“You missed this, didn’t you?” Leah asked, standing atop Empire State Building, balancing herself on the narrow spire.
“Missed what?” Nate asked, floating upside down. His cellphone slipped off his pocket, hitting his chin on the way down. Nate cursed, catching the phone and pocketing it, correcting his posture as he floated closer to his sister.
“This. This building. The streets below. All the people.”
“You are asking me if I missed Earth.”
“Yeah, dummy. I mean, I get that space is nice with all the stars and aliens and singularities. But Earth ain’t pretty bad either, right?”
Nate shrugged. What was he supposed to say?
“Yeah, Earth is pretty alright. I just wish the papparazzi wasn’t as persistent, you know? Especially with the drones. I mean, look you can see that one right? The one hovering near that Wendy’s? It’s been following us for the last thirty minutes.”
Leah craned her head, looking intently at the Wendy’s across the street. “Oh yeah. That’s from the Howler’s fleet. It’s very annoying, I know. But we are safe. They can’t see us, remember?”
“Yeah, I do. It’s just that, I wish we didn’t have to hide all the time.”
Leah laughed. It was an honest laugh, the kind he heard from Leah so frequently. Nate smiled, his spirits lifted, if only slightly.
“You don’t like it here, do you? You have always wanted to be up there, in the stars. Fighting Imperius or building the next human colony.”
“Yeah. We get to start fresh out there. No baggages, no pressure. I just get to be Nate Waid. Okay guitarist. Pretty okay songwriter.”
“Brilliant singer!” Leah exclaimed.
Nate nodded, grinning. “Yeah. I mean, I am not Summit out there, you know? Don’t get me wrong. I like being Summit. Those days we went out and fought the Infernal Nine as a family? Some of the best days of my life. But I never wanted that to be my whole life. And that’s what it’s become in the last few years.”
“I get you, bro. Listen, things get easier once you get done with school, you know?” Leah said, stepping off the spire. “This isn’t permanent. Nothing is, especially for people like us. I mean, how many New Yorks have I seen that were empty or overrun with zombies? Other people are just that, other people. We have us.”
Leah grasped Nate’s hand, squeezing it gently. “We got this. We are going to make it. I know it.
Now let’s get started for Seattle, yeah? It’s almost time. We don’t want to be late.”
Nate nodded. He followed his sister’s lead as they sped through the skies, rising higher and higher in altitude until the Empire State Building (and all others beside it) were reduced to specks, glittering under the glare of the morning sun.
Nate took out his phone, connecting them to his microspeakers, wedged safely above his earlobe. He started things off with Audioslave; lonesome chords sounded in his ears, and soon Chris Cornell’s soulful voice came blaring out, soothing the inner torrents of his soul. He looked up, peering beyond the Moon, focusing on the lonesome form of Mars.
He missed the sandcastles he had built there, with intricate layouts. Some mirrored the insides of British castles, while others were born from his own head. They were amalgams of things he had read and things he wished that were real. He had started building cities when his dad had to cut their vacation short.
He had tried to find that place later, when he was sixteen. He found Curiosity (and also Endeavor), but he couldn’t find any castles. Maybe he had imagined them, like Don Quixote had dreamed of giants when faced with windmills.
It didn’t matter, really. He had been to countless other planets. But there was something about Mars. And he wondered what it was.
Maybe he will find out someday.
~*~
Alexis took a deep breath, centering herself. This was the first day of the rest of her life.
Alexis smiled, adjusting the hem of her business suit, keenly inspecting her reflection. There was a way with which she transitioned between her different garbs of clothing that surprised even herself. It was probably part of her godly charms. It also explained how she had gone unnoticed for most of her nine hundred year lifespan.
Had it really been nine hundred years? Sometimes, it felt as though it had only been thirty years since she emerged fully-formed in Mykonos. There had been no one then to take care of her, or to comfort her. She remembered kicking, crying, screaming when men first tried to dishonor her, and then being mortified after bashing one of their heads with a rock. Why were the fates so cruel, she had wondered then. Why had she been sent to Earth clueless and defenseless?
She spent the first four years as a mute, slowly learning to speak as she spent her days as a beggar and occasional day laborer. She had lived in abject poverty for the next forty years, until the locals noticed that she never seemed to age. Things were very different for her afterwards.
When Alexis looked back on her life, she saw a never ending sea, beset by hurricanes and tropical storms, braving these onslaughts with grace and serenity. How exhilarating it had felt, when she crossed her first ocean! How terrifying it had been, fighting off Aztecs and conquistadors at the same time, while combing the entirety of Mexico in search of El Dorado! Yes, her life had been eventful and fulfilling indeed. But now another storm grew in the shadow of peace.
She had known Bob Ward since he had first become Jupiter all those years ago. He was a bright boy then, but even then he sorely needed guidance. Over the years, Bob grew into a soft-spoken, nebulous man, barely having a functional life, always on the job, saving people from disasters both natural and man-made.
