by David Reiss
The urge to lecture was overwhelming: to explain how my methodology was superior to the means outlined in those leather-bound texts. How nanotechnology and the vast analytical capabilities of Whisper’s server farm had allowed me to create so perfect a clone of Terry Markham that my memories could be pre-loaded into the new body, updated to the nanosecond before the prior body’s expiration. That—unlike any so-called ‘magical’ method of akashic identity transfer—my process could be permanent without the need for constant energy input. In only a few days I had simulated and then improved upon a working that a sorcerer would have required a decade to master.
The Ancient would have appreciated the innovation. Skullface, on the other hand, would be baffled by the technicalities. I blasted him with a high-energy particle-beam on general principle.
His stance was stable as he was pushed backwards, his armored feet skidding across dust and rubble coated stone. Annoyingly, his armor was sufficient to ward off any damage.
I spun my scepter in one hand as though warming my wrist. “Shall we continue?”
Skullface leapt forward as though shot from a cannon, wreathed in yellow-green flame. There was no subtlety to his movements now, and very little skill: only rage and power. Rage and power still made for a credible threat; I pulsed my forcefield to its maximum and blocked his sword swing with the scepter’s haft. His jaws opened wide and a vibrant stream of balefire poured over our crossed weapons, a wage of putrid, overwhelming heat that taxed even the Mk 38’s environmental controls.
My current suit of armor was my most recent design and it was not as powerful as the oversized Mk 35 before it…but I had access to the accumulated sensor readings taken from the first stage of combat. My weapons and defenses were now far more well-tuned. The hellish fire spilled over the starfield surface of my armor, curled behind me and heated stone to a dull red glow. I waited until the deluge began to fade before countering with a second more-powerful stream of charged particles that snapped his jaws shut and threw him head over heels.
It was disturbing, how completely natural my new body felt; there was no discomfort, no hesitation. Neuron by altered neuron, even my reflexes had been completely reconstructed. Technically speaking, the new corpus was an upgrade—but it felt as though nothing had changed. If not for the now-charred carcass littering the amphitheater floor, it would have been easy to forget that Terry Markham had perished.
Onboard medical systems pumped adrenaline and amphetamines into my veins and the medical nanites continued their work to optimize pathways in my brain…to limit emotional response to that which was useful for the mission. The void of space was held within my armor’s skin, a pulsing blood-red glow bled from the Mk 38’s seams, and incandescent stars—distant and cold—offered judgment without comfort from within my being. I was wrath incarnate.
Doctor Fid lived.
Laughing gleefully, I followed the particle beam with three quick strikes from my scepter, each impact resounding like thunder. My skeletal opponent was driven back ‘til he was braced against the towering stasis crystal at the coliseum’s center. According to the Ancient’s texts, such structures could not be breached by physical force; I tested this by pounding my opponent’s skull against the pulsing purple surface with all of the Mk 38’s considerable might.
Somehow, Skullface had lost his sword and shield; he grabbed my scepter with both hands and spat a word of power. The orichalcum core—that remarkable alloy discovered by Whisper’s lost supervillain ‘father’ Apotheosis—burst into shrapnel, followed by a wave of light and energy that drove me into the sky. My opponent was wounded but not yet defeated.
With a joyous laugh, I dove back into combat.
◊◊◊
Bobby is gone.
There’s blood on my hands, more than I’d ever thought possible. The world smells of burnt nitrites, of carnage and shit and vomit and hate. My brother’s heart isn’t beating and I think that my own stopped, too. It feels like it…like my chest is compressed, tight and empty at the same time.
I breathe.
Automatic gunfire rattles; Bronze is focused on the insectoid supervillain who began this attack, and some of Locust’s men have retaken their weapons and are rampaging as they try to escape. People are wailing, children scream and there’s so much chaos that I couldn’t follow it all if I wanted to.
