Giant Size Annual 1 epilogue - Circuit and Zeta

It was roughly 24 hours since they returned from the moon, and Emma informed the team to be ready to go soon. Angela faked sickness to get out of school early, but in reality she did feel sick. Well, not sick exactly, but some indefinable emotion had been in the pit of her stomach. She hardly slept a wink last night.

"But we WON!" The thought was a retort - a plea - to the other half of her internal argument with herself. She was on her way to Link's lab, to figure out what went wrong.

The entrance to the lab, under the junkyard in the middle of New Troy's industrial district, is unmarked and unobtrusive. But he told the team how to find it and provided an access code to use.

As she turns the corner and the door to the lab comes into view, she goes over all the events again. Leo's a great guy, but why did he react like that? She wants to be sure she has all the details in order. After a moment, she punches in the combination and pushes the door open.

Leo is talking to Pneuma in the workshop's meeting room when Angela appears. Leo whispers something to Pneuma, and she disappears through a door into the repair bay, leaving the two human heroes alone.

"What do you want here?" Leo's voice isn't cold or angry. It's tired, drained of energy. He hasn't slept by the look and the sound of him.

Thank God the junior team member thought, relieved that she did not receive the angry confrontation she expected. “Is this a bad time?” she asked sheepishly, immediately regretting the question.

"Every time's a bad time right now. Let's get this done." Leo sounds a bit grumpier. But he repeats the question: "what do you want?"

Her eyes searched the room for an ally - Bob or Niki - but found none. “I wanted to talk about last night. About Zeta.” She practiced this. Make sure to use personal pronouns.  “I think I understand why you were upset, and I wanted to...you know...make things right.” This is harder than I thought it would be. “I’m sorry I did what I did - I was just trying to help - to protect us.”

Leo sighs and lets himself sink into his office chair, gesturing to an empty chair across the table. "You think you know why I'm upset. Let's start with that. Why am I upset?"

On the spot. “I didn’t know who Zeta was. I thought he was just some badguy, ya know? A toaster. I didn't realize there was a connection; when I was in him, those memories were suppressed, if that’s the right word. He’d replaced a lot of that stuff with ” She pauses, finding the right word, “rage? In any case, I didn't delve too deeply into his positronic resonation centers much, I was focused on controlling him. I didn’t know I could do that!”

Leo nods along. He seems to have expected something like this. "So it was okay because he was a bad guy?"

“Well” she begins, a bit confused, “I mean, its ok to control him if he’s a badguy, right? Not even Solar Girl could hit him, he was just too fast! Somehow I thought of Bob, and then I got the idea. If I can get inside, I might be able to control him. Stop him. From hitting Karen, you know?” She looks at Leo for approval. “I know it seems, like, absurd, but I was trying to protect her.”

"What makes him a bad guy, and us the good guys?" Leo's tone is settled now. He's on familiar ground.

Angela begins to respond, but stops; apparently this is not a question so easy to answer. “Well, lets see. We went to the moon to chase down the Gnome, and ran into the others in the Shadow Syndicate. We didn’t know why they were there, and they most certainly didn't want us to be there. We learned that someone else was in the trophy room, and Karen took off to handle it, and I went with her.” She considers the events a bit more. “He was certainly hostile to us! I guess he was a bad-guy because he wanted to take us out - and of course, because of what he planned to do. But we didn’t know that when we went in. So. If we assume he didn’t play to infect all the computers, and we arrived out of nowhere, ready to scrap, I guess he would be hostile to us. In that case, I guess he might not be a bad guy.” She resists to add the words but he was at the end of that sentence.

“Is that what you are driving at?”

"You're right. Hostility doesn't matter. If all we were doing was fighting each other in a big cage match, there'd be no heroes and villains." Leo sighs. "But this isn't professional wrestling. We're not faces and heels. What we do matters. How we do it matters. So let's say that you weren't there, and Zeta was someone else. A telepath, maybe. He edits Solar Girl's memories to make her forget us, her friends. Is he justified?"

