Author's Note: Sorry that this took a little longer than usual, but Real Life is pretty stressful right now, though I'm grateful that it hasn't gotten so bad that I can't keep on writing, if a bit more slowly. My thanks to all who offered their thoughts and their compassion for my husband and I; right now, we're in the waiting phase, as he isn't scheduled for surgery until October 5th. We're still hoping that all will go well (with the surgery and his health, though I have my doubts about the issues we're certain to face with what's laughingly called health insurance), so being able to keep creatively active is better than spending my time fretting about things I can't change. And my thanks to all who keep on reading and reviewing, your support helps keep my spirits up, too. Now, onward!
Chapter Five
At the Edge of Uncertainty
He knew what he had done. And he knew he'd been the worst kind of coward. Koan Rii had persuaded his wife to steal from a friend, and he had lied to her about his interest in that friend's design schematics and development information about an engine to which he himself had no rights. He had paid others to build what he told them to build, as quickly as possible, had gotten others to outfit one of his biggest merchant ships with the hastily completed engine, and had gotten others to take it on its maiden voyage.
But he had taken none of the risks. He had done the safe parts, the easy parts. He had made his own interpretations of the stolen designs, had run that information through the filter of what he wanted it to be, and had drawn conclusions as to how the desired result of achieving a large-scale interstellar engine could be achieved, much sooner than the Ayalthan scientists claimed was possible. And he had used his own resources to obtain and pay for any materials or staff that was needed to do the job, hurrying it along as quickly as possible.
But in the end, he hadn't even had the guts to be on board the ship during its first and supposedly glorious maiden voyage.
Oh yes, he was powerful, wealthy, a man to be reckoned with — and he'd hidden behind others every step of the way. As he'd tried to hide behind a lie of ignorance when the man whose work he'd stolen and misused had called to inform him of the results of his arrogance. Varaan hadn't known that Koan was specifically responsible, of course, but the merchant wasn't the best liar in the universe. The Ayalthans were extremely perceptive when it came to the emotions of those around them, and Koan couldn't have hidden the guilt he felt while hearing the truth about what he'd unleashed even if he had been the most skillful liar ever born.
This whole idea had been to expand the horizons of his merchant empire, to make the House of Rii stand far above any other, to make himself a Prince among princes. Instead, his arrogant cowardice was about to bring down not only his House, but every single house in the entire system.
And to make matters worse, his wife was furious.
"You told me that you were helping Varaan to help our son!" Lethai spat at her husband when she finally found him in one of most private rooms of their sprawling estate after she herself had discovered what had happened from the ambassador's wife. Ephles hadn't known that Koan was responsible for this accident as she thought it to be, a mistake made by someone on the team of Ayalthan scientists — but Lethai knew better.
She remembered how it had begun months ago, with Koan's smoothly honeyed words, offered while she'd been nursing little Zan, telling her how he had been struck by inspiration after Varaan had showed him his engineering work on the drive that would do so much to broaden all their outlooks for the future. He hadn't wanted to seem a fool if he was wrong, and he did so want to surprise his friend with his insights if he was right. But he needed another, closer look at the schematics and test data to be sure, so he'd claimed, and he didn't want to risk spoiling the surprise by asking Varaan's wife for the favor, so he'd asked his own to do it more secretly. It was for all of them, he reminded her, especially for their children, and with baby Zan sated and sleeping peacefully in her arms, it had all seemed so perfectly reasonable, Lethai hadn't been able to say no.
She was saying more than just no right now. She was angry, and she was a force to be reckoned with. Though not built to the same massive proportions as her husband, Lethai was tall and strong in a more lithe fashion, the strength of flexible steel rather than hard, heavy stone. Her long black hair was a mane of rippling waves around her head, her eyes flashing with blue fire, the hottest part of the flame. This time, Zan was asleep in another part of the sprawling estate and not in his mother's arms, well away from any chance of overhearing his parents' confrontation.
"You used me, and you used Zan!" his mother now snarled at his father, furious with herself for having been so tricked, and furious with him for having dared to try such a thing.
Koan knew she was right, but he grasped at any straws he could find to muster some kind of an explaination. "Lethai, beloved, this wasn't what I expected to happen..."
"Oh, don't give me that!" she ended the excuse before it could do more than begin. "You know that when it comes to anything scientific or even mechanical, you barely have the gifts of an Ayalthan child, and you still keep pretending that you're every bit as good as their experts, even better! It's an acceptable conceit if you limit it to discussions and debates among friends like Varaan who accept your eccentricities, but every single time you try to tinker with or tweak something more complex than a bread crisper, it blows up in your face! Only this time, it didn't blow up in your face, did it?"
Her spouse cringed. "I didn't know—!" he began, only to be cut short again by Lethai's growled retort.
"You suspected enough to not be on that ship! Bakka and Drin were both good pilots, but was it any coincidence that you chose people without family ties?"
