by Logan Jacobs
Miles Chapter One
I sank into my favorite chair, glanced at the center projection screen for the Criminal Diagnostic System that I was developing, and tapped a red dot at random where the algorithm had calculated that a crime was likely to be taking place.
The screen zoomed in to show me a pixelated live feed of a ski-masked mugger holding a plump and panicking couple at knifepoint. It was pretty clear that none of the parties involved possessed superpowers, so I personally was not interested. But once the municipal police department implemented my system, it could send alerts about events like this to the nearest available patrol units. Then it could forward relevant screenshots and video clips to police department servers to aid either in the apprehension or eventual prosecution of suspects.
I zoomed out, selected another dot, and saw a homeless man throw a rock through a department store window. The mall cops started to chase after him, but they didn’t have their little scooters with them and didn’t seem physically prepared to give chase on foot. The homeless man also had a limp and appeared to be intoxicated, so I wasn’t sure who to lay my bet on.
I selected another dot and got an unwanted eyeful of a teenager getting a blowjob in a parking lot. He clearly didn’t realize that he was within the field of a security camera mounted on an exterior corner of the drugstore.
Ugh. I wasn’t sure what had prompted the algorithm to pick up on that scene. Had it been erroneously tagged as an incident of sex slavery? Child pornography? I was pretty sure I had adjusted the filters to ignore prostitution and violations of public decency, because those weren’t the kind of illegal activities that required the swift intervention of superheroes. That would be a waste of resources that my system was designed to deploy, so I’d have to double-check and possibly reset the parameters regarding visuals of genitalia.
I zoomed back out, and the screen returned to being a vast map of Pinnacle City. It was a beautiful bird's-eye view of all its streets, buildings, lakes, parks, and lots, with all those busy little red dots milling around and flickering in and out. The “bad” neighborhoods where kids started getting inducted into petty gangs before they had even graduated middle school were so dense with dots that they looked like they were covered by red amoebas. The suburbs had just a few, like glaring zits on a perfectly nice face.
The C.D.S. was a work-in-progress, but soon it would be ready for release, so I leaned back in my leather chair, let out a deep breath of satisfaction, and let my eyes wander over the room where I worked.
Besides the mega-computer that hosted the C.D.S., my lair also contained prototypes of many of my personal inventions and an arsenal of purchased gadgets, some of which I had outbid the Department of Defense for. Many of the tools remained as I had bought them. Others featured personal modifications that made them more fun.
“Fun” meaning more deadly for whatever enemy of mine who stood on the other end of the device.
My lair was three floors underground beneath my lakefront mansion and accessible only via elevator. Some might have called the interior decorating scheme minimalist. Those that were less charitably minded might have said sterile, like a hospital or a prison. Those that were still less charitably minded might have added that I, its architect, belonged in a mental ward or a jail cell myself. But the world is full of small-minded people who can’t see the big picture who are nothing more than prey for the red dots.
I called this place The Cellar. Otherwise known as home sweet home. The one place where I could be most truly myself.
“There you are,” said a small voice from in front of the elevator.
I glanced at an inactive monitor to see the reflection of the person behind me. It was my assistant Norma, as I expected. I really should have recognized her voice for sure by then, but not only was I aware that the technology certainly existed to duplicate someone’s voice, the other problem was that Norma’s particular voice could have belonged to practically any young lady. The pitch, the timbre, the intonation; none of it was distinctive in the slightest.
Neither was her appearance.
She had a pleasant but highly forgettable face. Nothing was out of proportion, there weren’t any glaring flaws, but it didn’t have the kind of exceptional features that inspired paintings or graced magazine covers. The lips were neither thin nor luscious. The nose wasn’t big or bulbous, but it wasn’t elegantly carved either. The cheekbones weren’t noticeable. The eyes were brown, the hair was brown and lacked volume or luster.
Her figure, likewise, was completely unremarkable. She stood somewhere around 5’5” and wasn’t overweight, not really anyway, but carried a little softness in her figure like most women who weren’t athletic. She had decent… assets… but they were nothing to write home about. I let her wear whatever she wanted around the house, and today her wardrobe consisted of a tank top that was a bit too tight for her and khaki shorts that were a bit too loose, as well as her slightly oversized glasses. I could never decide whether the glasses were an intentional hipsterish touch or a dorky fashion misstep, but either way, I found them rather endearing.
Norma would have made the perfect spy. Actually, that wasn’t true. Her physical appearance would have been optimal for going unnoticed and unsuspected. But she would have been utterly average at each of the individual actions involved in executing any given spy’s mission. And not average by trained CIA operative standards… just average by human standards.
That was her superpower.
Not spying, but being average. At absolutely everything.
So, in the hypothetical scenario of Norma being put in the role of an undercover field agent? She wouldn’t be able to pull off James Bond-worthy acrobatics chasing villains across rooftops and grappling with them atop moving trains, not that most spies really did that kind of stuff anyway. But, she was fluent in every single language in existence. Not exceptionally eloquent, but capable of carrying on a typical conversation.
