in the kingdom of boredom, I wear the royal sweatpants

—Mark Lyner

JUNE 19

Dear Diary

Rain today, as per the program I've inputted into the weather control device. It's a balmy 72º wherever people congregate, while areas with less human activity have temperatures more suited to their particular flora and fauna. For example, I've been keeping the Amazon at about 98º with about an inch of average daily rainfall, and I've heard nothing but good things from the natives. In fact they sent me a basket full of those hissing cockroaches, and at first I was so incensed that I threw it against the wall (Right against Guernica! Damn my temper!) and was going to use the weather machine to raze the whole river basin to ash with ball lightning until Karen pointed out that that the damn things are considered delicacies to them. (She was embedded with them during a tiff with loggers) As you can imagine I was mortified and called the bots to clean up up, but of course the damn things tend to scatter and Karen's sure there'll be a million before the week's out.

Karen.

If I'm brutally honest with myself, the whole reason I've been calibrating and recalibrating the weather control machine is just to avoid Karen, God knows it can function perfectly on it's own, I doubt I could design anything to work imperfectly if I tried. [note to self: create something intentionally flawed; a new project???] Karen would rather fellate a red hot poker than speak with me and she's been good enough to remind me of this each time we meet, but still, we are the only two people in Castle Malevolence save for the eunuch guards, and loneliness can be a powerful motivator. At least that's what I was counting on. I'm starting to wish that I hadn't cut the guards tongues' out as well. [prosthetic tongues? Investigate!]

JUNE 23

Dear Diary

Huge mistake today, though I'd be lying if I said it was entirely my fault. I don't give interviews as a rule, since the only thing worse than sitting still while a sub-mental questions genius like it's the most natural thing in the world are those damn pre-prepared “What's it like being the unquestioned ruler of the earth?” fluff pieces, but I just had to get out of the house. (impenetrable titanium fortress, what have you) I'd finally gotten Karen to sit down and watch a Kristoph Kieslowski film (La double vie de Véronique) but my successes stopped there. “What's going on? I don't understand. You actually enjoy this? When is something going to happen?” I ended up stalking out of the media room twenty minutes in, and instead of sneaking around the Castle Malevolence avoiding her like I'm a prisoner in her home instead of vice versa, I accepted one of the invitations that had been piling up on my hard drive and took the Malevomobile to New York for a taping with Charlie Rose. There's no love lost between me and any media figure, but at least the man's never interviewed Paris Hilton. In a way I'm still glad I went, despite what happened on Lexington Avenue. It's easy to lose perspective if you're always operating out of a fortress the size of Rhode Island that's shaped like a skull and normally rolling across the ocean floor. I know that I should probably move to the Malevolence Palace one of these days, that it's just sitting there where Mount Everest used to be with my laser-etched face visible from space. But again.

Karen.

I can't remove Captain Forever's invulnerable carcass from the walls without appearing weak, but I can't have her drinking bleach again either. I had to use my last metahuman to resurrect her, and she still says everything has an aftertaste like cleaning solution, though she could be lying to bother me. [Give her prosthetic tongue? Would it dampen the triumph when she finally kisses me?]

But I've wandered off topic again. It's an occupational hazard, when a mind moves as fast as mine.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed piloting the Malevomobile, even if the stupid name I gave it in headier days has stuck to it like the Permagel that always failed to incapacitate Captain Forever back then. The steady hum of the Casmir drive reminded me of the first primitive antigravity device I built in my garage, my unparalleled exhilaration when I realized that it really worked, that I wasn't just another malcontent, I was a malcontent with an antigravity device and I wasn't afraid to use it, ergo I was a Supervillain, this realization coming immediately before the device shot through the garage roof and floated off into the sky.

By my calculations it should have reached Jupiter by now.

It's hard (even for me) to express the mixed feelings unfolding in me as I floated over the world that had been re-forged in the crucible of my will, rescued from the fallen nightmare of the past to be the closest thing to perfection any place inhabited by humans could be said to be. The acres and acres filled with my genetically perfect hybrid crops became blurs of flowing color as I accelerated past a thousand kilometers per hour. (the last holdouts against the Metric system having been vanquished by yours truly, you're welcome) Every river and port assiduously combed by the man-sized pulsing green jellyfish of my cleaner droids as they dutifully converted every speck of pollution into materials for maintaining the ecosystem. The carbon fiber modules of my skytrams poised over the continents and oceans in alien sculptures of spun glass, with each supersonic tram speeding along its axis with the fluid grace of a raindrop running down a spiderweb filament.

I gave them paradise. And they hate me for it.

An entire world of resentful, intransigent, JEALOUS Karens who don't know what to do when they're unmoored from their suffering.

I tell you, I understand why God kept withdrawing his grace from the tribes of Israel, the grim satisfaction that fictional deity took in watching his chosen languish in exile, tear their clothes and beg his favor. I swear: If I—The Doctor Malevolence, unquestioningly the ultimate product of human evolution [have personal stationary reprinted with that legend]—can't think of a reason to spare them, can anyone?

But that came later. I emerged from the clouds I'd made to color my commute and saw New York in all its resplendent, remade glory. Interlocking towers of crystal colored the landscape in multifarious shades of of light and shadow as the Smartglass tinted itself in accordance with the sun's every shift to save the electricity generated by my ocean thermal energy converters.

I used to draw cities like this on my notebook during Advanced Calculus to keep from going insane with boredom. Strange how achieving the one thing you've dedicated your life to can seem so unreal, like a bubble that could pop at any moment.

