We Could Be Heroes

by Mike Chen

  Another clang erupted, but it was soon followed with the squeaking and scraping of twisting metal. From behind, the corner of the door had been torn off, and a circular puncture emerged in the metal slab’s center.

  Things had moved past not good.

  “Waris?” Jamie said, intensity ratcheted up in his voice. “Any time now.”

  A screwdriver. He was going to fail because of a goddamn screwdriver. On the other side of the room, the puncture in the door grew with progressive kicks—an impressive feat given that Sasha still had her heeled shoes on.

  Then the kicks stopped. A shuffling noise faded away, followed by...nothing.

  Jamie counted to five, then turned to Waris. “Okay, maybe we’ve got a little—”

  Before he could finish, the damaged door flew off its top hinge, the mangled sheet now hanging by a twisted bolt on the bottom hinge. Behind that stood Kaftan, shoulder down and breath heaving, her face wearing the most intimidating look anyone in a business suit ever pulled off.

  “Zoe?” Jamie said quietly into the headset mic, “we’ve got a bigger problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I need a screwdriver to take off the cable. Flat-head. If you got it.”

  “Can you try, like, your fingernail or something?”

  “Also, Kaftan just broke down the door.”

  “Oh fuck.” Zoe’s response captured everything, so much so that despite the situation, Jamie laughed.

  “Yeah. I—”

  “I’ll turn around. I’ll be right there.”

  “No, wait. How far away are you from the basement?” Jamie asked.

  “The stairs are down a corridor.”

  Jamie’s eyes widened as Kaftan stood up straight. She looked herself over, dusting off the debris on her shoulders from apparently doing a hockey body check into the metal door, then smoothed the front of her blouse. “Go now.”

  “Jamie, you listen—”

  “No, seriously. Get to the reactor in the basement. I’ll figure something out.” He adjusted the headset on his ear and smirked to himself. “I’ll figure something out” probably wound up being the last sentence said by a lot of people in difficult scenarios. “Waris,” he said as Kaftan began walking toward him, deliberate step after deliberate step, “if you got a last jolt in you, I could really use it now.”

  * * *

  The last thing Jamie remembered was being tossed into the wall. From the human-shaped crack in the concrete, he guessed that he hit it pretty hard.

  Fingers and toes flexed, confirming that they still had movement. Same thing with his neck, though turning from side to side proved to be against the laws of physics at this point. Ahead of him, Sasha Kaftan stood over Project Electron’s console.

  “Hey,” Jamie managed in a weak voice. Scanning the floor by Kaftan’s feet showed that the headset had flown off his ear and landed about five feet away from him, though the main walkie-talkie unit remained clipped to his belt loop. “Sasha.”

  She turned and glared at him, though he supposed the good thing was that she couldn’t—or perhaps wouldn’t—shoot lasers out of her eyes. “You were trying to murder my husband.”

  “I think you’re misunderstanding the situation.” Jamie tried to stand up but his back muscles seized, making his legs flailing extensions of his core. “This is a mercy.”

  “Mercy?” The word came out with a sharpness that may as well have been an energy weapon; its mere expression caused Jamie to wince. “Project Electron was Waris’s dream. It will eliminate hunger. The only way to finish Project Electron is to revive him. And now I can finally do it. The latest evolution of the serum works. It’s the one. We’ve been waiting for Zoe to finally get your powers. This,” she said, holding up a small vial, “shows that she has regenerative physical and mental abilities. Waris will finally be able to heal body and mind, and sustain it.”

  “Sasha.” Jamie’s muscles burned as he managed to twist himself into a semicrouched position. “You realize that he’s projecting himself as a being made out of pure electricity?”

  “Of course I knew that. That preserves his mind. But it can’t be sustained. Not until now.” Her shoes clacked on the concrete as she walked over to him. “Getting up is silly. I’ll just toss you back over. It’s not my intention to hurt you unless I have to.”

