I park my car in the local 'free municipal parking' lot, gather my briefcase, my laptop bag, my recorder, and my phone, and walk almost a block and a half to where I've arranged the interview. As I pass out of the parking lot, I snap a quick picture of the big sign noting that the lot itself is insured for any damage due to 'superhuman activity'. The town we're meeting in is like half an hour from the ass end of nowhere, but just in case of an Act of God or Superhuman, it's good to have proof of the city's claim. The fact that the insurance company name, the lot number, and the policy dates are listed in small print at the bottom of the sign doesn't hurt either, since it means the policy actually exists and is currently in affect. I even manage to get my car's license plate in the shot, with enough resolution that if some super does something like throws a car at the bridge from Newark, misses, and pancakes my car, I'll at least be able to place a claim with some hope of getting reimbursed.

I shake my head as I approach the address, a small cafe with a bunch of tables set up both on the wide sidewalk between the storefronts and the broad, slow moving street itself, and also in the closed off lot between the cafe and the neighboring building. My dad would lecture me about leaving my car unlocked, with the keys balanced on top of the driver's side sun visor, but there are bush-league Supers everywhere who spend their whole career doing nothing but 'good deeds' like finding stolen cars. If somebody wants a joyride and picks my econo-box? Hard to get insurance to pay for damages, since he might not be a Super, just a dude with some hot wiring skills. But if all he needs to do for the joyride is open the door, grab the keys and start it up, I don't have to worry about him smashing the window, destroying the ignition, or any of the other stuff somebody has to do to steal a car.

I scan the tables, looking for the man I'm here to meet. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a really good photograph of him. The public records of his Super identity are confusing, likely deliberately so. He's listed in the official records as a 'Grade E Super'. Grade Es are, for the most part, barely 'super' at all in any traditional comic book sense. Okay, some of them are on a par with the 'Mystery Men' from the earliest comic books. On the other hand, there are so many of them that it's not uncommon for even a quiet little town like the one I'm in to have at least a few. Some of that, of course, is the allure of 'being a super'. Somebody who goes out in a costume and does good things for people. Or, in some cases, bad things to people, whether you're talking about the semi-legal vigilantes who make their mark by beating up criminals, or the small time villains who register because not only does it excuse some really over the top outfits? If you get robbed by some random guy on the street, you're out whatever they took, but if you have insurance that covers 'superhuman activity', like the car lot? So long as you can prove it was a Super somehow, the insurance will replace whatever they took. So from the villain's point of view, being 'super' means their 'victims' don't resist as long as all they're doing is taking cash, credit cards, or other fungible stuff that an insurance company can make right. There's even a Grade E Super in New York City whose 'superhuman identity' is 'The Mugger'. He claims to be 'superhumanly good at disguises', although his trademarked outfit is literally just a domino mask and a bag with a big dollar sign on the side. The Mugger only steals cash, coins, and 'untraceable fungible valuables', which covers the few times he's stolen stuff like a can of gas or a box of collectible card game cards. The best part? The Mugger encourages his victims to record him taking their stuff and dumping it into his bag. It's part of his whole schtick. Sometimes he's even given his victim a cheap burner phone to record him with.

I'm sure you're asking how a guy like that is still in business, and how I know about him? For the first part, remember that 'superhumanly good at disguises'? That's his explanation for why he's been recorded as short, tall, fat, skinny, muscular, svelte, white, black, brown, yellow, blond, brunette, bald, male, female, and adrogynous, just to name a few of his 'disguises'. Every time the police or another Super brings someone claiming to be The Mugger in? They claim they're an actor paid to play a role in a documentary about The Mugger, and that they were told the victim and even the bystanders were part of the cast and crew. Since there's inevitably another robbery by The Mugger while they're in custody, the prosecutors generally just sigh, shake their heads, and move on to the next case. The reason I know about all this? The Grade E Super I'm interviewing today, who goes by the name 'Agent of Karma', was a longstanding nemesis of The Mugger. For like twenty years, Agent of Karma would show up at random Mugger robberies and intervene. At first that meant getting in a fistfight, but after about a dozen times, The Mugger, or more obviously whatever loose knit group that uses that alias, realized that even if he was Class E, the Agent of Karma outclassed them entirely when it came to fighting, so The Mugger's go-to maneuver against Agent of Karma became hollering, 'curses! Karma has caught up with me!', then running away. Unfortunately for The Mugger, Agent of Karma also had some top drawer parkour skills, so more often than not it just wound up being a whole street theater action comedy routine.

