We Could Be Heroes

by Mike Chen

  “Okay, then. Maybe later.” She set the coffee on her chair. “Break into my mind. Put me into a stupor. Or, if you want—” her laugh came through with a snort “—attack me.” She paced the room, giving Jamie time to get to his feet, circulation returning to his extremities. “We’re kind of short on time, so if you could finish this demonstration, that’d be great.”

  “I...” Freezing like this, being unable to conjure words for a performance, that never happened, not even at his first bank robbery. Granted, he’d prepared for that moment, rehearsed it until it became muscle memory like an actor practices his lines. This was a little different. “I... Fuck.”

  The woman started to laugh, not one of those evil villain displays, but a genuine circumstance-induced chuckle. “We really don’t have time for this. Are you going to rob my mind or what?”

  A hint of amusement came with her intense glare, goading him on. Jamie’s hands went up, mind reaching out to lock on to something, anything, sheer concentration causing sweat to form along his scalp.

  And nothing. It wasn’t just stress or anxiety that limited his ability with this woman. She was simply invulnerable to his abilities.

  “Okay. You proved your point. What do you want?” Jamie asked in his normal voice, falling back into the chair. “Do you want money for the Telos treatment?”

  “No, you paid that years ago. Before Frazer died.” She tapped the TV on the wall and its screen came to life. On it was a static image of Zoe. “My name is Sasha Kaftan. And it’s nice to officially meet you. Now tell me, out of all the things you’ve been able to recall, do you remember ever hearing about Project Electron?”

  “Is that...like a rock band or something?”

  “Project Electron was the brainchild of Dr. Waris Kaftan. My husband. He had the most extraordinary mind. His research on electricity in the human body was groundbreaking. Cutting-edge. Did you know the human brain fires off hundreds of billions of electrical signals for the basic things we do, to eat and sleep and breathe and think? Electricity is what makes the human nervous system go. Now what fuels the human body, that’s calories. The food you eat, that becomes energy, allowing the body to fire off all those electrical signals. Food is the bridge between resource and output. Project Electron bridges that gap.”

  Sasha’s speech came off as half sales pitch, half educational seminar.

  “Well...” Jamie said, searching for words. “That’s cool?”

  “It is more than ‘cool.’ Project Electron could completely change the world. Electricity. Generated by renewable resources. Being converted into energy used by the human body. A way to remove the need for food. Think of all of the wars, the economic oppression, the pure suffering simply created by lack of food. The industrial complex that devastates our planet’s delicate balance for mass production of food. Remove all of that. What could the human race accomplish? How might the earth recover? That is the scope of Project Electron.”

  “Sounds great. Where do I donate?”

  “Waris came close to achieving this. He created a successful electrical-biological system, something that connected to the human body. Now the amount of electricity the body could take. That—” her defenses broke, her eyes softening “—that is where Waris ran into a...problem. At low volume, the project worked. But anything greater than a snack, the equivalent of a granola bar, an apple, it shocked the system. Waris was determined to find a way to make it work. To tweak the equations. He was so close. And then...”

  This time, Sasha’s guard really dropped. Her eyes got glassy, her shoulders drooped, she stood silent for what felt like minutes.

  “The man in the capsule,” Jamie said, finally putting it all together.

  “Yes. Waris. That capsule keeps him alive. We are tweaking the genetic code,” she said. “We are using electricity to activate new parts of the human brain. You. Zoe. The others who’ve been experimented on.”

  Others? So the rumors about Hartnell City must have been true. Were they in this facility too?

  She went on. “But we need to find a way to heal Waris. So he can become whole again, and finish Project Electron. I used myself as the trial run on all serum variations until four years ago. Until my body couldn’t be pushed any further. But then we found Zoe. Each time Zoe’s memory was reset, we evolved the serum formula. With every revision of Zoe, she becomes stronger. Last time, she even got thermal vision. Her brain is activating more, her body becoming capable of more. Everyone else’s body burns out, but hers, she shows us that it’s possible for a body to safely bond with the regenerative properties of our serum. We just need full cohesion between the brain and the body. Only then can we give it to Waris. We are so close, but we need to reset Zoe one more time. That’s where you come in.”

