Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  “By itself? Not much. But it is also irradiated, and strychnine permeates the body’s tissues very quickly. In your case that happens to be all it will do. I presume you want to be done with this before the sun gets up.”

  The tube retracts, and a small plastic baggie on a hook is lowered in its place. Inside the baggie is something that looks like a pill, except it’s about half the size of a tube of chapstick. It’s got rounded edges and seems to be coated in soft rubber. There is a small green LED on one side that is flashing on and off.

  “What’s this?”

  “A suppository.”

  “No.”

  “Shove that up your butt.”

  “No.”

  “It’s for science.”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “You are going to buy me pizza.”

  “Deal.”

  “A lot of pizza.”

  • • •

  The sensor ring locks into place above me, and the tube hisses open. Doc Impossible is facing away from me, sitting in a chair and consulting what look like full body X-rays of me projected in 3D against the glass.

  “Good news. You’re definitely not going to die of radiation poisoning. Because that would have happened already.”

  She pops her tab of gum out, tosses it in the trash, and slips another into her mouth.

  “You’re really tied to that nicotine, aren’t you?” I say as I step into my pants.

  “Yep,” she says.

  “That stuff will kill you, you know.”

  “Danny, I’m in the super science racket, and I’m not nonpartisan—uh, that means someone who doesn’t take a side in our little fraternity of extraordinarily empowered social rejects.” She circles a finger in the air to indicate the whole of Legion Tower. “If you pick a side, you’re going to make enemies. If a lab accident doesn’t get me, one of them will. I won’t have time to get cancer.”

  I pull my shirt over my head. “Or maybe it just means you’ll get like, super tumors, and they’ll petition to be recognized as independent people.”

  Doc Impossible laughs, and flicks a glance over her shoulder to check if I’m dressed. “Yeah, and then they’ll be my mortal enemies, but they’re also the only ones who know who killed my father—”

  “—yeah, and then they start going out at night—”

  “—and doing their own experiments! So they—”

  “—so they get all huge and rargh!” And I start pantomiming out some eldritch horror leaping out from my chest, claws hooked, teeth bared. Doc’s out of her chair doing the same thing, and we’re halfway through theorizing how the National Guard will get called in when the door opens and there’s Carapace.

  Doc Impossible and I freeze mid-pantomime-and-snarl.

  “Have you prepared your briefing yet?” he asks.

  “Ya mind?” says Impossible with narrowed eyes. “We’re bonding.”

  “Just get your report ready on the…situation.”

  “Yeah, fine. Whatever,” says Doc. She makes a shooing motion with her hands. After a long, awkward moment of staring at me, Carapace turns and clanks away. The door slides shut.

  “Did I…do something?” I ask. Oh God, what if I messed this up already?

  Doc Impossible seems to sag a little. “No. It’s just…Dreadnought was really important to him. And, to tell you the truth, Carapace wasn’t super excited to learn who’d gotten the mantle. I’m sorry. You really deserve more time to get used to this before you have to deal with that kind of thing. Capes in private are…”

  “Weird?”

  “That doesn’t even begin to describe it.” She gestures to a chair. “Have a seat. You know Darkfist?”

  “Yeah, he’s big news in Empire, right?” I say as I slide a chair over and sit in it.

  “Yep. He’s just a billionaire with a utility belt.” Doc sits in her own chair. “His ‘superpower’ is being rich, okay? Not a single real power to his name. He doesn’t even use hypertech.”

  That doesn’t sound right at all. “Are you sure? The things I’ve heard—”

  “Are the things that criminals tell each other to make themselves feel better about getting beaten up by a rich boy in fancy cosplay. I’ve met the dude, and I promise you he’s as baseline as they come. What do you think convinces someone with that kind of money to patrol the streets at night, going hand to hand with thugs who have automatic weapons? Are you starting to see? He’s someone we choose to hang out with.”

  “But…I do have superpowers,” I say. “And I kinda want to help people.”

