The driving beat came through the black foam earpads and hammered straight at John’s not-yet-fully-formed worldview.
For the last six years, this pure white sterile room had been his entire world.
His only company had been the dull alarm tones, the cold mechanical female voice, and the Mozart and Beethoven that lulled him toward sleep.
But now a man named Freddie Mercury was screaming recklessly into his ear through a thin headphone cord.
It was an emotion John had never experienced before.
Not the trembling fear of the researchers in the lab when they faced him, and not the cold, condescending scrutiny of Supervisor Madelyn either.
There was a kind of reckless life force in this sound, like a fire that wanted to burn away every rule around it.
A single song was only a little over two minutes long.
As the last of the guitar faded out in the headphones, the machine gave a faint click and the tape stopped turning.
John slowly took off the headphones and let them hang around his neck.
A faint flush rose on his pale little face, and his chest was rising and falling slightly.
“This…
what kind of power is this?”
The boy looked at Leon, his deep blue eyes full of awe.
“They don’t have heat vision, and they don’t have strength, but I feel like they could tear this wall down.”
Leon couldn’t help laughing.
He pulled out a napkin and wiped a few burger crumbs from the corner of his mouth.
“It’s called rock and roll, John.
It’s how ordinary people express their feelings.”
Leon pushed the cup of cola toward him.
“See, this is what I told you about.
Ordinary people don’t have extraordinary bodies, but they can create all kinds of interesting things.
They take all the discontent, the anger, and the love of life in their hearts and stuff it into these instruments and voices.”
John took a big sip of the cold cola, the icy liquid running down his throat, barely holding down the urge in his chest to find something to smash.
“So are they fighting bad guys too?” John thought it over seriously.
“You could put it that way.
What they fight is boredom, repression, unfair rules.”
Leon shifted into a more comfortable position against the wall.
“In this world, not every battle has to draw blood.
Sometimes a song, a painting, or an invention can change a lot of people.”
John lowered his head and looked at the silver-gray metal box in his hands, his fingers gently rubbing the chipped paint along its edge.
He suddenly felt that the outside world, the one full of ordinary people, didn’t seem as fragile and useless as he’d imagined.
Meanwhile, in the monitoring room at the far end of the Block B corridor, the mood was strangely quiet.
A whole wall of display screens, more than half of them switched to feeds of the sterile room.
The technician on monitoring duty was a college kid not long out of school, and right now he was staring tensely at the screen, his forehead covered in cold sweat.
He turned his head and glanced at Madelyn standing behind him.
“Ma’am, Leon not only brought in unchecked fast food from outside, he also let the test subject listen to…
listen to rock and roll.”
The technician swallowed, his voice a little shaky.
“Should we initiate the emergency isolation procedure?
That kind of heavy-rhythm music might agitate the test subject’s emotions.
If he loses control…”
Madelyn stood with her arms crossed, watching the screen without expression.
On the screen, the little boy the company regarded as its most dangerous nuclear weapon was obediently holding half a burger, a pair of cheap headphones around his neck, listening to that young researcher next to him talk nonsense. Get faster updates on g.com.
A month ago, faced with a scene like this, Madelyn would have hit the alarm without a moment’s hesitation, then shipped Leon down to the basement to be used as fertilizer.
But now what echoed in her mind was what President Edgar had said this morning.
Let him use whatever method he wants.
“Leave him alone.”
Madelyn unfolded her crossed arms, her tone calm in a way that even she found hard to believe.
“Register that Walkman and the two tapes on the approved materials list.
For the description, write…
new psychological counseling tool.”
The technician froze, his hands stopping in midair over the keyboard.
“But ma’am, company regulations…”
“From today on, Leon has the final say on everything to do with daily contact with this test subject.
As long as the test subject doesn’t go crazy and smash that bulletproof glass, then even if Leon brings a whole circus in there, you don’t need to report it to me.”
With that, Madelyn didn’t bother to look at the technician’s horrified expression and turned to walk out of the monitoring room.
The light in the corridor was a little dim.
Madelyn rubbed her aching temples, her high heels clicking crisply against the metal floor.
When she reached the elevator, the heavy metal doors slid open right on cue.
