Outside in the street, my face feels naked. No sunglasses. I’m taking a serious risk here. It has been eleven years since I walked outdoors in public without a mask on. That long since I’ve been this close to a civilian who isn’t cowering or calling the police. I take the subway across the river, where once I flew. Doctor Impossible comes to Manhattan.
Emerging, I make slow progress up Amsterdam Avenue toward 112th Street. No one bats an eyelash as I walk past the corner where I first landed Antitron. A panhandler stares insolently into my face, and inside the pocket of my trousers, I clench a fist. No one knows me.
When I get there at last, the memorial service is half over, and the crowd is so large, it spills out onto the cathedral steps. Some of them are crying, and many carry signed photographs. Plenty of them are just here to see the most distinguished mourners, to get a glimpse of Damsel or Blackwolf or Elphin, the television-friendly heroes. I wonder if Erica’s in there somewhere. She’s been in seclusion for a long time, filing the occasional story remotely, still mostly CoreFire material. She keeps her whereabouts a secret these days, which is probably my fault.
I’ve come a long way for this, but as I edge inside through the sitting and standing mourners, into the dim, echoing interior of St. John the Divine, I’m not sure what I’m here to do. Working my way forward, I can see the reserved section up front, behind the velvet rope. Of course they aren’t going to let me up there, but I want to see who came.
I try not to look for her. She would be up on that platform with the capes and masks, up in the riot of forms and mythologies of the VIP area. But in a way, it’s too easy—in this light, she registers only as a group of highlights, where the candles reflect. I only have to spot the apparently empty seat.
And there she is, sitting between Feral and another hero, who I don’t recognize, a girl with a seahorse on her chest. She’s listening quietly, head bowed a little. I stare, despite myself. Who is she trying to kid? I’ve seen her tear the door off a Wells Fargo truck bare-handed, laughing, dragging a guardsman out by his shirt. I was there when she took the depleted-uranium rounds that chipped and scored the right side of her collarbone. We rode the roof of a D train together out of Manhattan that time, while the Metaman was still scouring Broadway for us, and we leaped off the Manhattan Bridge together when they finally found us. We crawled ashore at Williamsburg, to the cheers of drunken party-goers on a rooftop. In the cathedral half-light, she looks like a shadow among the reds and blues of the do-gooders.
I didn’t kill him. But it’s bad taste at any funeral to have tried to kill the deceased as often as I have, and taste is very much on my mind. Sooner or later, one of the crew on the podium is bound to recognize the incognito Doctor Impossible, and although I assume it is considered to be in equally bad taste to try to kill me as I pay my respects, taste feels like an increasingly tenuous shield against the planet-wrecking ordnance the VIPs are capable of launching in my direction.
I never understood CoreFire or liked him particularly. I should know how he worked if anyone can, but I don’t. I’ve pieced together as much as I can about his exploits from news broadcasts, hacked computer files, and eyewitnesses. He could fly, which was reason enough to resent him. He didn’t even have the decency to work for it, to flap a pair of wings or at least glow a little. He seemed to do it purely out of a sense of entitlement—something about it suggested that the rest of us had simply knuckled under to gravity. I didn’t kill him. But I wish I knew who the murderer was, because it was supposed to be me.
The image dominated TV news for days, a column of steam the size of a city block reaching out of the Indian Ocean into the sky. Helicopters and the smaller specks of superpowered fliers hung in misty silhouette, waiting to discover what had struck the water with such heat and force. Hard to tell where he came from. It didn’t make sense, scientists complained, that an object large enough to do that had not broken up in the atmosphere. When they brought him up, he looked unhurt, perfect like always. He had disrupted weather patterns for a thousand miles when he hit.
The mayor of New York spoke. CoreFire had a lot of friends in the community. He was faster, stronger, and tougher than almost anyone else. He never failed to answer a call for help, he never did celebrity endorsements, and, as far as I know, he never lost. Even old Baron Ether came, wheeled gently up the handicapped ramp by two of the Mechanist’s gunmetal-finish golems.
