Empowered Academy 1985

by Dawn Jansen

  Jasmine enlarged a scan of a classified document on the monitor—it looked legit. Hugo continued: “They exchanged technology, and one of the most powerful technologies given to the Philadelphia Experiment team was the empowered serum. That was when the Empowered Bureau was established. The empowered gene is only compatible with a tiny fraction of humans, so they spread the serum throughout the entire American population, knowing they could use their vast surveillance network to locate and rein in any humans that showed empowered characteristics.”

  “Lizzy was right...” I gasped, staring in astonishment at the documents going by on the screen. Lizzy didn’t have the entire theory mapped out, but she had always believed the empowered program started with the Philadelphia Experiment.

  “So we’re just... what? Puppets of the government?” Edgar said, his voice trembling.

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Hugo said gravely. “Pull up the next set of documents, Jasmine... This here proves that the Empowered Bureau gave the serum to the Soviets in 1973. They are responsible for the Soviet empowered program.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. My dad became director of the Empowered Bureau in 1978, so I at least knew it wasn’t his doing, but even still, I refused to believe a government organization—even a black budget one—would do something so horrible.

  “But it’s true,” Hugo said adamantly as more documents scrolled by on the monitor, each one providing more damning evidence to what Hugo was saying. “They wanted a pretext for war with the USSR. They believed reports of Soviet super-soldiers would sway public opinion in favor of war. And now that the first batch of trainees from the Soviet program, like Vera, have reached maturity, we may see just that.”

  “That’s... diabolical,” I said, my brow furrowed with deep concern.

  “I could go on, too,” Hugo said. “We hacked into nearly everything; the Empowered Bureau is rotten to the core—unethical experiments on Unstable empowered, testing of empowered abilities on human subjects, and even the Architect’s program to replace human EMPs with mindless empowered robots.”

  “She’s the one behind all this, isn’t she?” I asked, hoping my father didn’t have anything to do with all of these wicked schemes.

  “It seems that way,” Hugo said, nodding. “She became dean of the Academy in 1970, and that was when many of these initiatives were launched.”

  “What do you think, Em?” asked Ramsey. “I don’t want to believe it, but... I mean look—they have all the evidence here, pulled directly from the Academy servers.”

  I looked at Ramsey. I was used to him always being brash and boisterous, but he looked tired now. I imagined that’s how I looked too after having just learned that everything I thought I knew about the Academy was a lie.

  “I don’t know...” I said. I didn’t want to admit it was true.

  “If you don’t believe us, then here,” Hugo said, and then he turned a switch on the device in his hand.

  All at once, I felt my power reignited. It had been silent the whole time Hugo had been using the device on us, but now my connection to it was restored. My power itself seemed almost reticent, but soon it flooded my veins with energy, and I knew that I could use it again.

  “What are you doing, Hugo?” the woman, Jasmine, shouted. She was not pleased that Hugo had turned the device off.

  “Giving them a choice,” Hugo said calmly. “We’re not like the Academy, remember? We don’t control people or manipulate them.”

  I was shocked that Hugo would relinquish his control over us too. If we wanted to, we now had the option of striking back at them right here in this shack.

  “So what do you want from us?” I asked warily.

  “Join us,” Hugo said plainly, staring into my eyes unwaveringly as though he was testing me. His gaze reminded me once again how gorgeous he was.

  “Join you here?” Edgar suddenly scoffed. “You think you can take on the Academy from a junkyard on the outskirts of some bumblefuck town in Upstate New York?”

  “This is only a temporary location that we’ve been using to gather intelligence for the past few months,” Hugo answered, seemingly unfazed by Edgar’s scorn. “I want you to join us in San Francisco, where our main base is; where we have resources and powerful allies. We’ve already finished our intelligence-gathering operation; this data is being funneled back to San Francisco as we speak. You can join us and be on the next plane to San Francisco before the Academy even figures out what happened. I saw how you guys fight; your help could make a big difference.”

  “I can’t,” I said immediately. “I can’t leave Lizzy behind. And others too at the Academy who are good people; Blink, Wesley, even Baxter. We can’t just ditch them.”

  I looked to Ramsey and Edgar, wondering how they felt about all of this, and I was touched when both of them nodded at me, indicating that no matter what, they supported my choice.

  Hugo sighed. “Then what? You’re just going to go back to the Academy? Pretend you never saw all of this evidence?”

  I thought for a while, knitting my brow in concentration.

  “There’s another way to do this,” I finally said, looking up at everybody in the room. “There are good people at the Academy. Lots of them. Students and teachers. Give me the documents you showed us today. I’ll go back and show them to everybody I trust. That way it won’t just be the three of us joining you, but everybody in the Academy who wants to fight for justice. You need all the numbers you can get, right?”

  Hugo looked at Jasmine and the mycokineticist, who was also in the shack with us. Apparently, Hugo really respected Jasmine, because when she nodded, he finally turned back to us and said, “Okay. If you’re not willing to leave them behind, I suppose that’s the only way. I would advise you do this quietly, however. From what we’ve read, the Architect’s new robots are nearly ready. If you cause a scene when you try to leave the mansion, she could unleash them on you.”

