I groaned, twisting inside of the little broom closet as I slowly peeled off my armor, including all of the little bits of ice that had shredded it and now stuck into my skin and muscle like an acupuncture treatment gone wrong. Fortunately, the only piece of supertech I’d ever been able to afford, my image-altering goggles, could survive a hell of a lot more abuse than a class four alpha could easily dish out.
Technically I was leaving behind a lot of evidence. Blood, skin cells, shredded bits of DNA, even the bits of my costume that might lead back to me if some super-sleuth decided to take on the case, but I was far enough away from the scene of my crime that it was almost irrelevant unless one of the big-ticket boys got involved. Those guys had more important and profitable things to do than waste their time chasing down a thwarted, albeit ultimately stylish and fashionable, supervillain like me.
Teleportation sucked.
Okay, maybe it didn’t suck so much for the alphas who could just imagine where they wanted to go, and then popped there. For a guy like me, who had to carefully disconnect every single atom, shift them to their new destination, and then reassemble them consciously while avoiding quantum entanglement or losing even part of their dispersion, every single part of teleportation sucked.
Once I had all of my bloody Kevlar and polymer plates stuffed into the deep maintenance sink, I carefully dispersed the molecular structure and, turning on the sink, washed the resulting slurry of sand, polymer glop, and organics down the sink. It was thinned up enough that it shouldn’t clog up the pipes, and Glacier Girl’s ice would melt and disperse on its own like all summoned constructs.
In the end, yeah, they’d find some of my genetics if they really hunted for them, just like they’d find the traces of every single maintenance worker that had ever used the room before the plant closed, and pretty much everything they’d ever mopped or cleaned up. My personal signature would be one of the millions that wound up in a room like this, and because of the old electronic plant’s long history, even the minor amounts of quantum radiation I’d leave behind would be buried beneath forty years of old CRT television radiation scattered around the plant.
As a surface structure, there was no way that the Industrial Park would ever be inhabited again, because it was just too dangerous for too little gain, so our destructive little battle wasn’t really costing anyone anything, except maybe the insurance company.
Unlike a lot of other alphas, my magic didn’t yank matter imbued with my personal energy signature from the ether. Which meant that the last part of any job, clean-up, was what I was best at. I had no illusions that, if they really pulled out all stops, the Bureau of Strategic Anomalies, the BSA, wouldn’t be able to track me, but I made damned sure that it would be a difficult and expensive proposition that wouldn’t be worth their time on a whim.
Besides, I was pretty sure that they approved of me, at least on some unofficial level. I was easy to hire with the Vilnet app, not terribly expensive, had a clean kill sheet, and was willing to custom-design a villainous persona for a slight surcharge, as well as being ready to let an up-and-comer ‘finally defeat’ an established persona for a bit of a heftier surcharge.
I would brag, but that would sort of defeat the purpose. On Vilnet’s ‘100 most wanted’ list, I was number 26… and 28, 30, 33, 34, 41, 77, and 90. I was on the world’s greatest supervillain list three times also, although admittedly two of those times were marked ‘deceased’. All inside of two years. Barely nineteen years old, and I beat out long-established heels who’d been terrorizing the country for nearly thirty years.
I can almost hear you thinking, “Blueprint, if you are so famous, why aren’t you rich and powerful? I mean, you can literally turn air into gold, why do you work nine-to-five being a human punching bag for carefully-staged heroes instead of just retiring to enjoy your ill-gotten gains, or better yet, becoming a superhero instead?”
I already had some stock answers to that, if anyone ever actually asked, which they didn’t. I mean, sure, some of my personas had a certain celebrity value, but sitting still long enough to give a reporter an interview would sort of defeat the entire purpose.
My entire business model involved showing up someplace in an over-the-top costume, creating some visibly nefarious but ultimately harmless and easily-thwarted plot like turning everyone in Empire City blue or cornering the nation’s supply of zero-calorie sweeteners, doing a lot of property damage to heavily-insured but generally useless and abandoned real estate, throwing out a monologue about whatever ideology I’d picked to match the costume and scheme, and then getting beaten up by whatever heroes had agents willing to pay for a high-visibility takedown.
Look, Heroes were IMPORTANT. Not the two-bit vigilantes that used powers or brute strength to stop drug dealers and beat the hell out of purse snatchers, those guys were basically thugs themselves that would be better off working for the police as alpha auxiliaries or private security.
