Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle

by Reynolds, Tom

  The final bell rings at 2:30 p.m. Most of the campus is smiling and in a great mood. Their day is over, after all, and they have the rest of the afternoon to themselves.

  It's a different story for me and the handful of others that are making their way toward the far end of campus, heading to a fictional after-school activity, mindful that there's no one acting overly curious, seeing if they can tag along.

  When I make my way to the classroom that Michelle showed me, room 143, the door is already locked. A locked door means that the elevator is currently in use. Standard protocol for this is to immediately walk away and avoid bringing any attention to it. Standard protocol also says that I'll either have to wait the four or five minutes it'll take for the elevator to come back up or make my way to the men's room and use one of the elevator stalls. It's a little more than slightly humiliating to have to travel via toilet after being used to flying wherever I wanted to go before.

  15

  Upon reaching the facility via toilet elevator, I quickly realize that I actually don't have any idea where I'm going. This place is massive, and Michelle didn't give me any instructions yesterday other than to just come here after classes were over.

  Today is much busier than yesterday. The hall is full of metahumans finding their way to the various rooms where they'll train, learn, or be tested. Some are powered up already and in their full uniforms. The various colors, suit types, cowls, helmets, and domino masks make this place look like the weirdest Halloween party you've ever been to.

  No one seems to notice me standing in the middle of the hallway, looking completely lost. I guess some things don't change. An older man, or at least too old to be a student, locks eyes with me and heads my way.

  "Connor?" he asks.

  "That's me."

  "I'm John Foresight. Michelle asked me to come find you. I'm one of the instructors here, and I'll be walking you through your tests this afternoon."

  "Sounds good."

  I wait for him to say something else, like which way we should head or which room to go to, but he doesn't speak. Instead, he just stands there, staring at me, seemingly waiting for me to say something.

  "You don't recognize me?" he asks finally.

  "Um, I don't think so. Did I meet you yesterday when Michelle was showing me around? Sorry, I'm not great with faces."

  "No, no, no. I suppose you might not recognize me out of uniform. I get that. The Blue Lightning costume was pretty iconic."

  I just continue staring at him since I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

  "Really? How old are you?" he asks.

  "Sixteen."

  "Hmm, that doesn't make sense. You're certainly old enough to remember."

  "Oh, wait a minute. Were you the guy that got stuck up on the roof of the Imperial State Building when all the metabands stopped working during the first wave?"

  The name Blue Lightning finally rings a bell with me.

  "I wasn't stuck-"

  "Yeah, I remember now! You were completely naked because you didn't have anything on underneath your suit, and once your metabands powered down, the suit disappeared and you were stuck."

  "All right, first off, there are a lot of factual inaccuracies to the story that got passed around. I wasn't naked. I had my underwear on at the time. And I'd never used my metabands without clothing underneath before, contrary to what all the tabloids said. That was the first time, and I just happened to be the victim of some very bad timing.

  “And second, I wasn't stuck. The door on the roof was unlocked, and I was able to get back to the ground level on my own. I just had to walk the 109 flights."

  "In your underwear?"

  "That part's not important. Listen, I'm here to run you through your tests today. We can discuss my exploits from my time as a metahuman later."

  John turns to begin walking, waving for me to follow. We walk past a series of doors with mysterious labels on them: “Water Tank,” “Vacuum,” “Speed Track.”

  "Don't worry. You'll get the chance to get a closer look at all of those soon, Connor," he says, noticing that I'm not following as closely behind as he would like. "Here we are. After you."

  John opens a door that is simply labeled “Strength” and steps aside to allow me to enter first. The first thing I'm struck by is just how quiet this room is. The instant the door clicks closed, it feels like someone hit the mute button on reality. All of the chatter and ambient noise from the hallway full of students are instantly silenced.

  "It's a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it. The silence that is. Once you see a few of the other chambers, you'll understand why all of these rooms need to be soundproofed so extensively."

  I look around the room for a place to put down my backpack and find a metal stool near the far wall. The room itself is small and mostly empty. The walls are made of the same brushed aluminum found lining the hallways outside. They're without any type of markings, the lone exception being what looks like a touch screen embedded into one of the walls.

  In the center of the room are two handlebars. One is in the middle of the floor, attached to a small base. The other is hanging from a thin cord attached to the ceiling.

  "So, first things first. This is the strength testing room."

  "Michelle showed me a strength training room yesterday, but it didn't look anything like this."

  "That's because it's not a strength training room. It's a strength testing room, Connor. There's a very big difference there."

  I'm the only one in the room with him, but John is speaking like he's delivering the State of the Union address. It's like the room is full of thousands of people hanging on his every word, but I can't see them.

  "Yeah, they didn't have anything like this back when I was out there slugging it out. Wish they had, to be honest. It would have been nice, you know, just to know exactly how strong I was. Sure, people may say I was one of the strongest metas that there has ever been, but you're always gonna get a couple of knucklehead naysayers who want to see the empirical proof."

  John is rolling up his sleeves, revealing less than impressive forearms, and I'm not quite sure what he's doing.

