The Superhero's Return

by Lucas Flint

  “Do Brains and Vanish know you’re here?” I said. “And what about Mecha Knight? I can’t imagine he would approve of this.”

  “But he did,” said Blizzard. “See?”

  Blizzard pulled her phone out of her pocket and showed me an email from Mecha Knight. From what I could tell, the email stated that Mecha Knight approved Blizzard’s request to travel to Showdown, Virginia, to come to see me. It looked very official and formal, which meant that Blizzard must have gone through the NHA’s bureaucracy to get this trip approved.

  Blizzard pulled her phone away from me and stowed it away in the pockets of her costume. “I know you told me not to worry about you, but after our last call, I couldn’t stand just sitting on Hero Island, where I was safe from all harm, while you were out here in Showdown where you might be killed by a serial killer who targets superhumans. I wanted to make sure you were okay, that’s all.”

  I rubbed the side of my head. “And Brains and Vanish know this?”

  “Yep,” said Blizzard, nodding. “I forwarded them Mecha Knight’s email so they would know I’m allowed to be here. I thought it might take a while to get his approval—you know how slow and methodical Mecha Knight is—but he approved it fairly quickly. I think he’s just as concerned about your safety as I am, though he’s not very good at expressing it.”

  I snorted. Mecha Knight, the supervisor of the Young Neos as well as one of my mentors, was notorious for his cold, even robotic, personality. Lots of people joked that Mecha Knight actually was a robot, which wasn’t far from the truth, though the truth about Mecha Knight’s true nature was a lot more complicated than that. “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming, then?”

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” said Blizzard. She put her hands together. “I wanted to surprise you when you came back to your room, so I asked Brains and Vanish not to tell you I was coming. I was worried they would say no and tell me to go back to Hero Island, but luckily they liked the idea and let me come.”

  “Why would they send you back to Hero Island?” I said, tilting my head to the side. “You could be useful out here.”

  “I know, but I think they’re worried about this Neo-Killer guy I keep hearing about,” said Blizzard. “I thought they might send me to Hero Island for my own safety, but luckily they didn’t. Guess they must think that I am going to stay in the Braindome, which is supposed to be safe from the Neo-Killer.”

  “That’s why I’m here, rather than going out on a mission with Brains and Vanish,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Right now, they’re responding to a call for help in northern Showdown where a new supervillain has shown up. I wanted to go with them, but they said I had to stay here for obvious reasons.”

  “I actually agree with them on this,” said Blizzard. She stepped forward, a concerned look on her face. “I hope the G-Men capture him before he gets you. He deserves to rot behind bars in Ultimate Max for the rest of his sorry life for all the evil things he’s done.”

  “I agree,” I said, “which is why I don’t want you here. I know you’re worried about me, but the Neo-Killer is no joke. He’s only been in Showdown for a few days but has already killed two superhumans and nearly killed me as well. He doesn’t take prisoners.”

  Blizzard put her arms around me and leaned against me, her face just inches away from my own. I went stiff because even though she wasn’t hugging me very tightly, something about the way she touched me made it hard to stay angry with her.

  “I know how bad the Neo-Killer is, Bolt,” said Blizzard, never taking her eyes off of mine, “but if you think I’m just going to run away and hide on Hero Island like a good girl, you really don’t know me as well as you should. I’m a Young Neo, just like you were, and I’m almost old enough to graduate to the NHA like you. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself and you at the same time.”

  I put my arms around Blizzard and brushed her cheek with my thumb. Her skin was cool to the touch but in a nice way. “I know, Blizz, but—”

  “And it’s not like we haven’t fought dangerous villains before,” Blizzard continued. “Remember the Venetians? Or the Pokacu? Even Enor could have squashed me like an ant. I think I can fight some super serial killer, especially with you by my side.”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. “I guess I can’t change your mind once you’ve got it set on something. How long are you going to be here in Showdown?”

