I tapped my panel, releasing all my sanity-supplicants from their Event Chairs. Each one detached him-or herself, stretching and groaning, before exiting the techno-pinnacle of my analytical career. At more than three stories tall, the neurodimensional Id-Smasher® was a glittering titanium tower of nine hundred terabits of cognintegrated processing power. I held back a moment, admiring the technology which interlaced the psychespheres of my patients via the long, slender transduction rods through its two black processing bulbs.
“Looks just like a giant shrimp, Doc,” said the Brotherfly, observing me observing. “Come to thank of it, I’m hongry for some takeout now that we up outta there! Brotherfly be sayin ‘ka-pow!’—or should it be ‘kung-pow’? Bzzzt! Somebody, anybody, can I get a witness?”
Laughing at his own joke, he looked around for approval, holding out a hand palm-up for slapping reinforcement. He received none.
“Thank you for sharing, André,” I offered.
“Now could somebody fill me in on something?” said Omnipotent Man, rubbing a dried trail of drool from the side of his mouth. “How exactly did we bring down ol’ CycloTron, anyway? Cuz I think I mighta missed how that happened.”
Festus shook his head. “Since you people couldn’t destroy it, I went after its power source.”
X-Man snorted. “Only because I told you to!”
The Flying Squirrel rippled an eyebrow in my direction, then said, “When we were driving alongside that mangler, I called the Defense Department, which is what kept CycloTron operational. I got them to yank its funding.” He harrumphed, fluttering his flaps. “Hell of a simulation you’ve got there, Doctor, to’ve actually arranged a simulated DOD for me to talk to. Do you have a Hoover in some other section of that program, too?”
“I’m glad you approve, Festus. The program improvises according to the essential logic of any gambit you take, responding accordingly.”
“Hmph. Anyway,” he said, “that’s how it’s supposed to be done. Analyze the situation first. That’s what Hawk King taught us—those of us who bothered to learn. Forget the brute-force idiocy. That’s for amateurs. We’re the professionals.”
“Now,” I said, “if you’d all like to get dressed, we’ll pick up in the Group Dynamics Verbalarium.”
Back to Base, and Back to “Base Sicks”
All teams, super or otherwise, function and dysfunction like all families do: having to cope with intergenerational misunderstanding, birth-order clusters of privilege and disfavor, brutal grudges, pathological codependencies, tragically “scripted” behavior loops, pathogenic levels of neglect and abuse, and phony displays of affection and loyalty.
This catalog of psychological cancers forms what I call the “base sicks,” the bombed-out foundation of every human being which is the source of all adult misery and the terror of every “inner child.” Because these base sicks are buried at the deepest-level programming of any group’s origin, they’re as invisible to the individuals they’re poisoning as a rainbow is to Dog Man.
It’s Easier to Change One’s Uniform Than One’s Mind-Set
Emerging from the changing room, Power Grrrl stumbled, falling into me. I helped her along while she regained her “reality legs,” noting the extraordinary change in her appearance. Gone was the black and silver Sensosilk Event Tunic, replaced by one of her more restrained uniforms: a dazzle of sequins, a lace vest with garters, and thigh-high leather boots whose skyscaper heels had no doubt contributed to her tumble.
“Like, Eva,” she asked me, “could we have, like, died or something in that simulation? Because I am totally not cool with that?”
Behind us, Iron Lass ground her teeth so loudly that for a moment I thought she was chewing ice.
“No, Syndi, not to worry,” I said, intercepting the Valkyrie’s objection. “The release form you signed cleared me of any liability in the unlikely event of your mental incapacitation, grievous bodily harm, or life-cessation, but while you could experience the illusion of pain inside the Id-Smasher®, your bodies couldn’t be killed, even if your somatic simulations could be.”
“It’s precisely that kind of cowardice,” grumbled the man waiting for us inside the Verbalarium, “that’s destroyed this organization.”
Sitting already in the ring of chairs, the Flying Squirrel almost glowed from the sunlight streaming onto him, the fur of his world-famous mask gleaming with its oversized animal ears, snub nose, long white whiskers, and giant, pink-rimmed black eyes. With his Olympic build, tight skin, and laserlike stare, he looked more like a young Brian Dennehy than the seventy-year-old he was. But no one could mistake the power throbbing inside his clawed and furry gloves for that of anyone else.
