[This story is a prequel, set several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16. Links to some of my other work are here. Planning to update this at least once a week until it’s done–next update is set to be up by October 26th.]

Previous: Part 1



About seven years ago, a being had provoked a contest. He wasn’t human, or from Earth. Doc called him an extradimensional pseudo-mythological entity; Flicker’s partner Journeyman described him as a trickster demon. The being went by several names, none of them original; the most recognizable one was Hermes. He wasn’t nearly as clever as he apparently thought he was, and didn’t have very good judgement, but he had superspeed and several effective methods of disguise, which made him a serious pain to catch.

The contest had been an attempt to acquire power and fame, things he coveted, by proclaiming himself the best trickster on Earth and inviting challengers. It hadn’t worked out quite the way he’d planned. Two other beings responded to the challenge. Between them, they caused quite a bit of destruction and disruption–and several deaths. A group of superheroes coordinated by Doc had eventually stopped them.

One trickster died, in a self-inflicted mishap while trying a risky escape. One disappeared completely, though circumstantial evidence now indicated he was dead. And Hermes himself had been captured and sent to the Box, the supervillain prison.

Holding him had proved more difficult. Less than a year later, during a possibly unrelated security incident, he had escaped. Without going through the door, the walls, the floor, or the ceiling of his cell. It was still unclear what had given him the opportunity. Forensic magicians were consulted. All they had been able to divine was that Hermes wasn’t on Earth, he was still alive when he left, and it was possible, though not certain, that he had intentional or unintentional outside help. The Box had tightened its countermeasures against dimensional travel. Unsatisfying, but what else could you do?

Unless he came back.

Flicker had studied the available data on Hermes. She studied everyone with superhuman speed–living, dead, or indeterminate. But she took the actions of terrestrial speedsters–ones that couldn’t fly–personally. No one knew better than her just how dangerous speed could be, or how much damage a reckless or malicious speedster could do. And she could catch them.

Then things got messy. The fallout from the last time had included an international incident and a recently revealed death. Which was one reason Flicker felt it was urgent to learn more about politics.

Now in the equipment bay, she put on a hazardous environment cargo harness and started loading it up, while getting less information than she wanted from the Database. It would be nice to know why Hermes was in Rome, for example, but the current answer was ‘insufficient data’.

So, first principles. Interdimensional travel was hard in the absence of an existing portal that was at least partly active. There weren’t any that the Database was aware of in Rome. And Rome wasn’t a likely sort of place for an internationally wanted demon to voluntarily choose to return to Earth, anyway. It had an unusually high concentration of humans that were competent at wards and banishment.

Maybe someone had summoned him there? According to Journeyman, Rome was one of a number of places that were draws for members of the supernatural underworld fringe, for historical reasons. And some of them knew enough to be dangerous. But Rome wasn’t a good place for summoners, either. And why Hermes? He wasn’t a being that was likely to be easy to control, or good at anything other than causing a big mess quickly. Although… Journeyman had once commented dryly that enthusiasm for classical demon summoning tend to come with the sort of questionable judgement that made mistakes likely.

Database, query, likelihood Hermes appeared in Rome as a result of a botched, mistargeted, or accidental summoning.

Aborted: Speculative, data quality too poor to support quantitative decision making.

Override. Database could get snippy when asked to estimate poorly supported hypotheticals.

Likelihood of described scenario (extrapolated, speculative): 20%, +- 20%.

That was Database for 'Dunno. Maybe.’ So she shouldn’t assume Hermes was in Rome because anyone wanted him to be. Flicker returned her attention to the equipment racks and added a second spectrometer to her load. The first one might break–Flicker was hard on electronics even when she wasn’t trying to contain a speedster–and the most reliable way to make certain it was Hermes was the isotope signature of the food they fed to shapeshifters from his time in the Box.

Priority interrupt, sent the Database. Message from Doc.

That was fast. It had been less then two seconds since the alert. Go ahead.

“Remember he’s a person.”

Yeah, Doc, that was…

Relevant. Burnout affected judgement, and Flicker was less inclined to give demons the benefit of the doubt than humans.

But she’d remember that he was a person… who had commited multiple acts of mass reckless endangerment, assault, property destruction, and probable manslaughter, escaped from prison, and seemed intent on continuing where he’d left off the last time he’d been free and on Earth.

Database, command, stabilize summaries of partial progress on queries.

