skonen_blades

The fingertip in the vial had a cherry-red nail. It was from his friend Fireball. Omnivore had the vial on a necklace around his neck. Seventeen other vials clinked there. Fingertips, earlobes, locks of hair, all of them from dead heroes. Mostly enemies, some friends. Omnivore flew through the skies over what was left of New York.

Fireball had been killed in battle by Overloader and Pinnacle in downtown Manhattan. That had been the beginning of the final cull.

Ominvore’s original name had been Spongeboy. His secret identity was Orville Maynard Vorchik. He had the ability to absorb another super’s power if he was standing within fifteen feet of him or her. He didn’t drain the power and weaken the super and he didn’t steal the power permanently. As soon as he was fifteen feet away from the super, he’d revert to being a normal kid. As mutant powers go, it was great for being a sidekick.

He was a sidekick for Manatee for a while, both of them having the ability to gain weight and breathe underwater until Manatee had a heart attack. Spongeboy was a sidekick for Whyteclaw after that. He had the ability to shoot blinding white light from his eyes. He didn’t have his boss’s metal hands but he blinded Whyteclaw’s enemies so that those metal hands could go in and do their thing. Whyteclaw was indicted on several counts of manslaughter and Spongeboy ended up normal and jobless Orville again.

It was when Fireball took pity on him that his career bloomed. It was also the onset of his puberty. Fireball was a very attractive woman and while highly moral in the newspapers, had no qualms about seducing her ward. She changed his name to Flame as she did with all her young sidekicks and together they made fiery trails across the sky in search of crime. At night, she taught him carnal delights.

They were in the papers together. Orville was in love. He was Fireball’s fifth sidekick in as many years and while those in the know thought he was destined for the unemployment line yet again, he thought that his ability to naturally produce flame around her would make him a permanent addition. He may have been right. He never found out.

Fireball fought Overloader and Pinnacle near the Bowery. Overloader shorted out all the alarms for several blocks and Pinnacle used his super strength to tear off the front of the safe. It was a standard bank heist. Fireball and Orville responded to the call.

It happened so casually that it hardly registered on Orville what had happened. As soon as Fireball touched down behind Pinnacle, he turned around and broke her neck. Just reached out before she had the chance to give her “Stop, evildoer” speech. She didn’t even have time to flame on. Her limp body flopped to the ground in front of Orville. He stood in shock.

Pinnacle laughed and pointed at Orville, thinking him dormant now that his super was dead. In a fit of rage, Orville lashed out and to his surprise, a tornado of flame engulfed Pinnacle and Overloader. Within ten seconds, he’d burned the skin off of their bones.

He couldn’t figure it out. Fireball was dead but he still had her powers. He walked over to where the smoking skeleton of Overloader lay and to his amazement, he had the power to overload electronic devices. He was too far from Fireball, though, and his fire powers left.

It didn’t matter if the super was alive or dead, he realized, he could still take their power. He picked up a fingerbone from Overloader’s corpse and one from Pinnacle and put them into his pocket. He gathered Fireball into his arms with Pinnacle’s strength, and flew into the sky leaving a burning trail behind him.

After removing a finger from Fireball, he burned her body in a tearful funeral pyre, swearing to avenge her.

Since then, he’s taken no prisoners. Only trophies. Sixteen so far. He’s the most powerful super out there now. He keeps mostly to himself but his senses are vast. A living god seeking out supers that want to do evil and killing them.




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They called it a holoconference. That got shortened to holocon.

The folks down south pronounced it ‘hollah-con’. Up north with Queen’s drawl, it became ‘hollow-con’. Both ways of mispronouncing it came with their own ironic subtext.

As head of overseas development, I’d done a lot of these.

It was the cost of ferrying meat from continent to continent that eventually gave rise to these holocons. The exorbitant cost of flight thanks to the combined factors of heavy government levies on gas-burning vehicles as well as the growing scarcity of oil made international travel almost a thing of the past.

Great strides had been made with electric cars for inner-city driving. Solar powered bicycle creatures dotted the nearly deserted highways, making their way slowly to destinations in other states or provinces. Ocean travel was still possible but it took a long time by steamship and was mostly limited to expensive pleasure cruises, people immigrating or cargo. Getting to another continent quickly just didn’t happen anymore.

It was an odd world to be in. The rise of the digital had made instantaneous communication possible with every corner of the globe. Distance and the lack of oil made personal contact with anyone over a few hundred miles away a hassle. It made personal contact with anyone over a few thousand miles away nearly impossible.

Digital contact, however, was possible at any given moment. Tele, holo, text, email, h-mail, you name it. We were all connected but separate.

There were seven ghosts in front of me. It was a holocon board meeting. All of them were talking but their audio channels were cut off from me until the meeting was called to attention. I watched them, amused. They chatted in absolute silence, flickering in the grainy light, semi-transparent and unreal. The light sources where they were sitting were different from this room’s overhead soft globe. It looked like they’d been cut out of a different movie and glued here.

The Hempsey brothers were here from the UK, as were the two reps from Hokkaido. Holst Gerkinschaft looked off-camera, talking angrily to an aide in what I guessed was Low German.

Jaryl Skolstrom looked down at me from a great height, impatient for the meeting to begin. If rumours were to be believed, he had tweaked his avatar to make him taller. Illegal for a board meeting but so far, it was hard to prove. According to any records, he was actually just over seven feet tall. It was disconcerting.

His stare had the desired effect. I got things underway.

