Big Superhero Action (8 page)

“R
eally?” the Halo said in that whine that had been trendy for five minutes but she was committed to bringing it back.

Alphaville. It was a dull grimy sunrise after making their nighttime superhero circuit and now the Halo and JKM were walking up to an unnatural wonder.

JKM grunted, “What?”

“Suicide by biker gang?”

“Bullshit.”

“You didn’t care about living.”

“I stay ready for death if it comes.”

“There’s that and there’s seeking it out.”

“Being a superhero is a high-risk occupation.”

The Halo switched off her tiara. She switched it back on.

“I can do that with my remote now.”

“Good for you.”

“I’d rather have nylons that never ran.”

The Halo looked down at her legs in those high boots. The short skirt under which hung the post-disco pre-opera. Softened by hormones her face looked less like Pete Wentz but she kept his hairdo and the mascara. She had changed her name from
Princess Glimmer
to
the Halo
to be taken more seriously. She looked over JKM’s muscular build that was only partially augmented by the chest plating. The guns were real, pumped and massive. His body was broad with upper body training, striding upon broad, muscled thighs. His hair was stark white in a box-shaped crew cut
.

They were the only people out at that hour, in a lot between two tenements where the wheelchair mountain stood, abandoned wheelchairs were piled thirty feet. That was where The Corpus marked his territory.

“You are taking this way too seriously,” the Halo said.

“We’re superheroes.”

“We’re only in this to reach The Corpus.”

“Maybe earning virtue is the way to do it.”

“Please. By getting killed by a biker gang?”

“Should we not be worthy?”

“We have enough issues.”

“We fucking have more issues than TV Guide.”

“So who needs to get killed by a biker gang? Not me.”

They reached the wheelchair mountain, stopped, gazed up at the crooked pile.

“Be honest,” JKM said. “Am I desecrating the name of Jack Kirby? The man was a god. Sometimes even I think I went too far.”

“Don’t ask me, I’m a Dan Clowes person. Dan Clowes from the neck up, Robert Crumb in the thighs. My thighs are huge.”

“I like your big thighs.”

“Gee thanks.”

“Look, I wasn’t trying to suicide.”

“I know. It’s the testosterone. It makes you go too far sometimes.”

“Anyway what would you do without me? We’re a team. I’ll never let you be in danger.”

“Please. I could go solo. I can handle myself, okay? I can do my thing.”

“I know but don’t waste it on street thugs, let me do it.”

The Halo took his arm.

He said, “Are you crying?”

“Golly,” she said. “Wheelchair Mountain is so movingly iconic.”

“For the past year we’re out here every fucking day yet we never get close to him. Either he’s somewhere out of the city or if he’s in the city we only hear about him like Bigfoot sightings. Last week he was seen in Alphaville performing street surgeries. He did heart surgery on the hood of a car. Do you believe this guy? Do you believe us? But he could make us real.”

For the Halo a lot had become hard to believe over two years. Meeting JKM…becoming a kind of couple….becoming a superhero like him…with him becoming a superhero team. Taking up a real personal crusade: The Corpus. It had been a year since The Corpus was a guest on
The Cape Report
. The Halo had been waiting for that podcast, marked it on her calendar, Post-It noted it on her PC. Then she was listening to his Greek accent, picturing the Silver Surfer-ish nude white marble-skinned bald Greek statue that was The Corpus.

Clark Kant: The Corpus then is a body of knowledge?

The Corpus: Yes. I gave it the name of the historical Greek Corpus. It stores the knowledge and directs me.

So the power is in the technique or is it a power?

You are making a fine distinction. Is it the Christ-like power to heal? No. The Corpus uses surgical technique so advanced it can be done without instruments and is so quickly performed it has the appearance of healing powers. The Corpus uses advanced science that generates the instant regeneration of cells and tissue. The Corpus is based on science so advanced it seems like a superpower. Just as if a doctor today went back to primitive times he would look like he had superpowers. And maybe he would. And maybe I do. But it isn’t me pointing at a cripple and having the power to make them walk. The power is the knowledge of the technique for repairing the spinal cord with a two minute massage.