I stand unobtrusively among the masses, clutching my burden, half-listening while a representative from the State Department recites a litany of good deeds and public services. A middle-aged woman to my left begins weeping uncontrollably. I have plenty of time to sit and tick off the familiar names and faces. I know a couple of them from the Peterson School, which was a real breeding ground for powered types.
Before they shut it down, Peterson alone graduated eleven powered individuals. It wasn’t an accident; there was something in the culture there that drove it. Six of them are up there now, at least. It’s not as if I feel like talking, but I stare for a while, looking at what we’ve become, the ones who found power.
I remember Blackwolf, a thin, bright freshman who worked a little too hard to make people laugh. Wrestling team, gymnastics team, electronics club. He published clever sonnets about members of the student government, and became the smallest member of the rugby team. He’s here with Damsel and the rest of the popular kids. He looks grave, but he hasn’t lost that habit of watching everyone around him. I take care to stay well out of his line of view. They came in when I was a senior. Damsel, too, who attended in her secret identity, but I remember her anyway, a quiet, mathy girl who wore her brown hair long and straight. Debating team, and she ran the yearbook staff.
Jeff Burgess, who became Naga, a vigilante-cum-mercenary. He wears a cheap suit, eyes moving with a fighter’s twitchiness. Rarity, tall, with curly hair, bright eyes, and a glassy, confident smile, who went to Africa on a Fulbright and found the mystical Gemstone Nefalis, and touched it. And Mechria, a freshman when I was a senior—I see her again bent over the lathe in metal shop, her wide, froggy face always grinning over something.
I knew so many of them, then and later, but we’re all changed now, utterly, by industrial accidents, wild talents, gods. We’ve become psychics and knife throwers, rogues and religious fanatics and clowns, and criminals. They wouldn’t recognize me now, even if they remembered me. Even if I wanted them to.
When I think about it, I guess CoreFire must have had a story, too, something better than that a smug, popular jock accidentally became a smug, popular superhero. No one could possibly be as boring as he seemed.
At the end of the service a line forms leading to a makeshift shrine. I join it in good order, and leave my wreath with the rest.
I’m threading my way out when Lily finds me.
“Hello, Lily.” The crowd is flowing around us. People are noticing Lily, of course, but no one looks twice at me.
“You’re looking well.”
“Thanks.” I don’t want to think about this. It’s not as if they were even together that long.
People are leaving. I can see Blackwolf starting to look for her. Any second now, he’s going to see us, and all hell is going to break loose.
“Listen, I’m sorry….”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m…”
“It’s okay, Jonathan. Go.”
I never really had a girlfriend before that, or afterward, obviously. We met around the time of the Legion of Evil fiasco that Mentiac had put together, which had seemed like such a good idea at the time. For a few months, the concept had been making its way through a grapevine made up of prison-yard gossip, chitchat over the transfer of stolen goods, low-voiced exchanges in seedy underworld dives, stray psychical transmissions…. The idea was attractive; you get sick of seven-onone battles that always turn bad, of getting the upper hand, just to have some teenage monkey wonder steal the keys to the weapons locker.
I met the original villain team once,
the Delinquent Five, when they traveled to the present day to learn the future of their villainy. Their methods were hopelessly outdated, but in their day, they were geniuses! The Sinister Servant of Atlantis! The Diabolical Duplicate Sun! Their schemes are legend now, if only for their scope, their vision, the outlandish expense. It humbles even my own undertakings. But they came here seeking aid from their future selves, the selves they assumed would be wealthy and powerful, rulers of nations. When they found the world still ruled by governments and policed by heroes, they departed in silence, humbled. Maybe that was the beginning of the end for them.
Mentiac was semilegendary in the world of crime. A rogue supercomputer from the 1960s, built by a prescient trio of graduate students whose work went a little too far ahead of the curve. Mentiac got away from them, legend had it, suborned a forklift, and made his way into the labyrinthine sewer system underneath Chicago. He put down roots, and has been growing ever since, stealthily manipulating criminal affairs through phone lines. There’s a miniature cult of hackers and hardware enthusiasts that buy him cooling fans and RAM.
