Off The Pages
Chapter Eleven

Jericho sat in his rental car, still reeling from having relived Manny’s memories. How… His thoughts jittered around from one idea to another frantically as he struggled to comprehend how different his views were from real experiences. His parents weren’t lazy or stupid; how could they fail? The slight hiss of the air conditioner and the faint rumble of the engine were the only sounds. For a solid minute, he had to just sit and process what he’d just learned. These weren’t the type of people who should’ve come up short, according to Ayn Rand. These were hard working people who worked in fields continuously in demand in modern America. Yet, despite their sincere—and based on what he’d just seen, they were exceptionally dedicated—efforts to get ahead, they’d consistently been dumped upon. Situations kept arising outside of their sphere of influence. All his life, he’d been taught that people were poor because they failed to make good decisions, that it was a ‘you problem’ rather than a societal problem. Yet, he found virtually no areas where they could have made better decisions. They did almost everything right.

What did he believe? He didn’t know. He would have to explore this further. In the meantime, he had a power to explore. He flipped the switch.

Nothing changed at all.

What the hell? He thought.

Once more he tried, and nothing happened. “Alright, I don’t…” He exclaimed, getting up and out. He was going to go back in that house and demand to know what was going on. No sooner than his palm grasped the frame of the car to right himself, than did he figure several things out at once.

First, Manfred Voren wouldn’t know anything more than he did at the moment. Second, there was a far better explanation at play.

“Goddammit,” Jericho whispered. “You’re a fucking idiot sometimes, Jericho.”

He couldn’t imagine himself—sincerely, genuinely imagine himself—as anyone other than himself.

Goddammit, he realized. They always said you were a narcissist. He slumped into the driver’s seat, laughing. It was a tragedy. He’d bought a power he couldn’t use. Oh well, he’d already made an agreement. It would be a violation of his principles to break it now. Manny had held up his end of the bargain, after all. What would he do next?

He had more powers to collect, because he hadn’t come close to the amount of money he was willing to spend, and also, he wanted to explore more of people’s memories. Eagerly driving away, he headed for a hotel in Saint Louis, calling ahead and reserving a room. Thirty minutes later, he sat in his hotel room suite, at his computer desk. With a technopathic ability, he interacted with the stock trading applications on the internet to conduct his business at hyper speed. His accounts were looking good, and his financial picture seemed rosy, despite the various uproars in the world.

About ten minutes passed with him alone, accompanied only by his inner thoughts. A handful of water he splashed on his face, as he made his decision. The suit went into his closet and, of his clothes the bellboy had brought up, he selected a casual shirt, black jeans, and walking shoes. If the problem were his having lived a sheltered life, he would take it to the streets, so to speak.

The late afternoon crowd densely cluttered the streets, as those walking home from work mingled with those going to evening shifts. Who would he go into the memories of? Several promising candidates immediately came into view. The arc of his glance of the crowd landed on her. She immediately seemed the best target. She looked reasonably attractive to him, having stepped out of an apartment building. The evening dress under the expensive pea coat, combined with the slight mascara run from one eye’s tears, told him a story. With some effort, he pushed through the crowd until he found an empty patch around her of a couple feet. Several powers combined at once as he deliberately bumped into her, brushing hands. “Oh, geez!” he apologized, “I’m so sorry!”

“Be careful!” she cried, wiping one eye.

He ducked into a building and headed for the public restroom.

Oh, good grief, he thought, wiping his face with a paper towel. A litany of different ideas came to him immediately.

The experiment had been a success. By combining heightened intellect with enhanced perception, as well as general enhancement, the instant had felt like days instead of real time, as Manny’s had been. This meant he’d gotten all the same information, the same level of detail, with much less stress.

The next thought had been, wow, I’ve been so wrong about women for so long!

His sexual history had become a matter of public record, what with his financial status. No less than eight times had he been seriously involved with women only to replace them leaving him, blaming him each time. Before he’d been convinced of his innocence. Now, though, he learned just how ignorant he was of what life was like for women. Specifically, he saw, through her memories, how her boyfriend of eight months had hurt her emotionally and didn’t even see it. If only the man could see how he upset her.

Jericho cocked his head.

Wait.

“Son of a bitch,” he silently mouthed.

In his mind, a handful of powers activated. He saw the location of the boyfriend in question, in the woman’s apartment, seated at the couch, watching tv, utterly unaware of his guilt in the fight they just had. A heartbeat later, he stood behind the man, invisible. A single palm stretched out in the direction of the man. Hope this works, the billionaire thought.

He willed the man to experience her memories.

“WHAT IN THE FUCK!” the man shouted, jerking in his seat as if stung by a wasp.

Jericho backed up, still invisible, but outside the range of accidentally being touched if the man flailed about. The man sat up straight, hands clenching the seat cushion. Tears began to fall from the man’s eyes. “Oh…my god…” he quietly uttered. A hand came up to wipe eyes. “Oh my god!” His words became not just louder, but more urgent. He scrambled for the lamp table by the couch, where his phone sat. “Oh god, I’m such a fucking moron! Please pick up!”

Jericho teleported back to his hotel room.

The soft bed cushioned his head as he collapsed onto it. A rapid heartbeat came rising within him. Breathing came quick and in bursts. This emotion, it was joy? It confused him a moment. This act, this ‘good deed’ he had done, it meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. So, a couple would reconcile and better understand each other, so what? Yet, a feeling of exuberance filled him from head to toe, the likes of which he hadn’t felt since being a child. A moment later, a worry tempered his good feeling. He’d invaded privacy on a level never before seen. He would have to work on that, hopefully replace a way to block out certain kinds of private information. A mental note was made.

