Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

  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.

  Cough cough. “FAGgot…” Titters. Jason Garner, and a couple of his friends. Peterson was the same as middle school had been, only maybe more so. There had to be a way out of this, all of it. In my head soared louder and louder the sad, sweet songs of science.

  Oddly enough, there’s a second name listed in the computer under recent searches. CoreFire was looking for someone, too.

  NAME: THE PHARAOH (2)

  Why the Pharaoh? He wasn’t much of a supervillain at all, just a crank, a nuisance in a costume. I think he called himself the Mummy for a while before I met him. He pulled a few bank jobs in the late 1970s, claiming to be the reincarnation of the pharaoh Ramses. His most notable feature was that he’d chosen the same name as a more famous hero, but he wasn’t important enough for them to fight over it. Some villains make you embarrassed to be a villain.

  ALIAS: NELSON GERARD.

  Nelson the Pharaoh, King of the Nile. I never knew his real name, and I wonder how they did. I’m mildly surprised he has an entry at all. If it weren’t for that hammer he’d have been a complete joke.

  BIRTHPLACE: TUCSON, ARIZONA.

  KNOWN ASSOCIATES: MISS MINDBENDER. EMBRYARCH.

  DOCTOR IMPOSSIBLE.

  Known associate. I’m not really used to having friends. We could be in the same room without fighting anyway. I don’t know the others.

  NOTES: POSSIBLE MENTAL INSTABILITY.

  Maybe. But he was smart, too, that was the thing. You just wouldn’t think it. The irony is, he really did have a serious power in him, more than I ever figured out. I just don’t think he knew what he had.

  GOALS: GLOBAL DOMINATION; FOUNDATION OF

  NEO-NILOTIC WORLD-STATE; AUTOREINCARNATION

  AS RAMSES IV.

  I used to yell at him about that lack of ambition, but he didn’t seem to care. He was lazy, and he just didn’t have much patience for the big picture. That business about a revived Nilotic empire, pyramids on the Potomac, was a smoke screen. And as for “autoreincarnation,” he never bothered to figure out which Ramses he was the reincarnation of. When we broke into the Boston MFA that time, he couldn’t even read his own inscriptions.

  POWERS: HAND-TO-HAND WEAPON (HAMMER OF RA).

  INVINCIBILITY (HAMMER OF RA).

  The telling brevity of that notation. The Pharaoh’s invulnerability was just this side of magical, if not on the far side altogether. They never found anything that would get through it, and no one knew how it worked, although I was willing to bet it wasn’t the might of Ra. He’d pick up that hammer and mumble a made-up power word, and a second later he’d be one of the toughest villains on the planet. Then he’d yell, “It’s hammer time!” just to embarrass me. Bastard.

  He wasn’t just robust; whatever he had seemed to eat inertia. Bullets didn’t faze him; someone like Battalion would swing a girder, or a parade float, or a railway car, and it would just wrap around him, or he’d tear through it. He took a sixteen-inch shell once, the kind fired from battleships and designed to break down hardened fortifications, but it just dug a hole with Pharaoh at the bottom. This is the kind of technology that shouldn’t exist, and more than once I tried to get the thing away from him, but he’d only laugh.

  What was under all that gold paint he’d slathered on? Was it high-tech? An artifact from the future? The effect looked at least half magical, and followed no logic I could see. But it had made him invincible, or just about. He could come in handy.

  SOURCE OF ABILITIES: UNKNOWN.

  STATUS: AT LARGE. POSSIBLY INACTIVE.

  LAST KNOWN SIGHTING: CANCÚN, MEXICO.

  Cancún. I lost track of him, too, but that’s not unusual for people like us. We’d met in Thailand, and I never found out where he was from. He talked as if he’d had a little college. Most villains are unusual people, but there’s a fuzzy line with real mental instability. He disappeared into a demimonde of junkies and outpatient care, wherever people like that go. But trust Blackwolf to keep track, even of the Pharaoh.