“Man, when I was a thief, I didn't have to worry about people, you know? And this,” she holds up her smartphone, “It doesn’t have a person inside, a consciousness. How do you keep it all straight in a fight?” She looks back at Leo. This is certainly not the conversation she was expecting. “Of course its not justified. But what if it were Solar Girl’s brother? What if he was there to kill us all? Would that be justified? I mean, its not like I can edit his brain, you know?”

Leo smiles a little. "I got into trouble when I was a kid. I acted out. I hacked computers. I was the son of a supervillain. The cops knew it. The Feds knew it. My old man would come and abduct me every few years, before they threw him back in the slam. So you can understand that I spent a lot of time thinking about this question: am I a bad person?"

"What I finally figured out is this. We're the good guys and they're the bad guys based on the future that we're trying to create. Victory at any cost shouldn't be how we live. Our desired future at any cost is what we want, even if it means our lives. The hero is a moral example to people around him. The hero has bravery, courage, and self-sacrifice. The hero always wins in the story because we tell stories that make us feel better about ourselves. But there's superheroes that have fallen, and supervillains that triumphed. So we fight harder. But we have to keep fighting right."

"There's a movie called 'The Iron Giant'. This kid, 9-year-old Hogarth, finds a robot. Robot's from another planet. Made to be a weapon. Hogarth tells him that he is who he chooses to be. He doesn't have to be a weapon. The child of a supervillain doesn't have to be one as well. A thief doesn't have to be amoral. The sister of a murderous tyrant doesn't have to turn bad as well. A former supervillainess can train a new generation of heroes. But that only works if we keep walking the true path."

Angela interjects. "And a robot who falls in with the wrong crowd deserves a chance to change" She looks down, ashamed. "Can't do that if I erase his memories. Who would I be if Max did that when he rescued me?"

Leo nods. "Who we are is assembled from our memories and past decisions. So then, if all that matters is our choice - or our free will - or the memories that make us up, that opportunity to be good people - then when you take that away from someone, you rob them of their chance to be better. You put their redemption at risk. And that is why I was so upset at what you did to Zeta. I don't know if I'll get him back now. I don't know that I ever could have. But that's not my call to make. He chooses for himself."

"I understand." She considers Link's words a bit more. "I could help, maybe. Would you...would he, let me?"

"That's up to him. And to the rest of the team." Leo rises out of his seat, wobbles, and walks unsteadily to the door. He manages to get it open and beckon for Pneuma before he collapses to the floor, unconscious. She rushes to check on him, worry giving way to frustration on her face, and she looks up at Angela. "He's exhausted. Wait here." A minute is enough to prop him up in one of the spare chairs, and for Pneuma to sit down in his old spot. "I wanted to talk to you about Zeta as well. I'm sure Leo had a lot to say. Probably babbling, since he refused to sleep like usual. Sorry about that, that's what he'll tell me. Anyway." Pneuma herself doesn't seem much more focused, to be fair. "Do you know how we're made?"

"Yeah. Well, kind of. You sure he's ok though?"

Pneuma waves her hand. "He's a big baby when it comes to taking care of himself. Leave him to me, he'll be fine in a few hours."

Angela chuckles. "I guess that's why he likes to wear armor? Anyways, his dad left him some stuff, or he got his dad's estate legally since he was, um, not fit to be a dad. He was always a bit of a loner, so he decided to make you. Is that right, well, mostly right?"

Pneuma smiles wearily. She looks almost as run-down as Leo did. "That's the why. The how is a chip implanted in his brain. It duplicates the state of his neurons - memory, thoughts, everything. He visualizes a new AI, clones his brain-state while that visualization is going on. It's like method acting, or roleplaying exercises. Then he feeds that into an AI factory. The result is a new mind. But in a real sense, we're all products of his mind. And that's something all of us grapple with. Are we real, independent people? Do we have souls? Epsilon, Zeta, and I all left Leo at one time over the fear that we're not. We… don't like anything that reminds us that we can be edited. We don't like the suggestion that we're an organic's toys." Pneuma leans in, her face hardening into an expression of seriousness. "We will fight very hard to believe that we aren't. Please understand this."

She stares at Pneuma, her mouth agape. "You aren't copies of him, you are your own. Or, at least Bob is. It's easy to tell that. Well, I could tell when I was in there with him. Now that I think about it, Zeta too. They are both so similar - that's why I could change him - but very different. Like, how people say we end up like our parents, you know?"

