I went to Wally’s shop as soon as I woke up and changed clothes. I didn’t bother with showering since the hole in my side would make it into a task too complex for my liking.
I was hoping I could get some news on my nanites while I picked up extra cans of healing spray. My open wounds ached, and I had trouble just walking because I was still only breathing with one lung.
Despite my poor condition, Wally took me to breakfast first. I ate four eggs and half a dozen sausage patties like I was starving, and we talked about the fight the night before, and about the odd appearance of a boulder in the rock pile. We could think of no logical answers for how it got there, so we pushed the matter aside for another time and went to the lab.
I knew Morgan wouldn’t have any answers for me just yet, but I still felt nervous as Wally and I rode the elevator down to the lab.
The chomps greeted us at the door, and Fluffy nuzzled me affectionately, putting some of his body weight on me and straining my wounds.
I noticed that Fluffy seemed smaller than he had been on my last visit. But more than that, his body was much lighter than I would have expected. He certainly hadn’t felt so light last time. It was like he was now just a furry balloon.
After comparing him to the other chomp I frowned at Wally. “Fluffy is smaller and lighter than normal.”
“How did you know that was Fluffy?” Wally asked.
“I don’t know, he just seems more friendly than, uh…” I trailed off, realizing that I never got the other chomp’s name.
“Mitsy, and that’s how I tell them apart too. I just didn’t expect you to pick up on it so quickly,” Wally said and shrugged. “The size thing is supposedly part of their normal cycle according to Morgan. That’s what he told me when I noticed it, but he didn’t explain why they could change size. My guess is, they get bigger to be monsters—”
“Or smaller to become a disease.” I muttered.
“No, I’m sure they can’t get that small without splitting up,” Wally said. “I don’t think that’s coded in their DNA.”
“It isn’t, but they can split up and form separate entities,” Morgan said as he walked to the elevator. “Wally told me about the fight.” Both his eyes slitted in a pained grimace. “Those wounds look terrible.”
Snorting, I said, “They don’t feel too good either.”
“I believe I have a way to heal those wounds faster than a healing spray could. Your nanites shut down early last night, and we’ve been working on the programming non-stop since then. Based on our studies, I think we can inject some nanites with a modified program that can repair the damage in a few seconds. The spray would take a day, but the speed will have the trade-off that you experience a moment or two of extreme pain.”
“Morgan, I had the skin stripped off my chest yesterday,” I declared. “I think I can handle a little pain.”
Yes, I am an idiot.
“Then come over here to the table and lie down,” Morgan instructed and waved to one of the chomps. “Go ahead, Fluffy.”
I lay on the table, and the chomp draped his tentacles over me. “I sssorry,” he hissed before driving the point of every one of his tentacles into my body.
I thought that was what Morgan meant by extreme pain, but it occurred to me how wrong I was just a split second later.
If you could find a giant meat grinder and magically survive two passes through it, you might get half an idea of what this felt like.
I didn’t pass out during the grueling two seconds before the pain was replaced by a low throb. Within a minute, even that minor ache was gone, and Fluffy untangled himself and let me get up.
I took a deep breath, happily noting that I was using two lungs again. “Okay, so what just happened?”
“Fluffy injected blank nanites, and the pain you felt came from them activating and developing roles as cells in your body. What I’ve found is that your body is composed of synthetic material, or approximations of living tissue. To put it bluntly, you were dead too long for the revival to work properly.
“With Wally, the nanites had living tissue to use for examples, but your machines had to rewrite their code to produce approximations for you. It explains why your nanites behave differently. I modified the system AI prior to your revival so your nanites could reprogram themselves if a task was outside their normal parameters. You fell way outside of normal parameters, so your nanites are radically different than anything we’ve ever come across in the wild.”
I blinked at him, comprehending nothing. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Nanites can change according to their environment. If you think of nanites as a virus that mutate and change over time, your nanites can provide new areas of study as the machines reinvent their own code,” Morgan explained. “So your ‘wild’ nanites are nothing more than a strain of variant coding.”
“How much of my problem is related to this variant programming?”
“Most of it, but I believe we can perform a change of part of your coding. The aging process was seen as unnecessary by your machines, so they didn’t provide any model of aging for your body. We can try to set up a program to modify you to your approximate age and use a variant nanites strain to set up a permanent aging model.”
He spun on his thing leg to look at Mitsy when she hissed in what seemed like a derisive manner.
I ignored the chomp as my head wrapped around what Morgan was telling me. “You can make me age normally from now on?” I asked.
