Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

  I trace the negative space Valene creates in the vinyl of the projection screen, trying to smooth out the creases, the curl in her posture, the knot inside me that can’t be undone.

  A shadow eclipses the image of Valene. “Val?”

  There’s no one there. I drift back through the exhibit, back to what had truly drew me from Valene’s bed. Fragments of hardened roseate crystal, veined with frozen lightning, form a recreation of the Ever inside a glass display case. I search for some pattern that might help in unlocking the power I need.

  “Beautiful, isn't it?”

  An astronaut steps out of the dark behind me. Or a futuristic knight; an ancient diver, their bulky, awkward suit filled with nothing but air. The oculus of the empty helmet returns my own uncertain reflection. A face flickers inside the transparent helmet like a candle flame, in and out of intensity, in and out of definition. The only indication of who I’m looking at is a lopsided grin, intact despite his condition.

  “Professor Blackwood… is that you?”

  Five

  I go blank as one of the mannequins peopling the exhibit. He’s a myth, Blackwood. A phantom. The father of the Age of Empowered. The father of the woman I love. Professor Blackwood occupies a space in history similar to Einstein and da Vinci. He’s more than a genius. More than a hero. More than human.

  “A fake,” he says, his voice raspy.

  “What?”

  He gestures at the sundered Ever. “No one call tell.”

  I tug on the zippers of my jacket. “Actually… these remains are cast from plastic. The mold is convincing, but the details…” I point to the frayed edge of a faux-crystalline shard. “There’s a crosshatch pattern within the native material. It’s virtually impossible to see unless you know what you’re looking for.”

  “Impressive…” He leans forward, so top heavy I think the cumbrous suit he’s in might topple over. Some kind of containment suit. Has to be. “You’re not wearing a badge.”

  My fingers flit over my PEAL. “It’s on here, now. Um. We haven’t met… I’m a technician. In Applied Sciences. I’m Kit.”

  “Oh,” he says, after a moment. “From the bank.”

  “Right…”

  “You get a gold star, Kit,” he says, turning his attention back to the Ever. “It is a copy. The original pieces are down in the vault. When I shut down the ship, the alien turned to glass. Crumbled right before my eyes. This was all that was left. Damndest thing. Somehow, the alien and ship are connected. Somehow, they’re one and the same. The answer is here, in the pieces. But I haven’t been able to put them together.”

  A piece of this puzzle hums in the dark of the garage basement, ba-dumm, a melody I haven’t been able to decipher. No one has been more invested than Blackwood in trying to unlock the secrets of the alien. The uncertainty over how to clean up the wreck without triggering a meltdown left engineers around the world stymied. No one wanted the other shoe to drop, so the wall went up and I can imagine his frustration, forced to stand by for the last five decades on the precipice of man’s greatest advancement as the fears of lesser men held him back.

  “Professor…”

  The hydraulic joints of his containment suit groan as he circles the display case. “You know, nothing I’ve attempted to recreate in the lab comes close to this petrification of energy into crystal… and yet it grants us a glimpse into the true nature of the alien. This pattern, it can’t be natural and yet it must be, in some sense. It’s DNA. It’s code.”

  “Code?”

  “The Ever is a machine, as much as it is an organism. The core of the ship isn’t so much an engine, but a larger Myriad. A repository of energy the alien collected.”

  “The alien was feeding back energy to the ship?”

  “Yes, exactly. You and I might think of the ship as a computer, which is connected to a cloud network shared amongst the Ever as they go about their work.”

  I bite my lip. “There are others?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “How many? How do you know?”

  His expression drifts within his helmet. “Hard to say.”

  “And why did you call them the Ever?”

  “They call themselves that.”

  My jaw hangs. “You spoke to them?”

  “In a manner of speaking. If I hadn’t shut down their main computer, there would have been no stopping the Ever from acquiring the entire world. And to think we were going to set off a nuclear bomb inside the wreck… well. At least Break Pointe’s problems would have been solved.”

  All the questions in my head run into each other on the same track. My tongue twists with their wreckage. “But then… how did you gain access to the computer?”

  “Left that part out in the film,” he says, with that still boyish grin. “Are you writing a book, Kit?”

  “Sorry, no. I’m just curious. Who were they? Where did they come from? Why did they come here? Why do they acquire people?”

  Blackwood’s head floats within the dome, indistinct from a vapor thin amaranthine curtain. “Simply for the energy, it would seem. Perhaps for their ship. Themselves. Unfortunately for us, we are living, breathing electrical plants.”

  “And what happens to them? The people? Do they get fed to the ship, too? Are they just gone, or… are they still inside?”

  He squints. “Inside?”

  Grainy images of people being absorbed into the alien flicker through my head. “The Myriad?”

  “Unlikely any aspect of a person survives. Once acquired, the inherent electrical energy of any being is most likely consumed… you ask the same questions I have.” He gazes on the Ever. “We won, fifty years ago. We also lost. I salvaged what I could from the wreckage, and my advancements are certainly historic, of that there can be no doubt… but there’s so much more we should have had. Answers to questions we can’t begin to conceive are trapped behind that wall. If only I had access to the ship… a Myriad…”

  I haven’t been able to solve the power issue. Three months I’ve been working on it. Blackwood has been studying the alien for fifty years. If anyone can help me, help Val, he can.

