Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

“I was born in the twelfth century of your Christ, and I am the last fairy in the world. When the Fair Folk left the world of humankind early in the seventeenth century, I was left behind—Titania could not or would not explain why. But there I stayed, the lone fairy in all the woods of England.”

  She crouches in her cell and tells the story.

  “Year by year and century by century, the game thinned out, acorns lost their flavor, and the spring dew grew less and less nourishing. Alone, I walked the forests, empty now of knights-errant and loitering maidens, while the long nineteenth century stretched on. And the twentieth. The forest diminished into odd patches of undeveloped land, crisscrossed by dirt roads and power lines, overflown by airplanes three times a day. I began hearing cars zoom past on the expressway, where once cool forest had stretched hundreds of silent miles in every direction. I grew used to hearing them pass, always behind the next stand of trees. Squirrels replaced deer; wolves were a distant memory. One day, a young boy in a red anorak saw me in full daylight as I crouched drinking from a drainpipe.

  “I waited for Titania’s plan to become clear. I hiked farther north as time went on, and then farther. I crossed the roads late at night, asphalt stinging the soles of my bare feet, to get to the next square of land. I was lamed once when a car struck me. I’d taken wounds before in Titania’s service—I knew the burn of cold iron, and once the flash and hot thump of a lead musket ball—but this, the blinding light and the force of it rolling me over and over, it was like nothing I’d ever felt. I flashed away into the brush before the shock had worn off, and lay there shaking.”

  I look around and the others are listening silently. Blackwolf has heard this before; he must have. Rainbow clearly hasn’t. But Elphin is speaking to me.

  “I began to starve. I grew thin, thin even for a fairy, a creature of long nails and silvery skin stretched over hollow bird bones. The fish were gone. I munched nettles and drank tainted water from streams, and in winter I raided squirrels’ granaries. On summer nights, I sat and gazed at the few stars visible beyond the light of the cities, and dreamed of old hunts. It was 1975, unfathomably late in the day to be a full-blooded fairy in England. I wandered dazed in the forest, moonlight shining through my flesh. I was fading.

  “One morning in early spring, I collapsed and lay for hours at the bottom of a culvert, until a sudden rainstorm washed me down out of the hills. The hunters were up from Berwickshire, making a day of it. They found me stretched out in a streambed, unconscious in full daylight.

  “It was noon, and they were already a little drunk when they found me, a tiny woman in a nightdress, four and a half feet tall, inhumanly graceful even in sleep. One of them handed his buddy his gun and went to get a closer look. He must not have noticed the wings, or the nails.

  “According to a police report, I was later seen walking along the expressway around noon, naked, blood splashed over my face and body. I did not know what had happened. But when, after three hundred years, one of the Fair Folk walked barefoot up the center line of a main road, it was a Catholic priest who recognized the gravity of the situation.

  “He bundled me off the street and found me clothes, and a room with no crosses or cold iron. He called his superior, who found a scholar at the Vatican archive who specialized in such things. The Catholic Church has what you would call a very fine institutional memory. The last man to have been in this situation wrote in twelfth-century Latin and told the protocols, modes of address for speech between fairies and Christian men. And it remains in effect, Vatican Two notwithstanding. The priest repeated the language they gave him, and, dazed, I replied in the language of the ancient compact, words I had learned under Henry the Second.

  “I have been charged with two tasks, to uphold the honor of Fairy and to fulfill the task that has been laid on me, when the time is right. But those who made the covenant knew nothing of the world I found myself in now, nor did Titania.

  “I was a nine days’ wonder. The press grew tired of me—I could not be featured forever on your talk shows and in your magazines. I could not go back to the forest, to graze on highway median strips. I did not know how to rent an apartment, or work in a trade, or live in a city. I am a fairy, but I cannot be Titania’s knight anymore.

  “But Damsel found me and offered me a job, one that made sense of my life again. I could be a superhero.”

