The Inaction Man

by Phillip Donnelly

  Chapter 3

  Origins and Originality

  Some are born superheroes, some become superheroes, and some have superhero status thrust upon them. Inaction Man was most definitely a member of the latter category.

  His backstory is as empty yours or mine. Before becoming a superhero, he was a civil servant by the name of David. David Vincent, to be precise. By all accounts, he was a distant and aloof man, fundamentally disinterested both in his job and in the world at large. A man of few words with even less inclination to use them. At best he was civil, but more often than not, he failed to maintain even the most basic courtesies with his colleagues. Unsociability is not, of course, a dismissible offence – at least not in the civil service, and most certainly not in the French civil service. David kept his job and kept to himself.

  As year followed year, the dead hand of routine moulded his days into copies of the days that had gone before. His colleagues learned to ignore him as he ignored them. Jour après jour, he woke up, went to work, went home and went to bed. When required to describe his role in one of a performance review, he declared himself to be “a prisoners of habit and a hostages of the human need for predictability.” When his supervisor pressed him for more information, and a more conventional response based on his job description, he replied, in a very curt e-mail, that he was “a bear born and brought up in a circus whose life had not really begun. You can make a bear perform tricks, but instinct will always tell the bear that this is not how things are meant to be.”

  As he approached forty, David noticed something strange happening to his body. He started to feel disconnected from it. Like it was not really his body, like it belonged to someone else. The eyes that he saw with and the hands that he typed with felt mechanised. More worrying still was his growing conviction that his body was turning to stone. It was most evident in his stomach, but the petrification was spreading. Everything was getting colder, becoming lifeless. The world turned greyer, shade by shade. The city was being covered in dust; and beneath the dust, Paris was rusting. Disintegrating. Cracking.

  Night offered no solace. David dreamt repeatedly of giant cracks appearing in the city’s pavements and buildings. Through these cracks demons slid. At first, they were only lines. Two dimensional aberrations hovering in the air. Cracks above the sidewalk. They unfolded themselves slowly and in the chrysalis gained the third dimension of form. In the dreams, no matter how hard David tried to warn others, they would not listen. Only he could see the demons.

  He kept these dreams to himself, suspecting that he had discovered something that he was not meant to know. He also knew enough about the norms of society to realise that if he spoke of his living fossilisation and his nightmares, he would almost certainly be incarcerated. David had a morbid fear of prisons, hospitals and any other form of confinement. For him, a prison cell, a hospital ward, and any other building that he could not walk out of, was a coffin.

  David kept more and more to himself. “In silence lies safety,” he was later found to have scratched under his desk. He began to count the number of words he used per day, and rationed them down to a hundred.

  But the monologue inside his head would not be controlled and counted. It screamed for an audience. In granting himself a confidant, David hoped to be able to tease out his own thoughts and organise them. The best way to do this, he reasoned, would be to imagine he was writing to someone who would understand, someone who also knew that the universe was cracking. He gave this imaginary friend the name Secrecy. One cold November day, David began the first of what was to become many e-mails to Secrecy. He noted down what he had seen and how he felt about it and what he believed it all meant.

  He spent more and more time writing messages to Secrecy. At first at home, but then in the office as well. The addiction to catharsis consumed him. The quality of his work began to slip and then to slide and then collapsed completely. While efficiency is hardly the hallmark of any government office, there are certain minimum standards that have to be maintained. David’s poor performance became an issue that his supervisor could not ignore. For example, when asked to write an in-depth report on waste water management in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, David took three whole months to finish the report, which to his supervisor’s horror, consisted of only seven words: “Not too bad, but could be better.”

  While this was true, and captured the essence of the matter, David’s supervisor had great difficulty explaining that the report’s brevity robbed it of a certain gravitas. David, anxious to return to typing to his imaginary friend, and nauseated by the shape of his line manager’s nose, accepted the critique and promised to rewrite the report immediately.

  However, no sooner had he got back to his desk than he lost himself in a long e-mail to Secrecy on the incipient and insidious fossilisation of humanity. The report on waste water management remained in David’s inbox.

