by Mark Gardner
“Are those…snowflakes, floating in the air?” Cassandra whispered.
Sam peeked further out of their hidey-hole. They were the only non-law enforcement people in the area. Her stomach churned. She spotted forms on the ground, splayed out. A sheet was brought out, then another, and another, and another, and another… Like ghosts the sheets danced in the freezing air and fell down misshapen to cover a multitude of bodies.
“I can’t see anything from here.” Sam swallowed the rising bile. She slunk to the opposite side from where they were hidden and knelt behind a bench. Lucas and Cassandra followed her lead.
A man sat on the ground in the middle of the circle of bodies. He was dressed in a white crumpled shirt, a blue tie and a sport jacket. His hands were cuffed behind his back, his legs chained. He was kneeling as if awaiting his own execution; it was him emitting the incoherent, inhuman cries, his shoulders rising and falling. Before Sam could see his face or anything more about him he was dragged away by two heavily armed men—a tactical response team.
“Do you think he killed them? With his power?” Lucas asked, a shudder in his hushed voice. His eyes darted from the scene and back to Sam. She knew him long enough to realize that he was on the edge. She was pushing her luck here. It wasn’t just her own welfare, she was endangering her friends.
“I don’t know. Maybe…” Sam caught sight of ambulances backing in, doors opening, paramedics rushing out. She didn’t want to see the bodies being loaded in and driven away.
What Alex said was coming true before her eyes. Mass hysteria, a wrong representation. Soon the television crews would be here, and then the FBI, and then the president and the mayor will make an appearance to address the horrible tragedy. What would people think if they saw her ability right now? Would they scream and run away? Would the police tell her to put her arms behind her back or just simply shoot? Sam didn’t want to consider the possible answers to these questions. She wanted to think the best of people—but the threat of being proven wrong seemed to show up all around her lately. Made her warier, a little afraid. It saddened her.
Her phone buzzed again. Sam fumbled to silence the stupid ringtone, all the while keeping an eye on any approaching figures. It was a new message from Alex.
“It’s beginning, Sam. No one is safe anymore. Come to the train station in an hour. We CAN change this. Tell no one. -Djin.”
She turned her phone off with trembling hands and returned it to her pocket. Would her parents understand her absence?
Would they be relieved? she wondered.
Lucas and Cassandra would be freaking out, but they were solid and wouldn’t ask questions. This thing alive and strong residing in her soul and body, was slowly becoming a stamp, a mark that put her on the danger list. How would she explain to people that all she could do was lift pens off of desks? Sure, she wanted to be able to do more, but she wanted to use her powers for a higher purpose. Alex said that that was possible; everyone else would say it was “alarming.” The freak notion was returning heavier than before. At least she wasn’t alone. At least there was Alex and the members of the Discord group.
Sam promised herself that she would be strong. If she was going to be pushed to live in secrecy, she would rebel. If she was outed as having an ability she would embrace it and make sure no one got hurt like this anymore. She would be a hero.
The Archive
The crowd’s roaring applause put a spring in Globe’s step as he was ushered inside his tower by the security. His body still vibrated with the energy their echoes transferred onto him, numerous faces grimaced by the same outrageous want for justice and peace after what he showed them. Violence was greeted as expected. He had wanted a shared mind for a better future and he’d gotten it out of them, the social justice warriors. The idea of thousands of people promoting his name and raising banners with his name on them made him feel powerful, the adrenaline heightening his heartbeat. It was now stored in his joints, synced into his mind. And he wanted more. Achieving it meant he had to continue using the abilities of supers drawn to his cause one way or another—some willingly like Silas…others like Anne. Globe had another way of addressing her rebellious person.
Security hovered beside him like weights on his shoulders. Globe frowned. They were the council’s extra measures for a candidate as strong as him in the running, but they were outside eyes. He loosened his tie, slipping into a casual mood.
“You can go, boys. This building has more security protocols than the White House.” A light chuckle, a wink. It loosened them too but not enough to step away. “Hardly anyone is going to burst in and assassinate me…not this early in the campaign! Thank you for your service today, gentleman. Bless our city.”