"They both wanted the bonuses I offered," Koan defended, knowing that it was weak at best. "And most of my pilots are unattached. Anyone who travels off-planet knows that our invulnerability won't protect us if the gravity or oxygen fail or should the ship be stranded for too long, so it's common for such crews to be unattached. I'm not the only merchant who hires that way! But I swear, Lethai, I didn't know that this would happen! I expected that at worst, the new drive simply wouldn't work, the ship wouldn't be able to make the transition from here to Cobin, and they'd merely have to continue the voyage using the ordinary drive."
"And so even though the experts told you it wasn't safe, you didn't believe them — and now look at what you've done! People have died, Koan, people who were our friends! And now...!"
The golden-haired merchant saw the horrified look on his wife's face and felt something twist deep inside him. Varaan doesn't know, not for certain, he told himself, but he didn't truly believe it. Bakka and Drin had been friends, true, but not so close that Lethai would feel this degree of vehement upset over their loss. Her anger might be rooted in the fact that she'd unwittingly been made an instrument of that loss, but Koan couldn't shake the feeling that there was more to this, far more. "And now what?" he asked as neutrally as possible. "What have you heard?"
From the smoldering look she gave him, he wished he hadn't asked. "Ephles Thejhan just called to say goodbye. She and her husband are leaving this afternoon on the fastest transport to Ayalthis. Varaan needs to be there as soon as possible to work on repairing the effects of an unexpected use of an unstable wormhole hyperdrive. And she hopes they'll be able to get there before this 'accident' destroys everything and everyone in our star system!"
When Koan grimaced and dropped his head into his hands, covering his proud and handsome face in an expression of remorse, the raven-haired woman's fury shifted into anguish. "Koan, how could you do this? You tricked our friends, you lied to me, you let Bakka and Drin go into danger you were afraid to face — and now, everyone is going to pay for it! You, me, all our people — and our son! How can you say you wanted to ensure his future and then do something like this? Oh, yes, you ensured his future. You guaranteed that he's going to die before he's even a year old!"
Her husband had to struggle to speak, but it was less difficult than remaining silent. "Perhaps not," he said as he dropped his hands, his usually confident deep voice uncertain, unsteady. "The wormhole isn't stable, so it could collapse at any moment. Or the Ayalthan scientists could find a way to force it to collapse—"
Lethai's fury was back in full. "So now you count on them to undo what you did? And don't deny that you're responsible! Even if you haven't owned up to it and no one's come right out and said it, you know what you did — and I know it! First you had me distract Ephles to 'borrow' all her husband's research two days after he showed it to you, and not three months later, this happens!"
"I didn't expect this to happen, Lethai, I swear!" Koan cried as he turned his stricken face to her, the shine in his blue eyes suspiciously wet. "I know that I made a terrible mistake, but if I'd had any real notion that it could end like this, I would never have even tried!"
Her lips pressed together in a hard line. "You're going to do something about it now," she declared firmly, her tone one that would stand no argument. "You're getting onto that ship to Ayalthis with Varaan and Ephles this afternoon. You're going to take with you every bit of information you have about what you did with his designs after you had me steal them, and you're going to pray to the Great Maker that he and his associates will be able to see whatever it was you did wrong and find a way to fix it. And you're going to make a public apology to everyone in this system who will listen, or I swear I'll tell them what happened myself and let them take you out into space and shove you through an airlock!"
There was very little in the universe that frightened Koan or could make him feel small and insignificant and weak, but that determined look on his wife's face and the commanding tone of her voice were both among them. Either one alone could have made him submit to whatever just punishment he had earned; together, they were enough to bring the big, powerful man to his knees, literally, in abject remorse. "As you say," he agreed softly, meekly as he knelt before her. "I'll go at once, and stay for as long as they require my presence. If they ask me to submit to their laws, I will. I never meant for... for this to happen, truly, Lethai."
She sniffed, her anger still strong, though his willingness to abase himself tempered it. "I know you didn't mean it," she said briskly. "You never mean any of the foolish things you do, Koan, and yet you keep doing them! But this one can't be fixed with money or influence or a dashing smile and weak promises. If you'd actually had a brilliant idea that could've provided an answer to a problem that even expert scientists couldn't solve, you should have just told them! But no, you rushed on and tried to do it yourself because you wanted to grab the glory, and you wanted it right now! If by some miracle we all come through this alive—!"
Koan grasped her hands even though they were balled into fists, turning pleading eyes to her. "Don't even think it, beloved! Varaan said it will be months until that can happen, and surely there will be time enough to find a way to reverse this!"
She knew that he was trying to use his charms to soften her mood, but Lethai was adamant. "And if there isn't? If you've condemned everything living thing in this system to a horrible end, what then?"
He sighed in surrender. "Then if there is a Life beyond this life as our people believe, I will pay for my crimes to our Maker, and spend that Life making amends, if I can. And once I've submitted myself to the Ayalthans for whatever they require of me, if they will allow it, I will return to you and Zan. Even if I can do nothing to make right what I've done wrong, I want to have the courage to face whatever comes with my family."
