by Barry Lyga
“I know you can’t read them,” Kyle said to Erasmus, “but there are satellites up there. I could fly up and see them. You’re just looking on the wrong frequencies. But right now, I’m building something that Jack will turn into a gadget that can see those older frequencies.”
“What will that accomplish? And what does that have to do with the lighthouse?”
“It’s nice to be supersmart again,” Kyle commented. “I like being smarter than you.”
Erasmus was shocked into rare silence.
Kyle continued. “I’m going to fly up there into the exosphere. Get within sight of the satellites. Start logging the location, velocity, and direction of a bunch of them. And then I’m going to use Jack’s widget to send a signal.”
“To do what?” Erasmus’s curiosity overwhelmed his outrage at being called less intelligent than Kyle.
“Well, that signal is just going to bounce around for a couple of decades. From satellite to satellite, ricocheting all around the planet.” Kyle smiled when he thought of it — a single beam of encoded photons, shooting around the world in invisible silence for decades. “And since we’re going to calculate the angles perfectly, I can guarantee that the day of the zombie attack in Bouring, that signal will return here, right to the lighthouse, and activate the lighthouse computer.”
“I get it,” Erasmus said. “You’re going to use the lantern as a beacon, to guide people to safety. The lighthouse is the safest place in Bouring! Especially if you’re running from a zombie horde.”
“Well, yeah, that’s part of it. If Mighty Mike has any brains at all, this is where he’ll go.”
“That’s a mighty big if.”
Kyle grinned again. “Yeah, but if he doesn’t think of it, Mairi will. But we’re not just going to light the lantern, Erasmus. We’re going to use it to send a message. In Morse code. Something short. Something simple.”
“What should the message be?”
Kyle shrugged. “The easiest one possible: Look in 1987.”
Later, Kyle soared into the air, moving faster than he’d ever moved before. He would have to fly higher than ever.
The temperature extremes would probably destroy anything with him, so he’d left Erasmus with Jack for safekeeping. The AI was not happy about being left in the hands of an old enemy, but Jack was harmless enough now. Kyle truly believed that.
He flew higher. And higher.
Ice crystals began to form on him as he hit the upper reaches of the troposphere, water vapor in the air clinging to him and freezing in the icy cold. He had Jack’s gadget protectively tucked under his arm, shielding it from the temperature changes with his own indestructible body. He hoped Jack was right, that he could extend his power this far. Usually, the Mad Mask had to be relatively close to an electronic device to make it function. Kyle would be five hundred miles straight up when he needed the gadget to work.
“I’ll make it work,” Jack had promised. “Even if it causes my head to explode, I’ll make it work.”
“Can we get both?” Erasmus had snarked, and then Kyle had handed him off and leaped into the air.
Suddenly, the winds that buffeted him ended. He’d entered the calmer stratosphere. There was little water vapor here, too, so he shook off the ice crystals that had formed on him and watched them drift down, down, down, vanishing into the clouds below.
It got even colder as he entered the mesosphere, down to -148°F. The cold couldn’t hurt Kyle, but his breath froze as soon as it left his nose, so he held it instead.
And then — just when he thought he could stand the cold no more — he burst into the thermosphere, where the thinner gases absorbed ultraviolet radiation directly from the sun. The temperature soared to thousands of degrees in an instant, but Kyle couldn’t feel it — those same thin gases meant that the air pressure was so low that the heat wasn’t a factor. Still, knowing that he was surrounded by such heat caused Kyle to grimly set his jaw, praying that he’d shielded the device well, praying that Jack still had a connection to it….
Up he flew! Ever more up, where radio waves bounced and danced, broadcasting all over the planet. His own signal would live here for part of the next few decades as it made its slow, yet faster-than-light path from outer space to the future computer at the Bouring Lighthouse.
And then, finally, the exosphere, where there was almost no gas at all. Nearly no oxygen. Kyle kept holding his breath, mostly because there was nothing to breathe, but also because he wasn’t sure if Jack’s gadget would work or not.
