Project: Magnus

It shouldn't be such a nice day

We buried my father today. A man con­sid­ered by many as the bright­est mind that ever lived. Oth­ers called him the har­bin­ger of doom. Appar­ently that's the way it works with men who are super geniuses. If his death had been nat­ural I might not hate the sun­shine and cool breezes blow­ing around me as I stand here on the bal­cony over­look­ing the grave­yard where his body now lies.

My girl­friend is with me and has been try­ing to con­sole me all after­noon. Unfor­tu­nately this is one of those sit­u­a­tions where unless you've expe­ri­enced it, you can't even begin to under­stand what it's like. She kept remind­ing me that her father was killed when she was 12, and while that is true, her father wasn't killed by a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion that was cre­ated specif­i­cally to destroy his work. She can't under­stand that because of his work in genet­ics and biol­ogy, and because of the pow­ers he gave me and oth­ers like me, he was tar­geted from the beginning.

I don't blame her. I can't. Of the 10 bil­lion peo­ple liv­ing on this planet and the moon only 15, the ones dad chose for the Ich­a­bod project, would even begin to have an idea of what it felt like. Of those, only five had a par­ent in the project. Then of course only I was lucky enough to have the man that started it all, the man that dis­cov­ered how to give ordi­nary peo­ple what amounted to super pow­ers, as a father.

Right now she is in the other room try­ing to absorb every­thing I told her. In this case I can imag­ine what she is going through. I went through some­thing sim­i­lar 5 years ago when dad told me all about the Ich­a­bod idea. He told me about how he had worked out how to alter a per­sons phys­i­ol­ogy and bio­chem­istry to give them super human abilities.

He had got­ten FDA approval to begin test­ing on humans, and wanted to know if I would be will­ing to be part of the trials.

That's when every­thing went to hell. A group call­ing them­selves 'The Asgard' broke into the lab in Boston, stole all the serum and notes and research and blew up the lab. Injur­ing my dad in the process. They began to exper­i­ment on them­selves. No one is sure where their sci­en­tist came from, or if they even had one, but sud­denly they began to acquire abil­i­ties that were unsta­ble and dan­ger­ous. Well, more dan­ger­ous. Espe­cially in their hands.

Dad went into self-​​imposed exile to recover from his injuries. The worst of which was a shat­tered spine which left him unable to walk. 'Very Pro­fes­sor X' I always said, teas­ing him about it. At least it made him smile.

When he recov­ered to the point he could work again he ded­i­cated him­self to devel­op­ing a serum that would counter the orig­i­nal drug, hold­ing him­self respon­si­ble for all the death and dam­aged caused by Asgard.

Then a year ago they changed course. Some said that the lead­er­ship within Asgard changed, that there had been a coup of some kind and that was why the change of phi­los­o­phy. Oth­ers said it was because they had found out about dad's lit­tle fail safe. That those given the treat­ment became ster­ile and could not pro­duce off­spring. He had said it was to pre­vent the pow­ers from get­ting out of con­trol and evolv­ing into god knew what.

Either way they went from com­mit­ting crimes like theft and extor­tion to ter­ror­iz­ing the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. I'm con­vinced that they did it inten­tion­ally, know­ing dad would do some­thing and it would bring him out of exile.

And they were right. He came out of seclu­sion and, with the help of the gov­ern­ment, formed the super-​​human group he dubbed 'League'. He kind of named it after the 'League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men', but also, as a pri­vate joke, because the train­ing part of the pro­gram would be called 'The Minors'. He did love his baseball.

Because I was his son I was recruited to join. Train­ing was bru­tal. Not only did we get train­ing in using our pow­ers but we went through the stan­dard Marine basic train­ing. Only it was accel­er­ated because no one felt we had a lot of time to fig­ure it out.

We held our own the first time we face Asgard. No one died and no one got seri­ously injured. How­ever in retal­i­a­tion they attacked and lev­eled Atlanta. Sher­man would have been proud, and prob­a­bly a lit­tle embar­rassed. That was six months ago. They are still search­ing for miss­ing peo­ple. They announced a cou­ple weeks ago that they were tar­get­ing Boston next since that was where it all began and where League had setup it's headquarters.

When the announce­ment hit the news dad jumped on a plane from LA, where he had been work­ing to setup a west coast divi­sion, and headed back to Boston. They attacked his plane some­where over Kansas and brought it down. They pulled my father from the plane, tor­tured him for fun then fin­ished the job they started back when they first attacked the lab. I'm told he died quickly once they decided to kill him. Small consultation.

Steph came out after a cou­ple hours and is stand­ing next to me. We stay like that, nei­ther of us talk­ing for sev­eral min­utes until the sirens start­ing going off, announc­ing Asgards arrival in Boston, and my sig­nal that it was time to met the rest of the team.

I really wish it wasn't such a nice day.

