Soon I Will Be Invincible (8 page)

I don’t have a special costume beyond some custom shoes to handle my weight. My physique is distinctive enough by itself. I’m wearing my usual working outfit, sweatpants and a gray NSA T-shirt. I’ve stenciled a Champions logo onto the biggest patches of exposed metal, my left thigh and back. I didn’t have anyone to do my back for me, so I think it’s a little crooked.

“Sorry. What was that about?”

“Don’t worry about it. We went to high school together.” He bends down to lace up his boots. Up close, I can smell him a little. “Were you on a team before?”

“Not exactly. I had government jobs. Then I was solo.” I don’t know why I’m talking like this. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve talked to a man I wasn’t beating up. I actually start to blush. “Spideractive probably recommended me. We worked on that sniper thing in Albany.”

“I remember. You had some nice moves out there against Elphin. What enhancements have you got?” He turns to look me over, and I blush a little. I’m not used to being looked at.

“Vision. Strength—you know, arms and legs. Onboard tactical computer. A couple intrinsic weapons, different kinds. Armor plate, obviously. Grappling hook. Um, fire extinguisher.” He’s got my file, so I’m sure none of this is news to him.

“You can’t fly, can you?” He does a slow side kick, up over his head, and holds it without a hint of strain. I wonder if the rumors about his parents being part of a breeding project are true. It could explain their disappearance.

“No.”

“Me, neither.” Everyone knows he doesn’t have any powers, apart from being perfect. He starts to do a little warm-up routine now, stretches and handstands. You can see that he really does have a kind of power, even if you can’t put a name to it.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“There are other heroes you could have picked. Other cyborgs, if that was what you wanted.”

“Actually, it was Damsel’s call,” he says. “When she went out to meet you…she just thought you’d fit. Said you reminded her of the old days.”

“And she’s going to be leader?”

He shrugs. “She’s good at what she does.”

“Must be weird, taking orders from someone who…” I trail off. It’s weird to share a moment with someone I’ve only read about before. He laughs for the first time, a different laugh from the one I’d seen on camera, then shrugs.

“It’s for a good cause. There’s something else Damsel mentioned. Your file said you went on psych disability.”

Here it comes. “I got sick of being treated like a Sharper Image gadget. Is that a disability?”

“What’d you do before that?” He really doesn’t know about this, and I’m not ready. I’m sitting there with a billionaire genius crime fighter who thinks I can wear the same uniform as he does—I’m not about to correct the mistake.

“I’ll tell you later.” I can feel him looking as I walk out.

They didn’t exactly write me a glowing recommendation.

The last mission before I left, we’d subdued a drug gang and torched a coca field and were just about back over the border. Most of it I did myself, scaring the piss out of sixteen-year-olds with AK
-47
s who probably thought I was Damsel.

The NSA trained me to fight, rappel down a wall, read people their rights, perform basic first aid. I was always hoping I’d get to solve mysteries like the FBI agents on television, unravel a story, find a secret conspiracy. But that wasn’t what they used me for—most of the time, they threw me on a case just as it was all going to hell. I was shock troops—my job was to soak up bullets for the regular agents and strike terror into the enemy, usually illiterate guerrillas who had never even seen a metahuman, let alone faced one in action.

We were waiting for extraction, and it was one of the rare occasions when I’ve had a drink, which is really advised against in the manual, but I hadn’t been sleeping well lately. South American missions bring back a little of the day before the accident, and it’s not a good feeling. And I’d spent too many missions bailing out rookie agents, college kids who’d stare at me behind my back and speculate on exactly what parts of me the clinic had replaced.

I have augmented hearing, too, not that they were being too careful. I had a quiet talk with a few of them, nothing that would put them in a hospital, but nothing they’d forget in a hurry, either. I paid attention in my NSA training, all of it.

I was quietly put on a routine leave, which became an indefinite suspension. They don’t even recruit female cyborgs anymore—they’re considered too high a risk for psychiatric problems. Go figure.

Two days later I’m up in Boston, clearing the last of my things out, when I get a call on my intrinsic cellular phone, the one I can’t turn off. It’s Damsel, calling from one of the team jumpjets I’m not allowed to sign out yet. I’m to meet her in thirty minutes. I wonder why she picked me for this, and not one of the others. Blackwolf was free, last I looked.

