Liberation

Although the late night gloom did provide it with a tinge of spookiness, a description of the building still wouldn't steer too far from unremarkable. Its façade’s exposed brick was very much like that of many older buildings in the city. Maybe worn out a bit more than most, with those bricks closer to the ground pockmarked and stained by some long-forgotten liquid, but at first glance one wouldn't notice anything special. Four rows of windows were evenly spaced along the front side of it, the brass colouring of the frames dulled down in most of them, a few still clinging to their original shininess to reflect the lights of passing cars, the panes having accreted the city's grime for what at least fifty years.

If the thick layer of dirt wasn't enough to convince one of the building's march to dereliction, some prolonged observation might be more convincing. There wasn't, nor had there been, any sign of activity through any of the many windows that ran along the extended length of the building, not on the ground floor, not on the top floor, not on any of the floors in between. No lights on and off, no shadows, no noises, no windows ever opened nor, as was quite obvious, cleaned. Nothing.

However, if one was inclined to pay closer attention, the front door to the building might have caught their eye. Despite the inactivity at the windows, the door was a fairly busy one. Not quite bustling, especially considering the size of the edifice, but busier than many others. Somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred people walked in through the door during the daytime, with somewhere close to eighty replacing them during the evening. Up to two hundred and eighty different people walking into it every day, yet no movement at all in any of the windows.

Our theoretical observer, who by now would probably have become sceptical of the apparent quietness of the building's spidery eyes while its maw gobbled up so many people, might also notice a pattern in this daily migration. The larger group would stream in mostly within a mid-morning two-hour period, leaving eight to ten hours later. Their exit would overlap with the commencement of the smaller group's entry, more lazy and compact than its counterpart. It wouldn't be a leap to conclude that there was an office somewhere inside.

For the last five days, several observers, all of them very much non-theoretical, had taken turns watching the building. They had concluded it was a place of interest to their Cause and had sent two of its agents to infiltrate. Which leads us to the present. Specifically, to the unlit alley across from the building, hidden by the darkness of the night.

“So what's the plan?”

The words were called out from the shadows in a raspy voice, an attempt to whisper while being sure the message was carried across the width of the alley. The person being addressed wondered about this incongruence. The person being addressed was not one to keep this kind of thing to herself.

“What's with that voice?”

“What voice?”

“The voice you did – you're doing it again. What's up with that?”

“What are you talking about?” whispered the first speaker perfectly loud and clear. “And keep your voice down.”

“There it is again! It's all crackly and husky, like you slept all night with your mouth wide open. Is that what happened? Do you want a cough drop? Because I think I might have seen a packet of them somewhere in here when we arrived.” This second voice was coming from behind a bent-in dumpster that was vaguely outlined in the poor lighting that came in from the street, which began to rock slightly as its contents were rummaged through.

“No, I-. Stop doing that, Strongstar, please! I'm already nervous enough as it is!”

“All right, all right,” chuckled the woman, “I'm just messing with you. But seriously, why are you putting on that voice?”

“It's not a voice, it's a whisper. I'm trying to be discreet, avoid being noticed, that kind of stuff, you know? We're infiltrating this place, remember?” The raspiness was all but gone, replaced by the effect speaking through gritted teeth has on someone's voice.

The chuckle came back into the woman, a chuckle that sounded like it came from within a deep cave, reverberating on its ample walls, its pitch abyss-deep. With it emerged from the blackness a towering figure almost eight feet tall, dressed in a moss green canvas jacket and matching trousers, the seams struggling not to burst as they tried to contain the muscles within. A pair of black military boots, the kind made for crushing cigarettes before taking on the bad guys, and a brown leather cap, which drooped down over her forehead to shade her eyes, completed the ensemble. The owner of the first voice wondered at the usefulness of a cap at this time of the night, but said nothing. “Kid, your outfit alone would already make it hard to infiltrate that building,” she continued, nodding across the road from them, “but there's no way someone like me will ever infiltrate a place like this. There's only one way we're getting in there and it's the reason I've been sent on this mission. You just follow me at a safe distance and I'll let you know when your fidgeting is needed.”

“It's not-”

But before he got a chance to retort, Strongstar was sprinting towards the front door of the building like a freight train making up for lost time, pointing her shoulder at it like a shooter points the barrel of their gun at a target.

