I doubt it would come as a surprise to anyone if I said one does not regularly wake up under a pile of rubble, wearing a motorbike helmet and a cape, with no idea where or who they are. No, this sounds more like a once in a lifetime event.

So, I have amnesia.

Digging myself out of the pile of debris, I feel a dull pain throbbing across my neck, but the back of my head hurts even worse. I rub my hand there and discover that my helmet is completely thrashed. I believe I have found the source of my memory loss, and I count my blessings that things didn’t turn out worse. Rest in peace, helmet, you died doing exactly what you were supposed to: protecting me from that very fate. 

“Motorbiker, you’re… You’re alive! How!?” a voice rings out in front of me. I try to look, but my visor is smashed to smithereens. Thankfully, all it takes is a bit of pull for the remains of my headgear to give way. In front of me is a woman in a lab coat, long white hair, red eyes, and robotic claws covered by the tattered remains of a pair of latex gloves. She pulls back as she sees my face.

I don’t know who she is, though she feels comfortingly familiar. She looks half relieved and half annoyed that I am alive. “Hi,” I say. “I’m supposed to know you, right?”

“Supposed to…?” she repeats, raising an eyebrow.

“Sorry. I think I lost my memory. I don’t know who you are, but… I just have this feeling that I can trust you,” I explain with a smile.

She looks taken aback and blushes. “T-trust me!? You should’n— wait a minute.” She turns to her side and mutters to herself, stroking her chin, before she turns back to me. ”KYAH, KYAH KYAH KYAH!” Her laugh is certainly unique. “Why, of course! Who wouldn’t trust the greatest scientist that this planet has ever had?”

“You’re certainly lively.” I smile again, then get up. Speaking of getup, here’s one thing that doesn’t feel right. Underneath my cape, I’m wearing some sort of heavy, black leather jacket. It looks and smells like it was burned by something, almost torn to shreds. I place my hand on its sleeve and my palm starts to glow pastel green. I know this isn’t something anyone can do, but it doesn’t faze me either. It’s simply second nature. The jacket unweaves itself around me, leather turning to satin, before settling back as a comfortable off-shoulder green dress and matching long gloves. Then all I have to do is drop my cape off, and… Aaah. Now it feels homely.

The woman jumps back again. “How did you do that!? That’s not part of your… Argh, nevermind! Why are you wearing that!?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what I wanted to do, I guess.” I hop out of the rubble before twirling around. “It feels like I’ve never been so free before. So, if I have superpowers, that must mean we’re superheroes or something, right?”

“R-right! Superheroes! Doing, uh, superhero stuff, like… working for the government,” she says with venom in her voice, “or being a pain in the butt of good people with perfectly normal intentions! What do they mean it’s not ‘right’ to steal from a bank? They have too much money, they won’t even miss it!” She coughs. “I mean, oh no, bad crime, we, uh, stop that, yes!”

I giggle. Well, no situation is ever clear cut; I understand her having a mixed opinion on her own work. “You sound like you’ve got things figured out. You’re pretty reliable.”

Her cheeks puff red. “It’s… It’s nothing, really…” She shakes her head and points up at me. I realize she’s much shorter than she looked while I was down on the ground. “Look! Motorbiker! You work for me now, okay?”

I shrug. “Sounds good to me. Could you not call me that, though? I was thinking something more like a Carmilla, or a Loretta. Something that ends in ‘A’! Speaking of, what should I call you?”

She looks heartbroken. “You… you forgot my superv— hero alias?”

“Is that what I know you by?” We must not have been as close as I thought. And yet, the feeling that I know her from somewhere does not subside. Unfortunately, with my head a jumbled mess, I feel like I won’t find out anytime soon. “Hmm… Let me take a guess. Is your name Carrie, short for Caroline?”

“Why would a totally random guess be—” She pauses, a bewildered expression on her face. “…Wait, no, that’s… Nevermind! My name is… Doctor Suprema! KYAH KYAH KYAH KYAH!!”

I nod. “I like it, it’s punchy.” 

Suprema blushes again; I’m starting to think she isn’t used to receiving compliments.