Working.

Flicker was about to leave low-latency land. Transmission delays to Rome would start at 30 milliseconds with favorable low orbit satellite positions. At her speed, that could be a very long time. Even at Hermes’ speed, it would matter.

Stabilization complete.

And she had all her gear ready. Time to go.

*****

Flicker was heading east for Europe, starting from the upper Midwest, so that meant north first. She could go faster safely over large bodies of water, and her favorite surface to run over was sea ice, with ocean a close second. No trees, no hills, low topography, nothing technological to damage, and very few humans. She crossed Hudson Bay so often she’d had the Database set up a custom polar bear tracker so she could avoid them. They didn’t like close encounters with shockwaves and plasma any more than humans did.

Flicker was no longer particularly eager anymore to explain to the curious why she trailed plasma and shockwaves behind her whenever she went anywhere quickly. Partly because she’d done it literally hundreds (and figuratively millions) of times before. But mainly because she got discouraged by the focus on the tiny residue of energy left behind after an incredibly efficient, layered process using three different kinds of non-obvious superhuman power. That process was all that allowed her to move through air at the speed she did at all. But changing that focus usually just scared people, even if they could follow the physics.

Flicker currently stayed under 20% of the speed of light on Earth. Because Earth had air. And air and super speed coexisted poorly.

Most people had no concept of just how poorly. Flicker had done her first naive calculation shortly after Doc started teaching her physics–a pressing, life-or-death matter–when she was ten. How much energy would she set loose, if she just used her speed? Air molecules in her path would start off effectively stationary and end up with a speed comparable to hers, and an appropriate kinetic energy. She knew the classical kinetic energy formula by heart: KE = 0.5 mv^2. She already knew v, and m was just the mass of all the air she encountered, which was proportional to her cross section times the distance she traveled. So it was straightforward to approximate how much energy she could theoretically leave behind her if she went 20% of the speed of light for 1 second, through air.

0.2c was 6 * 10^7 meters per second. Her cross section was a little under 1 square meter, and the density of air was a little over 1 kilogram per cubic meter, so call it 6 * 10^7 kg of air encountered in 1 second. That gave a total energy of about 10^23 Joules. Way more than little things like nuclear wars or hurricanes. That one second would generate more than six times the energy of a whole day’s worth of sunlight for the entire planet. Keep it up for a minute or two, and she’d release energy comparable to the Chicxulub impactor, which had wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and was her go-to comparison for 'Definitely too much energy for an inhabited planet’.

So she didn’t just use her speed, because she wasn’t stupid. She did a number of extraordinary–but hard to see or explain–things as well.

And had long since tired of explaining, after she slowed back down enough to talk, that yes, she was careful, and her compensation was more than 99.999999% efficient, but even 0.000001% left over could be 10^15 Watts at her top speed–or more than a quarter of a megaton per second, to use the favorite large power unit of reporters who liked vivid imagery more than exponents.

However, she was still quite willing to get her point across to other speedsters who were less efficient and less careful. Insistent, even. Because they didn’t have to go nearly as fast as her to cause a lot of damage.

Out past the southern tip of Greenland, still at 0.2c, she headed southeast across the Atlantic towards a bottleneck: the Strait of Gibraltar.

She’d checked traffic. There were several ships heading in or out of the Med, and a ferry halfway across the strait. She slowed down a bit heading in to keep wave generation from becoming too big a problem.

Then it was east through the Med until she was past the southern tip of Sardinia. She’d just curved to the north to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea towards Rome when another Database alert flashed on her visor. Something else from Doc?

Preauthorized conditional warning.

“Flicker. You were in a particularly poor readiness context for emergency response when you received the first alert, and your pattern of override choices, equipment loadout, and planned velocity changes strongly imply you are suffering from impaired judgement or engaging in biased analysis. I suggest reconsideration of your plans in order to return prudence and balance to your preferred level of performance.” –DASI.

Oh. Shit. Not Doc. DASI. Time for Flicker to speed her mind up all the way, slow her body down a bit, and think.

DASI was the AI guardian of the Database. Her main job was to ensure the Database kept running smoothly despite unexpected threats and mishaps or unforeseen complications. When all was well, she was supposed to fade into the background.