  “How about you? How’d you get started?”

  For once, Damsel is looking directly at me, but the amber light makes it hard to read her features when she asks me the question I’ve been waiting to figure out.

  “You guys don’t want to hear about it.” I’m not ready to talk about it anyway.

  “What’d they do to you?” She says it in a tone I’ve never heard from her.

  And for a full minute, I can’t answer, a minute before the thoughts start to come again.

  “I was a superhero, too, for a while, but the NSA was just easier. It’s not like how they tell you it will be. It’s hard to make it on your own as a cyborg—I’ve tried. I weigh almost five hundred pounds. I can’t find clothes that fit me. I can’t ride a bicycle. I can’t eat in a normal restaurant, or sit in a chair not reinforced for my weight. I need special foods; I need medication to keep my body from rejecting the implants, and then I get sick too often due to a depressed immune system.

  “And those are only things I know about. I have systems nobody understands. It’s not like I’m a car that can be recalled if one model out of a million fails—there’s only one of me.”

  I don’t want to tell them this stuff, but I’m sick of being the only one who knows. It all comes spilling out.

  “When they told me they weren’t going to take care of me anymore, I thought I was dead. The Ohio facility that maintained me shut down overnight; I went in one day and found a bare office. And when I went to try to trace their assets, I found out they never existed.”

  It’s about as far as I can go, but there’s more I can’t even put into words. I still don’t have a boyfriend. I can’t even have children—that’s where the fusion reactor went in. I know it’s crazy, but I thought Doctor Impossible was going to take me in, or maybe he would fix me, put me back the way I was. I know that’s crazy. But I hate this piece of metal that I had them put inside me. God, I hate it. The way you can only hate a part of yourself that you made.

  I leave you to ponder the error of your ways. The error of opposing…Doctor Impossible. Ahahaha hahahahahahaaa!

  Damsel actually looks a little better now, but that light is still shutting down her powers. She and Blackwolf are talking in low tones. They’ve been in tight spots before.

  Blackwolf sees me looking. “It’s all right.”

  “How is it all right? We’re starting a new Ice Age and the entire Earth is now ruled by the angriest dork in the world. So tell me, how is it all right?”

  “I’ve actually got a backup plan. We’ve got reinforcements.”

  “Backup? Who is it—is it Stormcloud? Is it the Super Squadron?” But he shakes his head.

  “You really are new to this, aren’t you? There’s no way he was going to stay down for long.”

  The speakers crackle, and Doctor Impossible starts up again; he’s recorded his speech, and it’s starting to repeat.

  My dear “Champions.” Welcome. By the time you hear this…

  “God, what an asshole.” Blackwolf curses with sudden feeling. Amazingly, Damsel starts to smile, and then giggle a little. Suddenly, we’re all laughing, almost like a team again. Then, far off, I hear the thunder.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BUT BEFORE I KILL YOU

  “Well, well, well. CoreFire.” I’ve waited more than half a lifetime for this.

  CoreFire slumps, arms manacled to a central set of pillars. He’s doing that stupid thing of pretending to be asleep, like we’re at summer camp. Well, let him. But I wish for once he would at least look up and see this, because frankly, it’s another tour de force. Spectacular.

&nbs
p; I keep talking, but my mind is elsewhere. I’ve got to concentrate on conquering the world.

  “Now that you are lying helpless at my feet. Now that your finest efforts have proved futile. Now that you are totally in my power.

  “Now that there is nothing you can do to stop me. Now that you are thousands of miles from help. Now that there is no possibility of escape. Now that you have, finally and irremediably, lost.”

  Even though my experiment was a failure.

  “Now that the armies of the world are helpless against me. With my lasers. And force fields. And my army of robot soldiers. With their force fields. And their laser eyes.”

  Even though I never got the girl.

  “Now that your defeat is total and abject. Now that I have crushed you, comprehensively and without qualification. And I will reign supreme forever.