“Cowardice, contempt for chain of command, lack of discipline,” sneered the Flying Squirrel, “and a hundred other maladies of character forming a toxic cocktail that has shaken, not stirred, everything that Hawk King spent decades building. If he’d seen how you invalids performed in there today—”
“O-kay, we get it?” said Power Grrrl, snapping her bubble gum. “You know Hawk King, you, like, worked with Hawk King, you used to fetch coffee for Hawk King—I got it the, like, first thousand times?”
“Aw, man, Squirrelly,” said André. “Brotherfly say girly-girl just put the Bzzzt! on you—”
“Quiet, you,” said Festus Piltdown III. He paused to scrub Power Grrrl with his glance. “And as for you, your juvenile blandishments which reduce every statement to an interrogative don’t erase the simple fact that your performance was subfarcical!”
“Oh, now jess tether yer ponies a sec, Festy,” said Omnipotent Man, making a “whoa” gesture with his hands. “I’ont think we was all s’bad in there. We set ’er up, an you an th’X-Man knocked ’er down. That’s the hokey-pokey, right?” He grinned and winked at the ravenish woman in the winged helmet. Iron Lass’s ivory faced flushed. He sang, “Now we turn ourselves around…that’s what it’s all about!”
“Ah, poor, pathetic, possum-fried Wally,” said the Flying Squirrel, shaking his head minutely. “Would you be giving that moonshine-and-stained-overalls assessment if Hawk King were here? Did you happen to notice that your so-called settin’ ’er up amounted to virtually zero role in the mission’s success?”
The X-Man spat, “ ‘Success’?”
All faces turned to Kareem Edgerton, HKA the X-Man, before flitting toward my hand, which I kept poised above my whistle, like a gunfighter fingering his Colt.
Kareem leaned back in his seat, letting out a breath while reconsidering his tone. “If today’s ‘combat’ had been real, there would’ve been a hundred thousand people lined up outside of hospitals looking like bleeding pincushions from the flying glass. ‘Success’?” he repeated, catching his voice just as it spiked. He glanced toward my whistle, looked down, loosened his fists, and stage-whispered, “You call that success…. I’d hate to see failure.”
The Utility of Aggression-Aversion Therapy
Festus Piltdown said, “If you’d been in this business as long as I have, Edgerton, you’d know that sometimes tough decisions—executive decisions—are required when the professionals take on the hard jobs no one else is qualified for—”
“Professionals?” said the X-Man, extravagantly sweeping invisible lint from his black blazer and pants. “Mr. Squirrel here said ‘professionals’ like that’s something to be proud of. But there’re professional killers, too. And those two”—he wagged his chin across the circle, first to Omnipotent Man and then to Iron Lass—“were willing to professionally liquidate everyone in Langston-Douglas to protect the borough of Bird Island. Don’t the people in Stun-Glas have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of not being blown to kot-tam hell?”
I moved my whistle toward my lips.
“Excuse me, Doc,” said Kareem, “blown to golly-gee-whiz-gol-dang heck. Or was it just that not enough ‘professionals’ live over in mainland Los Ditkos?”
Hnossi Icegaard shifted in her chair. “It vuss only a simulat
ion, Kareem,” she sighed, adjusting her gleaming silver-gold breastplate and black-feather cloak. “No actual human beingks vut haff been harmedt. Just like in ze moofies.”
“So why not—!” Kareem stopped, lowered his volume and tempo. “Why not…just let CycloTron hit the island, then? When we were inside the simulation we all believed it was real. And yet you and Wally had no hesitation to sacrifice how many of us to save how few of you?”
“Oh, Kareem!” snapped Power Grrrl. “That’s, like, not even—”
“That didn’t take long, did it?” said Festus. “Have we gone to simulated Las Vegas now? Because once again Kareem is playing his race cards!”
“You know, in my experience,” said Kareem, caging his fingers and drawing out his words, “the jokers…who talk the most about ‘playing the race card’…are the people who own all the diamonds…who’ve picked up the clubs…to beat down the spades…because they’ve got no heart.”
