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      Rory Daneer pulled up another new file on her research console. It was late, but she’d rented this library pod for the full eight hours and intended to make good use of it. By now, she’d scrolled and skimmed through many hundreds repetitive documents, books, and articles going back centuries.
      She’d been going through the library’s entire section on the Superheroic Age of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They had a half-shelf full of physical books and a “palette” — really a plastic storage tub — full of 99TB drives, loaded with documents and other materials. She’d been working for quite a while and was only on the third drive. She’d combed through the “Source texts” folder, and into the “Dramatic interpretations” subfolder, until she’d found something interesting to read. It was some kind of mixed media — written like a short story, but apparently meant to be performed by a cast of actors and a narrator.
      As with many documents from deep in the archives, Rory lacked some vital context. This was what her professors called a “bullshit source.” Fiction from three hundred years ago, dramatizing an event from over a hundred years before it was written. The best you would get out of it was a better understanding of what people of a previous era thought about these events, or maybe, corroborate something from more reliable sources. Even that was dependent on the document itself being readable and not subject to so much bitrot or other glitches.
      She’d be awake all night anyway, thanks to a handy stimulant she’d taken beforehand. She’d pay for it eventually with a monster hangover, but why not let it ride and read this stupid thing? She pulled the document up on the biggest part of the pod’s internal monitor:

Man’s Inhumanity to Martian
or
Foul-Weather Friends

An Action-Drama of the Superhero Age, in the Classic Style

The Players:
      Our story begins in the New York City headquarters of that famous superhero team of the early millennium, the Project. They operate from the basement of a former hospital, and travel via the former ambulance bay. It’s here where Marion stands, glaring up at busy city streets.
      “I’m counting,” he said, pre-empting a question from his colleague David Mitchum, as he approached.
      “Counting what?” Mitchum said. He was in his green Infantryman uniform, sans helmet, as he usually was.
      Marion turned to the other man, feeling short and feeble in the presence of such an impressive athletic specimen. Most men did.
      “I’m counting the cars. I’m trying to see if there’s a pattern. I know there’s a better way to do it — I have the cameras on, to collect traffic data — but it comforts me to count myself. A selection of the data is hand-gathered…” Marion said. He was writing down numbers in an inscrutable shorthand with a pad and pencil. His shiny-black mechanical hands held them in a precise grip.
      “Makes sense to me. I’m not sure I trust in machines the way everyone else does. I lived without for a long time,” Mitchum said.
      “Your time in the… shadow dimension, yes?” Marion said, avoiding looking back.
      “Not my term. Ka-Foluk-Gah is what my hosts called it,” Mitchum said. He shook his head and put a hand up in a “stop” gesture. “Not the point, not the time. Gathering data is fine. I just wanted to tell you that I need your head in the game when we’re in the field.”
      “Must we use the sports metaphors?” Marion said. His shoulders relaxed for a moment, and when Mitchum’s hand rested on the small of his back, he surprised himself by not tensing up again.
      “It’s something I’m used to,” Mitchum said. “At one time, it was like a universal language. We’d play soccer with the kids outside of Phu Bai.” He looked away, and for a moment, he was somewhere else.
      “They had soccer back then?” Marion said.
      “We had it in Oakland, too, little man,” Mitchum said. He followed that up with a sincere smile, and another reassuring touch to the shoulders. He couldn’t hate this kid if he tried, and occasionally, he really tried. A rich, white, gizmo-obsessed brat, is what he first thought of him. He was still that. But Mitchum had come to see there was more good and brilliance in him than even Marion himself realized.
      “Of course, I… I didn’t mean to imply anything,” Marion said.
      “I know. You have a lot to learn,” Mitchum said.
      “Yes, of course. Outside my textbooks and machines, there’s a whole world out there! You know how many times I’ve heard that? I think more people have said that to me than even been impressed with what I actually can do,” Marion said. He sighed, and flexed his mechanical fingers.
      “I’m impressed by it,” Mitchum said. “It’s not my skillset. But we work well together. I already feel that. Can we go back inside for the debriefing? The girls are— everyone is waiting.”
      “I see I’m not the only one with things to learn,” Marion said, smiling cutely.