  “Now that I win.”

  Even though I’ll never be you.

  Yes, he faked it. I don’t know how yet. I’ll have to make him tell me.

  The generators are just the hub of a network of forces I’ve set up, stretching well past the orbit of the Moon. Gravitational generation, and perfect reflection of energy. There’s no one who can see the whole of it except me, the scale of the project, a vast and shadowy galleon putting about infinitely slow, infinitely ponderous in the high seas of the ether, dragged at by innumerable threads and sheets.

  It can’t be done all at once, only by a slow, steady application of impetus. It was a fantastic piece of mathematics, a baroquely extended word problem of novelistic proportions, a shifting matrix of angles of incidence, rates of spin, shear strength…. To manipulate an unthinkablyheavy mass of rock and clay, oceans and seas, buses and grand pianos afloat in space, was like an ant pushing an ocean liner, a tail wagging a million-ton dog. Behind me the machines rise up, tier upon tier, to the cavernous ceiling.

  I might have managed this years ago if that experiment had been completed. Those meddling fools! If only I’d written my dissertation properly. If only I’d gotten to finish. But I still needed you gone.

  The tendrils of energy whip out and charge the five subsidiary poles, and the whole apparatus begins to turn, ever so slowly, massively, nudging the Earth off course without breaking it apart. Slowly, almost imperceptibly bringing the whole ponderous business, the whole cosmic clockwork, to heel. For a second, I stand at the fulcrum point of creation.

  God I’m so unhappy.

  When the Nemesis Alert went off, I could scarcely believe it. I set them up a long time ago to scan for objects that were superdense and fast-moving and human-size. In other words, for him.

  I should have guessed it, with all the publicity, that maudlin spectacle. I wonder if there was anything in the coffin at all. There must have been a few people in on it, laughing up their sleeves at me. And to think I fell for it, I, Doctor Impossible! Tricked, by one of these mental pygmies. And it was so obvious, exactly the kind of almost clever idea these people come up with, like pretending you’ve been knocked unconscious. Like the secret identity thing. As if we don’t know what you look like.

  Maybe he wanted to draw me out. No one would fight him anymore—maybe he was bored. He changes things just by existing. Nothing about him is normal. His senses alone make a difference to what you can try when he’s on the planet.

  I had about ninety minutes’ warning, ninety minutes to recalculate everything, my enormous intelligence working at full power. But it’s better this way—the Champions were always in a league below him. Beating them without CoreFire is almost cheating.

  But you have no idea what it’s like to face one of these people. One of the absolute unstoppables. He’s strong, much too strong to bother shooting at. You may as well shine a flashlight on him. CoreFire has only gotten stronger over the years, and the world of solid matter must be like fog to him now.

  You need layers. And there needs to be a trick. I used to fight Go-Man, the Super Squadron’s speedster with a carefree disregard for atmospheric friction and inertia and a few other things we rubes understand to be the laws of physics. I’d rarely see his actual body, lost at the center of a perpetual whirlwind like a hummingbird’s wing or a helicopter’s rotor, invisibly rapid.

  I first met him in Berlin, and built a whole new class of defenses to deal with his class of ability—trip wires, gases, immobilizing foams, areas of the complex that could seal off instantly if I even suspected he was inside them. Then I’d pour in everything I could think of—poisons, sonic vibrations, mutant bees—until something worked, until he fell unconscious and stopped moving, precipitated out of the air like a spirit.

  CoreFire poses these threats and more, and he’s seen my older tricks already. It’s not like I can just set off a smoke bomb, duck into a hall of mirrors, and run away cackling. I don’t think there’s anyone who could beat him in a straight fight. There’s nothing else like him now, not on Earth anyway.

  He set down lightly in the ruined forecourt. There was no one waiting for him. Henchmen are no use in a situation like this. Don’t get me started about henchmen.

  “Wow. Time to fire the maid.” Imbecile.