He spoke with great sincerity — and for once, Lethai could hear no trace of his natural tendency to manipulate, to talk and think and act like a trader. He was speaking from his heart, as a husband and a father. Lethai closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them again, the anger had melted into sorrow.
"We'll be waiting here for you," she said softly, sadly. There was no need to explain why. If Koan took his family with him, it would look as if they had all fled Glaupek to deliberately avoid facing their own people once the news spread. In their culture, it was a terrible act of cowardice to leave none of one's House to face such shame directly; Lethai knew and accepted that under the circumstances, she would have to be the one to stand fast. "If they let you return, do it quickly. You said you wanted to do this for Zan; if you can do nothing more, at least be here with him at the end."
Koan leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the hands he held in his own in a gesture of contrite surrender. "You're braver than I, beloved, much braver. Everything will be as you say. I know the Ayalthans, and I know Varaan; they'll only ask restitution of me if they can undo this, and then it will be to repay them for what it cost to do so. I'll be back, Lethai, so you can tell any of our people who try to vent their anger on you to wait to do it to me. I'm the one who caused this, and all the blame and the shame is mine. Just shield Zan from it. Come what may, he shouldn't suffer for even one hour because of my arrogant mistake."
Moved by his honesty, Lethai pulled her hands from his to turn his face upward so that she could bend to kiss him. She was as passionate in her love for this man as she was when he moved her to anger, and though the rage would pass, the love never would. "I'll pray that it be so," she murmured when she broke the kiss and pressed her cheek to the thick golden waves atop his head. "Whatever punishment may be ours for what we both have done, I pray that Zan will be spared such a fate."
More than three and a half decades later, Zan Rii — who was now the adult Wayne Scott and totally unaware of his true birth name — found himself at the Metro City Prison for the Criminally Gifted, not bringing some villain or mere thug there for justice, but instead on an errand of mercy. Today was the day his adoptive parents had estimated was his birthday when they took in the foundling alien; by Earth's reckoning, they were off by some seven months and sixteen days, largely because Lady Scott had wanted to imagine that the baby boy who was to be hers was only a few weeks old, at most.
He had just finished having brunch with his Earth mother and had planned to spend the rest of the day with her in quiet celebration before he told the entire world the real story of Metro Man's "tragic" retirement in tomorrow's interview, when Roxanne called. He'd been startled to hear that Megamind was back in prison and she needed a ride to help get him out, since Minion was still involved with the city's holiday parade and festivities and she didn't want to spoil things for him.
Wayne had been a little miffed by the fact that Roxanne didn't seem to mind spoiling the day for him, until she told him the particulars. When he passed on the information to his mother, Lady Scott had given him another shock. She insisted that he go and give whatever help was needed, since for all the nuisancy things his former opponent had done, he had never involved anyone in the kind of lie Wayne had perpetrated, letting the world believe that Megamind had murdered him for nearly a full year before coming up with another lie to clear him, but still hide the truth. The Scott family may have been ruthless business folk in their day, but never had they been liars, and she felt that Wayne owed some consideration to his ex-nemesis after his bratty childhood bullying, all things considered.
So he'd taken his mother's Bentley — which he'd spent the last month learning to drive better, after experiences over the summer had taught him that he really needed to learn how to be a normal human being so that he could better relate to them, a thing long, long overdue — driven to the Lair to pick up Roxanne, and headed out to the prison.
"It was completely an accident!" a distinctly upset but reasonably controlled Warden Alvarez told them both after he met them just inside the building's main entrance. "The escape failsafes were built into the system from the start, the techs say, but we didn't trigger them on purpose! I mean, I know that Megamind's turned over a new leaf and more, he's been doing a lot of good since he went straight, and I wouldn't want to ruin any of his hard work by pulling such a nasty trick on him!"
It was obvious that the man was sincere, and though she was worried about her husband, Roxanne couldn't bring herself to make things worse as they hustled to the special isolation wing. "What kind of an accident?" she wondered, carefully keeping her tone non-accusatory, if not exactly neutral. "You said he's unconscious?"
Alvarez nodded. "The cell was made to lock down and pump in knockout gas if the scanners picked up any unusual kinds of activity. It's not enough to kill him, just keep the prisoner from continuing with whatever escape or attack plan had been launched. But the truth is, it never went off before, not even when he was an inmate and was plotting all sorts of breakouts and other schemes from the second he was put in the cell!"
Both Roxanne and Wayne were startled by that. "Never?" the latter asked, truly surprised.
"Not once," the new warden confirmed. "It worked if the system was deliberately tripped during tests, but beyond that, never. Most of us thought the scanner part of the system was just a huge waste of money, since it either couldn't work the way the designers said it would, or Megamind had ways of controlling his brain activity so the scanners couldn't register the things it was supposed to be looking for. I don't know what happened now, but after he and the techs finished running the diagnostics and making the repairs and adjustments it needed, I went in to let them run a scan on a normal person, and then I asked Megamind if he wouldn't mind going in to let them run a check on someone...well, significantly above normal. He didn't have a problem with it, but I swear, I had no idea the system would decide that now was a good time to work the way it was supposed to!"
