The Prospects (Book 2): Nothing Poorer Than Gods (18 page)

“I have none.”

“Everyone is passionate about something.”

“I'm not like other people. I pretend to feel emotions.”

“Interesting. Heroes are motivated by pride and rage, while villains are driven by greed and envy. Why would someone with the self-control of a saint but the soul of a shadow make it her life's work to hunt villains?”

“Out of boredom more than spite. I enjoy the challenge, the chase, even the occasional loss.”

“Then why not hunt heroes?”

“No one mourns villains. No one calls a lawyer when I take their loot. Heroes are protected by vengeful allies and property laws. Too much hassle for too little reward.”

The Handler pressed an intercom button. “Security, bring the girl in the waiting room to the holding pen.” He released the button. “We won’t have time to send her out. She’ll be part of the token resistance the superheroes find here.”

“What did you mean by send out?”

“If you look to the left, you’ll see many of them being loaded into a truck. Four trucks already left. The first is going to Boston, the second to Baltimore, and the third is going to Philadelphia. One, driven by Puca, already left for Manhattan. That’s where this one is headed.”

“You send your soldiers away as the enemy approaches?”

“While the idiots in capes leave their protected hideouts to tear apart my facilities, many of which are merely offices for my profitable shell companies, these second-rate goons will run amok in their cities.”

Portia watched Flayer carry Junkyard Kat with his metallic whips and place her next to the horned, muscular, and senseless All-Beef Patty. Four men with identical faces strapped the woman with metallic dreadlocks to the table.

The Handler kept walking. “Most of the casualties will be the superhero team reservists, local neighborhood do-gooders, and law enforcement personnel. They'll let the big-name superheroes know what’s happening. At that moment, I won't be their priority. They'll rush back to their homes.”

“That’s quite a prediction. How do you know they’ll fall back?”

“Because they won’t let their cities be destroyed, especially when most of them realize they were sent on a wild goose chase.”

The Handler opened another door. This one led to a room with a wall covered by flat-screen monitors. Some showed the rooms he and Portia walked through. Others showed rooms with supervillains standing in their motley costumes, some with weapons brandished, others emitting energy or flames through their hands, and a few that were so monstrous that “grotesque” was the only word Portia thought of to describe them. One showed Malone standing at attention in front of men in urban camouflage.

“Behold, my second wave. These are the mercenaries, intelligent villains, and calculating murderers with their minds transferred into cloned bodies customized to fight superheroes. They’re in hidden places I never told the CIA about. All are in close proximity to their target cities. After the superheroes exhaust themselves running back and forth, this second wave will come in and kill anything in colorful tights.”

“So superheroes and survivors from your first wave?”

The Handler nodded. “By tomorrow night, when the cities are in ruins, the world will realize how ineffective the superheroes they worship are. They’ll come to realize these arrogant idiots have no right to impose their will upon us. After the dust settles, I will call the CIA to discuss eliminating all but the ones who could be useful to the government.”

“And only villains will be left?”

“The mercenaries, like Malone, and foreign-born villains, like you and Flayer, will be paid to leave the nation. The ones in cloned bodies, like Puca, well, her body was a year old when she got it four years ago, and I deliberately forgot to tell her the cloned bodies only have a five-year lifespan. Even if she and the others elude capture, they’ll die soon.”

“As for me, I’m ready to accept my final payment and move on.”

The Handler pointed to a monitor in the lower-right corner. “Your girl is putting up a fight.”

The image showed two uniformed security men sprawled on the ground as Venusta vaulted over the secretary’s counter.

“She’s yours now, in every sense of the word.”

“Well, it’s not like I’ll need those cloned security men for much longer anyway.” The Handler slid his card through another reader to open another door. Portia followed him into an empty room with black holes against the plain white wall.

“Portia, despite your recent failures, I respect your intelligence and discipline. I’d like you to be my second-in-command.”

“Quite a promotion.”

“There will be no danger. Minor masterminds like Puffin and Count Clockwork have their goons-for-hire ready to assist me. All you’ll do is help me keep track of what happens and when to who so everyone goes where they belong.”

“Sorry. My plane to Fiji leaves from Newark in three hours.”

“Name your price for one night’s work.”

“You don’t understand me. I didn’t become the villain who preys on other villains by being greedy. I did it by setting goals and achieving them through rigorous self-control. I may not have enough to live in luxury for the rest of my life, but I can spend a few years at five-star resorts. That’s what I intend to do.”

“I understand you well enough to know you took my money as readily as any other mercenary.”

“As Machiavelli said, mercenaries are useless and dangerous because you can’t pay people enough to give their lives. The money was merely a reason to tolerate you. Before we met, I matched my wits against villains because I am the spider that eats other spiders.”