The cell phone on his nightstand dialed a number that had not called his in years. “Yeah, Luther?” Jericho announced into the voicemail. “I’d like to sit and talk to you.” He rolled his eyes. “I know I’ve been an asshole, but you’re my brother, and I think I need a new perspective. Call me back.” He hung up.

What other perspectives could he get?

In for a penny, he figured, as the saying went.

“Hey,” he called up one of his employees in New York. “Do you remember when Sharon Francis left her phone number with me?”

An awkward pause came and went. “Sir,” the woman replied, “she was challenging you to a debate.”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “I know.”

Another awkward pause came and went. “Pardon me for being so frank, sir,” she continued, “but I didn’t think after the spat you two had on CNN, that you would want to talk to her again. Especially given the way she reacted to what you said.” She paused. “But, if you want, I can call her.”

Jericho thought about it. “You know what? It’ll probably mean more if I call her myself,” he admitted. “Just give me the number and I’ll call her.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes, really.” She read him the number. “Great. Thank you.” He hung up. He dialed.

“This is Sharon Francis,” the woman well-known for her outspoken support of the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter, said.

“Jericho Torvalds here,” he said.

“Oh, really?” she stated, getting ahead. “After the shit you said on TV about black people? You actually want to talk to me?”

“First of all,” he replied, trying to be graceful, “I was wrong.” He gave her a moment to digest his words. “Second, I’m calling because you wanted to talk to me about it, and I want to expand my horizons. I’ve been sheltered and living in an echo chamber, just like you said. Who better than you to show me a different viewpoint on the subject?”

An audible gasp of a laugh escaped her. “Tell you what,” she said. “In three days, Anderson Cooper is interviewing me for the opening of a youth center in New York. I’ll be in New York tomorrow, and we can talk about it there, IF, that is, you’re willing to be recorded, so you can’t walk back anything you say. Give me a location.”

He cleared his throat. “Tell you what,” he argued. “The Waldorf-Astoria at two P.M., and you can even film the fucking thing if you want.”

This time she laughed for a solid five seconds. “Okay, you know what?” she challenged. “You’re on. Be prepared to be hit with some serious hardball.”

“No problem,” he said. “Goodbye.” He hung up. Next, he called the hotel in question and requested a meeting room with audio-visual equipment and catering service and flexed his financial muscle to get it done. No doubt the media would get wind of this, and he expected to have his mind changed somewhat. He hadn’t been converted into far leftism; in fact, he didn’t know what his current political beliefs were. What he did know, however, was that it couldn’t possibly hurt to get too much empathy with others.

“I need a distraction,” he whispered, realizing he wasn’t going to get to sleep right away. The last few weeks had been a whirlwind of rushing around to gather powers, making business deals with people, and spending money to add an air of legitimacy. He had explored some of the powers, specifically the ones with obvious uses. He’d made sure to learn all the abilities with offensive and defensive capabilities. There had been, however, some abilities he’d skimped on using.

In the suitcase, he had a bag of clothes he’d bought specifically for an experiment. The shirt and pants were baggy. In the bathroom, he fully undressed and sat on the toilet lid. In his inner mental collection of triggers, he located two specifically. The first, he collected from a young man of almost four hundred pounds, who had lost a tremendous amount of body fat and gained huge muscularity since the lights, without changing anything. The second, a woman got run over by a delivery truck and stood up afterward unharmed.

Sure, his physique had the hallmarks of regular exercise, but the lean arms and flat torso displayed a lack of calories rather than an abundance of muscle. The belt size thirty and the medium shirt showed his lack of dedicated strength training.

“Here goes nothing,” he uttered, activating both regeneration and optimization together. In his mind, by combining the two, the regeneration would speed up the process. Nothing seemed to be happening, however. Hmm, he wondered. Maybe his calculations had been wrong. Maybe the regeneration treated his body as it was now as the thing to return to, and the optimization was nullified by…

“ERGH! FUCK!”

His shout came after a bolt of pain shot outward from the center of his chest to every corner of his body. The pain burned outward, as his flesh began to redden from the heat of tissue expansion. It did not spare him the pain, and it prolonged his suffering. Tissue damaged from heat instantly recovered as it grew, and it took all his strength to stumble to his feet, slump over the edge of the tub, and turn the cold water on. “Ah! Ah!” The sharp sting of ice-cold water on his skin rattled his brain as he let out more shouts of pain. As the water began to fill the tub, heat steamed off the wet skin as droplets evaporated. His body heat began to warm the water. A lift of his head allowed the water to drain, and fresh cold water rushed against his reddening skin.

“Oh, fuck, this hurts!” he blurted.

The pain suddenly shut off.

“Ah!”

A sharp breath escaped his lungs as a shout. A trembling hand reached up and shut off the water. A leg stretched over the tub and stood on the shower mat, followed by the other. At once he stuck his arms out to stabilize himself. Stumbling forward, he planted both hands on the counter, and caught his breath. A few seconds later, he looked up.

He legitimately did a double take.

The image that greeted him possessed a bodybuilder’s physique, with all of the sculpted bulging muscle. He no longer had a pencil neck, and his chest had pecs and his abs were visible, and it had none of the gross exaggerated looks that a lot of professional bodybuilders had. Optimization, indeed, he figured. After drying himself off, he dug around in his suitcase and found his new clothes. The underwear fit fine, but the shirt and pants, he’d expected them to still be slightly baggy. Instead, they fit very snugly. Indeed, he would have to have a whole new wardrobe. Could he get a new suit by tomorrow’s appointment? He didn’t know, but if not, he would just have to show up wearing gym clothes. Hey, why not? They would just shake their heads and call him weird. Poor people were crazy, after all, while rich people were ‘eccentric.’