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Sue had barely spoke on the way home. Reed's mouth was moving a million miles an hour speaking about Elder and his Moloids. Theorising and conceptualising how he'd managed to create life and where these ancient creatures had came from. Sue's mind was elsewhere. The thought of all of this being beneath their feet for so long frightened her, why would any new sentient race be content living underneath the earth? The question of if they'd ever breach the surface felt more like 'when' would they breach the surface to her. Or worse yet, when Lord and his troops would find them. She stared out the window of the bus as it rumbled through New York toward their safehouse, the skyline was blurred and grey under the cloud-choked sky. Her reflection in the glass looked pale and drawn. She barely recognized herself.
Reed continued rambling as they opened the door to the Baxter Annex and peeled off their field gear. "-the bioluminescent mycelium isn't just for light, it's a neural mesh. He's networked it. That's why the walls felt like they were humming, Sue. It's living architecture - it's got to be. Symbiotic, probably semi-sentient. Elder might not have just bioengineered those creatures - he might've shaped them! Do you realise what this means?"
Sue slumped down onto the couch, barely looking at him. Herbie Jr. floated out of his charging dock and glided over to her like a curious pet. She rested her hand on the white robot's smooth dome, absent-mindedly stroking it as if he were a cat. Reed hovered nearby.
"Sue, are you listening to me?"
She glanced up at him. "Yeah, Reed, I'm listening."
Reed had seen this face a few times. The last major time was when Johnny had left them. Sue was the smartest woman Reed had ever met, but she had a terrible poker face. She wore her heart on her sleeve, you could almost always tell what emotion she was feeling by the slightest glance at her face.
Reed stopped his train of thought. Thinking for a moment before perching himself on the arm of the sofa. "Okay, what is it? You're clearly upset. Just say it."
Sue didn't answer at first. She looked back out the window with her chin resting on her hand, the clouds were hanging like smoke over the city. "I don't trust him."
Reed blinked. "Who? Elder?"
"Yes. Elder." She spoke with a sigh. "That man isn't a victim. He didn't just fall into the Earth and become some tragic figure surrounded by misunderstood mole-children. He's playing you, Reed."
"Playing me?" Reed echoed, baffled. "Sue, he's deformed. He's half-blind. He's living underground surrounded by the last remnants of some extinct civilization he alone brought back to life!"
"Yeah. That he engineered into servitude."
Reed opened his mouth to argue but Sue cut him off.
"Did you even look at them? Those Moloids aren't a new species, Reed. He admitted it! They could have been people once. Maybe not human, but maybe close. And now they're just...feral husks. Do you really think they just chose to follow him? How do you explain Belo? Why is he the only one we saw that could speak?"
Reed frowned. "There's no evidence he enslaved them. They're imprinted - possibly epigenetically. We don't know their baseline. They could be-"
Sue raised her voice, emphatically standing up from the couch and moving to the other side of the room from Reed. "Don't do that! Don't sterilize it with scientific jargon. We both saw the way they flinched when he raised his voice - the way they huddled. That wasn't imprinting, Reed. That was fear."
Reed's brow furrowed, but he didn't reply. Herbie Jr. rotated in midair, sensors dimming, as if trying to avoid the tension.
Sue stepped forward, lowering her voice but keeping a firm tone. "You want to know the real reason I don't trust him? It's not just the Moloids. It's because I remember who he was at the Think Tank."
Reed's eyes narrowed slightly. "Sue-"
"No, let me finish!" She snapped. "He used to sit in judgment of every girl who walked through those doors. All the boys? You, Victor, even that creep Wittman! He nurtured you, encouraged you, gave you freedom. But the girls? Me, Gloria, Sharon, Aiko - we had to beg for scraps of approval. He second-guessed every proposal we made. He rolled his eyes when I corrected him. You ever wonder why the best I ever got from him was b B+? I remember he once said to Gloria that women 'lacked the true competitive drive' to change the world!"
Reed took a breath, barely opening his mouth to speak. "I never heard him say that."
"Of course you didn't!" she said, incredulous. "Because you were the golden boy. You were everything he wanted to mold. You're still defending him, Reed. Even now. You're making excuses for a man who built an empire underground and turned sentient life into furniture!"
Reed ran a hand through his hair, pacing. "Maybe he was biased. Maybe he is a bastard. But he also cracked a code that could change biology itself! Do you understand what that means? Sentient architecture. Regenerative infrastructure. We could cure disease, feed the planet-"
"Oh my god, listen to yourself!" Sue snapped. "You sound just like him. And what if he uses this technology for evil? What if he buddies up with Osborn and Lord and the rest? Helps them bio-engineer the X-Gene out of mutants?"
