Aberrant Trilogy 1: Super Charged (11 page)

I am completely amused. This man is trying to pitch me, to make me a part of the company. He needs my last name to keep his credibility.

I suppose I should be grateful, but right now I just want to chuckle. Perhaps being the son of Jeffrey Boding isn’t such a bad thing after all. Maybe I can use this company’s eagerness to woo me for my own benefit.

The elevator stops at the desired floor and the doors slide open.

The three of us get off and the doors close behind us.

Mr. Crichton takes the lead and shows us the way down a fancy corridor lined with futuristic lights until we come to a plain wooden door with a label tacked onto it reading
Archives
.

“Well, here we are,” says Mr. Crichton.

I nod. I am this much closer to finding some answers to my questions.

“Thank-you very much,” I say. “Is there anything we need to know before we go inside?”

“Only that we ask you to use the white gloves when handling the papers,” Mr. Crichton replies. “You’ll find them in the box hanging beside the door.”

I go to open the door when Mr. Crichton stops me, a hand lightly on my shoulder.

“You
will
think about my offer?” he asks, an eyebrow raised.

I take a moment to seem like I’m thinking it over, then I nod.

“Of course I will,” I reply.

This seems to settle the matter and the man nods, stepping away.

“Be sure to close the door when you’re finished. And let Peyton know that you’re done. She will have someone come up to return all the files where they belong.”

With that, he returns to the elevator.

I glance over at Mae once the man is gone, shaking my head.

“What a crazy world your father worked in,” she says.

“You’re telling me,” I reply. “Now, let’s get in there and see what mysteries my father has buried away.”

18

The Drone

“So, what exactly are we looking for?” asks Mae as she pulls a set of white gloves out of the black box hanging on the wall right where Mr. Crichton said it would be.

“I’m looking for anything having to do with the Vestige,” I answer.

Mae gives me an incredulous look as she flexes her fingers into the first glove.

“Uh, that’s a pretty broad subject, Shaun,” she says. “The Vestige is in every single issue of your father’s work. Is there something more specific?”

I pull on my own set of gloves. They are tight, but not uncomfortable. I flex my own fingers to get the gloves to work around my hand.

“Well,” I say, trying to think of how to word it. In the end I decide to just go for bluntness. “I’m trying to find anything that will tell me how the Vestige works.”

Mae tilts her head to the side for a moment.

“That’s a little bit more specific,” she says. “But, if I remember correctly, I don’t think your father ever completely explained what makes the Vestige work. At least not in the comics themselves.”

“Yeah, but there’s tons of other places we can look,” I reply. “The forewords to the graphic novels. The afterwords to the individual issues. To be completely honest, I usually skipped over those.”

“You were more interested in the drawings,” Mae says with a wink.

We make our way deeper into the room and I am stunned by how organized it all is. I was expecting there to be tons of boxes and things stacked all over the place, but this room is surprisingly sparse. That is mostly due to the way that the files are stored.

Along the walls are long counters with cabinets underneath. Some of the counters have drawers that pull out, containing larger sheets of artwork. I expect those are some of the figure drawings that were used for reference. This archive room doesn’t just store work that my father did. It also stores at least a dozen other artists’ work. I can feel the creative energy pulsing through the air.

Besides these counters, drawers, and cabinets, there is also a long row of what look to be metal bookcases in the center of the room. However, these are not ordinary bookcases. These are all stacked against each other with placards on the ends of them. They are in alphabetical order by the last names of the authors and the shelves are designed to be pulled out like a stack of dominos. This is achieved by the way they are hung from the ceiling on large steel rods, with wheels attached to allow free movement. This is also an ingenious way to store artwork because when the shelves are all collapsed on each other it prevents sunlight from damaging and bleaching the paper.

Mae and I walk down the row of shelves and the overhead lights turn on at our movement. Mae runs her fingers along the placards until she comes to my last name: Boding.

