How to Defeat a Hero

by J Bennett

  Her lips purse. I try to imagine the machinations running through her brain. Then she uncrosses her arms, walks purposefully across the room, and sits on the couch next to Gold.

  “Alright, let’s start conspiring then,” she says. “That’ll make for some drama at least.”

  My hands shake a little as I set up Lysee’s personal cam drone to auto record. I sync it to my Band and station it to hover in a corner of the room.

  “Nitrogen, move a little to your left and come closer to the couch,” I tell him as I back up, watching the screen input on my Band. “K, we’re all in the shot. Here we go.”

  I hit record and explain the situation again—everything about being set up and my conviction that this next mission will be our last. This time I keep out Tatianna Wentworth’s name and lay the blame on shadowy interests in the town. The others play up their shocked reactions. Gold leaps off the couch, raises a fist, and releases an avalanche of Stream-appropriate curses.

  Mermaid rises from the couch as well and glares out the window, standing at the edge of the frame I marked out before I started recording.

  “So what are we going to do?” Sequoia eventually asks, setting me up perfectly.

  “Simple,” I say with a grin, “we choose our own adventure.”

  “A different mission?” Gold feigns uncertainty. “But The Professor won’t like that!”

  “We don’t have a choice,” I tell him. I do my old trick of letting my gaze settle on each henchman. In my mind, I imagine the music Leo will add to this scene for our future ep. The sound will begin to swell with power and purpose right about now. “We’re desperate,” I tell the team. “There’s power in that.”

  “We’ve got to pull off something good,” Mermaid says.

  “We’ve got to pull off something utterly enthralling,” I correct. “It has to be something no one’s done before. Like nothing the civvies in Biggie LC have ever seen!” I pound my fist into my hand. My heart is racing as the fake energy infects me. The others nod along.

  “I assume you have something in mind?” Mermaid says, turning back to the group. The light from the window turns her hair into spun gold.

  “Oh yeah.” I pause dramatically. Great pauses are the whipped cream on the tension pie, Tickles the Elf likes to say.

  After one more breath, I announce my big plan. “We shoot something up into the sky, like some huge cloud or something, that hovers over Biggie LC and blocks out the sun.” I wave my hands overhead to illustrate. “It will cast everything into darkness.”

  I smile smugly. I’d actually gotten the idea from a recent convo with my brother, Alby. I look around at my silent teammates and continue enthusiastically. “The entire town runs on solar power. With no sunlight, there’ll be no streetlights, no 3D printers, no drone deliveries. Even Bands will stop working without an external charge. All the other vil and cape shows will go down. Their cams won’t work. Everyone will be in the dark… except us!”

  I imagine a crescendo of music, then a dramatic silence in its wake as the cam pans to the surprised and rapt faces of my fellow henchmen. Except, when I glance around, I notice that my teammates are anything but rapt.

  Mermaid is already shaking her head. “No way we can pull that off in three days. How exactly are we supposed to—” here she tents her fingers into air quotes, “—shoot some huge cloud or something into the sky?”

  “Well, I haven’t exactly worked out all the kinks yet,” I manage. “I thought maybe Nitrogen would be able to…” I glance at Sequoia, begging for a lifeline.

  “You’re talking about interfering with the entire environment of the town,” he says slowly, an apology clear in his voice. “I don’t see how we could create an effect that would maintain a fixed position. And then we’d have to design a way to reverse the effect.”

  “But… but,” I stammer, “… people do stuff with the environment all the time. The U.N. is spraying seawater into clouds to lower the earth’s temp.”

  “Those are climate scientists,” Sequoia says. “They have highly specialized training.”

  “Not to mention legal permission from the U.N. and thoroughly tested equipment,” Mermaid adds.

  “And, besides, every town has solar battery reserves that can last for weeks,” Gold says. “We’d have to sabotage those, too.”

  My soul is a balloon and my teammates just jabbed it with a hundred needles.

  “Well, fine, you guys come up with something,” I huff.

  “It was a creative idea,” Sequoia offers.

