Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes Migratorius): Extinct, read the plaque next to the cage. The birds were once so plentiful in North America that their annual migration blotted out the sun. Thanks to over-hunting and the destruction of their habitats, they had gone extinct in the early 1900s. At least they were supposed to be extinct. It said so right here on the plaque. If these raucous birds knew they were extinct, they gave no sign of it. Maybe they couldn’t read. I could only hope to be as sprightly as these birds when I was dead.
The two things that made my heart stop were near the exit to the huge animal room. I froze when I saw them, as of course did the ball I had been following.
Mounted high up on the wall was an animal head. It was not a tiger, but could have been a modern tiger’s great-great-great-great granddaddy. Its fur was brown with streaks of red, orange, and gold. Its eyes seemed almost alive. They looked down at me hungrily, glittering in the light emitted by the still orb. The way it seemed to look at me, it was as though raw Theo with a side of Kinetic was its favorite food. It had two unbelievably long fangs poking down from its upper jaw. Rows of razor-sharp incisors completed the killing machine that was the animal’s mouth. Even dead and decapitated, the animal was so scary, it made my butt cheeks clench. I had to smother the irrational impulse to run.
Saber-Toothed Tiger (Smilodon Fatalis): Extinct. Captured in North America by Millennium during the Pleistocene Epoch, read the plaque under the animal’s head. The fact the head was from a saber-toothed tiger was pretty obvious from the animal’s appearance, particularly the two huge fangs. This certainly wasn’t Sylvester the Cat.
The taxidermied animal to the right of the saber-toothed tiger made my heart palpitate even more than the tiger had. Though clearly in the bear family, it was unlike any bear I had ever seen. For one thing, it was massive, much bigger than the black bears I had seen on the farm or the grizzly bears I had seen in zoos. Even if I discounted the short platform the animal was mounted on, the animal on all fours was still taller than I and had a broad, well-muscled body. If it stood on its hind legs, it would be nearly ten feet tall. Its snout was much shorter than the usual bear’s. It was as if someone had taken a grizzly’s snout and mashed it down into its skull some, like a push switch depressed in the “on” position. The animal’s shaggy coat was black with flecks of brown. The lips of its snout were curled in a snarl, exposing teeth clearly designed by Mother Nature to break bones and rip flesh.
Short-faced Bear (Arctodus simus): Extinct. Captured in the area that would become California by Millennium during the Pleistocene Epoch, read the plaque fixed to the platform the bear stood on. I could see why honey companies put their product into cute bear bottles instead of bottles shaped like this monster. If they did, people would be too scared to buy it.
What the plaques for the tiger and the bear said about them being captured during the Pleistocene Epoch was what had gotten me so excited about seeing the animals. I was hardly a paleontologist, but I had learned enough about Earth’s history during my training to know that the Pleistocene Epoch ended over ten thousand years ago. How had two animals which had gone extinct thousands of years ago been captured by Millennium and then stuffed and mounted? The implication was obvious. Millennium, an Omega-level Hero whose powers were said to be magic-based, must be capable of time travel.
Maybe Millennium could send me back in time to correct the mistakes I had made. I could save Hannah’s life. I could prevent Iceburn from killing Dad. I could make sure Hammer wasn’t killed by those robots during the Trials. Maybe I could even stop Mom from dying of brain cancer, though that was a tougher nut to crack. Unlike the bastards who had killed Hannah and Dad, you could not stop cancer by punching it in the face. In Mom’s case, maybe I could travel to the future first to see if they have found a cancer cure. With the way medicine advanced by leaps and bounds these days, surely scientists finding a cure was just a matter of time. Once I got the cure from the future, I could then go back into the past and save Mom.
Though I had of course come here to confront Mechano, I was now excited about the prospect of perhaps meeting Millennium as well. He had been a Sentinel longer than anyone else. Helping people was his business. Surely he would help me.
With thoughts of time travel swirling in my head, I glanced at the glowing orb. It seemed to wait patiently for me. It was time to move on. I would not meet Millennium or Mechano standing here staring at extinct animals. I wondered if I would spot lions somewhere in the mansion too. Lions and tigers and bears. I had my “Oh my!” all ready.
