by Chewy Walrus
Darkness.
Edulcore Cicciotto had been floating in it for quite some time, completely oblivious to the happenings around him. Content to just be floating there, he had no need to awaken, until he realized where he was.
I'm asleep, he thought to himself. This darkness... it's not the real world. It's... it's a dream state. I've got to wake up!
As the former Eurostar pulled himself from his slumber, he realized the contrast of the real world and the world of dreams.
Bright lights hit his pupils like his namesake train at its top speeds. Recoiling slightly at the brightness of the lights above, Cicciotto was then faced with the fact that he was strapped onto some sort of table. His arms and legs were pinned, and the hero found himself completely unable to move them, not even to shade his eyes. He tried to phase through them through an alteration of his density, but he found the task utterly impossible.
Clenching his eyes shut, Edulcore Cicciotto called out as loudly as he could to whoever was listening, "What's happening to me?"
"Ah, Mr. Cicciotto," came an all-too-familiar voice from somewhere by his feet. "I was wondering when you might awake."
"What is this, Walker?" he asked, straining to free his body from its bonds. "Why am I chained here this way?"
"It's quite simple, Cicciotto," the voice of Dr. Charles Elias Walker said, making its way closer to the Italian's head. "It's time..."
"Time for what?" Cicciotto said, his voice that of a man who has put up with too much irritation.
"Well, if I were to ask you or any of your friends on the outside, I believe the answer I would get would be revolution..." Walker said calmly.
"Revolution?" Edulcore repeated. "Merde! Walker! It's Rothman! He's insane! You must let me stop him!" Edulcore began to struggle even harder against his bonds.
"There's no use struggling with your bonds, my friend," Walker said calmly. "I've been adapting them for just such an occasion, actually. They're basically a steel-titanium alloy modified to resist your density-control by alteration and a slight rearrangement of the atoms within it. It took Curie a few days, but I think it does the job quite well."
"Walker..." Cicciotto whispered, a tear forming in his eye as he ceased his struggle. His voice was hoarse and tense, but sincere. "You fail to understand. If you don't let me out, millions of innocent people will be brutally murdered!"
"I fear you're a bit late to assist in any rescue endeavors," Walker said quietly. "We have already apprehended Rothman, and in a few short seconds, the revolution he caused will be over... for good."
"What?" Cicciotto said, squinting to try to make out Walker's form amid the sea of bright light. "How?"
"Well, we only have to work with what you give us," Walker said, a slight bemusement lining his inflection. "Despite what you may or may not believe, I care quite a bit for what goes on here, Cicciotto. When I noticed that your breathing patterns had begun to cease while you were asleep, I began to suspect that something was amiss. So, I had Vidalia devote an entire evening scanning for your consciousness. She was the one who confirmed that you had, somehow, gained the ability to leave your immortal body. After that, it was easy..."
"Vidalia?" Cicciotto asked, a flood of emotions swimming through his head.
"She's dead, Edulcore..." Walker said, a false sincerity hanging within his speech.
"Dead?" Cicciotto asked, both remorseful and unbelieving. "How? Why?"
"Your revolution," Walker said sadly. "Slain by a vengeful metahuman."
Cicciotto gritted his teeth and furrowed his brow. "You lie..." he mumbled defensively.
"Do I?" Walker asked, his voice coming closer to Cicciotto's ear. "Tell me then, Cicciotto: can you give me any reason why you wish to stay here? Any reason at all?"
Cicciotto's eyes clamped tighter as a thousand and one thoughts went spinning through his head. He thought of the world he left behind. He thought of his days as an Olympic medal winner. He thought of his life as a fugitive. He thought of his friends -- Danny Hearn, Naecken, Tobias Christopher, M'xy, and Marv Velo. He thought of his clone, the being that he preferred to think of as his own son... but never once did Vidalia Owens enter his mind.
Tears came streaming down Cicciotto's face. "My God!" he cried, sobbing openly before the man before him known as Walker. "What have I done? I've killed her! Oh, my God! I am so sorry..."
"Rothman made a pretty good showing out there," Walker said, his voice now inches from Edulcore's head. "At last report, the death toll had reached almost eleven thousand humans and five thousand metas." The Eurostar's wailing turned into a sporadic, spastic sob. "It could have been worse, you know..." Walker said, gently patting the Italian's head.
"Why -- why was it not?" he asked between gasps.
"The EPS," Walker said softly, but with enough force so that the runner's ears picked it up over his cries. With a large sniff, Cicciotto's tears stopped, though his chin still quivered slightly.
"What do you mean?" he asked incredulously.
"What you have made, I have undone," Walker said almost monotonously. "What you have started, I have finished."
"I don't understand," the man strained, his voice cracking under the stress on his vocal chords.
"Do you honestly think it was in our best interests to get involved here?" Walker asked, his voice now moving from its stationary spot. At random points, the voice would be at any given spot in the room as Walker strolled around the place where Edulcore lay. "What does it benefit for an organization such as our own to get involved here? What good would it do?"
"Simple," Cicciotto answered, inhaling deeply. "You hate us. You hate our kind. You are a human who hates and fears us. You hate and fear what you do not understand."
"Is that what gets you to sleep at night?" Walker shot back, half laughing at the words. "Is that really what you believe?"
"You have given me no reason to believe otherwise," the old hero replied, his voice now stern and emotionless.