  Blizzard shrugged. “About a day or two. Mecha Knight only gave me that much time to come and see you. He doesn’t want me spending a whole lot of time away from Hero Island, especially now.”

  I frowned. “Why now? Is something bad about to happen?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Blizzard. She looked down at my chest as if lost in thought. “I’m hearing rumors that the Leadership Council is worried about something. They’re beefing up Hero Island security and requiring more training from NHA members than usual recently. Stinger is also spending a lot more time at the Tower of Heroes than he usually does like he’s having meetings with someone, though he insists it’s classified.”

  I nodded. Stinger was the current leader of the Young Neos, my successor after I graduated. He was a trustworthy guy, but I wondered what kind of ‘classified’ information Mecha Knight was giving him. And it had to be Mecha Knight because Mecha Knight was the supervisor of the Young Neos and he used to summon me to private meetings to discuss issues and details which were too sensitive for the rest of the team to know about. “That’s not good.”

  “Not good at all,” said Blizzard. She draped her arms around my neck and smiled. “But enough about that. You said Brains and Vanish are gone, which means we’re going to have some alone time. Want to know how I want to spend it?”

  I smiled and held Blizzard more tightly in my arms. “I don’t need telepathy to tell what you want. And it’s exactly the same thing I want.”

  Blizzard’s smile grew wider. “Great minds think alike, huh?”

  I nodded and leaned in to kiss her, but before I could touch my lips to hers, Valerie suddenly spoke in my ear, saying, “Bolt, I apologize for interrupting, but I have finished compiling the information I retrieved from Freya’s files in Vault B into a readable, digestible report, available in PDF for your reading pleasure.”

  Scowling, I pulled my face away from Blizzard’s and, tapping my earcom, said, “Val, is this really the time to let me know you just finished your homework? I’m busy.”

  “I know, but I came across some very important and interesting information while going through her files,” Valerie continued. “Much of it is older data Genius put in while he was building Vault B, but there’s also some information which might explain how your uncle has apparently come back to life.”

  I paused. “What? Really? You mean Dad might have known about Uncle Jake coming back to life?”

  “Uncle Jake?” Blizzard repeated with a puzzled frown on her face. “Who’s that?”

  I wanted to answer, but then Valerie said, “It is hard to describe what I found so I will send you the file on your suit-up watch. I suggest projecting a hologram of the file. That will be easier to read than on your watch’s tiny screen.”

  Taking one arm off of Blizzard, I held up my suit-up watch and started scrolling through my email until I found one from Valerie with a heading ‘DOCUMENT.’ I downloaded the attached PDF and immediately opened it, making sure to activate my watch’s holographic features at the same time to ensure that both Blizzard and I could read it.

  A hologram about the size of a piece of paper projected out of my watch. It showed a simple PDF document, its text perfectly readable in the glow of the hologram. Despite being such a small document, it had a lot of text, yet the text which stood out the most to me was the header, which read thus:

  PROJECT REVIVAL.

  FIRST TEST SUBJECT: JAKE JOHNSON

  STATUS: SUCCESSFUL.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A sudden sense of relief and horror washed over me w
hen I read that header. I didn’t read any other part of the document. In particular, my eyes were locked onto the last line—STATUS: SUCCESSFUL—which I was sure was evidence that I had finally and completely lost my mind. Even Blizzard didn’t feel quite so real to me anymore, despite her arms draped around my neck and her body pressed against mine.

  “Project Revival?” said Blizzard. I realized she was also reading the same header I was. “Jake Johnson? Successful? What does this mean?”

  I shook my head. My head was still murky with all of the emotions swirling through it, but I needed to focus in order to figure out what the hell was going on here. “I was about to ask the same questions. Val, you went through the docs. What does it say?”

  “First, you must understand where I found this document,” said Valerie. “As I said, I was looking through some of Freya’s old files. This was in order to find out how to connect her to the wider Internet, per our agreement with her. Her AI is somewhat out of date in comparison to modern technology, so I was forced to go in and perform some updates on her AI in order to make her coding compliant with modern Internet standards. She didn’t like it, as you might guess, but she allowed it anyway once I explained it would make it easier to free her.”

