Chapter One
Foiled Again
This morning on planet Earth, there are one thousand, six hundred, and
eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise-superpowered persons. Of these, one
hundred and twenty-six are civilians leading normal lives. Thirty-eight are kept
in research facilities funded by the Department of Defense, or foreign
equivalents. Two hundred and twenty- six are aquatic, confined to the oceans.
Twenty-nine are strictly localized-powerful trees and genii loci, the Great
Sphinx, and the Pyramid of Giza. Twenty-five are microscopic (including the
Infinitesimal Seven). Three are dogs; four are cats; one is a bird. Six are made
of gas. One is a mobile electrical effect, more of a weather pattern than a
person. Seventy-seven are alien visitors. Thirty-eight are missing. Forty-one
are off-continuity, permanent émigrés to Earth’s alternate realities and
branching timestreams.
Six hundred and seventy-eight use their powers to fight crime, while four
hundred and forty-one use their powers to commit them. Forty-four are currently
confined in Special Containment Facilities for enhanced criminals. Of these
last, it is interesting to note that an unusually high proportion have IQs of
300 or more-eighteen to be exact. Including me.
I don’t know why it makes you evil. It’s just what you find at the extreme right
edge of the bell curve, the one you’d get if six billion minds took an
intelligence test and you looked at the dozen highest scores. Picture yourself
on that graph, sliding rightward and downslope toward the very brightest, down
that gradually gentler hill, out over the top million, the top ten thousand-all
far smarter than anyone most people ever meet-out to the top thousand-and now
things are getting sparser-the last hundred, and it’s not a slope at all now,
just a dot every once in a while. Go out to the last few grains of sand, the
smartest of the smartest of the smartest, times a thousand. It makes sense that
people would be a little odd out here. But you really have to wonder why we all
end up in jail.
Wake-up for me is at 6:30 a.m., half an hour earlier than the rest of the
inmates. There’s no furniture in my cell-I’m stretched out on the painted green
rectangle where I’m allowed to sleep. The way my skin is, I hardly feel it
anyway. The facility is rated for enhanced offenders, but I’m the only one
currently in residence. I am their showpiece, the pride of the system, and a
regular feature on the governor’s tours for visiting dignitaries. They come and
watch the performance, to see the tiger in his cage, and I don’t disappoint.
The guard raps on the Plexiglas wall with his nightstick, so I get up slowly and
move to the red painted circle, where they run a scan, X ray, radiation, and the
rest. Then they let me put on clothes. I get eight minutes while they check the
route. You can do a lot of thinking in eight minutes. I think about what I’ll do
when I get out of here. I think about the past.
If I had writing materials, I might write a guidebook, a source of advice and
inspiration for the next generation of masked criminals, bent prodigies, and
lonely geniuses, the ones who’ve been taught to feel different, or the ones who
knew it from the start. The ones who are smart enough to do something about it.
There are things they should hear. Somebody has to tell them.
I’m not a criminal. I didn’t steal a car. I didn’t sell heroin, or steal an old
lady’s purse. I built a quantum fusion reactor in 1978, and an orbital plasma
gun in 1979, and a giant laser-eyed robot in 1984. I tried to conquer the world
and almost succeeded, twelve times and counting.
When they take me away, it goes to the World Court-technically I’m a sovereign
power. You’ve seen these trials-the Elemental, Rocking Horse, Dr. Stonehenge.
They put you in a glass and steel box. I’m still dangerous, you know, even
without my devices. People stare at you; they can’t believe what you look like.
They read out the long list of charges, like a tribute. There isn’t really a
trial-it’s not like you’re innocent. But if you’re polite, then at the end
they’ll let you say a few words.
They’ll ask questions. They’ll want to know why. "Why did you … hypnotize
the president?" "Why did you … take over Chemical Bank?"
I’m the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought
battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with
their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the
Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to
pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the
dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing
he could with his life.