I again stepped toward the orb. It resumed its journey to lead me through the house. Though I saw more things that blew my mind, nothing else inflamed my imagination the way seeing the tiger and the bear had. Maybe the past was not written in stone. Maybe it was written on an Etch A Sketch—one good shake and everything could be different. Better.
Eventually, the orb led me to a shiny silver door. It was closed, with a shoulder-high metal and glass scanner on the right of it. The orb floated right through the silver door as if it did not exist, and disappeared. I couldn’t follow. The ability to phase through doors was not in my power set. I need not have worried. When I approached the door, it slid open noiselessly. Bright lights spilled out of the other side. I stepped through the open doorway. I stopped, unable to see. I blinked away the sudden brightness.
My eyes adjusted. Whereas the rest of the house looked like the set from a British period piece, this enormous room looked like the bridge of a starship. It was as if I had stepped out of the eighteenth century into the twenty-fourth. Everything was bright, shiny, glassy or metallic, and high-tech.
“Welcome to Sentinels Mansion, Mr. Conley,” came a booming masculine voice. I almost jumped out of my skin, both at the unexpected sound and the name of my supposedly secret identity.
My head snapped toward the voice. Mechano’s big robot body sat at a large transparent table in the middle of the huge room. Seer and Millennium sat with him. All three Heroes were looking at me. As none of them looked quite human, it was like being stared at by aliens. Since all three were living legends, it was intimidating to say the least.
“We have been expecting you,” Mechano said.
18
“We have much to discuss, Mr. Conley. Please come have a seat,” Mechano said. His voice emanated from a circular, gold-colored metal grate located on his robot head where a human’s mouth would be. I presumed the grate covered a speaker.
Fear clawed its way from the pit of my stomach up to the top of my throat as the three Heroes stared at me. Being afraid of Mechano was understandable. He had tried to kill me, after all. One shouldn’t run up to one’s attempted murderer to give him a hug and a kiss. Not unless one wanted one’s ability to hug and kiss in the future to come to an abrupt and permanent end. Being afraid of Millennium and Seer seemed irrational, though. They were respected Heroes. I had admired them and the rest of the Sentinels for years. They helped people, not hurt them. Besides, after discovering the saber-toothed tiger and the short-faced bear, I should have been particularly delighted to see Millennium and have the chance to talk to him about time travel.
Why then was my gut shrieking at me to get the hell out of here without bothering to say “goodbye, nice to meet you, I’m a big fan” first?
Your gut is the voice of your subconscious mind, the Old Man used to say. Ignore it at your peril.
This would not be the first time I didn’t listen to him or my gut. Despite wanting to, I was not going to flee. I had come here for answers, not to cut and run the moment someone looked at me hard. I did not sit as Mechano asked, though. Considering his past attempts on my life, I had no interest in getting within easy throttling range of his robot body.
“How do you know my name?” I demanded instead of beating a hasty retreat. First Truman, then Cassandra, now these three Sentinels. At the rate people were learning my secret identity, I should’ve saved everyone time and trouble and put it on a billboard in big bri
ght letters. As I spoke, the glowing orb which had led me here floated over to Millennium. It disappeared inside his body like a raindrop hitting a pond.
“We know just about everything there is to know about you. We have been closely monitoring you with great interest for quite some time,” Mechano said. Oh no, that doesn’t sound at all stalkerish, I thought, though I kept the sentiment to myself.
Now that I was recovering from the shock of being in the presence of these three Heroes, I could hear that Mechano’s deep masculine voice had a slightly artificial quality to it, like it was computer generated. As I supposed it was. He said, “Even if I did not already know who you are behind the mask, the feature-camouflaging technology it contains is based on my patents. I can see through it to the real you as easily as looking through a clear window. I could then run your face through my facial recognition software and come up with your real name faster than the time it takes to tell you about it.”
