They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded

by James Alan Gardner

  My outfit is black on black: a hockey uniform with all the pads and armor. The armor is only fiberglass, which will never stop a bullet. However, if I keep on getting into superpowered fights, fiberglass is better than nothing. The helmet protects my head, and I’ve coated my face with black greasepaint. You wouldn’t believe it could hide who I am, but being a Spark is special: as long as you wear a costume and mask, and you go by a code name, you absolutely can’t be recognized. Weird super-science redraws your fingerprints, changes your voice, and even scrambles the DNA on the hair and skin cells you shed. Your own family won’t recognize you. The only way your true ID can be exposed is if you mess it up on purpose … like telling someone who you are, or dropping big hints, or doing super-stuff in your civvies.

  I might do that someday, cuz I’m stupid and reckless. But as far as I know, I’m still good. I haven’t endangered my friends.

  I clump down the stairs, holding the banister for support. I’m wearing Reeboks, not skates, so I’m not as wobbly as I could be. Even so, ever since I boarded the plane in Alberta, I’ve been drunk enough to kill an elephant … and I mean an adult African bull, not one of those little Indian pishers. Loxodonta africana ebria —that’s me. The rare African bush lush. But if you can say “bush lush” three times quickly, you’re sober enough to fight crime.

  Bush lush, bush lush, bush lush.

  “What?” asks Aria. But I ought to call her Miranda, since she’s taken off her mask.

  “Nothing,” I say with perfect diction. “Have you heard from Zircon yet?”

  Zircon appears out of nowhere. No wait, it’s only K. Ze still wears the top hat and tails, but ze has taken off zir blindfold, so ze’s officially in civilian identity. And may I have a hallelujah for nailing the pronouns, even when pissed to the operculum?

  Hallelujah, Sister Jools. Amen, and also with you.

  “I’m back,” K says.

  “Where’s the bazooka?” I ask—proud that I say bazooka without flubbing it. (I’m the best in the world at not appearing drunk. With great power comes great responsibility.)

  K says, “I shrank the bazooka and left it in a corner of Diamond’s old lab.”

  “The lab that blew up?” Miranda asks.

  “That’s the one,” K says. “It’s all sealed up. Got a new steel door with a serious lock, so I doubt anyone will go in there anytime soon. As a bonus, if the gun starts giving off wonky radiation, people will think it’s just residue from Diamond’s tech.”

  “What if the gun self-destructs?” Miranda asks.

  “At the moment, it’s the size of a fruit fly,” K says. “Can’t make a very big bang. Anyway, it’s behind that steel door, so the blast will be contained.”

  Miranda still looks worried. “You couldn’t have taken it farther away? Like out in the country?”

  “I don’t fly fast,” K replies. “You might be quick enough to dump the gun in the middle of nowhere, but me, I need ten minutes to fly a block. Besides, you never know if we’ll need the gun on a second’s notice.”

  “Why?” asks Miranda.

  “Because being a Spark is insane. For all we know, Godzilla might start stomping downtown Waterloo, in which case we’ll be glad to have the bazooka within close reach.”

  “Also,” I say, “I’d love to dissect how that sweetheart works.”

  Oops. That just slipped out. Weird how toothpaste makes you impulsive.

  K and Miranda give me the wary eyeball. “You sincerely want to analyze Mad Genius tech?” Miranda asks.

  I say, “I’m a teensy bit curious. Know your enemy, right?”

  “Only a few days ago,” says Miranda, “you got seriously upset about possibly being a Mad Genius. Remember?”

  Of course I do. The night we got our powers, I had a mini-major breakdown when designs for Mad Genius inventions started popping uncontrollably into my head. Miranda stayed with me and talked me down, till the flood of bad ideas subsided. I told her I was swearing off that shit: I appointed Miranda my sanity sponsor, authorized to rein me in if I got out of hand.

  But I suck at following the advice of trainers. Just ask the people who’ve coached me in hockey. There’s a reason I got thrown off the varsity team, and it wasn’t because of my grades … even if that’s the story I told my friends.

  “Look,” I say—and even as I do, I wonder why the hell I’m doubling down—“I won’t go cray-cray just from looking at the gun. It’s a bazooka, not Cthulhu. And we should learn as much about it as we can.”