And she knew how to operate absolutely any tool from a lock pick to a spud wrench to a porosimeter, drive or fly any vehicle from a forklift to a helicopter, and wield absolutely any weapon, at least, any weapon that a physically average woman could wield effectively.
She wouldn’t be excellent at any of this, of course. But she wouldn’t be bad either.
The woman could have pursued almost any career in the world knowing that she wouldn’t fail at it, but also cursed never to excel. The job that she ended up in after college was working retail at a department store after she failed to find a position within the field of her degree, which I think had been Art History or something if I remembered correctly. Due to her general lack of ambition and initiative and her somewhat abysmal level of self-esteem, poor Norma probably would’ve languished in the footwear section well into middle age, if it hadn’t been for me, that is.
It had been a matter of pure chance that I had discovered her. A few months ago, I had hacked into the federal registry of all superpowered citizens in order to pilfer some data to feed into the C.D.S., and my eye had been caught by Norma’s classification when I stumbled across the row where she was listed as #178309. Omni-average.
“Aileen?” I had asked my AI assistant, the brains of my house. Her physical body was still in development. “You seeing this? What the fuck does that mean, omni-average?”
“Well, the Latin prefix omni means ‘all’-- ” the sultry disembodied voice murmured seemingly in my ear, due to the sound wave projection mechanism of the microspeakers installed throughout my house.
“I know that,” I interrupted. “But in context, what the fuck does that mean?”
“Well, I suppose it means that this individual is average in all respects?” Aileen suggested. Her artificial voice ran the gamut from a breathy whisper to a raspy purr to a
faint indefinable foreign accent to an audible mischievous smirk. The voice alone arched and slunk and strutted and gyrated its way through even the most mundane of sentences. I was really pretty proud of that little piece of engineering.
“Okay, but how the fuck is that a superpower?” I asked. “That’s more like… an anti-superpower. That’s just like, being a boring useless human. Are you sure there wasn’t some mistake in the entry?”
“… I calculate that the probability of this entry being erroneous is negligible,” Aileen replied. “But I lack sufficient data to form a reliable conclusion. Should I trace the credentials of the employee who entered this individual into the database and produce a report on his or her work history, education history, medical history, criminal history--”
“No,” I interrupted. “That was kind of… a rhetorical question. I need to make you better at recognizing those. But that’s pretty low on my list of priorities right now.”
What was top of my list at the time was completing the C.D.S. or, at least, getting her ready for the beta test. I was sure there would be many future iterations. This one didn’t have to be perfect. It just had to be stunningly awesome enough for Pinnacle City to recognize the potential of its society-altering impact. So, I scrolled past the row of text representing Norma in the superpower database, found and extracted the info I needed, had Aileen wipe my digital tracks, and went on with my day.
I didn’t think about Norma again until that evening, when I was reading online reviews for a few potential purchases and came across a two-star review titled, “Meh, really just you’re average robo shark.”
Average robo shark? How, exactly, would one define an average robo shark anyway?
I forgot about the schematics for an aquarium that I had been mapping out in my head and instead started rethinking the implications of being average at absolutely fucking everything. All right, so kicking a soccer ball averagely wasn’t going to land you a pro contract. But what about things that most people couldn’t do at all? What if you were average at managing a corporation, able to provide average deep tissue massages, had average skills in every martial art known to mankind, and could make me an average version of any kind of sandwich I wanted?
Then, I might just have a job for you.
“Aileen!” I yelled.
“Yes, boss?” she purred.
“Do you remember who the omni-average superhero was that we saw in the database?” I asked her. “What was her name? Her ID number?”
“Norma, ID #178-- ” Aileen began.
“Okay, can you find her for me?” I interrupted. “Get me her address of residence. Her contact info. Her current place of employment. And, ah… her favorite color.”
After a moment of internal processing Aileen said, “Norma’s favorite color is not a matter of public record.”
“Go into her recent purchase history for the last six months and analyze the color selections,” I said.
“… Purple is the most frequently recurring selection, although results may be distorted by the arbitrary nomenclature that brands sometimes assign to certain color schemes for marketing purposes,” Aileen replied. “There is no available graphic for the lipstick shade identified in this receipt as ‘Urban Vixen’--”
“Purple is fine,” I interrupted. “Figure out what brands she favors. No, adjust for income level and figure out what brands she probably would favor if she could afford them. Identify her clothing sizes and her hobbies. Assemble a gift basket totaling one year’s worth of income for her. We’re about to make this average girl feel very special indeed.”
“Calculating now,” Aileen replied. “Compiling shopping carts at thirty-seven venders. Shall I have the gifts shipped to her address in Ohio?”
“No,” I said. “Charter a private jet to bring her here.”
“Copy that,” Aileen responded.
And the rest was history.
Once Norma received due reassurances that the whole thing wasn’t just a scam or some kind of incredibly elaborate kidnapping scheme, she reacted to my invitation to come to Pinnacle City to become my full-time personal assistant the way a typical single girl stuck at a dead-end job and bored with her current drab lifestyle would, and now she occupied a luxurious bedroom in the west wing of my mansion.