And pop it did. My first mistake was not changing the Malevomobile's landing cycle from my days as an active supervillain. The Casmir drive uses a mechanism of my own design to convert energy into motion directly so there's no sound, and since I use Helium 3 as an energy source there are no byproducts except Helium 4. The thing is if you arrive in a floating car with your face on it with no accompanying visual flourish or sound effects, each person tends to think they're the only one who sees you. To this end I installed a smoke machine to pump out noxious black smog and a sound system to expel a noise of my own creation that I cobbled together from a Lion's roar, bending steel, and a Scandinavian Drone Metal song called Dëcomposure Pt 2. That landing cycle was responsible for some of my best entrances ever. (A good entrance is a must in my profession, since supervillain exits almost always involve a savage beating and handcuffs. They did, anyway.) Alas, in the course of complete world domination a thing or two tends to slip one's mind, so my landing on Lexington Avenue's new car-free boulevard induced a needless wave of horror and panic.

My second mistake was not just barreling through the pedestrians into the building. There were a couple reasons I let myself be surrounded. Part of it was just habit, I'm used to pausing when I exit the Malevomobile so I can strike an imposing figure. Part of it came from confidence. I didn't think random people would attack the man who crucified Mr. Excellence on a cross of burning plasma. Part of it was being overwhelmed by the presence of such a sheer mass of humanity after the huge, empty passages of Castle Malevolence.

They inched toward me, a few individuals at first, then a wave of people, all of them like Karen. I'd forgotten there were so many, all of them so small and frantic. One of them dipped into a pocket and withdrew a wallet, then a picture.

“This is Alex.” It said. “Your robots took him during the Great Cull.”

“I don't see you giving up the space and lifestyle its afforded you.” Saying that was my third mistake. In a moment there was another hand with another picture.

“This is Amellie. She was killed when you decimated France after they refused to cede their sovereignty.”

“This is Walter. He was collateral damage during your last battle with Titanus.”

“This Casey. She went with the rest of Toronto when your antimatter containment field ruptured.”

“This is Roger. You ripped his spine out and fed it to him because he sneezed during your inaugural address.”

“I was TRYING to create a MOMENT!” Saying that was my last mistake. Like an explosion they were suddenly everywhere, graduation photos, driver's license photos, baby photos, baptism photos, birthday photos, a million moments in a million lives waving at me from paper and solenoid and camera and phone, demanding my attention.

“...burned...”

“...disintegrated...”

“...torn...”

“...mangled...”

“...atomized...”

“...spaced...”

“...experimented...”

“STOP!” When you've lived by your reflexes as much as I hav

There's really no point in sugarcoating it. I opened the portal attached to my right palm, the one whose other end is in low orbit around Betelgeuse, and the resulting outflow of ionized particles and solar wind destroyed two city blocks. The resulting radioactive fallout, I'm sure, will kill many more.

In retrospect I should have just walked to my destination and done the interview like that was something I do every day. Instead I got into the Malevomobile and drove back here as fast as I could, nearly burning out the motor trying to outrace a smell like burnt offal and a sound like a glass organ playing Bach's requiem as it shatters.

I hope Karen's happy with herself.

[Set the weather control machine for heavy rain over Manhattan. That should mitigate some of the fallout.]

JUNE 29

Dear Diary

In 1918 the so-called “Spanish Flu” killed 500 million people. It proved particularly fatal among the youngest and strongest, because their own immune systems responded so violently to the new strain of influenza virus that it literally destroyed it's own host's lungs in the process of trying to fight off the infection.

An interesting, if not mind-blowing bit of trivia. The difference between a normal human mind and my genius intellect is that I re-imagine and reapply data like this.

Think of the laws of physics as the universe's immune defense, a self-regulating system that keeps reality from destroying itself. One of the rules of this system is The Universe Tends Toward Stuff. Be it space, matter, or time, the universe hates it when there simply isn't anything there and desperately tries to fill the void with something, which leads to things like the unsurpassed hunger of a black hole. What I've done with my portal system is create a kind of quantum mechanical retrovirus for the universe's immune system that exploits the young, strong Milky Way galaxy's tendency to overcompensate in response to a perceived threat. By injecting a particular quantity of my very own specially designed Cate Radiation (itself a reengineered strain of Hawking Radiation) into a particular portion of space I can cause the laws of physics to panic and attempt to shut down a perceived threat to reality's fabric, thereby creating the very damage in spacetime those laws are trying so hard to prevent. With controlled bursts of Cate Radiation I can orchestrate this process to within an atom's accuracy and thus redistribute matter as I see fit, provided the process doesn't have to be particularly delicate. With this principle I can use a thousand carefully managed portals to move a cold front from Canada to Bolivia, move precipitation from Bangladesh to any drought-ravaged region of Sub-Saharan Africa, pluck up a class 4 Hurricane en route to Indonesia and exile it to the Oort cloud.

You're welcome, human race. You can also thank the same principle for keeping those nasty tectonic plates from shifting and cracking your cities apart like matzo in Samsonman's fist.

Fuck.

One wonders of all the muses are as bitter and unwilling as Karen Cate. When Homer entreated Calliope to grace him with her presence, did she reply “Suck a bag of dicks, Rodney.” as mine does? Minus the “Rodney” part, of course. [Note to self: Have legal name changed to Doctor Malevolence.] [And create new legal process.] Some time ago I resolved not to tell Karen Cate about her incredible namesake until such a time as she would be capable of truly understanding what it meant historically, scientifically, and emotionally. I've long since settled for trying to just make her understand what radiation is. I rewrote reality itself for her, dragged God kicking and screaming out of heaven, split the firmament and vivisected the multiverse's rabid, jabbering metaconsciousness so I could bring forth what mere chance and luck had failed to produce. I surfed across space and time like a flea skipping across a neverending ocean of boiling mercury and I CROSSED IT! I STORMED THE SHORES OF FOREVER, NOT THAT PATHETIC CAPTAIN!

“What?” She mumbles, looking up from the Hossenfeffer with Bearnaise Sauce I spent five hours cooking from scratch and she's been slowly murdering with an oyster fork, having yet to take a bite. “I wasn't listening.” My speech having fallen flat yet again, I pick up the throne I knocked over when I sprang to my feet and return to my meal. I don't have to eat, I rendered caloric intake obsolete when I modified my body to photosynthesize from the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, but I go through the motions so as not to be rude. Another wasted gesture.

