Resistance

by Samit Basu

  “Welcome to Manhattan,” says Aman.

  The leader is still in pursuit. He’s folded in his batwings, and is following them Spidey-style now, sending thin black cables shooting out from his shoulders and smashing into buildings, swinging through the streets like some future-dream Tarzan. Uzma watches him draw close and fall away, and shudders. He seems to have no face, just a blank black mask.

  They streak eastwards through Lower Manhattan. They almost lose their pursuer at the Stock Exchange, but he finds them again at Wall Street Station.

  Vir’s out of breath. Uzma can hear him moaning and grunting as he flies. He goes through patches of dizziness, blanking out mid-flight, just dropping, and then waking up just before they hit the street. Uzma feels like she’s on the world’s worst roller coaster. But when Aman tells them their final destination, Vir finds a final burst of energy, and they soar up and away towards the New Twins.

  NYPD skybikers race along with them, sirens fill Uzma’s head. She and Vir are both familiar faces in New York, the cops are more interested in their pursuer. As Uzma watches, he swings up to a marauding skybike, extends his arm into a long sword, and smashes it through the rider’s skull. A second later, he’s vaulting off the bike, and grappling on to a tower in a stomach-churning swing that almost brings him right next to Uzma.

  And then Uzma’s worst fears come true.

  At the peak of one swing, the leader sends a black rope arcing their way. Vir screams in agony as the end of the rope transforms into a harpoon and cuts right through the armour into his foot. They’re at the New Twin towers now, but Vir falters. Uzma watches in horror as the faceless man pulls himself up and towards them, and Vir loses control, flailing and flapping as they hurtle downwards.

  “New plan!” yells Uzma.

  “No,” says Aman. “The roof. You have to make it.”

  Vir roars and speeds upwards. Uzma feels her fingers slipping, and hangs on to him with sheer force of will. The leader pulls himself closer.

  Windows speed by, horror-stricken office workers’ faces flash past her. She looks down again, into the shapeshifter’s empty face. There’s a crack where his mouth should be. It looks like a twisted smile.

  “Why the roof?” she screams. “What’s on it?”

  Vir reaches the roof. He throws Uzma forward, and collapses. The harpoon in his foot shrivels away. A sound of flapping wings, and the shapeshifter appears above the roof, batwinged, deadly.

  Vir’s armour crumbles and falls off him. Through a dizzy, delirious haze, Uzma watches it as if there’s nothing else in the world. It folds at incredible speed, and unwraps itself upwards, a high-speed Lego stop-motion tower. It forms a crude human shape. She hears the sound of running feet.

  “I am,” says Aman.

  The armour opens up and folds itself around him mid-leap. A pulse of energy races through the roof. The shapeshifter lands lightly near Uzma. There’s a blinding white flash, a shrill scream.

  Aman leaps over them, his armour whining and throbbing. He lands and hits the shapeshifter with another plasma blast. As the super’s body twists and churns, Aman leaps up to it. He raises his arms and grabs the shifter’s head.

  Uzma hears a sizzle and smells something horrible burning.

  She looks up. Aman stands on the roof. Near his feet is a twitching waist-high blob, wobbling, hissing. Gaps open on its surface, and she hears screams coming out of them as Aman pounds more plasma into the creature. A minute later, it’s over, and the shapeshifter is a puddle on the New Twins roof.

  Aman races to Uzma. They embrace.

  “We’re in trouble,” he says. “Utopic has Jai.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Agent N gives the hoverjet pilots their instructions, and then walks slowly out of the cockpit. His face is grim as he strides through the armoury, and the launching bay. Before entering the holding area, he takes a deep breath and straightens his tie. He mutters a few motivational phrases he picked up that morning from a self-help book. He considers ghosting through the door, giving Jai a bit of a surprise, but instead he counts to ten, mans up and steps forward.

