Isaac snorted.
“I wish I were gay just so I could come out of the closet,” he said. His brown eyes glittered maliciously. “It would give my homophobic mother a heart attack.” I had learned during the Trials that Isaac had a love-hate relationship with his mother. Mostly, he loved to hate her. Based on what I knew of her, I could hardly blame him.
“If we were gay, you know I’d be the top, right?” I said. “It’s my right as an Omega-level Meta. An Omega like me is named after Omega Man himself. A Beta-level like you is naturally beneath me.”
“Nuh-uh. You’re crazy. You didn’t even know what a top was until I taught you.” Isaac hesitated. “That sounded dirtier and gayer than I meant. Anyway, nobody—and I mean nobody, Omega-level or otherwise—gets to peel this brown peach.”
“That’s a visual I could have gone my whole life without.”
“You’re the one who brought it up. And yes, pun intended. But don’t think you’re going to divert me with all your gay talk from the topic of what happened with Mad Dog. I’m the master of changing the subject when I don’t want to talk about something. Don’t try to pull a me on me. You’ve been avoiding talking about what happened ever since last night.”
“What do you want me to say? That I went too far? That I lost my head? That I never should have pounded on Antonio the way I did?” I was suddenly exasperated. “Okay, I went too far. I lost my head. I should have given Antonio a cookie for abusing Hannah instead of a beating. Happy now?”
Isaac shook his head at me. “I just don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. It was bad enough that you wanted to break into Antonio’s place. I went along with that because the cause was just. And like you, I couldn’t think of a better way to stop him from abusing Hannah. But for you to pound on him like you did—” He broke off, his eyes suddenly widening. He leaned forward. “Hey, do you have a thing for Hannah? It would certainly explain your behavior. Trying to scare off the competition?”
“Of course not,” I said hotly, offended by the suggestion I’d used my powers to get a girl. Well, I was mostly offended. The truth of the matter was that, deep down, I wasn’t so sure what my motivations were. When I had originally befriended Hannah it had been to figure out what the deal was with her constant injuries. But now that I had gotten to know her, I felt myself trying to ease out of the friend zone with Hannah despite the fact I was still very much in love with Neha. The few times Hannah had touched me had sent my pulse racing. Etched in my mind, I could close my eyes and visualize those moments as if they had been captured on film. In fact, just two nights ago I had a dream about Hannah. And it wasn’t the kind of racial equality dream Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had spoken of, either. Rather, it was the kind of dream you could turn into a white-on-Asian interracial porno.
Unmollified suspicion smoldered in Isaac’s brown eyes. But thankfully, he let the issue of my complicated feelings for Hannah go. “So why did you go all WWE on Antonio then?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Isaac shook his head. “If you think I’m going to let you off the hook that easily, Antonio’s energy blast must’ve knocked something loose in your head last night. You haven’t been yourself for a while now. Last night was just the starkest example of it. As your friend, if something’s troubling you, I want to know about it. As a fellow Hero, if what’s bothering you is making you cross the line and beat someone to a pulp, I need to know about it. You didn’t see your face as you were pummeling Antonio. I did. The way you looked, if I hadn’t been there, you might have killed him. I’m not going to let that happen again.” Isaac’s face, which normally had a half-grin dangling from it, was dead serious. “So, you’ve got a choice: either tell me what’s bothering you so we can do something about it, or I’ll report what happened last night to the Guild and you can tell them what’s bothering you.”
I was shocked. “You wouldn’t dare. I’ve known you for too long. You wouldn’t do that to me. Plus, you broke into Antonio’s place with me. You’d be on the hook with the Guild as much as I’d be.”
“I don’t care. Right now, with you bottling up whatever it is that’s bothering you, you’re a danger to yourself and others. I’d rather get both of us into a little trouble now than see you in serious trouble later after you badly hurt or kill someone. Plus, like you said, we’ve known each other a long time. Long enough for me to know that, despite whatever’s come over you lately, if you did seriously hurt or kill somebody, you’d never forgive yourself. So what’s it gonna be: talk to me, or talk to the Guild?”
