From the Audio Logs of Ethan Blair
World- 32
2039, September 6th
Log entry [text]
Well, today's... August 3rd, 2039? I don't know, I'm not entirely sure at this point. Doesn't matter, anyways. My name is Ethan Blair. Hello to whoever's going to listen to this entry… if anyone ever listens to this entry.
Maybe you're living a hundred thousand years from now, or only fifteen. Maybe you're fighting against some threat of your own, or maybe you're off to explore star systems, or maybe you're the last hope for the human race against a bunch of zombies. Hey, I won't judge. Although I don't think the zombies are especially plausible… well actually, considering what Malignance was able to do… I digress.
The first thing I need to tell you, if you've just picked this Emitter up from someone and don't know what you're doing, is that yes, you've been given this thing for a reason, and yes, it is bonded to you for the rest of your life. Sorry in advance if I'm the one who gave it to you. Then that raises another question. Who am I?
Like I said. My name is Ethan Blair… and I'm the second face of Volta.
You want to know my story? I think I'll need some time to put it together. It would be a good idea to have it here, as an inspiration to whoever picks this thing up after me.
Or, perhaps, a warning…
Let me start at the beginning. Back when I was a kid, back before I was Volta, and way back before the Worlds started merging...
I had, and still have, two first loves: science fiction and comics. To this day, my favorite novel is still "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov. It was fix up novel. A bunch of short stories tied together by themes of human-robot interaction and morality, though at the time I was too young to understand those deeper themes. Asimov's novel played a major part in jump starting my interest in a STEM education.
While "I, Robot" managed a big part in that interest, the other was comics. My dad kept this cardboard box filled with things he referred to as "relics of an old age". Shuffling through the box's contents, I picked up these thin books with oddly dressed people on the front doing spectacular things. But one shone brighter than the rest. "Showcase #22". It was about Hal Jordan, an ace-pilot who gained powers from a ring he got from a dying alien.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Even as a kid, I knew enough about life to know aliens didn't exist, and if they did, your chances of meeting one are zero to none. But I knew that, like Asimov's stories, those comics were all works of fiction. Hal Jordan, Dr. Calvin, they were myths. People only as real as the writer's imagination. And like myths, origins weren't important.
I loved their stories and adventures. I loved their villains, but more than anything else, I loved pretending that one day I could be them. I knew I'd never fly like Superman, or find a magic ring capable of creating anything like Green Lantern, or have a robot companion. But I could learn. Maybe, someway somehow, I could learn to create something similar with science.
It didn't matter that it wasn't real. Though, once I experienced actually having powers, I wasn't all that thrilled. Nor was I thrilled when my life became something right out of a comic.
Skipping ahead to age eighteen, there were these two beings from space who landed on Earth. I don't know where they came from, again, origins don't really matter, but one of them wanted to destroy this planet. An automaton bent on the destruction of all organic life in the universe, my future enemy. Malignance. The other wanted to save us. He was my predecessor, the first Volta.
Honestly, I'm not precisely sure of the gory details, but it seemed simple enough when I started. Good guy, bad guy, bad guy tries to end the world, good guy saves the world by capturing or killing the bad guy, ticker-tape parades and life goes on like normal.
Except it didn't end that way. The good guy, the first Volta, decided that he would save the world by crashing his ship into the bad guy's, Malignance's, and forcing him to land instead of taking over the world via mind-control waves or some nonsense. This at least crippled Malignance's ship pretty much completely. Which, yes, that saved the human race. Sort of. But it also mortally wounded the first Volta.
Now, this normally wouldn't be a problem if we were on Superhero Earth because then Superman or the Green Lanterns or someone would go flying in to save us from the horror from outer space, go punch him down for us, and award the fallen hero a posthumous Medal of Honor. But of course we're not on Superhero Earth, so the only actual superhero here in that situation was that fallen hero.
And he was dying.
At about the same time that day, right at dusk, I was going home to my dorm after work, and next thing I know, I'm pulling up to a police barricade and they're telling me that the aliens who've been sending us radio transmissions have crashed. On my campus.
My first reaction was disbelief. You know how nothing interesting ever happens to you, and then one day your little Chihuahua gets eaten by a mountain lion? It's kind of like that. You freeze up and then there's this moment where the only coherent thing that comes out of your mouth is "What?" and then it's a long few minutes before you can get your tongue to work properly again.