The people of New York City loved it. Not only did they get free street theater, it brought in tourists, coming in from all over the world specifically to see if The Mugger would show up to mug them, hoping that Agent of Karma would show up as well. Apparently in his younger days, Agent was something of a ladies man as well, because not only did a fair number of women he rescued wind up 'thanking their hero'? On two separate documented occasions The Mugger he caught pulled off her mask and claimed to be the Agent's 'biggest fan' who just wanted to 'meet him in person'. While he took both women to the police, in at least one case the woman in question streamed her apology to the Agent on her OnlyFans.

In a world where the only reason there are still landmarks are the Superheroes who can recreate them from scratch, turn back time to keep them from being destroyed, or otherwise keep them standing, because there are Grade SS+ Super Villains who absolutely will destroy them if given a chance? Stuff like The Mugger and Agent of Karma are a low key blessing, letting people look on all of it as some kind of theater, where good guys stop bad guys and insurance companies pay for all the damages afterward. They don't have to think about the trauma people accrue from having their lives threatened, or even ended, because some of those Supers can even do that. But while a Superhero who has spent his whole life training to fight against Supervillains, Natural Disasters, and whatever else the world throws at them can get up after being dead for the fortieth time and laugh with his buddies about it, because even the scars are gone? The office clerk with severe anxiety who got thrown forty stories into the air from the top of a sixty story building in downtown Manhattan, only to splatter across the surface of the Hudson several excruciating seconds later? It hits different when they wake up to find it wasn't a nightmare, that they really did die after several seconds of screaming terror while they watched it coming.

In case you're wondering about me, my name is Nelson Samuels. I like to say I'm a reporter, because that usually opens a few more doors than saying I'm a college student working on a History degree, specializing in the History of Supers. The reason I've driven down from Princeton to the 'largest farming town in New Jersey' is because Agent of Karma claims to be the most knowledgeable person on the planet regarding History in general, especially Super History. When you're working on a degree like mine, and a genuine Super, one who has been a Super for over forty years, most of those registered, who makes a claim like that, says they'll meet with you not just for a brief interview, but for an open ended series of interviews? Even if all he knows are the past forty years, it'll still be a gold mine of information for my thesis.

But right now, looking around the cafe tables, I can't spot anyone who even vaguely looks like they're a sixty year old semi-retired Superhero, even a Class E one. Four couples, three small groups of friends, and one big group, all women who have pushed three tables together and are having some kind of party. There's also a guy, twenty something maybe, sitting by himself at a table just out of arm's reach of the party, flirting with any of them who look his way. He's not half bad looking; well built, a clean form fitting white tee shirt showing off some nice pecs, razor sharp edges on his hair, faded short on the sides with just enough length on the top to show tight curls. His skin tone makes it hard to tell whether he's Black or Hispanic; at a guess I'd say Dominican, maybe Puerto Rican. I catch myself staring, shake my head and start back toward the front of the cafe, hoping I'll find Agent of Karma inside.

"Samuels, where you goin?" The deep bass voice prompts a wave of titillated giggles from the party of women, and I turn to see the guy tilt his head back in a 'come hither' gesture aimed at me, smiling warmly the whole time.

I walk over to him, not really believing my eyes, but I don't know anyone in Vineland. I think maybe he recognizes me from Princeton, or even from High School, but as I get closer I realize I wouldn't have forgotten a guy like this if I'd met him. Maybe this is somebody from grade school, and puberty hit them like a goddamned freight train?

When I get just outside of arm's reach, he holds out one hand. I juggle my phone and recorder into my left and grasp his hand with my right. "Gilpatrick Matos. Otherwise known as Agent of Karma. Good to meet you." He nods and waves at the seat around the table from him. "Have a seat."

As I set my gear down on the table, he turned back to the women for a moment, setting off another round of giggles with a nod of his head and a raise of his eyebrows. Nothing on his registration entry said anything about this guy's sheer charisma. Then again, it's not like most of the 'Super Charismatic' people I've seen videos of or read about. They always seem to dominate whatever room they're in, drawing the eyes of everyone, forcing people to believe them, believe in them. This guy? I'd nearly walked away from him, dismissed him as my point of contact out of hand. I just got this sense that he knew exactly who he was, and part of that was a sublime confidence, a complete lack of anything even resembling fear. The rest was a little more subtle; I didn't pick up on it until I watched him with the ladies as I set up my laptop. He wasn't focused on any single one of them, but as I watched them steal glances, he met the gaze of any of them who looked for more than a moment; in that moment? He focused entirely on them, to the exclusion of everyone else at the cafe. It wasn't, like, stalkerish either. It was just him giving his complete attention to the person in front of his eyes at that moment, and clearly, obviously, enjoying looking at them and them looking at him. It took me a moment to remember the phrase; joie de vivre. In that extended moment of eye contact, an almost palpable wave of zest for life washed between them. She looked away, blushing and trying not to giggle along with her girlfriends, and he looked over at me.