A tall, silent figure stepped out.
The man was wrapped head to toe in pitch-black tactical armor, with a fully enclosed black hood that didn’t even leave his eyes exposed.
A faint smell of blood mixed with gun smoke drifted through the air.
It was Black Noir.
As the best cleaner Vought currently had on hand, Black Noir had just returned from a covert mission in a small town in Texas.
The local police department over there had been taken over by a superhuman who’d lost his mind, and the PR department couldn’t suppress the news, so they could only send Black Noir to physically erase everyone who knew, along with the superhuman.
Seeing Madelyn, Black Noir stopped, said nothing, and silently pulled a report stained with dark red blood from the tactical pouch at his waist and held it out.
Madelyn didn’t take the report.
She only glanced at the several deep scratches in his armor.
Those scratches clearly weren’t the kind an ordinary weapon could leave.
The superhuman on the other end had obviously given him no small amount of trouble.
“Turn the report in to logistics for filing.”
For once, Madelyn softened her tone, reaching out to pat the hard shoulder plate of his armor twice.
“Go to the medical room and have Sarah patch up your wounds, then take a few days to rest properly.
The company has stirred up enough trouble out there lately.
You need to stay in top condition.”
Black Noir nodded slightly, put the report away, and like a ghost with no feelings, walked silently toward the medical room.
Madelyn stayed where she was, watching Black Noir disappear around the corner of the corridor, and let out a helpless sigh.
These older-generation heroes were loyal, but their ceiling was too low.
Facing a situation that kept getting more complicated, the company could only keep bleeding to maintain its glossy surface.
She turned her head and looked toward the Block B sterile room.
She hoped that young man named Leon really could raise that little monster into the thing the company was hoping for.
In the sterile room, lunchtime was already over.
Leon expertly tossed the burger wrappers and empty cola cups into the trash bag, then picked up the tablet, getting ready to start the afternoon’s “general knowledge class.”
John still had those headphones hanging around his neck, clearly unable to put down his new toy.
Besides singing, what do they do the rest of the time?”
John sat cross-legged like a curious little kid.
“They hold concerts all over the world, which means singing for tens of thousands of people.
That’s their job.”
Leon swiped the screen and pulled up a photo of a city street in the eighties.
“Grown-ups out there all have their own jobs.
Some make burgers, some build cars, some write stories.”
John pointed at the photo on the tablet.
“What about bad guys?
What’s a bad guy’s job?”
“A bad guy is someone who doesn’t work by the rules and goes around taking other people’s work for themselves.”
Leon used the opening to steer the topic back on track.
“Like that fat guy Bob.
He didn’t grow the apples, and he didn’t pay for them.
He just took someone else’s apple.
That’s a bad thing.”
John nodded seriously in agreement.
“But John, there’s one thing you need to remember.”
Leon looked him in the eye.
“We can’t define a person as a hopeless bad guy just because he made one mistake.
The outside world is complicated.
Sometimes the line between good people and bad people isn’t all that clear.”
He felt it was necessary to mix a little gray buffer zone into the kid’s all-or-nothing sense of justice.
Otherwise, once he got out and saw someone spit on the ground, he’d fire off a beam of heat vision, and that would be a big problem too.
“Look at this Rubik’s cube.”
Leon pointed at the plastic toy beside them, already twisted so one face was solid red.
“When it gets scrambled, every side is a mess of colors.
You can’t say it’s a bad cube.
It just needs someone to patiently put it back in order.”
John picked up the cube and looked at the tangle of colors on it.
“I get it.”
The boy lifted his head, and a near-stubborn light flickered in those pure eyes.
“If they do one little bad thing, I’ll break their legs, and then, like turning a Rubik’s cube, I’ll patiently teach them the rules and turn them back into good people.”
Leon opened his mouth, then swallowed the words that had already reached the tip of his tongue.
Never mind.
One step at a time.
At least he’d now learned to give people a chance to “turn over a new leaf,” even if the price of that chance was spending the rest of their life in a wheelchair.
Leon picked up the tape case and flipped the tape inside over.
“That’s it for the afternoon class.
Do you want to hear that song one more time?
The piece on the other side is good too.
They sing that one as well.”