We’re going after known enemies first—anyone CoreFire fought three or more times. It isn’t a very long list—most people who’ve fought CoreFire twice aren’t that eager for a third go-round. The ones who are tend to be stupid, like Kosmic Klaw, or crazy, like Nick Napalm.

It’s 5:00 a.m., so I dress in street clothes and wait for the meet on a snowy bench in Boston Common, hood up, trying to look inconspicuous. One guy stops and stares at me, but I ignore him.

Obviously, I don’t have a secret identity—I look the same all the time. There’s a rubber half mask I can fit onto the right side of my face and neck if I want to make a try at looking human (the effect is grotesque, but with a hood up it basically works). I might have looked more human if I’d wanted, but I hate the store-mannequin plastic feel prosthetics have, the Band-Aid-colored flesh. So when they showed me a whole binder full of pastel swatches, a world of browns and pinks, I finally told them to leave the metal exposed. I save the half mask for emergencies.

She meets me only forty-five minutes later. She wears a long coat for appearances, but it doesn’t look like she feels the cold. In the dawn light, she looks different, more ordinary. She has the same markings as her father, faint blue lines on her cheekbones and her neck, but in this light they look painted on. I wonder if she looked this way on Titan, where the dawn comes once every sixteen days.

“I think we have a real lead this time. Police in Providence say they picked up Nick Napalm last night. He says he knows something about Doctor Impossible.”

The jumpjet is grounded at Logan, so we drive my old Toyota Tercel all the way down to Providence. Damsel spends the whole drive down looking out the window and ignoring me. I realize, more vividly than before, that I don’t know these people at all. They were a team for almost fifteen years. They went to the stars together with Stormcloud. They’d traveled in time, fought alongside Roman legions when Doctor Impossible went back to fix the Punic Wars for Carthage. And they’d all seen Galatea die, under the rings of Saturn.

CHAPTER FIVE

FREE AT LAST

         
When I get out of here—
I thought it a million times when I was in prison. Now I’m lying on a bare mattress with the television on, thinking about nothing. It’s the middle of the afternoon. I paid for the room with cash stolen from an ATM I dragged out of a convenience store. I carried it into the back parking lot and tore it apart; then I ran as fast as I could. Not my finest scheme, but these are trying times.

The apartment is three small rooms and a gas stove, and cooking smells drift up from the floor below. Outside, a woman with a bruise on the side of her face is arguing with an elderly man. He looks like a homeless guy.

I’ve probably seen this building before, overflew it in an orbital plane or drifted over it in the dirigible. The exterior is a grubby pink stucco. I never thought about what it would be like to rent a room in it, with cash and no references. I paid it all up front, six months. I’d walked for eleven hours along the highway, going west until I found a town and a change of clothes. Then I rented a car and drove east, careful to drive the speed limit all the way. I discarded it a couple of hours ago. I need a place to stop running for a while, somewhere they won’t be looking.

It’s time to start again. There’s a scheme already boiling up inside me, a good one. I worked it out in prison, sketching the angles in my mind while staring at the blank white walls. But I’m starting to feel I’ve been here before.

How do you take over the world? I’ve tried everything. Doomsday devices of every kind, nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological, gadgets that fit in a shoe box and that were visible from space. I’ve tried mass mind control; I’ve stolen the gold reserves in Fort Knox, only to lose them again. I’ve traveled backward in time to change history, forward in time to escape it; I’ve stopped time altogether to live in a world of statues. I’ve commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasion. Interdimensional alien invasion. Alien god invasion. Even a corporate takeover, Impossible Industries, LLC. Each time, it ended the same way. I’ve been to jail twelve times.

Give me where to stand, said Archimedes, and I will move the world. It feels like I’ve stood everywhere, the center of the Earth and the top of the Eiffel Tower and on the surface of the Sun.

Though never, up to now, in room 316 in the Starlight Motel in Queens. I’ve operated out of sinister casinos, accursed castles, diabolical fortresses. Caves. This is somehow worse. The smell of disinfectant comes off of everything, and a brown substance is sweating out of the pale yellow walls in the bathroom. Plaster instead of brushed steel; plastic wood-grain sheeting, pressboard instead of blinking readouts. Seventeen-inch RCA color television with three channels of pornography, instead of forty-foot-high monitors; remote control bolted to the night table, instead of voice-activated command protocols. Instead of robot servants, Debbie at the front desk.

