Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

  “See anything?” Lily calls from overhead.

  “Hang on.”

  There’s a lot of cracked tile where Blackwolf and Doctor Impossible met up. The Doctor caught him off guard somehow and threw him into the wall. A chip on the wall shows where Blackwolf threw one of his knives, and I have a lame impulse to find it and hand it back to him, before I remember he’s a millionaire.

  “I think your boyfriend beat up my boyfriend,” I call back.

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Fine.”

  “And you’re not going out with Blackwolf. He just talked to you.”

  “Okay!” I’d told her about it, what Blackwolf said. Who else could I tell?

  “Any clues, Madame Detective? Are we done? The police are looking at me.”

  “I guess we’re done.”

  Just then, my radar pings on another object, small and cool and metallic, just under the water. There’s a handful of loose change, an old-fashioned subway token, and a motel key with a tag that reads Starlight Motel, Queens, New York.

  Cold entrances are dicey when you’re talking about a metahuman living situation. There’s no real way to guess what weirdness you’ll find, anything from genetically enhanced cockroaches up to a pocket black hole. For a second, I think about getting the others.

  But it’s worth the risk for the chance of catching Doctor Impossible alone and making that collar. Forget the newspaper headlines—the look on Damsel’s face will be more than worth it.

  The key goes in and turns. I open the door as quietly as I can, feeling a little foolish—for all I know, he’s standing right on the other side. What will I say, exactly? But the lights are off and the living room is empty. I wait for a moment in the hall, hoping this isn’t one of my bad decisions. It’s 6:59 p.m.

  It’s warm inside, quiet and dark, and I stand in the doorway, letting my organic eye adjust. I can make out shelves and a couch, and garbage on the floor. A white plastic telephone sits on an end table that looks like it was salvaged from the curb outside. It has one drawer, which hangs open, displaying a jumble of circuit boards, slabs of coarse-grained green plastic laced with metal. Loose objects crowd the shelves—a doll’s head, a lumpy piece of pottery, a plastic figurine from a Japanese animated show.

  The room is coated with a layer of dust, which has gotten into everything. In the corners, power cables and network cords lie half-covered in it. The walls are painted with the bumpy, gooey white paint endemic to cheap apartments in New York, and it laps onto the edges of doorknobs and light switches and windowpanes. The air smells of sweat and decayed food and a burned odor from the radiator.

  I step inside. A plastic bag hangs from the doorknob in lieu of a garbage bag, spilling over with take-out containers and used paper towels, a bare concession to the idea of housekeeping. Someone ate and slept here for a few weeks at least.

  To my left, the last of the sunlight filters through dirty windowpanes and onto carpet fragments scattered on the floor and grimy linoleum tile. Ahead of me, a short corridor ends in the half-open door of a bathroom, and what must be a bedroom door on the left. Living room first, I decide. On the carpet, a polished metal tube, outsized, oxidized at one end, as if it had once been part of an immense engine. The surface has a crazed patina that looks superheated. It must have come out of one of the Doctor’s rocket planes.

  The couch has a faded plaid upholstery that looks as if it had spent a few weeks outdoors. On the floor, almost buried under cardboard boxes and packing materials, is a robotic hand almost four feet across, three jointed fingers and a thumb, painted a carnival blue and red. Where the wrist should be, it trails long wires, as if torn from its owner with immense force. I touch one broad, cool finger. The door sighs shut behind me and cuts off the street noise outside. Overhead, a neighbor paces around. A toilet flushes elsewhere in the building.

  In the sudden quiet, I hear cooling fans, and the whir and the chirp of hard drives read/writing. I follow the sound down the hall, and in the bedroom, green and red LEDs spangle the dusty air like fireflies, next to a futon laid out on the bare floor. I’m conscious of being at the heart of something.

  He must have come here as a last resort, when the money for castles and islands ran out, when they found the last of his offshore accounts and buried caches. And he was here not too long ago.

