Nuklear Age

by Clevinger, Brian

  “That’s a new look for you,” Atomik Lad said at last.

  Nuklear Man ran a hand through his short dark blond beard. “I thought it might make me look more mature. What do you think?”

  “I think I find it mildly terrifying that you could ever appear mature.”

  Nuklear Man broke into a smile. The facial hair melted away. “You’re probably right.” An awkward silence. “I’m done here.”

  “Oh? Great. What’s next on the To Do List Of Saving The World?”

  Nuklear Man was silent. His golden eyes trailed away from Atomik Lad in response.

  “Nuke?” Atomik Lad tried to catch his gaze.

  “I’m done here,” he repeated, more quietly this time.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Go? Where?”

  Nuklear Man looked to the clouds. “Away.”

  “Nuke. What are you talking about!”

  “I’ve been thinking it over. I have to leave the Earth.”

  “What? No! You can’t go.”

  “I have to.”

  “You can’t! We still need you here,” Atomik Lad pleaded.

  He shook his head. “I’ve done enough. You don’t need me anymore.”

  “Yes!” Atomik Lad said, his Field pulsed. “Yes I do.”

  Nuklear Man shut his eyes.

  “Nuke. I, you’re…” Atomik Lad let out a long sigh. “It’s safe to say that I have led a uniquely insane life. But you have always been the one constant in that madness. You can’t leave me. Not like everyone else. You can’t. Especially now. Not now.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re all I have left.”

  “Things have changed.”

  “Like what!”

  “Me.”

  “Bullshit. Look. I don’t know what happened between you and Nihel and I don’t know what you think has changed, but I do know that you’re the same person you’ve always been to me. You’re the same man who took me in ten years ago. The same man who taught me everything I know about being a hero. Maybe you have changed, but you’re still the man who raised me. The same man who made me who I am today. That’ll never change.”

  “You have to trust me. I can’t stay here any longer. I’m a danger to this world and everyone on it.”

  “Is this about Nihel? No one blames you for that, Nuke. No one. You saved us from utter destruction.”

  “I saved you from myself. Besides, Nihel was only the beginning. There will be others. I have angered beings of incredible power by my actions here.”

  “So? Let them come. We can defeat them. We always win.”

  “But at what cost? It will be decades before this world can ever return to its former way of life, and many of the scars left by Nihel will never heal. I cannot be responsible for more needless suffering. Not when it can be avoided simply by my absence.”

  Atomik Lad felt like he was losing control. Things were slipping away from him. Desperation was taking hold in its place. A minute of silence passed. “Take me with you,” he said at last.

  “You know I can’t. Your people still need a Hero. They need you.”

  “I’m no Hero. I’m just a sidekick.”

  “It’s your time.”

  “I can’t do this alone.”

  “You won’t be alone, Sparky.”

  The clouds rumbled heavily above them.

  “Why do you have to leave me?”

  Nuklear Man shook his head. “Things have become too grave. We were living in a dream world, you and I. But now the dreamers are awake. We must have the courage to face this reality, as harsh and unforgiving as it may seem.”

  Atomik Lad stared at his feet. “Don’t talk like that,” he said barely above a whisper.

  “I have to. It’s the truth.”

  The sidekick looked him in the eyes. “No, I mean don’t talk so seriously. It scares me.”

  “Worse than the beard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It scares me too. I’m not sure if I like what I am.”

  “Why can’t things be the way they were?”

  Nuklear Man nodded in agreement. “I have asked myself the same question many times in recent months. I don’t know if there is an answer.”

  Atomik Lad looked over Nuklear Man’s shoulder to the clouds that lurked above them. He brought his gaze back to the Hero. “Who’s going to stop you from trying to take over worlds populated by weakling non-overpowered creatures, hm?”

  A small smile appeared on Nuklear Man’s face. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Naw, it’s a matter of scale. I’ve set my sights on entire galaxies now.”

  “Beware, mortals of the universe.”

  They laughed little nervous laughs. These were their last moments. There had to be a way to prolong them.

  “This is it, isn’t it?” Atomik Lad asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  Nuklear Man paused. “You will see me again,” he said finally. “I promise.”

  “I can hardly imagine life without your bungling.”

  “I was just thinking the same about you.”

  They embraced. No masculine back patting. Just a simple mosaic of respect, admiration, and unconditional love. Like father and son.

  “I’m going to miss you, Big Guy,” Atomik Lad said with a catch in his throat.

  Nuklear Man gave him one last squeeze with arms that could move planets. “You may just be the one thing I’ve done right,” he said.

  They released one another, Atomik Lad’s Field reluctantly unraveled itself from Nuklear Man. The Hero floated back a few feet. In a flash, he was at the end of a golden arc that pierced the clouds and tore through space.

  Atomik Lad watched until Nuklear Man’s luminous trail faded. His gaze fell to the world below. “From this height, everything looks so small.”

