Blackjack Wayward (The Blackjack Series) (53 page)

“You sure, boss?” Moe asked.

Apogee moved away from me and I saw the hope on her face.

“I can do some of it on the way, maybe even stabilize him,” Superdynamic said, walking closer to me.

“I need you to hold on, Blackjack,” he said, raising his voice on my account, lowering it again to speak to the others. “We’ll need to reconfigure medlab with new equipment. And make some stuff from scratch,” he said, turning back to me, lowering himself so he was inches from me. “You hear me, Dale? I think can save you, but I’m going to need to you hang on for me. You hear me?”

I nodded.

“If I’m going to do this,” he continued, “I need you to fight. I need you to want it.”

I squeezed Apogee’s hand, “I want it.”

“Good man,” he said. “You fight like hell.”

I nodded again.

“I think this will work,” he told Apogee, then stood away, speaking as he made modifications to his suit, changing modules functions from shields or weapons to whatever was needed to save my life. “Database says we have the same blood type, so I’m going to give him a blood transfusion. Moe, Rico, you guys are O positive, too. With your permission, you’re next.”

“Anything, Dee,” Moe said.

“No probs, boss,” Ricochet said, but I couldn’t see him. “What about the injuries?”

“I’ve infused him with nanites, retasked to assist his healing function and lower his temperature to give us more time. Focus, I need you to contact Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University. He’s a friend.”

Focus was already moving away, “What do I ask him?”

“He’s just recently discovered a method to reconfigure normal skin cells into stem cells. With that, and William Shih of Harvard’s theory for using DNA-origami for cell structure replacement ... and a transdermic 3D printer that I need to design....” Superdynamic paused, studying me as if debating whether I was worth the trouble. “And a new MRI I’m going to invent that interpolates the original dimensions of damaged tissue....”

He looked over at Apogee, and I knew who he was doing it for.

“Yeah, we’re going to save him,” Superdynamic said, moving off to give Focus some instructions for her call to Dr. Yamanaka.

“You hear that?” Apogee said, hopeful, still sobbing. “We’re going to bring you back.”

I smiled.

She kissed my right hand, right where the webwork of scars lay, and rubbed it against her cheek.

“You gotta stay with me, okay?”

I closed my eyes, feeling the tears stream back across my cheeks. Of course I was going to stay with her. There was nowhere else I’d rather be.

Epilogue

Eventually, I did sleep.

Superdynamic induced a coma and off I went. When I woke, it was to the ringing of a phone, loud and blaring. I looked around, still having only the use of one eye, and realized I was in the Tower, probably in the same room where Ruby had checked me out a few hours before. The configuration was different, more spacious, but the walls were made of solid-light tech, designed for ultimate modularity.

Apogee slept on a real fold-out bed, a blanket half coming off. She was still wearing her damaged costume from the Washington fight. My body was in a solid-light cast. I was virtually immobilized, with only enough wiggle room to scratch and itch, or to shift a little to get more comfortable.

The ringing ended and I looked around for the phone. Apogee stirred, looking at me, still half asleep. She smiled and let her eyes flutter closed, falling back asleep.

Ruby walked in, dressed in lab coat instead of her usual getup, and moved over to me.

“You should try to get some sleep,” she said, monitoring an info screen beside my bed that gave a readout to all my vital signs.

“The phone rang,” I mumbled, struggling against a brace that held my mouth tightly shut. I could basically expel air and formulate the words with my lips and tongue as a form of communication.

She looked over at me, not understanding at first, but once she translated my mumble she looked more confused than anything.

“There’s no phone in here, Blackjack,” she said. “You might be imagining things. The painkillers we’re giving you are pretty strong.”

I smiled and tried to shrug, but moving my shoulders was impossible, and painful to even try. I tried to turn my head toward Apogee, but that too was immobilized.

“Just get some rest, hon.”

Ruby looked over at Apogee, following my stare. “She hasn’t left your side. Hell of a thing how Superdynamic saved you.”

“Thank you,” I said, but she shushed me.

“Just fall asleep, okay? You need rest.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, feeling her move away and leave the room as I began to settle back into sleep.

Then the phone rang again.

Apogee shifted, reaching for her blanket, but didn’t wake as the phone continued to ring.

