Masked (2010) (43 page)

“October tenth. It was cold out there tonight.” He paused in the flood of devastating images. “Everything’s changed. There’s no longer a need for Nox, for this secret life. For everything I’ve been doing this past year. My enemy is dead. The architect of all my misery, all this city’s suffering. Killed by my hand, buried where he’ll never be discovered. I didn’t plan it that way, of course I didn’t. It was the last ending I wanted. But what happened was inevitable. I know that now. All those seemingly unconnected strands drawing together. If only I’d been able to see it at the start. I remember. . .”

Waking
.

“Matt?” Her hand closed on his.

As he surfaced from the depths of his head, he opened his eyes to painfully bright illumination. “Owww!”

“Dim the lights!”

Daniel, his best friend. His savior? Yes, of course—it would have to have been Daniel. And Rose. God, he’d put her through so much.

“How are you feeling?” The concern in Daniel’s voice had an edge of excitement.

As his thoughts settled, Matt understood the reason for Daniel’s exuberance. “Finally got an experiment that can talk back?” The words trailed away when he realized he could see so clearly in the hospital room’s gloom, it was as though it were flooded with sunlight. Daniel, with his faintly baffled expression and untamed blond hair sticking out at angles like a clichéd mad scientist. Rose, never a cliché, her hair sapphire blue today, her eyes glistening with tears that flared in his acute vision; a beacon of hope.

“Hey,” he said gently. She gave a pale smile that did little to hide the pain that lay between them. “I feel. . . great?”

The explosion. The shock wave and heat.
He looked down at his hands, the skin flawless.

“Phenomenal healing is just one small part of it,” Daniel said. “I’d never have gotten here if not for Roger Penrose. He was right: brains are hypercomputers. The Quantum Mind gives massive scope for reapplication of function.”

“How bad was I?”

“Third-degree burns over eighty percent of your body. And a metal spike rammed through your skull, puncturing both hemispheres of the brain. But mechanics really don’t matter, just like Penrose said. Consciousness is created and maintained on the quantum level.”

“So, I’m okay now?”

“Well. . . there may be some side effects.”

“Looks like my decision to invest in your research was the right one after all.”

“And there was me thinking you were just helping out an old friend,” Daniel responded wryly. “It’s self-interest all the way with you, Matthew.”

Rose leaned in so that he could smell her perfume, so rich and powerful it was intoxicating; all of his senses had been magnified. “I’m glad you’re okay, Matt. We thought we’d lost you that first night.”

“I’m sorry.” The tremor in his voice gave away the depth of his feelings. “What I put you through—”

“Later,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”

They never did.

“Side effects? Just one or two. Like my mind shutting down completely when the first rays of the sun hit me. In return, I get super night vision and magnified senses, optimum strength when I need it, and a healing capacity a thousand times better than anyone else’s. Superhuman abilities. Anyone would want it. But. . . would I have lost so much if I’d been a typical guy, just muddling through, trying to survive without thinking of the consequences of my actions? Maybe that’s the way the world works at the quantum level—the more good you do, the more shit rains down on your head. There are patterns all over the place, but most of the time you’re too close up to see them for what they are.

“Before Daniel’s process, I was never a good guy, not really. I didn’t see that at the time, but everybody thinks they’re the hero of their own particular story. The only superpower I had back then was making money, and I pursued it relentlessly. Nothing, nobody, stood in my way. It was all legal, sure. But moral? Part of my new existence. . . part of my curse. . . is that I can now look back at who I was with new eyes. The joke at the time was that nobody gets to be a billionaire by being a saint. Funny. But I had my army of creative accountants and business managers to shield me from the harsh glare of judgment, and I set about buying up, and stripping down, with a relish that increased with every extra dollar. Jobs were discarded. Lives discarded. People. They were
assets
. Desks and chairs and computer servers.

“When I was setting out, I bought out the company owned by Rose’s father. It was a way to win her over, some kind of pathetic peacock display. The company was her father’s life’s work, and I gave it a lifeline. Everybody loved me. Then when I was too busy to pay it any attention, some drone in the accounting department shut
it down and sold it off. Everybody thought it was my direct order. Rose’s father killed himself. She never forgave me.

“Then, as the recession bit, I became a hate figure all over, not just in Rose’s house. That’s when I got caught in the bomb blast at the company I was closing down in Modesto. Some guy who’d lost everything wanted to take out the big supervillain. And he never knew how close he came to doing it. Nobody knew.

“Daniel’s Quantum Mind process gave me a chance to be someone different. I cashed in everything, retreated to this penthouse, cut off ties with everyone who knew me, except Rose and Daniel, and thought about what I wanted to do with my second chance. But maybe I really was cursed, like the Flying Dutchman or something, and all I gained was just a chance to cause misery on a greater scale.