  “Why?” asks Miranda.

  “Because first, that guy Reaper claimed it might only work when held by a Spark. See the implications? If Diamond has technology that operates like that, he can tell who’s a Spark and who isn’t. And so can whoever has the gun.”

  “Ouch,” says K. “That would be a disaster.”

  “I know, right? Because if anybody got something like that, how hard would it be to…” Shit. A flood of ideas geyser into my brain. Any one of them might work as a foolproof Spark detector. I so, so wish I had a bottle in my hand to wash those ideas away. All I can do is take a deep breath and say, “It’d be trivial to make a remote detector, something to scan a crowd and pick out anyone who’s a Spark.”

  “Okay,” Miranda says, “I’m officially scared.”

  “And another thing,” I say. “We’re gonna face Diamond again. You know that, right? We stopped his stupid scheme and hurt him bad. Once he heals, he’ll come back for revenge. He’s a mass-murdering supervillain. He won’t let bygones be bygones.”

  Miranda looks at K. K grimaces. “Jools has a point,” K says. “I read up on Diamond over the holidays. He’s got an ego the size of Betelgeuse, and he never lets things slide. He’ll want serious payback, and sooner rather than later.”

  “See?” I say. “If only for self-preservation, we should learn what we can about his tech. If he really has some gadget that can tell Sparks from ordinary schlubs on the street, I need to find out how it works and how to jam it.”

  Miranda looks very unhappy. “Jools…” she says. Then she brightens. “No way you can analyze something like that. You don’t have the proper equipment. The only analysis thingie in the house is that piddly little hand lens K uses to look at rocks.”

  “It’s not piddly,” K says. “It’s a precise optical instrument. My mom ordered it from Zeiss.”

  “It’s a 10X lens the size of a thimble,” Miranda says. “You really think it can analyze a superweapon? And for all we know, the bazooka is a Trojan horse. Diamond could have left it behind because he wanted it to be found. Maybe it contains a hidden camera that Diamond can watch from. When he spots a suitable victim, he’ll push a button and auf wiedersehn.”

  Miranda has a point—that’s Diamond’s brand of jam. But if so, why hasn’t the gun gone boom already? Reaper implied it was found by government agents. Diamond would love blowing up government agents. If not that, there’d been a golden opportunity for mayhem in the baggage area. An explosion would have caught me, Stevens & Stephens, Reaper, and Wrecking Ball. Or what about when Zircon picked up the gun and cradled it like a baby? Diamond loathes Zircon. If he could make the gun blow up, he would have done it then.

  Absolutely. Positively.

  I lay out my reasoning … and while I’m talking, WikiJools pulls another useful fact from the cloud. “You know what?” I say. “We can analyze the gun without using K’s lens thingie. The university has facilities for examining Cape Tech.”

  “It does?” Miranda says.

  “Yes. A brand-new lab. Funded by anonymous backers.”

  “Who must be Darklings,” K says. “Nobody else could afford it.” K pauses. “No, wait—Darklings always put their name on the door. They want bragging rights, not anonymity.”

  “It’s probably funded by the government,” Miranda says. “They have this approach-avoidance thing about Spark technology. They’d love to ban it, but they’d also love to know how to reproduce it.”

  I say, “It doe
sn’t matter who put up the money. All I care about is that we’ve got a nice shiny lab full of everything we need.”

  Miranda scowls. She always scowls. She’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf of scowlers. She says, “We have a horrible track record with labs at the university.”

  “Then it’s time we turned over a new leaf,” I say. “Benevolent basic research for a worthy cause.”

  “What if somebody’s in the lab?” Miranda asks.

  “On a Friday night? On the second of January?” I scoff an Olympic-level scoff.

  Miranda says, “There must be security alarms.”

  I say, “We have someone who can shrink under doors, not to mention yours truly, who happens to have mad burglary skilz. No, wait, not ‘mad.’ Poor choice of words. Nothing mad about me.”

  “Shut up,” Miranda says, trying not to smile. “If you really want to do this, we’ll all go, to keep you out of trouble. Then we’ll come back and watch Frozen. I got the 3D-V for Christmas.” She glares at me. “You will sit through the movie, you will not make rude comments, and you will let me sing along.”

