Soon I Will Be Invincible (14 page)

I moved off campus, but not very far. I found a basement apartment in Davis Square in Somerville, I haunted cafés and bookstores. Once, on the street, I heard someone point me out to a group of incoming freshmen as “the Zeta Beam Guy.”

At night, lying on my bunk, I felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a river of dark water. Where was all my potential now?

After a while, I was asked by the university to take time off, counseling recommended. I refused. I went down to the library as I usually did, where I studied and read all day. At midnight, the stacks closed, and I sat down on the front steps. The long winter had passed, and it was a warm, misty night in May. Here and there, students were hurrying back to their dorms, laughing and talking about trivial things that I could no longer imagine.

My last stop is in the museum annex across the street, but I’m going to have to hurry. Sirens sound outside—one of the guards must have woken up and identified me. They know they’re dealing with a costume now, so it won’t take them long to bring in the posthuman element, vectoring in from up and down the East Coast.

And here it comes: Damsel glides above me, black against the sky like a nightmare goddess, uncannily weightless, laser eyes shining in the darkness. The crescent moon symbol on her chest is dimly visible by starlight. The field damper should keep her from spotting me. I clutch Laserator’s invention to my chest.

Rainwater is soaking into my costume, seeping through the steel and nylon fibers onto super-hardened skin. I wish I were anywhere but here; I wish I were home. But I’m a supervillain, and I don’t have a home, just a space station, or a jail cell, or a base, or a sewer tunnel. I don’t have a secret identity; I’m Doctor Impossible just about all the time now.

The annex is just a big warehouse, most of it underground. The fire stairs are at the back, locked, but I crouch down and aim Laserator’s device at the sheet metal. Starlight is enough; reflected, amplified, and focused, it burns right through. The aluminum stairway booms as I pound down five flights, arms out, cape flying. I already know where I’m going. Wherever he is, CoreFire isn’t around anymore to stop me.

I moved on to graduate study at Tufts, the physics department, squeaking in with a stipend on the basis of early work and the fact that when I tried, I could still do pure math better than anyone. But I remember wandering down to the student center one afternoon to take the GREs, startled at how young all the seniors looked, and how slowly they worked. When I wandered up the aisle, completed test in hand, they asked me if I was taking a rest room break.

My adviser at Tufts was an ancient chemist, a man who didn’t expect to understand my research, and didn’t ask about my progress. The work was not going well. Experiments produced null results, or random. I seemed on the verge of a thing that would not materialize. Kleinfeld’s monographs haunted me, his insights decades old but still out of my reach.

Erica, oddly enough, still found the time for an occasional lunch with me when she came up from New York, where she was already making her name as a writer. But apart from these rare glimpses of sunlight, my human contacts were with lab assistants and systems administrators. Boston is a rainy city that peters out into suburban strip malls and office parks at the extremities, and this is where the high-tech laboratories flourished, at which I found work and enough lab space to push forward with my ideas. I daydreamed on the long bus rides to and from the suburbs.

And no one knew what had been entrusted to me. At night, I stared at the television, feeling the seasons go past at unfathomable velocity. I felt myself growing older and fatter, my power languishing, flickering, while Dimension Zeta grew ever clearer, its red radiation glowing just behind the visible world. At times I felt close to that discovery again, the one that would make my name, prove them wrong. A genius languishing alone and undiscovered.

Down three, four, five flights, into the reserve archives, then past the government seals into the proscribed section—fiddling the locks takes only a few seconds. Downstairs in the stacks, the shelves run endlessly on, mostly cardboard boxes with miscellaneous lots, donated or bought at auction. I’m looking for a piece of a private collection, brought to America and broken up after World War II. Luckily, I know my way around the archives.

It’s right where the catalog said it would be.
Tactical Climatology,
1927 edition in two volumes, Neptune Press, copious illustrations, fair condition. Officially proscribed by a wartime council of generals, senators, and scientists, only four people alive know it even exists, which makes it one of the better-known works of Ernest Kleinfeld, aka Lianne Stekleferd, aka Lester Lankenfried. Better known as Baron Ether.

