Stronger: A Super Human Clash (26 page)

Casey had been locked in the cell with wrists and ankles chained. He was tall—about six three—with a slim build, broad shoulders, and a very square jaw. His black hair was tight at the sides and back, a little longer on top.

“I like working with machines,” Casey said. “People are …” He shrugged. “People are unpredictable. It’s almost
like they have minds of their own. There’s an old programming joke I’ve always liked: A computer is a machine that does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. Doesn’t apply to me, though. I understand how they work. The robot you destroyed … Yes, it cost a lot of money. But mostly what it took was a lot of time and a little ingenuity.”

“Which you have, I suppose.”

“No. I have a
lot
of ingenuity. The robot was a prototype, based on the tech Tremont’s people had been developing. We never got our quantum processor to work, but we did create a lot of very advanced technology along the way, including the self-modifying processor that controlled the robot…. You’ve never seen a machine move and react as fast as that before, have you? When we put it to the test, it was able to analyze every move we made and prepare a counterstrike so quickly, it’s like the robot was seeing into the future….” He sighed. “Just a shame it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I really thought I had something there. The trouble with self-modifying processors is that all it takes is one glitch and they change a part of themselves that they really shouldn’t change.” He leaned back in the plastic lawn chair and peered at me. “You and I would have met before now, if you’d stayed with Tremont’s people in Texas. Why
did
you leave?”

“I didn’t trust him.”

“Very wise. I’ve never trusted him myself.”

“Is that why you allowed yourself to be caught? To get away from him?”

A slight twitch of Casey’s eyebrow was enough to tell me that he hadn’t been expecting that. “You’re smarter than people
give you credit for, Brawn.” He leaned forward again, resting his elbows on his knees. “This is how it works…. Dalton captures me and seizes the assets of the entire Ragnarök organization. Legally, of course, the assets should go to the government, but Dalton will use his ability to persuade the people in power to let him have everything. And the reason
I
want him to have—”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Seriously. I don’t care about you and Max going back and forth with your stupid power play, each of you manipulating the other, playing some dumb cat-and-mouse game.”

“Ah, but which of us is the cat and which is—”

“Not interested in
any
of that. Just tell me this: What do you want?”

“Control.”

“Of?”

“Same as everyone. I want control of everything. The whole world.”

I lay back on the floor and tucked my hands behind my head as I stared up at the ceiling. “Why, though? What good will it do you to control the world? With your brains you could make enough money to live in luxury for the rest of your life, and no one would have to get hurt along the way. You don’t
have
to be a supervillain, you know. No one is forcing you.”

“Supervillain?” Casey laughed. “What makes you say that?”

“You’re superhuman, and you’re a villain. It’s not complicated.”

“Who says I’m a villain? Seriously, Brawn … Which laws have I broken?”

He’d got me there. “Well … you were working with Gordon Tremont and Harmony Yuan.”

“So were you. They lent you out to the military to take down Norman Misseldine and his band of deluded followers. Do you know
why
they did that? Did you even ask?”

“Misseldine was threatening to destroy Washington.”

“No, that’s why Misseldine had to be stopped. But why did Tremont get involved? It was because he wanted the military to owe him a favor. That favor would have been access to their own research into quantum computing. He used you, just like Max is using you.”

“Yeah, but the difference is that I
know
Max is using me.”

Again, Casey laughed. “No, you don’t know anything of the sort. You know only what he wants you to know. Brawn, Max Dalton is not a particularly smart man, certainly not compared with me, but he’s ambitious, and his power allows him to read other people’s desires and give them what they want. He can even directly control some people by hiding parts of their memory, or implanting suggestions. One of the first things he does when he meets someone new and important is plant the suggestion that they should trust him. He …” Casey stopped himself. “Huh.”

I sat up again. “What?”