  __________

  Sort of an Epilogue or The End of the Sequel I Never Wrote

  I remember this one episode of the Twilight Zone.

  It was this TV show where I come from.

  Don’t even ask about TV.

  It was about this man who had been sentenced to solitary confinement on a planet far from Earth and how he started to go crazy because he didn’t have anything to occupy his time. I suppose we were meant to sympathize with his lonely plight but I never understood it. The idea of being utterly alone was nothing new to me. Perhaps it was a symptom of being an only child, or the only child within a twenty mile radius, or the only child in the world quite like me.

  Or maybe it was more a symptom of the world I came from. It was so obsessed with distraction. I think they were simply terrified of themselves. Terrified of finding themselves lacking they never looked for their own worth in the first place. Thinking about it always made me a little sad. Even in the end, I don’t think they could face themselves.

  I used to worry I accelerated the process. But as the years reached closer and closer to infinity, it became more and more clear to me it didn’t matter. I don’t remember how long I waited there all alone on a barren world, but I do remember when the Sun it revolved around died. The violence of it was beautiful.

  I’d recommend watching a supernova if you ever get the chance, but it’s too late for that now. It’s too late for anything now.

  Still, losing the Sun presented me with a problem. Without a Sun, without an Earth, there weren’t any more years. It’s just as well, they were becoming too cumbersome anyway. I mean, four billion years. You lose all sense of perspective when you say a number like that, even if you lived through it. Toward the end I wasn’t even really paying attention anymore. They simply passed me by as I thought and watched the stars from my dead world.

  But, if time was a thief, I was going to keep a running tally of what it took from me. I decided to use gamma ray bursts to keep track of time. I remember our scientists thought they were dead
stars giving off pulses like clockwork. The truth was much more interesting. A story for another time. It didn’t take much effort to find one that still occurred at regular intervals back then. They’d light up the entire sky with energy if you knew how to see it. That’s when I began to mark my hours by years. You can’t imagine how taxing it was to keep track of the more frequent bursts. As if individual days mattered in light of the time I’d spent living. I could afford to let time keep the change.

  Ah, yes, I should explain that shouldn’t I?

  I was once a man. I was once mortal. I’ve been called many names. My name there was John but everyone knew me as Atomik. It was the kind of name you had to grow into. I have some interesting stories about Earth. It was always such a strange place. But then again, so was everywhere else in those days. Realizing that reminded me of when you think you’re the only crazy person in the world but then as you grow up you realize that everyone is crazy. And so it was with the Earth. I thought it was the only world that was crazy. But as I grew up amongst the stars I learned that the entire universe was strange. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I was a hero on Earth, or so they told me. I can’t say that I ever felt I got it quite right. I don’t know. Maybe I just felt that way from living in the shadow of the man who had the job before me. Whatever the case, I served my fellow man to the best of my abilities. I can say I made that world a better place. But looking back, I wonder if that ever mattered.

  And then one day, one ordinary day, I died.

  Or so they told me.

  After all the villains, their schemes and machinations, all the social ills, genocides, and all the things we did to destroy one another, it was a simple meaningless asteroid that threatened the existence of our little world. We had teetered on the brink of destruction once before. I was at the forefront of it then and I was powerless to stop it. I lost everything I loved that day. But we had Nuklear Man back then so we won in the end. This time…this time they all had me to look up to, me to depend on. I had to be their Hero.

  And I was powerless once more.

  Everything I’d fought so hard for, everything that mattered, everything I cared about was going to die all over again.

  I was infuriated.

  I’m not sure how it happened, but they told me that my Field expanded to encompass the globe. The asteroid was pulverized. The world was saved. They never found my body. It was apparently consumed in the process that saved them. All I remember is waking from a nightmare of nothing. I remember screaming against oblivion. I remember staring into the abyss and declaring “I am.”

  And I was.

  My flesh had been vaporized, but my powers remained. Dr. Genius said there was a precedent for this sort of thing but I had no idea what she was talking about. I was a being of pure energy, pure will. I could be anything I wanted, I could effect any change upon the world I wished. I was beyond human, beyond mortal. They resented me for it. Nothing I did could make it up to them. They grew to hate me. As always, I did what had to be done and in this case I disappeared. But I couldn't leave. I still don’t know if it was sentiment or cowardice. Back then I labeled it as a responsibility to protect them, but in any case I never strayed from my world. I watched them from afar. Watched their trials and triumphs, their successes and setbacks, their beauty and their vulgarity.

  I was alone, but I took solace knowing they were there and that I could still help them, though I could only do so without their knowledge. I diverted solar flares, intercepted a wayward comet, adjusted Jupiter’s orbit—that one was Nuke’s fault, don’t ask—and adverted cataclysmic natural disasters. I never interfered with the world they built for themselves, I only protected them from the one they lived in. Looking back, I should have done more, should have risked their resentment. But in time, I came to realize it didn’t matter. They hated me for being what they wished they were. Their fear at what they thought I might do to them was more telling of their own cruelty than anything else. All I wanted was to help them.