Inside, beautifully drawn diagrams illustrate what needs to happen; columns of meticulous equations prove their effectiveness. “What Makes the Weather?” indeed. I do, now, and it’s going to get a lot colder soon. The book goes in my satchel, two items in one night and I’m halfway there—it’s almost too easy. I don’t fight fair, not hero-fair anyway, but it’s not like I cut corners. Anybody could do what I do, anybody at all, if only they’d do the homework.

By the end, even other graduate students were starting to avoid me. I was older than they were. Our first semester, there was a welcoming party, and I was shocked at how young they seemed. I stood there limply for an hour in my tweed jacket before slipping out and going to a movie. I thought that at graduate school I would finally meet people like myself, but my fellow students looked like ski instructors, drinking and dancing like people on MTV. A few of them even knew who I was, the screwup, the Zeta Beam Guy.

My roommates in college had gone on to become entertainment lawyers, theater directors, physicians. I always thought that being smart would excuse everything—the $
11,000
per year lifestyle, the dreary walk-up apartment in Somerville, the deferred hopes.

Maybe there are no other people like me, even in the sciences. I don’t know what they want from it, how they can be satisfied with the petty round of grant money, publication, and prizes. Whereas I have always known, deep down.

I spent endless hours in the stacks, looking hopelessly for the one book that would show me the way forward, that would unlock Dimension Zeta. I wanted things I saw only dimly—fluids that glowed, and electricity that arced and danced like a living thing. I wanted science inside of me, changing me, my body as a generator, as a reactor, a crucible. Transformation, transcendence. And so, of course, they called me mad.

They laughed at me, and that I would never forgive or forget. I would, to use the old phrase, show them. I would find it, and not for anyone else’s sake. Save the world? I don’t think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing’s going to fix it, maybe not even science.

And what if I did find something back in those stacks, way back, a book so old it’s not in the card catalog, moldering in the last reaches of the library system, a sub-sub-sub-basement, so old that the title could not be distinguished. I took it from the shelf and sat down on the floor and read. I found it. I looked where no one thought to look. I read a book no one else thought to read.

No ordinary book. A book of leaves, a book of rain, a book of parking lots and college quadrangles and all the long walks and lonely afternoons of my days and nights. What is a genius? I read and read and read, until I saw in that summer landscape of strip malls and parking lots and high school auditoriums a grand design laid out like a printed circuit in grass and asphalt, a strange rune of mysterious import, shining and telling the true story of the slow closing of the last great age.

Getting out is easy. Never guessing my target, they didn’t even follow me to the archives. Heroes don’t concern themselves with things like libraries and research. Once they’ve had their origin, they don’t try to think anymore, just fly around. Books, inventions, discovery—they leave that to us.

Damsel will be zooming south again to her luxury suite at the Champions’ Tower. I steal a car out of a rental lot, my prizes on the passenger seat. The car has tinted windows, so I don’t even have to change.

It’s another thing I used to do. Driving home from the laboratory late in the night, I would detour onto the highway just to feel like I was going somewhere. The drive takes four hours this time. I stay carefully under the speed limit for most of the way, racing the rising sun at the end, book and mirror on the passenger seat beside me. The master plan is well on its way to completion.

They say you never forget your origin, but most of that evening is gone for me, no matter how many times I return to it. Fragments of it come back to me at odd times.

I’d been having dinner with Erica—I remember that much—and we talked afterward, walking back to my apartment, but most of that night is still missing. I went back to the lab to work late. When I hurried across the road from the bus stop, the air smelled like rain. There was a haze around the street lamps and the car headlights as I waited to cross the expressway. I was still commuting to an office park in Lexington, pulling long hours and nursing along the last of a series of failed experiments.

The rain was pounding the parking lot outside. It was a Friday night, the best time to do my own work, and the parking lot was empty of anything but the lights glowing orange-yellow and the empty white lines drawn on the pavement like a cartoon skeleton. Out beyond the last parking spaces, there’s nothing but swamp, bulrushes and tall grass and frogs and chirping insects and the black suburban night of Massachusetts. I stared out at it from tinted-glass windows, breathing climate-controlled air as another deadline slipped away. I was losing my funding. This was my last chance to prove my ideas.

