“A shame you can’t fly across the chasm and end this test now.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth. Actually, hold that thought.” It had suddenly occurred to me we shouldn’t simply take at face value Overlord’s word that our powers wouldn’t work. Maybe this was a test of our gullibility.
I held my hands up. Waves of energy that always surrounded my hands ever since my Metahuman powers first manifested a few years ago were now gone, as invisible to me as they normally were to others. Nonetheless, I concentrated, trying to trigger my powers. I focused on lifting myself off the ground.
I didn’t feel the surge of energy I normally felt when I used my powers. I stayed on the ground like my feet had been nailed there.
“You look constipated,” Hacker said somberly as I concentrated hard.
I dropped my hands and gave up.
“It was worth a try.”
“Indeed,” Hacker agreed. She fingered the gold band around her neck and looked up at Overlord’s node. Its normally liquid silver surface was tinted red in the sun’s light. “I’m assuming my powers have also been neutralized. If they were working and if I could get up high enough to touch Overlord’s node, I could reprogram it, and make it turn off the device that’s dampening our powers and open the portal back up.”
I was scandalized at the thought.
“That’s cheating,” I protested.
Hacker turned her attention back to me. Her serious eyes matched the green of her costume. Her head tilted slightly to the side in puzzlement. The movement was almost mechanical. Hacker seemed slightly artificial, as if she was becoming too much like the computers she could control.
“How is that cheating? No one has said we cannot reprogram Overlord if we need to.”
“I don’t know,” I said, the idea still not sitting well with me. “It may not violate the letter of the rules, but it feels like it violates the spirit of them. We’re supposed to pass these tests on our own merits, not by monkeying around with the thing that’s judging us.”
Hacker looked at me like I was a simpleton, as if I shouldn’t be allowed to shave or take a bath unsupervised.
“I’m a hacker. It’s right there in my code name. Hacking by its nature is rule-breaking. I love to not follow the rules the way everyone else does. It’s kinda my thing.” She shook her head with a sigh. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree. Besides, it’s a moot point. Overlord is out of reach and, if your example is any indication, my powers aren’t working anyway.”
“Well, we need to figure out some sort of way to get past this chasm.” I started walking towards it. Hacker immediately joined me. We had to skirt around a huge red rock at least three times my size that thrusted out of the surface of the ground like some sort of weird stalagmite. Something about the huge rock caught my eye. I slowed then stopped when I was next to it. Hacker stopped alongside me.
The rock was riddled with tiny holes that were about the diameter of my pinkie finger. I put my eye up to one of them. The hole extended all the way through the rock in a straight line that looked like it could have been drawn with a ruler. I could see to the other side of the rock through the hole. I checked a few of the other holes. They were all the same way.
“What in the world are you doing?” Hacker asked. She sounded both impatient and mystified.
“What do you make of these holes?” I looked down, and spotted a fist-sized rock a few feet away. I picked it up. It was as solid as, well, a rock, except that it had a few holes that ran through it just like the much larger rock did. I handed it to Hacker. She gave it a cursory look.
“It’s just a dumb rock,” she said disdainfully, dropping it back onto the ground. She started walking towards the chasm again, leaving me behind. I got the feeling that anything that wasn’t electronic or mechanical didn’t interest Hacker much.
I let Hacker proceed without me as my curiosity had been piqued. I checked another rock, and another, and another. They all had holes. Now that I was looking for them, all the rocks around us had holes that were so perfectly and uniformly cylindrical, they could have been drilled into them with a power tool. No power tools I had used back on the farm could have drilled through rocks as hard as these appeared to be, though. I was hardly a geologist, but I had never seen rocks like this back on Earth. If these rocks just naturally formed this way, and I had no reason to think they hadn’t, I wondered what kind of otherworldly geological process created them.
Then again, perhaps Hacker was right: maybe they were just dumb rocks. I put the rocks out of my mind and hastened to catch up to her.