  “And that’s normal! It totally is, and good for you! But did you see how Carapace was still wearing his armor? He lives here. This is his home. But he’s still walking around ready to slug it out with a platoon of tanks. The whole whitecape thing isn’t a real great way to spend a life. The normal thing to do with powers is to use them to get a job. You’ve seen aerial couriers downtown, right?”

  “Of course.” Every major city has a few people who can fly who make their living zipping time-sensitive materials from one end of the city to the other. Once you get ten feet in the air, there’s no such thing as a traffic jam. Until now, I’d never really stopped to think about why they’d be doing that instead of fighting crime. It seems normal; they’re just able to fly around town, right? It’s like being really good with a bike, but a little cooler, is all.

  “Right. Courier work is real popular with anybody who has a mobility power. High pay, short hours, and dead easy work that lets you spend most of your week doing whatever you want to do without worrying about money. A lot of fire departments will pay more than you’d think for people whose powers would help them with search-and-rescue work. Hell, one in a hundred of those guys doesn’t even need to breathe. They don’t do much to draw attention to themselves, but they’re there. That’s what a normal person who wants to help people with their power does: they join a government, or a nonprofit, or even just a company that’s not evil.”

  “But those are just special abilities, right? Not real superpowers?”

  “Eeehhh.” Doc Impossible spreads her fingers out and waggles her hands from side to side. “That line between special abilities and superpowers is something the nonpartisans came up with. A lot of the nonpartisans even have abilities that, if used to their full extent, would be superpowers no matter how much they torture the definition. They don’t want to be associated with us. Someone hears you have a superpower, and suddenly they don’t want to date you, or hire you, or rent an apartment to you. Because everyone assumes superpowers mean you have super enemies, and who wants to be out at dinner with someone when a psychopath in a black cape shows up and starts melting people with a death ray? So all of the sudden it’s, ‘No, sir, I don’t have a superpower, I just have a special ability.’ It helps cut down on the jealousy, too.”

  There’s a flutter of unease in my chest when she says this, because yeah, I went through some phases where I was very jealous of people with superpowers. But, strangely, not of people with “special abilities.” Doc Impossible seems to read the thoughts flitting across my face and nods. “Yeah, you see how that works?” she says. “Look, I don’t want to scare you away from being a whitecape if that’s who you want to be. There’s nothing like it in the world, and when it’s good, it feels like you’re a god. I wish I could spare you all the gruesome details until after you’ve gotten comfortable with your powers, but you’re going to be making some decisions soon, sooner than I think you should have to. You deserve to do it with your eyes open.”

  “What kind of decisions?”

  Doc Impossible sighs and leans back in her chair. “Dreadnought was very important to the status quo. It would mean a lot to us, and to the city, if you were willing to take his place once you’re old enough. We’ve been real lucky that all the other people who have worn the mantle wanted to be whitecapes, but there’s nothing that says you have to. You have zero obligations here, do you understand? This isn’t like po
litical power—you didn’t fight for this; it was dropped in your lap. So all those great responsibilities that come with great power, those are only yours if you want them to be. It’s not fair to demand more of you, and worse, it’s not safe. This is a hard life. Someone as strong as you, if suffering from mental and emotional trauma, could quickly become dangerous. So a lot of people are going to want you to be a whitecape, but only you can decide if that’s right for you.”

  “Maybe I could become a blackcape,” I say with a smile.

  Doc Impossible looks at me the way you’d look at someone across an open grave. “Don’t ever joke about that, Danny.”

  “Sorry,” I say quickly.

  “It’s okay, it’s just…we’ve all lost people to them. They’re the scum of the Earth, and don’t let any graycape tell you differently. In fact, don’t hang out with graycapes; they’re just capes who aren’t always horrible.”

  “Right. I guess…well, being a cape—a whitecape, I mean—sounds like it would be pretty cool. It’s not like I’ve never been scared before, so why not do it? Why not join when I’m old enough?”