“Brag about what you’re capable of later,” Seer said impatiently. Her clear, strong voice was in stark contrast to her almost frail appearance. “We’ll be here all night if you don’t cut to the chase.”
While the two bickered like an unhappily married couple, I scrutinized all three of them. It was not every day I was face to face with famous people I had watched on television and read about for years.
Seer was not wearing a mask. She never did. Her white skin was pale and tinted slightly blue, like that of a drowning victim. Her long, straight hair was albino white and pulled back into a ponytail. Her face was completely unwrinkled. It made her look both very young and timeless, though I knew she was middle-aged. Her pupils and irises were creamy white. Looking into her eyes was like looking into pools of milk. She wore a robe-like garment that shimmered iridescently, like a soap bubble catching the light. It was partially translucent, giving tantalizing near glimpses of her naked alabaster body underneath. Her figure was willowy, suggestive of a tall adolescent girl whose body had not filled out yet.
Like me, Seer was telekinetic. I had seen footage of her picking up and throwing a jumbo jet with her powers like it was a dart. As I was Omega-level, my telekinesis had the capacity to be far more powerful than hers, but it was not there yet as I did not have the lifetime of developing and strengthening my powers that she had.
In addition to her telekinesis, Seer also had precognitive abilities. Her ability to look into the future was said to be like the vision of a near-sighted person: If someone with near-sightedness looked at a car dozens of yards away, the car would be nothing more than a blur. He would be able to tell it was a car, but wouldn’t be able to make out the details of it. If he walked closer to the car, though, he would be able to see the car more and more clearly until it became crystal clear when he was right on top of it. The same was true of Seer’s precognition: events in the distant future were hazy, ill-defined, and could change. But as time passed and those events came closer to happening, Seer could see them more and more clearly. I had seen footage of battles where Seer had stepped out of the way of a Rogue’s attack with unerring accuracy, seeing the attack coming before it had even been launched.
Millennium was so slim he was almost skinny, though there was something about his presence which made him seem large and imposing. He wore a light brown, shiny metal helmet with a flat top. It reminded me of an upended bucket. Its surface was an unbroken smoothness except for tiny slits for his eyes. There were no openings for his nose or mouth. I could not see his eyes behind his eye slits, only darkness. Looking into his eye slits, even from this distance, was like peering into a bottomless well. It gave me the creeps. He wore gauntlets, cavalier boots, a belt, and a floor-length cape that all matched the brown color of his helmet. The loose tunic and leggings that covered the rest of him were royal blue.
The press often called Millennium the Thousand Year Man. Legend had it that his body was frozen in time, unable to age or change, until he lived a thousand years, at which time he would die. I did not know if that was true, but it certainly was true that Millennium had an exceptionally long lifespan. He was one of the Sentinels’ founders after all, and he was still on the team over half a century later. Other than me, Millennium was the sole living Omega-level Hero, and one of only four Omega-level Metas in the world. The other two were Chaos, the Rogue serving multiple life sentences in MetaHold, and Lim Qiaolian, a telepath and super-genius in China who put herself into a self-induced trance when she was five-years-old over seventy years ago. God only knew what she had been thinking about all this time. Maybe she was busy unraveling the secrets of the universe. Maybe she was trying to puzzle out why some people were foolish enough to worship her as a god. Or, maybe she was trying to remember where she had hidden her candy from her brother. If she wound up going through some of the hair-raising stuff I had been through as an Omega-level Meta, for her sake I hoped she never woke.
Millennium’s powers were the least understood of the Sentinels, at least by the public. They were said to be magic-based, with his Metahuman ability allowing him to tap into the mystical plane. I would have scoffed at talk of magic and mystical planes before my powers developed. Since then, I’ve seen too much to not keep my skeptical mouth shut about what was possible and impossible. Regardless of exactly how they worked, like me, Millennium channeled his powers through his hands. And there was no doubt they were formidable. He could teleport halfway across the planet in one moment, and reduce a skyscraper to rubble the next.