The Brotherfly laughed, slapping his knees in exaggerated delight. “You gots to admit, Squirrelly-man, Kareem just put the Bzzzt! on y’all!”
Kareem switched his gaze to Omnipotent Man and Iron Lass. “Five times more people live on the mainland than on the island. I even told you two to clear a path for CycloTron to get onto Centurion Bridge so we could sink it there. Did you even consider moving into position?”
“For all you know, Kareem, even if ve’d destroyt ze bridch, CycloTron vut haff continuedt rollink out of ze vaater. Dit you sink about zat?”
“X-Man, hold up there a minute,” said Wally. “What if Bird Island got flattened, and then th’entire economy crashed? Then all the mums and dads in Langston-Douglas woulda lost their jobs! Well then how they supposta pay their mortgages?”
“Wallace, have you ever even set foot in Stun-Glas? You think the people there have mortgages? You think half the people there even have jobs?”
“Now jess round up yer rangers a spell, Kareem. Jess last week I got a ball off the roof at one a them Langston-Douglas midnight basketball dealies. And don’t be saying they don’t have jobs, no sir. I saw lots a fine automobiles there with some very shiny, expensive-looking hubcaps, an that means hardworking folks, car loans an auto dealerships fulla happy employees. Gracious jiminny, th’folks down there even try t’dress like superheroes—evra-one wearing red or blue—”
“This monolithic level of ignorance about life in Stun-Glas,” said Kareem, imploring the ceiling itself, “is exactly why the F*O*O*J lost its HUD contract to police the neighborhood in the first place, and why the L*A*B picked it up and protected our homes, reduced crime to almost nothing, and earned the loyalty of the people there—”
“Maybe, Kareem,” said Festus, “if your L*A*B wasn’t such a bunch of spear-sharpening, whitey-hating, race-fixated reprobates, they would’ve kept in HUD’s favor. But then they wouldn’t be the League of Angry Blackmen anymore, would they?”
“You hear that, Doc? Where’s your whistle now? Festus, those sheets you ride around in at night—they made of satin, or silk?”
“I don’t have to take that from you, Edgerton!” said Festus.
I blew my Mind Whistle™, and the bickering ceased as quickly as the migraines sucked everyone’s hands to their skulls.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we went over the rules yesterday,” I reminded them, while resentment skittered across my group’s faces like silverfish across a dinner plate.
“I’d thought we might go a few weeks at least before the whistle first had to be used, but…well. While controlled venting is a necessary part of the therapeutic process, aimless unleashing of antihappiness merely blasts psychemotional shrapnel into the vulnerable underbelly of our healing community. Your real task inside the Id-Smasher® wasn’t tactical training, of course, but to prepare you for postsimulation self-observation of how you are decapacitizing the life-potentials you seek.
“Your board of directors—pardon me, your Fantastic Order of Justice Leadership Administrative Council—was quite specific with me, and with all of you. Unless you six can resolve the problems that are making you, and I quote, ‘contentious in the extreme, dysfunctional, and impossible to work with,’ end quote, the F*L*A*C will terminate your employment with and membership in the F*O*O*J.”
I let the weight of my words rest like rhetorical cement blocks upon their psychemotional fingernails. Each hero was also still wincing from the beneficial operant conditioning of the Mind Whistle™.
“Now, while some of you are unconcerned at the prospect of losing your benefits and pension, either due to your personal fortune,” I said, nodding to the Flying Squirrel, “or due to your immortality,” I continued, nodding to Iron Lass, “I assume the real threat is that of dishonorable discharge from the Fantastic Order of Justice.
“And while such scandal might be a temporary boost in the ‘no press is bad press’ mode, dishonorable discharge from the F*O*O*J could severely damage a young heroine’s outside commercial endorsements,” I said, nodding to Power Grrrl, “distance oneself from the command of dedicated soldiers,” I said, nodding again to Iron Lass, “or from a community of friends and admirers,” I said to the young black man with the floppy transparent wings, bluebottled bug-eye goggles, and hairy antennae.
I finished by nodding to the thirty-four-year-old black man in his conservative black suit and tie. “And it would annihilate an ambitious man’s career aspirations.”