Isaac and I stared at each other. The only sound in the room for several long moments was the voice of a CNN reporter dispassionately talking about a fresh atrocity in Peru perpetrated by its dictator, the supervillain Puma. The United Nations was debating a resolution asking the Sentinels to intervene.
After a while, I looked away, breaking our gaze. I let out a long breath.
“Okay, you win. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me.” I paused, not knowing where to begin. “It’s everything.”
Isaac leaned back, put his feet up on the coffee table, and laced his fingers behind his head. “Everything? You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
“Everything. Mechano. Being a Hero. Life in the big city. Neha. Everything.”
“All right, we’ll tackle them one at a time. Let’s start with Mechano. Since you know he was the person who made attempts on your life during the Trials, I still don’t understand why you don’t report him to the Guild. The Guild has an investigative division devoted to looking into allegations of Hero malfeasance. All us new Heroes were introduced to Ghost, the head of Guild investigations, when we were sworn in.” Isaac paused, shuddering at the thought of Ghost. “Remember how he looked during our swearing-in ceremony? Like he had just stepped out of someone’s nightmare. He might be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something as I’ve seen my mother without makeup. Ghost has the reputation of being entirely fair and going where the evidence leads him. Even with a Hero of Mechano’s prominence, if Ghost concluded that Mechano tried to assassinate you, the Guild would take his cape away and turn him over to the civil authorities for prosecution so fast that his murderous metal head would spin.”
“As I’ve told you before, it’s not that simple. If I report what I know about Mechano to the Guild, they’ll ask me how I know what I know. And if I tell them that, I’ll get someone else into trouble.” I shook my head. “I won’t do it.”
That wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that I knew Mechano had tried to murder me because I had cheated on the final test of the Trials. In that test, I had to battle Isaac. Hacker, a fellow Trials participant who had owed me a favor due to me saving her life earlier in the Trials, had at my request used her Metahuman hacking ability to reprogram Overlord before my battle with Isaac. Overlord was the artificially intelligent computer designed by Mechano which oversaw the Trials. Overlord determined who won the duel between potential Heroes that comprised the final Trials test. Before Hacker had monkeyed with its system, Overlord had been programmed to declare just one of the duelists the winner. The winner got his Hero’s license; the loser was out of luck and would have to go through the Trials all over again if he wanted to get his license. That hadn’t seemed fair to me at the time. It still didn’t. So, I had Hacker change Overlord’s programming so it would declare a tie and that both Isaac and I were the winners if the result of our battle was close.
When inside of Overlord’s system, Hacker had stumbled upon two shocking facts: the world-renowned Hero Mechano had planted nanites into Overlord’s system which had tried to kill me earlier during the Trials; and, Mechano had programmed Overlord to allow the planting of a bomb into one of my Trials’ tests. That bomb had nearly blown my head off—not to mention other body parts I had grown quite attached to—plus almost killing a bunch of innocent bystanders. As that bomb was a bigger version of the bomb slipped into my pocket by the blonde woman in D.C.
before the Trials, perhaps Mechano had been behind that attempt on my life as well. For all I knew, Mechano was also the one who had hired Iceburn to kill me after my powers first manifested, leading to my father’s death.
So, after completing the Trials, recuperating from them, and then getting my Hero’s license and white cape during the Guild’s investiture and swearing-in ceremony, I had known what was next on my to-do list: Confront Mechano and find out why he had made attempts on my life. Also, figure out if he was behind Iceburn being sent after me and, if so, kick his mechanical butt from here to Pluto for being responsible for Dad’s death. Oh, and avoid Mechano throttling me with his super strong robot body, or blasting a hole through me with his energy beams, or doing something even more unpleasant to me. Let’s not forget that very important part.
My list of things to do post-Trials had been all too clear. What had been a lot less clear was how to go about crossing all those things off my list.
You could go a bunch of different routes once you got your Hero’s license after the Trials. Some Heroes joined the military or went into law enforcement. Other Heroes went into private industries where their powers would prove useful. Hacker for example worked for a tech firm in Seattle. Others went into private security. Neha had done that. She had moved to Chicago to work for a famous reality television star. Thinking about her made my heart ache, even all these months after our fight.