  I look over the tangle of circuitry, careful not to touch. He must have started with five or six off-the-shelf PCs, but none of it looks stock now. Some of the wiring is plainly stuff that’s never been done before, inexplicable but obviously intentional rewirings, chips sawed in half, or soaking in solutions in Burger King glasses. I’m looking at a supercomputer. He probably bought everything at CompUSA and wired it all together himself on his hands and knees. It’s easy to forget how smart he is.

  I should have called in by now, but I want to know what he’s doing. I sit down on the futon and look foraportonthebackofoneofthe computers that I can jack into. Even my plug sizes are getting out of date.

  The data sheets down across my display in blue-white ASCII, a hugely complex piece of engineering, all shear forces and rotational inertia. Diagrams show the Earth wrapped in an interconnected web of lines of force, thousands of tiny vectors. Something big and complicated is being simulated or controlled from here, but I don’t have the math for it. Most of the minds that can understand this kind of thing are on the wrong side in the first place. Half a dozen lines crisscross and connect at a symbol or diagram sketched in, what looks like a lightning bolt. He’s got a question mark next to it, too—something he’s still working out? The words “More power! Invincible!” appear, underlined.

  Pages and pages of orbital schemata, asteroids, planets, comets moving around, columns of figures, stranger things: A fat man? A jewel? Stars and governments, heroes and villains are connected by dotted lines extending through space, time, and other dimensions. This must be how a mastermind sees the world. I see Damsel and Blackwolf, and the others are scattered around. I don’t see myself there, unless I’m the letter F? Would he know about me? Do I want him to?

  I download it all, always listening for a footstep in the hallway. But I don’t think he’s coming back.

  It’s on the way out that I see it. There’s a twin to the enormous robotic hand lying on the kitchen counter, but this one is human-size, intact, with a cunning ball joint where the arm would go. Where my arm would go, actually, because this time I recognize the workmanship.

  Back at the Champions’, this time I’m the one standing at the giant screen in the Crisis Room. I lay out what I’ve found—the key, the motel, the diagrams. I throw the Doctor’s calculations up on the big screen, page after page, while they listen to my analysis.

  Blackwolf scribbles notes frantically as I talk, but he’s not looking at me. I tell them everything but that last thing.

  When I’m finished, Blackwolf and Damsel are talking fast, overlapping each other’s sentences.

  “It’s good work, Fatale,” he says, barely glancing up.

  “Really good. This is going to do it.” Even Damsel is smiling for once, wickedly. “It’s confirmation. He’s going magical.”

  “And he’s desperate. We’ve got a time limit.”

  On the screen, spheres rotate around one another, and around the Sun. There’s a critical window of time coming in a few days.

  “Fine, but what’s that?” I point to the lightning bolt.

  “Whatever it is, we don’t want him to have it.”

  Lily asks, “What did it look like? The room.”

  I shrug. “I don’t know…evil impoverished grad student?”

  She doesn’t look happy. “You’re right that he’s desperate. I think he’s going to try to take over the world.”

  Blackwolf stands unnaturally still in his skintight black leather, his lips moving silently every minute or two. I look closer. He’s saying “Doomsday.”

  He’s contemplating a white board scribbled nearly solid with overlaying d
iagrams in red, green, blue, yellow. It’s not all that dissimilar from what Doctor Impossible was working on, and I wonder for a second what Blackwolf would have been like as a villain, and what kept him from going that route. I remember the Doctor’s squalid surroundings, the smell of spoiled food. When Blackwolf speaks, it’s in a grim monotone.

  “No villain ever beat CoreFire. But what if a hero could?”

  “You know the cataloged powers.” Damsel looks bored. “I could have done it. You could. Who else?”

  “Lily.”

  “No. I’ll vouch for her.” Damsel sounds sure of herself. I wonder why.

  “We need to expand this list.”

  Damsel stands. “Say whatever it is you’re saying.”

