by Wyatt Kane
Enhancer
By Wyatt Kane
Legal Stuff
Copyright © 2018 Wyatt Kane, All Rights Reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
1: Ty’s Crappy Existence
2: Missing The Bus
3: A Chance Encounter
4: Cybertech Device
5: Waffles
6: Architect
7: Hardly Heroic
8: An End To The Adventure
9: Technological Enhancement
10: Unexpected Guests
11: Stun Gun
12: Totally Mental
13: An Encouraging Grip
14: Crusher Fury
15: Choices
16: Sightseeing
17: Home
18: Dinah Lore
19: Feast
20: Workshop
21: A Second Enhancement
22: Upgrades For All
23: Plans
24: A Pleasant Surprise
25: Power
26: Possibilities
27: Glitter And Bling
28: The Concubine Club
29: A Change Of Plans
30: Message
31: Preparations
32: Wake Up Call
33: Confrontation
34: Hidden Strengths
35: Reversal
36: Waffles And Information
Author's Note
1: Ty’s Crappy Existence
“Ty! Ty Wilcox! You worthless slacker, you should have finished that by now! Hurry up, there’s shitters that need to be cleaned. And some of them are nasty!”
Ty Wilcox was 26 years old and had the misfortune of working as the janitor at the Concubine Club, the name of which gave the place a far fancier impression than it really deserved.
It was a pulsating labyrinth flooded with noise and strobe lights of different colors that never quite alleviated the dark. A seething, wall-to-wall mass of people gyrating to pseudo-musical beats that shook the walls.
It was a fun place to be if you were young, part of the cool crowd, and liked to pay too much for fancy colorful cocktails and designer drugs as you bumped and swayed into others like you.
Sadly, Ty wasn’t part of the cool crowd. Not even close. He was angular, geeky, and had a mop of sandy hair that refused to behave, and in a time when genetic modifications were the norm, he had none. As well, the noise and lingering miasma of alcohol weren’t his thing. Given the choice, he much preferred drinks with friends over the noise and madness of the Club.
Yet he had little choice. He was at the Club more often than not, working to make ends meet in the city of New Lincoln where poverty was rife. It was the only job he’d been able to find after dropping out of his cybertech course halfway through with an A- average and mounting debt.
Of course, with his grades and the fact that the university itself was owned by one of the mega-corporations specializing in what he was studying, it might have made more sense for them to help him out.
But no. He’d learned the hard way that students weren’t resources to foster, but income streams to be exploited for years after they had completed their studies.
“Yes ma’am,” Ty said, glancing up from what he was doing and immediately wished he hadn’t.
His boss, Angie Cunningham, loomed over him like an enormous green mountain, her profoundly ugly features twisted into an expression of disdain and a mop in her hand.
The image was almost enough to make Ty physically ill. Angie was only a few years older than him but looked closer to forty. With the body modifications she’d had done, she resembled nothing so much as an enormous, warty toad, right down to the color of her skin.
Anyone else who looked like Angie would have done something about their weight, but she seemed proud of her noxious look. It was as if it was a status symbol to her. A source of pride and an expression of the power she held over her staff.
Like Ty.
‘Angie the Hutt,’ most of the staff called her, after an old film that still resonated with certain groups.
“Will do. I’m nearly done here,” Ty added, his tone respectful for no reason other than that he wanted her to go away and leave him alone. He was elbow deep in the guts of an entertainment machine, a dancing game that had been popular several years ago, trying to get it to work.
Of all his regular tasks, this was the only one that he really enjoyed. It made the rest of his job almost tolerable and gave him a little self-respect. Which, of course, Angie knew full well, and delighted in trying to take it from him.
It was no surprise that she had turned up when she did. As Ty worked on the machine, two girls, customers of the Club, had been chatting with him. Although yelling might have been a better description. They were young, in their early twenties, and displayed genetic modifications more typical than Angie’s. The one on the left had a unicorn horn growing out of her forehead, which Ty thought was interesting but not really practical. The other had the ears and tail of a fox, the latter of which she twitched back and forth.
Ty’s acquiescence and display of respect weren’t enough. Angie looked from Ty to the girls and back again.
“You’d better,” she said, her face breaking out into a broad, vindictive smirk that told Ty that she knew exactly what she was doing. “Those shitters have your name written all over them, and I am damn sure I’m not going to clean them.”
She and Ty both knew from long experience that nobody wanted to flirt with the toilet cleaner guy. The tech guy who fixed the machines, sure. But the toilet cleaner guy was the lowest of the low. The most disease-ridden rat in the alley. The piece of dung on the underside of her shoe.
As if to drive the point home, Angie the Hutt added something for the girls. “Don’t waste your time on this one. He’s mostly useless. And I wouldn’t want him touching me, given that his hands tend to be covered in shit all day long. Who knows what sort of diseases he could pass along?”
It worked. Over the ongoing beat of the music, Ty could hear the girls giggle as they drifted away as well as Angie’s mocking laugh.