“Then why are you turning down a chance to be a part of my masterpiece?”

“Masterpiece?”

“Millions of little strokes coming together to create one big picture.”

“I see your big picture, and I don’t like it. True art is ordered symmetry, subtly blending into complexity to create something sublime. You attempted something on a grand scale but compromised your vision in the interest of time. Your perspective is so warped and uneven you don’t realize how likely you are to fail.”

The Handler laughed. “Aren’t you a harsh critic? I am the artist of war. I brought together thousands of strokes, inferences, and illusions to create one thing. Years of planning and preparation for a moment that will influence the world. That, my dear, is art.”

“To you, maybe. All I see is a portrait of hubris, self-gratification, and other truly destructive male pathologies.”

“I did the best I could with what I have. Artists never have enough time and money, so we always compromise with reality. But if not our these visions of what could be, these dreams we manifest, what is the point of creating anything at all?”

“Some dreams aren’t worth manifesting. Be honest, Handler …”

“That’s the Handler.”

“You were ready to lead a mutant army in the seventies, but your superiors denied you the opportunity. Six years ago they let you create another army, but this time when they ordered you to abandon it you refused. You want this war to happen, whether there’s a reason for it or not.”

“I fight to save humanity from the self-made gods’ might, from death, from slavery.”

“Mere justification. You can’t force freedom on people. We can only accept it our own terms. Only when we are actualized are we actually anything.”

“When all is done, there will be no more heroes resisting change or villains trying to subjugate everyone, only a world for humans to become what they are meant to be.”

“Please. There will still be cruelty and exploitation. Nothing is more capable of inhumanity than humans.”

“I can't expect a cold soul like yours to feel the warmth of my passion.”

“What drives you isn’t passion, it’s madness. With that, I will leave and never speak of what you showed me. I won't return to this hemisphere until after the dust settles”

Dejected, the Handler walked to the wall. “I’m really sorry you see it this way, Portia. I hoped you would help me against the titans’ mischief and to deliver us from slavery. But if you’re right, if it is madness that drives me, I’ve gone too far to go back.”

He reached into his coat and drew a Beretta 92. His shoulder stayed low as he spun and fired with a single practiced motion.

Portia doubled-over before she heard the bang. She grabbed her stomach and felt warm blood over the stinging burn of hot metal in her flesh.

“What the …” said Portia.

The Handler blew across the Beretta’s barrel. “Every artist wants to do that to a critic.”

Portia’s right arm straightened. A 9mm pistol sprung into her hand.

The Handler fired again. Portia fell over backwards when the bullet went into her chest.

“The only value of anything is its meaning,” The Handler stepped on her wrist and pressed until she dropped her pistol.  “To me, a spider that eats other spiders means as little as any another pest.”

He pointed his Beretta at her head to administer the
coup de grace
.

Trista gasped when she saw Vijay. Stray strands of black hair poked under the huge mass of white bandages covering his head. His puffy cheeks strained against the straps of the respirator over his mouth. Dozens of tubes connected to a stack of machines ran into his arms and under his blanket.

But she also remembered how Vijay told the other Prospects about her villainous past. And how he constantly insulted her. And how he tried to make her his sex slave as a reward for helping the Idea Man. That was enough to drive the pity from her mind.

“Could going into his mind hurt him?” asked Trista.

“The doctors don’t recommend it,” said Stormhead.

A familiar voice on the other side of the room’s partition said, “There’s a prissy Eurotrash accent I didn’t want to hear again.”

“Noah? Is that you?”

Ruby said, “I’m here too.”

“Well, shut up, both of you,” said Stormhead. “Trista, do what you must. It will be no great loss if Vijay dies.”

Pinwheel tapped a few keys on the laptop. “That’s cold.”

“His treachery nearly destroyed us.”

Pinwheel handed the laptop to Trista. “It’s logged into the hospital’s wi-fi. I copied every hacking program he downloaded onto this computer, but I don’t have the passwords to unlock his accounts.”

Trista pulled a chair to the foot of Vijay’s bed and put the laptop below his feet. “I have to ask, how did a boy from Virginia get so good with computers?”

“First, I’m from North Carolina. Second, while I do enjoy an occasional bluegrass festival or rockfish derby, I still grew up in the digital age. And I’m not that good. I can swap a hard drive or clean out a keyboard as well as any office temp. This hacking stuff, I don’t know anything about.”

“Neither do I. It’s time to learn.”

Stormhead gestured to a nurse in the corner. She inserted a needle into a tube that led into Vijay’s wrist.

“What is that?” asked Trista.

“A combination of zolpidem and caffeine. It should wake him up a little.”

“Will his eyes open?”

“They may not.”

“Can you open them?”

