By Aladdin
Edited by Christopher Leeson
Originally written 2006
Revised and posted Dec. 22, 2018
PINNACLE
And thine is a face of sweet love in despair
And thine is a face of mild sorrow and care
And thine is a face of wild terror and fear
That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier.
William Blake
Going from Internet link to Internet link, I learned that Gus – young August, as they called him – had gone on a destructive rampage on the 15th, which was only cut short by the sudden arrival of an unknown ultra creature. This entity was described as a female-appearing humanoid protected by armor and possessing a tail. The two aberrations fought like Godzilla and King Kong, until both were knocked flat. A special police unit belatedly burst in and August Blake was taken into custody. The police unit and its insignias could not be identified by observers.
That was about all I could find out about the Night of Terror, even though there were hints that it had affected the whole world. Some of the alt-right sites were complaining about a multi-government clamp-down on information.
Switching my focus, I searched for references to Gus's earlier – and equally tragic – encounter, the one with the so-called fairies. A keyword search for “August Blake,” “Canoga Park,” and “fairies” drew in a scattering of stories – most of them frustratingly brief. They were mainly located on “strange world” websites. The August Blake Jr. it described had been a normal boy, a boy very much like the one I remembered, until May 23. Then, inexplicably, he had suffered a spontaneous mutation, one that medical science found itself at a loss to explain.
Felicia Campbell, the wife of Prototype and a noted specialist in ultra-oriented medicine, was interviewed about the case on FLOX News, a corporate network, but the best of a bad lot. According to reports, the scientist said, August Jr.'s physical changes generally followed a pattern observed in extreme ultra transformations, those involving disfiguring mutations. This time, however, no observable ultra abilities had developed in the boy.
The only other useful information I could glean was that the boy's claim to have been captured by fairies was being passed off as merely a fantasy of his trauma. Moreover, the supporting assertions by his younger sister were similarly ignored. With annoying quickness, I could see, Gus's problem passed out of the news, and the devastated child was left to a miserable and reclusive existence in the family home.
The poor little guy! I could easily believe that events -- even before the Night of Terror -- had left him half out of his mind. Nothing more useful was recorded concerning the tailed creature in armor, though I was willing to believe that what Evie had told me was true. As for the the "special police unit" mentioned, Evie's testimony had likewise convinced me that it had been Aladdin. Like a bad penny, it kept turning up wherever there was trouble -- and almost always managed to make the trouble worse.
Then I had to imagine what it had been like for the local Mantra. Everything taken together must have been hideous for her. I, fortunately, hadn't seen these things happen, but just learning about them was choking me up worse than anything I had experienced since the mid-fifth century!
Glancing at my watch, I saw it was a little after noon. Mother wouldn't be arriving in Frisco for another six hours and Lauren would be out of touch for almost that long. I continued to worry about Gus, but since Aladdin hadn't called back, I supposed that he was still sleeping. Frustrated, I tried to make sense of all these disparate bits. Though I could tell myself that this wasn't my world to worry about, I had to do the best I could for both of the Blake kids. But what, really, could I do?
I needed advice, and not just the ordinary kind. But to whom could I turn? Aladdin probably knew a lot, but it was staffed by professional paranoids whose business had always been to hide information, not to circulate it. If I were caught tapping into their data bases without authorization, I could disappear and never be seen again.
Taken all together, the situation was making me antsy. I needed to do something positive and do it immediately. Did the Mantra of this world have ultra allies whom she could call on? Was there anyone of them that I could locate? Not Warstrike or – as he was called here, Strike. He was currently in hiding as a fugitive. The Strangers were, apparently, still in San Francisco, but government hostility and the vengeance-mentality of organized crime had made most of the ultras do their best to make themselves undetectable. Finding what amounted to missing persons would take a long time.
Wait a minute! I did know an ultra in this city, and I also knew her address. Or, at least, I knew the address that she had used on my home planet.
Pinnacle had been the most powerful psionic I'd ever run into. She had told me little about herself, but I knew she had been worked on by the bio-tech company, NuWare, to endow her with abilities. One of the company's biggest money-making schemes was inducing ultra powers into ordinary people – for high fees, of course. When NuWare got done with her, she had been able to give a supercomputer a run for its money.
What made my and Pinnacle's friendship harder than it should have been was that from the start she liked me in a way that I didn't want to be liked. Her beauty should have made that palatable for me, but that degree of kinkiness had instead made me uncomfortable.
Now, as things stood, any such issue had become secondary. She was my best bet for finding out what had happened to me, and to the rest of the world. I had to find her, but an Internet search for "Pinnacle" brought up hundreds of trash listings that had absolutely nothing to do with the woman I was looking for. That was probably because“Pinnacle” had never gone public as an ultra; there had been no mention of her in The Ultramate Source. In fact, she could easily be using another codename, like Warstrike/Strike. Or, even worse, she might have become a “missing person,” like Contrary had.
But Pinnacle had, I knew, built up a fully-equipped lab, using intermediaries and dummy companies to cover her traces, while paying her way through the use of her abilities, such as breaking the banks of Las Vegas casinos. J.D. Hunt, meanwhile, was seeking to find her, determined to reassert his control over his pet, something that Penny wanted no part of.
I still remembered the lab's address. I could only hope that Pinnacle would be found there in this world. I needed to make a drive across the sprawling city and check the place out.
Or did I?