“You're not even going to try it?” I say.

“Everything tastes like bleach.” She mumbles, staring through the Nicolas Poussin on the south wall.

“How do you know if you haven't tasted it?” Eyes majestic with undiluted hatred slowly swivel and stay on me as she violently jams her fork into the meat and forces a piece the size of a dust mote through her scowl. She spits it out and sweeps her plate off the table.

“Bleach!” She cries, hurling the word like a grenade.

“At least your manners have improved.” I say as the cleaning bots scuttle across the floor to Karen's mess like crows converging on roadkill. “Normally that plate would be directed at my skull.” Turned out she was just waiting for the cleaning bots to show up. Invulnerability or no, you never really know just how pointy something is until an irate woman hurls it at your head with uncanny accuracy.

This is victory? This is what I get for being the better man?

At least in the old days it was fun. Sure, it would always end with Captain Forever punching my head into solid concrete again and again until I was more ostrich than man and then I'd go to metahuman prison and get raped in the shower by that thing from that thing from the fifth dimension, (at least that's what it was trying to do, I don't think it understood human anatomy very well) but there was always that one transcendent moment when it truly seemed like I'd pulled it off. I'd break or phase through the wall of the Daily Clarion, scoop Karen Cate up in a robot arm, teleport her to the phantom zone, or transmogrify her into an ocelot, then Captain Forever would show up and the fun would begin. In a world of proud mediocrity Captain Forever and Doctor Malevolence were the only ones who could challenge one another. Throw in the fact that we both loved the same woman and it's almost enough to make you believe in fate. Even Karen seemed to accept to her role with unequivocal acumen. I daresay after a week spent covering the gangland murders, crushing poverty, casual abuse, irredeemable corruption and third world hellscapes Captain Forever was so content to ignore, being trapped in an artificial paradise outside time and space was a welcome change of pace for her. I'll admit she was much more peasant to be around when she had an unswaying belief that Captain Forever would eventually rescue her. She even deigned to flirt with me from time to time, if only to make him jealous. Nothing I did could ever hurt her. I'd drop her off a skyscraper and she'd disappear though the clouds with a smile on her face like a Cheshire cat. Then her boyfriend would kick my ass, and we'd start over next week.

We had a system and it worked. I guess you could say it was my fault for breaking the rules.

You'd be wrong, but you could.

July 5

Dear Diary

Judgment day today, set the weather machine to reflect an appropriate mood of somber awe. If my calculations are correct (they are) the skytrams will come out of the clouds just as they come within the perfect distance to be overawed by the Malevolence Palace. At the last minute I decided my nose was too big and spent an hour sucking energy off of Bangalore's grid so I could shave it down with a precision laser, but I did it one to many times and my mountainous countenance ended up looking like the Sphinx. Not all is bleak though, it gave me the idea to have everyone requesting an audience answer a riddle before they enter. That should nip any morons or looky-loos in the bud.

I've left Karen at Castle Malevolence. I keep telling her that she'll be free if she can puzzle out the keypad sequence to the control room, but her guesses are pathetic. It's the Fibonacci sequence. How hard is that? I've even left copies of my diaries lying around, wherein I say it's the damn Fibonacci sequence! Is it possible she doesn't even know what the corresponding numbers are? [Look into repurposing intelligence enhancement surgery for use on K.C.]

No, I won't let that woman consume my thoughts today. These people were good enough to come to Malevolence Palace, answer the riddle and brave the labyrinth. (a last minute addition) My governing supercomputers may be infallible, but I conquered them, so I might as well listen to what they have to say. Wish me luck, silent companion.

July 6

Dear Fucking Diary

Bullshit! Bullshit! BULLSHIT!

July 7

Dear Diary

I apologize for yesterday's outburst. As you've no doubt surmised, Judgment Day was less than a civil and honorable exchange of thoughts.

For one thing, my first petitioner blew himself up. He sauntered through the Arch of Constantine I'd appropriated for the entrance to my reception chamber and without so much as a how-do-you-do or Allah-Akbar he exploded, killing himself along with a sizable amount of guards both human and automaton, not to mention covering me in nails and rat poison in the process. I'd bring him back to life and torture him to death if I had any metahuman prisoners left to power the graviton/tachyon reacceleration matrix. [rearrange, rename to make catchy acronym, LAZARUS or something] Of course canceling Judgment Day would've just been capitulation, so I called in some maintenance guys to hose the human slurry of the arch's facade and invited in the next petitioner, who simply pulled out a MAC-10 and began spraying bullets in my general direction.

One of the byproducts of filling your mind with lofty concerns like bettering the human condition and generating a unified field theory is that sometimes petty earthly concerns just slip past you. Petty earthly concerns like screening and searching people before they come face to face with the emperor of the globe.

I'll admit that it was spite that led me to invite everyone else in at once, then just sit there and watch as they all tried and failed to kill me, then settled for killing each other. It was a colorful microcosm of the world before my ascendance. It was also very depressing.

That reminds me, I didn't have anybody clean up the remains. It must be pretty rank in there by now.  

 

July 19

Dear Diary

Snow in most places north of the equator today, though not on streets or houses. About four inches of wet with a two inch frosting of powder, ideal for any and all wintertime diversions.

Feeling tired for some reason. Easily rectified by 150mgs of cocaine, administered intravenously.

Perfected the prosthetic tongue. It's arguably better than the organic model. You can program it to make broccoli taste like ice cream, provided you're willing to attach it to your computer via USB cable. (bluetooth coming next year) It holds a thousand songs and has a vibrating function.

I'm not happy.

