FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #13

"Wish You Were Here," Conclusion
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

For perhaps the first time in his romantic experience, Adam's lover is the first to pull away.  They have a very fine moment on the roof of the Nakeet observatory, even with her naïveté regarding her dimension-window technology and his mild ego embarrassment at her superior combat skills.  Adam is willing to let Rosa go home while he stays behind to protect her device from their pursuers because that's what she wants, and she's willing to stay to keep him from having to.  Adam is, in other words and despite Rosa's subsequent coldness, the only person who could convince her to stay, to bring her out of her own head and back into her body.  And whatever Rosa's protestations after their re-emergence that "none of it was really real" (FBP #13: 15), their bodies in the tank suggest otherwise.  Whether Cicero and Sen take notice, Adam and Rosa are nearly holding hands after their snowstorm tryst (2), and in shielding Rosa from the explosion through the door to the roof, Adam's tank-body reaches out to guard her (8).

Their return to—not "their world," maybe not even the "real world"—perhaps the world they left behind becomes something of a confluence of lovers for Adam Hardy.  Still desirous of and affectionate toward his partner who chose to use their return as a convenient way to forget their affair, still concerned for his sometimes lover Clara who thankfully survived in their home world despite her murder in the other, and perhaps a little bitter toward his other-world's doppelgänger Bailey Fawcett who manages to be an agent of Blackwood in both worlds, Adam's romantic life is constricting.  It's a prominent distraction from the more pressing mysteries (and threats) in his life, a distraction that Rosa is perceptive and sensitive to set aside.  She is sincere and resolute in her offer to help Adam find his father, and as Blackwood's new pet interest, she's uniquely poised to do so.  It's the latest in Oliver's slow-building sleight of hand that has more or less repositioned Rosa Reyes as the series' protagonist, and like us, Adam sometimes fails to see it.

Though his prevalence in the story has expanded increasingly, Blackwood's lead henchman, the Twain-mustachioed gentleman, alternate-Clara's murderer, has yet to be identified and his more than passing resemblance to Adam's father Caleb Hardy unexplained.  Adam's Newton's Gulch ball, with his wish "Find My Dad" (19), might still, in fact, be ironically delivered by his father himself.

[October 2014]