“So, what is this paper about, exactly?” she asks as I help her to pull the shelves apart.

“It’s about inspiration,” I say. She gives me an interested look and I elaborate. “Basically the teacher wants me to look into the beginnings of an idea and analyze how it evolved over time. I figured that using my father’s work would be the easiest since I have access to almost all of his notes. It was either that or Tolkien, and I don’t feel like wading through a dozen volumes of backstory.”

“Instead you opted to go through about a million scraps of paper that your father wrote on,” Mae teases.

This brightens my mood. Up until now I have been completely serious. Rightfully so, I think. It’s not every day that someone gets super powers. Heck, it
never
happens, as far as I know. But, here I am, wearing the Vestige under my shirt, looking for answers.

Just like the comic book
, I think with an ironic smile.

I wonder if my father ever thought this would happen. I doubt it, since he never once spoke about the Vestige being a real thing. Not even in news interviews did he give away where the idea came from - only that it just came to him on a car ride one night when he was coming home from a football game.

“I don’t think it will be too hard to find
something
to base my thesis around,” I say.

The shelves lock into place and we make our way down the row, searching for my father’s boxes. We don’t have far to walk because the bookcases are five shelves high and only a foot into the aisle we come across the first of dozens of black cardboard boxes containing my father’s work.

I rub my hands together and look over at Mae.

“Well, we’re in for a party,” I say and pull down the box closest to me.

Our search begins in earnest, then gradually tapers off into a more leisure pace. I’m not exactly in a rush. My train home doesn’t leave until tonight, so I have plenty of hours to peruse the boxes.

There are so many things in here that I can’t help but become absorbed.

Leafs of lined paper with my father’s messy handwriting filling every inch. Notes on plot, character, and even a few life stories that inspired different scenes. Super Guy’s parents are no doubt inspired by my grandparents. They share the same names, albeit with changed last names, and their sketches are similar to what my grandparents looked like in their younger years. I smile at these.

Moving on, I come to another box that is filled with storyboards. These are my father’s rough outlines for scenes. Not exactly useful for my purposes, but I enjoy looking through them. There is definitely a stark contrast from where my father first began his comics to where he ended up at the end. His drawing abilities flourished, and I can see that his confidence grew after about issue ten.

“Anything useful yet?” I ask Mae.

She’s at the other end of the aisle, and she shrugs.

“Not too much,” she replies, kneeling on the carpeted floor with a bunch of papers laid out around her. “A few scraps. I found a description of the Vestige from the beginning, but not much else. A lot of these boxes are concept sketches.”

That’s what I’m finding as well. Though, I’m not getting discouraged. We’ve only just begun, and there are plenty more boxes to go through.

I return the papers that I’m holding to the box in front of me and slide it back on the shelf and go to pull down the next one.

This one is heavy, and I find that instead of artwork in here, there are piles of typed pages. These were done on an old Smith-Corona that my mother still has in our home. It’s one of the things that we wouldn’t give up to the publishing house.

Before I get too deep into the box, however, I am stopped by something that I don’t expect.

Sitting on top of one of the piles of papers is a photograph of my father and me. I don’t remember when it was taken, but it was obviously when I was very young. I look to be about four. Dad is holding me in his arms. He’s so young. His hair is full, his eyes are bright, and we’re both laughing. It’s a professional photograph because the background is a solid screen of fabric.

I crouch down with the box, nearly sitting on the floor, and reach out to the photograph. My hand trembles slightly as I pick it up by the edge.

My father’s eyes look back at me, almost like they were expecting to see me here.

“Hi, Dad,” I say softly. I bring a hand up to my chin for a moment, covering my lips. “Would you look at us? So happy.”

I flip the photo over and see that it is inscribed with my mother’s handwriting. The inscription reads:
My two best men
.

I blink away the tears from my eyes. No need to let Mae see me getting so emotional.

I set the photo down and lift out a stack of the typed papers.