July 21

Dear Diary

Then again, I never have been. You don't become a supervillain because you want to use your emotional stability as a bulwark to shore up a teetering planet. I can't speak for the Goon Squad or Freakshow or Frigid Bitch, but I became a supervillain because human life seemed eminently perfectible and every flaw was like an air raid siren singing inside my skull, as pathetic and shameless as feces smeared on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. [note to self: outlaw modern art]

I once paired with Condition Mayhem (Was there a colon in his name?) in one of my rare team ups and before he made himself useful as cannon fodder he said something that stuck with me. “All supervillains want revenge, most on themselves.” Of course it doesn't really make sense if you think about it. It's probably that very koan quality that fascinates me. It's enough to make me wish I hadn't pushed him in the particle accelerator, though I can't be blamed for his demise. Usually our kind come back from something like that with improved powers and a new costume.

I took a walk with Karen today. Or rather, I was walking in one direction, Karen happened to be walking in the same direction, and neither of us opted to turn for some time. I asked her if she had enjoyed Phillip Glass' Metamorphosis for piano and she said she didn't get it, she never got anything I gave her. I told her there was nothing to get and she said in that case give me something that can be gotten, next time.

Then she surprised me, which I frankly didn't think her capable of at this point.

“Why me, Rodney?” She looked tired. No, not tired. Weary, I think. Though I could be projecting. “I'm sure there are hundreds of girls who'd be happy to be your slave, or captive, or whatever the hell this is. So why me? Is it because I was with Captain Forever?”

“You call him that.” I said, my own voice sounding strange now while outside bioluminescent fish drifted past the Castle Malevolence's foot-thick windows, their clear skin advertising lambent organs that winked in the inky depths like neon signs promising nude girls or Jesus. “How come I'm still Rodney Rostenkoff but he's still Captain Forever, not Blake Busey?”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to admit that I won. That I beat him. I want you to admit that having a neutron star for a heart wasn't enough to save him from an ordinary mortal who was dedicated and smart.” She laughed, a sound so lyrical its fundamentally scornful quality almost didn't transmit.

“Ordinary?! You're calling yourself ordinary? You're eight feet tall! Your skeleton is titanium, your muscles are carbon fiber nanotubes, your blood is liquid helium, you don't eat, you don't breathe, you don't sleep-”

“I sleep!” I protested, admittedly grasping at straws. “I take ten fifteen minute naps a day. All these supposedly dehumanizing facts you're trotting out are j-just trivia! They're cosmetic! My brain is completely and utterly unchanged. And what right do you have to criticize me for perceived inhumanity? Captain Forever didn't even exist in this dimension in any meaningful sense! He was a hologram resulting from the intersection of two extradimensional hyperplanes, the physical equivalent of someone playing shadowpuppets with a film projector, but that didn't stop you from letting him stuff you like a turkey-” She slapped me, though she couldn't reach my face so her blow ended up glancing off my chest, rendering a pathetic and futile gesture even moreso. I saw it coming, of course. My adrenal implants and endorphin supplements naturally kicked in and slowed my perception of time. I watched her outrage unfold like an instant replay: her eyes widening, her jaw setting, I could practically see the transmission from her brain to her arm telling the nerve fibers to twitch, now flatten the palm, now jerk the elbow.

I leaned down until my face was level with hers, presenting it for further abuse.

“Here.” I held out my positron pistol. “Everyone's been getting their shots in lately. Might as well make yours count. Maybe the antimatter me is everything I'm not.”

She stared at me a moment, then stalked away.

July 22

Dear Diary

Incredible, really. The sheer effort I put in to make my first handheld laser projector was fantastic, ridiculous, the very definition of superhuman. Merely fleshing out the Gaseous Kinetic Energy Phase-Uptake Perpetuation Amplifier required more effort than went into designing St. Peter's basilica, more effort than drafting the American constitution, more effort than Captain Forever put into engineering all those CIA-backed coups against democratically elected governments. (stone, meet glass house) And that's nothing compared to my strangelet projector, which could've unraveled the multiverse like a cheap sweater. All my creations were magnificent, incredible, genius, and very fucking labor intensive. And all of them did absolutely nothing because of Captain Forever's intervention.

Then I bought a gun.

And I conquered the world.

Whoop de fucking do, by the way.

It started after I'd disappeared for two months. I'd built a working Klein bottle in my 4space chamber and, in a moment irrational exuberance, stepped inside. I eventually managed to escape by forcing myself to think in two dimensions, and it was so good to be out of liminal space I jumped right in the Malevomobile to terrorize Captain Forever's friends and loved ones.

I swear, when the walls of her Daily Clarion office disintegrated, her face lit up. In retrospect I probably imagined any expression of relief, but there was real affection on her face. I know that for a fact. The camera I installed on the Malevomobile never yielded any useful tactical data, but it did catch that moment as I hovered outside her office, the autumn sunset painting the city skyline with fire as steam bled off the Malevomoblie's chassis, still sub-zero from tropospheric flight. I'd made perfect entrances before but until then I didn't know the difference it could make when someone gave a shit.

“Where have you been?” She said.

“I could say the same thing. It's not like you came looking for me.”

“What can I say? Sometimes a girl gets used to being chased.” I watched her fellow reporters run away, scattering in the Brownian pattern of animal panic while she reclined at her desk, as immobile as Pygmalion's statue before the gods animated her.

“I'm here now. Chasing you. Are you gonna run?” She laughed.

“Do you want me to?” And then Captain Forever hit me in the head with a fire truck. I fell sixty stories to the pavement below, where I was met by the same man swinging the same fire truck. My recollection is kind of blurred after that, but Karen Cate had been branded into my brain. It wasn't a game anymore, and for reasons I can only describe as irrational, I decided not to treat it as such anymore.

Two days later when I yet again broke out of the Ronald Reagan Metahuman Correctional Facility, I didn't summon the Castle Malevolence out of the sea, didn't don my titanium armor and didn't begin work on a new dastardly scheme. Instead I took the bus to Century City. Two days can be a long time when every iota of your unsurpassed intellect is obsessing on one person, and it can feel much longer when you spend an hour wandering around a metropolis you've never had to navigate at street level before.

“Hi.” I said when I reached her desk and realized I hadn't thought about what I was going to say.

