by Mia Archer
He sure as shit didn't know everything if he was still wondering whether or not I was the real deal or one of the many fakes that seemed to be popping up around Starlight City these days.
"So if this has all happened before, how is this going to go?" I asked.
The general shrugged. Those two stars on his shoulders rose and fell. Which was a disappointment. If I was going to be interacting with someone who was higher up the totem pole than the army asshole who'd acted so disappointed at the thought of losing equipment but not men then I wanted to be dealing with someone who was closer to the top. Not a lowly two star.
"I guess it depends on what version of you we're getting," he said. “Some of them come in guns blazing and destroying everything around them. Others obviously have minds aren't even fully formed. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with not having enough time in Dr. Lana’s cloning tubes. Regrettable, that. She always was sloppy with that sort of thing. Then again, if we'd known she was using those to clone you, well…"
I decided I was going to ignore the fact that he knew about the cloning. Not to mention the fact that his only regret was that he didn’t know Dr. Lana was cloning me, which presumably meant they would’ve found some military application for my clones rather than putting a stop to it.
I still thought I might have a chance of getting some information out of this asshole, so I was going to grind my teeth and play nice until I figured out what was what here.
He trailed off. I'm sure he was trying to sound like they would’ve cut the program short, but knowing what I did about the military, most of that knowledge coming via Natalie who knew quite a bit more about how they operated than I did from her time fighting them, I got the feeling he was disappointed Dr. Lana hadn’t shared that information with them before whatever had happened to her had happened to her.
"And the other clones?” I said, genuinely curious about how the different versions of me reacted to running into the military.
"It's really quite fascinating," he said. "Some of them want to help us. I’ll admit you’re the first one to come along who destroyed some of my equipment and then talked about how you wanted to negotiate. It's an interesting tactic, I'll give you that, even if I don't appreciate losing all that equipment."
“So sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said, giving the air another vague dismissive wave. “Might as well get some use out of all that shit the contractors are constantly building for us.”
I noted that he didn’t say anything about getting something out of the poor bastards who were presumably inside the machinery that was constantly being churned out by the military industrial complex. That pissed me off. It was odd to find that one little part of me that wasn’t quite as villainous as the rest of me had become, but it was a small spark of the old me that was still there.
If someone deserved what they were getting then all bets were off, but if they were an innocent, even where “innocent” was stretched to include some bastard driving military hardware into a situation he had no control over or desire to be in, then they were still off limits.
That was a relief.
"So what are you going to try to do with me?” I asked.
He shrugged. "I'm going to do the same thing I did with all the others, but I'm not going to bother to draw it out with some song and dance where I pretend to interrogate you or lull you into a false sense of security. Consider it a courtesy because you asked to negotiate.”
It occurred to me a moment too late that standing here talking with this asshole might not be the best idea, all things considered. The edges of the tent on the three sides other than the one I walked in on dropped at the same moment, revealing a bunch of troops holding weapons that looked for all the world like the old Super Scope guns from the Super Nintendo back in the day.
Those were a little before my time, but I had older cousins who still had the stuff gathering dust in their rooms, and I’d always been fascinated by it at family gatherings and bothered those cousins until they hooked up their old games to an ancient CRT television gathering dust in their attic.
"What the hell are you…"
Pink light hit me from all sides. I cried out in pain. The thing Natalie had been using on me had been enough to give me a little tingly feeling, but this was different. This actually fucking hurt. I guess there was something to be said for using a lot of the things on me at once. Fuck!
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“I’m doing what has to be done to protect this nation and this world,” the general said. “And if that means taking out all you clones who are threatening our security then so be it.”
I threw my head back and laughed. The sort of villainous laugh Natalie had let loose back in the day when she was still totally villainous and not walking the line because she was dating me and didn’t want to make me mad. It felt good to laugh like that, for all that I was still getting hit with that pain on all sides.
“I fail to see what’s so funny,” the general said, his mouth turning down in a frown.
I took a step forward. From the way his eyes widened I was the first of the Fialuxes he’d dealt with who’d done that. Well if he thought the original was going to go that easily then he had another thing coming.
Assuming I was the original, but I tried not to think about that too much. I had to be the original. The fact that there were a bunch of copies of me running around didn’t change that fact. I was me, damn it, and there was no changing that.
“You asshole,” I said, taking another step forward.
I stumbled to the ground. When I hit I actually felt a little twinge of something that was almost like the pain I’d felt when I’d been robbed of my powers. I figured it wasn’t a good thing that I was feeling pain again. Not when that meant there was a good chance I was losing those powers all over again.
I was going to get these sons of bitches.
“Name calling is hardly going to do anything productive, Fialux,” the general said, shaking his head and taking a step back that put his desk between me and him. If he thought an oversized desk that’d probably been a pain in the ass for some grunts to move into place was going to save him then he had another thing coming.
