by James Maxey
“Maybe,” I said, looking down at the floor.
“Why is that not a definitely?”
“Golden Victory went out of his way not to kill the alien invaders,” I said. “I mean… I knew he was a good guy. I didn’t understand he was a damned saint.”
“Maybe he’s not,” said Harry. “The Prime Mover told us Golden Victory is this Glorgon the Conquerer the aliens came here looking for.”
“Just when I thought things couldn’t get any crazier.”
“That’s one reason Retaliator looks so grim. He’s planning to confront Golden Victory.”
“Shit,” I said. “I mean… Prime Mover can’t be telling the truth. You’re basically taking the word of a deranged supervillain over the word of the guy who just saved the planet. I’m not buying… huh.” I lost my train of thought, as another train jumped onto my mental track.
“What?” asked Harry.
“Anyman thinks there’s some kind of big secret about Golden Victory. Something Arc and Tempo know about.”
At that moment, my team-issued phone buzzed. I looked down at the screen. “We’re being summoned to the meeting room. The whole team is.”
Golden Victory came around the corner, flying toward us. Harry gave me a worried glance.
“See you in the meeting room,” he said before flying on. His face looked grim.
I leaned in close to Harry and whispered, “I forget. Does he… does he have super-hearing?”
“I think so,” Harry whispered, as we headed down the hall. “I know for sure Blue Bee does.”
“Do you think he heard us?”
“If he did, why didn’t he say anything?” said Harry, scratching the back of his neck.
“I heard you,” said Golden Victory as we walked into the door of the central meeting room. There were two big tables there, semicircles forming a larger circle with a gap on each side. Golden Victory stood in the middle of the circle, his arms crossed. Retaliator stood beside him. Seated at the two tables were Smash Lass, Blue Bee, Prodigy, Arc, and Anyman.
“Where’s Atomahawk?” I asked.
“Med bay,” said Golden Victory. “I checked on him when we got back. He’ll be okay. Retaliator got him on life support in time.”
“Life support?” I asked. “How badly was he hurt?”
“Technically, he was dead,” said Harry. “But around here, dying is like catching a cold in most workplaces. You tough it out and get back to work.”
“I understand the Prime Mover escaped?” said Golden Victory.
“Yes,” said Retaliator. “But not before making some interesting allegations.”
“Regarding me,” said Golden Victory.
“He says you’re Glorgon the Conqueror,” said Retaliator.
Golden Victory smiled gently. “That would be very interesting news to my parents, rest their souls. You’ve known me a long time, Eric. Why would you waste even two seconds contemplating such a transparent lie?”
Retaliator pulled off his mask. He sort of looked like Sylvester Stallone if he were bald, with an insane number of scars. He looked weary, and he looked genuinely sad.
“Your parents were Doug and Ethyl Palmer,” said Retaliator. “You were raised as Simon Palmer. Or so you believe.”
“Those are the names on my birth certificates,” said Golden Victory.
“Your birth certificate is fake,” said Retaliator.
“That’s absurd,” said Golden Victory. “You’ve been busy fighting the Prime Mover—letting him escape in fact—but you had time to swing by Kansas to grab a copy of my birth certificate and put it through some sort of forensic analysis?”
“Of course not,” said Retaliator. “I secured your birth certificate years ago.” He looked around the room. “It’s no secret that I don’t have a great deal of respect for the privacy of anyone in this room. You all have incredible powers. Any one of you represents a danger that ordinary law enforcement would have little hope of confronting. I can’t be blamed for wanting to know everything there is to know about you. I don’t have superpowers. My only leverage is information.”
“And that gives you the right to violate our privacy?” asked Blue Bee.
“Rights are a legal fiction, not a fundamental reality,” said Retaliator.
“Don’t you, like, own a law firm?” asked Big Ape.
“Which gives me a sense of perspective on the question,” said Retaliator.
“I think perspective is exactly what’s needed here,” said Golden Victory. “If you have questions about my life, you could just ask me.”
“I didn’t ask because I didn’t know what to ask until now,” said Retaliator.