  Jamie looked back at the screen, at the image of Zoe tied to the chair, the same way he was. Her matted hair fell in front of her face as her head fell forward, unconscious or at least very groggy.

  “You’re not resetting me?”

  “No. Your evolution into memory powers are a valuable tool. We don’t want to mess with that. We need two things to bring Waris back—the city’s electrical grid and Zoe. Well, three things, really. Because you need to do what you’ve done before. You need to wipe her mind again.”

  Again? Jamie was starting to piece together the picture here, that previous versions of himself had used his abilities for them. “What? No!” Even though he never wanted to really hurt the Throwing Star, removing some of her memories wouldn’t have seemed like the worst thing in the world. But not now, not after everything. Zoe’s whole goal was to discover who she was meant to be; he couldn’t take that away from her.

  “We’ve reset her powers. Letting her keep her memories while we await the next serum’s results puts us all at risk. Unless you think holding someone with anger issues and extraordinary strength and speed contained here is a good idea. I certainly don’t. And I’m not putting my staff at risk. No, we reset her and let her organically activate her abilities. Something about being out in the world triggers the evolution in unique ways. It’s the best way to test them.”

  “Why are you even telling me your whole plan? That’s really villain of you.”

  Sasha shook her head with a very nonmaniacal frown. “Villain. That’s funny. Now, I’m not just telling you my plan. Our plan. I understand you’ve become friends with Zoe. Hurting your friend is hard. But consider what you’re doing it for. Eliminating hunger. Changing the way the entire planet handles resources. Literally saving the world. You would be doing that by wiping Zoe’s memory. There’s no way she’d cooperate with the experiment if she knew what already happened. Look, Zoe is not really your friend.”

  “I think I’m the better judge of that.”

  “Not the real Zoe. The original Zoe. That person is long gone. You interacted with a fragment of her, a controlled experiment, for a few weeks? How does that make you a friend? You think about that for a minute.” Sasha got up before he could respond and stormed out the door, her gait completely different from her departure to grab coffee. A minute later, she appeared on the screen’s security feed, now with a cart behind her. She pressed a button on the cart, and suddenly the device on it lit up with a blinding blue, a light so intense it caused trails across the screen. With clinical precision, she pulled out a tube connected to the device and attached a needle to it.

  “Oh shit,” Jamie said under his breath.

  Sasha looked directly at the camera and nodded, then jabbed the needle into Zoe’s arm. Ten, maybe fifteen seconds elapsed before Zoe’s body seized up, causing the blue light to fluctuate. Her neck was thrown back, her shoulders tensed and bounced and fell and repeated. The cycle continued, throwing Zoe’s body into an ongoing cycle of seizing and relaxing. Sasha threw another look, a message in itself to Jamie, before exiting the cell.

  Outside, several doors slammed before Sasha came back in. “He
r body is resetting. Now it’s time for her mind. Look, I’m not sure what it is about you two. The last time we reset her, she escaped to the roof. We caught you talking to her, but we weren’t sure why. That’s why your mind was erased. You volunteered to do it, as an apology for stepping out of line, and we reset you in your apartment. We gave you the illusion of freedom to let your ability evolve organically out there, safely away from any other experiments at the facility. Never expected the whole Mind Robber thing to happen, though.”

  “You left those notes? You set me up? Why would you do that?”

  “For this exact moment. I’ve been watching you this whole time. Who do you think sent the police your way after the last bank robbery?”

  That evening, before the support group, when that detective showed up at his doorstep for no particular reason. Sasha did that?

  “I’ll tell you why,” she said, as though she read his thoughts. His eyebrows arched up and he glanced at her. “See, I can read memories. Like you. But I can’t pluck them out. I’m not as powerful as you. You have read-write access. I am read-only.” She gave a short laugh to herself, and Jamie told himself to laugh too even though her joke wasn’t funny. “I did that to keep you in line. We need you, your powers. We can’t be having you get caught or killed.

