The first words she hears are, “this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Ji-a finds Leo back in the storage room. The gentle lapping of water against the dock is background for the sound of his sniffles. When he turns, she can see the tears in his eyes.
“I haven’t told you about - dad. Your husband. You’re not going to like it.”
Ji-a composes herself, and beckons with her hands. “Come. Sit with me. I’ll listen.”
The two park themselves on a crate. Leo rubs tears from his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Karl Taitale is Rossum, the Minion Maker. He’s a supervillain now. Has been for years. Ever since he lost you. Thought he lost you.”
“He took care of me, in his own weird fucked-up way. Put a chip in my head that fixed a fatal brain condition. Turns out, that chip unlocked all the tech I use now. See, I’m a superhero, and I fight bad guys like him.”
Ji-a crosses her arms over her chest, hunching up against this news. But she’s listening, and Leo goes on.
“He’d make robot minions for other villains. Build artificial henchmen, gadgets, whatever. Sell them to bad guys, and take a cut of their haul. The authorities found him. They took me away, of course. But Rossum, y’know, he was a genius. He’d just keep coming back and back and back–” Leo slams a fist down on the crate. “Outta I dunno, some kinda twisted love, but like, he was gonna make me some kinda general in his fucking army. So they finally got him. Fucking AEGIS got him.”
Ji-a’s voice is gentle, as she tries to pull him away from the worst of the memory. “When I knew Karl, he was already quite the inventor. Underwater drones for submarine exploration. He showed such promise. And he needed a focus for that promise. He found that in my work.”
Leo rubs his eyes again. “Well, he’s not doing that shit any more. They got him in maximum security now. He’s never ever getting out. Means I’m free to do my thing. I got the same inventive spark. I built - I built a lot of things. Cool armor. You haven’t seen that, it’s pretty neat. It’s got grappling hooks and shit.”
Ji-a smiles at that. “I would like to see your grappling hook system.”
Leo nods, rallying himself away from the worst of it. “Listen, hey, now that they got him, my job is done, right? So, I’ve been settling down. Building things. I got friends, smart ones, with that same genius, you know? We’re all working on great stuff. I uh, I did…”
He glances carefully at Ji-a, gauging her reaction as he speaks. “I made some robots. Intelligent ones. People. Like, real people. I took my connectome and did a - hey, do you know what a Variational Autoencoder is? Kaspar Martens, Christopher Yau?”
Ji-a laughs. “I do not know what this is. Tell me.”
Leo’s ragged breathing is stabilizing. “It’s uh, shit. This is gonna take too long. Listen, I know you’re smart but I’m gonna summarize, okay? You can take the pieces of a brain. You can reduce them to a mathematical model. Like tiny little LEGO bricks, you can break the model apart and put it back together in a new shape. There’s a direct mathematical relationship between that abstraction and actual neurons. So you can, y’know, dream up a person and make them real.”
“And you did this?” Ji-a sits up in genuine interest, and a little bit of shock. “You created these?”
“Yeah!” Leo is finally breathing steadily, and he’s smiling through damp eyes. “Otto. You’re gonna like him. And Pneuma. So, uh, a thing happened. Pneuma turned into two people. Aria, and Summer. You’re gonna like them both. Listen, mom, Aria and I are kinda in love, and like, uh, a lot is happening there, but I want to make a family. Dual connectomes. Aria’s working on the math. She’s making sure everything’s covered. Safety, you know?”
Ji-a smiles again. “This is a lot to take in, but I think I understand. Artificial lifeforms with human minds. Non-human people. Like dolphins. Or the True Atlanteans.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Leo is excited. “Listen. You have to meet them. And you’re gonna fix dad. When he sees you alive, he’s gonna realize he can stop his bullshit, he’s gonna turn around. Everything’s going to turn around. Mom…”
His shoulders sink, and Ji-a sees the fear and pain take hold of him again. “Mom. You can’t stay here. You gotta come back with me.”
Ji-a rises from her seat, laying a hand briefly on Leo’s shoulder as she does. She takes several steps, looking at nothing, thinking of everything. “What about what’s happening here?” she finally asks.
