6. Hard-Light Hero, Part 6

  The video of me jumping over the police barricade and dashing into the front entrance of the chemical factory was quite impressive, and it made international headlines. Of course, nobody except for a few people who had to sign NDA’s longer than the bible knew who it actually was. I was kind of upset when I found out that included my sister and her friend Sam, but learning that the government would be paying for their college education helped to ease the sting of that betrayal.

  It was also a little creepy to realize that the captain – and everyone in the room with him – was able to see through my eyes. More than just through my eyes, they had access to the full sensor suite within the projector, which meant they could see in angles and in spectrum which I couldn’t. Which is how I was able to quickly identify the bodies of the deceased and the locations of the survivors who had barricaded themselves against the fumes.

  It was one of those survivors who told us what had happened. A barrel of a dangerous chemical had been spilled, and it was going to take a hazmat team to clean it up. That was more or less what the captain and everyone else already suspected, but they assured me that having confirmation was extremely important to solving the crisis quickly and in a way that kept anyone else from getting hurt.

  And the fact that I was able to actually go into the spill area and look at the barrel? They told me that would tell them exactly what sort of suits the team needed to wear, and what sort of cleanup gear they needed to bring. How long it would take, how long the area would be dangerous, how far the fumes would likely spread, everything. The information that I provided was vital, I was told time and again, and I was literally saving lives.

  They were telling me this when the other ghost attacked me from behind.

  Apparently, he didn’t realize that I was hard-light like him, because he seemed very surprised when I didn’t die after he reached into my chest and squeezed where my heart would be, if I had one. I turned to face him, hoping that he didn’t realize that my core was actually in my head, just behind my eyes.

  “Captain Trevers, are you seeing this?” I inquired calmly. While the ghost was clearly hard-light, it lacked the sharp definition or detail of the projector I was using. It looked like one of those paintings where the person is blackeyed and screaming, and screaming is what it started doing once it realized that it couldn’t kill me so easily.

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  “Ho. Lee. Shit,” was the response I got back. “Do you see the projector? Does anybody see the other projector? Luke, I know you’re just a kid, but you’ve got to fight back if you can. You cannot let whatever this is get hold of your tech.”

  “Flagging for PVP,” I confirmed. “[Equip pvp gearset three].”

  It turns out, I was much better than my opponent. Dancing about the chemical factory with Time Dilation kicked up to maximum, captured only by a few CCTV videos in a few frames, I slashed into his staticy-white body over and over again with my daggers. Steel, with silver inlays to deal with vampirism and lycanthropes. Not that it actually mattered except for cosplay, because we were both actually hard light. But I kept exploring his body, looking for his projector. Turns out that it was in his abdomen, and it was destroyed when I stabbed him there.

  “I think I got him,” I informed the captain once the sparks stopped flying. “So … this was terrorism? I helped stop a terrorist? The terrorists are using hard-light now? This is so cool, I can’t wait to tell--”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, son,” Captain Trevers said, ever the voice of reason. “Shit. We were going to have you pull out, but now we need you to guard the Hazmat team in case there’s another one of those shitty poltergeists.”

  “Is that what we’re calling them?” I asked, excited. “That’s actually a cool name for them too! I thought we’d just call them bogey alpha or something because you’re in the army. Or is bogey an air force thing? Do you think they’ll want to interview me because I stopped a terrorist? If they do, can I show up dressed as Iron Man? Oh that would be so freaking cool!”

  I didn’t stop talking for twenty minutes.

  Three hours later, after the Hazmat team had sealed the barrel and cleaned up the spill, I returned to my [Pocket Dimension], where a series of government lawyers proceeded to explain to me that I could never, ever tell anyone what had just happened and threatened me and my family with what would happen if I ever broke my silence.

  I decided that I no longer liked the government after that.

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