Mutation (24 page)

Chapter 41

I slept fitfully that night, awakening a few times with the temptation to just teleport home.  If I left without a green light from the doctors, though, Mom would worry, and she’d had enough on her mind lately.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt almost like my old self – despite a restless night.  Electra came by shortly after I finished breakfast.  We chatted amiably for a while, holding hands, but I could sense a tension building up in her, a need for something.  Finally, she asked her question.

“When you got back,” she said, “from being with Adam, I mean, why didn’t you come see me?”

“You mean to let you know I was alive?” I asked.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I knew you were alive.  I could sense your bioelectric field – at least once you were back at the school.”

I was a little surprised.  “I didn’t know you could extend it that far.  I always had the impression that the person had to be in close proximity to you - something like the same room.”

“Doesn’t have to be
that
close.  Still, I never tried reaching out that far before, but I needed to know.  Anyway, maybe I just pushed myself or maybe it was the virus, but I knew when you were back on campus.  But you didn’t come see me.”

I explained Li’s theory about how seeing me might trigger the virus, so I had kept my distance.  She nodded, seeming to understand.

“Plus,” I added, “you were under quarantine.”

She laughed, giving me a playful punch.  “You know what the worst part of quarantine was?”

“Missing me?”

“The food!” she exclaimed, ignoring me.  “They issued us seven days’ worth of meals-ready-to-eat!”

“MREs?”

“Yes, and they were awful!  I’d rather eat a pot full of dirt.  Too bad your friend Li didn’t have a theory on how to get us some real food, but at least we didn’t have to eat the entire week’s supply of them.”

The mention of Li put me in mind of my other friends, so I asked about Kane and Gossamer.

“Oh, no one told you,” Electra said.  “They’re here.  They even checked in on you a few times.”

With a little bit of coaxing, one of the nurses told us what rooms Kane and Gossamer were in.  Both were in the same wing, one floor up.

We took the stairs and tried Kane’s room first.  It was empty.  We decided to try Gossamer’s next, but long before we reached her door we heard arguing drifting out from the room.  I grinned, suddenly having a very good notion of where Kane was.

Sure enough, he was in Gossamer’s room.  She had her bed in an upright position and he was sitting on the edge of it, next to her.  Gossamer had an impressive amount of gauze wrapped around her head, all intended to keep a bandage in place over her right eye.  Kane had bandages wrapped around his wrists.  (It turned out that Estrella had given him third-degree burns.) The two of them were currently engaged in heated debate, but that stopped abruptly when I knocked.

“Hey,” Gossamer said, “I heard you were up.”

I went inside and gave her a hug, then gently shook Kane’s hand before taking a seat in a nearby chair.  I started to introduce Electra, who stood next to my chair, but the three of them already knew each other.

“How’s the eye?” I asked Gossamer.

“Pretty much blind at the moment,” she said, in better spirits than I would have imagined.  “Hopefully it won’t stay that way.”

“I feel so bad,” Electra said.  “The things you guys had to do to save the rest of us.”

Kane gave her a mockingly smug grin.  “All in a day’s work, my dear.”

We chatted about everything that had happened for another half hour, at which point Electra and I made to leave.  As we were walking out, I heard Gossamer and Kane go right back to arguing about apparently the same subject they were discussing when we arrived.

I turned back to them.  “Hey, Kane.  Why don’t you just kiss her?”

“W-What?” Kane sputtered, almost in shock.  “Kiss her?  I’d rather kiss a dead
–
”

His words were cut off when Gossamer, taking the initiative, grabbed him by his shirt and pulled his lips to hers.  I couldn’t help but notice that, despite the protest he was just making, he didn’t pull away.  Electra and I closed the door behind us as we left.

*****

Walking back to my hospital room, I couldn’t help smiling again as I thought of Gossamer and Kane finally being a couple.  Theirs had been an odd courtship, but who was I to talk?  My first date with Electra had ended up with her blasting me with a bolt of electricity.

As we got closer to the room, I could hear voices raised in argument.  Unlike the banter between Gossamer and Kane, however, there was real anger behind the words being spoken.