He sounded mortified, but as they came to the corridor leading to the isolation cell, Roxanne began to piece together the puzzle. "I'm sure none of you did anything wrong," she assured the worried man. "You let Mykaal get his hands on it, he doesn't like the cell's current resident, and I'll wager he did some tweaking of his own to 'improve' things." While she genuinely believed that, she also had a strong feeling that after his session with the sleep teacher not even twelve hours ago, her husband's brain was doing leaps and somersaults it had never done before.
"That's possible," the tech Lee said as they arrived, having overheard her. He and Norm were on the floor with the console and every breaker panel opened up, working to try to restore at least minimal power to the system. "I've been doing regular checks on this system ever since it was installed, and I've never seen it do anything like it did just before all the containment failsafes went off. Every single gauge maxed out a few seconds after we activated the scanners, and then blew."
Roxanne wrinkled her nose. "I thought I recognized the telltale stink of electrical shorts."
Wayne frowned as he surreptitiously used his super-vision to see into the cell. The lights inside were out, but the iris cover on the door's window was open, letting in enough light to see by. Poor Megamind was still unconscious, crumpled on the floor on the other side of the door. "Why haven't you let him out?" he asked, concerned about his ex-rival's condition.
Norm grunted. "Because when the system shorted, it took the controls for the door out, too. And the ventilation. The gas stopped pumping in when the power went, but we can't suck out what's in there and pump in fresh air."
"And there aren't any non-powered releases for the locks," Warden Alvarez added. "They were afraid Megamind would figure them out and use them to his own advantage, if they were there."
Roxanne frowned. "And you haven't forced your way in because...?" she prompted.
Lee snorted. "Because though the designers didn't do so hot a job with the actual sensors, they did a bang-up job overdoing the armoring on the room and the door. We don't have any blowtorches, but even if we had some brought in, if we try to cut through that way with the vents down, it'll take so long to get through, we'd use up the air he needs to breathe before we can cut even a few air holes. Even the window's so heavily reinforced, cutting through it could present the same problem."
"Not to mention the issue with the knockout gas," Norm added. "We don't know what it is exactly, and there's a strong chance it might be flammable."
"Okay, good to know," Roxanne said with a sigh, understanding their caution but not liking the fact that her husband was still trapped in that room, unconscious. Another unsettling thought occurred to her. "If enough of the air was replaced with knockout gas to be dangerous and the vents are down, how long will it be before he suffocates?" she asked, just barely able to keep her reporter's cool.
The two techs cleared their throats; the warden grimaced. "We don't know. There are just too damn many things we don't know, to be honest with you. That's why I called you in. You're his wife; I want to have your okay before we try anything. I would've just asked you over the phone, but we'd hoped to at least get the ventilation system up again before you got here."
Well, she couldn't blame them for being cautious, but she was also glad she'd asked Wayne to come with her. When she looked at him, she saw him looking back, and understanding passed between them. "Could you do it?" she asked softly, not wanting to compromise him if he wasn't ready.
The retired hero looked at the two frantically working techs and the worried warden, thought hard for a moment, then decided. He nodded. "Yeah, though I think we'd better warn them first."
Roxanne understood, turning to Alvarez. "Is there anyone else who's likely to come in here?"
The man shook his head. "Not until the power's back up. Any time we have a failure in any part of the prison, we put things on lockdown as a security measure. The guards won't come unless I call 'em. The other electricians are working on the main lines to see if we can bypass the isolated circuits for this unit, and though I put in a call to the system designer, he's on vacation in Hawaii."
The reporter had to grant that the warden answered thoroughly when questioned, though that was probably more than she needed to know. "Good, then it'll be easy to keep this quiet for a day. Can I trust all three of you to keep a secret for that long?"
Alvarez nodded, though he was puzzled, and the two techs paused in their work long enough to give her similar looks. "You want us not to talk about this thing going haywire for a day?" Lee asked, wanting to be sure he understood correctly.
Roxanne shrugged. "Not exactly, though I suppose it wouldn't hurt, Mykaal's probably going to feel pretty embarrassed once he's out of there, and I suspect he'd going to have a doozy of an explanation for you when he wakes up. No, I just want to be sure that what happens here stays here, at least until tomorrow night."
The two techs exchanged glances at her request, then shrugged. "Sure, why not?" Norm said equably. "To be honest, I'm not all that thrilled with people finding out that we came to do a routine maintenance job and it went wrong so badly." When Lee concurred, Roxanne took them as the answers she wanted. She turned to Wayne, indicating that the next move was his.
He loosed a little sigh. "Okay, then. Would you mind stopping your work for a minute? And step back a little, against the wall, all of you. I want to have the corridor clear for this."
