Soon I Will Be Invincible (2 page)

We kept driving through the slate gray morning that grew slowly brighter, although the rain kept up. Most people were asleep, and every twenty minutes or so we would stop to pick up another child, another one of us. Most of the kids must have gotten up at three or four in the morning to meet the bus as it crossed the state. Everyone was drowsing or sleeping or staring out the window. I slept a little myself, although it felt strange to be dozing off among all these strangers. No one talked, but there was a faintly intimate process taking place among us, a bond forming out of the shared unfamiliarity of the trip. We wouldn’t forget it. For all of us, it was the start of a new phase of our lives; a group identity was taking shape out of the rainy morning and the engine noises and forty-eight dreaming minds.

For the first few months we had to sleep in the gym. The student dormitories hadn’t been finished properly, and they flooded and had to be rebuilt. Sheets were hung for privacy. We congregated at 9:30 p.m. and were led to the bathroom in groups of fifteen, and there was the funny feeling of seeing kids from your math class again in their pajamas, each holding toothbrush, cup, and toothpaste, being herded sleepily to the line of sinks. We were seeing one another the way only our family had seen us. We’d get back, each to our sleeping bag, to stare up at the moths fluttering around by the ceiling. At 10:15 exactly, the big overhead lights audibly went out, and a chorus of whispers would rise. It was hard to fall asleep in such a big room—your ears picked up how big it was. The girls slept in the library, laid out among the shelves and study tables, but I never heard how that was, although I tried to imagine it—quieter, sounds vanishing instead of bouncing around.

Things like this became normal, became the way we lived, waking curled up on the cool, hard gym floor, having slept the night away just inside the three-point arc. Cold sun streamed through high windows, and voices echoed off bleachers and the rafters painted blue, a few kids already beginning to shout and run around. Some had Walkmen and listened to pop music long after lights-out.

The classes themselves were little different from the ones I had taken at public school. The other students were perhaps more advanced, but the same classroom dynamics seemed in place, as if determined by some underlying law of the adolescent educational condition. Jocks were jocks, cliques were cliques, and students who were popular were popular again. Nothing had changed; I couldn’t really imagine it changing, except that I now ate silently in a dining hall, instead of silently with my family.

Thinking about that time is thinking about another person. How every day I was going to be smarter and better. I was strong, proud, as sharp as glass, and I was never going to be any other way. I took top honors in the Junior Putnam, the Westinghouse, and, believe me, I was just starting to accelerate. Walking into the computer lab, into the smell of coffee and plastic and the hum of the fluorescents, I was like a prizefighter smelling sawdust and sweat and hearing the crowd.

I didn’t cultivate friendships, just a nerdy camaraderie with the top few science students. But I was the usual combination of petty arrogance and abject loneliness. I was ashamed of my desperate eagerness to please, and unable to control it. Why should I be singled out from other people as uniquely gifted, and uniquely worthless? I ate my lunches alone, and it’s a small blessing my diaries were destroyed.

Junior year I won a Ford Grant for summer study. I’d already decided not to go home that summer, and the Ford was a lucky excuse. I very much didn’t want to see my parents. I was already hoping to make myself into someone else, a person who had nothing to do with their house or their soft-spoken way of talking, or what I belatedly recognize as their kindness.

I was bright, but no one suspected how bright I would become. Prodigies are an old story, and everyone levels off after a while. Or do we? I may not be smarter than I was last year, but I know more. And I’m certainly no stupider.

So I wasn’t always this way. I went to a good school. I wrote lengthy short stories about my hapless infatuations; one of them was even a runner-up in the school magazine. All about the girl I saw in the dining hall, at the party, in the hallway, but never spoke to. I wasn’t very much different from a lot of people. Except that I was.

Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone’s problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor. My first subterranean lab was a disastrous little hole underneath a suburban tract home. One morning, two unsmiling men in leotards appeared on my doorstep and demanded to see what I was working on. I said, “It doesn’t do anything.” They didn’t say anything. I showed them inside. I kept my back to them while I worked my fancy locks, but who was I kidding? The one in white had that look people do when they have X-ray vision. Like you know they’re seeing just bones.