  “What if it’s the Scepter of Elfland?” Blackwolf licks his lips before he says it. I’ve never seen him nervous before. There was a bit of silence after. A taboo subject. Damsel’s expression is, as always, hard to read, but if I had to guess I’d say she’s appalled, and at least two other things. Apprehensive? But maybe a little bit grateful to Blackwolf for coming out and saying it. Maybe she’d like to take a swing at that stepmother after all.

  Any mortal foe.

  I know Blackwolf keeps a lab somewhere upstairs. It’s already a late night, but I wait until 2:30 before I go looking. Everyone is asleep and the whole building is quiet, so I just wander around until I find it. There’s a keypad lock, but, as I said, I’m good at things like that.

  It’s cold inside, and pitch-dark except for bright halogen bulbs illuminating the work area. He’s in shirtsleeves and a mask. I can see wine purple bruises from yesterday’s fight.

  “Fatale.” He doesn’t even have to turn around. He’s going over tapes of the fight, frame by frame, on a big flat-screen monitor. Elphin’s frozen mouth open in a silent battle shout.

  “Yeah. Hi.”

  He goes on working, paging forward frame by frame. Doctor Impossible is zapping someone off-camera with his walking stick.

  “Look at that. It’s not the same staff he had before. He got a new one.”

  “Sorry I missed out.”

  “Not your fault.”

  Outside, the city looks asleep, except for a few late workers twinkling in the office blocks around us.

  “Look, I don’t know how to say this…. I need you to take a look atmy enhancements.”

  “Sure. You having a hardware problem?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Just step up on the scanner. Ah, can you take the costume off? It’s shielded.”

  “Okay.”

  I set down my bag and step onto a glass-topped dais, a kind of walk-in MRI. There’s a lot about my body I don’t like people to see, but I guess I asked for this. It takes a minute to get the costume off. I strip down to the tank top and panties I wear underneath and take a breath. LED indicators run up my side and down one leg, glowing brilliant in the darkness. The air on my skin raises goose bumps. He can see just about everything that’s been done.

  “Galatea helped build this when she was here. Just hold still for a couple of minutes.”

  He does something at the keyboard and the scanning element swings over soundlessly on two long arms and gently encircles my midsection before doing a slow transit up and then down. The results come up on two of the big monitors.

  It’s a full-body scan. I haven’t seen this view of myself since Protheon closed. I can see my skeleton—everything they did. On the screen, my fusion plant pulses like a second heart. A cascade of cables and jewellike points descend through me. When I move, it moves. Looking at the screen, Blackwolf is looking at me in a way no one has ever looked at me, with power or without.

  He gives a low whistle. “You’re a piece of work.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I’m not kidding. This is brilliant work. Totally unconventional. Somebody wasn’t kidding around.” I’m blushing, furiously, but the monitor doesn’t show that.

  “Yeah, well, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I think…I think I found out who the somebody is.” I take a breath, then reach into the bag and toss him the metal hand I’ve been carrying around all day. “This was in Doctor Impossible’s motel room.”

  He turns it over and over, his long fingers feeling the joints, spreading the fingers. You can see the same configuration in my own arm, right up there on the screen, and I can almost feel his hands on me. There’s a long silence. I can hear the air conditioning, a couple of machines beeping, the thrumming of hard drives.

  No one knows much about Blackwolf’s own origin. Why he’s so good at things. A lot of people, including me, think he’s the outcome of a government breeding project. But that doesn’t really explain the crime fighting, the obsessive behavior. I want to ask, but I don’t.

  “Has anyone else seen this?” he asks.

  “Just you.”

  “He made CoreFire, too, you know. That’s the rumor.” He takes my hand, the real one, turns it over, feeling the metal bones. His hands are still warm in the cold laboratory.

  “What if there’s a bomb? Or a microphone, or a tracking device?” I feel excited just saying the words, and I’m not even sure why.

  “The NSA must have checked you over. I’ll look myself, but you’re clean, I’m sure of it.”

  There never was a supersoldier project. I must have been part of one of his schemes, and not even one of the good ones. There was never going to be another one of me, unless we were going to be superhenchmen robbing banks for a malicious idiot in a cape. But I’m not even that; I’m a discard. Or am I?