A heavy sigh drifted out from the alley, followed by a scrawny man who trotted after his companion. The expression of nervous frustration on his face was slightly obscured by the baseball cap sitting on his head, the irony of his thoughts on Strongstar's cap lost to him in his half-panicked state. He was wearing blue work overalls in a poor attempt to give out some kind of a genius feel – where he had made a connection between those two things, nobody knew –, but only managed to convey a plumber's apprentice vibe.

He winced at the crunch of the front door being shouldered into three large chunks and three hundred chips and splinters, raising his arm above his face in a tardy and unnecessary attempt to protect himself from becoming collateral damage in the woman's rampage. His pitiful trot died down to a walk as he reached the entrance. He waved his hand around to dispel the cloud of dust Strongstar had somehow managed to conjure up out of demolishing a door, letting out feeble wheezes as he plunged into it.

“Tinkering Kid! This way!”

He couldn't see through the tears of his dust-covered eyes, but he heard another crash somewhere on the other side as he hacked and coughed out a reproach. “It's not cough Tinkering Kid! cough cough It's cough The cough Hacker!”

The speckled fog gradually thinned out as he shuffled through it, the hallway behind it slowly emerging.

He hadn't been sure of what to expect. Cameras and security personnel definitely, maybe a bulletproof booth with a guard for extreme cases, an alarm likely going off, perhaps even gunfire. He'd been told Strongstar would deal with such situations if they arose – they failed to mention she would probably be the one starting them, though –, that he was there for his powers over electronic devices. Unlocking a mechanical door, muting an alarm, accessing a computer, that kind of stuff. He felt at ease with that, sure in the knowledge that he could deal with such problems. What he didn't feel comfortable was with the idea of seeing casualties, friend or foe. Having seen the front door brought down like it was a sliver of paper rice, he didn't want to find out what that kind of force could do to a person. Broken bones at the least, internal injuries likely, bleeding pretty much guaranteed. Not his cup of tea. Which is why he was pleasantly surprised to find out he was walking into a deserted hallway.

The spotless carpet – spotless except for the door pieces fanned out over it in Strongstar's wake – was an ocean of deep blue spreading out to the far end of the hallway, two parallel lines of overcast grey running along it, one to each side, following the skirting boards. The cream walls were interrupted on both flanks by several doors, all identical in their weathered wooden surface, save for two of them. One, located at the far end of the wall to his left, was more modern than the others, a smooth, uniform layer of white paint setting it apart from the rest. The other one, the third one on the right, distinguished itself from its siblings by having been ripped off its hinges and discarded unceremoniously on the floor. Strongstar's now distant screams, curses and snarls were coming from this door – or from the gap it had left behind, rather.

He peeked through the door frame into a room that was empty except for a couple of pallets leaning against a wall, where they provided support for a jungle of cobwebs as thick as gauze. An inch of dust covered the entire floor and crowned the light switches and skirting boards, only interrupted by two parallel lines of bootprints that crossed the room into what looked like an identical room past an empty door frame. The rooms seemed to go on forever, as did the trail. As he looked at the tracks on the floor, he was reminded of the famous picture of Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the surface of the Moon. The ones before him gave an impression of speed, though, which made him imagine Armstrong and Aldrin dying for a bathroom, rushing out of the lunar module as soon as they landed to find a bush somewhere on the inhospitable surface of the Moon to relieve themselves.

He shook the random thoughts from his head and called out for the woman. “Strongstar! Strongstar! Janet!”

Strongstar was either too far away or too immersed in her own rampage to hear his calls, but, given that no alarms seemed to have been tripped and nobody had shown up, he decided it was probably safe for him to investigate the white door without waiting for her to come around. He turned the knob on it gently, wondering if it would even budge and already considering three different ways of unlocking it from the outside, but he encountered no resistance as it swung open easily and noiselessly.

The stairs behind it led him down to a more sophisticated environment of offices walled up with thick translucent layers of glass, preventing anyone from looking into them while spilling out the unmistakable silvery blue glare of computer screens onto the linoleum of the hall he slunk along. Pieces of conversations occasionally floated out from some of the rooms, but never enough to catch his interest, and the gurgle of a water dispenser reached him from time to time.

After rounding several corners, he came across a room that was decidedly different from all the others. The translucent glass had given way to a wall of cement from floor to ceiling, while its metal door was framed by a lambent light that escaped from within, bright green with splashes of yellow. Once again, he tried his luck on the doorknob. Once again, it opened without resistance.

What he saw inside made him gasp.

