Welcome to Utopia Prologue Two: Runaway Superhero (Patreon)

22nd District Police Station
Chicago, Illinois
Saturday, December 17, 2011
9:28 PM Central Daylight Time

Vanessa Power shifted her legs uncomfortably. While there should've been room to spare inside the power armor—it had recently been upgraded to take her next growth spurt into account—she was wearing heavy winter clothing under it instead of the usual light bodysuit. This was cramping her movements, making it hard to bend her arms and legs with any sort of ease. Fortunately for her synthetic proprioception, the neural-induction receptors placed throughout the suit needed little in the way of skin contact—her uncovered head and neck, within her helmet, were perfectly adequate for this—to function properly.

She tried to focus on that, so she didn't have to think about anything else. About everything else. About the fact that her entire universe had just exploded around her, and nothing would ever be good or nice again.

A mental impulse activated the suit's neuro-induction display for the dozenth time, projecting information on to her mind's eye.

Primary Suit Systems: nominal.
Secondary Suit Systems: nominal.
Power Reserves: 97%
Operational Duration in Standby Mode: 103 hours.

She realized that the female police sergeant sitting with her (the woman's nametag read FOSTER) had said something. With an effort, she assumed a polite expression for the woman's sake. "I'm sorry, I missed that."

Sergeant Foster had faded blonde hair and a careworn expression. She was clearly trying to be motherly, but her attempts were falling woefully short. It was quite apparent that even if she'd been taught how to handle distraught sixteen-year-old girls, the fact that Vanessa was wearing power armor potentially capable of leveling the building was a complication she hadn't been trained to deal with. Still, she was making the effort.

"I said, would you like a cup of tea?" Foster spread her hands and gestured toward the kitchenette counter. "We have cookies. Or I could fetch you another soda from the machine."

"What I want is to talk to someone in charge who can put me through to the Mayor's office so I can tell him exactly why he should have my father arrested," Vanessa said forcefully. "What's taking so much time?"

"I'm not entirely certain but I'm sure they're working on it," Sergeant Foster said soothingly. "Now, these are very serious allegations you've made—"

"They're not allegations!" snapped Vanessa. "I was there! It happened!" She clenched her fists. A message popped up in her NID.

Haptic Trigger detected. Deploy Micro-Missiles? Y/N

Hastily, she declined. Fortunately, the system was weighted toward not deploying, so if she got a cramp at the wrong moment, she wouldn't accidentally blow a hole in the wall. With elaborate care, she relaxed her hands.

"Miss Power, I'm afraid they are allegations until independent proof is gathered." Sergeant Foster was blissfully unaware of the weapons going back into standby mode, encased in the metal surrounding Vanessa's forearms.

Vanessa had had enough. She activated another system via the NID.

Sensory Systems deployed.
Directional Audio Gathering System: Active.
Audio Filtering: Active.
Speech to Text or Live Audio? S/L
Display Pseudo-Sonar Imagery of Targets? Y/N

Selections made, she settled down to see what she could find out. Green crosshairs overlaid themselves onto her vision. As she turned her head, doing her best to appear to be looking idly around the room, humanoid shapes moved back and forth in her field of view. She settled the targeting sights on one shape after another, bringing forth snatches of conversation.

"—randa rights do not include the right to order a pizza—"

"—uck's sake, did you just shit yoursel—"

"—orry honey, we're balls to the wall here—"

"—tuation with Vanessa Power? I've just had—"

She stopped and put the crosshairs back on the person who had just been speaking.

"—er mother, who pinned my ears back hard. She's told me that until she has her kid back in her care, she's holding everyone in the building personally responsible for her welfare."

There was a mumble from the phone the guy was holding. Vanessa couldn't focus the audio gathering closely enough to decipher it.

