Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

  Next came the first muscle enhancements, basic nerve grafts, and the power plant that would run it all, light as they could make it but still heavy and bulky in my back. Don’t ask how they made room for it. I can feel the warmth of it all the time, hotter when I’m working hard. I had to be strapped down most of the time while I learned to access the motor functions of a new set of skeletal muscles.

  For months, I walked like a drunk staggering in a high wind. You learn to think and move with it. You have to accept that you’re not the same person. It doesn’t work if you try to be. You move, then it moves, and then you’ve gone a step. When a situation’s happening too fast, when a gun goes off or I’m hit from behind, the machine takes over and executes everything for me—by the time my regular brain catches up, I’ve already returned fire, already thrown an elbow, rolled forward, come up in cat stance, and my HUD is showing me half a dozen options. After a while you start to like it.

  Everything afterward was refinement. Enhanced senses gradually layered in to include light amplification, infrared. Reflexes, sped up bit by bit over four weeks so I could adjust to the idea of superhuman speed, think in smaller units of time. The arsenal of gadgets that line my arms, legs, and torso—grappling hook, sonics, aqualung, dozens of tricks to get me out of any situation they could think of.

  Sensation isn’t quite what it was. It feels like half of me is standing in another room, one where there’s always a warm, soft breeze blowing. Sometimes I wake up in the night and panic, thinking half of a department-store mannequin has gotten into bed with me. At least I don’t get my period anymore.

  I’m not complaining. They did a good job. My enemies call me “Tin Man,” which would be less offensive if I had an actual boyfriend. Maybe I had one before the accident, but if I did, he can’t have been a very good one. He ought at least to have sent me flowers while I was having my body replaced. Good riddance. Or maybe he doesn’t know I’m still alive.

  And, wait, what exactly was the Tin Woodman’s problem anyway? I can’t remember, except that he had a magical ax that chopped him up, limb by limb. Someone must have put a curse on the ax, and there must have been a third person—a tinsmith?—who put him back together again, who stuck on tin parts as the living ones came off. But who was so mad at him in the first place? Why didn’t he throw away the ax and get another job?

  The joke of it is, there never was a super-soldier program, not one that appears in any Pentagon budget. The Protheon Corporation disappeared without a trace—it was just a front, rented office space. Somebody put a lot of money into making me what I am, then disappeared, leaving me feeling a trifle rejected, if you must know.

  That’s the part not even the Champions know, my own secret. One of them anyway.

  The meeting breaks up into several private debates that sound like they’ve been argued a hundred times before. Lily pushes her chair back and walks out; I stay and try to catch Damsel’s eye, but she’s caught up in a back-and-forth with Mister Mystic. I get the impression that the real decisions get made behind closed doors, just the old crowd.

  Blackwolf gives me directions to the guest suite, and I wander off down the brushed-steel corridors to the brushed-steel room. We’re way too high for the street noise to come in, but I lie awake anyway, thinking about the apartment waiting for me back in Allston. Even at home, sleep doesn’t always come. I can send my onboard systems into standby if I want, but the rest of my brain does what it likes.

  Sleeping, I dream about my cyborg half, that it’s a monster that has half-devoured me, its teeth sunk in the right half of my body. Or it’s a forest I’ve wandered into, and I’m lost amid its mazy pathways, deep pools, strange trees whose long fronds brush my shoulders. In the center there’s an enchanted well I can never quite reach. Night falls and the sky shows strange new constellations. When I wake at night, the world glows in wireframe.

  Tonight, I have a whole long dream about a list of assembler instructions and their possible uses and then about the team that wrote them, a bunch of engineers in the 1980s. It turns out to be obsolete documentation that got left on an install disc for a chip series three generations before mine, made by a Protheon-owned company out in New Mexico. Just before waking, I catch a glimpse of red earth and a storefront office window in an Albuquerque strip mall, the smell of air conditioning and bad office coffee, the glass door swinging shut, as if whoever made me has only just left the building.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RIDDLE ME THIS

  The guards wake me at about one in the morning, three hours after lights-out. They seem nervous. The scan isn’t the usual once-over; they bustle around me for a full half hour, testing the seams on my jumpsuit, checking my teeth, two of them always standing beyond arm’s reach.

