Exploding Man

Mirah had lied to Walter, inadvertently. She had definitely tried to sleep, tossing and turning for two hours without any luck in drifting away into the rest she knew that she desperately needed. Regardless of how brutally tired she had been during the day, the tiredness seemed to evaporate in the night.

Usually Mirah was content to wait for sleep to come, but her mind had been buzzing with thought ever since her Remembrance. It also hadn't helped that she'd taken part in no less than three conversations that contorted her worldview further into a pretzel than it already had been.

Well, four if you counted the being in the Remembrance.

The general information that she had learned from Tracker was certainly helpful and managed to bring a lot of things to light about the world. Corporations were so far removed from Mirah's reality that she hadn't considered any demand for Linked they might have, or what that'd look like.

The conversation with the rest of the team about their backer was nothing knew, though breaking into the AASAU HQ to steal information was a massive step that would be a hard pill to swallow, Mirah personally had to take Aaliyah's side on it. Mirah held her own sovereignty above all else, and she wouldn't allow herself to fall under the thumb of someone she knew nothing about.

But what had really stayed in her head, was the conversation with Walter about the Enforcers and Centerpoint. It was short and bland, but it started to sprout questions inside of Mirah's mind.

She had begun to realise that her understanding of the world was limited to that little street in the broken districts of Melbourne, and it was starting to severely limit her. There were too many implications that Mirah couldn't parse.

One of them, specifically, was Blast and Suicide.

Mirah got up from her bed and clicked the lights on. After struggling with the bright lights for a minute or two, her eyes finally adjusted sufficiently and she made her way to a corner of her bedroom that held a small desk, with paper, pens and other bits and pieces that you might need.

This had, of course, been all untouched by Mirah in the time she had stayed in the room. Though there was a reason she was at this desk after all. On its wooden surface, there laid a small piece of laminated paper which Mirah had read on the day of her arrival, but never found much need for it.

Welcome, Trainee. Inside this desk is an up-to-date model of a linktech laptop that you are free to use. It had been configured for you ahead of time, simply open the lid of the laptop and let the machine guide you through the process. For technical help please contact administration.

Mirah shoved the laminated card to the side of the desk and gently opened the drawer under the wooden surface, revealing a sleek, black thing. Mirah handled it hesitantly, never having interacted with technology any more complicated than the touch screen menu in the cafeteria.

It was entirely label-less, with only faint markings on the ports running down each side of the machine. Mirah felt a slight lip on one of the long sides of the device and gently pried it open in her hands like you would a book.

Immediately the screen that had been revealed lit up, almost making Mirah drop it in surprise. There was no logo to announce the name of the laptop or its manufacturers, but text started to appear on the screen, prompting Mirah towards certain actions. In what it called a 'setup phase'.

It took five or ten minutes to get to the point where Mirah was confronted with the daunting task of trying to navigate a computer. She looked at the pleasant picture of snowy mountain ranges that she had picked as her background, paralysed with indecision.

After she had finally decided to simply try to click on each of the seven icons on the screen, she managed to find what she was looking for.

Whiz, a popular internet browser, appeared on her screen, proudly displaying it's default page—lording its benefits and features that only served to confuse Mirah. That was, until it detected that Mirah had stopped interacting with the application and simply made a textbox appear.

Looking for something? Ask Whiz!

An arrow appeared that gently curved upwards towards a long, glowing bar at the top of the screen. Mirah hesitantly tapped the long bar with her finger and suddenly the collection of lettered buttons that Mirah had been hoping she could ignore lit up brightly.

The little blinking cursor in the search bar almost taunted her with the intimidation that the keyboard brought. It took Mirah almost a minute to find the first letter that she wanted on the keyboard, an 'S', and she looked up hopefully towards Whiz and found nothing much had changed.

It was torture to Mirah and took almost five whole minutes to figure out how to simply write 'Suicide and Blast', but she had done it. With a click of the 'go' button next to the search bar, the screen rapidly changed.

The introductory page had been reformatted into a long list of confusing lines of text, but something stood out to Mirah. At the very top of the page there was a large, coloured box that jumped out at her, a warning red.

Be advised, Whiz has flagged the actions of Suicide as potentially mentally harmful. Whiz has decided to place a content warning on Suicide, his history and his crimes. If you feel you are equipped to know more, Whiz has compiled a comprehensive, factual article here.

Mirah's hand reached out to tap the link but stopped just short of actually doing it. The content warning was without the flair or the design that Whiz had displayed on their landing page. No pretty colours or arrows to lead you in the right direction, just a simple textbox with a link to an article.

Mirah swallowed a hint of nervousness as she tapped the link, committing herself to the act.

---

Jeffery Devlin Hughes, known as Blast in his time with the Enforcers from 1989 to 1994, was one of the first Linked (formerly known as powered) to be inducted to America's Enforcers at age 27. Later in life known as Suicide.

Hughes' link manifested as the ability to absorb any significant source of energy, storing it to then be released at a later date as an explosion that could be manipulated on a rudimentary level and would also not hurt himself. It was theorised that Hughes had the capability to absorb significant kinetic energy, allowing him to combat Sludge in September 1989, though not able to detain the shapeshifter.

Hughes was, as a result of his link and lack of perfect control, constantly a point of media interest. The most common complaints were of the brutality that Hughes was capable of, many of his fights with criminal Linked causing high amounts of environmental damage, including the crippling of Linked serial killer, Red Mask in March 1990. In an interview after that incident, Hughes defended his crippling of Red Mask, stating that "[Red Mask] would have escaped and killed another thirty people that night if I had let him go in the fear that I could seriously hurt him."