“This is all a lot of crap,” said Arc, standing up. “Retaliator, you’ve always been crazy, but this is insane. You can’t seriously think—”
“You know the truth, Arc?” asked Retaliator. “You, Tempo, and Golden Victory were the real architects of the Butterfly House program.”
“Wait, that’s real?” asked Blue Bee. “I’m so confused. I thought Cut Up Girl’s book was fiction.”
“It’s real,” said Retaliator. “And I, too, was confused. It’s never been clear to me why someone with Golden Victory’s seemingly textbook American values so easily condoned a program of kidnapping and brainwashing. Now, the final pieces of the puzzle are in place. Golden Victory approves of the program because he subconsciously knows he benefited from a similar program. The techniques used on him provided a template for future superhumans.”
Golden Victory shook his head, looking genuinely hurt at Retaliator’s accusations. He opened his mouth to speak, but at that exact second all the monitors in the meeting room spontaneously turned on. We were once again treated to a small army of alien faces, with Sterngeist standing at the center. Only, instead of a generic, sci-fi looking spaceship backdrop, they were plainly standing on the plaza in front of the United Nations in New York. The other thing that had changed was that, joining the aliens, there was a middle aged guy who look like he’d wandered onto the set by mistake.
“Prime Mover!” said Harry.
“The twelve hours are nearly up,” said Sterngeist, facing the camera directly. “We’ve confirmed the presence of Glorgon the Conqueror on this planet. For years, he’s hidden among you under the disguise of Golden Victory. If he doesn’t turn himself over to us before our deadline, we will carry through with the threat to remove the moon.”
“He must not know we’ve destroyed his tower,” said Anyman.
“For the so-called superheroes who believe they have neutralized the threat, I applaud your ingenuity in deducing that the tower was linked to a counterpart in an alternate reality. What you seem to have failed to follow to the logical conclusion is that there are multiple realities where our towers can be built. My allies the Vesterians are masters of transporting themselves across the multiverse. We’ve already replaced the towers with others plucked from alternate timelines. You’ve not saved the moon. You haven’t even prolonged the inevitable. You’ve failed. Your only hope of surviving doomsday is for Golden Victory to surrender. We gave you half a day. Now you have half an hour.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Fake News
Echo’s Story
Oh no,” said Arc, looking at the wall, though I had the sense that his gaze was directed far beyond. “The moon’s below the horizon now, and I’m having to stare through the core of the moon to see the dark side, but assuming I’m making sense of what I’m seeing, Sterngeist is telling the truth. The tower is back!”
“So we break it again,” said Golden Victory, pressing his fist into his palm. “Thirty minutes is an eternity as long as Anyman can access Tempo’s powers. We’re not beaten yet.”
“Certainly the aliens will anticipate such a reaction,” said Prodigy. “We can’t know how many towers they have in neighboring universes waiting to project into our own. We need a different strategy.”
“I’m done with strategy!” said Harry, slamming his han
d on the table. “I joined this team so I could legally punch people. Let’s take the tachyon tube to New York and kick their alien butts so hard they flee the solar system and stay out.”
“I’m all in on any plan that involves punching,” said Smash Lass.
“A more prudent course of action would be to give them what they want,” said Prodigy. “While we were aboard the alien tower, I took the liberty of downloading files. A lot of them document atrocities committed by Glorgon the Conqueror. He killed millions, enslaved billions. Why shouldn’t we help the aliens bring a monster like this to justice?”
“The records could be faked,” said Blue Bee.
“Please,” said Prodigy, rolling her eyes. “You think I haven’t taken that possibility into consideration? The evidence fits into a larger pattern. Human civilization has existed for ten thousand years without dealing with an alien invasion. Now, we’ve had forty-two documented alien incursions in the last decade. There’s no logical reason for any alien race to invade us, except—”
“We have a lot of water,” said Harry. “Maybe they came here to steal it.”
“Or some rare element,” I said. “Like, aren’t there things called rare earth elements? Maybe they need those.”
Prodigy’s mouth opened slightly. She looked like she was completely caught off guard by our stupidity. She cleared her throat. “Any element found on Earth is present in abundance throughout the universe. Water isn’t some rare commodity. The rare earth metals aren’t exclusive to our world, and they aren’t even terribly rare. There are likely biological molecules found on Earth that would be rare elsewhere, but a technologically competent race could surely learn to synthesize them without leaving their own solar system.”