  I step off the platform and snatch my hand back. “Get it off the screen.”

  “Fatale…”

  “Just get it off. Get rid of it.”

  “I really don’t think it matters.”

  “Maybe I’m one of them.” I’m whispering now. “Did that ever occur to you? It doesn’t have to be a bomb. I could be a traitor. It could be written in the code.”

  I’m making this up. Doctor Impossible probably doesn’t even know I’m out here. But maybe he does, and I’m under his control. Maybe this is all part of it.

  Blackwolf widens his stance a little as he listens, one foot feeling the floor. His pupils dilate behind the mask, and his breathing changes. I can see him waking up, noticing me in a way he’d never done before. As a threat.

  “I could be the one. He could have planned every bit of this. I wouldn’t even necessarily have to know about it.” I take a step toward him. I know I’m right, and it feels powerful in a way I haven’t known before.

  “Fatale…” He doesn’t go on. He’s trying to figure out how to beat me. I honestly don’t know what will happen next, but something has to. I take another step, and reach for him.

  He moves so fast, he’s an afterimage on the cameras. Somehow I never thought of him as dangerous. He reads human to all my senses, just bone and meat, like the rest of them.

  The world slows down. I’m moving into fighting stance, arms coming up, but it’s too late. He doesn’t hit me that hard, but he gets just enough leverage behind me to knock me off my feet, all 450-plus pounds. By the time I hit the tile, he’s pulled an extensible police baton from somewhere I didn’t see. He’s straddling me, one hand pinning one of my arms back, the other holding the baton cocked, trembling. I’m ready to unleash some seriously nasty countermeasures, but he’s stopped. It’s a submission hold, and if I were human, I would be in agony, but I’m not.

  It’s as good a chance as I’ll ever get. I could punch him through the ceiling, but I lean up to kiss him. He’s breathing hard. It’s been a while since my nonmetal days, and I’ve kind of forgotten how this goes, but I bet I can figure it out. My artificial nerves are lit up, even better than I thought they would be. I can feel the taut muscles in his forearms, even the tremor of his skin, but my hands are as strong as his, stronger even. I’m steel maybe, but I’m not dead. I’m getting a lot of error messages from my onboard systems—they don’t like ha
ving anybody this close. They keep wanting to electrocute him or break his wrist, and part of me is busy stopping them.

  Our lips touch, and for a second it’s everything I thought it would be. The metal in my jaw is awkward but somehow exciting, and he kisses back. I pull him down to me, get his weight against me. I’d forgotten what it was like to want something this much. He reaches up under my shirt, and the feeling is so good it makes me want to cry. Nobody but a surgeon has touched me there for a really, really long time.

  Then I make a mistake. I reach for the mask, and he catches my arm, ready to break it. His jaw sets, and I’m dealing with Blackwolf again. It’s like watching a different personality take hold, and I get a glimpse of what he’s always holding back, a terrible, unappeasable mourning. Something really god-awful must have happened to him at some point.

  And the only woman he’d chosen was the closest the world could produce to an unbreakable girl. I’ll never be anything but an also-ran, half invulnerable, half twentysomething nobody. Metal alloy and flesh are nothing compared to Stormcloud’s daughter.

  Before he can do anything, I catch him under the arm and lift him off of me as I get to my feet. I could break bone with the grip I’ve got, but I set him down.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Forget it,” I say, grab my costume, and slip out. The early-morning corridors are pitch-dark, but not to me.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MAYBE WE ARE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I

  The way people talk about it, you’d think anyone could build a doomsday device. Like it’s not a power at all. But you have to remember everything, catalog everything, and realize how to fit it together in a new way, a way that solves or destroys or takes everything apart. If it were so easy, they would have figured out what I’m doing by now.

  This is the last piece, the jewel, the one I’ve been putting off. I didn’t want to come back here, and I didn’t want to do it this way. I’d hoped for something subtler, and a fresh invention. But then, I’d hoped for a lot of things.