  “Who’s Freya?” said Blizzard. “And what’s Vault B?”

  I explained to Blizzard as briefly as I could everything I found out in Vault B. It didn’t take me long, but that was mostly because I hurried through it so I could hear Valerie’s explanation for where she found this document.

  “Wow,” said Blizzard when I finished my story. “I knew your dad was a smart guy, but I didn’t realize he was that smart. How many Vaults did he build?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “That’s what Val was trying to find out, but it looks like she discovered something far more interesting along the way.”

  I touched the hologram and began scrolling through it, but I found the text almost impossible to understand. Lots of scientific jargon, long sentences, and complex sentence structures. I knew Dad wasn’t much of a writer, but dang it if I didn’t feel like I was reading a foreign language only vaguely related to English.

  “Val, what is this report?” I said. “What is Project Revival?”

  “To continue on my earlier explanation, I found it while I was digging through Freya’s memory files,” said Valerie. “It was apparently created back in the year two thousand, so it is about eighteen-years-old, though it was modified a couple of times in two thousand and one, and once more in two thousand and two, which seemed to be the last time Genius updated it.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “What was Dad trying to do?”

  “Unfortunately, the report was corrupted when I found it,” said Valerie. “When I downloaded it onto my servers and opened it at first, most of the text was ruined due to digital decay. I managed to clean up a good chunk of it, but most of it was unrecoverable. What I did find, however, was a secret project even I didn’t know about.”

  “Tell us what it is,” I said, staring at the holographic PDF document hovering before us. “Or at least what you’ve been able to recover.”

  “Very well,” said Valerie. “From what I have determined, Project Revival was a project that your father, Genius, started shortly after the death of the Crimson Fist. Its exact purpose is not explicitly stated, but it appears to have been an attempt by Genius to perfect a process that could create human clones which were identical in every way to their original.”

  “Clones?” Blizzard repeated. “Do you mean like Triplet and his Thirds?”

  “Not exactly,” said Valerie. “It is closer to actual cloning, as in, making copies of actual human beings that exist independently of the original, unlike Triplet’s Thirds, which are dependent on him for life.”

  “So was Dad trying to clone Uncle Jake?” I said. “You said it was made in two thousand. That was a year after Uncle Jake was killed by Master Chaos.”

  “Genius did not merely try to clone Uncle Jake,” said Valerie. “By all accounts, he succeeded.”

  My eyes widened. “Then where is the clone? Why have we not known about it until now? And how come Dad never even mentioned this to us?”

  “Is this really so weird?” said Blizzard. “I mean, obviously, cloning is kind of a weird thing to do, but Genius built a lot of weird machines.”

  “Yeah, machines,” I said. “Dad wasn’t very interested in biology. He liked technology better. I guess he could have built a cloning machine, but that is still different from what he normally built.”

  “I am not sure what happened to the Uncle Jake clone or why Genius appeared to abandon the Project,” said Valerie. “And I use the word ‘abandon’ very deliberately because it appears that he stopped updating the file at some point and I could not find any other documents related to this mysterious Project anywhere else in Freya’s files. I suspect Genius must have deleted everything related to Project Revival but somehow missed this document.”

  “Does Freya know anything about this?” I said. “If Project Revival was performed in Vault B, then maybe—”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Valerie said. “I asked her about it, but she said she had never heard of Project Revival. I suspect, however, that Genius must have wiped her memory of the Project at some point, because why else would I find a document related to Project Revival in Freya’s memories if she was not involved in it somehow herself?”

  “But why would Genius try to clone the Crimson Fist in the first place?” said Blizzard doubtfully. She let go of me but continued to stare at the holographic document. “What made the Crimson Fist so special?”