# # #

      The team, currently numbering five, sat at a round table. They had no leader, but Mitchum, the Infantryman, had established himself as a capable decision-maker. His combat experience, ethical code, and unique position as a survivor from another time period garnered him respect.
      “As I was telling Marion earlier—“ he started to say.
      “Um, sorry to interrupt, um. Shouldn’t we be using code names?” Stability Girl said, feeling like an intruder, as she usually did. She spent every moment on the team expecting to be fired, despite reassurances.
      “Whatever name each member would like to be referred to as, is what we’ll use,” Mitchum said. “You can call me Infantryman, Mitchum, David, Dave, Mitch… whatever you want. I’ve heard ‘em all. ‘Inf’ is one I saw online. I’m not sure about that.”
      “OK. Thank you, Mr. Mitchum,” Stability Girl said.
      He made a slight face. “Honestly, PFC Mitchum would feel more appropriate. That’s what people called me for the longest time. But I want you to be comfortable, SG.”
      She smiled. That nickname did feel nice, for whatever reason. It was cute, small, and fit in your pocket, like her.
      “OK, OK. Thank you… David,” Stability Girl said.
      “See? That’s not so bad. As I was telling Marion, I think the number one thing we need to work on is teamwork. I don’t mean to say that you’re selfish. Actually, we’re so committed to saving people that we’re letting other things slip aside. I want to work as a unit. Train, so we operate like… individual limbs. Each of us has a job and we have to move in concert,” Mitchum said.
      Marion cleared his throat and gestured to be allowed to speak. “But I feel compelled to point out, we are not actually a military unit. We do not have military training—“
      “Speak for yourself, flyboy. I’ve been fightin’ in one war or another for a hell of a long time. Even longer than grandpa here,” Skarta said, gesturing to Infantryman. She folded her arms over her chest in satisfaction. It was true; Skarta was two thousand years old, and had been an adventurer of one kind or another for most of that time. Her story was functionally infinite.
      “Modern military tactics are of course very different, Skarta, as you well know…” Marion started, before running a hand through his hair in frustration. He was not sure how to communicate with people like this, nor most people, at all. He was young, brilliant, impatient, and desperate.
      “We all have unique experience to draw on,” said Orthona. She spoke serenely and softly. “I think what David is trying to communicate to us is, we must synthesize that knowledge and experience. To make something better. I believe this is the purpose of a ‘superhero team’.”
      “Well put,” Infantryman said.

# # #

     Was it? Rory thought while reading. The dialogue rang a little false to her. Maybe she had a tin ear. Or was that really how people talked back then? Was it how people in the 2140s thought people in 2004 talked? She leaned back in her pod chair. Her mind wasn’t working at maximum capacity. Maybe her brain was foggy from an oncoming stimulant crash.
      It was strange to see Marion Childress as a bratty kid, when she knew him now as a generation-defining pioneer in medical prosthetics. Few people had quite so many metaphorical fingerprints in the bodies of so many. His fame must be why they didn’t use his codename, Engine: everyone in the audience would know him as himself, first. The other characters weren’t so famous. In fact, she hadn’t heard of this “Stability Girl” at all. Really strange to see a total nobody on a team with many of the most famous heroes of the era.
      She felt a sympathetic zap in her own synthetic spine, based on a Childress design. Sitting in these pod chairs for so long would do a number on anyone’s body, and she was asking for trouble with her issues. Her parents had waited to do a replacement after her injury, worried about complications from the Aurralith technogenetics she’d inherited from her dad. They had been right to worry, and she’d undergone three extra surgeries to correct issues with her techno-organic parts melding improperly with the new spine, plus all the issues of installing it in her weird post-puberty body. From the outside, she didn’t look that different. But her posture, chronic pain, and twitching were always there to remind her. She was tall and gangly and awkwardly shaped, unlike some of her supermodel-looks classmates like Sybill Onivado or Dana Petrarch.
      She hated stopping in the middle of something, so she read on. Her eyes glazed over, and she tried to picture in her head the scene of a bunch of actors sitting around reading their dialogue, an audience paying close attention. She imagined herself in that crowd, in a world where superheroes were meaningful, rather than relics of a dead culture.

