Switched Ch. 08 - Paper Doll

There was an actual holo-projector. And around it was the famed table around which so many legends sat, and still do.

There was a faint, rumbling hum. Comforting.

The walls were video displays. That's right! They were connected to... "KRONOS, are you there?"

"I'm here," replied the same voice as the door, and I understood we'd already spoken.

I tried to say something, but I just gawped. Faced with the most powerful computer in this building of unbelievable marvels and a sizable chunk of the world beyond, I made an open-mouthed dum-dum face. I gawped! I didn't think people even did that.

Now I was processing.

I wanted to cry, or laugh or howl. Maybe I would just...

Something was tugging on my pant leg. I looked down into Tiffany's placid brown eyes.

She blew a raspberry at me, then smiled.

I giggled. Just a little. And I felt that laugh pushing at me with a need to get out and explode into hyena hyperdrive.

I took deep breaths. I closed my eyes. The place even smelled amazing.

In a soothing tone, KRONOS said, "I think you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. Why don't you sit down and I'll dim the lights for you?" It was the most sympathetic computer program I'd ever encountered. The original version had been written by Gadgetator himself, in the Seventies.

"Yeah. And if you could, try not to do anything omnipotent for a few minutes?"

I sat, but I was too energized. Wanting to show the new team that I had discipline, I tried to force myself to calm down, which was embarrassing and a waste of time, but I kept at it with dogged determination. That, as any non-dumbass will tell you, is precisely the wrong way to meditate.

"Tiffany..." warned KRONOS.

Calm. Serene. Balanced.

"Tiffany!"

Calm. Serene. Be serene! Try harder, goddammit!

"Tiffany, stop that this instant!" There was the sound of feet pit-patting rapidly.

This is just a thing that is happening. Several things. Several horrifyingly incomprehensible things. There's a kaiju out there at this very moment. Let go of the thoughts. Identify the feelings, then strangle them and bury them in the backyard.

"Get off that! No! You'll get fur on my buttons!"

They could kick me out. I could be deemed unfit. That was the thought that had been lurking in my head all this time. I knew I'd never be free of the worry. What if I couldn't make the cut, and all this was taken away? Oh, God. What if I deserved to be abandoned?

I was hot and cold at the same time. What did a heart attack feel like? Ooh, or a panic attack?

"Don't touch that, you... you bad chimpanzee!"

I opened my eyes to see the stunningly effective illusion that the Command Center was inside a big=ass discotheque. Lights strobed and flashed, and glitter adorned all the smiling, boogying digital people surrounding us. It was fully three dimensional and hard not to think I was at a huge club full of partying people. The first few strains of 'The Hustle' began to boom out.

"I am so going to have a word with Blue about this, Young Lady!" hectored the mighty computer.

Tiffany ignored it, engrossed as she was with jumping onto the heroes' conference table and shaking it to the music.

"I told him he should get a raccoon instead!" hissed the mighty artificial intelligence. In a more respectful time, he said, "Paper Doll, I am very sorry about this. You see, there are overrides to which certain mischievous little apes have access that can produce harmless effects."

"Why in the hell?" I asked.

"Why in the hell, indeed," it replied. I felt scandalized, hearing it cuss. "It is because someone thought himself funny."

It just kept thumping along, this beat. We were helpless before its power. It was club-loud. I could feel it vibrating my body. Might as well dance, I was fucking everything else up.

I felt it tugging at me. Luring me in. It started with a simple twitch of the hips, and soon I found myself shaking what I had. This was me losing it, I guessed. Should I just take my clothes off now? I wondered.

Tiffany hooted with glee, hopping, then turned to plant her palms on the table and gyrate her tiny simian booty in the air.

A laugh burst out of me. I'd been looking at it wrong, that was all. If I lost it all, I at least had Disco Night at superhero HQ, with Blue's pet chimp.

Yes. This was better than freaking out from sheer joy. Just dance. It was hard not to.

I danced. I let go of it all. Everyone else was doing it.

When Lorelei's face appeared on the wall, I was on the table, pretend-spanking a giggling primate.

The woman in command of Atlanta and its surroundings was every bit the regal, graceful superheroine. Exotic and immaculate, with varicolored feathers for hair and silver-edged irises, she wore a queen's ransom in fine precious metals, and her white garment seemed to be made of light itself. These adornments, as stunning as they were, barely rivaled the striking, unforgettable woman who wore them. Behind her was a sky streaked with smoke and the sound of sirens and shouts.