On CNN, the heroes are having a press conference about my disappearance. Blackwolf is making a windy speech about justice. They’re asking me to give myself up.

They’re running the file footage of my last capture over and over, first a zoom-lens shot, probably from a helicopter, showing me at the bridge of my dirigible, cape streaming in the wind. Then, cut to handheld video of me sprinting down a Manhattan avenue, Power Staff gone, zigzagging between cars, turning around to spray knockout gas to slow them up. You can see the sweat stains. My costume wasn’t designed for long-distance running; that cape is as heavy as velvet. Cut to me again, in chains and titanium leg fetters, helmet off, still groggy from the beatings I’d taken—that’s the image that ran in the newspapers the next day.

Four years ago, I stood a thousand meters above this spot in Queens, looking down at the world, at the scum. I was planning how I’d exact my tribute, which cities I’d rename in my honor.

“People of Earth!”

The sound of car alarms drifted up from among the buildings. The dirigible glided forward a few car lengths. I looked down to see its long oval shadow swallow Main, Lansing, Dean, and Church.

The battle-blimp was an expensive gamble, but there’s no doubt it put me on the map. The sun gleamed off the brass railing; the wind ruffled my imperial robes. I didn’t just want their money. I wanted them to look into the sky and see me—something extraordinary, something menacing and grand.

I built the air sack to collapse in a matter of hours and fit inside a couple of shipping containers, so I could appear and disappear virtually without warning. No one knew when I would be looming above them at the wheel of a colossal airship, laughing maniacally through a loudspeaker. No one would forget the sight of it. It obliterated the sun and cast its shadow a country mile, over banks and traffic lights and schools, libraries and police stations.

In the bathroom, the handle on the toilet comes off in my hand. Part of me never adjusted to the super-strength. A profound biochemical change inside me, an inner fire. And a cottony weightlessness in my arms and legs that told me I would never feel quite so acutely again.

This far into my career, that first morning is a moment I can scarcely recapture in memory. Dust sifted down over me, after the moment of heat and pressure was over. I was on my back. I could see the stars. The laboratory was in ruins, and the emergency teams had come and gone without finding me. No question, my graduate study was basically over. It was the last the world knew of me, a fifth-year grad student with a degree nowhere in sight. A clumsy lab assistant come to a tragic end, the beginning of Doctor Impossible’s long, impossible doctorate.

Disappointingly enough, I couldn’t fly. I couldn’t go invisible, or move objects with my mind, or shoot lasers from my eyes. I couldn’t communicate with my mind or read other people’s thoughts, not that on the whole I wished to. The night wore on, and I exhausted every variant on heat and cold, growing and shrinking. After a lengthy series of hops, half gestures, and brow-furrowings, I satisfied myself I didn’t have any of the more recherché talents.

I was fast, though, my reflexes seemed to run on oiled casters, and the world would almost freeze in place when I focused my will. I haven’t dodged any bullets yet, but I’ve come close.

As my eyes adjusted, extra wavelengths seemed to flower slowly into being. The night colored with deep infrared and earthy radio tones, and the unearthly sheen of the frequencies above the violet. The world took on new patternings around me. I wasn’t quite human anymore. I was strong, really strong. I could do whatever I wanted. Be a sports star, some lame jock. I imagined what would happen if anyone messed with me now. I imagined it carefully, in slow motion. I wasn’t a civilian anymore, I had superpowers. I was a super…what? But really, I knew. When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.

It all unfolded in my mind, plans and inventions that formed faster than I could name them, chemical, biological, metallurgical, cybernetic, architectural. This is what they had held me back from. This is what had lain dormant, what I had suppressed, that had been like a bomb going off underground, over and over. That last failed experiment had done something. I was strong enough, yes, but this is what my empire would be founded on, on raw computation and rage. A shadowy design was forming. I stole clothes from a laundry room in a nearby dorm. Wearing jeans and a too-large sweatshirt, I walked until the sun came up.

The midwestern dawn was gray and the bus station was gray, as well. I had slept a little next to a dumpster behind a supermarket. I had cracked open pay phones with my hands until I had enough for the bus ticket and a Milky Way bar. I was exhausted and broke, young and evil and superintelligent, somewhere in America.

When it came, the bus was nearly empty. I took a seat two-thirds of the way back, on the left, and sat looking out the window. The roads and houses and gas stations rolled by, and I knew that not one of them was a place I could live or work. My ticket was for Reno, Nevada, bought at random.

