Mod Superhero

After class, Emmett walked quickly out of the C Building and across campus to catch the two o’clock bus to the edge of Eastside. 

The far East side of the city was barren compared to the rest of the research district. Where earlier it was impossible to walk the block without being bombarded by billboards of electronic ads, here they were almost non-existent. The only two billboards were for Gnosis. Each one hung from a parking garage and covered the entire front of it. They changed throughout the day, but always showed some combination of their health and beauty products. 

In contrast, the Gnosis headquarters across the street looked more like a military compound than a billion-dollar corporation. The buildings were pristine white and barren of anything except the Gnosis logo—a white square with a simple, blurry face staring back. And the entire place was ringed with razor wire and guards armed with military hardware. 

Emmett walked past the first parking garage and the giant tub of facial cream on display

The entrance to Dr. Venture’s lab was sandwiched between two parking garages for Gnosis. It was a nondescript metal door that looked more like a custodian’s closet.

Emmett stepped up to the door, pulled back his hood, and waited. 

A second later, the eye scan registered and a robotic female voice crackled with static. “Thank you for verification. Please step through, Emmett Laraway.” Even after these months of working for the doctor, Emmett wasn’t sure where the scan or the voice came from—there was no camera or speaker visible. 

He shivered as the door creaked open, but for another reason: There was something about an inhuman intelligence watching him that Emmett still hadn’t gotten used to. 

~

If Gnosis across the street resembled a military compound, Dr. Venture’s laboratory resembled a nuclear bunker.

Emmett descended the long stairwell, with only tiny lights on each of the steps to push away the darkness. Even from all the way up here, eerie clangs and hisses echoed from the lab. He ignored them and descended over a hundred steps to reach the bottom. 

He followed the concrete hallway, passing half a dozen doors of reinforced steel and access hatches for the pipes and wiring that ran alongside the hallway like bundles of nerves. None of the doors were labeled—only numbered—and Emmett had only ever been in one of them. Each of them had a small camera and display next to it, no bigger than his palm, and each looked to be several decades old. 

It puzzled Emmett why there was such a mix of old and new technology in the lab, but the doctor had never given him a straight answer. Emmett couldn’t say why, but it felt like it wasn’t an issue of funding… There were other things Venture pinched pennies on, but those were things like frozen meals instead of takeout or a clunky car instead of something new. Instead, it felt like some parts of the underground had been purposefully kept the same.

Emmett stopped at the door painted 003, and waited for the lab’s artificial assistant, TINA, to scan him. After a moment, the door split along the seams and parted for him. 

“Dr. Venture is expecting you,” TINA said, appearing on the old display as a voice waveform.  

Emmett stepped through into a small locker room. At some point, the number plates had been removed from all the lockers except those on the left wall and the rest of them had been welded shut. He stuffed his phone, wallet, and backpack into the first available one.

A short hallway and another set of reinforced doors separated the locker room from the lab three’s main room. 

The walls of the testing hub were covered in display screens and readouts, and the center of the room was taken up by a metal platform that both served as a table and as a holographic display. Most of them were powered down, save for a small cluster of screens in the back of the room. That was where Dr. Venture stood. It would’ve given the impression of someone huddling around a campfire at night, except that his hands clasped behind his back, watching the screens intently. 

Rugged was probably the best word to describe him; Venture was tall and broad, always wearing his titular greased-stained lab coat. He was always fiddling with his wide glasses, his hands calloused from working as much with wrenches as he did with programming. His face was always covered in stubble and his graying hair looked like he had just brushed it back a moment before someone entered the lab. 

Venture glanced over his shoulder as Emmett entered, muttered a greeting, then said to the monitors, “That’s enough for now, Clara. Come back up so we can resume work on the heat sinks.”

Then he pushed up his glasses and turned to Emmett. As he did, the ambient light in the room gradually increased. 

Emmett nodded in greeting, but Venture ignored it, instead bringing up a hologram in the center of the room. 

“Tell me what you think about this design.”

Emmett examined the diagram while ignoring the doctor staring at him. It was a test—something Emmett had gotten used to over the past months. 

The hologram showed a thermoelectric system: Plates of carbon composites meshed together around a heat source. As heat emanated from the source and passed through the plates, the energy was converted to electricity. 

Right away, Emmett noticed several things. He gestured to the hologram as he answered. 

“Hydrothermal power is preferred in most instances, but this type of system is for small-scale applications where space is an issue. It doesn’t scale well—the heat source can only be so powerful or the plates will melt. Stacking plates isn’t a solution because the heat source will scale logarithmically, but power conversion is linear—”

“If I wanted a textbook answer, I would read a textbook. How would you improve it?” Venture’s voice was firm as a math problem. 

“If the scale can’t change, then efficiency or materials are the only answers.”

“Go on.”

“The plates could be rearranged for greater efficiency, or another composite could be used…”

“You’re missing something.”

Emmett grit his teeth and looked over the hologram again. “Additional systems could be used to recycle or remove excess heat…” Then another answer came to him. “Power sources! Using multiple power sources instead of one large one would allow the system to scale.”

Emmett turned, excited and waiting for confirmation. Dr. Venture merely nodded, his face stoic and unchanged.

“Not bad. When Clara gets up here, we’ll work on integrating our heat sinks into the design.”

Venture turned back to the other monitors, leaving Emmett standing in silence.

So he turned back to the hologram still hanging in the middle of the room. There was something familiar about it, but Emmett wasn’t sure exactly what that was. 

Before he could get too invested, Clara came through one of the adjoining doors. Her eyes met Emmett’s as it slammed shut behind her. 

