“Done!” the Circuit Super darted down the alley towards the junction.

  There, the subject jumped as the cartridge struck him in the leg and injected the pharmaceutical payload. Almost immediately, he felt fine! Just fine!

  He plopped into a puddle, splashing away his problems. The agent, whatever it was, acted exceedingly fast. Within what felt like a flinch, the clamp disintegrated. Cooper breathed freely again. Then the heat and itch totally cleared, and he assumed the rash also. The autoinjector hung out of his flesh, but he made zero move to extract it.

  Beyond feeling as fine as he could, his code to live by included never sticking needles into himself or conversely pulling them out, while also avoiding his eyeballs, which he modeled as a soft, jiggling jelly instead of the hard-boiled eggs he had no clue they actually felt like, since he had never handled them.

  He had never confronted the Circuit either. He had no clue what could happen to him, and didn’t hope to find out.

  In the commotion, the sparrow fluttered around the subject, hissing into his ear. Cooper froze, trapped between the snake with fang and the Circuit converging on him. The Super plugged one passage as the subordinates barred the others.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “Get the hell away!” he yelled at the Circuit.

  They towered high and mighty above him, promising obliteration. Their eyes glinted metallic. Cooper held his hands in front of his face, as if that could ward off a strike. In that case, they could hit him everywhere else. They would fix him. What had he really run for, to end up in end times like these?

  In the center of a circle inscribed by the junction, Cooper beat back his primal instincts, resisting the urge to jump up and take off. Sucking in the sizzling, electric air, he longed to fly wild and crazy again. He tensed like a spring. Why not bolt past the Circuit? He could zoom through a void. What if he ripped out the autoinjector and stabbed it into the impasse?

  Egged on by the sound, Cooper leaped to his feet, neglecting the snake looping near him. The Super reacted as fast as he could, yelling for it to go “down and out”, but too late.

  “Stop! Stay!” the Super yelled at someone.

  It was hard to tell which one, the Circuit or sparrow or subject, all in crazy, haphazard motion.

  “Goddamned!” the Super yelled.

  A sequence of events unfolded cleanly. The subordinates observed in uselessness, unable to abort all actions.

  The sparrow shot up with the subject.

  The snake shot straight ahead.

  The fang shot him in the back of the neck.

  Just like that, in a sharp stab that hurt, his surround sound damped to gone.