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As his eyes tracked across the space between, his smile never left, but I got the impression that instead of reveling in the view of a converted theater, two hair dressing salons, and a pizza place, he scanned and cataloged everything in his field of view. Then his eyes met mine, and suddenly his smile came alive again, making him look half a dozen years younger. "Man, I would never have pegged you as sixty someting."

He chuckled. "You haven't seen my business cards or looked really closely at my registration file, have you?"

I shook my head. "No, no, I've read your file. Agent of Karma's file, anyhow, since I guess you could have something in common with your old nemesis."

If he took offense, it didn't show in the slightest. He just laughed, a low rumble that might have been seductive, had he any intention of it being so. "Nah. Check the pictures in the file. Some of the old ones are a little grainy, but if you look way in the back it ought to have my old military ID from my Army days. No mask, no makeup, just this face."

I shook my head as I popped my briefcase open, pulling the printed copy of the file I'd brought along, both hands on it to flip through it without losing any of it to the breeze. There at the very bottom, part of his initial registration, was a photocopy of an older Army ID. On the small side, but still very clearly the man sitting in front of me. If he'd aged in the slightest, I couldn't see it.

"What are you, immortal or something?" I joked. An actual Immortal, if anybody like that existed, wouldn't be a Class E Super. He didn't respond as I put the file back in my briefcase, and when I closed the lid and looked up, he caught my eye and glanced meaningfully at my recorder. I blinked, picked it up and turned it on, then in my best 'for the record' voice said, "This is Nelson Samuels, interviewing Gilpatrick Matos, AKA Agent of Karma, in Vineland New Jersey at a street cafe. It is," I glanced at my phone, "eight past noon, July seventh, twenty twenty-four."

When I went silent and waited, he rumbled, "I think you'd asked me something just then?"

I retraced my verbal footsteps, then carefully repeated, "What are you, Immortal or something?"

I'd never had someone burst into laughter at a question and not been offended before. It's a natural reaction; somebody laughs at something serious you said, and you think they're laughing at you. But when Gilpatrick laughed? It felt like he was sharing a joke with me, like I'd just filled in the punchline to a joke we both found hilarious. "C'mon, man. 'Immortal'. What kind of a question is that? Hell, what even kind of word is that?"

I caught myself smiling, barely kept from laughing along with him. I heard the amusement in my own voice as I replied, "what do you mean, 'what kind of word'?"

He shrugged, clearly communicating how sublimely hilarious he found the entire idea. "It's a weird kind of word, isn't it?" He paused to take a sip of his drink; something iced, with just enough color to not be water. "It's a privative." With a nod to the recorder he continued, "A word that describes something by it's lack of something else." He shook his head before continuing. "Hell, even 'mortal' is only really described as a reference to something else. 'Subject to Death'. Death? That means 'Becoming Dead'. Dead? Another privative! 'A lack of life'."

He shook his head, laughing again, meeting the gaze of one of the women at the other table, who bit her lip and ran an ice cube across her forehead, her eyes slipping closed as she did. "No lack of life over there, is there?" he asked, never looking away until she did, clapping her hands over her mouth, as scandalized as her friends.

"Back to your question, though. Well, that 'Immortal' part. You got synonyms, like 'Eternal', or 'Everlasting', or 'Deathless', but those latter two are both Modern English, and Eternal changed meaning over time; it used to mean something like 'of great age' in Latin. 'Endless'? Like Deathless, only moreso. 'Perpetual' is probably the closest. 'Continuous', with a connotation of 'never ending'." He paused, shrugging his shoulders with a self-deprecating grin; strange to see on someone who so obviously knew exactly who they were, and seemed to have very little reason to question their own value. "It's just weird to me that people would have this idea, this mythical status, that isn't even really described by the word they use for it, or by any other word in the language."

I laughed a little myself as I replied, "I guess it's like 'pornography', they know it when they see it, right?"