So I'm standing there at the police barricade trying to argue with them that yes, I am carrying slowly thawing frozen burritos and I need to get back home because I haven't eaten in nine hours. And then there's a streak of red light heading east, and a streak of orange light heading back down in the direction that the streak of red light came from.
I should probably mention, now that I know what it is, that the streak of red light was Malignance and the orange light was him dropping the Emitter into my neighborhood, presumably to recruit someone to finish off the nearly dead guy who happens to be Volta. But that's a digression.
In any case, most of the police went motorcycling off in that direction, presumably to go chase after him (not that they'd catch him, he goes at 200 miles an hour easy), and in the chaos, I ended up shimmying under one of the parked LA Police cars they'd used to form the temporary barricade.
Which, in hindsight, was an incredibly stupid thing for me to do. But at the time, all I was thinking of was that I really needed to get back before my ice cream was a watery mess. Anyway, once I was under the car it was simple enough to crawl out of the way and into my dorm complex, where – true enough – there was a huge column of smoke and a dull green glow coming from the next compound over.
There was also a column of smoke rising from my dorm building.
Abandoning caution even more thoroughly than I had previously, I ran towards my building and found Volta lying in the dust, holding something out towards me. It was glowing. You know, even with the benefit of a few months of hindsight…
I still have no idea why I took the thing.
The first thing I was aware of, when the emitter touched my skin, was that I wanted to put it in my breast pocket for safekeeping. The second thing I was aware of was that everything had turned blindingly white. All of my senses redlined for an agonizingly long moment, and then reality wobbled and snapped back into place.
I was hovering just above the ground, seemingly with no means of support, enclosed in a powersuit the likes of which I had never seen before. A HUD tracked my movements and drew steel-blue traces, labeling everything with statistics that I would take weeks to subsequently understand. More importantly, the ozone smell indicated that I now held several thousand volts of live electricity in my hands.
I spotted someone wearing a similar suit. The smell of ozone intensified, and, as if on reflex, I brought my hands up to call a bolt of lightning. Thunder roared above and lightning struck the suit wearer.
And then time turned in on itself, and the next thing I know is that I was standing over Scorch's prone form. Then, on some kind of instinct, I placed my hands on his chest and pulled the Emitter out. Scorch's suit faded into light, revealing a man underneath. He fell to the ground limp, and I stood back in horror of what I had done. Then I crouched next to a car, a dead body in front of me, and waited to be found.
They kept me for days, it seemed. At first with interrogators and then with scientists; clipboards and x-rays and a lot of people with words that expressed concern and faces that expressed something else entirely.
They asked me a lot of things. Most of the time, they told me what they were doing to me, and I told them about the incident with the Emitter. They just looked at their papers and wrote it down in some sort of indecipherable shorthand. I think they figured out what kind of power I had before I understood it.
And in between the days and days of featureless white rooms and no privacy, there was some girl they'd assigned to keep me, if not comfortable, at least nondestructive. Her name, apparently, was Penni. She was of no particular origin that I could pin down, tan-skinned and dark-haired with brown eyes, dressed in nondescript but reasonably flattering suits. She came around daily, asking me about everything.
Unlike the others, she actually showed signs of caring about my welfare, and waved off any compliments as "just doing her job." That's probably why she was placed with me. I think I liked her, I still do, but it took me a long time to get past that aura of innocence of hers.
She apologized to me when I was told by the lab coats that if I wanted the Emitter out, I would die, as it had replaced most of my heart with a fusion reactor. What some of them wanted to do was vivisect me to figure out how it worked while I was alive. I turned them down.
And then I was in a boardroom, somewhere with Penni, some guards, and someone from the Department of Defense. I was being briefed on the others who'd also gotten a hold of Emitters and were in cahoots with the governments of their respective countries. The secretary told me this: I could fight for the United States government. I could fight against enemies of the State, including other "Heroes" and Malignance… Or they would remove the Emitter and give it to someone more "deserving."
What remained unsaid is that this would involve my death, but the implication was very clear.
So of course I agreed to fight for them, because I had to.
And so it went. I fought the other Emitter users and took their Emitters upon defeat. All seven of them. Seven humans met their end. I remember their faces, twisted in horror as they died. I remember their voices… So you want to know my story? My life wasn't a comic book. It's a long, horrible tale filled with tragedy and death. I am no hero, I'm a murderer. I am so sorry if I'm the one who gave you this Emitter. I would've apologized in person… but if you have this Emitter in the first place, then I'm already dead…