"Yeah," said the police officer. "She said she's coming right over and she'll clear this whole thing up. Team Power saved my life one time. Do I think the old man really molested his kid? Hell if I know. The sooner the Mayor's office takes this mess ov—"

Vanessa had heard enough. She'd told them that she wanted to talk to the Mayor. But they'd contacted her parents instead. They're coming here. To take me home again. The fear that clenched in her gut then boiled into anger. I'm never going back.

Abruptly, she stood up. A mental command flipped her visor down and locked it into place. Sergeant Foster rose as well, startled but clearly trying not to show it. "Miss Power, what's the matter?"

"The matter," said Vanessa bitterly, "is that someone called my parents. I trusted you guys not to go behind my back."

"Even if they come in, you don't have to go with them if you don't want to." Sergeant Foster spoke soothingly. "We can protect you."

Vanessa laughed harshly in her face. "They are Adam and Tesseract Power. You couldn't stop them from doing shit if they weren't inclined to let you." Accessing the neuro-induction display, she gave the order for the micro-missile launcher to briefly deploy. Metal folded away and the sleek little projectiles emerged from hiding. "See that? That's nothing to what my father has on his suit."

Letting the launcher stow itself again and ignoring the stunned look on Foster's face, she swung her head toward the front of the building. The quasi-sonar image showed blurry movements, and she centered the crosshairs on two images that were moving in her general direction.

"—ere is she? I want to see her. I want to make sure she's okay."

Vanessa froze. That was her mother's voice.

She's here. In the building. If she wants to make me go back with her, there's nothing I can do, even in this suit, to stop her. The fact that she was in the middle of a fully staffed police station didn't even cross her mind as a factor, except as potential collateral damage.

Her course of action was now clear. There was a fire evacuation map on the wall, showing the quickest way out of the building. She headed for the door to the break room and pulled it open. Behind her, Foster said something, but Vanessa had long since ceased paying attention to her.

"Vanessa?"

Slowly, she turned. Her mother stood there, at the other end of the corridor. Tesseract Power, like Vanessa, was a redhead; she displayed the Team Power uniform, composed of vibrant blues and golds, with pride. Under the uniform, Vanessa knew, her mother wore an advanced PowerTech exoskeleton.

PowerTech Industries, her father's company, sold a lightweight mobility frame on the civilian market. These incorporated an extremely basic version of the neural induction system within her own suit, allowing many who would normally be dependent on wheelchairs or walkers to stand, walk, run and even play sport without hindrance. The one her mother wore was as far beyond those as the newest generation space shuttle (in which her father had also had a hand) was ahead of a World War One biplane. Even without it, sparring with her was an exercise in 'name that bruise'. With the speed and strength it gave her, any serious fight was over before it began.

Vanessa straightened her arm toward her mother, palm forward. "Stay back, Mom," she warned. This activated a different haptic trigger, which she acknowledged; a rising whine filled the air between them as the under-mounted laser charged. Crosshairs flared in her NID, bright red and pulsing to warn her that she was going weapons-live. She had no illusions about her ability (or her resolve) to actually hit her mother, but the threat was there.

"It's going to be all right, Vanessa." Tesseract had stopped, at least. "We can talk about what you believe happened—"

"I know what happened!" shouted Vanessa. "He was on top of me! He tried to pull my clothes off! I don't even want to think about it! But it happened!"

"I know you believe that something happened …" Tesseract took a step forward as she tried again.

"Stay back!" Jerking her arm downward, Vanessa fired the laser at low power. The carpet just in front of her mother's foot blackened and smoked. Tesseract's forward movement stopped.

"It's more than what I believe." Vanessa breathed deeply, trying to maintain control of both herself and the situation. "Look at the security footage. You're good at investigating. Investigate. The day I see in the news you've had him arrested and charged is the day I come back. And one more thing."

"I'm listening." Tesseract Power's eyes were measuring the distance between them. Vanessa knew she was calculating the odds of closing the range fast enough to knock Vanessa's arm aside before the laser could fire again. She could probably do it, too.