“Hi?” She said, looking up at me. “Oh, you're the, uh, union rep? I thought it was Thursday.”

“Karen, it's me.” She squinted.

“Look, give me a hint, here.”

“I duplicated you, remember? You two fought for awhile, then teamed up against me, then I sent the other you to live in that alternate universe where your parents couldn't conceive?” I'm glad I didn't record what happened next.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I don't know, I just wanted to...”

“Leave. Quietly. Don't make me call him.” It's hard to picture how I must have appeared at the time. I don't have much occasion for outdoor activities, and tend to be on the pale side. Tall, muscular, I cut a nice figure when I'm in full body armor or piloting a giant robot, but in a sweatshirt and jeans I probably look like a mongoloid. We can't all get our power from the warpage of spacetime.

She started walking away from me. I followed.

“Would you at least talk to me?” My pleading, tinny voice. My beaten, sagging posture. When she looked over her shoulder I didn't see outrage or fear or hate. All that was there was disappointment. I could hear him coming then, the rhythmic sonic booms as he went from mach 2 to 3 to 4. Moseying, by his standards.

“Why?” She had me there. My imperiling her and her tolerating it was the only relationship we had. And as long as Captain Forever existed, that was all there ever would be.

He came, and after Karen pointed him in the right direction he beat the shit out of me, though I could tell his heart wasn't in it.

After that I spent a month in jail, mentally perfecting an idea I'd had on the back burner since grad school.

I left.

I built it.

Then I went back to the Century City office of the Daily Clarion, again wearing street clothes, again taking the elevator.

I walked up to Karen Cate's desk, said hello, and shot her in the forehead with the Glock .40 I had purchased across the street for two hundred and ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents, not counting tax.

July 23

Dear Diary

Not sleeping well, troubled by the skittering of cockroaches. At least I think I hear them, cleaner bots report no sightings. I hear the scratching, turn on the light, there's nothing there, and I'm left wondering if I dreamed the sound.

It's the world that suffers. Every extraneous minute added to my sleep schedule is a minute not spent administrating the planet.

My system works, but I've run scenarios, and without a metaconsciousness like mine to multitask and maintain factors that computers are fundamentally incapable of managing, everything collapses. What will happen when I die? Can I curb humanity's self destructive tendencies in the few decades I have left? On the other hand, I could find some way to live forever, but that would mean I'd spend eternity restructuring nutrition and hygiene maximization paradigms in concert with the noninvasive eugenics initiative. I'd be as much a prisoner as Atlas, though perhaps Sisyphus is the more apt comparison.

Any bureaucracy I created to take the pressure off me would just be a step backward, wouldn't it?

Broke down and got a psychiatrist to speak with Karen today, though I got the feeling it was really me Dr. Schlesinger wanted to analyze. Still, I've checked him out and he's good, not one of those true believers that obsessively clings to a single school. His papers are in the behavioral, existential humanist vein. They're competent but not earth-shattering, which shows he's mature enough to forgo the salacious exaggerations and logical leaps so often empolyed to garner attention from colleagues. I asked him when Stockholm Syndrome usually kicks in, and he said he couldn't comment since it was impossible to clinically research, a brave and honest answer. [arrange simulated hostage, kidnapping scenarios to study phenomenon]

I led Karen to my hall of trophies, though it's really more of a storeroom at this point. Only when he was gone did I realize how much Captain Forever had held me in check, how weak and stupid all the other metahumans really were compared to us. Some fell like dominoes, others dropped like flies, but they all kissed dirt sooner or later. By the time Virtueman and Genocide tried teaming up against me it had just gotten pathetic, though (hindsight being 20/20) I wish I'd imprisoned more metahumans to power the graviton/tachyon reacceleration matrix[rename!!] with. At the time I'd just wanted to remove every obstacle to my remaking the world. Consequently I have everything from Dr. Darkness' shroud to Mother Nature's vine whip to Samsonman's hair to Dreamscar's thought goggles to The Kraken's mechanical arms to Omnidame's antigravity girdle to The Traveler's phase suit to Broken Bullet's sonic replicator to MissMystic's razorwand to Mightylad's enchanted asthma medication to that spherical black rock I could never discern the damn use of that Datum the Android Prince carried around. [too dangerous, toss it all into Betelgeuse] I took Karen to Dayknight's display case, punched in the code and gave her his electromagnetic disruptor, an exquisite piece of technology that bathes everything with a circuit in a sea of white noise, thereby ensuring that she'd have complete privacy with her doctor.

I gave the good doctor full access to the synthesizer in case he wanted to prescribe anything, and left them to it in the lounge while I diverted myself with some CAT scans I'd surreptitiously taken of Karen's brain and planned the harder-than-you'd-think intellectual enhancement surgery.

June 25

Dear Diary

The die is cast. The Rubicon is crossed. The anesthetic is general. Now that I actually have her on the table, it strikes me as morally, ethically, scientificly, even aesthetically repulsive to be rebuilding the mind of the woman I love to make her...

What?

Happy?

More like me?

Not that she's left me any alternative.

I've been considering neurological enhancement via physical intervention since I first realized I was a genius. (My third trimester. I'm certain I wasn't cognizant beforehand, that's why I'm pro-choice.) There are 10¹¹ neurons in the average human brain, with each individual neuron having approximately seven thousand connections to its fellow cells, amounting to more synaptic gaps (Where thought actually occurs. Everything that matters happens in the space in between, be it atoms or intelligence.) than there are stars in this universe.

Even with incisions made by a laser firing individual photons guided by a quantum computer...

Well, it's a crap shoot, boys and girls. Intelligence is a gestalt. Each action doesn't have an equal and opposite reaction.

I get to do the surgery anyway, because I'm a supervillain.