He had originally joined the Cause more for protection than because he believed everything they said. Sure, he'd been discriminated for his innate powers ever since he remembered, but some of the claims they made about the suffering of superhumans seemed outlandish. Capturing and breeding superhumans? The government? Pitting them against each other? Subjugating them to their will? It all sounded too far-fetched to him. Yet here he was.

The man was sitting on a massive black leather chair that looked like it might engulf him any minute. A myriad of cables hung down from the ceiling and were plugged into a strange-looking helmet made entirely of electronic equipment of one kind or another that only covered the back half of his head, up to and including his ears, where most of the cables were zoning in on. A pair of opaque glasses covered his eyes and eyebrows, like an extra large pair of snowboarding goggles. Once they touched the ceiling, the cables spread out like a net, reaching out to the dozens of servers that lined every wall in the room top to bottom. It was these that were emitting the combination of green and yellow lights that had been squeezing out of the room.

After twenty seconds of astonishment, he managed to join the two ends of his jaw once more. He closed his eyes and focused his senses on the strange helmet. He wasn't sure what it was doing exactly to the man, but he had decided he was going to stop it. He felt a tingle somewhere inside him as he located his special sense and directed it at the device, powering it down before it could do more damage.

As he did so, the man began to sob.

“No, please, no. Don't turn it off. Who did that? Why are you doing this? We had a deal! Please, turn it on again!”

Confused, The Hacker strode over to the man and tried to calm him down, to explain the situation to him, but the man didn't seem to hear him and he eventually felt compelled to re-activate the helmet.

As soon as he did, the sobbing stopped and the man exhaled a sigh of relief. “Thank you.” Then, after a few seconds, “Why did you stop it? Who are you?”

“I am The Hacker. I am a member of the Superhuman Liber-”

“Oh, you've gotta be kidding me, not you guys. Seriously?”

“I, uh... what?”

“What, you've come to liberate me?”

“Uhm... kinda, yeah...”

“Unbelievable,” scoffed the man. “You self-centred idiots.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. It wasn't enough that I left because you couldn't help me, but now that I've found someone who can you have to come after me and liberate me.” He said these last words in a mocking tone, like a child teasing his younger brother.

“You... you don't want to be liberated?”

“Do I look like I need liberating?”

“Uhm... yeah, actually, you do.”

For a few seconds, nobody spoke, the hum of the servers around them the only noise in the room. Eventually, the man replied. “OK, that's a fair point, I can see why you would say that. But no, I don't really need liberating.”

The Hacker looked around at the racks lining the walls, at the cables sprouting from them and converging on the man's head. “Really?”

“Yeah, really! Look, kid, Hacker, whatever your name is. Do you know what my power is?”

“Not really, no. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what they were expecting us to find here.”

The man shook his head, a sardonic smile on his lips. “Why am I not surprised? OK, here's the deal. My power is superhearing. But, like, incredibly super, superhearing. I can virtually hear everything going on on Earth right now.” The Hacker's eyebrows jumped up, his eyes wide as saucers. “However, my brain cannot process so much information. It becomes overloaded all the time. Enter this magical device right here.” He pointed at the helmet. “This thing taps into my auditory nerves, interrupting the information travelling up through it and sending it to the servers around us. It also inserts a focused signal coming from this computer here.” He tapped the goggles that covered half his face. “This way, I am able to live without a constant barrage of sound, only hearing what I need from this computer, while they can tap into rooms on the other side of the world. It's a win-win situation,” he smiled. “Well, not for the bad guys in those rooms, but they shouldn't be doing what they're doing in the first place.”

The Hacker was speechless. His mouth opened and closed repeatedly as he tried to think of an argument in favour of him liberating the man, but he could think of none.

“Well then, thank you for your efforts. Have fun liberating those in need of it elsewhere, I'm doing fine here. Off you go now.”

The Hacker turned his back to the man and plodded his way back through the corridors that snaked between the offices, up the stairs and into the building's main hallway. As he shut the white door behind him, Strongstar's shouting became much louder and a few seconds later she burst out of another of the hall's doors, this one next to the front of the building.

“Ah, there you are! What kept you? I haven't encountered anyone so far, but I'm certain it will happen soon enough.” She said this while repeatedly punching her fist lightly into her cupped hand, an eagerness in her eyes.

The Hacker sighed and trudged past her, out the front door and into the night.

“Tinkering Kid? Where are you going? Hey, kid? Hacker...? Larry?”