I take a look around. I seem to be in some sort of abandoned hangar turned laboratory. I look back at the plaster debris I was in a few moments ago. There’s traces like an explosion leading right towards it, no smell, probably electrical. The trail is about twenty meters long, ending abruptly with my former resting place — a load-bearing pillar I repair with one wave of the hand.

“What? But… Huh?” Suprema is slack jawed. “But your powers are like… Pew pew! Fwoosh! Slash!” She pantomimes attacking with her hands. “How did you do that?”

I tilt my head. Brandishing my arm, I manifest a ball of energy in my palm. “You mean, something like this?” I send it flying into a wall. It explodes on contact, dissipating into thin air. “I guess I can use my powers like that, but that doesn’t seem very effective.”

“Not very effective!? You had me completely outmatched!!”

“Were we fighting?”

“N-NO! DEFINITELY NOT! AND IF WE WERE, FOR THE RECORD I WAS WINNING, MOTORBIKER!!” Suprema huffs, blushing again.

That reminds me I’m still looking for a name. “Hrrm. Henrietta? Angela? No, that’s still not right. You wouldn’t know my name, by any chance?”

“Uhhhh…” She looks at me up and down, stopping on my dress multiple times. “Uhhhhhhhhh… John… Bob… McKevin?” 

I giggle again and smile. “That’s a pretty creative sense of humor, but I don’t think that could ever be right. I’m a woman.”

“I’m… starting to understand that, yes…” She straightens up and starts walking in a circle, one hand on her chin and the other behind her back. There’s a bit of a limp to her walk. “Did the cranium shock somehow cause this…? Would a hit to the occipital lobe ripple all the way to the hippocampus… Complete identity and personality reversal? Kyeh, in fiction maybe. There must be a logical and realistic explanation. Henchman—er, assistant!” She gestures towards another section of the lab and heads in its direction. “Come this way, please.”

I prance behind her, my gaze turning from one incredible contraption to the next. A giant robot arm is affixed to the ceiling; over there, a satellite dish whirrs and rumbles providing background noise; a large cone-shaped device with a red light at the end points at a table with handcuffs — oh my, I won’t ask about that one. If these are Doctor Suprema’s inventions, I must be in good hands.

She brings me to a table facing a wall of computers and screens. “Well, please sit down, assistant!” The mechanisms on her claws individually flip with a clickety noise, reshaping into a pair of hands. She starts rummaging inside a nearby crate, discarding complex-looking contraptions left and right.

“Oh, so polite. Don’t mind if I do, Susu.” I can’t hold back the teasing, she’s just too easy to fluster. And flustered she gets, popping her reddened head back out of the box. I manifest a pair of emerald clouds under my feet and lift myself up above the worktop, then float down onto my back. 

Seemingly pleased by the item she’s found — some sort of repurposed barcode scanner — she turns around and walks up to the table. She stares up at me for a moment, grumbling and still red in the face, before giving a kick to the table, prompting it to staggeredly lower itself to her elbow level. “Now! Stay perfectly still! I’m going to scan your brain. It might tickle a little in places you can’t reach.”

Seeing no reason to distrust her, I make myself comfortable and hold my breath for a moment. She shifts her arm to point the device straight at my head and presses the trigger. 

A big red light beams onto my forehead. Indeed, it feels like ants are walking around on the inside of my skull. She keeps her hand steady and slowly moves up until the light passes the top of my hair. At that, she releases the trigger and turns to her computer array, pulling a cable out of the grip and plugging it into one of the towers. After a moment of fiddling with folders, a heatmap of my brain shows up on one of the big screens. It’s all blots and colors to me, but Suprema stares intensely at it, obviously understanding it in a way I can’t. “Oh, that’s not good. Jeez. Severe shrinkage and deterioration of the hippocampus… The silver lining is that this probably isn’t new. And I can fix it! …I can fix it, can I? Right, right, I’m Doctor Suprema, can’t settle for anything but the top! Kyah kyah kyah!”

“Hm mmh!” I sit up and turn sideways, swinging my legs by the table’s edge. “If there’s anyone I know I can trust to help me, it’s you.”

She smiles awkwardly before shifting to a sadder expression. “Why… do you trust me?” she asks, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I could be your worst enemy, for all you know.”