The nurse crossed her arms. “I’m not happy with what you’re doing to this boy. He needs rest if he’s going to survive.”

“I only need a glance to make the connection.”

Pinwheel went to the other side of the bed and pulled Vijay’s forehead back far enough to reveal a sliver of eye.

Trista stared into the small part of Vijay's pupil that showed and trembled. “Wait. This is bad. There’s no order or reason. It’s a mess in there.”

“Does that mean you can’t help?” asked Stormhead.

“I’ll try.”

Trista projected herself into the wreckage of Vijay’s mind. There was no real distance, depth, or length. The memories around her were warped like old glass. Trista made out fragments of video games, a picnic with an Indian family on a sunny day, being beaten up outside of a middle school dance while his classmates watched, fantasies of standing on one of the Chrysler Building’s eagles in a four-armed silver battlesuit, a funeral on a rainy day, changing his grades in a high-school computer network, a blond girl laughing at him after he asked her out, and the scent of fresh samosas, all interspersed by shards of insecurity and resentment for everyone he met and tempered by self-indulgent amazement at his own intelligence.

She focused on breaking into the high school’s computer. Memories are interconnected like webs through associations and shared feelings, but this one led nowhere. It was a boring for Vijay, something he had done many times. She grabbed another thread the closest one within her psychic reach. This time it led to a center where many threads met. The connection gave Trista a sense of width and length to make the foundation for Vijay’s mindscape.

“Trista?” In the mindscape, the thoughts were as clear as voices.

The thought was so weak she barely noticed it, but the associated images of herself made the association clear. Some images showed her sad and subdued, others had her in the Mind Dame outfit with a larger chest and impossibly narrow waist.

Vijay must have thought about her quite a bit. That made her skin crawl.

Trista waved her hand and the images scattered upwards into a third dimension and creating the reality of height. She picked up the hacking memories again. This time the thread led to the names of programs. Each had them had the same ID, Vjawesome, and the same password, SilverShiva.

She broke the connection. On her way out, the weak words “Don’t go” echoed through the mindscape.

Trista logged into the hacking programs but quickly ran into a dead end. The screens of code were nothing but long lines of incomprehensible symbols to her.

She re-established the psychic connection. Vijay’s mind seemed brighter but the clutter of broken memories and fractured facts were more chaotic than before. They tried to fit together like puzzle pieces in a shaken box. They bounced off of each other without making a connection, but they never stopped trying.

The hacking memories were somewhere in that shifting mess. Trista grabbed a few memories. She saw curved lines for candles and somehow knew it was for Diwali despite having no idea what Diwali is. Another memory held the scent of a lotus flower in a cemetery on a spring day. The next memory association was a snippet of Lady Amazing showering captured from a hidden camera.

That made Trista retch. She still hated him for that violation. Lady Amazing did not deserve that. No one did. But he uploaded the video to the internet, so she pulled it towards her. That led to associations for how to set up a wireless camera and hack into file-sharing sites. Hacking was what she wanted.

Everything felt hot at first, but Vijay’s mind became cool again in a snap.

“You came back. You were gone for so long.”

There’s no time, no fourth dimension, in the mindscape, where the distance is measured only in feelings. Trista thought, “It was only a minute.”

“I can’t see or hear anything but you. What happened?”

“You were shot.”

“By who?”

“We don’t know. We can find out who wanted you dead if you show me how to hack.”

Vijay’s mind trembled with warmth tinged with sourness. “Hacking is what I do. That’s like asking a rocket why it …” The mindscape shook and changed colors quickly and vividly. “Wait, what about rockets?”

“Hacking. Give me all you have
.
”

The memories rolled around Trista like a glistening tunnel of lights. Several fell in front of her like rain. She grabbed as many as she could. Each had a bit of information, but she couldn’t tell what each meant.

“I need everything,” she thought. She drew the memories to her. Far more came to her than she anticipated.

There was something far larger linked to his hacking, the foundation for the sparkling tunnel. Something warm yet sour like sadness.

The mindscape grew stuffy with hot arrogance. “You can’t take that from me.”

Trista drew in those memories. Everything shifted under her power.

“Stop,” thought Vijay. “I won't let you take that.”

A cloud of vague ideas formed a silver mechanical man with four arms. Trista recognized as Vijay’s self-image as the Silver Shiva despite never having seen it before.

His sleek guns pointed at Trista. Rockets popped out of his shoulder. Behind an ornate mask he grimaced.

Trista grabbed the thought web and yanked it. Everything shifted from sky-blue to dark and hot and sky-blue and cool again as the mindscape quaked. The Silver Shiva fell to pieces like a glass statue in an earthquake.

Trista withdrew from Vijay’s mind. “He’s conscious enough to be a jerk, but something keeps shaking things up.”

