Appreciation...

"Dedication to the cause must be renewed."

His first words to me after I emerge from the training room, sweaty but confident. He thinks that the masses don't care anymore about being saved, don't care about heroes and justice, just want to live their lives and take their chances and hope somebody else gets shot instead of them. I can tell this is going to be a long speech, so I hoist myself back up onto the bars and dangle by my feet.

"The people of this world need to be reminded that we are daily sacrificing our lives and the prospect of normal happiness, so that they can continue theirs. They accept our gifts and then shut the door, never asking us in for tea, never acknowledging that we are anything more than street cleaners!" He paces around the room, furiosity growing within his veins.

"But we are not just cleaners! We are people! We demand to be realized for the saviors we are! For generations we have fought, underground and in secret, to keep this world a place of safety and respite. Is it not so? Were we to step aside, the dangers would manifest themselves to the common people in their utmost horror! Is that what they want? They would be destroyed!"

"Now, Jack," I smile, using his code name to help calm him, sliding down from the side of the exercise bar, "You know that's not entirely true." He faces me, eyes glazed, slowly coming out of the fervor that takes hold of him every Saturday morning when the man next door refuses to let him watch his favorite TV show in his house.

"Well, if they don't want to have to look at us, they could at least pay for us to have our own supplies in the base. I mean, superheroes get bored too! Are we all just supposed to sit here like mannikins until a call comes in? A little TV couldn't hurt. Really, I mean, what are we supposed to do? This is inhumane treatment! I mean, I'm missing the game!"

"Jack, Jack, Jack..." I reply, jumping from the bars to the trapeze up above, "You could try reading a book." I toss him down the one I was reading while working out.

"Bleghhhh. Thoreau? Really?"

"Have you ever read him?" I counter, leaping down to the floor and taking a swig from my thermos.

"No, but I've heard he's really boring. Always blathering on about trees and nature and things. What I need is some adventure!"

Hunh. We'll see about that...


So I take him by the hand and run into the lab and plug him into the Imaginator I've just created, a filmy tentacular screen that latches onto the eyes, and all of Thoreau's life is uploaded into Jack's brain.

"Wow..." he mumbles, eyes bugged out. "How did that just happen..." He walks slowly around the room, and concedes that he was perhaps incorrect in his assumptions. "I didn't know he had a family...I thought he was a drifter with no connections...woa...this guy was deep..."

He staggers around a bit more, and I wonder if I've maybe gone overboard in an invention this time...nah.

Jack says, "See you later," and heads toward the door.

"Where are you going?" I call.

"To climb a tree."