I woke up to something clicking loudly. My alarm? A pen? I was disoriented and stumbled in the dark, reaching out until I fell out of my hammock.

“Oh, good you’re awake,” AEGIS said. She finished what she was typing, her keys making the clicking noise which had awakened me. But much softer.

“Uh. Sure am now. Hard to sleep with all that typing right by my head. Were you…typing loudly to wake me up?

“No. Noooooo. No,” she laughed and blushed. “Okay, yes. I’m sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone in so long. You probably think I’m crazy.”

“No, just kind of annoying right now. You know your stupid beeper thing woke me up last night too?” I held up the Booooop device to the camera for her to see.

“Yeah I have no idea what that is,” she said, squinting into the holo. She leaned forward which gave me a reasonable peek at her small-but-definitely-still-there chest. On one hand, the image was yellow and full of distortion and artifacts from the scratched lens. On the other hand…weren’t girls supposed to wear a bra under a sundress? I blushed and turned away.

“Holy crap, you letch,” she said, now blushing and frantically pulling up her dress, though that drew my eye to the now-rising lower limit of it. “OMG! You’re a complete pervert! Worst rescuer ever! I can’t believe I ever even thanked you!”

“I’m sorry! I’m a healthy teenager! You can’t blame me.”

“Oh, I can and I will. Now I feel all gross for waking you up. I bet you were having weird dreams about me.”

“For your information, I was dreaming of home. My mom, and my sister–“

“OMG that’s even more disgusting!”

“No! They’re my family. I miss them. What the hell is wrong with you?”

She giggled, but was still blushing. I realized that at least some of her reactions were deliberately overdone. Though wait, did she flash me on purpose then? “Well, I was just messing with you a little bit at first, but the way this conversation has been going, I’ve been starting to wonder if there is something seriously wrong with you.”

I was going to reply in jest again when my heart sank and I realized there was something we did need to get out in the open before we could have any kind of actual relationship. I swallowed hard and put on a serious face. “Well, yeah, there is.”

She looked me up and down. “Uh, you look pretty normal to me. Is this ‘something wrong’ in your head or…” her eyes darted imperceptibly downwards.

“I don’t think I’m the pervert in this conversation,” I intoned. “But seriously. What I was going to say is, well, actually…” she waited patiently for me to finish my thought, getting that we were done kidding around at this point. “Sorry, I’ve never said this out loud to anyone before. I’m in exile here, wherever this is, because I’m an…I’m an…”

“A…what? You have me nervous here, Athan.”

“An Exhuman.”

“Oh.” She paused for a second, her expression blank. “And um, what exactly is an Exhuman?”

“You are kidding me.”

“No, not kidding at all, sorry.”

“Just how long have you been in that room? Don’t you get any news or ‘net in there?”

“If I did, do you think I’d wake you up by tapping loudly so I could get a conversation out of you?”

“Wow. I’m just…amazed. We learned all about Exhumans in grade school. We heard nursery rhymes about them. We went through drills three times a year. They were on the holo every day, even when there hadn’t been an Exhuman event in months.”

“Yeah, still no idea. Sorry?”

“Don’t be sorry…I’m actually…kind of relieved to hear that. Probably makes you the one person on Earth who won’t hate me out the gate.”

“Still confused. Should I hate you?”

“Probably?”

“Why?”

“Uh. I mean, I’m kind of two minds here. On one hand, you should probably know what Exhumans are, because everyone does. On the other hand, being one, I’m a little conflicted in wanting you to hate them.”

“How’s this sound,” she said. “You can tell me what they are, and I promise I won’t hate you anyway. Deal?”

“Sure. We’ll see.”

“Okay, well, I’m not sure when they started, it’s been hundreds of years at least, but once upon a time there were no Exhumans. Then, one day, a normal everyday human person just kind of had these miraculous powers handed to her. She had kind of a crappy life before, so once she was stronger than everyone else, she took whatever she wanted and hurt and killed everyone who’d hurt her before, or who tried to stop her.”

“What kind of miraculous powers are we talking about here?”

“Well, for this chick, the first Exhuman, her powers were just being really strong and tough and fast, I think. But I was keeping it vague because every Exhuman is different. Like, there have been Exhumans who can turn into gas, and I can create lightning.”

“So there’s nothing linking you each to each other? How do you know it’s not just a bunch of freak accidents?”

“I’m getting there. So she goes on this rampage once police try to stop her, and completely overpowers them, and then the military steps in, and ultimately they have to bomb a city block to take her down. Thousands are hurt or killed, and it’s a huge disaster. Now called the first Exhuman event. Great creative name.”

I continued, “anyway, a week later, same thing happens. This time, they jump straight to the bombing once they realize what’s going on, but it does nothing. This Exhuman has some kind of telekinesis — can move things with his mind — and he just snatches the bomb out of the air and throws it at downtown, where it blows up and kills everyone. Eventually does go down, but kills over a million first.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. And so this is one of the very few things linking the Exhuman events. Whatever people try will fail. There’s been a bunch of studies done and some law named after some scientist, but it’s been done again and again and it always fails. So the next one, they try gassing it out, and sure enough, it doesn’t need to breathe. Next one, the military had finally gotten laser weapons down and were excited to use them, so of course the very next two Exhumans, one turned invisible, lasers passed right through it. That one took months to kill. The other was dynakinetic, could manipulate energy. Made the lasers go wherever it wanted.”