I knew I needed to go someplace emptier, preferably with a desert where I could start building underground. Working with my hands if necessary, I’d truck in concrete and generators and electronics. It would be bare-bones at first—the soaring archways and gleaming metal would come later. For now, I’d lay out circuitry on wood and metal frames and make the supercomputer I had already designed in my head. I’d build up power gradually, computing power, electrical power, superpower. Soon I’d be working with teraflops and running off fusion power. For a long time, I watched the world change from green fields to rocky scrub, and the clouds darken and burst up in the mountains. Raining somewhere else maybe, but not here.

I remember those nights, planning technologies that didn’t exist yet, outsider science, futurist dreaming, half-magical. The things I could do outside the university setting, now that I didn’t have to wait for the pompous fools at the college! I was building another science, my science, wild science, robots and lasers and disembodied brains. A science that buzzed and glowed; it wanted to do things. It could get up and walk, fly, fight, sprout garish glowing creations in the remotest parts of the world, domes and towers and architectural fever dreams. And it was angry. It was mad science.

You don’t become a world-class villain overnight. I wandered for a long time before I became Doctor Impossible. Leaving the country for the first time was a revelation. I was opening myself up to new influences, changing myself into a new person, someone exotic and dangerous. All the best villains have a whiff of the foreign about them, something of the Orient or the depths of Transylvania. There has to be mystery.

In those years, I found my way into many strange places. I walked for three days through the northern Sahara, hauling water and dozing in the shade during the day, until I reached Khartoum. The solitude was immense; heat sheeted off my altered skin. At night, I’d dream of pharaohs whispering, of huge spirits prowling the dunes by night.

I fought for prize money in unlicensed hero fights in Bangkok, brawling in basement rooms lined with mattresses, sweating under the lights. It was the bottom end of the hero trade—local talents and wanted fugitives, oddballs with nothing going for them, just a taste of power to set them apart. An American in homebrew armor fought three Australian pigmy shamans; a karate specialist fought a French sorcerer, a Russian who’d come out of Chernobyl. Small-timers, grotesques and rejects, one-on-one or in groups, late into the nights, while the crowd screamed and jeered so loud you couldn’t think; you wouldn’t feel it when you’d taken a bad cut or a burn. I fought as Baron Benzene, as Count Smackula, as whatever name they put on the marquee. Smartacus. Doctor Fiasco.

I learned basic lessons, how to throw a super-powered punch without falling off your feet, and how to take one. How to spot the telltales of power: the stutter-step of a bad nerve operation, and the alien hybrids, Altairian eyes and Enderri hands. How to look at the way superheroes walk, or their eyes, or their hands, and see what happened to their bodies, once upon a time. Most of them had paid a price for their power, and for most of them it turned out to be too high. If you knew what to look for, you could see it in the first few steps they took in the arena.

I fought three or four times a week, waking up on off days bruised or singed, steamy rainy mornings in Bangkok in an apartment over the market a half-dozen of us rented together, Pharaoh and Shylock and a rotating cast of down-and-outers. I’d be stretched on a mattress on the floor; somebody with an insect’s head passed out on the couch.

It was where I met the Pharaoh, and the first time I met anyone at all like me, ones who had found power but said no to the mask and cape, to the role. Of course, most of them were nothing like me—criminals with no advanced degrees, some of them hadn’t even been to high school. But like me, they’d said no, and they hadn’t found anything worth saying yes to. It’s the closest thing I’ve felt to belonging.

I remember the night Argonaut showed up incognito and fought all comers to a standstill. The night Colony was killed in the ring, and what came out of him. I remember holding a stranger by the hair, one arm raised to the crowd; the alcoholic celebrations on prize money that sent us reeling through the streets, heartsick, swearing drunken vows to one another, our nameless common ethos of silence, exile, and the long defeat.

And I marveled that no one else ever appreciated how serious it all was, the things that were happening to us, the change that had happened to our bodies, the destinies that were slowly beginning to work themselves out for these wastrel ninjas, Martians, exiled sorcerers who would one day have to find their myriad ways home. One night, after an evening when I’d been badly beaten by a magical stone creature, Pharaoh and I sat by the ocean, the strange waters of the Gulf of Thailand. Ribs cracked, I swore inwardly that I would never quit, not ever.