By the time I did, she was lying on her chest at the edge of the chasm. Her head and shoulders extended over the lip of it. She twisted to look at me at the sound of my approach.
“Come take a look,” she said.
I got down on my hands and knees and carefully crawled forward to join her. After all I had been through since I had gotten my powers, if I got myself killed by falling off a cliff, my ghost would never forgive me.
I looked down into what seemed like eternity. The bottom of the canyon—assuming there even was a bottom on this weird-ass planet—was shrouded in darkness far below, even with the faint glow of the golden energy field in the middle of it. There was the faint but distinct smell of smoke, as if something was on fire far below.
“Look at the walls,” Hacker prompted me.
The canyon dropped down at almost a ninety degree angle below us. There were no hand or footholds that I could see. I rubbed the face of it a little with my hands. It wasn’t as smooth as glass, but it was hardly a climbing wall, either.
“It’s literally impossible for me to climb down this thing, cross to the other side, and then climb back up without breaking my neck and everything else,” Hacker said. “Could you do it?”
I stood up and backed away from the edge of the chasm. Looking down it was making me dizzy. Hacker followed me.
I said, “Maybe Spiderman could climb down this thing. I can’t.”
Frown lines sprout on Hacker’s brow.
“Who’s Spiderman? Friend of yours? Another Hero candidate?”
“Spiderman. You know, Spiderman,” I said, miming shooting webbing out of my wrists at her.
Hacker looked at me like I was having a seizure.
“The comic book character,” I added, getting exasperated.
“Oh. Well, that explains why I’ve never heard of him. I don’t read comic books. Never have. I have better ways to spend my time.”
I was flabbergasted.
“You don’t need to have read comic books to know who Spiderman is. He’s an icon. He’s a part of world pop culture. There have been movies and TV shows about him. There was even a Broadway musical. How have you not heard of him?” I was having a hard time not raising my voice. Who didn’t know about Spiderman? What kind of weirdo had Overlord paired me up with? If it were inclined to answer questions, I would have asked it.
“What’s a 456 Kevlar Macroprocessor?” Hacker asked.
“Huh?” I said, startled by the sudden change in subject. “I don’t know.”
“Well, just as you don’t know about that, I don’t know about the Spiderman,” Hacker said primly. “Everybody has different bases of knowledge.”
She had a point. That didn’t change the fact I wanted to shake her and tell her it was not the Spiderman, but simply Spiderman.
I changed the subject. The clock counting down over our heads reminded me we were wasting time. I wondered what would happen when the clock hit zero. Would that mean we had failed?
“We can’t fly over the chasm, and we certainly can’t climb down it,” I said. “We need to figure something else out and do it quick. I can’t imagine Overlord’s countdown is to remind it to take its cookies out of the oven.”
“Let’s check out that building. Maybe there’s something inside that can help us.”
That was as good of an idea as any I had. We hastened over to the building.
Close up, the building looked weathered and beaten up, as if its metal exterior had undergone multiple sandblastings. There was a single large window on one side of the building. The glass—if glass was what it was—was thick and cloudy, like the bulletproof windows they had in jail. I knew from personal experience the kind of windows they had in jail thanks to me getting arrested after I had fought Iceburn. I wondered if I was the only Hero candidate who was a jailbird.
I paused outside and looked at the weathering on the building’s metal more closely. Parts of the metal seemed to be pretty thick; other parts were almost but not quite worn through. The parts that were almost worn through were cratered a bit, as if one good punch would be able to poke through them. There were circular indentations all over the building’s exterior, like it had been shot countless times with a battery of BB guns shooting oversized BBs. The diameter of the circles looked to be about the same as the diameter of the holes in the rocks we had seen earlier.
“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice,” I murmured as I examined the wear and tear on the building’s exterior.
“What?”
“Nothing.” If Hacker hadn’t heard of Spiderman, surely she hadn’t read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I wondered if Hacker read anything but computer manuals.