  “We’re not afraid of a few test robots,” Ramsey said scornfully.

  “They’re not like the old test robots. They’re much more advanced, and they’re equipped with these devices,” Hugo said, holding up the disempowerer. “Trust me; you don’t want to run into them.”

  “We’ll be careful,” I said. “Lizzy and her friends will definitely join us, and some of them can teleport. Getting out of the Academy undetected won’t be a problem.”

  “Good. This location is compromised, so meet us back at the Old Field Psychiatric Center once you gather your people. We’ll wait for you there for two days—but if you’re not there by then, we’ll have to fly back to the west coast without you. We can’t risk staying on the east coast much longer, especially once the Academy knows about what we’ve been doing.”

  “Aren’t you all forgetting something?” Edgar said. “We were sent here on a mission; a very specific mission. We can’t go back empty-handed.”

  “Edgar’s right. You need to give us the device,” I said to Hugo decisively. “We’ll say that we found you here, got in a skirmish, and in the end you all ran away, leaving the stolen tech behind.”

  A few weeks ago, I would have been appalled at the idea of lying on a field report, but a lot had changed since then. Hugo and Jasmine looked at each other once again. They seemed to be silently deliberating for a few seconds, communicating through eye contact.

  “We were hoping to bring these back to San Francisco and reverse engineer them, but... I guess that’s the only way this plan will work. You have to make it look like you got what you came for,” Hugo said.

  Jasmine then swung open a shabby-looking box on top of a nearby table. Inside were several more devices.

  “We stole five of them,” she said. “Take this box, and don’t turn them on by accident. We didn’t have a chance to study them yet; we don’t know if the effects are permanent after a certain point.”

  That was a terrifying concept—permanently losing my power. When Hugo used the device temporarily on us before, I felt so impo
tent, as though not only just my power had been dampened, but the essence of my life force itself. I guessed that’s how important our powers were to us.

  “What about Vera?” I asked suddenly.

  Hugo looked surprised that I’d bring her up. “What about her?” he asked.

  “She was the reason you broke into the Academy in the first place. Maybe we can help you get her back.”

  Hugo bowed his head, lost in thought for a moment. He said they had made progress with Vera, and I wondered for a moment what their relationship was like. It was silly, but I even wondered if there was any affection between them.

  “It’s too big a risk,” he finally said with a sigh. “She’s being held where they keep the Unstables. Maximum security. We lost two of our people trying to get her back. I wouldn’t want you to lose any of yours.”

  I had been feeling wary about all this—it all seemed so insane, actually—but hearing Hugo say that convinced me of what I had felt back at Old Field; that Hugo was a good person. A moral person.

  “If we can find a way, we’ll get her out,” said Ramsey in a determined tone of voice.

  I was shocked to hear that coming from him. Since we started going together, I had come to know how protective and caring he was of me, but now I saw that he had the capacity to extend that caring to other people as well.

  Hugo seemed to appreciate Ramsey’s pledge. He nodded solemnly.

  “I’m sorry about your friend, by the way,” Hugo then said, referring to Mr. Hill. “If I had been here, that all could have been avoided—Hector too... We’ve spilled a lot of blood trying to stop the Academy, and there’s more to be spilled yet, but we can’t give up.”

  “We won’t give up,” I said. “We’re going to make things right.”

  Chapter 20

  Emily

  Hugo and his people left the junkyard at the same time we did, making sure to trash all of their equipment beforehand (Jasmine’s power was especially effective at destroying electronic devices). I was reluctant to see Hugo go. We were all about to do something very dangerous, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again. Meeting him again proved to me what I’d only suspected during our first encounter: that he was a righteous man. And though I didn’t get to absorb his power this time, I sensed that spark of free-spiritedness inside him that I had felt before and it drew me to him just as it had the first time.

  Edgar, Ramsey and I were presently in the van heading back to the Academy. We had the devices that Hugo had given us, but more importantly we had evidence of the Academy and the Architect’s wrongdoing—papers and floppy disks filled with top-secret documents that I kept hidden in the largest of my belt pouches. Another crew would be dispatched to the junkyard to catalog everything and collect the bodies of Mr. Hill and Hector, but they wouldn’t find anything of use in the shack.

  The three of us were exhausted. In the course of a few short hours, we had battled with other empowered, lost and regained our powers, and been exposed to the harsh realities of the world. A world we thought we understood before the ugly truth came crashing down on us.

  I was giving some impromptu first aid to Ramsey, who had gotten clawed up pretty bad when he fought Hector, using the kit in the van, disinfecting and bandaging up the wounds on his torso. Edgar was on my other side.

  “That was pretty clutch with the mushrooms,” Edgar said as I continued to work on Ramsey’s injuries. His voice was hoarse.

  “Yeah,” said Ramsey. “I guess you can do four powers at once now, huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I guess I can. I think it was the urgency of the situation that... heightened my powers I guess. I had to protect my boys, after all.”