Can you restore youth?

No. The Corpus only covers what can be done medically. Medical science. There’s no medical way to restore youth or stop the aging process. So far. I hear Xoir has done that but I’m not a super scientist.

What celebrity would you most like to heal?

Muhammad Ali…Larry Flynt…Stephen Hawking…

Would you go to them except you have no powers outside Brutalia?

Apparently not. But there have been inquiries made my way.

Do you ever get a break?

I go outside the city, The Corpus disappears and I’m…it’s like going back a thousand years.

I couldn’t imagine it.

There is too much work to do everywhere. So no, I need the break. The Corpus…you need a break from it. So I leave Brutalia and I’m back to having one brain instead of a thousand brains.

We need to take this to the larger world. Is that the goal?

I can’t do all the work. The goal is to find a way to spread the power to others. But I could no more share this or teach this than I could teach geometry in a language I do not know to a blade of grass.

Do you stipulate who gets the benefit of your powers?

I only heal the good. And the innocent.

That rules out joining the OSD.

That rules out joining AXIS too. I don’t use The Corpus for fascists.

Two sides, both power freaks.

I say never follow anyone who cannot heal your ills. Anyone else is a power freak. There has never been a so-called leader who offered anything of worth to the people they want to lead. They are afraid one day I will lead the people. They know if I ever did their day will be over.

Will you ever create a movement to lead the people?

I am not leader of people. But I do like to keep the fascists nervous.

THIS INTERRUPTION IN INTERNET ACCESS WILL LAST APPROXIMATELY THIRTY MINUTES AS A SECURITY MEASURE TAKEN BY AXIS. AXIS IS GOOD
.

Everything went dead. AXIS had picked that moment to shut down the Internet just to show its power.

Today in grimy daylight JKM said, “Fuck AXIS.”

The Halo said, “Fascist asshole Nazis. And OSD is just as bad.”

“They can’t get to him. That happens they control his powers. That can’t happen.”

“I know. But are we…enough to stop them?”

“We find him,” JKM said. “We protect him. That takes superheroes.”

I
nside the city of Brutalia the OSD was headquartered in the 77-story OSD Towerplex. It had proven impregnable to the U.S. armed forces. Nuclear warheads had dissolved against the tower surface. You felt secure there.

Dr. Playground’s indestructible exoframe activated itself, the white light went on, hit the gleaming surfaces. There were two types of supervillain, the Lex Luthor/Joker type and the Darth Vader/Dr. Doom model. One was villainous, the other villainous and the most powerful motherfucker in the room. Dr. Playground’s exoframe was made with better comfort design than a warm bed while it made Darth Vader’s suit look like a string bikini. It was indestructible and better armed than a third world country. Dr. Playground could level four city blocks or strangle a mosquito. The face plate was a screen that flashed ghost-like a face. This week it was a mash-up of black eye-patched Emilio Largo, the villain in
Thunderball,
with the Wizard of the 1939 MGM
Wizard of Oz
. The synthetic voice made James Earl Jones sound like Jennifer Tilly. The exoframe was neuropedically connected to his brain and nerves. Its “face” changed with every twitch of his mood. The face image darkened.

Across from him sat Xoir. Born 1932. By age sixteen she had earned a doctorate in psychiatry from Columbia. At twenty she had been a Yale graduate reinventing neurosurgery. By thirty she had taken to esoteric projects in the field of aging reversal. Today she permanently appeared to be age 36. Brutalia was the next frontier. It had advanced her scientific work to a 23rd Century level. She became a masked and costumed supervillain named Xoir. Then Communications Director of the Order of Social Domination.

Once a week they met for the weekly recap of OSD operations.

“You’re not going to like the weekly recap, Doctor.”

“I already didn’t like the week. But we still earned. Go.”

“The Blue Boss took down the Customizers. He gave Sonny Ditlow to the PD. Both he and Man Mafia 3 are under indictment for the eight murders. Martian Justice wiped out an entire outlaw biker gang in one night, the Motorchrists. Both superheroes are out of commission until next month. That makes two big ones down. By now the carousel is thinning out.”

