Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (30 page)

“Do you have any idea what
you’re asking me to do? Really?”

“No, and I don’t care,
because you’re not going to explain yourself to me anyway. You never do. You
always act like you have a reason for treating us the way you do but you never
tell us what it is. You just expect us take you at your word.” I lean in to
him. “Your word is
worthless
.”

To hell with this. I could
stand here all night talking in circles, but Edison Bose has stolen away enough
of my life. He gets no more.

“Good night, Mr. Bose,” I
say, turning on my heel.

“Carrie. Wait.”

I stop. I don’t know why but
I do. I turn back to Edison, who proceeds to tell me a story:

The Secret Origin of
Concorde.

TWENTY-FIVE

Edison Nicholas Bose was born
to Taylor and Marnie Bose, a simple couple from a middle-class background who,
through some quirk of fate, managed to produce one of the most brilliant minds
of the 21
^st
Century.

To call young Edison
precocious or a prodigy would be a gross understatement. While his peers were
still grappling with basic addition and subtraction, five-year-old Edison was
making short work of basic geometry. His final book report as a first grader
was on Stephen Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time
. He received an A-plus,
but only after his teacher held a lengthy conference with his parents to verify
they had no hand in writing the report. His second grade science fair project
was a modified Lionel model train set. The fully functional maglev train, his
first serious foray into the field of magnetic levitation and propulsion
technology, boasted a scale top speed of two hundred miles per hour. The
project handily won the competition.

His parents skipped Edison
ahead several grades after that.

At age thirteen, as a high
school senior, Edison revisited maglev technology for his science fair project,
but took it to an unprecedented new level: He fashioned out of a riding
lawnmower chassis a maglev hovercraft capable of holding a single passenger.
What made this creation so radical and innovative was that the hovercraft did
not need to repel off a base. The few maglev trains in operation at the time,
commercially and on test tracks, required a magnetic base with an opposing
polarity as the train’s drive system, but Edison’s creation rode the Earth’s
magnetic field itself.

The invention immediately
caught the attention of Simon Edward Leeds, the head of Leeds Innovative
Technologies and the fair’s special guest judge. Later that week, Leeds and the
Boses met for dinner in Boston to discuss Edison’s bright future.

That future took a dark turn
when the Boses returned home to interrupt a burglary in progress. Taylor died
instantly after taking a point-blank blast from his own shotgun, which he kept
hidden but unsecured in his bedroom closet. Marnie bled out from a gut shot
while waiting for an ambulance. Edison escaped unscathed — physically.

The Boses’ killer was never
caught.

Leeds, who had also lost his
parents at a young age, felt Edison’s pain deeply, personally. Leeds took the
boy in, raised him, did everything within his power to help him heal, and to
nurture his gift. In that latter effort Leeds succeeded, although Edison’s
accelerated development was as much due to his own obsessive behavior; he spent
his every waking hour working, researching, tinkering — keeping his mind
occupied so he had no time or energy to dwell on his loss. Advances in maglev
technology that might have otherwise taken years occurred within the space of a
few months.

Edison’s sole interest
outside of his work was the super-hero known as Hardwire, a mysterious
vigilante who fought crime with a dazzling array of high-tech gadgets. In
Hardwire, Edison saw someone who coupled his greatest passion with his greatest
desire: To see the innocent protected and the guilty brought to justice.

In this idolization, Leeds
saw a chance to finally break through the wall Edison had erected around
himself. He made the fateful decision to reveal his secret to the boy: he was
the hero Hardwire.

The gambit worked. Edison,
long distant and disconnected, came alive again.

Eager to impress his hero,
Edison crafted his own alter-ego, Technokid, and built an arsenal of non-lethal
weapons that rivaled and eventually surpassed that of his mentor. Side by side,
they fought the good fight for four years.

Hardwire’s fight ended when
Simon Leeds died — not in the line of duty, but in an insultingly mundane
manner, at the hands of a drunk driver.

Days after losing the man
who had become his second father, Edison lost Leeds’ company. A rival
corporation, sensing blood in the water, swooped in and acquired Leeds
Innovative Technologies in a leveraged buyout.

The loss was not total,
however; Edison’s many patents remained his, and his groundbreaking work in maglev
technology was more than sufficient to leverage enough venture capital to found
his own company. Bose Industries was born soon after Edison’s nineteenth
birthday.

As part of this transitional
period in his life, Edison retired Technokid and reinvented himself, trading
his arsenal of gadgets for a sleek suit that utilized his maglev technology in
a manner he has, to this day, yet to duplicate for the purpose of mass
consumption. Concorde was his alone.

In time, Edison Bose the
industrialist and Concorde the super-hero grew their respective reputations to
become leaders, idols, role models. In some ways, Edison preferred his life in
the Concorde suit to his life in a business suit. Concorde had no past, no
tragedies to haunt him. He was a clean slate.

That would not last.

The day came when an
indiscretion from Technokid’s past came home to roost in the form of Nick
Azubuike — the son Edison never knew he had, a son born of a tryst with a
fellow teenage adventurer known as Valkyrie Red. The thrill of battle, the
intimacy forged among comrades facing death together, the rush of victory, the
smoldering fire of teenage lust — it was perhaps inevitable they would
commemorate their successful team-up with a night of passion.