  "These machines here were built and designed, with some input from yours truly, to accurately gauge metahuman strength. Since we aren't entirely sure where the upper limit of that strength may be, a new way of measuring it had to be designed. You didn't think we just used plain old weights did you?"

  "Actually, I never really-"

  "Of course we didn't. They'd be too big! Way too big. And heavy, naturally. So we designed these babies. Bored holes way into the earth, even farther down than we are now. They rely on Earth's natural gravitational field and electromagnetism to provide resistance."

  "So like a big magnet?" I ask.

  This question seems to puzzle John, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure this was exactly what he was just talking about. Instead of answering my question, he plants his feet on either side of the floor-mounted handle, and I start to see where this is going.

  "Do me a favor, Connor? Head over to that wall there and ratchet this bad boy up, will you?" He asks in a way that's not really asking while rubbing his hands together and stretching from side to side in preparation.

  I walk over to the wall where the touchscreen is embedded and tap the screen to wake it up. A bunch of abbreviations and numbers appear. Dozens of them. This thing is obviously a lot more complicated than John has let on. I turn to ask him what I should press next.

  John is hunched over the handlebar, both hands firmly gripped. At first I think he's just getting into position to lift it, but then I notice his face. Its color is changing shades from beet red to a deep, dark purple. His lips are pursed and his eyes are squinting almost shut. He's trying to lift the handlebar with literally all of his might. I'm not sure what to do or say, but a second later, it doesn't matter.

  "Argh!" John yells as he exhales a huge breath. He lets go of the handlebar but remains doubled ov
er, breathing in and out in ragged gasps as the natural color begins slowly filling his face back in.

  "Ha! Well, that's what I get for thinking I'd still be able to lift the kinda weight I could back when I was a metahuman. Still, had to give it a try. I got it off the base there a little bit, but she just didn't want to give me anymore," he says to me.

  He didn't move the handle off the base. It's lying exactly where it was when we first entered the room. "So, how much weight was on there?" he asks, gesturing toward the touchscreen.

  "Oh, I'm not sure. I couldn't really figure out how to use it," I tell him.

  "The whole thing's in metric because of the German guys who built it. Tap that button on the right side of the screen and it'll let you know how much weight was on there. Just give me the metric units, and I'll do the math for you."

  I do as he instructs and then read out the numbers to him.

  "Umm, it looks like it was set to fifty kilograms."

  "That's impossible. You're probably looking at it wrong. You've probably still got it set to pounds."

  "But pounds are even less than kilograms, right?"

  "Never mind, it doesn't matter," John says in an attempt to save face that's about thirty seconds and fifty kilograms too late. "We're not here for you to watch me lift weights ..."

  "Right, I mean ... you didn't really lift it."

  "It moved a little bit. Besides, it's set for metahumans, so, you know, there's probably something like that to it. I'm not really one hundred percent sure how these things work."

  "Didn't you say you helped design this?"

  "Design it, yes. But design is different from engineering it. You can explain to someone how you want something to work until you're blue in the face—"

  "—or purple."

  "Right, or purple," he says, not getting the joke. "But at the end of the day, they're going to build it the way they want to build it, and there's not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it. In any case, come on over here. Let's get you saddled up."

  John rotates his arm around his shoulder socket while massaging it with the other hand as he crosses the room and exchanges places with me.

  "Okay, first we're going to need to get some baseline readings without your metabands activated," he says.

  I bend over and pick up the handle, not expecting it to be as light as it is. While I was only intending on getting ready, I've actually pulled the weight up without really trying.

  "No, you have to do it without your metabands active first," John says.

  "They aren't."

  He looks puzzled for a minute, as though he can't understand how I could lift more weight than he could, despite the fact that John looks like he hasn't lifted much more than a sandwich in the past ten years.

  "All right, well, put the weight down then. I must have calibrated it when I pulled it just now and it reset itself for non-metahumans," he says, still trying to make ridiculous excuses for himself. "It doesn't matter. Let's see what we've got here now."

  He taps on the screen while simultaneously pulling a pair of bifocals out of the front pocket of his salmon-colored polo shirt. With his glasses in place, he squints in front of the screen, trying to read it. Finally he seems to have found what he was looking for and begins tapping at the display, pushing up virtual levers and twisting virtual dials. After a few seconds of this, he pulls his hand back to look everything over and seems to be pleased with where it's all set.

  "All right. We're all ready then. Do your thing," he says.

  I'm not sure exactly what he means, but I assume he means to pull the handle again. I begin to lean over and place my hands on the holds.

  "No, no, no. Do your thing first."

  He sees that I'm still confused and elaborates.

  "Activate your bands. The metabands. Turn on your metabands."

  "Oh," I say, slightly embarrassed that I didn't understand.

  With a thought, my metabands appear on my wrists, and I quickly strike them together for activation and then lean over again to grab the handles.

  "Wait," John says, stopping me a second time. "That's it?"

  I'm not quite sure what he means. I haven't even tried to lift the handlebar yet.