The most traditional route for Heroes, though, was to use your powers to fight crime and Rogues, the technical word for supervillains. Though some Heroes fought crime out of the goodness of their hearts, many others also leveraged the fame acquired through their crime-fighting efforts to make money. Massive Force, for example, was a textbook example of how to make crime-fighting lucrative. Before he was murdered here in Astor City, he had made a boatload of money by making paid personal appearances, through television, movie, and book deals, and on toys carrying his likeness. As someone who used to be scrawny, I had a hard time picturing an action figure being made in my likeness. Maybe one day someone would instead make a movie about my life. It could focus on how a small-town farm boy felt overwhelmed by the big city even though he was a Hero. Its title could be Stranger in a Strange Land. I hoped Robert Heinlein’s estate didn’t sue me.
Some Heroes banded together in teams to fight crime. Mechano was a member of such a team. And not just any team. Mechano was part of the Sentinels, Earth’s oldest and most preeminent superhero team. The Sentinels were headquartered right outside of Astor City. As Athena had been so fond of saying, every battle was won or lost based on who was better prepared to fight it. In light of that, to prepare to take on Mechano and perhaps all the Sentinels—God help me!—if they too were involved in Mechano’s shenanigans, I needed to find out everything I could about him. Not only would such information help me figure out how to take him out if I needed to, but maybe it would also give me a clue as to why Mechano had attacked me.
To find out everything I could about Mechano and the Sentinels, I figured I needed to go where they were. Namely here, in Astor City. That was how a farm boy who grew up intimidated by the size of a Walmart superstore found himself living in one of the biggest cities in the world, wrestling with how to confront one of the most prominent Heroes in the world.
The Sentinels were the gold standard for Heroes, which made Mechano’s involvement in the attempts on my life even more disturbing and perplexing. When the average person heard the word “Hero,” they usually thought of the Sentinels. This was no hyperbole; surveys had been conducted that had amply demonstrated just how ingrained the Sentinels were in the public’s consciousness. For good reason. The Sentinels had saved the world more times than I could count. They had fought off alien invasions, defeated Rogues bent on world conquest, destroyed civilization-ending asteroids on a collision course with the Earth, and done a bunch of other things to pull the planet’s bacon out of the fire.
I had grown up idolizing the Sentinels. Especially Avatar, one of the team’s founding members. He had helped found the team shortly after the passage of the Hero Act of 1945, the federal law mandating that all Metahumans register with the federal government, and that forbade us to use our powers unless we were first licensed. Avatar had formed the Sentinels along with Omega Man, Lady Justice, Millennium, and three other Heroes to deal with menaces that were too formidable for a single Hero to handle alone.
Most people thought of Avatar as the second greatest Hero, right after Omega Man. Though Omega Man had been killed in the V’Loth invasion, there was an urban legend that he would return to life if the Earth faced a potentially world-ending crisis again. Avatar had an unusually long life span and had been the Sentinels’ leader until he had been murdered a couple of months before my own powers had manifested.
I didn’t like to think about Avatar’s murder. Like me, Avatar had been an Omega-level Metahuman and therefore one of the most powerful people in the world. Unlike me and my powers, which still were developing and growing, Avatar had been at the height of his powers when he had been killed. If it could happen to him, it certainly could happen to my scraggly ass. In fact, thanks to Mechano, it almost had happened to me. Several times. If I were a cat, I’d be on at least life six or seven by now between my encounters with Iceburn and what I had been through in the Trials. It was enough to make me want to lock myself in my room to conserve my remaining lives. I couldn’t bring to justice the guy who had hired Iceburn or find out what Mechano’s beef with me was while barricaded fearfully behind the door of my room, though. Besides, Coward Man was a less than heroic-sounding name.
In addition to Mechano, the current members of the Sentinels were Seer, Doppelganger, Ninja, Millennium, and Tank. Avatar’s spot on the team had been vacant since his murder despite the precedent set by the team’s founders that there always be seven members. The Sentinels had said that Avatar’s empty spot would be filled once they found a Hero worthy of taking Avatar’s place.