I had been as careful as I could be, buying equipment through a dozen aliases, some of them legitimate government agencies. Waste heat was going into the aquifer, and there was enough background radiation that no one should have caught anything I was doing. But obviously I’d hit one of their trip wires. We didn’t say anything on the way down. Up close, these two weren’t especially reassuring. The white one’s eyes were set too far apart, and he only breathed about once a minute, rapidly, in-out. I didn’t get much on the black guy, except that in the silences I could hear faint tinny voices and bursts of static, as if a cybernetic component in his chest were inadvertently picking up shortwave. It was vaguely embarrassing, like a fart.

It was my first underground lab, and it showed. It was still too hot because of the reactor, and it looked like shit. I hemmed and hawed and started up a little dimensional viewer I had been tinkering with. The Gateway flickered into life, and through the cloudy window we could see dimly the great misshapen head of one of those alien leviathans trawling the ether like a whale in the depths. They looked bored. The black guy, Something-tron, gave me a speech about meddling in things I didn’t understand; it was obvious they were peeved they weren’t getting a fight. When they left, they had me tagged as just another backyard inventor, but I’d made my mistake—I was in the system. They’d seen my retinas.

Wearing a cape doesn’t do much for your social life. There’s a standing, unspoken, and utterly unreliable truce among enhanced criminals, the robot-army, hood-and-mask, good-evening-Mister-Bond set. My peer group is largely a collection of psychotics, aliens, and would-be emperors. The result is I meet people like Lily.

Lily was born in the thirty-fifth century. She’s what your sort of person might call a supervillain, although she might quarrel with the definition. When you first meet her, you look twice—everyone does. She’s not quite invisible, merely transparent, a woman of Lucite or water. When you get to know her face, she has that long-jawed look people start getting a couple centuries from now, a hollowness around the eyes. You recognize it when you’ve been up and down the timestream a few times, and seen a few of the far-future possibilities—the Machine Kings, or the Nomad Planet, or the Steady State, or the Telephony. When we met she looked right past me, just another monkey-man, but I have more in common with her than I do with most of the people I meet.

Lily was born in New Jersey at a time when the Earth was dying. Only
200,000
humans were left, wandering among the empty cities and grasslands that were once the civilized world. She grew up with a thousand square miles of grassland and forest and highways for her backyard. She could drive for days without seeing anyone, up and down the old I
-95,
now cracked and overgrown in places. Later, she told me about the decaying bridges over the East River to the lost city of Brooklyn, where the towers of Manhattan loomed in the distance. She would find a stone embankment and eat lunch, down where the warm wind stirred the stagnant ocean that was slowly rising, year after year.

Her time line was simply a dead end. She told me about the spreading blight, the dimming, dying sun that she could look straight into without blinking. The only aliens who came left without saying good-bye. In her future, the new ruler of the Earth was going to be a particularly successful strain of algae that had spread in a supercolony up and down the northwest American seaboard, choking rivers and canals and blooming for miles out into the sea.

Lily was trained to be a hero, humanity’s long-shot solution, rigorously screened and genetically engineered. A team of desperate scientists worked for decades, racing against humanity’s decay to put her in place to save them. She was the best of them, and they trusted her.

A crowd of tense, brave faces was the last thing she saw on the day she left. Brave Dr. Mendelson, strong-jawed and gray-haired, shook her hand once and then gave the countdown, and the world faded from view. The machine that brought her back in time could only work once. The logic was obvious: She had a list of targets, a suite of weapons layered into a smartmesh leotard, and a mission to save the world. Nearly invisible and devastatingly strong, she succeeded easily.

Years later, when she managed to rebuild her machine and return to her own time, it was all different. The Earth she had known, and everyone on it, was gone, and in its place was a world of happy strangers—the blight had never happened. And she realized she missed the quiet, and the gentle, mournful quality of her thirty-fifth century. So she came back to our time, and after a few months she started hitting high-tech and infrastructural targets. She’s still at large, still sabotaging the world in search of the chain of events that started the blight in her version of history, the invisible thread leading back to the vanished ruins of her home.