  As the door slides open, he sees Jai standing in the middle of his makeshift cell, arms extended unnaturally at his sides, fingers bent into claws, head bowed. Beside him, his young captor holds her tiger stance with grace, though not without effort, great beads of sweat dot her forehead. N clears his throat and rubs his hands together.

  “We have several teams combing the planet for you at this very moment,” he says. “I’ve just sent word to them. They’ll be relieved. We were all looking forward to meeting you. But I confess we were all terrified of finding you.

  “The young lady to your right is someone you’ve actually met before. May I present the Shadow Puppeteer? You almost caught her last year, when she made the old Statue of Liberty walk. I can see from her face that that was far easier than holding you prisoner.”

  N considers patting the Puppeteer on the shoulder, but she shoots him an anguished glance and shakes her head, and he decides against it.

  “I am known as Agent N,” he says. “It’s an honour to meet you, Jai. I’m a huge fan. And I have so much to say. I wish we could have just sat down over a drink and discussed it, but I frankly don’t dare. But may I start off by saying that we – by which I mean my employers, the board of Utopic, and myself – are your well-wishers, and want to be your friends. And that once I’ve laid down my proposal to you, we will land the jet and set you free. The only reason we’re causing you this discomfort now is that we needed to ensure we had your attention while we explained our intentions.”

  Jai stands perfectly still.

  “Is there any way you could release just enough control to let him shake his head?” N asks the Puppeteer. She rolls her eyes and grimaces. Jai’s shoulders twitch, and the Puppeteer groans as she reapplies herself to the task of keeping him still.

  “Well, we shall make do,” says N.

  “Yes,” says Jai. “We shall.”

  He straightens himself up and smiles. The Puppeteer crumples like a paper doll and collapses, moaning. Jai looks at her with interest.

  “She’s good,” he says. “But I’ve had better.”

  He thunders towards N, hand outstretched to grip his throat. His hand passes through the agent, and he staggers, but collects his balance immediately.

  “Coward,” he says.

  “Agreed,” says N. “Another word for that is smart. Now, Jai, please, before you do anything hasty—”

  “I wonder how long it would take me to kill every person on his jet,” says Jai.

  “A few seconds,” says N. “You could also just jump out of the window and make your escape. We’re above the Atlantic now, but it wouldn’t take you long to swim to wherever you wanted to go. Or you could just take control of the jet.”

  Jai nods. “But you want me to hear you out before I go,” he says.

  “Exactly,” says N. “Should we get that drink now?”

  They sit in the passenger cabin behind the holding area and a crewman brings old-school military Old Monk rum for Jai and a cobalt-coloured cocktail for Agent N. Jai takes a deep swig and sets his glass down with a quiet smile. N doesn’t touch his drink.

  “Please tell me you didn’t just try to poison me,” says Jai.

  “Of course not. It wouldn’t work, would it?”

  “No. So you can’t eat or drink when you’re in this form?”

  “No.”

  “That makes sense. But why aren’t you falling through the jet?”

  N smiles. “If we were following the laws of physics, Jai, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “I suppose not,” says Jai.

  “Finding the limits of our powers is one of the best things about having them, isn’t it? You know, I’ve spent time in a team whose exclusive mission was figuring out how to kill you.”

  “Time well spent, clearly. Did you reach a conclusion?”

  “Sending you out into orbit
was the most popular theory. We thought about dropping you into a volcano—”

  “Someone tried that a few years ago. It’s not nice. I showed him that. Throwing me into space is the most popular one. Good luck getting me up there, though.”

  “I see. We also thought the sea floor might work. Put you at the bottom of Mariana Trench and see what happened.”

  “That’s not a bad one, actually. I’ve never tried that.”