Not that I have much of a choice. The eminent Dr. Schlesinger's prescription was 1000mgs of Hydrocodone, which is ten times a fatal dose in patients not tolerant to opiates. Or it would have been, if I hadn't gotten to Karen and flushed her system the moment her session with the doctor was up. It was my fault for hiring a male doctor. Karen exudes an incredible hold on the male of the species, even when she's not trying to. Maybe that's why she loved a man who wasn't human, but I don't have time to wax romantic right now. Her heart stopped, her brain was deprived of oxygen for too long, and I don't have any leftover metahumans to power the graviton/tachyon reacce

Rebirth machine, that'll have to do. I can only hope that the intelligence enhancement procedure will jumpstart her brain, or vice versa. Not very scientific, I know, but as my life proves, none of us are immune to hope's allure.

Time to scrub in.

July 27

Dear Diary

Clear skies.

Thirty hours in surgery, and I'm still not sure what the hell I did.

If she wakes up it worked. If she doesn't it didn't.

July 29

Dear Diary

Fog.

Wildfires in Greece, terrorism in Berlin, middle easterners clashing over borders that no longer exist, not that they ever really did. What do you do when two children are fighting over one toy, refusing to share? You take the toy away. The holy land is now under thirty feet of water. I find myself resorting to gratuitous displays of force more and more often, it seems. This disturbs me, it signals a deficit of imagination on my part.

200Mgs of cocaine, administered intravenously.

No change in Karen's condition.

August 3

Dear Diary

Partly cloudy.

No change. Cat scans read like Rorschach tests.

One liter of 50 proof brandy, administered orally.

August 4

Dear Diary

Windy, humid.

No change.

Two liters of 50 proof brandy adminstered orally. 200Mgs of cocaine, adminstered intravenously.

August 5

Dear Diary

Tears.

No change.

Three swipes of a Gillette razor, administered dermally.

August 6

Dear Diary

Woke up today (long since fell into old sleep patterns) to explosions. Found the Castle Malevolence beached on the Jersey Shore. The control room has been breached. The trophy room has been raided.

Karen Cate's bed is empty.

August ?

Dear Embossed Stationary That Finally Came

“How did you unlock antigravity?”

“How did you make your blink-bots move faster than light?”

“Where did the moon go when you stole it?”

My fellow inmates could have asked me anything during my various stints in correctional institutions, but of course they only wanted to know about Him. Was He really that fast, was He really that strong, was He really that good, was He really that handsome, with the latter coming up unnervingly often.

I don't know what they expected me to say. That he was an ugly, slow, amoral, weakling? No. He was everything they weren't, including happy. And me? As far as they were concerned I was just a sluttier version of them. I was the skinny bitch that monopolized the attention of the star quarterback, the one whose skanky schemes and gaudy death rays obscured their sparkling personalities.

Captain Forever. The Man Of Time. Two species in dimensions we can't imagine made a last, desperate attempt to save their advanced but dying races from the entropic collapse of their respective universes, compressing everything they were and could yet be onto the quantum waveforms of particles we don't have a name for and shooting themselves through the multiverse, both species not knowing that an antimatter version of themselves was doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. The two doomed races, now only recognizable as waves of pulsing light, cascaded through unfolding petals of forever that cradled them in an embrace of pure flowing energy, glowing red as they entered and blue as they left, like quantum traffic lights. Form, space, and time all dilated like the pupil of an eye staring into the sun, bulging pregnantly in five dimensions to accommodate a race who denied annihilation by becoming information, two universes determined to carve themselves into the fabric of forever, each thinking they braved the void alone. Did they see one another before they hit? Could they sense the head-on collision that would mean the mutual erasure of everything they had split reality to preserve? Could they feel it when matter met antimatter, when atom met antiatom?

My theory is they planned it all along. When matter meets antimatter they convert one another to energy, and that's it. A new form of consciousness doesn't move in a direction that didn't exist 10⁻³⁷

seconds ago and project a hologram that travels to the nearest planet with sentient life, models itself after it, and starts writing wrongs. People like to say that Captain forever was a miracle, but miracles are just physical laws we don't understand yet. The multiverse is a magnificent, ridiculous place, and the only people who insist on calling Eternity's Champion a miracle are those who think reality has to conform to their own pathetic lack of imagination.

When the two particle streams met in our galaxy, the resulting wave of energy destroyed the constellation Ursa Major and rewrote the heavens, though it would take seventy eight years for the light heralding The Son Of Infinity's arrival to reach us.

I was seventeen at the time and in the Scottsdale County Mental Health Facility. I was under twenty four hour suicide watch, which means that every night, every hour on the hour, an orderly comes to the room you're sharing with a compulsive masturbator and shines his flashlight right in your fucking face. This is supposed to prevent you from killing yourself.

And they say my worldview is twisted.

So when I was woken up by a bright light I just turned over and tried to dive back into my usual nightmares. (Nothing special. Being chased, falling, drowning.)

Twenty years later and I still don't see what all the hubbub was about. When he came through the wall of the Daily Clarion Karen was still on her feet, the red mark on her forehead emitting a weak tendril of smoke as a few grams of lead tunneled through her frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. He raced to her and then just stopped, letting her fall. In retrospect I wish I'd spoken to my fellow prisoners one more time instead of herding them all into that trash compactor, just so I could finally answer them with what I saw at that moment. Just so I could say that Captain Forever is us. He's meat and more energy than usual. Anything more than that is what we've made him into.

There was no timeline-twisting deus ex machina, no miraculous alien technology, no spelunking in Hades to pull friends and loved ones back into the daylight, no fourth quarter miracles at all. Our only companion was death, the persistent echo of a hollow victory.

“Rodney, how could you? What did she ever do to you?” There was something perverse about seeing such an archetypically all-American face showing real emotion, like a logo breaking out in tears when you chose their competitor's product. His Aryan Übermensch features weren't made for real expressions, his designers hadn't anticipated how he'd change as he lived with us, how he'd absorb our obsessions and frailties.

“Blake, I could give you a thousand answers, but you wouldn't understand them, so I'll just give you the answer I don't understand.” I realized I was still holding the gun and dropped it. “Because I couldn't think of a reason not to.”

“You're sick.”