  “Now that you’re here, you know the truth—that we own you. And you can’t disobey. There’s only one thing you can do and you know it. Help us change the world. Help us save humanity. Bring Waris back. You need to wipe her mind. And I’ll check her, make sure you didn’t leave anything about her identity.”

  Sasha’s truth sank in. There was no way out of this room or this situation. His teeth ground while his mind raced for something different, something new. The walls were concrete. She had extraordinary strength. Every single angle tilted in her favor. The only difference was that Sasha needed something from him.

  The only measure of control in this situation, the fact that he alone would be performing the surgery.

  But maybe that was enough of an advantage. “You know, there’s never a one hundred percent memory wipe,” he said, the words coming deliberately while an idea formed behind it. “There’s always a fraction left of scattered memories.” The statement caused Sasha’s head to tilt. “Scan me. You’ll know I’m not lying. I just want to make sure you know this so you don’t hunt me down if you see random fragments in her mind.”

  “I understand,” she said, standing up and gesturing at the door. “It’s time.”

  Jamie watched as Zoe’s body shook and raged, driven by unconscious turmoil inside her body. There was only one way to help her, to help both of them.

  “You want to be a hero to the world,” Jamie said. “Alright. Then I’ll be the villain.”

  21

  THEY WERE THE MOST lovely dreams.

  Not just hovering, but flying. Endless propulsion upward, forward, zooming down, and when Zoe did hover, the most effortless of hovers, a giant tiger-bird floated up to greet her. It nudged her with its cat nose while feathered wings beat at a soothing rhythm, then it looked up.

  Of course it looked up. Because falling oh so gently from the sky were tacos. All sorts of tacos: crisp corn-shelled tacos with ground beef, soft tortillas with fried fish, tiny street tacos with carne asada. They floated down, slow enough to take a bite out of passing tacos, and she looked at the tiger-bird; it looked back and they hovered somewhere above the clouds, eating tacos together.

  But when she looked down, she realized that her feet were now stone. Not just feet, but all the way up to her knees. Zoe ate more and more tacos, and every time she looked down, the farther the stone inched up. She should stop—she wanted to stop—but she couldn’t, as if her arms moved on autopilot, grabbing and shoving tacos into her mouth until her fingers stiffened and everything up to her neck was solid rock.

  Then she started to fall, her powers gone. Frozen, arms outstretched, weight of her now-stone body caused her to circle continuously while she dropped, the tiger-birds laughing at her, tacos pelting her in the face all the while. Her shoulder slammed into the ground, splintering the stone shell and opening up a torrent of blood and the sharpest lightning strike of pain. Zoe’s eyes flew open, and rather than being surrounded by tacos, she found herself in a dingy room, fluorescent lighting overhead showcasing the sharp contrasting tones of, well, everything.

  She blinked as details came into focus, or at least she thought so. Maybe. There weren’t that many details to grasp for this drab space: walls, a door, some cracks in the floor and a whole lot of olive green, or at least that’s how it appeared given the harsh lighting. Except for when the lamp flickered, a brief flash of blue coming through as Zoe’s visual focus returned.

  Then it went again, everything becoming blurry as the pain in her shoulder hit her conscious mind. In fact, it hurt so much that it rippled up and down her body, causing her head to sting and her legs to ache. She craned her neck and saw a bandage, a small dot of red oozing into the middle of the white gauze.

  Arms. They were tied up. She wiggled her fingers, all while telling herself to pull details of what transpired. She’d rushed back to San Delgado after leaving a facility.

  A facility with grim walls and ugly lighting. Just like this one.

  Shit.

  And then she’d sprinted to Jamie’s apartment. They were talking. No, not just talking. They were finishing Lo-Bot: Samurai Cyborg. Goddamn it, they actually finished it and right now she couldn’t remember the way it ended. Jamie’s cat was there, though, and then something happened. Noises, lights went out. Shouting. And hitting the floor.

  “Jamie?” She tried to yell, but her strength wouldn’t let her. It came out a meek call, sounding more like scolding someone who held up the table’s order at a restaurant rather than a desperate cry following a crisis.