Mechano’s long, thin, single rectangular eye glowed at me disconcertingly. It was like being stared at by a mechanical cyclops. It was worse, actually, as no cyclops I had ever heard of had the ability to blast you into smithereens with its eye the way Mechano did. Maybe he stared at me like this because he was scanning me with his x-ray vision. I hoped I was wearing clean underwear. It would be hard to seem intimidating to Mechano if I was confronting him with pee-pee stains in the front and skid marks in the back.
Though I knew Mechano’s burnished silver body was about seven feet tall, he seemed taller than that, even seated. Though his mechanical muscles were obviously merely for show, he looked like the beefiest of Mr. Olympia competitors painted silver. His head was earless and hairless. His cranium was shaped like a billiard ball with the top loped off, leaving a flat plane at the apex. He had no nose or mouth, with three small holes in the place of the former and a circular gold-colored metal grate in the place of the latter.
The large transparent table the three Sentinels sat at was heptagonally shaped, with tall silver-colored chairs positioned at each of the seven sides. A large golden “S” was stenciled into the middle of the table. The table made me realize where I was. I was in the Sentinels’ Situation Room, the fabled room where the team held formal meetings and monitored what was going on in the world, looking for issues the Sentinels needed to deal with. Despite my fear, I felt a surge of awe and wonder. As a longtime Hero fanboy, being here was like a Star Trek junkie being transported to the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
On the back and front of each chair around the table was a symbol representing the Sentinel the seat was reserved for: a black and white amorphous pattern that looked like a Rorschach test for Doppelganger; a katana glowing red for Ninja; a metallic blue clenched fist for Tank; and a blood red capital A for Avatar. A black sash ran diagonally around Avatar’s chair, presumably to signify and honor his death. Though I could not see the emblems for Seer, Millennium, and Mechano as the Heroes’ seated bodies obscured them, I knew they consisted of a wide-open eye with energy rays shooting from its perimeter for Seer, an hourglass with most of its sand in the top hemisphere for Millennium, and a large metal nut with a yellow lightning bolt passing through it for Mechano.
On the other side of the table, against the far wall, was a massive bank of dozens of large video monitors. They flickered with various images. Stacked on top of one another to form a semi-circle, the monitors rose from a futuristic-looking, waist-high control panel all the way up to the top of t
he room’s high ceiling. You had to crane your neck to see what was on the monitors at the very top. From the control panel extended a mass of thick metal cables that were silver in color. The ends of the cables tapered down to connect to a silver helmet which rested on top of the big chair in front of the control panel.
I recognized the bank of monitors as well from my research on the Sentinels. Known collectively as Sentry—yet another of Mechano’s inventions—the monitors drew from satellite imagery and security feeds from around the globe to keep the Sentinels aware of threats, Rogue-related or otherwise, the Sentinels might need to deal with. The silver helmet resting in the chair fed data from Sentry directly into its wearer’s brain. A Sentinel was supposed to be on Sentry duty almost all the time. The fact the three Sentinels sat at the table looking at me rather than one of them wearing the Sentry helmet was further proof something I did not understand was afoot. As if me being allowed to stroll unimpeded into one of the most secure rooms in the world in one of the most secure buildings in the world wasn’t proof enough of that.
While keeping a cautious eye on the seated Heroes, I checked out some of the images on the monitors. Some of them were of high-security and high-risk areas I would expect to see under surveillance: the grounds of the White House; the Guild space station; MetaHold on Ellis Island; the supervillain Puma’s palace in Lima; the temple that had been constructed around Lim Qiaolian’s small comatose body; a mass protest outside the Kremlin; and a riot in Monrovia, Liberia led by a masked black man the size of a small house. Other footage was more surprising and made me wonder how in the world the Sentinels had gotten it.
On one monitor was an orgy. The participants were several male United States Senators from both political parties and a roomful of girls. None of the Senators were in particularly good shape, which made the footage hard to watch. The fact that none of the girls looked older than sixteen made watching it harder still. On another monitor was the mayor of Astor City, sitting back in a leather recliner. His eyes were open, and partially rolled back in his head. His sleeve was rolled up, and a needle was impaled high up on his forearm. I doubted the needle contained civic pride.
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