Hardly A Hero [REWRITTEN ON NEW ACCOUNT]

Chapter 37: Never A Plan Like No Plan

The recording device I had planted in one of NASEB's labs was disabled. After Mindwave and his friend decided to interfere, the thing must have broken in the collapse of front half of the building. I wasn't too upset though; at least I knew where they were going to pop up.

I flipped Mindwave's card over and over between my fingers, the other hand leaning on the armrest of my new desk chair with my head relaxing on top of it. It was so easy to get caught up in the rush and adrenaline of it all that I forgot that I had a mother back home who knew who I was, a mother who let me down and, in return, I had pushed away. We were both equally responsible for the lack of good treatment and familiar love that was supposed to keep our relationship in place. Although I hated to admit it to myself (and believe me it took a long walk around my new HQ before I could come to terms with it), my mother couldn't be trusted with that information. 

I so desperately didn't want her to have that information anymore... and now I actually had the opportunity to take it all back.

So it wasn't long before I was outside my old home, a baggy, red hoodie curved over my head and looking into the front window. It was the same old scene; the forgotten glass bottles that dotted the floor like knocked over bowling pins, probably indifferent to one another in my mother's mind as she lay, unconscious, on the front room sofa.

It wasn't too long before Mindwave was beside me, his hoodie also absorbed by the early morning rain and his eyes trying to assess what significance the house in front of us held.

"You said you could manipulate thoughts, right? You can make people forget things too?"

He stutters, his usually fiery, rust-coloured hair now sticking to his forehead and drooping over into his eyes. 

"Uh, yeah." He responded. "Why, what do you want me to do?"

"That's my mother, on that couch, I need you to do something for me."

"Your mother?" His tone was more alive now, more cynical, like the first time I met him. His confidence was only slowly returning. "That seems a little... unethical."

"Your whole damn power is unethical." I shot back, my head moving quickly around to face him, before subtracting back into the shadow of my hood. "Sorry. This is a touchy subject."

Then I explained it to him and I didn't hold anything back. He needed to know it all, anyway, for him to really be able to do a good job. He listened intently to all of it, watching my face with that same, unmoving expression. A little like the first time I met TerraStorm and the way he watched me, but Mindwave seemed more... passive. It's like I could almost actually see the plan forming in his brain, building and restructuring with each word I said.

He simply nodded after I finished and we approached the door. With the key shaking slightly in my hand, I opened the front door and watch as he placed his hands over my mother's oblivious, motionless face. Then he got to work; he talked to me as his eyes turned white, which didn't scare me as much as it should have. It felt like I had seen almost everything in the past few months. He said it was easy to erase her drunken memories, he could just input some other intoxicated thought from the past. He said he replaced my identity confession with a false memory of me telling her I accepted my offer to Chilton Academy of Media and Journalism... which I had turned down only a few days prior. I wasn't staying here; I had to be close to the new HQ, which was a heck of a long way from here. 

Just before he was finished, he confirmed one last adjustment. The biggest one yet.

He was going to make her believe I had moved out and into the dorms of what would have been my college, so she wouldn't be able to see me for a while. Not that she would have noticed anyway.