  The Power Staff chimes softly—the energy signature from Blackwolf’s plane is closer than it should be. Enough kidding around. I do one last search to make sure I’m in the right place. I am. Dollface’s effects are still on-site.

  If the front lobby is a monument to heroism, the trophy hall is its opposite. I pause a moment, humbled. The hall is crowded with display cases, trophy plaques, and force fields that hold souvenirs of the most twisted imaginations of the century run riot. The Oboist’s oboe, the Gentleman’s gloves and monocle hang together across from a life-size mannequin wearing the Abomination’s armor. An ornate golden key hangs by itself, one section lifted away to reveal miniaturized circuitry of the thirtieth century.

  The workmanship here is priceless, and even I can’t name it all. A fountain pen, a fedora, a painting whose lurid colors shift as I watch. A dress worn by Anne de Siècle, one of Sinistra’s left-handed gloves. I spot one of Baron Ether’s old pocket watches and contemplate stealing it back for him. Amulets, shields, ray guns. Malevolent statuary. A tiny castle under glass. A music box. A shelf holds books and blueprints. I could leave with an armload, but that would attract attention.

  A decade ago the Champions fought a woman who called herself Dollface. She built tiny malevolent toys—a cowboy, a tiger, a carriage—but the toys worked, and they each did something different. A novelty villain, arguably, but she had a kind of concentrated ingenuity. Why only toys? It must have meant something to her.

  They’re in back, a dusty miniature carnival behind glass, their creator mislabeled as “Doll Woman.” Sic transit gloria mundi. Tiny merry-go-round, tiny Ferris wheel, tiny elephants, and tiny calliope, each with its own sinister function. A genius work of miniaturization; they don’t make craftsmen like her anymore. They have the full set, but I snap the lock and take only the one I need.

  Gravity is many things to many people: a wave, a particle, a force. To Dollface, it was the luminous gaze of a tiny laughing fat man, a tiny ray that could make a person heavier or lighter. Some trick inside it no one ever figured out, not even me.

  But in my hands, Dollface will finally get her due. She and Laserator never met, but they’re going to make a great team.

  A louder chime from the Power Staff tells me I’ve made a mistake. I cut it too close. I just have time to change back into my cleaning uniform before someone’s caped shadow falls into the front hallway from the lobby, long and thin in the afternoon light. There are three of them standing there. Floating, actually. Damsel, Blackwolf, Lily. This is going to be awkward, to say the least.

  It’s been a long time. Not since that night in the bar. It feels like all the blood is rushing to my chest, and I’m frozen. She’s right there. Crap. In two steps, I could reach out and touch her back, just under the shoulder blade.

  I don’t know what to do. It’s unprofessional. I should be attacking while they think they’re alone. In another second they’re going to see me anyway. Is she going to fight me? In front of her
friends?

  You can’t let these things get to you, not if you’re going to get anywhere. It’s sooner than the plan calls for, but never mind. I can do this. The Power Staff is charged. I fought their fathers to a standstill in the days of the Super Squadron, and I’ll fight them, too. I step out into the light, ready for anything.

  But then they aren’t looking at me. The television is on in the lobby, so I hear it at the same time they do. CoreFire has been found.

  That morning, for an instant, I thought I was in jail again, waking up under a dozen cameras, waiting for the guards to unstrap me. But there was no one there, just the alarm clock and the anonymous charm of the Starlight Motel. It’s four days later.

  Slowly, deliberately, I dress for the occasion. I’m still not used to street clothes, and the overlapping folds and clasps and pockets of a single-breasted suit seemed absurdly overcomplicated after the economy of my imperial garments. I comb my hair straight back, and trim my beard, a pale, slightly weary Lucifer. I am aging, slowly, in spite of my powers. Finished, I step back to inspect the results. I look like a person I had forgotten about, the shabby postdoc I said good-bye to twenty-five years ago. I look like a civilian. I look like a loser.