“Jesus.”

“So they started trying to go in tandem, bring multiple solutions to bear. And those were the worst days, apparently. The Exhumans would be so resilient to so many things that there would be whole days or weeks of fighting, like, solid continuous guns-blazing before they went down. Eventually, no matter what they tried, they just made it worse. They scaled way back, and now we just have the XPCA, who, well, we always heard they try to get the Exhumans to surrender, and focus on evacuating civilians. I’m not so sure after my experiences with them.”

AEGIS gasped and stared at me.

“Relax, I surrendered peacefully. XPCA still tried to arrest me even after I surrendered…turns out my powers work automatically, though, and…” I trailed off, remembering the still, lifeless body laying next to me outside my house.

“…and?”

“Twenty-one. Twenty-one brave and stupid XPCA’s tried to arrest me and died trying. That’s how dangerous an Exhuman is, that even one who is fully surrendering and complying can still kill twenty-one trained, armed, and armored soldiers, without even trying.”

“Damn,” she whispered. “I’m glad you didn’t try to fight them.”

“It would have been a lot more,” I agreed grimly.

“So, they just ask these new superpowered people to surrender and hope it works for the best?”

“Eh, you could say so. I think in practice there’s a lot more sort of behind-the-scenes stuff at work. Like I said, we’re taught about Exhumans from birth, and one thing drilled into all of our minds over and over is that if we turn, we need to turn ourselves in so we don’t hurt people. I don’t know how much it works, but there are still at least a couple events every year.”

“Maybe it works really well and those are just the really awful people who turn.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself, hold onto that ray of hope.

“Maybe so.”

“So after they arrested you, why are you out here instead of…I don’t know, in prison or something. I’m sorry, it sounds horrible to ask.”

“Well, my power apparently just electrocutes and blows up anything which would restrain me, so they just kind of had to let me go. They tried to kill me too, but it didn’t take, and they probably didn’t want to keep trying that in case it pissed me off, so they told me they’d drop me off here and I was allowed to live out here as long as I never had contact with another human or tried to come back to civilization.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, that’s why I wanted to talk to you about this. Because…technically, you and I should never have this chat.”

“That seems silly. I’m on the other side of a holo, inside a locked room where I don’t even know where I am, and have no memory. What’s talking to you going to do?”

“There were some cases where just by talking to or interacting with an Exhuman, people became corrupted. Perfectly normal folks one day, next day they went postal and turned into crazed suicide bombers.”

“Holy shit. Are you making this up?”

“No. Wish I was.”

“That’s not you, right? I’m not going to wake up crazy tomorrow?”

I let out a sigh. “I don’t know. I already killed twenty-one people without ever meaning to. For all I know, everyone I talked to back home is now a mad bomber. Not like they’d send me a postcard to let me know.”

“Damn that’s scary.”

“Yeah. So, sorry that I’m the one who happened to find you. I can’t exactly walk you into a police station and hand you over. It’s just you and me. Or, just you, if you didn’t want to risk me, which I wouldn’t blame you for.”

She shook her head, making her long twintails cascade behind her. “No, I think you’re a pretty decent guy. I’m not sorry you found me at all. I mean, aside from all the lechery, obviously.”

“Obviously,” I said with a smile. She pretended to cover herself and stuck out her tongue at me.

“Well. That’s not the best news I’ve ever heard, but I appreciate you being so up-front about it. Hopefully we can both work together to improve each other’s lives, I hope? Kind of a banding together of misfits here?”

“Hopefully.”

“Okay. Completely unrelated and much lighter question then. Is that a mass-fab in the corner?” She thumbed over her shoulder so her holo would be gesturing in the right direction.

“Yes, but the core’s corrupt and it’s got no blueprints. Thing’s basically worthless.”

“Well, I have a whole wall of cores in front of me if we can figure out how to hook me up to that thing, and if we can get that working, I might have a plan for how to get me out of here. But I still need to do some research, so that’s for another day. In the meanwhile, how’s your day looking?”

“Well, I spent basically the last two days hunting you down, though I didn’t know that at the time, so I’ve wasted most of my spare food and water stocks. Guess I’m foraging and making a trip to the river today.”

“Okay. Sounds like a good plan. You’ll be back at sundown?”

“Yep.”

“Cool. Stay safe out there, Athan, you’ve got someone at home depending on you now,” she said coyly.

“Sounds suspiciously like a wife?” I said.

“LOL,” she said, pronouncing each letter. “Yeah maybe in your dreams.” A weird look and a blush crossed her face. “Wait, no not in your dreams, that’s gross. Not when I have to live right next to where you sleep. Wow, that came out wrong too. What the heck are you making me say?”

“Okay, I’m getting out of here before you accuse me of being the pervert here again.”

“You totally are!” she called after me as I left The Bunker into the morning sunshine.

I had a busy day ahead of me, but didn’t mind. She was right that I did have someone to come home to, and even if it was just a holo of a girl a million miles away, she was a lot closer to me than anyone else.