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  Once a week they met for the weekly recap of OSD operations.

  “You’re not going to like the weekly recap, Doctor.”

  “I already didn’t like the week. But we still earned. Go.”

  “The Blue Boss took down the Customizers. He gave Sonny Ditlow to the PD. Both he and Man Mafia 3 are under indictment for the eight murders. Martian Justice wiped out an entire outlaw biker gang in one night, the Motorchrists. Both superheroes are out of commission until next month. That makes two big ones down. By now the carousel is thinning out.”

  “That’s two AXIS strikes,” Dr. Playground said. “One has no effect on OSD, taking out the Motorchrists only drained the free agent pool. The Customizers go to Man Mafia 4. I want a dead AXIS member in two days.”

  “We have no members identified.”

  “Still only Milo Spector?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still no known friends or associates?”

  “No.”

  “Then we need to fucking find one in two fucking days.”

  “Done.”

  “Where’s the twink?”

  “A sighting or two of a flight or two. One account of Chase Juniper rescuing a suicidal gay teen in Massachusetts. The teen was about to go off a bridge when Chase spotted him, intervened.”

  “Why can’t a gay commit suicide by jumping?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he never reaches the ground.”

  Xoir gave that a dutiful smirk.

  He said, “I am not happy with Her Blue Majesty. Why him? Where’s his technology? Obviously he has it by accident. Ask him how he passes through the Brutalia Limit he couldn’t tell you to save his life, poor little fucker. Even with the laser beam slowly cutting the table towards his crotch. Yet he has the key. Confirmed.”

  “If he doesn’t know,” Xoir speculated, “then the reason may be biochemical. Or genetic. Or any of the physical causes related to the ability to fly. We may not be asking him why as what he eats. We may need him wired to machines we haven’t invented. For years.”

  “We have to find him before AXIS does.”

  “We find him. We recruit him hopefully. We seduce him. Create positive association with OSD. Make him head of Homodevious Operations.”

  “We seduce him by putting him on the map,” Dr. Playground decided. “We up his stock. Put the footage out. Debut him as the next superhero.”

  “He needs a name.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Well…since he’s still in the picture…and he’s in a picture… his name is The Kid in the Picture. How’s that?”

  “You have a way with names. That’s our Hitler.”

  “Done.”

  “The boy is so exquisitely beautiful I don’t know whether to pimp him, recruit him, or kill him. Not that it has to be multiple choice. He’s hot enough for Dr. Playground. But a little old.”

  18

  Once a month Xoir liked to awake nude with a holosynthetic Salvador Dali painting her.

  “Lightly,” she said, parting her thighs. “Like a dove.”

  Dali put down his brush and his mustaches lowered between her thighs. The holosynth would be faded out by the time she got out of bed. She designed them to her need for power affirmation, queued at random. She could awake to Pablo Picasso up all night painting her while she was asleep. She could awake inside a closed set where the bloated middle aged Orson Welles was filming her sleep. She could awake beside a nude Sylvia Plath rescued from suicide by her sexual magnetism.

  She got out of bed, crossed the floor-to-ceiling view of downtown Brutalia, went to the bathroom suite. Two hours later she was dressed and headed to her office suite one floor above her home suite.

  The nerve center of her office suite was surrounded by 15 screens. Her software-accurate videotape-like memory storage and retrieval capability had been better than having 15 screens, her superior autobiographical memory recording every moment of her life from an inexact point in utero during the third trimester. She had kept zero records, zero files. Her brain had the storage capacity of a PC. Until the year 2000. Every memory to that year had been encrypted from retrieval. Her response was her invention of neuropedic science, her invention of the neuropedix to unencrypt her pre-2000 memory banks. It was an ongoing project that could take the rest of her life to complete. If the memory was gone, the super scientist skill set remained only now it was like practicing unlearned magic.

  Her other role was as Dr. Playground’s analyst. Her specialty was superheroes. After superheroes there was no going back to the ordinary patient. For their sessions he wore no exoframe. The psyche of Simon Stranko was equally psychiatry and archeology. He appreciated the irony of the patient-on-the-couch cliché applied to a supervillain. What had been determined about him so far: he was neither pedophiliac nor homosexual. But he had a strong attraction to acquiring the orientation of pedophilia. Mentally she reviewed the later part of their last session.

  “I need to be something don’t I?” he said in his corrupt sense of playfulness. “At least allow me to talk like a pedophile. You should have made me one by now.”

  “Rebuilding your sexuality takes time.”

  “It takes strength to be a pedophile. If I had to be something, I would pick that. So I picked that. My psyche is waiting. Let’s go.”

  “Again, science can’t change your sexuality until it has been located.”

  “Are you closer to extracting the programming?”

  “Your psyche is still too protected.”

  “So how do you know I’m not actually a pedophile?”

  “The statistical odds are against it.”

  “My fault. I’m thinking it might be fun to beat-off once in a while. A guy likes to know whether he’s hetero or homo, kind of get the nuances of his wetness.”

  “That part of your psyche is missing. Yet you are capable of missing what you don’t know. Interesting.”