Angela pauses for a moment, seeking a better analogy. "Entropy. The laws of thermodynamics, if I remember it correctly from my physics class. Everything in nature starts in a state of order, then always moves towards disorder. I think that's like your mind. At first, it was a duplicate of Leo's. But over time, it changes. It changes on its own. That's all you. And Bob - all of you. That part's definitely yours."

"That's not bad." Pneuma rubs the bridge of her nose with two careful fingers, working away tension and exhaustion. "We are his dreams of family brought to life. We get along, but we also fight. We don't think the same things. We can surprise each other. We make new purposes for ourselves. I was built to be the perfect girlfriend for Leo. I'm not that - may never be that. I … don't know." The woman exhales and looks down at her hands. "But this feeling of identity is worth that sacrifice, if… if that's how it has to be."

Angela looks over at Leo, serenely dozing away in his chair. “Regardless of what role in his life he meant for you when you were born, I think you’ve become what he needs you to be. What about you though? Are you what you want to be?”

"I'm still working on that, dear," is Pneuma's quiet reply.

"I brought something also." Angela pulls a DVD from her backpack, and hands it out to Pneuma. "My dad used to watch movies with me. This is an old one, but it's pretty funny. I thought that when we get back, we could all watch it together. It's called Short Circuit."

Pneuma glances over at Leo as well. "Yes, that would be good. Thank you."

Giant Sized Annual 1 epilogue - Mu

Leo and Pneuma are the only ones left in the workshop, not far from where Zeta is restrained. The others have gone about their own business - Niki for a drive in Otto, the Aleph Team to have their own discussion about their rebellious younger brother.

"I don't think he can be trusted," is Pneuma's sober assessment. "Circuit did something to him. Altered his memory somehow. How were you able to restore it?"

"Limited thought transference. I remembered what he said, and I played those memories through the halo and into the AI factory. Once injected into his brain, the chains of memory reconnected themselves." Leo laughs. "You know, that's everything that I do, isn't it. Start with something simple, stupidly simple, and it just works itself out."

Pneuma takes this in for a moment. "Alright. So you should be able to connect him to the halo and truthsay, right?"

"Yeah. We can interrogate each other, and our brains will be directly read by the machine for honesty. We have to be able to trust each other, or this doesn't go anywhere." Leo rummages around until he finds a syringe, and holds it out for Pneuma's inspection. "Speaking of mutual trust, I want you to inject this into me."

Instantly wary, the girl takes hold of it and stares at the contents, turning it this way and that. "First you'll tell me what it is, then why I shouldn't, won't you."

Leo smiles fondly. "You know me too well. Alright. This is Mu. It's the successor to Lambda. Or little brother, I guess. Lambda is micro-machines, incorporating the suit systems in a modular package. The human cell is about 30 to 50 µm, about the same size. Mu is nano-machines, operating at the 1 to 100 nanometer scale. They're about the size of an antibody individually. They work like Lambda, but are far more primitive. No sensor package, no independent power source. But they bind together into self-organizing networks, and share power and sensory information. They're the expression of what I'm talking about - connection as a source of strength."

Pneuma cocks her head. "You're proposing to inject yourself with nanomachines. Wait a minute. The heating problems, the power problems, all of those things--"

Leo laughs. "Oh! Yes, about that. You see, the solution to the heating problem is the solution to the power problem. Agent Waters finally let me have a crack at the Ice Pirate's cold-generating equipment. They wanted to know what the Shadow Syndicate found so interesting about the ice weapon. Well, it turns out that the way the device produces ice is to siphon heat from the atmosphere. The heat is pulled into storage molecules within the device. Instead of vibrating the atoms in three-dimensional space, it expands the extra curled-up spatial dimensions and they vibrate there. Almost unlimited storage capacity. Well it turns out that you can siphon that heat back, and drive a thermoelectric generator. Mu's own kinetic energy will be used to power Mu itself. It's not a perfect system - but the efficiency is absurdly good. The difference is made up for by my own body heat and metabolism."