I stand by the door in a ring of armed men while my cell is checked by three
specialists with a caseful of instruments. From the tiers come yells, shouts of
encouragement, or catcalls. They want to see a show. Then I march, past their
eyes, followed by two men in partial armor with bulky high-tech side arms. They
have to wait until I pass before their morning lineup.
There’s a lot of prison talk about my powers. Inmates believe my eyes can emit
laser beams, that my touch is electrical or poisonous, that I come and go as I
please through the walls, that I hear everything. People blame things on
me-stolen silverware and doors left unlocked. There is even, I note with pride,
a gang named after me now: the Impossibles. Mostly white-collar criminals.
I’m allowed to mingle with the general population at mealtimes and in the
recreation yard, but I always have a table to myself. I’ve fooled them too many
times by speed or misdirection. By now they know to serve my food in paper
dishes, and when I turn in my tray they count the plastic utensils, twice. One
guard watches my hands as I eat; another checks under the table. After I sit
down, they make me roll up my sleeves and show my hands, both sides, like a
magician.
Look at my hands. The skin’s a little cool-about 96.1 degrees F., if you’re
curious-and a little rigid: a shirt with extra starch. That skin can stop a
bullet; it stopped five of them in my latest arrest as I ran up Seventh Avenue
in my cape and helmet, sweating through the heavy cloth. The bruises are still
there, not quite faded.
I have a few other tricks. I’m strong, much stronger than should be possible for
a mammal my size. Given time and inclination, I could overturn a semi, or rip an
ATM out of a wall. I’m not a city-wrecker, not on my own. When Lily and I worked
together, she handled that part of it. I’m mostly about the science. That’s my
main claim to life in the Special Containment Wing, where everything down to the
showerheads is either titanium or set two inches deep in reinforced concrete.
I’m also faster than I should be-something in the nerve pathways changed in the
accident.
Every once in a while a new prisoner comes after me, hoping to make his
reputation by breaking a prison-made knife against my ribs, a stolen pencil, or
a metal spoon folded over and sharpened. It happens at mealtimes, or in the
exercise yard. There is a premonitory hush as soon as he steps into the magic
circle, the empty space that moves with me. The guards never step in-maybe it’s
policy, to alienate me from the prison population, or maybe they just enjoy
seeing me pull the trick, proof again that they’re guarding the
fourth-most-infamous man alive. I straighten a little in the metal chair, set my
single plastic spoon down on the folding table.
After the whip crack of the punch, there is silence, ringout, the sighing
collapse. The heap of laundry is carried away and I’ll be left alone again until
the next tattooed hopeful makes his play. Inside, I want to keep going, keep
fighting until the bullets knock me down, but I never do. I’m smarter than that.
There are stupid criminals and there are smart criminals, and then there is me.
This is so you know. I haven’t lost any of what I am, my intrinsic menace, just
because they took away my devices, my tricks, and my utility belt. I’m still the
brilliant, the appalling, the diabolical Doctor Impossible, damn it. And yes, I
am invincible.
All superheroes have an origin. They make a big deal of it, the story of how
they got their powers and their mission. Bitten by a radioactive bug, they fight
crime; visited by wandering cosmic gods, they search for the lost tablets of
so-and-so, and avenge their dead families. And villains? We come on the scene,
costumed and leering, colorfully working out our inexplicable grudge against the
world with an oversized zap gun or cosmic wormhole. But why do we rob banks
rather than guard them? Why did I freeze the Supreme Court, impersonate the
Pope, hold the Moon hostage?
I happen to know they’ve got practically nothing in my file. A few old aliases,
newspaper clippings, testimony from a couple of old enemies. A transcript from
the Peterson School, and of course the accident report. The flash was visible
for miles. That’s what people talk about when they talk about who I am, a nerd
with an attitude and subpar lab skills. But there was another accident, one that
nobody saw, a slow disaster that started the morning I arrived there. Nowadays
it has a name, Malign Hypercognition Disorder. They’re trying to learn about it
from me, trying to figure out whose eyes are going to be looking out at them
from behind a mask in thirty years.