  This was not the reason for his dismissal, which happened later in the afternoon on the very same day. Distracted at a crucial moment by a fly that had alighted on his sandwich, David inadvertently saved a letter to Secrecy on the company’s shared drive, rather than on his encrypted USB key. In other words, he accidentally saved his thoughts in public, rather than private. It was only at this point that his co-workers in the office realised just how strange David actually was.

  The letter is reproduced below.

  Dearest Secrecy,

  I’ve just come from a meeting with my supervisor, whose purpose I cannot remember, but during the meeting I had a revelation, which I’ll share with you now.

  As we know, people whose lives are slaves to routine object to anything and anyone that threatens that routine. This isn’t, as we imagined, a psychological trait, but rather the effects of an external force. Not knowing its real name, let’s call it the Status Quo Force – or SQF, or Squiff.

  It grows within us. It wraps itself around our spine and spreads its tentacles to our testacles, and from there spreads through the endocrine system to infect the rest of our body. First it takes our bodies, then it takes our minds.

  It controls what you see and what you don’t see; what you hear and don’t hear. That’s why the cracks in our world are invisible to all but you and I, dearest Secrecy, and why we must speak to no-one of our visions.

  Our colleagues and family (Squiff ciphers, all!) would surely imprison us to keep us silent.

  We must move stealthily, gentle Secrecy, or they will discover us. We must be as quiet as the computer mouse I hold.

  “It’s worse than you know.”

  “… Who are you?”

  “I am the reader, the one to whom you write, the one you call Secrecy. I am an immortal, charged with the protection of this galaxy from the forces of darkness. I have created two knights on each planet to act as its guardians and sentinels. You are one such knight of light. Your first quest shall be to find the second defender against the FOE.”

  “The foe? You mean the Squiff?”

  “The status quo is merely a weapon, a tool to prevent humanity from perceiving that their world is being taken over.”

  “If the status quo is a weapon, then who wields it? Tell me this, Secrecy.”

  “The FOE, the Forces of Evil. Life forms that preceded us. Creatures from before the big bang that gave birth to this blessed age of light. Pan-dimensional beings from before time and space.”

  “What do they want, Secrecy?”

  “They want to return to the Age of Darkness. To turn off time, to close space.”

  “How can they do that?”

  “By spreading dark matter. By subsuming worlds, by turning off suns.”

  “But why me? Why have you chosen me, Secrecy?”

  “You can see the cracks. You are a visionary. You shall henceforth be known to the immortals as Inaction Man.”

  “…Inaction Man? Why?”

  “That is your second quest, noble Inaction Man. To discover the secret of your name. And in so doing, to discover y
our purpose.”

  “But why don’t you just tell me?”

  “You must prove yourself worthy. Before we add to your powers, you must show yourself capable of wielding them wisely.”

  [Transmission Ends]

  David stared at the screen long after the immortal Secrecy stopped typing. When he remembered to save the message, a fly landed on the half-eaten sandwich beside the keyboard. It was a suspicious coincidence, in David’s mind. Distracted, he saved the letter outside a folder on the shared drive, with the eye-catching title, Secrecy Squiff.

  He didn’t notice the rest of the office workers gossiping about him, and since no-one forwarded the saved document to him, he would not have known what they were whispering about.

  When the document reached his supervisor, David was called into a private office and asked to consider spending more time at home to help him deal with the complex emotional issues he seemed to be experiencing.

  David ran from the office never to return, certain that the forces of evil had taken control of it and were on the point of imprisoning him. Knowing they would search for him in his home, he never set foot there again. To be extra safe, he threw his wallet into a bin, and later that night, changed clothes with a tramp. This and a few day’s stubble made him invisible to all who had previously known him. Only the bums are free of the all-seeing state and the dark powers behind the government.

  David began his second life, the life of a superhero. He smiled widely, and truth be told, rather wildly. He never looked back, and with time, persistence, and a great deal of alcohol, he even forgot that he had once been someone else. David the morose civil servant was dead. Inaction Man was born. He was sighted, he was keen, and he was ready for his first two missions – to solve the riddle of his name and to find the second knight errant.