  “Glad to be fucking interesting to you. Any new information drilled from this fucking well in my brain? Give me a drop of oil to lube with. Something.”

  “I can give you stronger erotropics,” Xoir said. “But have no fear. You are not a pedophile, Doctor Playground. But your intent to become one speaks to pedophilia as the bright sunshiny surface on the incredibly deep underground water table of what you really are.”

  “You promise?”

  Xoir freeze framed her memory to study the look on his face. In her entire life so far Dr. Playground was the first person to inspire fear in her. And the most fascinating person she had ever known was a man almost as brilliant as herself who like her appeared to have had the past life of a Kinner & Membert research scientist, his psychosexuality past-protected by an unknown science. She had cracked him more than she revealed. One of three artifacts dredged was the blurred image of Christ. The other two were the blurred sight of a horse’s carcass, the vivid image of a spinning daisy. Her diagnosis was that Simon Stranko had been so traumatized by his early sexual interactions with women his innate response was to replace the other gender with the nonthreatening helpless innocence of children and the domination he would have over them. But that diagnosis struck her as somehow shallow. She knew not but posed the question to herself if restoring his sexuality would affect his drive for global domination. Or his arcanely derived genius.

  If anyone was game enough to pull a coup on the OSD it was her. She had learned Dr. Playground better than anyone in existence. She knew the operation well enough to run it alone. For her a discreet hit on Dr. Playground would take two years’ planning. And only she ever had contact with the man outside his exoframe. He appeared to trust her enough for physical contact. Direct homicide was not a first for her and during a business trip to Mexico she had bought the perfect 14-karat gold machete to sever his head. That or setting him up for a hit by Man Mafia clones who would nail him quick & dirty. But after three years of treatment she was unsure that she had mined his brain for all the lost outtakes of Kinner & Membert. His was a
brain built with booby traps and secret vaults. His brain was too valuable to shut off before she had a grip on KM. Unlike him she was willing to settle for social domination over global and she could keep her domination inside Brutalia. Taking the world was still better. Dr. Playground was her Walt Disney and she was holding out for more cartoons. For now she could afford to put the coup and his assassination on a longer schedule. But longer was getting shorter with each year for her to run the organization that had come to dominate her life.

  Xoir started each day with a report listing mass media references to the OSD. Over a decade it had built a reputation that crossed the Mafia with a domestic nuclear dictatorship. If its powers were confined to Brutalia city limits making it a paper tiger it was one whose claws now and then reached beyond to draw blood. That was the role of CWI, Crime Wave International, a division of the OGD, the Order for Global Domination. In a laboratory collaboration with Dr. Playground, their genius extended beyond KM tech to work on an exportable drug named Playground-14 that was like meth made from heroin and nuclear orgasm. The OGD exported violence not as terrorism but as a show of force. The OSD was a secular, pro-authoritarian organization not entirely of this world. People got it, adapted to it, came to live under its shadow. They even took sides between the OSD and AXIS. The OSD had better numbers in the younger demographics, teens and young adults. Among teens OSD tattoos were outselling AXIS tattoos.

  At noon, as the human face of the OSD, costumed in the mask and black KGB domme costume of Xoir, she taped the latest video directive to be issued via Internet on the OSD website. The directive was directed to the Portland OR police department in response to harassment of OSD gang members.

  “If this harassment continues your department and your city will be targeted by the OSD. The Brutalia Limit will not put you beyond our reach. Through the OGD the OSD can strike anywhere in the world.”

  19

  The song restarted.

  I…

  I will be king…

  Rock Hero held the position of an air biker like the sky was his chopper. He held air handlebars, flew above the wheelchair mountain in a long arc. The name Heroes Man was out, Rock Hero was in. That was step one of the upgrade. Step two was the costume. Bowie’s black leather jacket from the Heroes album cover, Jim Morrison’s black leather pants. This would do until he had a unique design for a costume with mask and cape.

  The stench of exposed human organs hit him first. Down below, a massive crowd had formed around a street curb. He followed the crowd to its formation around a pool of blood, a bloody and mostly split open human body with exposed organs atop the hood of a parked car, The Corpus performing surgery with only his hands. The grossed-out fled the ring of onlookers like petals separating from a sunflower.

  At the edge of the crowd he recognized two amateurs, JKM and the Halo. Toward the center they were swimming through the ring of humans, JKM creating the path, the Halo following.

  Rock Hero kept flying. If he got The Corpus to sign up for AXIS…. Opportunistic thinking like that would put him on the superhero map. He was a rising young super with a dream. But he also refused to ever be part of a crowd. Not happening.

  He made a note. Rock Hero wasn’t yet getting the dangerous AXIS assignments. Rock Hero was too lightweight, lacked the specialty in violence. Step three: add violence skills to his power of flight. Rock Hero flattened like the chopper was impossibly low, riding one inch above the road, arched his back, held the handlebars elbows out.