To my surprise I see the heading of the first one reads “The Vestige”.

Looking back at the photo, I smile.

“Guiding my steps again, Dad?” I say.

Then I dig into the papers.

They are dense. My father used to type in a flow of notes - connected thoughts - things that he called thinking-and-writing. This was where his main task was to write exactly what he was thinking and then make sense of it all at the end of his session. These are typed thinking and writing notes.

The first page starts off with general notes about the Vestige. These are mostly descriptions of what the medallion looks like. As I remember from the comic books, the medallion is star-shaped with five corners. Under my shirt, however, the Vestige is missing the top right corner. That is not accounted for here.

Then the notes go on to talk about where the Vestige came from. It seems that in this early stage even my father didn’t know exactly where it originated.

The notes turn into a bulleted list.

It reads:

Space? Crash landing.

Earth origin? Possible, but how? What are the details?

Obviously ancient. From a time beyond man. The Vestige taps into a forgotten power that only the Shamans or Native Americans can remember. It is all legend and there are few who truly remember the power.

I pull out my tiny notebook from my pocket and begin to scratch out notes.

Native American origin?
I scribble. That is one that I never really heard from my father. These notes are incredibly early on. Most scholars who have studied my father’s work believe that the object came from space. I suppose that it’s possible that the Vestige could have come from space and
also
been of Native American origin, if they were the first people to discover it.

But, how did my father figure these things out? Did he have some sort of research when he typed out these notes? That is a question that I don’t find an answer to.

At least this is some sort of lead. I make a note to look into Native American folklore for anything that resembled the Vestige in shape or properties at a later time. I have to chuckle at the thought of it coming from space. It’s a very base observation. The star-shape lends itself to the cosmos. However, the sharpened edges resemble arrowheads when studied closely.

Maybe my father was onto something.

The Vestige is cold against my chest as I set the pages down onto the stack and browse through the rest. It occurs to me that these notes take on a new meaning to me that Dad’s publishers wouldn’t have picked up on. To them, these notes are the musings of a great fiction writer. To me, at this very moment, they are historical documents detailing an actual object that is strung around my neck.

The rest of the box doesn’t yield much results. It’s more story notes, and I come to the end of the papers. I collect them all and tap them into place, then set the box back on the shelf.

“Would you take a look at these?” Mae suddenly calls to me from the other end of the aisle.

I set down the notebook I’m scanning through and walk over to her. As I glance over her shoulder I can see that she’s holding a small stack of sketches. The paper is yellowing at the edges, but the artwork that is etched onto the surface of the pages is still crisp and beautiful.

“Wow,” I say, reaching out to take one of the pages from her.

The drawing shows a series of expressions for the main villain of the series, a man named The Drone. Except, these drawings show The Drone in a younger state. It’s unmistakably that character. I’ve read every issue of my father’s comic series, so I recognize the face in an instant, even if it is younger here.

The line work is exquisite. Dad used a regular graphite pencil to sketch out the contours of the character - the chiseled nose, thin mouth, and deep-set eyes - and he used a sepia toned pencil to shade in the areas that needed it. At the same time he also used a white colored pencil to add highlights to the cheek bones, chin, and the upper lip.

“That’s The Drone, isn’t it?” Mae asks.

I nod.

Mae leans closer to me, handing me another page that shows a full-body sketch of the character. However, instead of his signature villain costume consisting of a long trench coat, thick steel-toed boots, and his eye mask, the character is simply wearing every day clothes. His shirt is unbuttoned at the top. His pants are a simple pair of jeans. And he is wearing sneakers.

“I can’t believe how realistic these drawings are,” says Mae.

I agree with her. I’ve never seen concept sketches like this from my father’s collection. Most of the time they are always stylized. I look at the bottom of the page for a date and see that the year he drew them was in the early 1990’s. These are really old, from when he was probably in high school. I run my gloved fingers over the date delicately.