# # #

      “We’re going to have plenty of time to figure this out, gang,” Mitchum said. “I trust all of you. I think we make a good team. I believe in us. I believe in the Project.”
      “Can we move on from some of the sentimentality—“ Marion was saying, when the alarm system he’d only recently finished installing went off. Red lights and sirens and alerts on the computers and phone calls in other parts of the complex.
      “Let’s move!” Marion said, feeling, for once, like a leader. He clacked against a switch on the wall console and the entire team got up and moved.
      “The alarm was tripped in Section 4G!” said Stability Girl, who activated her armor’s hovering abilities and floated through the hallways. The team raced through their still under-construction headquarters until reaching one of the lowest levels in the complex. At one time, it had been part of a parking garage.
      When they got there, an enormous metal capsule jutted out through the broken concrete floor to greet them.
      “Hey, flyboy, was this in the plans?” Skarta said.
      “No… from the looks of it, it looks like it was here… already,” Marion said. He approached cautiously. Infantryman stepped in front of him, and Metalwing did the same in turn.
      “It may have an organic contagion. I’ll be unaffected,” she said. She approached the capsule, and it popped open with a steam hiss.
      What emerged was a gangly figure in a strange environmental suit. They removed their helmet to reveal a bumpy-scaly green face.
      “This planet is under my jurisdiction, Earthpoids! Submit or die!” they said.
      “Please identify yourself. We are known as the Project, a team of—“
      “I am Biodread, foul machine! I speak to no computerite!” they said. “I am here for the Martian Federation. We have claimed this planet for our own!”
      “Let’s just take it easy… no one wants a fight,” Infantryman said.
      “Fight? This is conquest, peon!” Biodread said, with a howling laugh, and pulled her gun from its holster.

# # #

      “Oh, Jesus,” Rory said to herself. Was this… bad? First of all, the alien just happened to be under their new headquarters? And all that dialogue was the hokiest stuff she’d ever heard. Even kid’s shows wouldn’t be caught saying “computerite” or “peons.” It needn’t be said that it was painfully historically inaccurate. The Martian Federation didn’t arrive on Earth like this at all. Their first ships did land on Earth about ten years after this, on the other side of the country. And maybe Biodread was supposed to be a stand-in for some of the Martians on that original ship. But the rest of the Federation fleet didn’t reach Earth for fifty years, and they went through proper diplomatic channels to become Earth allies. This was some kind of propaganda. What kind, she didn’t even know.
      Now growing impatient, she decided to scroll through the document faster. There was a lot of action, with way too much detail on the fight. They almost read like— oh, god. They were stage directions. In this kind of thing, the actors left the stage and stuntmen came on in costume to fight, like a theme park stunt show. She’d seen one just like it at Grand Imperium, the theme park in Northwest Phoenicia that her uncles lived by.
      She skipped all that stuff. It might be interesting if she were a drama history major, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to know what people thought of the Project. By the end of the fight, it turned out Biodread — what a stupid name! — was actually one of the “good” Martians. Then, there was some other stuff where the Project ended up in an emergency with some terrorists or something, and fought them. Biodread teamed up and showed her worth, along with her cool telekinetic powers. Rory wondered how they showed that on stage.
      Some of it made sense. The Martian Federation eventually became Earth allies and one of the passengers on the original ship did join a version of the Project sometime in the 2020s. Too bad this was written before the unsealing of the Martian Legendarium, though. She would love to know what people of this time would think of genuine Martian superheroes that were, now, beloved all over Earth and its colonies.

# # #

      “You’ve proven yourself, Biodread. We think there’s a spot for you on the team,” Infantryman said. “Even if the people of Earth will not always understand you. I’m a native of this planet, and I’ve suffered my fair share of discrimination, sometimes just because of the color of my skin.”
      “Your skin? But… it’s beautiful,” Biodread said. She reached a hand forward, but didn’t touch.
      “We have a greeting here. Like this,” Infantryman said, and he put his hand out in the traditional manner.
After a few awkward attempts, they shook. Marion nervously approached from behind.
      “We should make it official,” he said, and put his hand out.
      “Very well,” Biodread said. Her dark lips, green skin, and yellow eyes looked feminine, friendly, motherly to him for the first time. They shook hands, each member taking a moment to welcome their newest member.
      “Like a missing piece,” Orthona, called Metalwing, said.
      “Uh, yeah,” Stability Girl said.
      “I can show you a few things about life on Earth, by the way,” Skarta said. “I’m pretty experienced.”
      “Oh, I think I should like that quite a bit,” Biodread said.
      Marion elbowed Infantryman in the ribs gently. “Jealous? Your new girlfriend already found somebody else,” he said.
      “Guess I’ll just have to look elsewhere,” Infantryman said, and he put his hand in between Marion’s shoulder blades again, firm and reassuring.

