New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (20 page)

Normal people could afford to lose their
temper once in a while. Even heads of state had that privilege, at least in
private. A man who could shatter buildings with his fists had to always keep
his emotions in check, however.

The Council agreed to keep the entire
Legion on full alert and postpone any discussion on retaliation until more
evidence was available. The meeting ended quietly. John had been ready to leave
himself, but caught the look in Kenneth’s face.
We need to talk
was
written all over it. Their planned dinner for that evening had not happened, of
course. John remained in the conference room with Kenneth. Olivia stayed
behind as well.

“I know,” John began as soon as the three
of them were alone. “Something is seriously wrong with me.”

The relief in his friends’ faces was
almost insulting, but he could understand it. “The press conference,” Olivia
said. “I saw how close you were to reacting violently. Whatever is happening,
it’s been building up for some time, hasn’t it?”

John nodded. “And it’s more than my
temper.” He described the blackouts and nightmares. “What do you think, Doc?”
he asked Kenneth. “Have I got Neo Psychosis?”

“You know that term is nothing more than
popular slang,” Kenneth said. “You may simply be experiencing shell shock, like
we discussed earlier.”

“Even if that’s all it is, that’s no
joke,” John said. “My temper’s fraying like never before. And I don’t
understand why it’s happening now.”

“The timing is suspicious,” Kenneth
agreed. “But it’s happening, and we have to deal with it.”

“So what do you think I should do? Resign
from the Council? See a shrink? Now, when the Legion has been attacked directly
for the first time in over a decade? They
gutted
us, Kenneth. A dozen
dead Legionnaires in one day. We haven’t suffered losses like that since the
Second Asian War. I can’t be sidelined now.”

“Why not wait until we know what we are
facing?” Olivia said. “It was good advice for dealing with the attack, and it’s
a good idea here, too. Let’s get somebody trustworthy to evaluate you, find out
what is wrong, and then we – you – can decide what to do.”

“Sounds like a plan. Any suggestions as
to who to see?” John asked. The idea of meeting with one of the Legion’s
counselors did not appeal to him.

“Doctor Martin Cohen from Chicago,”
Kenneth said without hesitation. “He’s a very skilled empath and an authority
in parahuman psychology. He is the man who convinced me that using surgery to
remove violent tendencies in criminals was a terrible mistake, even before the
side effects became apparent.” Kenneth’s regret managed to seep through his
seemingly unemotional tone.

“Ah.” Doc Slaughter had used his skills
as a neurosurgeon to make alterations in the brains of forty-six convicted
criminals in an effort to ‘cure’ them from their criminal tendencies. In all
fairness, they all volunteered to undergo the procedure in return for reduced
sentences. The operations had been successful, inasmuch as forty-four of the
patients had never committed a crime again. The two exceptions had turned into
brilliant criminal masterminds of near Neolympian ability. The others… the
kindest thing one could say was that they had done very well for several years.
Within a decade, however, all had been struck with a wild assortment of mental
problems and ended up institutionalized for life. Doc had discontinued the
program long before that happened, thankfully, or the toll would have been much
worse. The press hadn’t really caught on at the time, although back in the 1980s
Rolling Stone
magazine had published a scathing exposé, which in turn
had sparked a flurry of lawsuits and a Congressional investigation. It had
taken decades for Kenneth to live down his mistake.

“He is the man to see,” Kenneth
continued. “Very discreet, and not directly affiliated with the Legion,
although he has received some grants from us in the past.”

“Okay,” John agreed. “Is he going to be
able to get a read off me?” All parahumans were fairly resistant to psychic
powers, and the resistance seemed to be a function of the parahuman’s overall
power level. Most telepaths and mind-controllers couldn’t touch him.

“Probably not, or at least not a detailed
one,” Kenneth said. “But he does not rely on his powers to diagnose problems.
He is a skilled therapist.”

“Guess he has a new patient now,” John
said resignedly. Anything, even confiding in a stranger, was better than this
slow dance with madness.

