Paragon to Pavement 4

Blonde Blazer’s boots click-clacked down the hallway, the heavy door to the Records Room clicking shut barely a few seconds after she left it behind. The sudden vacuum she left behind in the space was filled almost immediately with the low sixty-hertz whine of the CRT monitor straight out of the eighties, accompanied by the aggressive crunch of sour cream and onion potato chips.

In a different situation, Robert would have been fixated on the absolutely ancient computer he was seated in front of, not having seen anything like this in… ever. For a global organization the size of SDN, he really didn’t understand why they used technology literally from the eighties for all their work.

Sure, it made it harder to access, but that could only do so much when you were running around with floppy disks instead of USBs.

Today, though, the archaic tech wasn’t what had him so fixated on the screen.

Robert slouched an inch further down the squeaking plastic spine of the rolling chair, baggy blue cotton bunching up around his waist as he continued reading the file in front of him, eyes on the scarred mugshot looking right back at him.

“Now, tell me you aren’t actually buying that.” Chase’s voice dragged across the silence of the room.

“Buying…” His hand rested on the beige mouse, plastic cold under his fingers as the trackball beneath it grinded softly against the pad. “Buying what?”

“The whole motivational seminar she threw at you while flashing those big blues.” A single potato chip snapped between the old man’s white molars. “The little ‘we’re not looking for miracles, Mr Mecha Man’ routine.”

“I don’t think she said all that, Chase.” Robert kept scrolling down the digital file, looking for more information he could use. “In fact, I’m pretty sure she didn’t.”

“Yeah, but that’s how you heard it.” A harrumph came from over his shoulder, followed by more chewing. “I may look old, but I still got a brain half my age. I saw that shoulder touch.”

Robert cleared his throat rather than respond, leaning his elbows onto the desk as the missing chunk of his right ear throbbed a familiar dull ache in the cold. “Lucius Connor Bright.”

The full government sat at the top of the digital file in crisp oddly-high resolution text.

“Hell of a name on this guy.” The murmur slipped free as he reread it a few more times.

“Better than Robert Robertson III.” Chase and one of his hands occupied the edge of the particleboard to Robert’s left as he leaned forward, teeth making quick work of the smelly potato snacks.

“..yeah, that was implied.”

“Oh, sorry.” The yellow knit bunched around the old man’s shoulders as a withered hand dug back into the foil bag, plastic crinkling loud in his ear. “Guess we can’t all use our brain like the great Robert Robertson III.” 

Robert almost answered back, an insult ready on his lips, before he simply stared at the older man. Chase chewed in a slow rhythm, jaw moving under that white mustache as he breathed out in a papery whistle through his nose.

Thirty-nine years old. Brown eyes unfocused for a bare second, glowing text on the monitor blurring as he thought back to Track Star. The same Track Star who used to babysit Robert at almost any time, but especially when his dad’s suit needed recalibrating.

The one-and-only Track Star that could break the sound barrier like it was just a simple cooldown walk. To think the guy that was so full of life burning through his own cells with every step until his own biological clock lapped him twice over.

Now the man looked at least eighty, sounded pretty much the same, and acted just as grouchy as you’d expect a man of his age to be. Damn.

For all the distance between them, Chase might as well have been family and it seemed their family tradition was spending all you had on a life that just eats you alive. 

Robert just spent his inheritance and fifteen years of his life.

With no inheritance to throw away, Chase had spent at least three times more in those same fifteen years.

Robert sighed as he scrolled down, the mouse wheel catching for a second before he dragged it down hard to force the page to render. Love that for us.

“Age twenty-one…”

“If you believe a word that comes out of his mouth.“ Chase countered, leaning his yellow sweatered arm up against a stack of manila folders. “Different dimension, anyway, right? Like he even knows if his years are different. Could be fifty. Could be twelve.”

Robert ignored the old(ish) man as he kept on parsing data blocks, scanning through information the same way he used to read integrity diagnostics in the suit. “Dimensional displacement.” 

Falling out of the sky through a hole in the world. Robert knew a little bit about that, the falling out of the sky part at least. He could still remember the altimeter screaming in his ear, the chassis of his suit tearing apart from the fall and the HUD flickering a bloody red before the final blackout. 

The kid fell through reality and woke up swinging. “…Yeah. His situation’s making sense.” 

“You gonna do any of this for the other rejects or just blue boy here?” 