Alexis had always known that Bob was going to die in an unusual way. By the end, there was nothing usual left in his life. His wife, Jenny, had passed away thirty years earlier, leaving him childless.
When Bob transitioned out of his leadership role at Pantheon, he invited Alexis and David to his house, along with their kids. It was a private affair, and by the time the night had ended, Bob seemed more present and alive than he had in years. She had also seen something else in his eyes: a deep, mortifying sadness. It was the same kind of sadness he had seen in the eyes of Hernan Cortes when she visited him on his deathbed: the kind of sadness that stayed with you long after glory and fame has faded from memory.
Alexis exited the washroom, smiling warmly at the sea of faces that surrounded her, nodding and hugging her colleagues as she made her way to the conference room. She wondered if any of them knew who Bob really was: not the hero or the persona, but the actual human being underneath. Then again, how would they? Bob retired from public life two decades ago.
“Alexis!” Kiera exclaimed, enveloping her with wide, welcoming arms. “You look focused. It’s game day, huh?”
“First day of the rest of our lives, Kiera. Let’s knock the meeting out of the park, yeah?”
“Yeah, yeah! You ordered your coffee, yet? Paulo got everyone these great coffee beans from Rio. It tastes exactly the way you expect ambrosia to taste like.”
Alexis laughed. “I am better off without it then. I already got a cup of latte in my office, so I will be good for the next ten hours.”
There were a score of people waiting in the conference room. The board members were there, but so were many others: Alan and Edith were there, as was Terrence Sawyer. Isaac York and Liam Alexander were standing in the corner, deep in serious conversation with Vera Edwards.
“Alright everyone, please take your seats,” Alexis said, setting into her own chair at the head of the table. “I know everyone has a lot of questions, and we will get to them, as soon as we get the agenda out of the way. Kiera, take it away.”
The table’s holodeck lit alight, constructing an image of Pantheon’s operating interests across the globe. “Our overall brand equity took a bit of a hit, especially in areas where Jupiter was regarded as a close, important ally.,” Kiera said. “However, our main projects remain unaffected. We are still on target for our Q2 earnings. In fact, we might exceed them if the sales for subdermal wearables picks up.”
“It’s not just subdermals that are going to pick up,” Nate said, poring through financial dashboards on his phone. “This is the year when AI-assisted counselling is going to hit big. The way our investments are positioned, we are probably going to see a double digit return, at the very least.”
Alexis grinned. “That’s great. We can discuss this in detail later. As some of you know, Isaac and Liam have been investigating Jupiter’s death for some time. Isaac, care to share your thoughts?”
Isaac nodded, leaning closer, linking a thumb drive to the table computer. “What I am going to show you right now is for your eyes only. This must not leave this room at any cost.”
The hologram changed, taking the form of a gigantic, meticulously detailed human brain. “This is a time-series lapse of Bob Ward’s brain. Zoe Ballack helped me put it together after the autopsy. Her recreations have a 98% success rate, so this is as close to the real thing we are going to get.”
A phantom, second brain projection appeared around the edge of the first brain, flickering slightly, connected through razor thin threads to the primary brain.
“This is what happens when you reverse-engineer a god’s body and quantum superpose it with a human being. When he was Jupiter, Bob’s human brain was connected to this bigger, more complicated god brain. Think of it as a lightbulb connected to the electrical grid of the entire Eastern Seaboard.”
The projections moved forward by twenty years. Several areas of the primary brain were now inflamed, which then spread to several larger areas on the second brain. “This is how his brain was in the sixties. Bob didn’t start taking therapy until ’69. By then it was already pretty late. Hence his semi-retirement, which eventually turned into a full retirement in ’85.
It’s a miracle that he survived as long as he did. It’s hard to determine why the trauma was so intense even after all these years. It’s like a part of his brain was stuck in limbo, forever repeating a chain of negative thoughts.”
“We tried to look into it,” Liam added, glancing solemnly towards Isaac. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t magic, light or dark. Might be one of those cosmic worm thingies. God knows Ward got into his share of weirdness in his prime.”
“What we did learn, though, is that Ward was secretly operating as Jupiter for the last two years,” Isaac continued. “And that was part of why his brain went from this to…this.”
The neural connections between the two brains multiplied, sending the primary brain’s cerebrum into a frenzy, wreaking havoc on his brain matter.
“He started suffering from what I can only describe as massive blackouts. There are whole sections of time we cannot account for. From what we saw with the brief flashes we got near the end, the inflammation got significantly worse. Whatever he did or went through caused him a whole new kind of trauma on an unprecedented scale. Do you remember how he was on that last day, Alexis?”