“Your friends Abigail and Thunder and Lance don’t trust Max, but that’s because he thinks of them as nothing but cannon fodder. When they’re a little older and more experienced, he’ll start to see them as potential allies or adversaries, so that’s
when he’ll start directly manipulating their feelings about him. But
you
… That’s strange. You’re already close to the apex of your powers. Max needs you on his side. You’re potentially stronger than Titan and you’re pretty much invulnerable. Plus you’re a tenacious fighter—you keep going long after anyone else would have quit. So why don’t you like him?”

“He’s a jerk.”

Casey raised his eyes. “I know
that
. What I mean is, why hasn’t he forced you to like him?” Before I could answer, he said, “Oh my. Oh, that
is
interesting. Max is unable to control you. He can’t read your mind.” Casey’s grin returned. “Until now, I thought that I was one of only two people he couldn’t control, the other one being your old sparring partner Krodin. But now I see that there are three of us.”

“How do
you
know about Krodin?”

“Tremont’s organization is a splinter group from The Helotry. They have quite voluminous files on Krodin. All protected with a bespoke encryption system that’s impossible to break.” He grinned. “Tremont was an idiot…. He put me in charge of their computer division, the primary purpose of which was to crack encrypted files.” He grinned again, a faraway look in his eyes. “Now,
that
was a good solution. When you enter a password into a computer, the computer checks the characters one by one to see if they’re correct. If they are, it makes a note of that and then checks the next character. I wrote a tiny piece of software that timed the computer’s response for each character. We’re talking
nanoseconds
here. Correct characters took four-billionths of a second slower to process than incorrect characters. With that, I cracked the encryption on Tremont’s
files faster than you can blink. He doesn’t know that, of course. That’s a lesson for you, Brawn: Never show all your cards.”

Casey got to his feet and shuffled forward until his forehead was resting against the bars of his cell. “Still … If Max can’t access your mind, then I can tell you
everything
and he won’t be able to pick it out of your brain. You want to know why we’re superhuman? Why only some people have these powers? How’d you like to know exactly why your power has made you four meters tall and blue? And I’m sure you’d love to know how to reverse what happened to you, right?”

“Is that possible?”

“I think so. Not with the technology we have today, but maybe in a few years. And that’s why I need a quantum processor.”

“Go on….”

“One of my gifts is the ability to see and understand the power in others. Your friend Thunder, for example … He thinks he controls sound, but that’s not quite accurate. What is sound, only vibrations through the air? And there’s a young Italian woman who, like you, has undergone a permanent physical transformation. She calls herself Loligo. She’s a water-breather. I’ve seen film of her swimming…. It’s incredible. She moves through the water just the same way as Thunder flies: She subconsciously commands the water to do whatever she wishes. Let’s look at another young woman, the—let’s be honest here—staggeringly beautiful Energy. You’ve seen her produce lightning, and conduct heat. If she could see what
I
see in her powers … she’d be terrified, I expect. Energy has the potential to extinguish a star.”

I was kneeling in front of his cell now, unable to take my eyes off him.

“All of us have these abilities for a reason, Brawn. Even you.”

“Why am I like this? Why did this happen to
me
?”

“Oh, I’m not going to tell you that. Not yet. Max doubtless has this place wired up with dozens of hidden cameras, and he doesn’t need to know everything. But where was I? Yes, our superhuman brethren … I know
you
can’t see the blue lights. Very few of us can. But they’re there, spheres of energy floating around, fading into and out of existence. They make us what we are. They provide us with our abilities. I know how to temporarily nullify those abilities, as Abigail, Thunder, and Max discovered in Pittsburgh.”

“What are the lights? Where do they come from?”

He shook his head. “That’s for another time, Brawn. Like I said, Max is recording. Now, I’ve got two more superhumans to tell you about…. Terrain. I know you’ve heard of him, and you’ve seen what he can do. Telekinetic control over inanimate matter. If he weren’t such an idiot, he’d really be dangerous. Landslides, earthquakes, volcanoes … He could be their master. And then, finally, there’s Quantum. The fastest human who ever lived. After Georgina Bergeron’s
little stunt in Windfield, Quantum took the cure for her plague to every person on the planet. Now, by anyone’s standards that’s impressive. Pity about what it did to him, though. Quantum was already on the edge of sanity and the strain of visiting almost seven billion people in a little over a day, well—”

“Wait, who’s Georgina Bergeron?”