  “Project Electron requires the entire city’s power grid to infuse a serum in Waris. You said so yourself,” Jamie said. “If you do that, you’ll be basically dropping an EMP into San Delgado.” Kaftan arched an eyebrow at him, but then turned away and started walking back to the console.

  “We understand the sacrifice,” she said without hesitation. “One city versus eliminating world hunger. Are you really picking one city over the entire planet? Your scope of things is so small. Project Electron will change the world. It will level the playing field for humanity. Imagine it. It just needs Waris. It needs his mind.”

  “Waris.” Jamie’s voice came with a mix of intensity and desperation, but also the tenderness of truth. “He doesn’t want that.”

  The steps stopped. “Don’t you dare lie to me about Waris.” A cold edge carried Sasha’s voice.

  “I’m not.” Jamie leaned further into gentle pleading, a quiet resignation in his tone. “I swear I’m not. He’s come to us, both me and Zoe, these split-second visits in the form of electricity. But when we got here, we connected with him.

  “Sasha, he wants to die. That’s what he wants. He wants peace.”

  Fury returned to her eyes, an intensity that eclipsed her physical acts of violence. She stormed over to Jamie with one hand out. Her fingers grabbed his forehead, thumb and pinkie pressed against the temples. From that single grip, she raised him off the ground, as easy as a normal adult picking up a carton of milk.

  “You do not get to speak about Waris. Ever.”

  “Sasha,” Jamie managed to get out. He reached out with his mind, seeking any possible way to get through to her, but it remained inaccessible, invisible to him. “‘Everything here is beautiful.’ That’s what he said.”

  Kaftan’s grip loosened, a hesitation replacing her momentum. Despite that, Jamie’s breath slowed, everything becoming heavier. Waris, on the other hand, was starting to wake. If not physically, then mentally, his mind appearing as a ghost silhouette when Jamie shut his eyes.

  “You figured out how to get in my head.”

  “No,” Jamie said. “I swear. I can’t dive into your mind. It’s the opposite. Waris showed us everything.”

  “How dare you talk about my husband. One more word and I cave in your skull.”

  A single word. That was quite the risk. But given how pleading seemed to be Jamie’s only remaining option, he gambled on using his remaining breath. “Please,” he said, the pressure creating a deafening pain in his head. “Give me a chance to prove it. That night out on the plains. Watching lightning. When you got the idea. This isn’t the way to achieve that. He never wanted anyone to get hurt. ‘How many more people have to suffer?’ Right? That’s what he asked. That’s what he wants now. Let me prove it.”

  Kaftan’s fingers opened, and Jamie dropped to the floor. Pain echoed up and down his legs, then into his spine and shoulders. “Prove what?”

  “Waris hears us. I can connect with him. I’ll be the conduit. Zoe did it. You can talk to him directly. Then read my memories for his response. It’s, um, a little clunky. But it gets the job done.”

  Kaftan loomed over him, a different kind of intensity to her glare.

  “You’re a good person. Waris knows this. He wants to tell you that there’s another way.”

  She stepped back, hair falling in her face, and squinted, lingering for several seconds without a single blink. “You’re not lying,” she said quietly.

  “He just needs to be fully conscious. His mind is there, but his body has to
support it. Can you,” Jamie bit his bottom lip, considering the right way to ask, “can you turn him on?”

  Harsh cheekbones and a frozen stare framed Kaftan’s face, remaining static for a good minute or so until they softened. A crack, a flash of something more human, then she paced around the capsule, her gaze focused on her husband’s burned face. She knelt down and one by one, locked each of the cables Zoe had disconnected back into place.

  Was she playing him? It didn’t seem necessary, given her physical domination. Rather than try randomly mashing buttons on the console or pulling more cables, Jamie opted for patience. Patience, and a little good faith that Sasha loved her husband more than Project Electron.