  “No, it was sadpocalypse,” Gold says and then rubs his hands together. “Let’s see, let’s see.” He begins pacing. I bet he reads The Henchman’s Survival Guide. Tickles always says that movement grabs eyes and lens time.

  “Let’s steal a page from Shadow’s playbook and start blowing up buildings all over town,” he says. “That’d get attention.”

  “No!” I snap. Shadow’s grease-covered face and glowing red eyes seep into my mind. I feel again the terror of the night he stepped into the restaurant where I worked. When I close my eyes, I see the holo-clock bobbing above his wrist, counting down from ten minutes…

  “That’s… that’s not The Professor’s way,” I manage. “We shouldn’t do anything that puts people in serious danger.”

  “We’d give them some kind of warning,” Gold says with a shrug.

  “What’s our goal?” Mermaid asks. “What does The Professor want?”

  “Well, that depends,” Sequoia says. He moves closer to the couch. “His arch-nemesis is Beacon, of course, so anything he can do to defeat or punish her is always on the top of his list. But then he also wants to build and test new equipment.”

  “We don’t have time to build a new machine or weap,” I say.

  “But we can twist Beacon’s tits,” Gold replies, a smile growing on his face. “Her pretty boy is sitting in a cell in the lair. We dim Shine’s lights and she’ll come running.”

  A bolt of panic shoots through me. Sequoia speaks up, “But The Professor and I are already building the singularity pod. We need Shine for that.”

  “What’s the point if The Professor gets nabbed before you finish it?” Gold snaps back. “I say we use him now.”

  I open my mouth to speak up. We can’t put Adan… I mean, Shine in real danger. Before I can form a coherent sentence, Mermaid steps in.

  “Money. That’s what this bank heist was all about. The Professor wants money for supplies and equipment.”

  “… and paychecks,” Gold mutters.

  “We kidnap someone,” I say. “Someone we can ransom.”

  Gold throws up his hands. “We just tried to kidnap someone!”

  I ignore him. “What about the new police chief? What’s his name?”

  “Everyone and their service robo has kidnapped the police chief,” Gold says.

  “Uh… Reena Masterson?” I mumble.

  “She gets kidnapped once a month!” Gold groans.

  “Well, everyone with any fame in this town has already been kidnapped,” I snap back. “We could grab the school lunch lady. You wanna do that?”

  “Then we take someone from outside of town,” Sequoia says.

  Shocked silence falls across the room. My mouth actually drops open.

  Gold recovers first. “Dinosaur farts. We can’t pull off a heist outside of Biggie LC.”

  “All semi-reality activities have to stay within the borders of the specified semi-reality town,” I tell him. I may have skimmed most of the fine print of the resident contract when I moved to Biggie LC, but even I picked up on that part. It’s kind of the rule.

  “We went out of town to run the obstacle course,” Gold argues back. “That was half a state away.”

  “The Professor must have gotten special permission from the City Council for that,” I tell him. “They’d never give us a green light for something like this.”

  “You said we had to do something big,” Sequoia says simply.

  “This
is different,” I sputter. “Crimes committed outside of town are… crimes. We wouldn’t just lose our show and our jobs. We could get arrested, carted off to a drooly camp.” I know I’m breaking the fourth wall. None of this talk about our show, town rules, and City Council permission can go in a future ep, but right now that doesn’t matter. We’ve moved into a whole new realm of lobotomy.

  “They’re only crimes if we get caught,” Gold says quietly.

  All the excitement is draining out of me, replaced by a growing sense of dread.

  “Did you have someone in mind?” Mermaid asks, staring intently at Sequoia.

  He swallows, then nods. “Not only that, but I can get us access.”

  The four of us are quiet, each contemplating this new reality.

  “We need to all agree,” Mermaid says. She puts her hands on her hips. With the sun from the window shining behind her, she almost looks heroic. “We share the risks and the rewards.”