The target solution was a unique fluid. A revolutionary new fuel source, infused with the zeta radiation only I understood, a fluorescent cocktail of rare poisons, unstable isotopes, and exotic metals, it roiled in the beaker, swirling purple and green.
Toxic
isn’t the word for it; it was malign, practically sapient. A single drop would have powered an ocean liner for a thousand years. One evening, on impulse, I stripped a glove off and touched a sample. It was cool and luminous, and the end of my finger went instantly numb.

The temperature went on rising. Spiderweb cracks formed on the glass of the containment chamber an instant before the explosion. The pain was like burning or drowning, and it went on and on, unbearable. I wanted to faint, to leave my body. When you can’t bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn’t you anymore; you’ve changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all. The formula saturated my body, and I changed.

CHAPTER TEN

WELCOME TO MY ISLAND

         Golden Age, then Silver Age, then Iron. There must be a Rust Age as well, an age when even the base metals we’re made of now will have changed again. By what, into what, I don’t know. All cyborgs have to think about rust—high-tech alloys or no, the metal parts of me will eventually oxidize. People call this the Information Age, the Silicon Age, or the Nuclear Age, but I think they’re wrong. They don’t have the temper of it. When the world’s metal changes to iron, it changes for the last time.

I sink into one of the leather seats of Blackwolf’s custom-built airship, tangible proof that I’m not a small-timer anymore. Below us, I can already see that Doctor Impossible’s base has rusted.

Coming in from the air, we see the remains of a shattered grandeur, skeletal arcs of decaying metal soaring into the sky, gesturing at what used to be. In its prime, the base held unsurpassed marvels; now, metal and concrete lie rotting in the sun.

The north beach is dotted with a row of immense concrete pylons, streaked with rust from their internal reinforcements, foundations for a high-energy physics laboratory that went unbuilt. A railway, overgrown now, leads inward to the main facility, a jewel set into cliff and jungle by robot labor. A central dome bulks up out of the trees, only the spines of its four structural girders intact. The curve of the dome itself is still defined by a rotting latticework, but half the panes have fallen in, to shatter on the gleaming laboratory floor below. Moss and vines drip from the holes.

Water has seeped into everything. When CoreFire cannoned through the outer bulkhead, the whole structure shifted off its axis, windows shattered, the sterile shell cracked, and seals popped. The floors of clean workrooms are smeared with windblown dirt and animal tracks, lost to contamination. Thick tree roots have broken through the tile. Iron railings have begun to rust, and stone stairways have cracked and fallen away.

Under the laboratory dome, an enormous spherical mechanism lies frozen in decay. A stray beam of heat vision made a tiny hole to let the moisture in, and the delicate mechanisms, so smooth and finely balanced that a child could turn them with one hand, rusted into a solid mass. And Phathom-
5,
a supercomputer built to plot the arcs of shattering atoms, is silent; tropical rains now fall into the sterile core, where the tiniest particles of dust were once forbidden. The plasma rifles mounted along the eastern wall are silent, and the particle accelerator is still, pointed upward at a seventy-degree angle, garishly painted and crested with radiator fins. A family of osprey nests in the barrel.

“And they actually called him mad,” Damsel mutters next to me.

Lily kicks at a shell casing. Blackwolf shushes them.

Damsel points. “That’s where they breached the inner fortress. You were unconscious by then.”

“I was shamming,” mutters Blackwolf. “I can do that, you know.”

Doctor Impossible built this fortress in the late 1970s, at the beginning of his career, that golden time when every six months he was back again, looming giant on the world’s view screen. No one knew what to expect—peril from the sky, or an armored robot rising out of Hudson Bay, or a mind-exchanging ray—a stranger among us aping familiarity, peering at the others with hyperintelligent eyes. He’d even gone to the stars, tamed an alien god. No field of endeavor seemed closed to his manifold, questing intellect.

Out there in international waters, he worked day and night. His gleaming citadel would have been visible from space if the light hadn’t been bent around it. He’d fought Stormcloud to a standstill, thrown back the Super Squadron, outwitted Doctor Mind on his home ground. His battles with CoreFire dominated the news. And there were rumors of a device, a machine he had conceived and would one day build, that could make him utterly invincible.