“Then maybe they need space to grow,” I said. “Maybe they have a population control problem?”
Prodigy shook her head. “You think an alien species could master interstellar flight but be unable to develop birth control? Don’t be foolish. The most plausible motivation is the one they’ve offered. They’ve come here seeking justice.”
“There’s still a huge hole in the plan to give them what they want,” said Golden Victory. “They’ve come here for Glorgon the Conqueror. The Prime Mover might tell them I’m him, but I’m not. I’m Simon Palmer, a small town newspaper editor with a side hobby of saving the world. I would turn myself over to them in a heartbeat if the accusations were true. They just aren’t.”
Arc let out a long, slow breath. His eyes looked pained as he said, “What if it’s true?”
“Arc, we’ve known each other since before we formed the Legion. You can’t seriously believe this falsehood,” said Golden Victory.
Arc swallowed hard, looking heartbroken, but his voice was steady and calm as he said, “I’m sorry. It’s true. You’re not Simon Palmer. At least, you weren’t Simon Palmer until we created him. You’re an alien. Most likely, you’re Glorgon the Conqueror.”
“What?”
Arc nodded. “You know my origin story.”
“You’re an electrical engineer who absorbed your wife’s experimental generators into your body,” said Golden Victory.
“That’s not the real story,” said Arc. “Look, what I’m going to tell you… it can’t leave this room. This is Top Secret, highly classified stuff.”
“I’ve got a security clearance,” said Golden Victory. “The others can leave.”
“Your clearance doesn’t go this high,” said Arc. “The others might as well hear this as well. In for a penny, in for a pound, they say.”
“Go on,” said Retaliator.
“What do you know about MK Ultra?”
“The CIA’s mind control program,” said Prodigy. “Officially it ended in 1973, though there’s evidence it was revived during the Reagan administration.”
“It never ended,” said Arc. “I came onto the program in the late seventies. I wasn’t precisely an electrical engineer. My PhD was in psychiatry. My specialty was targeted electroshock therapy. I’d written my doctoral paper showing that it was possible to shock portions of the brain in chimps in such a way that you could erase their memories and implant new ones. For example, the chimps learned that every morning there were two doors in their cage, a red one and a blue one, and every day there was a banana behind the red one. With a few well targeted zaps, I could make them open the blue door every time. The CIA was greatly interested in my research and offered me a job. It’s there I met Frank, before he became Tempo. Frank headed two projects. He was working with tachyons to try to see back in time, which would have been the ultimate spy tool. But, he was also a chemical wizard who was in charge of perfecting mind-altering drugs, and together we pursued the CIA’s ultimate goal of being able to rewrite an individual’s whole identity at will. Between the two of us, we made a pretty good team. Then we met the alien.”
“Glorgon?” asked Harry.
“We never found out its name. The Russian’s had captured an alien spacecraft and woke a being they found in stasis. The being showed a propensity for violence, and they wanted to develop it as a weapon. Then the thing escaped and took over a nearby nuclear base. The KGB got desperate enough to bring in the CIA to help figure out a way to stop the alien. Tempo and I were part of the team that went over to look at the captured alien ship. The team was led by Mark Christian. You know him today as the Prime Mover.”
“I’ve looked into this lead before,” said Retaliator. “It’s fake news.”
“I’m telling the truth. Mark has covered his tracks so well no one can tell truth from lies anymore.”
“You were allies with the Prime Mover?” asked Smash Lass.
“He wasn’t crazy back then, just a little creepy. The CIA dabbled in the paranormal, stuff like ESP and remote viewing and what they called chaos magic. Mark was supposed to be an expert in this stuff, and there were rumors he was a Satanist, but he wasn’t bad to work with. He was a true patriot. Turns out Satanists are really big fans of religious liberty and free speech. He hated communists more than any of us. And then there was the accident.”
“Accident?” asked Retaliator.