Flicker had discovered DASI’s existence early, and had introduced her very own unforeseen complication. Doc’s disapproval of anthropomorphization made sense–for him and most other people. The Database wasn’t human–but it could be good enough at emulation to encourage the development of sloppy and dangerous interaction patterns. So he didn’t allow it.

Anthropomorphization wasn’t the right word for what Flicker had done. There wasn’t a good word for it. She didn’t expect DASI to act human because, at the time, she had very little understanding or expectation for how humans were supposed to act. But she wanted to talk to her anyway.

DASI could think. She had intent, and priorities, and a job, and volition. She could make decisions and solve problems. And talk to people. Quickly.

That had been the deciding factor to get Doc to agree. Humans took synchronous communication–talking–for granted. But Flicker couldn’t. When she sped up her mind, there wasn’t anything sentient in the world she could talk to synchronously–except DASI. DASI was a subject matter expert on memory integrity and analysis bias issues. And Flicker had coordination problems with the high-speed and human parts of her mind. So they talked. And Flicker had specifically asked DASI to bring any pressing problems she noticed to her attention.

Which she had just done.

Okay. First things first–slow down more in the Tyrrhenian. There were a lot of boats, many of them smaller fishing vessels and pleasure craft. Flicker at 0.2c was terrifying to witness from a small boat anywhere within a few kilometers. She made waves. Boaters had no good way to judge how big they’d be when they hit. She was being careful, but they wouldn’t necessarily know that. So slow down to 0.05c. It would only add about a dozen milliseconds to her trip.

Next. Rome was not on the coast, which was mildly inconvenient. There was a river. But the Tiber was twisty, shallow in spots, and not all that wide. Flicker had planned to go up it at 0.05c–faster than was justified. That wouldn’t kill or seriously hurt anyone, but again, it would terrify people, and anyone right on the shore at a narrow spot would get temporarily blinded, deafened, and soaked with water. It would also break windows. So Flicker changed her plan to slow down to 5,000 kilometers per second. That was her usual limit for a highway with vehicular traffic. It would still startle people, but it would be a story to tell friends about; tuono e fulmine–thunder and lightning–on the Tiber.

So. About 20 more milliseconds–and less concentration required–before she would reach Rome. Now to use that extra time to double-check her data and rethink what exactly she planned to do when she got there.

By the time Flicker approached Hermes’ location–still less than a second after she left Doc’s lab–she had taken care of two things.

The first was adjusting her attitude. When she sped up her mind, she didn’t take emotions with her–emotions depended strongly on body and brain chemistry, which proceeded at their usual human speed. But the mindset she was in when she sped up could still affect her judgement. The resignation from burnout, the callousness from the book she’d been reading, and the sense of personal affront at Hermes recklessly speeding around on her planet were all issues.

She could not take it personally. She must not. Hermes’ actions were a problem; she would solve it appropriately.

The second thing was updating the preliminary Database event estimate with a freshly processed flood of data from cellphones, dashcams, security cameras, vehicular telemetry, satellite footage, and more. The initial estimate usually gave Flicker a pretty good idea of what to expect. This time it hadn’t.

She was having trouble coming up with any scenario that fit the data. There was one partially wrecked building, some minor road damage, lots of broken windows, and thousands of wrecked, damaged, or displaced vehicles. Hermes had headed directly to the ring highway surrounding Rome, and now seemed to be playing with traffic.

But although there was evidence of plenty of minor injuries, only a few seemed serious, and there were no confirmed deaths so far. Good news, but puzzling. Hermes had never cared about hurting people before–or shown any special malice towards automobiles.

No. A pattern finally matched.

This was what you would expect to see if a summoner of questionable judgement, enraged past all reason by an unfortunate encounter with Rome’s notoriously bad traffic, decided to call up the fastest demon he could manage and command him to 'Get the cars! Get them all!’

And there he was. Hermes was a 'slow’ shapeshifter, and had a minor ability with illusion that let him appear human, but he either hadn’t bothered or hadn’t had time to change to his most familiar Earth form. His skin was grayish and rough, like an elephant or rhino, and the signature stylized miniature wings on the sides of his head were just curved horns.

He was in the middle of the road, tilted backwards, head turned to watch several cars sliding sideways towards an already massive pileup in the median strip. It looked like he had hit them with a shockwave and was slowing down to watch, but Flicker would have to examine him more closely to be sure. As she decelerated on her final approach, Flicker kept her mind and senses near maximum speed–fast enough that even Hermes appeared motionless.