The morality of the situation was widely debated, though it came to an end when the Enforcers decided to put Hughes through 'retraining' in an effort to abate the outrage. Hughes was removed from the field for a year. Whenever other Enforcers were asked about his absence, no clear answer was given.

It is reported that, while in this period of 'retraining', Hughes was mentally and physically abused by other Enforcers and their staff. Hughes' ex-wife, Gina Larret, later corroborated this saying that, "he would come home at night in a state of depression and anxiety." Larret went on to say that his mental state worsened throughout the year and that Hughes would 'shut down' at any mention of the Enforcers. She reportedly pleaded with Hughes to retire from the Enforcers multiple times but was only ever answered with; "I can't."

Hughes was reintroduced to the public in early 1991, focusing on his ability to control his explosive discharges to a much greater degree. Though much of the debate around Hughes resurfaced, he quickly became one of the most effective members of the Enforcers, even overshadowing Centerpoint's criminal Linked arrests.

However, despite the success of Hughes' reintroduction, he quickly became jaded and emotionally closed off from those around him, including his first daughter. Larret, after finding Hughes inebriated one night, questioned him. Hughes confessed that the American Government and Enforcers leadership were covering up the fact that Hughes had to let criminal Linked escape from his capture under fear of injuring them and facing punishment, regardless of the risk to the public.

Between 1991 to 1993, Hughes had become loved as a public figure and Enforcer, but Larret revealed that he had become obsessed with counting those that had died due to his forced inaction. After the birth of his second child, Hughes' mental state continued to decline, falling into the abuse of alcohol. According to Larret, there was never any abuse towards her or their children.

However, the marriage fell apart due to Hughes' emotional disconnection from Larret and his children. The year following was marked by a further decline in Hughes' mental state, likely due to increased alcoholism.

It was during the start of 1994 that Hughes had a chance encounter with Grand, the leader of Splinter, what was the most powerful collection of criminal Linked serial killers in the early 90's. At this point Grand had killed an estimated 3,400 people. It was likely that he had a hand in upwards of ten times more than that estimation.

Hughes, seeing that the fight would not end with the capture of Grand, decided to ignore orders to retreat and instead released an explosion inside of the Texas nightclub they were fighting in. This resulted in the death of Grand and a 19-year-old onlooker, Mateo Baker.

Although Mateo was not the first accidental death in the course of a fight between Linked, the media crucified the Enforcer for the accident. It has come to light in 2010, that many accidental deaths were swept under the rug by payouts and legal action by Enforcer leadership and American government officials.

Hughes was 'excommunicated' from the Enforcers on May 12th, 1994, only a week after the incident, and was sent to the now non-existent Nebraska Powered Special Containment Facility. He was held in solitary confinement for eight months.

In an exposé written by respected Linked journalist, Adam Atkinson, it was revealed that those detained at the NPSCF were tortured constantly by the guards, and containment supervisor Mark Seno. Hughes was beaten and physically tortured to such an extent that he had become seriously disfigured, scarring across his body indicated that he was whipped and cut with blades.

After eight months of torture, Hughes had collected energy through access to a wire, running to the high security door of his cell. With this energy, he was able to destroy the material around the hinges of his cell door and slip through the hole.

In his escape, Hughes was almost captured by an armoured taskforce sent to restrain him but was able to absorb the energy of any bullets and other physical sources of energy to escape.

Hughes disappeared from the detection of authorities for three weeks but was found by a hypercognitive detective, Eyespy, working with the Washington Police Department. Hughes had been syphoning off of the Grand Coulee hydropower facility, absorbing astronomical amounts of power.

All thirty-seven people initially sent to investigate Hughes were killed.

Linked, such as the Enforcer's own Centerpoint, were sent to detain Hughes, with orders to kill if necessary. However, without knowledge of what Hughes planned, they were incapable of stopping him in time.

It was the next day, February 19th, 1995, that Hughes walked into the Pennsylvania Beaver Stadium in the middle of a Linked sporting event.

After briefly addressing the crowd, Jeffery Devlin Hughes instantly killed 103,498 people. This was the birth of Suicide, and the death of the Enforcers as we knew them.

---

The article didn't stop there. There were pages upon pages of information on how he did what he did. Every failure that lead up to the creation of the monster know as Suicide. Every crime that Suicide committed. In the end, the total death count from that incident was just over one-hundred and twenty thousand people.

Mirah's body was consumed by cold sweats, a panic so surreal that you couldn't truly believe it. She went through every article she could get her hands on. Whiz had written their article with a goal of presenting the truth of the situation, why it happened and what happened afterwards, but other articles weren't so kind.

The hate and terror seeped from those articles, from the articles that were written mere moments after the incident, to ones written after Suicide was killed, it was all a mire of terror for Mirah.

Hours passed, searching and reading, scraping the information out of each morsel that she came across. When she found the video. She clicked on it, not expecting to see what she was going to see. A video that had been viewed millions of times.

The video.

The man walked to the centre of the football field without a care for the mass of Linked that surrounded him on the field. The players were confused, unsure what to do about the sudden intruder. A sudden booming voice, somehow audible from where the camera was placed.

Then the brightness, and nothing.

That night, Mirah had nightmares of an exploding man.