Arc nodded. “While examining the alien ship, we triggered something that caused the alien drive to explode. Technology aboard what was left of the ship repaired us, giving all of us strange powers. I became a living dynamo, and Frank, perhaps due to his experiments with tachyons, gained the power to step outside the ordinary flow of time. Mark alone seemed unaffected by the explosion, but his mind had changed in subtle ways. His IQ was growing little by little, until he began having the illusion of omniscience and believed himself to be God. But, look, it was months before Mark went off the rails. Back then, we had a more immediate problem. The alien had back-engineered the controls on the Russian nukes and taken command of their whole arsenal. We think it planned to trigger a war, destroying civilization, so that it could build a new world from the ruins. With his increased intelligence, Mark had greater control over his magic and tracked the alien’s precise location using a dowsing rod and a map. We found the alien, who had shapeshifted to look like a Russian general, but with my newly enhanced vision I saw right through him. I tried to zap him, but wasn’t very skilled with my powers back then. The alien probably would have killed us if Frank hadn’t been able to keep us out of his grasp by time jumping. Bullets bounced off the alien, he shrugged off grenades, laughed when we tried nerve gas, and ignored acid like it was rainwater. It couldn’t be drowned, couldn’t be burnt, and we were starting to feel like all hope was lost when Mark desperately tried hypnosis on the thing. And it worked!”
“Hypnosis?” asked Prodigy. “How can that work on an unwilling subject?”
“Because it wasn’t an unwilling subject,” said Arc. “The aliens who’d sent the creature here had erased its memories, and they would have stayed erased if the Russian’s hadn’t used torture to try to get it to give up its secrets. Lucky for us, the mental framework for mind control was still hardwired into its brain. When the alien
had shifted to look like a human general, its brain had become similar enough to an actual human brain that I could see into its structures. Once Mark had it hypnotized, he suggested it should lower its invulnerability. I was able to zap it, knocking it into a coma. We brought the alien back to Langley, and Mark had the bright idea of completely rewriting the thing’s brain. With my new powers, precision electroshock was easier than ever. Frank’s powers gave him all the time he needed to perfect new mind control drugs. Mark’s control over the mystic arts started getting more elaborate and he said he could cleanse the alien’s soul of darkness, leaving it only capable of good. The Russians had wanted to turn the alien into a weapon. Our goal was to turn the alien into a hero. About a year later, Golden Victory made his debut. He was meant to be a propaganda triumph over the Russians, a way of demoralizing them with the existence of an actual real world superhuman. Frank, Mark and I were also given costumes and code names. Back then, Mark’s codename was Mr. Mystical.”
“I’ve seen that name in my investigations,” said Retaliator. “Officially, he died long ago.”
“More disinformation. The plan was, the four of us would operate individually for a while, get the public used to the idea of superheroes on the front pages of newspapers, then team up as the Lawful Legion. Unfortunately, not long after that, Mark went off the deep end and started believing he was God. Golden Victory met Retaliator during this time and, seeing the good in everybody, saw him as a potential ally. Then She-Devil popped up to help Golden Victory stop one of the Prime Mover’s first attempts at triggering the apocalypse. The next thing Tempo and I knew we were invited to a join a team being formed by Retaliator, She-Devil, and Golden Victory. They called their team the Lawful Legion, just like we’d planned.”
Golden Victory shook his head. “I can produce a thousand pieces of evidence proving I’m human. Not just my birth certificate. A whole life’s worth of documents and photographs.”
“All faked,” said Arc. “The CIA is very thorough when creating cover identities. But, not so great about getting in front of unanticipated consequences. Your emergence as Golden Victory seemed to trigger some sort of evolutionary signal that caused people with alien genes to start manifesting powers. I mean, think about it. When we started, we mainly fought street criminals and the occasional Russian spy. By the late nineties, new supervillains turned up in the headlines almost every month. The second wave of Lawful Legionnaires like Anyman and Lt. Laser helped face a lot of these threats, but Tempo and I were worried that most of the people gaining superpowers didn’t show much instinct for being heroes. Then, Golden Victory pitched the idea of the Butterfly House, a place where superhuman children could be taken and taught the values that would ensure they became heroes. He even suggested it would be possible to remove traumatic memories to make sure they didn’t have emotional baggage preventing them from choosing to fight on the side of the angels. We think he championed the Butterfly House perhaps because, on some level, he understood he’d been created by a similar program.”