But real heroes? Earth was NOT safe. It was kind of a dimensional crossroads ever since the quantum membrane experiments in the forties resulted in the first q-weapons, and the resulting fallout started awakening alphas. The REAL bad guys, insane megalomaniacs that wanted to rule the world with their powers, dimensional invaders from hell worlds, Opportunistic aliens that saw Earth as an easy raiding target because of its low tech levels, displaced deities, mutated super-monsters, suicidal psychopaths, and wannabe warlords, needed heroes to stop their schemes.
Those guys were NOT harmless kooks and had zero compunctions about doing whatever it took to accomplish whatever cripplingly evil crap they had in mind. Solid class three and four heroes were needed to protect people from those assholes. The problem is, that being a hero was not cheap. Beyond just their gear requirements, a lot of alphas had special dietary requirements like shoveling away enough food to feed a family of six at each meal, having to occasionally ingest expensive substances like deuterium or tritium to stay healthy or grow their powers, the need to sleep in a special environment like a vacuum chamber or alpha fallout just to get a good night’s rest.
And widgeteers, tinkers, and sorcerers? Those guys almost HAD to have federal funding just to produce the marvels that so many people took for granted, like holographic traffic control, enhanced food production on kaiju-free farmland, and the protective machinery that KEPT those farms kaiju-free. All of this stuff required money and had strict limits. True Genius and Tinker tech worked regardless of what happened, but widgeteer junk? Widgeteers could only keep a certain amount of constructs going or had to replace them occasionally when they dispersed, and that took support.
And don’t even get me started on Kaiju. Humans were not the only ones affected by the Q-bombs and quantum instability, and Kaiju were universally driven to hunt down and consume Q-instability sources, and lacking those, they enjoyed consuming secondary Q-instability, meaning sapient life. Most cities had to deal with the occasional Kaiju attacks, from the small-scale predators like Z-vamps and cranium rats that had to be tracked and destroyed when they infested a population center, to the giant monsters like rocs, dragons, murder bunnies, and the occasional Lovecraftian monstrosity that crawled out of the ocean.
The thing is, the public was fickle. Alphas were expected to pay their own way unless they were part of one of the state or federal teams, which tended to be very picky and exclusive clubs for well-connected or exceptionally powerful alphas. When something like a roc or an alien invasion appeared, though, EVERY Alpha higher than class two tended to help unless they were totally selfish rat bastards and medical bills and funeral expenses sucked.
That’s where I came in.
Vigilantes didn’t appreciate what I did. Ironically, despite being outlaws, they tended to have a narrower view of right and wrong than even the well-known do-gooders. Mostly I think that they hated the entire idea of publicity and getting paid for doing good. I couldn’t blame them all that much, since I, too, was envious of people who got paid for doing what they loved when I was broke, working dead-end boring jobs, and trying desperately to keep my head above water.
There’s nothing like working long hours at a job you hate to cement a sort of bigotry against those who were successful doing something they enjoyed. It’s a fact that if you did want to worry about keeping a nine-to-five job, you needed sponsorships, patrons, a trust fund, or heck, even a popular streaming service showing your exploits. Me, I help to provide those exploits.
Okay, enough trying to convince you. Either you already think I am a total sell-out, or you are looking for tips and are already on my side. I like to think I am good at my alternative job, but I was strictly small potatoes. Not just because of my less-than-phenomenal superpower, but also because big heroes, class fours and fives, needed big villains to fight. That meant big money for big schemes and big paydays.
I started shrugging into my civvies, a beat-up hoodie, and a pair of black jeans and trainers. I checked my balance on Vilnet and activated the withholding software for Strategic Special Simulations, the holding company, and the hidden pass-through for getting paid to play a bad guy. It was a stunt coordination company, based out of Columbus, Ohio, and I was the boss and only employee.
We had some links to indie video games, basically, some budget motion capture work, but the real income was from ‘private effects’ commissions, in this case, twenty grand from Glacier Girl’s PR firm. After taxes, insurance, and the sheer costs associated with making a realistic villain scheme, in this case, a failed plot to add silver nitrate to the South End’s water supply to turn everyone blue, it had been a fun, but expensive little scheme. My total expenses, including the armor that GG had wrecked and now was floating down the drain, I’d only made about twenty-five hundred profit.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Yes, I paid taxes. The quickest way to get on the radar for law enforcement was untraceable income. That’s also why I didn’t use my ‘power’ to make something like gold. Not only was the energy expenditure to make such a huge change prohibitive, but my registered ID was ‘Blueprint’ for a reason. Sure, I’d invented lots of other identities, but when I’d first discovered I was a class two alpha at seventeen years old, I’d had hopes of being a superhero.