“Blackjack,” whispered a voice near to me.

I tried turning my head again, but I couldn’t.

“No, don’t move,” the voice said. “I’ll come to you.”

The monitor shifted, groaning on its hinges as a weave of wiring knitted itself around it, inching it closer to my field of view. The screen shifted, as the signal changed to reveal an animated vision of Mr. Haha 2000 in full Rabbit-man form.

“Hi, there,” Mr. Haha said, his voice modulator returned so he sounded like a psychotic carnival barker again.

“Haha?”

“She’s a looker, my friend,” he said, referring to Apogee. “First Influx, then none other than the Lady Vexille, and finally, Apogee. You sure know how to pick them.”

“Where have you been?”

Haha’s 3D form crossed its arms, frustrated. “I’ve been out there, doing the hard work, while you’ve been moping.”

“I could have used your help,” I said, my voice dripping with bitterness.

Haha laughed

“What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve made all of this possible for you.”

“You left me out there,” I said, growing angrier by the second, wanting to let him have a piece of my mind, but my shattered body was muffling my intentions.

“Don’t get all wound up, Blackjack. It’s a miracle that they put you back together. I guess it’s nice to have friends in high places. Something I factored into the equation, you know.”

I looked over at Apogee, who was too tired to wake with my ranting. Haha was making sure to speak in a low voice, and I couldn’t speak in more than hushed tones. Every breath felt filtered through a sieve of fractured ribs.

“Just go away,” I said. “I don’t need you anymore.”

“Well, that’s fine thanks for all I did.”

I looked at him, bewildered. What the hell did he want from me? It was over. He had missed the show.

“Thanks for making you a big star, of course,” he said, trying to fill in the blanks of my confusion. “For making you the best show out there. Hell, it wasn’t easy, either.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Haha,” I said.

“Well, you should know how much trouble I went through, Blackjack. I mean, you were holed up in a secret underwater facility, lost to the world, and I couldn’t let that happen. So I made sure that Doctor Zundergrub found the location. I knew you were too savvy to let him kill you right there. I know how resourceful you are, how good you are in those desperate situations, and lo and behold, you made it out. But then you went and decided to become all domestic with the evil villainess and it wasn’t any good for the show, you see. So I had to put a bounty on your head, a billion dollars, enough to motivate everyone to come after you. I also let half the world’s villain population know where you were. I had no idea there were going to be so many–”

“What show are you talking about?”

“What show?” he repeated, bewildered. “You, Blackjack. You’re the show. But let me finish. Hmm ... where was I? Oh, yes, of course. I was surprised how many responded to my bounty. It was pretty impressive to see how many people hate your guts. But again, as in the prison, I had a feeling you might make it. And you did, didn’t you? I had to keep you motivated in Superdynamic’s base, just my way of making things exciting, you see, a glitch here, a fight there. And by the way, let me just say that hacking into that man’s base is harder than it looks, and controlling his training room, eliminating all the security protocols? The timing I can’t take credit for, you know. To have a woman in the combat room at the same time, for you to be the hero? That was just plain luck.”

I thought of Focus, almost torn apart by the battle droids.

“That was you?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course,” he said with a flourish and a bow. “It was worth it, though. Don’t you agree? It motivated you. For once. Because the final battle was so wonderful. One for the ages. And Zundergrub played his part, too. He might not have, you see, because it was all so ambitious. The poor man was brilliant, but so asocial. If not for me, how do you think he would have kept his little army together? Then I delivered Lord Mighty so you would have a worthy challenge. It was easy. Mighty felt guilty after Hashima. See, he followed Nostromo and saw him killed by the Lightbringer alien. He saw someone greater than him destroyed and felt fear for the first time. Can you believe Lord Mighty ran away? I, of course, monitored all of this with a small transmitter I snuck onto his costume, but after the nuclear device you used in Hashima he proved hard to find. So very hard. But then again, I’m everywhere, aren’t I? And just the right combination of subliminal images strategically placed in his normal television viewing got him thinking that the planet was safer without humanity, without any civilization to attract the Lightbringers. Once I had him worked into a frenzy, well, it was just a matter of making the introductions between Mighty and Zundergrub.”