  As each cable clicked back in, icons and lights blinked on the main control display. Sasha walked over to it and moved some digital levers on the touch screen. “I’m going to awaken him,” she said, a shakiness to her words that didn’t exist before. More lights flashed, and Waris’s measured, automated breathing took on an irregular pace.

  His eyes flew open.

  “Waris,” Kaftan said kneeling down next to him. “I’m here. Can you hear me?” Her hand rose, and though Jamie braced himself for something, she motioned a quick wave for him to join her. “This is Jamie. I know you’ve met. He says you can communicate with him. I can read Jamie’s memories. Anything you say to him will come to me. Do you understand?”

  Beneath the burned tissue, muscles moved enough to pull Waris’s mouth into the slightest of smiles, and Jamie noticed a softness in his eyes that stated exactly what he thought of his wife.

  “Alright. I just need to know. Do you want me to finish the project? Or...” Through their brief encounters, Kaftan’s demeanor projected a menacing, threatening air. Maybe that happened when belief of purpose intertwined with absolute commitment and deep love. But that delicate balance was suddenly undercut, leaving only uncertainty on her face. “Or do you want to let go?”

  Waris’s eyes turned to Jamie, and they were clear. The rest of his body may have been burned and scarred, but his eyes held the brightest of whites and the deepest amber hue. He looked at Jamie, and Jamie gave in, letting his own thoughts create the connection between the two.

  Waris spoke. It was a message for his wife, for only his wife. Jamie bridged them, and because of that, he tried not to listen, to simply let himself be the conduit between two life partners. And when it was done, the connection evaporated, leaving Jamie only in the moment.

  Waris no longer looked at him.

  Kaftan stood up.

  And finally, for the first time, he could see the presence of her mind when he closed his eyes. It was faint, a translucent fuzziness capturing her presence, but there it stood, plain as day. Perhaps understanding Waris’s thoughts had finally managed to lower whatever shielded her mind.

  Jamie considered his options. He could try diving in, stunning, wiping her mind or something to deliver the upper hand. But instead, he opted to wait, putting all his hope that she could move past her global ambitions to let individual humanity win out.

  She didn’t budge for several minutes. Jamie considered stepping past her to get the headset and check in with Zoe, but given the tension in the room and Kaftan’s overwhelming strength, waiting seemed like the smarter play. Finally, she walked over, not to the main console, but the small laptop connected into it. Her fingers flew over the keys, the tapping creating a constant percussion as she went through screen after screen, message after message. Several more minutes passed, and finally Kaftan closed all the screens and turned back to Waris.

  Once again, she knelt down beside him. “It’s done,” she said.

  Jamie braced himself in anticipation of whatever “done” meant.

  “I’ve uploaded the designs and initial data to a public server. Project Electron is now open source. Someone will finish this dream. But it won’t be us.” Any pretense of stoic resolve disappeared as Kaftan pressed a series of buttons near the capsule’s edge. A sharp hiss cut through the quiet, then the protective glass covering Waris’s head retracted. Kaftan reached in to cradle her husband’s face. “It won’t be us. It won’t be us, and I’m so sorry about that.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear, the briefest of sentiments before she tugged at each cable identified by Zoe.

  Five pops later, each accompanied by bursts of sparks, and then the monitors around the capsule went dark. All except for one, that was: a simple EKG meter that let its steady rhythm turn erratic before leading to a flat line and an unending high-pitched tone.

  Kaftan sat on the floor. Her eyes didn’t move from the capsule.

  Jamie got to his feet and grabbed the headset lying on the floor. “Zoe?” he said quietly.

  “Jamie! What the hell’s going on?”

  “We did it. Waris is gone.”

  “Holy shit. How’d you pull it off?”

  Kaftan still hadn’t budged. Jamie wondered if she even listened to the noise coming out of the tiny speaker in his hand. “I’ll tell you later. Can you cut the power?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I have to hover to reach it, but I think I have the strength to do it.”

  “Okay. Do it and get out. I’ll check back in in a few.”