“He was barely there, Isaac,” Alexis said, her voice threatening to crack. “There was barely a person there anymore. It was like someone consumed him. Someone, or something.”
Isaac nodded. “This is what his brain was like on March 9th. You guys might want to hold off lunch for today.”
Whole chunks of the secondary brain were gone; there were huge indentations around his hippocampus that looked like gigantic bite marks.
“What did this to him?” Kenneth asked, chin resting on hands. “Nothing on Earth can exert enough force to bite off a god’s brain. Especially if that god was Jupiter.”
“That’s what we want to find out,” Isaac said. “Our best guess right now is that this happened when he was in space or in another dimension. We can’t directly retrace his steps, but we are trying to work around that.”
“I have been investigating all the places Jupiter visited in the last few months. If any of you want to join me, that would be great,” Liam said, fiddling his lighter cap.
“I can send some of my psychic agents with you,” Terrence said, a hint of devilish mirth dancing behind his hard-set eyes. “Or I can lend you Jen. She’s always had a good nose for these things.”
“As good as Jen Cooper is, we also need to send one of our own there. Kenneth, you up for it?”
Kenneth blinked, clearing his throat. “Well I can spare a week or two from my schedule. But our contracts with Boeing and Northrup-Grumman are coming up soon, and I need to be here by May 5 to renegotiate those.”
“I could join you too, Kenneth,” Leah said. “I don’t have as many obligations. I can delegate my current stuff to my support team, which means I am free for most of April and May.”
Alexis frowned. Leah getting involved with the investigation seemed like a logical choice. She was, after all, goddess of the hunt. Yet something gnawed at her mind, pawing her divine intuition, telling her that this wasn’t as good a idea as it seemed on paper.
“I am sure that you will be a great help to Liam and Isaac, Leah,” Alexis said, hands cusped and pressed against the table. “And you will learn a great deal from them. But keep your eyes open. My gut’s rarely wrong, and it’s telling me something’s not okay here.”
Leah nodded, smiling, eyes twinkling. “I will be alright, mom. If you want to keep tabs, you could join us for a bit too.”
“With my schedule, that’s highly unlikely,” Alexis replied. “But we will see.”
“It’s a pity, Alexis,” Terrence said, pausing to drink water from his flask. “I have half a mind to join the kids myself. But deputy director Cole is currently busy with Mars, no thanks to that smug son of a gun sitting right there,” Terrence pointed at Noah Bekker, who smiled and waved. “So no vacation for me.”
Liam grunted, pocketing his lighter. “I am happy that all of you are so interested in joining our merry band of misfits, but we need to take our show on the road. The trail’s already as cold as the Alps. We got our work cut out for us.”
“You guys can work out of our offices,” Alexis offered. “The ninth floor has been basically empty anyways, since Balder moved out a couple of years ago.”
Liam nodded. “Appreciate the offer. We have been working out of Isaac’s cave, which is cozy, I give you, but I will take the wonders of internal heating over that any day.”
“Well, my cave has a supercomputer, Liam. And those don’t come cheap,” Isaac said, grinning.
“Yes, yes, I am quite aware that you are filthy rich. Alright, I guess that concludes our business here. Isaac and I will be around a while longer, in case any of you wants to discuss the case.”
As the guests left, Alexis saw Nate flinch for a moment, elbows and legs raised. Leah noticed it too; she stared at him questioningly before snickering. “What, you forgot that you are a board member, huh?”
Nate nodded, settling into his seat. “Yeah. It’s been a while since I sat here. Still getting used to it.”
“Three months in space can do that to you,” Paulo remarked. “The last time I was dipping in the Sun, I lost track of time. Ended up being gone for four weeks.”
Ana tutted, and Paulo winced. “You were gone longer, Paulo. I slept alone from spring to summer that year. And then you turned up with that ridiculous sun tan.”
Alexis took a good, hard look at her chil popdren. She still wondered if she had done the right thing, bringing her family into her work. Of course, Pantheon was also her family: it was just a different kind of family, full of its own joys and problems. Some of them, like Ana and Kenneth, were her own flesh and blood; and then Ana and Kenneth sired children (both with each other and with other mortals) over the past few hundred years, who in turn produced their own brood with various partners.
“Alright guys, let’s wrap this meeting up in a few minutes,” Alexis said, motioning Kiera to move onto the next item on the agenda.
“Alright,” Kiera said, turning on the holodeck once again. “Up next: Project Hypatia. Our Asia desk is investigating a possible cult in Myanmar. In more encouraging news, we managed to retrieve some priceless scrolls from a parallel Earth’s Alexandria.”
Alexis beamed, quickly accessing her own files on Project Hypatia. “Go ahead, Kiera, tell me more.”
~*~
Liam exhaled deeply, smoke exiting his mouth as if from a furnace. He and Leah were standing by an open balcony, gazing at the inky, vibrant streets. He grinned, and not for the last time that day, he regretted his poor sense of dental hygiene.
