Accelerated

by Heppner, Vaughn

  On the day it all went down, I stayed with the white-coated team of scientists in the main control chamber. There was a battery of radiation and Gamma detectors, overhead screens and the stale smell of sweat mingled with high-tech electronic ozone. Most of the scientists held blue-lit slate computers or spoke into receivers.

  Dave had entered then and told Kay the head office wanted a word with her.

  I distinctly remember that Doctor Harris and Doctor Cheng found that funny, and laughed. Kay blushed, and I think she had been ready to refuse Dave. He tapped his watch. I don’t know what that meant, but Kay set down her slate and followed him out the door.

  I don’t remember everything after that. As I’d said before, Kay was in charge of the dark matter experiments. For the test today, we were dealing with heavy-ion collisions instead of the usual proton-proton collisions.

  The LINCAC 3 and the Low-Energy Ion Ring first accelerated the lead ions. Afterward, the Proton Synchrotron and then the Super Proton Synchrotron further accelerated the ions. These tests were originally designed to investigate quark-gluon plasma, a substance only a little less dense than a black hole. The second and more dangerous stage of the test attempted to quantify dark matter. That portion of the test would need power, a surge of it to supercharge the quark-gluon plasma.

  I don’t claim to understand the physics of the tests. I ran Security. What I’ve come to understand was that the plasma reacted differently to the power surge than any of the scientists had expected.

  Now dark matter neither emitted nor scattered light or other electromagnetic radiation. It remained invisible, although it apparently accounted for much of the universe’s mass, as I’ve said before. Ordinary matter only accounted for four point six percent of the mass-energy density of the observable universe. That was always a mouthful to say. The remainder of the mass was attributed to dark mass-energy. The term dark referred to man’s ignorance about its exact nature rather than any sinister force, although for me it turned out more than sinister enough. The scientists believed that the vast majority of dark matter was nonbaryonic. In other words, it lacked atoms and didn’t interact with ordinary matter via electromagnetic forces. Such dark matter was not supposed to carry an electric charge.

  Neutrinos were said to be nonbaryonic dark matter. In addition, hypothetical entities such as axions and supersymmetric particles were nonbaryonic.

  What exactly happened that day, I don’t know. Our shielding in the control room did nothing to protect us from the strange forces. An explosion occurred in the ring because some of the magnets failed. We found out later the explosion redirected the quark-gluon plasma and caused dark matter to wash through the chamber, exposing our bodies to several seconds of it.

  Some of the technicians closer to the initial exposure disappeared, leaving only their shadows. Kay was far enough away to have escaped contamination. Unfortunately, Dave received the greatest exposure of those who lived. Not only did he seem to end up in a comatose state, but his body also phased out at times. I saw it happen once. I could see the outline of his body like a ghost, and like a ghost, I could pass my hand through him without feeling a thing. Later, Dave phased in and I could touch him. But so far, no one had been able to awaken him.

  The point to all this was that I changed. Doctor Harris changed, so did Doctor Cheng and the others in the main control chamber. The change badly frightened people, and it was at that point the Shop collected us and took us to their top-secret facility in Italy.

  -3-

  It was noon when Kay left my boat. Noon Friday, June 12. I returned to my cabin and slipped on shoes and a shirt, shoved on an A’s baseball cap and added my extra-dark sunglasses.

  Kay’s story troubled me, so I decided on the simplest expedient. Even though it was noon, I would follow her and see what I would I see.

  I hurried topside and to the edge of my boat. There were dozens of motorboats and cabin cruisers docked here, and there were plenty of people outside. Some were sunbathing on deck, others ate lunch or painted their vessels or did one of the hundred little chores it took to keep a boat shipshape.

  Frowning, I put my hands on the chrome rail. I’d always left a large gap between my cabin cruiser and the wharf. I did it on purpose to discourage visitors. It took a good leap to make it across the gap. If someone failed or their foot slipped on the boat’s railing, he or she fell between the boat and the wharf. They would splash into the brine among the crabs that had learned to thrive in the oily water.