  Then they were gone. I no longer had any distractions, nothing to keep me from looking at myself. I realized I was as scared of myself as any of them were. Scared of what I had become, of embracing my potential. My will was my power, my imagination was the definition of my limits. The freedom was horrifying.

  I mean think about it. If you can do anything, what should you do first?

  It wasn’t until the Sun exploded that I finally figured it out, or perhaps I finally stopped denying that I knew. Without the Sun, I had no reason to stay. I had to face the truth. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you do it sincerely.

  And so I soared through the cosmos at the speed of thought. I watched a thousand worlds grow, mature, and die. I watched nations rise from the mire and stretch across the stars only to fall and seed new worlds. It was a beautiful symmetry. It was then that I began to mark my hours by centuries.

  I fell into a routine there. I acted as an interstellar guardian angel. Old habit, I suppose. And though I was alone, my Earth remained with me. Everywhere I went throughout the galaxy, their voice was already there. It was another of those strange things about the Earth.

  Nuklear Man accidentally sent an artifact all about our world to the other side of the galaxy and thousands of years into the past where it was found by some alien race who took the artifact to be a message from their gods. They looked at our history and it terrified them. They did everything they could to be as unlike us as possible. They reached to the stars with a message of peace born on the wings of our incompetence. They took the tragedy of human history everywhere they went to scare the indigenous peoples of wherever to be not like us. Theirs was a society that spread peace through sixty percent of the galaxy which, and this is the best part, Nuke was created hundreds of thousands of years before all this specifically to destroy it in order to unleash the wrath of the gods chained by fate.

  Believe it or not, that's the short version.

  Also? Turns out things like this were happening all the time.

  I watched as the Milky Way died. It happened much quicker than I would have thought. It was like one day the stars began disappearing and, with them, all signs of life. It was little more than an ashen graveyard echoing with the electromagnetic whispers of specters. Voices and monuments proclaiming the eternal glory of some long dead people as the Milky Way spun itself into nothingness.

  And I was truly alone. There were no more ancient echoes of my Earth. There were no civilizations to watch over, no more worlds to protect. And worst of all, no more stars to give me hope. You see, a promise was made to me a long time ago, in the days when I was still a man.

  “You will see me again. I promise you that,” he had said.

  Looking back, I suppose that was the real reason why I took to the stars, the real reason for all my little acts of heroism. I was hoping to see my friend one more time. But without the stars of the Milky Way to fuel his life, I had to accept that my friend was dead, and with him all ties to what I used to be.

  I was saddened. Who wouldn't be. But there was a curious optimism there as well. The universe was at my fingertips. I embraced it. And it was magical. I met gods, I battled giants, I shared knowledge. I spoke to stars, I traveled among packs of sentient light, and the living darkness they lanced through. There was a race of beings that came to be known to me as the Girth. They were native to the vast chasms between galaxies. They dwarfed even the giants. They were often mistaken as empty massless space by the creatures observing them from the outside and as the entire universe by the creatures observing them from the inside.

  At first, I envied those dwelling inside the Girth. Theirs was a universe so much more comprehensible to the mortal mind than the universe I knew. But then, one day, I asked myself, “Why? Why would anyone want to understand the universe? Why would anyone quantify their awe into nothing?”

  Galactic superclusters revolved around these beings because that was the only place for them to fit. Their sheer size mad
e it impossible for them to have any predators other than themselves, a fact which made their mating season more than a little interesting. This was the universe I wanted. A place where the wonderfully bizarre is happening all the time.

  I saw all this and more. I had become a member of an eternal community of celestial beings. They called themselves, simply, the Strange. Their ranks were made up of the most unique and odd beings the universe could produce. They traced their lineage to the beginning of time when the very first being told itself, “I am.”

  According to the Light, that first being had consisted of two bits of information, genetics of a sort, encoded in silicon rock. But other historians among the Strange are more ambitious. One particularly ancient section of the Dark told me that the universe itself was the first unique thing to come into existence.

  Of course, the Light and the Dark hardly ever agreed.

  We all had names like that among the Strange. The Girth, the Light, the Dark, the Song, the Equation, and so on. I particularly liked the Viral, a planet covered in microbes engineered to be the perfect biological weapon for the wars of its original inhabitants. The idea, as I understood it, was that these germs were designed to evolve at hyper-fast speeds to overcome the immune system of anything matching the genetic code of the enemy. What was overlooked, it would seem, is that all life native to a given planet will have remarkably similar genetic information. The germs had killed everything and covered the entire globe in weeks. Their evolution continued until they reached consciousness. The world became their body. The Viral traveled from star to star charging itself with solar energy before traversing the great expanses of nothing. It was a very peaceful being considering it had been built for murder.

  I was known as the Atomik. I had few other choices left to me. The Will didn’t sound right. The Field wasn’t terribly interesting. And don’t even try The John.

  Sorry. It’s an old Earth joke.