The door to my room was partly open.  Electra and I crept up and peeked through the crack where the hinges of the door were located, her bending down below me.

Gray and some of the MIBs were in the room, as were Mouse, Mom, and Gramps.

“-ibly be real,” Gray said, looking at some papers in his hand.  “You manufactured this.”

“Oh, it’s real,” said Mouse.  “Prince J’h’dgo is a member of the royal house – the royal family, in fact – and is therefore entitled to everything written in that charter.”

“Who the heck is Prince Jargo?” Electra whispered, mangling the name.

I gulped.  “I think it’s me.” I felt more than saw Electra’s face swivel up towards me.  I’d heard the pronunciation of my name in my alien grandmother’s language even less often than I’d heard my full name in English.  And as for being a prince, I guess it was something I always knew was technically true, but I’d never lived any kind of regal lifestyle.  To have the title suddenly applied to me seemed surreal.

“In short,” Mouse said, “he’s a prince, a dignitary and a diplomat, and that charter gives him full immunity.  Moreover, it’s retroactive, covering anything he’s done in the past.  You can’t touch him.”

Gray grunted angrily and headed towards the door.  Electra and I hugged the wall as he stormed out and down the hallway, followed by his subordinates.  We then slipped into the room.

Mom, grinning widely, came over and gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“I don’t think we’ll be having any more issues with Gray,” Gramps said.  “At least not officially.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.  “What happened?”

“Gray seems to have forgotten that when your grandmother came to this planet, it was as the envoy and emissary of a foreign government,” Mouse said.  “She was granted full diplomatic status – as was her family – including diplomatic immunity.”

“And the diplomatic charter was never rescinded,” Gramps added.  “It was inactive for a while, but never revoked.  So we just filed the paperwork establishing the installation of a new ambassador, and that reactivated the charter.”

“So,” I said, working it all out in my mind, “I have diplomatic immunity?”

“Yes!” said Mom excitedly, almost clapping her hands.  “They can’t arrest you for any crime you committed!”

“Can we say, ‘Allegedly committed’?” I asked.  “But still, that’s pretty cool!”

Mouse got the attention of Mom and Gramps to discuss something else, and Electra took the opportunity to have a whispered conversation with me.

“So,” she said in a low voice, “I’m the girlfriend of a prince?”

“Oh,” I replied in mock indignation, “now that I’m a prince, you’re my girlfriend?  Well, no thank you; I see no need to settle or start dating down.”

She gave me a playful punch on the arm, then spent a few seconds tickling me.

“By the way, who’s the new ambassador?” I asked no one in particular after Electra stopped her playful assault on me.

The silence in the room was deafening as all three adults turned to look at me.

Oh no…

Chapter 42

I was dismissed from the hospital the next morning.  After letting Mom fuss over me for an hour or so after arriving home, I decided it was time to start getting the answers to some questions I’d been curious about.  With that in mind, I called Mouse and asked when would be a good time for me to drop by his lab.  He said any time, and I was standing next to him before he could put the phone down.

“How’d I know that was going to happen the second I said those words?” Mouse asked.  He was sitting at a worktable, looking at some schematics.

I just smiled, glancing around the lab.  There were banks of sophisticated computers and machinery along one wall.  A set of bookshelves hid the entrance to a secret chamber.  At least a dozen flat screen monitors placed strategically around the lab constantly displayed a steady stream of information.  It was just like the last time I’d been here.

“Okay,” Mouse said, “what do you want to know?”

“For starters, how is it all the students managed to be okay?” I asked.  “Even without the control module Schaefer had, my friend Li said that the virus would unravel their DNA in just a couple of days.”

“We were able to develop a vaccine.  We gave it to them once they all came through.  In fact, we’re giving it to every meta on the planet.”

“A vaccine?  How’d you develop a vaccine?  How’d you even know about the virus in the first place?”

“With this,” Mouse said.  He opened up a drawer at his worktable and took out a cylindrical item, which he laid in front of him.  It was a syringe.

“What’s that?  I mean, I know it’s a syringe, but what’s the significance of it?”