He pulled it out from under his arm. If it was still connected to the Mad Mask, a single LED light would be illuminated.
Kyle almost wept when saw that the light was on.
He pressed the only button on the device and waited a moment. It would have been nice if something dramatic had happened, like a light show or something like that. But the signal beam was invisible and silent.
Kyle tossed the gadget into space and dropped back down to Earth, plunging through the cold, the heat, the cold again, the sudden impact of weather, the planet rushing up at him like a bullet.
Later, Kyle sat once again at the top of the lighthouse and stared up at the stars, where his encoded message now lived. It was up there, so tiny and so concealed that even the satellites it used to relay itself around the world wouldn’t know it was there.
An exhausted Mad Mask lay next to him, asleep. Kyle smiled. Jack was sleeping a lot lately. He deserved it.
Kyle remembered lying out near where the plasma storm had transformed him, hanging out with Mairi and the Astronomy Club right before the ASE attacked. He had showed Mairi how to find Pegasus in the stars. It was a happy moment for him. With his best friend.
He would never see her again, he realized. Well, unless he stuck around Bouring for the next couple of decades. Then he would be there when she was born. But by then Kyle would be old — over thirty! — and he doubted young Mairi would want to be friends with an old guy.
Besides, she would be better off without him. He had saved her life more than once, true, but he had also done that thing no best friend should ever do: He had lied to her.
And he had erased part of her memory. Best friends shouldn’t do that, either.
Pegasus was bright tonight. Kyle stared at it until his vision blurred. He should have been tired — it had been at least thirty-six hours since he’d slept — but instead he felt only a quiet peacefulness. Contentment.
Marred by only one thing.
“I’m sorry, Erasmus.”
“For what?”
“For stranding us here. It’s all my fault. I should have listened to you and just gone back to the night Mighty Mike arrived, like we planned. Then we wouldn’t have ended up here. Stuck here.”
“You didn’t know. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it probably wasn’t even your fault. Maybe we were destined to come here. To learn about Lundergaard’s plan and foil it. You mentioned before that maybe there was some kind of quantum entanglement that drew us here. Based on what the Mad Mask told us, maybe Lundergaard’s machines and experiments attracted us to this time period. Maybe it would have happened no matter what. Think of it that way.”
Yeah, maybe … “I just wanted to help Mairi. That’s all. I couldn’t stand looking at her, being around her, talking to her, knowing what I did to her. It was wrong.”
“You didn’t have a choice.”
Silence. For a long time. Kyle watched the stars and the planets. Mars. He could see Mars. He wondered: Could he fly to Mars? Maybe that would give him something to do in the boring old days of 1987….
“Maybe not.” Kyle lay back on the roof of the lighthouse, his hands behind his head. “Maybe not. But just because you don’t have a choice doesn’t make the thing you do right.”
“Hey, Kyle?” It wasn’t Erasmus speaking — it was Jack. Kyle turned to the Mad Mask.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I was. I just woke up. I overheard, well, your par
t of the conversation. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not really.”
Jack bit his lip. “Kyle … what if I told you there was a way back to your time?”
Kyle sat upright. “What? What do you mean?”
If Erasmus could have gasped, he would have. “What’s he talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go to the chronovessel.”
“There’s no point. Even if I put it back together —”
“What do you have to lose?” Jack asked.
True.
With the Mad Mask in tow, Kyle flew to where the chronovessel and its pieces waited for him. “Now what?”
“Put it all back together.”
“But —”
“Just do it.”
Kyle relented. After all, he had nothing else to do with his time, right? Until he could figure out what sort of life to live as a refugee in 1987, he might as well do something. And once the chronovessel was back in one piece, it would be easier to hide it somewhere.
It took him a couple of hours, but soon he had the chronovessel completed. He had enjoyed the work, actually. Working with his hands on such a complicated project forced him to focus on what was right in front of him. It left him no time to feel guilty about mind-wiping Mairi or stranding Erasmus.