“I know, and I've long since accepted that. You're the one who can't seem to wrap his head around it.”

“You realize I'm going to have to kill you now.”

“You could. Or you could save her one more time.”

“She's dead.”

“Yes, she is.”

“People don't come back once they're dead.”

“They didn't.” He looked at me for the first time since I'd taken off my 'M' shaped mask and tried to hit on his girlfriend. I realized that he'd never really hated me before, had indulged me to a certain extent as one does an opinionated child. He'd never really had a nemesis before, nemesis coming from the Greek νείμειν , meaning 'to give what is due.' I had taught a perfect creature how to hate, dragged the Son on Heaven down into the shit and mire with the rest of us sinners.

I have to admit, it was pretty gratifying.

At the time, anyway.

Seems kind of Pyrrhic now.

He put Karen in the remotely summoned Malevomobile and flew alongside us as we traveled to the Castle Malevolence, the most bizarre funeral procession in history.

“That's it?” To the untrained eye the tachyon/graviton reacceleration matrix/Rebirth Machine just looks like two rectangular chambers connected to a transformer and several supercomputers because, essentially, that's exactly what it is. Genius always lies in the elegance of simplicity.

“It will work.” I insisted as Captain Forever placed Karen in the east chamber like she was made of glass. “It's based on a principle of my own devising, where a particular kind of radiation can be used to disrupt and reset time and space. The catch is that only metahumans contain enough energy to compress and stabilize the realigned particles, whether you're bringing back another human or a metahuman.”

“And why shouldn't I just shove you in the other chamber and use you to bring her back?”

“Because you don't know how to make the machine work, special needs. Push the wrong button, destabilize Karen's particles, and she'll be the first woman to be directly converted into a thermonuclear explosion.

I have to hand it to him, he didn't hesitate. He stepped right into the west chamber without a moment's hesitation, like he thought it was an elevator that would take him to heaven to retrieve his beloved.

“And you're sure it will work?”

“Of course I am.” I said, powering up the starting sequence. “I designed it after all. Just be sure to hold very still, no matter how much it hurts. Give me a minute to calibrate it, your energy signature is difficult to compensate for.” My hands flew over the controls, seeming to know exactly what to do with little or no intervention from me.

“Rodney?”

“Yes?”

“What will you do when I'm gone?”

“What I've always wanted to do, Blake. Take all the cranks and lunatics and megalomaniacs out of power, save for yours truly, of course. Force people to live in a manner that won't cause their extinction and will live up to their potential.”

“And then what?” There was a long pause. Rather than bother trying to fill it, I started the machine.  

 

And that was it. A few minutes later Karen Cate woke up without so much as a headache and Captain Forever was dead, or at least his holographic projection was rendered inaccessible to his extradimensional metaconsciousness. Karen behaved pretty much how you'd expect, and I had to sedate her before I left to terminate my remaining rivals for global supremacy.

When I shrugged off my imperial robes and strapped on my full combat armor... I guess it was this morning, it seems so much longer ago now—I was amazed at how foreign something I used to wear for weeks at a time had become. How heavy the hoverboots felt when their graviton lambda point superfluidity field wasn't engaged. How unnecessarily bulky my 'M' shaped anti-PKE helmet felt when returned to my head. I never went anywhere without the positron pistol I outdrew Doctor Death with, (A PhD in the fine arts! Doctor indeed!) but what the hell did I ever need a flamethrower for? For Bohr's sake, I can open portals to a star with my mind! When did I ever use an ultrasonic transducer? And this kinetic energy dispersal engine never worked, why the hell did I strap it to my back? Did I think it looked cool? My God, did I, at some vague point in my life, stop trying to build functioning inventions, leaving things half finished or half begun just so I would have an excuse to accost Karen and Blake?

Well, I certainly had an excuse now.

By the time I flew the Malevomoible out of the Castle Malevolence about half of New England was gone. Not literally gone. There was still something there, but it was all blackened glass and igneous rock. She'd been careful, she'd been thorough. Everything was sulfur and carbon, the ocean boiled away where it touched land, nothing would ever live here again. She'd made a point of hitting major metropolitan areas as she'd worked her way up the east coast, finding new and creative methods of annihilation with each new city. She simply annihilated Baltimore with an H bomb. She used Black Hole's replicator and The Mechaniser's robotics to make a herd of quasi-autonomous diamond tipped circular saws that reduced Washington DC to a pile of gore-flecked splinters and pebbles. She used Mindmiser's thought amplifier to force half of Philadelphia to kill the other half. In her old home of Century City she used LifeForce's cellular reconfigurator to turn the entire population to infants, then set the larger metropolitan area on fire with The Ember's black torch. She used Primeforge's phase transmitter to move half of Jersey City exactly six inches to the left. I don't think I can express what she did to New York in words, a city she knew I redesigned personally. It's so creative it's almost art.

The Greeks had their gods invent Nemesis as the spirit of divine punishment for those who succumbed to hubris, but it seemingly never occurred to them that the act of punishing hubris was itself hubris, and they never envisioned what abomination the gods would fabricate to punish the punisher. What does the archvillain of an archvillain look like?

Of course Nemesis was just a creature of cold, dispassionate judgment.

It never loved anything.

It was noon when I reached Boston and saw that it looked intact, the same Smartglass towers rising out of the distance like a forest of Quartz crystals. My onboard spectrometer registered the electromagnetic fields of human life. I dumped the Malevomobile's auxiliary fuel tank, keyed in the afterburners and raced toward the city in the hopes of mounting some kind of defense. That hope disintegrated along with the Malevomobile when Karen Cate collided with it.

My endorphin and adrenal implants wouldn't catch up and register anything was happening until she had driven me about twenty meters into the ground. Fortunately she was having so much fun punching my breastplate into scrap that I was able to open a portal and blast her out of my readymade grave with an eruption of nuclear energy. I crawled out of the ground, ten brand new varieties of agony screaming from every part of my body that still functioned well enough to transmit. I ratcheted up my biorhythms to maximum output and was subsumed in a white glow as my body greedily absorbed radiation and converted it into energy to knit my broken body back together. I stood up just in time to see a thin womanly fist that snapped my head back like a bottlecap being removed, and I flew.

