Ice Cream and Venom (2 page)

The first superheroes were street-level types. The first ones—like Blacknight and Deadpan—weren't technically superheroes at all, more like world-class athletes and prodigies. The later ones—Corporeal Punishment and Captain Canada and Hot Chick and the Six Billion Peso Mexican—were basically modified humans who'd been diddled with by various governments to make super-soldiers. These started showing up just about exactly ten years after I got out of college. Then came the 'genuine' metahumans, though it's never entirely sure what 'genuine' means. Were they product of a more advanced genetic diddling? Were they a new stage in human evolution? Were they covertly adjusted by forces beyond man's knowledge? Were they the result of time travelers re-writing our history? Undoubtedly any and all of those were true. But when they started showing up, things changed. No longer did we have simple souped-up humans and cyborgs, now we started having things that used psychic powers, that had different senses, abilities, and things started to change, the rules started to change.

Quantum mechanics suggests that the physical universe is the way it is in large part
because
we perceive it to be. There's a kind of feedback loop between reality and our perception of it, with our perceptions directly affecting the physical laws by which the universe works. The presence of fundamentally different perspectives can change the rules by which quanta play. It was noticed one day that gravity was no longer a constant. It was
nearly
a constant, but 'nearly' isn't the same thing. Then it was noticed that the speed of light was a bit off. Other things changed too, all caused by new kinds of sentient life on earth who felt sunlight and heard gravity and saw time and tasted magic.

If that sounds like bullcrap, you're not alone. It makes no sense to me either, but that's what Maxwell Regent, The World's Smartest Man said on TV, explaining the phenomenon. He might have been lying. He has an odd sense of humor, but even if that's not exactly how the two-slit paradox meant things worked prior to the advent of superheroics, it is how things work now. Dammit.

The rules changed faster. Bits of history randomly rewrote themselves. Laws of causality changed. There were retcons—the most obvious of which was when Venus went from being a lifeless, hellish planet to being a near twin of our own, ruled by vengeful pagan gods fighting an endless civil war. The Greek god Apollo and Deadpan claimed they were responsible for this, the results of a time traveling adventure, but they were never very clear on the details, and now that the laws of causality are shot, can anyone ever be sure that they've actually done the things they've done? About half the people I knew couldn't remember Venus being any other way when it happened, but I was never sure if this was the result of some kind of time traveling futzing with memory, or if people were just kind of stupid and uneducated to begin with. It could go either way. Even before the world started to fall apart, the education system in our country kinda sucked.

"You're too loud to hide," Superjunge said, staring eye to eye with me. He was beyond handsome. Imagine the best looking male model you ever saw, and then imagine him as being ugly compared to Junge. I'm not gay, not even a little bit, but I was aroused. You can't help it around the supers. They exude every kind of pheromone, every kind of sexual signal. Animals are even attracted to them. Plants are even attracted to them. I wouldn't be surprised if inanimate objects were attracted to them.

"If we're so loud, then you must have heard what happened," I say, fighting to keep my breathing regular. I'm in full-on flight or fight mode, I'm terrified, and awkwardly turned on by a gender I'm not attracted to. I'm malnourished and sleep deprived and depressed as hell. Frankly, it would only take the tiniest push to send me over the edge in to madness, and though madness sounds pretty good to me right now, I don't have the luxury. I hold on to sanity with my fingernails, I claw it back in to my head.

His dark face becomes disturbingly beautifully sad. He shows a resigned fear that is pure Wagnerian opera, and in a voice like a prayer, he says, "Is it true?"

I fully expect to die, and the idiot refugees behind me are lined up to watch it, too stupid to run. "Yes," I admit, waiting for the punch that will go through my body like I'm made of tissue paper. It never comes. I notice absently that my eyes are closed in fear. I open them experimentally, and see the teen hero is quietly sobbing in front of me. I reach out to touch him, to sooth his tormented brow, to taste his tears, but something stays my hand. I look to see what it is. It's Ivan. He's grabbing my arm and pulling it back.