“I think so. We can send in a new set of nanites to supplant your current set and allow you to age normally.”
I started crying. I couldn’t help it. “How soon?” I whispered.
“Between myself and the chomps, we can whip up a new batch of nanites by tomorrow night,” Morgan said.
I started blubbering at his answer, and I fell against Wally, who held me without teasing or cajoling. My heart was fluttering, and I felt no shame at crying in front of everyone. I was going to be cured, and nothing else mattered.
My shoulders lighter with my burdens lifted from them, I left the lab minutes later, and Wally took off to go on patrol. I wandered around the city with a goofy grin, waving at anyone who looked at me and smiled back.
I got so happy that I even started whistling.
“You seem fairly chipper today,” Simon observed from behind me.
“I may be cured as early as tomorrow night,” I explained and grinned at him as he fell into step beside me.
“Good for you. Will a little rain on your parade be okay, or should I go away?” Simon joked.
“Let it pour, Simon,” I confirmed in a cheerful tone of voice.
“The Blazers are robbing the bank up the street, and I was wondering if you’d be my backup. I just need you to do one tiny thing and then I can handle the rest.”
“Who could resist an offer like that?” I asked and nodded. “Okay, what do I get to do?”
“See that red van in front of the bank?” Simon asked and pointed down the street, several blocks ahead of us.
“The suspicious looking conversion job with the spoiler?” I asked, as there were in fact three red vans in front of the bank.
The Blazers have a habit of splitting up to confuse the cops as to who has the money. Simon shook his head, pointing to a rust red Volkswagen van with a peace symbol on the back window. “The other two are empty, but there’s a wheel man in that van. I think that’s which one the money is going in. If you filled the tires with ice, then froze them to the pavement—”
“Then he couldn’t get away and wouldn’t know until it was too late,” I interrupted him and nodded as I went to work. “It’s done, so what do I do now?”
“You come inside and watch me work,” Simon said and smiled wickedly.
“Are you sure you want to take on the entire gang your self?”
“I won’t be. The drivers will be outside, making it a four on one fight. That’s not really fair to them, but I let you have all the fun at the pizza parlor. Now it’s my turn to show you some unorthodox tactics.”
“This could be fun,” I mused.
Simon bowed as he held open the door for me.
“You have no idea,” Simon said glibly. His expression changed, and suddenly he looked like a goofy kid who just heard a good dirty joke. He grinned and began to skip in circles around me while he fished a dollar out his hip pocket. “Oh boy, Sis, I got a whole dollar! I’m filthy rich, right?”
“If you say so,” I remarked in a bored manner, slipping into the role easily enough. Of course, a moment later, I was forced to drop the role when I got shot. I glanced down at a laser singed hole in my in my shirt then looked up at the ski-masked robber.
“Totally did not see that coming,” Simon said.
“But a laser doesn’t work on me,” I said.
The robber stumbled back on his ass in surprise.
I was going to hit him with a hailstone to knock him out, but before I could get a pea-sized piece of ice formed, Simon drew a heavy red velvet curtain around me.
The curtain had most certainly not been there before, but when I opened it to ask Simon what was going on, he had vanished. I stepped around the red fabric column to find him standing behind the counter.
He activated the intercom system and jumped onto the counter, his voice booming out loudly in a way that seemed impossible for the kind of cheap lobby speakers mounted in the ceiling.
“Ignore the girl behind the curtain!” he roared, causing everyone to stumble, robbers and hostages alike. “I am the great and powerful—oh shit!”
Simon ducked as all four of the Blazers fired at him. Dropping off the counter, he reappeared on a desk on the opposite side of the room. “No kewpie dolls for you bozos!” he yelled, his arms pinwheeling a moment later when a laser pierced his chest.
“Simon!” I shouted before it occurred to me that for someone who was shot, he was hamming it up quite a bit.
“Aiee, he got me!” Simon squealed and fell backwards off the desk. He appeared in front of the robber who had shot him, shoving a cigar in his mouth and lighting it. “That was some nice shooting there, ace,” he said while shaking the robber’s hand.
A second later the cigar exploded, obscuring both of them in a cloud of thick white smoke. The robber was flat on his back when it cleared, and Simon was all the way across the lobby, kicking a metal bench behind the remaining three robbers. It hit the backs of their legs, forcing all of them to sit down hard.
Simon was in front of them a moment later, shaking a set of pompoms.
I’d like to take a moment to apologize for my poor writing skills now. This may not make sense to you at this point, but it didn’t make any sense then either.