Both Lily and I were contacted—I received a phone call over an extremely private line, Mentiac’s circa 1977 speech synthesizer quacking out the time and place for our meeting. It was held in rented office space in a downtown L.A. high rise. It was a curious concatenation of the obscure powers of the world, a dozen maniacs, menaces, and underworld bosses, standing, sitting, or perching on bits and pieces of office furniture left over from a defunct talent agency. Of course nothing was agreed on, not even who had the right to speak first. No one bothered to offer a name. Two of them turned out to have the same villain epithet (“the Infamous…”), and violence threatened to break out. Mentiac’s managerial skills were far from adequate, and the afternoon wound down as one crime lord after another stormed out.
I kept staring at Lily. She stood with her back to a line of windows facing west, the L.A. skyline behind her, blue sky shading into gray and brown at the horizon. The colors deepened as the afternoon wore on and the light grew orange and purple. It warped and rippled as it came through her face and body. I’d heard of her, of course, mostly a bank robber, pound for pound one of the strongest out there.
I could never tell when she was looking at me. Her eyes are like the rest of her body, clear glass marbles, featureless as a statue’s. I once pointed out that she should be blind. Transparent eyes shouldn’t work; an optic nerve needs to reflect light. She made a rude noise.
There’s a photograph of her charging a line of Paris cops, punching her way out of a bank robbery. A blue-and-red défense de stationner sign shows, distorted, through her midsection. She’s in motion; her right arm is a little blurry, just starting to swing. You can see the police beginning to give way at the spot she’s aiming for. She was never that careful—she didn’t have to be.
The last of the Napoleons of Crime had left, and we were alone, the room darkening into shadow. It seemed natural to have a drink, once we found a place that would serve us. So the Legion never materialized as such, although a few of the robots later came back as the Machine Intelligence Coalition, which I guess still has its asteroid somewhere. And I met Lily.
We had dinner that one night at the fortress. We ate in the main control room, inside the long arc of the command console. Electricity swirled overhead from the big generators I’d put in—it was my last doomsday device but one. I lit candles anyway, and everything glinted with the unaccustomed warm illumination. The robots cooked us a sumptuous meal; afterward, I programmed them to do this funny dance I had thought of, and we almost fell out of our chairs laughing.
Lily and I had a whole plan put together. I could outthink anyone they could throw at me, create byzantine schemes, and craft devices beyond imagining. She was all but unbeatable in a straight fight. She seemed to want it as much as I did.
I was deep in hiding when I heard about her and CoreFire. It was in the papers, how they’d been seen coming out of one of the hero-style bars in London, England being one of the countries where, it turns out, she’s still legal. They’d been together a few weeks. He had always had a kind of loner, hero-on-the-edge appeal, and I guess that was part of it. And maybe it was her way of getting out of it, coming in from the cold. There was no mention of me; no reason why there should be.
I guess she got bored with me. Some nights on the island, it’s beautiful—tropical constellations, jungle sounds, and luminous fish. But when it’s five in the morning in the hideout and you can’t sleep, and CNN’s stuck on another economic summit, well, that’s another feeling. You’re blacked out and can’t work because some hero team is trolling the South Seas, the heat is unbearable, and it’s an hour until dawn, the slow tropical sunrise over the lagoon, and you’re thinking about how far you are from home, and that this whole thing was maybe not such a brilliant idea after all, but there’s nothing you can do about it now.
My style of work takes a lot of preparation. I build things and test them out. I have to order parts, or cast them myself. I have to pull allnighters to debug my robots’ pathfinding routines before an invasion. It isn’t that interesting to other people.
I leave just as the trucks begin arriving. They’re burying him in a nuclear-waste facility, I’m afraid, taking no chances. No one understood what kept him going all those years, what exactly was inside of him. Something might become unstable, burst underground. You can’t put that class of object in Arlington National Cemetery.