My senses quickly return: One does not touch the tears of a god. If their mere presence provides enough hormonal confusion to turn a solidly heterosexual man like myself in to a horny little teenaged girl watching MTV, then what the hell would bodily fluids do? I make eye contact with Ivan, and without a word passing between us, we both back up a step in unison. Then another.

"You're back to Strike 1 now," I said. He smiled toothlessly at me.

"Who did it?" Superjunge asked.

"Vox Inhumana," I said, "But Blacknight killed him with a Parthian shot. He didn't survive, though." Despite the fact that this young alien in front of me has tried to kill us more times than I can count in the last six months, I have to fight the urge to say 'I'm sorry.' Blacknight was gay as a three-dollar bill, and Superjunge had been his first, and most formidable, sidekick. It was rumored there was more between them as well.

"Clarion's orders?" the boy from another world asks in a voice that is frankly frightening.

"I don't know, son, I don't know. I'm just an insurance adjuster, it's not like I had any kind of connections here. But it was a music-themed attack, so I assume so." Junge falls in to a seated slump on the floor. The building shakes a bit as he does. He looks just like us, and his natural gravity-controlling abilities make him seem about as massive as a normal guy, but appearances are deliberately deceiving: he's heavy. He weighs tons. That's the central rule of superheroes, and pagan gods: They look like us, but they ain't us. Don't be fooled.

"Get your people out of here," he says, with his head in his hands. The raw emotion boiling off him is too much; it's overriding my senses. I reach out to touch him, then realize what I'm doing, and back off another footstep. Any moment now, his pheromones will hit the idiot refugees, and they'll start crowding forward to touch him, and that'll be the end of everything.

"You're letting us go?" I ask, wary.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he says, "So you'd better get gone while I'm figuring it out." I start to usher the others out, hugging the wall to stay downwind of his sex appeal.

"There was no way we could bury the body," I say, "I cleaned him up as best I could, and left him on the couch at a psychiatrist's office on the second floor of an office building over on the other side of..."

He laughed, "Psychiatrist's office? That's funny. That's ironic. He'd have appreciated it."

"He did. He lasted a little while," I said, "We talked."

"Thank you," Superjunge said, "I'm glad he wasn't alone when the end came. You need to get out of here. Two of your people made a break for it last night. Xenophilos caught one last night, and it won't take the Mentalist long to pry your location from the man's memory."

"How did you find us?" I ask

"I caught the other one, and tortured her until she told me. Then I killed her."

Superheroes. An impotent rage flies through me, but I really had already known the answer before I asked the question. I grab my bag full of hardback books and as I walk through a shattered floor-length window, I notice it looks like rain, so I pull out my umbrella.

It's interesting to see how the real-life world of superheroes differed from the comic book version of things from my adolescence. There's a number of differences that tend to underscore the similarities to what people had imagined.

Superheroes are gay, of course. Specifically, they're both kinds of gay. They're the stupid kind of gay, the sort you get when someone tells you their theory of how Antarctica is actually Atlantis, and you say, "That's the gayest thing I've ever heard!" And then there's the actual sexually deviant kind of gay. Superheroes have both of that, in spades. Technically, I guess, they're omnisexual, they'll nail anyone and anything, attractiveness is a survival trait—the prettier you are, the more likely you are to breed and continue your genetic line—so it follows that superhuman would be supernaturally attractive to both genders, and they've got a super-amped-up sex drive that makes them able to take advantage of it. Men, women, they don't discriminate. Vervectikleib had a thing for cattle, actually.

It's funny to me—I'd half-forgotten it, until I found the old comic books in the fridge—but all those old stories assumed Superheroes would be clustered around major cities. Marvel had a burr up their ass about New York City, and DC invented hokey fake ones like "Gotham" and "Metropolis" which were also obviously New York, or occasionally, Chicago. In fact, in the real world, New York and LA barely get a mention. The hot, burning center of the Superhero universe is, was, and will always be Atlanta, Georgia. I don't know why that is, it just is. Trust me, when I used to live here, all that superheroic crap used to annoy the hell out of me. I left early on.