  Doc Impossible rolls her chair closer to me, and puts her hands on my knees. Her face is as open and sincere as I’ve ever seen on anyone. “First, please understand that I don’t mean to talk down to you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re fifteen. Right now, you see the fights, and the excitement, and the power. And all of that is sexy as hell. I know, believe me, I know. But trust me, the world is not always going to look the same to you as it does now.”

  “I know—”

  “Listen to me!” Her fingers dig into my knees a little more than I’d expect of merely human hands, and I lean away from her sudden vehemence. “Someday, you might get tired of needing to know where the nearest safe house is at all times. Someday, you might be sick of needing to take vacations in disguise. You might want to buy a house and be able to invite casual friends over and not lie to them about who you are. You might want to be able to make plans that don’t involve being on call for combat duty for the rest of your life. You might fall in love with someone who can’t protect themselves from the kind of people you’re going to piss off if you put on a cape. You have a family now? They’re going to have to go into a witness protection program if you start caping. They might to have to go underground if your identity is compromised. Do you understand? It means living under siege. We’re not all roommates in this tower because we can’t stand to be apart from each other. We live here because it’s safe here. We go anywhere else in the world, except maybe to another team’s HQ, and we have to be ready to throw down at a moment’s notice. Once you choose this, it is really hard to walk it back. If your identity gets blown, it’s basically impossible. They want you to make a decision that is going to change the rest of your life. It will narrow your world, and narrow your choices. You will do things nobody else can even dream of, but you’ll never be able to do almost everything normal people take for granted. There is a reason, Danny, a really good reason that most of us are nonpartisan.” Doc Impossible drops into silence. Her eyes plead for me to understand.

  “I think I get it.”

  “Good. Good.” She lets go of my knees and scoots back from me. Now that she’s done speaking, she suddenly seems tired. Doc Impossible takes a moment to collect herself, and then puts on a smile. “Now, I found a few things in your physical you might be interested to know.”

  “Oh?”

  “To start with, you’re as fit as an entire Olympics team. Fitter, actually, than any individual athlete could hope to be. Nobody has enough hours in the day to train every part of themselves to the level you’re at. You’ve got the cardiovascular system of a marathon runner, the flexibility of a gymnast, and the muscle tone of a swimmer. Your muscle density is off the charts; you weigh about a hundred and eighty pounds. Your strength and speed are beyond all human limits, of course, but even without them you’re a better physical specimen than basically anyone else alive.”

  I smile. “Cool!”

  “And here’s the bad news: if you want kids, you’re going to have to let me convert some of your blood into sperm and have someone else provide the egg and womb. You don’t have a uterus. You’ll never get pregnant.”

  I’m falling. I’m falling down, down into a deep pit. And at the bottom, there are flames. I’m up on my feet before I know what I’m doing. I kick back at the chair and it rockets across the room, gets embedded into a wall behind me. An enormous spiderweb of cracks slams out across the entire wall panel, which flickers and throws random, contorted image across its shattered segments. “Dammit!”

  “What the hell, kid?” says Doc Impossible, rising.

  “Sorry! Sorry! I…” I sigh. The bubbling cauldron of frustration is still there, even if it’s not boiling over. “I guess I just thought that I was finally a real girl.”

  “Hey! None of that!” She takes me by the shoulders. “You think it’s a uterus that makes a woman? Bullshit. You feel like you’re a girl, you live it, it’s part of you? Then you’re a girl. That’s the end of it, no quibbling. You’re as real a girl as anyone. And you really need to learn to express your anger better.”

  “I’m sorry. Really. And, thanks.” I close my eyes and take a breath. “How did you know that was bad news?”