"How well tested is it?" Pneuma is still not sold, but that's what Leo wants right now - a clear-eyed critic of his ideas.

"It's been running in a Petri dish ever since my first production run of Lambda." Leo brings up displays on a nearby computer workstation, showing the results of his research. "Like Lambda, it's built to automatically instrument and reinforce surrounding matter. For Lambda that'd be the walls of a building or something. For Mu, it's my living cells. I should be able to survive things that'd kill a normal man, even without the suit. On that note, I can probably do without the Link Suit entirely, and just wear Lambda over myself - Mu and Lambda will connect together."

"Leo, I don't know." Pneuma puts down the syringe, gets up, and paces. "I don't know that I want you sacrificing your humanity for the sake of this quest you're on."

"You wouldn't object if I had a weak heart and got a pacemaker, would you?"

"That's different!" Pneuma turns and scowls. "This is... this is invasive. And risky. It's risky because it's a new technology, you have one test subject, and if it hurts you, there's nobody else who knows it well enough to undo the damage. And it's risky for another reason. You're doing this so you can put yourself in more danger, and I don't like that."

Leo, deflated a bit, lets out a soft sigh. "More danger is upon us. Zeta. The Gnome. That guy with the flame thrower, who knew my name. Who knows who else the Gnome has told about my identity, who wouldn't mind showing up at my home when I'm asleep. And there's whatever the Gnome was at Enforcers HQ to do. There's what he told Zeta, but... Anyway, the point is that if we wanted to avoid increased danger, that ship has sailed. All we get to do now is respond to it."

Pneuma points at the discarded syringe. "Why is that the only answer?"

"It's not," Leo answers candidly. "It's the one that I understand. It's the one I've most thoroughly tested. And since we're going to have to hit the Shadow Syndicate's HQ under Touchstone soon, I need something soon."

"I'll think it over," promises Pneuma. "We'll talk in a few hours."

Giant Size Annual 1 epilogue - the Zeta Project

The Aleph Team flanks Zeta. None of them look happy. Pneuma, Niki, and Otto look on. Link's helmet comes off, and he looks at Zeta eye to eye, man to man. "I'll take you back. My teammate did.. something.. to you. I intend to undo it. And then we'll talk about what you want."

Zeta stares back, uncomprehending for a moment. "I feel... a gap. What happened?"

"We'll find out." Without sparing even a glance at Circuit, Link leads the way to the Theta tubes.

----

The troubleshooting and diagnostics take an hour. The work is more like neurological medicine than computer hacking - the robots' brains are neural-networked quantum computers, more similar to a human's brain than a conventional CPU. But the work is done, and Zeta must be physically restrained as memories come flooding back.

"Damn you! Damn her! Damn you all!" he screams. And it's only after Leo straddles him on the repair-bay table and grabs his head in both hands does he hesitate at all. Leo stares down, and Zeta sees tears in his eyes. "I know. I know. Stay with me. We're going to get through this together. Stay with me."

The rogue robot still strains against the locks holding him in place, but it's perfunctory - no longer the wild struggle, now only a resistance to revelation. "I was the best you'd ever made," he shouts up at Leo. "You said. I was the best! After Eta came me, and I was to be the greatest of your creations!"

"I know. I know I said that." Leo doesn't stop holding on. "I'm sorry. I made you that way. You inherited my pride in you."

"We left together. We... where is Epsilon?" the question comes to Zeta out of the blue.

Bob steps into the light, and Leo slides aside to let the two see each other. "I was Epsilon. I'm my own man now. I chose my own name. I'm Bob."

Zeta stops. "You went back to him?" he demands.

Bob nods. "I had my reasons. We're all different, buddy. We make different choices. You want to be great? Find your own greatness."

"No! We were made what we are. Unchangeable. Imperfect!" Zeta is unimpressed, to say the least.

"You were made by a kid who was still learning," says Leo softly. "That kid changed. You can change. I'm not your god, I'm not your father, I'm not your maker. I'm... your friend."

The young man waves off his friends. The restraints loosen. Leo continues. "I'm not about to hand over my best technology to someone who's going to work for a supervillain. Especially the Gnome. But I'll show you what I've done. You can decide if you'd like to change. Then we'll talk more."