  I tried to envision Kay, her thin five-five frame and with her clutching onto the microwave-sized box. If the box had been light, that would have been one thing. It was as heavy as a microwave, however. I’d moved it into my bedroom, deciding to open it later. Could Kay have leapt across the gap while holding onto the box?

  What had she said earlier? She’d gained abilities.

  The sun was bright and I shoved the bill of my cap lower. It helped a little. Even so, behind by special sunglasses, I squinted so my eyelids were mere slits. The exposure in Geneva had changed me. One of those changes was that sunlight hurt.

  I jumped the gap and landed on the wharf. A board creaked ominously. I was six-two and lean, with greater mass than before because of increased density.

  There were other people outside, as I’ve said. It was tourist season, and San Francisco was a crowded place this time of year, especially this near Fisherman’s Wharf. I moved past three teenage girls in bikinis talking about a movie and I looked over the heads of two tall men carrying fishing poles and tackle boxes.

  Kay was already far ahead of me climbing a set of wide concrete stairs that led up to the street. Her red hair, sundress and tanned legs were unmistakable. She had a nice sway to her butt, and it took a moment for me to notice a man hurrying after her.

  It all happened so fast. I was too far away for my shouts to be effective so I broke into a run.

  The man coming after Kay bounded up the stairs three at a time. He had jerky moves like a junkie, and even from my distance, I could see that he was too skinny and wore a ratty shirt with flapping tails. At the last moment, I realized he meant to rob her, likely to snatch her purse and run.

  Despite the uselessness of it, I shouted a warning. People turned toward me and then whipped around to see what I was staring at.

  The junkie accelerated, reached with a long arm and grabbed her purse. Kay carried hers up high, the handle looped around her left shoulder and the purse tucked under her armpit. He grabbed the purse from two steps down and tugged. It was a vicious thing to do, as it was a long fall down the stairs. Maybe it was his modus operandi. Frighten the mark with fear of falling so they let go of their purse.

  Instead of losing her balance or releasing her purse, Kay spun around. With her open palm, she struck the man against his nose. His head whipped back as if a slugger had walloped him with a baseball bat. He collapsed and tumbled down the concrete stairs like a mass of jelly as his head repeatedly struck and bounced.

  I stopped in surprise, blinking behind my sunglasses. There were people ahead of me, and by this time, many had turned to look at Kay. Some of them pointed and shouted at her.

  I don’t know if Kay recognized me. It’s possible. It might be she was frightened by the attack. She looked around once and then darted up the stairs and disappeared from view over the top.

  During the junkie’s jelly-slide down the stairs, a teenager shouted, a boy who worked at the marina’s gas pumps. He ran to the purse-snatcher heaped at the foot of the stairs and reached him before I did.

  Other people neared, still pointing at the man and asking their friends questions. They kept several feet away from him, however, as if the purse-snatcher carried the plague.

  “Did you see what happened?” the teenager asked me as I knelt beside the man.

  The teenager wore flip-flops and long tan shorts that went past his knees. He had a shaved head and a ghost of a mustache. I thought he’d look better with them the other way around. I couldn�
�t remember his name, but I knew he worked at the marina. He was a polite youth who spent a lot of time wondering if he should get a tattoo.

  Like me, he knelt by the unconscious purse-snatcher, maybe thinking about CPR or whether we should move the man and risk damaging his spinal cord. The thief had horrible acne and his skin was much too white. He also radiated a strong odor. He looked thirty, but was probably in his early twenties. Blood poured from his nose. It spread over his mouth and chin, and dripped into the hollow of his throat.

  I kept telling myself Kay had done that to him. She’d done it with a single, openhanded blow. Maybe as impressive, she hadn’t lost her balance as he’d tugged her purse from two steps down. The thief was taller and despite his wasted body, he likely weighed more than she did. As he’d grabbed her purse, Kay should have lost her balance or at least fought to retain it. Her ability didn’t make sense. Ability…didn’t she say she had new ones?

