Soon I Will Be Invincible - By Austin Grossman Page 0,1

could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life.

I stand by the door in a ring of armed men while my cell is checked by three specialists with a caseful of instruments. From the tiers come yells, shouts of encouragement, or catcalls. They want to see a show. Then I march, past their eyes, followed by two men in partial armor with bulky high-tech side arms. They have to wait until I pass before their morning lineup.

There’s a lot of prison talk about my powers. Inmates believe my eyes can emit laser beams, that my touch is electrical or poisonous, that I come and go as I please through the walls, that I hear everything. People blame things on me—stolen silverware and doors left unlocked. There is even, I note with pride, a gang named after me now: the Impossibles. Mostly white-collar criminals.

I’m allowed to mingle with the general population at mealtimes and in the recreation yard, but I always have a table to myself. I’ve fooled them too many times by speed or misdirection. By now they know to serve my food in paper dishes, and when I turn in my tray they count the plastic utensils, twice. One guard watches my hands as I eat; another checks under the table. After I sit down, they make me roll up my sleeves and show my hands, both sides, like a magician.

Look at my hands. The skin’s a little cool—about 96.1 degrees, if you’re curious—and a little rigid: a shirt with extra starch. That skin can stop a bullet; it stopped five of them in my latest arrest as I ran up Seventh Avenue in my cape and helmet, sweating through the heavy cloth. The bruises are still there, not quite faded.

I have a few other tricks. I’m strong, much stronger than should be possible for a mammal my size. Given time and inclination, I could overturn a semi, or rip an ATM out of a wall. I’m not a city-wrecker, not on my own. When Lily and I worked together, she handled that part of it. I’m mostly about the science. That’s my main claim to life in the Special Containment Wing, where everything down to the showerheads is either titanium or set two inches deep in reinforced concrete. I’m also faster than I should be—something in the nerve pathways changed in the accident.

Every once in a while a new prisoner comes after me, hoping to make his reputation by breaking a prison-made knife against my ribs, a stolen pencil, or a metal spoon folded over and sharpened. It happens at mealtimes, or in the exercise yard. There is a premonitory hush as soon as he steps into the magic circle, the empty space that moves with me. The guards never step in—maybe it’s policy, to alienate me from the prison population, or maybe they just enjoy seeing me pull the trick, proof again that they’re guarding the fourth-most-infamous man alive. I straighten a little in the metal chair, set my single plastic spoon down on the folding table.

After the whip crack of the punch, there is silence, ringout, the sighing collapse. The heap of laundry is carried away and I’ll be left alone again until the next tattooed hopeful makes his play. Inside, I want to keep going, keep fighting until the bullets knock me down, but I never do. I’m smarter than that. There are stupid criminals and there are smart criminals, and then there is me.

This is so you know. I haven’t lost any of what I am, my intrinsic menace, just because they took away my devices, my tricks, and my utility belt. I’m still the brilliant, the appalling, the diabolical Doctor Impossible, damn it. And yes, I am invincible.

All superheroes have an origin. They make a big deal of it, the story of how they got their powers and their mission. Bitten by a radioactive bug, they fight crime; visited by wandering cosmic gods, they search for the lost tablets of so-and-so, and avenge their dead families. And villains? We come on the scene, costumed and leering, colorfully working out our inexplicable grudge against the