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This is the first few pages of a story I have been working on. I wondered if I could get some feedback from people about it? I know the super-hero genre doesn't have much in the way of non-graphic literature but it's an area I enjoy writing about.
Be as brutal as you like, I only ask that all criticism is constructive. I'll try not to go all...y'know...from teh Bleed about it.
It was four fifteen in the morning, and I found myself standing alone in a cliff-top car park somewhere in the road along the French coastline, waiting for the corridor between here and England to open up. They weren’t too specific about the actual time it would appear, so I came early and spent the evening watching the humans come and go. If any of them noticed me standing alone besides the sign warning about high winds and small rock falls it was only a brief thing. None of them thought anything suspicious about it. The A.I. woven across the inside of my skull was monitoring local frequencies. In truth I could have just turned invisible, but I had an appointment with the Doctor. Why burn valuable energy now when I’d probably need it to fight my way out of his home later?
The last of the humans left around midnight. A young mated pair who had turned up in a tiny, yellow petrol burner, probably one of the last ones left on the roads these days. They pulled up and disappeared along the trail along the cliffs. My hearing enhancements picked up the sound of their mating about ten minutes later. I read the local temperature as three degrees C. You have to love that about the French. Never let things like near-freezing temperatures get in the way of a romantic session on the cliff-tops. They came back to the car-park wrapped closely around each other and sped away into the night. The noisy engine growling off until even my heightened senses couldn’t pick it up any longer.
For the next four hours I watched the sea and listened to local radio stations, switching back and forth to avoid adverts. The news reports were still talking about the incident over in South America. Some rebel group apparently got access to the codes for one of the Crimson Claw’s old hideouts and found eight backups of the old bastard’s power armour, along with various esoteric WMD’s. They spent the rest of the day invading and occupying as much of the local government as possible. It had been the best part of a week until a joint taskforce of Chinese and American capes had gone in under UN mandate and restored order.
It was hardly much of a fight, untrained humans in out-dated war-suits versus the cream of the international community’s breeding programs. Still, the media circus was in full swing and the footage of the battles was apparently being made available for the internet pay-per-view sites. Human civilisation’s taste for super-on-super action hadn’t been blunted by the damage our kind had inflicted on the planet since our arrival back in the seventies. They would make loud noises about the threat we posed, campaign for registration acts and new ways of controlling us. But in the end they would go back to relying on us to fix all of their problems for them, and all the time trying to ignore little things like the gaping chasm where San Francisco used to be, or the Anti-Man invasion of North America.
It really was a wonder they had survived so long without us.
I felt the AI stir in my mind. Transient sensory ghosts flashed over me as she woke up, the taste of metal clashed with the smell of ginger before my systems filtered it out. A minor flaw my maker had never been able to iron out. Two minds sharing the same body, it’s bound to get a little crowded in there. I felt the comfortable presence of her as she looked out at the world through my eyes, calmly assessing and calculating. When she spoke to me it always sounded as though she were right behind me, leaning in close to my head. She spoke with the voice of my maker, cold and full of self-assured authority, but with a hint of the tenderness the original had never shown whenever she talked to one of her creations.
“There’s still time to turn back, Schism was never a friend to our cause.”
“Decided to stop sulking, have we?”
“I don’t sulk darling, you know that. I was running a few simulations to see how our chances are of getting out of England alive.”
“Slim?”
“Oh we can get out certainly. I have several exit strategies formulated.”
The wind picked up slightly, and I felt her smiling.
“But?” I let the question hang between us.
“Well, even the least aggressive of the three would produce a rather high number of civilian casualties.”
“Then they aren’t options are they? Darwin! We have this discussion whenever I go into populated areas. It’s not like the good old days, we can’t just smash through buildings and damn the baselines.”
“Happier times.”
My A.I. and I had been stuck on this particular difference of opinion for a while now. She was programmed to defer to my decisions in most cases, but there was nothing in there about her having to like it. She could be a capricious thing, but I guess that was her right.
At least she had remained loyal to our maker.
I was about to launch into another rehashed rant about the importance of us staying off of the UN’s radar. When I noticed a subtle change in the night sky above me, a portion of it was darkening down, the stars and clouds vanishing into a strip of pure black that stretched out across the sea towards England. A countdown started in the upper-left part of my field of vision, the tiny digital numbers bright against the darkness. The corridor was open.
“Nice visual effect.” I said as I redirected my personal gravity and flew up towards the strip of amended sky, “You realise that no-one calls them Shadow Corridors anymore?”
The strip turned bright pink as the AI again manipulated my optical enhancements.
“Better?” she said. I imagined my maker’s face with an expression of unconvincing innocence.
“Oh much. It really adds to the sense of impending confrontation.” I shunted more power from my Heart into my flight systems and left France behind me with a sonic boom that was echoed by thunder from the clouds
I had an appointment with Doctor Schism, last of the mad scientists |
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