“Why would I have a worst enemy?” I reply with a question of my own, then ponder the thought more. “There’s many different ways to have a worst enemy, and discounting all the options where I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” —Suprema mouths these words after I say them, her eyebrow arching, but doesn’t interrupt— “I don’t think I’d get there unless I was fighting unrepentant nazis or shitheads of the same caliber. And I know you’re not either! …Huh. I do know you’re not either. Good to know I know things. Oh, we have sooo much in common, don’t we?”

“W-we are ABSOLUTELY nothing alike,” Suprema growls, blushing. “You said you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you had a worst enemy, right…? How do you know that?”

“Well, bar the exceptions, you don’t get a worst enemy without doing something terribly wrong somewhere. Especially as a superhero! Going out of our way to help people who are trying to hurt us, other people, or themselves, that’s kind of our thing! Dig out the root issue, not just lock the symptoms away, you know?” I smile.

She stays silent for a little while, then sighs, fiddles with a dial on the scanner and unplugs it. “I can’t exactly repair the dead tissue, but I can try to get a reaction by stimulating it. Think of it like triggering rigor mortis on your memories.” She gives me a smug little smile. “Of course that’s very layman terms, kyeh kyeh.”

“You know what you’re doing, Susu.” I stretch my arms before lying back down.

“My name is Doctor Suprema!” She emphasizes each syllable, stomping her foot on the ground.

I grin. “Oh, I know, but it’s very fun to fluster you.”

“You’re… mean!” she huffs, flushed with embarrassment. “… and weirdly honest about what’s on your mind. Come to think of it, you’ve been very nonchalant about all of this…”

That is true. I take a second to think about it. “To be fair, I have no recollection of what a normal reaction to having amnesia is supposed to be.”

Suprema opens her mouth like she wants to raise an objection, but ends up just sighing. She leans over me. Once again, she points the scanner at my brain. “Hold still.”

The images that flash in my mind bark at me, assaulting all my senses in an incomprehensible cacophony. A frenzy I take a part in, a sense of pride and of superiority, at first revered, then crushed to bits. An overachiever turned disappointment, wasteful, shameful. Moments of joy growing further apart, replaced with an ever looming, pedestrian dread. Jealousy from the people in my shadow turning into an excuse for harassment, until the positions reverse, yet the roles do not. And a solitude… a solitude turned loneliness. Until all that was left of a pile of innocent dreams was scrounged scraps desperate for sullen survival at the slithery grasp of a soulless system.

I jolt, and my head collides with Suprema’s. My hands shoot up to my forehead as I wince. “Ow… Ow ow ow…”

“Aiie!” she whines, holding her head the same way. “Weeeh, I hope I’m not gonna have a migraine…”

“Sorry…” We both wait for the pain to abate. “Oh, that was not pleasant.”

“And totally, definitely your fault, Motorbiker!” She wobbles to the desk and plugs in the device, while I make myself comfortable, sitting at the edge of the table. Then, as a new map of my brain, all colorful and indecipherable, shows up, she immediately grimaces. “Oh, jeez. That is just textbook PTSD, totally unmistakeable.”

“Is that bad?” At least from her reaction, it likely was. “I kind of don’t recognize the acronym.”

She takes up her thinking walk routine again, predictable as clockwork. “Retrograde amnesia brought on by a TBI event and psychological trauma? Would that explain the one-eighty in personality?” She fixes her eyes on my outfit and studies it intensely. “…Masking? Repression? Could memory loss include that of inhibitions?”

“What’s wrong with my dress?” I tilt my head to the side, arching an eyebrow. “Do you have a problem with it?”

“Hmm? N-Nothing! There’s…” She blushes and avoids my gaze. “There’s… nothing wrong with your dress, Motor… whoever you are. It was just a bit, uh… unexpected, for me.”

“So a dress is unexpected, and the unexpected just gets the cutest noises out of you…” I smirk. “Learning so much for my first day on the job.”

“Hgjdfghsdff,” Suprema replies, tensing up like an uncoiling spring. “If you continue on like this I’m going to think you’re trying to flirt with me…”

“I am,” I respond matter-of-factly.

“Apology acc— YOU ARE???” She spins right on her heels to face me, her face a burning painting of scarlet hues.

“Do you want me to stop?” I ask.