Ty put his head down so Angie couldn’t see his irritation. He could have ripped the guts out of the machine or tweaked it to the point where nobody would be able to fix it again. It wasn’t even close to the main source of revenue for the Club, but every week it turned over significant credit. They would miss it if it no longer worked.
But Angie had made a point of threatening him at least three times a week ever since he started. She said if he ever failed to fix a machine, that would be it. “Guys like you are a dime a dozen,” she said. And she was right. As far as society at large was concerned, Ty Wilcox was a loser, a no-hoper, without any hope of a ticket to anything good.
And cleaning toilets wasn’t exactly a skill. If Ty failed to fix a machine, he would be out on the street before his shift ended.
Instead of sabotaging the machine and his future, such as it was, all at once, Ty tweaked a faulty connection just enough for the machine to burst back into life, adding its own metallic music into the cacophony of the rest of the Club. Then Ty closed the access panel and screwed it in place.
Angie Cunningham was still there with her vile smirk and her mop. She thrust the latter into Ty’s hand and said, “Get in there, big guy.”
2: Missing The Bus
Angie had calle
d Ty a big guy, but that was no more than mockery on her part. In reality, he was five foot eight, skinny, and had a pasty complexion.
Sure, he would have liked to be taller. He also wouldn’t have minded a pair of devil horns and maybe a tail. With his thinness, Ty could have made it work, and he knew that girls were attracted to that sort of thing even if his hair was a few shades too light. He could even maybe grow a pale goatee to complete the look.
But he just didn’t have the credits. He couldn’t afford it.
As Ty mopped out the floor of the men’s bathroom and tried not to think about the noisome stench that emanated from two of the stalls, he reflected that Angie was right. And society in general. He was a loser. He had a crap job working under a vindictive boss and no prospects for improvement, no girlfriend, and he lived in a tiny, shabby apartment which shared with a friend.
Effectively, Ty was a non-player character in the game of life.
Growing up, he had never expected to turn out like this. He was bright enough to do well at school, and his interest in tech should have stood him in good stead. Maybe he wouldn’t have ever been the most legendary hero in life’s quest, but surely he could have sat at the table. He could have been a sidekick, or one of the questing party.
But there were a million guys like him in the city of New Lincoln. Some of them were smarter than he was, more capable, more gifted at figuring things out. Many others weren’t so good either, but as it turned out, that didn’t matter as much as whether or not they could afford to finish the course.
Ty had only managed a partial scholarship, and his family had never been wealthy. He struggled as long as he could but it wasn’t enough. So while his classmates got to work for the mega-corporations, doing what Ty enjoyed doing, his lot in life was to clean toilets for a living and wonder how to get out of the hole he’d found himself in.
With a heavy sigh of regret over how messed up his life had become, Ty pushed open the door to the first stall and curled his lip in disgust. He couldn’t believe the extent of the mess. Or maybe he could. He’d seen it many times in the past. What he couldn’t understand was how the mess came about.
He muttered a curse under his breath. Had someone with explosive diarrhea just bent over and let fly? They couldn’t have been trying. Or maybe they had been trying really hard, to get as much of it everywhere except in the bowl.
It was beyond disgusting. Nauseating. As good a metaphor for Ty’s shitty existence as any.
And it stank! Truly, awfully, in such a way that caused the bile to rise in Ty’s throat. It was like he worked at a sewage farm, and he seriously worried about the health of the person who’d given birth to such a stench.
It was almost enough to make Ty retch.
He was unsure if a toilet brush and a mop would be sufficient to combat it. He wondered if maybe a fire hose would be the best bet, and couldn’t help but express his dismay.
“Could this day get any worse?” he murmured to no one other than himself.
Almost at once, he knew he should have kept his mouth shut.
As well as body mods, wearable tech was becoming more and more standard. Most of the customers in the Club had communication devices embedded somewhere on their bodies. Hand-phones were common for those into nostalgia, but many others had simple sensors in their skin that could be activated by touch. Some were clever enough to display holographic screens from which all sorts of apps could be activated.
While Ty would have given his right arm to have been able to play with that sort of thing, he had to make do with an old-fashioned smartphone.
He’d programmed an alarm into that smartphone to remind him when the last bus of the night was due to leave.
That alarm had just gone off, ringing into the comparative quiet of the bathroom and echoing off the walls like a high-pitched knell of incipient doom.
“Shit,” Ty said, ignoring the irony.
Ty’s shabby apartment was five miles away from the club in a high-density residential area. Not a fun walk at 3 am in the morning.
He knew there wasn’t much chance of catching the bus now, but he had to give it a go. Ty leaned the mop against the wall and headed back out into the club. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t just leave. He had to get Angie the Hutt’s permission first. He just hoped he could find her quickly enough….
She was standing just outside the bathroom with a superior smirk firmly in place.