"I have given you every reason to believe otherwise!" Walker yelled. A shattering followed as something was knocked from its place onto the floor. Edulcore would have jumped at the noise had he not been banded down. "Answer me this! Why would an ordinary man who abhors metas collect them and use them to collect even more? Research? My friend, if that is how you feel, you have another thing coming, let me assure you! Research is one of our goals, certainly, but, like all things we do here, it is merely a means to an end! Means to an end!"
"The Prince," Edulcore whispered to himself. "Machievelli. Of course. 'The ends justify the means.'"
"Correct!" Walker cried, his fist connecting with a table or countertop of sorts. "We could have easily overlooked your revolution. We could have easily only protected our own interests. And yet, we fought it! Sought to end it! Can you possibly fathom why?"
"You hate us..." Cicciotto whispered gently.
"AGAIN!" Walker screamed. He grunted a few times and muttered unintelligibly in the following seconds, as if battling the frustrations within his own mind. "You really are simple, aren't you, Cicciotto? Simple, close-minded, and small..."
Now, Walker's lips were barely grazing the man's ear. His decibel level remained the same, but now Cicciotto could feel the scientist's warm breath on the side of his face and the random spittle careening toward him.
"You fail to understand that, had it not been for us, the entire city of Chicago and possibly the entire world as we know it would have fallen!" Walker yelled. "Had it not been for the EPS, the United Nations would have surrendered the borders of all membership countries to Rothman, a man who is the ideological equivalent to Adolf Hitler!
"Had it not been for us," Walker continued, his voice suddenly much softer, "the entire human race would have been extinct within the year. You owe us that much, Cicciotto. After all, it was your mess to begin with."
"I..." the former Eurostar muttered, tears once again forming in his eyes. "I... I did all this?"
"By disobeying orders and taking some foolhardy dream of metahuman superiority and putting it into action, yes! You did all this!" Walker said smugly. Cicciotto imagined the man spreading his arms open wide and smiling his sinister smirk as he said it. Still, one phrase caught the man's attention.
"'Metahuman superiority'?" he questioned, his voice weak with sorrow. "I do not believe in that... I believe in peaceful co-existence betwe..."
"Bah!" Walker resounded, standing and once again moving around the form of the man once called Eurostar. "'Peaceful coexistence'! Foolish ideology! You obviously have no idea what you are! No idea what you are capable of! No idea what your mere existence means for the future of mankind!"
"What are you talking about?" Cicciotto croaked weakly.
"When I was just a high school student," Walker began, his voice beginning to sound as though he were beginning to tell a story, "I read a large book by a controversial man which absolutely changed my life. It actually made me want to become a scientist. The book was called Origin of the Species and was written by a man named Charles Darwin. You see, Darwin had this wonderful idea called natural selection, which suggests that once a species evolves, it grows stronger to adapt more easily to its surroundings. These stronger creatures are then able to overpower and eventually outlive the weaker species... thus eradicating its presence entirely."
"Darwin?" Cicciotto laughed, almost choking on the tears left over in his throat. "Darwin is nonsense! His theories are scientifically unsound and unproven! It's theoretical hot air!"
"Spoken like a true Catholic," Walker said, snickering. "I believe that it was Frederich Nietzche who said that 'God is dead,' and I've never known another phrase to be more accurate. If there was a God, why would he allow such terrible things to happen to his chosen people, the human race? Why would he allow that 'people created in His image' to be outshone by a group of overpowered bullies with an inferiority complex? Why?"
Walker chuckled to himself and continued his speech. "I can tell you why, Cicciotto. Because He doesn't exist. He's not real. Your life is random and left up to chance. 'Religion is the opiate of the masses,' Edulcore. Hard cheese to swallow, but there it is. Accept it, or you'll be in a whole world of trouble later on in life.
"What you fail to realize, my friend, is that you are Darwin's theory in the flesh. You and your metahuman friends are the next stage in human evolution. Rothman knows it. I know it. I fail to see how you couldn't recognize it. Honestly, I cannot see why you did not."
"So, what do you plan to do?" Cicciotto asked, too shocked by the enormity of what he'd just taken in to say anything else.
"With you?" Walker said, beginning to circle the room in the opposite direction. "I merely plan to grant you some of the mortality I've always wanted you to have."
"Why not kill me?" he asked.
"Kill you?" Another chuckle. "My boy, I am a scientist. I specialize in life, not death. Besides, this poses another excellent opportunity for experimentation."
"What about my brothers?" Cicciotto asked. "What about the metahumans around the world who have as much a right to live and breathe as you do?"
"They are not my concern," Walker said, ceasing his movements. From the clanking that Cicciotto could make out, it sounded as though he were working on something on his chemistry set.
"But, you said..."
"The actions of the metahuman community are not my concern," Walker said. "My sole concern is the preservation of the human race: the true human race, as they were meant to be. It is my role to give them a fighting chance, an upper hand in this debacle. Chicago was just a first step. I by no means intend to go global, as Rothman did. Rather, I merely hope to pool my resources and gather my workers, so that when the time comes, I will be ready!"
"I... I do not know what to say..." Cicciotto said, dumbfounded.
"Less than seven minutes ago, a Boeing 747 filled with the last remnants of your pathetic revolution in Chicago was destroyed along with the remains of Agent Vidalia Owens," Walker said softly. "We live to play another day, Cicciotto. Say good night."
As those final words escaped Walker's lips, Edulcore Cicciotto felt a sharp pain in his neck and, almost instantly, he found himself, once again, floating in darkness.