Reed stopped cold. He had no reply.
"You're so obsessed with what it means that you won't look at how he did it. What he sacrificed. Who he hurt. Do you ever think about the cost of these ideas, Reed? Or do you just catalogue the upside and call it progress?"
His voice sharpened. "That's not fair."
"No? How do I know every time we find someone like Elder you won't want to understand them first before we stop them? How are we going to fight back against Lord if you're so focused on figuring out what makes monsters tick instead of stopping them from hurting people?"
"Because understanding is the first step to-"
"To repeating their mistakes. You're a step away from becoming like them with that mindset!"
"What makes you think I want to fight Lord in the first place? What's wrong with what we've been doing? Newsflash Sue the Fantastic Four are done - were done years ago! Even before Ben and Johnny left it was done! We are not heroes and we never were!"
Sue gasped at the mention of her brothers name. She felt tears welling up in the corner of her eyes. "Yeah well Newsflash brainiac-" She parroted back with venom in her voice. She grabbed her phone and unlocked it, tapping away before turning the screen displaying emerging reports of their infiltration to the Baxter Building towards him. "-We might not have a choice! You think they don't have footage of our face? What are we gonna do hide somewhere else? Let everyone around us die while we sit underground with the Moloids?"
Reed stood silent. His hands were clenched. For once, his mind didn't have an instant answer. He could see the pain across his partners face. It hurt him to see her so upset, but he couldn't let this go, whether it be pride or stubborness he felt like this was one argument he couldn't resolve so quickly.
"I thought you'd changed." Sue said quietly. "But maybe some part of you is still that kid trying to impress monsters like Elder."
That was the one that landed. Reed's face dropped, he had pure anger displayed across his features and yet he remained silent. He moved toward the door, grabbing the data tablet off the charging dock, ignoring Herbie's soft chirp of protest.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm going to find whoever's been tracking Elder. If there's another player in this, we need to know who." He said in monotone.
"Reed-"
He didn't turn around to answer her. "I'll be back when I have something useful."
The door hissed open. And then Reed was gone, leaving Sue standing alone in the low hum of the Baxter Annex, Herbie Jr. whirring softly beside her as she began to cry.
Reed felt the cold night air bite his face. He was following the data tablet like a blood hound, it kept his mind off of the argument with Sue. Somewhere in his heart he felt, or perhaps knew he could be wrong about Elder. That Sue was right. But something bigger was stopping him from admitting it.
Every few blocks, Reed stopped to recalibrate the device. He rerouted through a low-level satellite relay, bypassed two security nodes without thinking. The deeper he followed the signal, the more anomalous it became. At first, he'd assumed it was a leak, something primitive in Elder's jerry-rigged architecture made up of salvaged tech. But now he was sure this was something deeper, the source of all of this was being protected.
He stepped into a shadowed alley off Canal Street and knelt down tapping into his device. For every security measure he'd bypass another would pop up. It was getting quicker and quicker, loading up more than he could handle alone. God damn did he choose the worst time to argue with Sue.
Suddenly the screen went blank. For a moment he thought his tablet had been overloaded. He hit the side of it with his palm hoping to jig it back into life. Suddenly the console opened on the screen. A line of code scrolled across the interface - one he hadn't written.
[Welcome, Dr. Richards. I estimated a 94.6% probability you'd follow.]
Reed's breath caught in his throat. He rushed to sever the connection but it was too late too late. The tablet screen went black once more. And then flickered as a new window opened. It was a map of him. Or more accurately, his movements since leaving the Baxter Annex.
Footprints traced every movement he'd made over the last hour. Time-stamped, even with the altitude tracked. It was like a running app he'd never asked for.
At the center of the map, a blinking point labeled only:
[YOU ARE HERE.]
Then it changed:
[YOU ARE LATE.]
Suddenly, the tablet chirped and rebooted. An address appeared on the map leading to the docks. Reed zoomed in with two fingers and rushed to the old Warehouse at the end of the pier.
He pushed open the rusted door to the warehouse a short while later to find it surprisingly empty, save for a glowing terminal at the end of the room. The whole place felt off, like he was about to spring an ambush. This was a necessary sacrifice. If the person on the other end of his tablet had been tracking him they'd know where the Baxter Annex was. This was no longer just about helping Elder, it was about protecting Sue.