My other best friend is the Pharaoh, a supervillain, and he’s an idiot.

Today was the official last day of fall. There was an early frost last night, and the chill seeps into the stone here. Most inmates don’t go out in the yard anymore—no one but me and a few die-hard smokers, idly kicking the dirt, huddled together against the cold I haven’t felt since
1976.
The wind kicks up dust in the yard, blows leaves through the barbed wire. Our uniforms flap in the breeze. The trees past the fence are bare now except for the oaks. I can see beams from the security net bouncing around in the infrared and ultraviolet, and the KLNJ antenna is pulsing out low-frequency stuff over the hill.

Somewhere out there, the snow is falling on Lily’s base. I can’t say where it is, but this late in the year it’s pretty well covered. I used to tune in to the perimeter cameras just to scan around the woods. It’s buried deep now—a layer of snow, pine needles, frozen dirt, then crushed gravel, concrete, water tanks, and then titanium.

I last saw her six years ago, in a bar. She was smoking. I remember how the match flared and glistened liquidly on her glassy skin, still scored slightly where a chain gun once caught her. She set the cigarette to her lips and drew smoke delicately into her throat, to curl in her lungs like a genie in a smoked-glass bottle. She would only meet me in a public place. I guess we had trust issues.

I went to a lot of trouble to set up that meeting. I tried to think of a way to tell her to come back. I’ve never been that good at this kind of thing, even before I went into hiding. I tried to think of a reason she would have, a really good argument. But even supervillainesses would rather date a hero. Sometimes I wonder if there really are just two kinds of people in the world.

To be a supervillain, you need to have certain things. Don’t bother with a secret identity, that’s a hero thing. Not that it wouldn’t be convenient to take off the mask and disappear into the crowds, the houses, the working world. Perhaps too convenient—why become the most audacious criminal mind on Earth (or at least in the top four), only to slink off in the other direction when things get difficult? It wouldn’t mean as much if you could just walk away. When I’m arrested, they read the litany of my crimes at the trial, longer and gaudier each time. I’ve been tried for crimes on the Moon, in other centuries, other dimensions, and I’ll be damned if I won’t put my name on them.

Besides, I never wanted to go back to the way it was before. Heroes have that weakness, not supervillains. When you become a villain you cut your ties and head for the bottom. When you threaten to crash an asteroid into your own planet just so they’ll give you a billion dollars or substitute your face on the
Mona Lisa,
there’s no statute of limitations. So you have to have the courage of your convictions.

You should have a nemesis. Mine is CoreFire, an imbecile gifted with powers and abilities far beyond mortal man’s. If anything can hurt CoreFire I haven’t found it, and don’t think I haven’t looked. I’ve got others—the Champions, disbanded now but no less dangerous as individuals. Damsel, Stormcloud’s daughter, and her ex-husband the gymnast, and that alleged elf they got from somewhere. I’ve fought dozens of heroes over the years, but CoreFire is the toughest. After all, I made him myself.

You need an obsession. The zeta beam, key to ultimate power. Secret of CoreFire’s might, and the fire that scarred me, and made me what I am. And you need a goal. Viz, to take over the world.

And you need…something else. I don’t know precisely what it is. A reason. A girl you couldn’t get, parents slain before your eyes, a nagging grudge against the world. It could be anything. I really don’t know what it is, the thing that makes you evil, but it does.

Maybe I should have been a hero. I’m not stupid, you know, I do think of these things. Maybe I should have just gone with the program, joined up with the winning team, and perhaps I would have, had I been asked. But I have the feeling they wouldn’t have wanted someone like me. They’d turn up their noses or just never quite notice me. I knew some of them in high school, so I know.

I learned what a villain was by watching television news broadcasts of the big fights in New York and Chicago. I could tell who the villains were because they always lost, no matter how good their ideas were. I don’t understand how or when the decision was made for me, but whenever it was the moment is lost now, gone away as far off as Lily’s home Earth.