"Don't leave Buddy alone with him." Vanessa stared at her mother, willing the older woman to understand. "Don't let that monster hurt my brother." There was no way Vanessa could get back to the house and spirit Buddy away without her parents intervening—even if she could convince him to come along—so this was the only other option she could see to keep her nine-year-old brother safe.

Tesseract's eyes went flinty. "Nobody is going to hurt your brother."

That, at least, Vanessa could believe. Her mother did 'momma bear' better than anyone she knew. The trouble was, she had a massive blind spot where it came to her husband; Vanessa's father.

Vanessa had heard the story a thousand times. Before her parents had married, before the Challenger Act was even finalized, Tesseract had been faced with one of the worst threats a superhero could encounter; an adversary who knew her secret identity and was willing to expose it. But then Adam Power had stepped up and neutralized the threat in one bold, unprecedented move. His sacrifice had led to the establishment of Team Power and was the reason why Tesseract Power would never believe such a thing of her husband. And before this day, Vanessa would never have believed it either.

But she'd come out of the bathroom in her flannel pajamas after brushing her teeth, to see her father just turning away from the armor stored on its rack in the corner of her bedroom. Suspecting nothing, she had sat down on her bed and picked up her brush from the dresser to run through her shower-damp hair. She'd managed exactly one brush-stroke before he was on top of her, groping her through her pajamas and trying to kiss her.

She'd fought him off and he'd fled her room. It had happened. She didn't care what her mother said. She wasn't safe in the same house as him.

I'm never going back.

Accessing her NID, she pulled up yet another menu.

Flight Systems activated.
Warning: Obstacles in close quarters.
Activate Collision Avoidance Systems? Y/N

Her suit thrusters flared to life, and she launched herself down the corridor away from her mother. An office door was directly ahead; she clenched her fist in her right gauntlet once, twice, three times. That was the signal for "I don't have time to mess around with menu commands". The launcher deployed itself again and a micro-missile scorched off the rails before she had time to second-guess herself.

She'd put the crosshairs on the door handle; one-tenth of a second later, the missile blew it clean out of the door. Her suit hit the wooden barrier, smashing it half off its hinges, then she continued across the office and out through the window. Glass shattered, and then she was into the open air.

It was cold out, she knew, but her suit could handle it. What it couldn't handle was the imposing suit of power armor standing on a rooftop across the way. She knew that suit almost as well as she knew her own. That's Dad's armor. Even thinking his name made the bile rise in her throat.

She kicked her suit into high gear, pulling up and over the police station in a climbing turn. Behind her, she heard his thrusters roar into action. Her suit was lighter and more agile; she could keep ahead of him in the short term. But he could outlast her, or disable her suit with an EMP strike, or blow her out of the sky if he wanted to. She didn't think he'd shoot her down, but she hadn't thought he'd sexually assault her, either. If she was going to get away, she had to do something now.

Her supply of flares and chaff was limited but she needed to drop out of sight, so she blew through them all in seconds. Then she played her trump card.

Activating Stealth Mode.
Warning: Prolonged use of Stealth Mode will result in higher than normal drain on power reserves. Do you understand this warning? Y/N
Do you wish to leave a frequency window open for radio use? Y/N
Do you wish to leave a frequency window open for tracking beacon use? Y/N
Operational Duration using Stealth Mode during flight: 12 hours 14 minutes.

A skin-level force field mapped over every part of her armor, then flickered as it went into active camouflage mode. Her heat emissions were similarly disrupted; she wasn't invisible, but it was the closest she was going to get. At the same time, the sound of her thrusters went from a dull roar to a faint whisper. This had the downside of a somewhat higher power draw, but not even the best PowerTech sensory systems could pick her out from the background noise now. Or so she hoped.

As she straightened into level flight, her father burst through the cloud of fluttering foil and burning magnesium, then came to a hover. "Vanessa?" he called out. "Vanessa? Come back, baby!"

