Soon I Will Be Invincible (15 page)

One wing still runs on its own generator. From overhead, I hear Blackwolf saying, “See the control room? I remember from when we switched brains that time,” and I follow.

Here the rooms are still bright and clean, humming with life. The control room where we end up looks down on the great domed laboratory. Catwalks crosshatch the upper reaches. The dome’s retractable roof has jammed open a little, giving us a sliver of fading sunlight.

I lean over the rail to watch Lily squinting at something on the laboratory floor. “C’mon up,” I call. “Looks like we’re in here.”

Going in I squeeze past Feral standing guard, his loud breathing and his animal warmth.

Blackwolf taps away at a computer but doesn’t seem terribly interested in what he’s doing. An animated hologram globe shows the Earth morphing from the primordial supercontinent Pangaea through the present day into a future version, a single landmass labeled Pangaea Ultima, ice ages coming and going in between. Colored graphs show temperature and CO
₂
levels shifting too fast to follow.

“Now what?” I look over at Damsel.

“Keep looking. He can’t hide forever.”

In the field, everyone defers to Damsel and Blackwolf, our nominal co-leaders who don’t seem to want to look at each other.

Finally, Blackwolf speaks up. “We’ve got other options. Someone’s still got to track down those iridium isotopes.”

“I thought you and Damsel got rid of that stuff ten years ago.” Feral’s back again, apparently satisfied there are no evildoers nearby.

“That was ten years ago; I’ve thought of a whole new set of possibilities since then. I’m including matter transmutation, and a couple of unidentified ETs. There are magical options.” Blackwolf ticks them off on his fingers.

“God, I didn’t think of that. CoreFire hated magic.” Damsel is looking down at the laboratory floor. She seems to be remembering something, or trying to. I watch Damsel and that famous force field shimmering, and involuntarily I wonder if I could take her if it came to it. Blackwolf glances over, and I feel uncomfortably as if he’s read my mind.

“Fucking Impossible.” Damsel slumps into one of the high-tech chairs and spins around, looking at the ceiling, her force field flickering blue.

“What happens now? What can we expect?” I ask.

Lily looks at me and speaks the answer everyone is already thinking: “Doomsday.”

No one talks on the way back up, even when I waste a clip on a laughing hologram of the Doctor, a rookie mistake. I blush furiously, but Blackwolf winks at me.

Back in Blackwolf’s high-tech airship, acceleration pushes me back into my seat, and the island recedes behind us, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I used to have a real life; I used to be someone who went on vacation to Brazil. I used to be able to walk down a street without getting stared at, and lie on a bed, and talk to a man who would look at me in something approaching a normal way.

Mentiac predicts that in the very far future, the stars will have cycled through all possible stages of their fusion reactions, from hydrogen to helium and so on down the periodic table to iron. And then there will be a true iron age, when every atom in the universe will have turned to iron, everything transmuted by inexorable centuries to basest metal, even high-tech alloys, even diamonds. Everything. In my imagination, iron stars orbited by iron planets float through an iron galaxy in an iron void. But even then it won’t be over. There’s always a Rust Age.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

INVINCIBLE

         Dressed in gray coveralls and a sanitary mask, I mop the marble floor of the Champions’ lobby and dust the statue of Galatea until I’m satisfied my machines have disabled the cameras. Then I retire to a supply closet and change, stepping out under the domed skylight in full mask and cape. Time for stage two of the doomsday plan, a three-stage plan not counting the actual doomsday.

It’s an illicit thrill to walk through the front door in costume. Just another chapter to the legend, and everything is falling into place, almost too easily this time. No sign of CoreFire, and the Champs are off on another useless reconnaissance mission. They’ll be gone for hours, and meanwhile the next piece of my device will soon be safely in my possession. Thanks to me, Dollface is finally going to have her day in the sun.

The new Power Staff is complete and for the hundredth time, I test it out for grip and heft. Most of the parts came out of a local RadioShack, but the design…only I know how to do that. Molecular circuitry, holograms, pocket MRI…I had a lot of time in prison. The power jewel glows a deep red, and I pad silently and invisibly through the corridors, no more than a drift of static on the monitors. I have the floor plans from the place memorized, details culled and inferred from blueprints, satellite photos, fan magazines, even that interminable documentary.