  He flew over the city orphanage where the counselors dressed like the nurses in old movies. The kids were happy to be there. Most of them had been cured of things. Some of them had been blind. Now they could see. Others had been retarded. Now they could write computer programs. Burn victims now with perfectly restored skin. People brought their sick children to the Kinner & Membert Medical Center. More than one of the children wound up at the city orphanage. Duff had been left there in 2001. He had been cured of Down’s Syndrome and everything before ten was the same blur as his infancy.

  Restart.

  I…

  I will be king…

  By now he didn’t hear the song, it had blended into the background of his functions like his heartbeat. The orphanage passed below, more streets, more rooftops, all stretching to the horizons, an ocean of generic grey buildings, most of them unoccupied. From the sky you noticed the city was almost color-coded. Blocks of city had grey buildings, blocks were in red brick, blocks came in blue brick, there were blocks of tan and beige.

  In a tan section of the city Teenage Cleopatra occupied a four-story temple made ornate by the graffiti covering every inch of the surface. The graffiti was Ancient Egyptian themed, a fusion of Cheops and hip-hop. Rock Hero took down the volume, made a soft landing on the roof.

  The security system was robotic, costumed dog-headed Pyramid guards armed with AK-47 assault rifles. The robots were old and noisy, painted in chipped tomb-like colors. They took him prisoner, took him into the building, escorted him between tattooed walls across tattooed floor. Some of it graffiti, some of it wall art. Some of the wall drawings were mock 1950s-era comic book covers titled Teenage Cleopatra. They had Frank Robbins-style artwork and depicted her as a black haired bombshell, a teenage Bettie Page. Then there wall art “recreating” 1970s-era Teenage Cleopatra paperbacks painted by Frank Frazetta.

  They led him to a darkened room of white stucco walls bisected by a black screen. From top to bottom the screen was lined with polka dots of open space. Teenage Cleopatra’s superpower was seduction. Her superpower: anyone exposed to the sight of her became physically addicted to her allure. At her peak superhero activity Teenage Cleopatra led armies of addicts. Images of her created a drug trade that went out of control when rivals took to street bombings. There were overdoses and suicides and Teenage Cleopatra rehab. The surrounding madness drove her into seclusion. She never left her compound. She only saw visitors from behind layers of screens. She wore a mask to conceal her mask. There were rumors that she left her compound in disguises that concealed any trace of her appearance. Few actually knew what she looked like. All he knew about her was that she was no longer a teenager, the name sticking to her the way the Beach Boys were still “boys.”

  Through the black screen he saw the white dots of the stucco wall, saw red dots…a mask of terra cotta red he knew covered her entire face. Below the red dots were light peach dots that flowed, filled white stucco dots, caressed them in a female shape. The shape alone changed the color of his bloodstream.

  “Talk to me,” spoke a female voice behind the screen.

  “I’m with AXIS,” he said to the screen.

  “The Heroes guy?”

  “You know me?”

  “I heard of you.”

  “My name is Rock Hero.”

  “What do you want, Rock Hero?”

  “I bring an offer to join AXIS.”

  “AXIS is short.”

  “Why is it short?”

  “It has The Carousel. It has you. And that’s it.”

  “AXIS has the Siren Syndicate. It’s restarted and they signed up.”

  “So that makes eight.”

  “We’re a select group.”

  The light peach dots flowed past, stopped, flowed the other way.

  He added, “Plus AXIS provides protection from the OSD.”

  “I have my own protection.”

  “The old-time robots?”

  Silence. He fucked up. He seized-up. He should’ve prepared for this. Now he was already out of shit to say.

  She said, “Are we done?”

  Fuck. He was losing her. “Not yet.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I need your help.”

  “How?”

  “I need advice. I have a question to ask.”

  “Is it about AXIS?”

  “No.”

  “Then you did not come to me to talk about what you talked about.”

  “Right.”

  “You us
ed that as a pretext.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your question?”

  “The question is…why am I fascinated by you?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a riddle?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does it go?”

  He said, “The same reason you are fascinated by me.”

  Silence. Fuck. Too aggressive. He waited for her to lower the boom. He had set himself up. He was a tool to have given in to the impulse and gone to her too soon. He should’ve held out. Now he blew it. Silence stretched. Lame was turning to awkward to creepy. This thing had to be killed fast. He had to pick a tactic. Anything more felt wrong, was too soon. He wasn’t where he needed to be for that yet. He came up with a save. Go cryptic. Leave but leave as an enigma. That way he would live to try her another day.

  He said, “You’re like music from the future.”

  Silence.

  “See you around,” he said.

  He reached the roof in two minutes, turned on the iPod, took to the air.

  20

  Behind a wall of the sheer reek of exposed organs, crowd control handled itself. A space perimeter of ten feet held around The Corpus at all times. People were afraid to step inside it. They were silent and spellbound by what they saw and smelled and heard. His hands were bloody to the elbows and spatter had reached his shoulders. Somehow his hands folded human skin so that it sealed over the incision like it had never been made. The patient was a bloody gooey mess but the body had been scooped of a majority of its fat cells. He had done a liposuction that had reduced the patient’s body weight five hundred pounds. The Corpus held up his fat dripping hands to create a wall around him as he made his exit.