After the Golden Age Read online

  She shouldn’t have worried.

  A shroud of smoke covered the city, along with a smell like a furnace, making the sky like dusk, dark enough that she could see her destination lit up like a storm cloud. Crackling electrical lights glowed through clerestory windows like faint bursts of lightning. Something was happening inside a building that was supposed to be abandoned and crumbling to ruin. That had to be the place.

  It had taken her too long to get here. Mark would be here any minute. She couldn’t let him face down his father. No one should have to do that, no matter how great they were or how great their father was. She drove around the block and when she didn’t see his car, she parked, got out, and waited on the corner.

  Twenty minutes later, twenty minutes of pacing the sidewalk and wondering about the crackling electric hisses that occasionally whispered from the warehouse, and wondering if maybe she shouldn’t be standing in plain sight, Celia began to think she’d been too late after all. Mark had been smart enough to not park right in front of the building and hid his car on one of the side streets.

  Maybe he’d already gone inside.

  Maybe she should try to talk to Paulson herself. And say what? You’re a jerk, just like your father?

  Actually, that had its appeal.

  She could just sneak in and take a look. If she saw Mark in there, if he was in trouble, she’d call Arthur, the police, and Analise at Olympiad HQ and get help. If they weren’t too busy keeping the city from burning down.

  Celia approached the front door. Glancing nervously at the windows high on the warehouse walls, she hoped no one was watching. They looked too frosted to see out of.

  What she took to be the front doors, double steel slabs that swung open, had chains looped through the handles, secured with a padlock. Just what she’d expect to find on a shut-up building. She walked around. In the back she found a loading dock, and a sliding steel door that was not only unlocked, but open a crack. She climbed up on the ledge and squeezed through.

  She entered a dark receiving area, a block of bare concrete, cold and musty, with an air of abandonment. Continuing through it, she stepped softly, aware of the numbers and depth of the shadows, and how much danger might be waiting for her.

  She reached the door in the back of the warehouse area. Standard size, simple knob, unlocked. It led to a hallway. She passed a few doorways with frosted windows showing dark interiors. Ahead, though, a light with a bluish tinge showed. Voices murmured. Mark, was Mark in there?

  The rectangle of light before her beckoned. Pressing close to the wall, she crept forward until she reached the frame, where she could peer into the main room.

  This was it. This was the lab where Sito performed his great experiment, where the accident happened, where a dose of radiation bathed a dozen technicians and instigated mutations that no one had expected or understood.

  And now, Anthony Paulson was trying to re-create it.

  She looked into the cavernous heart of the building. The ceiling reached up three stories, and the tile floor stretched fifty yards across. Most of the space was empty. All activity congregated in the middle, in an area that could have fit in any of the rooms she’d passed. She expected dust, the stale smell of air that had been locked behind walls. But the air was fresh—the hum of fans and filters edged the background noise. Floodlights blazed down on a clean room, spotless lab benches, cabinets, tables, monitoring equipment. In the center of it all stood a device mounted on a wheeled pedestal. A hundred wires looped from point to point, from a box underneath that might have been a battery or a power relay, to bolts protruding from steel rings looped around a cylinder that made up its bulk. The thing looked like a cannon, tapered at one end, where a series of glass or crystal nodes reached out, aimable and threatening. Toward the back, coils of copper wire glowed, like the interior of a toaster grown too hot.

  A half-dozen people worked, some of them studying equipment, making adjustments and scribbling observations onto clipboards. Another half-dozen, burly men wearing dark clothing and brooding expressions, stood at the periphery, armed with machine guns. She recognized Paulson’s ubiquitous aides and bodyguards among them. More pardoned convicts? Loyal henchmen?

  She found nothing unexpected here. Nothing particularly impressive. Nothing she hadn’t seen before. Like father like son. This might as well have been the Destructor’s Psychostasis room.

  Or this might have been a scene from fifty years ago. She could almost see it, in the black and white of newsreel footage. Her imperious, bearded grandfather standing to the side, cane in hand, observing; a young Simon Sito bustling around the equipment, perhaps rubbing his hands together in anticipation; and a dozen scientists and techs, innocent, just doing their jobs—George Denton, Anna Riley, Emily Newman, Janet Travers. Young faces from personnel files, come to life in Celia’s imagination. History changed here, and none of them ever knew it.

  She didn’t see Mark.

  “Ah, at last. Ms. West, I’ve been expecting you.” His voice echoed, a rich tenor used to giving speeches to filled auditoriums. Anthony Paulson emerged from behind a bank of computer servers and strolled toward Celia. The sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up, the collar undone, tie missing. A couple of the lab people glanced up, frowning.

  Celia blinked, stunned, a deer staring down the barrel of a hunter’s rifle. She’d been quiet, she’d stayed hidden, she hadn’t made a sound—Paulson must have been watching the door. He’d left that loading dock door open just for her, and made sure she found her way down exactly that hallway.

  She turned to run. Behind her, two gunmen stepped out of formerly shut rooms, barring her escape. They moved toward her, threatening with their weapons, herding her through the door and into the warehouse, into the glaring lights.