Leah didn’t mind. She stifled a laugh when Liam grabbed a tiny mouth spray from his overcoat’s pocket, spraying it liberally onto his teeth. “You have still got this look going on huh? The whole overcoat, shirt and tie thing? it’s like you stepped out of an eighties film about greed and politics.”
“Guilty as charged. I came of age when Thatcherism was at its peak. Not the best of days, those times. But at least ciggies were a hell lot cheaper.
You sure you want to join us on this investigation, Leah? It won’t be pretty. Jupiter was a strange, grave man. Who knows what he got up to in those last few years.”
“He was quiet, yes, but Bob Ward was also a kind human being. Bob Ward is one of those handful few who paved the way for all superhumans across the world. And we need to find out what happened to him, especially if this is a supervillain’s doing.”
Liam snickered, taking another puff from his cigarette. When he exhaled, he fashioned the smoke into the image of the Triumvirate, who were also joined by Sentinel, Britannia and Paradigm.
“Doesn’t matter what you call them, sweetheart. Heroes, villains, gods. They are still just people. They have their scruples and vices just like everyone else. And they have secrets too, I reckon. Which is a funny thing, especially when you consider that secret identities are now mostly a thing of the past.
Did I ever tell you about my first team up? It was with Moonshadow. We met each other while investigating this necromancer commune operating out of Trenton. She made quick work of those buggers. We went out for a drink afterwards. It was cheap swill, but her charming disposition made up for it.
Do you know when I met her next? When she was undergoing therapy for PTSD. She had just found out that Mephistopheles had created her husband, boy and girl out of thin air. Created them to be loving, kind people. And of course, dear old Toph went ahead and dusted them once she learned about it.”
“And let me guess,” Leah said, “the next time you met her was after she killed those Satanists in Georgia?”
Liam shook his head. “Nah. I was out of the country, attending to some personal business. I never saw her again, even after she did her time in Hades. There wasn’t a point to it. It was random, what had happened to her. That’s the point. Life is random shit. And then you die.”
“Not a big believer in human progress, are you?” Leah said, lighting her own Marlboro Light with her laser vision. “There are two ways to see people. You see them as they are, and you see them as the people they want to be. We are the ones who are supposed to help them bridge that gap. That’s one of the things I learned from both mom and dad. You can’t let the shit that happened to you define who you are and what you can do.
I haven’t told anyone this. You know I can see basically everything that happens in the northern hemisphere, right? There are times when I look at this brownstone in Brooklyn. He lives there with his wife and son. They don’t even know he used to be part of the Rage Crew. Or that he kidnapped me twelve years ago and had his way with me for the next three weeks.
You know what’s the funniest thing about it? He doesn’t look like he even remembers what he did. He just goes to work, comes back, watches TV and then goes to sleep. He has sex on Wednesdays, and sometimes on a Tuesday too, if she’s in a good mood. Her name’s Kay. She looks a little bit like a beaver. Her son plays Fortnite all day. He’s good at it, too.
Do you know how easy it is to burn a hole into someone’s liver? Or to damage certain parts of his brain, without it ever turning it up on a CAT scan or a MRI? I know, Liam. I spent weeks learning those stuff. There are days where nothing’s going right, and I turn towards Brooklyn and look into his brain. Then I get up from my bed, grab my morning coffee and go for a run.
The world has always been a shitty place, Liam. That doesn’t give anyone the right to be a shitty human being too.”
Liam laughed. It was a hoarse, ringing laugh that sounded as though it hurt his vocal cords. He muttered a few words, and the cigarette in his hand disintegrated, turning to dust. “You are a fine piece of work too, Leah. No wonder you got along so well with Ward and his ilk.”
Leah inhaled, holding her breath in, the nicotine going to war with her superhuman lungs. When he exhaled, her throat felt ragged, wisps lingering in her breath. “Yeah. I can’t wait to find the bastards that did this to him. They picked the wrong Earth to mess with.”
Liam turned towards the door, his hands tucked in his pockets. “Be careful what you wish for, girl. We just might be over our heads with this one.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I am on your side, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. You better start smoking real ciggies, though. It’s not like you are actually going to get cancer from them, like I did.”
“Stop it, Liam,” Leah chortled. “You totally did not have cancer.”
“I totally did. Pinky promise. You can ask Morningstar about it too.”
Leah shook her head. She had long harbored a stupid schoolgirl’s crush on Liam Alexander. But now that she was spending time with him, she saw nothing but desolation in the place where his soul was supposed to be.
She hated that. All the men in her life were either broken or unavailable. Even her father had grown more distant over the years. It made her wary.
The superhero experiment had worked so far. Maybe it had an expiry date too, like everything else in life.
~*~
This is an original multi-chapter story that will be updated periodically.