“The old woman who was in charge of The Helotry of the Fifth King. Krodin’s followers. You didn’t know her name?”

“No one ever said.”

“Well, if you ever get the chance to meet her again, ask her about her life. It’s as fascinating as it is disturbing. But we’re getting away from the point.”

“And what
is
the point?”

“The five superhumans I mentioned. Terrain, Thunder, Energy, Loligo, and Quantum. Each one with potentially complete control over the five elements … earth, air, fire, and water.”

“That’s
four
elements. What about Quantum?”

His chains clinking, Casey walked backward to his seat and sat down. “Quantum’s power is speed. But what
is
speed?”

I shrugged. “You tell me. I didn’t have a lot of schooling, remember?”

“Quantum’s ability makes him the most powerful of all superhumans, and therefore the most dangerous. Speed is nothing more than distance over time. Just as Thunder controls not sound but the air in which sound is carried, Quantum has the ability to manipulate not speed but time itself.” He smiled. “The Helotry were fools to worship Krodin as a god. If any of us deserve such a lofty title, it’s Quantum. The god of time.”

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
I talked to Max about Casey. “He hasn’t done anything wrong. You have to let him go.”

“If you knew what I know about him…,” Max said.

“Then why don’t you
tell
me? What has he done?”

We were in the sectioned-off corner of the warehouse that Max used as his office. Max was behind his desk, sipping coffee as he read something on his computer screen, while I sat on the floor.

“Brawn, let it go. You talked to him for hours last night, right? He got to you. That’s what he does. He can be very persuasive.”

“Yeah, but what has he done that’s a
crime
?”

“For a start, he built a robot that could have killed you and Abby. It’s a brilliant piece of work, by the way. I’ve shipped the wreckage to Cord. Be interesting to see what he makes of it.”

“Building the robot wasn’t against the law. Max, you can’t lock someone up just because he
might
do something bad. That’s like arresting anyone who owns a kitchen knife because they might use that knife to murder someone.”

Max finally looked away from his computer. “The fact that he wants to rule the world doesn’t bother you?”

“It does, but
wanting
to rule the world isn’t a crime. What you’re doing is much worse than anything Casey has done. You’re keeping a man prisoner on nothing more substantial than fear of crimes he might commit in the future.”

“So suppose we let him go, and somewhere down the line he ends up killing a hundred people. We would be responsible for those deaths. How are you going to feel then?”

I countered that with, “Suppose we let him go and he
saves
a hundred people?”

“We could argue about this all day,” Max said, “but deep down you know I’m right.”

That annoyed me. “No, you’re not!”

“He told you that his purpose was to manipulate me into capturing him and seizing the assets of the Ragnarök organization. Yes, I
was
recording everything last night. Casey has some bigger game going on here, and I want to know what it is. If that means playing along for now, then that’s what I’ll do. He wanted to be captured, so why are you so intent on letting him go?”

“If you’re so certain he’s a bad guy, why are you doing what he wants? And if …” I stopped myself. “No, I’m not getting drawn into this!” I crawled back out through the doorway, and stood up.

Lance was waiting outside. “I was listening to that.”

“And?”

“And I think you’re right.”

From his office Max shouted, “No, he’s not!”

Lance raised his eyes, and—unnecessarily loudly—said, “We can talk about this later when a certain person isn’t here to read our minds!”

We walked over to the gymnasium. I sat on the vaulting horse while Lance attempted to climb one of the ropes suspended from the ceiling. He wasn’t able to get very high.

“Never been able to do this,” he said, his voice strained.

“You need more upper-body strength.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to work out.” He gave up and dropped the three feet to the floor. “When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

“I don’t think I ever gave it much thought. You?”