I have to admit it’s magnificent. Spinning in place, I gawk like a tourist at the profoundly vulgar piece of architecture. Guy Campbell, the Silver Sentinel, more or less bought his way onto the team by refitting this place as the team headquarters after gutting the telecom giant that built it. He lasted about six weeks, and I think he was just too embarrassed to ask for it back.

Splendid, but the place smells like they always do—sweat and ozone and disinfectant, hospital smells. The ability to stretch your limbs or secrete acids can wreak havoc on the human metabolism. There’s a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.

The heroes left an hour ago, and there’s time for a little sightseeing. The entrance lobby is a museum of superherodom, souvenirs from brighter days.

The wedding of Damsel and Blackwolf was the brightest moment of 1980s superherodom, a union of the two founding members of the greatest super-team in the world, at the height of its powers. The added fact that Damsel was Stormcloud’s daughter made it a matter of superhero royalty. They were our Charles and Diana. When Stormcloud placed the Nightstar Sapphire around Damsel’s neck, it was effectively a coronation for the Champions, a passing of the torch. Both Peterson graduates, actually—to think I knew them when. Not that they’d remember me.

The rest of us watched from the shadows, wondering what it meant. I was there myself, hidden in the crowd, waiting for my moment. Stormcloud stood in the background, looking almost statesmanlike. CoreFire was the best man and gave a toast even I found funny—someone must have written it for him, probably Blackwolf. When they kissed, Damsel’s shield glowed a deep red, then disappeared altogether as they rose into the air. I should have finished her right there, but I was still a little sentimental back then.

The Crisis Room. This is where their shifting roster of robots, athletes, madmen, and gods used to get together and talk about me. A
U
-shaped table points its open end toward a sprawling computer console and three enormous wall-mounted display screens. This is where my face must have looked out at them, threatening, leering, and demanding tribute. I hope they had a good sound system.

To business. Their computer security isn’t much to write home about—probably Blackwolf’s work, clever but not exactly genius, just self-confident. Heroes like these don’t think very hard about security. They assume their own reputation is going to scare people off, and if someone does try to break in, they can just have a fight about it. Great office chairs, though. Picture window looks out over midtown—the feng shui is immaculate. I spend a few minutes noodling around on the broad, flat console before diving in.

I could break it, but I don’t even have to. Toward the end of
Titan Six
they show outtakes from a televised tour of the fortress, shortly after they came back from outer space. Damsel’s talking to the camera, looking very, very tired. No one seems to be doing any work. It was their greatest triumph, but they seem to be suffering from a group depression. In fact, they’re weeks from breaking up.

In the background, Blackwolf is just sitting down at the computer. With the film slowed down and enhanced, you can see Blackwolf’s arms moving at the keyboard as he logs himself in, and from there it isn’t too much work to figure out where his hands must have been, what he was typing. You only have to do your homework on these things. I key it in now:
GALATEA
.

Once I’m in the system, it’s impossible not to start poking around a little. I flip through staff records, secret identities, powers. Damsel, Blackwolf, Elphin. I already know who they are. I remember some of them quite well, even if they would never remember me. And everyone knows who you are, CoreFire. Jason.

Activity logs. Blackwolf’s been online recently, going back through the CoreFire archives. He spent a little time in the media archives—file footage of Galatea aloft in action, wine-colored hair always floating away on an intangible breeze, violet headband above her featureless green eyes. She projected silvery energy from her hands—even I don’t know what it was. It hurt like hell, though.

Blackwolf’s also been looking at me. The entry under
DOCTOR IMPOSSIBLE
is surprisingly inadequate. I’ve never given out much under interrogation, but even so it’s surprising how much I kept from them. The file gives age (estimated), place of birth (a short piece on my accent and regionalisms), estimated Stanford-Binet (insultingly low; but then, they haven’t seen my best efforts yet). A couple hundred megabytes of shaky-cam video footage, and some rather reductive psychological guesswork.

All those years and they don’t know me. There are five working theories as to my real identity, all of them dead wrong. Four are missing persons cases dating from the 1960s. Their photographs all look and sound a little bit like me, precocious intellects with aptitude in math and science, prodigies who performed less and less well in school as they grew older. By eleven or twelve, they’d all displayed antisocial behavior patterns—here, a prizewinning violinist becomes a drug user; there, a national mathematics champion burns down his own school. Three of them show histories of child abuse. All of them went missing between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, vanished out of Portland, Shaker Heights, San Diego, and Bridgeport. Did they all slip out of their neighborhoods early one morning and onto a bus? Did they find new names somewhere? How did each one manage his disappearing act? And what did he become? All I know is, none of them ended up being me.

