“It’s not heroes dying that’s the problem.” The Operations Manager, Larry or Donald, maybe Nigel, actually pauses here for dramatic effect, like we’re all going to lean in so he can whisper his pre-prepared punch line. “It’s that most of them live too long.” The suits nod and purse lips, the whole damned ammonia-soaked hallway suddenly full of Larrys. “They pass away, we throw them a hero’s funeral, get the military involved, weeping masses lining the street for the procession. No problem. But when they get old and start forgetting where they are, or worse, who they are, well, you can imagine.” More nodding and murmured assent from the Nigels. Hell, you could mix and match these little fuckers’ suits and limbs without anyone even noticing. Like those paper dolls cousin Liz showed up with one summer at the lake house that Dad wouldn’t let us play with cause it’d look too fem. We remember this with more focus now, let the anger and hurt seep from our cortex down the spine and into our limbs, that memory permeating the limbic system, coiling into a slow heat. Another minute and the Donalds’ll start to sweat.
“I trust you’ve all been briefed on the incident of June 19th?” Larry the OM raises unevenly sculpted eyebrows at the word briefed, like he’s testing the vocabulary of an elementary school class. “I’m referring, of course, to the regrettable actions of Captain Y—well, the resident formerly known as such,” another raised eyebrow.
We simmer but keep a lid on it. “Ahem,” we say, raising our hand, careful to avoid the heat sensors and sprinklers above. “The report,” we do not say terribly written report, though it was, “was slightly unclear as to the severity of the nurse’s injuries.”
“I don’t follow,” says Nigel-Larry the OM.
We want to ask if they’re dead, if that maniacal fucker of an international hero Laser Gazed someone to death in here. But we mustn’t. Even Larry might suspect something then. Some of the Donalds mutter and cough into fists. “What exactly,” we say, staring at the Donald nearest to us until he coughs again and looks away, “does nearly decapitated mean?”
“Well,” says the OM. Maybe it is Nigel. “Normally we wouldn’t comment on something like this. Privacy issues for our residents, of course.” The suits nod in unison. “But with so many investors here precisely to address this very issue, and, well, to rectify it, I can tell you all that sadly, tragically really, Head Nurse Atkins died in hospital last week.” More nods and barely audible noises from the cut-outs, noises meant to sound vaguely sympathetic without committing to anything as solid as language. “But I’m glad you’ve highlighted this for us, Mr, um, Mr?”
We stare without blinking at the OM.
“Yes,” he continues, sweat beading on his pasty forehead. “I’m glad. Because this is precisely why we’re asking for investment. Investment in safety. In our own, highly trained, highly specialized Safety Force, TM.” He actually says TM. “Individuals who can support our medical staff here, and ensure that no one else suffers nurse Atkins’ fate.”
We literally have to close our mouth at this. On purpose. Safety force? Capable of what? Taking out a proper superhero?
“It’s what we all want. It’s what our shareholders want. It’s what our nation wants. Safety. And you know what?” The suits lean in again, hanging on this jackass of an OM’s every syllable. “Some of these folks here, take Captain Y for instance, have helped keep us safe for decades. Shouldn’t we return the favor? I know you’ve all got big hearts, just like me, not to mention some seed money burning holes in your pockets, am I right?”
Not the worst idea, we think. Burning holes in pockets. Our second eyelids snap shut to shade our retinas from the flare as the heat spills out of us, brighter than the sun, face-melting and cosmic in its destruction.

The sprinklers soak the charred bodies and suits scattered over the floor of the hallway, and we stride deeper into the facility, heat emanating but less intense. Relief to hear the fire alarms, anything to drown out the memory of Nigel the OM. Ex-OM. Take Captain Y for instance. Yeah, he kept us safe all right. Safe from political protests over the sale of the Yukon to America, the relocation of indigenous nations with each new discovery of oil or lithium, McGowan’s takeover bid for drinking water rights. And Bethany out in front of the legislature with her hand-painted signs. Fearless and willing to adopt a worthy cause. And that last cause. The drinking water. The largest protest in the history of the country. The issue that encompassed every other issue. Twenty years ago now. There was that.
We follow halls full of panicked employees in blue uniforms trying to evacuate elderly residents from their tiny quarters, each room a window to the truly awful and wonderful: a gray-haired woman in a thick pink housecoat levitating above her bed, bare feet and ankles dangling and crackling with green static electricity; an enormous man with a handlebar moustache in lotus on a chair, grass sprouting from the carpet beneath, vines around the windows, tulips from the nightstand; and then a room that swirls in black cloud, soundless and growing, dark tendrils licking the hallway.