The three men exchanged puzzled glances, but when Roxanne complied with his request, moving away from the door to stand against the wall about ten feet away, they followed her lead. When they were clear, Wayne closed his eyes for a moment, steeled himself, and went to work.
Using his laser vision so quickly that there would be no excessive heat build-up inside the cell, he cleanly cut away the clear glass-like material of the open window, leaving only an inch-wide rim all around. Even as the three men behind him gasped to see the supposedly powerless super using his powers again, he caught the cut section of the window and moved it safely to one side. Then, employing both his powers of super breath and super speed, he sucked the remaining knockout gas from the chamber before it could roll out to overwhelm those behind him, then zipped outside the prison to release it harmlessly before zipping back in to blow fresh air into the breached cell. His movement from cell to outside and back happened so quickly, he seemed only to blur slightly, his passage unnoticed by anyone else in the prison.
When he was sure the air inside the cell was safe for non-supers to breathe, he turned back to Roxanne and the warden. "I can't fit in through a hole that small," he admitted, trying not to notice the shocked looks on the faces of the techs, and grateful in a way that Alvarez didn't actually seem surprised by the demonstration of his great lie. "But I can help one of you inside, to help move Megs out of there so he can recover someplace more comfortable. The poor little guy is stuck in a position that's gonna tie him up in knots if he stays that way much longer."
"I'll do it," Alvarez volunteered without hesitating. "It's my fault he went in in the first place, it's the least I can do."
That settled, Wayne hoisted the warden through the glassless window, both men taking care so that Megamind didn't get stepped on in the process. Alvarez was happily in good physical condition, so lifting the small blue hero up so that Wayne could move him through the window and out of the room went quickly. On the warden's suggestion, he took the still unconscious ex-villain to a cot in the bolthole adjacent to his office, there for the times when the situation at the prison demanded that he remain on site until matters were resolved. The move again took place at super speed, so that it seemed as if he was standing there holding the unconscious Megamind one moment, then the next simply wasn't. After he'd helped the warden out again and was in the process of carefully "welding" the cut window back into place, Roxanne turned to the three men, focusing most on the astonished techs.
"No, you're not imagining this," she told them. "And Wayne didn't miraculously get his powers back; he never lost them. You may have seen ads for a special interview I'm doing with him tomorrow; it'll explain everything. But I hope you can understand why we don't want this leaking until then. The reasons behind this are pretty complicated, and I don't want rumors making things even messier before Wayne has a chance to tell everyone the whole story."
Her mention of rumors seemed to snap the two techs out of their flabbergasted stupor just as Wayne finished repairing the window. He'd done such a good job of it, one would only notice that anything had been done to it if they knew to look for it. Realizing that the former Metro Man had not lost his powers — or perhaps had gotten them back — both Norm and Lee were very willing to agree to keep their mouths shut, just to stay on his good side, and Roxanne's. Satisfied, she and Wayne followed Alvarez to his office while the techs went back to work, trying to get enough power back to the isolation cell so that Hal could be returned to it at the end of the day, scanners working or not.
Megamind was still out of it when they arrived at the warden's bolthole, looking much more comfortable on the small bed than he had slumped on the cell's floor. Roxanne went to him immediately, and was relieved when he responded to the touch of her hand on his face, even though he didn't come around yet.
"This is just awfully weird," Wayne remarked as he watched the reporter gently trying to rouse his former foe, feeling more than a touch envious of her tender attentions to him. "Megs lived in that cell whenever he was here for almost seven years, and the thing never went off like this. What happened?"
"I'd like to know that myself," Alvarez admitted. "You say you think he might've changed something while he was working on it, something that made it really work?"
Roxanne shrugged. "I don't know for sure, but knowing Mykaal, I'd say there's a pretty strong chance that he did. He's told me that he always thought the whole brain scanning bit was a joke because it wasn't capable of monitoring the right things, and wasn't nearly sensitive enough to do more than a standard EEG. So if he saw ways to tweak things to make them work... Yeah, he'd do it, and he wouldn't say anything until it did work, just to surprise people — and to cover his own butt if it failed or didn't work the way he wanted."
She gazed at him fondly as she rubbed his cheeks, encouraging him to shake off the effects of the gas. "Guess you got yourself this time, sweetie," she said with a crooked smile, leaning forward to press a light kiss of consolation to his lips.
As if this were a cliched fairy tale, his big green eyes chose that moment to flutter open, his vision still a bit foggy from the drug's aftereffects. As Roxanne was the first sight to greet him, he smiled happily, thinking she'd come to waken him from a nap — until memory came roaring back like an avalanche.
The blue hero sat bolt upright and started to shriek, "What the—!" in pure outrage, until the wooziness of the fading drug hit him a moment later. Dizzy, he was caught in Roxanne's steadying grasp; he welcomed it, since it gave him a chance to note the figures of Wayne and Warden Alvarez just beyond her. A reflex frown creased his face but didn't deepen much, as he could also see the two of them watching him with genuine concern.
