1
The man sits on a stone bench, fingering the thick metal collar around his neck. The sores in his skin glisten with antibiotic cream. He looks ancient in the cell’s light. Worn out. Tired. Long scars in the shape of a V have been scratched into his forearms by fingernails that have now been pulled out for his own safety.
He sighs and leans back against a pillow.
A guard pulls the empty metal tray through the slot in the door.
They’re terrified of him. They wear masks so that the man can never identify them, they never speak to him, they watch him warily with their hands on the buttons of small remote controls that are ever held in the hands.
One wrong move, one suspicious twitch, and they’ll trigger the collar.
Then the man’s head will be detonated.
2
There is a gantry over the roof of the cell instead of a ceiling. Five pairs of eyes watch the man’s every move, with their hands hovering over large red kill-switches.
Any hint of a movement faster than their eyes can process, and they’ll slap them.
When that happens, the man’s head will be detonated.
3
Deep below the cell, through thousands of feet of solid concrete in a bunker that runs on its own bottled air and features a series of reinforced doors that can survive a nuclear strike, there’s a control room where all the cameras in the facility send their feeds, a team of artificial intelligences monitor every nook.
They can think faster, see faster, think faster, and hit the kill-switch faster.
If they see any motion faster than the normal human range, the man’s head will be detonated.
4
They never use his name. He is Four Dash Seven.
Four Dash Seven.
It is a way to create a distance. To dehumanize.
Think of him as the subject. One of ‘them.’ A thing. A piece of machinery. Do that, and you don’t have to come to terms with the fact that this is a human you’ll have to kill.
“When we started doing this,” one faceless guard in a mask tells another, somewhere up on the ground floor high overhead, “the facility was homey. We were up near the surface. They let Four Dash Seven have a garden, cable TV, visitors. There was a french chef. There was a fountain.”
“What happened?”
“Broke the rules.”
The guard picked up his detonator and checked the battery, then turned it on.
5
Four Dash Seven.
He prefers Kevin.
Kevin is what his mother called him when she swung him around in the air, his blond hair a long, tangled mess that flew around his cheeks.
Kevin Stanley is what his father called him when his voice got all loud and angry when Kevin did something wrong.
More and more, Kevin spends his time lying on the cell bench thinking about his parents. They’d been so proud of him when they realized he was the Fast One. Captain Skippy.
He called himself Captain Velocity. Added the Captain because it felt more legitimate to have a rank of some kind. Spent months building a suit that wouldn’t go up in flames with a big V emblazoned on the chest.
In the beginning, it’d been amazing. The alien serum in his veins fizzed and spat, and he’d felt so full of potential.
6
When you crack the speed of sound, a shock wave develops around you. Pops eardrums. Shatters windows. The sonic boom is stunning.
As Velocity, Kevin has run across water. Saved people from muggings. Outrun bullets.
It felt good, didn’t it?
Amazing to make a difference, directly, to people’s lives.
7
“Come off it,” the FBI agent says. “You’ve been running around, a blur all over the city, and doing what? Catching a bunch of fucking purse snatchers?”
And that was the schtick, wasn’t it? Bigger game? A super villian.
“No,” the agent says. She’s a raven-haired, older woman with weary eyes. She sighs. “No. This isn’t cops and robbers. This is about society. There are larger criminal organizations. There’s corruption in the city. Instead of you running around after every little thing you hear on the scanner, join us. We can give you the support of an entired department. There are things we can do together.”
Things changed after that. No more small crimes. After this, it was working with SWAT. Go in with the team. Wear a bullet-broof vest.
Change the city. Change the world.
Go higher. Go bigger. Go faster.
8
Whipping through a room with SWAT is way more fun than accounting. That’s what Kevin did before the accident. Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables.
He’d slammed into the side of the alien starship going down Main Street after work. His fault: he hadn’t been paying attention. Tired after work. Looking forward to getting home and going raiding with his MMORPG team.
The old sedan broke through the tear in the craft’s skin, and Kevin had been thrown out the front window. He’d skidded across the hood, off into some dank corridor.
Something in his neck broke.
He was pretty sure he broke his back.
He couldn’t move, but he could open his eyes. Which meant he saw the alien squat down in front of him. It ran long fingers over his spine, and moved his body over onto his back.
Kevin had stared up into four sets of massive, gelatinous eyes, gurgling, realizing that he was about to die.