The public often called Mechano “The Mechanical Man” because he had an artificial body, but the consciousness of a man. That man’s name was Jeffrey Cole. Mechano was the only Sentinel the general public knew the real name of. Cole’s Metahuman power was the ability to download his consciousness into mechanical receptacles. Cole’s human body was long dead as he had been born in the late 1800s, but the essence of the man lived on in Mechano’s robotic body. I had seen a couple of black and white pictures of Cole before his human body had died. He had been a spare man with stringy black hair, a widow’s peak, deep-set intelligent eyes, and a moustache trimmed to near invisibility.
Mechano’s current robot body was his fourth one. The first of Cole’s robot bodies had been mostly destroyed in a battle with the Rogue known as Vengeance long before I was born. The second and third bodies were decommissioned by Cole and put into storage after he built his current one. It was far more powerful than the others. Cole’s body du jour was almost seven feet tall, super strong, and had sensors that gave him superhuman senses of smell, touch, sight, and hearing. Also, he could project various forms of energy through the single rectangular red eye his body sported. I had seen television footage where Mechano’s energy blast had sheared off the top of a mountain and, on another occasion, reduced a skyscraper to a smoking pile of twisted metal and rubble. There were undoubtedly other things Mechano could do I didn’t know about as he was constantly tinkering with and enhancing his mechanical body.
As indicated by him designing and building such powerful robot bodies, Cole was a mechanical and electronics genius. It was not known whether that aptitude was a facet of his Metahuman powers. Regardless of whether his genius was Meta-based or not, Cole held more patents for various inventions than any other person in history. Heck, Mechano had even invented the material that composed the artificial teeth implanted in my jaw by the Guild after the Trials to replace the ones I’d lost in my battle with Isaac. The oral surgeon who put the implants in—an upper and lower incisor, plus a canine—had assured me o
f their quality after he had performed the procedure.
“Though they look natural, they’re as hard as diamonds,” he had said, as if he wanted me to chomp down on a steel beam to test them, “and they’ll be free of cavities, decay, and discoloration long after your natural teeth have rotted out of your head. The material they are made of was invented by Mechano himself.” The doctor had said that last part proudly, as if he had been on hand to shout “Eureka!” when Mechano had come up with the stuff. I also wanted to shout when the doctor told me that, but I had wanted to shout an expletive instead of eureka. Thanks to knowing Mechano had tried to kill me, I had no interest in having anything related to him anywhere near me, much less implanted in my jaw. Unfortunately, the doctor did not tell me Mechano had invented the tooth material until the teeth had already been implanted and it was too late to remove them.
After learning of Mechano’s connection to my teeth, I halfway expected that at some point my new teeth would explode in my mouth, or start dripping sulfuric acid, or drill through my skull and into my brain, or something else equally unpleasant. So far, however, they had done nothing more nefarious than biting my tongue so hard blood was drawn. In the teeth’s defense, that incident had been the fault of my overly enthusiastic devouring of a hamburger rather than theirs. My tongue had been in my mouth my entire life, and yet still I sometimes bit down on it. It made me wonder how often someone would inadvertently bite down on something they weren’t used to having in their mouth. Consequently, the thought of being fellated terrified me. Being a guy, my fears would likely not stop me should the situation arise, which it most definitely had not since my falling out with Neha.
In addition to Mechano’s inventions like the material comprising my teeth, he had also commercialized many of his other inventions and made them available to the general public. Other technology he had not commercialized, and those pieces of tech he only made available to the Sentinels and the Heroes’ Guild. Almost all the futuristic tech the Sentinels used was designed by Mechano, not to mention much of the technology the administrative arm of the Guild relied on, including the Guild’s holosuites and matter transporters. Cole had even designed the secret space station only Heroes knew about which the Guild maintained in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Built by the Guild after the V’Loth invasion in the 1960s had caught Heroes and the rest of humanity by surprise, the space station was part alien invasion early warning system, part world guardhouse, part Guild office complex, and part Hero clubhouse.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 53
