Soon I Will Be Invincible - By Austin Grossman Page 0,2

world with an oversized zap gun or cosmic wormhole. But why do we rob banks rather than guard them? Why did I freeze the Supreme Court, impersonate the Pope, hold the Moon hostage?

I happen to know they’ve got practically nothing in my file. A few old aliases, newspaper clippings, testimony from a couple of old enemies. The original accident report, maybe. The flash was visible for miles. That’s what people talk about when they talk about who I am, a nerd with an attitude and subpar lab skills. But there was another accident, one that nobody saw, a slow disaster that started the morning I arrived there. Nowadays it has a name, Malign Hypercognition Disorder. They’re trying to learn about it from me, trying to figure out whose eyes are going to be looking out at them from behind a mask in thirty years.

I have a therapist here, “Steve,” a sad-eyed Rogerian I’m taken to see twice a week in a disused classroom. “Do you feel angry?” “What did you really want to steal?” The things I could tell him—secrets of the universe! But he wants to know about my childhood. I try to relax and remind myself of my situation—if I kill him, they’ll just send another.

It could be worse—there are stories villains tell one another about the secret facilities out in the Nevada desert, the maximum-intensity enhanced containment facilities, for the ones they catch but are truly afraid of, the ones they can’t kill and can only barely control. Fifty-meter shafts filled with concrete, frozen cells held to near absolute zero. Being here means playing a delicate game—I’m in the lion’s jaws. I mustn’t scare them too badly. But Steve has his questions. “Who was the first one to hit you?” “When did you leave home?” “Why did you want to control the world? Do you feel out of control?” The past creeps in, perils of an eidetic memory.

It’s a danger in my line of work to tell too much; I know that now. And last time I told them everything, giving it all away like a fool, how I was going to do it, how escape was impossible. And they just listened, smirking. And it would have worked, too. The calculations were correct.

By the time the bus came that morning it was raining pretty hard, and the world was a grayed-out sketch of itself, the bus a dim hulk as it approached, the only thing moving. Inside the bus shelter, the rain drummed hollowly on the plastic ceiling, and my glasses were fogging up. It was 6:20 a.m., and my parents and I were standing, stunned and half-awake, in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s in Iowa.

I knew that it was a special morning and that I should be feeling something, that this was one of the Big Events in a person’s life, like marriage or a bar mitzvah, but I had never had a Big Event and I didn’t know what it was supposed to be like. An hour earlier, my alarm had gone off; my mother stuffed me into a scratchy sweater that was starting to itch in the late September warmth. We trooped out to the car and drove through the gray, silent town, the deserted city center, and turned into the lot by the mighty I-80. When my mother cut the engine, there were a few seconds of silence as we listened to the rain rapping on the ceiling. Then my father said, “We’ll wait with you at the bus stop.” So we dashed across the steaming asphalt to the plexiglas shelter. The rain sizzled down and cars and trucks swooshed by, and we stood there. Maybe someone said something.

I was thinking about how that fall everything would start without me at Lincoln Middle School. In a few days, everyone I knew would be meeting their new teachers, and the accelerated math class would be starting geometry, doing proofs. In June, we had gotten a letter from the Iowa Department of Education, offering to send me to a new school they were starting called the Peterson School of Math and Science. The year before, they gave a standardized test during homeroom, and everyone who scored in the top half a percentile got a letter. They gave me a talk about whether I would miss my friends or Mr. Reynolds, my math teacher.

I told them I would go. I didn’t think about how weird it was going to be, waiting for a bus