We skip past these and push through fire doors, still open—we’ll note that for the incoming OM—and stop short in the wide common room, afternoon sun slanting through windows overlooking cedars, firs, and maples. So green and mossy, so full of light, and the room so quiet. We clock a scorched patch on the ceiling where the alarm should have been.
“You’re naked.” The old man sits in the corner of the room with an Airedale resting its curly-haired chin on his knee. One of the man’s eyes is covered in a black leather patch, but the other glows an icy blue as he strokes the dog’s head. “Sorry about the alarm. Dennis couldn’t handle the racket.”
We nod slowly, taking in the man’s wrinkles, his ring of gray hair, the way the light in his eye flickers now, a bulb on the fritz.
“We forget our clothes sometimes too. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
“We won’t,” we say.
“Say, we know you, don’t we? Are you here for Dennis’ checkup? Been ages. Keep telling the nurses it’s time, but they won’t listen.”
We have been preparing for this eventuality, and yet it takes every ounce of restraint and energy to remain still, even as our hands tremble with heat. “We’re not here for the dog,” we say. “We’re here for Bethany.”
“Yes, of course,” says the man, as though he too has been waiting for this moment, for our arrival, for this very doom. He leans forward and we tense, succeed in controlling the surge, but the man’s eye remains dark as he holds out an arm. And then we see it: what had looked like a scrapbook on the coffee table rises on thin, multi-jointed metal legs, a robotic arachnid holding a sheaf of papers. It scuttles from the table up the man’s arm and onto his head, its legs forming a spiky crown as it holds the papers before the man’s eye.

We cannot speak for a moment, such is our mix of horror and awe at this manufactured parasite pinning itself to the former hero’s scalp, chittering as it shuffles through the pages, the man’s eye wide and scanning. The dog agrees, cowering beneath a chair. We hook around the man to see what he’s reading: newspaper clippings of protests, of riots gone wrong, of police brutality, and then, finally, of a young woman in hospital with head injuries.
From an unknown cause, they said. Not her in this picture, but close enough.
“She was only seventeen,” we say. “What is this? Your memory book? Your newspaper trophy case?”
The robot releases its grip on the man’s head and spiders down his neck and arm, back onto the coffee table, where it folds itself flat again, tucked beneath the now-loose papers. Is it hiding? We step into the old hero’s sightline, and he stares at us for a beat that stretches through awkward into intense; we fight the instinct to recoil, to hide from the apocalyptic potential of his gaze. Blood wells in tiny dots around the man’s scalp where the robot’s legs punctured skin, and all at once we understand how he lost an eye.
“Memory book, yes. Trophies, no. This is how we are reminded of our failures. Our worst moments. We must not forget.” He pauses here, staring at the pages on the table, lines of anxiety and anguish over his already wrinkled brow, his hand hovering over the clippings, vibrating with the slightest tremor, as though a foreign electric current runs through his body, which, who knows, maybe it does?
“You could have stopped it. Stopped the police. You saw the batons, the tear gas, the horses.” The words ring true, but there is only a sickly pleasure in watching the old man crumble further into his regret and self-inflicted pain. He is too far gone to truly remember who he is, and when he returns, he returns to this spider’s prompts, to this list of failures. His hand twitches, and a tear crackles from his right eye and evaporates. Where is the other eyeball? We refuse to mentally recite the line from Exodus or Gandhi’s reply, simultaneously struggling against the urge to imagine a jar in a lab, a team of white coats pulling apart retina and ocular nerve, looking for the source.
“We all have them, you know,” he says. “Everyone here has their own Memory Aid.”
We can feel it on our goose-fleshed neck and scalp now, fear, the metallic taste under our tongue.
“You’ve forgotten your clothes.”
“Yes,” we say. “Scorched and disintegrated.”
“Ah, yes. We can relate. We thought you were a we. Careful walking around like that. It’ll cost you extra minutes with your Aid.”
This we were not ready for. This welling of the wrong emotion. This… pity. And we remember the intensity of becoming a we, of the heat sinking into us that day at the plant, the pain of it attaching to our nerves and bones, infiltrating every network and system within us.