“Well, I’m just sitting here minding my own business one day, when all of a sudden
this
thing pops up next to me.  I’m curious, so I go test the liquid inside and find that it’s actually got some of your blood in it. 
Infected
blood.”

Unexpectedly, I had a flashback of Dr. Prasad telling me how they tried to inject me with something and that I teleported the syringe.  I also remember the weird dream I had with the mouse and the snake.  Somehow, I had managed to teleport something across dimensions!  The thought of it was almost enough to completely freak me out.

“Wait,” I said.  “How’d you know it was
my
blood?”

“I didn’t initially, but I had enough clues.  There was the fact that it had obviously been teleported here - and teleporters are rare - the strange anomalies in the blood, and a couple of other things.  I was sure, but I called BT for confirmation, which she provided.”

That made sense.  BT was the closest thing to a medical professional I had ever let come near me – before recently, that is – and she would know my blood at a glance.

“Don’t be mad at BT,” Mouse said.  “I know you might feel she betrayed your trust in confirming your blood, but she did what she thought was in your best interest.”

I shook my head.  “I’m not mad; it was the right call.  She saved a lot of lives.”

“I’m glad you see it that way.”

“What about the vortex?  Your timing couldn’t have been better if we’d planned it.”

“The minute we found out it was your blood, we tried to conference with the Academy and couldn’t get through.  That’s not completely unusual.  It was in a different dimension, after all - not like making a call to a neighbor down the street.  But when we couldn’t get through after a day or so, we decided to open the vortex.”

“And?”

“Since our equipment isn’t designed to punch all the way through anymore, from one dimension to another, we were hoping someone on the other side would see that we were trying to get through and open their end of the vortex.  When that didn’t happen, we had to reconfigure our equipment to do things the old-fashioned way - not to mention getting a special dispensation to re-route a tremendous amount of power.  It took a little bit of time.”

I absorbed all of this in silence, and then something occurred to me.

“That special dispensation…did that come from the government?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“That was the tip-off,” I said.  “That’s why they tried to abort everything so fast.  They knew you were coming.”

Mouse seemed to consider this.  “Possibly.  Gray’s got his hand in almost every cookie jar imaginable, so they could have gotten a heads-up.  But even so, we still almost bungled the whole thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“We actually needed two bites at the apple to get things right.  We were doing everything in such a rush that we didn’t notice that our dimensional alignment was off, so when we first opened the vortex, it actually didn’t take us to the Academy.  We ended up on the top of some mountain range.

“We were about to shut everything down and re-run all the numbers when we detected a brief vortex pulse.”

“Our attempt to open the vortex from our side,” I said, guessing.

“Yes.  It didn’t work, but it showed us where our calculations were off, so we reset everything based on the new numbers and that did it.”

I smiled to myself, thinking how Li - despite not being able to open the vortex as we’d planned - had still been instrumental in saving everyone.  That brought something else to mind.

“Were you there when Alpha Prime came back through the vortex with me?” I asked.

“I was the first one to meet him,” Mouse said.

“Before I lost consciousness on the other side,” I said, “before AP found me, I’d been holding a piece of ceramic.  Do you know if I still had it when we came back through?”

“Oh, yes,” Mouse said, smiling.  “You had a death grip on that thing, so tight that I thought we’d have to break your fingers to get it loose.  It’s a wonder you didn’t crush it.”

“Do you know what happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” Mouse said, grinning.  “Let me think…”

He got up from the worktable and walked over to an odd piece of computer equipment and flipped a small switch.

“Hello,” he said, looking up into the air, but at nothing in particular.  “Can you hear us?”

“I can,” said a voice that - although disembodied - I had no trouble recognizing.

“Li!” I said, totally shocked.  “You’re alive!”

“Technically,” said the voice, which seemed to come from all around us, “I was never alive biologically, but I am still functional.”

“It’s good to hear your voice,” I said with a smile.

“Yours, too,” said Li.  “Unfortunately, while I have audio receptors and a voice module, visual sensory has not yet been established.”

“I’m working on it,” Mouse said in mock anger, holding up the schematics he’d been looking at.  Now that I looked more closely, I could see that they were designs for an android.