“I am so sorry,” the alien whispered to him, through a gentle hand on his forehead. Some sort of telepathic contact, as the mandibles never shifted as those four dark eyes met with his. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t landed right in front of you.”
There was a blur. At the time, Kevin hadn’t understood.
Now he knew that it was the alien moving faster than his eyes could process. Giving him the serum. Or doing surgery. Or something like that.
They would never know.
The alien ship melted away to leave Kevin alone in a puddle of goo in the middle of the street as the police who’d surrounded the ship stared.
9
“Why do you think an alien being gave you its power, and your life?”
“Maybe it was a really moral being, maybe it felt so horrible about accidentally taking a life that day that it landed in traffic that it had to fix things.”
10
Sometimes Four Dash Seven breaks. He refuses to get up on time.
When he does that, the collar warms up. It’s just a warning. A reminder about his situation.
Usually that’s enough.
Four Dash Seven will curse at them. Fingers will tense over buttons. Ready.
The next level are a series of shocks. They come from devices surgically implanted into the subject.
Torture, for those days when Four Dash Seven is depressed and struggling. For those days when he thinks about the days when he used to have cool gardens to walk through, and fine finger foods to nibble.
Sometimes he fights with them for books. Or movies.
But those only come when he beats his production quotas.
11
It came when he stumbled when leaving the hospital. He just hopped forward, and half ran to catch his balance.
And then he was halfway down the street. Just like that. His khakis crackled with fire, rubbed hard enough to start a fire like a boy scout rubbing sticks. His shirt fell from his shoulders, shredded by movement.
He laughed. It felt like a whole world had opened up in front of him.
There was nothing but possibility ahead.
12
If you have superpowers, what are your moral responsibilities?
Obviously, you can’t just sit around on the couch watching robot fighting championships on the big flat screen eating chips.
Save who you can.
Make a difference.
13
The world is dying. Dying from the pollutants pumped into the air every day. Dying from lack of clean energy. Heavy weather, created by the heat dumped into the atmosphere, destroys lives and property at an unprecedented rate.
A country is crying out for clean, renewable energy. It’s citizens demand power.
This is the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.
Who can face it?
People with powers.
14
“You’re the fastest man in the world,” the scientist says. “It’s this simple: five hours on a massive dynamo, hooked through a series of hyper-strong gearing systems, and you can provide most of the power needed to the eastern seaboard.”
It isn’t about hunting down purse snatchers, anymore, they say to him, it’s about the greatest good you can do with the tools you have at your disposal.
Kevin looks at the man and thinks about it. He’s been thinking about excel spreadsheets and columns and the bottom line. And the summary line, it adds up, doesn’t it?
Velocity can save the world. Not by fighting small crime, or beating up random petty thieves. Velocity can save the world by spinning a wheel in a factory for five hours a day.
15
“Is it tough?” she asks. “Being cooped up in here, all day everyday?”
“It’s no different than a day job,” Kevin tells her. “Five hours a day, split up however I want. The flywheels all store energy in between.”
And it will save the world.
At first, that’s the headline. That’s what brings in admirers.
But eventually it all fades away.
People forget that it’s Velocity pushing away at the wheel. Round and round. Every hour. Hour after hour. Plod plod plod.
It’s fucking boring saving the world.
So one day he wakes up, and the bed is empty. And it’s been empty for weeks in a row and he’s lonely.
16
Path dependency.
They said it was a temporary solution. Supers, all over the world, pitching in because they could and no one else had their abilities.
But then, once this new power came online, there was less urgency to develop something new. Easier to double down on what came before.
Exploit the resource. Demand more hours. Get more power. More, more, more for every quarter.
Numbers up?
Numbers down? Down is a problem. Down means phone calls and panic.
What can be done to secure a nation’s power grid?
The nation will do anything that must be done to secure itself.
Anything.
17
Four Dash Seven can barely remember the water gardens.
He wakes up because the collar grows hot to the touch, searing at his neck.
He sighs, wearily.
Washes his face in the sink. Eats breakfast.
The door clangs open, and the faceless guards are there, fingers ever near the buttons.
Four Dash Seven follows them, slowly. Down the corridor. Past the power control rooms. To the generator room.
It has been resurfaced recently. He’s worn out the concrete floor so many times he’s lost track.
There’s the massive wheel with spokes. Four Dash Seven puts his hands to the familiar worn-out handholds and takes a deep breath before he starts running.
It is time to save the world.