I was bright, but no one suspected how bright I would become. Prodigies are an old story, and everyone levels off after a while. Or do we? I may not be smarter than I was last year, but I know more. And I’m certainly no stupider.
So I wasn’t always this way. I went to a good school. I wrote lengthy short stories about my hapless infatuations; one of them was even a runner-up in the school magazine. All about the girl I saw in the dining hall, at the party, in the hallway, but never spoke to. I wasn’t very much different from a lot of people. Except that I was.
Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone’s problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor. My first subterranean lab was a disastrous little hole underneath a suburban tract home. One morning, two unsmiling men in leotards appeared on my doorstep and demanded to see what I was working on. I said, “It doesn’t do anything.” They didn’t say anything. I showed them inside. I kept my back to them while I worked my fancy locks, but who was I kidding? The one in white had that look people do when they have X-ray vision. Like you know they’re seeing just bones.
I had been as careful as I could be, buying equipment through a dozen aliases, some of them legitimate government agencies. Waste heat was going into the aquifer, and there was enough background radiation that no one should have caught anything I was doing. But obviously I’d hit one of their trip wires. We didn’t say anything on the way down. Up close, these two weren’t especially reassuring. The white one’s eyes were set too far apart, and he only breathed about once a minute, rapidly, in-out. I didn’t get much on the black guy, except that in the silences I could hear faint tinny voices and bursts of static, as if a cybernetic component in his chest were inadvertently picking up shortwave. It was vaguely embarrassing, like a fart.
It was my first underground lab, and it showed. It was still too hot because of the reactor, and it looked like shit. I hemmed and hawed and started up a little dimensional viewer I had been tinkering with. The Gateway flickered into life, and through the cloudy window we could see dimly the great misshapen head of one of those alien leviathans trawling the ether like a whale in the depths. They looked bored. The black guy, Something-tron, gave me a speech about meddling in things I didn’t understand; it was obvious they were peeved they weren’t getting a fight. When they left, they had me tagged as just another backyard inventor, but I’d made my mistake—I was in the system. They’d seen my retinas.
Wearing a cape doesn’t do much for your social life. There’s a standing, unspoken, and utterly unreliable truce among enhanced criminals, the robot-army, hood-and-mask, good-evening-Mister-Bond set. My peer group is largely a collection of psychotics, aliens, and would-be emperors. The result is I meet people like Lily.
Lily was born in the thirty-fifth century. She’s what your sort of person might call a supervillain, although she might quarrel with the definition. When you first meet her, you look twice—everyone does. She’s not quite invisible, merely transparent, a woman of Lucite or water. When you get to know her face, she has that long-jawed look people start getting a couple centuries from now, a hollowness around the eyes. You recognize it when you’ve been up and down the timestream a few times, and seen a few of the far-future possibilities—the Machine Kings, or the Nomad Planet, or the Steady State, or the Telephony. When we met she looked right past me, just another monkey-man, but I have more in common with her than I do with most of the people I meet.
Lily was born in New Jersey at a time when the Earth was dying. Only 200,000 humans were left, wandering among the empty cities and grasslands that were once the civilized world. She grew up with a thousand square miles of grassland and forest and highways for her backyard. She could drive for days without seeing anyone, up and down the old I-95, now cracked and overgrown in places. Later, she told me about the decaying bridges over the East River to the lost city of Brooklyn, where the towers of Manhattan loomed in the distance. She would find a stone embankment and eat lunch, down where the warm wind stirred the stagnant ocean that was slowly rising, year after year.
Her time line was simply a dead end. She told me about the spreading blight, the dimming, dying sun that she could look straight into without blinking. The only aliens who came left without saying good-bye. In her future, the new ruler of the Earth was going to be a particularly successful strain of algae that had spread in a supercolony up and down the northwest American seaboard, choking rivers and canals and blooming for miles out into the sea.
Lily was trained to be a hero, humanity’s long-shot solution, rigorously screened and genetically engineered. A team of desperate scientists worked for decades, racing against humanity’s decay to put her in place to save them. She was the best of them, and they trusted her.
A crowd of tense, brave faces was the last thing she saw on the day she left. Brave Dr. Mendelson, strong-jawed and gray-haired, shook her hand once and then gave the countdown, and the world faded from view. The machine that brought her back in time could only work once. The logic was obvious: She had a list of targets, a suite of weapons layered into a smartmesh leotard, and a mission to save the world. Nearly invisible and devastatingly strong, she succeeded easily.
Years later, when she managed to rebuild her machine and return to her own time, it was all different. The Earth she had known, and everyone on it, was gone, and in its place was a world of happy strangers—the blight had never happened. And she realized she missed the quiet, and the gentle, mournful quality of her thirty-fifth century. So she came back to our time, and after a few months she started hitting high-tech and infrastructural targets. She’s still at large, still sabotaging the world in search of the chain of events that started the blight in her version of history, the invisible thread leading back to the vanished ruins of her home.
My other best friend is the Pharaoh, a supervillain, and he’s an idiot.