  “Professor Blackwood, there’s something I need to…”

  He pinches the leather of my jacket sleeve. “You’re cold?”

  I kind of hug myself. “I just feel naked without it.”

  His smile is somber. “When I was a boy, the idea of being invisible was appealing. But it’s not the movies. It’s not a switch, you turn on and off. It’s like being erased, slowly. Without the suit, I would vanish from existence.”

  Most people think of the Blackwoods as inordinately wealthy and privileged, and that’s true; but it’s also true that they suffer for their power, beyond human limits.

  “Professor Blackwood… I care about Valene. A great deal. I’ve been working on something. I may have a way to help her.”

  “Some people can’t be helped.” Blackwood pulls at the gloves of his containment suit. “Way it goes. But some people don’t know how to help themselves. Valene, for instance.”

  The leather of my jacket crumples between my fingers. “I don’t know how you mean.”

  “Of course, you wouldn’t. You work. You’ve worked very hard for everything in your life, haven’t you? I can see it in the calluses on your hands. You’re smart. Dedicated. Focused. Imagine waking up every day and not having to work. Everything has been handed to you. Power. Money. Fame. Kings win the crown. Princes inherit it. She’s always confused herself for a prince. No ambition. No value for work. No sense of appreciation.”

  The fuck is this? “Professor… she’s not well.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “For someone who is always telling me how she just wants to get away from it all… she always manages to find herself in the center of attention. San Francisco, for example. It’s always something dramatic, with her. Something loud.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hea
ring. “She’s not faking, Professor. Valene can’t even leave her bed most days.”

  “And you have a solution?”

  “Yes – “

  “But do you know what the problem is?”

  He limps from the display case, and I follow, caught up in the wake of this indifference, as he comes to an engineering model of a restored downtown. According to the placard fixed on the broad table the model rests on, Blackwood first presented his plan for the rehabilitation of the city in 1978.

  “The real problem, with the world today? It’s all been handed to you. The future. Comfort. Power, beyond conception. There aren’t any frontiers left. No horizons. No impulse to strive to better yourself. Only a sense of entitlement to all that has been unlocked by those who came before us.”

  “Professor, about Valene…”

  “The alien opened a door we seem determined to seal shut,” Blackwood says. “And yet some of us still yearn. Don’t we? We seek. We boil in our angst and frustration. There’s nowhere for it to go. We can’t just pick up and leave.”

  Curtains flutter in the living room. Birds drum against the windows and I turn away from the model, back into the suppression of the exhibit, compressing history down to a few clips, a few photos, some uniforms and placards of facts.

  “The horizon has become a wall.” Blackwood turns from looking out the window, across the river at The Derelicts, dark and divided, to the exhibition hall. “The map a rat maze. Our history confines us. Our continuity strangles us.”

  “We can make a new world,” I say. “A better world.”

  The cardboard lines of the architectural model bend and warp across the glass of his helmet. “Yes, we can. After 1968, the world thought I could do anything. And I could, except for the one thing that mattered. They held me back. They held this city back, and now they blame me for its failure. I don’t believe in failure. I believe in lessons. The lesson of shutting down the ship without any understanding of the consequences was that the rewards far outweighed the risks. We paid a dear price that day. The cost was necessary. Nothing great comes free.”

  I don’t make connections easy, but I’m pretty sure he just said all the people that died and suffered in ’68 were worth it.

  “Professor… are we going to do anything about the strike?”

  A hint of a smile forms at the corner of his mouth. “We?”

  “The company, I mean.”

  He shrugs. “Nothing we can do. The city is delinquent in its dues, and we’re operating here at significant risk.”

  “Will GP leave?”

  “Did she mention that?”

  “No, I just… I’m trying to understand.”

  He nods. “Break Pointe isn’t safe. The city can’t do anything about that. Washington, they don’t have the time or the money, evidently. The ship is a very expensive, complicated problem. I could be persuaded to forgive the city’s debt, if the powers that be allowed us to take over administration of the wreck, and make the city safe once and for all.”

  The model reflects in the window, superimposed against the crooked silhouette of the actual city. With the wreck secure or gone, Break Pointe would be new. Healthy. Prosperous. There would be schools. Parks. Homes. There would be life again.

  “I think people would support that,” I say. “I know my parents would have. They wanted a better city for me. I’d love to see a better city for all the people that live here.”

  With the Myriad, I can save Val. Blackwood can help me. We can learn how to harness and control the power of the alien together. Taking down the wreck won’t be impossible.

  Everything will be right.

  His expression wavers inside the helmet. “A new Break Pointe would be a laboratory, like Applied Sciences, or this tower, even. Everything here is an experiment in the science of living in the future. Nothing is proven without testing, and nothing is given. Everything is earned, starting with your place. You understand, don’t you? You earned this, didn’t you?”