If I thought he'd really been laughing at my inadvertent joke before, I realized I'd been wrong, as his laugh rolled over me, tumbling my own along with him. I glanced at the big party table, and realized that if my tastes ran that way, I could stand up, walk over, and walk away with any woman there, as they all laughed along with us. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? Except 'pornography' literally translates to 'writing about prostitites'. Okay, the original phrasing might have been 'writing by prostitutes', but I'm pretty sure the whole intersection of the Venn diagram of 'sex professionals' and 'writing' leaves a pretty clear picture of what's going on with 'pornography', right?"

I blinked. "Damn, you're right. I never really thought about it that way before."

He smiled at my reply, even as a slight quirk to the smile told me he'd caught my wince as I swore during my own recorded interview. "Yeah, that's where this kind of conversation always winds up, since its kinda odd for women with a lack of clothing and inhibitions want to chat about etymology and parts of speech, y'know?"

He never looked at the other table; maybe a twitch like he'd been going to, maybe not, but with my eyes locked to his, I still caught two of the women pushing themselves back from the table, shaking their heads and taking deep breaths, blowing them out and chuckling as they looked at each other. I glanced over as one of them looked at the other ladies and said, "We're gonna head back to work now. Keep all of us out of trouble." She winked at them as she and the other woman, with one last appreciative glance at Gilpatrick, turned and walked away down the street.

The other woman called out over her shoulder, "See you back at the office." I almost didn't hear her amused mutter of, "most of you, anyway."

I did hear when the first departing woman, her fingers toying with a wedding band on her left hand, said, "you hope!" Then started laughing. The other woman joined in after only a few steps.

Still watching them walk away with clearly genuine appreciation for the view, Gilpatrick spoke again. "Y'know, I think I do remember the earliest place I read the word 'Immortal'." He pulled out an old phone; the kind with an actual keyboard integral to the hardware. "Lemme see if I can find it. I know I scanned it in here somewhere." He shook his head. "You have no idea how often I've wished for an OCR app that would be able to handle handwriting and non-Latin alphabets. Or, really, handle multiple alphabets at the same time, because let me tell you, old school polyglots? They would straight up write whatever they wrote in whatever alphabet they wanted. Usually either the one for the language they spoke most often, or maybe the one the word they were using came from, but I've seen a letter where a woman cusses her ex husband out in eight different languages using no less than five different alphabets, most of the time spelling shit phonetically using the 'wrong' alphabet. Yeah, Ada was a trip."

As he scrolled through his phone, a kind of sea change came over him; his good humor remained, but a kind of melancholy rose up under it, spiking now and again as he glanced at the documents on his phone. "Anyhow, I think... gimme a second... yeah, here we go." He handed me his phone, and I took it carefully, not wanting to break an obvious antique.

I squinted at the screen. "Uh..."

He laughed, somehow managing to be amused by my confusion without seeming mocking in any way. "Yeah, I know the screen's a little small, but the image is high res, so you can just..."

"That's not it," I interrupted. "I don't speak Greek."

He blinked in confusion of his own, something finally knocking his good humor askew. "What do you mean you don't speak Greek? It's not even..." He stuttered to a stop, then tried again. "It's written, and it's not..." He laughed, clearly at himself this time, as he shook his head and the heel of his hand met his forehead. His chagrin was clear in his voice when he continued. "You don't read Aramaic. Sorry, between auto-translation, most of my friends being bi-or-poly," he paused with a wink, "lingual, that is, and you being a historian, I assumed. Sorry, didn't mean to make an ass out of me, and definitely not out of Uma Thurman."

"That's okay?" I said, my head now spinning trying to keep up with him. "I didn't think Aramaic uses Cyrillic?"

He shook his head, "It doesn't, but this old f..." he paused, clearly editing himself.

"Please, speak freely; I try not to swear on my own recordings, but you're not the interviewer." I blushed as I said it, I have no idea why, but his sly smile might have been the reason.

"No worries. Anyway, this guy, Hero that is, he was always writing stuff in one language, speaking in another, and probably thinking in a third. Weird guy, but, y'know, like us." At my head-tilt, he smiled again and filled in, "a historian." He reached out, waving for his phone. I handed it back, and he fished a pair of old, cracked reading glasses out of a back pocket, slipped them on, then looked over them at his phone's screen, expanding and shrinking the scanned document a few times before glancing at me over his glasses to say, "no worries. I'll read it to you."