We froze. The music shut off and silence boomed in our ears. Tiffany made a low, worried hoot, her butt frozen in mid-twerk.

I thought, Please, God, take me back five minutes in time or just kill me.

Lady Lorelei's left eyebrow rose slowly.

"I can explain," I blurted, cringing.

She looked at Tiffany, who was hiding her face behind both hands, then back to me. Her nostrils flared, just once, then she asked, "Art thou ready, as required?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"This conflict has taken a turn for the worse. I am activating my plan for this contingency, of which thou art a key component."

She let me take that on, then KRONOS simplified, "We need you to win the fight."

I squared my shoulders. "I'm on it! What do I do?" Maybe if I went out there and got badly wounded, they'd keep me around for my noble sacrifice. It was looking like my best shot at keeping this job.

Lorelei said, "It pains me to drive thee like this, but this be our sole remaining chance to beat back the infestation before it attains critical mass. Now go! KRONOS will guide you."

I got off the table and helped the little ape down, stealing a kiss as I went, and then I ran.

Holy deep-fried dingleberries, I was dashing off to... I whooped. Didn't think people did that, either.

*

Nerdy-Cool

We'd taken off like a bottle rocket from the Stronghold's hangar deck in an airplane they'd only ever built one of. It was just too cool for quantity.

The pilot said it was powered by plain old jet engines, but it looked like it should be dogfighting in an asteroid belt. I sat in a rear-facing seat with some very exciting gunnery controls that I was ordered not to touch and was briefed while we flew.

It was a totally nerdy-cool plane and I really hated to leave it like I did.

The pilot's voice through my headset said, "Three, two, one, go!"

Screaming in terror, I jumped out of the aircraft.

The fact that I was now plummeting toward the ground had every single bit of my attention.

My goal here was... To not die. I really wanted that. What I really wanted to do was to show them I was capable so we could forget the whole monkey spanking incident. That meant not using my parachute and flying on my own, which did not sound easy at all.

I'd had no time to practice. Everything had happened very quickly.

A trio of technicians rushed me to the upper hangars and showed me to a long and very sciency-looking box.

Through my comlink, KRONOS said, "The man inside has been preserved for some time. He is completely whole and healthy, but his mind is gone. I shall open the pod."

The box beeped, and then the thick, glassy lid lifted on my side, then slid back to fold itself against the back of the pod. Within it was a foxy-looking fellow with red, hipster-style facial hair. Fortyish and slight, he looked like he had a lot of miles on him.

Softly, KRONOS said, "Possess him, please."

I hesitated. "What happened to him?"

"He received a brain injury during a battle and succumbed before its conclusion, whereupon his body was healed in a futile attempt to bring him back."

"They healed a dead guy?"

"His brain was repaired, but the personality encoded within had unfortunately passed on. Mentally, he's a tabula rasa. Physically, he's perfectly healthy. We've examined this shell thoroughly. Now please, there's not much time."

I let my fingers trail over his face. Warm, he was warm. Feverish, in fact.

Sitting in a nearby wheelchair, I activated my Ability, moving my consciousness from my body into the empty shell.

Now I lay in the box. Comfy, but hard to pull myself out of. I clambered over the side and took stock. I was nearsighted. No real joint pains or stuffy nose. The stomach wasn't a disaster (So many people are walking around with shitty stomachs, and they just don't know!), and that was a relief. Crick in the neck. Pain in one of the feet and up the leg, but not bad. An old burn, maybe, but that didn't make sense. Acid, maybe? The skin felt tight there, and numb, but it was manageable. If I had to do any running or much walking, I wouldn't be doing it quickly, but I was sufficiently mobile. It felt like there had recently been needles in the inner elbow of one arm. I checked and saw a little scab.

I was barefoot in a kind of thick medical onesie, but that didn't last. Techs hustled up with a costume, essentially a much cooler onesie, and helped me undress and get into it. I asked why they were gloves, so one guy poured a few drops of his bottled water on my hand. When I saw them rapidly shrink and disappear, I realized I was a really hot motherfucker.