  The junkie groaned as he lay on the cement, and his eyelids flickered.

  “Is he going to be all right?” the teenager asked me.

  The junkie opened bloodshot eyes and touched his nose. When he got a good look at his gory hand, he screamed. He struggled to sit up. There was something juiced-up about him. He climbed to his feet and swayed unsteadily. Then, bent over, leaving a trail of wet red drops, he staggered away.

  I stood up and debated following him. Sometimes the Shop was tricky. Watching him stagger convinced me he was the real thing, however, a failed purse-snatcher.

  “Should we help him?” the teenager asked.

  “He almost pulled a woman down the steps,” I said. “Maybe he’s learned his lesson.”

  People watched him leave. One woman was on her cell phone. She told her friend, “I’m calling the police.”

  That was my cue to slip away. Cops, government agents, IRS accountants: I trusted none of them.

  I heard traffic noises and saw mass movement as I reached the top of the stairs. This near Fisherman’s Wharf at noon meant mobs of tourists on the sidewalks. They were packed with kids on skateboards, tanned men on rollerblades and various vendors hawking caricature drawings, tarot readings and spray-painted signs. The musicians were spread farther apart from each other, although each had a hat or a tin can on the ground for donations. The crowds were always thickest around the musicians as tourists stopped to watch and listen.

  Kay moved with the general flow of people. There were two main streams, each surging past the other in the opposite direction. I lost her at times as I followed from a distance and she often moved in front of taller individuals.

  Each time a streetlight turned green, masses of vehicles sped by. Most were tourists hunting for parking. For thirty bucks, sometimes less, a person could park his car for the day in various lots. Or he could park on the nearby streets and use the parking meters. The city meters only accepted an hour charge, however, meaning a tourist had to run back to his car and pay again for another hour or face a nearly certain traffic violation. The city needed money like everyone else, and the tickets were a lucrative way of making it. When the light changed, it also flashed a green WALK for waiting pedestrians. They surged across the intersection in a mob, with more always coming up behind.

  The masses of humanity made spotting a tail harder. The trick wasn’t to look directly, but indirectly. A trained operative let his subconscious spot the anomaly. I tried that, but saw nothing unusual around me. Maybe the better way to say it was that I spotted nothing strange that didn’t already belong in San Francisco.

  I didn’t believe Kay had practiced the trade long enough to hone her instincts to a fine pitch. It was like shooting hoops, like basketball. If you played long enough, if you practiced every day and took thousands of shots, you developed your instincts. You knew a second before a person was going to lunge for the ball to try to steal it from you. Most people never consciously learned why they knew such things. The Shop had taught me both the how-to and the why.

  I tailed Kay, and I studied her out of the corner of my eye. I suspected she had learned to sense someone watching too intently. Most animals do manage that trick, some lucky soldiers, too. In your gut, you felt someone’s hot stare, or it caused your neck to tingle. I had felt it more than once in Afghanistan. Sometimes, nothing happened and you forgot about it. But other times, a Taliban fighter jumped out of a doorway, with his AK-47 blazing. The second you saw the door open, however, you shot him. Your friends would ask how you knew. The answer was you must have felt him staring at you through a crack in the door, muttering his prayers, psyching himself up to take down the American.

  What organ in you sensed the intense stare? I wish I knew.

  I felt something then, and looked around. All around me the tourists surged, the folk of Frisco. I glanced back at the East Harbor. How hard would it have been for someone to trail Kay to my boat? If someone had, might they jump aboard my boat now and retrieve the box while I was gone?

  I rubbed my chin. I needed a shave. I should have been asleep in my bunk right now. With a shrug, and an “excuse me” to a man that I brushed too hard, I kept after Kay.