“Okay, it’s done,” he told Jack. “And I appreciate the distraction. I really do. But it’s still pointless. There’s no computer in this time period sophisticated enough to run the chronovessel.”
“Yes, there is,” Jack said.
Kyle blinked. That was impossible. He had hacked into every major computer that existed in 1987. None of them was powerful enough to do the chronometric calculations, much less small enough to fit in the motorbike. “There’s no such supercomputer. We checked.”
The Mad Mask grinned. “Well, what if I told you you don’t actually need a supercomputer?”
Erasmus made a pretty decent digital imitation of a snort. “He’s really lost his marbles, hasn’t he?”
“You,” Jack went on, “just need something that thinks it’s a supercomputer.”
Kyle’s eyes widened. “No way. Look, you’re weak. And it’s so complicated … I wondered before, but I didn’t want to ask because of everything….”
“Because of everything I’ve been through. I know. But, Kyle —”
“Can you really do it?”
“I think I can. While you were up in the exosphere, I talked to Erasmus a little bit. About your chronovessel. I think I can put together a machine that will function long enough to get you back to the present.”
“You think you can?” Kyle shivered at the thought of being lost in time. Again.
“This might be our only chance, Kyle,” Erasmus said. “In the words of the original Erasmus: ‘Fortune favors the audacious.’”
“I thought it was ‘Fortune favors the bold.’”
“I dislike that particular translation,” Erasmus said officiously.
“Of course you do.”
“Well, in the original Latin, it’s —”
“Enough. I don’t care.” He tapped his foot, thinking. The Mad Mask stared at him, steadily, unnervingly. “Okay, okay,” Kyle said at last. “Fine. Let’s give it a shot.”
“Excellent!” The Mad Mask rubbed his hands together. “Give me a little while with some of the spare parts.”
“Okay, and while you’re doing that, I have something I need to do. Before we go.”
He took off, flying toward Bouring.
When Kyle was little, his father used to enjoy telling him about the Bouring of his own childhood. “It was so safe here,” Dad used to say, “that half the time people wouldn’t even lock their doors at night.”
Kyle figured that was just Dad being hyperbolic, trying to make some kind of point about the good ol’ days. But as he stood at the front door to his grandparents’ house, he realized it wasn’t just hyperbole — it was midnight and the door really was unlocked. He went in, quietly.
Upstairs, he paused in the hallway to slip on the ski mask he’d borrowed from Danny. Then he stole into his grandparents’ bedroom.
Gramps was snoring loudly on his back. Gramma was wearing a sleeping mask and earplugs, poor woman.
Kyle took a deep breath. A part of him wanted to play the worst, meanest prank possible on his jerk of a grandfather. Maybe haul him out of bed at superspeed, race down the stairs, out the front door, and then into the sky.
At a thousand feet straight up, maybe Gramps would gain a new perspective on how he talked to his son.
And then … back to bed? Leave him hanging on a tree somewhere? Drop him off at the peak of Mt. Everest for a couple of hours? Lots of nasty things could be done with superpowers, after all.
But in the end, instead, Kyle crept into his father’s bedroom. Danny slept peacefully, the Walkman clutched in his hands.
“Thanks, Dad,” Kyle whispered.
“Last chance,” Kyle said. “Are you sure about this?”
The Mad Mask stood up from where he’d been crouched down by the motorbike and brushed his hands on his pants. Inside the open gas tank was a tangle of wires and circuits that Kyle knew would only work because Jack Stanley believed they would.
“Am I going to lose my superintelligence again?” Kyle wondered aloud, not really expecting anyone to answer.
“No way to know,” Jack said. “But I don’t think so. I think Lundergaard’s interference caused that particular problem. He won’t be messing with your trip this time.” Jack touched some of the rat’s nest of wiring he’d shoved into the chronovessel. “All systems online,” he said. “Everything is green. You’re good to go.”
“You mean we’re good to go, right?”
Jack said nothing. He just closed up the gas tank.
“Jack. We’re going back to the present, right?”
