Anti-Hero (#FridayFlash)

Chirp, the computer said.

“Hunh,” said Helmut Harr, better known as the supervillain Pulse. That chirp meant he’d received a DM on Twitter, which didn’t happen often. He kept a low profile online, routing his access through several hacked PCs and an anonymizing relay or three. His Twitter account followed a few random normals and the known superheroes and supervillains. Even mortal enemies had to communicate on occasion. Harr shrugged and closed his solitaire game. He gave the tweet a curious scowl:

Captain Heroic (ret.)
You have HNN on? Go check it out.

“Vas ist…?” he muttered, then shrugged and ambled into the living room. HNN was often useful for tracking movements of the enemy, giving villains windows of opportunity, and that was the channel the TV came up to most days.

Harr gasped at the title on the screen: “Pulse: Supervillain or Folk Hero?” He gaped at the parade of normals being interviewed. “About time someone took Wall Street down!” “Yeah, Pulse, stick it to the Man!” “He did more for normal people in ten seconds than all the superheroes combined have done in ten years!”

They cut back to the studio, where Betty Kanaka (so easy on the eyes, Harr thought) anchored the desk. “It was an audacious caper,” she said. “Pulse managed to gain entry to the server rooms at Goldman Sachs headquarters, and the Skyscraper City branch of Bank of America, and left them a smoking ruin. Computers, routers, disk drives, security systems—all completely destroyed. Statements issued by both banks claim that no data was lost, and disaster recovery plans allowed them to function normally within a few hours.”

“Ha. No data lost.” The fact was, Pulse had hacked into Bank of America and deleted several hundred mortgages from the system (including his own), along with about ten thousand foreclosures (including one for Jaguar, a supervillain who’d had a run of bad luck lately). The EMP attacks covered his tracks, and he’d hit Goldman Sachs just because they were assholes.

“Pulse has not yet issued a statement, nor has he responded to our emailed questions.”

Harr muttered a curse in German. He only checked his email once a week, and most of it was spam anyway.

“The FBI has reiterated their standing offer of a two-million dollar reward to anyone who can positively identify Pulse, or bring him to justice. For HNN, I’m Betty Kanaka.”

Harr hit the Power button on the remote, and returned to his computer. The DM window was still up, so he typed his question to Captain Heroic: WTF?

Captain Heroic (ret.)
You thinking about switching sides?

sv_pulse
Nein. No. Hell no.

Captain Heroic (ret.)
Hey, I’d come out of retirement if you did. Might be fun to work together.

sv_pulse
I had personal reasons.

He opened his email, and found the questions from HNN buried in about two hundred offers for reverse mortgages, horny married women, Nigerian ancestors, timeshares, discreet pharmacies, and the like.

Captain Heroic (ret.)
So what’s next?

sv_pulse
Spammers. I hate opening my email these days.

Captain Heroic (ret.)
So you’ve already switched sides. If you need help with that one, let me know.

Captain Heroic (ret.)
Miss Siles wants a piece of spammer. Or some spammers in pieces.

Captain Heroic (ret.)
But keep it online. She’s… distracting to work with in person.

sv_pulse
So I’ve heard. I’ll keep that in mind.

“No time like the present,” he said, opening the HNN message. He scanned the vacuous questions, clicked Reply, and typed: Those who make a supervillain look like a hero, should take a good long look in the mirror. Yesterday, big banks. Tomorrow, spammers. Do not think of this as switching sides, rather I am eliminating the competition. He clicked Send, and smiled.