Then three superheroes banded together as friends and teammates, and the world had a reigning super-team again. Doctor Impossible had a real opponent, and they foiled his schemes again and again. The last time, they’d brought the fight to him.

A couple of areas are still sealed off. Doctor Impossible dug deep—there are eight or nine levels below ground, living quarters and specialized laboratories. And the scans show shafts running deeper, down below the level of the ocean floor. One of them, we’ve tagged as a geothermal pipe; the others are anybody’s guess. Blackwolf spends a little time looking at them, then shakes his head.

The titanic remains of a late-generation Antitron sprawl across the courtyard and over one wall, an enormous blaster cannon still clutched in its hand. It had fought a desperate fight, but stripped of malign animation, it displays a primitive beauty, a face like an Inca mask. Its chest dimples inward where Damsel’s final punch landed.

The eight of us stand there in the shadow of the doomsday device, lying on its side now, partially buried in the sandy ground. What had it been like that day? What was he thinking? The helmet, the cape, the army of mutants. He must have known he was going to lose. He was supposed to be smart, though. He was supposed to have been a scientist.

I shuffle vision modes through infrared, ultraviolet, and a weird sonic ping that makes me nauseous. I can do a kind of ultrasound bounce, a limited X-ray vision. Everybody shows up different on that one. Blackwolf’s a baseline normal, an ordinary man; a few bits of metal have lodged in him over the years, and one of his knees got rebuilt. Feral’s all organic, flesh and bone, both much denser than normal—and of course he’s not human; his skeleton’s a morph between human and a Bengal tiger. Damsel shows up all black—the sonics bounce off her skin, just like everything else. Rainbow’s insides are crammed with augmentations, cables, floating extra organs. Her technology’s a different flavor from mine, more biomimetic, H. R. Giger’s dream of a schoolgirl.

We’re not sure exactly what the device was. A series of metal-plated globes, one inside the other, multiple shells now broken open and exposed to the air. Sand lies in the mechanism, fatally spoiling its polished smoothness. I remember Doctor Impossible on TV, swearing it would destroy the Earth if he turned it on. Mister Mystic puts one hand to its side and shivers. He says Doctor Impossible’s work is too complicated for him to read, that he has a hypercompressed style. But he thinks it probably would have worked.

I’ve been over and over the footage recorded of the last time anyone saw him, a fragment of news video taken after a skirmish with Embryarch. His face glows vivid in close-up, barred with scan lines. He’s walking, talking to someone off-camera, right before it cuts out. A name.

Mystic stands in the center of the chamber, arms out, fingers spread. He’s reading energy traces out of the surrounding air. If CoreFire came here, he’ll have left a unique signature. Mister Mystic has unusually long fingers.

“CoreFire did come here, but only for a minute. He landed there, and stood for a while. I think he was using his zeta sense. Then he went inside for a few minutes. He didn’t touch anything.”

“So what?” Rainbow looks bored, twitchy. She’s used to fighting in front of a camera.

“We don’t know yet.” Blackwolf’s thinking something, but he’s not saying what.

It’s getting cold in the shadows. Elphin perches on the outer wall, watching the sun set over a tropical sea like glass, gilding everything and casting long shadows from the towers and the beams poking up out of the ruined portions. The enormous hulk is absolutely silent, absolutely still.

The service door is armored; two feet thick, it’s set into the rock away from the main installation. People always think cyborgs can open things, as if carrying a chip in your head made you a magic lock pick. But I see a look go between Rainbow and Feral that plainly says, Amateur hour! so I kneel, tear off a panel, and give it my best. Any 57 percent–replacement cyborg knows a little about military electronics. I hack away for about fifteen minutes, armor heating up in the hot sun, before I hear the hum and click of bolts sliding back. Feral and I haul it open together, his thick, hairy arm reaching over me to pull with demonic strength as I strain awkwardly from a crouch, his breath on the back of my neck. He’s as strong as I am, at the very least.