The nurse said, “He’s having seizures. He wasn’t like this before you came in.”

“I may cause more if I pull anything out.”

“Trista, I don’t mean to pressure you, but we need this information. There are many locations on the CIA’s list. This can show us which one the Handler is at.”

Noah said mockingly, “He doesn’t mean to pressure you, but do this or he won’t know what to do.”

Stromhead almost yelled before Pinwheel put his finger to his lips and pointed at Trista.

Trista locked eyes with Vijay.

Pinwheel took a notepad and wrote, WHY DID YOU SAVE 4-EYES FROM THE ISLAND?

Stormhead took the notepad and wrote back, I HAD TO.

Pinwheel wrote, YOU HAD TO SAVE SOMEONE YOU HATE?

Stormhead wrote, HEROES DO NOT CHOOSE WHO THEY SAVE.

Pinwheel wrote back, THEN WHY ARE YOU WILLING TO LET VIJAY DIE?

Vijay’s mindscape was filled with crimson seething heat. Echoes of insults in Vijay’s own voice about being weak, clumsy, and ugly almost kept Trista from thinking. Only Vijay's pride in his own intelligence held things together. No, wait, the negative words were in a voice deeper than Vijay’s, but somehow still his.

The Silver Shiva lay in tarnished pieces. Vijay sat among them, his face hidden behind his hands.

It became cold and blue when Trista took more of the hacking association web. The pieces of the Silver Shiva reformed. Instead of standing in a threatening posture, they staggered and stumbled.

Trista pulled at the hacking association web again. The mindscape shook and shifted to a shade of lightning-blue.

“Please,” thought Vijay as his Silver Shiva image fell apart again. “My memories are all I have. Don’t take them.”

“If I don’t do this, people may die.”

“But you’ll take what I am if you do.”

Trista yanked the association web hard enough to cause a massive mindquake. “You betrayed us. You deserve worse than this.”

Everything shook again as the sensations changed from extremes of burning to freezing.

Vijay created an image of Trista with feathery wings, a white gown, and a halo. “I thought you were good.”

Trista warped the image back to herself as the fishnet-clad Mind Dame, with emphasis on the sadistic smirk. “You don’t know what I am.”

Vijay’s mindscape rippled and turned a thousand different hues as Trista pulled more hacking memories away. She saw images of nodes, IP protocols, and blocks of codes that she somehow now knew revealed bugs that allowed access to the underlying program.

Vijay’s image as the Silver Shiva came together with all four arms spread. “I won’t let you take the only thing that makes me special.”

“Do you remember how the Idea Man offered me to you, and how willing you were to accept?” She threw back Vijay’s image of her with exaggerated proportions. “You had no problem taking my body. I have none with taking your mind.”

The Silver Shiva glowed power from what remained of Vijay’s willpower. He raised four fists at Trista’s self-representation as Mind Dame.

“You know nothing about psychic combat.” Trista’s presence took on the sharpness of a razor. “I can do anything I want to you, and you can’t stop me.”

The Silver Shiva made himself so big he dominated the mindscape. His guns and missiles aimed at Trista.

Trista hit him with enough psychic energy to induce a massive seizure. Everything spilt apart.

The Silver Shiva crumpled into a million little pieces and sank into the liquefied mindscape beneath him. Trista ripped the huge tangle of memories associated with hacking into her.

The shaking got worse and everything went black and bright again and again. It took Trista time to realize Pinwheel was waving his hand in front of her face. “Pull out. Stormhead says to abort the mission.”

Trista blinked repeatedly. Vijay’s puffy face contorted in agony.

Stormhead pointed to the monitors. “He had too many seizures.”

The nurse said, “You tore his brain apart after my son put it back together.”

Memories of nodes and code-cracking techniques settled behind Trista’s mind in a tangled mess. She tried to put them into some semblance of order.

“Your son?” asked Pinwheel. “You’re Deon’s mother?”

Something about the word “mother” made the jumbled memories associated with hacking take on a sharper tone. Mother. There was something about a mother in there, a foundation below the hacking memories.

Trista envisioned an Indian woman pointing to an old white plastic computer. In the monitor’s curved glass Trista saw a reflection of a smiling Vijay – he had a gap in his smile where his baby teeth fell out - and felt second-hand excitement. The woman said, “Happy birthday.”

This was Vijay's memory. But it jumped sharply through many hours of experimenting to a moment.

It happened on a night when Vijay downloaded movies that weren't released yet. His mother said she had to work an extra shift at the convenience story. He said she could work a shift after that because it was annoying having her around the house.

A forgettable time later, there was a knock at the door. He heard the policeman his father that his mother there was a robbery. He didn’t hear the exact words about his mother’s death. His father’s expression said it all.