Bobby’s eyes are still turned towards the lobby across the street. To the very end, he’d stared uncomprehending at the place where his favorite hero had disappeared. He’d been confused but still hopeful at first, still waiting for his idol to come to save the day…and then his expression changed when he realized help wasn’t coming. Not soon enough.
I’d brought my brother here. His birthday present: to meet a true superhero. It was supposed to be a surprise for both of them; Bobby is Bronze’s biggest fan! Who wouldn’t be thrilled to meet a kid with so much enthusiastic belief, so much joy? It was supposed to be a gift for everyone involved, for my little brother and for Paul Riley—Bronze’s secret identity—both. It was supposed to be a present for me, too: I was going to get to watch Bobby’s giddy smile.
Was. Bobby was Bronze’s biggest fan. His eyes are unfocused, now. Unseeing.
Bronze is fighting Locust now but had come out of hiding far too late. He’d made that choice: to leave us in harm’s way long enough to safeguard his alter-ego, Paul Riley. Bronze wasn’t a hero, wasn’t deserving of my brother’s adoration. He was just a man who happened to have powers, just as flawed and unworthy as I.
Mom and Dad would have saved Bobby, I’m certain. I don’t know how, but they would have! They’d given life to Bobby and me; Mom and Dad would have known what to do. What had I been thinking, taking Bobby in after the car accident? I’m just a skinny, pale youth who looks half a decade younger than my twenty-one years. A physicist, a mathematician, a professor. A freak. I should’ve known that I was destined to fail.
“Get up!”
A rough hand grabs my shoulder, pulling me away from Bobby. My brother’s blood is still warm and slick on my hands, and Bobby’s shirt slides from my grip when I try to resist. My captor is taller than me, stronger, and his grip is like iron. Something hard and sharp is pressed under my chin and I’m tugged back against a costumed man’s chest like a human shield.
“All right, faggot! Move nice’n slow, maybe you get out of this alive.”
Why on earth would I want that? I let Bobby die right in front of me. Also, I was at least moderately certain that I wasn’t gay. The question as to my own sexuality had always seemed purely academic and there’d always been other subjects more worthy of study. I’m certainly observant enough to identify members of either gender who are aesthetically superior but that recognition never elicits any emotion other than an acknowledgment of my own deficiencies in comparison. The man pulling me along isn’t making sense.
“Just keep moving,” he growls into my ear then raises his voice to address the policemen who are pointing guns at me: “Let me go or I’ll kill him right now!”
“Put the knife down!” one of the officers—the older one, the one on the left—orders. “Let the kid go!”
I don’t have a knife, and Bobby is still by the concrete and wood-slab bench. The police aren’t making any sense, either.
We’re getting too far away from my brother, so I grab the thing at my neck and struggle with a renewed desperate ferocity. Heat blossoms in my fingers and in a line along my throat, but the surprised mercenary let me slip from his grasp. Gunfire erupts behind me as I stumble back to Bobby’s side and drop to my knees.
The scent of freshly cut grass is still present under the acrid smoke and bile and death. I still smell salt on the air. The sky is a beautifully clear cerulean and the sun still shines.
Today is Bobby’s birthday and his deathday. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.
A hero would be able to make things right.
I think that maybe most of them aren’t really heroes at all…that they’re ju
st people who pretend. If they didn’t take willing part of this masquerade—if they didn’t let children worship them—then I wouldn’t have brought my brother to Virginia Beach at all! When horrors like this occur, it’s the so-called ‘heroes’ fault as much as it is the villains’. Damn them.
At least the villains are honest. They don’t profess to be anything other than what they are: monsters, freaks worthy only of society’s hate.
Just like me, like Kenny Bryant and Louis Nguyen could see all those years ago.
I want to close Bobby’s eyes but my hands are still covered in blood. So I kneel there, helpless, and finally begin to weep.
◊◊◊
With staff and scepter lost to me, I was reduced to fighting hand to hand; I dared not increase the distance between us—to hover above and launch energy blast after energy blast—lest he steal enough time to cast more complicated spells. Skullface may not have been worthy of being the Ancient’s disciple but he was still a credible threat. He’d bartered with entities from far-flung dimensions, and (through ritual) could channel their power.