Today was the official last day of fall. There was an early frost last night, and the chill seeps into the stone here. Most inmates don’t go out in the yard anymore—no one but me and a few die-hard smokers, idly kicking the dirt, huddled together against the cold I haven’t felt since 1976. The wind kicks up dust in the yard, blows leaves through the barbed wire. Our uniforms flap in the breeze. The trees past the fence are bare now except for the oaks. I can see beams from the security net bouncing around in the infrared and ultraviolet, and the KLNJ antenna is pulsing out low-frequency stuff over the hill.
Somewhere out there, the snow is falling on Lily’s base. I can’t say where it is, but this late in the year it’s pretty well covered. I used to tune in to the perimeter cameras just to scan around the woods. It’s buried deep now—a layer of snow, pine needles, frozen dirt, then crushed gravel, concrete, water tanks, and then titanium.
I last saw her six years ago, in a bar. She was smoking. I remember how the match flared and glistened liquidly on her glassy skin, still scored slightly where a chain gun once caught her. She set the cigarette to her lips and drew smoke delicately into her throat, to curl in her lungs like a genie in a smoked-glass bottle. She would only meet me in a public place. I guess we had trust issues.
I went to a lot of trouble to set up that meeting. I tried to think of a way to tell her to come back. I’ve never been that good at this kind of thing, even before I went into hiding. I tried to think of a reason she would have, a really good argument. But even supervillainesses would rather date a hero. Sometimes I wonder if there really are just two kinds of people in the world.
To be a supervillain, you need to have certain things. Don’t bother with a secret identity, that’s a hero thing. Not that it wouldn’t be convenient to take off the mask and disappear into the crowds, the houses, the working world. Perhaps too convenient—why become the most audacious criminal mind on Earth (or at least in the top four), only to slink off in the other direction when things get difficult? It wouldn’t mean as much if you could just walk away. When I’m arrested, they read the litany of my crim
es at the trial, longer and gaudier each time. I’ve been tried for crimes on the Moon, in other centuries, other dimensions, and I’ll be damned if I won’t put my name on them.
Besides, I never wanted to go back to the way it was before. Heroes have that weakness, not supervillains. When you become a villain you cut your ties and head for the bottom. When you threaten to crash an asteroid into your own planet just so they’ll give you a billion dollars or substitute your face on the Mona Lisa, there’s no statute of limitations. So you have to have the courage of your convictions.
You should have a nemesis. Mine is CoreFire, an imbecile gifted with powers and abilities far beyond mortal man’s. If anything can hurt CoreFire I haven’t found it, and don’t think I haven’t looked. I’ve got others—the Champions, disbanded now but no less dangerous as individuals. Damsel, Stormcloud’s daughter, and her ex-husband the gymnast, and that alleged elf they got from somewhere. I’ve fought dozens of heroes over the years, but CoreFire is the toughest. After all, I made him myself.
You need an obsession. The zeta beam, key to ultimate power. Secret of CoreFire’s might, and the fire that scarred me, and made me what I am. And you need a goal. Viz, to take over the world.
And you need…something else. I don’t know precisely what it is. A reason. A girl you couldn’t get, parents slain before your eyes, a nagging grudge against the world. It could be anything. I really don’t know what it is, the thing that makes you evil, but it does.
Maybe I should have been a hero. I’m not stupid, you know, I do think of these things. Maybe I should have just gone with the program, joined up with the winning team, and perhaps I would have, had I been asked. But I have the feeling they wouldn’t have wanted someone like me. They’d turn up their noses or just never quite notice me. I knew some of them in high school, so I know.
I learned what a villain was by watching television news broadcasts of the big fights in New York and Chicago. I could tell who the villains were because they always lost, no matter how good their ideas were. I don’t understand how or when the decision was made for me, but whenever it was the moment is lost now, gone away as far off as Lily’s home Earth.
There are moments in life you just can’t take back. In the terrible slowness of the accident, I got halfway across the room before realizing what I’d done. I had time to look back and read the controls, to see the glass begin to bulge and craze before it shattered, time to notice the sound of my foot scuffing on the floor, and an urgent musical whine from one of the generators sliding up the scale.
A dozen people have gotten themselves killed trying to replicate the effects of that explosion. I turned and saw my future crystallizing out of a volatile green compound, written out in invisible ink. All my life, I’d been waiting for something to happen to me, and now, before I was ready for it, it was. I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings. I was going to declare war on the world, and I was going to lose.
CHAPTER TWO
WELCOME TO THE TEAM
Four years ago, I decided to start calling myself Fatale. It’s my superhero name. I chose it from a list they supplied me in the clinic, and at the time it seemed like the perfect symbol for my dangerous, sexy new self, a cybernetic woman of mystery. Admittedly, I was on a lot of painkillers.
Before this, I was an enhanced operative in an NSA-style spook show. When they fired me, the government techs said I was having an adjustment disorder, but I prefer my term for it. I’m a superheroine, gifted with powers and abilities above the norm. I’m superhuman, one of the good guys. One of the chosen.