Gritting her teeth, she rounded a building, so she didn't have to hear his voice anymore. Then another, and another. Slowly, she made her way west. Out of the city.

I'm never going back.

Flying just fast enough to use the suit as a lifting body, she flew onward, following the maglev rail. Three times, she was nearly picked up on radar by PowerTech drones flying a search pattern. The third time, she realized what she was doing wrong; the gleaming rail made a nice bright landmark, for both searcher and refugee. Angling northward, she flew until it was out of sight, then turned west again.

Extending the suit's stub-wings made for slower going, but it let her stretch the power reserves. Normally, she could've flown across the country and back more than once on a full charge, but she didn't dare drop out of stealth mode. As a result, the suit was chewing power like a frat party consumed beer and pizza. It didn't help that she kept feeling the impulse to turn south again and she couldn't understand why. It wasn't as though she'd be any safer from her father, and right now she needed to stay away from the maglev rail.

As the darkened landscape rolled by beneath her, she couldn't help going back over what had happened in a vain attempt to make sense of events. She hadn't been asleep or dreaming; every detail was razor-sharp in her mind. There was no doubt that the man who had attempted to force himself on her was her father, Adam Power. Worse, her mother had not immediately jumped to her defense, but had instead questioned her version of events. Now, she had no idea who she could trust. I am never, ever going back.

Two hours into the flight, her power reserves were still in the high seventies. Her original goal had been Seattle, but now she was reconsidering. If she started a gentle curve around to the south, at her current rate of power consumption she should be able to make Los Angeles easily.

Her internal debate over the matter was rudely interrupted when every icon available to her neuro-induction display activated at once, flashing more danger signals within the virtual image-space than a five-alarm fire. Audible warning buzzers within the helmet blared in counterpoint to the urgent messages popping up in her NID.

Warning: Stealth Mode offline.
Warning: Fuel Cells venting. Power Reserves dropping.
Warning: Secondary Suit Systems offline.

What the hell? What's going on here? She triggered menus as fast as she could, trying to force a suit restart and get past whatever glitch the operating system had encountered.

Warning: Suit Restart failed.
Warning: Power Reserves at 59%.
Warning: Primary Suit Systems failing.

Around her, the suit jolted, the thrusters surging and then stuttering in and out. She flicked through the few remaining menus, cutting non-essential systems out of the loop and trying to reverse whatever the hell was causing her fuel cells to vent their contents to the night air. Fortunately, the suit also incorporated high-density batteries; while these didn't have anywhere near the storage capacity of the fuel cells, they couldn't be accidentally discharged either.

Warning: Power Reserves at 37%.
Warning: Flight Systems offline.

Crap, crap, crap. Adrenaline flooded through her as the thrusters died for good. She pulled up a specific menu and activated the emergency auto-landing option, cursing herself for not doing this earlier. The auto-landing function was hard-wired into the suit's capabilities and involved air brakes, a landing chute, and the ability to draw on all power reserves, no matter how limited. This was where the batteries would come into their own.

Warning: Power Reserves at 13%.
Warning: Battery Pack ejected.
Warning: Emergency Auto-Landing Sequence disabled.

The air brakes, which had begun to extend, retracted again. With a bang of explosive bolts, the landing chute detached from its niche behind her shoulders without ever deploying properly. And with it went the battery pack, and her last chance for a simple, safe landing.

What the hell? That shouldn't even be possible. None of this should be possible.

Warning: Emergency Tracking Beacon disabled.
Warning: Power Reser&*#@:;…

As the power died, the warning buzzers cut out, along with the NID itself, leaving a profound sense of emptiness in her head. Gone was the running analysis on the suit's failing (now failed) systems. Also gone, the neuro-induced synthetic proprioception that had allowed her to operate the suit as an extension of her own body and experience the airflow over the suit's exterior. All that was left was her, the silent suit, and the whistling wind audible through the helmet's insulation.

