This was perfect. Maybe I couldn't show her footage of what our life had been like, but I could show her what happened on the day we finally and definitively fell for each other.

"What is this?" she asked.

"Order some breakfast, because boy do I have a show for you!" I said.

I pulled up the news recording of our exploits when we'd saved the city. The only time we'd saved the city that everyone knew about, come to think of it.

There'd been a couple of times when we'd gone out and busted some heads without the news cameras running. I liked to say if you were doing your job right then it was splashed all over cable news and the Internet for the whole world to see, but that wasn't always necessarily the case if you were doing hero stuff instead of villain stuff.

And of course there were the constant alien invasions to think of. It seemed like I was beating back one of those at the edge of the solar system every other month, and the less the people of earth knew about that the better.

It would only throw them into a panic, and panicked people were difficult to rule. Anyone who tried to rule via the crisis model, keeping people constantly on edge with an external threat, was asking to have their back against the wall when that constant tension eventually reached a breaking point.

"Wow," Fialux said. "We really fought a giant robot together?"

"You bet your cute ass we did!" I said.

I blushed when she gave me an odd look. She'd been my girlfriend a day ago and flirtatious stuff like that had been the norm. It was difficult adjusting to a world where that was no longer the case.

I shut up and let the recording play while we enjoyed breakfast. Fialux ordered up some sort of sugar loaded cereal that I totally wouldn't be able to eat myself. Not without spending at least a half hour in the gym to make up for it. I looked down at my oatmeal and frowned.

The sacrifices we made in order to look good in a profession where you had to regularly squeeze into the kind of skintight cat suits that would make Hollywood movie stars blush.

Though as I looked at Fialux wolfing down her own food, I wondered if she'd be able to continue packing away the calories like she used to. After all, if she'd been relying on some sort of strange accelerated alien metabolism to be able to eat whatever the hell she pleased and still look as great as she did then there was going to be a rude awakening at some point.

I figured it would be better not to bring that up. The poor girl had been through a hell of an ordeal. She'd had her powers completely stripped from her. She'd had the crap beat out of her by a robot without seeming to realize she was having the crap kicked out of her. She'd lost her recent memories.

I figured telling her she was going to have to start counting calories when she was used to packing away the junk food would be too much on top of everything else.

Fialux stared at the newsfeed. She gasped at all the appropriate moments, and by the time she was done looking through a complete summary of our fight from multiple angles she looked at me and seemed very impressed.

"You helped me do all that?" she asked.

"Well, you were the one who did all the work of taking out the giant robot."

"But you were the one who tossed in the bomb thing that killed him and…"

She put a hand to her head. I leaned forward, on the verge of whisking her off to the medbay if it turned out something bad was going down, but she held up a hand and shook her head.

"Sorry. I had a flash of something. Of you being chased by a bunch of missiles and then… But it's gone."

I sighed. Those flashes of memory were a good sign, but it was going to be endlessly frustrating dealing with her almost remembering us. I wanted my Fialux, my Selena, back damn it.

"Trust me. You were the one who did the real work breaking through his armor. The bastard changed his specs without telling me and made it a hell of a lot more difficult for me to break through with my toys. You busted through that armor like it was tissue paper."

"If you say so," she said, sounding unsure.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"I do say so," I said. "I was just there to soften him up and triangulate the position of the real bad guy."

Her face scrunched up in confusion. "The real bad guy? What are you…"

I waved a hand and stopped her. "There's always a real bad guy behind the bad guy you think is the real bad guy, if that makes sense."

That look of confusion never left her face. "I'm afraid it doesn't."

I sighed. "Look. It's Villainy 101. CORVAC revealed he wasn't hiding where I thought he was hiding. None of the stuff I'd put in place to kill him if he went rogue actually killed him. Security through obfuscation. Really an amateur move. From there it wasn't difficult to figure out he had to be hiding his traitorous circuits somewhere else. I also figured he wasn't hiding all of his eggs in that giant robot chassis since killing the giant robot would kill him. From there it was easy enough to figure out he was controlling it from a remote location and track him back to the lair he was sharing with that Roth asshole down by the docks. Probably some other better villain's lair they moved into after it was abandoned."