Chapter Ten

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

After they had made their plans to fly to
Chicago – to be more specific, to fly to Chicago in a home-made, non-FAA
certified aircraft that was over thirty years old – Condor and Kestrel had left
for some private alone time, which Christine expected would involve whips,
chains and edible underwear. Face-Off had led Christine to Condor’s rec room.
It was big and high-tech like the rest of Condor’s Lair, with lots of screens,
something that looked like a cross between an X-Box and a military-issue flight
simulator seat, six large reclining armchairs and half a dozen lesser game
consoles. The room was dominated by a flat screen TV big enough to be used as a
dinner table.

“Guess Condor likes to watch his stories
in full life-size goodness,” Christine commented.

“Yeah, the guy’s a big movie buff,”
Face-Off said. “He’s got a big library of laser disks, and just about every pay
channel there is. So if there is anything you’d like to watch, I’m sure I can
get it for you. Well, stuff from this planet, at least. No John Travolta
movies, sorry.” He had a mental grin on as he said that. Christine could pick
the invisible smiles automatically now. “Or if you want to get some rest, I’ll
show you to your room and you can catch some Z’s.”

“Maybe later, it’s still early and I
spent the last day or so unconscious, so I’m slept out right now.”

“No problem. Can I get you anything to
drink? I’m going to grab another overpriced foreign beer.”

“Another Diet Coke would be great, thank
you. Or a regular Coke, I guess.”

Christine sat on one of the armchairs.
She noticed there was a keyboard and game controller attached to one of the
arms. This was a gamer’s dream setup. She wanted to open a
World of Warcraft
account and see how this universe’s version stacked against hers. If they
turned out to be the same, she’d freak out. It was freaky enough that the same
game existed in both worlds. Sure, Monopoly and chess would be around, since
they predated the appearance of the zany guys in latex, but computer games from
the last decade? Maybe there was some sort of telepathic communication between
the two worlds, and some ideas got passed on through the collective unconscious
or some weird Jungian crap like that. Come to think of it, that might explain
why people all of a sudden started creating comic books with costumed heroes in
a world where they didn’t exist. Maybe the comic book guys and computer nerds
from her universe got some sort of visions or psychic seepage from Earth Alpha.
If anybody was going to receive messages from another universe it would be
geeks.

“Hey,” Face-Off said, and Christine
jumped a little. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” He handed her a Diet
Coke.

“I was lost in thought for a second,
that’s all. I space out sometimes, as in a lot. All part of the Dark charm.”

“No problem.” Face-Off sat on another
chair and took a sip of his beer. He had to produce another face to do it;
Christine recognized the old tough guy he’d looked like when she first met him.

“By the way, what is your name? ‘Face’ is
a little impersonal. You saved my butt; I would kinda like to know your name.”

“I have lots of names,” Face-Off said,
getting up and standing in front of the TV. His face changed, and now she was
looking a black-haired man who looked a bit like a younger version of the guy
from that Showtime show
Episodes,
what was his name? Matt something. “In
Little Italy, I’m Tony.” His voice had changed and gotten much more Jersey
Shore-like. Even his body language was different, with more hand gestures and
nods at nothing in particular. “Tony’s a funny guy, a real wiseass. But people
like him, ‘cause he’s always got money to spend, and he sucks at playing cards
but he don’t mind when he loses.”

He whirled on his feet, and when he spun
back around he was a thin-faced kid with messy brown hair. “On 137th Street I’m
Dean.” Dean apparently couldn’t stand still; he started doing little hops in
place, and he hugged himself and rubbed his upper arms a lot. The way he
slouched his shoulders made him look a lot shorter than his usual five ten. His
voice was whiny and annoying. “Donny's a junkie, a little dope fiend. He usually
has enough cash to pay for his medicine, though, so people don’t care if he
hangs around.”

Another whirl, and now he was a blonde in
a crew cut. He looked mean until he smiled. He had a sweet, friendly smile.
“Johnny hangs out with the hookers on West 28
^th
. He buys them coffee
and donuts, and never tries to pull any shit on them, so they trust him a bit,
enough that they will share with him any street gossip they hear. They also
know that if they tell Johnny about a pimp who gets too slap-happy with his
girls, the pimp will end up having a nasty accident.”