In many ways, Clara was a reflection of her father: She had the same dark hair, though Clara kept it buzzed short. She was a head shorter than him, but she had his strong build. And Clara definitely smiled more than her father did, but she had that same intensity of focus.

Except she was fond of leggings, baggy sweaters, and beanies instead of lab coats. 

“Glad you could make it,” Clara said sarcastically.

“Some of us have classes.”

“Who says you need those?”

Dr. Venture cleared his throat as if to say, ‘I do.’ 

Clara rolled her eyes. “Some of us get by without it.” She was speaking as much about her father as herself. As far as Emmett had heard, Venture had never went to college. 

Venture glanced sidelong at her. “Just because I didn’t enroll in school doesn’t mean I didn’t learn everything I could.”

Clara held up her hands in mock defeat. “It was a joke, Dad.”

The doctor grunted. “I’m sure. Suit up and go to testing chamber two.”

Emmett and Clara shared a smirk and exited through the adjoining door. 

~

Clara led the way down the hall.

“I saw a hero today. On the bus.”

She paused for breath, then kept walking. “Did you see who it was?”

“No. They… Well, I was on the bus.”

“You’re losing your touch.”

Emmett scoffed. “Do you know the odds of running into a super?”

“Do you?”

“Well, no. But why do you think I keep up with the forums?” Clara chuckled, and Emmett asked seriously, “What’s funny about that?”

She called over her shoulder, “It’s just that with the crazy tech we get to work with and experiments we get to do, you still can’t stop thinking about superheros.”

“You’re not the least bit interested in the supers?”

Clara held up a finger. “I didn’t say that. I was talking about you.”

Emmett shrugged, though she wouldn’t see it. “You’re right. We do get to play around with some pretty cool stuff… That just means I get to dream a little bigger.”

Emmett thought he heard Clara chuckle again, but neither said anything else. 

She stopped at the metal door to the testing chamber, grabbed the handles, and spun the release mechanism. The door unlocked with a heavy clang and she pushed it open. 

Testing chamber two was a large, domed room, some fifty feet across. It was featureless and almost completely smooth, save for the smaller spherical structure embedded in the center of the floor—it was the heat source that would test their heat sink design, and it was wrapped in coils of refrigerant that glowed with an eerie purple light—

That was different, Emmett realized. They’d changed the refrigerant. They’d been working in testing chamber two for the last few weeks, slowly adjusting the heat sink’s design. 

The other difference was Clara and the doctor had added batteries in a thin strips overtop of the coils. 

“You changed refrigerant,” Emmett said idly as he searched for any other changes he might’ve missed.

Clara smiled, and her father’s voice came through the intercom speakers at the top of the room.

“Why?” Dr. Venture asked through the intercom. Another test.

“You added batteries,” Emmett replied.

“Correct. Both of you, verify connections.”

Emmett followed behind Clara as she pointed out the new additions. He listened and studied intently. 

It almost seemed like the system was missing something… Emmett just couldn’t imagine what. Neither the doctor nor Clara had been forthcoming about just what the system was designed for. For all he knew, it might’ve been some new nuclear design, or a power system for robotics or military hardware—any of those would explain the secrecy. 

Emmett worked for Venture, but he was only an intern. 

When they were done with their check, both of them retreated to the small, reinforced viewing room where they would be safe from any ambient heat or malfunctions.

Both of them had taken to calling it the “broom closet”, since it was only a little bigger than one. 

Emmett and Clara filed inside and peered out through the three inches of plastic that comprised the viewing window. 

“We’re ready, Dad.” Clara waited, but no one responded. “...We’re ready down here.”

Clara sighed and stared out the viewing window, inadvertently stepping closer to Emmett, who was already wedged up against the other wall. 

They were shoulder to shoulder now, and the small room felt just a bit hotter. Emmett focused on staring straight ahead. Meanwhile, his thoughts raced.

Was this awkward? He should say something instead of just standing there. That’s what a normal person… friend… co-intern would do, right?

“Maybe, uh…” Emmett cleared his throat. “Maybe he went to the bathroom—”

Dr. Venture stepped in front of the viewing window, glaring at him. Emmett jumped. 

Venture stepped into the broom closet a moment later. This caused Clara to scooch over another step until she was practically leaning against him. 

Emmett tried to catch his breath. 

“We’re ready now,” Venture said. He pushed up his glasses and glanced at Emmett out of the corner of his eye. “What’s the matter? Nervous?”

Emmett stayed silent, but swore a smirk crossed the doctor’s face. If Clara noticed, she didn’t give any indication.

“Begin countdown,” Venture said. 

TINA counted down from ten, and then the sphere in the center of the room began to heat up. The tubes surrounding it glowed steadily brighter, bathing the room in rolling purple light. Soon the sphere was glowing a molten orange beneath the coils, but even as the heat grew, the purple didn’t diminish. The batteries were glowing too, like thin beacons of white. 

All three of them watched silently. Emmett wanted to see the readouts later, but so far, everything was going well. 

Soon the orange glow from the sphere was completely eclipsed, and TINA said, “Battery charge steady at one hundred percent.” 

“Begin venting excess heat,” Venture said. 

Emmett looked over nervously. This was new and unexpected, but he stayed silent. The doctor’s face was stoic as ever, but Clara's eyes were wide and her smile was even bigger. 

Steam erupted from the coils, clouding the room, but soon the steam oozed out in a slow and steady fog. 

The team watched intently for another few seconds until the TINA’s voice came on again. “Heat sinks holding steady.”

“Cut the power,” Venture ordered. 

The power faded from the experiment, but the excitement didn’t leave them. 

“That’s cause to celebrate,” Venture said. He’d already turned to leave, but Emmett imagined there was a smile on the doctor’s face that mirrored his and Clara’s.

~ ~ ~