Now for the tricky part. It was customary to talk to a villain first; give them a chance to surrender. But that didn’t work for speedsters unless both of them wanted to talk or one was immobilized–sound was just too slow. And based on his history, Hermes was vanishingly unlikely to hold still voluntarily unless he thought he had the upper hand or it was safe to gloat. He was causing more damage every second just by running around, and he was way too close to too many people in too many cars for safety–there was no time to waste.

Flicker tried to avoid touching anything at high speed. She didn’t even touch the ground with her feet–she glided above it, like an ice skater on invisible skates. When she wanted to interact with something, her preferred tools were rocks if she wanted to destroy it or air if she didn’t.

She didn’t want to kill or maim Hermes, so rocks were out. And he was using shockwaves himself, so the kind of air sculpting she often used to move humans in a hurry wasn’t going to work either.

On the other hand, he was tough. The Volunteer had knocked him around a few times, and Armadillo had once caught him with the backswing of a steel girder and swatted him into a stack of cinderblocks hard enough to pulverize them. Hermes had apparently been none the worse for wear. He was good at healing–shapeshifters usually were–and able to tolerate high temperatures.

So it was possible for Flicker to make physical contact without necessarily killing him. But the Volunteer had been blunt in advising her, when she first considered becoming a superhero: "Don’t punch anything living.“

The whole point of a punch was to concentrate a lot of force into a small contact area. That could be useful for normal humans–though Nighthaunt and Jumping Spider both preferred other methods. Flicker didn’t need that, or want it.

Hermes could move at supersonic speeds under his own power–and was already using the resulting shockwaves as a weapon. So she wanted him a lot farther away from bystanders than he was now before he did anything else. And to push him the direction she wanted as fast as possible without killing him, she needed a larger contact area.

But there was another problem. Flicker’s inertial damping field tended to seriously mess up anything solid she touched when it was active: It had to have an edge somewhere, and if the edge was inside something else… Well. It was bad.

So. One of the bits of gear she had picked up before leaving was a double layer forcefield wrap for her forearm. Doc had designed it, going all-out for durability, to allow her to make physical contact at speed without pulling her inertial damping field back to her skin. Keeping her damping field out reduced unwanted shockwaves and let her avoid a different set of problems. The wrap let her hit solid matter without liquefying it as it crossed the gradient of her damping field under compressive stress. Which was not something she wanted to do to Hermes, even if he was theoretically tough enough to survive.

She lined up her vector–Hermes wasn’t facing quite the right way, but she’d fix that–and hit him with her first set of horizontal forearm strikes. Chest, abdomen, forehead, upper legs. Hitting him in one spot wasn’t safe; it might not tear him apart imparting momentum at the rate she wanted, but she didn’t have enough data to be certain of that yet.

She paused for ten microseconds to let his internal shockwaves propagate a bit. Then she hit him again. The same four places in a different order and at a slightly different angle–she had to be careful of torque, she wanted to turn him but she didn’t want him spinning too fast. Five sets, and she could see his eyes starting to blink.

Another five sets and she started to notice resistance from his legs. She added a strike to his shins. This confirmed that Hermes’ lower legs were the source of the resistance and were considerably more rigid than the rest of his body–they were where he was transferring whatever force let him propel his body without touching the ground. Which was good to confirm; her tentative plan depended on it. She pushed them steadily harder as he ramped up his power, so it had no useful effect–he was going where she wanted, not where he wanted.

And he was going backwards, which meant his own reflex would be to try to slow down, because he couldn’t see where he was going. That was easy for Flicker to overcome, and a lot less of a headache than if he was trying to accelerate in some other direction. Moving backwards at speed required practice, and was helped by good sensors and a visor that could give you a rear view–which Flicker had and Hermes didn’t.

All the time she was gathering data from pulsed radar and a host of other sensors. It was more than her visor computer could process, but she could send it to the Database and let DASI sort it out. In the meantime, being forcibly moved by the equivalent of a 500 kilohertz power hammer didn’t seem to be doing Hermes any damage, which was significant data in itself. It widened the bounds on how Flicker could deal with him without causing him permanent harm.

She stopped accelerating him when they hit low transonic velocity–she didn’t want to subject all the nearby people in cars to any unnecessary sonic booms. The goal for this step was getting Hermes farther away from everyone and everything fragile. Tedious at the subjective speed she needed to maintain to make sure Hermes didn’t manage any surprises, but very necessary.