The costume was a stately charcoal and ornamented with blazing flame designs at the wrists and ankles. A separate piece enclosed all of my head but face and ear holes. I wore a pair of prescription ballistic goggles and had a chrome-tinted, full-face visor over that, surplus from some equipment locker instead of fabbed on demand. It smelled faintly of chewing gum.

At the end, one of my clothes-changing pit crew said, "We'll take your body back to your room." She handed over my comlink and I donned it. "Everything fit okay, Sir? I mean ma'am? Sir?"

"I look like I'm about to jump a motorcycle over a school bus."

The crew laughed with me. "You look fine," she said.

I leaned down and kissed my body tenderly on the forehead. "Take care of her." I didn't watch them wheel her away, I'm not quite that sentimental and besides, I had a fucking city to save. There wasn't even time for—Okay, one selfie and then we'll go. Turns out the comlink had a camera.

Myron accompanied me to explain about the threat: this kaiju lived underground in an amorphous form. No one knew its origin, whether it had been a Variant or something even stranger. It did exhibit a low cunning and ability to form simple plans, but no other signs of intelligence were detected. Its mind was unreachable, according to psychic capes who'd encountered it, including Lorelei.

From time to time for unknown reasons, it would send a tendril to the surface and start absorbing nutrients, particularly fats. It grew very quickly with the right food sources, which thankfully didn't include things like plants. When it reached the size of a house, it started adding junk and other debris to its form and growing into the enormous ambulatory mountain that we were all scared shitless of.

The briefing ended there. No more questions, thanks. I only had five minutes for another briefing on how to use this body's abilities while I struggled into a parachute.

So there I was, falling through space. There wasn't even time to be scared.

I wobbled, then tumbled for a pants-wetting moment before remembering to spread my arms. Yep, plenty of time to be scared. I would fucking make time. But there was no choice but to rally. I even remembered how to turn over so I was falling face-down.

The hard part was next, but for a moment I found myself fully diverted by the view. The emergency was so pretty from here, just some cozy-looking orange flames here and there, a couple of bright motes that must be my teammates circling above, and festive, blue and red emergency lights sprinkled all over.

Time to see if I really had super powers. Some part of me refused to believe it. It seemed more likely, somehow, that this was a ridiculously elaborate joke.

I was going to be a quivering wreck when all this was over.

With the wind whistling in my ears, I pictured a core of molten heat within me, growing outward, and my power responded promptly. It spread to my every extremity. I was filled with it, buoyant.

So far, so good. I was feeling a weird warmness all over, but it was hard to separate that from the sensation of falling. I then imagined the warmth pushing downwards from my whole body.

I slowly increased that heat and pressure. More. I wobbled, feeling like gravity was returning. I had to shift to keep my balance.

My comlink buzzed, Blue's voice, "Fuego One, be advised, your parachute is on fire. Repeat: your parachute is on fire."

"Man, why the fuck you gotta tell him that?!" demanded Slim.

I looked over my shoulder and saw smoke and flames coming from my parachute, then back at the unforgiving, inevitable ground.

I was going to die.

In a panic, the heat and pressure that I had slowly increased, I now blasted out with everything I had.

The air below me was solid heat shimmer. I could feel that it was hot, but it wasn't uncomfortable. The sound of air rushing past my ears faded gradually away. I was hovering! Shit, now I was rising really fast! Trying to fix it, I was soon falling again.

Another blast of heat had me rising, then I turned it down and tried to find a happy medium. "Comlink, gimme altitude on the screen," I ordered, and focused on the number. Thank fuck it could be an altimeter, I'd been guessing. Just the number, I coached myself. This is a game. Keep the number steady.

I settled at last into a hover. It was like balancing on hands and knees on a pile of greased watermelons. The parts of me that produced the most lift took the most weight, so when I made more lift from my body and less from my limbs, it felt much more stable.

"Fuego One, on station and ready," I said, then couldn't contain myself. "I'm fucking flying, y'all!"

My comlink was now connected to their channel. They expressed mature disapproval or laughter according to their personal preference, then Bright Angel briskly brought them to order. Clipped status reports and warnings filled my ears. I was so excited I lost my balance and fell a hundred feet before I could right myself.

The baby kaiju was a filthy yellow streaked with brown. It was unsettlingly active and moved by ejecting pseudopods under pressure, latching onto distant spots and pumping itself into them.