I was able to land on my feet when I touched down in Boston Common, knocking down every tree, overturning every car, damaging every building, and no doubt killing many in the process, but I was too busykeying in to every live satellite over the northern hemisphere with my mental uplink to notice. A Smartglass tower teetered drunkenly above me, the hole I'd made crashing through its north and south faces radiating angry cracks that curved along its facade like fingers wrapping around it. A bystander stumbled to his feet. Half of his face had been crushed like a rotten pumpkin to expose a mosaic of red and pink viscera. He tried to say something out of a mouth that lacked a mouth's shape and articulation. I couldn't make out his words or even hear them through the torrential singsong rain of Smartglass shards pelting us, but I nonetheless knew what he meant.

He was begging me to save him. To save his family. To save his city. To save his little, unremarkable life from the thing that was crushing and mutilating and torturing him.

A flash of light and every organic thing in sight vanished. Smoke wafted off my skin as my red-hot armor fused to my flesh as it repaired itself, healing around the scalding metal and burning with the furious intake of radio microwave infrared visible ultraviolet x ray gamma ray anything and everything it could use to heal boiling flesh. I turned off my pain receptors, but the smell was still there. Astrophysical calculations ricocheted inside my skull as I directed my remade eyes skyward.

There she was, floating immobile in a blizzard of tinted glass. Blake Busey didn't know what he'd done when he destroyed that constellation. We'd been sent a new constellation, the constellation Goddess of Annihilation, constellation Kali, constellation Itzpapalotl, constellation Marzanna, a blind nightmare god to ravage the world so as to better reflect the ruined sky. I'd even played my own part in developing the mythos. Death. Rebirth. Trials. Now horrible perfection, and like all divine creatures it had to destroy its creator to truly achieve godhood.

It was the first time I'd seen her smile since I'd brought her back to life. At the time its juxtaposition with the widening maw in the tower seemed inevitable.

“Why didn't you tell me it was this fun?” Her voice was the sweet, gurgling squeal a piglet makes when its throat is slit. Her eyes shone with aching, phosphorescent brilliance. Her right hand carried the black rock I'd taken from Datum and never been able to understand, pulsing like a spherical black stone heart. In her left was her own heart, torn open and flapping in the sour breeze. In the place her heart should have been she'd inserted Sinewave's Hilbert space oscillator integrated seamlessly with the engine Terrasect had claimed contained a wormhole that opened to the universe's beginning to mine energy from the Big Bang, plugged into some of my own bionics used in ways I'd never imagined.

“Please stop.”

“Make me, faggot.”

“I'm begging you-”

“There'll be plenty of time for that when I feed you your skin, one layer at a time. After I've made you watch me eviscerate your world.”

“This isn't you.”

“I'm sure apes thought the same thing about humans.”

“You're a monster.”

“I know, and I've long since accepted that. You're the one who can't seem to wrap his head around it.”

“Actually, I was just stalling to keep you in that spot.” Hitting someone with a satellite you've purposefully diverted out of orbit is like trying to throw a pebble across a continent to hit a dime, which is itself eminently possible, given the right calculations. Like Lucifer itself the fused core of steel and circuits fell, renting the air and striking her from behind with the clean, baseball bat cracking sound of kinetic reversal as it drove her into the ground. I was immediately hovering and pouring the full hell of Betelgeuse into the crater it had rammed her into, screaming as loud as I could like the Chinese trying to scare away demons with noisemakers at new year.

“Having fun?” She was next to me. She grabbed my arm, touching me skin on skin for the first time. The titanium of my ulna and radius screamed as she bent them like a paper clip. She twisted her wrist. With a tear and a spurt my right forearm was gone. “Isn't this what you always wanted?” She clamped her mouth on mine, pushing my teeth down my throat with her tongue.

I felt like I did back in New York, back when there was a New York. How they must have felt when my androids dragged their friends away screaming and kicking, to be recycled for their own good. Like then I can only credit pure animal terror with what I did next, drawing my positron pistol with my remaining hand, placing it flush against her right eye, and firing. The explosion threw us apart. Her scream shattered everything that was still intact, including my eardrums. It proved the final straw for the teetering skyscraper I'd crashed through, and it fell between us.

I want you to understand why I'm doing this.

First, that I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing this because I can't stop her.

I ran then, setting my positron pistol for overload, throwing it in her general direction, then burning my hoverboots to slag to outrace the explosion.

Second, because before I ran away I saw neat little hole running clean through her head.

As she stumbled to her feet, it healed.

I think Datum's rock does something like what you do, projecting its bearer's consciousness into another dimension and letting the them manipulate their body at will, central nervous system or no.

Third, and most important, I want you to save Karen. That was always what you were best at. I've included with this exegesis the notes from her surgery. Everything should still be in the Castle Malevolence, if she hasn't destroyed it.

She's still in there. I know you won't forget that.

I'll know you'll want to leap right out the window and save the day, but I've programmed the Malevolence Palace to keep you inside until you read this. To be honest I've always doubted your literacy. Make me eat my words, oh Captain my Captain.

I guess some of us just aren't meant to get what we want. Except you, of course. I know its absurd, but I still hate you so fucking much. I hate, I lose, I don't get what I want, and that's me. Now it's your turn. Love and win and get what you want. Restore humanity to the teeming, mewling, gibbering masses you so love to save when you're not letting them use and destroy each other.

I've dragged you off the walls of the Malevolence Palace, you're in the east chamber of the Rebirth machine. I'm getting in the west chamber. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It's symbolism. Learn to appreciate it.

Please leave the Malevolence Palace the way it is. Turn it into a museum or something. After you fix the nose.

Goodbye.

Good luck.

There's a present for you in the reception chamber.