  “Yes, Elsa,” I say.

  She scowls me a scowl. We head out.

  * * *

  ARIA TAKES ZIRCON AHEAD to fetch the bazooka from where it’s stashed. I’m happy for the chance to clear my head: five minutes of fresh air as I jog from our town house to the University of Waterloo.

  The city is snow-a-rama between our house and campus. The roads are clear and the sidewalks are shoveled, but the shortcuts I usually take are buried under thigh-deep drifts.

  The snow isn’t natural—it was deposited by a blizzard that Diamond created in order to bog down cops on the night of his hijinks. And I can’t help wondering how Diamond produced so much snow. The night had started clear and cloudless, not much humidity in the air. So where did Diamond get enough H 2O to make a blizzard? Did he teleport it from elsewhere? I don’t know how teleportation works, but I assume it takes humongous energy, especially when you port several millions of tons of vapor.

  How did Diamond do it?

  How would I?

  A Mad Genius needs resources—matter and energy, plus shitloads of cash. Where does it all come from?

  Set Diamond aside for a moment. Let’s think about a more recent Mad Genius fiasco. On New Year’s Eve, Doctora Desafío attacked Buenos Aires with an army of giant robots. To build them, she needed truly colossal quantities of steel, electronics, mechanical parts, and God knows what else.

  It must have cost billions of dollars. Where did she get the money? And how did she buy the raw materials without being detected by antiterrorist agencies? Especially when said agencies have their cyberhooks embedded in every financial database on the planet, plus honest-to-Gygax magic spells filling in the cracks. Super-smart freaks like Doctora may be able to hack the computers that are watching for trouble, but no Mad Genius can finagle sorcery. Sparks can’t cast spells: period, full stop.

  I suppose if Desafío had billions of dollars, she could bribe Darkling wizards to cover her tracks. Darklings are obsessively money-centric. Expert magicians will sell out for the right price. But the Elders of the Dark try to prevent that from happening—they’ve created the Dark Guard, a secret police force, to stomp any Darklings who go rogue.

  The Guard are the best of the best: powerful Darklings trained to sniff out anyone who breaks the Dark Pact. The details of the Pact are a deep Darkling secret, but the gist is well known. Any Darkling who helped Desafío before, during, or after the fact would be the Dark Guard’s public enemy number one.

  But as The Great Gatsby tells us, wealth breeds careless people. Darklings crash through life without considering the results. How could there ever be problems that money can’t solve?

  And even when the Dark Guardians catch and execute some sleazebag, it gets hushed up. Publicizing the punishment wouldn’t act as a deterrent, cuz careless people can’t conceive that the rules apply to them.

  Besides, Darklings hate airing their dirty laundry in public.

  So, with enough cash, Doctora Desafío could hire a Darkling with the smarts to hack magical surveillance as easily as Desafío hacked other types of tracking. After that, she was free to assemble her robot army in peace.

  In her massive underground lair.

  That she somehow constructed without being noticed by anyone in the neighborhood.

  An underground lair where she received deliveries of high-tech components day and night for months on end, while she built a million robots all by herself.

  Or maybe she built a thousand machines that could each build a thousand robots.

  Or she built a single machine that built a thousand machines that could each build a thousand robots.

  Fuck, she’d have to be a genius just to plan the logistics, never mind the actual inventing. And she’d have to be insane to go to such trouble. Why spend billions on a stupid scheme that you know will be foiled by do-gooder heroes, when you could fill your day with booze and hot willing men for a fraction of the cost?

  I don’t understand it. And whoopee for me. Maybe it means I won’t turn into Waterloo’s own Mad Genius.

  Instead, I’ll just be a high-IQ underachiever.

  That’s my niche. Fits me like a glove.

  * * *

  I GET SO DISTRACTED by these thoughts, I almost run past the building I was heading for. It’s one of the newest on campus, tucked in an out-of-the-way corner behind the big smokestack that says WE ❤ FOSSIL FUELS.

  Welcome to the T. V. Tagore Energy Research Centre.