"I am so sorry, Mr. Thejhan," the warden said with immense contrition and politeness, not at all the demeanor of a man who had engineered a betrayal. "If I'd known the system would react like that, I would never have asked you to play guinea pig! Is there anything I can do to help? Call the doctor, get some water or coffee...?"
Megamind's nose wrinkled expressively at the last suggestion. "From the cafeteria?" he said, pausing to clear his dry throat. "No, thank you, I'd sooner drink battery acid."
Having heard his stories about the unpalatability of prison food, especially the horror they called coffee, Roxanne chuckled. "Yes, now I know where you picked up your taste for coffee with half a pint of cream, a cup of sugar, and an entire bottle of chocolate syrup! I'd ask Wayne to fly over to the Starbucks down the street, if it wasn't a day too soon. Just water, Warden, thank you."
As Alvarez hustled to fill her request, Megamind leaned back enough to favor her with a startled look. "If it's a day too soon for that, should you have said that in front of the warden?"
"He knows," Wayne said as Roxanne shook her head. "That failsafe system on the isolation cell worked really good, once it actually was tripped! A lot of things shorted when it blew from the overload, though, including the ventilation system, so I needed to use my powers to get you out of there before you suffocated. Warden Alvarez and the two techs who were there promised not to say anything until after tomorrow's interview. Is Roxanne right, little buddy? Did you tinker with those scanners to make them work better — by a few thousand percent?"
Though he might've been irritated by the retired hero's persistent use of nicknames, Megamind was pleased to hear him finally call Roxanne by the name she preferred, so it was a wash. "Yes," he said candidly, partly from the drug hangover and partly because he saw no reason to lie. "But I didn't expect them to trigger the security lockdown and overload! That's what you said, didn't you? That the whole system overloaded and shorted out after it was activated and I was in the cell? It shouldn't've done that...!"
Roxanne hugged him in sympathy. "I don't think it could've done anything else, sweetie," she opined with a small sigh. When her blue hero pulled away enough to give her a profoundly skeptical look, she smiled. "You have to admit, ever since you woke up this morning, your brain has been running like one of those overclocked computers some techies love to make, the kind you need to cool down with liquid nitrogen. I think that either you didn't account for that when you did your tweaking, or the hardware you tweaked just wasn't able to handle what you wanted it to do. Maybe both."
"Probably both," Megamind deduced, still frowning. "I should've known the circuits and processors weren't up to it, but I don't see why being excited over finally getting answers to a lot of things I've always wanted to know should make any difference. I still have the same brain I had three years ago!"
The reporter waggled one hand. "Not exactly." She glanced at Wayne, then gave her husband a meaningful look. He didn't quite seem to catch what she was trying to communicate, so she made an executive decision and went ahead and said it. "Three years ago, you were still an adolescent of your people. Now, you're an adult, and remember, your parents told you that what makes the difference is the maturity of your physical brain. Even if you didn't know that you're genetically unique three years back, you aren't physically the same. It may not seem like a huge difference, but it might be bigger than we know. To top it all off, that special brain of yours just had a lot of very important information downloaded into it at hyperspeed, and ten to one, it's still working on processing it all. Put all those things together, and I'd say you probably would've made those scanners light up like fireworks on the Fourth of July and fry every circuit in 'em even if you hadn't done a thing to up their efficiency."
For the better part of a minute, Megamind could only sit there and blink, trying to figure out whether or not Roxanne's deductions were truly possible. Just off the top of his head, he suspected that they were, but as he concentrated on the matter, he suddenly felt something inside him... shift. Not physically — or at least he didn't think the sensation was physical, but there was a definite perception of something changing, like an engine changing gears or a microscope increasing its magnification to bring whatever it was studying into sharp focus. And just as suddenly, he could see the original design for the security scanners, the alterations he'd made in working on it, all the possible effects that could have resulted, the gradual increase in both the amount and efficiency of synaptic activity in his own brain over the past four years, the comparative differences between each year's stage of maturation, the way in which his one session with the Teacher had initiated a biological shift from what was the normal level of neurochemical production for his people into a state uniquely suited to his own personal capacities defined by his genetic structure—
The green eyes widened as he was struck by the disturbing realization that he was feeling his own brain at work in ways he'd never imagined anyone could. It wrung a shocked gasp from him even as it made him dizzy. The whole thing was both exhilarating in its extraordinary newness — and utterly terrifying.
When Megamind turned his face to Roxanne, she had never seen him look so pale, or so frightened. "What's happening to me?" he whispered, unable to manage any greater volume. "Oh, God, Roxanne, did I make a horrible mistake last night?"
Even as she tried to think of a response, some way to comfort him, Wayne, who was completely in the dark, spoke up. "What happened last night?" he wanted to know, hoping that his former foe hadn't experienced some kind of relapse into villainy, not right before he was about to inform the world that his powers were just as strong as they'd always been.