“That’s pretty awesome,” Christine
admitted. “You should be in the movies. But those are masks. What about, you
know, the real you? I know that’s kind of Oprah of me – do you have Oprah here?
Never mind – but who are you, really?”

The blank face was back. “This is my
face, the only face I’ve got,” he said as he sat back down. The Tony-face
appeared for a second while he chugged some beer, then disappeared again. “When
I make a face, it is a constant effort, like keeping a muscle clenched. Not a
big effort, but you have to concentrate on it all the time. When I relax, this
is what you get.”

“Uh, were you always like that?”
Christine asked.

“Did I scare the shit out of the entire
maternity ward when I was born, you mean?” Face-Off said and chuckled. “Nah,
nothing so dramatic. There was an incident when I was sixteen. That’s when my
old face went away. For some reason, I can’t bring it back. I’ve tried to do it
off old pictures, and I can’t get a grip on it.”

When he said ‘incident,’ her Christine-senses picked up a nasty emotional spike. Whatever the incident had been, it
hadn’t involved sponge cake and cuddly kittens, unless the kittens had ended up
baked into the cake. “Okay,” she said, pointedly not asking any questions about
the incident. “That’s your face. Cool. What’s your name?”

He hesitated for a second. “Mark. Marco,
if you want to be technical. And if you say ‘Polo’ I’ll… I’ll get miffed. Marco
Ernesto Martinez. My father was Puerto Rican, my mother Italian. Call me Mark.”

“Mark it is,” she replied. She raised her
Diet Coke to him. “Thanks for saving my butt, Mark.”

He raised his beer bottle in return.
“Cheers. Pleasure saving you. Now that you’re a Type 2.5 or higher, you’ll
probably end up saving my butt if we get in trouble before we get you home.”

Condor had explained to her the whole
power classification thingy. It was a nerdy thing to do, assigning numbers to
powers and trying to rank them. She could see a couple of geeks at a comic book
store or worse, an online forum, having furious arguments about the actual PAS
numbers of some superhero or another. Who was stronger, Ultimate or Mighty
Mouse? That made her smile, and she explained why to Face-Off – to Mark.

Mark was mentally grinning when she was
done. “Oh, yes, we get a lot of that shit. Is so-and-so a 2.7 or a 2.8? Neos
are as bad or worse than vanilla humans about it. ‘What’s your number?’ That’s
the question we ask each other to see where we fit in the Cosmic Pecking Order.
The whole thing is ridiculous.”

“So what’s your number?” Christine said.
“Hey, I am a nerd. And a geek, pointdexter, dork – with my last name, I get
that one so effing much – you name it. I like linking numbers to things.”

“I’m a 2.3 or 2.4. So I usually say 2.4
to puff myself up. Which means you are anywhere between thirty and a hundred
percent more powerful than me, supposedly.”

“I guess. But I don’t know what I’m doing
yet, so I’m sure an experienced 2.1 can gank me pretty good.”

Mark nodded. “That’s part of why I think
the rankings are bullshit. There’s plenty of cases where Neos beat opponents
several times more powerful than them. The whole testing system isn’t an exact
science, either, and the tests fail big time at predicting how far you can push
your powers when you get angry or desperate. Plus some people develop their
powers over time, so this year’s 1.2 can be next decade’s 2.2 or whatever. And
the actual powers you have also count for a lot. The electric fucker that tried
to kill me when I was rescuing you could hit me from range, so unless I closed
the distance he had the advantage, no matter what our numbers were.”

“Ranged versus melee, gotcha,” Christine
said. Her games had the same issues. And unlike games, the world didn’t have
designers to bitch at about game balance and ask to please nerf the ranged Neo
powers so they didn’t win every duel. The number one rule of the Reality Game
was ‘life’s unfair.’ “So why even bother with the ranking system?”