  Flanked by her captors, she approached Paulson.

  Mark told him he’d called her. Mark told him she was coming, that was the only way he could have known to look for her. Still, she said, cautiously, “How?” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Paulson raised his hand, showing her the mini digital player he held. He touched a button, and Mark’s voice played back at her:

  “Celia? It’s Mark. I don’t know who else to go to. You’re in the middle of this as much as I am. You seem to know more about it than I do … This is all a distraction, isn’t it? Like the kidnapping plots…”

  Goddamn it! She fell for that stupid, idiotic trick again. She stamped her foot and growled, rolling her eyes to the ceiling and mentally beating herself up.

  Paulson said, “I’ve been recording Mark’s phone calls for some time now. He made this one to Chief Appleton an hour or so ago. I had my people doctor it up a little for you. Fortunately—for me—the good chief has his hands full with other business right now and can’t spare anyone to send over here.”

  Celia shut down her emotions and recalled the bitter teenager who would have sought out this situation. People like Paulson, like Sito, expected people like her to be cowed by their power and intelligence. They expected that a bright-eyed young woman would want everything they had to give—or that she could be frightened into putting herself in their control.

  They expected her to care.

  That was the trick: be blasé enough that nothing they did affected her. She crossed her arms, turned her back to the gunmen, and faced Paulson. She locked a careless smirk on her face and raised an eyebrow. She watched him like this was all some silly joke. Stayed quiet, because she couldn’t think of anything witty to say.

  She kept herself from looking at the gunmen. They weren’t going to kill her. Paulson needed her or he’d have had her killed already. One of them reached for her shoulder. She sensed him approach, timed it, and stepped forward before he could touch her. Heart racing, stomach knotting, she walked toward the lab area and the machinery.

  “What are you going to do with me?” She wanted to laugh. Almost, she let herself laugh.

  “Nothing special,” Paulson said. “Huma
n shield. Keep your parents out of my way.”

  The usual reason, which meant he wasn’t any different than the others. She was only ever a tool to them. Which was a good thing—no one ever expected a tool to fight back.

  “Huh,” she said, like she thought this was an interesting but irrelevant conversation, and turned her attention to the tower of glass, wires, and steel. “So this is it? Sito’s machine?” she said, gazing at the device as if it were a piece of incomprehensible art in a museum. “You know what it does, right?”

  Paulson said, “Do you know what it does? Exactly how much do you know?”

  “I have a guess. Did you have to rebuild it, or was it intact?”

  “It had been stored—wrapped in plastic and shoved in a closet. The place hadn’t been touched. It’s like someone expected to come back to it.”

  But no one ever had. Sito’s depression and madness consumed him, the other techs had signed nondisclosure agreements. Had her grandfather saved the lab? Had he suspected how the device had worked?

  “Hmm,” she murmured, by way of polite observation.

  “Ms. West, I’m curious. What do you think this does?” He watched her, gaze sharp, smile amused. His intensity burned; she felt like a mouse to his cat.

  Calm, stay calm. “You know, I could make the argument that all this really belongs to me, as Jacob West’s direct descendant.”

  “I heard that your father disinherited you. Or that you disinherited yourself.”

  She gave a noncommittal shrug. “People hear lots of things.”

  “Be that as it may, I claim salvage rights on behalf of the city.”

  “You’re not doing this for the city.”

  “Oh? Really?”

  She tested her range, strolling a couple more steps toward the machine, moving partway around it, looking it up and down, purely out of curiosity. The gunmen didn’t move to stop her. All three men watched her closely, but she might as well have been a bug in a jar for their lack of apparent concern.

  No one was afraid of her; she didn’t have any powers. But she wouldn’t flinch. That was her talent. That, and recognizing people under their masks.

  “No one ever does anything like this except for themselves.” She offered him a sad smile, full of condescension.

  “You sound so sure.”

  “You’ve killed people to get what you want. The good guys don’t do that.” She made it an observation of fact, not a judgment call. Like she didn’t care that he’d killed.

  “Weber, hand me that folder. Yes, that’s the one.”

  One of the people in a lab coat brought Paulson a thick file from the top of a filing cabinet. The brown pressboard folder looked familiar; Celia had been looking through similar folders all week. The texture of files from that era was distinct.

  Paulson passed the folder to her. “Take a look at this.”

  She opened the file, balancing the spine in her left hand. Stacks of pages were fastened to both sides. She flipped through, taking in random lines and data. Charts, graphs, diagrams, rows of jagged lines labeled with numbers, black-and white-photographs.

  The top page of text read, “Use of Directed Radiation to Induce Neurophysiological Responses, with the Intent of Encouraging Specified Emotional Traits in Human Subjects.”

  The early West Corp logo, before the last couple of redesigns—the crescent moon as the arc of a bow and an arrow tipped with a star preparing to launch—was printed on the bottom of the page.

  West Corp didn’t have a medical research division. At least, it didn’t now.

  “This is the original lab report,” Celia said. “I found the financial statements, but not the research notes.”

  “Because I found them here months ago. One of my aides uncovered this place during a survey of the area. This is what I put the highway plan on hold for. Go on, keep reading.”