“Right at the start, there was still a chance of breaking the pattern. I didn’t have to be a hero. I could have made the most of my permanent night shift, while the world went on with its business just around the corner of my life.

“All I had to do was turn away when I saw the writing on the wall. Ignore the mystery. Cut the threads that held the pattern together. Refuse to keep. . .”

Running
.

Choking smoke filled the pitch-black corridors of the medical research facility at UCSF. Rescue workers stumbled blindly around the fringes of the blast, but Matt moved through it with clear purpose. He saw in bright, unwavering detail, felt the shifting air currents, selected and processed distant sounds that others would have lost in the confusion. His brain regulated oxygen, adrenaline, and a host of other processes with an efficiency far beyond that of even the greatest athlete.

His memory recalled the route to Daniel’s suite of labs with perfect clarity. The center of the blast had been somewhere near there, according to Daniel’s garbled message left on his phone.

As he reveled in his abilities, he recalled Daniel’s long, dense
explanation about quantum coherence in the ion channels of the brain, and Godel’s theorem, and how the brain really wasn’t a computer like the mechanistic biologists said. “It’s not algorithm-based, you see,” Daniel had said, not realizing he’d left Matt behind long ago. “It has abilities far beyond any computer. And now I think I can manipulate it at the quantum level to magnify those abilities. Imagine what we could do.”

Imagine what we could do.

Another blast. Chunks of concrete and burning pieces of shrapnel hurtled toward him. Matt avoided them as if they were moving in syrup. He didn’t even feel his heart beating fast. Everything was still. No stress, no confusion; golden, perfect.

Feeling her way along the wall, a woman staggered from the billowing smoke, crying and coughing at once. Matt paused to guide her down a branching corridor, which he knew was the quickest route away from the disaster zone.

The area around Daniel’s labs was devastated. Fires raged out of control around a dense pile of fallen masonry. Staggering around in the half-light, Daniel tore at the wreckage.

“Are you crazy? You need to get out of here. I can show—” Matt began as he tried to lead his friend away.

Daniel threw him off. “No! You’ve got to help Rose.”

“Rose? What’s she doing here?” His incomprehension was washed away by a rising tide of anxiety as he looked around what remained of the research facility.

Thrusting Daniel to one side, he threw himself into the worst area, letting the clarity fall on him. As irrelevant sounds and sights faded, he quickly processed what remained. A murmur. Fingernails scraping weakly against a door hidden behind the debris. Hints that would have been missed for hours by any other rescuers.

Futilely, Daniel attempted to lift a steel roof beam barring the door. Calmly, Matt eased him away. When he gripped the beam, his abilities optimized in an instant. On past experience, he wouldn’t be able to maintain it for long, but as he felt the beam shift, he knew it would be enough.

With an effort that exhausted all his strength, he threw the beam to one side and tore away the remaining chunks of masonry. Wrenching open the door, he found Rose, coughing from the smoke but unharmed. Sweeping her up in his arms, he raced through the corridors, with Daniel unable to keep up in the dark and the confusion. Matt could feel her eyes on him, sense her gratitude and a hint of the emotion that had existed before her father’s death, and a notion began to form deep in the core of his enhanced Quantum Mind.

Finally he broke out into the night awash with the glare of the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles. He didn’t move from her side until the paramedics told him she would be okay, and then, as Rose hurtled away in the back of the ambulance for observation, he was overcome with exhilaration.

“You couldn’t have planned a better test of what I can do,” Matt said. “She could have died in there. I saved her.” He turned his attention from the disappearing lights to Daniel’s puzzled expression. “What I did. . . that meant something. It was important. I can do it again.”

“Save Rose?”

“Save
people
!”

Understanding, Daniel led him to one side. “You don’t have to make up for your past life.”

“Yes, I do. I was a bastard. This is my shot, Daniel. My chance to pay back for all I’ve taken.”

Suddenly angry, Daniel jabbed an accusatory finger. “So instead of having your face all over the media for being such a financial parasite, you now want it up there so everyone can see what a great hero you are? With abilities you wouldn’t have if I hadn’t given them to you?”

Matt was stung by his friend’s words, but put it down to the shock of his ordeal. “No, I don’t want that. You can develop some kind of armor, something lightweight, that’ll hide my identity.”

“And then what?”

“And then I make a difference.” Matt could see he still hadn’t convinced Daniel, but there was plenty of time for that. His atten
tion was drawn back to the devastation. “What happened here? An accident?”

“I don’t think so.”

The blast had come at sunset, when most people had gone home for the day. “So the motivation wasn’t loss of life,” Matt mused. “Then, what?”

While the emergency services still searched the devastation for survivors, he bribed his way into the security offices to examine the digital recordings from the cameras.

“Money still gets you everything,” Daniel said with an uncomfortable note of bitterness.

“If you’ve got it, might as well put it to some good,” Matt replied, adding with a regretful note, “Finally.”