“You’re wasting time,” Hacker said impatiently. She flung open the narrow door set in the middle of one of the long sides of the building and went inside. Unseen, I rolled my eyes at her. She seemed to have the intellectual curiosity of an eggbeater.
I followed Hacker inside, noticing as I did so that the entire exterior of the door, including the doorknob, was made of the same beaten up metal as the rest of the exterior of the building.
It was hot and stuffy inside the building, but it was still cooler than it had been outside as we were now in the shade. Hacker and I both were sweating bullets by now. It would have felt great to strip my costume off and take a nice, cool bath. Preferably with a nice, hot girl. Not Hacker though. Anybody who didn’t know who Spiderman was wasn’t my kind of gal.
The interior of the building was all one big room. A skylight that appeared to be made of the same translucent material as the window was embedded in the building’s metal roof. Though the skylight was clouded over, it still let in enough of the sun’s red light to let us see adequately.
Over on my left against the wall were rows of thick shelves. On the top shelves were stacked a bunch of canned food. Vegetables, beans, fruit, tuna, sardines, that sort of thing. I was hungry, not having eaten breakfast. But food could wait. We had bigger fish to fry. Overlord’s countdown continued to nag at me.
On the bottom shelves were plastic bottles. There were two kinds of bottles. There were huge multi-gallon clear drums, like the ones used to fill water coolers in office buildings. They were full of a clear liquid. I hoped it was water as I was already thirsty from being out in the hot sun. There were also smaller bottles, like the seventeen ounce water bottles people carried around. They were unlabeled, and also full of a clear liquid.
I picked one of the smaller bottles up. I shook it gently. The liquid inside moved like water did. I looked carefully at the cap. The bottle appeared to be sealed, which I considered a good sign. I twisted the cap off, and took a sniff. I smelled nothing. I dipped the tip of my pinkie into the liquid. My pinkie didn’t get eaten away by acid, nor did anything else horrific happen. I licked my wet finger. It tasted like water.
Well, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably not a non-duck that will kill you painfully if you drink it. But, I had learned that it was impossible to be too careful. After all that had happened to me and my friends lately, I should have changed my name to Captain Caution.
I took a tentative swig from the bottle. The liquid was a little musty, as if it had sat in one place for a long time. Otherwise it tasted fine and just like water. I wanted to drink the whole bottle to keep from getting dehydrated, but I forced myself to stop when I had finished only a third of it. If I suffered no ill-effects, I’d finish the rest of it later.
Captain Caution was my name, being careful to not get poisoned was my game.
“You want some water?” I called out to Hacker, who was poking around in a pile of stuff on the other side of the building. “At least I think it’s water.”
Hacker nodded, so I lobbed an unopened bottle over to her. She caught it handily. She took a drink.
I cautioned her, “Don’t drink too much of it just yet. Maybe not getting poisoned is part of the test.”
Hacker lowered her bottle.
“Thanks for the advice, Captain Obvious,” she said with a sniff. “Mansplain much?”
“That’s Captain Caution,” I muttered under my breath. Now that Hacker was drinking it, I kind of hoped the water was poisoned.
Hacker and I were getting along just swimmingly. I would have to invite her to my wedding. If I didn’t like my in-laws, I’d be sure to seat Hacker with them.
Actually I was putting the cart before the horse. Step one was find a girlfriend. Step two was to make sure she wasn’t Hacker.
I took one last look at the water and canned food. There was enough food and water for two people to live off of for weeks if we were careful with it. Was that how long this test would take to complete?
We continued to explore the building. It was built on a wooden framework. I imagined if I pulled the metal walls away, the building would look like a wooden skeleton. The metal walls were secured onto the framework with thick metal screws. I wondered where the wood had come from since we hadn’t seen a scrap of vegetation outside. Had the Guild brought the wood in from Earth Sigma or somewhere else? That assumed the Guild had even built this thing. Maybe there was intelligent life somewhere on Hephaestus we hadn’t encountered yet. We had only seen this small part of the planet, after all.
