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THE Acropolis is a hill in Greece. Acropolis is a village of 10,000 just south of Starved Rock in Illinois. When the leaves change, tourists book it for the self-proclaimed world’s largest festival without a beer tent. The village balloons to about 100,000 and the roads get foggy with motorists as they look for street signs that got blown into the rocky hills by tornadoes. Thanks to budgetary restraints, only the intersections on Main Street are labeled. But they’re not that hard to remember if you sponged up US History class. The north-to-south streets go from W. 12th to Main to E. 12th. East-to-west, they go from Washington up through Ford. There’s a debate going on about whether living presidents should be made into streets or if they should skip a street that will become Carter so they can put in Reagan because it’s disrespectful not to include him.

Acropolis, IL is also the home of Bronson Free, a techno-geek and anglophile who at 13 plucked his teeth because they were a hassle—a philosophy shared with Roald Dahl. When 18, he self-surgeoned his jaw into a robotic clamp to replace the acrylic dentures. He also installed USB ports into his wrist so he can plug in speakers to broadcast thumping bass straight to his ribs or he’ll plug in flash drives loaded with porn that he can view as he saunters down the street. His nerves were replaced with high-speed fiber but he still complains over the nanoseconds of load time. A mini-reactor in his gut powers these additions but it makes him ravenous for his finger nails, which are always scraggly and bleeding. Bronson Free gave himself the codename Byte, a name he used everywhere on the internet. When the username was already taken on a League of Legends forum, he hacked the account and stole it until it was reported to the admin who returned it to the original creator: some thirteen-year-old Chinese boy. After sending several death threats to everyone involved, the Guardians were called in. But they let him go with a warning after his parents promised he was a good boy, just spirited.  

Byte is not a super villain with designs to demolish the world or stand atop it with a flag, but he is dangerous. He likes cats.

Who are the Guardians? Well, I’m one of them. Bullets don’t bounce off me. Some winter mornings, the sniffles (and laziness) keep me in bed. I’m not a billionaire or millionaire, though I spent a year teaching in Japan and saved roughly 2.4 million yen so I was a mill-yen-aire. That’s only about 24,000 USD.

But I guard the Earth, the people on it, and my coworkers—or they protect me.

And I started as a janitor.