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He was your son, too, and you can love what he was in the beginning without condoning what he was in the end.”
    Alpha Prime nodded, then reached out and put a grateful hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, son.”
    Oddly enough, for the first time, his use of the term “son” didn’t immediately get my ire up on some level, and I found myself giving him a supportive smile. That was surprising enough, but what was even more bizarre was that we seemed to be bonding over something related to Paramount. You’d have thought the guy was dead, the way we usually tiptoed around talking about him, but in truth my half-brother was being held in some high-end, super-secret security facility. Alpha Prime knew where it was, but on this topic I was the one who hadn’t cared enough to ever ask.
    “It’s too bad you two never really got to know each other,” he said, glancing at the photo of Paramount again. “Maybe knowing you, or even just knowing about you — that you were out there — would have made some kind of difference. Kept him…balanced.”
    I kept my thoughts to myself, but I didn’t think there was anything short of a lobotomy that would have changed Paramount’s warped view of the world and his own existence. I wondered for a brief second if Alpha Prime was also thinking of his own brother (from whom he was estranged), and I was tempted to mention that I’d actually had an opportunity to meet my uncle.
    Of course, I didn’t know he was my uncle at the time, and I was actually in the process of breaking into a government facility when our paths crossed. (In all honesty, it was more of a skirmish than a meeting, since my uncle was one of the supers guarding the installation that I broke into.) Bearing that in mind, as well as the fact that I committed about a dozen or more felonies when my uncle and I had our run-in, it didn’t seem prudent to mention the recent family reunion. (There was a silver lining however: I had been successful in rescuing my friend Rudi — a young psychic — and her little brother from the facility in question, which had been the whole reason for breaking in there in the first place.)
    “Anyway, we should probably get going,” my father said, glancing at his watch. He turned to leave the room, and I rose to follow him. As he reached the hallway that led back to the library, he turned his head to the side and said casually over his shoulder, “Race you to the car.”
    There was a sudden whooshing sound of displaced air and he was gone, leaving a powerful wind in his wake that buffeted me slightly as it whipped through the confined space of the passageway. I grinned and teleported to the garage.
    The main garage, that is. There were apparently something like three of them. One housed classic cars that were essentially museum pieces — primarily just for show and rarely ever driven. Another held autos that were in need of some work (awaiting a rare part or the like).
    The last garage, the one that I had popped into, was a cavernous chamber that echoed if you spoke too loudly and also housed about two dozen “drivable” cars — those that my father would occasionally take out for a spin. I was standing there, arms crossed, tapping my foot in mock impatience when Alpha Prime showed up a few seconds after I appeared.
    “Took you long enough,” I said.
    “Hmmm. I’ll have to check the dictionary to see when the definition of ‘race’ was altered to include teleportation,” he said.
    “It’ll be right there next to the definition that says one guy can just shout out ‘Race you!’ and get a head start before his opponent is even ready.”
    “Touché,” he said, then looked around, taking stock of the various vehicles. “Well, which one do you want to take?”
    His question caught me a little by surprise, but I recovered quickly enough. Previously, Alpha Prime had selected the vehicles we’d taken to the games we attended. (While he drove, I usually spent my time oohing and