Of that, the only things keeping her airborne and alive right then were the suit's stub-wings. Had they been retracted, as they normally were, she would've had about ten seconds before the power armor smashed into the rock-hard midwinter soil at several hundred miles per hour. The suit's padding was augmented by her winter clothing, but no amount of cushioning was going to protect her from being pulped against the inside of the armor under that kind of impact.

The stub-wings weren't so sophisticated as to contain dedicated control surfaces; their function was more to reduce energy expenditure by improving the overall aerodynamics of the suit. Fortunately, the suit had one last built-in fail-safe, in that the joints and articulation remained flexible in the event of power loss. This was actually a common precaution for anyone using 'fully invested' power armor, where the user's limbs extended into the suit's arms and legs. The alternative was to risk being locked into place like a store dummy in the event of a power failure.

This meant that in a pinch it was possible to use the suit's posture to change the angle of the stub-wings and thus the direction of travel. As the suit's trajectory began to curve downward into a dive, she arched her body. This angled the stub-wings upward and pulled her descent back into level flight for the moment, with the inevitable trade-off that she lost airspeed. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it would keep her alive for another minute, so she took it.

Up ahead, starlight shimmered off the frozen ground; stub-wings or no, she would die when she hit it. She was just traveling too damn fast, and the suit's air brakes were out of commission, so the inevitable crash-landing would require a miracle to survive. But then she saw the white-edged black ribbon and she knew she'd found her miracle. An ice-covered river running from north to south, it offered a single, sole chance of landing safely. It would take everything she had to pull it off, but she was all out of better options.

Tilting downward, she put everything she had into flying the dead suit as precisely as she could. Pulling a deliberate descent raised the airspeed perilously high, but she couldn't help that. She stretched her arms wide, doing her best to replace the non-functioning air brakes. This was still going to hurt.

The river loomed closer as she skimmed over the frozen terrain. She lost as much height as she dared, her heart in her mouth. With the suit systems down, the collision-avoidance radar was nothing but ballast; one power line in the wrong place and she would be toast, in more ways than one.

In level flight with no thrusters, her arms held out with all her strength against the freezing slipstream, she felt herself losing airspeed. Up ahead, beyond the river, she saw headlights travelling from south to north. A remote, analytical part of her mind noted that the vehicle was traveling at a reasonable clip, which meant it was on a sealed road of some kind.

The riverbank whipped beneath her and she put all extraneous thoughts aside, bringing the second stage of her plan into action. Twisting her body as hard as she could, she put everything she had into banking the suit hard left to line up roughly along the river. As wide as it was—maybe a thousand feet, at this point—it was still far too narrow for her needs if traveling across it. Along it, however …

At this point, her lack of precise control bit her in the ass. As she dragged the right-hand stub-wing into the air, the suit stalled out and lost lift altogether. Out of control, she tumbled, flailing.

On the knife-edge of panic, she stilled her mind and followed the procedure that had been drummed into her. Tucking into a ball, she snapped out of it with her body aligned along the direction of travel. Immediately, she felt the lift once more as air flowed over the stub-wings. She was gliding again, but the mishap had cost precious altitude, and she was halfway across the river already.

More carefully, she angled around; by the time she was flying straight once more, there was less than five feet of air between herself and the dark ice beneath. And her airspeed was still higher than she was strictly comfortable with.

She didn't want to hit the ice any faster than absolutely necessary. Punching through and into the freezing water beneath would be as much of a death sentence as impacting the ground on either side of the river. Even if she made it out of the water, hypothermia would kill her before she got half a mile. Which was why she was coming in at the shallowest angle she could manage.

And then there was no more time. Even with the stub-wings, the suit's glide ratio was for crap. The suit hit the ice, leaving great cracks everywhere, and bounced. Inside the suit, Vanessa felt as though she'd just slammed into Mount Rushmore. She hit again, then skidded face-down across the ice. From the uneasy feeling, however, the ice wasn't all that thick. She could feel the crunching, crackling sensation of it subsiding as the heavy suit scored its path diagonally along the river.