Build­ings all around where I sit have col­lapsed and the streets are lit­tered with aban­doned cars and debris from the bat­tle. From the repots I'm get­ting over my head­set we held the city but at a steep price. Cam­bridge is pretty much lev­eled, and the North End is gone. No one has any idea how. It wasn't lev­eled or destroyed, it just isn't there. Some­one said it just dis­ap­peared in a flash of light.

It's amaz­ing what passes through your mind some­times. As I sit on my knees feel­ing the pain of my dis­lo­cated right shoul­der and bro­ken fore­arm I remem­ber the last time I felt pain like this. The day I went through the trans­for­ma­tion process.

It hurts. They didn't know that at first, though in hind­sight it should have been obvi­ous. The first test sub­ject died from the pain before they fig­ured it out. The sec­ond went mad before they were able to get the pain and anes­the­sia lev­els right. Even then you feel it and it's still the worse pain you've ever felt in your life. The process causes your bones to re-​​knit them­selves so that they become stronger. Your mus­cles are restruc­tured as mil­lions of new fibers are cre­ated and your skin is reworked so that it's denser and vir­tu­ally impen­e­tra­ble. In essence every cell in your body is trans­formed. In minutes.

All this passes through my mind in an instant. Even now the mem­ory is still enough to make me catch my breath. Which the titan of a man in front of me appar­ently took as a sign of pain or weak­ness because he started laugh­ing. Frankly it's rather annoying.

I raise my head and look at titan boy. He's at least 8 feet tall and built like a young Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger. I have no way of know­ing if was like that before or if the process did this to him. Either way, he's big. The process is also what gives us our pow­ers. Every per­son is dif­fer­ent so we never know what we will end up with. Some pow­ers are, for lack of a bet­ter way of say­ing it, use­less. Hav­ing the abil­ity to grow plants well doesn't really help. Pow­ers can range any­where from telekine­sis to super speed, although not on the level of the Flash, to a super genius. And every­thing in between. I was gifted with telekine­sis. A rather strong form of it too. Where as most have trou­ble mov­ing any­thing larger than a mid-​​sized SUV, I can bring down build­ings. I've men­tioned that the process reengi­neers every cell and makes us stronger and our skin denser. Any­thing short of an armor pierc­ing shell will basi­cally bounce off. It hurts like hell, but only for a sec­ond. It's the equiv­a­lent of being smacked with a ruler for normals.

With that said, physics is still physics. If I hit him with some­thing big enough, and with enough momen­tum, it won't stop him, but might put him down long enough to get away. Instinc­tively I reach out and grab whats left of the side of a 7 story build­ing behind me. He sees the wall start to shake, places his hands on his hips and starts laugh­ing even louder. Not exactly the response I expected but he's start­ing to piss me off so I don't bother restrain­ing myself and fling it at him with every­thing I've got.

The impact is tremen­dous, I feel it from where I'm sit­ting sev­eral hun­dred yards away. It's enough that a cou­ple unsta­ble struc­tures near us start to col­lapse and fall into them­selves in response. I head the crack­ling and tin­kling of small stones falling back to earth after the impact sent them sky­ward. I strug­gle to stand, when a tremor shakes the area and knocks me back on my ass. Trou­ble is it doesn't feel like a nor­mal tremor, nor does it come at the right time. There was too much time after the impact for the two to be related.

That's when I real­ize the crack­ing sounds I heard ear­lier weren't stones. Now that the dust has set­tled I see him kneel­ing on the ground with his left fist on the ground. He has caused the tremor by pound­ing the earth. And he has a force­field sur­round­ing him. That's new.

He grins and picks up the burnt out remains of a car next to him and heaves it at me. Can't dodge with my arm and shoul­der so I push myself up and over using my gift, som­er­sault­ing badly over the car. I land wrong caus­ing pain to flair in my shoul­der and wrench my ankle. No dam­age is done but it puts me off bal­ance long enough for him to uproot a light pole and swing at me. I can't recover in time and the impact throws me across the street. When I land the impact shat­ters my head­set, how­ever my only thoughts are that I'm glad he doesn't play for the Yan­kees and that he's left handed.

He launches him­self into the air directly at me. It's one hell of a leap, but based on the dis­play so far noth­ing for some­one with his strength. As he's in the air I real­ize where we are and using my power grab him in mid air and slam him into a con­crete build­ing in the cen­ter of the street. It's the build­ing where the Red Line goes back under­ground so I put every­thing I have into forc­ing him as far down as I can and pil­ing debris on top.

It won't hold him for­ever but should long enough for me to get away.

I go north, plan­ning to cross over the Charles at the museum head­ing for the Gar­den where our HQ is set up. They need to know that the game has changed.

The head of the task force assigned to work with us in deal­ing with Asgard has been going over the reports and after­math of the encounter in the Boston area for the last 15 min­utes but I've tuned out.