I thumbed the conference button and sent the chime around to all of their waiting microphones. They straightened in their seats, made minor adjustments to their suits, and stared ahead with their game faces on before nodding to their off-camera techs to turn on the sound.

“Good evening gentlemen. Good morning, Hokkaido.” I said. “We have something to talk about.”





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Every day at this time is the tests.

All sixty-seven of us are shuffled out of our quarters and into the multi-chambered test hall where we do what we’re told.

We don’t do tests in pairs unless we’re told to. Today I am told to do a pair test.

I am paired with Wendy. She is 13.

I am told to kill her with my mind.

She can cause fires with her hands but she is trusting and docile. It has been determined that:

A) I am more useful to the program than she is.
B) My mental abilities are getting stronger.


She looks at me with a smile. I remember us kissing the day before in recreation.

The green light goes on. I hear a snick as the door locks.

Wendy smiles at me.

I turn off her brain.

She twitches. The smile stays on her face but her eyes unfocus. She voids her bowels and falls off of her stool.

I wait.

The door opens and the people in white come in. I am given a sugar cube and a shot to put me to sleep.

I wake up the next morning.

I play backgammon with Paul. I play chess with Linda. I play Scrabble with Ted.

The red light goes on silently and we line up against the door.

Every day at this time is the tests.

All sixty-six of us are shuffled out of our quarters and into the multi-chambered test hall where we do what we’re told.


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The lab was top secret. The sub basement had many levels of security. It was five clearance protocols above the office of the President. It was assembled in secret by technicians who each worked on a small piece of it and were not informed about the others. To tell the truth, there were sixteen people on the entire planet who know of its existence. There were ten scientists who worked on the experiment. There were three test subjects. There were two agency heads that authorized it.

There was one more person that knew about it and he was the one who organized it all. He was standing in the green glow of the control panel looking down at them when it happened. He was the head of black ops. He knew more about national security than anyone else alive. He was gazing down at the subjects deep in their sleep cycle. He was a tall man with white hair and long precise nails. He was pale skinned from so much work in the shadows. His post and his division didn’t actually exist and all of his operations were off the books. He lived in the margins. He lived off a percentage of the national surplus. His operations were written off. He was the unconscious mind of the US of A. He was the lizard brain lying at the base of it. His job was to come up with the means to protect the nation from hypothetical scenarios. He conjured up conjectures and possible threats and then came up with ways to defeat those ideas.

His name was Easter Standing.

The year was 1889.

I remember it well. That’s the way I was designed. Total recall. It’s a bitch when you’re as old as I am. Going into 2010, I realized that being 121 years old isn’t that big of a deal if you still look like a super fit thirty year old. I think back to the day of my birth and the day of Easter’s death.

I remember opening up my eyes and seeing Easter looking down at me from behind the glass. You have to remember that this was a long time ago and we didn’t have the same technology. We had primitive pheromone detectors at the doorways and security cards with holes punched in them that were changed every day. The metal was mostly copper and brass. Some of the power was provided by steam and coal.

Most of the power, though, was provided by the hydroelectric dam that we lived under. A whole city’s worth of energy diverted solely for our use. This experimental sub station was set up underneath a large lake created by the dam. Underneath water and a mile of earth we slept. Lightning rods were set up and connected to huge batteries underneath us. Geothermal rods led into them as well.

All for me and my sisters.

My name is Falayla. My sister’s names were Doreen and Lektrinka. We were super heroes born in the late 1800s. We were created to combat enemies of national security. What can I say?

Easter was standing over us to supervise our execution. He was livid. He knew that he had created beings that he would never able to control effectively. He was watching one of his best ideas getting crumpled up and thrown away. The trouble with Easter is that he was too good. He had great ideas that didn’t always fit in with the inherent limitations that humanity gives him.

He had the technicians put us down.

I woke up just as my second sister died. We were linked in the mindspace. When I was alone there in that other place, I woke up out of curiousity to see where the minds of my sisters had gone. That simple thing. If they hadn’t tried to do us one at a time, they would have succeeded.

I saw Easter’s eyes widen when he saw that I was awake. I saw the technician standing beside me with a large brass syringe. There was a moment where it all became clear what was happening when I saw the open vacant eyes of my sisters.

It’s all a blur after that. Doreen was a teleporter. Her code name was Door. Lektrinka could manipulate electricity. Her code name was Lectric. I could make my body diamond hard and extend unbreakable tendrils out from my body. My code name was Flay. All of us could fly.

The technician beside me lunged for my arm. He disappeared in a mist of blood as the hairs on my arm shot out, tangled around him and convulsed. I cut my self free of my bonds and shredded my way through the rest of the scientists. I picked up the bodies of my sisters and left Easter standing behind the glass. I think he was smiling. At least he got to see his handiwork in action before he died.

I flew up through the ceiling and further up through the dirt and into the bottom of the lake. I broke through the lake bed and went up through the water. The lake rushed down into the hole I had just made. The water reacted with the coal engines and overloaded the steam pipes. Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be cooked was crushed and drowned.

The vortex that formed like water going down a bath drain was what I had to fight against flying up through the water. I was strong and invulnerable but I still had to breathe. It was a two full minutes before I burst out of the whirpool on the surface of the lake in a geyser of steam, carrying my dead sisters and screaming like some sort of born again phoenix mermaid siren.

I flew over to the bank and took giant gasps of air and watched the water level of the lake go down a few inches and then calm down over the next twenty minutes. I buried my sisters.

That was a long time ago. It bothers me that I never saw Easter die. That was some pretty thick glass he was standing behind.

There’s a knock at my door.





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