Twenty-one years ago

A fat man with a stain on the cuff of his shirt sat at his principal’s desk, looking as imposing as a moist towelette. Oliver stood before him. He had declined the man’s offer of a chair. He was nearly seven feet tall and knew his height intimidated others, so he stood ramrod straight.

“Who did you say you were with?” the fat man asked, shuffling papers on his desk absentmindedly.

Nervous habit.

“I didn’t,” Oliver said without inflection. “Tell me what happened in detail.” He said nothing more, just stared silently at the fat man.

“Ah, well, the boy has had problems before.”

The boy? Probably can’t remember his name. Idiot.

“Ah, he’s an orphan. Been in foster homes for a while.”

“I am aware of his record. Skip to Thursday’s incident.”

“Right, ah. Well, Francis, that’s one of the older boys, had been giving him trouble. He had been in my office a few times about it before, but you know how boys are. Especially now that the state won’t let us hit them, am I right?”

Trying to find common ground.

Oliver said nothing.

“Ah. Yeah. So, as I was saying, this older boy, Francis, he was giving the kid some trouble, right? Taking his pudding, pushing him over. You know, kid stuff. But then last week, the kid just snaps. Attacks Francis at lunch. Broke his jaw and most of his ribs. Put him in the hospital. I told all this to the police.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“I’m not with the police,” Oliver said. “What happened next?”

“We called the cops,” the fat man said. “School policy you know. We will be conducting a review of the processes we have in place to stop this kind of thing happening again.”

“No. What happened with the child? After the fight, what did he do next?”

The fat man looked puzzled. “I think he went back to eating his lunch. Why?”

Oliver nodded.

The fat man waited for an answer. Oliver didn’t oblige him. He, unlike the fat man, had no problem with silence. He turned and left. An unanswered question has a kind of power. Some might consider it a petulant gesture, but it was a small pleasure that he couldn’t resist.

Later that day, Oliver paid a visit to the child’s home and made his foster family an offer that wasn’t really an offer. He left with the child in his custody.

The boy, who was almost nine, was the oldest child to enter the Program. He was almost too old to be considered, but Oliver had a feeling about the boy. Not that he was the kind of man to let a feeling get the better of his judgment, but there was little cost to the Program in giving the boy a chance, and great potential reward if his intuition paid off.

“My name is Oliver,” he said to the boy as they left in his car.

“I’m—” the boy began, but fell silent when Oliver held up a hand. Cutting off candidates before they got the chance to use their name was another technique favored by Oliver.

“You will no longer be using that name. Once you pass a physical examination, you will be assigned a number. You will answer to that until such time as you complete the Program and take a new name.”

The boy looked up at Oliver with a degree of apprehension, but not the level of fear one might expect from one so young.

“What program?” the boy asked.

Making candidates ask about the Program was also part of Oliver’s conversational arsenal.

He smiled. “The one to train the world’s first superheroes.”

“For real?” the boy asked, sounding skeptical. It was a common response from candidates.

Oliver smiled his most confident smile, the one he sometimes internally referred to as smile number one-four-seven; though he had no idea how many smiles he used, it just appealed to him. “For real.”