  This is a precipice. I know I need to back away, plug my ears, and break up this meeting at once. But if I do that, our show is over and so are my financial prospects. I remember how impossible it was to find any other work in town. I actually shiver at the memory of the terrbs platypus rap song I’d written in an attempt to garner pity tips from my tiny group of followers.

  The money I’ll earn from this show is the only thing keeping me in school and on my way to my degree. That degree is my ticket out of town. My mind tumbles down the familiar path of my greatest fear. If I lose this paycheck I’ll have to slink back home to Quincy and become just another subsister, hidden in a repurposed cargo container in a dusty square of land that even GPS doesn’t bother pinpointing.

  In the end, though, even this horrific prospect isn’t enough to convince me to jeopardize my freedom.

  Something else does.

  Not something. Someone.

  Alby.

  I look down at my Band. In the corner of my Alice Stream, I see a tiny thumbnail of his video message. I remember how the sunlight played across his face, how he looked less bloated and exhausted. He’s getting better. The therapy program is pulling him back from the poisonous tendrils of the virtual reality world where he hides.

  And my paycheck from this show is the only way I can afford the subscription to his therapy program. I need to help Alby. I need to put all the pieces of him back together. Because I’m the one who broke him.

  “I’m in,” I hear myself say. The words sound far away, drifting over the precipice into a new, perilous place. I look around at the others. No one has left the apartment. Without words, they’ve all decided too.

  Gold looks at Sequoia. “Who is it? Who we going after?”

  Sequoia waits a beat, playing it up for the cam, for all the ears that will be aching to hear. “We’re going to kidnap Ash Anders, the Mayor of Chicago.”

  Buddha’s spleen polyps! My gasp isn’t a staged reaction.

  Gold laughs. “Ash Anders!”

  “This is going to be dangerous,” Mermaid says. Her face is grim but determined.

  “Ash Anders!” Gold hoots again. “We’re going to kidnap the president’s son!”

  Chapter 12

  Fav hero? I don't watch semi-reality shows. My fav heroes are the police officers who protect our city every day. ~ Mayor Ash Anders, Chicago Times Interview

  ~

  Three days later, we henchmen assemble in the lair to set out on our doomed bank heist. The Professor limps purposefully out of his office, head held high. He stops before us, and after a moment of silence, hollers, “Big Little City will tremble with fear tonight!”

  He raises both hands in the air as his bowtie flickers from black to an inky green hue. “Every citizen will jump at their own shadow. Each creak in the night will send shivers down their spines. We will be an acidic compound, corroding their courage until this entire town buckles.”

  He grounds out those last words. Sparks sputter from the wires hanging from the hem of his lab coat and his silver hair sticks every which way. In spite of what he believes will be our inevitable failure, The Professor is giving viewers a show. Despite all the fear eating through my guts, I feel more than a little nostalgic.

  “WHOO!” Gold shouts, pumping his fist, grabbing for the lens as usual. He’s been buzzing around the lair with a mad energy since he arrived. Mermaids beats her chest with her fist. Kitty claps, slapping her one hand against her thigh. I force my hands to clap. Sequoia looks like he’s just trying not to pass out. I feel the way he looks, dread twisting up every single part of me.

  So much can go wrong tonight, and if it does… I force a reassuring smile on my face and give Sequoia a little nod of confidence.

  “Onward!” The Professor shouts and limps toward the elevator. The others follow, but Leo catches my eye and beckons me over with a short nod. He stands near the back of the lair, outside the frame of the scene. His enhanced Goggs sit on his forehead, pushing back his wavy brown hair. Those Goggs let him control the four cam drones that will be capturing every part of our heist tonight while he sits in his editing studio.

  We’ll give you quite the ep, no matter what, I think. What I say out loud is, “I’ve got to go. We’re on a strict timeline.”

  “You look nervous.” His amber eyes seem to cut right through me.

  “Robbing a bank is scary work. I might trip,” I reply.

  “You and the others have been acting strange all week.”