# # #

      What was that old rule? If it ends in a funeral, it’s a tragedy, if it ends in a wedding, it’s a comedy? It wasn’t a wedding, exactly, but it was pretty close. Anyone watching this at the time would have known what happened to those two. It didn’t exactly strike her as a happy ending, given how soon they’d split up and the way Infantryman died, but maybe all that mattered was that the Brains and the Brawn got together, for a little while.
      She wondered how many of the unanswered questions were something audiences at the time would have known instinctually, or if it was just stuff people didn’t care about. Stability Girl was there along with all these heavy hitters, famous Project members. Who the hell was she? How could there be a superhero in that time that Rory had never even heard of? There was something missing, a gap in her knowledge, and it ate away at her. Maybe it was a hole in the historical record that she could fill, proving some kind of worth for all this.
      Avenues for future research aside, reading this crap had drained her of much of her enthusiasm. Her stims were definitely wearing off, and she had probably five or six hours before a hard crash. Maybe if she moved fast, hydrating a lot and going straight to bed, she’d get by with just a hangover and no monster migraine. She decided she’d stop at the 24/7 place on campus, grab a twelve pack of Sportsplash, and turn her dorm bed into a cocoon.
      She saved her work onto her personal device, closed all her documents and apps, unhooked her research hard drives, and reset the pod to blank slate settings. She stowed the HDs in her bag in their special safety pouches, and then reluctantly popped open the research pod side door. It was dark here, with only a few pods active and humming, but she could tell from the ambient light on the far side of the pod room that the sun had come up. She’d been in there all night, she realized, and groaned loudly. Maybe she could afford to miss an afternoon class or two. Blame it on her spine implant, if she had to. It did hurt like hell, but she could tell that her professors were getting tired of that excuse.
      Rory slung her bag over her shoulder and pulled a joint from the pack in her hoodie pocket and started to smoke. It might help her relax enough to actually fall asleep. Otherwise, her “cocoon” would be more like a TV watching station. Today, she wanted to watch something black and white. Probably from the big TV revival in the 2320s, the stuff her mom liked growing up.
      She was walking back to campus from the convenience store when she saw Sybill Onivado, another grad student. They’d had a few classes together in undergrad, like Introduction to Old American Archaeology. Rory always remembered Sybill because she was rude, smart, and hot — Rory’s type. They made eye contact, but seemed to react more to each other’s smell. They were smoking the same brand, and Sybill too had that “research pod funk” layered beneath it, making a fine bouquet.
      “Hey,” Rory said. “Working hard?”
      “Hardly twerking, boss,” Sybill said.
      “Jesus,” Rory said.
      “That bad?”
      “Yeah. Work on it. What are you working on, anyway?”
      “Oh, my thesis,” Sybill said, like it was no big deal.
      “Already? Fuck!” Rory said. “I’m still chasing dead ends.”
      “The whole superhero thing was always a dead end, girlypop,” Sybill said. She always talked like that. Rory hated it, in a cute way. The actual content of her sentence, she hated in a “hate” way.
      “You’re lucky I’m too tired to scream,” Rory said. “Why are you already working on your thesis?”
      “It takes a long time to get the approvals for a timejump,” Sybill said.
      “Wait— You’re studying time travel, I get that. But actually doing it? That’s nuts,” Rory said.
      “What better way to prove the value of my research?” Sybill said.
      “Yeah, I guess so…” Rory said. “Where are you— When are you going?”
      “You mean when is the trip or what’s my destination?” Sybill said.
      “Come on!” Rory said, and stamped a foot. “Destination!”
      “We’re still working out the details, but… turn of the millennium. Probably 2012, 2014… somewhere in there. Los Angeles of course. That’s the safe zone for time travelers,” she said.
      “Oh,” Rory said. The drugs and the lack of sleep meant her mind refused to work for a long, halting couple of seconds. “This might sound crazy, but, when you get there… you think you could look someone up for me?”

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