It wasn’t going to happen. Class two’s were not exactly as common as dirt, and sometimes they could get decent civilian gigs with their powers, but my power, microkinesis, wasn’t even strong enough to influence a roll of the dice, let alone all that superhero stuff. Unlike most supers, I couldn’t summon matter or power from the ether, so on the superhero scale I was simply one of the few males with a mostly useless single-function power. A bit like an antique icebox, I was both rare and mostly useless.
Two and a half grand wasn’t a lot. It would cover another month’s rent and probably my food bills, but I had to hope to pick up another gig soon, or drop out of college and get a real job for a while. The occasional ‘real’ commissions that SSS picked up were peanuts that could barely keep the private company insured, but since I didn’t have to worry about things like payroll, it was a pretty decent shell.
Honestly, just about everyone that did commission work, from graphic artists to web designers, tended to own their own minor company to run the profits through, just as a way to protect themselves from any legal fallout if something stupid happened, like an audit from some asshole Infernal Revenue agent trying to get a promotion by busting pieceworkers.
Yeah, the IRS did that kind of petty crap with regularity. Every IRS Agent was convinced he would uncover the next Al Capone, and by the time they got done tearing apart some poor schmuck’s personal finances looking for money laundering links, the artist was ruined, their clients permanently spooked and looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to prove that they were innocent. If the devil was real, he undoubtedly worked for the IRS.
That was why I was always careful to pay taxes on every dime I made at my side gig. That, and as a motion-capture guy, I was technically a stuntman. I paid the hazard insurance, which meant unless I was stupid enough to actually get knocked unconscious and unmasked by the cops during one of my schemes, my legal bases were covered. If the IRS tried to dive into SSS taxes, all of the income was thoroughly covered, and if they pressed too hard, I could just dissolve the company and file bankruptcy, and then start a new one… a new logo, new website, new path to getting paid. The virtue of a logistics management education shows its value, and my Vilnet links and reputation score would remain untouched.
As I made my way out of the abandoned industrial park, wiggling through the big gap between the chain-link fence posts, I knew this was the most dangerous part of running any scheme, getting away. As a class two male alpha, even dressed up in beat-up civvies, I still had the ‘look’ of an alpha. If there were still cops looking for Diabolus Firetrap, my invented persona, I’d get grabbed just on suspicion.
***
Sure enough, as I jogged towards where I had my beat-up 1996 Sentra was parked, I caught the red flash of a police car flagging me. I sighed and started jogging in place as I waited for them to pull up, making sure I had a nice solid sweat going. It was weird, to me, the way that cops liked to wave a red flag at potential suspects and then take their lack of assent as proof that they were guilty, but the reality was, these guys weren’t really expecting to find a class four supervillain jogging through an abandoned industrial park at three in the afternoon wearing Value-Mart trainers and a girl-band hoodie from the nineties.
The guy didn’t even open his car door as the vehicle pulled up to the curb. He wasn’t a powered cop, so he was clearly just going through the motions as he looked me over. “Alpha?” he asked, more curiously than accusingly. Since I hadn’t run, my only suspicious tell was the fact that like all Alphas, I had an incredibly high metabolism and looked like a bit of a bodybuilder. I did in fact work out, since as a male alpha, refusing to put in some basic time tended to make you look… weird, and I also liked drawing the occasional female eye.
There was also a ninety percent chance that there was a budget quantum displacement meter in the car somewhere. While I could and had fooled them on occasion, right now there was no real reason. For all they knew, Diabolus Firetrap was long gone, and I was just a low-ranked teenage alpha keeping myself fit that happened to be nearby, and not even suspiciously so.
I nodded, “Yep. Going for a run. Class two. How can I help you, officer?” It always paid to be nice to cops, even the occasional assholes. As a registered alpha, cops were always considered to have probable cause, since it was considered the same as carrying around a loaded weapon at all times.
Yeah, it was unconstitutional and blatantly unfair, but I couldn’t begrudge the human race its best efforts at defending itself from people who could potentially destroy an entire city in an eye blink. Some alphas used it as an excuse to consider themselves an oppressed minority, but to me, well, it was a Tuesday. As long as I wanted to live among humans, I’d follow human rules, and if I didn’t like it I could go try and live among the Kaiju… and that was unlikely to end well.
Yeah, I know, selective morality. I was a supervillain, that’s what we did.
“Registration?”
I nodded, and still jogging in place, fished out my registration card, and handed it to the slightly overweight crew-cut blonde through the open window. The government had considered, for a very short time, demanding that registered alphas get a bar-coded tattoo, but that was a step too far… even the Humanity First creeps admitted that being forced to accept a brand would turn alphas from a necessary evil into a permanent enemy, and honestly, it was even less popular than the pro-alpha attempts to institute a mask immunity law had been.