  “Really?” I put a hand on my hip with fake casualness. I hate how aware I am of his body, so close to mine. He wears a white t-shirt today with two green lines slashed across. That’s about as decorative as he gets, and I appreciate the simplicity of his wardrobe. Living in Biggie LC, I’ve discovered that there’s often an inverse relationship between outward and inward complexity.

  “Nitrogen hasn’t been spending extra hours in the lair,” Leo continues. “Arsenic doesn’t practice on her own anymore. You all seem…” He searches for the word. “… united.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” I glance back at the elevator. The others are already gone. Only Sequoia waits for me.

  “When things that I want happen I get suspicious,” Leo answers. “You’re planning something.”

  The shirt looks good on him. So do those faded jeans he wears all the time. He doesn’t recycle his clothes much. I like that about him. I like a lot of things about him. I just wish he weren’t half so canny.

  I give him a smile. “Just keep those cams rolling.”

  I expect another dry rejoinder. Leo’s good at those. But instead, he says, “Don’t do anything reckless.”

  I have to laugh at that. “You’re a producer. Your purpose in life is to get me to do reckless things.”

  Something flickers in his eyes and his lips press together. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think he cares. The thought makes me uncomfortable because though I like almost everything about Leo, there’s one thing I don’t like.

  One big thing.

  Leo is a producer. His loyalty isn’t to me, only to ratings. And he’s already given up on our show, I remind myself. If it were up to him, we’d just lay down and let Tatianna Wentworth swipe us into oblivion.

  That’s how much Leo cares.

  “Iron,” Sequoia calls.

  “I’ve got to go,” I tell Leo. “Stay sharp. It’s going to be an interesting night.”

  Leo opens his mouth to speak, but I turn around and jog to the elevator. Only when I break away from his gaze do I feel like I can breathe again.

  Topside, we trundle into a car Gold hired. Beacon’s face is plastered on the side of it, along with her famous phrase: I am the beacon in the night!

  Coincidence, or just Gold’s sense of humor?

  We’re quiet on the ride over, but my brain bubbles with endless questions. Did we think of every possibility? We’ve gone over our plan a thousand times, walked through it step by step, but it still feels weak. So many things have to go right. If even one of us makes a mistake�
�

  Our glowing bowties light up the darkness as some inane K-pop song plays through the speakers. This moment reminds me of our last heist, except Gold and Mermaid aren’t glamming for the lens. The mood in the car is tense. We all know what’s on the line.

  Getting caught committing a crime outside of Biggie LC will earn us a ticket directly to a rehabilitation camp. I shudder. Sage Anders loves to tout how humane and progressive the rehabilitation camps are. I guess when compared to human cages, solitary confinement, and murdering your own citizens as we did in the not-too-distant past, anything looks like a step up.

  The gov is all too happy to broadcast vids of rehab camp inmates playing baseball, immersed in positive feedback VR worlds, and receiving education and job training, but everyone knows the truth about the drooly camps. The guards and counselors are only supposed to use psychoactives on the inmates to balance mood disorders, but when all the rehab camps were privatized ten years ago, the new owners realized it was a lot easier and cheaper to babysit inmates made docile by drugs.

  In a fit of macabre fascination two days ago, I dug up dozens of stories on the news Streams of inmates marching into rehabilitation camps and not remembering the next five years of their lives. Interviews with ex-guards reveal that some camps slap skin patches onto inmates laced with high doses of Mellows. The inmates turn into drooling zombies. No one comes out of the drooly camps the same. Their minds are warped, their brains spongy from the drugs. No wonder the reoffend rate is so low. When someone can barely remember their own name, it’s hard to be a criminal mastermind.

  No surprise that many drooly camp inmates graduate right into a gov care facility for the disabled – also privatized. The Captains of Industry who own those companies are swimming in currency made on human suffering.

  My fear begins to shift into anger, and this, at least, makes me feel a little better about our heist. After all, Ash Anders is part of the problem. Just because he talks a big game about protecting our rights doesn’t mean he’s any better than his mother, though there are plenty of rumors floating around that he despises her. In the end, all politicians are the same. Power first. People last.