The Loop

August 17th

The time of Jaleel’s vision—the news program showing the aftermath of the attack on Grand Central—came and went and to no one’s surprise, nothing eventful happened.

Lincoln had been pestering us for details since we got back to Texas, and no matter how many times we went over the entire sequence of events that saw us briefly transported to New York to scare off one villain we didn't even know existed and find the one we were looking for dead, he wanted to hear it again. He believed we were intentionally leaving things out, keeping him in the dark.

I didn’t have much time or energy or patience to spare for him. For one thing, we only had another half hour before Kayla would be opening a portal between Shannon’s house and a meeting point in New York, and for another, I hadn’t slept more than a couple hours the night before.

As Lincoln asked again—looking at Harper this time—for us to go over what had happened and explain what we were doing next, I lost my patience.

“Enough,” I said. “You’ll meet them soon enough. You can ask them all this shit yourself.”

Truth be told, I couldn’t see why he was coming at all. His power worked best in the background, in a strictly supporting capacity. The same could be said for Jaleel, but I could understand his reason for coming. For him, this was personal; the man we were now after had killed his uncle.

And the others? I guess at some point if you wanted to call yourself a superhero team—which I was still very unsure we did—you had to do things as a team.

Lincoln stared at me, and even through his mask I thought I could see a look somewhere between hurt and enraged on his face. He was hiding his thoughts from me—he'd gotten very good at that—but I knew him well enough to know what he was thinking.

At least we had costumes now. It had been stupid to go yesterday with nothing covering our faces. On their end, at least the two detectives had had primitive face coverings. I knew their identities, anyway; I remembered them from before—from a timeline where I’d eventually worked with them enough and gained enough mutual respect that we’d all done away with the trappings of secret identities around one another. But it hardly seemed fair to use knowledge gained in that way to shortcut getting past a person’s boundaries.

And we’d all been using our real names yesterday. It was idiotic, absurd even, but it was too late to take any of it back. All we could do now was don our laughable costumes and use our hastily thought up pseudonyms and insist that the New York team played along. At least we didn’t have to reveal ourselves to anyone to whom we hadn’t already done so. And the New York guys had only met three of us—four if you counted Lincoln on the phone call.

“Ease up, Adam,” said Christine. The whole team was staring at me with what I could only assume were looks of shock at my outburst. I couldn’t be absolutely certain because I couldn’t see any of their faces. I could, however, know that they felt shocked because it was clear in their minds. Outside of Lincoln, none of them had even started trying to learn how to conceal their thoughts.

I didn’t think I’d spoken out of turn. I didn’t think that I was the only one getting annoyed with Lincoln. But then, I was sleep deprived and going along with a plan I wasn’t fully sold on. I was on edge and I knew it, so maybe I couldn't fully trust myself.

And that wasn't all. I tried to put it out of my mind, but underneath my conscious thoughts, somewhere deep where I wasn't sure whether the words in my brain were mine or someone else's, there lurked a presence, an impulse, urging me toward conflict.

Lincoln is dangerous, it said. You're right to keep him at a distance.

I pushed those thoughts away.

“… Sorry, Linc,” I said, trying to make my voice sound more sincere than I felt.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, doing the same.

I looked him up and down and tried hard not to laugh, my mood brightening at the absurd image before me. Our costumes were a labor of love that we’d been working on for all of two days—since the meeting in Shannon's kitchen where Jaleel had revealed his vision and I'd told them to get in touch with the New York team—and it showed.

Lincoln wore a black, tight-fitting bodysuit that covered everything, including his head, with neon green shorts helping to maintain some degree of modesty. He had a tracery of bright green lines running all over his body, evoking the image of a circuit board. For such short notice, and considering we’d all had a lot of more important things on our mind, it wasn’t that bad. But still …

“And by the way, I think we should start addressing each other with our Hype names now so we’re less likely to slip up when we’re around other people,” he said.

“Of course,” I replied. “That’s a good suggestion, Cyberspace.” His name, too, felt laughable. But I had to admit, all of our names were stupid. I couldn’t yet remember what all the members of the team had been called in my last life, and since Shannon hadn’t lived at all, and Lincoln had been a villain off doing his own thing, it felt only right that we should all pick new names this time around.

Thank you, Ganzfield,” he said. He’d actually chosen the name for me, after touching a computer and doing some quick reading about the history of ESP research. It had seemed too-quickly chosen and silly at first, but it was starting to grow on me. I liked the fact that most people wouldn’t get it. It was certainly less on-the-nose than ‘Poltergeist’. I remembered being called that last time, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember why or how I’d come up with the name.

My own costume consisted of another black bodysuit—they were cheap and widely available at party supply stores, even in rural Texas—but with a logo of a stylized, cartoon brain with arrows pointing away from it in eight directions painted in bright red on the chest and back. I wore black sweatpants over the bodysuit, but nothing on the top half, and I was constantly self-conscious about how skinny-fat I looked in the skintight outfit. On my head I wore a cowl that obscured the top half of my face, and a neck warmer pulled up over my mouth on the bottom half. Both had the same logo as my chest painted on them.

Shannon had done the logo painting on the costumes after spending a few short hours becoming a design and painting aficionado. Her own costume stood out compared to the rest of ours; she wore a white Dobok, complete with black belt, and a fencer’s mask on her face, with a sabre held at her side. She’d leveraged her power to become an expert fencer over the last couple weeks, and with the fact that even before she got her powers she had been a black belt in Taekwondo, and with the gymnastics skills she’d acquired, she was a formidable fighter.

