewn about of every color, size, and age you can imagine.
“All of this is starting to add up, is all I’m saying.” Bentley was wrapping up his summary of his research so far, much of which had been unimportant, but Bentley was thorough, if nothing else. “I think this guy not only truly believes in the prophecy,” he said as he paused and then swallowed, “but after looking over all this material, I’m actually starting to think he may be right.”
“What?” Henry said through a mouthful of calzone. Bentley was, in fact, the only one not currently stuffing his face. “Mr. Science-Loving Guy is buying into mystic prophecies now?” It was a valid question, and one I would have asked myself if Henry had given me a chance, though I would have been more polite about it, of course. And waited until I stopped chewing.
“It’s not mysticism, though, that’s the thing. The further you dive into this prophecy and especially McKenzie’s theory of mathematical recurrences in DNA cycles … it’s science. It’s math. It’s a formula.”
“Awesome. And I’m so good at math,” I said sarcastically.
“That’s the thing, Phillip: he’s already done all the math for us.” Not even a chuckle out of Bentley, that’s how focused he was. When he was on a roll, he was difficult to distract. “Actually, several folks have. Grankage, an early seventh century philosopher, was the
first one to speculate that Malia’s prophecy wasn’t religious in nature but scientific. Then, a few centuries later, came Cray and his gang, and they’re the ones that actually started laying down the track, doing basic calculations on when the conditions of the planet and human evolution might again allow for an all-empowered individual.”
Henry looked at me, giving me a glance at my own confused face. “Are you getting any of this?”
“Me, no,” I said immediately. “I’m waiting for the CliffsNotes version.”
“Me neither,” Chad chimed in before slurping at his soft drink. “Get to the point, Smart Phone.” Smart Phone was a nickname Chad had assigned to the uber-bright Bentley, one that he generally detested.
Bentley sighed. For a moment, I felt sorry for him. It truly must be difficult to be able to reach and understand conclusions long before your peers. “It’s this year, okay? Every person who’s ever run the numbers in an attempt to decipher the prophecy’s end-date has come up with the same year … this one. I don’t think Malia was making a prophecy. I think he was offering up a mathematical proof that, sooner or later, the odds demanded another all-powered being show up.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t mean Finch is right, right?” It was James, but it could have been any of us because we were all thinking it. “So the math suggests the return of Elben will be this year, but that’s only if you believe in the prophecy, right?”
“Well, sure,” Bentley agreed. “But it doesn’t really matter whether or not we believe. It only matters that Finch believes and that, for some reason, he seems intent on including us in the event.”
“Okay, this is all a little too much for me. I’m taking a pinball break.” Henry threw up his hands briefly and then scampered down the arcade line to his favorite machine. I was at once mad at him for bailing and jealous that he’d get to skip the next few minutes of science lessons.