The Front Steps
by Glitch Girl

The front Entrance of Electric Freedom HQ, Early 2004

The path between a condemned man's cell and the electric chair is often described as "The Longest Mile".

Lauren McKay never thought about the analogy until that moment standing at the base of the steps in from of the headquarters of the hero team known as Electric Freedom. She wondered, not for the first time, how in the world she had been talked into this. She didn't feel the least bit like a superhero, and if the only person on the planet who seemed to think she was hadn't been standing right behind her, she probably would have turned around and gone home without a second thought.

She felt a heavy reassuring hand on her shoulder.

"Nervous?" Direwolf asked.

"A little," she lied. In reality, her stomach felt like a failed origami attempt and her shoulders were so tensed they practically twanged.

"You do fine," he smiled down at her. "I'm sure of it."

"Uh-huh," she answered, but she still wasn't convinced. Sure, Direwolf had been a hero for years, he could punch a hole in a wall and take a bullet without breaking stride. He was practically a legend.

She... well, she talked to electronics. Big deal.

This power over electronics wasn't a power she'd been born with, but one that, for lack of a better term, "showed up" one day after that awful camping trip. The trip was yet another bad idea she'd gotten herself talked into, this time by her college friends who thought she needed to "get away from it all". All the camping trip did was confirm her belief that she was a city girl to the core. It had rained the entire two days, half of the provisions got lost when Kyle's pack broke, she got three blisters, and for a grand finale, there was the UFO crash.

The UFO was small and metal, shaped more like a tiny satellite than the space ship like you might expect to find if you've seen one too many 50's sci-fi movies, and it had crashed about forty yards from their camp, sending a shockwave that flattened everything and everyone into the mud. They'd all examined it, her friend and herself, all four of them poking and prodding at its smooth scorched surface that steamed in the surrounding dampness and all of them all marveling at what it might be.

Of course, it wasn't long before the army arrived and took charge of the situation and the four of them, which meant the remaining part of the weekend was spent getting debriefed by men in camouflage with no sense of humor and most of them in a bad mood because their equipment kept going on the fritz for no apparent reason. She still remembered the commander screaming a stream of obscenities that would make even Howard Stern blush as he yelled at his radio which had inexplicably started picking up music stations from Guam and nothing else.

At the time, she didn't think much of it; all it was was just an added bit of punctuation on an already horrendous weekend.

In fact, she didn't start noticing anything unusual until about two days later. It was the way she could feel when something electronic was around her, the way she didn't have to finish keying in her PIN number at the ATM before it accepted her, the way she noticed the TV would change channels without a remote... and the way things seemed to short circuit or simply glitch up around her. There were too many coincidences for it to be... well, coincidences. It soon became painfully apparent that whatever was causing all the strangeness was coming from her, and it had started after that camping trip.

Why the same strangeness wasn't happening to the rest of the camping party was a complete mystery, one that still didn't look like it would be solved any time soon.

Even though she had powers, the thought of becoming a superhero never entered her head. It wasn't even until the Patriot Mall incident that she even considered using them for anything more elaborate than programming her VCR.

That changed on a cold Tuesday evening in late December, right in the middle of the Christmas shopping season. Dr. Mechanical had sent a mass of robots into the Patriot City mall and took a large number of the shoppers hostage, about 250 people total, herself included. They'd all been herded into the central atrium, and high above, Mechanical spouted his demands to the Freedom Force as his robots loomed at the edges of the crowd, threatening instant fiery death if his demands weren't met. Negotiations hadn't been going well, and Mechanical was rapidly losing patience. Everyone in the atrium was scared, hoping that somehow, the heroes of Patriot City would rescue them from the mad genius.

Lauren remembered feeling the panic of the crowd all around her, pressing in on her like being in the middle of a riot about to begin.

But at the same time, she was sensing the robots guarding them, the sickly feeling of their slipshod programing and borderline unstable systems that sparked and oozed on the edge of her mind. She could even feel the simple inferred beams linking them all together, feeding them coded instructions from Mechanical's control systems.

She remembered concentrating, quietly adding her own commands to the data stream, filtering out the intended instructions and replacing them with some of her own. They weren't very good instructions, but it was all she could think of at the time.

When a small team of heroes arrived to try and ambush Mechanical, the madman had screamed the order for the robots to kill the hostages.

Instead of fiery carnage, the robots had answered as one "I'm sorry Dave, but I can't do that."

Then, they started singing "Bicycle Built for Two" as one slightly monotone robotic chorus.

Mechanical didn't see the humor in the situation but fortunately, he didn't have time to do much about it as he was quickly subdued by the heroes on the scene and the crisis ended without a single casualty.

In all the chaos, Lauren thought no one had noticed her use her power.

However, as Mechanical was being escorted away, one of the heroes broke off from the rest of his team and approached her as she lingered at the edge of the dissipating crowd. Strangely enough, he already knew her name and even the nature of her powers.

It was more than a little disconcerting. For lack of a good response, she asked if they'd met.

His reply was cryptic.

"Not exactly..." he said, "You haven't met me but I've met you."

Then he added with a small laugh "Don't worry, it'll all make sense someday."

And somehow in the next twenty minutes, the dark vigilante Direwolf managed to convince Lauren McKay that being a superhero was a good idea.

...Which is why she was standing at the base of these stairs dressed in a mask and costume and wondering if it still wasn't too late to change her mind.

"Go on," Direwolf said. "It's getting late."

"Um... Maybe we should try this next week."

"Lauren," he chided. "You're ready."

"Then why don't I feel ready?"

"You never do, at the beginning," he smiled. "I don't think you're supposed to. Feeling ready comes later."

She looked up at the doors again decorated in the lightning bolt motif. They didn't seem quite as intimidating as they had a moment ago.

Lauren, soon to be know as Glitch Girl, breathed deeply and took the first step.