Rogers 2099
Skimmers passed overhead on streaks of neon. Advertisements blurted from holoboards set every few feet, pushing noodles and anti-rad pills and libido enhancers and muscle relaxers and legalized hallucinogens. New York soared up, the buildings running into the low, brackish clouds. People bustled by, wearing heavy coats cut into unmistakable styles, their eyes on the flip-visors in front of their faces, laughing and jeering at private calls and projected entertainments, lost in themselves, too insular to see the a 6' 2" musclebound super athlete wearing bright red, white, and blue body armor that walked among them.
Steve Rogers was far past mourning the loss of his country. America—the America he had grown up with, the America he had fought for all these years—had not existed in a long time. Some days he missed it. Some nights he wondered if it had ever been real to begin with. He had come to believe that the America he loved, in which citizens cared about their neighbors, helped the poor, and fought for one another, was more of an ideal to strive toward than a reality to be achieved.
1942. 2017. 2099. He had seen the United States in its most troubling times. Thanks to the serum still flowing in his veins, he had lived to see all those eras, and likely would see many, many more before his end.
Each era had its trouble. Each era had its dictators, its heroes and its villains. And as the years changed, he had done his best to remain the same. A paragon of the Dream, regardless of whether or not that dream was real.
Still, no matter what year it was, he was certain that setting off a genetic deterioration bomb in Times Square was some grade-A evildoing that needed to be stopped.
"C2," he said, into the mic on his helmet, "do you have visual?"
"Copy, C1. He just docked with the central bus terminal. Looks like he's got some help."
"Does he have the bomb?"
"Looks like it." There was a pause. "You don't want to hear about his help?"
Rogers looked up from the crowd. The bus terminal was a cylindrical column that stretched out of the Times Square street and plateaued outward, a mushroom of steel girders and neon. Automated air buses groaned onto and off of the platform every few minutes.
"Goons are all the same," he replied, moving toward the terminal. "I'll be up there in a moment. If he rabbits, handle it."
"Copy."
Theodore Brakan was nineteen years old, which was you for a bio-terrorist. He wore a red skull on his face, a rubberized mask he had designed and printed himself. It was a statement, he often said, though he was not sure what it was a statement of. All that Theodore Brakan was really sure of was that he was brilliant, that he was angry, and that he wanted to set off a bomb to turn everyone in New York into lopsided fish people.
He was about to get the bomb out and set to work doing just that when the first of his hired thugs dropped. The man was huge, his muscularity boosted by gene treatments and anabolic abuse, but none of that had prepared him for a vibranium disc to the temple. The shield snapped him in the side of the head and rebounded, careening into another thug's chest, knocking the wind out of him before bouncing on, skipping off the steel decking and landing back in the easy grip of the man who had thrown it.
Theodore Brakan looked at the man, standing there in his patriotic armor. "Who the fuck are you?" he said.
Rogers looked at the kid. He wasn't offended by the lack of recognition. No one cared about heroes anymore. What he cared about most was the backpack the kid was wearing, and the chance that it might go off.
"Take the pack off, son, and stand down," he said. "There's no reason to do this."
"He's not going to listen," C2 said, in his ear.
"The hell with this!" shouted the kid. He gestured to his remaining five thugs. "Get him!"
Get him? Rogers sighed, locked his shield to his right gauntlet, and dashed forward.
The first guy threw a hook. It was powerful—the man was strong—but it was slow. Muscle was nothing without speed. Rogers ducked it, slammed his fist into the man's elbow. Bone snapped. The man screamed, and Rogers levered the broken arm to propel him face-first into the ground.
Another thug had pulled out a submachinegun, a collapsible Stark model, and let it rip. Rogers cartwheeled, dodging the majority of the shots. What he couldn't dodge he caught on the shield. He sprang off of one hand, twisted through the air, and landed on the man's neck with both boots. The gun clattered to the ground.
Rogers spun, slinging his shield. It rebounded six times off of three heads and a lightpost, then came back to him. The rest of Brakan's help was unconscious, blood leaking from their busted foreheads.
"Back off!"
Rogers turned. Brakan was standing at the edge of the platform, holding his bag over the edge. Rogers assumed that however the bomb worked, it had been armed. Otherwise the plan wouldn't have worked.
"Back off!" the kid said, again.
Rogers clamped the shield onto his back. He spread his hands, palms open. "Let's talk about this, Theodore."
"He doesn't want to talk," said C2. "He just wants to turn everyone into fish."
"Quiet," Rogers replied, subvocalizing.
"I'm on the way," she said. "Keep him talking."
"Why the fuck would I talk to you?" the kid said. "You're wearing a fucking flag for a costume! You're insane!"
Rogers shrugged. "Fair point. But you're the one with a bomb in your backpack, so since we're both a little looney, maybe we can talk."
"Talk about what?"
"About why you're doing this," he said. "What makes a prodigal chemistry wizard wake up one day and decide to bomb a city?"
The kid was quiet. Even though his expression was hidden behind the mask, Rogers could see him looking down at the street sixty feet below, at the people that swarmed there, all staring straight ahead, all blind.
"Nobody cares anymore!" the kid shouted, looking back at Rogers. "No one knows anything! No one wants to learn anything, or check to see if what they know is right! No one gives a fuck! No one even looks up from their fucking face screens anymore!"
"It's been like that since before you were born," Rogers said. The irony that the kid was wearing a red skull on his head and talking about ignorance was not lost on him.
"So what? It's fucking sick!"
"ETA damn quick," said the voice in his ear.
"Theodore," Rogers said, "you need to take a deep breath."
"Why?" The kid shook the backpack, gesturing angrily. "So I can calm down? So you can talk me down and out of this? So you can make me see the error of my ways? So you—"
Theodore Brakan smashed into the deck, taken off his feet by the sudden flying tackle of Roberta Mendez. The younger Captain America pinned the homegrown terrorist to the ground, one hand holding his wrist to the deck to keep in from activating the backpack bomb while her other hand punched him in the face. Brakan's head smacked the steel and his eyes closed.
Rogers looked down at the unconscious Brakan. "So that it would hurt less," he said.
Mendez stood up. She collapsed her holo-wings and picked up the backpack, taking it to the other side of the platform. "Authorities are inbound," she said. "Sentinel Patrol will haul him to Rikers. Good night's work, Old Cap."
"You as well, Young Cap," Rogers said. They stood at the edge of the bus terminal. Rogers had cuffed Brakan and his cronies, and had them seated neatly on a bench. He held the kid's mask, its red rubber draped across his glove.
"Bet that brings back old times," Mendez said.
Rogers turned the mask over in his hands before crumpling it up and dropping it into the crowd below. He watched it land on a woman's head. She swiped it off without bothering to check what it had been.
No one gives a fuck, the kid had said. Rogers wasn't sure he had been wrong.
"Not so much," Rogers said. He heard the downwash blast of approaching sentinels in the distance and turned to Mendez. "What's next?"
She grinned, pulling up her datacuff. "I thought you'd never ask."