  “If someone ordered a pizza, I don’t have any change.”

  “Shut up. You’ve got visitors.”

  When they’re satisfied, they shackle my hands behind me with a heavy piece of metal, and a doubled guard leads me down the hall and through a security checkpoint, down a flight of stairs and into a part of the prison I’ve never seen before.

  We pass through a pair of heavy security doors, moving a few rings outward in the high-security onion. A uniformed pair of men check IDs, fingerprint me, nod to each other, and turn keys in unison. Our destination turns out to be a white cinder-block room with a two-way mirror along one wall. The ceiling is paneled, perforated with tiny holes, and has a single square of fluorescent bulbs behind plastic. It’s furnished with a metal table and a metal chair.

  There is a brief halt, a muted conference among my captors; then they motion me to sit in the chair. My hands are loosed briefly, one of my arms fed through the back of the chair, then remanacled.

  The door closes behind them and the bolts shoot home. I can’t feel what the restraints are, but they’re stronger than regulation handcuffs, which I can snap in a moment. This is a thick, solid metal tube, seemingly cast in one piece, with two holes for my wrists. I test it without much hope. They pretty much know how strong I am, and they’re bound to be watching me if I try to get creative. It’s hard to estimate what a person of my intelligence is capable of, so in prison it’s Gilligan’s Island rules—they’ll always wonder if I can make a radio out of that coconut, or a stun gun. And maybe I could if I had one, and enough copper wire. But not with my hands shackled behind my back.

  So I wait there for around twenty minutes; then two superheroes walk into the room.

  I don’t know them. They’re startlingly young, even younger than the so-called Champions. For all I know, they may have gotten their powers while I sat in prison. There’s a new generation of superheroes, people I have to fight whose names I don’t even know. But you can learn a lot by watching. Superheroes carry their stories around on their bodies.

  They’re also small for heroes, both under six feet. Coordinated outfits, expensive tailoring, latex and nylon. One wears an orange half mask, and a leotard with flamelike designs in brown, gray, and orange. Whatever else he had done, he has a retractable blade grafted into each forearm, energized metal alloy with a pinkish sheen on it. It must be a new implant; he can’t stop testing the edge with one thumb, and the skin is still red with secondary infection where the metal went in. It looks like he paid a lot of money for it, so he probably had more work done under the skin. I’ll have to watch him.

  The other one is a different matter. Blue traceries glow under his skin. He has a startled look around the eyes, no hair or eyebrows, and no pupils at all, solid blue. Alien technology. I guess him for having informational powers, one of the human calculator types, my opposite number in a way. Smart, without the taint of evil that seems to come with genius. Stupid in a certain way, then.

  They look as if seeing me is a little bit of a letdown. They’ve finally met Doctor Impossible, the Scientist Supreme, and he’s a middle-aged man in prison overalls stuck in a metal chair.

  Blade Guy takes the lead. He’s really happy about those new blades. He cou
ld probably cut right through the prison wall, given time.

  “This is Bluetooth. I’m Phenom. We’re the Chaos Pact. Don’t bother introducing yourself; we know who you are.”

  Jesus. How old is this guy? Twenty? Twenty-two? I can tell it’s his first time doing this.

  I don’t say anything. I just watch. Rich kids? The orange guy might have been. They could be childhood friends, following through on a pact they’d sworn in seventh grade. I wonder if Phenom paid for their implants. I can see they don’t know much about me, just what was on TV. They aren’t afraid of me.

  What happens now? It’s a standoff. They keep their distance a little, just common sense. They’re nervous—this is their big break. They can’t believe they’re interrogating me, the terror who held the Super Squadron at bay for a decade. A guy who stood in the Oval Office and told the President of the United States to call him Emperor. And now I’m inches away, chained. This is their shot at history.