I have a therapist here, "Steve," a sad-eyed Rogerian I’m taken to see twice a
week in a disused classroom. "Do you feel angry?" "What did you really want to
steal?" The things I could tell him-secrets of the universe! But he wants to
know about my childhood. I try to relax and remind myself of my situation-if I
kill him, they’ll just send another.
It could be worse-there are stories villains tell one another about the secret
facilities out in the Nevada desert, the maximum-intensity enhanced containment
facilities, for the ones they catch but are truly afraid of, the ones they can’t
kill and can only barely control. Fifty-meter shafts filled with concrete,
frozen cells held to near absolute zero. Being here means playing a delicate
game-I’m in the lion’s jaws. I mustn’t scare them too badly. But Steve has his
questions. "Who was the first one to hit you?" "When did you leave home?" "Why
did you want to control the world? Do you feel out of control?" The past creeps
in, perils of an eidetic memory.
It’s a danger in my line of work to tell too much; I know that now. And last
time I told them everything, giving it all away like a fool, how I was going to
do it, how escape was impossible. And they just listened, smirking. And it would
have worked, too. The calculations were correct.
By the time the bus came that morning, it was raining pretty hard, and the world
was a grayed-out sketch of itself, the bus a dim hulk as it approached, the only
thing moving. Inside the bus shelter, the rain drummed hollowly on the plastic
ceiling, and my glasses were fogging up. It was 6:20 a.m., and my parents and I
were standing, stunned and half-awake, in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s
in Iowa.
I knew that it was a special morning and that I should be feeling something,
that this was one of the Big Events in a person’s life, like marriage or a bar
mitzvah, but I had never had a Big Event and I didn’t know what it was supposed
to be like. An hour earlier, my alarm had gone off; my mother stuffed me into a
scratchy sweater that was starting to itch in the late September warmth. We
trooped out to the car and drove through the gray, silent town, the deserted
city center, and turned into the lot by the mighty I-80. When my mother cut the
engine, there were a few seconds of silence as we listened to the rain rapping
on the ceiling. Then my father said, "We’ll wait with you at the bus stop." So
we dashed across the steaming asphalt to the Plexiglas shelter. The rain sizzled
down and cars and trucks swooshed by, and we stood there. Maybe someone said
something.
I was thinking about how that fall everything would start without me at Lincoln
Middle School. In a few days, everyone I knew would be meeting their new
teachers, and the accelerated math class would be starting geometry, doing
proofs. In June, we had gotten a letter from the Iowa Department of Education,
offering to send me to a new school they were starting called the Peterson
School of Math and Science. The year before, they gave a standardized test
during homeroom, and everyone who scored in the top half a percentile got a
letter. They gave me a talk about whether I would miss my friends or Mr.
Reynolds, my math teacher.
I told them I would go. I didn’t think about how weird it was going to be,
waiting for a bus with my clothes in bags. The kids at school would remember me
as the kid who never talked, who drew weird pictures and always wore the same
clothes, and cried when he dropped his lunch, who was supposed to be reallyfa
good at math…. Whatever happened to him? Where did he disappear to?
The bus pulled in; a man got out and checked the fistful of signed forms I held
out to him, then threw my bags into the compartment that opened in the metal
side. My parents hugged me, and I climbed the steps into a warm darkness that
smelled of strangers’ breath. I walked unsteadily into the dimly fluorescent-lit
space, glimpsing faces passing in rows, until I found a pair of empty seats just
as the bus roared and pulled out of the parking lot. I remembered to look for a
last glimpse of my parents watching me leave, then we surged up the on-ramp and
into through traffic. Suddenly I hated the sopping morning and the impersonal
helpfulness of my parents, always a little held back, as if they were afraid to
know me; and I was glad to be gone, glad to have no part of them, to be where no
one knew me, away from the quiet of their house, their self-restraint. I had a
dim inner vision of myself rising up in flame.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Soon I Will Be Invincible
by Austin Grossman
Copyright © 2007 by Austin Grossman.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Pantheon
Copyright © 2007
Austin Grossman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-42486-1
