Techie Tales: 13 New High-Tech Heroes

These stories introduce thirteen new high-tech heroes, not superheroes but scientific ones. Each has a high-tech system that uses state of the art and beyond science to give him or her a limited and specific enhanced ability to deal with problems. Three chemists use wide arrays of glues, or lubricants, or psychoactive chemicals to influence events. Three others have devices that super-size their hearing, smell, or vision. The rest can: deploy a protective energy bubble at will; use strong but focused magnetic attraction or repulsion; float soundlessly in the air; slow up the muscle movements of others with a ray; interpret auras to guesstimate people’s intentions; blend with many backgrounds to disappear in plain view; or travel through the phone lines to listen or emerge in distant places. These are not all-purpose heroes ready and able to deal with all manner of bad guys and problems, they are civilians who deal with problems that their specialty can help with when they see them but usually don’t go out looking for those. They generally depend on their wits, agility, and the advantage of their enhanced specialty rather than fists or weapons to fend off bad guys, to save people from the mistakes they or others made, or to thwart scams. When threatened with fists and weapons in the process they deal with those, even if it means killing an attacker to save themselves or innocent people. In these adventures they continue the on-going process of testing and developing their inventions, using them to deal with problems large and small as they find them.