  But it wasn’t just her voice that lacked strength. Her fingers flexed behind her but when she tightened her arms, they failed to snap the ropes that bound them. Her legs too, they should have been able to somehow get out of whatever was binding her, maybe even propel her up into a hover.

  Instead, only pain registered. Her shoulder for sure, but it went beyond that. Everywhere else joined, from burning in her veins to pounding in her temples. Clearly she’d picked the wrong time to try to be responsible.

  This all seemed familiar, and for a moment, Zoe wondered if another memory might be surfacing, a true memory. Her eyes squeezed shut, her mind urging something to come into the light. It did—except it wasn’t her memory. No trick from a prior escape or secret visit arrived to rescue her, and instead she remembered a similar scene in a 1980s slasher flick called High School Basement Massacre. Spoiler: the chained-up teenager died in a gruesomely fake way. Not the preferred ending for her own story. “Come on,” she muttered to herself, the chair’s legs scraping and bouncing against the floor. Then the doorknob turned.

  The door pushed open, squeaky hinges preventing any sort of stealthy rescue. But it didn’t matter because unlike High School Basement Massacre, a friendly face appeared.

  “Jamie!” she said, a surge of adrenaline bringing things into focus. At least for a moment. The reality of whatever they’d stuck in her clawed and grabbed her back toward reality. Her mind and body remained a step out of sync, both like a car engine that simply refused to turn. “Jamie,” she said again, her voice softer, not because of relaxing or wanting to keep her voice down, but from barely being able to function.

  Why wasn’t he responding? Her words seemed to bounce off him; he didn’t look at her, and instead he paced the room, back and forth, mumbling to himself. His words lacked the projection necessary to be audible, and...

  Where was his heat signature?

  No strength.

  No thermal vision.

  No detection of any kind.

  This wasn’t good.

  And a thick fog over her consciousness. It
came and went, spiking and crashing, bringing her thoughts and muscles into alignment for seconds before everything felt like a muddy mess. Even her eyes blurred.

  The fluorescent lights of the room buzzed as they flickered. In the corner of the room, she swore she saw a flash of blue again. What did Jamie say about the blue before? It meant something, something important, but the moments leading to her capture blurred out the most. “Jamie, quit pacing around. My powers are gone. We gotta get out of here.”

  Jamie kept talking to himself, a rhythm to his words even though Zoe couldn’t hear the specifics but their singsong nature reminded her of almost a children’s nursery rhyme.

  “Zoe Wong,” he finally said, turning to face her. “That is who you are. Not who you think you are—the Throwing Star.” He gave a quick laugh, and even though he spoke in his native British accent, his words carried the pacing of his Mind Robber speeches. “Does your arm hurt? Is it sore? You’ll find that it’s more than a little pain. You see, your days of going out to fight crime are over. It must have been fun, playing vigilante out there. Thinking you could do something special, the whole city working together to cheer you on. Well, this is the thing, we were all having a laugh at you when we got the sense that you were trying to do something a little more. A little too much. But then one more impossible thing happened, more impossible than the chance you’d meet me.”

  He rushed in close, noses practically touching. So close that she could see the sweat on his brow, and though his words and tone communicated venom, his eyes showed something different.

  Fear.

  “You got caught.”

  “Jamie, whatever game you’re playing, you can act like a maniac later. We need to get out of here.”

  His brow creased and his eyes gave away a sense of vulnerability or hesitation or something that wasn’t this act he’d been putting on. He stood back up. “They expect to see you all over the city,” he yelled, his voice louder than she ever recalled hearing, continuing as if he didn’t even hear her. “In the Banking District. At McCrimmon Square. On top of the TransNational Building. At Dock 19. They all look for you. The woman walking her child to the grocery store. The couple meeting for the first time downtown. The man braving the cold bay wind with a long scarf. They look outside at ten, eleven o’clock, midnight, hoping to see you. Hoping that you’ll be out there trying to make a difference. ‘I’ll wait every night for just one glimpse, one second of something extraordinary’ they tell themselves. But no more.”