The group spills inside, down a service ladder clinging to one wall of an underground chamber, a rock-walled factory space. Elphin skims down and in, spear shaft held high, feet well off the ground—she won’t touch cold iron. God, she even trails her legs behind her like Tinker Bell. Blackwolf slides down with his feet on the outside. Feral stalks in afterward, climbing head down like a squirrel descending a tree. Damsel waits a moment in the sunlight, the last to come inside.

For fourteen years, this was his stronghold, an open challenge to the world. The inside is cavernous, a metal catwalk crossing a deep crevasse, rock walls rising to meet overhead. Light spills in through what might be gun ports, unmanned now. Doctor Impossible built machines to attack the world, machines to make cities cower, and he built to scale. Infrared shows bats nesting above.

“Power’s on,” I remark, pointlessly. A few shafts of light scar the dimness. Beneath us, electricity once flashed and sparked between towers of metal, now lifeless. Damsel and Blackwolf are talking, barely looking around.

“No, you’re missing the point. Just because I can’t fly doesn’t make it—”

“Jesus, give it a rest, Marc.”

But the door at the far end of the bridge shoots open. Blackwolf spots it first, but waits for Damsel.

“Uh…darling?”

“What?”

“Contact.”

I’ve never worked with real professionals before, and the response is impressive. Damsel shouts, “Fliers! Get in the air!” And everyone scatters, Elphin buzzing sideways off the bridge. The robots bear the imprint of Impossible’s style, metal spiders moving with aggressive intelligence. One of them has lost a leg in the earlier battle. Feral bounds forward, ducking and rolling under the chattering guns. I’ve seen video of Feral working, but video is nothing. It doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be close to someone that big who can move that quickly.

I kick into a power sprint to catch up, legs extending an extra foot of metal skeleton, cantilevering out from inside my calves. Blackwolf dodges an initial burst of fire with ridiculous ease, turning an insolently casual cartwheel before vaulting atop the lead robot and yanking at its sensory cluster.

Elphin is already beside one of them, her lance lodged in its side, with a cry of “Titania!” As I plow into Blackwolf’s ride, she levers hers off the bridge and into space, while Feral tears at the other’s wiring. I’m too pissed off for subtlety, and by the time Damsel and Lily catch up, I’ve broken this one’s back.

“Nice one.” Blackwolf gives my arm a playful slap that clunks dully on armor, but inside it I feel it for a long time after that. Mister Mystic materializes from somewhere with a shrug.

The inner door goes quicker than the first. Damsel scouts ahead. I hear a blast, and she comes skidding backward unhurt along the polished metal floor, the front of her costume shredded. I look the other way as she twists it around to cover herself—I don’t need that kind of trouble.

Blackwolf stops to help her up, but she snaps at him.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I’d swear that behind that mask, he looks hurt. I must be imagining things.

We come out into the entrance hall, built on a titanic scale, the upper reaches lost in arched and buttressed dimness, letting in the sunlight where the ceiling has rusted out. Even Feral seems subdued by its cathedral hush. Elphin lets herself drift upward in the warm air as we spread out across its football-field width, half-waiting for a counterassault that launched two years ago. The air is damp, and a few tufts of grass have managed to take hold in the places where the mud collects.

A thin stream trickles where one of the ceiling seams split, puddling on the floor before draining off to some lower level. Galleries to the left and right afford glimpses of laboratories and audience chambers where the battle raged, leaving blast marks and the shells of shattered robots. A few intact display cases hold some of the Doctor’s trophies—a helmet, a pistol, and an odd-looking piece of ancient bone. At the far end, a pair of immense doors hang on their hinges. The throne room lies beyond, where they arrested him.

The upper rooms are still open to the sky in places. The rain has washed dirt and leaves in, and seabirds build their nests in cracks in the monumental statuary. We walk slowly in the metal-walled rooms, listening to our footsteps, unwilling to speak. The walls feature displays of dead television screens and banks of LEDs, red and orange and green, now dull, gemlike nubs.

Mystic concentrates on reading old thoughts, but it’s been a long time since Doctor Impossible was here. The rest of us idle around, poking through living quarters and office space. The Doctor used chipboard desks and Aeron chairs, just like a high-tech start-up.

Blackwolf puts a hand on my shoulder for balance while he adjusts his tights. Damsel doesn’t appear to notice.