That was all that ‘magic’ was: the superpower to act as a conduit for beings that exist in alternate universes extraordinarily distant from our own. There was no ancient knowledge handed down from our ancestors, or arcane wisdom gleaned from secret texts; instead, there were only interdimensional beings that had learned to prey upon humans who believed in those moldy fairy tales.
It was a recent phenomenon; it wouldn’t have been possible before the Legion scientists had done whatever they’d done halfway across the galaxy. Before they’d rung the dimension-separating membranes like a bell to make changes to the laws of physics, to give members of their own race the telepathic power that they’d intended to use to build an interstellar empire…and before they’d accidentally granted superpowers to the inhabitants of a few systems that happened to have the correct properties for quantum interactions to propagate. Before the Legion had unexpectedly created the superheroes and supervillains that had killed my little brother—and now, threatened my little sister.
In our home, Whisper’s beloved puppy was curled against his mistress’ side. She was still. The little android body was empty, and my opponent was to blame.
Battle-lust withered and rage exploded inside me like a physical force: a pressure at my center so intense that it felt as though my ribs were straining to contain it. Hate pulsed with the beat of my heart; I’d let this battle go on too long.
For their crimes, I’d thrown the Legion into such chaos that their empire would never recover. My plans for Skullface were far more visceral.
I rotated between Wing-Tsun chain punches to Fiore dei Liberi’s late fourteenth century grappling method to Krav-Maga hammer-blows and elbow-strike techniques, advancing steadily and keeping my opponent off balance. No individual attack or counter was sufficient to cause damage but I remained in control and Skullface’s temper continued to deteriorate. I felt no exultation, no pride…only grim conviction.
The unseeable things in the coliseum’s seats moaned eagerly. They were too inhuman to truly care who was the victor in this battle. All they wanted was the spectacle: to witness skill and determination, drive and viciousness, power and control. I put on an exhibition, and I could see in Skullface’s body language that he was aware that he had lost his audience’s favor; he was shaking with rage and the first hints of fear. Both of us were pouring energy into every attack, great flashes of lightning and flame that threw shadows to the stadium walls.
In desperation, Skullface chanted a quick cantrip that called a howling pillar of balefire to erupt from beneath my feet; I’d been struck by similar attacks several times already in this battle, so my defenses had already been adjusted.
“Checkmate,” I declared, and stepped through the flame to land a single straight punch to Skullface’s missing nose.
Having unbreakable armor was of little use if an impulse could travel through the material to shatter the body encased in within. One of the most important innovations within Doctor Fid’s feared powered armors, therefore, was the embedded inertial displacement systems. It was those mechanisms that allowed me to survive blows and falls and sudden movements that would liquefy an unprotected human being. The apparatus functioned by containing a carefully modulated energy field inside the armor’s confines and measuring all the forces that were acting upon physical objects within that field. When an unexpected force—an impact, for example, or a sudden change in velocity or direction—occurred, the kinetic energy was shunted away to an artificially created subdimension. The apparatus had many possible uses; it was just such a device that I’d offered to the Red Ghost so that he could see to it that auto manufacturers would install a similar system.
With that final punch, I reversed the flow of stored kinetic energy: all the combined forces from a drop from low earth orbit, countless violent confrontations with heroes and villains alike, and seven thousand car accidents…all funneled through the surface of the Mk 38’s knuckles.
A thunderous crack shattered the air; a shockwave pulsed the atmosphere into a sphere of plasma and the world went white. The cacophony was indescribable.
With the armor’s defenses temporarily disabled, my arm was blown off clear at the shoulder and I was thrown back halfway to the coliseum wall. Medical alerts warred for my attention as burst organs and muscle tears were identified and prioritized. I relaxed, dizzy and lightheaded from sudden blood-loss; even Valiant would have been felled by that blow. The only remaining task, I thought, was to shatter the stasis crystal and return the population of Boston to their proper place. To wake Whisper up so that she could comfort her little black Labrador…
And then the dust settled and Skullface began to laugh. Somehow, he’d managed to raise a defense in time.