  “We would’ve been toast without you,” Ramsey said, stroking my hair.

  He used to object when I lumped him and Edgar together, but it didn’t seem to bother him anymore. I guessed it was because of how much the three of us had been through with each other.

  “So Lizzy’s going to be ecstatic, isn’t she?” Edgar said.

  “That her theories have been vindicated? Yeah, big time,” I chuckled.

  “You sure she’ll believe us?” Ramsey asked.

  “We’ve been best friends since we were four years old; I’m positive she will. Besides, we have indisputable evidence...”

  I worked on patching Ramsey up a bit more as I thought about how to phrase what I wanted to say next.

  “You know...” I said after a while, “there is one person I want to tell first though... My dad.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Edgar asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “I was looking at the documents; most of the terrible stuff happened before my dad joined the Bureau. And since then, the rest has been all the Architect’s projects... My dad raised me to be good. He always taught me the importance of justice and equality and... there’s no way he could be involved with all this shady crap. We can’t just leave him at the Academy, and if he joins us in San Francisco, we’d have a huge advantage having somebody who knows the inner workings of the Empowered Bureau with us.”

  Ramsey and Edgar looked at each other concernedly. Neither of them had actually met my dad before, but I’d told them about him.

  “I know he can be a real hard-ass sometimes,” I added, anticipating what they might say, “but he’s not a bad man. He’s just strict and demanding. I know he’ll be outraged when he hears about all of this.”

  “You know him better than either of us,” Edgar said. “If you think you should tell him, then... I support you.”

  “Me too,” Ramsey said.

  Relief washed over me. I turned around in my seat and hugged Edgar and Ramsey at the same time, one of my arms over each of their shoulders. I had been expecting resistance, but I guess they really did trust me. It was heartwarming, but it also meant I couldn’t let them down. Though I was a little nervous about how my dad would react, deep down inside I believed he would be proud of me for doing the right thing, because that’s what he always encouraged me to do.

  ━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━

  We arrived back at the Academy at six in the morning, just as the sun was cresting over the forest that surrounded the mansion.

  Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to figure out an excuse to ask to see my father because he took the initiative to call me into his office as soon as I returned. I hugged and kissed Ramsey and Edgar in turn after we got out of the van, knowing I was about to do something that would change the course of all our lives. It was scary, and I wished they could accompany me to talk to my father, but I knew that wasn’t feasible—since Mr. Hill was KIA, they had to report to the Architect herself for debriefing.

  We lingered in the Academy garage—apparently they were as reluctant to part from me as I was from them. They looked so damn handsome standing there with the early-morning light slanting in through the nearby garage door. The gauze bandages I had applied to Ramsey’s body highlighted the muscular shape of his torso, while the scrapes on his chin and face added a hint of danger to his appearance. Edgar, meanwhile, managed to retain his suave gracefulness while still looked just as rugged as Ramsey.

  These are my men, I thought to myself, and this thought seemed to carry much more weight than usual.

  Our relationship felt so much more real after everything that had happened last night. We’d put our lives on the line for one another. We’d trusted each other. We’d made sacrifices for each other. As we held hands, I felt love radiating out from both of them that filled me with the courage to go do what I needed to do.

  “I shouldn’t keep my dad waiting,” I said, squeezing at their hands before I let go.

  “Good luck,” Ramsey said, and then he and Edgar walked off together.

  I watched them stride side-by-side into the mansion, impressed at how close they’d become in such a short period of time.

  Once they were gone, I zipped open my belt pouch and took one last look at the documents Hugo had given me, mentally preparing myse
lf for my encounter with my father. It was normal for me to be stressed out before seeing him, but this time would be different. This time, I would be the one to give him some shocking news. I took a deep breath and closed the pouch.

  Here I come, dad.

  ━━━━━ ▣ ━━━━━

  Walking into my dad’s office that day was the most nervous I’d ever been in my life. I knew I was doing the right thing, but I guessed I still wasn’t used to doing things not completely by-the-book.

  My dad was terse as usual, telling me to sit as soon as I entered. The smell of coffee and cigarette smoke was thick in the air already. He looked like he’d been up all night last night, and I wondered—perhaps naively—if he had been up worrying about me.

  “You retrieved the devices,” he said plainly with no preamble, as was his style.

  “Yes sir,” I said obediently, wanting to hear what he had to say first before I broke the news.

  “Tell me about what happened with Mr. Hill,” my dad said, taking another robotic puff of his cigarette.

  I knew this was my chance to reveal the truth about everything that happened. I walked my dad through the whole mission—entering the junkyard; fighting with the “rogue” empowered; the creeping fungus trap; Mr. Hill getting mauled by the weretiger; and finally I got to the part I had been waiting to tell him about all along...

  “Then they took us inside this shack. That’s where they showed us everything they’d been doing for the past few months,” I continued. “They kept the disempowerer on us the whole time. All we could do was watch...”

  My dad had been listening dispassionately, but now he tilted his head and raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, evidently curious about this part of my story. My heart was pounding in my chest and my voice had even started to tremble a bit, but there was no turning back now.