Everyone finally took their chairs in the circle, leaving the X-Man as the last man standing, since he’d been jockeying to avoid sitting near either Power Grrrl or Festus. Finally he sat on the opposite side of the circle from his implacable adversary, the Squirrel.
Perhaps ironically (for those untrained in psychoanalysis), the quietest of the group stood out the most. He’d made neither fuss nor folly during the just concluded mini-fracas, and he sat serenely resplendent in his blue suit, golden epaulets, red necktie, and cape. Were I not a highly perceptive practitioner of the healing arts of psychotherapy, I might have believed this man had no worries at all, with his massive brawn and his hands folded in his lap so immaculately they appeared to have been carved by Michelangelo himself.
But I did know better. For Omnipotent Man was as wracked with self-destructive pain as any of his comrades beside him.
Every Superstrength Is Also a Superweakness
As you just saw, conflict on a hyperhominid team is virtually inevitable. That’s because careers self-select for personality type. The irony, of course, is that success during the workday can mean severe interpersonal and psychological dysfunction at night.
Take Clifford David Stinson, HKA the Blue Smasher. His heroism demanded his willingness—indeed his eagerness—to smash anything, anywhere at any time. But during domestic disputes, he also smashed several of his own homes and vehicles as well as those of his neighbors in Los Ditkos’s upscale Royal Arch district. In 1988 he so flattened Bucksome Hills that the city council had to rename it Spinster Flats.
Eventually Clifford Stinson’s personal failings became professional ones. In 1983, when the Gasteroids threatened to infest the intestinal tracts of the entire population of Crystal City, Arizona, Stinson reduced its city hall, Jewel Museum, and 40 percent of its downtown to shards. No one doubted that smashing had its place—but never in Crystal City.
Similarly, Magna’s magnetic-seduction was powerful enough to sway even the Iron Eunuch and the Cobalt Castrati. But her overreliance on her erotipathic powers to the exclusion of all her others tossed her off the peak of her celebrated career and into a sewer of sexual addiction, facedown in the lap of the capes, the niche-porn market of ex-heroines and -heroes.
The chief social advantage of the Götterdämmerung had been its demand from all citizens, and certainly from the college of heroes, for self-sacrifice—that is, the development of the superego. But lacking an overriding threat, many in our society, including its former champions, had by now developed overactive ids. Such was the case with nearly everyone in my team.
; Who’s That Whispering from Your Shoulders?
Selfish desire and highest ideal—in the cartoons, they’re represented by a miniature devil and angel perching on our shoulders. In rare cases, these voices are literal, as with the tiny wizard Mage Mogdobnag and Lord Lizaard on the opposite epaulets of Noble Man.
But for most of us, these “voices” are expressions of our id and superego, our respective sub-and supercognitive urges toward selfish, violent gratification and altruistic self-actualization.
Our id isn’t evil. Its self-interest fuels our self-preservation and individual advancement. The id’s social defect is its incapacity to value the needs of others. And while the superego’s lofty goals might seem almost saintly, if left unmoderated a superego-controlled individual could starve to death from refusal to harm animals or plants, or be so possessed by her idealism as to slip out of our reality and into the Platon Dimension of pure Ideals.
That’s where the ego comes in. The ego balances selfishness and selflessness. But because the superstrength of most heroes comes from the interaction between super-ids and super-superegos, destabilization occurs when one capacity becomes stronger than the other. Unfortunately for several members of my team, a post-Götterdämmerung world has starved their superegos, letting their ids grow unchecked, like black-dripping toadstools on a yellowing psychemotional lawn.
Failing Checks and Balances Among Super Powers
Festus,” I asked the Howitzer of a man after he’d stopped grimacing from the effects of the Mind Whistle™, “despite the simmering soup pot of rage which has just bubbled over onto your behavioral stove, you haven’t walked out. Why not?”
He leveled his eyes on me like twin turrets, silently.
“As one of the country’s wealthiest men,” I probed, “you’re at the head of a corporate empire of mass media, defense contracts, surveillance technology, and fast food. You’ve led a distinguished career as one of the nation’s finest investigators—”
Minister Faust Page 2