"Not what I think you're thinking," the reporter correctly deduced. "You know about the recordings Mykaal's parents sent with him, right?"
"That little glowing ball that won't light up for anyone but him?" The musician nodded. "Yeah, he told me about it and showed it to me the first time he let me into the living quarters of the Lair. It's made me wish my own parents had done something like that."
"I'm glad mine didn't," Roxanne said with a small snort. "He found a new message on it last night, and it told him how to find some other things that had been hidden in his escape pod, for him to use if he managed to survive this long. One of the things was a sleep teaching device that was able to give him a lot of information, about his family, his people and Minion's, about your planet, too, and what happened to destroy them."
"Really? Whoa, that's pretty amazing! But did it end up giving him nightmares?"
As Warden Alvarez returned with a bottle of cool water, Megamind finally shook off enough of his disquiet to answer the question rather than be discussed as if he wasn't in the room. "No, it didn't give me nightmares," he snapped rather testily, not liking the lightheaded feeling that insisted on persisting. "I already remembered the worst part of it, the vortex created by the unstable artificial wormhole literally swallowing entire planets whole, first my world, then yours, then..." He shook his head, trying to shake away the image of that very old memory that suddenly felt as if he was seeing it for the first time, amplified by the fact that he now understood exactly what had happened and how it had come about.
Alvarez had heard what he said and offered the water with a startled and sympathetic expression. "Ralph Thurmer told me what you'd told him about why you wound up here," he said, letting Roxanne take the bottle to open it, since Megamind appeared to be thinking too hard to notice it. "He thought it was a black hole that destroyed your planet, but he never said it was artificial."
"It would have to be, to do what it did so quickly," the blue genius said in a distracted tone, as if his brain was working on several hundred things at once. He closed his eyes even as he continued his explanation, trying to lessen what now felt like a growing headache without the physical pain. "Our sun wasn't of a type that would've evolved into a black hole to begin with, and even if by some fluke of nature it had, it would've gone nova first, wiping out any life in the system long before it collapsed into the gravitational vortex. Since a wormhole is by definition a double-ended black hole, opening one to provide a means of vastly faster than light travel would temporarily, and artificially, create a singularity — but without proper stabilization, it can't be held open long enough to be transversed. With improper stabilization, it caused the formation of only one end — a vortex of intensely destructive force from which there could be no escape — and forming it deep in the gravity well of an already existing planetary system gave it the conditions and 'fuel' to allow it expand to immense and quite unnatural proportions. The result was a gravitational vortex that when it swallowed the energy of our sun hit its critical mass, and then created the effect of a black hole that 'exploded' in a supernova-like fashion, with an extremely accelerated rate of expansion after the crucial threshold was exceeded. There were six and a half months between the initial formation of the malformed wormhole and the threshold point; after it was reached, it took only six hours for it to consume every habitable planet in our system. By the projection of those who'd been attempting to reverse the effect, it should have achieved its maximum expansion within six days of the 'explosion,' and then finally collapsed once the available fuel — all the local significant mass in planets, asteroids, and other physical debris — was expended."
"The same amount of time it took to create the world," Roxanne murmured, noting the Biblical similarity.
"But it was done artificially?" The warden's question was answered with a single heavy nod. "Who would be crazy enough to do a thing like that?"
"Not crazy," Megamind corrected, massaging his temples in a vain attempt to coax his brain into slowing down enough to ease the new and powerfully disturbing sensations of his mind so rapidly — and efficiently — at work. "Just stupid, ignorant. It was an accident — one that could've been prevented if the person responsible had taken enough time to think things through instead of rushing ahead because he was impatient."
His laugh was dry and rueful. "I should talk! If I'd stopped to think things through last night, I could've saved myself a lot of headaches today!"
"Don't think like that," Roxanne scolded, though only lightly. "There really wasn't any way you could have known how you'd react to using that sleep teacher. I'm sorry that Minion and I even said anything to you about suddenly having spates of talking like—" She was about to say like an encyclopedia, but caught herself in time. That would only add fuel to the fire that was making the blue genius upset, and it was really an unfair assessment, reducing him to the level of a book or a machine. "Like a... what was it your people called it? Natoosheena?"
Her not deliberate mispronunciation brought a faint smile to Megamind's face. "Natoshi'ana," he corrected, and some of the sensations of pressure growing inside him eased. "Do you think that's what this is?" he asked in a small but hopeful voice, opening his eyes.
Roxanne's answering smile was as soft as her touch on his cheek. "What else could it be? In a lot of their messages, your parents said you'd be able to use your full potential once your brain had reached full maturity. I think part of the reason you were finally able to trigger the message last night was because it was set to play only when the sensors in the data sphere could tell that you were completely ready for what would happen once your potential was unlocked."
Still jittery, the ex-villain noticed the odd ways Wayne and Alvarez were looking at him. It felt as if Roxanne had just said he'd grown two heads or something equally creepy, as if for the first time, they'd looked at him and realized just how alien he actually was. "But what if I'm not?" he had to wonder, since at the moment, he certainly didn't feel ready.