  They’re probably hoping I’m going to make it easy for them. That I’ll cringe and snarl and make speeches and give everything away. I’ve made that mistake before. But I don’t see any reason why I should make this easy for them.

  Again, Phenom breaks the silence. “Been a long time in here, huh? Two years. Not much to a guy like you, though. Bet you’re pretty much running things from inside, huh? Pulling strings. Guy like you has a long reach, huh? Master mind…” He chuckles. He has an easy charisma.

  I stare back at him. I don’t know where he got the idea I’m some kind of boss on the inside. The Prism talks to me sometimes, zaps in through the glass when no one’s looking, but he’s not making much sense these days. Spend too much time as a rainbow and you lose your grasp on certain things.

  Suddenly the absence of chairs is making them look a little stupid. No one knows what to do with their hands. Except me, of course.

  “You know why we’re here. It’s the big guy. Word is, you know where he’s gone.”

  CoreFire! The penny drops. This has been on the news for a while. He’s been away for a little longer than normal, eight weeks or so. People are starting to talk. I keep my face carefully expressionless.

  “You fought him, right? He was like your nemesis? You guys were archnemeses. Last seen with your friend Lily, I’m told.”

  We fought once out over the ocean. I had jet boots on, trying to fly like he does. He was wearing that stupid leather jacket, hair falling across his glowing eyes. I lost.

  Phenom prattles on. “No sightings. No messages. What could happen to a guy like that? Psychics say he’s just gone.”

  It’s actually a good question, and I give it a moment’s consideration. But I don’t see who could have killed CoreFire, or even how. He isn’t supposed to be able to be killed at all, as far as anyone knows—we all thought he was going to be flying around rescuing kittens and putting people like me in jail forever. I’ve never seen him reach his limits, not even that day on the Golden Gate Bridge, when for a second the whole structural weight of the thing came down on his slight frame. If he can’t knock a thing over he can wear it down, the way he slowly pulled Deimos into its new orbit away from the Mars station. You could say he’s my greatest invention.

  The last bit of whatever iridium isotope can stop him got hurled off the planet decades ago, like a baseball hit over the fence and across the street. To make more, you need lots and lots of heat and pressure, like at the center of a sizable star, or in the Zeta Dimension. Like where he gets his power from.

  “He put you away last time, didn’t he? When exactly did you see him last?”

  Idiot. Damsel beat me last time, not that that’s any better. Another pause. Bluetooth looks on, impassive, a human hard drive.

  “Not much to say, huh? I get that. Not gonna break that easy. I can deal with that.” He snaps one of his forearm blades in and out, fast, giving me a good look at it. And it does look good. Things have come along a bit since I went inside. I wonder what the rest of the heroes are sporting, and if my tricks are old hat by now.

  “Just give us a piece of it. You want to end up on a table in a government lab? They do that to people. We could figure out what makes you so smart. Think about that for a while, supergenius. You know what we can do to you in this room?”

  Jesus. The same stuff, I assume, they can do to me outside of it. Their friends have already done it to me a dozen times already, so I don’t imagine my being in custody is going to make anyone squeamish.

  The guards are gone. They figure the heroes can handle themselves. And I don’t like those blades at all. They aren’t legal in most states, as if that matters. No superhero gets an implant like that, unless he doesn’t mind killing people.

  What do they expect from me? A full confession?

  “Look. If it isn’t you, then it’s a friend of yours. I know you guys talk to each other. If you can finger the right guy, maybe there’s something in it for you.”

  As interrogations go, this one is already starting to lag a little. Phenom lacks the conversational expansiveness of the truly gifted torturer, but I can see they aren’t leaving. It was probably a lot of work to set this up, and they won’t want to walk out empty-handed. They want a clue, a story to tell, a memory of how they stood up to Doctor Impossible and he cracked.

  “Come on. Was it Bloodstryke? Was it the Pharaoh? Was it your old girlfriend Lily? Come on, Einstein. Talk.”

  He’s talking right into my ear now. His breath is hot, ruffling my hair a little.