The fact that she had also acquired a lot of non-combat oriented skills using her power wasn’t highlighted anywhere on her costume, and that was just as well. Costumes that hinted at our powers without revealing too much about them to any would-be opponents seemed like the way to go.

She stood in a corner of her living room, nervously running through drills combining her current three main physical skill sets, first thrusting forward with her sabre, then falling into a backward cartwheel, then sweeping out with one leg extended in something that was halfway between a pirouette and a kick. It was graceful and beautiful and I would not have wanted to be on the other end of it when it wasn’t just practice.

“How much longer do we have to wait?” she asked.

Try as I did to avoid skimming into my friends’ thoughts unless necessary, I couldn’t help picking up information about their moods. Shannon was, at present, the most nervous one of us. And that was too be expected; the rest of us had already faced down a super-powered criminal together; Shannon had been incapacitated for that. This was her first real rodeo.

I checked my watch, but Jaleel beat me to the punch. “Four minutes,” he said.

His costume was simpler than ours, and I suppose that reflected the fact that he wasn’t a front line fighter. If things were going well, he wouldn’t be out and about fighting bad guys in costume, so his outfit didn’t need to have as much thought put into it. He wore a black sweater with the hood up, the string through it cinched tight to obscure most of his face. His eyes were covered by round-framed glasses with clock hands painted on the lenses. On his chest, Shannon had painted a logo that looked like a pair of binoculars with their lenses replaced by the faces of a clock as well.

“Roger that, Foresight,” said Shannon, with a shaky laugh that did nothing to ease her tension.

“Well, you know, Virtuosa, time is kind of my thing, so …” he trailed off, grinning at his own silly joke. I grinned too.

Although Shannon—Virutosa—was the most anxious person present, that isn’t to say that the rest of us weren’t anxious as well, to varying degrees. And now that I had noticed her nervous tic, I started to notice we were all doing something similar.

Lincoln was absently tapping his phone one finger at a time, his eyes glowing softly for a moment with each contact.

Jaleel’s eyes too kept lighting up and then returning to normal. I couldn’t see what he could possibly gain from these brief uses of his power. Whatever moment in the future he kept looking at couldn’t possibly be changing between uses; we hadn’t done anything yet. But it obviously made him feel better.

Harper, the only one of us with no costume to speak of at all, was shifting her face and skin tone so rapidly that her features never settled into anything recognizably human. We had agreed that the need for an identity-obscuring costume or mask was a moot point for her; her power provided anonymity. When we were out and about on official Hype business, she would turn her face into a sort of amalgam of several celebrity’s faces. She wouldn’t look like any actual person. She wore a yellow tartan skirt with black tights, and a black blouse with an exposed belly. It was the type of outfit she wore regularly, and yet with her face changed, I wouldn’t have recognized her no matter what she had on.

“What do you guys think of this?” she asked, changing her face to that of a distinctive popular singer whose name I couldn’t think of.

“It’s very convincing, dear sister Mimic, but I don’t think it would be fair to her to lead people to believe that she’s a Hype by wearing her face around,” said Lincoln. “I think it’s best if you stick to someone who doesn’t really exist.”

Harper pouted. “But I always wanted to be her when I was a kid, and now that I can, you’re telling me I can’t.”

“Pretending to be a thing, however convincingly, doesn’t make you that thing,” said Christine, apparently missing the joke.

She was dressed in a bodysuit, like over half the team, but hers had lines of LED lights running over her limbs, chest, and back from her feet to her neck. She had the exposed wires of these light strings touching the index finger of her right hand, and she had figured out a way to change their color by pushing more or less voltage through them. Around her head was another string of lights, worn like a crown, and these could be pushed to such an intense brightness that they gave the impression of a halo, bright enough to obscure her features simply by making her difficult to look at. Nevertheless, the bottom half of her face was still covered by a face warmer.

Presently, she was shifting through the full spectrum of colors on her suit simply for practice, but we had worked out a sort of signal system using the colors to mean different things. If she turned them yellow, for instance, it meant that she was about to attack using electricity. Blue meant she would strike using kinetic energy. Red meant heat. The changes were intended as a warning to the rest of us, so we could steer clear of her depending on what she was about to do.

“Lighten up, Dynamo,” said Harper with a snicker.

Apparently unable to detect either humor or sarcasm, Christine looked like she was about to shoot an angry retort Harper’s way when Jaleel interrupted: “Assuming Kayla’s as good with time as I am, she should be opening a portal in about ten seconds.”

We all looked out the window into the backyard expectantly, and, right on cue, a rectangular distortion in space appeared without warning or preamble right in the middle of the lawn.

“I guess that’s our cue then,” I said. “Everyone ready? Cyberspace? Foresight? Virtuosa? Mimic? Dynamo?” I forced myself to say all the silly names without laughing. I realized that they wouldn’t seem silly for long before they became normal. Everything you do feels normal eventually if you force yourself to keep doing it.

They all nodded their assent.

“And you, Ganzfield?” Shannon spoke quietly, and I could feel in her voice and her mind a sliver of hope that I would say ‘no’, that I would turn the whole thing around and decide against it. That I'd give her an out.

I nodded. “I’m good. Let’s go.”

We marched, single file, out Shannon’s back door, and I shut it behind us with my power, deciding that it looked more badass if none of us turned around or looked back. Shannon was at the front of the group and she had a moment—only a moment—of hesitation at the edge of the portal before stepping through. The rest of us followed.

And then we were on the other side.