The guards fell back and quickly found their way out the front door. Globe thought about hiring them too. Official hired gun on the payroll had proven efficient thus far.
Globe patrolled the pristine white corridors of his building with a cocky posture until he stood in front of a door unassuming even with a placard declaring it the “Server Room.” His unique keycard opened it to a deep and vast dark broken by a faint illumination in a corner. Globe submerged himself into the dark, taking in the warm, stale air.
“Subject 337, open access to The Archive.”
He waited for the emotionless voice to confirm his instruction. It came through faint and distant.
“Yes, Doctor Globe. Access to Room 001, The Archive now granted.”
A light click to his left was followed by the sliding whirl of a panel being open. Newborn light burst into the dark room and Globe caught glimpse of the sitting figure before a single working screen. It remained nonverbal and motionless.
“Begin preparation for simulation one version one point five, Subject 337. You don’t mind me calling you Subject 337, do you? Of course you don’t. Connect to the Room. I will want you on speaker there.”
“Yes, Doctor Globe.”
Globe stepped through the threshold and into the brightness of a large white room with a fifteen-foot-tall ceiling. The panel slid shut behind him, sealing them from noise into the new environment. On a table by the wall three sensors the size of a dollar coin were left in grey foam casings beside two pairs of optic lenses in plastic protection cases. Globe took the sensors and tapped a flat circle at the center of each one. They beamed with a faint blue light, indicating they were on. Globe placed them on his temples and on the back of his head. Then he took care to guide the fragile lenses into each of his eyes. Their activation was confirmed by the 3D data filling his vision.
Subject 337’s voice streamed through built in speakers in the ceiling. “Augmented reality session initiating. Please relocate to the center of the room.”
Globe took his place on the grey circle pulsating with the same faint blue. He blinked, adjusting to the lenses. His world, while still pristine and white, was beginning to fill in with objects as small and unimportant as rocks and trees and clouds. He spotted some motionless birds “awaken,” beginning a series of semi-circles in a blue, autumn sky replacing the white ceiling. Then the rendering took on a bigger scale, introducing mountains and huts into his environment. The trees filled the far distance and Globe was amused to see the zoom allowed him to single out falling leaves and scurrying critters. Olfactory kicked in: Fire and ash, burned skin and blood, rabbit meat: it was a mixture of accurate scents belonging to the day.
Other sensory modalities soon followed. He could understand the wind against his face, feel it, the gentle touch of the sun on his skin. His sensory neurons responded to the change at the surface. His proprioception was alerted and he spun around finding a familiar palace shimmering in the illusory, augmented distance as more of the white room’s surface was repurposed by the simulation’s data being generated. The rendering of the ancient environment was nearly finished, and the fabled Jade Palace stood still intact from the Gene Wars. It was time for the participants to be drawn from memory. Blood memory.
“Awaiting your command, D
octor Globe.”
“Insert blood sample two, vial two point two.”
He always felt nauseas in this stage of the process and that was one of the reasons why he visited The Archive so rarely. It was when his somatic senses expanded and his haptic perception allowed him to also experience touch. The sensation was thrilling but it bordered on madness. Blood magic, Globe liked to call it even though it was digitalized. It brought memories of ancient times to life and gave them visual and auditory and haptic qualities, making them as real as the day they transpired. The representation was drawn from DNA, from the blood’s “memory” of its ancestors. Globe had gone through impossible lengths to secure Temujin’s speck of blood and had run it through countless tests until it was viable again after centuries. Blood manipulation wasn’t exactly legal science and there was no other precedent in the world. Only two samples out of a produced batch of twenty were strong enough, information-rich enough for the program to run. He’d already wasted the first one some years ago feeding it into an unfinished program ridden with bugs and glitches.