“That’s two AXIS strikes,” Dr. Playground said. “One has no effect on OSD, taking out the Motorchrists only drained the free agent pool. The Customizers go to Man Mafia 4. I want a dead AXIS member in two days.”

“We have no members identified.”

“Still only Milo Spector?”

“Yes.”

“Still no known friends or associates?”

“No.”

“Then we need to fucking find one in two fucking days.”

“Done.”

“Where’s the twink?”

“A sighting or two of a flight or two. One account of Chase Juniper rescuing a suicidal gay teen in Massachusetts. The teen was about to go off a bridge when Chase spotted him, intervened.”

“Why can’t a gay commit suicide by jumping?”

“Why?”

“Because he never reaches the ground.”

Xoir gave that a dutiful smirk.

He said, “I am not happy with Her Blue Majesty. Why him? Where’s his technology? Obviously he has it by accident. Ask him how he passes through the Brutalia Limit he couldn’t tell you to save his life, poor little fucker. Even with the laser beam slowly cutting the table towards his crotch. Yet he has the key. Confirmed.”

“If he doesn’t know,” Xoir speculated, “then the reason may be biochemical. Or genetic. Or any of the physical causes related to the ability to fly. We may not be asking him
why
as what he eats. We may need him wired to machines we haven’t invented. For years.”

“We have to find him before AXIS does.”

“We find him. We recruit him hopefully. We seduce him. Create positive association with OSD. Make him head of Homodevious Operations.”

“We seduce him by putting him on the map,” Dr. Playground decided. “We up his stock. Put the footage out. Debut him as the next superhero.”

“He needs a name.”

“Any ideas?”

“Well…since he’s still in the picture…and he’s in a picture… his name is The Kid in the Picture. How’s that?”

“You have a way with names. That’s our Hitler.”

“Done.”

“The boy is so exquisitely beautiful I don’t know whether to pimp him, recruit him, or kill him. Not that it has to be multiple choice. He’s hot enough for Dr. Playground. But a little old.”

O
nce a month Xoir liked to awake nude with a holosynthetic Salvador Dali painting her.

“Lightly,” she said, parting her thighs. “Like a dove.”

Dali put down his brush and his mustaches lowered between her thighs. The holosynth would be faded out by the time she got out of bed. She designed them to her need for power affirmation, queued at random. She could awake to Pablo Picasso up all night painting her while she was asleep. She could awake inside a closed set where the bloated middle aged Orson Welles was filming her sleep. She could awake beside a nude Sylvia Plath rescued from suicide by her sexual magnetism.

She got out of bed, crossed the floor-to-ceiling view of downtown Brutalia, went to the bathroom suite. Two hours later she was dressed and headed to her office suite one floor above her home suite.

The nerve center of her office suite was surrounded by 15 screens. Her software-accurate videotape-like memory storage and retrieval capability had been better than having 15 screens, her superior autobiographical memory recording every moment of her life from an inexact point in utero during the third trimester. She had kept zero records, zero files. Her brain had the storage capacity of a PC. Until the year 2000. Every memory to that year had been encrypted from retrieval. Her response was her invention of neuropedic science, her invention of the neuropedix to unencrypt her pre-2000 memory banks. It was an ongoing project that could take the rest of her life to complete. If the memory was gone, the super scientist skill set remained only now it was like practicing unlearned magic.

Her other role was as Dr. Playground’s analyst. Her specialty was superheroes. After superheroes there was no going back to the ordinary patient. For their sessions he wore no exoframe. The psyche of Simon Stranko was equally psychiatry and archeology. He appreciated the irony of the patient-on-the-couch cliché applied to a supervillain. What had been determined about him so far: he was neither pedophiliac nor homosexual. But he had a strong attraction to acquiring the orientation of pedophilia. Mentally she reviewed the later part of their last session.

“I need to be something don’t I?” he said in his corrupt sense of playfulness. “At least allow me to talk like a pedophile. You should have made me one by now.”

“Rebuilding your sexuality takes time.”

“It takes strength to be a pedophile. If I had to be something, I would pick that. So I picked that. My psyche is waiting. Let’s go.”