  Some things take forever to click with me. Other things burn so fast my tongue threatens to rocket out of my mouth. I struggle to find the right words, afraid of saying the wrong thing and finding myself out of the tower.

  “I think the people of Break Pointe have earned something, for all their suffering in the last fifty years.”

  His eyes harden. “Suffering isn’t any achievement. Or any get out of jail free card. If you expect something, you don’t respect it. I might be inclined to work with the city, if they had more respect for us. This will be a lesson to other cities. Respect us, or lose their power.”

  Right then, I know I’m never going to hand the Myriad over, not for all Blackwood’s knowledge or money or help. Unimaginable power slumbers within device, power I can harness to save Valene, and provide GP and Break Pointe a more considerate future. Her father will only use it to further his own aims.

  “I learned a very painful lesson the day my mother died,” I say. “I learned you can’t save everybody.”

  “Seems we understand each other.”

  “But you have to try. You never give up on people.” I turn away. “Good evening, Professor. It was good to meet you.”

  His voice is as amorphous as he is, slithering and vaporous. “I’ve enjoyed speaking with you, Kit. It’s so hard to relate to others. People never see me. But I always see them.”

  He lumbers away into the dark. I linger at the model of the unrealized city, paralyzed in disbelief, swamped in disappointment. Even before Valene, Blackwood was a hero to me. Our lives mirrored each other. Poor kids, smart kids, out of sorts of kids and we had both risen high above our ruin. For decades, Blackwood has lived in his tower, transparent as he is, and looked down on the world. Everything is small to him.

  I start back toward the elevator and the penthouse, but I’ve got work to do. I leave her, to save her. Out of heaven, across the river into Hell, trying to flint a fire.

  Every trek to the swap, I take a different route. This time, I turn east on Shelley, back toward downtown, in the opposite direction. News vans line the street outside City Hall, waiting no doubt for some development with the strike. The building stands in the shadow of the wall, an act of hope that in the last fifty years has become a symbol of quixotic futility. Every effort to restore the city ends in the same bureaucratic quagmire: there’s no cleaning up the wreck. No one wants to invest in a disaster zone, let alone live there. Even so, people remain. Thousands of us, scattered like defiant stars in a dawn that never arrives. I chain my bike behind some tall weeds near the old Powers Clothing Factory. I pull up my hood and satisfied no one is on my tail, head into the train station.

  The letters of the original LAKE SHORE RAILROAD sign that spanned the roof of Crown Station litter the marble floor of the waiting area. I rearrange them in my head, like I always do. I put it all back right. The debris of the old clock tower. Skeleton of the train shed. Muddy light stabs through the rent steel lattice, down onto rusted trains stalled at platforms turned into the floor of a swap meet peculiar to Break Pointe. Fresh apples and oranges make pyramids next to sacks of grapes. Hunger I’ve found isn’t something you can switch off; it’s got an override. Old cell phones checker fold out tables alongside movies and books and pills, basic things hard to come by in the city. Most people don’t come to Crown Station for the basic.

  Most sellers offer debris from the ship, or at least that’s how they label it. A lot of this is just metal twisted beyond recognition. Red colored glass out of railroad lights. Steel melted to strange, flimsy scabs from cosmic heat. Real ship debris you can’t fake. Just has this feel to it; glassy metal.

  Book shuffles around the stalls, thumbing through the ever-growing stack of magazines and newspapers he carries with him everywhere he goes. He only stops to show me a dense page of old movie ads. ROBOCOP – HELD OVER BY POPULAR DEMAND!

  “See?”

  So long I’ve known him, he’s never said anything else. Parts of me never got switched on. Book is like a l
ot of people here in the ruins, stunted, and sometimes I wonder if that’s me, too. But I don’t think of Book that way. He’s just Book.

  “I see,” I say. “Where’s your coat, Book?”

  He never wears one, even in the winters when the city turns into a meat locker. Not long now. Winter always comes early and stays too long here, like unwanted relatives. Some sellers at the swap have coats, still on hangers or in plastic bags, scooped off department store racks in proper cities. Gangs like the Straw Men unload these to kids in the ruins, to sell here or on the corners. Money isn’t always their object. Some of these boys I pass on my bike out there on the streets, selling other sweets to make a living the only way they can, they’re men now.

  Book drifts from me, not quite leaving, not quite staying and I understand. I understand better than anybody else in the broken streets and homes of Break Pointe. Book shuffles from table to table, bouncing almost, off invisible barriers.

  “Kitty Cat,” Gennady says. “I think you leaving us behind.”

  The old man works out of one of the better-preserved B&O cars on the tracks. Most dealers are ready to bolt at any moment. Never Gennady. He told me once that after the Doomsday Clock Alarm, he had run enough. He sits on the edge of his chair, hand on his cane like he’s ready to stand. He never does.

  “I’m not officially here,” I say.

  “None of us are. What you bring me today?” His eyes burst as I unlatch my hip bag. “Where are you getting this?”

  I cradle a crystalline fragment I found in the wreck. “First rule of the market, Gennady. No questions.”