“You’re insane,” I whispered.

Haha cocked his head and crossed his arms.

“Not even a little bit of thanks?” he said.

“What do you want, Haha?”

There was a long pause as he weighed variables and probabilities. Haha was ready for every conceivable outcome, and to find him speechless meant that maybe he didn’t know himself.

“I wanted to congratulate you,” he said finally. “Now you have what you wanted, right? You have reluctant acceptance, which will grow into something more with great effort. And I couldn’t have asked for a better narrative. Redeemed villain turned world’s greatest hero. And you have the girl, of course.

“Just leave us alone,” I said, wishing for the strength to reach out and shatter the monitor. “I don’t want to be a part of–”

“But how could I do that? How could we walk away from this after all the hard work we’ve put into it? Ask yourself that. You’re the best show on earth, but this is only the first act. First we build you up, we make you. You’re the big hero and everyone loves you, right?”

He paused, his voice changing, turning more ominous.

“Then we expose the real you for all to see, and after that, we break you.”

Haha let that sink in, and then leaned back, his effervescent attitude returning.

“So get your rest,” he said as he faded out. “This is just the beginning.”

Author’s Notes

Acknowledgements

This has to start with you guys, the ones that have followed Blackjack, written reviews, emailed and messaged me, commented on Facebook and other places…Thanks.

Wayward took me about half the time to write as did Villain, and it’s in large part because of the energy you guys gave me throughout the whole process. I got into Facebook and made the blog kind of late in the game, the story was set, but I had so many good ideas from you guys that I’m implementing some of them into Book three. The response to Blackjack has humbled me, and I will be forever in your debt for it.

There are others to thank, starting with my writing partner, Josh. I never expected our partnership to grow stronger than it already was. I mean, he was already indispensible to my writing process. But somehow he’s managed to become more. Few ideas find their way onto the text without filtration through him, and nothing gets through the editing process without his tacit approval. Of his intensive edit list, I said no to just a couple of things. The rest I just hit “Accept” in Word’s Review tab with track changes. He’s an unbelievably gentle sounding board to all of my ideas, and has such a kind way to handle me, to make me understand when something genuinely sucks. This book is more a product of his work than ever, and I’m proud to say that he’s honored me with the same role in his future book series,
Owen Caine: Longview
.

If you hate Twilight, you’ll love Owen Caine.

I also want to thank my loved ones, my wife and daughter. My wife has a zero threshold for bullshit, so when I come up with something stupid, it seldom gets past her “crapmeter.” It has to be good before I even propose it, and when it’s crap, it gets shot down like a Zero in the Mariana’s Turkey shoot. A good woman gives you thick skin. My little one too, deserves special notice. She fancies herself a novelist as well, and already writes stories more complex and interesting than her old man’s. The other day I asked her if I could borrow a name from one of her ongoing projects for a Book Three character that I’m tentatively naming Miss Despoil (a name that I hate). My daughter told me “No, she’s not for your book.” Tough kid, she’s already pushing me around and she’s only eight.

As far as Wayward goes, we had a similar thing happen as the first book, a last minute scare. Some of you that read the sample first act will know what I’m talking about; the end of the Shard World section.

Blackjack is a work in progress, like most of us are, except he’s farther along in age than some of the behavior I attribute to him. He’s never been forced to grow up, and now he’s facing a difficult world unprepared with the social tools to do so. In a way, his evil is apathy, the carelessness that comes from being talented and smart and not having to work hard. At some point, it all catches up with you, and that’s what this book is supposed to represent.

I know movies and books are brief things, real characterization occurs in a slow-motion montage with some cheesy music. I wanted to show the process, to show the difficulties of having to change. Most importantly, I wanted to have Blackjack learn the way most of us learn, by making mistakes, by earning a scar or bruise to show you right from wrong.