He took a deep breath as he stepped further into the empty space, his eyes darting around the room as he slowly made his way through the darkness and to computer. As he approached he placed a hand on the old dentists chair sat in front of the monitor. He inspected it briefly, it had a tangle of wires hanging out the back and some sort of harness system around the arms.
"Don't sit." he muttered to himself. "Definitely don't sit." He glanced at the screen, a blinking cursor in the top right of the console. The person on the other end began to type.
[Hello, Dr Richards.]
Reed stood still. His own reflection stared back at him in the glass.
[You are not being watched. Not in the way you think.
You are being measured. Modeled. Replicated.
And, if possible, improved.]
Reed leaned forward over the desk. He instinctively moved to type on a keyboard, but found none available. He scanned the room again, looking for anything that could have been monitoring him. He ventured a try at speaking.
"Who are you?"
[Unimportant.
You are more machine than man, Reed. A soft machine. Even your grief follows geometry.
Let's test that.]
The monitor flickered again and two folders appeared side by side. One labeled: "/Personal/Archive/Shared_Memories/" and the other: "/Security/Protocols/Four_Scramble/"
Reed felt a surge of anxiety as his shoulders tensed. He recognized both of these filepaths instantly. 'Shared_Memories' was exactly what it sounded like. A private vault Sue had asked him to build. Hidden files from their years together. Photos, voice notes. Moments that had slipped through the cracks of grief and survival. And most importantly, the last recorded memories they had of Ben and Johnny.
'Four_Scramble', on the other hand, was the system they had built to keep them invisible. A location scrubber Sue had coded to hide their movements, decoy identities built into Lord's metahuman census, and a voice-cloaking keyed to distort their speech patterns across tapped comms. Everything they needed to operate under the radar and without too much hastle from Lord.
The cursor pulsed and then began to type.
[You may keep one.]
[The other is overwritten.]
[Not copied. Not moved. Not archived. Gone.]
Reed's mouth felt dry. "You can't-"
Another line:
[Can't I?]
The Shared_Memories folder opened itself and began opening and cosing various documents at random:
- sue_laugh.wav
- annex_first_night.mp4
- johnny_last_sighting.mp4
- graduation_photos.zip
- Ben_Argument.mp3
- storm_family_photos.zip
The cursor typed again.
[Keep the life that built you — or the life you hold onto now.]
Reed took a slow step back from the screen, his head racked with thoughts. "They're not separate." he muttered.
[They are now.]
[You can save your past.]
[Or you can protect her future.]
He froze in place.The wording was deliberate. Not his future, her future.
[You love her. Predictable. She makes you human.]
[But she is not invisible without this.]
Reed stood in silence. Shellshocked. His mind was scattered. For a few moments he stood staring at the text in front of him desperately wishing he could wake up from this nightmare.
The cursor blinked again.
[When you are ready to make your decision, please take a seat.]
Reed looked behind him at the dentists chair and took a deep breath, before sliding back into the chair and being locked in place as the metal clamps tightened around his wrists and ankles.
Sue sat on the floor beside the workbench with her knees pulled to her chest. Herbie Jr. hovered at her side, chirping quietly in a rhythm that almost felt comforting. She hadn't cried like that in a long time. Not since Ben walked out. Not since the moment Johnny told her she wasn't his sister anymore.
Now Reed was out there chasing ghosts again. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the console. She had half a mind to shut it all down, the scanners, the monitors, the data. Just turn it all off. Maybe Reed was right, they were scientists for gods sake not superheroes. Even with their powers they barely made it out against the security force back at the Baxter Building. And now Reed was out there, probably about to get himself killed without her there to protect him.
She rubbed her nose with her forearm. The time for feeling sorry for herself was over. Her partner might've been bullheaded, but he was still hers. It was time to track him down and help him, even if his plan was crazy. She rose to her feet and turned to the computer on the workstation, furiously tapping away at the keyboard as she began trying to track the tablet Reed had taken.
She was having an unusual amount of trouble, like something was blocking her. She was faster though, especially with Herbie by her side helping with the hack. Finally she managed to break through, tracking Reed to a warehouse at the docks. Her brow furrowed, what was he doing there?
She stared at the blinking dot on the screen. "Herbie." she spoke. "Ready for your first field mission?"
Herbie let out a happy chirp, spinning in place as Sue rose from her chair, wiping the remaining tears from her cheeks.
"No more crying. We're doing this my way now."