  "That's all you do? Connor, Connor, Connor," he says, abandoning his post at the touchscreen and crossing back over toward me. "These," he begins, one hand on my shoulder, the other grabbing my right arm by the metaband, "are not toys. Nor are they just a simple tool.

  “These, Connor Connelly, are the most amazing technological achievement that man has ever seen. These are what separates us from the rest of humanity," he says, strongly implying that he still considers himself a metahuman. "When you turn these on, it's not like turning on a toaster. It's like turning on life itself. It's like turning on millions of years of human achievement and understanding. It's like turning on the culmination of everything the human race stands for. You don't just click them together like you're unlocking the door to your car across a parking lot. You turn them on with some style, some panache. You've got to show the world just how amazing all of it really is."

  "But isn't one of the first rules that you shouldn't let anyone else know you've got them when you're not disguised?"

  "Yeah, yeah, of course. But that doesn't mean you should forgo any theatrics when you turn them on, even if it is just for an audience of one."

  "What do you mean, theatrics?"

  "Showmanship. Okay, let me see if I can explain it in simpler terms. What do you usually shout out when you activate your metabands? Pretend this isn't just training and you’re in a real pickle. What do you yell out?"

  "I'm not really sure I follow."

  "Geez, you're really going to make me work for this, huh kid? Okay, so when I had my metabands, whenever I activated them, I would accompany the activation with the phrase—" He clears his throat before shouting in an extremely loud voice, "’All good and evil across the lands, beware the power of my metabands!’"

  John looks at me with a smug smile as the words he’s just screamed continue to echo throughout the room. I am at a complete loss for words.

  "So you would yell that when you turned on your metabands?"

  "Every time."

  "But ... why?"

  "Forget it, Connor. If I'm going to have to explain everything to you, we're never going to get through all of these tests today, and we're already behind as it is."

  While this doesn't answer my question, I'm happy to drop the subject if it means hurrying this up past its current glacial pace. John taps a few buttons on the touchscreen and then turns back to me once he's ready.

  "All right, Connor. I'm going to start you off at five thousand pounds. That might be a little overly ambitious, but we can always back it off. Whenever you're ready, just go ahead and give that-"

  John stops talking because I've already lifted the handle up to my chest.

  "Hmm, all right then. Looks like you're a little bit stronger than I thought. Go ahead and lower it back down there and let's try a little bit more weight."

  I do as he says and wait while he readjusts the machine. On his mark, I bend over and pick up the handlebar again.

  "Amazing. That's decuple the amount of weight," he says, more to himself than to me.

  "Decuple?" I ask.

  "Ten times. You're going to have to start picking up on this scientific lingo, Connor. I can't explain everything, you know."

  I place the handlebar back on the floor and wait while he, again, adjusts the parameters on the screen.

  "Okay, let's see what you've got," John says, motioning for me to try picking up the handlebar again.

  I wipe my hands on my jeans to remove the sweat from my palms and lean over the bar. Wrapping my fingers around the handlebar, I can already feel that it is much more firmly seated in place than during my prior two attempts. I try pulling it upward just using the strength in my arms, but it won't budge.

  "Ah, there it is. You had me worried for a second that there was
something wrong with the equipment. I'll go ahead and readjust it back down a bit."

  "No," I say as he turns to the display. "Just give me a second. My stance wasn't right."

  Fully aware that now I've got to at least pull this stupid handlebar off the floor if I don't want to look like an ass, I readjust my feet and make my stance a little wider. I squat down, remembering that thing people always say about lifting with your legs and not your back. Or is it back and not your legs? I'm not completely sure, but I'm going to use everything I've got this time.

  At first it feels like the handlebar just isn't going to budge. I start to feel bad for laughing to myself about John's attempt now that I'm sure my face is turning ten different shades of purple too. But then, I feel a slight give. The handlebar is no longer completely resting on the floor, and I can feel that I'm supporting the full weight. I dig down deep, hoping that if I pop my arm out of my shoulder the metabands will take care of fixing it later. I don't think I’d want John popping it back in.

  Unleashing a weird grunting noise that I didn't know I had in me, I slowly pull the handlebar further, past my ankles, then my knees. By the time it's up to my waist, it starts to feel easier. Maybe it's just that the worst part is over, or maybe my metabands are just realizing I need a little more juice and helping to compensate.

  Finally, almost ten full seconds later, I've pulled the handlebar all the way up to my chest. I look over to John for the first time and his jaw is practically on the ground. I can feel my arms trembling and the muscles beginning to burn.

  "Can I drop it?" I ask through clenched teeth.

  There's no response from John, who is still just staring at me.

  "Can I drop it?" I ask, a little more urgently this time.

  John snaps out of it long enough to give a nod, and I immediately release the handlebar. It snaps back into place on the ground instantly. The metallic clang of the bar hitting the floor with that kind of momentum rings throughout the training room. I'm bent over with my hands on my knees, wheezing to catch my breath.

  "How much was that?" I ask through gasps.

  John looks back at the screen, double-checking the weight to make sure before he tells me.