  WikiJools helpfully supplies me with the résumé of T. V. Tagore, but please: she’s just another Darkling donor who wanted her name on something cool. If it wasn’t a research center, it’d be a football stadium or proctology clinic.

  I circle the building to make sure no lights are shining inside. Nothing but EXIT signs. By the time I get back to the main entrance, my friends have arrived.

  “Any problems?” I ask as Aria holds the door open for me.

  She shakes her head. “We have the bazooka. Zircon has gone ahead to check out the security.”

  Clear sailing. When we reach the lab we want, Zircon transmits from inside, « I can open the door anytime you like, but there’s an alarm pad—the kind that gives you thirty seconds to key in a number code, or else sirens go off. »

  « No problem,» I say.

  “You know the code?” Aria asks.

  “No, but I know the lullaby.”

  She gives me a quizzical look, then shrugs. « Okay, Zirc, let us in. »

  The door opens. I move inside, playing it cool AF as I look at the number pad. It’s a Singatec Model 3C, child’s play for an Olympic-level expert in B and E. I pry off the faceplate, yank loose a wire, then knuckle-punch the control wafer. The wafer cracks down the middle and I pull out both pieces.

  “We’re good,” I say.

  Aria says, “Where by good, you mean we’ve successfully committed breaking and entering, trespassing, destruction of public property…”

  I say, “In Alberta, that’s what good means.”

  Zircon snickers. Zirc’s from Alberta, too.

  I hit the light switch beside the security pad, then turn to scope out the room. It’s less than a year old, so it’s uncannily fresh: clean white paint and unstained floor tiles. No dents in the drywall or any of the other wear and tear one expects in a lab used by university students.

  As an Olympic-level architect, I can tell the far wall was originally supposed to have a bank of windows, but at some point the plans were changed. You can still see the window frames, but instead of glass they hold titanium steel plates. Gawkers can’t see in, and shrapnel can’t shoot out. It wouldn’t surprise me if the window plates included a layer of lead—all the better to block X-ray vision and radiation leaks.

  As for the lab’s equipment, each piece seems blankly anony mous. These days, analyzer machines are basically just boxes. There’s a slit for inserting your samples, but you can’t
see anything else from the outside. Any melting, pulverizing, and/or Kirlian scintillation is done in tightly sealed internal containers.

  Before I became super, I would have seen nothing here of interest—just a bunch of off-white metal boxes of various sizes, each with a computer attached. Now I recognize everything; even as I take stock of what I’ve got to work with, I’m figuring out how to proceed.

  What are my goals? Number one: to avoid setting off any self-destruct surprises in the gun. Number two: to determine if this is really Mad Genius tech—with so much showy bling, the bazooka may just be a prop for someone’s homemade movie about supervillains. Number three: if it is Mad Genius tech, try to understand how it works …

  Or not. Comprehension is risky. Can I get my head around a Mad Genius’s work without twisting my brain in the process?

  Guess we’ll see.

  “Where’s the bazooka?” I ask.

  Zircon shrinks out of sight, then grows back holding the gun. Aria takes it quickly, before Zirc falls over from the weight. Aria is about to hand the weapon to me when she thinks better of it. “Where do you want me to put it?”

  I point to a nearby worktable. It’s basically a kitchen island, with a hard plastic work surface on top and casters so you can wheel it around the room. Attached to one edge is a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate. It’s on a long metal arm with hinges and ball joints so you can turn the lens any direction you want. “Set the gun there,” I tell Aria. “We’ll give it a once-over.”

  “Anything special you’re looking for?” Zircon asks. “My Spark-o-Vision can scan better than any lens.”

  “I don’t know what to expect,” I say. “But feel free to take a look-see. Tell me if you find anything scary.”

  Aria says, “It’s too bad Dakini isn’t here. She could link you to Zircon telepathically, so you could see through Zirc’s eyes.”

  Zircon’s mouth tightens. “Dakini should keep her telepathy to herself. Now shush, let me scan.”

  Zirc shrinks to the size of a Barbie and/or Ken and walks the length of the gun like a shopper checking out the frozen-food aisle. I can barely restrain myself from leaping forward to make my own inspection. But deep down I know Zirc’s Spark-o-Vision is the most sophisticated analytic equipment in this room; I’d be stupid not to use it.