Although we WERE expected to keep our registration cards available. The same way a guy driving a car was expected to have his driver’s license handy. We simply couldn’t put our ‘car’ in a garage somewhere. I’d already ‘reset’, so I didn’t have any blood on my clothes or anything, but female alphas had it a lot easier trying to pass as a basic. A gorgeous girl was a gorgeous girl, but a tall, muscular guy with near zero body fat stood out anywhere but Hollywood, a sports team, or a red carpet.
Despite the nomenclature, ‘alpha’ was not the same thing as an alpha male. Basically, over time, a ton of different terms had been used, from metahuman to awakened human, from quantumite to mutant. Alpha was the term that basically stuck. We could still be absolutely antisocial and shy geeks, over-the-top extroverts, or self-absorbed nerds just like anyone else. Why? Because in the end, we were just as human as anyone else, we just had a lucky reinforced recessive in what humans prior to the Q-bomb release referred to as our ‘junk DNA’ which somehow activated and linked to our physical form, and made magic possible.
Yes, I said it, magic. It really WAS magic. Scientists kept trying to quantify it, but so far they couldn’t even figure out what part of the DNA housed the gift, if it was the DNA at all. Certain physical gifts came with measurable physical changes to the individual that had it, like density increase or improved physique actually changing the way an alpha’s body was put together, but some girl that could fly without wings or shoot lasers out of her eyes? Well, her eyes were just eyes, and her brain was still her brain and behaved the same way any other brain behaved. Eyes cannot shoot laser beams, and yet some eyes did, thus… magic.
“What the hell is microkinesis?” he asked, looking at my card.
It was a question I had been asked a lot. I had a lot of stock answers, but I wouldn’t give anyone a rundown on what it could REALLY accomplish, since that would be stupid. “It’s a non-ether form of telekinesis. I can’t pull power from the ether, or matter, so it’s a super weak type of telekinesis. It’s mostly useful for shoving around like… dust and stuff.”
He looked at me curiously. “And that’s class two? That sounds more like class one.” Class one powers were so focused or specialized that they were considered the same thing a normal human could do without powers, or just generally useless, like changing your hair color at will or having preternatural balance without all the cool things like enhanced strength or hyper-perception that went with it.
Obviously, with a lot of training, you could often leverage those abilities to incredible levels, but a normal human with enough training could break a stack of bricks with his bare knuckles, too. Class ones were generally not required to bother with a registration card, because they were generally less threatening than a human with a gun or a knife.
I shrugged, “Technically it’s strong enough to push a button at a distance, or interrupt an electrical circuit, so the government in its wisdom decided that it’s potentially a threat. Mostly it’s just about strong enough to spell out words in my breakfast cereal or affect a coin toss on a bar bet, but I am definitely NOT on the invasion alert list.”
To be completely honest, if they ever re-assessed my abilities, I mean, if I didn’t actually lie to the assessors, they might rank me as a class four or class five. See, while my individual telekinesis was really, really weak, I could affect a LOT of things at one time… and microkinesis allowed me to affect little things, like, say, the vibrational speed of a couple quintillion molecules, or flipping a proton and a neutron’s polarity a few hundred million times.
I had the ability to reset or rebuild molecular and atomic structures based on things I had sampled. It was kind of like having an image database, and was the reason I called myself ‘Blueprint’. I couldn’t fly, but I could rip apart my own molecular structure, shift it to another location with my microkinesis, and then reassemble myself based on the blueprint I made at the time I decomposed my original structure. It was only slightly faster than running, but it made my escape feasible.
After looking at my registration card and calling it in, he nodded and handed it back. “Yeah, you should probably head out of here. I already let the station know you were here, and as a class two you clearly aren’t who we are looking for, but there was an alpha fight near here, and the cowl in question managed to barely escape. It’s not safe at all in the area.”
I smiled, accepting my card back as I nodded towards the parking lot where my chariot awaited. “Yeah, I was already pretty much done with my run. I appreciate you guys and might consider joining up with the force when I am done with my schooling. I am in 3G housing, and you have my number if you need anything from me. I hope you have a good day, sir.”
He nodded, looking a little relieved as he pulled out and I ran over to my car. I couldn’t blame him for being a little relieved. I mean, it was his job, but it’s dangerous to interfere with someone who was clearly an alpha, especially so close to a known incident.
After all, I might be a supervillain.