There were three separate masses of the thing that I could see, with all kinds of little lumps and strands scattered between. A bubbling blob of it was taking up at least ten parking spaces in the parking lot of a home improvement store amid several burning cars, while a narrow two-story pillar of baby kaiju had risen above a cluster of fast food joints nearby.

Lenser and Hanan were farther up the road, blasting away at a blob trying to link up with its counterparts. Lenser had constructed a complex apparatus of glass lenses, and Hanan was pumping intense amounts of light into it. The brilliant, uninterrupted beam emitted by Lenser's device drove the proto-kaiju back at every turn, but the monster was expansively protean, shifting mass away from where the laser was focused and moving it elsewhere, at high pressure, through tubes the size of a fire hose. The only reason I could see the beast's smaller parts was because it was warmer than the background. It was so hard to explain how I knew. The higher temps were just more intense, somehow. They weren't a different color or anything, they were just more. It was plain as day.

The Kaiju's connecting tendrils could be cut, but new ones were constantly being formed. Fighting it was like shoveling the tide.

There were baselines down there with flamethrowers but the fight was outrunning them. Lorelei had placed herself on civilian protection duty. Her spear could do little to the amorphous thing, but she could swoop down and sever a pseudopod at the right moment or lift a fireman to safety when he got surrounded.

The section at the restaurants was getting visibly larger by the second as it absorbed their pantries. It whomped a farm supply store, presumably for the animal feed, and though it was punished with beams, lasers and those tepid little jets of flame, it gained mass.

My comlink told me Slim Chance was out of the fight and moved to a support role. I had only Blue with his lasers, plus Hanan and Lenser with their sunbeam to help. Both abilities were potent, but they weren't destructive over a wide area.

I willed the flame from my palms and feet to increase. Flying like this was easier, once I figured out how to stabilize myself. I wondered if other heroes' abilities were this easy to learn. This had to have been part of Lorelei's plan.

"Fuego One, this is Chancy. Do you read?"

"What up, Slim?" I was a bit of a fan of Slim Chance. He was one of the gutsiest heroes there was. I wasn't the only one who thought so, either. His popularity exceeded even Bright Angel's.

"My suggestion is to novabomb the mass at the grocery store," he said.

I had the coolest life imaginable. Some people balanced spreadsheets, some built houses. Me? I firebombed monsters! I wished Tawney and Bryan could be here to see this. I replied, "Acknowledged, Slim. Fuego One, redirecting."

There was a stream of words in my ear reminding me about the novabomb. I had to start preparing right away. The trick was to imagine a barrier holding in the heat while making as much of it as possible.

I hovered and let the temperature build. I watched a cluster of pseudopods shoot out toward a convenience store before being cut off by the sunbeam.

"Citizens evacuated," reported Blue, burning more tendrils with his laser.

"Move the cops," I suggested.

"I've got them covered." Lenser. I hoped she was right.

Lorelei's voice was strained with effort. "Fuego One, go, go, go!"

It was like holding off an orgasm, I thought as I flew toward my target. It couldn't be done for very long. I tried not to grind my teeth together. They felt weird. It always took a while before I got used to the feel of a different mouth. The teeth weren't in quite the right places. These were glowing with heat.

I was a raging, white-hot star held back only by willpower. Letting this orgasm out prematurely could get people killed.

I was trying to work out how to swoop without busting my head open on something when Country Kaiju simplified things for me by grabbing me with its greasy, disgusting blob-parts and dragging me down to be eaten.

There was no fighting out of this thing. It was squeezing me so hard I couldn't breathe. When a tentacle would become too hot it would release and two more would wrap around me. All I could do to warn my teammates was grunt urgently and slap at my comlink. My eyes felt like they were bulging out of my head. My panic was feeding the heat. I couldn't hold it!

With a steam-powered scream, I exploded in every direction. The pressure blasted the lipids in the kaiju to a fine vapor that flashed over into a thunderous secondary explosion.

The pseudopod that had been holding me was vaporized, as was everything else. Every joint on my body popped, my head rang, and then I fell twenty feet onto cement.

Everything hurt. It was a miracle of visor design that I wasn't deaf and blind. My right leg felt all kinds of wrong, and my pinky finger was bent backward.