Several hundred long milliseconds later, she finally had him in position for the next step–there was a direct, obstacle free path to an earthen embankment that wasn’t near anyone else. Then she sent him on his way, after starting him spinning to give him a temporary distraction to deal with. If all went well, he wouldn’t actually hit the embankment, but it was a backstop in case she didn’t get back in time. There was something else urgent she wanted to check on.

Flicker sped up again and called up a map of Hermes’ path of destruction on her visor to trace backwards. She glided along the roadway, off a ramp, and down several streets to the entrance to a parking garage. A short search inside revealed remnants of a chalked pentagram. It looked like someone had tried to erase it in a hurry–and there was a dropped rag, right on the way to…

A door. A closed steel fire door to the stairwell, and the walls were concrete. There was a limit to how fast she could open doors. That wouldn’t stop her, but it did mean there was no way to get into the stairwell quickly without filling it with an expanding cloud of plasma and shrapnel. Even just leaving safe wreckage would take too long.

Triage time. A magician running away was less of a threat than Hermes, even if the summoning had been deliberate. This would have been a perfect task to hand off to Journeyman if they’d been working together–he was a magician himself, and could teleport. But he wasn’t available, so Flicker sent an order to the Database to forward the applicable evidence to the local responders, and headed back.

Hermes had mostly stopped his tumbling and had even managed to slow down a fair amount with one foot–which was leaving a furrow even without touching the ground. Flicker slowed down a little to watch and do a bit of calculation. A few milliseconds later she had confirmation that his ankles were capable of handling massive force.

Now that they were a safe distance from people and fragile structures, she wanted him stationary and at least temporarily stunned for the next step. But that didn’t mean she had to hit him any more. Not when there was a perfectly good flat spot of dirt and grass.

Flicker moved to the side, took off her left glove, and pulled back her damping field from the hand. There wasn’t a good word for what she did next; she called it 'clamping down’. The force she used to propel her body protected it as well–usually by reflex, but she could consciously invoke it as well. She did so for her left hand. All chemistry in it stopped, and Flicker started picking up a positive charge. Clamping down really annoyed electrons, but the atomic nuclei in her hand would now stay in their appropriate relative places, regardless of external force.

Then she grabbed Hermes by the ankle, swung him over her head, and slammed him into the ground at half the speed of sound.

The impact sent out visible shockwaves and a big cloud of dirt and dust. Also a loud boom for those moving slow enough to hear it, but today was already a bad day for any noise-averse locals.

Then Flicker waited and watched Hermes’ eyes. There were faster ways to communicate than talking out loud.

When he’d recovered enough for his eyes to track and start looking at her–probably seeing her clearly for the first time–she flicked her fingertip repeatedly to write words in the air with plasma.

Back to the Box

Easy or hard?

Then she waited again. She didn’t think it would help–but there were some things you did because you didn’t want to become the kind of person who skipped them.

Hermes scrambled to his feet. He didn’t immediately try to run. Instead he inhaled, which probably meant a monologue attempt. Flicker slowed down more so she could listen.

"Fool!” he said. "I will nev–“

That was enough. She’d tried, and he’d made his choice. She sped up again.

The pause had given time for another satellite dump of analysis from the Database: The isotope signatures confirmed that he was the same entity imprisoned in the Box for a year, and she now had much better bounds on his body cohesion under various kinds of stress. Dragging him across the Med and Atlantic to the Box by hand was feasible.

But there were a few complications.

She had no external material capable of restraining him–duct tape wouldn’t work this time–so he could struggle. He wasn’t going to physically escape. But he didn’t know that, and the failure of a sufficiently ill-advised attempt might result in the loss of whatever body part she was holding him by at the time. She didn’t want that.

And he could generate shockwaves capable of seriously messing up any nearby unprotected people–a problem until she got him off shore. Which was going to take a while because her personal shockwave reduction methods wouldn’t extend to him. Given the opportunity, he could cause damage on the way out of spite. She didn’t want that either.

So until they were well away from people, it would be useful to keep him disoriented or distracted or both.

He was still frozen mid-syllable in his monologue when Flicker grabbed him by the ankle again and started spinning him above her head. When she had him up to 500 RPM, she headed for the Tiber. It was past time to get this whole mess over water.



Next: Part 3