I got my powers by accident, a random tourist mishap in São Paulo. It wasn’t a fancy accident, just a runaway dump truck on the Rua Augusta that plowed into me and scraped me forty feet along the side of a building. I was on life support for four months and unconscious most of that time. I’m going to be in a clinic for three weeks this year, and the next, and basically for the rest of my life.
Why I was in Brazil, or even who I was there with, I don’t know. That went in the accident and the surgery that followed, taken out when armor plate and dead reckoning and a prototype microwave projector went in. I’ve looked at travel guides to try to jog my memory—was I there to see the architecture? The zoo? I don’t even speak Portuguese.
But yes, I did it to myself. I signed the papers, medicated and supine in a hospital bed, scrawling an illegible name with a fuck-it-all panache, knowing vaguely that I didn’t have much of a shot otherwise. The press release was of course bullshit, not that anyone bothers to look at my web site. They wrote it while I was still in recovery, all about cancer and a miracle cure. I never even learned all the made-up details about my grandmother and the old house, and how I wanted to be an astronaut. The real story is much more complicated and stupid and isn’t a thing I could explain fully, not even when I had all of my original brain tissue.
Protheon approached me in South America. The corporate doctors came to see me several times during my conscious intervals; polite, friendly men, in suits and in lab coats, to talk to me about a proposal they had for me. I was the one-in-a-million accident they had been waiting for, and they were my last option. They explained about the super-soldier program. They told me I was going to be the forerunner of an army of people who looked and fought like me. I said okay.
The Brazilian clinic had contracted the advice of a Swiss designer of artificial organs, three American software engineers, a German military contractor, and a Thai plastic surgeon famous for sex-change operations, but the main design and modification was the work of an unknown party.
Forty-three percent of my original body weight is just gone. Mostly on the left side, ground into the pavement or discarded on the operating table. Muscle, nerve tissue, bone, and skin. Hair, fingernails, cartilage, an eye, and a good deal of brain tissue. A lot of my guts are plastic, too.
That was the unlikely beginning to my career as a superhero, enhancile, trans- or super- or metahuman or whatever other term you like to use to describe it. What I am now, and will be for the rest of my life.
I can see myself reflected in the curving metal walls of the Crisis Room, a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, souvenirs of a bad day in São Paulo. I lost a lot of skin, and gained four inches of height and a metal skeleton.
I’m in Manhattan, on the forty-eighth floor of a midtown skyscraper, sitting down with the seven most powerful heroes in the world, and I’m lucky they even asked me to be here. A month ago I was spending my daytime hours watching television and listening to the police scanner. It’s hard to make it on your own as a cyborg—we have serious overhead, maintenance and supply issues I’d rather not explain.
I check my reflection again to make sure I’ve got the look exactly right, a silver-haired, high-tech Amazon warrior, hair drawn back in a long ponytail, a gleaming technological marvel. I was going to be the next generation of warfare.
The past few hours are a blur. Flying up from Hanscom Air Force Base, where it took me three hours to get through security, aprivate helipad. A crowd of reporters stood around the Champions’ headquarters shouting questions about CoreFire, but no one so much as recognized me. Then another long security check before I could get a visitor’s badge.
Even though I was running late, I stopped in the trophy room outside the Champions’ Crisis Room to gaze at the old memorabilia and the old group portraits of the finest superteam in the world. Two of those faces are absent now, two empty places at the table. Nobody says anything, but it’s obvious whom I’m here to replace. Galatea’s sculpted face beams down from the glamour photographs, a metal angel.
So I’m the last to arrive. Nobody looks up—the meeting’s already running. Being this close to so much power is a vertiginous sensation. The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing
cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game. A man with the head of a tiger sits next to a woman made of glass. The woman to my right has wings. This is where I want to be—the players.
The Champions have money behind them. A marble table the size of a small swimming pool, arched ceilings, a dozen instrument panels blinking global updates. There’s a charge in the air. This is where the greatest heroes in the world sat—their portraits ring the room, images of the heroes they were ten years ago. Except two of them, Galatea and CoreFire, are missing.
“Whatever this is, it’s global. The tides are off, and there’s a temperature drop in the deep ocean. And CoreFire is still missing.” In the Crisis Room, Damsel tells us the world is ending. We sit in a half circle, like children. A U-shaped table spans the room, and Damsel hovers at the open end before the wall of monitors.
Her force field flickers a moment, green and then indigo, over her skintight red-and-purple costume. Her face is familiar from a thousand interviews and magazine covers; a slender, pretty brunette, nondescript save for the odd little markings on her throat. She has the glamour of a film star, but her power is no illusion.
Damsel’s father was Stormcloud, the mainstay of the old Super Squadron, so Damsel is that rare thing, a superhero by inheritance, her name a half-serious play on her father’s vocation. His weather powers may not have been genetic, but his strength and speed are there. She wears a pair of swords to compensate, wire-wrapped hilts coming up over her shoulders.
Soon I Will Be Invincible Page 2