  Sito, a psychologist with an interest in how the physical structures of the brain contributed to the development of personality and psyche, had been experimenting with methods of altering the brain physically to treat mental illness, as an alternative to medication or shock therapies. Other potential applications had presented themselves.

  In a memo to Jacob West in which he urged secrecy, Simon Sito outlined the potential applications of his procedure. Some of the most promising involved nonlethal crowd control: draining aggression from people at the touch of a button, or pacifying prison populations to prevent riots. The process could curb the sociopathic tendencies of habitual criminals.

  Initially, Sito planned on concentrating his efforts on one emotion, one simple but particularly useful personality trait: loyalty. With a press of a button and a dose of mild radiation, the test subject would become instantly loyal to the chosen ideal or person. Convicted criminals could finally be made into useful citizens. And more—the military and police forces would have nothing but intensely loyal soldiers and officers in their ranks. No more treason, no more bad cops.

  Sito had identified the characteristic that he believed held society together, and he wanted to learn to manipulate it. This was the same technique he would later use to develop the Psychostasis device, which used radiation to erase his victims’ basic sense of self and individuality. Like the rest of his psyche, he’d gone from wanting to alter—to improve—to wanting to destroy.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, not because she didn’t, but because she didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe she could possibly understand what she was reading. The conclusion refused to allow comprehension.

  The superhuman mutation was a side effect. Completely unintentional and unobserved by everyone involved in the experiment. It was crazy. But it wasn’t. It was all right here. She couldn’t let her shock show. She had to be vaguely interested. Not appalled.

  Paulson said, “If it had worked, West Corp would have had a monopoly on the human spirit. Too bad for you it didn’t. Your father might have been the mayor now.”

  Now that was an appalling thought. But he was missing something. He didn’t know about the superhuman connection.

  “You know there was an accident, right? You may have the lab report, but I’ve seen the accounting files. The employees were paid off.” The lab file didn’t have anything about the accident, as if no one had thought to update the information after that. The report was frozen in time.

  “Nothing happened,” Paulson said. “The device released a benign dose of undirected radiation. It had no effect.”

  So she did have something to hold over him. She had a lot of cards, in fact. Play them one at a time. Let him think she was giving him something.

  “Would you like to hear some of the names of people who worked here at that time? The people who were present during the accident? Jacob West, father of Warren West, also known as Captain Olympus. Anna Riley, who went on to have a daughter, Suzanne, who became Spark. George Denton, father of Robbie Denton, the Bullet. Emily Newman was the mother of Arthur Mentis. I’m not through tracking everyone down. But I think you get the idea.”

  She let him consider that. The look of wonder growing on his face was rewarding.

  “Really?” he exclaimed finally. “Sito accidentally created the superhumans? That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? It almost makes me wish we hadn’t fixed the thing. Oh well.”

  He didn’t want superhumans. He wanted a troop of undyingly loyal supporters. He didn’t want anyone stronger than he was getting in the way. That was why he’d worked so hard keeping the Olympiad busy, wearing them down, distracting them from the real danger.

  She stopped her slow pacing around the machine and looked at Paulson across the radiation emitter.

  “Have you considered something?” he said. “The device must have worked partially, even when it malfunctioned. Why do you think the superhumans have all become crime fighters and not circus freaks? Something inside them drives them to it. They’re loyal to this city over everything else in their lives. You know that better than anyone.”

  She�
��d asked Arthur if people were born or made. Maybe they were both. She could be forgiven for feeling that her entire life had brought her with purpose to this point.

  But the process wasn’t perfect. Janet Travers should have passed along the mutation to Anthony Paulson—and she had, Celia supposed. The man had become mayor, after all. But he’d inherited Sito’s megalomania as well. For every person Paulson successfully converted, how many would he push into insanity? Did he, in the end, think he was doing this for the good of the city? Then again, maybe the loyalty experiment had been passed on untainted to Janet’s grandson, Mark, the dedicated cop.

  And what of Jacob West’s granddaughter, who had spent half her life standing on the cusp between success and disaster?

  In a low voice she said, “You think you can make the experiment work.”

  “I have.”

  He had a room full of loyal scientists and bodyguards here to prove it. And more—

  “You tested this on Andrea.” Instead of a sullen woman who’d grown tired of politics, he now had the eternal publicity photo standing by his side.

  He just smiled.

  Nothing frightened her anymore. She had to remind herself of that. Otherwise, her hand would shake. She closed the file and set it on a nearby table. One of Paulson’s technicians glared at her and shoved it away from where he’d been working.

  “Great. Now what?”

  “Ah. This is where I make an unlikely speech revealing all my plans, thereby giving you a chance to thwart me. That doesn’t happen in the real world.”

  “Who says I’m trying to thwart you? You know my history. Maybe you’ve shown me where the cards are falling. Maybe I want to ask you for a job.”

  “I’m curious, what exactly do you think you can offer me and my operation? What did you bring to the Destructor’s operation when you joined him?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Figures. Too bad I’m not in need of a staff accountant.”