  Seconds later, the lights dropped, wrapping them in darkness. A single pin of light appeared, so tiny that Jamie wasn’t sure if it actually existed. But then others joined it, dots filling out a sketch of brilliant blue light against a canvas of darkness, all pulling into form in the silhouette of a man.

  In his electric form, Waris walked over to his wife, a final surge seemingly to burn off the remaining power in the capsule. He extended a single finger, which she extended to match. Sparks flew off of him, leaving traces of singes and burns on her white lab coat, and Jamie watched as their fingers connected. Her mouth formed soundless words, and Jamie swore that he saw the blue figure nod in return.

  Then Waris disappeared, electricity seemingly folding into itself before being pulled down to the floor, a snake of brightness drawing back to a sparking exposed cable along the wall.

  The room lit up with a low red glow as the emergency lighting returned. Through the low light, a few fading sparks burned out and tufts of smoke dissipated where the blue figure had stood.

  From his back pocket, Jamie’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out only to see that not only did he now have full signal coverage, the photos had been transmitted to Chesterton, and even warranted a reply. Got the photos, it read, we’re coming in. Looks like the entire facility’s power is out.

  “Power is out?” he asked aloud.

  That question finally snapped Kaftan back into the moment. “How can power be out?” she asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.” From the observation room, smoke began to rise out of one of the stacks of hardware before it spit a miniature firework. The pyrotechnics ate up the hardware’s display, shattering the glass and replacing it with small flames.

  The headset came to life with Zoe’s voice. “Jamie? You there? ’Cause something bad is happening.”

  41

  MAYBE AN EARLIER VERSION of Zoe had a degree in engineering.

  That would have helped, given the massive wall of technology looking like it was about to hit catastrophic levels.

  “Define bad.” Jamie’s voice came in over the headset, and Zoe figured there was no science background bubbling under the surface of her memories. Everything in front of her looked like a mass of metal and wire and blinking lights and a few big hand-sized switches. If she had some sort of formal technical education, there probably would have been some sort of instinctive understanding of what sat in front of her, a “this goes to that goes to the other thing” logic that might have given a sense of why shit didn’t work.

  Instead, it simply looked like a bunch of stuff. “Well,” she said, brushing the hair out of her face despite the pain coming back in her arm. “This thing doesn’t want to shut down.”r />
  “That’s impossible. I just saw Waris disappear.”

  “Well, I think the right part shut down for Project Electron. Because I saw one part go dark when I threw the switch. But then lights started blinking and—Oh, oh shit.”

  “Zoe!”

  What she meant by “oh shit” was the fact that steam suddenly shot out of a pipe that tracked all around the basement walls, ending in the side of the hunk of metal in front of her. But she wasn’t going to explain that to Jamie. “Stuff is breaking.”

  The headset went quiet, which meant either Kaftan had exacted vengeance or Jamie was struggling to form a response. More things started beeping around her, except this time sparks flew from above, and not the kind that meant a blue figure made of electricity would show up for some nice heart-to-heart conversation. Something somewhere popped, causing a piece of metal debris to shoot by her head, and some distance away, she heard a rumble loud enough that she also felt it.

  “Motherfucker,” Zoe said to herself. “Jamie,” she said into the mic, back at normal volume but urgency tinting her words. “I’m just gonna start pushing buttons if I don’t get any advice.”

  This time, the entire room shook, perhaps the entire building above her. She couldn’t tell for sure, and though she had no memories of any specific earthquakes—at least not yet—she was betting on the overall experience being really close to this.

  “Okay, seriously. There’s like...” she did a quick count “...nine buttons here, four switches, and three really big switches. I’m just going to—” More flames erupted, this one from the console. “Make that eight buttons. So that’s one decision out of my hands.”

  “Zoe, things are getting worse up here.” Jamie’s voice hit somewhere between panicked and yelling. “Something blew up in the Project Electron room. And I hear things breaking everywhere—”

  “Get out of there! Like now!”