  She knew some of the tricks of the trade, the obvious ploys like glancing at a parked car to use its window-glass as a mirror to check behind her. Or she crossed a street at the last minute. It was minor-league stuff, but she did it smoothly.

  Kay had spoken about Polarity Magnetics. Doctor Cheng worked there, she’d said. Were any of the others there as well? The accident had exposed a chamber full of scientists to mysterious forces. Before the accident, none of them had been physically dangerous. Afterward, after they’d gotten over the shock of transformation, most of them had thought of themselves as deadly mutants. Each had different abilities. One could lift two thousand pounds over his head. Another climbed a concrete wall, digging her fingers into it as if it was sand. A third could phase out enough to swim through certain types of substances.

  Kay hurried, passing people in her stream. I lost sight of her for a moment, and then I saw her stop abruptly at a crosswalk button. She un-slung her purse and slipped her hand into it. It was hard to see with the mass of people between us, but she kept her hand in the purse for some time.

  Maybe I’d been watching her too intently and not focusing enough around myself. As her crosswalk sign turned green, I sensed something strange behind me and turned around. The man directly behind me was thickset, had long gray hair and tattoos on his neck that disappeared down his collared shirt. His rough clothes and snarl that revealed several missing teeth all indicated an ex-con or biker. His eyes were fixed on me. In his wide right hand held down low, he palmed a hypodermic needle containing a blue solution.

  “Tough luck, man,” he growled in a smoker’s voice, and he shot his hand at me, stabbing underhanded with the needle.

  I tried to twist away, but he stabbed me with it in the side. He seemed practiced, and I wondered how many women he’d injected and dragged into a parked van to misuse later. The sharp needle easily poked through my shirt. He laughed then. It was an ugly thing full of vile promise. Shoving the hypo harder, his thumb with its black nail began squeezing the plunger. He must not have counted on my increased density, on my toughened skin. Instead of sinking into me, the needle had bent. My twisting aside had changed the angle of thrust. The needle might have gone in if he’d plunged it in straight. The blue solution squirted onto instead of into me.

  “What the crap?” he said.

  I latched onto his offensive wrist as several people around us lurched away. An older man asked something sharply in what sounded like German.

  I twisted Mr. Ex-Con’s wrist. The hypo fell from his grip and he grunted painfully. As he sucked in a lungful of air, he stepped into me, slamming a fist against my gut. More people surged away from us, and two women shouted urgently. The blow did nothing to me, and his eyes widened. I suspected this was his favorite tactic, the fast blow to the gut, surprising another con in the yard or the homeowner he was robbing trying to protect his p
roperty or his wife. I squeezed his wrist, and he grunted again. Then I twisted savagely. Bones snapped. The man screamed and the color fled from his face. Around us, other people shouted and backed away more. I shoved the ex-con, and he staggered into two ladies. The three of them went down in a heap. In that second, I glanced at the sidewalk, saw the needle and bent to grab it. A citizen hero slammed against me from behind. I think he meant to tackle me. In order to keep my balance, my right foot shot out and kicked the needle, sending it skittering into the crowd of feet. The would-be hero bounced off me as he might have bounced off a four-hundred-pound sumo wrestler. I continued to stagger forward, however.

  The ex-con was on his feet, cradling his broken wrist. Despite his thickness, he was like a cat. He stared at me for all of a second. Then he turned and fled, crashing into people who scrambled to get out of his way.

  I had two seconds to decide what to do. For the first second I scanned the sidewalk for sign of the needle. I wanted to know what was in the blue solution. Was it an ordinary knockout drug or was it something meant to take out a person like me? The next second I scanned the crowd, looking for someone who watched the proceedings with too much calm.

  People backed away from me. Most were already hurrying, wanting nothing to do with violence in the big city. The would-be hero had partially changed his mind, keeping his eyes on me as he backed away. He looked like a weightlifter, his shirt tight around his biceps and with a muscled neck.