And now here she stood and started to blink nervously as I stared at her contemplatively for a few moments too long.
“I-Is something w-wrong?” she stammered as she flushed red under my scrutiny.
“No,” I said, and flashed her a broad smile to reassure her. “Quite the opposite. I was just thinking how lucky I am that I found you.”
“O-oh,” she said. “Well, I’m happy to be here… Miles.” I detected the slight hesitation in her voice, as she still wasn’t completely comfortable calling me by my first name. She had tried out “sir” and “boss” and “Mr. Nelson” first before I finally convinced her that “Miles” would do just fine.
“So, what do you have for me?” I prompted as I glanced at the stack of folders clutched in her hands.
“Well… um… first off, the automated blade system above the mansion’s main entrance is complete,” Norma announced as her whole face glowed with excitement.
“Bravo!” I said. “Well done indeed.”
I had originally just planned to have a dense row of motion sensor-activated spears drop down and skewer anyone who entered without being cleared by the iris reader beforehand, but it had been Norma’s idea to revise the design into more of a propeller blade situation that would descend like a drill and fling the pieces of the intruder’s carcass all over my lovely parlor. It was a bit more flamboyant than necessary to accomplish the same purpose and cleanup would be a pain in the ass, but I hadn’t wanted to crush Norma’s initiative and the bloodthirsty side of her personality that she was just barely starting to embrace, so I gave her encouragement and helped her resolve all the technical aspects that were too tricky for an average weapons engineer.
“Have you tested it?” I asked Norma.
Her brown eyes widened in shock as if I had just accused her of homicide. I guess maybe that’s how she interpreted the question. “Well, k-kind of,” she replied. “On a manikin, I mean. A crash test dummy. I don’t know how else I would… uh… ”
“That’s fine, how did it go?” I asked.
“Well!” she said. “I mean, not well for the dummy. So, well.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “Run me through this weekend’s itinerary again.”
Norma blinked rapidly and bit her lip nervously as she glanced at the first page in her top folder. “Well, the President said that it would be his ‘honor to have the privilege of your company’ for a dinner on Sat-- ”
“Pass,” I said.
Norma cleared her throat. “I know you don’t agree with some of his policies, but er, don’t you think that this presents a pretty significant opportunity-- ”
“You know I don’t care about politics, Norma,” I interrupted. “The only relevant issue here is that I am not remotely inclined to do the President doggy-style. And my other potential dinner companions for Saturday… remind me of their names?”
Norma sighed, rolled her eyes, and recited, “Veronica Salinger, Emma Kingston, and Georgia Summers.”
“Yup,” I said. “And they have other engagements on Sunday and they’re flying out for a shoot in the Bahamas on Monday. So, Saturday is my window of opportunity.”
“There’s only one President of the United States, and there are lots of other lingerie models,” Norma huffed.
“Not with Veronica’s eyes, Emma’s ass, and Georgia’s accent,” I replied. “Draft a diplomatic refusal for the White House and a flirty confirmation text for the centerfolds. Run them both by me for final approval before sending them.”
“As you wish,” Norma said sarcastically. “I’m not sure if you’re really this self-destructively short-sighted and testosterone-driven or if this is a coldly calculating move to cultivate your playboy bill
ionaire mystique in the media and divert public attention from the true scale of your ruthless ambitions.”
“Well, both of those are my true motives, but I won’t spoil it by telling you which is primary and which is secondary,” I replied. “Now, why don’t you pour us each a shot of the Old Fitz and we’ll toast to the completion of the blade system?”
Norma’s eyes widened. “I’m, er, I’m still on the clock… ”
I laughed. “I know. I’m the one paying you, aren’t I? I’m not letting you off work early. But you’re just drafting communications for the next hour, not programming sharp objects for lethal purposes, so a drop or two of expensive liquor won’t hurt.”
“Okay, if you’re sure,” Norma said and walked over to my liquor cabinet. But just as she started pouring the bottle of sixty-year-old bourbon, my phone rang.
I took it out of my pocket and glanced at the number. I didn’t recognize it. “Aileen?” I asked. “Who the fuck is this?”
“That number is not registered to any individuals or organizations,” her sexy disembodied voice floated through The Cellar. “It is most likely a disposable--”
“Whatever, as long as it’s not anyone I’ve slept with,” I interrupted and accepted the call.
A menacing voice on the other end growled, “Miles Nelson, you’re about to become a statistic in your own data system.”
The caller sounded like he was using one of those cheap voice mufflers that you could buy on the black market downtown for less than ten dollars.
I laughed and said, “I don’t think you want to associate with my end of the bell curve, buddy. If I were you I’d stay on the other end where I belonged.”
There was a moment of static silence. I pictured a Neanderthalish forehead furrowing in confusion. Then the voice concluded, “I’ll be seeing you soon,” and the call ended.
I laughed as I dropped my cell back into my pocket.
“Who was that?” Norma asked nervously.
“An anonymous threat,” I said.
“What?” Norma exclaimed.
“I dunno, probably a prank call,” I said. “I get them all the time. But if it was for real, then it’s just some joker that doesn’t even have the balls to give me a name.”