“It makes people feel a little better, I
guess. If you can measure things they aren’t quite so scary,” Mark said. He
made another face – the Christian Bale look-alike this time – and finished off
his beer. “So how about you, Christine? What’s your story before you got
dragged into Olympus 2.0?”

“Me? God, nothing much to tell. Born and
raised in New Jersey, mostly around Princeton Junction. Junior in college,
Physics major at UM, which meant I was headed for grad school, except I was
getting kinda sick of physics, I love the math but the theoretical stuff is more
annoying than useful sometimes. That was back when my problems were little
things, like wondering if I really wanted to do what I’d been studying for two
years, and if I had gone too far to change my mind. Plus there weren’t a lot of
women in the Physics department, which can really suck. Yeah, you end up being
the center of attention sometimes, but it’s the wrong kind of attention, you
know? And a lot of a-holes thought I didn’t belong there because as far as they
were concerned only people with dicks can understand the mysteries of the
universe.

“Lately I’ve been playing too many
computer games and letting my grades slip; it’s almost like I want to fail. But
if I do, the a-holes are going to smirk and say the girl couldn’t hack it. So
should I finish my degree to show them what a-holes they are, even if I’m not
sure that’s what I want? I was thinking of maybe taking a year off and think things
through. Guess I am taking a year off now,” she realized out loud.

Mark just sat there, listening and
actually paying attention, unlike your typical guy. Usually by that point her
dates’ eyes glazed over or they interrupted her, either to talk about
themselves or to ask some stupid question meant mostly to shut her up.
Except
this is not a date, just an ex-victim and her rescuer yakking it up
, her
brain dutifully informed her. “And my social life sucked. My roommate Sophie
thought that party was one of my last chances of having a normal college
experience. I’m not saying I had no social life. I had two serious boyfriends
and stuff, but they didn’t work out. As in both relationships ended in total
disaster. One cheating a-hole and one domineering d-bag.”
Smart, let’s talk
about my exes. Guys love to hear about other guys, said nobody ever.

Who gives a frak?
Her brain retorted.
Are you actually interested in a
murderous guy with no face?

What if I am?

Then I think you have serious problems.
Plus it’s pretty pathetic, swooning over your rescuer like some loser bimbo. So
last century, or even the century before that.

We’re just talking
, she replied, and realized that outside in the real world, it
had gotten pretty quiet. “Sorry,” she said. That made it how many times she’d
said ‘sorry’? A large integer, that was for sure. “Mind wandered off again.”

“That’s all right,” he replied; his
mental smile was warm and relaxed. “I was pretty wound up about tomorrow. I
don’t like doing things without a clear plan, a definite goal, and it’s driving
me apeshit. This little chat has helped me relax for a bit. And trust me,
Cassandra is the queen of the wandering minds. Sometimes she’ll stop in
mid-sentence and won’t say a word, or listen to a word I say, for a good hour
or two. I usually grab a book and catch up on my reading until she comes back
to earth.”

That led to a nice conversation about
books; they exchanged favorite titles for a while. Both worlds shared a lot of
the same classic authors, like Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Things changed
radically after World War Two, which made sense. No J.K. Rowling, for example.
Stephen King, yes, although his books were very different, except for the Dark
Tower series, amusingly enough. George R.R. Martin was around, but he wrote
long convoluted novels about the doings of a bunch of fictional Neos instead of
fantasy. Supers sold better than dragons in this world, she supposed.

Movies came next. Some actors existed in
both worlds – Nicholas Cage, for one, the Olsen twins for another, except in
this world they were triplets and one of them was a Neo superhero. Katherine
Heigl made rom-coms in both worlds. Bruce Willis, yes, but no Demi More or
Ashton Kutcher.

How did that work? If chaos theory was
right, very few people born after, say, 1945 should exist in both worlds.
Butterfly effect and all that jazz, little changes building up until almost
nothing was the same. Oh, well. She wasn’t that big a fan of chaos theory.
Maybe the butterflies canceled each other out some of the time. When she had
the time, she’d have to sit down and try to figure it out. If she ever got
back, a careful study of the two timelines would make for a great paper. She
might get an A or end up in an insane asylum. Maybe both.