That tingle was growing more intense. I thought back to Natalie teleporting and me doing something that kept it from working on me. The tingle was similar to that, and a small flame of hope rose in me.
If this was the same as teleporting then maybe I could do whatever I’d done to keep her from teleporting me.
“You’re a coward,” I said, trying to shuffle forward and not really getting anywhere. It was a good distraction, at least. “You can’t take on those aliens, so you’re sitting here around the city edge picking off innocent clones who only want to help you. Well I want you to know you’re going to be the first one I come for when I get out of here.”
I thought about that for a moment. Thought about that asshole who led me here. The on who’d been more concerned about the price tag on the equipment I was taking out than he was about the lives of the men running around in that equipment.
“Actually you’re going to be second on that list,” I said. “But the point is I’m coming for you.”
“Up the power boys,” the general said, his knuckles white where they gripped at the chair sitting behind his desk. Oh yeah. He wasn’t as confident as he liked to play at being.
I pushed back. Something in me seemed to fight that ray, but they’d been trained on me for too long. I was exhausted, and whatever I might be able to do to fight these things wasn’t enough at this point.
I glared at the general as the world started to go black around me. I wanted to memorize every feature of his face so thoughts of punching through it could keep me nice and warm through whatever was coming.
I had a feeling it was going to be a hell of a lot less pleasant than the last time I’d lost my powers. I’d had Natalie right there to protect me and keep me sa
fe, but I didn’t have that luxury anymore.
13
Questions
The world came to me in flashes. A flash of those men moving in and loading me onto something. Of being pulled into the light outside the tent and seeing that smarmy asshole still standing there looking supremely satisfied that they’d managed to capture me.
I’d walked right into it. Overwhelming shame hit me, then the world went dark. I came to and there was light all around me. A blue sky above. I looked to the side and saw Starlight City in the distance, and what looked like a bunch of army toys all around the city.
That was weird. Where did those come from? Was I flying? Flying was something I did, wasn’t it? I couldn’t remember. Everything was a confused jumble.
It was like there was a block of memory in there somewhere that was trying to get knocked loose, but it wasn’t happening.
Someone appeared over my head. Their face was covered by a mask and glasses, and their eyes were wide behind those glasses. They shouted something I couldn’t quite make out despite the fact that they were shouting right over me, and a strange pink light bathed me. A tingling ran over my body. I tried to push back on it and the blackness threatening around the edge of my vision was pushed back for a moment, but only for a moment before the tingling grew more intense and everything went dark again.
When I came to again I remembered more, though those memories had me wishing I was back to staring at the blue sky and hearing that strange thumping noise in the background and thinking about how nice it was to be going for a flight.
My current surroundings weren’t anything to write home about. We’re talking the kind of dank place I figured only ever existed in HBO series about life in prison, only here I was in a very real version.
Someone was wheeling me down a hallway in a cart that was, honest to goodness, exactly like the kind of thing they used to transport Anthony Hopkins in that creepy movie about the lambs, or whatever the fuck it was. I’d only seen clips, and not the actual movie since that kind of stuff creeped me the fuck out.
At least I didn’t have a mask.
I looked from side to side. I could do that too. The rest of me seemed to be immobilized, that didn’t seem like a good thing considering there shouldn’t be much out there in the world that could immobilize me, but at least I could see where I was being wheeled.
Not that seeing where I was going was a pleasant experience. No, when I glanced around at the exposed piping and the dank concrete blocks that made up this place it made me wish I’d stayed unconscious.
“What are you doing to me? Where are we going?”
Someone appeared next to me. It wasn’t the person with the mask over their face. No, this was someone in a uniform that said they were decently high ranking, but I couldn’t tell the exact rank because I’d never spent enough time around military people to be able to tell that sort of thing.
Natalie would’ve been able to figure it out with a single glance. She was always good at that stuff, and I felt like an idiot now for never taking the time to learn it.
“You need to quiet down,” he said. “This will all go a lot easier if you just let it happen.”
“Like hell am I going to let it happen!” I shouted, the sound of my shout enough to rattle some of the pipes overhead. One of them must’ve popped something, because steam started coming out of it.
That seemed to bother the army dude walking next to me in his fancy pressed uniform. He glanced up at the exposed piping nervously, then back to me.
“Don’t do that again,” he said. “There’s no point in trying to fight. We’ve licensed technology from Lana Industries that allow us to control your powers, and we are not above using it to punish you if you can’t fall in line.”
“So you’re talking about torture, you fucking prick?” I spat at him. “You can’t do this shit to me! I’m an American citizen, and I have rights! I want to talk to a fucking lawyer! You can’t do shit to me if I say I want to talk to a lawyer!”
The annoyed look he gave me told me the whole thought of them not being able to do anything to me as long as I asked for a lawyer was so much wishful thinking.