Noting my interest, Mouse handed me one of the drawings.  “I’m working on building Li a new body,” he said.  “It would be great if I could consult with his designer, but he doesn’t know who built him.”

That brought a whole new series of questions to mind, but I decided to leave those for another time.  Instead I asked, “How’d you even know what he was?”

“When I finally was able to pry it away from you,” Mouse said, “I could tell that what you were holding was some kind of processor.  I hooked it into one of my machines to see what I could find out about it, and Li started communicating with me.  It didn’t take long to figure out that I was dealing with an artificial intelligence.”

All of a sudden, I felt bad for intruding.  Mouse was here trying to do something important, and I’d selfishly come barging in because I thought my own need for answers took priority over anything else.  I mentioned to Li that Kane and Gossamer were more than okay, and prepared to leave.

“Before you go,” Mouse said, “I just want to say that you and your friends did an amazing job - but you especially.  I think everyone pretty much realizes that if you hadn’t been there, we’d be dealing with a lot of bodies right now - especially if Schaefer had brought that virus back to Earth.  And even if he didn’t kill every super outright, having the virus - and the cure - would have let Schaefer, and presumably Gray, control anyone who was infected.”

His words brought to mind Rudi’s earlier prediction (Rudi, whom I would still need to rescue whenever I got the requisite info), about how it was imperative that I go to the Academy.  I felt a little pompous acknowledging it - even if only to myself - but apparently she had been right.

“What about Gavin?” I asked.  “What will happen to him?”

Mouse shrugged.  “Hard to say at this point.  He was instrumental in spreading the virus at the Academy, but he also came around in the end.  Bearing in mind that he’s a minor and that there were extenuating circumstances, my best guess is some type of probation.”

“I guess that would temper justice with mercy.  Anyway, I should let you get back to work,” I said to Mouse.  “I’ll see you later, Li,” I just shouted up into the air.

“Jim,” Li said, almost timidly, as I was preparing to teleport.  “It may be a while before my new body is manufactured.  In the meantime, will you…will you come visit me sometimes?”

“Of course, Li.  I’ll bring the others, too, if that’s okay.”

*****

There was only one other person I really needed to talk to, and it was a conversation I both looked forward to and dreaded.  Still, I made the call, and he showed up right on time.

Mom and Gramps had found reasons to be somewhere else, so there was no one else at home when Alpha Prime showed up.  He was wearing a V-neck sweater-shirt and jeans; it was far more casual than I’d ever even pictured him, let alone seen him.  We went into the kitchen and took seats around the breakfast table.

“Thanks for inviting me over,” he said.  “The invitation was unexpected, but I’m happy about it.”

“No problem,” I said.  “I, uh, I would have been happy to come to you, but I don’t know where you live.  Other than League facilities, that is.”

He laughed at that.  “I’m sorry, I should have told you.  But yes, I have a place - several places, in fact.  I just need to get away sometimes.”

I nodded, picking up a slight hint of exhaustion in his voice.  He’d mentioned it to me before, about how having to deal with all the world’s-greatest-superhero stuff just felt like an unbearable weight sometimes.

“Anyway,” I said, “I just wanted to say thanks for what you did.  They told me how you came after me.  You saved my life.”

He waved off my gratitude.  “You don’t have to thank me for that.  Not now; not ever.  You’re my son, so it’s not like I had a choice.  It was either get to you or die trying.”

There was an earnestness to his words that touched me.  He wasn’t saying any of this to make me like him or think highly of him.  He was saying it because it was true.

“The last time we spoke,” I said, “you mentioned something about sons needing their fathers.  I didn’t agree with you then, but I do now.  Not because you saved my life, but because of the example you set.  That’s probably the greatest need that fathers fulfill for their sons - a role model.  And according to Mouse, I need all the role models I can get.”

“Thanks,” he said, before adding almost furtively, “son.”

“Anyway, since the Academy is destroyed now and I’m back home permanently, there’s no need to wait for the holidays to go catch that game.”

For a second, he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, and then he grinned.  “I can get courtside tickets for next week.”

THE END