They didn't really bother with secret identities in reality. It wasn't practical: They were too pretty, too perfect, broadcasting sex on too many channels simultaneously. There was no way to be hidden. You could be an amazingly sexy crime fighter, but you couldn't exactly hide it by putting on glasses and a conservative suit. You were still gonna be amazingly sexy, and someone would figure it out sooner or later. In the end, secret identities were simply more trouble than they were worth. And in the end, Superheroes are about the simplest solution to the most complex problems, usually the WWF smackdown solution. Despite all their high-minded ideals, it always comes down to a Wallace Beery film in the end.

Also: they didn't really date. Fictional Superman may have had fictional Lois Lane, but the real life supers might occasionally use someone for a moment's guilty pleasure, but they didn't really have relations with people. For one thing, they were too strong; they had to hold back too much. I'll leave you to read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" by Larry Niven to figure out what I mean by that, but the bottom line is that they kept to their own kind. The only long-term relationship I ever heard of between a human and a super was the one between Superjunge and Blacknight, and that was just a rumor, one staunchly denied by both communities. Supers don't really have relationships with humans for the same reason humans don't marry gorillas.

Another substantial difference between reality and the comics was that in the comics the superheroes mostly respected the civil authorities. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the American Way. More liberal fictional heroes like Oliver Queen frequently opposed the government's policies, but they overwhelmingly supported the government itself, at least in theory, supporting what it stood for if not what it actually did. In actual practice... not so much.

In retrospect, it was hopelessly naïve to expect aliens like Superjunge and The Venusian Vigilante and Sky-Fi and Ikonoklast to have any particular loyalty to any particular country. They weren't from here; they didn't exactly come here willingly. Ikonoklast—who was black—had been forced in to slavery in the decade leading up to the civil war. There were some anger issues there, and I'm not saying they aren't justified.

It was even sillier to assume that supernatural superheroes like My Beautiful Assistant, or Doctor Destiny or The Njorn would have any particular loyalty to a country. I mean, the Njorn was a supernatural being for Pete's sake; she was older than the earth itself. And The Blue Djin, they say, used to be on Satan's payroll before he joined the nominally-good guys. Once they've rebelled against God Himself, how can Uncle Sam hope to keep him on the straight-and-narrow?

We did get the superhero teams, of course, modern day pantheons of modern day gods, lording it over mortals from the modern day Olympus that was the Peachtree Hotel. But it's amazing how fast things fell apart. Endlessly beautiful people with a penchant for order, and an endless sexual appetite are clearly going to have little in common with your average overweight schlub with zits and ulcerative colitis. Eventually, they're invariably going to lock up all the super villains, and tire of using their powers to nab purse-snatchers and people who don't bring back their library books on time. Eventually they're going to turn to The Big Issues, eventually they're going to tire of a government that isn't doing enough to fix The Big Issues, eventually they're going to simply fly to Africa with endless amounts of grain taken by force from the US, and of course everyone is going to praise them for it. I mean, hell, I cried when Uberlord fed those starving Somali kids, I'll admit it. But there wasn't a government on earth that could stand in their way, and governments that can't enforce their own rules cease to be governments at all.

But the biggest difference—and the one that's completely missing from the old comics—is that democracy is no longer democratic. In a human world, we're all born, we live, and we die, and we're all roughly equal. In a superhero world, we're all born, but some of us will not die, and what could be more inequitable than that? It didn't take long for that to set in with our thinking, and from then on there was the uncomfortable feeling of time passing you by, of being on the losing end of evolution, of being replaced.

Eventually, the Superheroes just divvied the world up in to their own personal fiefdoms, and suddenly none of us were Americans or Russians or Europeans anymore, we were Feral Laddians, or Bloodwoodians, or Ragin' Cajuns or Purple Hearts. Most people seemed to think this was a good thing at the time. The early 21st century had more-or-less sucked, after all, and a lot of us welcomed the change, though of course that didn't last long. After all, in a world with little people who didn't matter, and hopelessly attractive, sexually voracious gods, it's not like even love can survive, so what chance did humanity have?

Total time from when Blacknight hit the streets to the time when the superheroes simply assumed command of the world? Just six years.