But even though the vial contained preserved blood cells, the artificial treatment blurred the originality. What Globe saw was distortion, gory and chaotic against the perfect reconstruction of the background. The vibrant “memory specters,” as he’d nicknamed the participants in the war, animated in almost perfect synchrony with the actual events. Some of the details he’d derived from the nether regions of Anne’s memory where she’d suppressed the events of the day she lost the gene war to a mongrel. She wasn’t aware that transference of data had occurred and Globe made sure she would never be. Her memory of the Jade Palace was the most intact. Jacob marveled at it as the legendary building was layered inside the simulation.
The light green of the stone raising the walls higher than a mountain shone, caressed by the rays of a dying sun. The shimmer made it impossible, floating. The steps, a hundred chiseled into the face of a jade boulder, were draped with a rich green and gold carpet depicting a history of battles, legends told in threads seemingly animated by the sun. Globe traced the only familiar figure—that of Anne bouncing from story to story told in a wordless epic. He admired the 3D reconstruction in its full exterior scale, gargantuan and decorated with gold ornaments: chimera heads, hydra wings, titans raising boulders, spears of deities ordered toward the skies with poisonous tips, words in languages spoken by none etched into pillars as thick as old oak trees.
Globe traced his steps back through the terrain, desperate to find Anne and observe her. The mixed reality’s haptic perception hit him then and there. The remaining aspect of the simulation had loaded in. A figure of smeared red bumped into him and Globe felt the simulated punch. It nearly knocked him off his feet and Globe spun around, wide-eyed. The figure of Temujin, the infamous Genghis Khan stood before him, a savage, a defect dressed in armor befitting a king.
The simulation paused.
“Are you alright, Doctor Globe? Should I disrupt the experiment?” Subject 337’s voice had no intonation attached to it, so the presumed concern came out flat.
“Keep it going, Subject 337!” Globe’s voice was shaky and he loathed that. The sensation of being touched by a person dead eight millennia ago, as if another person was there in the room with him, was a one of a kind experience. Globe had watched the events unfold as a silent observer—but now he was intruding. And the entertainment cost him a grain of sanity; he was momentarily afraid, as if his life was being threatened, and at the same time felt larger than life because he couldn’t be harmed. The simulation was nothing more than binaural whispering crawling at the back of his neck.
The simulation resumed and Globe circled Genghis Khan, tripping on the uneven terrain. How he wished he could pick a sword himself and drive it through Temujin’s throat. Better yet, how he wished he had a power to bring down onto this little man like a great hammer.
The Gene Wars had started because of him—but it was humanity’s fault that they couldn’t contain their purity throughout the generations. They let fate take charge. Globe knew he wouldn’t allow that to happen. He would be fate, he would decide. All these newborn supers circulating the web, the streets, they weren’t the legacy of humanity. Anne, Joaquin, Kristoff…so very few carried the true supers gene. And in generations even they would become faulty, lose their spark. Their abilities would die out with their children and grandchildren, leaving nothing but sideshow freaks with seconds of fame.
That was why Jacob Globe had stepped in, taken the drastic measures at the cabin in the Canadian woods, and at today’s speech. Why he would continue taking them to secure an almighty humanity once again.
Even if he had to scrape away all that remained and start anew.
Globe cocked his head in curious admiration of the ground-shaking powers erupting around him. His face became a frown the longer he watched. The powers the ancient supers wielded in the Gene Wars were…primitive. They were suited for fighting swords and arrows, not airborne chemicals and bombs, nor even the likes of Kristoff... Globe wanted to build supers as powerful as ten atomic bombs, as powerful as Kristoff and Peter combined.
A glimpse of that Canadian wilderness flashed in his mind, he tried to dispel the memory of what Bree did to those birds. With these supers, that would never happen again. So, he stared at Genghis Khan’s face and didn’t see him as a threat anymore. He saw an opportunity, an enemy easy to manipulate and destroy.
Threatened was not a feeling that Jacob Globe could haggle with. Threatened, afraid…weak human feelings. There is that word again: feelings. Jacob Globe dealt in solutions. Results. Feelings were a problem to solve, and threatened was the one he could solve with the greatest precision and logic.
