FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #7

"There's Something About Rosa," Part Two
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

With a potent blend of flirtation and intimidation, Lily extorts Rosa into completing a wormhole machine, a portal designed to locate and enlarge existing fissures in the universe.  Steely Rosa never tips her hand entirely, but Lily's a shrewd judge of emotional soft-spots.  Rosa may not have any surviving family to speak of, no notable friends, but she cares about everyone, so anyone is a suitable hostage, especially a young girl named Reyes.

Rosa's solution is brutally suitable and a little morally questionable:  trap both Lily—whom she snared trying to kill the young random target Kara Reyes in revenge—and her murderer lover Frank—just escaped through the wormhole machine Rosa helped to fix—in a wormhole loop.  Using their own machines against the criminals who use them, especially those willing to kill children in cold blood, is poetic.  But Cicero's right; they shouldn't "go making a habit of this" (FBP #7: 19).  But Adam too is right; it's "quite the team-building exercise" (16).  Something like this, when combined with Rosa's seemingly unflappable demeanor, earns a new team member respect, especially from an agent as unconventional as Adam Hardy.

"Rainwoman."  Certainly, it's a profoundly unsubtle reference to Dustin Hoffman's titular autistic savant in Barry Levinson's Rain Man, an insensitive and reductive commentary on Rosa's social awkwardness and, perhaps, her professional expertise.  The irony, of course, known to the reader but seemingly not to her colleagues, is that Rosa's life (and career) have largely been shaped by her birth during and disappearance/reappearance in a rainstorm.  During a bloody and difficult delivery twenty-four years ago in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, Rosa, her mother and the midwife vanished from their house in Honduras while her father was out fetching water.  Ten years later, Rosa reappears in an equally violent storm alone and naked and entirely aware of who she and her father are.  Adam quips to Cicero in what he no doubt means to be sarcastic hyperbole:  "But those are the social skills of someone who grew up on Mars" (FBP #6: 7).  The ironic truth is Rosa may have grown up much farther away than that.

[March 2014]