The bench that the robbers were sitting on looked nothing like the wooden variety all around the lobby of the bank. Simon was getting these things from somewhere, but I didn’t see how.
I was watching him closely when the pompoms popped into his hands, but I saw no way to explain what he was doing.
“Simon—” I began to object.
“Hush, I’m almost done,” Simon chided and grinned at the robbers. “Go Simon, go!” He chanted and the robbers fell in with him a second later.
He led them through two chants before one of the robbers noticed a fine column of dust falling from the ceiling. He leapt out of the way just as a safe hit the bench.
Dropping the pompoms, Simon snapped his fingers. “Damn! I wanted to get all of you with one shot.”
Falling in extreme slow motion, the pompoms dissolved before they hit the floor.
“What the hell are you?” the remaining Blazer yelled in a terrified voice and began firing wildly.
Simon vanished, but the gunner kept firing until he emptied the battery pack on his laser rifle. How he managed to miss everyone is beyond me, but he spun around when the gun chirped a signal that the battery was depleted, finding Simon right behind him.
There was an impish grin on Simon’s face, and he looked up at the robber, causing the poor fool to shake visibly.
Simon said, “Hey, have you ever tasted nut butter?”
“N-no,” the robber stammered, and then screamed when Simon drove his kneecap into the Blazer’s balls.
Even I cringed, but Simon tapped the guy’s shoulder, grinning wider. “So how did it taste?”
“Like shit,” the robber whimpered.
“Hmmm, I guess I hit your colon by mistake. Let me try that again,” Simon suggested and drew back his knee.
“No please, I surrender!” the robber begged.
“Bright boy,” Simon noted before he drew back his hands. A mallet appeared in his grasp, and he hit the Blazer on the side of his head, knocking him out cold.
Simon dropped the mallet, which evaporated before it hit the ground, just like the pompoms.
He walked over to me and asked, “So, what did you think? Was I too over the top?”
“How did you do that?” I asked, confused by what I’d seen.
Simon waved a hand dismissively at me. “It’s too complicated to explain without a mile long chalk board and a calculator. My powers are, shall we say, unique?”
Still stunned by what I’d seen, I looked back where two of the Blazers had been crushed by the vault, and I was confounded even further by the four robbers lined neatly side by side. The vault was missing, as was the hole in the ceiling that it made.
This lead me to think that there never was a real vault, since the two Blazers would have resembled a spilled jar of spaghetti sauce if it had been. Simon just chuckled and shook his head when I mentioned this.
“Wait, if that was a real vault, where did you get it from? From this bank?” I commented in an agitated voice.
“You think this bank would use an ancient Acme safe?” Simon replied and smiled. “It was a real vault, but I didn’t get it from anywhere around here.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense, Simon. If that was a real vault, how did those two survive? For that matter where did the vault and the hole in the ceiling go?” I asked.
“Terry, I could stand here all day and try to explain how my powers work, but you still wouldn’t understand. It really is easier if you just accept it and move on. To pose this as a question, why can you breathe in absolute zero air when air isn’t supposed to move at absolute zero?”
I tried to think of an explanation before I nodded, giving up. “Okay, I’ll file this under things that make me go ‘huh.’”
Simon’s laughter was warm as he offered me his hand. “You might get the hang of this after all. Come on, let’s go before your friends in the press show up.”
... I write dark fiction in a variety of genres. My blog contains my rants and rambles, and some short fiction that can only be found here.
I can be pretty fucking offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.
Yeah for Terry, she now knows why she can’t age (and now so do we) and boy is it a duzy. So that would make Terry a synthetic lifeform now, no wonder all it takes is one to survive for Terry to come back to life. Depending on how a person looks at it, Terry is a machine in a sense.
And boy watching Simon would be like watching Bugs being a hero, all slap-stick in how he takes them down. Powers could almost work the same way, at least an ACME safe says they might at least. Ok so we know he is out of sync with time, and now can create or call things to where he is. At least he didn’t use an ACME rocket, those almost always work poorly.
Yep, Terry is just as much a synthetic life form as the East End Boys or Fluffy and Mitsy. She could be considered a cybernetic machine programmed with the memories of an expired metahuman. But because of her coding, she isn’t comfortable with admitting that she’s a machine.
Simon is kind of like a cross between Bugs and the Mask. You’ll get a little bit of his history in the next chapter, but now you have a better idea of why he’s having trouble coming up with a rational explanation for what he is. It’s a complex problem that involves the warping of space-time, not to mention most of the laws of physics. Kind of a deus-ex boy friend. ^_^