But the brunette was firm, if still sympathetic. "Then I doubt it would've played that message and the instructions. It's who you really are, sweetie, not something you were turned into. Though it was a little shocking for me to realize that something in you had changed overnight, it's not something you should feel bad about, and I'm sorry that I said anything to make you think you should. It may be a little mind boggling, but it's exciting, too. Sure, it fried every circuit in that security scanner and shorted out power in that part of the isolation wing, but I'd think you'd be proud of that! It's big for a reason, remember?" She tapped his oversized head playfully, reminding him of one of his oldest trademark lines.
That brought a more certain smile to his face. "I guess it is." Megamind accepted the bottle of water she offered then and took a long, deep drink, easing the dryness in his throat and giving himself a moment to regroup. When he'd finished swallowing the cool liquid, he lowered the bottle and turned his eyes to the two men still watching in silence. "Well?" he prompted, determined to get any unsettling things they were feeling out into the open. "Go ahead, already, say it! Yes, I really am alien, I've got strange genetics that gave me this huge mutant brain that's decided now would be a good time to grow a few times bigger and turn into some kind of organic supercomputer! And yes, I was just a big, stupid, weird, overgrown child for the last thirty-some years, going around throwing citywide temper tantrums because I didn't like being called Mr. Blueberry Head and I was sick of being either ridiculed or hated or ignored! Come on, say it, I know that's what you're thinking! I'm not stupid!"
The expressions on both Wayne's and Alvarez's faces shifted, the warden's to surprised understanding, as if a light had finally been shed on a dark and confusing subject, Wayne's to shocked but nonetheless sincere regret. Roxanne put her arms around her trembling husband, now aware that this wasn't a tantrum but an example of his people's heightened emotions in a state of extreme turmoil. "Shh, sweetie," she soothed. "Nobody said that..."
"But he's right," Wayne forestalled. "That's how all the trouble started, back when we were kids and I never let him catch a break, even encouraged the other kids to tease him and ostracize him, and I just kept it up by letting people call him an overgrown juvenile delinquent, all these years. But Megs, I didn't know that your people really do take a longer time to mature, I swear! If that's for real, it's nothing to be ashamed of — as a matter of fact, it kind of puts everything in a whole new light."
"Legally speaking, too," Alvarez added with a nod of support. "There's precedent for people in their early twenties being given lesser sentences or being tried as juveniles because doctors were able to successfully argue that their brains hadn't fully matured yet, and as such they couldn't be tried as adults. If there's any concrete evidence at all to show that your kind don't reach that point until their mid-thirties... Well, I'm not exactly sure what good it would do since you've gotten full pardons for everything, but it might be something to shut up at least a few of the people who keep whining about how it's not possible for grown adult to turn over a new leaf the way you did."
Their remarks — compassionate rather than mocking or accusatory — helped calm the agitated hero considerably; Roxanne could feel some of the tension drain from him. "I never thought of that," Megamind admitted, the energy of his upset now turned in a different direction. "I doubt that the evidence I have at the moment would be considered admissible in a strictly legal sense, but it could be very enlightening in other ways — properly presented, of course."
Alvarez smiled, relieved to see him take the suggestion so well. "Of course. And since you're the master of presentation, I'll leave that up to you. In the meantime, if you don't mind, I want to go check and see what kind of progress is being made on at least bringing back power to the basic systems of that cell. I don't want Stewart getting any notions that he's being moved someplace where he can just lie in bed all day and watch TV. Sitting up is the most exercise he gets, unless we force him to move his butt."
When Megamind nodded his consent, the warden excused himself and left. Wayne, however, continued to look thoughtful, though not in a way that could be interpreted as negative. "Well?" the ex-villain prompted, lifting one elegant eyebrow.
That got the retired hero to shake himself out of whatever rut of thought he was stuck in. "Oh, ah, nothing! I mean, not about this adolescent thing, you explained that and I believe you — and I am sorry for being such a jerk when we were both kids. No, I was wondering..." He paused to rub the back of his neck. "You know what happened to our planets, now — what really happened. Do you know, were there any other survivors? I mean, could we wake up one day and find our parents or cousins or someone knocking on our doors?"
Megamind shook his head without hesitating. "No. They only had a limited amount of resources and not enough time to build more, never mind that a lot of people apparently thought that this was the hand of Destiny. You and Minion and I are the only survivors."
Wayne accepted that, since it was what he'd figured to be the truth, long ago. "But why us?" was the question now on his mind. "Why did we get picked to be saved, and not someone else?"
The blue man sighed, withdrawing from Roxanne's loose embrace just enough to lean back against the wall the cot was pushed up against. "Not for the same reasons — not entirely," he finally admitted, smiling wanly at his wife as she shifted to settle beside him. "All of our parents loved us, of course, but their motivations were... slightly different..."
To be continued...