As soon as he saw her, Ty’s heart sank. This was another one of her little games. She obviously knew what time it was and that he was supposed to have already finished his shift. His chances of not having to walk home were next to zero.
“Done already?” the toad-like woman said mockingly. “That was fast.”
Ty shook his head. “No, I haven’t finished. But–”
As soon as the word was said, the awful woman shook her head. “But nothing,” Angie the Hutt snapped. “I gave you a job to do. So do it.” She looked very pleased with herself, as if she knew very well what Ty would say next.
Even though it seemed hopeless, Ty tried to change her mind. “Angie, please, can you get someone else to do this? My last bus is about to leave and I don’t want to miss it.”
The toad-like woman’s smug, self-satisfied grin grew even broader. “Why should I care if it’s your last bus?” she said. She was a roadblock, a giant green slug standing between him and his bus, and there seemed to be no way through.
Ty hated having to beg but knew that’s what she wanted. It even worked every now and again. But even that, Ty knew, was deliberate and calculated. Angie was the type of woman who would allow her mind to be changed just often enough to encourage him to beg every time.
Ty imagined jamming her awful green head into the toilet she wanted him to clean. “Please? It’s five miles to my apartment, through some of the bad parts of town. It’s dangerous. I’ve been mugged three times in the last couple of months.”
“And why is that my problem?”
She said it in a tone that was flat-out hostile. Not even a hint of a joke. As soon as she did, Ty knew that this night, she wouldn’t budge.
“It isn’t, but I was hoping you might have it in your heart to help.”
Angie the Hutt had nothing in her heart except malice and bile. She shook her head. “Sorry, Ty,” she said, implying in her tone that she wasn’t sorry at all. “But there’s nobody I’d rather have cleaning up that mess than you. You’re lazy and slow and exactly suited for that sort of work. So go on, be a good boy, and maybe next time you’ll do your work just a little bit faster.”
Ty suspected at that point that the person responsible for the mess in the stall might have been Angie herself. It seemed like just the sort of thing she would do.
Even though his shift had already technically ended, he had no real choice. Hating Angie with everything he had, hating his whole life in the bargain, he turned back to the men’s bathroom.
3: A Chance Encounter
New Lincoln was a bustling city of more than 38 million people. At this time of year, it was cold during the night but there was no snow on the ground. There was, however, a light drizzle that made Ty shrug into his jacket as he trudged between tall buildings and through darkened streets. Sometimes his way was lit by flickering streetlamps. More often, it was lit by the glare of pink and blue neon signs.
Even at that time of the morning, with a couple of hours to go before dawn, the streets weren’t entirely empty. Homeless people shivered in dark alleys while others burned rubbish in bins in a time-honored tradition of trying to stay warm.
Nor were they the only people Ty had to worry about. In hidden corners, thieves, drug dealers, and illicit service operators were all plying their trade to the tune of ongoing traffic and distant police and ambulance sirens.
On some levels, New Lincoln was a wondrous place. The clientele at the Concubine Club was mostly wealthy enough that Ty suspected none of them would ever know the worst of it. But he wasn’t in that category. W
ith his rent, his loan repayments, and general living expenses, Ty was barely a single paycheck away from being one of the street people he avoided as he made his way home.
Yet to them now, he was one of the privileged.
It started raining more heavily before Ty was halfway home. His jacket was waterproof but didn’t come with a hood, so he shrugged into it is as far as he could. Then he hurried along, splashing through puddles that reflected the neon and trying to ignore the cold water that plastered his hair to his head and ran down the back of this neck.
With every step, he cursed Angie the Hutt and promised himself that one day he would not be subject to her vindictive ways. Yet, if it wasn’t for Angie’s cruelty, if she hadn’t decided on a malicious whim to keep him at work so that he missed his bus, his life may never have changed. He would have made it home to his bed safe and sound, but would never have witnessed the things he was destined to see.
Ty would never have met the superheroes that lived in the city. He would never have had the chance to become one himself, and the world would have been a much different place.
As he trudged through the streets feeling cold, miserable, and sorry for himself, he kept his wits about him. The slums of New Lincoln were not the right place to look at your feet and ignore everything else. And with the lights and the neon, the alleys were no darker than gloomy.
He clearly saw the homeless man charging toward him, his ratty trenchcoat billowing out behind him like a cape and his feet pounding through the puddles.
Ty reacted with fear. The homeless man was wailing out loud as he ran, an eerie sound that Ty couldn’t interpret. Ty hesitated, unsure what to do, his instincts shouting that either the homeless man was crazy or that he was about to attack.
As the man pounded closer, Ty tried to duck out of the way, but the running man had also corrected his course and spat curses at him. Ty had chosen the wrong option and was now stuck, still in the running man’s path, uncertain what he should do next.
“Get out of the way!” the man shouted, and shoved him roughly as he went past. The impact was enough to spin Ty about and make him lose his balance. He sat on the ground, soaking his trousers. He swore, at once relieved that the man was more mad than dangerous, and wondered why he was running.