Torrance SDN’s newest dispatcher simply kept reading. “From the sound of it, he’s gonna be my number one and he’s the newest like me. Shouldn’t I at least put that extra effort in?”

“…mmm. Good point.”

Robert turned back, squinting at the glare of the screen. “Five months hospitalized.” A dull ache pulsed deep in the marrow of Robert’s right arm, something he could relate to. “Nearly six months contained with a power-dampening collar the entire time in SuperMax.”

Eleven months in a cage or a bed.

“Fucking nightmare.” Chase clicked his tongue. “Accidental terrorist or not, sounds like a shit deal.”

“No verified identity. No legal citizenship, outside of his sponsorship with SDN. No SDN Threat Class or assigned Hero Role yet.”

The old man leaned over, heavy-lidded eyes dragging across the glowing screen as he left the crinkle of the chip bag behind. “You seriously ready to dispatch that?”

“Okay, look.” Robert leaned back in the rolling chair, one hand rubbing over the light stubble peppering his jawline. “If he was a real hero where he came from… maybe he just needs a framework, you know. You give a guy some structure, he tends to learn how to color inside the lines.”

Chase stared his way, another papery breath leaving him. “Robbie…”

“Yes?”

“That is what every divorced woman in LA says before dating a grown man into Funko Pops.”

Robert pushed out another breath of his own, this one a half-laugh he couldn’t hold back. Not willing to admit defeat just yet, he turned back to the monito, right hand palming the mouse again. “Sure.”

The page jumped, bypassing the administrative summary from SDN and loading the details from the Circle K crash; a wall of poorly formatted incident reports from both the LAPD and SDN.

Robert leaned in, blue light washing over him as he skipped the witness statements and went straight to the confirmed timeline. 

02:14: Target awakens in debris field. Highly disoriented. 

02:18: First responders engage. Target reacts violently to physical restraint. 

02:19: Target breaks perimeter line. Demonstrates high-tier martial proficiency.

02:20: Target ceases offensive action upon civilian vehicle entering intersection. Alters trajectory to intercept incoming crossfire away from non-combatants.

02:22: Target aborts kinetic strike on Officer Davis when civilian bystander enters peripheral line of sight. 

02:23: Target strikes ground, shattering street.

02:24: Absorbs impact from secondary responder.

02:25: Target strikes Officer Montoya in the face. Non-fatal injury. 

Robert leaned in, the rolling chair squeaking as his eyes locked onto the most important lines there. He stopped. Restraint shown in a situation like this…

Even concussed and clearly out of it and peppered with bullets, the kid was still running at least the most basic tactics. He stopped hitting the cops because civilians wandered into the blast radius. He pulled a punch that should have turned a normal officer to gravy.

“He stopped mid-combat.” Robert tapped a finger against the edge of the desk. “Twice. And that’s not even getting into how he kept from killing officers.” He looked over his shoulder at Chase, the old man half-squinting back at him. “That’s good, right?”

Chase reached into the bag, pulling out another single chip. “If you ignore the whole ‘punched a fuel tank’ part, sure. Very heroic with the property damage.”

“Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.” Robert turned back to the screen. 

“Idiot leveled almost half a block, Robbie.”

Robbie dragged the scroll bar one last time, dropping to the bottom of the SDN report where a block of tiny text sat italicized under the final damage assessment. 

Bio-energy matrix exhibits signs of exhaustion. Target post-engagement estimated at approximately 4% of inferred baseline. Dimensional transit resulted in massive bio-energy depletion.

Robert frowned, the muscles in his neck going tight as he read that line again.

Approximately 4% of inferred baseline.

Four percent.

The kid woke up from a dimensional drop, completely disoriented, and proceeded to level a commercial structure and hospitalize a tactical police squad on a dead battery before surviving a face-first fuel tank explosion.

At four percent.

“So he used to be stronger.” Robert muttered the words as he read the line again, cursor blinking steadily next to the single digit. “A lot stronger.”

Chase scoffed a spray of salt and vinegar crumbs onto the desk. “Yeah, no shit, Mecha-Sherlock.” The old man pushed off the desk, yellow sweater snagging briefly on the corner of the desk before he pulled it free. “You crack that code all by yourself?”

The cursor clicked the red ‘X’ in the corner of the window, the scarred face of Lucius Connor Bright vanishing to leave nothing but the blank blue expanse of the SDN background.

Robert Robertson III pushed off the desk, the chair rolling backward a few inches.

“He just needs a good first day.”