Blackjack starts this book resentful of what he believes is the great reward he deserves. He thinks that a good deed can overcome a serious mistake as if things in life were quid pro quo. We all know it doesn’t work that way. Life is hard, and good deeds seldom go unpunished. The act structure is intentional, with the first act culminating in his final descent that he began in book one. Some of us only learn the hard way, and Blackjack is no different. The act is inspired by a single line from one of my favorite movies, Excalibur. Near the end of the movie, Percival gives Arthur Pendragon to drink from the Holy Grail after a lengthy, ten-year quest, and when he sips from it, Arthur says; “I did not know how empty my soul was, until it was just filled.” I think Blackjack needed to hit bottom, crash hard into it, as it were, to realize that changing yourself isn’t something that you can do by just wishing it, or writing about it on Facebook. It requires looking within, and few of us are so willing to find our flaws and to work hard to correct them.

So there’s a scene in the book where Blackjack crashes hard into the bottom, it’s a rape scene, and it was as difficult to write as it is to read. I hate that scene, but I fought to keep it in, and in the end, the edits were minor. The version previous to what you’ve just finished reading had the “pullout” at Utopia happen during the rape attempt, which was Ben Bequer using Deus Ex Machina to save his character from actually doing something reprehensible. It was wrong, I was a coward. The truth is that the scene needed either to have him finish the horrible act, then live with the consequences, or what I came up with, which was a moment of realization. I think it’s stronger to have him stop himself, to be self-aware of what he’s allowed himself to become. It’s a dream world, you say, but he doesn’t know that, it doesn’t mitigate his act, and it’s made worse by the fact that he’s in fact the master of the dream, and the computers at Utopia are merely facilitators. It’s Shard World, you say, a more primitive place…yes, and that’s the point. He allows himself, over the course of a few days or weeks (in dream), to regress to a sub-human level, where he takes what he wants, kills anything that stands in his way. I think that’s the point. Imagine if you were placed in a similar situation, with the faculties that Blackjack has…what would you do? Now imagine yourself in the modern world, with his same strength and invulnerability. What would you do with the guy who taps your car from behind because he’s absentmindedly texting, or with the cop who abuses his power and forces you to stop recording a video in a public place? Or with a woman that you covet, who’s uninterested in you? There’s all kind of scenarios that always go through my head, and in almost all of them the abuse of power is almost impossible to avoid. Would you stop Bashar Assad? Or depose a leader because you didn’t agree with him? What would stop you? What would restrain you?

It’s a bit of the Spiderman theme, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Except I don’t want to have Blackjack learn his lesson in one act, with the death of his Uncle Ben. I want to show the process, with all it’s failures, as something that doesn’t have a moment of clarity where everything that follows is good and pure. Life isn’t that way, and we all know it.

The second act is a sort of interlude, the rise after the fall. Or the beginning of the rise, as it were. “Long and hard is the way,” Dante said, and my intention was to show how difficult the voyage Blackjack has to make. Remember though, there’s always hands to hold on to, people who’ll give you a second chance, a benefit of the doubt. It was something I wasn’t sure Blackjack could do himself when he saw Apogee, to forgive her for turning her back on him.

Why she did it, and the rest of the Apogee/Blackjack dynamic is something I’m dying to explore, from the point of view of a guy who has a wonderful/difficult relationship, trying to make it as real and contentious as it normally is. One of my favorite comedians, Patrice O’Neal used to say in his act that you’re not really in love unless you have a well-thought out plan of how to kill your significant other. A good relationship challenges your very core, makes you question yourself fundamentally, and that’s what I intend to explore in Blackjack three, among other things.

In writing, they say to cut out the fat, to start as late into a scene as possible, which means I should edit out the start of their relationship and start at the point where they’re fighting and she’s about to leave him. But that would miss the fun part, I think. The fighting and leaving is a constant, it’s what’s there if you find yourself not compatible. It’s always there for you, and always what we see in novels and movies. The guy just broke up with his girl of ten years and he’s beside himself…and that’s fine. But I have other things to say. Expect book three to start right where we left off, kind of like Wayward did.

As far as Haha, what can I say? He thinks he’s doing the world (and Blackjack) a great service, making a social commentary on a world gone mad. The idea to have Mr. Haha 2000 go bad comes directly from his originator, my friend Rashamon Green. It was an epiphany that changed everything, and I’ll be forever in his debt. Haha, though, writes himself, and expect him to get more heavy handed in book three. He won’t just resort to manipulating video feeds, or Danger Rooms, it’s the third act guys, and things will get serious…