I strained to sit up, but the skeletal villain was there before I’d managed the feat: limping, with a broken jaw and shattered orbital socket, and his left arm flopping uselessly at his side…but alive. With his right hand, he grabbed at the Mk 38’s faceplate and tore it away reveal the bleeding, injured man within. I was too sore, too damaged to resist.
“If you give me your copies of the Ancient’s manuals,” he slurred, “I’ll make your death painless.”
“You’re an idiot,” I wheezed, unable to keep from chuckling, and the Mk 38 self-destructed in a glorious orange fireball.
After another strangely eternal moment of disorientation, I disabled the stealth systems on the Mk 37 light-combat armor while a singed Skullface slowly struggled to his feet. Empty space erupted into being within my armor’s surface, cold and foreboding and emotionless.
“This suit doesn’t have the raw might of the others,” I admitted casually from my third body of the day, casually toying with the charm that hung from a necklace around my neck. “You’re wounded but this would still be a challenging battle. But today, Doctor Fid is playing a villainous role...
“And if the game isn’t playing out the way a villain originally hoped…villains cheat.” I tugged at the charm and the massive warhammer once wielded by the superhero Viking (and more recently by the late and unlamented Imperator Rex) filled my hands.
An indescribable strength suffused my very being; I was wrapped in power like I’d never known, and my footstep echoed like a bass drum as I stepped forward towards my enemy. The air tasted of electricity and the horrors in the bandstands shrieked and peeled away into nothingness to escape the terrible power I held in my grasp.
There would be a cost, I knew. But for Whisper—and for all the people of Boston—I would pay it gladly.
Skullface tried to flee, then Skullface tried to fight. Finally, he tried to beg for his life. In the end, none of those solutions worked in his favor.
CHAPTER TWENTY
"I'm ready to proceed," the neurosurgeon announced.
I was in the observation booth under the guise of Terry Markham. The room was crowded and tense; the Boston Guardians sat as a group in quiet support, w
earing their colorful superheroic uniforms while watching with varying expressions of concern, hope, and squeamishness. A priest was present, as well as a few medical experts and what I presumed were friends and family. And, of course, a representative of the insurance company that had authorized this scenario.
Titan was sedated on the operating room table, wrapped in blue and circled by medical personnel and equipment. His shaved head was exposed from the surgical tent, and his skull immobilized by a heavily reinforced pinion instrument.
Professor Paradigm had been flown in from California to assist in the first stage of the operation; the medical nanites that I’d supplied were not—could not be—as advanced as the versions flowing through my own veins. Some portions of the treatment were to be performed manually. With an expression of grave concentration, the graying west-coast based superheroic scientist manipulated a complex device intended to temporarily disable Titan’s invulnerability so that the surgeon could operate.
The incision could not be seen directly from the observation booth, but I’d hacked the video cameras and had a few microdrones present to perform more detailed scans; I could monitor everything in real time. Truthfully, I wasn’t particularly interested. My contribution to Titan’s rehabilitation would come later.
And so we sat in solemn silence while the neurosurgeon and her nurses performed their labor. They were competent and they did not rush.
Aeon needed to leave the room three times. Veridian’s expression was haunted but he barely moved throughout the entire procedure. The Red Ghost and Regrowth were holding hands, knuckles white with tension. The priest was comforting one of the other attendees, a young woman whose eyes were red and glassy.
It was three hours before the neurosurgeon was ready to inject the nanite slurry.
Willy Natchez, the Native-American microbiologist who AH Biotech had hired away from MIT only a year prior, had been chosen to assist. He’d been involved in the nanite program since he was still a post-doc, and had quickly become a well-respected member of his team. If there were no surprises, then William would not need to say a word. If there were questions or concerns, however, I had confidence that the young man would be able to represent the company in a professional manner.