And then the cracks spread ahead of the suit, and she saw water spraying up around the faceplate, freezing onto it in the night air. By her internal calculations, she was getting close to the other side of the river. This was a good thing, because the suit's forward momentum was almost spent; it was about to break through the ice for good and sink to the bottom.

There was a very specific posture that her father had trained her in, then told her never to assume unless she absolutely had to. Now, at the last moment, she assumed it; arms held so, legs held so, fists clenched, and index fingers making a trigger-squeezing motion. This activated the manual switches distributed throughout the suit, connecting internal storage batteries into a single circuit. Half a second later, explosive bolts blew the entire back of the suit off. Using a slightly different mechanism, the gloves and boots—and helmet—also came away from the suit. A giant punched her in the gut as an airbag inflated beneath her, blowing her clear of the sinking wreckage to spin crazily through the air.

She'd been trained in gymnastics from almost before she could walk, allowing her to get her bearings before she landed. Twisting in mid-flight, she got her feet underneath her, but it was still a rough landing. There was no way she was going to keep her footing, so she let herself go down, absorbing as much of the impact as she could. Hitting the ground with bone-jarring force, she rolled over and over, curled into a ball to protect her vital organs. When she finally came to a stop, she sat up and looked around. She was bruised and battered, and the helmet faceplate was cracked all the way across, but she was safely on dry ground; for a given definition of 'safe'.

Her heart still thundering in her chest, she scrambled to her feet and pulled her helmet off just in time to watch as the patch of dark water where her suit had vanished began to freeze over once more. That could've been me, if I hadn't hit the ice just right. Or if Dad had timed the sabotage a little earlier or later, I'd be wrapped around a hill or a tree right now. And nobody would ever know why. It was a sobering thought, in a night full of them.

It was cold, but that was only part of the reason she was shivering as she removed the dead boots and gauntlets and pulled the hood up over her head. The adrenaline still in her system was another part of it; the stark realization that she'd just survived a determined attempt to murder her with her own suit was the third part. Moving automatically, she stashed the remnants of the suit in the hollow of a dead tree. The fewer traces she left of her passing, the better.

Gotta keep moving. Shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her fleece-lined jacket, she turned and started trudging up the bank, her eventual destination the road she'd glimpsed earlier. The first order of business was to distance herself from where the suit had hit. The second, to be carried out at some later date, was to return with some method of salvaging her suit before anyone (including her father) found it.

She still had trouble wrapping her head around the idea that her father had deliberately sabotaged her suit. Had it been his way of ensuring that she'd never tell of what he'd tried to do to her? She had no doubt it was his actions that had caused the suit to crash; after all, he'd been fiddling with it just before she came out of the bathroom. The most chilling realization, biting deeper than the wind swirling around her, was that he'd done it before he knew how she would react to his advances.

He'd already decided that I needed to die, no matter what happened.

I don't want to believe it. But it happened, so I have to believe it.

I can't let this beat me. I can't let him win. I have to keep moving.

Reaching the road was easier than she'd expected. The wind was still bitterly cold, but she found she could handle it. Her breath blew away in long streamers as she turned, getting her bearings. To the south, the lights of a small city or large town glowed in the distance. Setting her hood more firmly on her head, she started out with a determined stride. This felt like the right way to go. There would be a bus terminal. Farther south would be a bigger city. Places like that always held opportunities for someone who was strong, smart and determined.

All her life, she'd been taught that she was someone special. That there was nothing she couldn't achieve, given the right tools. Which was a good thing because as of right then, she was on her own. There was absolutely nobody else in the world she could depend on.

I'm Vanessa Power. I got this.

- End of Prologue Two -

 Prologue Three