“ERR…. ERM… THAT IS TO SAY… I… OKAY???“

With a shrug, I do as she says. “Alright then, no more flirting.”

“WAIT, NO, THAT’S NOT WHAT I—” She stomps her foot on the ground and huffs. “You flirt!! How dare you!! What are you trying to get out of me!?”

“Well,” I start to count on my fingers, “a kiss, maybe a cuddle, a hug, affection, a girlfriend, a relationship, love, intimacy, a partner, someone to fall asleep next to, what else…”

“Oh. You’re serious,” Suprema replies, deadpan. Then her face heats up once more. “Oh no. You’re serious.”

“Do you not like it?”

“No, no! That’s… great! Yes, it’s great!! Absolutely great!!” She crosses her arms, trying to mask her feelings with a bombastic stance. “Who could ask for a more devoted minion, KYAH KYAH KYAH!?”

A little idea crosses my mind. I stand up, then sweep her off her feet from behind, cradling her in my arms with a smile.

“Jeez, you’re tall,” she mutters, steam figuratively coming out of her ears. Her mechanical hands click around idly. “And you can lift…”

“I’m sure you’ll find I am very lovable,” I say, setting her down gently.

“I-I-I-I-I— I think I need a coffee. If you’ll excuse me.” She speedwalks out of sight, muttering some more to herself.

So maybe I didn’t expect myself to be this smitten. Who am I to judge? Or… who am I, in general. Little skin off my back. I wait patiently for her to come back, at first. But then, I stare at her computer some more, and a strange feeling washes over me. Unprotected, Intel, Information gathering, those are the words that bubble up from the depths of my mind… They feel alien and intrusive… and depressing.

My first thought is to push them away, obviously. Yet still they nag and nag, and against my best judgment, I find myself walking up to the keyboard, dreading what I’m about to do. 

I give one last glance towards Suprema’s choice of exit, then plunge deep into my trance. Custom OS in naught but name. Standard folder structure, absent OPSEC, rerouted virtual connection, otherwise private server. My hands have a mind of their own, scouring hundreds of nestled folders searching for anything of ‘tactical value’. Compromised data, secret dealings, coordinates of POI, it’s all laid bare for me to absorb encyclopedically. But, tucked in a corner of the desktop, there lies a simple folder titled “lab security log”. I wrestle control back to myself and click it open. Inside, another set of folders, but one in particular calls to me: “cameras”. Hundreds of timestamped files stare back at me. I look at the corner of the screen; it is 4:17pm. I open the freshest file from the past hour.

An array of videos appear on the screen, filming different angles of the very warehouse I’m in. My eyes scour my surroundings and immediately identify which correspond to which. Most of the video is Doctor Suprema working on a machine of some sort, but around a third before it ends… A sudden quake shakes the building. Crashing down from the ceiling in a rain of broken glass, there is… me. I landed on my knee, my right fist against the ground. Suprema is surprised by my arrival and scurries back, shouting something or other. The recording doesn’t have audio. I tilt my head up slowly and stand straight. 

My past incarnation starts firing at her. Orbs of light explode out from my palm, wheezing past her as she narrowly dodges. Chaos explodes onto the scene. The fight weaves from screen to screen, from angle to angle, until one of my shots hits her square in the leg. She screams, stopping dead in her tracks. I advance slowly. She turns around and shouts at me again. No response. She trips on her labcoat and falls. I start to dash right for her. 

Barely visible from the corner of the camera, her mechanical arm charges up. She closes her eyes, and as I pounce towards her, hands readying for a point blank ray of light, her rocket-powered claw connects with my helmet and sends me flying towards my earlier resting place.

…

While my thoughts were captivated by what I was seeing, my hands hadn’t stopped working. A giant document plasters itself onto the center of the screen. It’s a superhero certification profile, originating from a folder named “government leaks.” Next to glowing praise from the Ministry of Defense, celebrating five consecutive years of top numbers in supervillain elimination, there is a photograph of a man wearing a helmet, the visor opened for the camera. 

There is no life inside the eyes that stare back at me.

I close every file I’ve opened.

I select the profile and the video, then delete them.

I place everything back where it was, leaving the computer looking undisturbed.

With a little spring in my step, I walk away, heading to meet back with the one person in the world I know I want to trust.

PrincessFelicie

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