  “Supposed to be smart, right? Can’t hear me? Hey, loser! Hey, stupid!” Suddenly we’re nose-to-nose.

  “I. Am. A. GENIUS!” The words bubble up out of me before I’ve thought about what I’m saying.

  They glance at each other for just a split second. Then something brushes my cheek. The world jumps and I’m sliding across the floor, one cheek against the tile. Phenom is fast, I’ll give him that. I never even saw it.

  Three or four seconds have passed. I’m still shackled to the chair. The side of my face is numb. With one arm between the bars of the chair back, I manage to get to my knees.

  “Boom, bitch!”

  Phenom’s pacing, making little half jogs, jabbing the air like a boxer. Bluetooth heaves me and my chair back to upright.

  “Dad said we shouldn’t…,” he says, speaking for the first time.

  “Lighten up. It’s Doctor Impossible. No one cares.”

  He hits me again, and this time I almost feel it. It’s been a long time since I felt much of anything. Other side of the face this time, and I slide all the way to the wall and stop with my nose up against it. Bluetooth stands me up again. I’m starting to get a little dizzy, but at least the blades haven’t come out.

  Phenom is back on form. “How long you want to keep this up? You don’t have a lot of powers besides that brain of yours. Things get physical, you fold up pretty fast. You want to start losing teeth?”

  I spit. “You won’t be laughing when I move the—” I start to say, the plan I’ve concocted in prison on the tip of my tongue. Why do I always tell people my plans?

  I look at him and then at Bluetooth, and just for a second I see something else. I’m on my back again, but in another room. A big room with a tiled floor. I land on something soft, which has smeared, soaked into my pants. People are looking at me.

  I can still hear Phenom’s voice. “So what’s it going to be? Look, you’ve got nothing in here. No gadgets, no gimmicks. You’re just a guy in an orange jumpsuit. How long are you going to last?”

  But then something strange happens. The scene shifts and I’m back at Peterson. Jason is there, a junior, his class representative. He’s in the crowd that afternoon, eating his lunch on a tray, peering over the heads of the younger students—the skinny kid who would later call himself Blackwolf, and Damsel, tall and quiet. I don’t remember them sticking up for the weak and powerless that day.

  “Think you’re smart? Think you’re smart? Wanna show me how smart you are?”

  W
hat’s happening? Then I put it together. I’m no stranger to psychic attack. Bluetooth isn’t a computer; he’s a telepath. They’re a little more sophisticated than I thought. They came in with a plan. Phenom would pound on me and feed me questions while Bluetooth rummaged around in my mind, pulling up whatever memories were there. I missed it before under the fluorescents, but that circuitry under his skin is starting to pulse.

  “Come on, Blue. Ninth grade, man, remember?”

  “He’s uh—wait. I got something,” Bluetooth says. He has his hands on his head now.

  “Stick on it.”

  When the next punch comes, it’s a thunderclap. This is probably about as hard as he can hit. I can tell this isn’t heading in a good direction. I have to do something. Say something. When you’re under psychic attack, the only thing to do is try to take control back.

  “Listen. Kid.” They stop and stare. “You want to know what happened to CoreFire?” My voice is sort of mushy—my lips are swelling up. I try again.

  “Come here. I’m going to tell you a story.”

  “Shit. This better be good.” Phenom lets his hands drop for the moment. They both stop and listen.

  “Once…once upon a time. There was this girl.”

  Nonplussed, they exchange another glance, but they’re listening. Bluetooth stands me back up again like a fallen chess piece.

  I keep talking. Bluetooth is still working on me, and if there’s one thing I still have, it’s my secrets. I have a plan for when I get out, and a real name, although for all I know, it’s public knowledge by now.

  Memories scroll by. I thought it would be different at Peterson, but it wasn’t. I see myself spending long afternoons in my single room, not very different from the one I live in now. I read and I filled my notebooks with drawings and ideas, crazy stuff. Once when I built the time machine that took me back to the Punic Wars, I couldn’t resist stopping to peer in my own window, looking in on that crucible time, of a genius that didn’t know itself.