The last face is Polgar, aka Martin van Polk-Garfield IV. Once, he was the scientist president of an alternate dimension’s America. Dethroned and exiled, he went looking for new Americas to conquer, and once in a while he still shows up in ours, dressed in the stars, stripes, and eagles of his native country, eager to accept our throne. I kind of like him, actually. He showed pluck, thought outside the box. Life gave him lemons, and he brewed his own brand of dimension-traveling, world-conquering lemonade. I almost wish they were right about Polgar—it’s better than my real story any day.

There wasn’t any warning with me, not the kind they look for. My earliest dreams were about my own brain, a cloud lit by flashes of blue and purple lightning. My school file never showed anything out of the ordinary. I quietly watched other children’s showy disorders, their early cognitive failures or compulsive aggression, and knew I was something different. Nobody was watching out for me. I rose undetected through the intermediate grades and they confidently packed me off to Peterson, another success for the system.

At sixteen, I would sit quietly in an empty classroom and work out problem sets weeks in advance. The work went as fast as I could write it. I had a system where I did the mental work three or four questions ahead of where my pen was. It was May already, almost the end of term. Outside, the hot Iowa sun was steaming off the previous night’s rainfall. They knew I was smart—I would skip my junior year entirely and begin the senior curriculum in the fall.

Another student with this kind of gift might have become popular, sold the answers or traded them, or at least let a hint drop every once in a while. I never talked in class, never helped people with their work. Never pandered.

This wasn’t my real work anyway. I had a milk crate in my closet, where I kept my real efforts, a mounting pile of spiral-bound notebooks that sizzled with my jagged ballpoint scribblings. I worked all the time, even during the achingly slow class lectures. I’d mastered junior-level calculus years ago.

So I doodled holes in space, robot locomotion systems, and quantum computing devices. I fit them in around the day’s dutiful notes on mitosis or
The Catcher in the Rye
or the Federalist Papers; then I would layer circuit diagrams for impossible machines, mechanisms of gears and pulleys raising and lowering cartoon weights, and dragons whose fish-scaled tails wound over and under, around and through columns of figures and dates of battles, tapering as thin as the fineness of my pencil allowed before finishing in a broad-head arrow point.

I wrote code for computer games I ran on the primitive mainframe the school had, partners at chess, and even a dungeon game, where I steered a tiny swordsman or wizard through endlessly layer-caked levels that spiraled into the earth, sunken ballrooms and throne rooms and treasure houses giving way to caverns, grottoes, and lightless oceans, and still deeper caverns below those.

I extended them as I played, everything getting stranger the farther down I went, from goblins and wolves to giant ants, dragons, and demons, and castles underground. I still play it occasionally, in the off-hours. There was never any sense who had dug that deep, or why, or when I was going to find the real bottom, but I never wanted to stop, knowing a great prize rested there, a centuries-old glittering treasure or hidden revelation, buried fathoms-deep under stone and earth; a relic from the deepest past, precious as life and ancient as childhood memory.

The bell rang for dinner. I gathered up books and papers and hurried down the long, dim corridor lined with lockers banging open and closed, shouldering among the larger kids. As an adult, I’m still a little smaller than average. I wasn’t any younger than the people in my grade, but I looked it. Something bounced off of my backpack, a little wad of paper. Hisses and titters as I passed down a hallway. I didn’t turn around, but silently I recorded everything.

Later, I’d sit on a toilet lid in our dorm bathroom and cut slowly and deliberately down my forearm. Just a couple of thin red lines, as much as a cat might do. It lasted for a while—for days, I felt the pull of the scabs on my skin when I flexed my arms. I could feel it under my clothes, a secret reminder of who I really was.

One time, I had a different idea. I brought the razor up, to my scalp. A piece of hair came away, and another, leaving bare scalp. The hair came away inch by inch. I nicked my scalp and started bleeding, but it didn’t matter. The cut hair covered the floor, and piled up on my shoulders like ash. I watched myself becoming someone else. One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered.

One day I would show them. Pull a rabbit from my hat. Breathe fire. I picked up my tray and joined the line behind the others. “We’re with him,” a tall horsey girl ahead of me explained to the lady serving food. Her friends held it for a moment, then collapsed into laughter.

I’m going to put on a mask and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I’m going to move the world.