  Doc Impossible smiles gently. “This whole time, you haven’t even once asked about being changed back. It’s pretty obvious you’re transgender, Danny.” She taps my forehead. “If you were a boy up here, I think you would have mentioned it by now. The other Dreadnoughts reported that when they took the mantle, it changed their bodies into what they’d always wanted it to be. Some got a little taller, one grew back some lost toes, that sort of thing. But they were all cis—that is to say, they weren’t trans—so their bodies didn’t change to match their gender identities because they were already matching. You, on the other hand, became a very pretty young woman who, upon extremely close examination, can be seen to have a history of masculine dimorphism. Real close. Like chromosome-level close.”

  “Why not…you know, change it all?”

  Doc Impossible shrugs. “I don’t know. You’re a sample size of one, so it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions. If I had to say, I’d guess that the mantle can only do so much with what it has available to work with when the change happens. For instance, your testicles have migrated up into your abdomen and have been reconfigured to secrete estrogen and progesterone, but they don’t have any eggs, and are anatomically recognizable as testes.”

  “Oh.” Then it hits me. This “ideal” new body—the magazine cover perfection, the shampoo commercial hair, even the fashionable shape of my thighs—it’s more than a different look. It’s a window inside my head. “Oh. Gross.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being trans, Danny.”

  “No. I mean, why I look this way. Mom took me to a fancy bra store the other day, and there were posters everywhere of these women that, well, nobody looks like that in real life, right?”

  “Except you, and a few genetic lottery winners.”

  “Yeah. So my ideal self—”

  Doc Impossible chuckles. “Is a photoshopped underwear model, I see.”

  “I guess it sounds a little stupid to be upset over being pretty—”

  “Yes! Yes it does. You think you’re immune to advertisements? That’d be a hell of a superpower, but even if Dreadnought were immune to mind control—and he wasn’t—you’ve spent your entire life swimming in the stuff.” Doc Impossible turns back to the test results—at least the wall I broke wasn’t one she was working on—and starts sliding files and images into a new folder with a few flicks of her fingers. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. They’ll find some way to make you unhappy with your body sooner or later, so until then, enjoy it. Keep it in perspective. I’m gonna be a few moments here, okay? There’s a cup of what looks like orange juice in that fridge over there. Drink it and head on over to the lavatory marked with the
nuclear radiation symbol, just outside the door and across the hall. You’re going to want to purge those irradiated fluids from your body before you go home and contaminate your family.”

  The fridge is one of those minibar deals you get in hotels sometimes, or so I’ve been told. The drink actually does taste like orange juice, and it’s a good thing the radiation toilet was so close because, well…

  Look, that stuff cleared out my entire digestive tract in a few minutes. How do you think it went? Medicine, especially the hypertech kind, is gross.

  “I don’t think I want to use the toilet again for a week,” I say, as I return to the medical lab on wobbly legs.

  “It’s all out of you? Good. Let’s get you suited up.”

  “You just explained why I shouldn’t be wearing a cape yet.”

  “You’re a teenager with friggin’ superpowers. You think we don’t know you’re going to experiment? We’d rather you do it in throwaway colors, a suit that won’t signify a cape persona, but will protect your identity from anyone who sees you. Come on, you’re going to love this.”

  She takes me to a different part of the lab, where the machinery is all hypertech 3D printers and clusters of robot arms like giant metal spiders curled up dead. I’m wearing a charcoal gray bodysuit, still warm and smelly from the fabricator. It’s snug but flexible. Matching boots and gloves, with a separate cape that goes down to the back of my knees. The cape is longer in back, but also wraps around my chest like, well, like a mantle that covers my chest down past my collarbones. I experiment flexing my arms a little, trying not to be too obvious that I’m seeing how the cape would sit with my arms stretched out in front of me in the classic flight pose. It’s actually pretty thin material, but slick and sort of heavy. It shouldn’t bunch up, or get in the way of throwing a punch. I’m not super thrilled about the cowl. It feels constricting around my neck—not that it’s hard to breathe or move, but it’s there, and kinda bugging me. It’s open at the top to let my hair grow out, and I’m touched that she included this traditionally female-gendered touch to a suit that otherwise seems to be patterned after Dreadnought’s classic uniform.