Leo sighs. “It’s… I don’t know this place. I just came here awhile ago. You know, I…”
He also rises, and begins pacing like a caged animal. “It’s Fuko’s fault. She could have told me all of this stuff. Atlantis. The factions. The everything. I thought it was going to be fine. You know? I trusted her. She’s on a team. I trust the guy with her. We played lacrosse in fucking high school! I’m supposed to know these people! We’re supposed to look out for each other!”
Leo aims a kick at an undeserving crate. “Thing is, it’s my fucking fault too. It was a weird thing to ask. I wanted this. I know, I know, I wanted it, okay? It’s my fault. Some part of me knew this was weird. But I wanted an adventure again. So I packed my armor, I didn’t tell Aria any details, didn’t bring a tracking device, I just jumped right the fuck in because I wanted some god damn excitement again.”
He throws his hands up in exasperation, then lets them down on the crate. Ji-a winces slightly at the impact.
She watches Leo turn, sees the fire in his eyes, and the hurt. “None of this was supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to meet my mom and then have her tell me she can’t come home with me. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair!”
Ji-a raises a hand. “Leonardo, I–”
“It’s - not - fair!”
Leo has started crying again. “I went from family to family. I was a little worm on AEGIS’s hook, and my dad always came for the bait. And he hurt everyone in his way. The Pucketts. The Delacruzes. The Lancasters. The Washingtons. The Dorseys. The Carsons. The Yamada-Kims. The Conways. I had so many people to call mom and dad, until they were snatched from me by my fucking father. And now you are telling me that there’s this thing that’s gonna happen because these fucking squids from a place I never even knew existed before, like, Tuesday, are afraid of surface people, and they’re gonna go to fucking war, and once again I’m gonna lose family. No. No.”
The tears have stopped, replaced with a furious intensity. His voice is a heady cocktail of indignation and disgust, words coming between sharp intakes of air. “They wanna be afraid of the surface? I’ll make them afraid. You have no idea, mom. You’re gonna see the shit I’ve built. The Phoenix was only the beginning. I will give them a god damn war.”
Ji-a sees and hears and understands the feelings radiating from the young man before her. She knows what she says next will be the fulcrum that moves his heart, but it’s so hard to know in which direction it’ll go.
She takes a chance, on the heart of the son she never knew before today.
“Aria. You said you love her. You wanted me to meet her. Help me meet her. If Aria were here, what would she say and do right now?”
Leo winces with the hurt he feels. “No. No. You do not get to use her name to manipulate me.”
But Ji-a sees that it’s too late, that the name has already had its desired effect. Leo slumps against a nearby container, and Ji-a gently eases him back to a sitting position as he talks.
“She’d… She’d be upset with me, for not telling her. She’d… She’d do that stupid thing where she ruffles my hair. She knows I hate combing it, because it gets matted and tangles and that hurts to comb. So she uses her fingers to kinda ease the tangles out. Tells me I should change shampoo. I just don’t want to use any of that girly stuff. Maybe I should.”
He leans back, and draws breath more slowly than before. “But she knows it calms me down. And then she’d tell me it’s not fair, tell me I’m right, empathize with me.”
The rage is gone, and Ji-a can hear the rains falling on the ashen soil left by that fire. She smiles and speaks. “She sounds very kind.”
Leo’s cracked laugh leads to coughing. “‘Kind’ doesn’t begin to cover it. But yeah. She is.”
Ji-a carefully, experimentally, brushes her own fingers through Leo’s hair. Sure enough, she finds tangles. “You make me want to meet all of these people. And see the world you’re from. And I think you know why it’s important to stay here. So I can help keep that world safe, in my own way, don’t you.”
Leo nods. He’s out of words for the moment.
Ji-a lets out a sigh. To see the surface again. To see what’s changed in twenty years. To find out what happened to Karl… My god. But she shakes the thought loose from her head. “Let’s do that together. Bring peace to the world. And then you can present me to Aria, and Otto, and Summer. To your other friends, the smart people you’ve worked with. Let’s work toward that goal.”
Leo nods again. The energy is draining out of him, and Ji-a briefly worries he’ll actually fall off the crate.
She tousles his hair again and takes in a breath. “Take a few minutes and rest. Then let’s go back to the others.”
“Oh. And listen to Aria on the subject of shampoo, and hopefully she mentions a moisturizing conditioner as well. Your hair smells awful right now. You have no idea how damaging seawater can be.”
“Mom, geez.”