With that question came a flood of memories, some contradicting what I would have said ten minutes before she asked.
At that point, I would have said that my grandmother, Romy Vander Sloot had died when I was ten or eleven. She had lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. Despite that, she’d been healthy until the last year or two of her life.
After she’d died, Grandpa had lived alone in the house they’d shared for almost another decade, spending most of it teaching me his technology and creating tools for other heroes.
It was good that Stephanie was up for saying hi. The last I’d seen her, she’d been in no condition to do much of anything thanks to Dominator trigger commands.
Of course, she’d now been removed from the triggering situation for days. So, she might not be affected.
I set my implant to remind me to respond to Courtney later. Thanks to Hal sending out messages to more than one hundred heroes and groups in my name, I had several times that many responses. Thanks to Hal, most of them wouldn’t need a personal response, but a few deserved it.
We didn’t talk after that. At any rate, we didn’t talk much. People leaned back in their seats and napped or at least closed their eyes. I would have too if I hadn’t been flying the plane.
In the end, it wasn’t a long trip. I took the jet up to a high altitude and then aimed the jet downward toward Grand Lake.
We didn’t have any trouble with intercepting planes, missiles, or paranoid supers. Instead, we dropped into the lake, entered through the underwater entrance, and emerged in the base.
Haley scrunched up her face, “That’s not really nice. They’re people.”
Amy shrugged, “Most of the time I’ve spent in this world was in Florida. I’ve heard that the benefits for working at Waffle House aren’t bad, but the dental care some people got before working there wasn’t great.”
Haley shook her head. “That’s restaurants. The full time staff get benefits, but most jobs are part time and they don’t get benefits at all. Are things different in your world?”
“It’s better than the alternative,” I said, and thought about what I might be getting. In addition to the practical knowledge of the Nine’s operations which we’d need to track whether we’d succeeded, Rook and Dr. Mind weren’t the only inventors who’d ever served the Nine.
We’d get in trouble with the government for stealing the Nine’s tech, but not for using their ideas—probably.
It did worry me that Rook had likely brought back Abominator tech from the Moon and Mars. I didn’t even know where it was if I wanted to destroy it.
“Weird,” I said, “but not surprising. Rook used Abominator tech for his implant. We used it too, but we modified ours with Xiniti technology in such a way that we can’t replace their parts without consent. For all I know there might be a way to turn things back. I think it’s unlikely, but you never know.”
Dayton sighed but followed it up with, “He’ll probably like the power upgrade.”
Looking over the place I found myself in the middle of a few different unrelated thoughts. First, that the island was a beautiful place. Especially around the platform where we exited the stairway, the vegetation all but screamed, “tropical island paradise.”
Colorful birds flew through the air above us. Others perched in the trees or on volcanic mound.
Noticing that, I hoped again that it was inactive, and decided to be grateful that Larry wasn’t here. While he was closer to me than some family members, he had the worst luck with fire and natural disasters.
It didn’t take long to reach the surface, relatively speaking. Izzy lead us down a hall off of the main room, giving me a chance to look at the dead, frozen bodies of all the people Rook had turned into robots as well as his own transformed body.
Amy shuddered as she passed it, telling me, “The little bit of him that’s left saw his dead body. Even for him, it’s weird and creepy.”
Lim glanced off to the side, adding, “I really should go now. I’m going to assume that explaining what’s going on with Ray’s corpse and the Xiniti is one of those things that would cause more problems if you explain it than if you don’t. Tell me if that changes.”
“Sure,” I said, intending to say nothing forever unless Ray reappeared on Earth.
Lim stared into the camera for a moment, giving the impression that he was studying me even though I knew he was just getting a still of the Rocket suit in his video feed. Continue reading Reality Tweaks: Part 3→
Lim’s face appeared on the screen. I couldn’t even guess where he was—someplace dark that wasn’t his office, for sure. The grey marble behind him and the hint of light reflecting from it suggested that he might be outside.
The polished marble in particular would fit with being in Washington D.C. or a suburb with federal buildings. Lim could easily have been mobilized by the AIs to take down one of the Nine’s outposts. Continue reading Reality Tweaks: Part 2→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