“Kyle … first of all, your present isn’t even my present. In your time, I’m still a fourteen-year-old supervillain with a bad attitude and a partly erased memory. I probably just got out of the Bouring sewer system and started planning my revenge on you.” He stopped for a moment. “Um, about that … Be on the lookout for me, will you? My memory’s a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure I did some nasty stuff to you to get back at you for destroying Ultitron.”
“Look, even if my present isn’t your present, wouldn’t you rather be there than here?”
“It’s a moot point, Kyle. I’m not invulnerable like you are. I wouldn’t survive the rigors of time travel. Not in this version of the chronovessel. Now, the one you’ll build as an adult is a whole different …” He shrugged. “I have to stay here.” He shoved Kyle at the motorbike. “Now stop arguing with me and get going.”
Kyle had so much to say … but in the end, there was nothing to say. Nothing at all.
He held out his hand. After a moment, the Mad Mask — Kyle’s betrayer, Kyle’s foe, Kyle’s friend — shook it. “Good luck, Kyle. We’ll meet again.”
“I’ll find a way to rescue you. Someday.”
Kyle swallowed hard and straddled the motorbike. “Coordinates in?” he asked Erasmus, who was wirelessly plugged into the system.
“Coordinates in.”
“Okay. I trust you, Erasmus.”
“Of course you do. Hit the activation button.”
Kyle hesitated only half a second before hitting the button. The motorbike’s strange fusion of gadgets whined.
“Kyle! Wait!” Jack shouted.
“Kyle, you need to hit the priming button now. We need to travel before the zero-point energy collectors overflow.”
“Hang on —”
“We can’t hang on —”
“What is it, Jack?”
Screaming above the noise of the chronovessel, Jack shouted, “I just remembered something! About your future!”
“Kyle! Hit the priming button!”
“One second, Erasmus! What, Jack? What?”
Some dust and sm
oke kicked up. Corn silk flew in the air. The Mad Mask held up a hand against it all. “There was a weapon! That’s the last thing I remember before Lundergaard pulled me through time and brought me back here! When you were betrayed in the future, you sent a weapon into the past! To help your younger self!”
“I did what?”
Erasmus screamed in Kyle’s ear. Kyle’s finger hovered over the priming button. He needed to time travel now, but he also needed to hear what the Mad Mask had to say.
“You had a name for it!” Jack yelled. “It was Project Something-or-Other. Something metallic. Project Steel. Or Steely. Or Brassy. Something with a y.”
“Kyle! Now!” Complete and total panic in Erasmus’s voice, and before Kyle could allow himself to think about it any further, he thumbed the button and suddenly the Mad Mask vanished, the corn field vanished, everything vanished.
Once again, a pattern of shapes and colors exploded before Kyle’s eyes. It happened again. And over and over, just like last time. He couldn’t keep up — the colors and lights kept coming, kept erupting and glowing and flaring before him, so fast, so beautiful, and so tragic. No one else would see this. No one else would ever see this.
AndthensuddenlyeverythingwentsofastthatKylecouldn’t evenseeitandtheworldbecamenothingmorethanablurof motionandactionandpatternsoflightanddarkthatbuffeted himlikehighwindsonaplainonlythesewindsweremadeof colorsandtheyassaultedhimoverandoverandhestruggledto stayonthemotorbikeandhescreamedtoErasmusbuttherewas notimeforthescreamandnoairandnosoundandhisscream diedassoonasitwasbornandthen —
Kyle’s scream choked off in his throat as the menagerie of moving colors came to a halt. He was gripping the motorbike so tight that he’d twisted and bent the handles.
“Erasmus? Erasmus, did we make it?”
For a heart-stopping moment, there was nothing in his ear. Then: “We definitely traveled in time. Not sure where … Systems are down….”
“We did it! When are we?”
“Check the readout. I need to reboot some things.”
Kyle glanced down at the readout in front of him; his jaw dropped. It was the night! The night of the plasma storm! Jack’s fake supercomputer had dropped him at exactly the right time and place to witness Mighty Mike’s arrival on earth.