We lost 8 of our own and only man­aged, through shear luck, to cap­ture 1 of them. None of the Asgard fell. From the tiny bits of infor­ma­tion we were able to extract from our pris­oner they not only have the force­field that I encoun­tered, they have also devel­oped a device that allows them to tele­port as well as anti-​​matter bombs. The lat­ter we think was used in the North End.

It means they can strike any­where at will and com­pletely dev­as­tate everything.

It also means they can kill hun­dreds, maybe even thou­sands of peo­ple in the blink of an eye. Ini­tial esti­mates put the loses in North End around 900. We will never know for sure because there are no bod­ies to count.

Some of the ana­lysts now believe that the bank heists and other rob­beries were designed to acquire funds to develop this tech­nol­ogy. Some­one on their side has to have an extremely high IQ. This is tech that's been dreamed of for years but no one else has been able to even come close to these kind of devices. They man­aged to do it in a lit­tle under two years.

The other thing we've learned is that their head­quar­ters is located in Que­bec. They are using one of the older north­ern cas­tles as a base of operations.

I have no idea why Que­bec would aid and abet these peo­ple but ever since they gained their sov­er­eignty the gov­ern­ment up there has gone out of it's way to piss off Canada and the US. What bet­ter way to do that then to pro­vide asy­lum to our biggest threat.

After the debrief­ing we met with the lead­ers of the mil­i­tary arm of the project to dis­cuss the next move. After some debate it's been decided that we will take the fight to them, we are to air drop into their home base and let the gov­ern­ment deal with the con­se­quences of what will be con­sider an inva­sion into Que­bec territory.

Drop from twenty thou­sand feet with­out a para­chute isn't for the weak of heart. It took me sev­eral months to get up the nerve. And like the joke says, it's not the fall that kills you but the sud­den stop at the end. 3 of us have tele­ki­netic abil­i­ties and we use them at the last sec­ond to slow everyone‚Äôs decent at the last sec­ond. We agreed ear­lier not to bring us to a com­plete stop but to land heav­ily in the stone court­yard of the cas­tle. A bit rem­i­nis­cent of the scene in Suck­er­Punch and maybe a lit­tle cliche but it was cool. Con­sid­er­ing the cas­tle looks a bit like the one in the movie it was all the more surreal.

I sent one group to work their way around the right side of the cas­tle and another to the left. Myself and the rest walked straight through the front door like we owned the place.

We searched for hours. Not that the cas­tle was very large, but we looked for hid­den door­ways, secret pas­sages, or hid­den rooms. Any­thing to explain why the build­ing was com­pletely deserted. Sad to think our show in the court­yard went unseen.

Every­one finally mets together in what appears to be the throne room. Along one wall, oppo­site where I imag­ine the throne would be, but where now sits a large orange sec­tional sofa, are four large tele­vi­sions mounted on the wall.

We are all milling around the room try­ing to decide what to do next, the mil­i­tary attach­ment is actu­ally look­ing a bit relieved, when the hiss­ing starts. Our first reac­tion is panic, that we walked into a trap and that an anti-​​matter bomb is about to go off. Funny how we didn't think of that before hand. Only when the tv's flash to life and we are all star­ing at the face of what has to be the ugli­est man alive do we real­ize that it was indeed a trap but that we aren't going to die just yet.

"Inter­est­ing. More of you sur­vived then I expected" says the voice from the tele­vi­sions, "I'm slightly impressed. Not that it matters."

I step for­ward and address the screens.

"You are the one they call Exo­dus I presume?"

"You pre­sume cor­rectly. And you are the son. Father would be proud."

"You do not get to call him 'father'."

Exo­dus laughs and waves his hand, dis­miss­ing my comment.

"Spare me the the­atrics. He was the cre­ator of all of us. He cre­ated the serum and the process that gave us our pow­ers, that made us more than human. He was our Gen­e­sis and I carry on ful­fill­ing my inter­pre­ta­tion of his vision, which is why I call myself 'Exo­dus'. But I don't want to upset you lit­tle one, so I shall refrain from using the term again."

"What do you want? I pre­sume there is a rea­son we are here and you are talk­ing to us?"

"Yes, there is a rea­son. I want you to run home and tell your pres­i­dent and mil­i­tary lead­ers I have a pro­posal for them."

"And what might that pro­posal be?"

"That is for them to know lit­tle one."

"You can't really expect me to tell them you want to talk and not give them a rea­son why?"

"Tell them I wish to make a deal."

I almost fall over laugh­ing. After all this he really thinks they are going to nego­ti­ate with a terrorist.

"What deal?" I ask when I finally catch my breath.

"We want immu­nity and gov­ern­men­tal sup­port to sell the Ich­a­bod drug to any­one that can afford it. Tell them that if they don't agree we will destroy a city every hour until they do and the clock starts in five hours.", Exo­dus leaned for­ward into the screen, "And you know we have the abil­ity to do just that. Now run along."