"I see," Fialux said, in a tone that said she didn't really see at all. "I can't believe Rex Roth was manipulating me that whole time."

"Yeah, it was a real son-of-a-bitch. Mind control stuff. He almost got me with it too."

"How did you stop him?" she asked.

"Simple. I've prepared for just about every eventuality I thought someone might throw at me. Including all the eventualities I'd invented to throw at other people."

She frowned. "So you've used mind control on people before?"

An uncomfortable silence settled between us. I wasn't sure that I liked this line of questioning. It was a line of questioning that was going to force me to admit something I'd rather not.

I needed to choose my words carefully. After all, even my Fialux hadn't known about that tech I'd developed. Something told me this was the sort of thing she'd continue to be perturbed by even after she got her memory back if I didn't handle this delicately.

"I developed mind control technology, yes. Sort of a proof of concept. But I never actually used it in the field."

I stopped. Thought about that. Realized it would be a good idea to be as completely and totally open and honest about this as possible.

"Scratch that. That's not quite true," I said. "I did use it one time. To get the job in the journalism department that let me teach your class."

"I wondered how you got that job," she said. "You didn't seem like any other adjunct professor I'd ever had. They're always so terrified of losing their jobs that they don't act nearly as brazen as you did."

I grinned. Selena frowned.

"What?"

"You remembered me teaching your class!"

Selena put a hand to her head and frowned. "Weird. That memory was just sort of there. Without thinking about it. There are still big holes around it, though."

"That's how it works," I said, thinking back to the first time I woke up with temporary amnesia from a stint in the medbay. Though it hadn't been as thorough as her amnesia. "It comes in fits and starts, and then it all comes back at once."

"I see," she said in a tone that said she didn't see at all. "Maybe it was how ridiculous you were in that class. That was memorable."

I shrugged. "What can I say? I needed to track you down, and it ended up working out. Until it didn't."

I frowned and looked down at my empty bowl of boring sugar-free oatmeal. Oh to have a fabulous metabolism that allowed me to eat whatever the hell I wanted without consequences in the calorie department.

Seriously. I'm talking when we went to the food court down on campus she ate like she was an Olympic athlete or something. Though considering the way she expended energy when she was flying around saving the world it was hardly a surprise that she'd have one hell of a daily caloric deficit, even if I was pretty sure she was drawing some power from somewhere else as well.

"So it's not something you've ever used any other time?" she asked.

"Nope," I said.

"And you're never going to use that again?" she continued.

"Villain's honor," I replied. Then, when she gave me a look that said that wasn't a very trustworthy thing to swear by: "Trust me. I take that very seriously."

"Right," she said. "I suppose it's a good thing you had that ready to go then if it saved our butts."

"That's what I was thinking," I said, relieved that this wasn't going to get more awkward.

I figured this conversation might go on a little longer, but Fialux turned her attention to the TV.

"That's weird," Fialux said.

I followed her gaze. "What's weird?"

"That robot attacking the city," she said. "It doesn't look like the one we fought. So what are those? Did we fight off another set of robots?"

I looked up at the screen. Realized the stream must've finished. It'd switched back to live TV, which was always on the Starlight City News Network. I had to constantly monitor the network by myself since I found myself down a supercomputer who used to be able to monitor all of that stuff and tell me when there was something worth watching.

I'd completely lost track of what was going on in Days of Our Lives, and it was endlessly frustrating thinking about everything I was going to have to catch up on when I figured out a way to monitor the news networks passively without giving my new system a cogito ergo sum moment.

I'd missed at least one blob of toxic sludge that had gained some measure of intelligence and decided to destroy the civilization that gave birth to its pained existence, and after that I decided it would be a better idea to watch the news myself to be sure.

Right about now that news was confusing the hell out of me. Because there were a couple of good old-fashioned anthropomorphic robots that looked very similar to the ones I'd fought on the university campus, but they were bigger.

They were also painted in a different color scheme and some of the design details were different, but the basic design was the same.

I wouldn't be caught dead using one of those things to attack the city, but that wasn't stopping the idiots at the Starlight City News Network from speculating that it was another attack from yours truly.

My eyes narrowed. "That's not from the day we saved the city from my supercomputer. That's live TV."

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