I’ve hinted at this before, but if they ever make a movie about Karen, they’re not going to cast Keira Knightley in the lead. She’s not plump, but she’s what I’d call a healthy weight – and most of it came down forcefully on my solar plexus. It knocked the breath out of me – and once the breath was out, it was hard to get any in again, because she was now crushing my chest.
I’m not very coherent when I first wake up at the best of times. In fact, it usually takes me until three-quarters of the way through breakfast before my mental functioning is above the level of, say, a chimp. A chimp who’s received a heavy blow to the head, at that. So waking up because I just received a heavy blow to the stomach meant that the events of the next few moments were a meaningless blur.
I made some kind of reflexive movement and contacted something soft and yielding, whereupon a siren went off next to my ear. The weight on top of me vanished, and shrieking receded into the distance.
Kevin sat up beside me. I clutched my ear fuzzily and blinked at him. I may have made some kind of monkey noise.
Kevin has known me since small times. He hauled me up and got some orange juice into me, and before long I was able to have a tentative reunion with my friend Cognition.
“What happened there?” he asked when he noticed the dawn of consciousness.
“No clue, dude. Someone landed on me, that’s all I know.”
“That was Karen.”
“Karen?”
“Yeah, I think she must have tripped over you and fallen. Powers are back, stronger than ever. I suppose Jane turned the machine off.”
“So I was invisible. And she tripped over me, and fell…”
“Buttocks-first, it looks like.”
“Straight into my wind. Oh, no.”
“What?”
“Kevin – I think I groped her.”
“Groped her? How?”
“I was the next-worst thing to unconscious, and I just reflexively grabbed…” I demonstrated groping, at chest height.
“Oh,” he said, then, “Oh. You groped her…” he made gestures.
I put my head in my hands and nodded.
“Well, it’s not like they’re easy to miss.”
I shot him the stink eye.
“Well, they’re not.”
He did have a point.
She, of course, had screamed like a banshee. A banshee with a lifelong horror of spiders who’s just discovered a great, big hairy arachnid in her stockings. Which she’s wearing.
Telepathy or not, juiced-up or not, in that situation I wasn’t putting out much in the way of thoughts (and my don’t-notice-me powers were probably covering what little I had), so it must have seemed like being groped by the Invisible Man. She was nervous already, and let’s be honest – a girl who looked like Karen and could read automatic thoughts was going to be pretty wary, just by the nature of things. I didn’t blame her for screaming and fleeing. I did wonder, though, how I was ever going to explain it – or even get her attention to explain it, since with my powers this strong I could probably walk down a crowded street naked, painted six day-glo colours and playing a tuba without anyone noticing me.
And I play the tuba really badly.
“So,” Kevin asked after a minute. “Uh, what was it… like?”
“What was…?” I started to ask, then I got it. “Hey, man, I was mostly unconscious through the whole thing. I don’t even really remember.”
“Yeah, you do.”
I retrieved the memory as best I could, frowning intensely.
“Soft,” I said finally. “Very soft.”
He looked at me enviously.
“Hey, at least you’ve got the chance of experiencing it deliberately someday. That memory’s going to have to last me for a long time.”
He opened his mouth, then thought better of whatever we was going to say and closed it again.
“She’s never going to speak to me again.”
Kevin is outstanding sometimes. He didn’t point out that she’d not spoken three sentences to me so far.
“Man, I feel terrible.”
“You look terrible. Actually, you don’t smell that great, either. Shower?”
“Might as well. At least it will put off having to face Karen.”
When we’d showered, shaved and dressed, we wandered downstairs for lack of anything better to do. Jane was watching a machine with the single-minded concentration of a cat at a mousehole.
“What’s that?” asked Kevin, speaking to Marie. She and Karen were sitting at a table, watching the machine rather more casually.
“Jane says it’s a fab.”
“A fab what?”
“A fabricator,” Jane said without looking away from it. “A machine that makes other machines.”
“What’s it making?” he asked, as a complex assembly extruded from the gap at the front.
“Another fab, to start with. After that…” She trailed off and adjusted a dial by a minute amount.
We waited, but she wasn’t going to finish the sentence. Kevin and I sat down at the table with the other two girls. I couldn’t even look in Karen’s direction.
An hour is a long time to be excruciated. Trust me in this. That’s how long it took for Jane to set up and assemble the second fab (she got Marie to open some valves leading into it from nowhere), and make them jointly produce the components of a device which was about the size of a very large belt buckle when assembled.
“All right,” she said. “John.”
“Me?”
“You. Clip this on your belt.”
It had a dial at the top, numbered from 1 to 10.
“Turn it down,” she instructed.
It was like – have you ever done a photography class, and you’re in the darkroom with the red light, and sloshing the print around in the developer, and the image gradually emerges on what looked like a blank piece of paper? That’s what it was like, except I was the paper. I could tell by Marie’s reaction that she could see me properly now (I still wasn’t looking at Karen).
“Now back up again,” she said. Marie’s eyes gradually went vague and confused, and she peered around as if she’d lost something but couldn’t remember what. They cleared as I dialed it back to 1.
“Perfect,” said Jane. “We’ll have five of those.”
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