  I left it quiet for a few moments, waiting, silent, then hit the lights. If it spooked him, he didn’t show it. He spent a little time looking around. He could have tunneled straight to me if he’d known where I was. He could have been running through there at a hundred miles per hour if he’d wanted, but he was going to play this out, just like I was.

  He’d gotten lazy—that, I noticed. He didn’t even x-ray the place, it’s been so long since anything could hurt him. The first mine went off, shuddering through the complex like distant thunder. On camera, CoreFire was unruffled, but he spoke for the first time.

  “Nice try.”

  I leaned in to the microphone. Time to talk some trash.

  “You didn’t think your prisons would stop me, did you? You knew I’d be back. I…Doctor Impossible!”

  It passed the time.

  All heroes have an origin. It’s a rule, right? Flash of fire, a miraculous accident. But what could have made something like you, CoreFire? So ungodly powerful, so perfect. You’ve barely aged, you know. You might live a thousand years. Some people think you’re an alien; some people think you’re Cain, condemned to wander the Earth, untouchable. Maybe you came from the future? A broken future, like Lily’s, here to fix the past. But no, I’ve been to the future, many futures, and seen nothing like you except you. I’ve seen futures where you went bad, went to my side, and futures where you reigned as king. I’ve seen alternate realities where the accident that gave you powers happened to Erica instead, or Professor Burke, or the kid standing next to you, or me—but not the real me.

  It’s one of the hardest puzzles. I was there, and I’ve tried everything to solve it, to work out the mystery of your accident, the secret inside you. It’s been a long time since Professor Burke’s seminars. But you never were much of a scientist, were you, Jason? Has everybody forgotten about the zeta beam? Because I didn’t.

  “Hmm…I sense a trap.” He poked his head into the entrance hall.

  The doors sealed shut, and the room fogged with an acid mist. Of course it was a trap. It was all traps, all the way. In the corridor beyond, cutting lasers lit the place in lurid greens and reds. Then sonics, then microwaves. He watched it all with an appraising stare, and pushed the next door open.

  “That all you got?”

  I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein.

  I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it’s hovering over Chicago.

  All the rooms were traps, but he came on like a hero out of legend. I froze him in a block of ice, and he melted it. Lava he cools w
ith his breath, and shatters. Electricity, poison darts, voodoo skulls. I try everything, just to be sure. The lasers left red tracks on his skin that faded after a few seconds, an odd little secondary effect. He was getting impatient. We’d done this part before.

  Then he was through the last door, brushing off some electrified wires. I’d had an idea about a Taser that didn’t quite come off.

  And now there’s nothing between me and him but air. I’m only sixty feet away, sitting on the throne you’ve seen in my broadcasts.

  “Hello, CoreFire. Did you think you were being clever?”

  “You’ll never get away with this,” he snarls.

  “Oh, come off it. I already have. You just missed it while you were playing the dearly departed.”

  “I’m going to break you.”

  “All right, then. Go on. Hit me. Go on.”

  In an eye blink, he’s speeding up the steps to the dais, half flying, readying a blow that would have shivered diamond. It passes noiselessly through the hologram figure, and, on cue, laughter fills the laboratory.

  “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

  Lights up on the real throne. I get my hands up just in time, and then he’s on me.

  We’ve fought so many times—underwater, in outer space, in burning control rooms and crashing spaceships and ancient temples, on Mars and at the center of the Earth. And I lost, every time.

  Not that I haven’t come close. But whatever he’s got powering him is tough, very tough, some freakish zeta vortex that I never quite solved. He behaves as if he were superdense and as light as a soap bubble, simultaneously. It drives conventional physics crazy.

  Our earliest battles were all robots and lasers, big ones. I piled on the iron and the lasers, thinking sooner or later I’d hit his limits. But he smashed it all into scrap, victims of a mistaken conception. I could build anything out of metal, but he’d always be stronger than any metal.