Globe’s blood was rushing in his ears, adrenaline renewed with the excitement. Figures even more faceless than their leader rushed past him, brandishing spears and curved blades. Globe stepped away and ducked flying projectiles, the whoosh of their strength sending shivers down his spine. He missed the battlefield, missed the weight and decision of weapons in his hands, but he was still a man of war, a soldier—through his words and through the orders he gave others.
There was a feeling he didn’t push away quite as quickly. Steaming blood racing through my veins to my brain, my pounding heart, body burning with adrenaline as hundreds of soldiers fought for me, extensions of my will, of my absolute dominion. He remembered the surge of pure power forcing a scream to erupt from his lungs, dreadful enough to be heard clear across the battlefield.
No feeling was more powerful than that one—not the unexpected, fleeting joy with Bree, not the swell of pride in Anne, not even anger.
They need me. The world needed his control to thrive.
I was born to command.
Globe retreated to the other line of fighting rushing across the room, now completely transformed to the barren arena littered with steaming bodies.
There she was: Anne, walking tall and proud, a red-headed witch. She looked so much different back then. Braver, fiercer. Her figure of blood moved in snapshot-like sequence. One second she was beside him, the next she was leaping at her enemy. They fell like flies before her, withered. She coated herself in their blood, the memory specter of her becoming a deeper, darker red. She was crimson against them.
Globe couldn’t help but smile. Once upon a time, Anne was powerful enough to take on a whole army herself. Now she flinched at his raised voice. Hers was proof enough that anyone could be brought to their knees.
That he could bring anyone to their knees.
Globe sat down and watched the trails of powers lost to time bombard the space between the two armies. Although he saw only their outlines, he was mesmerized. He knew he could never truly re-create them and frankly he didn’t want to. He came to The Archive to study them, learn how humanity’s greatest warriors lost to a group of powerless defects who’d decided godlike power should belong to no one. He’d come to the conclusion that pride was their downfall. The supers never expected to be broug
ht to their knees in such a way. Anne certainly didn’t. She’d failed to see that their numbers growing assured her power. That those close to her were sufficient weapons against an ever-growing army of supers And in the end they weren’t.
A corpse fell beside him, staining the grass. Globe stared into the black swirling pits that were his eyes and witnessed the lighting surrounding its body flicker and die.
This was a barbaric solution to an ever-growing and present problem. Globe toyed with the environment, creating an earthquake just as the Anne memory specter was about to lose to Temujin’s crouching, bloody figure. The diagram broke the simulation field to jigsaw pieces, scattering evaporating figures into the nether sphere. Globe froze them midair, rekindling the burning fire in his chest. He could easily topple them down. Some PR, some wise words for the masses and some newborn supers to add to the mix.
“Subject 337, run PrototypeX.exe from the Test_006 folder into the simulation.”
“The simulation is currently at 12% and unstable, Doctor Globe. Introducing a foreign element might create an alert and abruptly end it.”
Globe focused his enhanced eyes on the speakers in the ceiling.
“Did I ask for a lecture on virtual integration? I don’t fucking believe so, Subject 337. Introduce the prototype into the mix, now.”
“Yes, Doctor Globe. Right away.”
The figure that walked through the floating chunks of land, unfazed by the destruction was vibrant, white polygon outlines that moved with the precision of an early 3d model.
“Engage”, Globe commanded.
The figure found the threshold between his level existence and the paused elements of the blood memory simulation. It bounced up, sprayed out corpses and blocks of earth to reach optimum height. Then it balanced there in its own gravity, expanding it ever so slightly until everything from the periphery of the room was drawn to it, melting into an amalgamation of limbs. The white-coated figure released its grip, reversing the gravity pull. The ball of memory specters was shot against the far wall, where it burst in a rain of blood and smoke. Globe motioned for the new champion to return to the bottom level of the simulation. He looked at its brute form, tall and boulder-like, and decided it looked better a little more feminine…