“You can consider yourself to be outside the normal justice system now,” the army dude said.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“We do it all the time and no one cares about it,” he said. “That’s the thing about democracy. Someone has to care about what you’re doing and vote in people who care about it, and I think we both know that ain’t happening.”
I stared at him. I mean yeah, there was a part of me that figured there were some people somewhere in government service who thought that way, but having it so baldly thrown in my face was a surprise.
“You’re welcome to talk to a lawyer if you can figure out how to get one in here, which you can’t, and you can take it all the way to the Supreme Court when that happens, which it won’t because this place doesn’t work like that.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
The guy looked me up and down as though he was thinking about whether or not that might be something that was on the menu, but then he made a couple of whirling motions with his hand and I was pushed through a door that was bright pink for some reason, as though…
I woke up again and found myself in an even stranger room. It was sort of like the dentist. I always thought it was a little ridiculous that my parents ever sent me to the dentist considering I never had any cavities and it was a bunch of stress and…
My mind was wandering. Probably because it didn’t want to think about the fucked up situation.
Like that light hovering over me looking for all the world like a light at the dentist’s. That’s where the comparison had come from in the first place. Though there was one big difference between that light and the dentist. It glowed a dull pink instead of a blinding white.
Come to think of it, there was a dull pink glow coming off of just about everything. I looked around and saw more lights hovering overhead. Like all the fluorescent lights in the room had been replaced by a pink glow.
“Hello?” I called out.
“Ah, you’re awake!”
Someone appeared over me. The voice sounded feminine, but beyond that it was difficult to tell much of anything about the woman. She wore a surgical cap that covered her hair, and a surgical mask that kept her face hidden.
“Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing?” I growled.
Huh. I was feeling a little more punchy than usual. Then again I guess getting captured by… somebody. I couldn’t remember what was going on here, but the point is getting captured and finding myself in this strange place surrounded by that pink light that made me feel tingly all over wasn’t doing any favors for my mood.
“Such language,” the woman said. “I heard you had a bit of a potty mouth on you, but I guess I didn’t believe it. The rest of you have been so polite when you realize where you are!”
“The rest of me?” I asked. “What the hell are you…”
The light overhead got a little more powerful, and I found myself overcome with a strange feeling. Like I wanted to go to sleep. That’d been happening to me a lot lately, but I fought it. I wasn’t sure where I’d been while I was passed out, but I felt stronger. Maybe the stuff they were using in here wasn’t as powerful because they thought I was good and pacified.
My body tingled. I thought of what I’d done with Natalie’s teleporter and tried to do it again. That tired feeling went away. Just a bit, but it was enough that I knew I was getting somewhere.
“Look around dear,” she said. “You’re not going to be leaving, so you might as well get used to being surrounded by some of your closest friends.”
The woman giggled as though she’d just said the funniest fucking thing ever. I had no idea why the fuck she would think what she was saying was so funny. That bit about not leaving seemed downright ominous.
I turned my head from side to side, and when I got a good look
at my surroundings I found myself wishing I hadn’t.
There were more of me hanging around this place. I wasn’t sure what a bunch of mes were doing strapped down to a bunch of hospital beds, but I did know this was fucked up even by the standards of Starlight City.
“Who are you and what the fuck are you doing to us?” I asked. “I’m not going to put up with this!”
I tried to get free so I could show this woman exactly what I thought of this, but of course nothing happened. I was good and trapped. Only I kept pushing. Kept fighting, even if it was a battle this woman couldn’t see.
“Oh dear,” the woman said. “You really don’t want to fight the restraints. If you do then I’ll be forced to turn up the juice on your anti-Fialux field.”
“The what?” I asked.
“A little present we got from Lana Industries,” she said. “Do you like it? She said she’d field tested it against you, though to be honest we couldn’t be sure it would work until we had you around to test. I never would’ve imagined we would’ve had so many test subjects, but it turns out Dr. Lana was a little naughty with her experiments!”
She wagged a finger at me as though I was the one who’d been naughty by being the subject of one of Dr. Lana’s experiments. It made me want to rip that woman’s finger off!
“I know what you’re thinking,” the woman said. “You’re thinking about all the violence you want to visit on me. A surprising number of you seem to have a violent streak which was a surprise considering how the original would go out of her way to avoid damage before she was killed raiding the Applied Sciences Building at SCU and released all you clones.”
My head spun. The original was killed. I’d woken up at the Applied Sciences Building. Could it be I was a clone?
Only I was more powerful than any of them. No. I wouldn’t give in. I knew I was the original me, even with these weird holes in my head. I could almost…
I stood in a room staring at a bunch of tubes that looked like something out of the opening of Empire Strikes Back, only it was me floating in there and not Mark Hamill, and the glow was pink instead of blue. Rage built in me as I realized what Dr. Lana had done.