I wonder who did do it, if it wasn’t me. I pick my way down Amsterdam, among the mourners, walking faster now, until I’m lost among the thousands there, lost among people who can’t fly or teleport or turn to water, just going their way, until I could be one of them. She’ll tell them I’d been there. She’s in that world now, and I suppose I understand. Those are her new friends. They could come after me, I guess, but it doesn’t matter—I’m good at escapes. Maybe into the sewers, like the old days. It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SAVE THE WORLD
He’s gone. We’ve lost Earth’s strongest, fastest, and probably just its best superhero. The man who defined the term, practically. The funeral is odd, surreal. I sit in the VIP section, feeling like an impostor in my New Champions outfit, a version of the same uniform he used to wear. People who really knew him cried; I just sit there, feeling like a tourist. In the pictures they clutch, CoreFire is still smiling his boyish smile, the man who never expected this, not in a million years.
I sit in front with the team, but I’ve never felt less like one of them. They’ve seen CoreFire shrug off surface-to-air missiles, dive unprotected into lava. You just didn’t worry about CoreFire. You counted on him to make it through, to soak up damage the rest of the team couldn’t handle.
It’s a part of their lives I can’t touch, and it makes my full membership feel like a joke. I think they broke up after Titan partly because they couldn’t stand losing anyone else. Then losing him to Doctor Impossible, who they’d beaten before, who they thought was evil but at least a known quantity, that just makes it worse.
It hits them all differently. Blackwolf sulks, silently angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Elphin goes fairy-solemn, the closest to stillness I’ve seen in her. Feral is unreadable, but he smells of liquor. Damsel recedes even further into her lonely-leader mask.
I leave as soon as I can, brushing through the mass of reporters to one of our hired cars. A few shout my name, hoping for a picture; a couple even pronounce it right.
The day after the funeral, the old guard arrives to give us a briefing. Stormcloud and Regina, the surviving members of the Super Squadron, Damsel’s father and stepmother. It’s 11:31 a.m. by the digital clock that never stops blinking inside my left eye. There’s probably a way to turn it off, but that knowledge vanished with the rest of the Protheon Corporation.
Blackwolf bristled when the call came in. These guys are supposed to be letting us run things our way n
ow. Damsel speaks privately with him for a few minutes when he arrives, but her response to Regina is visibly cool. I don’t know what happened to Damsel’s real mom, but it doesn’t look like the stepmom was much of a replacement.
It’s practically a state occasion. I’ve never seen the Super Squadron up close before. Damsel and Blackwolf are famous, but these people invented us. Stormcloud hovers motionless, toes slightly pointed, resting solidly in air, as if encased in glass. A lot of people don’t know how to hold themselves when they’re flying; their legs just go everywhere. I don’t know how it works—there is no ground effect that I can see, no radiation, nothing. Regina is another thing entirely—like an animated chess piece, she hefts the Scepter of Elfland, the weapon that can vanquish any mortal foe, if the stories can be believed.
We sit around the U-shaped conference table while Stormcloud glares out from the center, sometimes turning to gesture at the display screens. He has almost no perceptible body language, only a wave of the hand here and there to reinforce a point he’s making. His hair is white; and his costume is a white-and-silver leotard with a simple blue-and-yellow logo on his chest, a diamond inside a circle, which must mean something profound to the cosmic types he runs with.
Regina stands next to him in full regalia, feet on the floor but radiating a queenly authority. Damsel’s distaste is almost palpable. I wonder if Regina wore that crown around the house.
Super Squadron members don’t often come out in public. Stormcloud spends most of his time outside the solar system. Once, they had the monumental quality of the large-scale scientific projects of the period, like fission reactors and Saturn V rockets. Like the Cold War–era science that spawned them, they’ve gone into eclipse.
World War II saw the first public superheroes, government-engineered and packaged by a U.S. Army agency sifting tens of thousands of recruits for certain qualities. There were rumors of men pulled out of their boot camp into special programs. They adapted to peacetime life as crime fighters and government spokesmen.
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