Why Valkyrie Red — real name
Helena Azubuike — kept their child a secret from him, Edison never learned. He
never got an opportunity to ask; Helena’s death due to advanced pancreatic
cancer saw to that.

The attorney who introduced
Edison to his son indicated that Helena wished father and son to be reunited
following her passing. Edison took the boy in without question, and was soon
struck with a profound sense of déjà vu as he attempted and failed to reach out
to Nick. The boy, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his father,
harbored the same simmering resentment Edison once felt toward the world,
alternated between stretches of grim silence and fits of white-hot rage the way
Edison did as a newly minted orphan. He often felt as though he were viewing
his own childhood through Leeds’ eyes.

When Edison learned that
Nick admired the high-flying hero Concorde, he knew exactly what to do. He
revealed his identity to the boy and sure enough, the divide separating them
vanished.

Later, Edison learned that
Nick decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and became a teen hero in his
own right. To achieve this, Nick appropriated several pieces of Edison’s
Technokid equipment, which he’d held onto for sentimental reasons, fashioned
for himself a crude costume, and set out to make his name in the world.

Edison never learned what
Nick called himself, nor did he ever uncover the exact circumstances that led
to the boy’s violent death.

He had Manticore to thank
for that.

We stand there in silence,
neither of us looking at the other. I take a few minutes to soak it all in, and
I glance up at Edison when he clears his throat. His mouth is set in a hard
line, his eyes are bright with impending tears, and I’m struck by the feeling
that I’m the first person to hear that story in ages, maybe ever. That realization
settles onto my chest like a physical weight.

Edison takes his wallet out
of his pocket, opens it, and removes a small photo. He looks at it, his lips
quivering as though deciding whether to smile, and turns it so I can see.
Edison is wearing a Red Sox cap and a toothy grin (two things I’ve never seen
on him). So is the young boy at his side — a boy who, at first glance, reminds
me a lot of Matt: He’s on the skinny side, has unruly dark hair, and his smile
is more of a cocky smirk. The weight on my chest increases.

Talk about a moment of
clarity. In the space of fifteen minutes, every question I’ve ever had about
Concorde has been answered. I understand him perfectly. His anger, his attitude
toward us, his attempts to dissuade us from a life of super-heroing — it all
makes perfect, painful sense.

One question remains: Does
it change anything?

The silence becomes too much
for me. “I’m sorry about your son,” I say in a whisper. “Parents shouldn’t
outlive their kids.”

“No. They shouldn’t,” he
says. “Your parents shouldn’t outlive
you
.” Edison reaches into his
jacket and presents me with my headset. Somehow, I’m not surprised he had it on
him. “Your transponder is active again. If you want this back I’ll give it to
you, but I want you to think hard about your decision, because if you go back
to the job and you’re killed in the line of duty, it won’t be just you who
suffers the consequences.”

The impulse to snatch back
my headset falters. I’ve always known dying was a possibility. I knew that even
before I had a couple of back-to-back near-death experiences, but I’ve rarely
thought about it past myself. I never considered what my death would do to my
parents or my friends.

“Carrie,” Edison says. “I am
begging you to step down as Lightstorm. For your family.”

For my family, huh?

“When you realized you had a
son, when you took him in, did you step down as Concorde?” I say. Edison looks
at me, his face a blank. “That would be a no, then.”

Edison cradles the headset
in his hand, looks at it, looks at me. He hands it over.

“If you’re going to do this,
you’re going to do it right,” he says. “We’ll sit down and figure out a
training schedule, we’re going to set firm parameters for your involvement in
any given scenario —”

“No.” Edison blinks at me.
“You’re doing it again: you’re not asking me what I want, you’re
telling
me. You’re telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it, and I’m
done letting you dictate my life to me.”

Edison sighs, nods. “All
right, so you tell me: What do you want?”

I want you to treat me like
an equal. I know I’m young. I know I’m inexperienced. That’s not an excuse to
dismiss me or ignore me or boss me around.

That’s what I want to say,
but I have a more pressing need than my ego. “I want your help tracking down
Buzzkill Joy.”

I bring Edison up to speed
on the Buzzkill Joy situation and, because I’m in a foul mood, I make damn sure
he knows that we’ve been trying to contact him about this for several days, but
couldn’t because he shut us out so thoroughly. Yes it’s petty of me, but Edison
has a lot of Humble Pie left to eat and I’m going to shove it down his throat
with a funnel and a plunger.

“I have some friends within
the defense department, if that’s what you’re driving at,” Edison says, “though
I can’t guarantee they’ll be in much of a sharing mood. And I can’t guarantee I
can get to that anytime soon.”

“Joy escaped on your watch,”
I say. More pie, Edison? “What’s more important than hunting down a dangerous
fugitive?”

“Trying to find whoever’s been
sneaking my nuclear micro-cells onto the black market.”

“Are you serious? Since when
is your business more important than hunting down a murderous lunatic?”

Edison holds up a finger.
“Here’s your first lesson, Carrie: As a team leader, you need to know how to
prioritize. Joy is dangerous, yes, but she’s a low-level threat.”

“Tell that to Missy and her
dad.”

“I’m looking at this
objectively. Yes, Joy is dangerous, and yes, she’s our responsibility, but
she’s one person; her damage potential is low, whereas a single micro-cell,
even an unstable one, could power something as devastating as an EMP bomb.”