  N smiles. “Well, hopefully you’ll never have to. Of course, capturing you and keeping you unconscious for long enough to put you where we want is the main problem. And we’ve tried that for a decade now. We’ve tried to find replacements as well. But the First Wave was something special, wasn’t it? Other people have your powers, but you – you stand alone. It’s the same problem with that internet supertroll, Aman Sen. We had him killed, but we think he managed to leave this cyber entity behind, a sort of online version of himself. Now all the superhackers we have can’t manage to delete it from the internet. It just keeps getting worse. In a way, he’s attained immortality.”

  “Aman Sen is alive,” says Jai.

  N’s eyes widen. “Do you know where he is?” he asks. “He could be very useful.”

  “He could,” says Jai. “But he won’t. I should tell you I’m beginning to get a little impatient.”

  “All right,” says N. “Then let’s talk work.

  “If you had to name the default global villains of the twenty-first century so far, apart from supervillains, it would be terrorists and big corporations. You could say politicians as well, of course, but there’s no point in human history when politicians weren’t a central problem. When supers arrived in 2009, that changed. You changed it. Suddenly there were new people, new Alexanders and Genghis Khans, capable of transforming the world singlehanded.

  “And then Utopic was formed. Its chief aim: to create a world where humans and supers could live together in harmony. A sustainable world. A noble goal, if we say so ourselves.”

  “You do. You say so every day, but that doesn’t make it true. Your goals and mine were the same, conquest and power, but you lacked the muscle to take my direct approach,” says Jai.

  “Yes. Which is perhaps why we have succeeded. You could say we were like any other megacorp – worldwide presence, corporate greed, reckless endangerment of powerless humans and natural resources, widespread corruption. And then something changed.”

  Jai shrugs. “Make your point,” he says. “You want me to work with you. What do you want me to do, and what do you want to give me in return?”

  “We want you to rule the world.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Hear me out. It’ll all make sense. Look, we’re crossing the Atlantic in a fast jet. If you break it and jump into the ocean, you’ll have to swim a long way. There’s really nothing else particularly productive you can do with this time.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “The Utopic board of directors, at this point, is the most powerful collective of people in the world. We own most of the UN. Most of the US, the EU and South-East Asia. Significant parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and nearly all of Africa. Through subsidiaries, partners, governments and treaties, we run the world. Energy, defence, food, technology, media, entertainment. If there’s a pie worth eating, we’ve got a finger in it. The ultimate comic book evil corporation, yes?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “But then something changed. The board of directors turned super during the early part of the Second Wave. And what a board it was. Businessmen with hearts. Tycoons from across the world, each known for his or her dedication to the sciences, the arts, humanitarian causes, all award-winning leaders of the world.”

  “Such love. They must pay you very well.”

  “I can’t complain. Six extraordinary individuals who run the world today. There should have been seven, but you killed one of them – the head of the Hisatomi zaibatsu in Japan, one of the founders of the company.”

  “So I hear. And his son got his spot.”

  “No. The son was deemed unstable. If you’re on the Utopic board and you don’t show up for meetings…”

  “What powers did they get?”

  “Immortality. Each and every one. It makes sense, doesn’t it? They were all obsessed with their legacies, and with making the world a sustainable utopia.”

  “You should have an elevator music soundtrack. I don’t need to sit here and listen to you sucking up to your masters, you know.”

  “Well, they deserve it. I know it seems unlikely, Jai, but they are all good people. Six Immortals – it sounds like something from a legend, doesn’t it? Four men, two women. The greatest leaders in the world. From all over the world. And now immortal. That’s what changed everything.

  “Big business. Megacorps. Ruthless beasts that run on maximising profits and exploiting resources in any way they can. This is their greatest strength, and their biggest problem. But when the world’s largest company is headed by immortals, things change. The company starts thinking about the long run. About the world we live in, and how it can be fixed.”

  “By building zoos for trapping supers. By cutting them up and seeing what’s inside,” says Jai. “Smart.”

  “We were only following in your footsteps.”

  “I was fighting a war. Your zoos are for profit.”