The building was like a miniature junkyard. In addition to the bottles of water and the unlabeled cans, there were various odds and ends: old machine parts; reams of different fabrics; tools; a huge industrial floor scale like one you might see in a factory; a big bucket of nails, screws, and fasteners; more pieces of wood of various sizes than a colony of termites could ever eat; paper of various colors and sizes; pens and pencils; and a bunch of gear I didn’t recognize. Hacker told me some of it was surveying equipment. There was even an old motorcycle and a replacement chain for it.
We brainstormed after we finished giving everything in the building a quick overview.
“We could build a glider out of the stuff in here,” I said optimistically. “Glide right over to the other side of the chasm.”
Hacker tapped her cheek with her finger thoughtfully. I had seen her do it before. It seemed like an unconscious tic.
“You ever build a glider before?” she asked.
“No. You?”
“No. I suspect it might be harder than what you’re imagining. We’ve got plenty of wood to build a framework out of, but is it the right kind of wood? Is it light enough? And the fabric we have? Is it non-porous enough so air wouldn’t shoot right through it, making our glider sink like a stone?”
I got a sudden mental image of the old film clips I had seen of inventors trying to fly gliders before the Wright brothers had come along. Them trying to fly their inventions had not ended well. And how long had the Wright brothers tinkered in their workshop before they made their successful flight at Kitty Hawk? I vaguely recalled it had been years. Did I really think we could whip together what it had taken them years to accomplish?
“We’ll table the glider for now,” I said. “You have a better idea?”
“I don’t have a better idea, but I have an idea.” Hacker let out a breath. “If that motorcycle works, I can try to jump it across the chasm.”
I stared at her.
Then, I burst out laughing.
When I realized she wasn’t laughing too, I sobered with an effort.
“Wait, you’re actually serious?” I as
ked, still chortling a little. “Who are you, Evel Knievel? There’s no way you can jump a motorcycle over a space that wide.”
“I don’t have to jump it all the way across. I just have to jump it halfway across, past the curtain that’s inhibiting our powers. I practically grew up on a motorcycle. I’ve done a little stunt riding, too. If we work the angles and the rest of the math right, I could do it.” Shockingly, she apparently knew who Evel Knievel was.
“And then what?” I demanded. “You somehow turn the motorcycle into a computer as you’re plummeting to your death? Right before you hit the bottom of the chasm you send an email to the Air Force asking them pretty please to order a missile strike on the box on the other side of the chasm?”
Hacker flushed, turning the same color pink as her hair highlights. “You’re right, I hadn’t thought it through. It was a stupid idea. Forget it.”
I let out a long breath. I couldn’t believe I was about to say what I was about to say.
“I could do it. No, strike that. We can discuss the highly theoretical but very unlikely possibility that I can be talking into doing it if we’re convinced I can do it without turning myself into a smear on the side of the chasm in the process.” I was in disbelief I was even entertaining the idea. “If I could jump past the golden field, I could then use my powers to fly the rest of the way to the other side of the chasm. Then I could destroy the power nullification box and then fly you over to the other side too.”
“That would work,” Hacker said excitedly.
“There’s just one problem. Actually there are a million problems with this hair-brained idea, but there’s one fundamental problem.”
Hacker frowned. “What’s that?”
“I’ve never ridden a motorcycle. I have absolutely no idea how.”
Hacker brightened.
“Is that all? I’ll teach you. It’s easy. It’s like riding a bicycle.” She paused, tapping her cheek again. “Only mechanized. And faster. And harder to control. And much more dangerous. And worse for the environment.” Her brow furrowed again. “It’s nothing like riding a bike actually. I take it all back.”
The Omega Superhero (Book 2): Trials Page 10
