Hello. I'm Jimmy Hero, and I'm here to save the world.

My target is a small laboratory on the top floor of a massive skyscraper in the centre of New York. You know it's serious because I'm going to a skyscraper in New York.

The lab is owned by a company called NuStart, which sounds cheerfully sinister, doesn't it? The rest of the building is owned by NuStart, too. All the other floors are security. Only that lab has something going on in it.

NuStart has other buildings too. There's the charity wing in Louisville, Kentucky, where abused kids get to do cool things like meeting popstars and doing street cleans. Maybe that's where it gets its name from. I don't know. I'm not the brains here. There's other people for that. I'm a man of action.

There's also the marketing department in Paris, from where NuStart has just announced it's on the brink of curing cancer. Headline news, of course, all over the world. Man's greatest enemy lies within, and all that jazz.

And then there's the headquarters in Berlin, from where we found exactly which lab the papers are going wild over. It's right at the very top of the skyscraper I'm entering now. One of our brains worked there. He doesn't any longer. He's in a jail somewhere in Germany, if he's lucky.

That, of course, means that NuStart know something's going to happen. That's why they cleared out all those offices in the middle for extra guards. There's plenty of guards in the lobby. Lots of guns. Metal detectors, that sort of thing. Perhaps I'd have tried a disguise if we still had those people with us, but the list of heroes grows thinner by the day in these times. So I start knocking some heads together like I'm good at.

Shots are fired, but I feel nothing. This armour is incredible. Another wonder of the modern age, designed for police and people pulling survivors from fires and things. Soon, the lobby is neutralised. But the cameras were watching. Reinforcements will be on their way. I've got to be quick.

I run across the chaos and take the stairs. I know all the passcodes, thanks to someone who shall remain nameless, as the last I heard, they were still free. There's automated turrets, but they're easily taken out by my stolen pulse gun. At the next landing, there's a lift. Just as I round the corner, it opens. Security pours out. My back quivers with bullets as I turn onto the next flight up.

It wasn't always like this, you know. The world used to be more in balance. Things were good. And then the types of people who rule companies like NuStart started running away with their crazy ideas. Tipped us over the edge. There's a new world order, alright, and it's going to be the end of us, unless we start fighting back.

So I did start. Here I am. I'm tearing through a small corridor off the main stairs, pulling open a blast door, wrestling a man in black armour to the ground and cracking his head off the chair before he can get a hand on his pistol. Papers fly from the desk as he rebounds, but I don't have time to read them, even if I wanted to. I have to get away from the main squads pursuing me. Yeah, I'm practically bulletproof, but if they get to me in numbers they can just pin me down and rip my head off.

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If I'm right, there's a panel to a maintenance shaft just.... here. I'm in. Now to get to floor 18, and then through the third door on the right to the next hidey-hole.

In the darkness, I think. There's so many people who hate me. They don't understand. They don't realise they've been conditioned all their lives, to think that what these companies are doing is good for us. They haven't thought ahead, to what will happen when all this work is complete.

They almost get me, on floor 17. I've never seen or heard of that type of drone before, but it figures they'd still have things to take us by surprise. I lose a finger before they're all down. It's a small price to pay. And besides, even if my mission is a success, I'm not sure I'll be leaving this place anyway.

There's three soldiers or police or whoever they are blocking the next shaft. So they're tracking me. They know the way I'm going, even if the main force can't catch up. I'll have to make a detour, throw them off. I'm making good time so far.

You'd really think this place would have enough money to hire people who know how to fight. Maybe there aren't enough to go around any more; this world has made everyone soft. There's another three down, only three hundred or so here left to stop me. And everyone I've dealt with? I've killed none of them. No need for bloodshed, yet. These are just normal guys. Good parts, bad parts. The ones upstairs are different.

Past the panel and the slow, looping ascent to my final destination.

As I go through the ambushes, the fist fights and the explosions and the ill-advised gas attack, I'm struck by the dedication I see on the defenders' faces. These are not hired goons; they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. Society has told them that they are doing the right thing for hundreds or thousands of years. Their fathers and grandfathers all did the same job, and if there's still more left to do by the time they die, their children will do it too.

They are making progress.

Just like me. I am on floor 35 now. My armour hangs in shreds from my chest, and I am bleeding. But I am progressing. It's all a man can do. And progress, I agree, is good, up to a point. It's given us wheels and light bulbs and free porn. It gives us something to live for.

But there's a catch.

There's a flurry of blows as I take out the elite in the upper foyer. Guns roar, knives flash. It would make a pretty good montage in one of the old action films. But finally I'm through. I've jammed all the doors to stop the others coming through. They'll hold long enough. It's only a couple more flights and I'm there.

I admire the almost perfect world through the giant windows as I climb. They've almost done it. It's almost a utopia. And there's the twist, isn't it?

You ever hear about that old experiment with the mice? Had everything they wanted. Every need met. They sat there and died. I'm proud to say I'm not doing the same.

Finally, as I enter the lab, my knife comes out for the first time. There's no struggle now; the scientists would never believe anyone could reach them up here. Even as I grab hold and plunge, again and again, I know they don't deserve it. They have the best intentions at heart. But that's why I have to do it.

We need some balance back.

I'm alone now, with the cures. Apparently, the bowel cancer one is 99% successful now. The rest would have followed shortly. They would have changed the world. In a couple of decades time, will we even be capable of dying any more? Will we not be left even that indignity?

Files, vials, test-tubes, steaming and buzzing machines all over the place. I don't understand any of what I'm looking at. Luckily, few people now do. Some of the ones that did are at my feet. There's back-ups of the data, of course, but those servers, in London and Bern and Beijing, are on their final seconds of existence now, if my colleagues have made it as far as I have. There's also another set of samples we know of. A single professor, on leave in West Virginia, in a cabin just off a lonely dirt track to the north of Sutton Lake, who signed some bits out last week for a working holiday. Some people are too selfless to even relax. He's in for a little bit of mandatory rest after today.

But it's so easy to destroy, to reverse progress. We're all good at it, if we put our minds to it. And doesn't that show that that's the natural order of things?

I pull plugs, open vats, slash at wires. Alarms start sounding, red lights are flashing overhead. Encouraging signs. I stomp every vial of goop I can see to pieces beneath my boots. It had taken the best minds years to get this far. But it's so quick to save the world.

I stand beneath the sparks and the smoke and know that I am the hero I set out to be.