  “The Crimson Fist was my uncle,” I explained. “He and Dad were best friends before he was killed by Master Chaos. In fact, the Crimson Fist actually introduce my mom, who was his sister, to my dad. His death really shook Dad, which must be what motivated Dad to try to clone him.”

  “So if the Crimson Fist hadn’t introduced your mom to Genius, then you would never have been born?” said Blizzard. She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Then I guess I know who to thank for you.”

  I smiled back at her, but then shook my head and looked at the document again. “Val, does the document say what happened to the clone of Uncle Jake?”

  “No,” said Valerie. “As I said, it appears that at some point Genius went on a mass deletion spree to wipe out all traces of Project Revival. I was lucky to find this single, corrupted document.”

  “Meaning Dad was trying to hide something,” I said, stroking my chin, “but what?”

  “Whatever he was trying to hide, it must not have been good,” said Blizzard. “People don’t mass delete things unless they have something to hide. Not saying your dad was doing anything wrong, Bolt, but maybe he did something he regretted and didn’t want anyone to know he did it.”

  I wanted to argue with Blizzard about that, but deep down, I knew I couldn’t. Whatever Project Revival really was—whatever happened to Uncle Jake’s clone—must have been bad enough that Dad, who rarely deleted anything, decided it was better to delete it all and pretend like it never happened at all than to acknowledge its existence. And that made me wonder if I was making a big mistake by investigating this, potentially opening a Pandora’s box that I would never be able to close.

  “I make no conclusions about Genius’ behavior myself,” said Valerie, “although I will note that it is odd that Genius would do this. If he made some kind of mistake, he was usually the first to admit it. That he would try to hide it seems out of character for him.”

  “I know,” I said, “which is why you need to dig deeper, Val. Keep looking through Vault B’s files and see what you can find. If Dad missed one file, he might have missed more. Also, try to find out if Freya has any deleted files in her memory and if you can recover them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Valerie. “But before I leave, there is one interesting clue I found in the Project Revival document which I think should catch your interest. Let me show it to you.”


  The holographic document suddenly began scrolling on its own at an absurdly fast pace before coming to an abrupt stop somewhere near the end. Unfortunately, this particular part of the document seemed more corrupt than the rest, because I could only make out a few letters and numbers. The rest was distorted gibberish which hurt my eyes just to look at.

  “What are we supposed to be looking at, Val?” I said, squinting my eyes at the corrupted text. “It looks like a big, unreadable mess.”

  “Most of it is, but I did manage to clean up some of it and made an interesting discovery,” said Valerie. “It appears that Genius did not work on Project Revival alone. As for who his partner was … I think you will have no trouble recognizing the name because it is someone you have met in the past.”

  Before I could ask Valerie what she meant, the document suddenly zoomed toward the very last lines. The text here was corrupted gibberish, at least until it was cleared away, like leaves being pulled back by a rake, and showed two recognizable signatures.

  The first was Dad’s. It was quite distinctive, because Dad had horrible handwriting, so his signature usually looked like the letter ‘G’ followed by a ton of scribbles.

  The second signature, however, was nicer and caught my eye. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense.

  “No way …” I muttered. “Mecha Knight?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Unfortunately, Valerie was unable to provide any explanation for Mecha Knight’s signature being at the end of the document. She did say that she was going to make sure to comb through Vault B’s remaining files with a fine comb, but somehow I doubted she would find anything more. Still, I didn’t see any harm in letting her look, so I told her to get back to work and report back to me as soon as she found anything interesting.

  Thus, Valerie left me and Blizzard alone in my room, but we didn’t have the fun we were planning to have earlier. I sat down on my bed and put my hands on my forehead, thinking about this revelation. Not only had Dad tried to clone my dead uncle, but Mecha Knight helped him, apparently. Yet Mecha Knight, like Dad, never saw fit to mention that particular fact to me even when I was in the Young Neos back on Hero Island. It made me wonder just what other secrets Mecha Knight was keeping from me other than this.