The distant fire alarm stops and the rising commotion of staff and residents spills from the hallway. If we are to do this, to end this, it must be now. Only… only there is more here than we expected to find. Not an unrepentant old man, vulnerable at last, but a prisoner, lost out of time, or perhaps in too many times, and subjected to—
The robot chitters from beneath the stack of paper, and our neck hairs stiffen. The dog races from the chair to the window, as if looking for an escape. Where will we be in twenty-five years? Here? And what would Bethany want? What would Mom have said?
“You realise you’re not wearing clothes?” The old man shifts his gaze from our body to the sheaf of papers on the coffee table. As if sensing this, the robot rises on its spiked legs and scuttles towards us. “They speak, in their way, you know. Each to each.”
On cue, the hallway door shrieks open, and they pour in, more like a wave of crabs in shallow water than insects, we see now, all of them making that clicking noise, climbing over one another as they stream towards us. The dog barks, but cowers against the wall.
No time to think more deeply on it. We pull the former hero from his chair, swatting his robot as it taps up his arm. The old man stares at us without recognition, eye vacant and dull blue, as we pull him from his chair, and push him to the bay window overlooking forest.
“Captain. We need a door here,” we say in as measured a tone as we can manage. And he complies, eye lighting up in a blue-white pulse of energy that he directs at the glass, blowing it out along with half the wall. And now a fresh alarm kicks off and the robots have surrounded us, and the dog rips outside and into the trees. The Captain hovers three inches off the ground, eye still glowing, and we give him a quick shove after his dog, wait till he’s drifted through the broken wall, then focus on the surge already building within us. We shiver with the density of the heat, which courses through every nerve and organ, heat like we’ve never summoned or allowed to escape, heat that pulses from our shaking body, torching furniture and wall hangings, curling the laminate floor and the sheafs of papers each robot holds, until at last the white-hot blast ruptures forth, liquifying the metal terrors and setting the entire facility ablaze.
Outside with the Captain, the old man’s green sweater glowing with sparks and embers, we struggle with our doubt, even as the other residents escape the smoke-filled facility—a circus of swirling black clouds and localized electric storms, the levitating and flying elderly hovering just out of reach of the remaining staff, who race in circles, as if trying to collect a bucket of spilled tennis balls. Some carry cattle prods, we note, though we’re guessing the former OM was correct in assessing the need for further security. We recognise many of the elderly we’s from newspapers and television footage: Lady Mutiny, inky tendrils wrapping around her former captors’ legs, binding them to tree trunks and lampposts; Doctor Harm, already stalking the grounds for the freshly dead to resuscitate; even The Fall, wild gray hair on end as she rises above the crowd and then drops onto the lawn, the rolling shockwave knocking those nearby off their feet. There was a time when such a move would have levelled a city block, we think, but there is no time to waste, and the Captain has taken to staring at us again, eye dark.
“Not that I’m judging,” says the old man, “but you’ve forgotten your clothes.”
We laugh at this despite ourselves and ask if he might know of a place nearby where we can hide for a while. “You know,” we say, “some top-secret Fortress of Solitude-like deal?”

Far north of the city, cedars creaking in wind off the Pacific, moss and lichen-painted basalt marking the palsy-drawn coastline. And we and we in a log cabin, the other who is so much more like us than we expected on the bed, asking for juice and snacks every two hours like a child. His dog, Dennis, lies curled on a rug.
“Tell us a story,” says the Captain.
We rub the man’s shoulder and place a glass of apple juice on the nightstand.
“Not about Mr. Bright this time. Tell us about Bethany, about the girl who fought against corporations trying to steal our water.”
The Captain sleeps through most of the day now, wanders the cabin and sometimes the woods at night, when he might lose control of his eye and the dark forest will flash blue-white for an instant. Dennis is best at finding him. I’m grateful for his nose and ears, especially as my own sight fails—too much light, it seems. In any case, the Captain’s powers are diminished nearly to the point of harmlessness, scorched squirrels notwithstanding, and we know it won’t be long now.
“So,” we say. “Bethany.”
He smiles at this, eye watering, and settles into his pillow.
“She was only seventeen,” we say. “And so full of light even our memory of her is hard to look at.”
But the other we has fallen asleep, so we turn off the bedside lamp, listen to the generator run down. All around us the scents of cedar and ancient blankets, damp dog, a hint of beeswax from our drawer of dusty candles.
We pull another blanket over the former hero, counting chest fall and rattle. Our own heat is fading too, and soon there will be decisions to make. But for now, we are here. We are free. We are enough.
Sleep, we think. Sleep. And dream of what we could have been.