  “What you call zoos, we call SuperCentres. Most of the revolutionary improvements in the world over the last decade have been thanks to supers trained and employed by Utopic. Look at what we’ve achieved in the last ten years alone, Jai. Global warming? Solved. Oil crisis? Food crisis? Water crisis? Energy crisis? Avoided. Recession overturned. New technology? Research? Progress? Terraforming? Exponentially accelerated.”

  “So you claim.”

  “It’s all true. Watch the news.”

  “Which you own.”

  “Utopic is going to turn our world into a good place to live for everyone alive on it. We run the world. But we are good people. We make things better.”

  Jai crosses his arms. “You could put this all in a presentation,” he says. “Why have you come to me?”

  Agent N licks his lips. “Do you know the world is supposed to end in three days?”

  Jai gets up. “Enough,” he says.

  “Sit down,” says N, his voice suddenly harsh. “This is important.”

  A smile spreads slowly across Jai’s face. He returns to his seat.

  “Let’s talk about nature,” says N.

  “Let’s not,” says Jai.

  “Indulge me. You, me, the Utopic board, and a few thousand others. We are the next stage. Post-human. In ancient times, we’d have been considered demi-gods. Maybe others like us were. Maybe millennia from now there will be no supers, and our exploits will be legend, and young humans will read about us and think we were works of fiction. Who knows how long this will last? Who knows when it will end? But while we have this chance, we must step forward. We must move the world into a new era.”

  “Yes, yes. Why are you called Agent N?” asks Jai. “What does it stand for?”

  “Nemo.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Nigel,” says N. “That’s my name. Nigel. Nothing major.”

  “You’re not doing too well, minor Nigel,” says Jai. “You’re giving me generic publicist-speak for a company I have no interest in. You want to live in a perfect world. Good for you. You want me to set it up for you? Me? Do you even know who I am?”

  “You’re the apex predator, Jai. You’re the last piece in our plan. But I have to explain what the plan is.”

  “Today?”

  “If all this – the super phenomenon – were just as simple as evolution, our goals would have been clearly defined. It would have been supers against humans. We’d have fought them. We’d have won. We’d have emptied the earth from end to end and taken it for ourselves.

  “But it’s not so simple, because we are not really a new species. Supers don�
��t breed supers. We know. We’ve tried. Our science cannot tell supers apart from humans at a cellular level. We need humans to survive because, apart from our powers, we are still human. There’s no escaping that. Do you read comics?”

  “I’ve read a few,” says Jai. “There used to be books lying around the Unit headquarters. I’d been turned into a superhero against my will. I thought I should find out how I was supposed to behave.”

  “And most supers, at some point or other, have done exactly that. Modelled their behaviour on the spandex brigade. But that doesn’t work. Because comics were written for humans. So supers protected the innocent, helped preserve society. Human society. Heroes saved lives, held the earth together. For humans. Or they worked in the shadows, and feared humans. Feared being outcasts. And if they worked against humans, or killed people, they were villains. Megalomaniacs, tyrants, people to be super-punched. If this were one of those stories, Utopic would be an evil corporation.”

  “Run by immortals. And represented by some smooth-talking, suit-wearing, speech-making idiot,” says Jai. “Yes, that would never happen in real life.”

  “The point, Jai, is that humans and supers must coexist because new supers come from humans, not supers. But that doesn’t alter the fact that baseline humans are only relevant now as breeding stock. Raw material. In the new world, they will live lives better than ever before. Most of them will count themselves lucky to be able to experience this age of miracles. And if they are really lucky, they will never even know that mankind’s days are done. This end of man that the prophets have been going on about? That’s real. That’s us.”

  “I’m confused,” says Jai. “You want to coexist with humans. You want to end humans. You want to make the world a better place for humans. Pick one.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that the systems humans have set up don’t work any more. The world that the collective struggles of mankind have led us to has ripened, and has begun to rot. We have to build a new one. A better one. Where humans and supers can live together in peace, each strengthening the other.